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methylviolet10b The Language of Flowers Part 2, PG H/W,
Oct. 22nd, 2013 02:25 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
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Part 2
I didn’t see Holmes at breakfast the next morning, and Mrs Hudson informed me that he had gone out early, toting under his arm a large canvas bag. That likely meant he had some plan that would take him about the streets in disguise. So I knew that much, but still, it was a poor indicator of how much time I might have to put my plan into action. Yet fortunately, there was very little I had to do at Baker Street; the bulk of my preparations required that I journey out into the city myself. And so it was that I allowed myself to linger over Mrs Hudson’s excellent breakfast as well as the beginnings of a second pot of tea, taking time to make a list of supplies before I set about my search.
I was loathe to poke around at Holmes’ belongings any more than absolutely necessary, and luckily, I soon found that my suspicions had been correct. With the object of my search safe in my hand, I went straight away to secure it in the drawer of my bedside table, but soon thought better of it and tucked the thing away in my breast pocket, where it would be safe from prying eyes and probing fingers. That done, I dressed for the day, bundling tight against the cold weather, and slipped out into the streets of London to procure what else I needed.
Though I did have to visit a few different stalls, I found what I was looking for easily enough, or most of it, anyway. I must admit that it was a rather exhaustive list, and I had recognised from the start that some of the varieties would be difficult to find in London even in warmer months. It was somewhat disappointing that I would not be able to present my friend with absolutely every one that had crossed my mind, but there was nothing for it. Tucking my delicate purchases away where they would not be crushed by the throngs of shoppers, I was soon making my way back to Baker Street. When Mrs Hudson greeted me, enquiring after the events of my morning, I gave her some simple explanation and was also able to determine that she had done some tidying in my absence.
The good lady, long-suffering as she is, may have been mistaken about the reason for my asking because she set straight away to imploring that I not tell Holmes what she had been about, saying that I knew “how he carries on.” I knew it very well, in fact, and assured her that I had not meant to imply anything with my question, adding that I hoped there had not been very much of a mess to plague her. She harrumphed at this and shooed me away upstairs, where, certain that our rooms would remain undisturbed for the rest of the day, I removed my woollen gloves and produced the brown paper-wrapped parcel that was the fruit of my morning’s efforts and deposited it on Holmes’ writing table.
It is barely an exaggeration when Mrs Hudson calls our sitting room a disaster, or enquires of my friend whether she is losing her hearing as otherwise she has no earthly idea how a hurricane could have passed through without her noticing. But even among all the clutter and our collected oddities, my little gift was the only thing that I could see; it was as if everything else faded into the shadows, leaving it the sole point of brightness for the eye to fix on. It might as well have been a grand, old Grecian column, or a fragrant palm tree thrusting up from the floorboards by the fireplace – I was sure that no visitor would be able to notice anything else.
Standing there, staring at the parcel whose dimensions were nowhere near as impressive as the importance my mind assigned to it, it suddenly occurred to me that I had left myself with nothing else to do for the rest of the day. I now faced the prospect of hours alone in our rooms, staring at Holmes’ writing desk and waiting interminably for his return, with nothing to do but anticipate that moment. It would be folly to imagine that I might focus on reading or writing or any of the other pursuits with which I might otherwise while away a winter afternoon. Panic set upon me.
I called down to Mrs Hudson, who was kind enough to furnish me with half a sandwich of roast beef and mustard over which to consider my options. I thought long and hard, and once every crumb of it was consumed, I sought out my coat and fled back into the chilly winter city to pass the time in my club. Between my military service and the adventures I have experienced at Holmes’ side, my life has been one of many and varied dangers. I had crouched in cramped waiting for long hours, and stared killers in the face without so much as a blink to betray my fear, but faced with the prospect of that afternoon, there was little else I could do but run and lock the door behind me.
The hours I spent in my club were comfortable enough, or would have been on any other day. I was quite unable to focus on any meaningful conversation, and the reading material I found there proved no distraction whatsoever. Their food was usually excellent but I admit that I remember nothing about that meal except for how, to my frayed nerves, it seemed enough to feed an army. Though it was almost certainly a normal portion, it boggled my mind that such an insurmountable pile of food should be heaped on one single plate, and I had no confidence that I could make any sort of dent in it. Feeling somewhat queasy, I sawed at it hopefully with my knife and fork, more to busy my hands than anything else, and shuffled the smaller pieces around the plate, employing many of the same tactics Holmes often used to convince myself and Mrs Hudson that he had made much more of a meal than he actually had.
I worried a bread roll down into crumbs and drank a cocktail to soothe my nerves. As a remedy, it was not particularly effective. All I could think of was the image of my friend’s silhouette against our fireplace – when I returned, would he be lost in contemplation, swaying to the strains of Paganini as if at work on a particularly vexing and unanticipated problem? Or would I find him furious and desperate and stumped, tearing apart his bookshelf and demanding to know the meaning of my message? Or (and the thought made my skin prickle with fear and noxious shame), I might simply find our rooms empty and Holmes gone, all but his most prized possessions settled and awaiting their retrieval at some later date. Imagining the bag he might pack, I thought then of the morocco case and his detestable poisons – it was also possible that he would be lost to me in quite some other way.
It was all too obvious what a fool I had been, how recklessly I had acted, even knowing the size of what I had to lose. What guarantee did I have, anyway, that Holmes’ knowledge of the subject truly meant that my feelings were returned, that he had been the source of that long-ago mystery? Were there not a thousand other ways by which he could have learned these things, if indeed he knew them at all? In fact, my initial surprise had been that he did not seem to know – how could I have allowed it to come to this? Was I truly so foolish to allow this to become the one piece of evidence to support a theory I so desperately wanted to prove true? It was folly, pure and simple. It was every mistake a detective should know to avoid, and the only thing it would prove would be my undoing.
I began work on a second cocktail, despite the disappointing effects of the first, and resisted the urge to lay my foolish head in my hands and groan aloud. This was Sherlock Holmes – what could I truly know of the man or his thoughts? How could I begin to presume about his heart? Among the murmur of conversation and the rustling of newspapers, I sat and repented in leisure my great haste, my impetuous tendencies that had pushed me headfirst into a plan that could only end in pain. I am a man of action – I do not have the constitution for long hours of sitting and pondering. This foolishness was not at all new, but never before had I had cause to regret it so deeply.
So I sat, mulling over my tasteless drink, and I cursed and damned my nature quite thoroughly, but it was that same recklessness that would eventually impel me out of my chair and set me to action. I knew that I could not continue to sit and brood – I had to return home to face the consequences of my short-sighted plan, whatever they might be. Eventually, I gathered up my courage, downed the dregs of my drink and set out.
On the journey home, I tried to keep from brooding about the rejection that I might meet, but I did not allow myself any of the hoping and dreaming I had done the previous night. I tried my very hardest to think of nothing at all. Although I did succeed in making my mind quite blank as I navigated the streets, soon to turn icy and treacherous in the long winter, my stomach weighed heavy with a feeling of dread that seemed to gnaw its way up my throat and cut off my air. I breathed deeply through my nose, pondering the white hiss of my breath in the gaslight, and tried not to wonder how unfriendly these familiar streets might look by tomorrow morning.
Similarly, I did not allow myself to entertain the notion that this might be the last time I climbed the seventeen steps up to 221B. Still, never before had the short walk seemed so interminable, nor the floorboards so vocal in their protest of my weight. Listening on one side of the door, I did not hear the strains of violin music or any other sound, and I could smell neither the distinctive smell of Holmes’ black tobacco nor the unidentifiable fumes of his chemical experiments, but I could see light underneath the door and knew that I had found him at home.
My heart was low in my gut and my throat tight as I turned the doorknob between my fingers, and in that instant, all the images I had been trying to keep at bay flashed before me as one. They sent my heart thudding and my mind racing with the fervent prayer that I might be granted the opportunity to change all this, to take it all back and allow things to continue unchanged from yesterday.
But these prayers were not answered, and the sight I was met with was not any of the ones I had imagined. Instead, I saw only my friend’s blazing grey eyes as he pounced on me from where he had been waiting behind the door. I drew back from this assault in surprise, and Holmes pursued me until my back struck the door and closed it behind me, his long fingers frantically unbuttoning my jacket.
“Holmes!” I ejaculated in surprise, but he paid me no mind, only continued until his hand rested against my chest and traced the outline of what it found there – the book I had tucked into my breast pocket that morning.
“Ah,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet of our rooms. “I rather thought you were keeping it there.” His fingers traced absently along its edges, forgotten now that the mystery was solved. “I saw that it was gone from my bookshelf, and when I did not find it in your bedroom table, I knew that there was no other place it might be.” Holmes spoke quickly, with little trace of any emotion or agitation, as if this were the same as any other mystery whose answer he had sought.
I, on the other hand, knew well that I could not pretend to the same. I was a jangling, tangled mess of nerves. I had to will my heart to stop beating so thunderously – Holmes could surely feel it battering against the palm of his bare hand.
I licked my lips (and if his eyes tracked the movement, it was surely my imagination, or just his constant, tireless observation). “Do you mean,” I began, finding my throat so tight that my voice emerged strained and unfamiliar, “that you needed this book to decode my message?”
If that were the case, I might be able to stall him, to think of something to explain it away. If that were the case, all might not be lost.
He drew in a deep, slow breath, and his chest rose and fell with it, bringing his body closer to mine.
“Not exactly,” said he, in such a soft voice as I had never heard from him, and at the sound of it, my pulse began to hammer in my ears. “I believe I have deciphered most of it myself… but I did not dare to believe my own conclusions.”
He was quite nearly inaudible as he finished the statement, and his hand still lay flat on my breast, doubtless monitoring the frantic pace of my heart. It occurred to me then how damnably, unfathomably unfair it was for Holmes, who already saw so very much, to also have this window into my heart and mind. There was nothing I could hope to hide from him, and so, after many years, I gave up the idea of trying.
I raised my eyes to his light ones and was struck by their calmness, their utter lucidity. It is true that Holmes has never been the type to lose his composure in the face of fear, but in that moment, his eyes were as clear as I had ever seen them. There was not a hint of the madness of his infernal vice, nor of its disconnected euphoria, and their grey was not dulled by spirits nor by wine. I breathed in the smell of him, warm and familiar and well-loved, and although I detected the faint odour of his strong black shag, there was not a whiff of alcohol about him.
If I had searched our rooms, the morocco case would surely have been left to gather dust in one of his many hiding places, because Holmes had not opened it up that night. He had understood my message, or at least believed he had (and I had every faith in the veracity of his conclusions). What was more, my declaration – my blossoms of balsam and berrirose, jonquil and mallow – had not sent him running for the hills or for his needle.
Instead, he had waited here, God knew how long, for the sole purpose of facing me, and he had done so sober. He had refused to cloud his judgment. He had waited patiently with his mind clear and his wits about him, and here he was admitting that he wanted me in return.
I felt a strange lightness in my heart. It was all so very much like a dream; here he was, standing before me and I could barely bring myself to believe any of it.
“Without corroboration, that is,” Holmes added suddenly. He must have been unnerved by my long silence; there was colour in his cheeks, and as he continued speaking, his words picked up a speed that was unusual even for him. “So I set out to find that book, as I said, and it was not in your room, but now I have found it, and where I expected, at that.”
He was unsettled enough not only to repeat himself, but to state the obvious, two practices I knew he loathed. It was absurd to think that I might be the cause of his uncertainty and stammering, but there the evidence was. I was sure, then, that if I were to place my hand over his heart in return, I would find it hammering away just as quickly as my own, and so I did – shocking myself with my boldness – and found my guess to be very on the mark.
All of the air went out of him in a rush, and he seemed to shrink into himself. “Watson,” he breathed, and I raised my other hand to his collarbone, to rest gently upon it.
He took a deep, shaky breath and let it out again. “A clever trick,” he whispered, voice low as if by necessity, as if he could not find the strength to speak any louder. “If I was not the sender, I would certainly need the book; by hiding it, you could put the question to rest and I would be none the wiser. “But Watson,” he asked, “what did you plan to do if I had been in possession of a second copy?”
The thought had never once occurred to me – you see now the curse of my impatience, one that Holmes surely knew well.
“I must confess, Holmes, I hadn’t considered the possibility.” I watched a slow smirk spread across his face. “Though, what do you suppose I might have done?”
His smile widened, and I could not help but to return it.
“Watson, this is why I have always thought that we worked much better together,” he said, and his fingers splayed playfully across my chest. Around the edges of the book and through my thick shirt, I could feel the warmth of his skin and I wanted to feel more – for the first time, I allowed myself to want more. I allowed myself to want him. I did not try to break our gaze, nor did I turn away to obscure my face, or flee temptation by hiding myself away in my bedroom, or do any of the thousand other things that might deny the singing in my blood.
His left hand caught my wrist and rolled up the cuffs of my jacket deftly, and then I could feel his touch on my bare skin, the rough calluses of his violinist's fingers. I had so often risked being caught staring at his elegant hands and now I was caught off guard and warmed by his touch – for reasons beside the cold outside, I am sure – but this time, I did not try to hide the shiver than ran through me.
Holmes, for his part, did not fail to notice– how could he? – and his eyes narrowed mischievously, playfully. “And as for what you’d have done, my dear boy, it would not likely be so different to what I suspect you plan to do next.”
“And what is it, pray tell, that you suspect I am going to do?” His eyes were dancing in the firelight, bright with the pleasure of the joke – one that was being made at my expense but not at all to my displeasure.
He laughed then, low and musical. “Why, what you always do, Watson!” He tilted his head to lean in closer. “You are going to help me verify…” He smirked and I could not help but follow the curve of his lip. “…whether my conclusions were correct.”
His words heated my blood, but they were so unexpected that I couldn’t help myself; I laughed aloud. “Am I?” I teased. “I thought you’d be quite confident in them by now.”
“Confident, yes,” said Holmes, pressing closer than I had ever imagined he would dare. “But you, my dear boy, do not express yourself simply and I am sure that after all this time, you have quite a lot you wish to say to me. I am also quite sure that in the midst of the London winter you would not have been able to locate all the flowers you wished to purchase. You must have something else that you’d like to add.”
What he said was true, and I saw plain satisfaction dawn on his face as he observed my astonishment at his deductions, at how after all that time, he could still amaze me.
“And besides,” he added, eyes bright and teasing, “is that not how your stories always end?” We shared a smile at this, but when he spoke again, his voice was low and rough. “You do say that it always makes the most satisfying conclusion.”
My breath caught in my throat. “They don’t all end like that,” I told him, though I fear the flush spreading across my cheeks may have detracted some from my authority. “You are not always right, you do realise.”
“No?” he teased, and I felt his breath on my face. “Tell me, then – what was the flower you failed to find? The state of your sleeves tells me there was one at the very least, but please, do feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.”
“There was one,” I admitted. I was sure that my sleeves had nothing to do with how he knew, but I loved him and I would let him have his game. “It was ambrosia.”
“Ah,” he said. “Ambrosia. ‘Love is reciprocated.’” He regarded me for a moment with warmth in his eyes before shaking his head. “Very well – it makes no matter.” I crooked a questioning eyebrow at him and he smiled. “I have faith, Watson, that we soon will find our own.”
If my hands trembled when I drew him to me, then it was a forgivable weakness, for I had spent so many years trying not to imagine this, trying to banish any stray thoughts of the warmth of his body and what it might feel like against mine. And when I felt that my friend was trembling too – Holmes, who in the face of danger remained so cool and unaffected – my breath came so short that I wondered how I was still standing. His hand still lay on my chest, and he brought it hesitantly up to rest on the nape of my neck, to pull me close and press our mouths together, and I sighed against him, melted into him, clutched him to me with my back against the hard wooden door of our home.
His mouth – I had devoted much of my life to chronicling his exploits, his cunning deductions and the flood of clever words that sprung from his lips – and never had I believed that I might be able to know its softness, to feel him open to me and learn his taste, not just the tang of tobacco that hung always on his breath, but Holmes himself, or to feel solid proof of his desire and his want. My eyes remained open in shocked disbelief; his closed as he pressed nearer and gripped me tighter, fingernails digging, a small noise dragged up from the back of his throat. I had never imagined that he might be like this, that he might want me, that his hunger might rival mine.
I had never experienced the like with another, and to this day, I cannot say I would like to. We are very happy, he and I. We understand each other well and live comfortably together, with the ease of long years of affection. We did find our ambrosia that night, as well as countless times since. These days, we often find it quite unexpectedly – the flower, that is – growing wild in the fields here in Sussex. When I come across a patch of it, I will often collect a few sprigs and leave it on the table for Holmes to discover. He collects the stuff as well, but is more inclined to hide it, stashing it between the pages of a book, or wrapped up in a pair of my socks, or beneath a rind of cheese in the icebox – anywhere that, in the course of a normal day, I might smile to discover the bright shock of colour. He has always loved to surprise me.
We do not need it for its message, however; these days, we hardly need words to make ourselves understood. This is not to say that our lives are empty of flowers – Holmes in particular encounters many different types in his apiculture, and swears he can taste the difference in the honey. I still have every faith in his ability to perceive, but am sure in my heart of hearts that he most certainly cannot. In any case, that is the only thing that either of us need deduce from flowers nowadays. Otherwise, I am quite content in appreciating them for their simple beauty.
I am aware that this life is an unconventional one, both by the standards of society and by what one might expect from the hero detective and his army doctor, but I cannot deny that it suits us well. It may interest you to know, dear Reader, that Holmes, for all his affections, remains unswayed by popular, sentimental ideas about love. He still swears to me that he was right to forswear it as he once did, that it was altogether sensible and justifiable. This is because he believes, you see, that the love that others experience truly is the insipid and unremarkable trifle that he had always thought to be beneath him. He is convinced that what we have is different, that we were the first to discover something worthy of pursuit. He has come to judge the softer emotions less harshly, but still harbours a suspicion that other lovers are to be pitied – that they only act as they do because they are too simple to grasp what they are missing.
I have tried my best to persuade him otherwise, but the man is nothing if not stubborn, and long years of having his brilliance lauded by every reader of my purple prose have done nothing to teach him compromise. It also does not help, dear Reader, that I will never be a good liar – certainly never one that could fool the great Sherlock Holmes – and try as I might, I cannot convince him that this is something I could imagine experiencing with another. (He is quite insufferable when he believes himself to be right.)
And so we go on as we always have, he with his work and his fantastic theories, and I believing them more and more each day. We work better together, as he once told me, and I have found it to be true – better than I had ever imagined
I didn’t see Holmes at breakfast the next morning, and Mrs Hudson informed me that he had gone out early, toting under his arm a large canvas bag. That likely meant he had some plan that would take him about the streets in disguise. So I knew that much, but still, it was a poor indicator of how much time I might have to put my plan into action. Yet fortunately, there was very little I had to do at Baker Street; the bulk of my preparations required that I journey out into the city myself. And so it was that I allowed myself to linger over Mrs Hudson’s excellent breakfast as well as the beginnings of a second pot of tea, taking time to make a list of supplies before I set about my search.
I was loathe to poke around at Holmes’ belongings any more than absolutely necessary, and luckily, I soon found that my suspicions had been correct. With the object of my search safe in my hand, I went straight away to secure it in the drawer of my bedside table, but soon thought better of it and tucked the thing away in my breast pocket, where it would be safe from prying eyes and probing fingers. That done, I dressed for the day, bundling tight against the cold weather, and slipped out into the streets of London to procure what else I needed.
Though I did have to visit a few different stalls, I found what I was looking for easily enough, or most of it, anyway. I must admit that it was a rather exhaustive list, and I had recognised from the start that some of the varieties would be difficult to find in London even in warmer months. It was somewhat disappointing that I would not be able to present my friend with absolutely every one that had crossed my mind, but there was nothing for it. Tucking my delicate purchases away where they would not be crushed by the throngs of shoppers, I was soon making my way back to Baker Street. When Mrs Hudson greeted me, enquiring after the events of my morning, I gave her some simple explanation and was also able to determine that she had done some tidying in my absence.
The good lady, long-suffering as she is, may have been mistaken about the reason for my asking because she set straight away to imploring that I not tell Holmes what she had been about, saying that I knew “how he carries on.” I knew it very well, in fact, and assured her that I had not meant to imply anything with my question, adding that I hoped there had not been very much of a mess to plague her. She harrumphed at this and shooed me away upstairs, where, certain that our rooms would remain undisturbed for the rest of the day, I removed my woollen gloves and produced the brown paper-wrapped parcel that was the fruit of my morning’s efforts and deposited it on Holmes’ writing table.
It is barely an exaggeration when Mrs Hudson calls our sitting room a disaster, or enquires of my friend whether she is losing her hearing as otherwise she has no earthly idea how a hurricane could have passed through without her noticing. But even among all the clutter and our collected oddities, my little gift was the only thing that I could see; it was as if everything else faded into the shadows, leaving it the sole point of brightness for the eye to fix on. It might as well have been a grand, old Grecian column, or a fragrant palm tree thrusting up from the floorboards by the fireplace – I was sure that no visitor would be able to notice anything else.
Standing there, staring at the parcel whose dimensions were nowhere near as impressive as the importance my mind assigned to it, it suddenly occurred to me that I had left myself with nothing else to do for the rest of the day. I now faced the prospect of hours alone in our rooms, staring at Holmes’ writing desk and waiting interminably for his return, with nothing to do but anticipate that moment. It would be folly to imagine that I might focus on reading or writing or any of the other pursuits with which I might otherwise while away a winter afternoon. Panic set upon me.
I called down to Mrs Hudson, who was kind enough to furnish me with half a sandwich of roast beef and mustard over which to consider my options. I thought long and hard, and once every crumb of it was consumed, I sought out my coat and fled back into the chilly winter city to pass the time in my club. Between my military service and the adventures I have experienced at Holmes’ side, my life has been one of many and varied dangers. I had crouched in cramped waiting for long hours, and stared killers in the face without so much as a blink to betray my fear, but faced with the prospect of that afternoon, there was little else I could do but run and lock the door behind me.
The hours I spent in my club were comfortable enough, or would have been on any other day. I was quite unable to focus on any meaningful conversation, and the reading material I found there proved no distraction whatsoever. Their food was usually excellent but I admit that I remember nothing about that meal except for how, to my frayed nerves, it seemed enough to feed an army. Though it was almost certainly a normal portion, it boggled my mind that such an insurmountable pile of food should be heaped on one single plate, and I had no confidence that I could make any sort of dent in it. Feeling somewhat queasy, I sawed at it hopefully with my knife and fork, more to busy my hands than anything else, and shuffled the smaller pieces around the plate, employing many of the same tactics Holmes often used to convince myself and Mrs Hudson that he had made much more of a meal than he actually had.
I worried a bread roll down into crumbs and drank a cocktail to soothe my nerves. As a remedy, it was not particularly effective. All I could think of was the image of my friend’s silhouette against our fireplace – when I returned, would he be lost in contemplation, swaying to the strains of Paganini as if at work on a particularly vexing and unanticipated problem? Or would I find him furious and desperate and stumped, tearing apart his bookshelf and demanding to know the meaning of my message? Or (and the thought made my skin prickle with fear and noxious shame), I might simply find our rooms empty and Holmes gone, all but his most prized possessions settled and awaiting their retrieval at some later date. Imagining the bag he might pack, I thought then of the morocco case and his detestable poisons – it was also possible that he would be lost to me in quite some other way.
It was all too obvious what a fool I had been, how recklessly I had acted, even knowing the size of what I had to lose. What guarantee did I have, anyway, that Holmes’ knowledge of the subject truly meant that my feelings were returned, that he had been the source of that long-ago mystery? Were there not a thousand other ways by which he could have learned these things, if indeed he knew them at all? In fact, my initial surprise had been that he did not seem to know – how could I have allowed it to come to this? Was I truly so foolish to allow this to become the one piece of evidence to support a theory I so desperately wanted to prove true? It was folly, pure and simple. It was every mistake a detective should know to avoid, and the only thing it would prove would be my undoing.
I began work on a second cocktail, despite the disappointing effects of the first, and resisted the urge to lay my foolish head in my hands and groan aloud. This was Sherlock Holmes – what could I truly know of the man or his thoughts? How could I begin to presume about his heart? Among the murmur of conversation and the rustling of newspapers, I sat and repented in leisure my great haste, my impetuous tendencies that had pushed me headfirst into a plan that could only end in pain. I am a man of action – I do not have the constitution for long hours of sitting and pondering. This foolishness was not at all new, but never before had I had cause to regret it so deeply.
So I sat, mulling over my tasteless drink, and I cursed and damned my nature quite thoroughly, but it was that same recklessness that would eventually impel me out of my chair and set me to action. I knew that I could not continue to sit and brood – I had to return home to face the consequences of my short-sighted plan, whatever they might be. Eventually, I gathered up my courage, downed the dregs of my drink and set out.
On the journey home, I tried to keep from brooding about the rejection that I might meet, but I did not allow myself any of the hoping and dreaming I had done the previous night. I tried my very hardest to think of nothing at all. Although I did succeed in making my mind quite blank as I navigated the streets, soon to turn icy and treacherous in the long winter, my stomach weighed heavy with a feeling of dread that seemed to gnaw its way up my throat and cut off my air. I breathed deeply through my nose, pondering the white hiss of my breath in the gaslight, and tried not to wonder how unfriendly these familiar streets might look by tomorrow morning.
Similarly, I did not allow myself to entertain the notion that this might be the last time I climbed the seventeen steps up to 221B. Still, never before had the short walk seemed so interminable, nor the floorboards so vocal in their protest of my weight. Listening on one side of the door, I did not hear the strains of violin music or any other sound, and I could smell neither the distinctive smell of Holmes’ black tobacco nor the unidentifiable fumes of his chemical experiments, but I could see light underneath the door and knew that I had found him at home.
My heart was low in my gut and my throat tight as I turned the doorknob between my fingers, and in that instant, all the images I had been trying to keep at bay flashed before me as one. They sent my heart thudding and my mind racing with the fervent prayer that I might be granted the opportunity to change all this, to take it all back and allow things to continue unchanged from yesterday.
But these prayers were not answered, and the sight I was met with was not any of the ones I had imagined. Instead, I saw only my friend’s blazing grey eyes as he pounced on me from where he had been waiting behind the door. I drew back from this assault in surprise, and Holmes pursued me until my back struck the door and closed it behind me, his long fingers frantically unbuttoning my jacket.
“Holmes!” I ejaculated in surprise, but he paid me no mind, only continued until his hand rested against my chest and traced the outline of what it found there – the book I had tucked into my breast pocket that morning.
“Ah,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet of our rooms. “I rather thought you were keeping it there.” His fingers traced absently along its edges, forgotten now that the mystery was solved. “I saw that it was gone from my bookshelf, and when I did not find it in your bedroom table, I knew that there was no other place it might be.” Holmes spoke quickly, with little trace of any emotion or agitation, as if this were the same as any other mystery whose answer he had sought.
I, on the other hand, knew well that I could not pretend to the same. I was a jangling, tangled mess of nerves. I had to will my heart to stop beating so thunderously – Holmes could surely feel it battering against the palm of his bare hand.
I licked my lips (and if his eyes tracked the movement, it was surely my imagination, or just his constant, tireless observation). “Do you mean,” I began, finding my throat so tight that my voice emerged strained and unfamiliar, “that you needed this book to decode my message?”
If that were the case, I might be able to stall him, to think of something to explain it away. If that were the case, all might not be lost.
He drew in a deep, slow breath, and his chest rose and fell with it, bringing his body closer to mine.
“Not exactly,” said he, in such a soft voice as I had never heard from him, and at the sound of it, my pulse began to hammer in my ears. “I believe I have deciphered most of it myself… but I did not dare to believe my own conclusions.”
He was quite nearly inaudible as he finished the statement, and his hand still lay flat on my breast, doubtless monitoring the frantic pace of my heart. It occurred to me then how damnably, unfathomably unfair it was for Holmes, who already saw so very much, to also have this window into my heart and mind. There was nothing I could hope to hide from him, and so, after many years, I gave up the idea of trying.
I raised my eyes to his light ones and was struck by their calmness, their utter lucidity. It is true that Holmes has never been the type to lose his composure in the face of fear, but in that moment, his eyes were as clear as I had ever seen them. There was not a hint of the madness of his infernal vice, nor of its disconnected euphoria, and their grey was not dulled by spirits nor by wine. I breathed in the smell of him, warm and familiar and well-loved, and although I detected the faint odour of his strong black shag, there was not a whiff of alcohol about him.
If I had searched our rooms, the morocco case would surely have been left to gather dust in one of his many hiding places, because Holmes had not opened it up that night. He had understood my message, or at least believed he had (and I had every faith in the veracity of his conclusions). What was more, my declaration – my blossoms of balsam and berrirose, jonquil and mallow – had not sent him running for the hills or for his needle.
Instead, he had waited here, God knew how long, for the sole purpose of facing me, and he had done so sober. He had refused to cloud his judgment. He had waited patiently with his mind clear and his wits about him, and here he was admitting that he wanted me in return.
I felt a strange lightness in my heart. It was all so very much like a dream; here he was, standing before me and I could barely bring myself to believe any of it.
“Without corroboration, that is,” Holmes added suddenly. He must have been unnerved by my long silence; there was colour in his cheeks, and as he continued speaking, his words picked up a speed that was unusual even for him. “So I set out to find that book, as I said, and it was not in your room, but now I have found it, and where I expected, at that.”
He was unsettled enough not only to repeat himself, but to state the obvious, two practices I knew he loathed. It was absurd to think that I might be the cause of his uncertainty and stammering, but there the evidence was. I was sure, then, that if I were to place my hand over his heart in return, I would find it hammering away just as quickly as my own, and so I did – shocking myself with my boldness – and found my guess to be very on the mark.
All of the air went out of him in a rush, and he seemed to shrink into himself. “Watson,” he breathed, and I raised my other hand to his collarbone, to rest gently upon it.
He took a deep, shaky breath and let it out again. “A clever trick,” he whispered, voice low as if by necessity, as if he could not find the strength to speak any louder. “If I was not the sender, I would certainly need the book; by hiding it, you could put the question to rest and I would be none the wiser. “But Watson,” he asked, “what did you plan to do if I had been in possession of a second copy?”
The thought had never once occurred to me – you see now the curse of my impatience, one that Holmes surely knew well.
“I must confess, Holmes, I hadn’t considered the possibility.” I watched a slow smirk spread across his face. “Though, what do you suppose I might have done?”
His smile widened, and I could not help but to return it.
“Watson, this is why I have always thought that we worked much better together,” he said, and his fingers splayed playfully across my chest. Around the edges of the book and through my thick shirt, I could feel the warmth of his skin and I wanted to feel more – for the first time, I allowed myself to want more. I allowed myself to want him. I did not try to break our gaze, nor did I turn away to obscure my face, or flee temptation by hiding myself away in my bedroom, or do any of the thousand other things that might deny the singing in my blood.
His left hand caught my wrist and rolled up the cuffs of my jacket deftly, and then I could feel his touch on my bare skin, the rough calluses of his violinist's fingers. I had so often risked being caught staring at his elegant hands and now I was caught off guard and warmed by his touch – for reasons beside the cold outside, I am sure – but this time, I did not try to hide the shiver than ran through me.
Holmes, for his part, did not fail to notice– how could he? – and his eyes narrowed mischievously, playfully. “And as for what you’d have done, my dear boy, it would not likely be so different to what I suspect you plan to do next.”
“And what is it, pray tell, that you suspect I am going to do?” His eyes were dancing in the firelight, bright with the pleasure of the joke – one that was being made at my expense but not at all to my displeasure.
He laughed then, low and musical. “Why, what you always do, Watson!” He tilted his head to lean in closer. “You are going to help me verify…” He smirked and I could not help but follow the curve of his lip. “…whether my conclusions were correct.”
His words heated my blood, but they were so unexpected that I couldn’t help myself; I laughed aloud. “Am I?” I teased. “I thought you’d be quite confident in them by now.”
“Confident, yes,” said Holmes, pressing closer than I had ever imagined he would dare. “But you, my dear boy, do not express yourself simply and I am sure that after all this time, you have quite a lot you wish to say to me. I am also quite sure that in the midst of the London winter you would not have been able to locate all the flowers you wished to purchase. You must have something else that you’d like to add.”
What he said was true, and I saw plain satisfaction dawn on his face as he observed my astonishment at his deductions, at how after all that time, he could still amaze me.
“And besides,” he added, eyes bright and teasing, “is that not how your stories always end?” We shared a smile at this, but when he spoke again, his voice was low and rough. “You do say that it always makes the most satisfying conclusion.”
My breath caught in my throat. “They don’t all end like that,” I told him, though I fear the flush spreading across my cheeks may have detracted some from my authority. “You are not always right, you do realise.”
“No?” he teased, and I felt his breath on my face. “Tell me, then – what was the flower you failed to find? The state of your sleeves tells me there was one at the very least, but please, do feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.”
“There was one,” I admitted. I was sure that my sleeves had nothing to do with how he knew, but I loved him and I would let him have his game. “It was ambrosia.”
“Ah,” he said. “Ambrosia. ‘Love is reciprocated.’” He regarded me for a moment with warmth in his eyes before shaking his head. “Very well – it makes no matter.” I crooked a questioning eyebrow at him and he smiled. “I have faith, Watson, that we soon will find our own.”
If my hands trembled when I drew him to me, then it was a forgivable weakness, for I had spent so many years trying not to imagine this, trying to banish any stray thoughts of the warmth of his body and what it might feel like against mine. And when I felt that my friend was trembling too – Holmes, who in the face of danger remained so cool and unaffected – my breath came so short that I wondered how I was still standing. His hand still lay on my chest, and he brought it hesitantly up to rest on the nape of my neck, to pull me close and press our mouths together, and I sighed against him, melted into him, clutched him to me with my back against the hard wooden door of our home.
His mouth – I had devoted much of my life to chronicling his exploits, his cunning deductions and the flood of clever words that sprung from his lips – and never had I believed that I might be able to know its softness, to feel him open to me and learn his taste, not just the tang of tobacco that hung always on his breath, but Holmes himself, or to feel solid proof of his desire and his want. My eyes remained open in shocked disbelief; his closed as he pressed nearer and gripped me tighter, fingernails digging, a small noise dragged up from the back of his throat. I had never imagined that he might be like this, that he might want me, that his hunger might rival mine.
I had never experienced the like with another, and to this day, I cannot say I would like to. We are very happy, he and I. We understand each other well and live comfortably together, with the ease of long years of affection. We did find our ambrosia that night, as well as countless times since. These days, we often find it quite unexpectedly – the flower, that is – growing wild in the fields here in Sussex. When I come across a patch of it, I will often collect a few sprigs and leave it on the table for Holmes to discover. He collects the stuff as well, but is more inclined to hide it, stashing it between the pages of a book, or wrapped up in a pair of my socks, or beneath a rind of cheese in the icebox – anywhere that, in the course of a normal day, I might smile to discover the bright shock of colour. He has always loved to surprise me.
We do not need it for its message, however; these days, we hardly need words to make ourselves understood. This is not to say that our lives are empty of flowers – Holmes in particular encounters many different types in his apiculture, and swears he can taste the difference in the honey. I still have every faith in his ability to perceive, but am sure in my heart of hearts that he most certainly cannot. In any case, that is the only thing that either of us need deduce from flowers nowadays. Otherwise, I am quite content in appreciating them for their simple beauty.
I am aware that this life is an unconventional one, both by the standards of society and by what one might expect from the hero detective and his army doctor, but I cannot deny that it suits us well. It may interest you to know, dear Reader, that Holmes, for all his affections, remains unswayed by popular, sentimental ideas about love. He still swears to me that he was right to forswear it as he once did, that it was altogether sensible and justifiable. This is because he believes, you see, that the love that others experience truly is the insipid and unremarkable trifle that he had always thought to be beneath him. He is convinced that what we have is different, that we were the first to discover something worthy of pursuit. He has come to judge the softer emotions less harshly, but still harbours a suspicion that other lovers are to be pitied – that they only act as they do because they are too simple to grasp what they are missing.
I have tried my best to persuade him otherwise, but the man is nothing if not stubborn, and long years of having his brilliance lauded by every reader of my purple prose have done nothing to teach him compromise. It also does not help, dear Reader, that I will never be a good liar – certainly never one that could fool the great Sherlock Holmes – and try as I might, I cannot convince him that this is something I could imagine experiencing with another. (He is quite insufferable when he believes himself to be right.)
And so we go on as we always have, he with his work and his fantastic theories, and I believing them more and more each day. We work better together, as he once told me, and I have found it to be true – better than I had ever imagined
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Date: 2013-10-22 11:13 pm (UTC)Lovely.
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Date: 2013-10-23 01:53 am (UTC)And I cannot deny that this marvelous story suited me, dear [redacted], right down to the very ground. :-D I am truly flabbergasted at such a fantastic present! Like Holmes' flower-messages, and Watson's in return, this was truly a heroic effort, and I cannot thank you enough for it. I'm humbled that you claim the Posy Killer as an inspiration for this, because you clearly needed no such fodder. What an amazing tale of loyalty, chance, grief, love, and yes, flowers - and bravery in the face of possibly, just possibly, getting what you'd never hoped to have.
And man-of-action Watson, too! And always-thinking Holmes! And bees, always the bees. A double cherry on top of this delicious sundae of delights.
Thank you so very, very much!
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Date: 2013-10-23 06:00 am (UTC)"...the man is nothing if not stubborn"...
Thank you!
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Date: 2013-11-06 09:36 am (UTC)And I'm actually still catching up on the last several fics. There are so many great stories and I just want to give them all the time they deserve ^^
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Date: 2013-10-26 06:07 am (UTC)I adored this, from the small but lovely glimpse you gave us of Mary, whose inclusion worked unusually well here, right down to that kiss. My god. You melted me into a puddle with barely a press of lips and a hand on Watson's heart. And I love you for it, dear Anon.
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Date: 2013-10-29 03:21 pm (UTC)Thank you for this gorgeous, atmospheric, pleasantly achy and satisfying fic!
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