A Golden Opportunity

The Fate We All Share

"I...I wonder Professor, if I might be able to sit with you today?" Victor wondered, abruptly enough that the request may seem suspicious. Abruptly enough that he wanted the man to ask why, he wanted someone, someone to care about his state of mind. Perhaps he was going for the low hanging fruit, praying that a nearly crippled man would not run away from him as well.
"Do you have questions about calculus?" the man wondered, taking a single bite of his bacon before crunching the charred bits of meat between his palm, now so frustrated with the state of the food that he could hardly give it a proper method of disposal.
"No," Victor shrugged. "I just figured you might want company."
"I am used to quiet, Victor, there is no need to entertain me," Professor Holmes assured. There was a brief pause, in which Victor nodded in his polite way, in the way he offered whenever anyone suggested an alternative to his better interest. So caring was he, so submissive. It would seem the Professor noticed this, he noticed the tone of silence. "Though if you would like to stay, I suppose we could work on a crossword puzzle together."
"Really?" Victor wondered quickly, daring to be thrilled at the notion. Perhaps enjoying the company of an older man reduced your own scope of entertainment, in which no drug in the world could beat the entertainment of word games.
"On the agreement that you can't hide anymore secrets," Professor Holmes added. "And that you have to admit to me what's on your mind here and now...and why you can't look me in the eyes."
"You'll be mad at me," Victor admitted finally, shuffling over for the guest chair and making him comfortable near the bedside. Professor Holmes lifted his breakfast tray as much as he could muster, his weak arms struggling to so much as release it from the barrier that was his lap, and as his wrists began to shake Victor quickly snatched the thing from his grasp, unwilling to watch the man dump the remains of his stinking hospital breakfast upon his woolen blanket.
"I'm always mad at you, Victor, always a little bit," Sherlock Holmes admitted, nodding in thanks as Victor tucked the tray near the foot of the bed for easy pick up from the nurse.
"Why would you be mad at me?"
"Because you're stupid," Professor Holmes admitted, daring a smile on the corners of his dry lips. "Because you can't do calculus, and because you left at ladder at my window. And now...now you know. Now you're the only one on this Earth that knows. And I failed right at the end to take my secret to the grave."
"You shouldn't hate me for that, Professor. Sometimes it's good to admit things. Sometimes it makes you breathe easier." Victor sighed heavily, as if to demonstrate his point. As if to address how much more air he could swallow without his own secret impeding upon his windpipe.
"So that's what's troubling you?" Professor Holmes reasoned, leaning back upon the firm wall of pillows and studying Victor's guilty blue eyes, studying them for their imperfections. "You, too, have a secret keeper?"
"I can't be sure he'll keep my secrets. I can't even be sure he'll keep me," Victor grumbled, pushing his hands across his eyes and keeping the light from passing onto his lids, digging his fingers deep into the roots of his hair while his palms pressed firmly against his forehead. "I don't know what possessed me, but he got so...so mad. About you."
"About me?"
"He doesn't like you for some reason, he doesn't like the time I spend with you."
"Am I such a villain for promoting your education?" Professor Holmes chuckled, his skeletal fingers picking at the seams of the blanket in the absence of anything else to do.
"He doesn't understand why I care about you, and last night I finally told him. I told him that we share something, something other than mathematics. He's clever enough to realize."
"A fool's mistake, Victor," Professor Holmes warned. "Though judging upon your grades I am not so surprised you made it!"
"I thought perhaps it would help! I trusted him enough; I thought...well I thought that even if he couldn't relate to me at least he could understand me. As a human being, as a friend."
"You were wrong?"
"Of course I was bloody wrong," Victor scowled, dropping his elbows onto his knees and staring forlorn into the darkness underneath the hospital bed. "Why do you think I have nowhere else to go?"
The old man was quiet for a while, the only noise coming from the soft catches of his chipping fingernails across the fabric of the blanket. Victor's breaths were shuttering now, staring and realizing that for once perhaps Sherlock Holmes was not the most pathetic man in the room. For once Victor felt equally friendless, recognizing that while he was probably the only one to care about the fate of his old Professor, that same consideration may very well be true in reverse. No one else would visit this hospital room today, but similarly no one would call to check on Victor's whereabouts.
"Certainly you can return to your dorm? Has he kicked you out?"
"No...no he's vanished. I don't know where he's gone. But I'm...I'm finished with university anyway. Even if I managed to pass your class I'm still terrible at mathematics. If they give me a degree in engineering I'll build a bridge that collapses, or a sewer system that overflows. I'll design a house that caves in on its inhabitants, or send a plane to the ocean. I'm unqualified, uneducated...unworthy. And what good is there to stick around and waste my father's money, now when there's not even love involved?"
"Your roommate...he is the one you admire?" Professor Holmes wondered, his one eyebrow rising to demonstrate his innocence curiosity.
"Yes," Victor admitted heavily, thankful to hear the word spoken aloud. Happy that his tongue did not tie itself in denial and refuse to speak the truth.
"I'm sorry," Professor Holmes muttered, averting his eyes with the truest form of sympathy.
"Is this the fate we all share?" Victor wondered, his questions escaping as breath, so quiet that even he had to wonder if they had been voiced at all. "Are all men such as ourselves destined to loneliness?"
"There is a certain stubbornness that pairs poorly with such unique tastes. I have to assume we share that as well...that which holds us to fantasies. To devotions which are not reciprocated."
"There's a difference between true love and stubbornness," Victor debated. "Sometimes people are clever enough to realize when fate was interrupted."
"Indeed there is, though who can prove what is fated and what isn't? How can I be sure that Fate's plans were interrupted in my case, when in her case John Watson was exactly where he needed to be? Sometimes fate is rerouted, yes...or perhaps it is simply confused."
"I don't know if Reginald is my fate or not. I'd like him to be, but I would think we'd start off better than this. Better than him running off, as if I had suddenly taken home an infectious disease."
"He may still come back, though you may never know if you keep this up," Professor Holmes warned.
"Would it not be better to have that consideration and hold some hope, rather than know for sure he isn't coming back? That he's scorned me?"
"No," the Professor said flatly. "It is hope that will tear you apart, Victor. Hope that will feed into your stubbornness until they're a constant, constant loop. And you end up on a hospital bed, dying without anyone to follow you to the grave, dying with a man's stitches in your leg and in your heart."
"It's better to know for sure, either way?"
"If John Watson had looked me in the eye the day I left, if he had made it clear his intentions to never speak with me again...I might have listened."
"You don't know what was in his head, Professor. You don't know if he hates you or not!"
"I know that he hasn't reached out," the old man said flatly.
"Perhaps he worries you hate him, too? Perhaps the mail service is thwarting you both, and he would have come sooner had he been given any sign?"
"There it is again, Victor. Hope. Stop giving me hope and let me die in peace."
"If it's hope that will keep you alive then I'll pump it into your arm like the IV," Victor insisted, showcasing his stubbornness as well as he could.
"I was hoping it was hopelessness that would kill me," Professor Holmes admitted quietly. "This rotting body had given up long before, though it's piloted by a brain which cannot give up. Or rather, one which had not given up before."
"There's a first for everything," Victor admitted with a sad sign. "Though I almost pity you're on the other side of it. Of...of this hurting."
"You don't have to doom yourself to years of suffering, Victor. It's not worth it in the end."
"From this perspective I feel there's no choice," Victor admitted with a grumble. "How can I find someone like him again?"
"You won't, though I would not wish you to. Why would you want to find a copy of someone who did not love you originally? Why would you want a replication of someone already imperfect?"
To that Victor could think of no answer, he could not reason in his head why a man would be worth such suffering if indeed he was willing to inflict such pain in the first place. And yet he had to wish, he had to wish that somewhere out there another boy would come along, one with the same wit, the same humor, the same quirks. One with the same tasseled hair and the same intense grey eyes, the same smile that stretched widely at even the smallest joke. The same voice, the same history. The same Reginald. The same...the same boy that had come to hate him.