I'm thinking about them two of them, individually and as a unit, post-retirement. again.
Holmes finding his own brand of peace out in the country, keeping bees and swimming in the lakeside pools, is just like a long sigh after holding some kind of tension for the entirety of canon thus far. He's not a character that has or will ever tend towards calm, but that he's found that balance, that place in the world which allows him some quiet both outside and in, is just a kind ending to his story. To think that he was doomed, not only at the falls but in life; as a person who had never known or learned honest contentment or willing rest, but that he still managed to bring the curtains down on a little cottage in sussex, clean, healthy, and having retired at his own conviction, feels like an appropriately hard-won battle.
We don't get much of an idea of Watson's life after they part ways, but then, that's to be expected from him. He still visited Holmes, but that stopped some years before the start of WWI, maybe because the journey out was no longer feasible, and because it has always been a case of delicate diplomancy to coax Holmes away from his rooms. But still, he was steadfast as ever, loyal as ever, ready in a heartbeat to throw himself back into the adventure when he recieved Holmes' telegram, and perhaps more glad than anything to see an old friend, one who had known him at his lowest and his best, before returning to the service that had left him wandering london alone those decades ago. In the last collection of stories he ever published, after the East wind had blown over and left them both standing in its wake, he included the only two stories penned by Holmes himself.
I always think about that. I wonder when Watson read them, what he thought of them, if he told Holmes to publish them himself if he wasn't able. I wonder if Holmes had pushed them on him while he was leaving one day, or if they sat down by the fire in that little sussex cottage, the famillair chord changes of a famillair violin just a little slower than they used to be. I wonder if Watson thought back to the first story, laid out at his old writing desk, long ago sold to a new tenant, because a young man with a brillaint gift had been bitter over a lack of credit. I wonder if he thought back to the months after Afganistan, to the hollow weeks of slow, stiff recovery in a hotel room, struggling to see anything like a future for himself, struggling to navigate a present that had become alien and untrustworthy.
I've seen people bring up all kinds of theories; that they continued to live together, and lied to protect thmselves from a bitter, intolerant world or the cold glare of revenge from behind prison bars. I like the idea, of course I do
But I thinknit's enough that thet just exist together, that they could be there, that they could be Holmes and Watson at any moment, that just by their beating hearts they are together, in some sense, in the abstract way that two people whose narratives can never be told individually will always be together.
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