A/N: This is actually a single-chaptered story: the second chapter is acknowledgements of essays and criticisms where I found some of the ideas for this, and a sort of explanation of the reasoning behind this, because, honestly, I think it’s depressing enough to warrant one.

I’m one of those strange people who loves Sherlock Holmes largely for his being very very weird. You know—the Jeremy Brett leaping over couches and waving people out the door, until Watson becomes as much PR guy as chronicler, the strange mood swings, the eccentricities, and all that other really fascinating stuff.

So, ever since my attention was brought to what should have been the very obvious fact that watching your best friend discover that you are dead and letting him continue to think so while you are on vacation for three years is kind of a strange thing to do, I’ve been curious to explain it. Here’s my explanation.

Enjoy!

(And talk to me! Do you like it? Do you agree? Was I too harsh, not harsh enough? Reviiiieeeeeeeeeeew!)

Bowing Out

You woke up this morning thinking, ‘this is the day that I will die,’ and you were not sorry. You had explained it all to Watson so cleanly—the exultation of a hero, ridding the world of Moriarty’s evil at the expense of his own life, and he marveled at your joy. You emphasized the exaltation of the thing, but it was the end, not the glory, that captivated you. Watson never commented, but you think he saw it, what it was you wanted. It was all so clear then: the agony of boredom punctuated by challenge had culminated in the rising crescendo, the wonderful, exhausted, exalted three months of fierce battle leading to the climax of raw physical struggle, caught between the rock and the water and the emptiness, where hero and villain would meet their ends locked in combat. All would be simple, and the London fogs, and the bored pacing, the sleepless nights, the prick of the needle, and the terrible tiredness would all be forgotten in the glory.

You looked at Watson this morning, peacefully sleeping off the effects of the drug, and you said goodbye. You did not admit that it was such, because you would not admit that you wanted it so, but it was goodbye. The dramatic flourish, the swish of the curtain falling—this was the moment just before the last scene, when the hero sees all that he will miss in the world, and he can mourn without reservation, because the bad things in life will end before too long.

You tried to bow out gracefully. Why are you still here?

The heat of the moment was ebbing, and my limbs were beginning to tremble with the chill of sweat and the cold mist, and perhaps with shock as well. It was well I had reached the ledge by that point; to climb the wet rocks shaking as I was would have been nearly impossible.

It was a strange moment, stranger in its internal commotion than almost any I have known, though I had dealt in the grotesque for twenty years. Even as high as I was, I could still see the footprints on the path, the scuffle, two going, none returning, the place where a figure had lain, gotten up, and obscured the fact that he had lain there, and the near indiscernible place where he had stepped over the trampled patch to scale the cliff beside it. It was clear to me to read, and clear to me that it would be impossible for anyone else to read correctly. I had made it so, and I was the master.

But what was not clear was why I had done it. I told myself then, and still more adamantly later, what I eventually told Watson: that it was to hide from Moriarty’s associates who had escaped. It was a pale lie, and I knew it, even as I told it: I did not know then that there were men of Moriarty’s still on my trail. Oh yes, it crossed my mind, that Scotland Yard was quite incompetent enough to let it happen, even that it was likely. I repeated to myself, there on the lonely cliff ledge, that I could not fight any more, that I needed to regroup, plan my attack, yet I was planning nothing but flight and escape.

You lied to Watson.

The initial lies were forgivable. When you told him Moriarty had come to you only to threaten your life (as if you did not know he wanted you dead!), you knew he would not question the needlessness of that threat. You did not want to tell him that Moriarty had threatened his life as the price of your meddling. You closed his windows fearing air guns, not telling him that it was not your head you feared they were aiming at, and you jumped over his garden wall, not telling him that you would watch his house all night. You do not know why. Perhaps you could not explain to him this weakness, that his life matters that much. Perhaps you did not want him to think, once you had died, that perhaps you had traded his life for your own. Perhaps you wanted to spare him the guilt. You know that is a more heroic interpretation than your actions deserve.

You remember dinner last night. The food was good, you were bright and alive, and you knew the most dangerous man in Europe was coming to kill you. Watson was laughing. He knew it too, and he trusted you.

“Hah! Curry, Holmes? Have you not always thought this the most dangerous possible dish for poisons and the like?”

“Good old Watson,” you had said, almost so warmly as to make him suspicious—but he knew some of the danger. Strangeness in your mood would not surprise him. “I looked in on the kitchens to make sure no one had the opportunity to put anything in it.” Yes, you had made sure no one but yourself had the chance to add anything. And when Watson was snoring on the table, you carried him to the room, laid him on his bed, and waited, as the note under the door that morning had told you to.

There was a knock, but he had entered before you answered. You had a revolver in your hand, and you had little doubt that somewhere on hid person, he had the same.

“So discourteous, Mr. Holmes,” he had said, swaying his head like a cobra.

“What do you want, Moriarty?” You could not match the silk in his tone: you had something to lose besides your life, and much to negotiate for.

“We are at a bit of an impasse, Mr. Holmes. My organization is in ruins, and I am not pleased, as you may imagine. You have ruined my livelihood; it would be only fair to do what I had mentioned in our previous interview.” He had looked down at the prone figure in the bed near him.

You had raised the pistol, and even Moriarty seemed taken aback by the threat in your face. “Harm Watson, and I will destroy you, lawfully or no. Kill him, and I will murder you in your bed, and you will see your most brilliant plots of assassination pale before mine.”

“Yes,” Moriarty had said dryly. “That is why he is still alive.”

You had stood with your pistol raised for a long time before Moriarty sighed and said what he had come to say.

“Dr. Watson dead would be my ruin, but alive, he is excellent leverage for me. Tomorrow, Mr. Holmes, one of my agents—do not look so upset, he is only a minor employee, you have taken most of the important ones—one of my agents will come to you. You will know when the time comes.

“Send Watson with him. He will come to no harm; it is you I want.

“When Watson is gone, I will come for you, and we will finish this alone, no weapons, no tricks. But keep him with you, and I will see to it that you see him die.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Mr. Holmes, you have destroyed me. I have no business left to protect, nothing left to save. It is only the joy of battle which is left to us. I have come to see what you said to me not long ago: it will be worth dying if I know that I bring you down with me.” At any other time, you would have been suspicious of such a declaration, but at that moment he looked as old, as bitter, and as spent as you felt, and you knew he would do as he said.

“I can promise you the one, but not the other,” you had answered, echoing his old words, but it was your own death you had thought of: locked hand to hand with him, seeing him dead just as everything dimmed out forever. In the nervous, manic, morbid turmoil of your thoughts, you thought of peace.

There was a cry from below: anguish, pain. I thought of Moriarty, in the depths of the falls, but it was Watson, on his knees in the damp soil, the scrap of paper in his hand, the cigarette case glimmering on the ground. He stayed that way a long time, jerking slightly, now and then. I could see the uneven angle at the back of his neck where a barber had trimmed carelessly, and the lighter patch at the top of his head where his hair had begun to thin, and I thought for some reason of the early years in Baker Street. I had thought him boring and comical then, and delighted in confusing and misleading him. Ah, how wrong I had been. He seemed now the single spot of life between the black rock and the white mist, and his sobs were prosaic and oddly comforting under the inhuman waterfall howl.

I thought of crying out to him, not warmly, but with something humourous and sardonic. I imagined him leaping up in confusion, calling out my name. I would call down a second time, and Watson would look up, and such happiness would radiate from his face that I would have to smile back with equal joy. I would clamber down the rocks, and at night in our hotel room, comfortable and safe, sipping glasses of brandy, I would explain it all, while Watson, boyish with delight and wonderment, would exclaim in all the right places.

Yes, and then, you would return to London, to the bleakness and the boredom. The last great hunt would be over, and there would be nothing left for this old hound that is too tired in the chase and too wild to ever rest. Better to go out in a crash and a grand sweep of the velvet curtains than to linger in tired bitterness through all the long years ahead. You should have died today. That was the theatrical way, the fitting way, the poetic justice, the tragic affirmation.

Why are you still here?

And so I stayed silent, and remained dead, while I listened to my closest friend call out my name until the echoes were lost in the endless crying of the torrent, and I thought of where I would go, now that I had been cut free of the tethers of my life. Where does a character go when the curtain falls and the actor that plays him has returned home? The hero of Watson’s exasperating, charming melodramas had fallen into the flood, and I was left to wander free wherever I willed, tied down by nothing and no one.

After a long time, Watson collected himself, rose, and made his slow way down the trail, to find the police.

I watched him go. To what I knew even then but felt only a long time later to be my everlasting shame, it was very, very easy.