Work Text:
Sherlock Holmes was an unsurpassed master at controlling his baser instincts. When he was involved in an absorbing case he would neither eat nor sleep until he had reasoned out the answer. Such masterful control included those instincts at which our staid society would quail, calling them unnatural, bestial, monstrous – but which, to the two men involved, was nothing less than holy marriage itself.
One such case was of such a politically delicate nature that it will remain unwritten for decades, and I have given it no public name. My poor friend’s mental and physical limits had been tested to the utmost in seeking and then pursuing the correct guilty party, and then strained nearly to the breaking point during the calamitous confrontation with said guilty party. I did not escape injury during the man’s knife attack on Holmes; ironically, the gash he inflicted on me almost as an afterthought galvanised my friend into a redoubled counter-assault that decisively rendered the blackguard unconscious, when Holmes would have been content merely to disarm and hold the rogue if he were only defending himself.
“I wish they’d stop hurting the same arm,” I groaned, holding the bleeding wound closed with my right hand.
My levity very likely kept the enraged Holmes from killing the man even as he lay helpless at our feet, for every muscle he owned seemed to unknot at my words and a humourless laugh barked out of him. He was at my side in seconds, long deft fingers pulling aside my bloodied tatters of coat and shirt sleeves to examine the wound, his hands cold and shaking from more than the aftermath of such a trying case. “The arm nearest your beating heart? It was well-missed. I did not escape damage either. But this –”
We were alone in that dingy room save for its insensate owner, so I kissed Holmes’ forehead and whispered, “It’s all right, my dear fellow – a little lost blood, not enough to be a danger. A few stitches, a good deal of profane language and a robust supper and both of us shall be right as rain. Now help me bind this up so we can leave this bastard with a constable.”
My neighbor Anstruther had long since learned not to question my calls upon him no matter the odd hours, nor to query about how I had acquired such damages. “Gunshot again, Watson?” he groused, cutting away my ruined clothing. “No – a knife this time. Short blade, a wild swing. No arterial damage. Your opponent either wasn’t very good or you weren’t his primary target.”
“In six months I could make you a member of our firm,” Holmes said from across the room in Anstruther’s study, away from the direct lamplight. “As always, we are indebted to you.”
“Don’t suppose I could ask you to quit getting yourself cut up or shot or bitten,” the man grumbled, completing his thorough (and painful) cleansing of my forearm-gash and taking up the needle. “Look at these scars! What bastard did that to your wrist? It’s as if he tried to lay open your blood vessels with a scalpel.”
“Correct,” Holmes said before I could react. “The situation was resolved to our satisfaction.” But for all his coolness, I could practically hear him vibrating, distanced though he was. The pain of the stitching focused my mind.
“Why is it that YOU never seem to take injury, Holmes?” Despite his question, Anstruther kept his physical self focused on tending my injury. “Damned if I can ever remember you coming in for a stitching or bandaging.”
“I tend him myself on those few occasions,” I said. “I’m the better shot, but in close-quarters combat he’s far quicker and less clumsy than I am. That’s why he’s able to avoid doubling your work-load. Now you know that’s true, Holmes,” I said sternly to the vocal objection in the far corner.
“Hmph.” Unimpressed, Anstruther snipped the last suture and took up the gauze. “No worrisome blood-loss, you’re warm enough and not showing the signs. Get some red meat and good brandy into your system as a precaution, drink a liter of water, and a draught of laudanum should numb the pain. Do you need – ?”
“We have what we need,” I reassured him, smiling. “I might be running around London playing detective, but I am still a doctor.”
A few more ‘adventures’ and your last three patients will tire of the postponements and leave you with no practise at all,” Anstruther warned, helping me arrange the sling.
“You may have them with my blessing,” said I, yawning, and found Holmes at hand when I reached out.
After Anstruther’s supper was our next priority, and at a nearby tavern I regaled myself with a beefsteak and porter. Holmes drank a little water from my carafe, but otherwise his sole attention to the table was to cut my meat for me, hampered as I was by the sling. His eyes glittered and his hands shook so that he kept them under the table when they were not so employed. But he is the master of his baser instincts.
“I can wait,” he said at one point.
“Nonsense,” I replied firmly. “This little cut won’t stop me from giving you what you need. And you are all but spent, my dear man.”
He nodded, and I did not imagine the gratitude that shone in the glittering depths.
Meal over and my inner man appeased, we returned post-haste to Baker Street. The night was well along now and we did not hide our urgency any longer. Holmes all but carried me up the seventeen steps to our main room, breathing as if he imitated a steam-engine. I did not need to see his eyes to know their feral shine.
Only when we were secure behind two sets of locked doors in Holmes’ room did I take up the immaculate scalpel on the end-table with the beslinged hand, expertly slitting my right wrist over the vein.
My friend fell on the welling blood like a starving dog upon a bowl of meat, gripping my forearm with both hands and lapping at the wound in his mouth with his cold tongue. His famished seizure of me was as gratifying as if I watched him hungrily devour a meal I had prepared for him.
He is as tidy in his dining habits as he is fastidious in his dress, even if his fare is horrifying to outsiders. Ravenous though I knew him to be, he did not suck at the wound nor tear it with his teeth; he knew he would feed to fullness and was content to take what my heart beat for him at its own pace. I waited; and knew him to be satiated when I felt the icy hands that gripped me grow warm to the finger-tips and the tongue at my wrist as warm as the flesh it stroked.
When he relinquished my arm it was clean and white, unbruised and unbloodied (save for that one slit), and he expertly bound up my wrist from the waiting roll of dressing before a drop could fall to the ground. The feral glint in his eyes was replaced by a glow of contentment, peace, and pleasure. “My dear Watson,” he said. “I cannot yet fathom how it is that when I take your blood, I feel least like one of the monsters from Mr. Stoker’s novel.”
“Mr. Stoker,” I retorted even as I smoothed back his black hair with my freed right hand, “is a writer of tawdry fiction. I should recognise such, shouldn’t I?”
He laughed, as I meant him to, and I held him, reveling in his temporary human warmth. It no longer alarmed me to hear nothing in his breast – no heartbeat, no pulse, no regular respiration when he was not speaking or smoking (he jocularly told me that he had taken up tobacco simply to keep himself in the discipline of breathing around ordinary people).
“Your own ‘damage?’” I said.
“Tch! Superficial.” With a dismissive wave of one long thin beautiful hand Sherlock Holmes pulled aside his own torn shirt and waistcoat to show me the deep stab between the third and fourth false ribs on his left side. Of course it had shed no blood and had not caused my friend distress, and was already closing now that he had taken nourishment once again.
His eyes were already closing in exhaustion, now that the case was concluded. I felt my own drifting shut. Laudanum was as nothing to whatever substance resided in his saliva that kept the blood flowing and took away pain. A warm bath would be lovely, but in the morning, I thought…
I moved just enough to turn down the gas and shed as much of my clothing and his as I could manage one-handed before rejoining him on the bed. We lay together like two snails curled in one shell.
###
He does not speak of most of his people, and tells me little of his past – only that he was “typical for our kind” before Stamford introduced us. He revealed his nature to me one horrified night when I caught him feeding from Mrs. Hudson’s poor old dying dog – and by then I could not find it within me to take his life. Curiosity warred with horror, and curiosity won. He was amused enough at my misapprehensions to enumerate the fallacies. He can and does walk abroad by day, though he keeps his head covered and his sensitive eyes averted; he can look upon and touch crosses with no ill-effects, though he will not set foot in a church (“I am a creature who has committed atrocities in my long and inhuman life – to enter would be the height of hypocrisy”). When I saw that the Sherlock Holmes who had amazed me with his brilliance and perspicacity was the same person even after my knowing his secret, we regained our friendship and continued our work.
And one night, both of us caught up in reckless joy in the aftermath of a case, I offered him my own blood. He was as frightened as I was – and as unable to resist temptation. I had seen the longing. A gentleman does not share with the public the sensations he experienced on his wedding night; for much the same reason I will not speak of how that exchange altered both of us. But alter us both it did, for the better. I remain as mortal and human as before – or as mortal as a man can be who is partnered for life with a demonic angel (or angelic demon).
I wrote around our difficulties easily enough. But my heart still sank every time I thought of the foul morocco case that lies in the locked drawer of his study. My readers had accepted my literary leger-demain of giving their heroic sleuth a very human and mortal fallibility. But I hated what was in that case even more than I would loathe vials of cocaine or morphine. Inside was a syringe, lying next to capsules of dried and powdered garlic and vials of holy water; and a small wrapped container of enough consecrated wafers to complete an act of self-execution if the solution did not.
“Your great intellect, your gifts, your decades of accumulated learning!” I had remonstrated with him, when I first found this dreadful kit. “Your brother! Surely you can survive me! For how many centuries had you lived before I was even born?”
He shook his head. “Before you I was a fiend. I fed as do all my cursed kind, to the death – even if I appeased my mind by feeding on those that deserved death. How was I to know how love sweetens the banquet and fills me as no murderer’s lifeblood ever did? No, my John. Unlike Mycroft, I have tasted love and will not let its memory turn to grave-soil in my mouth. The day I must lose you is the day I myself end.” He might have been saying “The sky is blue.”
How many men have been given such a pledge by an immortal?
I smiled at him to hide how moved I was, even though we both knew he would perceive the truth. “Then I have a sterling reason to keep myself alive and well for as long as possible, do I not?” I’d said, playfully thumbing the two tiny razor-sharp incisors he hid from everyone else.
###
He was cooler when I awoke, and still tired from the aftermath of the case. He would likely be in a low mood for the rest of the day, so I left him to attend to my own toilet and dress (one-handed, as I’d had to learn during my convalescence in Peshawar). I was a little light-headed and thirsty from the blood-loss, but a long drink of water and devouring both of our breakfasts had me feeling better at once. By mid-afternoon my wrist bandages could be removed; my arm-gash would take longer to heal, but not as long as it normally took.
He emerged in the evening while I sorted through my notes from several earlier cases. “Our villain?” he said, pouring himself a cup of tea.
“Gregson telephoned. He informs me that a ‘dour chap’ came along to collect him from the cells.”
A humourless grin flickered around his thin lips. “He will find the Diogenes Club a far more terrifying bailiwick than Scotland Yard.”
I had learned long ago not to ask certain questions. “And he was threatening all sorts of things, so Gregson says,” I reported, amused. “Swearing vengeance, cursing. ‘Sherlock Holmes, you are dead!’ That sort of thing.”
“He is correct,” Holmes said. “I am dead. A cinder, a husk.”
I walked over and patted his cool shoulder. “Then it’s just as well that I have life enough for both of us, isn’t it?”