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Sim tilts down the brim of her hat, hides in the shadow, in the curtain of her hair, from the pervasive smell of blood. The floor of the boxcar is smeared red, which can’t be helped; she scatters straw and folds herself into a corner to sleep. “I’ll keep watch,” Watson had said, “I won’t be sleeping anyway,” and she wonders if he himself had noticed the minute sidelong glance he cast at Holmes, worry visible like inked lettering on his face.
Andrzej sleeps by her side, a dark huddled mass on the floor, and she is thankful for small mercies; when he wakes he will feel Michael’s loss as acutely as a broken rib, a relentless throb.
Holmes is perfectly still where he leans against the wooden boards; were it anyone else, Sim would drag him to the floor to keep him from falling when the train jolts, but there is something absolute about his immobility, and she sees the same thing she did when he snatched her deck of cards from her hands - an absolute, a balance point, but there is something uncertain there, a single speck marring his untouchability.
Sim wonders why he sleeps so deeply; is it for fear of waking? is it for fear of not waking? is it with the knowledge that he will not sleep again? She dances around each thought as she would a chasm, and she isn’t sure that she wants to know, so she crosses her arms across her chest and slows her breathing, slips into sleep with the rocking of the train.
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It is hours before she wakes, some movement, the scuff of fabric perhaps, breaking into her dreamless sleep.
The light is low and golden, and the dust hanging in the air is less choking and a little more beautiful, a little like bubbles in amber. She peers out from underneath her hat, blinking away sleep-sand from the corners of her eyes, and her first thought is that perhaps she should have moved Holmes after all, that falling from his shelf couldn’t have been good for his shoulder.
A moment later she sees that he isn’t sprawled on the floor, but rather carefully arranged; his head is pillowed on Watson’s lap, and his eyes are still closed and his face a little more peaceful. Watson is almost asleep; his eyelids fall and flutter and he shakes himself awake again until the next time the weight of the day pulls at him.
She makes a tiny noise, scrapes her boot a little, to attract his attention. “I will watch,” she says. “Sleep. You will need it.”
Watson looks as if he’s about to protest for a moment, but she interrupts, “he needs it too,” and darts her eyes to Holmes. She’s never seen him this peaceful, and she feels a tug at the center of her chest, because none of them want this, none of them deserve it, not René, not Watson or Holmes or Andrzej or Michael, and because they will not get another moment like this, in the golden syrup of the evening, in the sunset, in the rocking of a train.
“Thank you,” Watson says, quiet, and lets his eyes fall shut, leans back against the wall.
Sim sits and watches them, Watson and Holmes and Andrzej, lets them sleep as the light falls and the train rushes on into the night.