Hallelujah

Holmes sat carefully on the bed that had once belonged to the good doctor.  He had seen this room, walked these floors so many times.  But now everything seemed different, fragile, like any sudden movement or rough touch would break the lingering presence of Dr. John H Watson.

It was true that he had lived alone before he had known Watson.  But he had been well and truly overthrown by the doctor, everything about him; his personality, his wisdom, his beauty.  It was impossible for him to turn back.  His bohemian soul had been touched, and there was no reversing a change such as that.  

The detective's gaze settled on his violin, lying where he had left it the night before at the foot of Watson's bed before he himself had crawled under the covers and slid into the deepest of sleeps.  The doctor had never really cared for his music played at 3 o' clock in the morning, but Holmes knew that Watson enjoyed it when he played to him a proper melody.  

He picked up his instrument and played without thinking a piece of music he had been composing himself for his dearest Watson.  It went like this; the forth, the fifth, before slender fingers stilled.  The music had never been finished, the right notes never within Holmes' grasp, and now it did not matter.  Watson would never hear the finished piece, never wake with black shadows under his eyes due to plucking of a violin keeping him from slumber, only to smile that smile that Holmes loved when he heard the music the detective had been working on through the night.  

He was gone.  The fact was simple enough:  Dr. John Hamish Watson was dead.  Deceased.  No longer living.  There were one thousand ways it could be phrased, yet Holmes' mind still refused to acknowledge it as true.  His Watson, his Boswell, simply could not be gone.

The detective had never been what would be called a religious man.  There could be no theory without data, and what data was there to prove the existence of a higher being?  But perhaps, just maybe, there was a God above.  For if there was God, then there was Heaven, and Holmes could not think of a man more deserving of Heaven than Watson.  

The doctor would perhaps be happier wherever he had gone to now.  For there could be no violin at 3am, and no chasing criminals half way across London in the dead of winter.  His leg would not hurt there, either.  But most importantly he would be free of the life of pretence, the secrecy that Holmes knew he had hated so much.  

Now Watson would never again have to lie to his friends, his family, to all of society.  He would never have suffer at the hand of his own mind, under the power of a good Christian upbringing.  He would never again have to feel the guilt that Holmes knew came with their secret relationship.

It was a blessing in some ways; but it was a cold, and it was a broken hallelujah.