Don't make people into heroes John

Cover art for Last Chances by @winterdaphne2, created for @fandomtrumpshate 2026.

An excuse to draw my favourite (dancing) duo, Baker Street wallpaper, Art Deco influences, and spend entirely too much time adjusting eyebrows by a just a few pixels. Thank you, @winterdaphne2, for giving me that gorgeous scene to draw.

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I wish all of you a wonderful start to Pride Month.

I hope this June brings you joy, acceptance and visibility, and lots of colorful moments.

Take care of yourselves, be proud of who you are, and have a beautiful Pride Month

It takes John even longer to be able to tell Sherlock, when it’s John having the bad day.

They’re not particularly good at this sort of thing but eventually they find a way to speak to each other in that soft, coded language that only they seem to be able to translate. John will come home to Sherlock bundled in his oldest pyjamas on the sofa, or Sherlock will notice John making dinner without saying a word, not asking Sherlock to chop this veg or get out plates. A certain silence; a stiffness in each other’s shoulders. It’s Sherlock who finds the actual words, in the end: my mind has gone dark.

The first time he says it, John doesn’t quite grasp his meaning and Sherlock, frustrated at not having been understood, refuses to explain. But a few hours later, while John is standing in the queue at Tesco, he finally gets it: his mind palace has gone dark. Like someone had turned the lights off. And people aren’t afraid of the dark, not really. They’re afraid of what might be lying in wait.

Sherlock is lost, John understands, wandering in his own memories and uncertain of what might be remembered next, afraid of the things he has trapped inside that he might let loose if he can’t anticipate how a string of thought might play out.

John abandons the shop and rushes home; Sherlock is curled into a hard circle on the sofa, trembling and trying hard not to be. Let me, John says, pulling at his long limbs to unfold him. Let me bring you out.

John wraps himself around Sherlock and whispers to him all their best memories, trying to focus on the more recent ones, the ones that have happened since John came home. He whispers and whispers his retelling until Sherlock rolls over and kisses his cheek and tells him to hush and falls asleep with his ear to John’s heart.

After that it becomes as good a code as any other that they’ve had. My mind has gone dark. It means, the spectres of the past are haunting at the corners of my eye. It means, I need to be touched to be reminded that you are real. It means, I need you.

The first time John says it, Sherlock is so surprised he drops a kidney onto the kitchen floor. Sherlock can see his memories in the way he clenches his fist–the limp bodies of war, the echoing stillness of a wrist on the pavement. They leave the kidney there on the floor and instead Sherlock guides John into the shower, where he painstakingly touches every single bit of him, washing him slowly and gently, letting John wash him in return, letting him inspect each and every inch, every single scar, until the water runs cold.

My mind has gone dark, they say without having to say, admitting without admission, asking without seeking. My mind has gone dark. I need you.

Sherlock had been gone all night.

No call, no message, no hint of where he was. John had run through every possibility, contacted Molly, called Lestrade, even in the early morning hours still hoping to find some trace of him. But there was nothing. Only that growing, dull fear in his chest he couldn’t reason away.

When Sherlock finally appeared in the doorway of 221B, he looked as if the case had spat him out. Pale, exhausted, dark shadows under his eyes, and that faintly confused expression, as if he couldn’t quite understand why John was staring at him like that.

John needed only two steps before he was standing in front of him.

“Damn it, Sherlock…” he muttered, his voice rough with relief and anger all at once. “I was worried. Don’t ever do that again. Call me. At least tell me where you are.”

Sherlock only blinked, still half lost in thought, as though he was only now beginning to grasp what his absence had done.

“John, I—”

“I love you, you idiot,” John said more quietly, gruff, almost reproachful.

Holmes, when we first meet him, is on the bleeding edge of forensics for the 1880s, and this continues on into the ‘90s (the planted thumbprint in ‘The Norwood Builder’! the Sherlock Holmes test for hemoglobin in A Study in Scarlet! the use of pigs as substitute cadavers in ‘Black Peter’!) and beyond. He’s flippant about and disrespectful toward the police because he knows how criminology is a science and forensics matter and the cold hard facts are significantly more important than intimidating witnesses to extract coerced confessions, or deciding on a theory and bending the facts to make them fit, or relying on racist stereotypes to explain how people act and who’s most guilty (all things that really happen in the canon, btw). He’s smarter than everyone else because he’s doing things no one else understands yet, he’s made a study of crime and he understands how and why policing is a flawed institution.

This is why he’s not a cop, only occasionally allied with cops, and so often complaining or explaining that a moral injustice and a legal one are two different things. There are multiple antagonists (Sir George in ‘The Beryl Coronet’, Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Roylott, the parents in ‘A Case of Identity’) who he can’t catch in the jaws of the law but wishes he could, and at least one criminal he overlooks because he knows prison would only force them deeper into crime.

But. But.

In the 21st century, forensics are not only the backbone of police investigation they’re common knowledge to any average police procedural enjoyer or true crime fan. Holmes’s once-cutting-edge chemistry and geology are passé and ordinary now. If he’s going to be smart, he’s got to be looking ahead.

And what does that look like? It looks like knowing about the flaws in forensic analysis, like knowing about fingerprints maybe not being totally unique, like arguing over DNA evidence being misinterpreted and innocent people being sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit, like calling for the defunding and dissembling of police forces, like siding with the underclasses every. single. time.

This is made the more notable because HOLMES IS UPPER CLASS. HE’S LANDED GENTRY. Once again, if you’re not familiar with the time period and the place a lot of this could slip by you, but here’s what we know:

1) Holmes and Watson live in a part of town that’s decent today and was considered downright fashionable back then.

2) They have multiple rooms and at least one window, both things that were signs of wealth. Watson is almost homeless at the beginning of the series—he’s got money later as he gets back into medical practice, but he was NOT the one carrying this partnership early on.

3) Holmes mentions that his family are “country squires.” That means they’re landowners, and possibly The Big Cheese in their county.

4) Holmes signs his correspondence “Sherlock Holmes, Esq.” This is short for “esquire,” which is a courtesy title. If Papa Holmes is still alive, he’s the squire; if not, then Mycroft is the squire. If Mycroft predeceases Sherlock, then Sherlock will become the squire, as Mycroft has no children. He’s titled and he stands to have a hereditary title in his later years. HE’S TITLED. That’s a big deal.

5) Holmes doesn’t just talk about having a university education—we also see he knows wines, how to set a menu for a guest, how to play violin, and more. This is a man whose family had the means to have him thoroughly schooled in etiquette. Yes, these are skills you can pick up as an adult, but they had to be performed to the nth power in Victorian society. He didn’t just learn them in a year at college.

This is a man, in other words, who had the right to kick 3/4 of his clientele to the curb for being “of the wrong class.” And he didn’t. He consistently took on cases for the disenfranchised and tried to provide, when he could, for those around him. Sherlock got a lot of things wrong, and many of them it got REALLY wrong, but the way it handled making the Baker Street Irregulars into the homeless network was a really graceful translation.

It is entirely possible that Papa Holmes was an actual country squire and Holmes has hereditary privileges conferred with that. But it is also possible that Holmes was referring to his ancestors in a more general sense, in the idea that "historically, we have been country squires" whether they still are or not, especially because depending on how many women there are on his father's side, it would have been easy to have descended from country squires but not be able to maintain the title. If that was the case, Holmes was still allowed to use esquire as the son of a gentleman, or the descendant of a gentleman, which was, at that time, a designation still found in the tables of precedence.

Though esquire as a title has kind of a complicated history, by the time that Holmes would have written "Sherlock Holmes, Esq.," it was considered proper for any man to address himself as such, ie it was often used in place of Mr, usually in formal or professional settings. Even today, when Buckingham Palace issues an invite to a man, it uses the Esq. designation as a mark of formality.

But there are so many other great reasons which demonstrate that Holmes Was Different, and that he is almost never on the side of the police or the establishment in general. Holmes definitely has friends who are titled nobility, or at least titled gentry. Victor Trevor's dad is a justice of the peace, and I believe Musgrave, of "The Musgrave Ritual," was either gentry descended from barons, or something like that. And back then, when you had money, you generally tended to hang out with people who had money, and not just for snobbery reasons. It was as much of a social insult for a rich person to try to be friends with a poor person as the other way round; I don't really have the space to explain why except to say that it was complicated and would have been seen as a power imbalance, among other things.

Holmes looked at all of that and went, "Yeah, I don't care," at a time when that might have meant a death sentence for his social standing, which absolutely determined things like where you could live, what sorts of activities you had access to, and how successful you were allowed to be. Moreover, think about how many times he dresses up as a member of the lower classes. That would have been absolutely unthinkable for most people of Holmes' standing at the time. He accepted anyone and everyone, and most of the times when he's angry with or uppity with clients, they are almost invariably wealthy or powerful or both. Someone without the comfort of independent wealth is not going to jeopardise their entire professional career by standing up to Lord So-and-So.

He kinda goes back and forth on what he tells clients about payment, and often says that they are at liberty, other than the fixed scale, to "defray" any expenses they deem appropriate, usually to rich people. Except for the Duke of Holdernesse, from whom he straight-up demands the reward money and then berates him for how the events of the case go, and it's because the duke put innocents in danger for the benefit of a blackmailer and his brutish accomplice. The duke even offers him double to keep his mouth shut, and Holmes refuses.

And he still doesn't tell the cops everything in that case, even though he would have been well within his rights to do so, simply because it is enough for him to see "the ends of justice are served" and that there's no reason to ruin a guy who was at the mercy of others and made bad decisions.

Over and over, Holmes' constant refrain is "I am not in an official position," which might as well be him shouting, I am not the cops don't you dare lump me with those idiots; everything he is and does is a reaction to how terrible the police are at that time. He'll often say things along the line of, I've left them all of the same evidence I had, and if they can't come to the right conclusion, why should I tell them? He actively hinders the police force as much as he helps them, and he is definitely not above flat-out lying to Lestrade, if necessary.

Modern Sherlock Holmes should be as anti-cop today as he was then. In fact, I bet today's Holmes would have to work against public smear campaigns the police would have in the press to delegitimise his work because he'd have no problem illustrating that they're as lazy and corrupt now as they were in the late 19th century, and I bet a fair amount of people would see him as little better than a criminal as the result.

--one of the stories has a detective named MacPherson. Although we only see him once (which is a pity because he was fun), Holmes indicates having worked with him before, and affectionately refers to him as "Mr. Mac." Even Watson doesn't get the compliment of a nickname.

--Holmes has the opportunity to finish The Hound of the Baskervilles without the police. Instead he brings in Lestrade.

--there's a story where he's working with a newish police inspector and he gets started on his "with me or against me" spiel and the inspector is like "say no more, I've read Dr. Watson's stories, it would be an honor" and while he's slower than Holmes and not quite as adept, he does actually put in the work and uses it as an opportunity to study, learn, and grow. At the end he's disappointed because he stalled out on a red herring, and Holmes is like "are you kidding me? You were almost there. You're going to go far in this field. Keep it up."

--perhaps most famously, and it's ironic that this is the one I can quote almost verbatim because I can't remember for the life of me which one it's from (Norwood Builder maybe?):

"It's no secret you've done the force a good turn from time to time in the past, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade said. "We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard; no, we're proud of you, and if you come by the station tomorrow there's not a man there from the youngest constable to the oldest inspector who wouldn't like to shake you by the hand."

"Thank you!" Holmes said; "Thank you!"

(And that's where my ability to more or less quote it ends, but Watson indicates that Holmes is visibly moved, perhaps more so than Watson has ever seen him.)

Keep in mind this is a dude who turned down a knighthood and accepts gifts from royalty as no more than his due, and THIS is what gets him to almost cry.

He'd absolutely call out brutality and injustice, but he'd do so for the innocent, not against the police. This is a man who'd find out a sex worker had been killed and show up to the scene with the intent to find her murderer come what may, and how it played out would depend entirely on the police. A cop who basically went "yeah that's what happens, she was probably drunk or high, well, we'll take samples but it's probably a lost cause" would be written off immediately and Holmes would take his own line. A cop who went "fuck. Cases like this are shit because the perp could be literally anyone and getting the state to approve DNA testing is a shitshow. Okay. Uh...okay. Let's document and get as much evidence as we can. Odds are against, but we'll try. This was someone's daughter" would have Holmes' cooperation.