Watson soon after departed Baker Street for a set of rooms in Queen Anne Street, to put some distance between them, though she knew not what other steps to take to kill their most unwise and impossible love.
Holmes seemed in a daze when she left with the last of her belongings. He sat silently brooding in his chair as if unable to contemplate the final wreck of their relationship, in its slow passage from a grudging companionship, to a genuine friendship, to the tangled maelstrom of emotions and passions that had been their love. He still harboured for Watson the most irrational need, and wondered if at long last she would prove to him now how readily she could live without him. He only knew that he was not possessed of enough resilient strength at this date to do more than subsist on his own.
Once she was gone, he could not bear the silence of Baker Street, so he retreated to the Diogenes Club, finding that the enforced hush of Diogenes was somehow less forbidding and empty than his own rooms at present. Holmes sought out his brother there and asked him, cryptically, for "sanctuary." Mycroft raised an eyebrow, but he did not as yet question his brother's lack of explanation.
Accompanying Mycroft to his home in Pall Mall, the detective remained silent and pensive throughout their dinner that evening. Though the brothers had not had any occasion to visit each other in over a year, Mycroft did not mind the lack of conversation, being the founder of Diogenes, after all, and in any case he had plenty of Whitehall matters to weigh upon his mind at present. Upon finishing the meal, they retired to his parlour, where the butler served them their after-dinner brandy and then withdrew.
Mycroft sank into his comfortable armchair and watched his brother take the seat opposite him. The elder Holmes suspected already what must be wrong, for what could cause Sherlock's own rooms to become unbearable to him besides some falling out with his friend and partner of many years?
Brooding there, Sherlock realised suddenly the significance of where he sat now, shutting his eyes and recalling Watson's voice when she had told him of her time spent with Mycroft. She had sobbed in this chair, had mourned him here, clinging to it for some kind of comfort and connection in her desperate grief. He grimaced, remembering how empty and lifeless he himself had felt during his three years' absence, how much he had wanted to return to her.
In the continued silence, Mycroft patiently waited for his brother to explain his troubles, and he wondered what agonising memory must currently be running across his mind as he buried his face in the wing of the chair and gripped the armrest.
Turning around finally and swallowing his pain, Sherlock opened his eyes and quietly confided to his brother why he had come, "I have nowhere else to go, Mycroft. She--" He slumped in his chair and reached for his glass of brandy. He drank a swallow, then said, "I have finally lost Watson, as I always dreaded that I would."
Mycroft narrowed his eyes at Sherlock. "Your self-fulfilling pessimism has always been unhealthy, too. What exactly happened? You have offended her more than usual, and it was the last straw for her? If you give her sufficient time, she may relent and return to you."
He shook his head. "I ruined us. I told her I love her."
Mycroft looked surprised and puzzled. "I thought you intended to never show your feelings, Sherlock."
"Good intentions never last," he lamented. Narrowing his eyes at Mycroft sharply, he protested, "It didn't help that you had kissed her."
Mycroft gave a start then and set down his glass, much chagrined. "Why did she tell you--?" He stopped and cleared his throat, dismissing it. "Well, that is long past, anyway, and I did not think it worth mentioning to you once you returned from your false death." He shrugged. "After all, it was not my fault that you had left her so emotionally fragile, with only me to comfort her. I could not help the moment, surely?"
Sherlock grudgingly conceded, "Oh, she tells me you were innocent."
"But you don't believe her?"
"I believe every word she says. She is incurably honest, and always has been, with me. But I have not done Watson the same courtesy. I never have. It torments me that I never showed her my affections without tainting it with omissions and equivocations because of what I am. What makes it worse is that you, you have to be tender to her! You have to make a stark contrast between what you can give her and I cannot!"
"I can give?" Mycroft looked doubtful. "She does not desire me, as I hope she has told you, and even if she did want me as a lover, you know very well, Sherlock, that I can no more give her that love than you can."
"I know that, Mycroft!" He groaned unhappily. "Our different deficiencies reduce to the same essential result: no passion left to give to anyone, even if we wanted to."
Mycroft frowned, still puzzled. "Then why are you angry with me?"
He sighed. "Because you can give her honesty, and I cannot. You can tell her truthfully that you have long since regimented all desire for women out of your life, for the sake of your lofty profession. You can tell her that and she will believe you and love you all the same. She can forgive you for it and choose to stay with you gladly and faithfully. But I could not tell her what I feel, what I truly feel, without driving her away. I am angry with myself because I have lost her. Because I never truly had her, in the first place." He sank his head tiredly against the armrest.
"Sherlock, I fear this overwrought emotion of yours is twisting your logic. You overestimate a woman's tolerance for a man's faults. She would not stay, if the case were hopeless."
He shook his head. "You don't know her. You have not heard Watson profess her undying love for you. Her tender, generous heart can settle for just your emotion and closeness, even when you are incapable of more."
"And why are you certain that this improbable hypothesis is correct?"
"It is not a hypothesis." He looked into the distance, growing guilty with just the memory. "For a time I pretended to her that my lack of passion for her was merely akin to your own incapacity."
Mycroft chastised him. "Sherlock, you should not have even attempted such a deception."
He feigned a laugh and shook his head miserably. "Too late for your sage advice, my dear Mycroft. Far too late."
"So what have you done? Told her that you love her, but cannot reciprocate her touch? No wonder she left you. Even I know that much about intimate relationships, Sherlock."
He sighed sadly, whispering, "She loved me for a time. She gave me all her devotion, all her heart, everything I have missed every time I thought that I could bury my passions elsewhere." He swallowed. "There was never a cure, either for my physical desires nor for my unreasonable love for her, yet for a time it was enough to wallow in the illness and have some semblance of love."
Mycroft peered at his brother without much sympathy. "It seems to me that you have needlessly toyed with expectations and emotions better left alone. You have also inexcusably neglected to consider the greater harm that you could inflict both upon yourself and herself, by acting in this fashion."
Sherlock rose from his chair and walked over to the fireplace, leaning one hand upon the mantle while he peered into the glowing embers. "I know I am to blame, Mycroft. I know also that it is not in your nature to understand either my sexual depravities nor my fixated emotions, but you try anyway to be a tolerant brother to me, and I thank you for that. I fear that this is a crisis far beyond you, and beyond myself as well."
"If you had come to me for advice much earlier, the crisis could have been prevented."
He shook his head. "If I had come to you about this, you could not have told me anything that I did not already know; you could not have suggested any remedy that I did not already pursue." He sighed. "I tried to leave her, to stay away, but you saw what became of that. Then I tried to live beside her again, numbing myself into silence each time I wanted a touch of her hand, or a kiss of her lips. But she was in love with me, and she knew that I knew. She thought I was indulging her if I permitted her to take my hand or lean near to me as we walked together." He tried to laugh, but it came out bitterly. "It grew harder every year, and I could not go on pretending that I did not love her too."
Mycroft nodded. "I can see that it has taken a great toll on you. You look as old as myself, my dear Sherlock."
"I feel older."
"If you stay here for a while and get her off your mind, it may do you some good."
He winced sadly. "If I stayed a hundred years, I could not forget her. Not now." He swallowed and turned to the door. "I shall go to bed."
"Get some rest, then."
An anguished smile crossed his features, then he departed silently.
Mycroft remained behind, settled in his chair and thinking back to the scattered times that he had encountered Watson in person. She was indeed an extraordinary woman for whom he felt a friendly, brotherly affection, but he had never quite shared Sherlock's intense attachment and love for her. That was his acquired deficiency in feelings, of course, but he wondered whether Sherlock were any happier to be burdened with such turbulent emotions and passions.
When Sherlock had first brought her to Diogenes to meet his brother, he did not even have to tell Mycroft that Watson was a woman in disguise, for they both knew Mycroft's exceptionally keen observational skills. Neither Holmes bothered to remark on such a plainly visible fact in front of Watson, and Mycroft readily picked up that she was living quite permanently as a man, for Sherlock stringently used only masculine pronouns to refer to "Dr. John Watson." Mycroft had accordingly adopted this practice as well, but ever since Sherlock's "death" and Watson's brief relapse into her female self, Mycroft had slipped into employing feminine pronouns whenever discussing her with Sherlock. Mycroft simply could not think of her as a man again ever since her grief over Sherlock had prompted her frequent visits to Pall Mall as Dr. Helena Watson. Once Sherlock had returned, of course, her visits to Mycroft had become considerably less frequent and she had ceased to visit him alone.
Able to picture even now how vulnerable and broken Watson had been on the night that he discovered her sobbing in this parlour, it occurred to Mycroft that Sherlock had also used feminine pronouns when referring to her tonight. No doubt, it had made their conversation more consistent and less confusing than usual, but it was still odd that Sherlock did not stumble out of sheer habit and slip into masculine pronouns again. Perhaps he too had begun to think of Watson lately as Helena instead of John?
Holmes meanwhile had gone upstairs to the guestroom reserved for him, but he knew that he would not sleep tonight. He could not, for this very room had been Watson's too when she had stayed over. Mycroft perhaps had thought that he would comfort her by giving her this bedroom, but the gesture had only served to highlight her loss and pain.
Holmes wearily lay down on the bed now and sighed, closing his eyes. He could picture her here, alone in the darkness. Tormented by her memories of him, sobbing and wishing she were dead at Reichenbach too. It made him heartsick. Why must he always be so wrong with Watson? In leaving her and trying to abandon his unhealthy love for her, he had wanted to give her a happy life without him, but he had only caused her horrible grief and suffering. In coming back to her and trying to make her happy again, he had only succumbed to his weakness for her, deceiving her about his love and ultimately breaking her heart again. He could not win, either way. Why must he possess this irrational, stubborn heart?
He could remember all their nights together in her bed, whether they had simply lain beside each other, or actually attempted a passionate embrace. Even when he had fumbled and struggled just to make love to her, he had always craved her kisses and her reassurances that she loved him desperately, hopelessly. She had always held him tightly and whispered to him in a voice that sounded sometimes like Helena, sometimes like John. The darkness was a convenient veil for such lies, and at times he did not know who was the more deceived between them. He should have anticipated that such deception could not go undiscovered forever.
What mere crawling worms people were! What fools! Men may consider themselves the supreme creation of God, or of evolution, these days, but in truth mankind remained such senseless, predictable fools century after century. "The proper study of mankind is man," Watson had written about him long ago. Now, after a lifetime of observation and deduction, Holmes felt thoroughly sick of the question. One might as well study an ant colony or a beehive, as the criminals and citizens of London. There would be more organization, more logic, among insects than among any number of human beings!
Holmes let out a cynical, pained laugh. Indeed, for the happiness of all involved, he ought to have ignored Watson's interruption that night and have simply continued his monograph on the segregation of the queen bee. Let her love die on its own due to his coldness, let her grow weary and leave him in frustration. Anything would have been better than the truth that she eventually discovered. Anything would have been better than the lies.
Indeed, bees would be a refreshing simplicity, compared to this.