solreefs - Tumblr blog

solreefs · 1 day ago

Text

these hands not fit for holding

this is my first Holmes fic! hard to believe considering my. whole deal. anyway it was such a joy to work on and I hope you enjoy it too.

“It is only natural that you should be out of practice,” I said. “It will come back to you.” Holmes looked at me in surprise, as if he had forgotten I was there. “Your violin. It has been a long time, to be sure, but you have many more years of experience behind you.” His lips formed a slight smile that did not reach his eyes. “If only it were that simple.” - Holmes does not return from his hiatus unscathed, no matter how much he would like to pretend otherwise.

words: 4,274

ao3

I had meant to go to sleep early that night, but a novel I had purchased two days earlier and had not yet read proved far more tempting. I meant to read only the first chapter, which quickly turned into two and three and four, until I had quite lost track of time. About halfway through the book, however, my exhaustion overcame my interest in the protagonist’s seafaring adventures, and I dozed off at last.

I woke up a few hours later, and at first I could not understand why. I could not recall any of my dreams, and the sky was still dark. But then I heard it. The discordant scraping of a violin, muffled slightly by the walls between my bedroom and the sitting room.

It was not an unusual sound in our home, far from it. And yet this felt different, somehow, from all those other nights I had listened to Holmes’s tuneless scraping, randomly interspersed with scales or bits of songs.

I sat up in bed, trying to think through the sleepy fog that clung to my mind. The answer, when it came to me, was so obvious I nearly laughed aloud. Of course. I had not heard that violin in three years.

As grating as this habit of Holmes’s could be at times, I was suddenly grateful beyond words for it. Though it had been a fortnight since his return, I still woke up nearly every morning convinced that the case of the empty house had been nothing but a dream. The feeling usually persisted until I could lay eyes on Holmes, and sometimes even after that. But today, at least, I could be sure it was real. For who else would be making such noise at such an hour?

I stretched my arms over my head, wincing at the stab of pain in my shoulder, and stood up. Holmes would likely be at it for some time, and while I was still tired, I did not foresee much sleep in my immediate future. I lit a candle, intending to take both it and my book to the sitting room. Holmes might be glad of the company; I certainly would be. Perhaps I could even convince him to play something recognizable. We were both fond of Tchaikovsky, and Holmes had once commented that he found the Russian composer’s work to be well-suited to hours of the late night and early morning.

But as I entered the sitting room, I realized that something else was different too. Now that I could hear it more clearly, I could make out a pattern to the violin scraping. It was not entirely random; it sounded almost like a scale, if the notes were all wrong and the player stumbled over them like a child running on uneven ground.

It was a halting, broken sound that made my chest tighten with what I could only describe as grief. I stood frozen in the doorway, watching Holmes. His back was to me, but his frustration was evident in his tense shoulders and unsteady hands. At last, with an oath, he cast both violin and bow aside and slumped into his chair by the unlit fireplace. He sat still for a moment, his head in his hands, and then raised his face and turned to me.

“Watson. I didn’t realize you were awake.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Holmes turned his gaze back to the fireplace, and I took my usual seat in the chair beside him. I set my candle on the side table and opened my book to the place I had marked, but I did not read. Instead, I studied Holmes.

His knees were drawn up to his chest, and his eyes were fixed on the grate in front of him, but with a faraway expression that suggested his mind was elsewhere. It was a pose I often associated with great clouds of pipe smoke hanging around him, but his arms were wrapped around his knees, and his empty hands were covered by the sleeves of his dressing gown. Dark circles ringed his half-closed eyes, and his lips were pressed into a thin, hard line. His whole demeanor gave the impression of a man both tired and deeply troubled.

“It is only natural that you should be out of practice,” I said. “It will come back to you.”

Holmes looked at me in surprise, as if he had forgotten I was there.

“Your violin. It has been a long time, to be sure, but you have many more years of experience behind you.”

His lips formed a slight smile that did not reach his eyes. “If only it were that simple.”

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t be,” I said, closing my book and setting it aside. “You develop your deduction skills with constant practice, and surely the violin is easier to learn than the many varieties of tobacco ash.”

He laughed softly and shook his head. “You see, but you do not observe,” he murmured, more to himself than to me.

It was a line I had often heard from him, but this time it stung. “I can observe enough to know you are keeping something from me,” I said hotly. “It has been two weeks since you returned, and you have not touched your violin until tonight, despite a persistent lack of cases since the incident of the empty house. And when inevitably the three years without playing causes you trouble, you refuse the logical solution of practicing.” I folded my arms. “It hardly takes a deductive genius to figure out that something is wrong, or that you are not going to tell me what it is.”

Holmes was momentarily silent. “No,” he said at last. “I think it will be more effective if I show you.” He uncurled his arms from around his legs and picked up my book. He did not lift it far off the table, but he could not seem to get a good grip on it, and nearly dropped it. It took him two tries to open the cover, and turning the pages proved similarly difficult. With a frustrated sigh, Holmes let the book fall back onto the table.

In the candle’s flickering light, I thought I saw the cause of his trouble, but all the explanations I could think of made me feel sick to my stomach. Fervently hoping I was wrong, I reached out and took one of his hands in mine.

He inhaled sharply, as if in sudden pain, but he held still while I examined his hand. His fingers, as I had feared, were crooked. They had been broken badly, all five of them. His other hand was in a similar state.

One broken finger, or perhaps multiple on one hand, might have come about by some painful accident. But all of them, not only broken, but in such a way that they could not heal straight?

I let go of Holmes and sat back in my chair. Rage the likes of which I had not felt in years rose up in me, and I spoke through gritted teeth. “Who did this?”

“It is my own fault, really,” Holmes said with forced nonchalance. “I miscalculated the risk, and received a correction I am not likely to forget.”

“ Holmes.”

“First you must promise me you will take no action against him.”

“Absolutely not.”

Holmes let out an exasperated sigh. “The man who did this has fled to Germany, most likely under an alias, and the man who ordered it done has enough legal woes to keep him from leaving France for quite some time. While I appreciate the sentiment, there is nothing you can do.”

“In that case, fine. But should either of them ever cross my path-”

“They will not, but if they do, I suppose I can let you have your way with them. Whatever that way may be.”

He held my gaze for a long moment when he said that last part, and I sensed he knew that I too had no clear idea of what it was I would do to them, beyond a burning desire to see them suffer for what they had done to my dearest friend. “What happened, then?”

“I broke into the office of a Mr. Jonathan Bailey, to look for evidence that he was one of the bankers who handled Moriarty’s funds. Unlike some of the others, Bailey knew perfectly well who Moriarty was, and where those vast funds came from. I had already found proof of past fraud, and I suspected he was also responsible for at least one murder.” Holmes gave a self-deprecating laugh. “It was meant to be quick and quiet. He was never supposed to know I was there. But his bodyguard, William Landry, had tracked me without my knowledge, and caught me picking the lock on Bailey’s desk. Bailey was out of the office at the time- I was correct in that observation, at least.”

“Go on,” I said, despite the knot forming in my stomach.

“We fought. I had not eaten for several days, too absorbed in studying Bailey’s habits, and so I was weaker than I might otherwise have been. Landry got the better of me and choked me unconscious. When I came to, Bailey had returned, and while Landry was in favor of killing me, Bailey instead ordered him to break my fingers to keep me from prying into any more of his private affairs.” Holmes looked away, seemingly embarrassed. “After that, well, I’m afraid I don’t remember much. I believe I lost consciousness about halfway through the second hand. Landry was kind enough to wait for me to wake up before he broke the last two fingers.”

I stared at him in horror. The flat, matter-of-fact way in which he described his torture filled me with almost as much dread as the events themselves. “Holmes, I-” Words failed me. His behavior over the past two weeks made terrible sense now; his not playing the violin, of course, but also his seeming lack of interest in his chemical experiments, the refusal to accept new cases, and the way he had withdrawn from me so soon after we were reunited. His hands, always so sure and even graceful in a crisis, were failing him, and if I had been allowed to study him more closely, I might have figured it out sooner.

As it was, I had no idea what to do. I believed that with practice, Holmes could regain almost full use of his hands, but it was clear that they would never be the same.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“Three months ago. I took the splints off about a week before I came to see you.”

I was relieved that he had at least given the bones the proper amount of time to heal. But I also knew that Holmes was a terrible patient. “And did you rest during that time?”

“It was hard to do anything else,” he said ruefully. “Though I am compelled to blame that on the morphine rather than the splints.”

“Morphine?” I repeated, warily. I would have prescribed morphine to any ordinary patient in such pain, but my friend’s tolerance for the drug was higher than what I, or any medical man, I should hope, would have been prepared to give him.

“You needn’t look so disapproving, Watson. Landry threw me out onto the street afterward, and I was in such a daze that I could not move. The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital- apparently a passing cab driver saw me and brought me in. The doctor kept asking me if I wanted to file a police report, and I honestly have no idea what I told him to get him to back down. But he did, and in the end I left with a splint on every finger and a healthy amount of morphine.”

“Then what did you do?” I found it hard to believe that Holmes had simply lain low for three months, or even three weeks.

“What I should have done in the first place. I sent an anonymous letter to a man suing Bailey for fraud, and then I left France.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You wrote a letter?”

“I borrowed a typewriter. I was less eloquent than I would have liked, thanks to the combination of the pain and the drugs, but I knew it would be enough to make Bailey’s life difficult for a few weeks. I confess I haven’t followed the case in any great detail, though I do recall that Landry abandoned his employer for a new post in Germany.” Holmes shrugged his thin shoulders. “And now you have the whole sorry tale. I made my way to Wales and stayed in a house owned by my brother until I felt well enough to come back to London, and you know the story from there.”

Again, I had no words for him. He spoke calmly, but with a detached look in his eyes that reminded me of those injured soldiers who refused to cry out when they were in pain, only laid there and withered away. The ones who screamed their pain and anger to the doctors, or God, or anyone who would listen, would throw themselves into recovery if they survived. But the quiet ones rarely lived that long.

In lieu of anything fitting to say, I rested my hand on his arm. Holmes shivered slightly at the contact, but did not pull away. We sat in silence for some time. It was not the amiable, intimate silence we had enjoyed on so many evenings before. It was instead the kind of silence where unsaid words hung like dust in the air, so thick I could have choked on it.

Holmes was the one to break it. He stood abruptly, pulling his dressing gown tight to his chest. “You will, I trust, refrain from sharing this particular adventure of mine with your readers,” he said, and though his tone was meant to be light, there was an undercurrent of real concern that made me frown.

“Of course, you know I would never-”

“Good night, Watson,” Holmes interrupted, and left the room without a backward glance. When he had gone, I remained in my chair, staring into the long-cold ashes in the fireplace until the sky began to lighten.

I saw little of Holmes for the next three days. My own work kept me busy, and my friend spent nearly all of his time locked in his room or out of the house. When I asked, he told me he had been going for walks in Regent’s Park. I was not sure I believed him.

Damned if I knew where he might be going, though. No clients visited Baker Street, according to Mrs. Hudson. His mail piled up unopened on the table, including messages from Lestrade and a few other police detectives. His chemistry set remained untouched, and if he made any more attempts at the violin, he kept them to those hours when I was away. No cases, no experiments, and no music.

So I was not altogether surprised at what I found when I opened his door on the afternoon of the fourth day. The fact that the door was unlocked only made more certain. Holmes was not in his right mind; he had not been for at least two weeks, and very probably longer.

Holmes was completely unconscious, and I had no idea what I would have done if he were awake. He lay on his back in the middle of the bed, his waistcoat discarded on the arm of a chair. One of his shirtsleeves was rolled up, and I saw fresh puncture marks on his skin. On the side table next to Holmes was a syringe and a still-open vial of morphine. Around him, the room seemed to be in its usual state of disarray, but when I looked closer I saw the fine layer of dust that had accumulated over everything. The books had not been opened, the curios all over his shelves and walls had not been rearranged or examined, the writing desk was totally untouched.

When Holmes took cocaine, he was seeking stimulation. But when he took morphine, he sought numbness. Oblivion.

My heart ached for him. How many hours had he spent like this, alone with only the drugs and the weight of what had been taken from him in France?

No more. I put the morphine vials and the syringe back into their case, and after a moment’s hesitation, packed away the cocaine as well. I took the whole case downstairs to Mrs. Hudson and told her to put it wherever she liked, just so long as Holmes could not get to it. She did not ask what was in it; I think she guessed.

This done, I went to my own room to retrieve the adventure novel I had been reading on the night Holmes’s violin woke me. When I returned to Holmes, he had not stirred. I sat down in the chair next to the bed, and waited. I did not know how much morphine he had taken, or when, but I did not want to leave him alone.

When Holmes opened his eyes, I had finished my book, and although the curtains were drawn, I could tell it had gotten darker outside. I closed the book and regarded my friend with something halfway between relief and disapproval. “Good evening.”

Holmes sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes- then stopped when he noticed the empty side table. “Ah,” he said. “I should have guessed. What did you do with the syringe?”

“I threw the whole damn case into the Thames.”

He looked me up and down, then laughed. “No, you didn’t. It is raining and your clothes are spotless.”

“I might have changed them. You never saw me this morning, so how would you know?”

He stretched his arms over his head. “You are a poor liar, Watson, but never let it be said that you don’t know how to make a point. What are you going to do with me now?”

“I am going to ask Mrs. Hudson to bring us a light supper- don’t argue, you can manage a sandwich- and you are going to clean yourself up. Then we are going to eat, and you can go through your mail. See if you can’t find something to occupy your mind other than… this.”

“All right.” Thankfully, Holmes sounded much more amused than annoyed. He stood, a little unsteadily, but he waved away my concern and I went to see Mrs. Hudson.

Our sandwiches arrived just as Holmes emerged from his bedroom. His hair had been combed, his face had been washed, and his waistcoat had been retrieved and buttoned neatly. He was as pale and thin as I had ever seen him, but he looked more alive than he had before. As we ate, Holmes and I made our way through the stack of envelopes in the middle of the table. He struggled at times with the letter opener, but it did not seem to bother him the way the violin had. The more promising missives he had me read aloud to him while he listened with his eyes closed and a cigarette between his fingers. There was a lightness between us that I had not felt in a long, long time, and I was a little sorry when we at last reached the last letter.

The majority of the cases presented were deemed either uninteresting or too old, but Holmes set aside three of them that had potential. “We shall if I can’t solve all three by this time tomorrow,” he told me. “They are small matters, but they are of interest to me all the same. And of course if any of them turn out to be something more, you will be the first to know.”

“You’re not leaving now?” I interjected. The rain was still beating against the windowpanes, and a man who had barely eaten for three days was the last person who should go wandering around London in such weather.

“No, I am going to smoke and turn the facts over in my mind for a while- an hour or two, perhaps. I shall leave tomorrow morning.”

My relief must have been palpable, because Holmes laughed. “Really, doctor? I am not a medical man, but I know enough to avoid catching a cold.”

“I would not go that far. Remember the case of Colonel Warburton?”

“Temporary insanity,” Holmes said, grinning. “And it all worked out in the end.”

I rolled my eyes. Holmes gasped in mock offense and nudged my arm. I tried to look annoyed, but could not hold my stern expression and burst into laughter. It felt so good to laugh with him again; it was enough to make me forget for a moment how I had found him earlier.

Holmes was out of the house before first light the next morning, in a great hurry according to Mrs. Hudson. Although he had not eaten, I was at least glad that he had slept for a few hours without the aid of any drugs. I myself passed an uneventful morning, and Holmes returned late in the afternoon. He did not acknowledge my offer of tea at all, instead collapsing into his armchair without a word. After a few minutes of silence, I ventured to guess, “You’ve had a long day, then?”

“Hm. Cases solved, all three of them. Simple matters, as I knew they would be.” His tone was flat, his words dull and hollow.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

He shrugged.

I sighed. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Holmes-”

“I will eat later.”

“Fine. But I will hold you to that.”

“It hurt,” he said abruptly. “To hold the lens.” He flexed his fingers, wincing. “I did not have much use for it today, but when I did, the pain was- unexpected. Sharper than I would have thought.”

“You must give it time,” I said, aware that it was a poor excuse for an answer. “You will mend.”

“I have no time!” The outburst took both of us by surprise. Holmes drew back, as if scared by his own emotion. He took a shuddering breath. “You know I despise boredom. And you know that the cases are the only thing that can hold off the boredom for any meaningful length of time. What am I meant to do without them?”

“I do not know, Holmes.” The weight of that admission was not lost on me, and I knew Holmes felt it too. We were in uncharted waters. We had been for quite some time now.

“Mycroft solves things without his hands,” Holmes said eventually, addressing the floor more than me. “I have done it myself a few times. Is that to be my life, then?” He looked up with a strange expression on his face, somewhere between anger and despair. “Foreign affairs and petty disputes, without even the relief of music? Letting my conclusions languish unproven, however true they might be? Reason conducted artlessly from an armchair?”

This was perhaps a bit unfair to Mycroft, who possessed a carefully cultivated intellect I would not have described as artless, but that was beside the point. “It does not have to be,” I said. “Bodies can heal from the most remarkable things.” I had seen death in Afghanistan, enough for three lifetimes, but I had also seen survival against impossible odds. If a soldier could tell stories in a bar about scars he should not have lived long enough to gain, if Holmes could come back from the brink of death, why shouldn’t he take up his lens and violin again?

“And if mine does not?” The question was spoken so softly I wondered if he meant to say it aloud at all. His face was now carefully blank, but his eyes shone with what I realised were unshed tears.

I willed my voice not to shake, knowing that if I did not say what I wanted to now, I never would. “Then I will be your hands on cases when you need me, and I will still chronicle everything even when you do not. If you decide to never leave our rooms again, I will stay with you. If you want to run away to France, I will follow you there and to the ends of the earth if I must. Wherever you are, whatever form your work takes, you are my friend, and if the past three years have not changed that, I do not think anything can. I would have gone with you into the abyss of Reichenbach, the temples of Nepal, and all the rest, if you had let me. So let me stay here with you now, and I will not leave you ever again.” My throat closed up after that, and for a few moments, the only sound in the room was mine and Holmes’s hitched breathing as we tried not to break apart.

“I was the one who left you,” Holmes said hoarsely.

“I know.”

“I can never make it up to you.”

“I know. But you can try. Stay with me, let me help you. And do not give up hope.”

He nodded, just once, and rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. “I will try,” he whispered, and when I put my hand on his arm, he covered my hand with his own.

#hi.

4 notes · View notes