Still on the Quest

For two hours I waited, trying to reconcile my medical instincts with my hesitation. It was not until I returned from my errand to Culverton Smith that I realized what had been bothering me. For all that Holmes looked terribly ill, the room did not smell like a sickroom. It was a sham. And I was not the intended target.





(60 words, for sherlock60 where they've been writing 60 word ficlets for each of the 60 canon stories. I couldn't resist this one.)

But I didn't have time or brains to make it shorter. Follow the link if you want to see a ficlet: Holmes/Watson, in response to a very pretty picture over here.

eta, the lj entry no longer has the pic, but it is here if anyone is curious.

John Watson had learned the way of it when he was seven. A familiar scent, a well-loved pattern, the sight of another boy being hugged by his mother. Reminders would come, and with them the memories, tugging at one's sleeve and turning one's head. If you practiced long and hard enough, you could turn the grief to something like happiness, to gratitude that you had not forgotten the touch of a hand, or the sound of lost laughter.

Once, halfway down a bottle, he had scrawled a list of names and tried to categorize the things which resurrected the shades who lingered forever at his heels. For most of them it was easy. Mary's perfume, the beat of marching men, the taste of curry, the ticking of his father's watch, the feel of the scarf his mother had knitted so many years ago -- cherished so long that he couldn't smell a mothball without thinking of her.

But when it came to Holmes, he was defeated. Holmes he saw at every corner of London, in the set of a sailor's shoulders, in the black of an old priest's cassock. Holmes who had worn a thousand guises and walked on every street. The loafer with the red hair, the scholar with his books, the beggar with his cup, the whiskered addict lolling in the gutter. All called to mind the gesticulations of pale hands, bright eyes in a noble face, the sound of a violin.

The other ghosts were boring by comparison.