Holmes’ voice announces: “Watson, I have found a way to make myself invisible!”

Watson has had to take a brutal course in being honest with himself so nothing Holmes says will ever be a surprise.

After Holmes returns there are recriminations. And then changes, subtle and insidious. There might be a plot afoot. If only Holmes were more of a detective.

“Intemperance,” a story from the secret journals of Doctor John H. Watson, intimate friend and long-time companion of the infamous Sherlock Holmes: A most curious and instructive report of the great man’s improbable fecundation, gestation, and parturition.

“Watson!” Holmes yells, in that urgent way of his which either means that he is about to burn something down or that Mrs. Hudson has delivered his tea cold. “Watson, come here, I need you!”

“I don’t suppose I can change your mind.” It’s not so much a question as a statement. Watson does, after all, know Holmes rather well, and changing his mind once he’s made it up would take something quite extraordinary.

When the smoke cleared, Watson blinked open his eyes. For a confused moment, he thought he heard his own voice shouting in a harsh and urgent tone, “Watson! Watson, damn you, man, wake up!”

“I am awake; what happened?” Watson replied, shaking his head and trying to get his limbs in order; if Holmes had seriously damaged him this time, there would be hell to pay for it, that much was certain. He tottered to his feet, and that was when it struck him how thoroughly Holmes’s experiment had gone wrong.

The man in the blue waistcoat levelled the revolver at Holmes’s face, and all Watson thought was, here we are again.

Holmes said, “Am I meant to be frightened?”

The man cocked his weapon, hard sound like fingerbones snapping. Watson twitched, standing in a puddle in this filthy alley and ruining his shoes. He eyed the distance separating him from the man in the blue waistcoat, the steady line of his raised arm. Watson needed at most two seconds of distraction.

Three weeks after Watson takes up his new residence, Holmes breaks in.

Adaptability was part of the human condition. There was not a living creature on earth who did not possess the inherent need to change and grow with their surroundings.

“Gently, gently!” Holmes rocked nearly up onto his toes with the force of it, his hand grabbing in a most satisfying way at Watson’s forearm.

Such a thing was impossible to hide from Holmes, but he tried anyway, binding his chest- god, breasts- putting on his thickest shirt, wetting and adding dirt to his face to suggest the appearance of recently having shaved. It was useless, he knew that. His eyelashes, slenderer brows, the curve to his hips, the stumble as he walked, unused to the difference in balance, all told of something which anyone else might dismiss at a glance, but that Holmes would know in an instant. He had fallen asleep as a man, but woken up as a woman. He felt no different, could discern no difference in his thinking, his old wounds were still there, but he was entirely altered.

Through the three layers made up of coat, shirt and underclothes, the bricks of the prison yard were frightfully chill against Watson’s back. Despite the carnage he and Holmes had wrought, much of it with no defense to offer towards merit, the police had retained some measure of courtesy. Certainly some knew of the illegal blade concealed within yet he had been permitted to retain his walking stick, and he leaned heavily on it now as he reflected upon the last few years of his life.

The disguise gets you in and the report keeps you from doing something reckless like running in and grab Watson by the arms, and your own brilliant mind can work out exactly what the injuries must have been anyway, but there’s nothing to brace you for the shock of actually seeing the damage.

Something about Watson requires extensive study.

Watson is certain that Holmes’s recklessness is sure to be the death of him. His medical skills can only do so much.

If one were to understand the passions that drove mankind, it was necessary to experience them.

The prime minister knelt before his queen and pledged to her, “We will clear Central Asia of Muscovites and drive them into the Caspian Sea,” and fifteen months later John Watson nearly died in Afghanistan.