He was sitting by the fire when I arrived home from a night out at my club, his hands steepled before his mouth. His right shirtsleeve was still buttoned at his wrist; his left was rolled back to the elbow.
Neither of us said a word. I sat in the chair across from him and took him by the wrists, feeling absently for his pulse. It beat steadily underneath his skin.
'I haven't,' he said suddenly, giving voice to my thought. 'I wanted to. I even bought the bottles. But I knew – I didn't want to give you cause to leave.' He gestured over, and sure enough, I saw two glass bottles sitting on the table, gleaming innocently in the lamplight. They still looked full.
Carefully, not trusting myself yet to speak, I lifted his left hand to my mouth, kissing the pale underside of his wrist before rolling his cuff back down and buttoning it into place. 'I will never leave,' I promised solemnly. 'Whatever you do, I will never leave you, Sherlock.'
His lips parted on a shaky inhale. 'Get rid of them, John,' he pleaded. 'Please destroy them.'
I did so, and then I sat with him, holding both his hands in mine until the night was through and the dark sky finally began to turn to bronze.
Everything was still, but change was coming.
Sherlock's hand slid through the bedsheets, seeking out mine. Our fingers tangled together in the last shadows of the night, warm and soft; his palm pressed close against mine. 'I think we should leave Baker Street,' he whispered into the hush.
I inhaled slowly, exhaled slower. 'Where shall we go?' I whispered back.
There was a shift across the pillows as he looked at me; I looked back. His eyes were soft in the early light. 'You don't protest?'
'No. You've been taking fewer clients; I've been taking notes to write a book. I think perhaps it's time for us to move on from this life. I assume you know already.'
'Sussex, I should think.'
I laughed softly, wondering how long he had been planning our shared retirement. 'All right,' I agreed. 'Sussex.'
'So it's settled,' he said, raising our hands to examine them, illuminated by the creeping morning. 'It's time for the next adventure. You'll write your book, and I'll study apiculture, and we shall see what good we can do at loving one another.'
'It sounds perfect,' I said, drawing his hand down to kiss the back of it. 'It will be just us, then. Just you and me.'
'And the bees.'
I smiled and closed my eyes. 'Yes. And the bees.'
It was a strange thing, to say goodbye to London, to Baker Street.
Of course we would be back – Holmes would not be able to resist an evening in town for the symphony or an especially desperate plea for a private consultation from Scotland Yard, but I suspected we would have our hands quite full out in the countryside, and our best intentions of visiting were likely to be waylaid often.
Still, London was our city: where we had found each other, where we had followed each other. We had run down these alleys together, sat in these restaurants, listened to these gossips and these newsboys and these society ladies, going about their trades. It was a familiarity that I was increasingly nostalgic over as our days there came to a close.
‘We'll see them again,' Holmes said to me, as I watched Lestrade and Gregson depart down Baker Street. Their good-byes had been brief and mannerly, no more than professional courtesy on the surface, but their handshakes had betrayed their true regrets at our leaving.
‘It will be different, though,' I said.
Holmes stepped close behind me, wrapped an arm loosely around my waist: an easy, unexpected comfort. ‘It will,' he said. ‘But different isn't bad, John.'
‘No,' I agreed, relaxing into him. ‘I'm sure it'll be for the better.'
'You're different here,' Holmes said, our second week at the little cottage on the Downs. He was down to his shirtsleeves, smoking a pipe, smiling around the mouthpiece.
'Different how?' I asked, setting aside my pen. The stories now were no more than journal entries, but the habit was too well established to give it up entirely, even if they did go to a dispatch box rather than a publisher's press.
'I haven't quite sorted it out yet,' he answered. He rose from his chair quickly and came to bend around me at the desk. 'I think I know you too well to see the change as it's happening, the way a man can't see his own hair growing out until he's in need of the barber. Give me time, though. I'll get to the bottom of it.'
'I believe it,' I said, reaching up to him before he could spirit himself away. 'I know your methods.'
I already knew what he was seeing, though. I felt it every foggy morning, in every cup of tea or violin song drifting into the heathers. It was a warm, soaring feeling, the way a bird might feel in flight; I felt bigger, somehow, more open in my chest, as though for the first time in my life, I could take a full breath.