Chapter 2

For a second year, Holmes tries to prepare a surprise for his best friend's birthday; we hear more about his earlier life and his childhood relationship with his brother Mycroft.

It seemed to Holmes that in the fifty weeks since that birthday, Holmes and Watson’s friendship had grown in strength and intensity, even as Holmes’s ever-tenuous grasp of the public’s ways of interacting had dwindled now, he hardly ventured to entertain any guests or visitors�"or even clients�"unless Watson were with him. At times, he felt himself liking his guests, and wished he could have a chance to get to know them better�"he tried to be funny, to be winning�"to make a good impression the first time so that later times would be easier; however, he simultaneous kept a mental running commentary of criticism, and each attempt was decried as a pathetic failure. They always seemed grateful and usually Holmes was capable of solving their minor mysteries with ease, but unless they needed more help later, they never paid any further calls on Sherlock: confirmation, to Holmes’s subconscious mind, that he had indeed failed to win their genuine friendship. Holmes relied on Watson to help smooth matters over. When Holmes got tongue-tied, Watson was always able to sense the perfect expression to speak out�"at least, if he understood what Holmes had in mind, and that was variable, as Holmes often did not share his thoughts before he was absolutely certain he was right. Holmes was, in fact, anxious not to lose face with John, and in some cases, Holmes’s string of conclusions, assumptions, and such were mere hunches�"so very fragile that he dared not tell John; Sherlock had a practiced poker-face--he had literally practiced it before his looking-glass regularly, and found it boosted his self-image--and did have adequate confidence in his own ability to act as if he were in control, and to think of a course of action in case of failure. Further, Holmes cultivated a somewhat cold air of abstraction and aloofness in order to discourage excessive chatter. At any rate, John was so good with visitors, and presumably, with his patients, that he could always help to make them more at ease, easily compensating for Holmes’s taciturnity.

One unannounced visitor, in particular, had shaken Holmes’s trust in himself and his capability of dealing with people when they were not predisposed to treat civilly with him. When Doctor Roylott, that malicious Samson of modern times, had sought Sherlock out at the Baker Street flat, Holmes had never needed his “poker face” so much�"he felt suddenly that flight would be the best option, as he dreaded confrontations, and obviously, violent ones were especially odious and alarming. He knew he could handle himself in a fist fight, and he could brave-face it out if he really needed to reckon with an angry client, suspect, or criminal maniac. He was brave and cool-headed in the face of danger, and he could keep his head as he kept his real emotions away from his face. But after every confrontation, when he had attained privacy, Holmes let his guard down and allowed himself the luxury of the panic attack he often had to thrust brutally down below his threshold of conscious thought, lest he lose his head�"something he wished never to do in life, and most of all when and where he could be observed�"a facade of calm strength was vital not only to his consultancy as a business, but to his sense of self in public. He had worked hard to establish a reputation as a cool, calculated thinker, stern and calm and rational�"a man of iron will and unflappable demeanour. He refused to betray his shameful trepidation to anybody; his brother had caught him unaware just once, as a young man�"Mycroft had never told anyone. That was, in short, the reason why Doctor Roylott’s appearance, though it had alarmed John, was assumed by Watson to have failed to quail Sherlock. It was all the detective could do to bluff it through, laughing at Roylott instead of crying out in alarm. Hand to hand, perhaps, Holmes would have been the victor, though the thought of Roylott’s hands on him was insupportable, but the factors of rage�"which Roylott was clearly prone to�"and panic, which could add an edge of power sometimes, but was not reliable, nor tractable to the service of combat�"these factors made the results of a physical fight less certain. Holmes could tell that a man like that could not be trusted to use only honourable means. He might force the door when Holmes was sleeping�"land a blow upon his head, and Holmes would never even wake up from the assault. Roylott might even use the same poker he had bent out of shape to deal Holmes a final injury. After Roylott stormed out, Holmes had nearly fainted with the relief of it, and his confident facade slipped entirely way. It was not until a while later that Holmes had even recalled that Watson was still with him�"his friend had stepped across the room to steady Holmes, and he later told Sherlock that his face had been quite drained of colour. Forcing himself to rally around, Holmes forced himself to shrug the incident off. He had needed his rather childish display of strength to help himself regain at least a shred of confidence�"but as Holmes bent that poker back to a semblance of straightness, his hands shook with shock as much as with the effort. He would, even under normal, calm circumstances, not have felt amused by it precisely, but he was well conscious of the irony of his emotional need to restore the poker concurrently with his social need to force from his lips a frown of dismay, back into something like the straight line of what is called a “poker face”�"and one could imagine the line of the poker as the lips of such a face! Besides�"as Holmes told Watson, moments after he had achieved this feat of physical as well as emotional strength�"he could not let himself be “bent out of shape” by such a beast as Roylott�"Mrs Hudson would throw a fit if she found out that Holmes and Watson had allowed a hostile stranger�"he could hardly be called a “guest” or even a “visitor”�"into her house, and allowed him to start mangling her property. She might decide to evict them both, and that would never do.

It had bolstered Holmes’s spirits immeasurably when Watson had declared that if they ever met with such a disaster, Watson would fervently wish to find new quarters with Holmes, so that they could continue as a team. Holmes had responded warmly�"especially considering his normally reserved demeanour. “You must know, my dear friend, that should I live a century longer, I never would be able to find another companion that I liked or cared for half as much as you.” It was hard for Holmes to imagine that in the four months after that day, Mrs Hudson could possibly have failed to notice the bent poker�"Holmes sometimes spent a few minutes trying, in vain, to make it totally straight, but it probably would never again look as if it were still new�"but she had never let on; presumably, once it was cold enough, she would catch on the first time she stoked the fire. In fact, Watson, half-jokingly, had presented Sherlock with a newly-purchased poker, gleaming with newness, but as it would never have passed for the same item, Holmes had elected not to make the substitution; he much preferred to let the incident pass to confessing the matter of the disfigured poker to his landlady. But Roylott was never to return, and the friends remained in their snug hutch undisturbed.

In truth, it seemed to Holmes, Watson was closer to him than his brother�"maybe more than any possible brother. The sense of a need for competition was ever an impediment to closeness with Mycroft; it remained in the corner if Sherlock’s mind even when the brothers were not in direct communication. Mycroft’s most salient quality was his piercing intelligence, the one characteristic of Holmes’s own sense of self that he had real confidence in, ordinarily�"but when they were together, Mycroft and Sherlock tended to tackle the same conundra�"Holmes could not help testing himself, his speed, against his brother’s. As for Mycroft’s other characteristics�"social suavity, sartorial flair, good looks�"Holmes had, with some dejection and bitterness, resigned himself to the role of a spectator rather than anything like a rival; he no longer put any effort into what the world called charm, save when a case called for it. Now, in Watson, Holmes found a counterpart who was his ultimate complement. Watson was a capable, competent, and patient man who could co-operate with him in all necessary ways with his work that involved working with clients and others involved in his investigations. Replete with humility, Watson was always willing to help, always did his own level best to observe, process, and try to reach his own conclusions about what had really occurred during a case. He never interfered with Sherlock’s cogitation, never asserted that his own thoughts were more valid than Sherlock’s, but when asked, John would promptly share his ideas and observations in clear terms, verifying what Holmes had noticed, and offering his hypotheses for Holmes to evaluate�"this helped to solidify Holmes’s thinking processes and eliminate false chains of logic. Frequently, over the past year, they had sat up until the wee hours, discussing and poring over the facts of a case. Sometimes this took the form of a Socratic dialogue�"for instance, when Holmes asked Watson what he made of the brackets that secured the bed in Roylott’s house to the floor.

In this manner, Holmes became Watson’s mentor, helping him to follow his own paths of thinking via his guiding questions. At other times, Watson had in fact felt quite sure he had solved the case, and in his soft-spoken way challenged Holmes to consider Watson’s logic�"and, in time, as Watson learned Holmes’s methods, this had become sharper and less aberrant�"and identify its weak points, but always respectfully, without frowning; never in a hostile or defensive way, Watson was a partner, not a competitor, in solving cases�"but always willing to be the junior partner. In all other ways, Watson was Holmes’s partner as well�"indeed, it was not too inappropriate to say that Watson was the detective’shelpmeet. Each had his role, with Mrs Hudson’s supplemental co-operation�"and each was content in that role. Holmes took the nominally dominant role in the partnership�"despite the temptation to compare it to a marriage, Holmes resisted classifying Watson as his “wife”�"not because such a characterization repelled him, for it did not, but because the traditional division of roles between men and women were arbitrary . . . and, in the end, meaningless. Holmes had had ample evidence that both classes of humans were capable of all manner of planning, managing, and carrying out any sort of endeavour�"it was only tradition and the common mind’s lack of the habit of thinking that limited them.

Author's Note

This is incomplete; this was written for NaNoWriMo, but my work was interrupted. Still, I'd welcome your comments. If I'm encouraged I'll get back to work on the story sooner rather than later!
I always picture Jeremy Brett as Holmes...ever since I saw the show. Before that, I had my own image, which sadly I think I can hardly recall anymore. Alas!