Chapter 27

Piper is not generally very good at getting angry. Besides all the cultural baggage of growing up as a girl (socialized not to provoke conflict) and being nonbinary (careful to appear nonthreatening), Piper’s parents never gave them a model for it. Piper genuinely believes they are two of the nicest people in the world. They never raise their voices; they never argue; any disagreement is immediately met with deep concern and a “family gathering.” Both sets of Piper’s grandparents were quite strict, and their parents’ conflict avoidance stemmed from a conscious choice, when Piper’s mom was pregnant, not to recreate their own childhoods. This was all very well—and Piper thankfully never lacked for love and support—but it’s a totally unnatural state of affairs to literally never argue, and Piper’s occasional clashes with friends growing up felt each time like a catastrophe. They hid their bisexuality longer than they wanted to, and later their growing sense of gender non-normativity, because they were afraid first one and then the other would be the thing that ultimately broke their parents’ state of eternal pleasantness. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case, though Piper has never been entirely sure what their parents think of how their life has turned out so far: after all, they wouldn’t say it if they disapproved.

Piper has gotten much better at expressing negative feelings since leaving home, but they still don’t seek out conflict. They dread it, in fact, avoiding it at all costs.

However.

They have to talk to Tyler.

Their stomach churns on the bus ride over to Tyler’s apartment. The 61B shuttles them past Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, up Forbes into Squirrel Hill, where they stare out at the coffee shops and restaurants and schools and synagogues with sour anxiety at the back of their throat. They are furious. When the police left the night before, their hands shook for an hour. Yet they felt as though they had done something wrong, felt guilty, ashamed, upset with themself instead of with Tyler, who had been the one to call the police against Piper’s specific request. They hated it, hated this feeling, all too common, that they were always the one to blame.

You did a really shitty thing, they practice saying in their head, as the bus runs past Frick Park and deposits them in Regent Square. I’m really angry, they repeat, walking past the wooden houses with bikes on their porches and trees pushing their roots up through the sidewalk. Why did you think you had the right to do this?

And in their head, Tyler’s voice answers: Because Lu might be in danger, and because the police might be wrong about Jack Hart’s murder. And you’re too afraid to do anything about it.

Tyler is on the porch when they arrive, big black boots up on the railing, script in hand. Piper didn’t warn him they were coming, but they wouldn’t be surprised if Tyler was waiting for them just in case. He has a habit, half maddening and half endearing, of setting the scene as if he’s in a stage play, props scattered around him in just the right place, his body arranged on the furniture in a tableau worthy of the opening curtain. Piper has always thought he was rather like Lu in this way—bossily theatrical, always moving through life as if it were a work of fiction—but they’ve never told Tyler that; he wouldn’t be pleased.

Piper quells the flicker of fondness that arises when he sees the burnt-out cigarette, half-smoked and then forgotten, dangling between Tyler’s fingers. They can’t believe they’re sleeping with someone who smokes, and still less that they find the habit charming.

Tyler waves and watches them turn up the front path. Piper stands at the bottom of the porch steps, hands in their pockets, waiting.

“Are you coming up?” Tyler asks finally, and stubs out the cigarette (unnecessarily, as it has already gone cold) in a nearby ashtray shaped like a very well-crafted, hand-glazed ass.

Piper bites the inside of their mouth and tries to decide what would be the least capitulating: to follow Tyler’s suggestion and walk up the steps, or to stand a full foot and a half below him, a position of definite weakness. They sigh and climb up to the porch.

“What’s up?” Tyler asks. He looks a little hesitant—as well he might, Piper thinks. Piper doesn’t answer. After a moment, Tyler says, “Look, I’m sorry if I overstepped the other day—”

“Overstepped?” Piper is incredulous. “You think?”

“I’m just worried about you.” Tyler reaches out to take their hand, but Piper jerks it back.

“I told you I didn’t want the police involved.”

“I know,” says Tyler. He’s still maddeningly calm. “And I still think you’re wrong, but I didn’t mean to be so pushy about it.”

The anger that Piper has been struggling to handle overflows for a moment. “Are you kidding me?” they ask, fighting the tears that threaten for a moment to spring to their eyes. “Pushy? You didn’t want to be pushy?”

Tyler looks almost puzzled. “No, I didn’t. I just…” He reaches out to take Piper’s hand.

“Tyler,” Piper bursts out, jerking back, “I’m mad at you!” The words feel ineffectual and pathetic the second they are said. Mad at you, like a sulky teenager, and that makes them even angrier.

Tyler laughs, startled, and for a second Piper wants to die. “Good,” says Tyler, “you don’t get mad often enough.”

Piper stares at them. “What?”

“Stick up for yourself. It’s good for you. Honestly, Piper, I’m genuinely sorry about leaning on you so hard at lunch the other day—”

“At lunch?” Piper takes a step back. “This isn’t about lunch.”

Tyler’s brow furrows. “It’s not?”

“No. Of course not. For fuck’s sake, Tyler, did you think I wouldn’t guess that it was you?”

“Guess what?” Tyler asks, looking genuinely confused—but genuine on Tyler, that consummate actor, is never wholly reliable. “That what was me?”

“That you were the one who called the police!” Piper can’t believe he’s trying to pretend it didn’t happen. “That you called the police about Lu!”

Tyler blinks. “What are you talking about?” he asks quietly.

“You called them! Last night, they showed up at my apartment asking questions about where she was, saying someone had told them she was missing—”

“Jesus,” says Tyler. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck you, no, I’m not okay!” Piper glares at him, angry tears shining in their eyes.

Tyler looks at them for a long second. “I didn’t call the police,” he says. “But I’m still glad you’re standing up for yourself.”

Piper steps forward, hands balled at their sides. Something is churning in their ears, loud, overwhelming their thoughts. They bite out, “Fuck you.”

Tyler’s face crumples—just for a split second, but Piper sees it—and then recovers, reassuming its usual cool. “All right,” says Tyler evenly. “Good for you. Have you ever told anyone to fuck themselves before? In an angry way, I mean, not a dirty way.”

Piper stares. “You’re being such an asshole,” they say, ignoring the voice that tells them they’re being unfair, that tells them to think before they speak. Tyler says he didn’t call the police. But of course he did, who else would have—“You can’t just—this isn’t a fucking scene study, I’m not, like, experiencing character development or some shit just because I’m angry at you, you can’t pass this off as—”

“Oh,” says Tyler, a note of anger bubbling up in his voice. “I’m sorry. You’ve never treated me like a character before?”

“What are you talking about?”

“A side character, more specifically. But not in your life, no—you’re a side character, too. Everything is Lu’s story, isn’t it? And if you’re the sidekick, I’m just—I get a few scenes, no monologues, maybe a kiss, and—and—that’s all I’m good for.”

Piper’s ears are still rushing with blood. They stumble back off the porch steps as if Tyler’s words have struck them with physical force.

“I—” they say, “I—I don’t…” And then they shake their head, fury rising again. “No. No! You don’t get to make this about you! I’m angry with you. Really actually angry. And I—I just—I came here to tell you that. And—and! What the actual hell, by the way, you didn’t actually fucking tell the police anything, so they came to me with all their questions, which, by the way, I did not answer, so nothing has changed! Like, why would you even—if you really cared about her, if you weren’t just trying to prove some point, why wouldn’t you tell the police what was going on? They just think she’s some random person who decided to skip town, and—and that’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t really want her found. You hate her, you always have, you’ve always been jealous—”

“No fucking shit,” Tyler bites out. “And I don’t fucking hate her, but I don’t like what she does to you—”

“I know what I’m doing!” Piper says. They’re crying now; they don’t know when they started. “I love her, okay? But that doesn’t mean I don’t—I can’t—care about—about…” They dash the tears from their face. “You’re such a fucking man, you know that? Possessive, always knowing best, having to have it your way—”

“Piper,” Tyler says, voice quiet, stepping towards them with palms open. “Piper. I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel that way. But I swear, I swear I didn’t call the police.”

Piper swallows hard, wiping their face with the back of their hand. “But…”

“I didn’t, Piper.”

Cautiously, as if trying not to startle a wild animal, Tyler reaches out for Piper. At the last minute, Piper pulls their hand away.

“I just…can’t,” they say brokenly. “I don’t…I don’t know what to think, I…”

They head is whirling with everything that’s happened, and they’re shaking from the adrenaline. They can’t be here anymore. They can’t do this.

They stumble backwards, off the porch. “I have to go.”

“Piper—”

“I’ll—I’ll call you, or—” Piper hurriedly escapes down the front path and, once on the sidewalk, just keeps going. Tyler calls their name again, but they don’t listen. They walk rapidly down the street. They pass one bus stop, and then another, head down to hide their tears. They walk all the way back down Forbes, across the bridge, back through Squirrel Hill, back into Oakland. It takes them an hour and a half, and by the time they reach home, their feet are sore and they are all cried out. They sit down in the narrow stairway up to their apartment. They don’t want to go in, to confront Lu’s empty armchair and empty bed. Fuck, what if the police were right to come here, what if Tyler was right to be so alarmed, what if something has happened to her and she isn’t just in hiding? What if she’s—if she’s already—

Piper’s phone buzzes. They look at the screen, planning to let it go to voicemail, but see who it is and pick it up.

“Hey,” says Charles. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

Piper looks a bit of a mess when they show up to the Long Street Detective Agency. Charles notes their puffy eyes and their uncharacteristically disheveled hair. But he is deep in Julian’s orbit, too caught up in the crackling energy of the detective at work to fully absorb Piper’s state of being. Ever since they got the email alert, Julian has been laser-focused, brimming with the kind of excitement Charles can’t help but compare to the energy of his former TV show persona. Charles had thought he was doing a rather good job of forgetting, or at least ignoring, Young Sherlock, for the last week or so, but his elevated heartbeat at the sight of Julian’s old familiar puckered brow gives that the lie.

But how could Charles not be caught up in the thrill of the chase? Lu has posted a new fic.

“That’s her. Right? That’s Lu’s username.”

Piper stares at Julian’s laptop. The three of them are crowded into Julian’s office, hunched over the computer. Charles’ elbow is pushed against Julian’s side, a point of contact that he almost (but only almost) doesn’t notice.

Piper nods, eyes riveted on the screen. “That’s her.”

“Her username,” Julian corrects, and then gets up from his chair. He points at it. “Sit,” he says to Piper. “Read.”

Charles leans in to read over Piper’s shoulder, though by now he has read the short fic enough times he feels he could recite it from memory.

Title: Men, Dancing

Rating: M

Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson

Tags: Post-“The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” POV Watson, the eternal mystery of desire, secret codes, epistemological uncertainty

When we had finished the case, and a family had been broken alongside the code of the dancing men, Holmes took my elbow and steered me to a cab with uncommon force. We rode home in silence, his long fingers resting pensively upon his lips and his brow dark. As soon as we were within our lodgings he grasped my wrist and half-dragged me to my bedroom, where he sat me down upon the bed.

       “Are you all right, Holmes?” I ventured to ask, for the look on his face was severe. “Have I done something wrong?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he took up my pen, which lay by the bedside, and pushed up my sleeve. My skin prickled as his long thin fingers grasped my wrist. The nub of the pen met my skin and as I watched, breathless, Holmes etched a series of those strange dancing men along my forearm.

“What do they mean?” I asked him, staring down at the figures. “Is it the same code?”

He merely shook his head, smiling his enigmatic smile, and ran his hand down my back, slowly moving lower and lower until I shuddered and threw back my head.

“It is not fair,” I protested, my voice already strained. “If you have created a new code, I have no means of deciphering it.”

In answer, he dug his fingers deeper, the fabric of my trousers chafing against my skin, and white sparks exploded before my eyes.

“You do this—all too—frequently,” I gasped out, gripping his shirtfront in an effort to stay in control. “You leave me in the dark.”

Holmes pressed his mouth against the dancing men on my wrist, his tongue darting out delicately to slide along my skin, and I fell back against the bed. He unbuttoned my shirt and again took up the pen. Across my chest, just above my heart, he drew another line of men.

“Holmes,” I pleaded, “tell me,” but he only kissed me, kissed me like he could see the inside of my head, and God knows how I loved him and welcomed his touch but sometimes I wished I could know him like he knew me. He was not a man for declarations of love or affection and at times I felt as though I were merely a momentary distraction, a passing fancy, a dream from which he would eventually awaken. As his fingers moved steadily at the buttons of my trousers, I buried my hands in his dark hair, willing them to dig deeper, into the secrets of the man’s great brain. But blind desire was all that I knew as he slid my legs free and once more touched the pen to my skin, drawing a line of figures along the inside of my thigh.

I record them here now in the hopes that someday he will relent and relay their meaning to me. They at least have a key and a solution—unlike, I am beginning to believe, the cipher to whom I have given my heart, my safety, and my life. Holmes is a code I fear I shall never break. And yet whatever the cost, it seems I am unable to turn away from him. I shall live my life half in the dark, with only ink on my skin and fingers in my hair for clues to his heart, and perhaps, after all, that ought to be enough to tell me everything. For him, it would be. But I am a plain man, and not a genius, and to me secrets tend to remain secrets, until such time as Sherlock Holmes, God willing, decides to tell me what they mean.

Piper reaches up and wipes a couple of tears off their face. “That’s Lu’s writing,” they say hoarsely. Charles unclenches a tension he hadn’t known he was holding: he was right. He had thought—this is hers, this must be hers, this is her voice; but after all, he could easily have been wrong. It’s a strange relief to hear Piper’s confirmation.

“Are you sure?” Julian asks intently. “Not just pretty sure. Not just it could be. But positive that no one else could have written this.”

Piper hesitates. Charles’ stomach dips. “Well,” Piper says finally, “if someone were really familiar with her style, and her—sort of—” they pause, eyes flickering to the screen again, “her sort of sensibility, then I guess they could have imitated her. But it’s a very good imitation.”

“Surely fic written in the style of Conan Doyle’s original stories is itself already imitation,” Julian pressed. “Two writers with a similar style wouldn’t be surprising in this case.”

“No,” Piper admits, “that’s true. But…she’d write this. Not just the prose. The, uh. The…eroticization of not fully knowing someone, that’s…that’s Lu. And the tags. ‘Epistemological uncertainty.’”

Julian brushes that away. “The tags would be the easiest to imitate. I’m much more convinced by your sense that Lu would write this particular kind of story.”

It makes sense. Charles watches Piper look again at the screen, lost, and then looks at Julian, who has begun to pace back and forth on the gray-carpeted floor.

“Someone could have gotten it off her computer and posted it under her name,” he says.

“They’d need her password, though,” Charles puts in. “Right?”

Piper shrugs. “Well. She stays logged in on her computer. And her phone. If she had this in her drafts…”

“Right,” says Julian. “So that’s a possibility.”

“Do you…” Piper hesitates. “Do you think she didn’t post this herself, then?”

Charles looks at Julian. The detective pauses, stopping in his tracks, staring at the cheaply framed photograph of anonymous pine trees that hangs on the wall next to the office door. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I don’t have enough information yet.”

“If she did—” Piper bursts out.

“Yes,” says Julian cautiously. “If she did, that’s…good news.”

That’s different. Charles can’t help but notice it; this measured understatement is different from the charming optimism of the young Julian, who punctuated every positive development in a case with a delighted grin. Charles understands, though. His hopes have spiked, his hopes that Lu is alive and all right and operating under her own steam, so he can only imagine how Piper must feel. Better not to feed that flame, just in case…well. Just in case this means something else.

But if Lu did post it, and if she wrote it since disappearing: “Epistemological uncertainty,” Charles says slowly. “Um. That’s…not knowing, basically, right?”

Piper nods. “More or less.”

“Do you think…well. We don’t know where Lu is, or what’s going on. Do you think…” He looks at the screen again, reading. “‘Secrets tend to remain secrets.’ Is she saying…”

Piper swallows, a pained expression crossing their face. “You’ll never know. Stop looking.”

Charles bites his lip. “‘Holmes is a code I fear I shall never break.’”

Piper looks on the verge of tears again. Then, from the corner of the room, Julian makes a noise.

Charles looks at him quickly, remembering suddenly Julian’s disdain of fictional detectives, of all serious mentions of Sherlock Holmes. But Julian looks pensive, not angry.

“That’s not what the story says,” he replies, eyes pointed toward the floor. “It says Watson will keep waiting and hoping that Holmes will someday reveal his secrets.”

A silence. Charles’ heart is in his mouth.

After a moment, Piper lets out a broken little laugh. “Well. I’m pretty good at waiting and hoping.”