Fic, finally.
Jul. 25th, 2009 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyThis is that fic I've been working on recently. I started it originally as an excuse to write one scene (I'm sure you'll know which one when you read it) and it kind of got longer than I expected it to be. I also wanted to write something for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
watsons_woes that didn't involve Watson's emotional angst, but physical pain or illness. Anyway, here we go :)
Title: Things Unspoken
Rating: PG for violence and mild language
Character(s): Holmes and Watson (slashy if you want it to be, friendship if you don't.)
Summary: Next time, Watson will know better than to assume a task Holmes sends him on will be uneventful.
Warnings: None
Word Count: 2,714
Author's Notes: This is one of my rare attempts at in medias res; I'm usually far too fond of longwinded set-up, but in this case I dove right into the middle of things. It takes place in 1885; make of that what you will.
I awoke to the smell of old wood, dust, and gin.
The latter caused my stomach to knot in on itself, and I felt the scratch of a rug against my cheek as I shifted - dust and gin in the rug, decaying wood from the floor beneath. When I moved, the nausea flared in a wave from my middle up through my head and left an all-consuming throb in its wake. I gave up, thinking it wise to put off that attempt for the moment. A whisper of panic that I had no idea where I was or how I had got there did me the service of clearing my mind somewhat. I had been hit behind my right ear with some heavy object, that much I remembered. Confusion, nausea, missing memory. A concussion, then.
Bits and pieces came filtering back as I lay, trying not to let myself be sickened by the combined smells of must and liquor and, now, blood. Not much blood, but enough smearing my cheek to know it was there and fairly fresh. It gently adhered my skin to the rug, the sensation of which somehow making me feel dangerously more ill. I reminded myself of the necessity of focus and corralled my thoughts. Holmes and I had been in the early stages of a case, investigating a man for insurance fraud and very possibly murder as well; his wives had a tendency to die tragically in the first few years of their marriage. Holmes sent me to watch an insurance office, the one which had alerted us to the suspicion in the first place, in the unlikely event that the culprit returned to try his luck again. We had either overestimated his caution or underestimated his foolishness, for back he came, and I followed him all through the East End for the better part of a day. When it became clear that I'd found where he lived, I made up my mind to go back and report to Holmes - and I got approximately fifteen feet before I found out in the most unpleasant way that there were two men involved in the scheme, not one.
It was not so dark in the room that I couldn't see the vague shapes of furniture, but it was difficult to learn anything about my surroundings otherwise, especially from my position of face-down upon the floor. My arms were bound behind me, and I gave an experimental pull at the ropes. To my utter surprise, I was able to draw my wrists a few inches apart, then more, with a bit of effort. I slipped the ropes off, got my arms under myself, rolled onto my back, and rested, breathing with deep deliberation to keep down the queasiness.
The ropes had been pulled tight but only looped around my wrists, not knotted. I struggled to give my thoughts passage through the haze of confusion. That could mean one of three things: my attackers were very stupid; they thought I was sufficiently incapacitated not to bother restraining me (which pointed back to my first idea); or they were interrupted in the act of tying me up. The latter explanation became the most plausible when I recognized the sound of distant raised voices somewhere at the front of the house.
I could hear only indistinct conversation, but I knew without a doubt that one of the speakers was Holmes. A surge of relief caught me so hard by the throat that I was obliged to blink back tears (heightened emotionality was another symptom of the concussion, a detached part of my mind informed me). But there was something off about his voice, something wrong in the timbre of it, and although I could not pinpoint what it was, it frightened me enough to set my heart racing – and the seriousness of that, I knew, was not an aftereffect of my injury.
There was an upholstered chair a few feet away from me. I caught the leg with one hand, dragged it closer, and managed to pull myself up it into a sitting position. From there, I got to my knees, and putting most of my weight on the arms of the chair, to my feet. The room whirled slowly, but it ceased after a few moments of standing with my eyes closed. In the dimness I made out a neglected fireplace, and in it, an iron poker. I tested my balance – very poor – and lurched from the chair to the mantle. Fire iron in hand, I made my way along the wall toward the door.
Out of the room, down the hall, toward the front of the house. It was a wonder they didn't hear me, stumbling and clumsy as I was, but they appeared preoccupied with their own conversation; it escalated in volume as I neared. The door was open wide, and all three had pistols: Holmes, the man I had followed, and another I didn't recognize but who I assume had been the one to strike me. Holmes, in fact, had my revolver; I'd left it at home, not expecting to need it. The third man was closest and had his back to the door. The room went abruptly silent for a split second when I appeared, and I hit him in the head with the poker – not terribly hard, as I wasn't in a state to put much force behind it, but enough to drop him. His gun skittered away across the floor.
I heard a sound from Holmes – not words, a voiced exhalation – and when I took my eyes off the man I had just felled, I saw that he had gone white. "Watson--" he said in a breath, thickness distorting my name almost beyond recognition, and then the other man shifted and Holmes had his pistol trained on him. Something in his features snapped back into place, and he said clearly:
"I would recommend against moving."
Having assured myself that the third man was unconscious, I fell into a nearby chair and watched Holmes disarm our quarry. He was breathing hard, or so I thought for a moment at least; when he wrenched the pistol away and directed the man to face the wall, he was as cold and collected as ever he was.
"Watson, what did they do to you?" he asked sharply, the muzzle of my revolver in the man's back.
"Caught me off-guard," I replied. "I don't know what they hit me with, but I wasn't out long. Only a mild concussion, if that. I'm fine, Holmes."
His eyes flicked over to me and seemed to lose a measure of their harshness. He hesitated, then: "I--"
Footsteps sounded in the hall, several of them, and a pack of Scotland Yard constables were tripping over the unconscious criminal in the doorway. At their back was Inspector Lestrade, looking harried. Holmes drew the pistol up and pushed his prisoner into the wall with his other hand.
"Where in hell have you been?" he snapped.
Lestrade went a trifle red in the face. He stepped over to briskly handcuff the man. "Some of us may have been blessed with preternatural speed, Mr. Holmes, but you only alerted us a half-hour ago, and it does take some minutes to--" Holmes cut him off with an impatient growl and came over to my chair. As if only just seeing me, Lestrade gave a start. "Good heavens, Doctor! Are you--"
"He is perfectly all right," Holmes said, pulling me to my feet, one arm hard around my chest and the other gripping my arm. "Up you get, Watson." Then, to Lestrade:-- "You have the scene under control, I take it?"
"Why, yes, I think we rather have," the inspector replied stiffly, and gave Holmes a knowing look. "It is not as though you left us much to do."
Holmes said nothing. In fact, he said nothing as he helped me into the police cab, said nothing as we were driven back to Baker Street. He merely nodded once to my insistence that all I needed was to clean and dress my wound and to rest, and the remainder of the journey he spent huddled in the corner of the carriage, his mouth pressed to his fist and his gaze out the window. Whatever had been wrong in his voice had, in short time since we reunited, mutated into something distant, hard, impenetrable. In our years together, I had never seen him in quite this mood: he was not ignoring me because his mind was caught up with other things. In those situations, it is automatic, unconscious, a function of his nature, and in this state, he fidgets – chews his fingernails, taps a rhythm on his knee. Now, he was still as marble. Whatever this was, it was nothing if not deliberate.
I had just enough time to go through all of the possible reasons why I could have angered him when the cab pulled up before our door. We gave Mrs. Hudson quite a fright in the front hall, but her worry gave way to indignation under Holmes's brusque order for hot water and his refusal to explain my injury.
The nausea itself had subsided during the ride home, but now my head throbbed to such an extent that my stomach threatened insurrection again. My balance had not improved either, and I had to rely on Holmes entirely to help me up the stairs. He left me clinging to the doorjamb while he turned up the lights and coerced the embers in the grate back to life. A supreme lack of common sense - or perhaps stubbornness - drove me to believe I could make it to my chair unaided, and I only got two steps before our previously trustworthy floor pitched like the deck of a ship. The wall was there to catch me and I slid down it; somehow I miraculously kept from upsetting the coat stand.
"Didn't I tell you to stay put?" I heard from Holmes, and there was a pleading edge to it that undermined his previous coldness. Footsteps marked his approach, and I felt his hands on my arms, though he did not attempt to raise me again.
"Sorry," I said blearily. He crouched over me, bent knee planted beside my thigh on the rug, and then cold fingers probed behind my ear. I tilted my head obediently to allow him to examine the wound. After several silent moments – this close, I could feel his tension, wound like a watch-spring – I added with hesitant levity, "I expect I'll live."
Holmes pulled back and made a quick sound in his throat, like a swallow interrupted. I have seen him look surprised rarely, and never afraid; his expression now was a cousin of the two, sharing the same roots but manifesting as something different. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but all that came out was a short puff of air, less than a laugh and far more fragile. Then Holmes did something quite surprising - he bent forward and rested his forehead against mine.
I did nothing, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. Holmes is not given to unnecessary physical tactility. As I have learned countless times, today being not the least, he has no qualms when someone's safety is at stake. And there is a difference, a significant one, between casually taking my arm as we walk down the street and this. Dire circumstances, and ones in which such gestures may mean nothing – these were Holmes's normal spheres of physical contact.
I felt his brows momentarily twist before he had them under control again. Holmes searched for my hand and found it, and his grip was like iron, loose enough not to hurt but rigid. I squeezed his in response. The moment I thought I felt a tremor - my imagination, I'm sure - he let go.
"Holmes?" I asked softly. He sat back on his heels and lowered his eyes, showing me only lids and lashes, so that I had difficulty judging his expression.
"They told me they had killed you... and, fool that I was, I believed them."
That was when the epiphany struck. It was no wonder his voice had seemed strange to me when I first heard him – it had never before held that particular combination of hopelessness, quiet rage, and a complete lack of regard for consequences. I hadn't recognized it then, but I did now, and the implications of this reaction in one normally so controlled – one whose regard for me, I confess, I was never completely sure of – were such that I forgot the pain in my head, the nausea, the gently spinning room, until my shocked silence became so awkward that I groped for something to fill it.
"You interrupted them, I think," I said, and even to myself I sounded distracted. "They must have tried to mislead you, hoping you'd leave."
"They were even more idiotic than I suspected, then." I smiled faintly, but his eyes were still averted and his tone bitter.
"They certainly proved themselves to be," I said. "They did return to the insurance office, after all, and they allowed themselves to be trailed. Speaking of that, how did you find me?"
"I wouldn't have if one of the boys hadn't seen you down in Bethnal Green and come to ask me what on earth my gentleman doctor friend was doing in a place like that. I had independently come to the conclusion that there was more than one person behind this insurance scam; I didn't know how many, though, hence my alerting the Yard in case a little back-up was in order. A fairly simple chain of inferences led me to the house." He unfolded himself from his crouch to settle on the floor beside my outstretched legs. "To be honest with you, Watson, I never imagined your surveillance would turn up anything at all."
"Neither did I," I said.
"And yet you went," said he, as at last he met my eyes again, "without argument."
"Yes." I put enough significance into the tone of that one syllable that it might portray all the things I hoped it to. I was surprised to find – although I suppose I shouldn't have been – that this fierce feeling of loyalty, and my need for him to know of it, eclipsed all physical discomfort. Holmes regarded me with the reined-in intensity he normally reserved for those clues he would later reveal to be pivotal, and I felt the foundations of my confidence begin to crumble. "It was a bit stupid of me to follow them, though," I added, "unarmed and alone."
"No," Holmes said slowly, with a thoughtful shake of his head. "Not stupid. It was reckless, perhaps, and not what I would have you do, but it is how I would have proceeded myself."
"So you weren't angry with me, then, for getting myself in need of rescuing? I thought, from your demeanor in the cab..."
Holmes gave a little exasperated growl that I somehow did not find at all insulting. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Watson, of course I wasn't angry with you. I only--" He bit it off and got to his feet suddenly, and although I wanted to very much, I refrained from asking You only what? He had entrusted more to me than I ever expected in that gesture – his forehead against mine, the closeness of him – that I could hardly press him for more now.
"Well, I shan't allow you to spend all evening on the floor," Holmes said. He took hold of my hands and helped me to my feet, and from there into my chair by the fire. "Where is your medical bag?" he asked over his shoulder. "I can clean and bandage the wound, but you'll have to tell me what to do."
I smiled. "That will be a change." Holmes fixed me what I'm sure he hoped to be a dangerous look, but there was amusement in it along with irritation, and that did more to soothe me than any verbal reassurance. He is, after all, a master of things unspoken.
watsons_woes that didn't involve Watson's emotional angst, but physical pain or illness. Anyway, here we go :)Title: Things Unspoken
Rating: PG for violence and mild language
Character(s): Holmes and Watson (slashy if you want it to be, friendship if you don't.)
Summary: Next time, Watson will know better than to assume a task Holmes sends him on will be uneventful.
Warnings: None
Word Count: 2,714
Author's Notes: This is one of my rare attempts at in medias res; I'm usually far too fond of longwinded set-up, but in this case I dove right into the middle of things. It takes place in 1885; make of that what you will.
I awoke to the smell of old wood, dust, and gin.
The latter caused my stomach to knot in on itself, and I felt the scratch of a rug against my cheek as I shifted - dust and gin in the rug, decaying wood from the floor beneath. When I moved, the nausea flared in a wave from my middle up through my head and left an all-consuming throb in its wake. I gave up, thinking it wise to put off that attempt for the moment. A whisper of panic that I had no idea where I was or how I had got there did me the service of clearing my mind somewhat. I had been hit behind my right ear with some heavy object, that much I remembered. Confusion, nausea, missing memory. A concussion, then.
Bits and pieces came filtering back as I lay, trying not to let myself be sickened by the combined smells of must and liquor and, now, blood. Not much blood, but enough smearing my cheek to know it was there and fairly fresh. It gently adhered my skin to the rug, the sensation of which somehow making me feel dangerously more ill. I reminded myself of the necessity of focus and corralled my thoughts. Holmes and I had been in the early stages of a case, investigating a man for insurance fraud and very possibly murder as well; his wives had a tendency to die tragically in the first few years of their marriage. Holmes sent me to watch an insurance office, the one which had alerted us to the suspicion in the first place, in the unlikely event that the culprit returned to try his luck again. We had either overestimated his caution or underestimated his foolishness, for back he came, and I followed him all through the East End for the better part of a day. When it became clear that I'd found where he lived, I made up my mind to go back and report to Holmes - and I got approximately fifteen feet before I found out in the most unpleasant way that there were two men involved in the scheme, not one.
It was not so dark in the room that I couldn't see the vague shapes of furniture, but it was difficult to learn anything about my surroundings otherwise, especially from my position of face-down upon the floor. My arms were bound behind me, and I gave an experimental pull at the ropes. To my utter surprise, I was able to draw my wrists a few inches apart, then more, with a bit of effort. I slipped the ropes off, got my arms under myself, rolled onto my back, and rested, breathing with deep deliberation to keep down the queasiness.
The ropes had been pulled tight but only looped around my wrists, not knotted. I struggled to give my thoughts passage through the haze of confusion. That could mean one of three things: my attackers were very stupid; they thought I was sufficiently incapacitated not to bother restraining me (which pointed back to my first idea); or they were interrupted in the act of tying me up. The latter explanation became the most plausible when I recognized the sound of distant raised voices somewhere at the front of the house.
I could hear only indistinct conversation, but I knew without a doubt that one of the speakers was Holmes. A surge of relief caught me so hard by the throat that I was obliged to blink back tears (heightened emotionality was another symptom of the concussion, a detached part of my mind informed me). But there was something off about his voice, something wrong in the timbre of it, and although I could not pinpoint what it was, it frightened me enough to set my heart racing – and the seriousness of that, I knew, was not an aftereffect of my injury.
There was an upholstered chair a few feet away from me. I caught the leg with one hand, dragged it closer, and managed to pull myself up it into a sitting position. From there, I got to my knees, and putting most of my weight on the arms of the chair, to my feet. The room whirled slowly, but it ceased after a few moments of standing with my eyes closed. In the dimness I made out a neglected fireplace, and in it, an iron poker. I tested my balance – very poor – and lurched from the chair to the mantle. Fire iron in hand, I made my way along the wall toward the door.
Out of the room, down the hall, toward the front of the house. It was a wonder they didn't hear me, stumbling and clumsy as I was, but they appeared preoccupied with their own conversation; it escalated in volume as I neared. The door was open wide, and all three had pistols: Holmes, the man I had followed, and another I didn't recognize but who I assume had been the one to strike me. Holmes, in fact, had my revolver; I'd left it at home, not expecting to need it. The third man was closest and had his back to the door. The room went abruptly silent for a split second when I appeared, and I hit him in the head with the poker – not terribly hard, as I wasn't in a state to put much force behind it, but enough to drop him. His gun skittered away across the floor.
I heard a sound from Holmes – not words, a voiced exhalation – and when I took my eyes off the man I had just felled, I saw that he had gone white. "Watson--" he said in a breath, thickness distorting my name almost beyond recognition, and then the other man shifted and Holmes had his pistol trained on him. Something in his features snapped back into place, and he said clearly:
"I would recommend against moving."
Having assured myself that the third man was unconscious, I fell into a nearby chair and watched Holmes disarm our quarry. He was breathing hard, or so I thought for a moment at least; when he wrenched the pistol away and directed the man to face the wall, he was as cold and collected as ever he was.
"Watson, what did they do to you?" he asked sharply, the muzzle of my revolver in the man's back.
"Caught me off-guard," I replied. "I don't know what they hit me with, but I wasn't out long. Only a mild concussion, if that. I'm fine, Holmes."
His eyes flicked over to me and seemed to lose a measure of their harshness. He hesitated, then: "I--"
Footsteps sounded in the hall, several of them, and a pack of Scotland Yard constables were tripping over the unconscious criminal in the doorway. At their back was Inspector Lestrade, looking harried. Holmes drew the pistol up and pushed his prisoner into the wall with his other hand.
"Where in hell have you been?" he snapped.
Lestrade went a trifle red in the face. He stepped over to briskly handcuff the man. "Some of us may have been blessed with preternatural speed, Mr. Holmes, but you only alerted us a half-hour ago, and it does take some minutes to--" Holmes cut him off with an impatient growl and came over to my chair. As if only just seeing me, Lestrade gave a start. "Good heavens, Doctor! Are you--"
"He is perfectly all right," Holmes said, pulling me to my feet, one arm hard around my chest and the other gripping my arm. "Up you get, Watson." Then, to Lestrade:-- "You have the scene under control, I take it?"
"Why, yes, I think we rather have," the inspector replied stiffly, and gave Holmes a knowing look. "It is not as though you left us much to do."
Holmes said nothing. In fact, he said nothing as he helped me into the police cab, said nothing as we were driven back to Baker Street. He merely nodded once to my insistence that all I needed was to clean and dress my wound and to rest, and the remainder of the journey he spent huddled in the corner of the carriage, his mouth pressed to his fist and his gaze out the window. Whatever had been wrong in his voice had, in short time since we reunited, mutated into something distant, hard, impenetrable. In our years together, I had never seen him in quite this mood: he was not ignoring me because his mind was caught up with other things. In those situations, it is automatic, unconscious, a function of his nature, and in this state, he fidgets – chews his fingernails, taps a rhythm on his knee. Now, he was still as marble. Whatever this was, it was nothing if not deliberate.
I had just enough time to go through all of the possible reasons why I could have angered him when the cab pulled up before our door. We gave Mrs. Hudson quite a fright in the front hall, but her worry gave way to indignation under Holmes's brusque order for hot water and his refusal to explain my injury.
The nausea itself had subsided during the ride home, but now my head throbbed to such an extent that my stomach threatened insurrection again. My balance had not improved either, and I had to rely on Holmes entirely to help me up the stairs. He left me clinging to the doorjamb while he turned up the lights and coerced the embers in the grate back to life. A supreme lack of common sense - or perhaps stubbornness - drove me to believe I could make it to my chair unaided, and I only got two steps before our previously trustworthy floor pitched like the deck of a ship. The wall was there to catch me and I slid down it; somehow I miraculously kept from upsetting the coat stand.
"Didn't I tell you to stay put?" I heard from Holmes, and there was a pleading edge to it that undermined his previous coldness. Footsteps marked his approach, and I felt his hands on my arms, though he did not attempt to raise me again.
"Sorry," I said blearily. He crouched over me, bent knee planted beside my thigh on the rug, and then cold fingers probed behind my ear. I tilted my head obediently to allow him to examine the wound. After several silent moments – this close, I could feel his tension, wound like a watch-spring – I added with hesitant levity, "I expect I'll live."
Holmes pulled back and made a quick sound in his throat, like a swallow interrupted. I have seen him look surprised rarely, and never afraid; his expression now was a cousin of the two, sharing the same roots but manifesting as something different. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but all that came out was a short puff of air, less than a laugh and far more fragile. Then Holmes did something quite surprising - he bent forward and rested his forehead against mine.
I did nothing, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. Holmes is not given to unnecessary physical tactility. As I have learned countless times, today being not the least, he has no qualms when someone's safety is at stake. And there is a difference, a significant one, between casually taking my arm as we walk down the street and this. Dire circumstances, and ones in which such gestures may mean nothing – these were Holmes's normal spheres of physical contact.
I felt his brows momentarily twist before he had them under control again. Holmes searched for my hand and found it, and his grip was like iron, loose enough not to hurt but rigid. I squeezed his in response. The moment I thought I felt a tremor - my imagination, I'm sure - he let go.
"Holmes?" I asked softly. He sat back on his heels and lowered his eyes, showing me only lids and lashes, so that I had difficulty judging his expression.
"They told me they had killed you... and, fool that I was, I believed them."
That was when the epiphany struck. It was no wonder his voice had seemed strange to me when I first heard him – it had never before held that particular combination of hopelessness, quiet rage, and a complete lack of regard for consequences. I hadn't recognized it then, but I did now, and the implications of this reaction in one normally so controlled – one whose regard for me, I confess, I was never completely sure of – were such that I forgot the pain in my head, the nausea, the gently spinning room, until my shocked silence became so awkward that I groped for something to fill it.
"You interrupted them, I think," I said, and even to myself I sounded distracted. "They must have tried to mislead you, hoping you'd leave."
"They were even more idiotic than I suspected, then." I smiled faintly, but his eyes were still averted and his tone bitter.
"They certainly proved themselves to be," I said. "They did return to the insurance office, after all, and they allowed themselves to be trailed. Speaking of that, how did you find me?"
"I wouldn't have if one of the boys hadn't seen you down in Bethnal Green and come to ask me what on earth my gentleman doctor friend was doing in a place like that. I had independently come to the conclusion that there was more than one person behind this insurance scam; I didn't know how many, though, hence my alerting the Yard in case a little back-up was in order. A fairly simple chain of inferences led me to the house." He unfolded himself from his crouch to settle on the floor beside my outstretched legs. "To be honest with you, Watson, I never imagined your surveillance would turn up anything at all."
"Neither did I," I said.
"And yet you went," said he, as at last he met my eyes again, "without argument."
"Yes." I put enough significance into the tone of that one syllable that it might portray all the things I hoped it to. I was surprised to find – although I suppose I shouldn't have been – that this fierce feeling of loyalty, and my need for him to know of it, eclipsed all physical discomfort. Holmes regarded me with the reined-in intensity he normally reserved for those clues he would later reveal to be pivotal, and I felt the foundations of my confidence begin to crumble. "It was a bit stupid of me to follow them, though," I added, "unarmed and alone."
"No," Holmes said slowly, with a thoughtful shake of his head. "Not stupid. It was reckless, perhaps, and not what I would have you do, but it is how I would have proceeded myself."
"So you weren't angry with me, then, for getting myself in need of rescuing? I thought, from your demeanor in the cab..."
Holmes gave a little exasperated growl that I somehow did not find at all insulting. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Watson, of course I wasn't angry with you. I only--" He bit it off and got to his feet suddenly, and although I wanted to very much, I refrained from asking You only what? He had entrusted more to me than I ever expected in that gesture – his forehead against mine, the closeness of him – that I could hardly press him for more now.
"Well, I shan't allow you to spend all evening on the floor," Holmes said. He took hold of my hands and helped me to my feet, and from there into my chair by the fire. "Where is your medical bag?" he asked over his shoulder. "I can clean and bandage the wound, but you'll have to tell me what to do."
I smiled. "That will be a change." Holmes fixed me what I'm sure he hoped to be a dangerous look, but there was amusement in it along with irritation, and that did more to soothe me than any verbal reassurance. He is, after all, a master of things unspoken.
