I Treated My Best Friend Like A Case, And Now He's In My Bed

The Abernathy diamond case was dead. Drowned in a sea of yellow-gray fog that had pressed against our windows for three days, suffocating London and, more importantly, my mind. All that potential—a locked room, a vanished thief, a trail gone cold before it could even begin—dissolved into the miasma. The telegram confirming the cancellation lay crumpled on the mantelpiece, a testament to my profound and escalating boredom. My thoughts, deprived of a problem to solve, ricocheted around my skull like trapped birds.

Across from me, Dr. John Watson sat in his armchair, utterly immune to my agitation. The sight of his placid contentment was an irritant, a variable I could not account for. My focus, having nowhere else to go, settled on him. It was not a casual glance but a full, forensic sweep.

Observation: Subject is seated, posture relaxed but not slumped. The spine maintains a certain military rigidity, a habit ingrained from his years in the service. His left hand supports a medical journal, thumb pinning the lower corner of the page. The nail on said thumb is clipped short, clean. The knuckles are thick, the hand itself broad and capable. I have seen that hand set a bone, stitch a wound, and steady a revolver with equal, unwavering competence.

My analysis shifted from the visual to the olfactory. The air was thick with the scent of his pipe tobacco, a blend of Arcadia mixture he favored. It was a familiar smell, as much a part of 221B as the scent of my chemical reagents or Mrs. Hudson’s polish. But now, I found myself dissecting it. It clung to the wool of his jumper, a comforting, earthy aroma. Beneath it, I could detect the fainter, sharper scent of carbolic soap from his morning wash. And beneath that, something else. The simple, unadorned scent of the man himself. It was a data point without purpose, yet my mind logged it with an unnerving precision.

Then there was the sound. The only sound in the room, apart from the crackle of the fire and the frantic thrumming of my own pulse, was Watson’s breathing. It was a steady, rhythmic cadence. Inhale, a quiet, even draw of air. Exhale, a soft release, punctuated by the faintest wheeze—a lingering echo of the Jezail bullet that had shattered his shoulder in Afghanistan. I had heard him breathe in his sleep, a sound of profound peace that I often found infuriating during my own bouts of insomnia. Now, in the oppressive silence of the fog-bound afternoon, it was the only constant, the only piece of predictable data in a world that had ground to a halt. The steady rise and fall of his chest beneath the thick wool was a maddeningly simple mechanism, and I found myself staring, tracking the movement, cataloging the rhythm as if it were a clue. The case was gone, but here was a new problem. A new, deeply unsettling puzzle presented in the form of my friend.

“For God’s sake, Holmes, you’ll wear a groove in the floorboards.” Watson’s voice, calm and measured, sliced through my internal monologue. He set his journal aside with a quiet thud. “If your mind requires a problem, let us give it one of a practical nature.”

He gestured with his chin towards the corner of the room that served as my laboratory. It was a disaster of my own making—a chaotic landscape of beakers stained with unknown precipitates, unlabeled vials, and burners crusted with the residue of a hundred experiments. “Let’s bring some order to that chemical station. It’s a miracle you haven’t poisoned us both in our sleep.”

The suggestion was insulting. My station was a map of my thoughts, its chaos a necessary byproduct of genius. Tidiness was the hobgoblin of little minds. I was about to deliver a scathing retort on the subject when I caught his eye. There was no judgment there, only a steady, practical concern. And the alternative—continuing to pace while my brain devoured itself—was infinitely worse.

“Very well, Watson,” I conceded, the words feeling foreign on my tongue. “If it will alleviate your domestic anxieties.”

We moved to the corner, the space immediately shrinking around us. The air grew thick with the sharp tang of acetic acid and the fainter, almond-like scent of cyanide. I began to catalogue the vials while Watson, with a sigh of forbearance, picked up a rag to wipe down the soot-stained tabletop.

He was a force of quiet order in my world of deliberate entropy. His movements were efficient, economical. Where I would have shoved items aside, he lifted each piece of glassware, wiped beneath it, and set it down with a surgeon’s care. Our shoulders brushed as he reached for a bottle of ether, the contact of his solid frame against my own sending a strange signal through my nervous system. It wasn't unpleasant. It was… data. A point of stability in the swirling vortex of my thoughts.

I reached for a rack of test tubes just as he reached for a glass pipette resting beside it. The backs of our hands met. His skin was warm, the fine hairs on his knuckles rough against my own. It was a simple, accidental contact that lasted no more than a second, yet my mind seized upon it, analyzing it with the same intensity I would afford a footprint at a crime scene. The warmth did not recede when he pulled his hand away. It lingered, a localized heat that felt entirely illogical.

I watched his hands as he worked. Broad, steady, competent. He handled a fragile beaker filled with nitric acid with the same gentle confidence he used to suture a wound. He was a constant, a fixed point. For years, I had viewed his presence as a necessary backdrop to my own brilliance, a sounding board for my theories. But here, in this suffocatingly small space, his physical presence was no longer a background element. It was the primary variable, the one piece of evidence that was beginning to throw all of my calculations into disarray. He was a grounding force, an anchor, and I felt, for the first time, the unnerving sensation of his pull.

Sleep, as it often did, eluded me. But tonight, the cause was not the familiar hum of an unsolved problem or the lingering effects of a seven-percent solution. It was a disquiet of a different sort. The data from the afternoon—the warmth of his skin, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the solid presence of him in my space—refused to be filed away. It was corrupt data, an anomaly that infected the entire system.

Giving up on my bed, I descended the stairs into the sitting room. The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing embers, casting a deep, orange light that painted the familiar room in shadows. And in his chair, a silhouette I would know anywhere, sat Watson. A half-empty glass of brandy was cradled in his hand, his head bowed as if in prayer. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t hear my approach.

I stood in the doorway, observing. This was not the placid, content Watson of the afternoon. This was a man weighted down by something. The line of his shoulders, usually so straight, was curved inward. The hand holding the glass was perfectly still, but there was a tension in it, a tightly coiled energy.

"The fog appears to have seeped into your thoughts as well, Doctor," I said, my voice quiet in the still room.

He didn't startle. He simply lifted his head, his eyes finding mine in the gloom. "Holmes. I didn't hear you." He swirled the amber liquid in his glass. "It's nights like these. The quiet. It reminds me of the field hospitals."

I moved to stand by the mantelpiece, leaning my arm against it. I said nothing, offering him the silence he seemed to require.

"We had an orderly," he began, his voice low and slightly rough. "Murray. A boy from Kent, barely twenty. Cheerful sort, always had a joke, even when things were at their worst. He… he took a ball to the leg at Maiwand. It wasn't a bad wound. I’d seen worse, patched up worse. I cleaned it, stitched it myself. Told him he'd be back to complaining about the army rations in a week."

He took a slow drink of his brandy, the glass clicking softly against his teeth. "Fever set in two days later. Sepsis. There was nothing to be done. I held his hand while he died. He was delirious, asking for his mother. All I could do was sit there. This hand," he said, looking down at his own, "the one that was supposed to fix him, just held on while the life went out of him."

He fell silent. The only sound was the soft hiss of the embers. He wasn't telling a story for dramatic effect or for sympathy. He was stating a fact. A memory carved into him. And the raw, unvarnished grief in his voice… it was a frequency I had never tuned into before. It bypassed my analytical mind entirely and struck something deeper, something dormant in my chest. It was a profound, aching pressure.

I looked at him, truly looked at him, not as my biographer or my flatmate, but as a man who carried the weight of other men's lives in his hands. The steadfast loyalty, the quiet compassion—I had always catalogued them as sentimental traits. Now, I saw them for what they were: the scars of a profound capacity to feel. And in that moment, staring at him in the dying firelight, I felt a connection that had nothing to do with logic or deduction. It was a new clue, the first piece of an entirely different kind of puzzle. One I suddenly, desperately, needed to understand.

The morning light that finally broke through the yellow gloom was thin and watery, but it was enough. The fog had retreated, leaving the streets slick and gleaming. With it came a telegram, and shortly after, the frantic arrival of a junior minister from the Foreign Office, a man named Atherton Jones whose panic was a palpable force in our sitting room.

“They’re gone, Mr. Holmes! Simply vanished from a locked safe in my study. Treaties of the utmost sensitivity. If they were to fall into the wrong hands…” He wrung his hands, his face pale and slick with sweat. He was a collection of frayed nerves, his agitation making his account of the facts disjointed and nearly useless.

I tried to pin him down, my mind hungry for the details, the pure, clean logic of the problem. “The make of the safe, Mr. Jones? The number of keys? A list of all persons who knew of the documents’ location?” My questions were sharp, precise incisions meant to cut away the useless tissue of his emotion. But my focus was fractured. My mind kept supplying irrelevant data: the scent of brandy on Watson’s breath from the night before, the exact shade of orange in the dying embers as he spoke of his loss.

Jones stammered, his eyes darting around the room as if the missing papers might materialize from the wallpaper. He was crumbling under my interrogation, his panic rendering him ineffective.

Then Watson moved. He had been standing quietly by the window, but now he stepped forward, placing a steadying hand on the minister’s shoulder. “Mr. Jones, why don’t you have a seat?” His voice was calm, devoid of the impatience that laced my own. “Let me get you a glass of water. Take a moment.”

He guided the trembling man to the armchair—his armchair—and poured a glass from the decanter on the sideboard. He didn’t rush him. He simply waited, his presence a solid, reassuring anchor in the man’s sea of anxiety. I watched, my line of questioning suspended, and found myself analyzing Watson’s technique. The low, even timbre of his voice. The deliberate, unhurried movements. The way he maintained eye contact, not with an investigator’s piercing scrutiny, but with a quiet, open patience.

I had always dismissed this as sentimentality. A doctor’s bedside manner, inefficient and irrelevant to the cold pursuit of facts. But as I watched, I saw its effect. The frantic heaving of Jones’s chest began to slow. The wild look in his eyes subsided. He took a sip of water, his hand steadier now, and when he spoke again, the information came out in a clear, linear fashion.

It was a formidable tool. Watson’s compassion wasn't a weakness; it was a solvent, dissolving the client’s panic to reveal the hard evidence beneath. He extracted the necessary data more effectively with his quiet reassurance than I had with my sharp demands. And as this deduction settled into my mind, it was followed by a second, far more disturbing realization. I didn’t just admire the effectiveness of the method. I felt a deep, illogical pull toward the quality itself. A sudden, sharp craving for that steady, grounding strength, a need that felt raw and possessive. It was the same unsettling pressure I’d felt by the fire, a hunger for something I could not classify but recognized as profoundly essential.

The minister’s study was a monument to organized bureaucracy, which made the violation all the more jarring. The safe, a hulking iron beast, stood open and empty, its door unscratched. The windows were latched from the inside, the door bolted. I circled the room, my eyes cataloging every surface, every object. Watson stood by Jones, a silent, steadying presence.

“No forced entry,” I murmured, running my fingers along the edge of the safe’s door. “He had a key, or he was a master lockpick. But that doesn’t explain how he entered the room itself.”

My gaze traveled upward. High on the wall, above a towering bookshelf filled with leather-bound volumes, was a small transom window, intended for ventilation. It was closed, but I noted a faint, dark smudge on the white paint of the frame. I pointed. “Watson, your eyes. Do you see it?”

He squinted. “A scuff mark?”

“Precisely. And look here.” I indicated the very top of the bookshelf. A small porcelain figurine of a Grecian discus thrower was turned slightly askew, its base no longer flush with the wood. “The room was sealed, but our thief did not require a door. He required a perch. He came through the transom, using the top of this bookshelf as his landing point before dropping to the floor. He was small, light-footed, and possessed of an extraordinary flexibility. Our thief, gentlemen, is an acrobat.”

Jones looked aghast. Watson appeared skeptical. “Holmes, that transom is barely a foot high. It’s impossible for a man to fit through there.”

“Impossible for a normal man, perhaps,” I retorted, a familiar thrill rising in me. “But not for one whose entire profession is the contortion of the human form.” To prove my point, I gestured toward the narrow space between the bookshelf and the wall. “He would have needed to retrieve his tools from his entry point. He would have squeezed through here.”

Before Watson could protest further, I stepped into the gap. It was tight, the spines of the books digging into my ribs on one side, the cold plaster pressing against my other. I inhaled, making myself as narrow as possible, and began to shuffle sideways toward the wall beneath the transom. It was a demonstration, a piece of physical theater to solidify my deduction.

Then, a sudden, blinding pain erupted in my lower back. A muscle, strained from the unnatural posture, seized in a violent, incapacitating spasm. A sharp gasp of air was torn from my lungs, and I froze, wedged in the gap, my body a prisoner of its own failing mechanics.

“Holmes!” Watson’s voice was sharp with alarm.

He was beside me in an instant, his hands on my shoulders. “Easy now. Don’t try to move. Tell me what happened.”

“Back,” I managed to grind out, the word clipped. The pain was a hot, sharp spike driving into my spine.

“Alright. I’ve got you.” His voice shifted, shedding the tone of a friend and adopting the calm authority of a physician. “On my count, I want you to try and straighten up. Slowly.” His hands were firm, guiding me out of the narrow space. The movement sent another wave of agony through me, but his grip was unyielding, supporting my weight as I stumbled back into the open room.

He insisted we return to Baker Street at once, leaving a bewildered Jones with instructions to have the police investigate the city’s circuses and performance troupes. In the cab, every jolt of the wheels was a fresh torment. Watson sat beside me, not touching me, but his presence was a palpable field of concern.

Back in our flat, he pointed to my armchair. “Sit. And take off your shirt and waistcoat.”

It was an order, not a request. I did as I was told, my movements stiff. I unbuttoned my shirt, the cool air of the room hitting my skin. I heard Watson moving about, the clink of a glass jar. He returned with a small pot of medical balm, the sharp, clean scent of wintergreen and camphor cutting through the air.

“Lean forward,” he instructed.

I rested my forearms on my knees, my back exposed to him. I waited, my entire nervous system focused on the anticipated point of contact. His fingers touched my skin first, gentle and probing, tracing the line of my spine. They were clinical, assessing the damage. Then his palm flattened against the spasming muscle, his thumb pressing directly into the heart of the pain.

The pressure was immense, a deep, grinding force that was both excruciating and profoundly relieving. A low groan escaped my throat. His hand was warm and strong, the heat of it sinking past my skin, past the muscle, feeling as though it were branding my very bones. He began to work the balm into the knot, his movements firm and circular. The cool salve was a sharp contrast to the heat of his hand.

My mind tried to remain detached, to analyze the sensation as a purely medical procedure. This was Watson the doctor, applying a remedy. But my body refused the logic. With every pass of his hand, a different kind of heat spread through me. It wasn’t medicinal. It was a slow, heavy warmth that pooled low in my gut and sent a jolt straight down my spine, unrelated to the pain. His thumb slid along the sensitive indentation next to my vertebrae, and my breath caught. The sensation was distracting, illogical, and entirely overwhelming. It was pure, irrefutable physical data that my brain could not process, but my body understood completely.

He released me only when he was satisfied the knot had been sufficiently worked out. The pain had subsided to a dull, manageable ache, but the other sensation—that low, coiling heat—remained. I put my shirt back on, the fabric feeling strange and abrasive against my over-sensitized skin. We ate a cold supper in near silence, the air thick with the unspoken memory of his hands on my back.

Later, I spread the notes on the acrobat case across the table, determined to lose myself in the elegant logic of the puzzle. The names of circus troupes, lists of known contortionists, diagrams of the crime scene—it was all there, the raw data waiting to be forged into a coherent solution. But my mind would not cooperate. The black ink of my own handwriting seemed to blur, the lines of reasoning tangling into knots as stubborn as the one that had been in my back.

My gaze kept lifting from the papers, drawn across the room as if by some magnetic force. Watson sat in his armchair by the fire, a lap desk resting on his knees, a pool of lamplight illuminating his focused expression. He was writing, documenting one of our past adventures for the public’s consumption. His brow was furrowed in concentration, the tip of his tongue just visible at the corner of his mouth.

He paused, lifting his fountain pen from the page. He brought the end of it to his lips, his teeth closing gently on the hard black casing as he stared into the fire, searching for the right word. It was a simple, mundane habit, one I had observed hundreds of times without a second thought. A meaningless tic.

But tonight, it was not meaningless.

I watched, transfixed, as his jaw worked almost imperceptibly, his teeth worrying the smooth surface of the pen. My eyes traced the line of his lips, the way they parted slightly around the object. I noted the way his mustache brushed against the barrel. My brain, starved of its usual deductive quarry, seized upon the details with a ferocious, inappropriate intensity. The pressure of his teeth. The moisture from his mouth leaving a faint sheen on the casing when he finally lowered it.

A strange warmth spread through my chest, radiating outward, a slow, heavy pulse that had nothing to do with the fire in the hearth. It was the same heat I’d felt under his hands. An illogical, biological reaction that defied categorization. My analysis of the acrobat case dissolved completely, replaced by a singular, obsessive focus on the man across the room. I found myself thinking about his mouth, the strength in his jaw, and a sudden, sharp image of that same mouth on my skin flashed through my mind.

The thought was so jarring, so completely alien, that I felt a physical jolt. My cock stirred beneath my trousers, a dull, insistent ache. This was not logic. This was not deduction. This was raw, unprocessed data that my intellect could not file away. It was an anomaly, a variable I had never accounted for in the equation of my own existence. Watson, my friend, my colleague, the steady, predictable constant in my chaotic life, had suddenly become the most baffling and compelling puzzle I had ever faced. The documents, the thief, the entire case—it all faded into utter insignificance. The only clue that mattered was the man sitting in the armchair, chewing on his pen, oblivious to the fact that he was systematically dismantling my world.