TIME TO REFLECT
By
Nikki Harrington
Set after The Final Problem.
Watson reflects on his relationship with Holmes and missed opportunities.
A pre-slash story.
Written: August 2009. Word count: 500.
When I think back over the years I have known Sherlock Holmes, how our lives have been so deeply and intimately entwined, there is only one thing I regret.
Maybe I should not write it, but after the loss of my dearest friend, I find the need to write his name, least there comes a day when I should not be able to recall it. Not that I can ever imagine that day will come, could come, but it gives me some element of comfort in my sorrow to write his name.
The one regret is that I never told him of my true feelings for him. That I never told him my love for him was more than that of just a friend and colleague; that I dared to love him as one man should not love another.
As I sit in the rooms we once shared I believe I can still smell his tobacco, can still hear his voice, can still feel the strains of the violin he played so well. Can still see him look at me and smile or cast me his exasperated look when I failed to pick up on something that to him was as obvious as an ink stain on an otherwise pristine page.
Had I known, when we left our hotel on the spring day, that it would be our last time together, I believe I would have dared to speak of my love for him. Even though I am married, I would have told him and faced whatever his reaction may have been.
I do not dare to hope that my feelings would have been returned and yet, and yet he loved me, as far as a man like Sherlock Holmes is able to love; of that I am certain. And he let me walk away from him, let me be lured back to the hotel by a message he believed to be fake in order to, I believe, keep me from harm.
Again my eyes fall on the final words he wrote; the final words he wrote to me. In his last moments, it was I who was on his mind. He took the trouble to write to me. Maybe, over the next few days and weeks and month, as spring turns into summer and summer into autumn and autumn into winter before winter once again becomes spring, maybe I can find some small comfort in the fact that I was the last person of whom he thought when he faced Moriarty at the falls of Reichenbach. And maybe one day, when I reflect back on my life with Holmes, I will cease to regret not having had the courage to speak out.
But for now I shall sit in the semi-darkened room, trying to ignore the odour of burnt wood and cloth, trying not to look at the signs of fire damage, trying not to hear the sounds of bird song, and mourn for my friend and lost opportunities.
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