John H. Watson, M.D.

Dear Sherlock,

So I’ve done it, haven’t I? Made it three weeks. And before opening this book, I looked hard at the cover, and flipped back through all I’ve written to you, and somehow it felt like it’d been no time at all.

Yeah - it still hurts like it happened yesterday. But this — writing this? — it feels good, Sherlock. Feels better than I’ve felt in a long time.

Maybe the familiar is comforting even if it’s only a familiar agony.

In short, this trial separation from my journal? No. Hasn’t helped. I still just need you to come back, and since that’s impossible, what I need is someone, I think. Another human being.

I suppose I expected someone from back home would find me more than I wanted them to. But it feels the same, in the end. Lonely.

You’d think they’d have been able to find me.

Sod it, I should stop using all these vague words. I’m talking about Sebastian. Seb Moran and all his resources. I expected him to have found me by now. Unless Mycroft helped me along without me realizing it, helped me disappear a bit more convincingly than I intended.

Which is possible, of course. Probable. Wouldn’t he want all evidence of you to vanish? Seems very much something a Holmes would do. A thankless bit of subterfuge.

Well, I suppose it’s time for me to update you: I’m on a plane.

Here’s how it went:

I wondered every day after I arrived in America what Seb was doing. Because there’s no harm in wondering, right? Or theorizing. Or remembering. Or scrolling through the internet like I’d suddenly come across some bit of telltale information about him.

Damn the internet. It’ll give me a million things I don’t need or want or care about, but not the one thing I need.

Well, usually.

A few days ago it seemed that the internet exploded. I … well, this is a bit embarrassing, but I check in daily on a few Sherlock Holmes blogs, all right? And the second they found out, the entire internet knew. And the next morning it was every headline. MURDERER MORAN ARRESTED: SHERLOCK HOLMES’ RIGHT-HAND MAN.

Which was hilarious for several reasons, but … well, moving right along.

Included were photos of a tall, muscular man slipping into a police car, the handcuffs looking like toys wrapped around his wrists. The look on his face: hard. Inscrutable. Familiar. And missing him hit like a slap to the face. You couldn’t see the green eyes from the photo but their color was splashed across the backs of my eyelids when I blinked. And of course there’s no way to feel the touch of two hands from looking at a photograph, but I swear to God I shivered.

I missed him. Of course I bloody well missed him, even if I didn’t want to admit it.

It was hard to justify, too. Because I want to say he’s not a bad man, but he murders people for money, and Christ, if that’s not a basis for a lack of morality, I’ve no bloody idea what is.

But he’s … I dunno. Thinking about Moriarty? That scared me. Moriarty was unhinged; he was insane and psychopathic and terrifying and brilliant. Sebastian is none of those things. He’s not a good person, but is he really bad? He’s always been a hired hand, a man who does what he needs to survive - because the only thing he’s bloody good at is killing and crime and more crime.

He’s a man with a first name I didn’t feel scared to use. He’s a man with a mind that I can understand.

Which is why my first feeling on seeing that photograph was guilt.

God, I thought, was it me? Was it my fault? Did the Yard trace footage of my unsubtle flight back to that house, did they drag Moran out in the middle of the night half-asleep?

I checked the photograph again, examined the surroundings, and thought, Thank God, it’s not Moran’s house. Not my fault.

For a second, that’s what I thought.

And then I realized he was standing outside 221B Baker Street.

Seb Moran was photographed being pushed into a police car just feet from my address of the last two years.

And that pretty much decided it, I suppose. That’s why I am on a plane going back to London after a month-long stint in the United States. That’s why tomorrow I will go to Sebastian Moran’s house and find his book of contacts and call the force of an army to my hand. That’s why I will try to remember how to command a group of other people, and shite, if I can manage it, how to command my own bloody emotions. And that’s why soon enough I’m going to be breaking a murderer out of prison.

God help me.

Yours,
John

Dear Sherlock,

It’s three in the morning and I’m drinking. Like an anniversary, isn’t it? This happens every bloody month.

Three months, now. One fourth of the year. Congratulations. You’ve been gone long enough that I can start measuring it in significant fractions.

Shit.

I was going to drive out to California, but I don’t have a car.

I was going to call my sister, but I don’t know her mobile number by heart.

I’ve got a job at the medical practice here. Pays well enough. I can live comfortably on it.

I can live normally, so Jesus, why do I still feel like I’m waiting for something? What, is Seb Moran going to dive out of the sky in a helicopter and kidnap me and take me back to London?

Fuck, if he actually did that … I could see him doing it. The man’s got a flair for stylish efficiency. Nothing elaborate, but he does like to show off a bit, when it comes down to it. Like the way he won me over to his cause in the first place. Subterfuge. Classy.

I shouldn’t … why do I miss him? Is it because he was there, and human, and real, and listened to the words I said and understood them? Is it because there was more to him than I could have guessed? Is it because he was hurt and I was hurt and we were two open sores bleeding into each other - Jesus Christ -

I can’t go back, can I. What if he hires someone to dispose of me? I was supposed to be dead. That’s what he wrote in here, just pages ago …

I’ll take care of him, he wrote. As much a message to me as to you. That was his promise to me.

What did I do?

Harry used to be this way. Gun-shy. A girl would like her and she’d sleep with her once and get terrified, run away. But never quite like this. Never halfway across the bloody globe.

I think I made a mistake — shit —

There’s no taking it back, though.

I need physical contact so fucking badly right now. I need a body against mine. I need something more than this bottle.

But there’s just nothing.

Could you have predicted this, Sherlock? Could you have guessed what I’d turn into, this directionless shell, washed up in nowhere’s backside?

When you jumped ship you should have lashed the steering in place.

I’m adrift in a whirlpool. The world is spinning so much faster than usual. I feel sick.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person on the face of the earth. I feel so small and alone, most days. And every night since. Save the ones I threw away.

I’m such an idiot.

Yours,
John

Dear Sherlock,

Sometimes I just want a home to go to. Sometimes I just want a warm room with a soft familiar bed and someone who’ll put a hand on my forehead and say I can go to sleep and not worry about a single thing. Sometimes I want safety and comfort.

I stayed all day in bed today because I could. It was very relaxing. No one to tell me I couldn’t just lie there and think about whatever I wanted for an entire day.

Sometimes I want danger, whatever iteration that comes in. Sometimes I want to break open routine and think on my toes. Sometimes I want everything I’ve ever known to go through the window in a single instant.

The only life I had that unified those halves of me was with you.

I miss it. I miss us, together. It rips at me how much I would give of myself to return to my old life.

Do you know what color the sky was today, Sherlock? The most beautiful robin’s egg. The color of the flecks in your brilliant eyes. Even you may have appreciated it.

I wish I could draw it into this journal, but I’ve no artist’s eye. If I had that sort of talent, I would have drawn you long before now, from every angle imaginable. I would have tried to capture you in every possible way before the memories faded.

You complaining at the television.

You trading glances with the skull when I said something you didn’t like.

You immobile and inscrutable in the doorway when I asked you what you thought of my girlfriend … you, unfathomably, trying to preserve my feelings.

Every last expression. I would have catalogued it.

But I’m no artist. So here I am, painting pictures in my head with words no one will ever hear. And here I shall stay until a better alternative presents itself.

Almost three months now, though, and nothing’s seemed better in any way.

Strange, isn’t it, how deep this pit can go?

Yours,
John

Dear Sherlock,

Felt like this entire country went quiet today. Remembrances and memorial. I didn’t really understand the legacy of the 9/11 attacks living in London, but here, in this small town? The feeling of it floats through the air. Palpable.

Back in June, the first couple days without you, I felt as if the world should come unmoored from its orbit and spin slowly to a halt. In a way, I’ve felt that way ever since. And today, finally, that feeling was fulfilled. There’s something strange and still and unifying in this lingering, collective sense of tragedy.

But seeing all these sober faces … hearing the collective hush on every American TV channel … well, Jesus, it doesn’t fix anything, the world joining me. It just makes me realize how small my grief is: a speck, dwarfed by the grief of an entire nation.

And as the world grinds back into normalcy again, after its brief stutter of remembrance, I’ll remember along with them. I’ll set thoughts of you aside, Sherlock, and join their memorial.

You’d say it’s sentiment. And you’re right. It’s a powerful thing - mutual sentiment, national sentiment. I like to think it’s something even you would have been able to feel.

Yours,
John

Dear Sherlock,

I’ve taken a room in a small house that was built in the 1940s. Every floorboard creaks, which is nice, because no one will be able to sneak up on me, if that were something anyone wanted to do. There’s an old fan overhead and an air conditioner wedged into the window. Kansas is hot and flat.

I don’t know if there’s much more to say. I’m removed so far from everything I’ve ever done that this is starting to feel like a dream. The man renting the house has so many wrinkles that he could very well have stepped out of some imagining of old age.

Old age … will I grow old here?

The young think of the old as fragile and feeble. But I wonder if in thirty years, I’ll still need the rush of danger through my bones. (I already miss it. I’m already wondering where I’ll go next. Maybe I’ll buy a car and go to California. Join the LAPD. Something.)

I wonder if, in thirty years, every day sprawled out behind me will seem as long. I wonder if I will still miss the feeling of your frenetic presence agitating me. I wonder if I will even remember the color of your eyes.

Aging never used to scare me. But now I feel like I’m destined to do it alone. That’s scary, Sherlock: when you’re dying, alone can’t protect you. When you’re old and you’ve got no one, alone is a reminder of your failings. It’ll be a reminder that I couldn’t even keep one person close. I will have wasted everyone I knew, squandered them back in time.

I think about dying a lot. But it feels gentler, now, the idea of it. I feel as if death is a person who met you and drew you away and will come back for me sometime in the future.

I suppose in some ways it doesn’t matter when they come.

Maybe I’ve outlived the world’s welcome. The number of times I almost got shot in the army … the month my parents passed away within weeks of each other … and you. Maybe it’s been the great dark beckoning me all along. Sending me messages.

Maybe I’d kill myself if I weren’t afraid the pain would go on, and on, and on. I don’t think it’s cowardice, not quite. Nor laziness.

I just feel as if there’s still more to me than pain. And that gives me some measure of hope, I suppose.

Yours,
John 

Dear Sherlock,

I’m on a plane to the center of the United States, the state of Kansas.

It’s so stupid. Part of me is saying that I shouldn’t leave London because you’ll miss me. As if you were in London. As if you were anywhere.

I’m hopeful about this place. Maybe I’ll wrap myself up in a small town. Maybe I’ll roll into Nowhere, Kansas, population 600, and there’ll be a brief stir while the only new arrival in four years gets situated. Maybe I’ll assimilate.

They’ll ask why I left London. I have to come up with something.

Lost my job? That’s a good excuse (and true enough). They’ll take that subject and move with it, move along from the idea of London to my future prospects. I can deal with that.

Maybe in a few weeks’ time, everyone in the town will know my name.

Or maybe I’ll move to Kansas City and hide myself in the gutter, ensconce myself in city life again. Cities here feel different, I know: Though I’ve never been to Kansas City, I’ve been to New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. There’s a different connotation to each one, and each one distinctly Statesian. Maybe there’ll be a gentle feeling to Kansas City; maybe it will open me with welcome arms.

Maybe I’ll find myself feeling like I’ve ended up in just the place I started.

Less likely for one of Seb’s gang to be in a small town than Kansas City. I suppose the choice is made for me, in the end. (Familiar sentiment.)

The plane is tipping down. Always makes me feel like my head is going to pop from pressure, or that we’ll topple into an exponential curve and drive into the ground nose-first in a rush of fire. Every time.

Maybe I’ll send Seb a letter to explain more fully.

You can do it through the internet - there are services that can send letters for you from a source in London.

That’s probably a retrogressive plan, though. I’m trying to cut ties, break bonds. The very ones I never expected to form.

All at once, with no chance of return … maybe your way was easier, Sherlock.

Yours,
John 

Dear Sherlock,

My side’s healed up almost completely. It looks ugly as hell, of course, like a scrap of raw meat - but it’s good enough to run on.

And for better or for worse, I’ve run.

I left a note, which is more than you left me, Sherlock, so I don’t feel too guilty. It said something about me being sorry and about how it was better not to think about potentialities. I don’t even properly remember what I said. Awful, a bit, isn’t that? I should remember every word, probably.

I’m writing this in a room in Cardiff. I suspect they’ll find me sooner rather than later, so I’m on a plane tomorrow. I will buy three different tickets to three different remote locations. I’ll get on one of those planes and disappear.

This room feels small, cold, and empty. No other voice. No easy movements in the corner of my eye. And obviously, no one in bed but me and the air rolling me up tight.

I’ve felt breathless this whole day. I suppose it’s a side effect of moving after having waited so long.

I don’t know what I’m running to. But Sebastian won’t have me hurt. Not as long as he’s giving the orders. All the times he could have hurt me, and not once. He’s made it a habit by now.

Maybe I should have …

No. No use thinking about any of that.

I should rest for tomorrow.

Yours,
John 

Dear Sherlock,

I stayed home. He went out and killed someone. It all felt so disjointed.

He’s sleeping in his own bed, which confuses me — and I can’t sleep.

I think I’m getting dependent.

I think that’s bad.

I think I should probably run.

And I’m locking this book up securely, this time, so he won’t know I’m considering it.

I’m trying not to think of the ways he’s trusted me. Trying not to picture him hunched over this book, writing to you and me both.

Leaving somehow seems like the only rational next step. I don’t know why.

Wait. Yeah, I do. It’s because I’m bloody scared.

Because he could leave me just like you left me.

Unless I don’t give him the chance.

Yours,
John

Dear Sherlock,

Seb said, “Don’t come along if you’re still angry at me.”

I said, “Of course I’m still angry at you, you bloody great git.”

“Then I’m serious. Stay home. Don’t do a job when you’re angry, ever. You’ll make mistakes.”

“I will not!”

He folded his arms.

“I won’t. Really.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

My fists curled up. “Then what am I bloody supposed to do, just wait here for you to come home like I’m some pining teenager?”

Seb gave me a lopsided grin I’d never seen before. “Sounds good.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Sebastian —”

“Sorry, sorry. Look.” He leaned against the wall and let his eyes do that thing where their lids slip down, making him look half-asleep, yet somehow completely aware. It’s an infuriatingly good look, too. For a second I thought I might just kiss it off his face. Or punch it. Both, maybe.

“Well?” I said.

“Well what?” he said.

“You said look. I assumed you were going to apologize for fucking going through my journal and destroying any sort of privacy I might’ve had.”

“You never said not to.”

“Well, it’s sort of bloody implied, isn’t it!” I shook my head. “You know what, fine. Just go. Just go, I can’t be around you right now. As if you didn’t already know everything that … go on, get out.”

“Easy, now. You don’t give the orders around here, Captain.” He reached out and turned my face back toward him. I seethed. Felt like my entire body was made from boiling water. The rough touch of his fingers didn’t help. “Not going to apologize,” he said. “I’m not sorry. You read what I wrote, you know what I think about it.”

“Yeah, I read it.” Every last scribbled, angry, weirdly protective word of that entry feels seared into my brain. I wish I could un-read the damn thing.

I squared up to him, swatted his hand away from my face. “You can’t just … look, we need boundaries, Seb.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned away from the wall. Leaned in toward me. I held my ground.

“Like hell we need boundaries,” he said, and dipped his head until I could’ve moved half an inch and closed the gap. I didn’t.

“I don’t have boundaries with someone after I fuck them, Watson,” he said, and I could feel my lips pursing tight. His voice should not have had the effect it did.

“We didn’t fuck,” I ground out.

“Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you had such a specific definition.”

“Well, we didn’t.”

“Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

“No,” I said. “No, you should be gone already. Go, or else you’ll be late and you won’t catch him, and then you’ll come home in a shit mood and I’m not in the mood for your shit mood.”

“I’ll just do it tomorrow, then, won’t I. He’s not going anywhere.”

I tilted my head, my heart going strangely fast. I stared into his eyes, stared him down. “I think you’re letting all this bloody power go to your head.”

“Not the only place it’s going,” he said, and grinned again, and fuck it. My self control can only hold so long.

After we finished, after I showered and came out with a towel wrapped around my waist, he said something that stopped me dead in the doorway.

“You still don’t want to do it,” he said. “What I do. There’s part of you that still cares.”

For a minute I couldn’t respond.

Eventually, “What does it matter?” I said quietly. “They’ll die whether you do it or I do.”

“No, it does matter.” He pulled the covers up over his chest and closed his eyes. He sounded tired. “I don’t think you’ll like looking down at yourself and seeing your own red hands.”

I shut the bathroom door, a little lost for words. I forced an answer out. “Er. Need to talk?”

“No. Come to bed.”

But when I sat down on the bed next to him, I said, “Red’s the only color for some people. Jim? Don’t think he could’ve lived without getting his hands bloodied.”

He left his eyes closed. “And I suppose it was Sherlock’s job to wipe them clean again, then, was it?”

“Yeah. And I suppose it’s mine to handle yours.”

I put a hand on his. Thought he’d pull away.

He didn’t. I felt the muscles tighten under my hand.

He’d never shown a shred of guilt. I don’t know if it’s guilt so much as awareness, with Seb. He’s rational, lucid; he’s straightforward. He knows what he’s done and what he’s doing.

And if he’s not going to stop, then I suppose I’m here for the foreseeable future. Because somewhere along the line I’ve got myself stupidly invested. Not in the job. In the man.

Yours,
John 

Sjunkhatten National Park. Norway. Feels around forty degrees. Colder, if he’s factoring in windchill, which naturally he is, because he’s sleeping (or rather, attempting to sleep) huddled up against the bole of a tree. And when one is sleeping against a tree, outside, in the middle of the night, in bloody Norway, one can hardly help calculating the speed and force of the wind against one’s body.

Sherlock Holmes’ cheeks are chapped by the swift breeze, his nose nipped red; his face feels brittle, as if his skin could split any second without warning.

He looks up at the star-studded sky. He wishes he could cover his face against the bite of the wind, but his scarf is somewhere back in Paris, torn to bloodied shreds. He would use his hands to shield himself, but it would be poor form; objectively, hands are far more useful than a face, and should be protected accordingly. He’s hidden his hands in the pockets of his ratty hoodie, and as such he has nothing to cover himself besides his upturned coat collar.

Perhaps he should discard the coat; the thing’s damp and doesn’t seem to be doing anything to insulate his body. Damn it all — if only he had more body fat.

But he doesn’t, of course, and wishing he did is such an inefficient use of time that for a split second he’s disgusted with himself.

The plane will be arriving in Bodø Airport tomorrow. Just one bloody miserable night, Holmes, he tells himself. One night and then he’ll be warm and Irene will be flying him into London herself. Thank God, some intelligent company. (Some company.) It’s been too long since he’s heard a voice speaking with any degree of logic. (Since he’s heard any voice at all.)

It’ll be strange, being in London again.

Is that nostalgia swimming atop his mind? Repulsive. Sherlock swats it away with all the patience of a man confronted with a swarm of mosquitoes. This is no time for nostalgia. This is no time for emotion.

Wind blisters his eyes. He sniffs back the wetness in his nose and grits his teeth.

Surely he can find better shelter than this.

Sherlock hoists himself to his feet and strides at a furious pace, heading in a vaguely eastward direction, head bowed. His hair is a dark tangled mass. His face wears a painter’s palette of blues and purples and blacks, a liberal veneer of bruising brushed across his cheeks and forehead. Hunting criminals does not do wonders for one’s health.

His eyes are reddened and watering and he is cold and miserable and there’s nothing fun about the wilderness, is there, nothing clever about animal instinct.

He hurries on for God knows how long, rummaging through his Mind Palace because there is nothing better to do. And he doesn’t come back to himself until the crunch of gravel reaches his ears, and when he realizes it’s coming from his feet, he stops walking and looks around.

He stands on the bank of a gigantic lake, a multitude of tiny pebbles spread underfoot.

The ink-black water before him reflects a colossus of a night sky, a creature sprawled atop the world without border and without end. For a second the foreign notion of humility flits through Sherlock’s head. He can see the curve of the universe, it seems, and though he could learn and catalogue the name of every star and every constellation, he is glad he hasn’t. There is something incomprehensibly staggering, he thinks, in ignorance; in the capacity of man to be awed by that which should not be awe-inspiring. It is something he has never understood, and that in itself gives it a strange weight, a strange value.

He flicks almost lazily through all the different ways one could kill a man in this lake at this very second.

When he returns from his list, the lake is still and silent as it was before, seemingly immutable, as though the water were carved from the vault of the sky itself. As though it were a plain of black granite and he could just walk across, just …

Sherlock turns back to look at the line of trees, at the bark sentries standing guard behind him.

An outcrop of rock stands at the corner of the lake. It will be dry there. He will find shelter there eventually.

But for now he does not move. After all, he will be as restless there as here. And here, dwarfed by the vastness of the world, he straightens up as if to prove his worth, for he has no other way to demonstrate it. He tilts his battered features to the milk touch of the moon and gazes, expressionless, back into its glowing eye.

He wonders if his city misses him.

He wonders if perhaps even his brother has missed him once or twice.

He thinks that maybe his friend is thinking of him as he watches the moon, and that were they to attach silken threads to each moonbeam they might be able to pluck their respective threads and hear it across oceans, like music, a gentle thrum of reassurance.

Then Sherlock reminds himself that poetry and imagining and heartsickness were never anything but a petty distraction for those weak of mind, and he turns back to the stone outcrop and walks toward it with his mind closing and speeding and ruthless once more.

His heart is beating too quickly and he is cold.

He finds himself thinking, Alone is what I have now and it is worthless. 

He wonders if the clouds will roll back in. He thinks it might rain.