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earlgreytea68Title - Holmes Is Where the Heart Is: In London with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (1/1)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John, Lestrade
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Five years after they became the biggest story in baseball, the Holmes-Watson battery is flourishing more than ever. Just on a different continent.
Author's Notes - HAPPY OPENING DAY, EVERYONE!
In honor of the return of the best season of the year, here's a little fic about B&C John and Sherlock and how they lived happily ever after. :-)
Thanks toarctacuda for looking this over for me and making it sound good!
“People think I’m the interesting one, and they ignore John,” is the first thing Sherlock Holmes tells me after John Watson shows me into their apartment. He leans forward and fixes me with his famous eyes and pronounces, “That is a fatal mistake.”
“It is neither fatal nor a mistake,” John Watson assures me, lest I panic and leave. Watson gives me a cup of tea, and Holmes sits and stares at me but doesn’t threaten any more fatality, and I decide that possibly I might get an interview out of this after all.
It’s a bright June morning in London, and I am ostensibly there to interview Sherlock Holmes, a surprise Hall of Fame pick this year for a career that Watson delicately refers to as “abbreviated.” The truth is that the general consensus in baseball is that the artificially shortened career of Holmes is a tragedy. And the truth is also that blame generally gets laid at the door of Watson, whom Holmes met in his last year of a respectable, but by no means glorious, catching career. Over the course of their one season as teammates, Holmes and Watson dominated an All-Star Game and won a World Series ring. Oh, and fell in love, outing themselves as baseball’s first openly gay couple. And when the season was over, Watson retired, as expected, and took Holmes, in the prime of a dominant career as a starting pitcher, with him.
The announcement of Holmes’s surprise retirement—breaking a multimillion-dollar contract—came while baseball was still reeling from the scandal that blanketed the World Series win that year: Closer Jim Moriarty, suspended as a result of a gambling investigation, was shot and killed at the apartment Watson and Holmes were sharing. According to the police report, Watson was the one who pulled the trigger, although no charges were ever brought against him due to it being a case of evidently obvious self-defense. Nevertheless, Holmes’s sudden disappearance from the game spurred rumors that more went down at the apartment than had been reported.
“It had nothing to do with Moriarty,” Holmes denies. “I had decided to retire months before that.”
Months before?
“The middle of the season, at least. John, when did I decide to retire?”
It is a common occurrence, Holmes turning to Watson for guidance. Watson was, according to reports, the only catcher Holmes ever listened to, and their personal life appears to mirror their professional one: Holmes is the one you’re focused on, but the one Holmes is focused on is Watson.
Watson demurs that he doesn’t know when Holmes decided to retire, so Holmes shrugs and says, “At any rate, it had nothing to do with Moriarty. It didn’t have anything to do with John, either. I was always going to retire. I was bored.”
When I point out that he had just signed a multiyear contract, Holmes just shrugs.
***
Sherlock Holmes burst onto baseball out of nowhere. “He was on absolutely nobody’s radar,” says Greg Lestrade, who was the only manager Holmes ever had. “I was struggling my way through this injury-riddled staff, and all of a sudden we had this kid in the minors who was blowing everybody away. And the scouts kept saying it had to be a fluke, that he was good but he couldn’t be that good. Turned out he was that good.”
Baseball origin stories don’t go that way. Baseball origin stories involve sun-dappled games of catch with Dad in the backyard, All-State selections in high school, decisions about whether to take the college offer or throw the dice. Watson’s origin story goes that way. In fact, everything about Watson seems as conventional as they come. Although born in England, he was raised in the United States, with a baseball-loving American father who encouraged his love of the game, which he began playing roughly around the time he learned how to sit up. Holmes, on the other hand, claims to have never picked up a baseball until he was eighteen. Having spent his entire life in Great Britain up until that point, he decided on a whim to move to the U.S. and give baseball a try. To say that he turned out to be good at it would be an enormous understatement.
It is not difficult to imagine why Holmes would catch someone’s eye: He oozes charisma and looks like a Byronic hero. What’s harder to determine is exactly why Holmes became so fixated on his catcher—so much so that, over the course of only a few months, he changed his mind about that multiyear contract he signed.
Holmes and Watson share an apartment in central London, steps away from Regent’s Park, where they can sometimes be found playing impromptu baseball games with expatriates who manage to lure them into it, such as on this particular summer afternoon. It is dazzlingly sunny and all of London seems to be outside enjoying the weather. A baseball field is sketched out using personal items: a backpack representing first, a sweatshirt representing second. Other than Holmes and Watson, the small crowd playing the game is part of a series of rotating regulars who were recruited personally by Holmes.
“It was a message board,” one of them tells me, amused, and those in our vicinity all nod their heads in agreement. “Looking to start up a casual regular baseball game. I used to play when I was a kid and thought I could use a bit of exercise, and sorry, but I’ve never really gotten the hang of a lot of the sports over here. So I responded.”
And then what happened?
“I was told when to show up, and when I showed up there was Sherlock Holmes.”
No Watson?
Heads shake unanimously. Watson wasn’t involved until later, they say.
It’s interesting because Holmes would be the first one to tell you that he doesn’t miss baseball at all, yet he took the time to organize a regular game.
When I ask him about it, he looks at me as if he feels bad for my parents for having such a stupid child. I get that look a lot over the course of the interview. “That was for John, of course. John gets depressed without baseball. And he needs it for stress relief.”
But Watson wasn’t involved in the early games, I point out.
That look again. “Obviously. I wasn’t going to make John play with imbeciles. I only invited back the least tedious people.”
Watson plays with a great deal of joy. He doesn’t always catch, I’m told. Indeed, in the game I watch he good-naturedly plays outfield and then shortstop. He never played either position in a professional context (when I ask him later, he says he thinks that before these recent Regent’s Park games, the last time he played outfield he was nine), but a professional baseball player outside of his comfort position is still head and shoulders better than even the best of the amateurs they’re playing with.
Holmes always pitches. This is not the Sherlock Holmes you would expect, however. His pitching is carefully calibrated for the talent level of the batter he’s facing. As a professional, he was an intensely strategic pitcher, but in these pick-up games in Regent’s Park he is not. He pitches to be hit, to let the people behind him get a chance to play. He pitches for both teams, never taking a turn at bat, and you get the sense that he is aware that most of these people will tell the story their whole life of how they got a hit off of Sherlock Holmes. He pretends to be dismissive of his stature in the game, but he actually appears to be keenly aware of his star power draw.
Different people take turns catching, but the agreement among the participants is that Holmes is happiest when it’s Watson behind the plate for him, which it usually is for at least a couple of innings. Watson, with a grin, tells me that he “doesn’t like to deprive people of what a delight Sherlock is to catch for,” and then he laughs, and I can’t tell if he means it sincerely or if he’s joking. At any rate, there are times when the players give up the pretense of a game and just sit on the sidelines, watching in astonishment while Watson puts Holmes through his paces. That quality of pitching, seen that close, is mesmerizing.
One awe-struck spectator, watching a curveball drift in, breathes, “That right there is the prettiest sight in London.”
***
Before flying out to London, I speak to Lestrade. I have never met Holmes or Watson and am looking for pointers.
“Meeting Sherlock Holmes with John Watson is a piece of cake,” Lestrade informs me. “Meeting him before John Watson was, frankly, terrible.”
Lestrade managed him through those years, but he says that “managing is a generous word for what I did.” Holmes was, Lestrade says delicately, “stubborn.” He ran rough-shod over a series of catchers until finally settling on Victor Trevor, an unremarkable journeyman who became his personal catcher. “He seemed to tolerate Victor more than he tolerated anybody else I threw at him,” says Lestrade, “and in those days I was looking for absolutely anything that would make Holmes less viciously irritable. I realize now that he just really hated baseball and was lonely and unhappy and terribly bored. I just didn’t know that John Watson was going to be the key to that.”
Why John Watson and not Victor Trevor? To Lestrade, it’s obvious. “John loves Sherlock. Absolutely everything about him. You won’t get John to say a single thing that he would change about Sherlock. There’s a lot that’s annoying about Sherlock, I’m sure he’d admit that, but he loves the entire package of him. John is the only person I ever met who that was true of. That’s why John Watson and not Victor Trevor. John understands Sherlock on a level that no one else can equal. Why John Watson can do that, I don’t know. A quirk of personality, I guess.”
Trevor’s brief assessment was that Watson must be “a saint.” His time as Holmes’s catcher, he says, was “miserable.” He describes Holmes as “capricious and petulant and sulky, just a nightmare to have to interact with constantly. I was relieved when he jumped ship [to go to Austin].”
It’s very different from how Watson describes working with Holmes. During their shared All-Star Game, Watson famously told reporters that Holmes was his “favorite,” the one pitcher he wanted to catch for the rest of his life. When news of their relationship broke, it was an endlessly replayed sound bite.
Watson is rueful about the quote now. “It’s not that it’s not true, but I hadn’t intended to give so much away. But here’s the thing: When you are in love with someone who you think is absolutely amazing, incredible, magnificent, it breaks your heart to think that there are people out there who don’t see that. I was so tired of all the bad press about what a terrible teammate Sherlock is. He’s not, and I thought that he needed someone on his side.”
And perhaps that answers the question of why Watson caught Holmes’s eye: He was the first baseball player to gush about Holmes. Holmes had always been a remarkable pitcher, but his abilities were brushed under the rug of the personality clashes that leaked out of the clubhouse. Watson’s unerring support seemed to allow Holmes to blossom in a way he hadn’t before. It was his Cy Young season, his All-Star Game start, his season with a perfect game. Holmes avoided talking to the press, protected by Watson, who kept the press away from all of his pitchers that season. Watson also took the pressure off of Holmes’s ace status. Holmes later said that Watson was the “captain” of the team, and the rest of the team agreed that it was Watson who took the leadership role, which cleared Holmes to focus on pitching.
And to fall in love. When I ask Sherlock Holmes when he first knew that John Watson was going to be special to him, he says, “Special to me? What does that even mean? I knew he was special, full stop, the moment I met him.”
“No, you didn’t,” says Watson cheerfully but with the air of a man who finds himself constantly correcting exaggerations.
“Yes, I did. You had a psychosomatic leg injury—how many baseball players can boast that?”
Watson huffs a laugh and looks at me. “Sometimes I worry that, when Sherlock talks about me, it sounds too much like hero worship. And then he says something like that and I realize how silly I’m being.”
***
Holmes was not born in London, but other than confirming that he doesn’t talk about his childhood at all and flat-out ignores all questions about it, to the point where he stands and starts playing the violin. Watson, who I’ve already come to rely on to smooth this interview, doesn’t come to my aid at all. So I drop it.
Instead I ask when Holmes moved to London. Holmes talks of an elderly aunt he used to visit during his school breaks who died when he was sixteen and left him a great deal of money and her London home. The time spent in London solidified his love of it. When I ask him why he lives in London, he says, “I don’t understand why other people don’t live in London.”
It was Holmes who wanted to move to London, the couple confirms. “I was born here, but we moved when I was a kid and other than occasional family visits I didn’t feel much of an urgent desire to be back here,” Watson says.
“I talked you into it,” Holmes adds, sounding almost anxious, as if it was wrong to do.
“The truth is that I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I spent my adult life living out of hotel rooms and suitcases. I didn’t have a home. He did. And seeing the way he lit up when he thought about going home, I wanted nothing more in the universe than to be here with him. And it’s been fantastic. I love it here.”
Watson says he’s “settled” now. “This is home, definitely, unquestionably. We go to the States all the time to visit my family and to do baseball-related things, and each time I can’t wait to get back home here. It’s just such a haven.”
Holmes beams, as if he has been completely vindicated in his life plan.
The apartment is undeniably charming in a madcap way that seems to fit these two men perfectly. It’s small and cozy and crowded with stuff. Watson is in medical school—a lifelong dream that Holmes convinced him to pursue—and his textbooks tower on top of the desk, next to sheaves of notes, a microscope, a number of mysterious vials, and a stuffed ferret. I ask if they’re related to med school homework and Watson says that Holmes has taken up criminology “as a hobby.” Holmes objects to that characterization, but then he is off and running, babbling about how many different types of tobacco ash there are (243, in case you’re wondering). Holmes has begun consulting with London’s Metropolitan Police. Those who have worked with him call him “difficult” but “brilliant.” Which sounds a lot like how he was as a baseball player.
***
Theirs is not a household that looks back a lot, Watson says, and it’s easy to believe him. Other than two baseballs that sit on the mantel (together with a skull, which presumably has nothing to do with their baseball careers, but I didn’t dare ask), there is nothing in the living room to tell you that two very good baseball players live there. I ask what the two baseballs are, and Watson says one is from Holmes’s perfect game and one is from Game 4 of the World Series, and he doesn’t know which is which.
“I do,” Holmes says.
“No, you don’t,” Watson tells him.
“Yes, I do.”
Watson looks at me. “No, he doesn’t,” he says, but he is smiling.
That is the remarkable thing that you realize about these two when you spend time with them. They smile a lot. Watson was always considered affable and easygoing, but it is a remarkable thing to see Holmes, once known for his glower, laugh. They both seem more relaxed than they ever did during that final season.
“It was just fraught,” Watson says, making a face. “I mean, yes, we won the World Series, and we met, of course, and I will be forever grateful, but there was just so much other nonsense. You meet someone and you fall in love and you want to hold hands and go on dates and tell your parents and we couldn’t do any of that. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, and then I would get worried it was showing, and so then I’d try to pretend I wasn’t happy, and it was just exhausting.”
Holmes has been very quiet. Watson looks at him and prompts, “Don’t you think it was exhausting?”
“Yes,” he agrees.
If Holmes hadn’t been hit in the head with a pitch, I ask, referring to the giveaway moment when Watson insisted that he not leave the unconscious Holmes’s side, were they ever going to come out as a couple?
“When the season was over,” Watson answers hesitantly, with another glance at Holmes. “The reason he’s so quiet is that he wanted to come out right away. I was the one who didn’t want to.”
“I didn’t really care either way,” Holmes says. “I just didn’t like…” Holmes frowns, as if considering his words, then says, “Well, you heard him. He said it was exhausting. And it was to him. And I was just sitting there watching him tie himself up in knots over the fact of me.”
“That’s not how it was,” Watson protests.
“I wanted to come out right away because I thought it would make him unhappy not to and I try to do whatever will maximize John’s happiness, for obvious reasons.” Holmes gives me a look that dares me to be stupid enough to ask what the “obvious reasons” are.
“I just didn’t want the whole season to be about our sex life,” Watson says. “I still wish it hadn’t turned into that. I wanted us to just be two normal people. Maybe that’s why I like London so much. I feel like we come closer to achieving that here than we ever did before. And that’s all I wanted. I wanted us to be normal.”
“You also wanted to win a World Series.”
“Yes, but you were more important than the World Series, as you know.”
Holmes shrugs. “You got both.”
Which brings us, of course, to the events of the night of Game 4 of the World Series. Why Moriarty was in Holmes’s and Watson’s apartment has never been clear. When I ask about it, Watson says that’s because not even they know why he was there.
“He was there because he hated me and wanted to burn the heart out of me,” Holmes says.
There might not have been any love lost between Moriarty and Holmes, but breaking into Holmes’s apartment seems a bit excessive, surely.
“He was insane,” Holmes explains shortly.
Holmes refuses to answer questions on what caused the bad blood between him and Moriarty. For a little while, at least, it seemed as if they had been friendly with each other before it all fell apart. But Holmes doesn’t talk about it, nor does he talk about the All-Star Game altercation with Sebastian Moran, an event that pre-dates his meeting of John Watson. He will say that throwing at Moran during the playoffs that final, fateful season was “not why Moriarty was at our flat that night.” Although, it must be said, it surely didn’t help.
Lestrade traded for Moriarty late in that final season, clearing him through waivers. “We didn’t expect to be able to,” Lestrade admits, “it was an enormous coup.” And was his ace pitcher enthusiastic about the trade? “No,” Lestrade answers slowly, “but you’ve got to understand they were both arrogant superstars. I thought it was typical alpha-dog posturing, that they just both wanted to be the most important pitcher on the team. Honestly, I thought that John would handle it, he’d been very good at handling the personalities so far. But it was just a disaster. And with how it ended, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if Moriarty would still be alive if I hadn’t traded for him.”
I convey that sentiment to Holmes, who immediately says, “No. Moriarty was reckless and, honestly, suicidal. He was bored enough to just want to end it all, but he couldn’t pick the usual way of doing it, he had to make sure to take the both of us down, too. It didn’t have anything to do with Lestrade. It didn’t really have anything to do with John. It only ever had to do with me.”
But it was Watson who pulled the trigger that night, as everyone knows.
There is a moment of silence, and then Watson says firmly, “We decided we’d talk about that night today, this one time, so that everyone will know what happened, and then we’re never talking about it ever again. He was in our flat waiting for us when we got home. He was in our bedroom. Neither of us knew. We didn’t go into the bedroom immediately. We talked for a bit in the kitchen, about our plans now that the World Series was over, about here, London, actually. Sherlock’s cell phone was ringing, so I told him to answer it and said that I would meet him in the bedroom. And when I walked in, Moriarty was there holding a gun on me.”
Holmes picks up the story. “When I walked in and saw what was happening, my immediate thought was that I had to get his attention away from John and onto me.”
“It was a stupid thought,” interjects Watson.
“It was the only logical thought. I was still holding the baseball from the game—” Here Holmes gestures toward the mantle, where the baseballs sit—“and I threw it at Moriarty. Which served its purpose of distracting Moriarty from John.”
“I was able to get to the gun, which we kept in the nightstand, and I shot Moriarty before he could shoot Sherlock,” Watson finishes. “That’s what happened, start to finish. And now we’re done talking about it.”
***
It is clear that Holmes thinks the Hall of Fame selection is silly, and that it should have gone in Watson’s direction instead. Watson, however, is insistent that it was the right choice.
“When I said he was my favorite pitcher ever, that wasn’t just starry-eyed adoration talking. He was always the best pitcher I ever caught for.”
“And John was the best catcher I ever had, so if being your best pitcher means I belong in the Hall of Fame then the converse should be true,” suggests Holmes.
After a moment, Watson asserts firmly, “It’s a very great honor, and we’re very delighted and looking forward to the ceremony.”
“Are we?” asks Holmes archly.
“Yes,” Watson tells him. “Drink your tea.”
After a moment, Holmes drinks his tea.
Content is not the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of Sherlock Holmes. But what I realized during my time with him in London is that maybe it should be. Maybe it always should have been. Because when you look back at his career, you realize that contentment was the driving force behind all of the explosive pitching to begin with. All of the fireworks of his first few years as a pitcher were a wild, desperate drive toward a contentment he couldn’t find. They were a symptom of a restless and craving talent seeking its counterbalance.
Likewise, that final incandescent season is clearly now, in hindsight, an indication of that counterbalance being found, of contentment being achieved. And isn’t the essence of retiring after a World Series win in fact an indication of utter contentment? An acknowledgment of feeling that there’s nothing left to strive for in this particular realm?
Holmes is content now. Nothing is clearer. His edges still have a sharpness that can slice at the right angle, but the sheen of them is less glittering and he wields them with more conscious precision. I would say that he smiles more, but, then again, when I was watching footage of his last season to prepare for this interview, I realized that he smiled quite a bit then. Mostly at Watson, it’s true, private smiles between the two that take on all the significance in the world these days. But he also smiled more at the crowd than he ever had before. And you know what he looks like after he pitches his perfect game, after the final out of the World Series? A man who is content.
Holmes and Watson were married at Boston’s Fenway Park in October. Watson chose the month because of its significance to baseball, and, he says, “Because I wanted to overload it with good memories.” They both chose the venue because Watson had grown up a Red Sox fan and because the stadium “had been good to us. Not a single bad memory. Plus the Red Sox management were enthusiastic about the idea.”
“And the Red Sox weren’t in the playoffs that year, so it was ideal timing,” adds Holmes.
“Thanks for pointing that out,” Watson tells him drily.
And were they already a couple by the time of the All-Star Game they played at Fenway together?
“We were a couple from the day we met,” Holmes says. “The label we put on it was meaningless. We met and we were a couple, regardless of whatever other artificial date in the timeline of our relationship you might try to choose. We met as separate individuals, and then our lives really began.”
After a moment, Watson says, “You can see why I married him, right?”
The photos from their wedding day show Holmes and Watson in matching outfits. Watson says he playfully suggested getting married in their uniforms, but Holmes was appalled at the idea, so they ended up “very traditional in what was otherwise a non-traditional wedding in every way. I think Sherlock liked the irony. So it was morning suits for us.” They look exactly as you would expect a newly married couple to look: very happy.
I ask who proposed, and after a confused glance, Watson says, “Neither of us. I can’t even remember when and how we decided to do it. Just that it seemed like we ought to.”
“I think you were feeling your mortality because of your classes,” says Holmes.
“That makes me sound very romantic,” says Watson.
Watson is taking his time with medical school. He says he is old enough now to want to “savor” school. He spends a lot of time commentating for Major League Baseball, a job he says he owes to Sherlock.
“He went and told Major League Baseball I wanted to be a commentator,” Watson says.
And did he?
“No. Not at all.”
“But he loves being a commentator,” Holmes says, which Watson does not deny.
In the meantime, Holmes keeps himself busy consulting with Scotland Yard and running experiments and writing the results up on his blog. Watson keeps a more active blog these days as well than he did when he was a player. On the day Holmes was named to the Hall of Fame, Watson posted a brief entry that read, “So proud of Sherlock for a well-deserved election to the Baseball Hall of Fame!”
The first comment on the entry is from Sherlock: “Not well-deserved at all, and not especially impressive considering that these idiots have managed to overlook you.”
Illustrative of the one simple truth about a relationship that has inspired such complex emotions: The world makes a fuss over Sherlock Holmes, but Holmes reserves his fuss for John Watson.
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John, Lestrade
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Five years after they became the biggest story in baseball, the Holmes-Watson battery is flourishing more than ever. Just on a different continent.
Author's Notes - HAPPY OPENING DAY, EVERYONE!
In honor of the return of the best season of the year, here's a little fic about B&C John and Sherlock and how they lived happily ever after. :-)
Thanks to
arctacuda for looking this over for me and making it sound good!“People think I’m the interesting one, and they ignore John,” is the first thing Sherlock Holmes tells me after John Watson shows me into their apartment. He leans forward and fixes me with his famous eyes and pronounces, “That is a fatal mistake.”
“It is neither fatal nor a mistake,” John Watson assures me, lest I panic and leave. Watson gives me a cup of tea, and Holmes sits and stares at me but doesn’t threaten any more fatality, and I decide that possibly I might get an interview out of this after all.
It’s a bright June morning in London, and I am ostensibly there to interview Sherlock Holmes, a surprise Hall of Fame pick this year for a career that Watson delicately refers to as “abbreviated.” The truth is that the general consensus in baseball is that the artificially shortened career of Holmes is a tragedy. And the truth is also that blame generally gets laid at the door of Watson, whom Holmes met in his last year of a respectable, but by no means glorious, catching career. Over the course of their one season as teammates, Holmes and Watson dominated an All-Star Game and won a World Series ring. Oh, and fell in love, outing themselves as baseball’s first openly gay couple. And when the season was over, Watson retired, as expected, and took Holmes, in the prime of a dominant career as a starting pitcher, with him.
The announcement of Holmes’s surprise retirement—breaking a multimillion-dollar contract—came while baseball was still reeling from the scandal that blanketed the World Series win that year: Closer Jim Moriarty, suspended as a result of a gambling investigation, was shot and killed at the apartment Watson and Holmes were sharing. According to the police report, Watson was the one who pulled the trigger, although no charges were ever brought against him due to it being a case of evidently obvious self-defense. Nevertheless, Holmes’s sudden disappearance from the game spurred rumors that more went down at the apartment than had been reported.
“It had nothing to do with Moriarty,” Holmes denies. “I had decided to retire months before that.”
Months before?
“The middle of the season, at least. John, when did I decide to retire?”
It is a common occurrence, Holmes turning to Watson for guidance. Watson was, according to reports, the only catcher Holmes ever listened to, and their personal life appears to mirror their professional one: Holmes is the one you’re focused on, but the one Holmes is focused on is Watson.
Watson demurs that he doesn’t know when Holmes decided to retire, so Holmes shrugs and says, “At any rate, it had nothing to do with Moriarty. It didn’t have anything to do with John, either. I was always going to retire. I was bored.”
When I point out that he had just signed a multiyear contract, Holmes just shrugs.
***
Sherlock Holmes burst onto baseball out of nowhere. “He was on absolutely nobody’s radar,” says Greg Lestrade, who was the only manager Holmes ever had. “I was struggling my way through this injury-riddled staff, and all of a sudden we had this kid in the minors who was blowing everybody away. And the scouts kept saying it had to be a fluke, that he was good but he couldn’t be that good. Turned out he was that good.”
Baseball origin stories don’t go that way. Baseball origin stories involve sun-dappled games of catch with Dad in the backyard, All-State selections in high school, decisions about whether to take the college offer or throw the dice. Watson’s origin story goes that way. In fact, everything about Watson seems as conventional as they come. Although born in England, he was raised in the United States, with a baseball-loving American father who encouraged his love of the game, which he began playing roughly around the time he learned how to sit up. Holmes, on the other hand, claims to have never picked up a baseball until he was eighteen. Having spent his entire life in Great Britain up until that point, he decided on a whim to move to the U.S. and give baseball a try. To say that he turned out to be good at it would be an enormous understatement.
It is not difficult to imagine why Holmes would catch someone’s eye: He oozes charisma and looks like a Byronic hero. What’s harder to determine is exactly why Holmes became so fixated on his catcher—so much so that, over the course of only a few months, he changed his mind about that multiyear contract he signed.
Holmes and Watson share an apartment in central London, steps away from Regent’s Park, where they can sometimes be found playing impromptu baseball games with expatriates who manage to lure them into it, such as on this particular summer afternoon. It is dazzlingly sunny and all of London seems to be outside enjoying the weather. A baseball field is sketched out using personal items: a backpack representing first, a sweatshirt representing second. Other than Holmes and Watson, the small crowd playing the game is part of a series of rotating regulars who were recruited personally by Holmes.
“It was a message board,” one of them tells me, amused, and those in our vicinity all nod their heads in agreement. “Looking to start up a casual regular baseball game. I used to play when I was a kid and thought I could use a bit of exercise, and sorry, but I’ve never really gotten the hang of a lot of the sports over here. So I responded.”
And then what happened?
“I was told when to show up, and when I showed up there was Sherlock Holmes.”
No Watson?
Heads shake unanimously. Watson wasn’t involved until later, they say.
It’s interesting because Holmes would be the first one to tell you that he doesn’t miss baseball at all, yet he took the time to organize a regular game.
When I ask him about it, he looks at me as if he feels bad for my parents for having such a stupid child. I get that look a lot over the course of the interview. “That was for John, of course. John gets depressed without baseball. And he needs it for stress relief.”
But Watson wasn’t involved in the early games, I point out.
That look again. “Obviously. I wasn’t going to make John play with imbeciles. I only invited back the least tedious people.”
Watson plays with a great deal of joy. He doesn’t always catch, I’m told. Indeed, in the game I watch he good-naturedly plays outfield and then shortstop. He never played either position in a professional context (when I ask him later, he says he thinks that before these recent Regent’s Park games, the last time he played outfield he was nine), but a professional baseball player outside of his comfort position is still head and shoulders better than even the best of the amateurs they’re playing with.
Holmes always pitches. This is not the Sherlock Holmes you would expect, however. His pitching is carefully calibrated for the talent level of the batter he’s facing. As a professional, he was an intensely strategic pitcher, but in these pick-up games in Regent’s Park he is not. He pitches to be hit, to let the people behind him get a chance to play. He pitches for both teams, never taking a turn at bat, and you get the sense that he is aware that most of these people will tell the story their whole life of how they got a hit off of Sherlock Holmes. He pretends to be dismissive of his stature in the game, but he actually appears to be keenly aware of his star power draw.
Different people take turns catching, but the agreement among the participants is that Holmes is happiest when it’s Watson behind the plate for him, which it usually is for at least a couple of innings. Watson, with a grin, tells me that he “doesn’t like to deprive people of what a delight Sherlock is to catch for,” and then he laughs, and I can’t tell if he means it sincerely or if he’s joking. At any rate, there are times when the players give up the pretense of a game and just sit on the sidelines, watching in astonishment while Watson puts Holmes through his paces. That quality of pitching, seen that close, is mesmerizing.
One awe-struck spectator, watching a curveball drift in, breathes, “That right there is the prettiest sight in London.”
***
Before flying out to London, I speak to Lestrade. I have never met Holmes or Watson and am looking for pointers.
“Meeting Sherlock Holmes with John Watson is a piece of cake,” Lestrade informs me. “Meeting him before John Watson was, frankly, terrible.”
Lestrade managed him through those years, but he says that “managing is a generous word for what I did.” Holmes was, Lestrade says delicately, “stubborn.” He ran rough-shod over a series of catchers until finally settling on Victor Trevor, an unremarkable journeyman who became his personal catcher. “He seemed to tolerate Victor more than he tolerated anybody else I threw at him,” says Lestrade, “and in those days I was looking for absolutely anything that would make Holmes less viciously irritable. I realize now that he just really hated baseball and was lonely and unhappy and terribly bored. I just didn’t know that John Watson was going to be the key to that.”
Why John Watson and not Victor Trevor? To Lestrade, it’s obvious. “John loves Sherlock. Absolutely everything about him. You won’t get John to say a single thing that he would change about Sherlock. There’s a lot that’s annoying about Sherlock, I’m sure he’d admit that, but he loves the entire package of him. John is the only person I ever met who that was true of. That’s why John Watson and not Victor Trevor. John understands Sherlock on a level that no one else can equal. Why John Watson can do that, I don’t know. A quirk of personality, I guess.”
Trevor’s brief assessment was that Watson must be “a saint.” His time as Holmes’s catcher, he says, was “miserable.” He describes Holmes as “capricious and petulant and sulky, just a nightmare to have to interact with constantly. I was relieved when he jumped ship [to go to Austin].”
It’s very different from how Watson describes working with Holmes. During their shared All-Star Game, Watson famously told reporters that Holmes was his “favorite,” the one pitcher he wanted to catch for the rest of his life. When news of their relationship broke, it was an endlessly replayed sound bite.
Watson is rueful about the quote now. “It’s not that it’s not true, but I hadn’t intended to give so much away. But here’s the thing: When you are in love with someone who you think is absolutely amazing, incredible, magnificent, it breaks your heart to think that there are people out there who don’t see that. I was so tired of all the bad press about what a terrible teammate Sherlock is. He’s not, and I thought that he needed someone on his side.”
And perhaps that answers the question of why Watson caught Holmes’s eye: He was the first baseball player to gush about Holmes. Holmes had always been a remarkable pitcher, but his abilities were brushed under the rug of the personality clashes that leaked out of the clubhouse. Watson’s unerring support seemed to allow Holmes to blossom in a way he hadn’t before. It was his Cy Young season, his All-Star Game start, his season with a perfect game. Holmes avoided talking to the press, protected by Watson, who kept the press away from all of his pitchers that season. Watson also took the pressure off of Holmes’s ace status. Holmes later said that Watson was the “captain” of the team, and the rest of the team agreed that it was Watson who took the leadership role, which cleared Holmes to focus on pitching.
And to fall in love. When I ask Sherlock Holmes when he first knew that John Watson was going to be special to him, he says, “Special to me? What does that even mean? I knew he was special, full stop, the moment I met him.”
“No, you didn’t,” says Watson cheerfully but with the air of a man who finds himself constantly correcting exaggerations.
“Yes, I did. You had a psychosomatic leg injury—how many baseball players can boast that?”
Watson huffs a laugh and looks at me. “Sometimes I worry that, when Sherlock talks about me, it sounds too much like hero worship. And then he says something like that and I realize how silly I’m being.”
***
Holmes was not born in London, but other than confirming that he doesn’t talk about his childhood at all and flat-out ignores all questions about it, to the point where he stands and starts playing the violin. Watson, who I’ve already come to rely on to smooth this interview, doesn’t come to my aid at all. So I drop it.
Instead I ask when Holmes moved to London. Holmes talks of an elderly aunt he used to visit during his school breaks who died when he was sixteen and left him a great deal of money and her London home. The time spent in London solidified his love of it. When I ask him why he lives in London, he says, “I don’t understand why other people don’t live in London.”
It was Holmes who wanted to move to London, the couple confirms. “I was born here, but we moved when I was a kid and other than occasional family visits I didn’t feel much of an urgent desire to be back here,” Watson says.
“I talked you into it,” Holmes adds, sounding almost anxious, as if it was wrong to do.
“The truth is that I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I spent my adult life living out of hotel rooms and suitcases. I didn’t have a home. He did. And seeing the way he lit up when he thought about going home, I wanted nothing more in the universe than to be here with him. And it’s been fantastic. I love it here.”
Watson says he’s “settled” now. “This is home, definitely, unquestionably. We go to the States all the time to visit my family and to do baseball-related things, and each time I can’t wait to get back home here. It’s just such a haven.”
Holmes beams, as if he has been completely vindicated in his life plan.
The apartment is undeniably charming in a madcap way that seems to fit these two men perfectly. It’s small and cozy and crowded with stuff. Watson is in medical school—a lifelong dream that Holmes convinced him to pursue—and his textbooks tower on top of the desk, next to sheaves of notes, a microscope, a number of mysterious vials, and a stuffed ferret. I ask if they’re related to med school homework and Watson says that Holmes has taken up criminology “as a hobby.” Holmes objects to that characterization, but then he is off and running, babbling about how many different types of tobacco ash there are (243, in case you’re wondering). Holmes has begun consulting with London’s Metropolitan Police. Those who have worked with him call him “difficult” but “brilliant.” Which sounds a lot like how he was as a baseball player.
***
Theirs is not a household that looks back a lot, Watson says, and it’s easy to believe him. Other than two baseballs that sit on the mantel (together with a skull, which presumably has nothing to do with their baseball careers, but I didn’t dare ask), there is nothing in the living room to tell you that two very good baseball players live there. I ask what the two baseballs are, and Watson says one is from Holmes’s perfect game and one is from Game 4 of the World Series, and he doesn’t know which is which.
“I do,” Holmes says.
“No, you don’t,” Watson tells him.
“Yes, I do.”
Watson looks at me. “No, he doesn’t,” he says, but he is smiling.
That is the remarkable thing that you realize about these two when you spend time with them. They smile a lot. Watson was always considered affable and easygoing, but it is a remarkable thing to see Holmes, once known for his glower, laugh. They both seem more relaxed than they ever did during that final season.
“It was just fraught,” Watson says, making a face. “I mean, yes, we won the World Series, and we met, of course, and I will be forever grateful, but there was just so much other nonsense. You meet someone and you fall in love and you want to hold hands and go on dates and tell your parents and we couldn’t do any of that. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, and then I would get worried it was showing, and so then I’d try to pretend I wasn’t happy, and it was just exhausting.”
Holmes has been very quiet. Watson looks at him and prompts, “Don’t you think it was exhausting?”
“Yes,” he agrees.
If Holmes hadn’t been hit in the head with a pitch, I ask, referring to the giveaway moment when Watson insisted that he not leave the unconscious Holmes’s side, were they ever going to come out as a couple?
“When the season was over,” Watson answers hesitantly, with another glance at Holmes. “The reason he’s so quiet is that he wanted to come out right away. I was the one who didn’t want to.”
“I didn’t really care either way,” Holmes says. “I just didn’t like…” Holmes frowns, as if considering his words, then says, “Well, you heard him. He said it was exhausting. And it was to him. And I was just sitting there watching him tie himself up in knots over the fact of me.”
“That’s not how it was,” Watson protests.
“I wanted to come out right away because I thought it would make him unhappy not to and I try to do whatever will maximize John’s happiness, for obvious reasons.” Holmes gives me a look that dares me to be stupid enough to ask what the “obvious reasons” are.
“I just didn’t want the whole season to be about our sex life,” Watson says. “I still wish it hadn’t turned into that. I wanted us to just be two normal people. Maybe that’s why I like London so much. I feel like we come closer to achieving that here than we ever did before. And that’s all I wanted. I wanted us to be normal.”
“You also wanted to win a World Series.”
“Yes, but you were more important than the World Series, as you know.”
Holmes shrugs. “You got both.”
Which brings us, of course, to the events of the night of Game 4 of the World Series. Why Moriarty was in Holmes’s and Watson’s apartment has never been clear. When I ask about it, Watson says that’s because not even they know why he was there.
“He was there because he hated me and wanted to burn the heart out of me,” Holmes says.
There might not have been any love lost between Moriarty and Holmes, but breaking into Holmes’s apartment seems a bit excessive, surely.
“He was insane,” Holmes explains shortly.
Holmes refuses to answer questions on what caused the bad blood between him and Moriarty. For a little while, at least, it seemed as if they had been friendly with each other before it all fell apart. But Holmes doesn’t talk about it, nor does he talk about the All-Star Game altercation with Sebastian Moran, an event that pre-dates his meeting of John Watson. He will say that throwing at Moran during the playoffs that final, fateful season was “not why Moriarty was at our flat that night.” Although, it must be said, it surely didn’t help.
Lestrade traded for Moriarty late in that final season, clearing him through waivers. “We didn’t expect to be able to,” Lestrade admits, “it was an enormous coup.” And was his ace pitcher enthusiastic about the trade? “No,” Lestrade answers slowly, “but you’ve got to understand they were both arrogant superstars. I thought it was typical alpha-dog posturing, that they just both wanted to be the most important pitcher on the team. Honestly, I thought that John would handle it, he’d been very good at handling the personalities so far. But it was just a disaster. And with how it ended, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if Moriarty would still be alive if I hadn’t traded for him.”
I convey that sentiment to Holmes, who immediately says, “No. Moriarty was reckless and, honestly, suicidal. He was bored enough to just want to end it all, but he couldn’t pick the usual way of doing it, he had to make sure to take the both of us down, too. It didn’t have anything to do with Lestrade. It didn’t really have anything to do with John. It only ever had to do with me.”
But it was Watson who pulled the trigger that night, as everyone knows.
There is a moment of silence, and then Watson says firmly, “We decided we’d talk about that night today, this one time, so that everyone will know what happened, and then we’re never talking about it ever again. He was in our flat waiting for us when we got home. He was in our bedroom. Neither of us knew. We didn’t go into the bedroom immediately. We talked for a bit in the kitchen, about our plans now that the World Series was over, about here, London, actually. Sherlock’s cell phone was ringing, so I told him to answer it and said that I would meet him in the bedroom. And when I walked in, Moriarty was there holding a gun on me.”
Holmes picks up the story. “When I walked in and saw what was happening, my immediate thought was that I had to get his attention away from John and onto me.”
“It was a stupid thought,” interjects Watson.
“It was the only logical thought. I was still holding the baseball from the game—” Here Holmes gestures toward the mantle, where the baseballs sit—“and I threw it at Moriarty. Which served its purpose of distracting Moriarty from John.”
“I was able to get to the gun, which we kept in the nightstand, and I shot Moriarty before he could shoot Sherlock,” Watson finishes. “That’s what happened, start to finish. And now we’re done talking about it.”
***
It is clear that Holmes thinks the Hall of Fame selection is silly, and that it should have gone in Watson’s direction instead. Watson, however, is insistent that it was the right choice.
“When I said he was my favorite pitcher ever, that wasn’t just starry-eyed adoration talking. He was always the best pitcher I ever caught for.”
“And John was the best catcher I ever had, so if being your best pitcher means I belong in the Hall of Fame then the converse should be true,” suggests Holmes.
After a moment, Watson asserts firmly, “It’s a very great honor, and we’re very delighted and looking forward to the ceremony.”
“Are we?” asks Holmes archly.
“Yes,” Watson tells him. “Drink your tea.”
After a moment, Holmes drinks his tea.
Content is not the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of Sherlock Holmes. But what I realized during my time with him in London is that maybe it should be. Maybe it always should have been. Because when you look back at his career, you realize that contentment was the driving force behind all of the explosive pitching to begin with. All of the fireworks of his first few years as a pitcher were a wild, desperate drive toward a contentment he couldn’t find. They were a symptom of a restless and craving talent seeking its counterbalance.
Likewise, that final incandescent season is clearly now, in hindsight, an indication of that counterbalance being found, of contentment being achieved. And isn’t the essence of retiring after a World Series win in fact an indication of utter contentment? An acknowledgment of feeling that there’s nothing left to strive for in this particular realm?
Holmes is content now. Nothing is clearer. His edges still have a sharpness that can slice at the right angle, but the sheen of them is less glittering and he wields them with more conscious precision. I would say that he smiles more, but, then again, when I was watching footage of his last season to prepare for this interview, I realized that he smiled quite a bit then. Mostly at Watson, it’s true, private smiles between the two that take on all the significance in the world these days. But he also smiled more at the crowd than he ever had before. And you know what he looks like after he pitches his perfect game, after the final out of the World Series? A man who is content.
Holmes and Watson were married at Boston’s Fenway Park in October. Watson chose the month because of its significance to baseball, and, he says, “Because I wanted to overload it with good memories.” They both chose the venue because Watson had grown up a Red Sox fan and because the stadium “had been good to us. Not a single bad memory. Plus the Red Sox management were enthusiastic about the idea.”
“And the Red Sox weren’t in the playoffs that year, so it was ideal timing,” adds Holmes.
“Thanks for pointing that out,” Watson tells him drily.
And were they already a couple by the time of the All-Star Game they played at Fenway together?
“We were a couple from the day we met,” Holmes says. “The label we put on it was meaningless. We met and we were a couple, regardless of whatever other artificial date in the timeline of our relationship you might try to choose. We met as separate individuals, and then our lives really began.”
After a moment, Watson says, “You can see why I married him, right?”
The photos from their wedding day show Holmes and Watson in matching outfits. Watson says he playfully suggested getting married in their uniforms, but Holmes was appalled at the idea, so they ended up “very traditional in what was otherwise a non-traditional wedding in every way. I think Sherlock liked the irony. So it was morning suits for us.” They look exactly as you would expect a newly married couple to look: very happy.
I ask who proposed, and after a confused glance, Watson says, “Neither of us. I can’t even remember when and how we decided to do it. Just that it seemed like we ought to.”
“I think you were feeling your mortality because of your classes,” says Holmes.
“That makes me sound very romantic,” says Watson.
Watson is taking his time with medical school. He says he is old enough now to want to “savor” school. He spends a lot of time commentating for Major League Baseball, a job he says he owes to Sherlock.
“He went and told Major League Baseball I wanted to be a commentator,” Watson says.
And did he?
“No. Not at all.”
“But he loves being a commentator,” Holmes says, which Watson does not deny.
In the meantime, Holmes keeps himself busy consulting with Scotland Yard and running experiments and writing the results up on his blog. Watson keeps a more active blog these days as well than he did when he was a player. On the day Holmes was named to the Hall of Fame, Watson posted a brief entry that read, “So proud of Sherlock for a well-deserved election to the Baseball Hall of Fame!”
The first comment on the entry is from Sherlock: “Not well-deserved at all, and not especially impressive considering that these idiots have managed to overlook you.”
Illustrative of the one simple truth about a relationship that has inspired such complex emotions: The world makes a fuss over Sherlock Holmes, but Holmes reserves his fuss for John Watson.
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Date: 2014-04-01 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-04-01 10:08 am (UTC)I realise how much I have missed these two in this Universe.
What a lovely visit - and seeing it through the eyes of a third person was quite a different and lovely approach.
"Other than two baseballs that sit on the mantel (together with a skull, which presumably has nothing to do with their baseball careers, but I didn’t dare ask), there is nothing in the living room to tell you that two very good baseball players live there."
Haha! Loved how you worked
Oliver'sthe skull in there!no subject
Date: 2014-04-02 03:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 11:16 am (UTC)xx
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Date: 2014-04-02 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 12:56 pm (UTC)*Melts into a puddle of gooey-goo*
This is great! I love it that you returned to your baseball verse. I was thinking of you too, knowing that yesterday was opening day.
I love how you wrote this like a sports reporter. Both Sherlock and John's personalities come through completely.
Watson says one is from Holmes’s perfect game and one is from Game 4 of the World Series, and he doesn’t know which is which.
“I do,” Holmes says.
“No, you don’t,” Watson tells him.
“Yes, I do.”
Watson looks at me. “No, he doesn’t,” he says, but he is smiling.
*Laughs* I'm inclined to believe John on this one.
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Date: 2014-04-02 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-01 01:01 pm (UTC)Loved the format of the article - it allowed us to see Sherlock and John from different perspectives while also including their quotes about each other. I was so happy to see them so happy and content and just observing their great relationship.
Thank you so much!! *squishes*
(For a nervous moment as I was clicking the link I was wondering if this was just an April's Fool joke and there'd be nothing behind the link. So relieved it wasn't like that!)
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Date: 2014-04-01 09:22 pm (UTC)“Yes,” Watson tells him. “Drink your tea.”
After a moment, Holmes drinks his tea.
*laughs* I always adore watching John's skills at Sherlock-wrangling.
I have a real fondness for Outsider POVs and this one was delightful. The fact that they do pick-up games in the park is adorable. :)
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Date: 2014-04-02 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-04-02 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-02 04:13 am (UTC)Of course Sherlock started up ball games for John, and perhaps a little for himself. That just makes so much sense to me.
And that last line! I can neither confirm nor deny that I sighed dreamily.
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Date: 2014-04-03 03:44 am (UTC)They are just so content, these two. Old enough to know the precious value of what they have and to protect it and enjoy it at all costs.
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Date: 2014-04-02 09:06 pm (UTC)“That was for John, of course. John gets depressed without baseball. And he needs it for stress relief.”
I love that, the way Sherlock does all he can to maximize John’s happiness.
“That right there is the prettiest sight in London.”
Oh, you mean Sherlock and John are snogging on the field?
“Are we?” asks Holmes archly.
“Yes,” Watson tells him. “Drink your tea.”
After a moment, Holmes drinks his tea.
*giggles* I love after a moment. Preservation of your self-esteem is important. :D
We met as separate individuals, and then our lives really began.
Aww, Sherlock says so romantic things. (Although he'd kill anyone who would call him a romantic.)
I love all the little nods to events that took place in B&C, you give us lovely "Aww, yes, I remember that scene" moments, like John telling reporters that Sherlock is his favourite, or the two balls on the mantel (I remember Sherlock put them on the mantel in his house in America and I commented they would be great mates for the skull at 221B :D), or the giveaway moment when John goes with Sherlock in the ambulance. I also love the mention of the wedding at Boston’s Fenway Park because when you did your Bang and Clatter Q&A in September I asked
youthem about getting married andyouSherlock said they were negociating Fenway. :DIt's really lovely to know what happens to B&C Sherlock and John after the end of the fic, and the interview form brings something new. I love the feeling of happy domesticity. *sighs happily*
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Date: 2014-04-03 03:21 am (UTC)Sherlock is *such* a romantic. Most people know it, they just know well enough not to say it out loud. ;-)
I'm so glad I didn't mess up any of the continuity! I was worried about that, I kept going back to check!
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Date: 2014-04-03 07:34 pm (UTC)