Collection of Holmes/Watson Ficlets
All of these are crossposts from my old journal.
"Dr Watson is an expert in uncontrolled addiction," Sherlock Holmes said smoothly, his voice glazed like shellac on a curl. His eyes flickered to my own, holding my gaze for the merest fraction of a second before he returned to his inspection of our client. He has said this before; it is not a statement grounded anywhere in my medical education, and I imagine that most assume it to be a reference to the time I have spent in despair at his own bouts of self-destruction, prostrate before the cocaine-bottle.
I wonder what he imagines.
Holmes, much as I deplore his habit, is no addict. His devotion to the seven percent solution is foolhardy, but by no means uncontrolled. I do not think that I have ever seen Holmes uncontrolled. For myself, however, I fear I cannot say so much. In uncontrolled addiction I am, indeed, well-versed, but it is no vicarious, observational knowledge.
The addict is myself, of course. My addictions, it grieves me to say, are manifold. They began with the creeping need to be near him, which came upon me gradually many years ago, when first we took rooms together. Then, his occasional fond glances, his smiles, and his words of praise. I would have given much to see more of those, and they tugged me along like a fine skein of thread, holding together both sides of my tenuous existence.
Lately, my addictions have become more sly; more, frankly, criminal. I crave the warmth of his skin, flush against mine in the darknesses in which we hide. His hair, before it is brilliantined in the mornings, I long to run my fingers through. His mouth, the fine turn of his lips, I wish to press to my own, over and over until he is breathless against me.
I recognise them in myself, the signs of addiction. A certain desperation, and an irregular heartbeat where one might not expect it. Delusions. Of late, indeed, hallucinations: his fine hands on my naked skin, sweat-slick and heated; his grip on my hips, pulling me into the fiery core of himself, which only I know. The most persistent of these delusions involves the two of us together in his little bed, our limbs entangled, his hardness flush against my stomach as I thrust my longing into him, seeking those parts of him which he keeps secret, even from his Watson. I crave the tingle this vision sends along my skin, and the lightness in my heart in the moment before I recall that it is only a dream, after all, and that, in reality, there is much of him I cannot hope to know.
Oh, I know all about uncontrolled addictions, I am ashamed to say. Sherlock Holmes has, with his usual ease, deduced this. It only remains for me to discover, with whatever pitiful slowness I may, how much he knows.
Fic: Dead Man Sleeping
Rating: PG-13?
Warnings: Um...I'm not sure where this came from. It's like a little pile of angst, with angst on top, and no Watson-voice, and present-tense, and - yes.
The death of Ronald Adair, though sadly premature, was a quick end, and a clean one. For many years, death has been no stranger to John Watson, its shadow looming smaller with every waxen face that he has seen. They died so bloodily, his comrades, in Afghanistan, and so quietly, his patients, in their beds; but the end result, coughed out in his arms, is always the same. The murdered, those who have become his patients only by way of Scotland Yard in these recent years, fall variously along the line dividing bloody from clean, to an extent that once surprised him. Victims of poisoning, for instance, frequently bear upon their still features the soft mark of sleep - and yet they are as far beyond his ken as the man whose skull fragmented in Watson's hand as he rubbed away the blood from the exit wound. In death, he has found but one continuous truth: the dead are dead, and that is an end to it. No dead man ever put by his mat, and walked.
The shadow of death shuffled into Watson's consulting room this morning, his back bent and creaking under the weight of Catullus. This morning, a dead man stood before him, and smiled. Watson's mind began to bend at the edges, as crippled by this assault upon the simple truth as the bookseller had been by his toils. And yet - the bookseller had gone, his life a fiction, his troubles an illusion. In his place stood a dead man, Sherlock Holmes, with arms outstretched like Lazarus.
Watson is a man not simple, but straightforward, to whom joy is joy and sorrow, sorrow. He is not given to the contemplation of his own death, with death so constant a presence in his quotidian existence: breakfast, child with the 'flu, lady with an ear infection, certificate of death for an elderly gentleman. Lunch. And so it goes. Today, though, nothing is straightforward. The presence of his most intimate friend in his surgery, what should have been the cause of nothing but gladness, rang notes false and strange in Watson's breast; his presence in other places tolled stranger still. Now, Watson watches the idle trickle of rain down the window-pane, and wonders in what way he will die.
Holmes's body is a warm coiled weight upon his chest, heavier than he might have imagined, had he ever dared to do so. He is perfectly still. He might be a corpse still cooling, Watson thinks, except for the flutter of breath against his skin, a fine mist from Holmes's parted lips. Slowly, he slides a hand up the length of Holmes's spine and over his shoulder, into the hollow of his neck. The pulse thumps steadily beneath his thumb, confirming the unfathomable fact that this man is alive, in his bed, in his arms. With a simple exertion of pressure, Watson thinks, he could render Holmes's larynx irreparably useless. Beyond that, he might strangle him, from here, with only his own two hands, and Holmes would not wake quickly enough to stop him. Sherlock Holmes has let down his guard, Watson thinks. His brain feels dulled. It is as if his thoughts are being fed into his mind through a small hole in the back of it, as cement is poured into a room through a narrow pipe.
He wonders how he will die. Somebody will find them out, he is sure. The thought arouses no strong emotion in him. It will not be a quick death, now; not a gentle death, in his bed. Nor will it be even as quick a death as the gallows might afford, since hanging is no longer considered fitting for this crime. Perhaps a death of exertion, then, in the course of a term of hard labour. Or, if his military training should prove sufficient to carry him through such a sentence, he might expire afterwards, from some condition incurred by the breakdown of his already taxed constitution. He thinks about this. He wonders whether the warmth in his arms is worth it.
Something seems to be wrong with his brain, in that it cannot answer the question, nor even devote it more than a cursory flash of attention. Sherlock Holmes is dead. The dead do not walk. They certainly do not appear miraculously in one's consulting room, nor fortify one with brandy, nor yet press unannounced kisses to one's lips. The dead do not make love. Therefore, he thought at first, Sherlock Holmes is not dead. But now, with the sound of the dawn rain in his ears, he realises how far he has erred in his logic, how far he has failed to apply the methods of the master. There are any number of other, logical conclusions which he might draw. Perhaps: this is not Sherlock Holmes. Or: this is not real at all.
Sherlock Holmes is murmuring something in his sleep, only little words, and incomprehensible. Of its own accord, Watson's hand drifts upwards, and into his hair, stroking soothing little circles through its softness. The rain begins to hasten outside, the sound of it swelling in the little room. He doesn't know what to do. He hasn't the faintest inkling, Watson realises slowly, of what ought to be done. He is a criminal. Sherlock Holmes appears to be asleep in his arms, in his bed, with no thought for his own safety. This is unlike him. This is not real.
Watson watches the rain, and wonders how he will die.
*
The Period of Ascension, Holmes/Watson, very short ficlet. There are no warnings, except for psuedo-Victorian verbiage and appropriately unreliable narration. PG, perhaps? I have never written Holmes/Watson before, despite my deep and persistent love of them, but tonight was rather moved to do so.
"I do not think," said Sherlock Holmes quietly, his grey eyes downcast, "that this course of action is one best pursued."
On the face of it, I was, as is so frequently the case, inclined to agree with my friend's judgement. That my hand ought not to have strayed to his pale cheek, I was forced to concede; that our posture of closeness beneath the gas-lamps of Baker Street might be looked upon disfavourably by passers-by was, doubtless, true. The fact remained, however, that my fingers had somehow performed, apparently of their own accord, a feat towards which my mind had impotently aspired for many months, now, and when they had come into contact with Holmes' skin, he had neither flinched, nor attempted to pull away, as I might have expected, but had only demurely offered the above comment. Chance - or, more strictly, accident - having played me such a heartening stroke, then, I was reluctant to release it even for a second without some guarantee of its continuance.
The evening had been, up to this point, unremarkable enough. It was midsummer, Parliament was empty, and everybody was out of town. It had also been, for some days, incessantly rainy, a state of affairs which had done nothing to improve the condition either of my old war-wound or of my temper. Even the capital's criminals appeared to be whiling away the summer in more accommodating climes. My only consolation was that Holmes had recently embarked upon a series of chemical experiments, all conducted in pursuit of some mysterious goal, and so had not been spurred towards that state of listless boredom so frequently engendered in him by the lack of appropriate crime. At seven o'clock or so, however, he had lain down his instruments, his sharp eyes taking in at a glance my slack posture in my accustomed armchair and the newspaper that dangled, unobserved, from my fingers.
"Watson," he said, "I perceive that you are dreadfully bored, and have been for some hours. Perhaps a turn around the quarter would be amiable to you?"
I readily acquiesced, and my friend and I then spent a pleasant hour rambling through the streets of Westminster, trading idle commentary on the people and places we observed on our travels. We had returned to Baker Street unaccosted by anything out of the absolute mundane, and it was not until Holmes had fitted his key into the lock of number 221B that I realised that anything untoward had occurred.
Had it not been for the sudden, unmistakeable stiffening in the lines of my friend's body, I might never have noticed that my hand had made the ascent to his cheek. To this day, I cannot say how it got there. I most certainly did not command it. Darkness was just beginning to fall, and the gas-lamps had recently been lit, so that a slight odour of sulphur, not unpleasant, was tangible in the warm air.
"I do not think that this course of action is one best pursued - " Sherlock Holmes said softly, raising grey eyes momentarily to mine, " - in the street, my dear Watson." His mouth twitched, and he raised a long white hand to briefly grip my shoulder. "If you will permit me a moment to open the door, I will be able to give the matter the attention it deserves once we have gained the sitting-room."
I smiled at him, and removed my hand, allowing the extreme tips of my fingers to graze the extreme tip of his earlobe as I did so. "Very well, Holmes."
Seventeen steps separate our rooms from the level of the street. Holmes had pointed out this fact to me some time before. On this day, I learned that it is possible for two relatively young men to scale these seventeen steps in a little under three seconds, if their need is sufficiently pressing. I toyed briefly with the idea of conveying this information to Holmes in expectation of his praise for my close attention to detail, but circumstances that prevailed upon our reaching the top of the stairs rather forced the matter from my mind.
"Dr Watson is an expert in uncontrolled addiction," Sherlock Holmes said smoothly, his voice glazed like shellac on a curl. His eyes flickered to my own, holding my gaze for the merest fraction of a second before he returned to his inspection of our client. He has said this before; it is not a statement grounded anywhere in my medical education, and I imagine that most assume it to be a reference to the time I have spent in despair at his own bouts of self-destruction, prostrate before the cocaine-bottle.
I wonder what he imagines.
Holmes, much as I deplore his habit, is no addict. His devotion to the seven percent solution is foolhardy, but by no means uncontrolled. I do not think that I have ever seen Holmes uncontrolled. For myself, however, I fear I cannot say so much. In uncontrolled addiction I am, indeed, well-versed, but it is no vicarious, observational knowledge.
The addict is myself, of course. My addictions, it grieves me to say, are manifold. They began with the creeping need to be near him, which came upon me gradually many years ago, when first we took rooms together. Then, his occasional fond glances, his smiles, and his words of praise. I would have given much to see more of those, and they tugged me along like a fine skein of thread, holding together both sides of my tenuous existence.
Lately, my addictions have become more sly; more, frankly, criminal. I crave the warmth of his skin, flush against mine in the darknesses in which we hide. His hair, before it is brilliantined in the mornings, I long to run my fingers through. His mouth, the fine turn of his lips, I wish to press to my own, over and over until he is breathless against me.
I recognise them in myself, the signs of addiction. A certain desperation, and an irregular heartbeat where one might not expect it. Delusions. Of late, indeed, hallucinations: his fine hands on my naked skin, sweat-slick and heated; his grip on my hips, pulling me into the fiery core of himself, which only I know. The most persistent of these delusions involves the two of us together in his little bed, our limbs entangled, his hardness flush against my stomach as I thrust my longing into him, seeking those parts of him which he keeps secret, even from his Watson. I crave the tingle this vision sends along my skin, and the lightness in my heart in the moment before I recall that it is only a dream, after all, and that, in reality, there is much of him I cannot hope to know.
Oh, I know all about uncontrolled addictions, I am ashamed to say. Sherlock Holmes has, with his usual ease, deduced this. It only remains for me to discover, with whatever pitiful slowness I may, how much he knows.
Fic: Dead Man Sleeping
Rating: PG-13?
Warnings: Um...I'm not sure where this came from. It's like a little pile of angst, with angst on top, and no Watson-voice, and present-tense, and - yes.
The death of Ronald Adair, though sadly premature, was a quick end, and a clean one. For many years, death has been no stranger to John Watson, its shadow looming smaller with every waxen face that he has seen. They died so bloodily, his comrades, in Afghanistan, and so quietly, his patients, in their beds; but the end result, coughed out in his arms, is always the same. The murdered, those who have become his patients only by way of Scotland Yard in these recent years, fall variously along the line dividing bloody from clean, to an extent that once surprised him. Victims of poisoning, for instance, frequently bear upon their still features the soft mark of sleep - and yet they are as far beyond his ken as the man whose skull fragmented in Watson's hand as he rubbed away the blood from the exit wound. In death, he has found but one continuous truth: the dead are dead, and that is an end to it. No dead man ever put by his mat, and walked.
The shadow of death shuffled into Watson's consulting room this morning, his back bent and creaking under the weight of Catullus. This morning, a dead man stood before him, and smiled. Watson's mind began to bend at the edges, as crippled by this assault upon the simple truth as the bookseller had been by his toils. And yet - the bookseller had gone, his life a fiction, his troubles an illusion. In his place stood a dead man, Sherlock Holmes, with arms outstretched like Lazarus.
Watson is a man not simple, but straightforward, to whom joy is joy and sorrow, sorrow. He is not given to the contemplation of his own death, with death so constant a presence in his quotidian existence: breakfast, child with the 'flu, lady with an ear infection, certificate of death for an elderly gentleman. Lunch. And so it goes. Today, though, nothing is straightforward. The presence of his most intimate friend in his surgery, what should have been the cause of nothing but gladness, rang notes false and strange in Watson's breast; his presence in other places tolled stranger still. Now, Watson watches the idle trickle of rain down the window-pane, and wonders in what way he will die.
Holmes's body is a warm coiled weight upon his chest, heavier than he might have imagined, had he ever dared to do so. He is perfectly still. He might be a corpse still cooling, Watson thinks, except for the flutter of breath against his skin, a fine mist from Holmes's parted lips. Slowly, he slides a hand up the length of Holmes's spine and over his shoulder, into the hollow of his neck. The pulse thumps steadily beneath his thumb, confirming the unfathomable fact that this man is alive, in his bed, in his arms. With a simple exertion of pressure, Watson thinks, he could render Holmes's larynx irreparably useless. Beyond that, he might strangle him, from here, with only his own two hands, and Holmes would not wake quickly enough to stop him. Sherlock Holmes has let down his guard, Watson thinks. His brain feels dulled. It is as if his thoughts are being fed into his mind through a small hole in the back of it, as cement is poured into a room through a narrow pipe.
He wonders how he will die. Somebody will find them out, he is sure. The thought arouses no strong emotion in him. It will not be a quick death, now; not a gentle death, in his bed. Nor will it be even as quick a death as the gallows might afford, since hanging is no longer considered fitting for this crime. Perhaps a death of exertion, then, in the course of a term of hard labour. Or, if his military training should prove sufficient to carry him through such a sentence, he might expire afterwards, from some condition incurred by the breakdown of his already taxed constitution. He thinks about this. He wonders whether the warmth in his arms is worth it.
Something seems to be wrong with his brain, in that it cannot answer the question, nor even devote it more than a cursory flash of attention. Sherlock Holmes is dead. The dead do not walk. They certainly do not appear miraculously in one's consulting room, nor fortify one with brandy, nor yet press unannounced kisses to one's lips. The dead do not make love. Therefore, he thought at first, Sherlock Holmes is not dead. But now, with the sound of the dawn rain in his ears, he realises how far he has erred in his logic, how far he has failed to apply the methods of the master. There are any number of other, logical conclusions which he might draw. Perhaps: this is not Sherlock Holmes. Or: this is not real at all.
Sherlock Holmes is murmuring something in his sleep, only little words, and incomprehensible. Of its own accord, Watson's hand drifts upwards, and into his hair, stroking soothing little circles through its softness. The rain begins to hasten outside, the sound of it swelling in the little room. He doesn't know what to do. He hasn't the faintest inkling, Watson realises slowly, of what ought to be done. He is a criminal. Sherlock Holmes appears to be asleep in his arms, in his bed, with no thought for his own safety. This is unlike him. This is not real.
Watson watches the rain, and wonders how he will die.
*
The Period of Ascension, Holmes/Watson, very short ficlet. There are no warnings, except for psuedo-Victorian verbiage and appropriately unreliable narration. PG, perhaps? I have never written Holmes/Watson before, despite my deep and persistent love of them, but tonight was rather moved to do so.
"I do not think," said Sherlock Holmes quietly, his grey eyes downcast, "that this course of action is one best pursued."
On the face of it, I was, as is so frequently the case, inclined to agree with my friend's judgement. That my hand ought not to have strayed to his pale cheek, I was forced to concede; that our posture of closeness beneath the gas-lamps of Baker Street might be looked upon disfavourably by passers-by was, doubtless, true. The fact remained, however, that my fingers had somehow performed, apparently of their own accord, a feat towards which my mind had impotently aspired for many months, now, and when they had come into contact with Holmes' skin, he had neither flinched, nor attempted to pull away, as I might have expected, but had only demurely offered the above comment. Chance - or, more strictly, accident - having played me such a heartening stroke, then, I was reluctant to release it even for a second without some guarantee of its continuance.
The evening had been, up to this point, unremarkable enough. It was midsummer, Parliament was empty, and everybody was out of town. It had also been, for some days, incessantly rainy, a state of affairs which had done nothing to improve the condition either of my old war-wound or of my temper. Even the capital's criminals appeared to be whiling away the summer in more accommodating climes. My only consolation was that Holmes had recently embarked upon a series of chemical experiments, all conducted in pursuit of some mysterious goal, and so had not been spurred towards that state of listless boredom so frequently engendered in him by the lack of appropriate crime. At seven o'clock or so, however, he had lain down his instruments, his sharp eyes taking in at a glance my slack posture in my accustomed armchair and the newspaper that dangled, unobserved, from my fingers.
"Watson," he said, "I perceive that you are dreadfully bored, and have been for some hours. Perhaps a turn around the quarter would be amiable to you?"
I readily acquiesced, and my friend and I then spent a pleasant hour rambling through the streets of Westminster, trading idle commentary on the people and places we observed on our travels. We had returned to Baker Street unaccosted by anything out of the absolute mundane, and it was not until Holmes had fitted his key into the lock of number 221B that I realised that anything untoward had occurred.
Had it not been for the sudden, unmistakeable stiffening in the lines of my friend's body, I might never have noticed that my hand had made the ascent to his cheek. To this day, I cannot say how it got there. I most certainly did not command it. Darkness was just beginning to fall, and the gas-lamps had recently been lit, so that a slight odour of sulphur, not unpleasant, was tangible in the warm air.
"I do not think that this course of action is one best pursued - " Sherlock Holmes said softly, raising grey eyes momentarily to mine, " - in the street, my dear Watson." His mouth twitched, and he raised a long white hand to briefly grip my shoulder. "If you will permit me a moment to open the door, I will be able to give the matter the attention it deserves once we have gained the sitting-room."
I smiled at him, and removed my hand, allowing the extreme tips of my fingers to graze the extreme tip of his earlobe as I did so. "Very well, Holmes."
Seventeen steps separate our rooms from the level of the street. Holmes had pointed out this fact to me some time before. On this day, I learned that it is possible for two relatively young men to scale these seventeen steps in a little under three seconds, if their need is sufficiently pressing. I toyed briefly with the idea of conveying this information to Holmes in expectation of his praise for my close attention to detail, but circumstances that prevailed upon our reaching the top of the stairs rather forced the matter from my mind.