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kittydesadeTitle: The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Characters: Holmes, Watson, OCx2
Word Count: ~23,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Holmes is semi-retired and inclined to stay that way when Victor Callahan of Special Branch knocks on his door and requests his help with a case of murder and suspected treason. Holmes agrees to investigate only under protest, after Callahan appeals to his puzzle-solving mind more than his patriotism. As the case progresses, it takes Holmes to some very dark places in his own life, and the detective becomes more and more erratic while Watson is powerless to help him.
A/N: Written for the Holmes Big Bang
The pounding at her door was loud, aggravated, and intrusive on her senses. Katherine opened her eyes long enough to scowl in the direction of the front door and say a word that would have shocked most polite company. Banging in the middle of the night never meant anything good, though, so she threw on a robe and refrained from shouting any louder until she reached the foot of the stairs. "Just a moment!"
Holmes was not the first person she had expected at her door at this hour of the night, but she let him in anyway. "Miss Walsingham," he nodded curtly to her, stepping in. She watched his eyes dart around as though looking at her home for the first time, taking in all the details.
"Mr. Holmes. Isn't it a bit inappropriate for you to be calling so late at night?" The polite form of what in blazes are you doing here at this hour, banging down my door. Another hour earlier and she might not have been so polite. She did, at least, show him into the kitchen, which was both more and less polite.
He gave her a quizzical look for the gesture. "You're making tea?"
"Graciela and Armand have left for the evening. It's gone half three in the morning. If you want a civilized conversation, you're going to wait until after I've had my tea for it."
Whether he listened to her or was simply stunned into silence he followed her into the kitchen and over to the fire. He even took a seat while she heated the water and prepared the tea leaves.
It was probably for the best. He didn't look well, dark circles under his eyes and pale skin like paper drawn over a framework of brittle, sharp-edged bones. He moved with the quick and sudden then slow and dragging movements of a man who hadn't slept in several days. His eyes darted around, black in the flickering candlelight, and he didn't seem to have the focus that he had in daylight. Which could be accounted for by the late hour and by the fact that he might well be on one or two of the drugs she had heard he indulged in from Dr. Watson. Safe they might be, but she had her opinions on what was put into the body, and it didn't include more concoctions and powders and potions than necessary.
Then again, Holmes would have called them necessary to his process of thinking. So would Victor, if she'd let him use them, if he'd gotten a taste.
"What do you want, Mr. Holmes?" She poured them each a cup of tea, not that she expected him to drink it, set it to steep for a moment and wrapped her hands around the cup. His presence made the house colder than usual, all of her energy bent towards watching him, understanding him.
He blinked at her, as though he didn't understand the question, and then his eyes narrowed and focused on her the way Victor's did when he was angry. "Why have you not married Inspector Callahan?"
Katherine stared at him for a moment, fighting laughter. Both because he would take offense and because it was the kind of laughter that was closer to tears, this late at night. "Because it would be a bad match. My presence would disqualify him for certain cases, to which he is better suited than any in his office. And it would give us nothing that we do not have already. I've no need to move in society as a whole, and no wish to marry for the status of 'barely acceptable' which is as far as it would elevate me."
His mouth twisted. In blank incomprehension, she thought, though he would try to conceal it. "How much does he tell you about his cases? If Special Branch knew..."
"Special Branch is aware that he consults with me on certain cases, even if they have not been made officially aware." She had made sure of that in the beginning. If Victor kept a secret like her from his superiors it would have spelled disaster, and perhaps criminal charges for them both. This way, no one was surprised, and special arrangements could be made. It had happened before.
Holmes leaned forward, arms braced against the kitchen table and fingers steepled. "You realize, of course, that this could point to you as the traitor they're looking for."
"I know. Though it's not very likely."
"Why not? You have access to information, through Victor you have access to the case..."
"But not the original information," she pointed out. "I have no connections in the diplomatic corps, and I only know of the Fenian troubles and the anarchists through what Victor tells me. I provide him with my thoughts on what manner of people might commit bombings and kidnappings, and he gives me very little in the way of specifics. It works best for us that way."
"I have only your word for that," he almost sneered, and she sighed, taking a large, irritated gulp of her tea.
"Mr. Holmes, if you're having so much trouble with the case, perhaps you had better let Special Branch take charge again."
Nostrils flared, and that pinched pale look was back again. She'd provoked him. And now she stared at him from behind her teacup, eyes evenly fixed on his, sipping the steaming drink as though this happened to her every evening. Which, every third evening or so, it did.
"I assure you, if..."
"What else have you learned?"
The interruption galled him, but it also dragged him to refocus on boasting after a moment of blinking at her over the abrupt change in topic. "There may be some documents missing. He may have burned them in the fireplace."
His voice was quieter. His gaze had dropped for a moment and when he lifted his chin again he was having trouble focusing on her face. His attention kept sweeping around the room, taking in the details, his mind likely churning over them while he tried to put it all together in a way that made some sort of sense to him.
"But you don't know for certain that there are documents missing, which means you don't know for certain that he was any sort of traitor. Or even that there is a traitor."
It was a cruel tactic, undermining him like that even in his own mind, but Holmes shook his head. "There is someone who is manipulating the information at least to create the appearance of treachery. If we cannot find anything in the investigation of the house we must turn to Watson's inquiry of the corpse, and..."
The banging on the door made her jump, tea sloshing out of her cup. Holmes came out of his chair and to his feet, one hand dipping into his pocket for a moment where he no doubt had a revolver or a small sap or something of the sort. At the second round of banging she started breathing again, and her heart lurched into a more sedate pace. Still, Katherine half-glared at Holmes. As though it was all his fault, which for the moment it was. He was the one who was at the center of the case they were working on. That made it his fault.
"Excuse me," she murmured, standing and moving to the door, tugging her robe around her and belting it tight at the waist.
There was a more familiar man at the door this time. A man who was welcome and not welcome, being one of Victor's colleagues at Special Branch. For Special Branch to come calling at her home in the middle of the night, well. It was heartening in that it meant they still thought well of her. It was disheartening in that it meant something had happened to Victor.
"What's happened?" she asked. Folding her arms over her chest, shivering in the chill of the night. "What's wrong?"
The man spoke his message with clipped words and an even tone, no flicker of expression. "There's been another attack. Victor was consulting with one of the assistants to the Under-Secretary when they were both attacked, and shot. He's dead." And after a short pause in which her heart leaped up into her throat and her knees almost buckled had she not been bracing herself for something of the sort. "The assistant, I mean."
Victor hadn't been shot at all. He'd been bludgeoned, but he'd also managed to wrestle the gun away from their assailant before he, in turn, was shot in the face. The other man was barely recognizeable. There were men in long coats everywhere.
No one seemed to notice Katherine moving through the house, stepping carefully through the shattered remains of the vase, the bric-a-brac, stepping around the documents strewn over the floor and over the arm of the dead man. It was as though she wasn't there. It was still the damndest thing Victor had ever seen, but between the fact that she had been useful to them in the past and the certain way she had about her, she went unremarked and nearly unnoticed by most of the men except him. He accused her, in jest, of having a kind of witchcraft, once.
Now he only darted her a grateful look as she stepped around everything and everyone, touched no one, spoke to no one, and listened. Took in all the information she could with that same blank, wide-eyed expression. she had one of his old coats on, perhaps trousers beneath it, her hair pulled back from her face. Out of the corner of their eyes, Special Branch probably thought she was one of them.
Holmes wasn't half so serene. "And you say he stormed in here, as though he knew exactly where you would be and with no sign of the door having been forced?"
"He knew where we would be and who we were," Victor repeated, trying to remember that this was for the detective's benefit since he hadn't been there earlier when Special Branch had asked the same questions. "He knew what we were about and the details of the case."
Holmes's lips thinned into an angry expression, and he started to pace, looking up at the walls, at the papers on the floor. "What did he take?"
"Stamps and whatever papers he could find, from the bureau drawer." One of the other agents spoke up, deferring to Holmes perhaps out of instinct if he was the youngest man there, or perhaps because Holmes was written up in The Strand more often. Victor knew which he'd prefer.
But he and Holmes chorused it almost at the same time, in the same words. "Materials to forge documents under his signature."
"He needs the signature to forge... documents," Holmes finished, glancing over at him. Victor gave him a bland look in return, refusing to rise to the bait.
"And he could do it. If he could age them properly. There are a number of official persons who have become so used to signing most things that cross their desk that they don't look to see what it is. Someone might come up with a piece of paper that bears the right stamp, the right seal, and the right date and signature and it would be assumed as genuine, even if we did put out the word that the stamps have been stolen and the signature could be forged."
Katherine's eyes widened just a little further, and now her lips thinned, more in disapproval and irritation than anything. Now that the edge of his near death experience wore off, she'd be irritated. Both with herself that she hadn't anticipated this and with the culprit. She was rarely angry or afraid when his, their cases became violent. Only irritated that someone was causing mayhem and requiring Special Branch to catch them. It was a peculiarity of hers that he viewed with some fondness and deep concern.
"Someone was in a particular rage," was as far as Holmes got before the door opened again and two people came in. Watson, escorted by his colleague at the door.
Watson's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't say or do anything other than murmur a quiet Good god and advance towards Victor. It was good; Victor remembered that he had been a soldier in Afghanistan. Or was it India. He couldn't remember, it ws hard to remember through this splitting headache.
"How hard did he hit you?" Watson asked, touching his shoulder a bit. It felt more like a shove.
Victor put a hand behind him to keep from falling backwards. "Hard enough. He was an expert boxer, and he was very good with the knife."
That got everyone's attention. A gun, his fists, and now a knife. "Knife?" Holmes asked sharply. "You didn't say anything about a knife."
"Didn't I?" Victor frowned. He couldn't remember if he had or not, and he couldn't think of why he wouldn't have told them about it. "I thought..."
"Holmes."
Watson's voice was agitated enough that Holmes stepped forward without question or comment. The doctor took Victor by the shoulders and this time he didn't have the energy to pull away. "Get the other side of his coat, I need to see how bad the wound is. Burke," he called over to the officer who had escorted him in. "Fetch the wagon. He needs immediate care."
Oh, that's right, Victor thought. I've been stabbed.
There wasn't much point to him convalescing in the hospital, but he couldn't be moved. It felt as though she hadn't slept in days.
Three hours later Watson had stitched the wounds and pronounced him fit to be un-prodded by doctors for a little while at least, and said that she could stay with him as long as she didn't agitate him. Perhaps this was because she looked as though she would murder Watson if she wasn't allowed, or perhaps he simply now understood the length of time she and Victor had known each other and how close they were. How much she needed to be with him.
His eyes were open. "Are you back?" she whispered.
"Perhaps. What do you..."
"It's worse than we thought." At this point there were only a few things he would be concerned about, and that sounded like a prelude to a what do you think type of question. Her fingers traced over the back of the hand she held as she thought out loud. "He's angry, he can't control himself. He's losing control, and that means both of them are ..."
"Rattled," he supplied, and coughed.
"Something like that. I don't know how much there is between the two of them. How much the moods of one affect the other, this could be a coincidence or there could be considerable overflow between the two, and..." Katherine sighed. "He's upset. And when he is upset, he'll be dangerous."
"He'll be all the more dangerous for how intelligent he is. Katherine..." Victor struggled to sit up, but he didn't have the strength. She knew he didn't have the strength. He knew it too, but he was stubborn in not admitting the fact. "Be careful. Please be careful, if he could do this to me he could overpower you in a heartbeat..."
"Physically, yes, and will you please lie back down? Before you pass out. Please."
It was the last 'please', exasperated and exhausted, that got him. He settled back into the bed, ash pale and sweating. She resisted the urge to scold him like a child and went on with the subject at hand.
"Yes, he has the strength on me and he has the fighting experience. And, no doubt, he will be armed. But he doesn't know me, and when he does, he will underestimate me, you know that. You've seen this happen over and over again."
"And I've seen you become overconfident as a result. You know how exhausted this makes you, do you really think you can control him on as little sleep and rest as you've been getting, as much work as you've been doing? Katherine, be realistic."
Katherine closed her fingers around his hand, clenching his fingers tighter than she needed to, if only to get his attention. "I know the length and breadth of my abilities, and I know my own strength. I can do what I have to do. You know as well as I do that he cannot sustain this pace, not for long. And he's already made several mistakes. We'll get him, and we'll stop him. And, if necessary..."
"Don't." Victor looked away. "Don't, Katherine."
They weren't going to agree on this. Katherine sighed, leaned back in her chair, but didn't turn loose of his hand. She could stay for a little while longer.
She went back to Baker Street in the morning, as the flower sellers were putting out their boxes and the lamps were being extinguished. Victor was right about one thing; she couldn't keep up this pace for very much longer. Except she hadn't told him, or rather hadn't pressed the point, that she didn't think she'd have to. She didn't think anyone on this case could sustain this pace much longer.
It made her wonder what had started it all. What had been the breaking point that had driven them to two murders and another barely survived. There was still some debate whether or not Victor would pull through, but she had faith in him and in his stubbornness. He had, most likely, taken worse wounds than that and survived. She had seen white puckered scars on his body from conflicts he had never told her about, and although she could guess at the source of the scar tissue she wasn't ready to broach the subject. This, one attack and a knife to the body, he would survive. At least this time she knew what happened.
"Getting distracted, Katherine," she murmured to herself, standing at the foot of the stairs and taking a couple deep breaths, looking up and knowing he could see her. "Focus. You can't approach him like this. He'll eat you alive."
Perhaps a more salacious metaphor than Holmes deserved, but it was true nonetheless. She smoothed her hands over her skirt and knocked, waiting for Mrs. Hudson to let her in.
Watson frowned when he saw her expression, recognizing some sort of importance if not able to put specifics to it just yet. "What's wrong? Is Inspector Callahan..."
"Victor's fine. As fine as he can be, but he hasn't taken any turns for the worse if that's what you mean."
Holmes lifted his head from his thoughts and his violin and looked at her. He looked as tired as he felt, sunken eyes and hollow cheekbones giving him a ghoulish appearance. "I'm sorry about your friend," he said, and she frowned. "Is he..."
"He's all right. He'll be fine, he's recovering. Actually, it was you I wished to speak with."
It took the man a moment to register those words, and then another to register them as relevant to his current interests. He nodded, rose from his chair as though he was expecting her, as though he expected to greet her with enthusiasm and equanimity. "Indeed. Fortunately, I meant to speak to you too. Ideally I would like to speak to the both of you, but..."
Katherine shook her head firmly, giving him a look of amused rebuke. "Victor is not to be disturbed at the moment. If this concerns Special Branch we can take a cab to the offices and you can give your full report there..."
"No... I think this had better not go beyond the three of us, for the moment."
This, she thought, was the Holmes of legend. The Holmes everyone knew from Watson's stories and The Strand, the insufferable yet unflappable genius whose quick mind and skills at observation put together clues most people couldn't see to reach conclusions most people couldn't imagine. She smiled, a sick and sad and tired smile, to see him reach this state of equilibrium. "You have a summation in mind, I assume?"
"I do..." Holmes started, but Watson stepped forward.
"Perhaps..." Another glance in her direction, for which she arched her eyebrows at him and said nothing. "Er. Perhaps this would be best saved for later in the day? It was a trying evening..."
She felt her lip curl in an expression that was more Victor's than her own. "Trying? We're past euphamisms, doctor, it was a hellish evening, but the case isn't quite over yet. And I would like to hear Mr. Holmes's opinion of things."
"My professional opinion?" he smiled. Victor's smile, full of teeth. She'd seen far too many of those to do much more than twitch her fingers a little. "I've solved your case and you inquire after my professional opinion?"
Katherine sighed inwardly, and took a seat with an apologetic smile and a token slump of the shoulders in a show of weariness. "I'm sorry. By all means. What have you discovered? Who will Special Branch be arresting, and..." She schooled her features into an expression of gravity. "Who can we trust to be the arresting officers?"
They trusted Victor to it, in the end. No one else. Holmes refused to let anyone else in on the truth except the four of them until it was all over.
And it was over startlingly quickly. They marched in and arrested Inspector Kinsley, who seemed to meet his fate with more resignation than surprise, and marched him off to the cells. And that was that, as far as she and Holmes and Watson were concerned. Victor had things left to clear up, but they settled accounts with Holmes before the three of them left and took a cab back to Baker Street.
Watson, it seemed, wanted to feed Katherine something like tea and sandwiches before she left. Holmes didn't see the point.
"He was concerned that he would be made redundant," Holmes shrugged, settling down into his chair and lighting his pipe without regard for Watson's rebuking stare or even Katherine's amusement. If she objected, no doubt she would speak up to the point. "That's all there was to that. He had heard some talk that Special Branch was creating too much stir and achieving too little result, and that measures had to be taken. Steps must be taken. He wished to preserve his status and his income, and so he created a situation that would require everyone's cleverness to solve, and yet could be exploited further against the future possibility that cuts would be made."
Watson looked incredulous, and quite disgusted. "It was all about money? Not..." he shook his head. "Not even some exorbitant sum being paid on the delivery of state secrets or..."
"It was the fear of wanting work."
"And the need to have meaning and importance to his life," Katherine added in a murmur, accepting a cup of tea with thanks to Mrs. Hudson and keeping her eyes on Holmes. "He was in a profession where he assisted important men with matters of grave secrecy, that gives a thrill of excitement and conspiracy that some men won't give up easily. You yourself have encountered a number of people who went along with activities they would ordinarily shun, simply because they were told it was necessary, urgent, and secret."
Holmes did not look amused, but he nodded. "And, no doubt, that as well. But it was all the work of one man, no grand conspiracy, no international powers attempting to erode England's control over its colonies, no Fenian influence..."
"And the missing papers?" Watson leaned forward, his expression creased into a frown of worry. "What about the information that had been taken?"
"Some, no doubt, was taken to increase the fears that information was being sold; the ashes in the fireplace were still warm, perhaps he burned them there. Others were never lost at all. You will recall that there was some question as to what had been taken in the first place, and none of it so vital as it was made out to be. Some train schedules and a list of times and places? Those could be changed easily if some outside danger deemed it necessary. A dire thing on the face of it but..."
"Not the sort of thing that one might get into trouble for having, if it was found out that he had it. Clever." Katherine's voice was dry and not at all admiring.
"Yes, it was, rather, wasn't it?" Holmes smiled. "He knew of the cyanide by either rumor or confession from the dead man himself, so it was very little effort at all to conceal the cause of death. He murdered the Under-Secretary's assistant and made it seem as though it was an aborted act of espionage, and then when Victor closed in on him he attempted to distract him first with the attack on you..."
Katherine's lips thinned but she otherwise made no comment.
"... and then with an attack on Victor himself. The other man simply got in the way."
"And was killed for it." Watson didn't sound happy with that at all, downright angry, he would have said. And grieved, sorely grieved. Watson always had been a little too sentimental for his own good.
Holmes nodded. "And then was killed for it. He was in..."
Mrs Hudson showed Victor into the room at that moment, interrupting their explanation. The man looked as though he'd been run over a few times with the carriage he'd arrived in, and Holmes blinked at him in surprise.
Victor looked to Katherine at first, who nodded. Only then did he turn to Holmes. "Kinsley is dead," he said, his voice ringing dull and hollow in the air.
It was the first sign of surprise to break his air of relaxed self-confidence. Holmes blinked, straightened and set down his pipe. "How?"
"Assassinated. While on his way to the prison. No doubt to cover up the original culprit's involvement."
For a moment it seemed as though no one could think of anything to say, and then Katherine rose with a shake of her head, setting the teacup on the saucer and the saucer on the tray with a series of small clinks.
"Miss Walsingham," Watson started, his voice strained and upset. "Please..."
"I won't allow this charade to go on any longer, Doctor," Victor interrupted. "Let her continue."
Holmes looked from one to the other of them, his eyes darkening as he felt the conspiracy closing in around him. He hadn't trusted her from the beginning, and Victor had always struck him as being too damned clever for his own good.
"There was no missing information, Holmes, no spy," Katherine said quietly. "There never was at all. There was no grand scheme of murder, only a burglary whose perpetrator was caught the morning after its commission. But Victor is right. This has gone on far enough, and two men have now died because of the desperate need for riddles to solve. Grand enemies and conspiracies to persecute in the service of a greater good that never existed in the first place."
Holmes rose, too, and stepped up to face her. Both other men took a step forward, but she waved them back.
"You have a different theory, then? Clearly you are privy to information I was not..." His voice was ugly. Holmes had never liked being lied to, but he accepted it as a necessary evil in human beings. That he had been deliberately and openly lied to and evidence in the case he had been called in to solve had been concealed to him, that was unbearable.
"This was never a case for you to solve, Holmes. This was a test."
And by the look on her and Victor's faces he had far from passed.
"We've been waiting for something like this to come around for months, it seems, though we didn't know what was going on at first. A series of crimes that were inexplicable by motive, that were unnecessarily convoluted and relied on far too many moving parts, and the more we investigated how these came to pass and how they were solved, the more your name came up."
She had her hands clasped behind her as though she was reciting a lesson, but her voice was tired. Her head was tilted slightly to one side, exposing her throat and her half-closed gaze spoke more to weariness than submission.
"You were bored. You were driven to the brink of sanity by your experience crawling out of the Falls and you were desperate for that feeling again, that kind of challenge. And you didn't find it. You operate at such a high level of intellect that it is hard for you to find people you can converse with, people with whom you engage and willingly spend time. Let alone people who provide you with challenges, puzzles to solve, foils for your erratic, hyper-active mind." That had been one of Victor's problems, too, before she came along. "Ordinarily the role would be filled by Watson, but having returned from the dead once, it wasn't enough simply to confine yourself to quarters and toss puzzles back and forth, not for you."
She didn't add in the element that Watson was no longer devoted solely to Holmes, and hadn't been for some time. That had been bearable before the incident at the Falls; no longer. Poor Watson, however, had enough guilt without making it seem as though it was his fault, especially when it wasn't. People such as Holmes, even Victor, were exhausting to keep up with. Watson had a right to a life and a marriage of his own.
And she didn't blame him for this. She didn't even blame Holmes, not in that particular way, at any rate. "You began to question your own skills, your own intellect. You took more drugs to give yourself that feeling of being sharp and at the peak of your abilities, and the more this went on the more you needed challenges to justify applying yourself."
"You attacked the man in the street, but it was only coincidence that he was robbed in his home and murdered later that night. Victor and I decided that it was the opportunity we needed to test our theory, whether or not one man with a clever and restless mind was responsible for all of these crimes, these crimes that seemed to be committed solely because they could be."
"A test..." Holmes' face paled in outrage. "A test, this was all a test?"
Victor moved to step in front of her, and she stepped on his left foot for that. If she was to withstand Holmes' outrage she must do so on her own, or be seen as capable of being stepped on. "We had to understand the danger you presented. We had to understand how far you could be pushed, how far you and your alter ego, Professor J--"
Holmes' face twisted into something ugly, something feral and threatened. Even Watson took a step back, startled, although Victor took a step forward and a firmer grip on his cane. Katherine didn't flinch or fall back, though her heart was pounding.
"Holmes." Stern and rebuking. The tone of a stern schoolmistress. And then again, snapped, louder but also more fierce. "Holmes!"
There, that second tone snapped him out of it. So that was the one to use, a challenger willing and capable of standing up to him, with as much arrogance and ego as he had. Part of her filed that away for future reference. Another part of her wanted to curl up in a chair and sob into her tea.
"It was all you. It was always only you. You rifled through documents for the knowledge to make your fantasy a fact. You destroyed all evidence to the contrary. You refused to hear, see, or believe that your nemesis was an illusion of your own making, and you refused to contemplate that any of this mess, or your other messes for that matter, involved only yourself. Your last five cases, I believe, have all resulted in the deaths of the culprit. How many of those did you kill yourself, and how many of those involved pinning actions you took yourself or set into motion on dead men?"
"You're talking nonsense," he snapped. Glanced to Watson for confirmation, and then looked again when he saw only resigned grief in his friend's face. "Watson, surely you don't believe this confabulation..."
"I wondered," his friend said, slow and weary. "You haven't been..." But he didn't know the right words to say, if there were any right words. He didn't have the means to describe what he had seen, so he fell silent.
"It's always a danger with those with sharp intellect and a tendency towards moodiness and periods of mania. The mind grows restless, needs the mania and the ecstasy and pursues it with increasing relentlessness because the lows grow evermore intolerable. Until the mind creates its own convoluted ideas just to keep itself occupied, and your world narrows. As your world has narrowed, down to you and your nemesis, whatever form that may take."
Holmes looked again to his friend for some kind of relief or release, but Watson had turned away. Victor stepped in again, this time coming up to her shoulder but taking up a supporting position behind her and a little to her left. "You were a brilliant man, Mr. Holmes. You might have continued on like this without difficulty, but now ..."
Katherine took over; Victor didn't have the kind of delicacy this required. Or at least, not the compassion within that delicacy. "Now your brilliance has become your sickness, and it must be remedied. You are a man of insight, you know your own limitations. This is one of them. You must..."
She let her words trail off as Watson came up behind and to one side of Holmes, behind and to the right, clutching his friend by the shoulders. The syringe in one hand slipped through layers of fabric into the meat of his shoulder, delivering a cocktail of sedatives that would put out even Holmes's drug-addled body.
"... sit down," Katherine finished, even though it hadn't been what she'd meant to say. "You must rest, now. It's time to put away the day, and rest."
Holmes glared at her with a shark-like fury that would have ripped her apart if he'd had half a chance, if he wasn't distracted by the betrayal of his friend or the pain in his arm. The drugs would take effect quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent him from leveling a glare at Watson, who turned away.
"Leave him be, Holmes," she told him. Her voice had fallen into the up and down rhythms of the teacher or the sage, the storyteller. Soothing and stretching out her words to hold his attention. "He's your dearest friend in this world, and he cares for you. Leave him be. It's time to rest, now."
"This won't go on, Holmes. Every time you struggle with your inner demons people die, good people. And I won't stand for it any longer." Victor's tone was scathing and ripped into the other man, causing him to leap half out of his seat. Katherine glared over her shoulder at him.
"Victor, hush. Holmes." Katherine took his face in her hands, turned him to look at her. "Look at me. Good, no, look at me. It's time to rest. You've done enough for the day, you've done enough. Let it go. Just rest, now..."
Eventually the tranquilizers had their effect. His shoulders slumped, his head slid against the wing of the armchair.
Katherine sank to her knees where she had stood in front of him and rested her head on the arm of the chair, crossing one hand over her shoulder to cover Victor's when he came up behind her. In the corner, Watson remained still, looking anywhere but at the three of them.
"You were right to be concerned," Victor said, ignoring the wince from Katherine. Holmes was being packed into the wagon and loaded off for parts unknown, and she felt Watson had a right to be concerned and miserable and guilty. It might not help, and she had already discussed with the good doctor that he wasn't to blame for Holmes's troubles, but it was only natural that he should feel the guilt all the same.
Watson shook his head. "I should have done something sooner. Perhaps if I had seen..."
"You couldn't have seen," Katherine laid a hand on his arm as Victor, wisely, went to see to the transportation for one last check of the arrangements. "That's the tragedy of this sort of thing. Those best suited to look for these kinds of problems are those who suffer from them, themselves."
"What about you?" Watson stared at her, a familiar stare, the kind she turned on Victor far too often. The kind she had turned on Holmes to evaluate what sorts of measures needed to be taken. She stared back, unashamed and unafraid of what he might see.
"I don't suffer from the symptoms, Doctor. I suffer from those who do."
Behind her, Victor made a choking noise that she knew was laughter, and she hoped Watson didn't recognize it as such. He frowned, understanding the idea but not the cavalier way she could toss off the words just yet.
Maybe in time, with Holmes in a place where he was safe from himself and the world was safe from him, Watson would understand.
Maybe in time she could teach him the skills and the sideways way of thinking that would make him a match for his old friend. If he wanted, she or one of the others could help him. Or perhaps he might make his own way.
The room was silent as she stood in the corner, behind the armchair, watching the man talk and smoke and talk some more. It might have been a French drama, but for the passionless way they all spoke.
"We could have changed the world, you and I..."
In a moment the same voice answered, but with regret.
"And who's to say we didn't?"
Maybe three people in the whole world would have said better. None of them in the room to correct him.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Characters: Holmes, Watson, OCx2
Word Count: ~23,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Holmes is semi-retired and inclined to stay that way when Victor Callahan of Special Branch knocks on his door and requests his help with a case of murder and suspected treason. Holmes agrees to investigate only under protest, after Callahan appeals to his puzzle-solving mind more than his patriotism. As the case progresses, it takes Holmes to some very dark places in his own life, and the detective becomes more and more erratic while Watson is powerless to help him.
A/N: Written for the Holmes Big Bang
The pounding at her door was loud, aggravated, and intrusive on her senses. Katherine opened her eyes long enough to scowl in the direction of the front door and say a word that would have shocked most polite company. Banging in the middle of the night never meant anything good, though, so she threw on a robe and refrained from shouting any louder until she reached the foot of the stairs. "Just a moment!"
Holmes was not the first person she had expected at her door at this hour of the night, but she let him in anyway. "Miss Walsingham," he nodded curtly to her, stepping in. She watched his eyes dart around as though looking at her home for the first time, taking in all the details.
"Mr. Holmes. Isn't it a bit inappropriate for you to be calling so late at night?" The polite form of what in blazes are you doing here at this hour, banging down my door. Another hour earlier and she might not have been so polite. She did, at least, show him into the kitchen, which was both more and less polite.
He gave her a quizzical look for the gesture. "You're making tea?"
"Graciela and Armand have left for the evening. It's gone half three in the morning. If you want a civilized conversation, you're going to wait until after I've had my tea for it."
Whether he listened to her or was simply stunned into silence he followed her into the kitchen and over to the fire. He even took a seat while she heated the water and prepared the tea leaves.
It was probably for the best. He didn't look well, dark circles under his eyes and pale skin like paper drawn over a framework of brittle, sharp-edged bones. He moved with the quick and sudden then slow and dragging movements of a man who hadn't slept in several days. His eyes darted around, black in the flickering candlelight, and he didn't seem to have the focus that he had in daylight. Which could be accounted for by the late hour and by the fact that he might well be on one or two of the drugs she had heard he indulged in from Dr. Watson. Safe they might be, but she had her opinions on what was put into the body, and it didn't include more concoctions and powders and potions than necessary.
Then again, Holmes would have called them necessary to his process of thinking. So would Victor, if she'd let him use them, if he'd gotten a taste.
"What do you want, Mr. Holmes?" She poured them each a cup of tea, not that she expected him to drink it, set it to steep for a moment and wrapped her hands around the cup. His presence made the house colder than usual, all of her energy bent towards watching him, understanding him.
He blinked at her, as though he didn't understand the question, and then his eyes narrowed and focused on her the way Victor's did when he was angry. "Why have you not married Inspector Callahan?"
Katherine stared at him for a moment, fighting laughter. Both because he would take offense and because it was the kind of laughter that was closer to tears, this late at night. "Because it would be a bad match. My presence would disqualify him for certain cases, to which he is better suited than any in his office. And it would give us nothing that we do not have already. I've no need to move in society as a whole, and no wish to marry for the status of 'barely acceptable' which is as far as it would elevate me."
His mouth twisted. In blank incomprehension, she thought, though he would try to conceal it. "How much does he tell you about his cases? If Special Branch knew..."
"Special Branch is aware that he consults with me on certain cases, even if they have not been made officially aware." She had made sure of that in the beginning. If Victor kept a secret like her from his superiors it would have spelled disaster, and perhaps criminal charges for them both. This way, no one was surprised, and special arrangements could be made. It had happened before.
Holmes leaned forward, arms braced against the kitchen table and fingers steepled. "You realize, of course, that this could point to you as the traitor they're looking for."
"I know. Though it's not very likely."
"Why not? You have access to information, through Victor you have access to the case..."
"But not the original information," she pointed out. "I have no connections in the diplomatic corps, and I only know of the Fenian troubles and the anarchists through what Victor tells me. I provide him with my thoughts on what manner of people might commit bombings and kidnappings, and he gives me very little in the way of specifics. It works best for us that way."
"I have only your word for that," he almost sneered, and she sighed, taking a large, irritated gulp of her tea.
"Mr. Holmes, if you're having so much trouble with the case, perhaps you had better let Special Branch take charge again."
Nostrils flared, and that pinched pale look was back again. She'd provoked him. And now she stared at him from behind her teacup, eyes evenly fixed on his, sipping the steaming drink as though this happened to her every evening. Which, every third evening or so, it did.
"I assure you, if..."
"What else have you learned?"
The interruption galled him, but it also dragged him to refocus on boasting after a moment of blinking at her over the abrupt change in topic. "There may be some documents missing. He may have burned them in the fireplace."
His voice was quieter. His gaze had dropped for a moment and when he lifted his chin again he was having trouble focusing on her face. His attention kept sweeping around the room, taking in the details, his mind likely churning over them while he tried to put it all together in a way that made some sort of sense to him.
"But you don't know for certain that there are documents missing, which means you don't know for certain that he was any sort of traitor. Or even that there is a traitor."
It was a cruel tactic, undermining him like that even in his own mind, but Holmes shook his head. "There is someone who is manipulating the information at least to create the appearance of treachery. If we cannot find anything in the investigation of the house we must turn to Watson's inquiry of the corpse, and..."
The banging on the door made her jump, tea sloshing out of her cup. Holmes came out of his chair and to his feet, one hand dipping into his pocket for a moment where he no doubt had a revolver or a small sap or something of the sort. At the second round of banging she started breathing again, and her heart lurched into a more sedate pace. Still, Katherine half-glared at Holmes. As though it was all his fault, which for the moment it was. He was the one who was at the center of the case they were working on. That made it his fault.
"Excuse me," she murmured, standing and moving to the door, tugging her robe around her and belting it tight at the waist.
There was a more familiar man at the door this time. A man who was welcome and not welcome, being one of Victor's colleagues at Special Branch. For Special Branch to come calling at her home in the middle of the night, well. It was heartening in that it meant they still thought well of her. It was disheartening in that it meant something had happened to Victor.
"What's happened?" she asked. Folding her arms over her chest, shivering in the chill of the night. "What's wrong?"
The man spoke his message with clipped words and an even tone, no flicker of expression. "There's been another attack. Victor was consulting with one of the assistants to the Under-Secretary when they were both attacked, and shot. He's dead." And after a short pause in which her heart leaped up into her throat and her knees almost buckled had she not been bracing herself for something of the sort. "The assistant, I mean."
Victor hadn't been shot at all. He'd been bludgeoned, but he'd also managed to wrestle the gun away from their assailant before he, in turn, was shot in the face. The other man was barely recognizeable. There were men in long coats everywhere.
No one seemed to notice Katherine moving through the house, stepping carefully through the shattered remains of the vase, the bric-a-brac, stepping around the documents strewn over the floor and over the arm of the dead man. It was as though she wasn't there. It was still the damndest thing Victor had ever seen, but between the fact that she had been useful to them in the past and the certain way she had about her, she went unremarked and nearly unnoticed by most of the men except him. He accused her, in jest, of having a kind of witchcraft, once.
Now he only darted her a grateful look as she stepped around everything and everyone, touched no one, spoke to no one, and listened. Took in all the information she could with that same blank, wide-eyed expression. she had one of his old coats on, perhaps trousers beneath it, her hair pulled back from her face. Out of the corner of their eyes, Special Branch probably thought she was one of them.
Holmes wasn't half so serene. "And you say he stormed in here, as though he knew exactly where you would be and with no sign of the door having been forced?"
"He knew where we would be and who we were," Victor repeated, trying to remember that this was for the detective's benefit since he hadn't been there earlier when Special Branch had asked the same questions. "He knew what we were about and the details of the case."
Holmes's lips thinned into an angry expression, and he started to pace, looking up at the walls, at the papers on the floor. "What did he take?"
"Stamps and whatever papers he could find, from the bureau drawer." One of the other agents spoke up, deferring to Holmes perhaps out of instinct if he was the youngest man there, or perhaps because Holmes was written up in The Strand more often. Victor knew which he'd prefer.
But he and Holmes chorused it almost at the same time, in the same words. "Materials to forge documents under his signature."
"He needs the signature to forge... documents," Holmes finished, glancing over at him. Victor gave him a bland look in return, refusing to rise to the bait.
"And he could do it. If he could age them properly. There are a number of official persons who have become so used to signing most things that cross their desk that they don't look to see what it is. Someone might come up with a piece of paper that bears the right stamp, the right seal, and the right date and signature and it would be assumed as genuine, even if we did put out the word that the stamps have been stolen and the signature could be forged."
Katherine's eyes widened just a little further, and now her lips thinned, more in disapproval and irritation than anything. Now that the edge of his near death experience wore off, she'd be irritated. Both with herself that she hadn't anticipated this and with the culprit. She was rarely angry or afraid when his, their cases became violent. Only irritated that someone was causing mayhem and requiring Special Branch to catch them. It was a peculiarity of hers that he viewed with some fondness and deep concern.
"Someone was in a particular rage," was as far as Holmes got before the door opened again and two people came in. Watson, escorted by his colleague at the door.
Watson's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't say or do anything other than murmur a quiet Good god and advance towards Victor. It was good; Victor remembered that he had been a soldier in Afghanistan. Or was it India. He couldn't remember, it ws hard to remember through this splitting headache.
"How hard did he hit you?" Watson asked, touching his shoulder a bit. It felt more like a shove.
Victor put a hand behind him to keep from falling backwards. "Hard enough. He was an expert boxer, and he was very good with the knife."
That got everyone's attention. A gun, his fists, and now a knife. "Knife?" Holmes asked sharply. "You didn't say anything about a knife."
"Didn't I?" Victor frowned. He couldn't remember if he had or not, and he couldn't think of why he wouldn't have told them about it. "I thought..."
"Holmes."
Watson's voice was agitated enough that Holmes stepped forward without question or comment. The doctor took Victor by the shoulders and this time he didn't have the energy to pull away. "Get the other side of his coat, I need to see how bad the wound is. Burke," he called over to the officer who had escorted him in. "Fetch the wagon. He needs immediate care."
Oh, that's right, Victor thought. I've been stabbed.
There wasn't much point to him convalescing in the hospital, but he couldn't be moved. It felt as though she hadn't slept in days.
Three hours later Watson had stitched the wounds and pronounced him fit to be un-prodded by doctors for a little while at least, and said that she could stay with him as long as she didn't agitate him. Perhaps this was because she looked as though she would murder Watson if she wasn't allowed, or perhaps he simply now understood the length of time she and Victor had known each other and how close they were. How much she needed to be with him.
His eyes were open. "Are you back?" she whispered.
"Perhaps. What do you..."
"It's worse than we thought." At this point there were only a few things he would be concerned about, and that sounded like a prelude to a what do you think type of question. Her fingers traced over the back of the hand she held as she thought out loud. "He's angry, he can't control himself. He's losing control, and that means both of them are ..."
"Rattled," he supplied, and coughed.
"Something like that. I don't know how much there is between the two of them. How much the moods of one affect the other, this could be a coincidence or there could be considerable overflow between the two, and..." Katherine sighed. "He's upset. And when he is upset, he'll be dangerous."
"He'll be all the more dangerous for how intelligent he is. Katherine..." Victor struggled to sit up, but he didn't have the strength. She knew he didn't have the strength. He knew it too, but he was stubborn in not admitting the fact. "Be careful. Please be careful, if he could do this to me he could overpower you in a heartbeat..."
"Physically, yes, and will you please lie back down? Before you pass out. Please."
It was the last 'please', exasperated and exhausted, that got him. He settled back into the bed, ash pale and sweating. She resisted the urge to scold him like a child and went on with the subject at hand.
"Yes, he has the strength on me and he has the fighting experience. And, no doubt, he will be armed. But he doesn't know me, and when he does, he will underestimate me, you know that. You've seen this happen over and over again."
"And I've seen you become overconfident as a result. You know how exhausted this makes you, do you really think you can control him on as little sleep and rest as you've been getting, as much work as you've been doing? Katherine, be realistic."
Katherine closed her fingers around his hand, clenching his fingers tighter than she needed to, if only to get his attention. "I know the length and breadth of my abilities, and I know my own strength. I can do what I have to do. You know as well as I do that he cannot sustain this pace, not for long. And he's already made several mistakes. We'll get him, and we'll stop him. And, if necessary..."
"Don't." Victor looked away. "Don't, Katherine."
They weren't going to agree on this. Katherine sighed, leaned back in her chair, but didn't turn loose of his hand. She could stay for a little while longer.
She went back to Baker Street in the morning, as the flower sellers were putting out their boxes and the lamps were being extinguished. Victor was right about one thing; she couldn't keep up this pace for very much longer. Except she hadn't told him, or rather hadn't pressed the point, that she didn't think she'd have to. She didn't think anyone on this case could sustain this pace much longer.
It made her wonder what had started it all. What had been the breaking point that had driven them to two murders and another barely survived. There was still some debate whether or not Victor would pull through, but she had faith in him and in his stubbornness. He had, most likely, taken worse wounds than that and survived. She had seen white puckered scars on his body from conflicts he had never told her about, and although she could guess at the source of the scar tissue she wasn't ready to broach the subject. This, one attack and a knife to the body, he would survive. At least this time she knew what happened.
"Getting distracted, Katherine," she murmured to herself, standing at the foot of the stairs and taking a couple deep breaths, looking up and knowing he could see her. "Focus. You can't approach him like this. He'll eat you alive."
Perhaps a more salacious metaphor than Holmes deserved, but it was true nonetheless. She smoothed her hands over her skirt and knocked, waiting for Mrs. Hudson to let her in.
Watson frowned when he saw her expression, recognizing some sort of importance if not able to put specifics to it just yet. "What's wrong? Is Inspector Callahan..."
"Victor's fine. As fine as he can be, but he hasn't taken any turns for the worse if that's what you mean."
Holmes lifted his head from his thoughts and his violin and looked at her. He looked as tired as he felt, sunken eyes and hollow cheekbones giving him a ghoulish appearance. "I'm sorry about your friend," he said, and she frowned. "Is he..."
"He's all right. He'll be fine, he's recovering. Actually, it was you I wished to speak with."
It took the man a moment to register those words, and then another to register them as relevant to his current interests. He nodded, rose from his chair as though he was expecting her, as though he expected to greet her with enthusiasm and equanimity. "Indeed. Fortunately, I meant to speak to you too. Ideally I would like to speak to the both of you, but..."
Katherine shook her head firmly, giving him a look of amused rebuke. "Victor is not to be disturbed at the moment. If this concerns Special Branch we can take a cab to the offices and you can give your full report there..."
"No... I think this had better not go beyond the three of us, for the moment."
This, she thought, was the Holmes of legend. The Holmes everyone knew from Watson's stories and The Strand, the insufferable yet unflappable genius whose quick mind and skills at observation put together clues most people couldn't see to reach conclusions most people couldn't imagine. She smiled, a sick and sad and tired smile, to see him reach this state of equilibrium. "You have a summation in mind, I assume?"
"I do..." Holmes started, but Watson stepped forward.
"Perhaps..." Another glance in her direction, for which she arched her eyebrows at him and said nothing. "Er. Perhaps this would be best saved for later in the day? It was a trying evening..."
She felt her lip curl in an expression that was more Victor's than her own. "Trying? We're past euphamisms, doctor, it was a hellish evening, but the case isn't quite over yet. And I would like to hear Mr. Holmes's opinion of things."
"My professional opinion?" he smiled. Victor's smile, full of teeth. She'd seen far too many of those to do much more than twitch her fingers a little. "I've solved your case and you inquire after my professional opinion?"
Katherine sighed inwardly, and took a seat with an apologetic smile and a token slump of the shoulders in a show of weariness. "I'm sorry. By all means. What have you discovered? Who will Special Branch be arresting, and..." She schooled her features into an expression of gravity. "Who can we trust to be the arresting officers?"
They trusted Victor to it, in the end. No one else. Holmes refused to let anyone else in on the truth except the four of them until it was all over.
And it was over startlingly quickly. They marched in and arrested Inspector Kinsley, who seemed to meet his fate with more resignation than surprise, and marched him off to the cells. And that was that, as far as she and Holmes and Watson were concerned. Victor had things left to clear up, but they settled accounts with Holmes before the three of them left and took a cab back to Baker Street.
Watson, it seemed, wanted to feed Katherine something like tea and sandwiches before she left. Holmes didn't see the point.
"He was concerned that he would be made redundant," Holmes shrugged, settling down into his chair and lighting his pipe without regard for Watson's rebuking stare or even Katherine's amusement. If she objected, no doubt she would speak up to the point. "That's all there was to that. He had heard some talk that Special Branch was creating too much stir and achieving too little result, and that measures had to be taken. Steps must be taken. He wished to preserve his status and his income, and so he created a situation that would require everyone's cleverness to solve, and yet could be exploited further against the future possibility that cuts would be made."
Watson looked incredulous, and quite disgusted. "It was all about money? Not..." he shook his head. "Not even some exorbitant sum being paid on the delivery of state secrets or..."
"It was the fear of wanting work."
"And the need to have meaning and importance to his life," Katherine added in a murmur, accepting a cup of tea with thanks to Mrs. Hudson and keeping her eyes on Holmes. "He was in a profession where he assisted important men with matters of grave secrecy, that gives a thrill of excitement and conspiracy that some men won't give up easily. You yourself have encountered a number of people who went along with activities they would ordinarily shun, simply because they were told it was necessary, urgent, and secret."
Holmes did not look amused, but he nodded. "And, no doubt, that as well. But it was all the work of one man, no grand conspiracy, no international powers attempting to erode England's control over its colonies, no Fenian influence..."
"And the missing papers?" Watson leaned forward, his expression creased into a frown of worry. "What about the information that had been taken?"
"Some, no doubt, was taken to increase the fears that information was being sold; the ashes in the fireplace were still warm, perhaps he burned them there. Others were never lost at all. You will recall that there was some question as to what had been taken in the first place, and none of it so vital as it was made out to be. Some train schedules and a list of times and places? Those could be changed easily if some outside danger deemed it necessary. A dire thing on the face of it but..."
"Not the sort of thing that one might get into trouble for having, if it was found out that he had it. Clever." Katherine's voice was dry and not at all admiring.
"Yes, it was, rather, wasn't it?" Holmes smiled. "He knew of the cyanide by either rumor or confession from the dead man himself, so it was very little effort at all to conceal the cause of death. He murdered the Under-Secretary's assistant and made it seem as though it was an aborted act of espionage, and then when Victor closed in on him he attempted to distract him first with the attack on you..."
Katherine's lips thinned but she otherwise made no comment.
"... and then with an attack on Victor himself. The other man simply got in the way."
"And was killed for it." Watson didn't sound happy with that at all, downright angry, he would have said. And grieved, sorely grieved. Watson always had been a little too sentimental for his own good.
Holmes nodded. "And then was killed for it. He was in..."
Mrs Hudson showed Victor into the room at that moment, interrupting their explanation. The man looked as though he'd been run over a few times with the carriage he'd arrived in, and Holmes blinked at him in surprise.
Victor looked to Katherine at first, who nodded. Only then did he turn to Holmes. "Kinsley is dead," he said, his voice ringing dull and hollow in the air.
It was the first sign of surprise to break his air of relaxed self-confidence. Holmes blinked, straightened and set down his pipe. "How?"
"Assassinated. While on his way to the prison. No doubt to cover up the original culprit's involvement."
For a moment it seemed as though no one could think of anything to say, and then Katherine rose with a shake of her head, setting the teacup on the saucer and the saucer on the tray with a series of small clinks.
"Miss Walsingham," Watson started, his voice strained and upset. "Please..."
"I won't allow this charade to go on any longer, Doctor," Victor interrupted. "Let her continue."
Holmes looked from one to the other of them, his eyes darkening as he felt the conspiracy closing in around him. He hadn't trusted her from the beginning, and Victor had always struck him as being too damned clever for his own good.
"There was no missing information, Holmes, no spy," Katherine said quietly. "There never was at all. There was no grand scheme of murder, only a burglary whose perpetrator was caught the morning after its commission. But Victor is right. This has gone on far enough, and two men have now died because of the desperate need for riddles to solve. Grand enemies and conspiracies to persecute in the service of a greater good that never existed in the first place."
Holmes rose, too, and stepped up to face her. Both other men took a step forward, but she waved them back.
"You have a different theory, then? Clearly you are privy to information I was not..." His voice was ugly. Holmes had never liked being lied to, but he accepted it as a necessary evil in human beings. That he had been deliberately and openly lied to and evidence in the case he had been called in to solve had been concealed to him, that was unbearable.
"This was never a case for you to solve, Holmes. This was a test."
And by the look on her and Victor's faces he had far from passed.
"We've been waiting for something like this to come around for months, it seems, though we didn't know what was going on at first. A series of crimes that were inexplicable by motive, that were unnecessarily convoluted and relied on far too many moving parts, and the more we investigated how these came to pass and how they were solved, the more your name came up."
She had her hands clasped behind her as though she was reciting a lesson, but her voice was tired. Her head was tilted slightly to one side, exposing her throat and her half-closed gaze spoke more to weariness than submission.
"You were bored. You were driven to the brink of sanity by your experience crawling out of the Falls and you were desperate for that feeling again, that kind of challenge. And you didn't find it. You operate at such a high level of intellect that it is hard for you to find people you can converse with, people with whom you engage and willingly spend time. Let alone people who provide you with challenges, puzzles to solve, foils for your erratic, hyper-active mind." That had been one of Victor's problems, too, before she came along. "Ordinarily the role would be filled by Watson, but having returned from the dead once, it wasn't enough simply to confine yourself to quarters and toss puzzles back and forth, not for you."
She didn't add in the element that Watson was no longer devoted solely to Holmes, and hadn't been for some time. That had been bearable before the incident at the Falls; no longer. Poor Watson, however, had enough guilt without making it seem as though it was his fault, especially when it wasn't. People such as Holmes, even Victor, were exhausting to keep up with. Watson had a right to a life and a marriage of his own.
And she didn't blame him for this. She didn't even blame Holmes, not in that particular way, at any rate. "You began to question your own skills, your own intellect. You took more drugs to give yourself that feeling of being sharp and at the peak of your abilities, and the more this went on the more you needed challenges to justify applying yourself."
"You attacked the man in the street, but it was only coincidence that he was robbed in his home and murdered later that night. Victor and I decided that it was the opportunity we needed to test our theory, whether or not one man with a clever and restless mind was responsible for all of these crimes, these crimes that seemed to be committed solely because they could be."
"A test..." Holmes' face paled in outrage. "A test, this was all a test?"
Victor moved to step in front of her, and she stepped on his left foot for that. If she was to withstand Holmes' outrage she must do so on her own, or be seen as capable of being stepped on. "We had to understand the danger you presented. We had to understand how far you could be pushed, how far you and your alter ego, Professor J--"
Holmes' face twisted into something ugly, something feral and threatened. Even Watson took a step back, startled, although Victor took a step forward and a firmer grip on his cane. Katherine didn't flinch or fall back, though her heart was pounding.
"Holmes." Stern and rebuking. The tone of a stern schoolmistress. And then again, snapped, louder but also more fierce. "Holmes!"
There, that second tone snapped him out of it. So that was the one to use, a challenger willing and capable of standing up to him, with as much arrogance and ego as he had. Part of her filed that away for future reference. Another part of her wanted to curl up in a chair and sob into her tea.
"It was all you. It was always only you. You rifled through documents for the knowledge to make your fantasy a fact. You destroyed all evidence to the contrary. You refused to hear, see, or believe that your nemesis was an illusion of your own making, and you refused to contemplate that any of this mess, or your other messes for that matter, involved only yourself. Your last five cases, I believe, have all resulted in the deaths of the culprit. How many of those did you kill yourself, and how many of those involved pinning actions you took yourself or set into motion on dead men?"
"You're talking nonsense," he snapped. Glanced to Watson for confirmation, and then looked again when he saw only resigned grief in his friend's face. "Watson, surely you don't believe this confabulation..."
"I wondered," his friend said, slow and weary. "You haven't been..." But he didn't know the right words to say, if there were any right words. He didn't have the means to describe what he had seen, so he fell silent.
"It's always a danger with those with sharp intellect and a tendency towards moodiness and periods of mania. The mind grows restless, needs the mania and the ecstasy and pursues it with increasing relentlessness because the lows grow evermore intolerable. Until the mind creates its own convoluted ideas just to keep itself occupied, and your world narrows. As your world has narrowed, down to you and your nemesis, whatever form that may take."
Holmes looked again to his friend for some kind of relief or release, but Watson had turned away. Victor stepped in again, this time coming up to her shoulder but taking up a supporting position behind her and a little to her left. "You were a brilliant man, Mr. Holmes. You might have continued on like this without difficulty, but now ..."
Katherine took over; Victor didn't have the kind of delicacy this required. Or at least, not the compassion within that delicacy. "Now your brilliance has become your sickness, and it must be remedied. You are a man of insight, you know your own limitations. This is one of them. You must..."
She let her words trail off as Watson came up behind and to one side of Holmes, behind and to the right, clutching his friend by the shoulders. The syringe in one hand slipped through layers of fabric into the meat of his shoulder, delivering a cocktail of sedatives that would put out even Holmes's drug-addled body.
"... sit down," Katherine finished, even though it hadn't been what she'd meant to say. "You must rest, now. It's time to put away the day, and rest."
Holmes glared at her with a shark-like fury that would have ripped her apart if he'd had half a chance, if he wasn't distracted by the betrayal of his friend or the pain in his arm. The drugs would take effect quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent him from leveling a glare at Watson, who turned away.
"Leave him be, Holmes," she told him. Her voice had fallen into the up and down rhythms of the teacher or the sage, the storyteller. Soothing and stretching out her words to hold his attention. "He's your dearest friend in this world, and he cares for you. Leave him be. It's time to rest, now."
"This won't go on, Holmes. Every time you struggle with your inner demons people die, good people. And I won't stand for it any longer." Victor's tone was scathing and ripped into the other man, causing him to leap half out of his seat. Katherine glared over her shoulder at him.
"Victor, hush. Holmes." Katherine took his face in her hands, turned him to look at her. "Look at me. Good, no, look at me. It's time to rest. You've done enough for the day, you've done enough. Let it go. Just rest, now..."
Eventually the tranquilizers had their effect. His shoulders slumped, his head slid against the wing of the armchair.
Katherine sank to her knees where she had stood in front of him and rested her head on the arm of the chair, crossing one hand over her shoulder to cover Victor's when he came up behind her. In the corner, Watson remained still, looking anywhere but at the three of them.
"You were right to be concerned," Victor said, ignoring the wince from Katherine. Holmes was being packed into the wagon and loaded off for parts unknown, and she felt Watson had a right to be concerned and miserable and guilty. It might not help, and she had already discussed with the good doctor that he wasn't to blame for Holmes's troubles, but it was only natural that he should feel the guilt all the same.
Watson shook his head. "I should have done something sooner. Perhaps if I had seen..."
"You couldn't have seen," Katherine laid a hand on his arm as Victor, wisely, went to see to the transportation for one last check of the arrangements. "That's the tragedy of this sort of thing. Those best suited to look for these kinds of problems are those who suffer from them, themselves."
"What about you?" Watson stared at her, a familiar stare, the kind she turned on Victor far too often. The kind she had turned on Holmes to evaluate what sorts of measures needed to be taken. She stared back, unashamed and unafraid of what he might see.
"I don't suffer from the symptoms, Doctor. I suffer from those who do."
Behind her, Victor made a choking noise that she knew was laughter, and she hoped Watson didn't recognize it as such. He frowned, understanding the idea but not the cavalier way she could toss off the words just yet.
Maybe in time, with Holmes in a place where he was safe from himself and the world was safe from him, Watson would understand.
Maybe in time she could teach him the skills and the sideways way of thinking that would make him a match for his old friend. If he wanted, she or one of the others could help him. Or perhaps he might make his own way.
The room was silent as she stood in the corner, behind the armchair, watching the man talk and smoke and talk some more. It might have been a French drama, but for the passionless way they all spoke.
"We could have changed the world, you and I..."
In a moment the same voice answered, but with regret.
"And who's to say we didn't?"
Maybe three people in the whole world would have said better. None of them in the room to correct him.