Disease
It seems innocuous enough in the beginning. Flu-like symptoms, shortness of breath, weakness, lethargy, some mild pain. Nothing to worry about.
Within a few days, the more severe symptoms develop with alarming momentum: unexplained ecchymoses begin to form all over the body, patients begin to experience vomiting, bleeding and hemoptysis. Patients experience intense headaches, delirium, and many fall into a comatose state. In most cases, the eventual result is death.
On the first week and a half, hospitals see an increase in volume of patients. By the end of the month, emergency rooms are flooded, hospitals are nearly overwhelmed, and there is a charged sense of fear and panic all over London.
There is noticeably less traffic on the streets, and those who venture from their homes walk hurriedly from point A to point B, their faces covered by surgical masks, determinedly avoiding any sort of physical contact. One cough, a sniffle or a sneeze can clear a room. People in hazmat suits entering and exiting homes, carrying large bags of biohazardous waste, are no longer an uncommon sight.
The first direct contact you have with the disease, strangely enough, is not through contamination.
The call comes sometime around midnight, and you glance up from the microscope, annoyed at the interruption.
You briefly consider not answering the phone, but the ringing has pulled you out of your concentration enough to realize the full extent of your sleep-deprived state. Your eyes are burning, your muscles are tense and cramped, and a pounding in your head reminds you that the last time you slept was forty-eight hours ago.
The ringing becomes more insistent and provides a shrill accompaniment to the throbbing in your head. You get up reluctantly to answer it, suspecting that it’s Mycroft. If there is a bright side to this epidemic, it’s that the whole situation has made Mycroft’s life a living hell.
You check the screen, but it’s not Mycroft. It’s an unknown number.
You frown and try to deduce who might be calling at this time of night. The phone vibrates insistently while you’re thinking, and with a roll of your eyes, you give in.
You answer with your customary greeting, a terse “Sherlock Holmes.”
The voice on the other end of the line is small and young, disembodied and faint, muffled by slight static. “Hello?“
Male, a child probably between six and ten, the voice is distinctly British, with just the slightest hint of a foreign accent on the enunciation of the vowels. You don’t recognize this voice.
“Who is this?”
“Mr. Holmes,” The childish voice is a little bit stronger now, emboldened perhaps by a response, no matter how terse or unwelcoming that response might be. “My name is Nero Wolfe… Nero Hamish Wolfe.”
You freeze, breath half-caught in your throat, and your hand clenches rigidly over the phone. Your heart thuds dully in your chest, and there’s a faint rushing sound in your ears.
One word, one name tells you so much.
… Hamish… If you were thinking of baby names.
… I’ve never begged for mercy in my life.
…Twice.
… If it was the end of the world… if this was the very last night, would you have dinner with me?
It’s been too long. The first thought that assaults you is how? Which is, in its own ridiculous way, the easiest question to answer.
One night is sufficient to answer how – that bare room in Karachi had been stifling hot, oppressively so; the sounds of the city had been loud outside the door, but it didn’t matter; everything else was insignificant, even the fact that she almost died, or the fact that you attacked all those people as a trade for her singular life; all that mattered was that her pulse was rapid beneath your fingers, her body warm and vital, and her clever eyes told you all you needed to know…
One night before you parted ways forever and never heard from her again. How is the only question you cannot comprehend, but can answer with perfect recall after all this time.
The tiny voice over the phone interrupts your thoughts and pulls you out of the cloud of shock. “Mr. Holmes?”
“Yes,” your voice is hoarse, and you clear it for the sake of the boy on the other line. “I - I’m here.”
“My mother told me to call you. She said to tell you: Eaton Square, ten o’clock tomorrow morning. She said you would know the address. She also said you would recognize me. I’ll see you there at ten sharp.”
“Yes, I know the address, but wait –”
Too late. The other line cuts off, and you’re left staring uselessly at a blank phone screen.
….
….
….
You arrive a good half an hour early, and in deep disguise as a precaution. There are very few people on the street when you arrive, and you linger far enough from 44 Eaton Square to avoid detection, yet close enough to see every single person who arrives. The mask and gloves help you blend in and it’s an excellent way to ensure that no one recognizes you.
At precisely one minute to ten, a black car with heavily tinted windows stops at the corner of the street and the door opens. A little boy hops out.
He pulls out a small brown rucksack – high-quality leather, clearly expensive – hefts it over his shoulders and starts down the street without looking back at the car. He’s neatly-dressed in a turtleneck pulled well up to obscure his face, and gloves, and then there’s the very telling black coat he’s wearing, a tailored miniature of your own.
The pointed clue is unnecessary – the moment you see his mop of black curls and his bright blue eyes, your suspicions from last night are confirmed.
The shade of the boy’s eyes are closer to his mother’s, as well as the cheekbones, though not quite as prominent due to childish roundness of his face… but the ears, the nose, even the shape of his forehead are as familiar to you as your own reflection.
The boy walks determinedly to 44 Eaton Square, cautiously crossing the street, before finally stopping at the steps leading to the house. He looks up at the facade, head tipped and contemplating it with a curious expression, before unceremoniously dropping his rucksack on the ground, and settling on the bottom step.
You don’t move immediately, not even to signal that your attention is drawn to him, but the boy is quicker than you. He turns his head and stares directly at you, as if he’s known you’ve been there all this time.
It’s slightly unnerving to see that clear blue gaze light on you with such direct intensity, and it takes you back to the first time you were at 44 Eaton Square and that very same translucent gaze stared right through your disguise so many years ago.
Disguise is always a self-portrait.
There’s no doubt who his mother is.
In the face of such blatant knowledge, your lips twist into a wry grin under your mask, and you finally shed your disguise. The boy – Nero – watches you approach with a wary look of recognition.
“Do you know who I am?” you ask.
There are so many ways to interpret such a loaded question, and the boy decides to take it at its hidden meaning. He looks at you with a very serious expression on his little face and nods, straightforward but cautious.
“You covered the lower half of your face, but studies have shown that the upper half of the face is more significant when recognizing kinship signals and facial similarity. But it doesn’t matter because I researched you last night and saw your picture. We have the same forehead and nose, and similar ears. And the hair.”
The boy looks calmly up at you, but you can see his hands fiddling slightly with the straps of his bag. A nervous habit, probably. He notices you noticing, and attempts to control it by shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat.
“She’s sick, isn’t she?”
Nero blinks, and he doesn’t answer, but a small tremor makes its way over the boy’s lower lip. His voice wobbles on a tiny, very unconvincing “No.”
“Did she tell you to say that?”
The boy’s lower lip pulls out despite his brave attempts to stop it, and you can see his hands balling into fists inside his coat pockets. For the first time, he looks away, but not before you see the tears pooling in his eyes. He swipes them away stubbornly with one hand.
Children have never been your area of expertise; especially not crying children. The fact that this crying child is your own further adds to the strangeness of the situation. But something tells you, that this time, you need to try.
Cautiously, you lift your hand and hesitantly touch the top of the boy’s head. When Nero doesn’t pull away, your hands settle on the boy’s soft dark curls, so like yours, and you stroke them gently, in what you sincerely hope is a consoling manner.
The touch seems to release something inside the boy, and the tears spill from his eyes, running down his cheeks and wetting his turtleneck. Nero makes a small whimpering sound, and then another, and another, before turning violently toward your leg – about the highest part of you he can reach – and burying his face in your trousers to muffle the sound. His arms wrap around your leg, clinging doggedly as he sobs.
You wrap your arm around him awkwardly. This is not the crying of a child like Rosie, who sometimes cries to get what she wants, or maybe that time when she skinned her knee. This uncontrollable outburst comes from something deeper, probably something the child has been trying to control, to hold back and keep himself from breaking down like he is now.
You wait patiently for the boy to expel whatever fear and confusion and anxiety and helplessness he is feeling. When his grip finally loosens on your clothes and his sobs dwindle into tiny hiccups, you kneel down in front of him and take his shoulders.
“Where is she, Nero?”
The boy’s lip wobbles dangerously again. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. I wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t let me. She said she didn’t want me to get sick too.”
You exhale slowly. You’ve never been one to care before, but there’s more relief in it than you’d like to admit.
She’s still alive.
Or at least she was when Nero left. But that in itself is a good sign. She was still well enough to take precautions for the boy.
Perhaps it’s the boy’s crying, but you find yourself being more careful around him, less brusque, less terse. You rub his back and take the time to wipe the tears from his cheeks, before picking up his discarded bag and slinging it over your own shoulder. You straighten up and hold your other hand out to him.
Nero looks up at you, eyes still watery, but he takes an almighty sniff and takes your hand with his own smaller one.
You take one last look at 44 Eaton Square, before turning away. With your son’s hand in yours, you head home.
_________________
By SorrowsFlower
Might have a part two. It was supposed to be just a few sentences long, sorry. And there might be some inaccuracies, my research wasn’t as in-depth as I would have liked.
Prompt: ’You’ve never been the type to care before.’