In 1891, as Holmes's case against Moriarty at last came to fruition, he and Watson journeyed through Switzerland to escape the criminal mastermind. Hoping to prepare Watson for the inevitable, Holmes did not spare him the brutal truth and spoke often of his possible death in this last, great case.
Watson did not take such morbidity well. "How can you talk so cheerfully about it?" he demanded.
"But I am cheerful, Watson. I'm perfectly happy to risk my life, as I always have been. It is no tragedy to me to face death for London's sake."
"The world doesn't revolve around this one case of yours. Even with him gone, there will be other crimes, other criminals."
"Not like Moriarty. There will never be another Moriarty." Holmes looked out over the snowy peaks of the Alps, leaning on his walking stick and seeming to see the face of his foe in the mountains. He shook his head. "It satisfies me more if I go out with him. My only regret would be having to leave you, my dear Watson."
Watson choked back tears, whispering, "But what would I do without you?"
He shrugged. "Start up your practice, of course. Or see your brother in America. Or anything you wish."
Watson grasped his arm urgently. "Holmes, please don't talk like this."
"Why not? You were always going to part from me eventually. I have prepared myself for that for years."
"Have you?"
"My dear Watson, do not look so sad. There is no guarantee to my speculations. Tell me, what are your brother and his family doing now?"
After Reichenbach, Watson crumbled, going home to Baker Street and taking to her bed in grief. She would receive no visitors, and it was only Mycroft who managed to get into her room, using a key that his brother had left with him prior to his death. Upon learning this fact, she became incensed, sitting up. "Oh, so Holmes planned this all out so perfectly, knowing just how I'd react and knowing that you'd have to come and check up on me!"
"To prevent your doing something desperate," Mycroft spoke evenly.
"Why not?" She hurled a pillow savagely. "It's my own life! My own heart he's broken."
Mycroft smiled weakly. "However neglectfully cold that members of our family are, we do have a conscience. If you wish me to summon your brother, or send you to America..."
"I don't need to be taken care of!" Fuming, she finally rose from bed and stomped over to the mirror to see her tear-stained face. "I don't need a damn thing more from your family."
"Very well," Mycroft turned and walked out, but now he wore a smile of hope.
It was a still furious Dr. Helena Watson who emerged at last from Baker Street later that day. Wearing feminine clothes and a feminine wig until her hair grew out again, she bought an entire wardrobe to replace her former garb and then went prospecting for a medical practice. She had had the money to purchase such a place for quite some time, but had never wished to leave Baker Street before.
Now she forced herself to think as a lone woman, without ties to either Holmes or her own family. She acquired a practice in Paddington and settled there with the intention never to look back. However, being a woman doctor now, and with little reputation to precede her, she had to wait for any patients. And somehow, during those long days that she sat alone in her silent office, her mind stubbornly drifted back to the memory of Holmes.
Dr. Doyle kept writing to Baker Street and even visiting the empty flat, trying to find the strangely disappeared Dr. John Watson. Helena read the letters and notes that he left with Mrs. Hudson, detailing a generous offer from the new Strand magazine. In the end, she surrendered, writing to Dr. Doyle to say that yes, he would like to memorialise his late friend with a series of short stories in the magazine. She dusted off her notes of Holmes's cases and began once more to chronicle her much-missed friend. It was quite strange, though, to do the writing without having Holmes nearby to offer his scathing criticisms.
Helena even sent a manuscript to her brother James, who wrote back approvingly, but still wondered why this John Herbert fellow kept using their surname to protect his anonymity. Was he in some sort of danger, being Holmes's former associate? Helena replied, "You know Holmes and his disguises. Any detective finds alternate personas useful." Any writer, too.
As the months passed, she lived her daily life as a woman, yet continued writing with the same old John H. Watson persona, caught in a tangled mixture of past and present mindsets. Relenting on her previous harshness, she dropped in on Mycroft Holmes to apologise for her prior behaviour, and he only smiled, saying that no apology was necessary. He amicably invited her to come by anytime that she needed anything.
Perhaps to centre herself a bit, Helena took a brief holiday from her practice to visit her brother James and his growing family in the States. The closest that she herself had come to having children was her contact with Holmes's Baker Street Irregulars, now quite fully grown, and she wondered if she should regret that lack in her life. However, as Elizabeth Blackwell and many other independent spinsters before her surely knew, some people in this world were meant to lead the common life, and some were meant for different, more solitary paths.
Helena wished her brother's family well and soon returned to England. Her medical practice remained far from absorbing, but her earnings from the Strand more than made up for the lack of patients. The short stories had become immensely popular, perhaps in a way that would have vexed Holmes, had he lived. Such was the irony of life.
In late 1893, Helena purged herself of her last memory of Holmes with the tale of his death at Reichenbach. Remembering the event was painful, especially as she had admitted to herself lately that she had harboured a foolish romantic crush upon him, and also a brief delusion that he had returned such feelings. It was time to let go of such notions now and just move on.
However, Holmes returned then.
It was, to say the least, unsettling. His return now, after three years' absence, was the last thing that she had expected. Finding him alive was both unnerving and awkward.
He simply showed up at her current residence in Kensington, looking a little hunted, a little weary, but largely the same as ever. He apologised for the shock that he gave her, but not, she noticed, for leaving her at Reichenbach in the first place.
Not knowing whether to sit or stand or even throw him out of her study and her house, she kept pacing and staring at him in numb silence.
Holmes assessed her with his quick, grey eyes, and then he said simply, "I missed you." He'd missed her. He'd found it difficult without his trusted partner at his side. He'd regretted not contacting her during his absence. He'd missed her.
Apparently, this was all that he had to say to her, and she went to her telephone remarking that she would call Mycroft to tell him to come pick up a lost family artefact from about three years ago. Holmes took the receiver from her hand and hung it up. "Watson," he implored, searching her wounded eyes, "let me just ask you something. One thing."
She waited with a hardened face.
He did not ask her to return to Baker Street, nor even to forgive him. He told her that he had a case to solve tonight, and would she come join him for old times' sake?
It was the strangest thing in the world for Holmes to ask, and yet she said yes to him. He immediately took her by the hand and departed with her for one of his old refuges in town, where he would sometimes disappear to slip into and out of disguises. She was surprised that the place was still maintained, but did not question him while he got out the familiar old costume trunk.
So into his clothes and makeup it was; he seemed to know that she had already thrown out her own John Watson wardrobe long ago. Pinning up her hair anew, flattening her feminine curves, and reapplying the mustache of old... all these things Holmes did as painstakingly as he did that first morning over ten years ago. They said nothing to each other, though their eyes met often in his mirror. It was an odd, silent reconciliation.
Their case concluded that night with the capture of Colonel Moran, murderer of the Honourable Ronald Adair and the reason for Holmes's hunted look, it seemed. Lestrade looked surprised and delighted to see Watson, greeting him heartily. "Hullo, Watson old fellow! I haven't seen you around since Holmes up and disappeared. You were in on it, weren't you? Well, glad to have you both back, I must say."
When all was explained about Moran's past and present crimes and they were alone at last, standing uneasily together in the old sitting-room, Holmes spoke quietly near her ear, "Stay the night." Watson nodded to this request, and then he ventured, "I shall have a wardrobe ready for you, should you ever wish to come back and be a bachelor again for a few days." He touched her hand briefly before turning and departing for his own bedroom.
When she did come back, to finally take him up on that offer, it was not on a temporary basis. She brought her bags with her and laid out newspapers once more upon her dressing-table, her meaning perfectly clear. She unpinned her hair and sat still while Holmes again volunteered to cut her tresses.
Thus John H. Watson was returned to Baker Street, but not to the publishing world, for he chose not to write anymore tales at present, while he and Holmes recovered their old relationship. Holmes despaired of finding a new Moriarty to satisfy his craving for a challenge, but made do with what London crime gave him. So they had years in relative peace, mainly by not discussing the things that had parted them in the first place.
However, the author in Watson developed an itch to write again, and after the successful publication of the old Baskerville case in 1902, Watson decided the next year to bring Holmes back to the world at large. Holmes found this decision less than pleasing, but informing Watson of that opinion would not be easy.
One evening as Watson typed away his stories for the Return, Holmes could no longer be silent. "Watson?"
"Yes?" He did not turn from his manuscript or stop clattering away.
Holmes approached Watson's desk and peered closely at the face that he helped make-up every day. "Why this James Watson again?"
"John--John H. Watson, M. D., Late of India Army." Watson dropped his hands from the keys and met Holmes's glance questioningly. "I've been John all these years, Holmes. Nothing's changed, but that I'm writing again."
"I know that. I wish that you wouldn't, though."
He frowned with a trace of bitterness. "Why am I not surprised?"
"We have certainly had our disagreements about your writings, my dear Watson, and yet I wonder if I ever made it clear to you--"
"Clear to me?" Watson snorted disdainfully. The sound was followed by a mirthless laughter, and some faltering in voice, as the line between John and Helena blurred a bit. "Clear to me?" she blinked at him. "You've made it more than clear how you felt about my writings. Repeatedly."
"My dear Watson," he tried to explain, "there is a difference between our living this way in private, and our being publicly displayed, painted as caricatures of ourselves in print..."
"The difference being that the quality greatly suffers in my incompetent hands?"
"Wats--"
"No!" she interrupted him forcefully and shook her head to fight her damp eyes. "Why, Holmes? Why would you tip over our delicate balance again after all these years? Why?"
He frowned to hear her voice breaking. "I do not mean to hurt you."
"You have done nothing but that!" She rose from her chair and began pacing around the sitting-room, her arms folded around herself. "No one hurts me half as much as you, Holmes. You've never respected me. You've belittled my writing, derided my intelligence, berated my sensational and emotional nature..."
He approached her and tried to touch her shoulder.
She pulled away and shook her head. "You don't think that I deserve to be a doctor, do you? That my medical training is wasted on such a trivial, irrational individual. All right, so I'm failure without you! So my only real patients have been your clients who were in over their heads. I've only been a success as a writer, and you don't respect that success either!"
"My dear Watson," he protested, "you are not a failure! Far from it." He turned her towards him and met her eyes with remorse. "How can you think in all these years that I don't respect you? That my judgments mean anything when I am petulant?" She did not answer him, and he stepped closer. "You are the most invaluable friend I have ever had, Watson, and I cannot do without you. Surely you believe me?"
She bit her lip and inflicted a wound. "You did without me for three years."
Drawing a breath, he averted his eyes and winced. "Not easily."
"Not easily?" she scoffed, unconvinced. "What does that mean?"
He spoke softly, "I had no one to rely upon as I relied on you. No one to share my conversations, my moods, my desperation without brainwork..."
"No one to torment, you mean."
He frowned, stung by her harshness.
She drew away from him toward the wall. "Why did you deceive me at all?" she demanded painfully. "Just leave me like that?"
His eyes were troubled, and his voice faint. "That was for your sake, Watson."
"My sake!" she stared at him in disbelief. "Abandoning me to grief and loneliness?"
He took some time in answering, looking guilty. "I am... not healthy for you. Neither is this John Watson fiction in which we've both indulged all these years. It was wrong to ever continue the pretence."
She laughed scornfully. "Wrong for you to ever come back, you mean? To undeceive me of my horrific delusion?"
He swallowed and appealed to her earnestly. "Why do you think that I came back to you, Watson? Why, when the danger from Moran remained?"
"You wanted to capture Moran, and you felt sorry for me. Mycroft had been keeping you verily informed of the emptiness of my life, I suppose?"
He shook his head. "I put you in danger by returning, by just coming to your door. I risked your safety, not even knowing if you would refuse me altogether."
"Oh yes, you were so very uncertain of swaying me, weren't you?" she rolled her eyes. "You'd failed so badly at manipulating my emotions before?"
He withstood her merciless tone, then continued, "I returned because I needed to see you again, Watson. Needed you, selfishly. Beyond all reason, I could no longer stay away." His hand brushed her cheek with an odd, lingering tenderness.
She peered at him bewilderedly for a moment, then turned away, pulling from his touch. "Don't lie to me, Holmes."
He blinked. "I'm not--"
"Don't!" She retreated back to her desk, cringing with wounded pride. "I don't need your idea of pity."
He followed her, frustrated. "Listen to me, please."
"Listen?" she whirled around at him. "To this drivelling nonsense? To this artificial, patronising--"
He grasped her arms. "I mean what I say, Watson!"
"You can't!" she pushed at him. "What kind of fool do you think I am? You 'need' me? For what, Holmes? You're a lone creature, self-satisfied and self-sufficient. All these years, you could have done without me just fine, and you know it. It was only an accident that we ever met at all."
"But it was not an accident that you stayed."
"It was!"
He shook his head. "Not your brother falling in love and forgetting you. If he had asked you to come, I would have telegrammed him that he couldn't have you."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "I don't believe that would have been your decision to make."
"No," he conceded quietly. "No, of course not. I have no claim to you. You are not even my sister. Not even my wife."
She shut her eyes, weary. "No, we are just two bachelors who don't belong to anybody."
"We are a spinster and a bachelor," he corrected, watching her face. He took a breath. "Do you remember Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton?"
She opened her eyes and scowled impatiently. "What about them?"
"An unlikely match. A disreputable spinster, naturally distrusting and independent; an honoured bachelor, trading prudent law for reckless love. Risking his life and fortune to follow her to an uncertain future. An imbecile, a madman--a bachelor who took the risk." He stepped closer suddenly, leaning near. She started to back away, but he caught her close to him and kissed her mouth, false mustache and all. She resisted, doubting his sincerity, but he held on and kept kissing her, stubbornly, passionately, taking her breath away.
"Watson," he sighed ardently between his kisses. His fingers slid through her short hair and against her skin. She had not imagined that he was capable of this kind of fire.
When he released her, she stumbled back against her desk, blinking up at him. She had never seen that look in his eyes before, so burning and intense. Shaking her to her very core. "Tell me, this isn't merely your skill as an actor," she demanded. "It-it cannot be an act."
He brushed her cheek with his hand, agreeing. "Cannot be."
Still she hesitated, finding this moment hard to grasp. He read her eyes, and sought for adequate words with a frown. "As you have seen," he murmured slowly, "certain words ring false in me, strike too much at odds with the outward aspects of me to which you have grown accustomed. Words that fall from my lips easily enough as charming postures and deception while investigating my cases, lose their quality of credibility with you, my dear Watson. However much I try, I fail where I would most wish to succeed. Perhaps you will understand, then, why I never so expressed myself to you before."
She absorbed this statement in silence, contemplating the feeling of his kisses and the failing of his words. "You have... loved me?" she spoke for him.
He took both her hands in his. "Would you even believe me?"
She withdrew from his grasp uncomfortably, turning and starting for her bedroom to sort through this whole mess, but she caught his faint whisper behind her, "Don't leave me." She halted and looked back to see him leaning haggardly upon her desk, his eyes rooted to the ground.
He grimaced, shutting his eyes against her stare. "You frighten me. You terrify me greatly with how much I need your presence. A weakness in me I cannot dismiss or eliminate." He swallowed with difficulty, surrendering. "Fine, continue your writing then. Publish it all and twist it anyway you wish. But don't go," he shook his head. "Don't take the practice back from cousin Verner and keep me at a 'safe' distance from you. I have learned in my years without you that there is no safe distance."
She was stunned, not having imagined before that the Dr. Verner who bought her practice was in any way connected to Holmes. And yet, the price he had been willing to accept--she must verify this.
For now, Watson stood viewing Holmes in a new light, wondering if the sentiment behind his words, so unlike the romantic pleas of any typical lover, could be real. Yet knowing him so well, it should not surprise her that his cold nature would view love as a violent assault on his rational mind, to be fought at all costs. "Give me time, Holmes," she spoke finally, turning and retreating back to her bedroom.
He did not follow her within, and was seated with his head resting on his folded arms upon her desk when she emerged once more. Her makeup and disguise had been compromised by his kisses, but she had repaired her appearance and composed herself, that she could go out. She was puzzled by his position, coming near and seeing that he had disarranged her stories, apparently reading through them.
He partly lifted his head, showing that he was not in fact asleep, but he spoke tiredly nonetheless. "Tell me, Watson," he kept his eyes levelled at a copy of her "Empty House" adventure, "why is everything public about us always woven with lies?"
"I don't know, Holmes. Perhaps it comes from the games of pretence that we learnt in our private lives."
He nodded and said no more.
She turned and walked out the door.
When Watson returned later from visiting Dr. Verner, Holmes was standing with crossed arms and staring into the fireplace, his violin tossed aside on the floor. Though he clearly heard Watson's entry, he did not turn around.
Watson thought for a moment and adopted his most careless, chat-by-the-fire tone of voice. "So where did you learn to kiss like that, Holmes?" he asked with challenging masculine bravado to break the tension in the room. "Were you more than chatting up girls on our cases, and more often than I knew of?"
"I should have had more girls following me home to Baker Street to give me unwelcome attention, then," Holmes answered, in the manner of stating an absolute fact.
He was right of course, in his inference that he could easily melt any female with such kisses if he chose to, but the question remained of why he chose to apply this skill to Watson, and at such a late date in their relationship.
Holmes continued without prompting, "You do not wish to know my history, Watson. Consider it a chapter of my youth best left unread."
Watson hovered, not sure whether to remain in John's persona or Helena's in this most delicate moment. He measured his words carefully, stepping closer to Holmes, "You must admit that you manipulated me with your cousin Verner. Paying a handsome sum for him to be ready to move at a moment's notice, as he watched the papers for my advertisements."
Holmes nodded. "I do not deny that I lie to you, that I deceive you often. It is--"
"--in your nature." Watson stood a bit behind Holmes, watching his features by the light of the fire. "And honesty is in my nature, for the most part. You have me at the disadvantage that you can tell I love you already, and can act accordingly."
"I can, but I would not inflict my own feelings where--"
Watson caught him off guard and pounced upon him with a kiss. Knowing that perhaps it would be the last that she would ever indulge in without a taste of bitter deception in her mouth, she kissed him with all her might and sought out his warm breath again.
He was willing, oh so willing. Surely even Sherlock Holmes could not, without notice, muster his thespian talents to counterfeit such ardour for someone he did not truly desire? He drew her nearer, kissed her ravenously as if he had more in common with his French ancestors than his English, and pressed his warm hands upon her coat, sliding down into the small of her back. Now, she felt certain of his love for her.
"Holmes, my darling," she smiled softly and sighed.
"You do believe me, then?" he blinked with relief.
She nodded and kissed him once again.
He tangled his hands into her hair and then murmured, lightly kissing her cheek, "An admirable execution of subterfuge, my dear Watson."
They laughed familiarly with each other, and for several moments more stood there embracing and kissing one another like fond young lovers, or perhaps old ones reunited. At last she drew back somewhat, gazing at him with new wonder and joy. "You must love me," she chuckled, feeling her disordered false mustache on her face, "you haven't yet asked me to change out of my costume!"
He laughed not as heartily, and then faced her with more serious eyes. "Watson," he frowned slightly, "on that matter, there is something I want to make clear to you."
"What?" she slid her hand along his sleeve.
"You know you are an unusually independent spinster--bachelor, really--and have grown accustomed to having far more freedoms than are possessed by most of the fair sex. I do not want to change that at all; I do not want to change you in anyway. You must not give up your income, your costume, your name, and most of all not your mind, for me. I did not profess my affections for you, Watson, simply to force you to become some tame, prosaic wife to me."
"Force me, Holmes? You could not 'force me' to do anything of the kind!" she smiled, quite amused. She laid her head on his shoulder and slid her arms under his coat. "You could try persuading me, though."
He raised an eyebrow, looking concerned. "I should not want to persuade you, either."
"Calm yourself, Holmes," she chuckled. "I certainly won't change myself around, but I think that, on certain amicable terms, I could be happy being married to you."
"You could?" he said.
She nodded, feeling cosy in his arms.
He did not say anything else for some moments, looking into the fireplace.
"What's wrong?" she ventured. "Did I scare the confirmed bachelor in you?"
He attempted a smile, but succeeded only weakly. "I had not thought of us becoming quite so domestic so soon, if at all." Then he became brighter and more dismissive. "You know, John Watson, you are starting to talk very much like a woman, with thoughts dangerously centred around matrimony, and I cannot have much more of that. We have always got along so well because I believed you were a confirmed bachelor like myself."
She laughed, holding fondly onto him. After a moment, she pensively asked, "What did you miss about me the most while you were gone?"
His voice was equally contemplative and soft. "The things that I could not have." He brushed his fingers across her short hair again.