Current mood:

gloomy

Um...what?
Yeah, I have no idea. I may be just the teensiest bit depressed. Tiny Holmesian ficlet of bizarre.



He does not understand.

It is strange. He usually understands everything. He’s fairly well known for it, as a matter of fact. Something changed, though, at Reichenbach; someone rewrote the script. Something happened that shouldn’t have, or something didn’t that should have, and the world has been strange ever since.

It seemed almost normal for a time. There was Watson, and there was Mycroft, and there were gaslights and cobbles and shag tobacco. And if he couldn’t quite remember the three years he’d spent roaming – he’d told Watson “hiding”; was that what it had been? – well, he was no longer young, and perhaps Watson had been right about the destructive effects of the cocaine upon the mind. He found he minded less than he would have supposed.

But the years have all fallen away now, and he keeps the obituaries in his breast pocket and does not eat. It doesn’t matter. He has been shot, stabbed, burned, drowned, exposed for seven weeks in the heart of the most barren desert on this lonely rock. It has done nothing. He has watched nations rise and fall; he has seen the sciences reborn and the most fantastic of inventions debut upon the public stage. He has seen enough of war to know that the man he was in 1914 was nothing but a fool. He has forgotten what sleep is like, or the taste of brandy, or the sound of his violin.

He misses Watson every day.

He should have died at Reichenbach and he did not; he has seen two centuries turn since. It is too much. He cannot think. He cannot deduce.

He does not understand.