Discovery

Holmes was rather fond of his pipe. It had stayed his constant companion over many years and too many adventures and now, just as his stomach began to protest its earthly confines and begin to stretch at its borders, he found himself needing it more than ever. You see, the singular John Watson had left to visit a friend in Paris, and behind him he had left a formidable collection of details from his adventures with Holmes. The adventures themselves were grand, but their pages sat neatly in boxes, stacked in chronological order in shelves.

Behind the shelves was a small drawer. Watson had created a card catalog, and at the very beginning was a list of abbreviations without definitions. Most of the abbreviations were standard, and the rest were reasonable, except for one, which perched precariously between the others as though it were just a bit too dainty to associate with its comrades. The letters were H, M, and S, and yet Holmes could not believe that they had anything to do with the royal fleet, so he was forced to consider the possibility that, just perhaps, he might not have all the facts the way that he wished.

For a brief moment, Holmes considered reading the card catalog. The moment grew longer, and after a few more of them, Holmes flicked to the first card. A Study in Scarlet, it read, and between "meeting" and "violin" there was the HMS. Watson really should have put his notes in alphabetical order, but Holmes supposed that there must have been some system. There couldn't not have been one, at least. He hoped.

He made it through the first quarter inch of the deck before he gave up. It wasn't that it was particularly boring-- it was fascinating to hear Silver Blaze summarized as "Horse racing, surgical knives, accidental death, fraud. No significant income."-- but Holmes wasn't learning anything. There didn't seem to be any system to the notation, and so eventually, Holmes made his way to the stacks of manuscripts.

Watson had kept the manuscripts, organized them instead of the published works, which he had placed in a bin at his practice for the customers to read. It was good publicity, and Holmes appreciated it, but it was a bit frustrating to pull the manuscripts apart to view the titles when there was no spine with which to easily see. Still, he wasn't entirely sure what he was looking for, but he tried to find stories with references to ships or boats or the navy. Watson had been in the military, and perhaps there were special significances ascribed to specific cases, repercussions which affected him in a naval sense, or perhaps the whole thing had nothing to do with anything.

It wasn't as though Holmes could just ask Watson about the abbreviation. Firstly, Watson was in Paris, and by the time a letter reached his hotel, he would have been on the train back. Secondly, while it wasn't actively discouraged, Watson had never actually offered to show Holmes the manuscripts. Holmes had never been bothered by proper social convention, and had always been an investigative sort of person, and so he had never had any difficulty excusing his ventures into other people's quarters. However, he was generally discreet about it, unless it helped a case, and he could hardly explain any of the situation properly, if Watson were to discover him, strewn about in papers.

Strewn about in papers. That was a thought. He and the HMS, together in the oddest situation he could have possibly been in, at that moment. Holmes took a breath and flipped the cloth off of the first manuscript. He had time.