"The move is yours, Jack."

I blinked in rapid succession, bringing my unfocused eyes to stare at the chess board in front of me. The long, careful fingers of Sherlock Holmes were resting upon each other in front of his face, where his eyes were carefully studying me. I rubbed my eyes unceremoniously and yawned. The chess game had gone on for what seemed like hours. I was inches away from simply throwing the board at my mentor's face and waking myself. But I was out of options.

"You are detached," Holmes said simply, sitting back in his chair. "Perhaps we shall continue at a later time?" I shook my head.

"No, Holmes, I shall not let you desert me as well..." I placed my fingertip upon my closest pawn and looked across the board at Holmes. His face was unchanged. With a great sigh, I fell back against my chair and folded my arms. "I despise this monotony, Holmes. This gray area is driving me insane." I sat forward again and contemplated my position on the board. I was losing, miserably. Finally, I moved my knight in to capture his open bishop, only to have it whisked away by his well-hidden queen. I glared furiously at the piece.

"You must be very low on options if you chose to retreat inside yourself to try your wit against mine, Jack," Holmes said as he twisted my knight with his fingers. "I am not the most entertaining or even agreeable chess-mate."

"As much as I would love to agree with you on that point, Holmes, I will not rise to ire. There is hardly enough stamina in me to keep my eyes open in this listlessness." In frustration, I moved my pawn forward a space. Holmes's black pawn quickly eradicated my white one.

"Checkmate," he muttered in a low tone, his eyes surveying the board. My head popped up and I frantically swept my eyes over the board. Indeed, my king was boxed in, incapable of movement without defeat. I grumbled as I knocked my king onto its side.

"Holmes, you must have gone through times like these, where it seems impossible to think."

"I found that, between cases, time itself would seem to slow and mock me. And, yes, I found it increasingly hard to focus in those, what did you call them... 'gray areas.'"

"Then, please," I pleaded, leaning my face into my hand, which was propped upon the table, "tell me what it is that helped you fight the tedium."

The silence that followed was one of the longest and most nerve-wracking I had ever had to endure. Just sitting there, watching Holmes's jaw muscle twitch, his eyebrows dig downward, and his piercing gray eyes look seemingly everywhere but at me. At last, after what felt like days, Holmes moved again, and he began to pack away the chess pieces.

"Holmes-"

"Opium," he told me tersely. I sealed my lips and watched in silence as he carefully fitted every piece into its place beneath the board. They each fell into place snugly on the red velvet lining. He folded the wooden board and locked the clasp tight. "I injected myself with opium, a seven-per-cent solution, to be exact." He looked up at me, and all the life had left his eyes. For the first time, I was afraid of Sherlock Holmes.

"I am sorry, Holmes," I said quietly after another agonizing minute of silence. He opened a drawer and placed the chess set inside of it. He looked up as he closed the drawer with a snap.

"No, you are inquisitive by nature. I was expecting the question and its inevitable answer to come some day." Again he sighed. The wind began to billow around us, and I stood from my seat to look around us at the scene I had created. It was the field of wheat. I had always been quite fond of it. The sun was setting, and the single desk in the center of the field stood out as dark wood on tan wheat. And there was Holmes.

Silhouetted against the orange of the setting sun, I watched as he contemplated, smoking that pipe. I was struck with a sense of strange beauty, about the whole scene and how the two of us fit into it, as if we were the subject in some bizarre painting. The wind rustled slightly, stirring the wheat about me.

"Holmes," I said quietly. He turned his head slightly. "Do you remember what I asked you almost six years ago in this very field?" Holmes cast an eye about him, and the edges of his mouth curled upward.

"Yes. You were quite a bit younger then." A chuckle. "And naive. But I remember your question. And the half of your retort that you failed to let me know the remainder of." A ring of smoke drifted up into the heavens. I watched it dissipate among the tufts of white clouds, then walked up to Holmes's side, following his gaze to a lovely tree in it's autumn best, a showy red.

"I remember as well," I told him, even though I knew that he already knew this. "I remember thinking that I did not want you to leave. I did not know how long I could make it on my own without you pushing me in the right direction, or your advice in my ear, nagging me." I laughed. I could feel his eyes upon me, but still I watched as the breeze played in the fingers of the red tree. "And even though I was barely old enough to be an adult then... I still think it. Every day. What if Holmes isn't there when I wake up one day? What if, someday, I am left on my own when I am not ready to let go?" I finally broke my staring contest with the tree and looked at Holmes.

There was something on his face that I had never seen before: indecision. His face was stuck between to two emotions, and it was as if he could not choose which to convey. There was concern, and there was also something I never expected to see grace his face. It was admiration, a caring smile with eyebrows tilted upward in that strange concern. Words were taken from my throat as if I had received a slap.

"If it is any consolation, my boy, I have no intention of throwing you to the wolves just yet." He looked back to the tree, the strange smile still clinging to his features, and he placed his hand on my shoulder and gripped it firmly.

A door opening and closing again woke me, startled, from my unconscious state. I sat up quickly and rubbed the sleep from my eyes to see who had entered the flat. As my eyes focused on the dark form, I smiled.

"Ron," I said with a laugh in my chest, "how was school?" He shot me a look of loathing. "The place is a hell-hole, Jack! How could you send me there? I'm suffering!" He threw his bag on the coat rack and walked into the living room to flop down onto the couch next to me. I gave him a look of comical hurt.

"Ron, I've sent you to the finest school for boys in London! I am sure that many of your friends would saw off a leg for the chance to attend the City of London School for Boys!" "Exactly," Ron moaned as he covered his eyes with his arm. "There are no girls there, Jack. What am I supposed to do, fantasize about the teachers? The school nurse? Please, Jack, she must be 40-something!" I cringed at his logic.

"What if you focused on your studies instead of the female anatomy?"

"I'm a teenager, Jack. I can't help myself." He flashed a smile and removed his arm from his eyes. I noticed, with pleasure, that his speech had dramatically improved since his schooling began at age 10. "Come on... You can't say you never looked at a girl when you were a teenager, can you?"

My thoughts, for an instant, traveled all the miles Watson and I had traversed to London, back to the orphanage, back to my teenage years, and back to Rose Williamson. A harsh blush rose to my cheeks, and I looked away to the ceiling. Ron laughed as the door opened again.

"Uncle John knows what I'm talking about, don't you, Uncle John?" Ron's gay brown eyes danced from my form to the two forms that had just entered. Watson's eyes bulged, and Sara giggled at his reaction.

"What do I know?" He looked from Ron, then to me, his face a jumble of questions. I laughed as well, getting to my feet to shake Sara's hand, even though she had become something of a permanent fixture in our home during the day.

"Nothing, Watson." I clapped him on the shoulder, then leaned close to whisper advice. "Watson, put your glasses on." Flustered, Watson reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out his newly acquired round, wire-rimmed glasses and set them on the bridge of his nose.

"Honestly, I shall never become accustomed to these blasted things," Watson said with a growl. "I don't even know why I need them." I shook my head.

"You sit far too close to the paper when you write. It gives you a penchant for bad eyesight." I looked sideways at Sara, who was admiring her beau's eyewear with a smile. "Not to mention your liking to sit as close as possible to the screen at the cinema." Watson's great frown flickered for a moment into a smile.

"Oh, but Holmes, I had never seen a picture before, being an orphan and all." He glanced at Sara, and his grip on her arm increased. "It really was amazing, Holmes. Nigel Bruce makes a very amiable if bumbling Dr. Watson." I wanted to burst into laughter, but I refrained.

"I hear that Mr. Rathbone plays a rather convincing Sherlock Holmes. I shall have to see one of his pictures one of these days." I simply had to wait a second for Holmes's gruff reply to come.

'Now they are making cinema pictures about me. My own fame will never cease to amaze me.'

"So, my dear Sara, what brings you to our doorstep this afternoon?" I asked, addressing the young woman presently. I noticed that, after her family had settled down only a few streets away, she had grown in more ways than one. Now at least 18, I thought, her hair, once long and braided, was now barely beyond her shoulders and filled with bouncing curls. She clung to Watson's arm as a bright smile filled her face.

"David was invited to a Halloween party tonight, and the invitation told him to bring as many friends and family that he wanted to. He's already bringing all of the girls, and offered to bring Johnny along." Her bright blue eyes shot to Watson's again, and she returned them to mine. "He's extended an invitation to you and your brother, Holmes." Ron nearly rocketed from his seat. A chance to meet women of his own age (a ripe 16) was an invitation he would be loath to pass up.

"I am sorry to say that neither of us can join you this evening," I said, looking with a raised eyebrow at my brother. His face became full of red anger.

"Well, you don't have to go, you stick in the mud, but I'm goin'!" He looked as if he were about to ask Sara something, then I held out an arm to quiet him.

"You have studying to do, Ron. I received the marks on your last English exam, and I was not very pleased. It would do you well to study thoroughly for the next exam in two days." I smiled. He opened and closed his mouth in rapid succession, his likeness to a fish increased tenfold, then grabbed his bag from the coat rack and stormed into the small room which I had occupied with Watson when Mr. Richardson had owned the flat. As the door slammed, I turned back to my two friends, who wore identical frowns.

"Well, we know why Ron can't make it, but what's keeping you, Holmes?" Watson asked. I shrugged and sat myself on the couch again.

"I have no costume. Do not think I failed to see your costumes stored in that bag," I added with a nod toward the bag held by Sara's free hand. She finally freed Watson's arm and sat beside me.

"You don't need anything fancy. You can just grab something out of the closet and pretend you're someone famous." She dug into the bag and fished out a strange, hound's-tooth-checked deerstalker and placed it on top of my head before sitting up again and handing Watson's costume to him. She disappeared into the loo for changing. Watson smiled with a sigh as he watched her go.

"You know, Holmes, I have no idea how I came to have the prettiest girl in London." With those words, he retreated to the master bedroom, where we had moved our two separate beds after Mr. Richardson died. I got to my feet and observed the unfortunate deerstalker by turning it over in my hands.

"I suppose that I have no choice," I muttered as I fixed the deerstalker atop my mass of thick hair as best I could.

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AN: All right! I'm actually getting this started earlier than originally planned due to popular demand. I've acquired a few more rabid fans than I expected. Just so everyone knows, this story will be longer, darker and more sinister than any Jack Holmes story I've written. Darker than ANY story I've written, to tell the truth. Hope everyone likes! Have fun!