Fic: Holmes/Watson, explicit
Feb. 8th, 2010 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseuntil you cry: now you must try my greed
Sherlock Holmes. Holmes/Watson rentboy!fic, explicit, 6576 words. He felt like a man possessed, enchanted by the spell of Holmes' long white exposed collarbones. To find his friend, his flatmate, the theme of so many of his thoughts in such a place, looking as he did - beautiful and strange and inhuman -
note: this was written while listening to the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor (download link), and, as mentioned in the fic, Grieg's Lyric Pieces (youtube link). Oh Mendelssohn. *le sigh*
*
It was, in truth, just the sort of place he had spent years carefully avoiding, such locations not being among the safest in London. The risk of blackmail at the very least were prohibitive. John Watson had enjoyed the various perverse pleasures exchanged between men well enough when they'd been ready to his hand, in the days when he'd inhabited barracks and tents and camps replete with young men whose passions ran hot through their veins. But now, back in the fog and chill of England – whose laws on the subject were ice-cold at the best – living with a detective and working regularly in the company of the police - it had seemed to him better to forget such things. He took pleasure enough from women's company not to hazard other enticements.
Of late, however, his resolve had weakened. He did not know why; he did not want to know. Out of the sight of his conscious mind, his blood had slowly turned entirely to flame. It was undeniable. Unmitigable, no matter how he behaved in the privacy of his own darkened bedroom. And so, Watson found himself standing in an alley in a veiled part of the West End, some time after the lights had been lit, feeling the chill air of early spring against his face and trying to decide whether he ought to flee or succumb.
He had heard the name of the establishment from a patient – one of the waifs Holmes had sent to him, if he remembered rightly. The india-cloth drapes sensuously framing the windows did not permit him to glance inside, but by reputation it was a better place than some, especially if one was, like himself, enough of a médecin to take prudent precaution against contagion. Signing himself over to risk and, once more, perdition, he entered the brothel, handing his coin over to the pretty, dark-faced boy who stood languidly with a hand outstretched. “Gent's choice, after you've paid your pence,” the youth said, eyes smirking sideways.
Various men and boys lounged, chattered, or breathed in elegant clouds of tobacco – and very likely opium – that swirled about their semi-nude bodies in snakelike curves. For a moment he was very nearly paralyzed in a sort of mesmeric shock. He had suppressed this for so long that the boldfaced inverted sexuality of the place quite shocked him. Having failed completely to consider his actions before engaging in them, he stood bewildered as how choose a partner or a purchase, and was very nearly going to take discretion as the better part of valor and retreat when his eyes caught, like a bird limed to a branch.
In the depths of the house a door had just opened, and a pair of men issued out into the hall. The one was a tall, broad-bodied man, well-dressed, with rings on his fingers. He touched the other's face affectionately, and then stopping by the door to gather up his hat and cloak went out into the evening. The other man - the prostitute – having farewelled his client, joined his fellows in an attitude of display, laying himself out on a chaise longue, turned away from Watson in a three-quarter profile.
He was not a young man, but his form radiated such an air of vital tension that his lack of youth seemed scarcely relevant. He wore a thin shirt, hanging lubriciously open to display a beautiful pale expanse of muscular, though lean and slender, chest and shoulder. Dark trousers, cut so as to skim close to the anatomy of his body, encased a pair of long and graceful legs. A knotted ribbon was tied across his upper arm in a tourniquet, though Watson could see no sign of a syringe. His hair was dark, black as night in the half-light of that place, careless and disarranged so that wild locks of it tumbled around his ears and fell over his high forehead. His face was turned away from Watson, so that he could not see the color of the piercing, evocative dark eyes.
And though Sherlock Holmes had often fooled him before with his various chameleon disguises, Watson somehow saw through this one as if it were a clear pane of new-hung glass. There ought not to have been much to see through: Holmes had no false nose, no greyed hair. But something in his manner, and in the positioning and languid grace of his body, was so completely and utterly unlike his usual appearance as to render him quite transformed, and Watson marveled that he'd been able to recognize him at all.
Reclining on a chaise longue in a homosexual brothel in London's West End, splayed out elegantly in an attitude indicating clearly that he was for sale to any sodomite who might pay his price, Holmes seemed ageless, both older and very much younger than Watson knew him to truly be. His lean and powerful body was as long as a cat's, and stretched out quite as luxuriously. The clothing was clever, cut as to be flexible in its implication as to the wearer's social class. In them, with that strange old-young face, Holmes could have been an elegant young student, a powerful masculine laborer. He was, Watson found himself reflecting inanely, an entire catalogue of inverted desirability all by himself.
He must have had, at some infinitely brief moment, a choice as to the manner of his action. The existence of such a moment, however, was opaque to him, and he did not mark it as it passed. He felt like a man possessed, enchanted by the spell of Holmes' long white exposed collarbones. To find his friend, his flatmate, the character of his stories and the theme of so many of his thoughts in such a place, looking as he did – beautiful and strange and inhuman -
Holmes turned his head, glancing towards the doorway where Watson still stood transfixed, and Watson could see the exact moment when the detective recognized him. The long-lashed eyes widened, and his face might have paled a shade further, though it was difficult in such low light to read the variations of such a naturally pale complexion as Holmes'.
His mouth opened slightly in surprise, and Watson knew with an electric jolt that he had accomplished that which he had rarely seen: he had shocked Sherlock Holmes completely, so much so that the man did not know what to do.
The eroticism of it was unspeakable. Watson crossed the room in three strides and buried his hands in the tousled locks, feeling the heat of Holmes' body brushing teasingly against his own. It was scarcely a rational decision, but Watson's rational mind had flown the coop, leaving only his heart and his loins with which to navigate their current situation. And his heart, upon seeing Holmes displayed so for the eyes of any who should choose to look, firmly declared: mine. Mine alone.
Holmes looked up at him, his breath coming in sharp gasps as though the wind had just been knocked out of him, and Watson could tell that the detective was gathering himself to speak. Either an explanation, or a plea, or a cutting remark, would in a moment issue from those firm lips, and Watson found that he had no desire to hear any of Holmes' possible protestations. “No,” he said, deliberately not speaking his name. “Quiet. I want you quiet.”
Holmes' eyes closed, and leaning into the pressure of Watson's heavy hand he drew in a trembling breath. His eye tilted slyly as he asked, clearly aware that he was disobeying orders, “Anything else you want of me?” His voice was a low electric whisper. Holmes arched the vulnerable curve of his neck, exposing his throat in a gesture of impossibly wanton submission.
“A room,” Watson said hoarsely.
Holmes stood liquidly, and wrapping his long delicate scarred fingers around Watson's wrist, he led them back into the bowels of the house.
The room was lit only by a few candles. Sparsely furnished, containing no grostesqueries of debauchery. It might, in truth, have been Holmes' own room back at Baker Street, save that that room was never so neat as this. No papers cascaded down over the bed, no chemical residues stained the red-and-gold tapestried carpet.
Holmes sat on the bed, silent and still, waiting. “Sherlock,” Watson said, and Holmes shuddered, “take off your clothes. I want to see you laid bare.”
He stripped plainly, as if he were merely retiring for the evening, revealing the curve of his back, his fine legs, the dark thatch of hair that surrounded his arousal. Watson had seen Sherlock Holmes' naked body before, but always in contexts of fear or care, when his need to heal and help his friend had prevented him from fully enjoying his various beauties. Holmes was not a pretty man, not classically lovely, but something in the stark powerful lines of his lean body was more than beauty. In Holmes' case, the body reflected the man: driven, strange, superlative, tense as a violin string and sensitive as a song.
“On the bed,” he said breathlessly, and then when Holmes went to kneel down, holding on to the headboard, “not like that. I want to be able to see your face.”
This, a very detached part of Watson's brain informed him, was insane. It would change both of their lives utterly; it was quite too momentous of a decision to make cavalierly, without rational consideration. But Holmes was lying down on the bed, his eyes dark and heavy with trust and passion and arousal and the residual effects of his cocaine, and Watson simply could not bring himself to care about such things.
The one concession he allowed himself to make to sanity was to ask, as he began divesting himself of his braces, “Are you clean? If not, I can see about a sheepskin, or some other sort of prophylactic.”
It was the first Holmes had spoken, since he'd led Watson down into madness, and Watson was not at all prepared for the intensity of the reaction he had to the combination of Holmes' nakedness and the well-known timbre of his voice. “I am free of disease,” he said. “save the criminal condition of inversion, which conventional morality informs me to be a grave sickness. I customarily use such methods, to protect myself. With you, I do not think I shall need them.”
Overcome suddenly by a deep raging jealousy, remembering the squared-off shoulders of the man who had been with the detective previously, Watson demanded, “Did he take you so, Sherlock?”
“No, he wanted only – Watson, I do not know how to say these things, not to you – to engage in frottage with me.”
“And the cocaine? When did you take that?”
“Before – before I was with him. It was – necessary – it was -”
“Hush,” Watson said, calmer now. “Here. Lie back and let me - “
Bare now except for his pressed cotton shirt, he brushed his hands up and down Holmes' flanks, feeling the smoothness of his skin where it was unmarred, the roughened tissue where old wounds had long since healed. When he allowed his hands to wander lower, to touch the curve of Holmes' thigh, the ridge of his hipbone, Holmes threw back his head and moaned, his hips jerking upward spasmodically in barely-contained yearning.
Watson leaned down and kissed him, swallowing the sounds. All the while he continued touching Holmes, his hands desperate and rough and demanding. Leaving Holmes' now-reddened mouth, he pressed wet kisses down his neck, his throat, his shoulder, one of his nipples. First one of his lubricated fingers, and then two, left Holmes writhing and gasping on the mattress.
“Watson -” Holmes choked out, “please – I – oh,” and Watson took his hips in his hands, positioning him before carefully, almost gently, entering him. Holmes' eyes widened, and for a breathless moment both men were silent, feeling sensations that were beyond words. Then Watson gathered himself and thrust into that wet heat, nearly losing his mind with the pleasure of it.
Holmes was breathing heavily against Watson's chest, panting and writhing there in his arms, and a deep atavistic part of him thrilled to this absolute possession of his friend, this complete loss of individual self in a passionate whole: two souls, two bodies, one being and one heart.
Crying out inarticulately, Holmes fluttered and trembled in his petit mort, his mouth opened in a soundless sigh, eyes closed, brows knit together with the intensity of the peak. He looked at that moment as if he'd been carved of alabaster, his sallow cheeks flushed with sensation, his entire aspect redolent of a peace that Watson had never before seen there. The ecstatic tremors running through the body pressed so intimately against his own drove him over the edge of orgasm, and he fell out of awareness, down into an electric burst of heat, light, and sound.
When he returned to himself, Holmes lay beside him asleep. His breathing was soft and slow, and he looked like nothing so much as a thoroughly debauched angel. It was more than he could bear.
His mind turned in turmoil like a boat swamped by heavy seas: what he had just done? How had he compromised himself? And Holmes? He had gone to the West End, he now recognized, to escape from his friend's inexorable orbit. By chance, by the slightest coincidence, he found himself more entrapped than ever. It was frankly terrifying. He had not been prepared for the intensity of his feelings, for the absolute nature of his desire and passion and need. He had been overwhelmed, had been absolutely drunk on Holmes' body, the sound of his imperious voice, the brushed silk slide of his skin.
Stuttering, he fell back to the irreducible reality: Holmes had been working as a whore, and he'd taken use of him in that position. It had been the most sublime experience of his life; it had been utterly monstrous. And suddenly he found that he could not bear it, could not bear the worry and the guilt and the deep feeling of uncleanliness that was beginning to pervade his heart. Holmes lay beside him, beautiful and quiescent. It was the very definition of unbearable, and Watson found himself struggling against a powerful current of panicked claustrophobia.
Feeling like a thief in the night, Watson extricated himself from the tangle of Holmes' sleep-heavy limbs, standing beside the bed on unsteady feet. He re-clothed himself with as little noise as he could manage to produce, and left the room. Holmes did not wake, or even stir.
Watson never could remember how he made his way home that night. It was quite indecently late – late to the point of being, in truth, early. He resolutely did not consider Holmes, left behind in that disreputable district to wake or sleep as he would, alone. Exhausted by physical activity, by the intensity of the night and by the dramatic implications it bore, Watson returned to Baker Street practically asleep on his feet, and falling into his familiar bed he slept the rest of the night without dreams.
He did not hear Holmes come in, but in when he rose in the morning he found him perched on the sofa in the sitting room. His legs were drawn up to his chest, a cup of tea cooling on the bookcase beside him, and his violin was held loosely in one of his long-fingered hands. These trembled ever so slightly, so slightly as to be almost imperceptible to human sight. He was not dressed, but neither was he particularly disheveled. He looked as ordinary as it was possible for a man to look, who had sodded his best friend in an anonymous brothel the night before.
"Good morning, Watson," he said, dropping his eyes quickly away.
Watson could have played along with Holmes' farce, could have welcomed the new morning in equally bathetic and conventional language; could, in short, have left the events of the past night to dissipate like so many nameless ghosts. He did not know why he did not. But his confused anxiety, his sense of imbalance and instability, rose in his throat and turned to heat.
“You're an abject fool,” he said instead. “Why, for the love of God, put yourself at such a terrible risk? To offer your own body up for sale? Holmes, it's insane! You have wealth enough to purchase a catamite, if that's what you want – after last night's actions, I can scarcely speak to you of the legality of the practice. But to go into such a place as a vendor! To allow men of all kinds unfettered access to your person – it borders on suicide.”
During this speech, Holmes had progressively lost his hold on his prosy facade; his complexion had paled, and the resolutely cheerful cast of his features melted into weariness, anxiety, and what might have been hope. “I had not thought you'd wish to speak of the matter, my dear,” he said.
“I see very little value in hiding from a known reality. I'm amazed that you'd be willing to tolerate such a fabrication.”
He could practically see Holmes' mind parsing, interpreting, constructing truths out of an ill-patched cloth. “You did not know, then,” he said slowly, “that I would be there? It was nothing more than coincidence? I confess that I am surprised: not at the coincidence, which has the same appallingly humorous nature that so often characterizes cases such as these, but that you should have acted upon a homosexual urge. It's most unlike you; in the time that I have known you, you have never before responded to such feelings.”
Watson laughed joylessly. “Of course you knew what I am. You've known all along, and said nothing.”
“There ought to be very little mystery in that,” said Holmes, his face grim, set, hard. “Having discovered that you found it equally easy to love women and men alike – that is, that you were not such an utter and irredeemable mandrake as myself – I was determined to let you have the happy normalcy that you seemed capable of supporting.”
He paused, and then raised an arched and sardonic brow. “Inversion is neither so holy nor so legal that I would wish any man not already forced to do so to share its confines with myself.”
“And yet,” Watson countered, trying to couch his vehemence in logic and failing utterly, voice slowly rising from a reasonable level into something more resembling a shout, “I think it not so much to say that such practices are only truly hellish when you sell your favors on the street like a common whore, with no sense as to the danger to yourself!”
“I cannot think,” Holmes said, frosty, aloof, controlled, “being that you are neither my father nor my wife, why you would presume to have any authority to -”
“Because if I do not, who will?”
“It is not as if,” he fired off with a sideways look, “you did not participate in last night's debauchery every bit as much as I. It is not as if you, also, did not seek that place out. Certainly, your anatomy was more actively involved in sodomy than was my own, which feat I fancy you scarcely could have managed had it not been to your liking. How long have you suppressed desire for me? How long have you lied to us both, merely to preserve the semblance of a respectability you've never had?”
The cold rationality with which he spoke of it - debauchery - hit Watson like a blow. Pained himself, he bit back with all the power he could muster: “As true as that may be, at least I was the buyer and not the bought! I retained the power of rational choice in the matter. I could, for instance, have chosen to leave you there, when I recognized you. I'm beginning to wish that I had.”
“John! - ” Holmes cried, strained, desperate. His hands were clenched around the arm of the sofa, knuckles white, sinews extended. “I've never had any choice.It is because I could not have you,” he continued, as though the words had been dragged from his tongue with a hook. “It's you that I want, my dear. But you I cannot have, and so I have tried to stop myself from wishing.”
The revelation might have rocked Watson to the core, had it not been presaged by both such shocking risk and such shocking intimacy. Now, it merely twisted his heart and fed his anger. “If you mean to say,” Watson said with the quiet of a battlefield before the first blast of powder is ignited, “that loving me has forced you into depravity and degradation, I really must question the nature of your feelings. Destroying yourself is a poor way to serve me. If you cannot want me and remain whole, it would be better for your feelings to die than for you yourself to do so.”
It ought to have been a romantic speech: the first iteration of the eleusinian word “love,” the overwhelming force of Watson's concern for his friend's welfare. But it was not. Watson's voice carried more aggression than he had intended. He inwardly winced as each word fell, harsh and accusatory and leaden, into the customarily quiet atmosphere of morning at Baker Street.
Holmes' face drained to the lips, but the bloodlessness seemed to strengthen rather than to enervate him, as if his veins being emptied of life had been re-filled with molten steel. His shoulders straightened, his lips thinned. “I am very sorry to hear that you think so, old boy – for I cannot, I find, agree with your low valuation of my regard for you. I fear that I weigh it rather more heavily, more heavily than any other part of my being. You speak of my survival without that feeling as though it were possible, when I could more readily believe in the wildest phantasmagoria than I could conceive of myself continuing to exist and not being in love with you.”
He stood gracefully, crossing to the still-curtained window. His shoulders and back were set in inflexible lines of pride. “You asked me,” he said magisterially, “why I did not simply purchase myself a whore, and save myself the trouble of becoming one. In fact, I believe the term you used was catamite, and in that word you may find your answer: I have no desire for a catamite. I do not wish to be - serviced - by some pretty child who has no real inclination towards me, but merely obeys.”
Holding up a hand to forestall Watson's objection, which he had somehow perceived even with his back turned, he said, “Little more do I want the kind of liaison which might be found with a social equal in such a house. Pleasure purchased with money is dependent upon the whim of the purchaser, and I do not want such pleasure. Better to be taken by paying men, to seek to please them, than to receive the obsequiousness of a bought partner. Irrational it may be, senseless to the point of literal criminality, but there it is.”
Watson protested, “But the danger to yourself – of abuse, of contagion – surely those risks are not worth -”
Holmes rounded on him, fierce as a bird of prey, his eyes radiant as cooling coals. “Do you have any idea,” he said, “what it's been for me to live with you, to spend each day beside you, to love you as I do and to say nothing? I have been the Tantalus to your clear water,” he cried, voice cracking under the weight of emotion with which he invested it. “Compared to that, of what import risk? And now – now that I know you to be willing to lie with me, at least, if not to love me – it is many hundreds of times worse.”
He looked squarely at Watson, as open-faced as his friend had ever seen him, his expression speaking of absolute honesty shot through with almost total despair. “Having you, I should need nothing else,” he said. “Not having you, there is nothing else worth having. I gave you the plain truth when I said that I had no choice. I am what I am, Watson, comprehensible to you or not. As our two conclusions are so clearly unresolvable, I shall leave you to contemplate their paradox. I find that I cannot bring myself to care.”
He crossed the room in four steps, shoved a sleepy and phlegmatic Gladstone out of the way with his foot, and very nearly slammed to door of his private room shut behind him; a moment later he re-emerged, silently snatched up his violin from where it had remained reclining on the sofa, and retreated again. Watson clearly heard the key turn in his lock, and then all was still.
No coherent music emerged from Holmes' room that afternoon, only pizzicato chromatics and occasional perturbed fragments of Grieg's newer Vals, clumsily transposed out of its native instrumentation. The jarring notes communicated to Watson a sense of deepest misery, as well as a sort of rootless chaos.
He himself tried to work, and then to read, but found all occupations equally nonabsorbent. At last, unable to bear the aching discontent of the sounds, he put on his hat and coat and fled the scene, striking out into the overcast afternoon in search of the populated warmth of a public house – in search of corporeality, sustenance, some sign that the world continued to rotate on its axis.
As he made his lonely way through the crowded street, Watson was pursued by the nagging realization that Holmes had not eaten anything all day, and that unless the pitcher in his room was filled he'd likely had no drink either. The idea nipped at his heels like a dog, and when he sat down to his own supper the food turned to ash in his mouth.
Despite this, when he at last returned to Baker Street as the evening gathered in, he was somewhat refreshed: his heart and mind were quieter, and his nerves were no longer quite so unbearably sensitized has they had been.
Mrs. Hudson met him at the door. “Mr. Holmes wouldn't take any dinner, Doctor, and he did look terribly worn when I took up his tea. Is everything all right?”
“If it is not, I will surely see that it becomes so,” he reassured her; he meant every word of it, for he not only felt up to the task of managing Sherlock Holmes, but was also impressed with the idea that if he did not do so, he stood to lose something very important.
All of the various reasons he'd held to, before, all of the risk evaluations and rationalizations, were suddenly meaningless, turned to so much dust and ash in the face of the potent heat he'd felt in Holmes' arms. As his shock had cleared, so too had his various misperceptions: nothing else, in truth, mattered except for that connection. He did not care a fig for the law, or for propriety, or for pride.
He took the stairs nimbly enough, and entered to find that Holmes' door was shut, that there was tea cooling in a china cup on the table, and that nothing else had perceptibly changed since he'd left. He nevertheless received the strong impression that Holmes had spent the afternoon wandering the full confines of the apartment, and had bolted back to isolated safety when he heard Watson's step on the seventeen stairs. The space of seventeen stairs was more than enough time to allow Sherlock Holmes to erase his presence; the man was nothing if not excellently good at hiding.
It was an apt enough way of putting it, Watson reflected. Holmes had hidden from him. He had hidden himself away so masterfully that Watson still could not entirely reconcile the image of sexual decadence Holmes had made the night before with the commonplace reality of their life together – but the frisson between those two conceptualizations of the man, instead of disturbing him, fascinated him utterly. He wanted above all things to discover the ligatures which bound the two personas together, to be able to examine at leisure the interaction of them in forming his friend's existence.
He'd expected on seeing the closed and doubtless locked door to have to drag Holmes out of his sanctuary kicking and protesting. But the detective surprised him by emerging of his own will not long after he'd made his entrance. He stood dark and saturnine in the doorway, his face both calm and cold. “Good evening, Watson,” he said suavely. “Shall I warm you some tea? I've been watching the fog roll in over the last hour or so, and it can not but have chilled you.”
Watson did not budge as Holmes swept by him to put the kettle back on the hob. “Holmes,” he said, “you implied this morning that, if you were my lover, you would not be driven to seek other masculine company – in a sexual sense, that is.” He felt damnably awkward, but soldiered on. He could see no other way. “Did you – was it only the passionate nature of the quarrel we were engaged in that drove you to say that, or does it still remain true?”
“The truth,” Holmes said hoarsely, not looking at him. “Nothing more or less than the absolute truth.”
The rough confession sent a warm rush coursing through him. Watson's first impulse was to cross the room to Holmes, take him into his arms, and kiss him thoroughly, to steal away his detachment and to run disordering possessive fingers through his neat dark hair. But he restrained himself. He'd already made such a gesture of spontaneous physical passion, and had in doing so failed to communicate in any way the solidity of his own feelings toward his friend. It had been a chemical reaction, and as so many reactions did when in the proximity of Holmes, it had quite exploded, leaving them both metaphorically shaky and soot-covered.
For a moment they stood suspended, the tall severe man brittle and cold supporting himself against the mantle, the stocky fair one standing in uncertainty beside the door. Holmes' famous opposition to sentiment constrained Watson's tongue: how could he talk of love to Sherlock Holmes? The situation was so very delicate, the bond of their companionship already frayed by inopportune silences and ill-weighed words.
Stepping to Holmes' side, taking his long-fingered hand in his own, he said softly, “I am glad, Holmes, to hear you say plainly that you love me, though 'by my troth, it is no addition to your wit, nor no great argument of your folly, for I will be horribly in love with you' – that is, if you will have me.”
It was as if some unseen hand had cut through the strings that were unseen supporting Holmes' tall frame. Watson caught him as he curled forward as if in a faint, helping him to a chair. Back bent harshly, Holmes buried his face in shaking hands. “I did not want to lose you, you see,” he said at last, voice muffled. “I needed you to still be here, and I could not be sure that you would not wish to put as much space between yourself and me as possible, if you knew in what ways I looked at and thought of you.”
Kneeling at his feet, Watson reached up to caress Holmes' face, at last indulging his wish to stroke and tousle his birdwing-soft hair. “I would have done the same,” he said, looking up into that beloved hawk-featured face. “Do not think that I could abide the loss any more than you could, my dear. You mean a great deal to me.”
“You are quite sure?” Holmes said, brow wrinkled in anxiety. “I am not an easy person to love, Watson. I am peculiar and ill-tempered and cynical, and it is far too easy for me to fall into being cruel. Have you truly considered what it will mean, not only for you to remove yourself from acceptable society, but to give your heart into the keeping of such a despicable fool as I can be?”
“You tell me nothing that I don't already know. I've lived with you this long. I suspect I've seen your worst, or near enough as is no difference. You have not yet driven me from your side, Holmes.”
It was a strange angle at which to kiss, though in Watson's opinion not an unpleasurable one. And there was a permanence, a reality, to it which he found almost more erotic than the fevered sensuality of the kisses they had exchanged in the bordello. There was no doubt as to the fact that John Watson was kissing Sherlock Holmes quite passionately, having dragged him from his chair down onto the hearthrug of their shared quarters, and that Sherlock Holmes was responding in kind, pressing the length of his body so closely against Watson that he seemed to be trying to climb inside of him.
“Watson,” Holmes panted, “Watson, please, this is scarcely the place for this,” and then he bit Watson's earlobe, the tip of his nose pressing against the sensitive skin at Watson's temple, and Watson found that he quite agreed with him.
Together they tumbled rather gracelessly down into Holmes' bed, Watson having first hastily kicked half-a-dozen papers and a tin of rosin off of the coverlet. He slipped Holmes' braces loose from his shoulders and then started on the buttons of his loose, rather wrinkled linen shirt. The fabric was soft against his fingers, but not nearly so soft as the pale skin beneath it.
“Yours too, Watson,” Holmes said, sounding impossibly suave for a man so nearly out of breath. He hesitated, and Holmes with a wry twist of his voluble mouth and that rather blinding insight that so often seemed to be somehow more than natural, said to him, “It is quite absurd, dear, for you to be shy about the scar. For the first: I have already seen it. For the second: you surpass me in total loveliness as much as the goldfinch does the gore-crow. And for a third: you know quite well that I am absolutely besotted with you, and it is thus highly unlikely that I should bar you from my bed, having once got you here, because of a few traces of old wounds long healed.”
“This,” Watson said, pulling off his shirt and proceeding to pin Holmes to the mattress, “is why I refused to let you speak the last time. You are possessed of entirely too many words.”
Holmes' eyes flickered dark at the positioning of their bodies, but he managed to hold his voice urbane and steady as he said, “Stop my mouth, then,” in such a way that it was very nearly a dare.
“I should rather you stop mine,” Watson said, and was gratified by the rush of hectic color that suffused Holmes' sallow face in response. “Let me please you,” he whispered into Holmes' ear, and was rewarded with a shudder, a moan, and the slight of Holmes' long dark lashes fluttering closed in erotic anticipation.
He took Holmes' length into his mouth, and was gratified to find that he had not entirely lost the skill through disuse as Holmes shouted and grasped at his hair. He did not last long, despite his usually iron control; Watson could not help but smile internally at that, well pleased by the compliment to his prowess. Later, after they had both recovered somewhat from that spectacular exertion, Holmes spent quite some time engaged in a thorough and systematic investigation of Watson's every erogenous response, murmuring categorizations under his breath as he made use of his dexterous hands and clever tongue. Through such touch alone he succeeded in bringing Watson to the peak of glory more than once, and the entire exercise left them both highly sensitive and quite out of breath.
Their love-making outlasted the afternoon, wandering languidly into the early hours of the night.
At last, worn out and satiated, almost purring with sensual satisfaction, Holmes dropped his dark head against Watson's shoulder. He sighed softly and closed his eyes, sleepy and trusting. Watson's fingers were idly carding through his disarranged hair. “Can I ask you a question?” he said, and Holmes hummed his assent against his ribs. “How did you come to be at the brothel? I understand something of why, now, but very little of how.”
“Simple, dear fellow,” Holmes said drowsily, with the trace of a laugh hanging about his voice. “I am not the usual sort employed in such business, but a few coins in the hand of the proprietor, and the assurance of my protection for his establishment gained me entrance. I was not engaged there long,” he said, peering up earnestly. “And I suffered no hardship, save for a quiet sort of misery that the men touching me were not you. I was lucky, and careful as well.”
“You needn't justify yourself to me, dear fellow. If you were rash, I was blind. There's enough blame to go around.”
“I do not think I can find any culpability to be had,” Holmes said softly, “in an affair with such a perfect outcome as this. Any different choice might not have led us here; therefore, I must call those that we made good ones, or risk the loss of that which I've gained through them.”
They were silent for a moment, Watson seemingly lost in thought. Then he raised his head, saying, “I do not think, Holmes, that you have eaten enough today. I upset you greatly this morning, and I am heartily sorry for it. I am sure that, during the time when I was out, you did not treat yourself well. Abstention at the very least, and restless nervous excitation, and very possibly morphia to boot. Will you let me take care of you now? Some food, and maybe a hot bath?”
Holmes' face was filled with a deep, inchoate longing, a longing that was somehow akin to contentment. It was, strangely enough, the happiest Watson had ever seen him. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I think I could do that. Yes.” And he rose from the bed, wrapping his dressing gown around himself, and followed Watson out into their rooms, where Watson had gone ahead of him to light the lamps.
Sherlock Holmes. Holmes/Watson rentboy!fic, explicit, 6576 words. He felt like a man possessed, enchanted by the spell of Holmes' long white exposed collarbones. To find his friend, his flatmate, the theme of so many of his thoughts in such a place, looking as he did - beautiful and strange and inhuman -
note: this was written while listening to the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor (download link), and, as mentioned in the fic, Grieg's Lyric Pieces (youtube link). Oh Mendelssohn. *le sigh*
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It was, in truth, just the sort of place he had spent years carefully avoiding, such locations not being among the safest in London. The risk of blackmail at the very least were prohibitive. John Watson had enjoyed the various perverse pleasures exchanged between men well enough when they'd been ready to his hand, in the days when he'd inhabited barracks and tents and camps replete with young men whose passions ran hot through their veins. But now, back in the fog and chill of England – whose laws on the subject were ice-cold at the best – living with a detective and working regularly in the company of the police - it had seemed to him better to forget such things. He took pleasure enough from women's company not to hazard other enticements.
Of late, however, his resolve had weakened. He did not know why; he did not want to know. Out of the sight of his conscious mind, his blood had slowly turned entirely to flame. It was undeniable. Unmitigable, no matter how he behaved in the privacy of his own darkened bedroom. And so, Watson found himself standing in an alley in a veiled part of the West End, some time after the lights had been lit, feeling the chill air of early spring against his face and trying to decide whether he ought to flee or succumb.
He had heard the name of the establishment from a patient – one of the waifs Holmes had sent to him, if he remembered rightly. The india-cloth drapes sensuously framing the windows did not permit him to glance inside, but by reputation it was a better place than some, especially if one was, like himself, enough of a médecin to take prudent precaution against contagion. Signing himself over to risk and, once more, perdition, he entered the brothel, handing his coin over to the pretty, dark-faced boy who stood languidly with a hand outstretched. “Gent's choice, after you've paid your pence,” the youth said, eyes smirking sideways.
Various men and boys lounged, chattered, or breathed in elegant clouds of tobacco – and very likely opium – that swirled about their semi-nude bodies in snakelike curves. For a moment he was very nearly paralyzed in a sort of mesmeric shock. He had suppressed this for so long that the boldfaced inverted sexuality of the place quite shocked him. Having failed completely to consider his actions before engaging in them, he stood bewildered as how choose a partner or a purchase, and was very nearly going to take discretion as the better part of valor and retreat when his eyes caught, like a bird limed to a branch.
In the depths of the house a door had just opened, and a pair of men issued out into the hall. The one was a tall, broad-bodied man, well-dressed, with rings on his fingers. He touched the other's face affectionately, and then stopping by the door to gather up his hat and cloak went out into the evening. The other man - the prostitute – having farewelled his client, joined his fellows in an attitude of display, laying himself out on a chaise longue, turned away from Watson in a three-quarter profile.
He was not a young man, but his form radiated such an air of vital tension that his lack of youth seemed scarcely relevant. He wore a thin shirt, hanging lubriciously open to display a beautiful pale expanse of muscular, though lean and slender, chest and shoulder. Dark trousers, cut so as to skim close to the anatomy of his body, encased a pair of long and graceful legs. A knotted ribbon was tied across his upper arm in a tourniquet, though Watson could see no sign of a syringe. His hair was dark, black as night in the half-light of that place, careless and disarranged so that wild locks of it tumbled around his ears and fell over his high forehead. His face was turned away from Watson, so that he could not see the color of the piercing, evocative dark eyes.
And though Sherlock Holmes had often fooled him before with his various chameleon disguises, Watson somehow saw through this one as if it were a clear pane of new-hung glass. There ought not to have been much to see through: Holmes had no false nose, no greyed hair. But something in his manner, and in the positioning and languid grace of his body, was so completely and utterly unlike his usual appearance as to render him quite transformed, and Watson marveled that he'd been able to recognize him at all.
Reclining on a chaise longue in a homosexual brothel in London's West End, splayed out elegantly in an attitude indicating clearly that he was for sale to any sodomite who might pay his price, Holmes seemed ageless, both older and very much younger than Watson knew him to truly be. His lean and powerful body was as long as a cat's, and stretched out quite as luxuriously. The clothing was clever, cut as to be flexible in its implication as to the wearer's social class. In them, with that strange old-young face, Holmes could have been an elegant young student, a powerful masculine laborer. He was, Watson found himself reflecting inanely, an entire catalogue of inverted desirability all by himself.
He must have had, at some infinitely brief moment, a choice as to the manner of his action. The existence of such a moment, however, was opaque to him, and he did not mark it as it passed. He felt like a man possessed, enchanted by the spell of Holmes' long white exposed collarbones. To find his friend, his flatmate, the character of his stories and the theme of so many of his thoughts in such a place, looking as he did – beautiful and strange and inhuman -
Holmes turned his head, glancing towards the doorway where Watson still stood transfixed, and Watson could see the exact moment when the detective recognized him. The long-lashed eyes widened, and his face might have paled a shade further, though it was difficult in such low light to read the variations of such a naturally pale complexion as Holmes'.
His mouth opened slightly in surprise, and Watson knew with an electric jolt that he had accomplished that which he had rarely seen: he had shocked Sherlock Holmes completely, so much so that the man did not know what to do.
The eroticism of it was unspeakable. Watson crossed the room in three strides and buried his hands in the tousled locks, feeling the heat of Holmes' body brushing teasingly against his own. It was scarcely a rational decision, but Watson's rational mind had flown the coop, leaving only his heart and his loins with which to navigate their current situation. And his heart, upon seeing Holmes displayed so for the eyes of any who should choose to look, firmly declared: mine. Mine alone.
Holmes looked up at him, his breath coming in sharp gasps as though the wind had just been knocked out of him, and Watson could tell that the detective was gathering himself to speak. Either an explanation, or a plea, or a cutting remark, would in a moment issue from those firm lips, and Watson found that he had no desire to hear any of Holmes' possible protestations. “No,” he said, deliberately not speaking his name. “Quiet. I want you quiet.”
Holmes' eyes closed, and leaning into the pressure of Watson's heavy hand he drew in a trembling breath. His eye tilted slyly as he asked, clearly aware that he was disobeying orders, “Anything else you want of me?” His voice was a low electric whisper. Holmes arched the vulnerable curve of his neck, exposing his throat in a gesture of impossibly wanton submission.
“A room,” Watson said hoarsely.
Holmes stood liquidly, and wrapping his long delicate scarred fingers around Watson's wrist, he led them back into the bowels of the house.
The room was lit only by a few candles. Sparsely furnished, containing no grostesqueries of debauchery. It might, in truth, have been Holmes' own room back at Baker Street, save that that room was never so neat as this. No papers cascaded down over the bed, no chemical residues stained the red-and-gold tapestried carpet.
Holmes sat on the bed, silent and still, waiting. “Sherlock,” Watson said, and Holmes shuddered, “take off your clothes. I want to see you laid bare.”
He stripped plainly, as if he were merely retiring for the evening, revealing the curve of his back, his fine legs, the dark thatch of hair that surrounded his arousal. Watson had seen Sherlock Holmes' naked body before, but always in contexts of fear or care, when his need to heal and help his friend had prevented him from fully enjoying his various beauties. Holmes was not a pretty man, not classically lovely, but something in the stark powerful lines of his lean body was more than beauty. In Holmes' case, the body reflected the man: driven, strange, superlative, tense as a violin string and sensitive as a song.
“On the bed,” he said breathlessly, and then when Holmes went to kneel down, holding on to the headboard, “not like that. I want to be able to see your face.”
This, a very detached part of Watson's brain informed him, was insane. It would change both of their lives utterly; it was quite too momentous of a decision to make cavalierly, without rational consideration. But Holmes was lying down on the bed, his eyes dark and heavy with trust and passion and arousal and the residual effects of his cocaine, and Watson simply could not bring himself to care about such things.
The one concession he allowed himself to make to sanity was to ask, as he began divesting himself of his braces, “Are you clean? If not, I can see about a sheepskin, or some other sort of prophylactic.”
It was the first Holmes had spoken, since he'd led Watson down into madness, and Watson was not at all prepared for the intensity of the reaction he had to the combination of Holmes' nakedness and the well-known timbre of his voice. “I am free of disease,” he said. “save the criminal condition of inversion, which conventional morality informs me to be a grave sickness. I customarily use such methods, to protect myself. With you, I do not think I shall need them.”
Overcome suddenly by a deep raging jealousy, remembering the squared-off shoulders of the man who had been with the detective previously, Watson demanded, “Did he take you so, Sherlock?”
“No, he wanted only – Watson, I do not know how to say these things, not to you – to engage in frottage with me.”
“And the cocaine? When did you take that?”
“Before – before I was with him. It was – necessary – it was -”
“Hush,” Watson said, calmer now. “Here. Lie back and let me - “
Bare now except for his pressed cotton shirt, he brushed his hands up and down Holmes' flanks, feeling the smoothness of his skin where it was unmarred, the roughened tissue where old wounds had long since healed. When he allowed his hands to wander lower, to touch the curve of Holmes' thigh, the ridge of his hipbone, Holmes threw back his head and moaned, his hips jerking upward spasmodically in barely-contained yearning.
Watson leaned down and kissed him, swallowing the sounds. All the while he continued touching Holmes, his hands desperate and rough and demanding. Leaving Holmes' now-reddened mouth, he pressed wet kisses down his neck, his throat, his shoulder, one of his nipples. First one of his lubricated fingers, and then two, left Holmes writhing and gasping on the mattress.
“Watson -” Holmes choked out, “please – I – oh,” and Watson took his hips in his hands, positioning him before carefully, almost gently, entering him. Holmes' eyes widened, and for a breathless moment both men were silent, feeling sensations that were beyond words. Then Watson gathered himself and thrust into that wet heat, nearly losing his mind with the pleasure of it.
Holmes was breathing heavily against Watson's chest, panting and writhing there in his arms, and a deep atavistic part of him thrilled to this absolute possession of his friend, this complete loss of individual self in a passionate whole: two souls, two bodies, one being and one heart.
Crying out inarticulately, Holmes fluttered and trembled in his petit mort, his mouth opened in a soundless sigh, eyes closed, brows knit together with the intensity of the peak. He looked at that moment as if he'd been carved of alabaster, his sallow cheeks flushed with sensation, his entire aspect redolent of a peace that Watson had never before seen there. The ecstatic tremors running through the body pressed so intimately against his own drove him over the edge of orgasm, and he fell out of awareness, down into an electric burst of heat, light, and sound.
When he returned to himself, Holmes lay beside him asleep. His breathing was soft and slow, and he looked like nothing so much as a thoroughly debauched angel. It was more than he could bear.
His mind turned in turmoil like a boat swamped by heavy seas: what he had just done? How had he compromised himself? And Holmes? He had gone to the West End, he now recognized, to escape from his friend's inexorable orbit. By chance, by the slightest coincidence, he found himself more entrapped than ever. It was frankly terrifying. He had not been prepared for the intensity of his feelings, for the absolute nature of his desire and passion and need. He had been overwhelmed, had been absolutely drunk on Holmes' body, the sound of his imperious voice, the brushed silk slide of his skin.
Stuttering, he fell back to the irreducible reality: Holmes had been working as a whore, and he'd taken use of him in that position. It had been the most sublime experience of his life; it had been utterly monstrous. And suddenly he found that he could not bear it, could not bear the worry and the guilt and the deep feeling of uncleanliness that was beginning to pervade his heart. Holmes lay beside him, beautiful and quiescent. It was the very definition of unbearable, and Watson found himself struggling against a powerful current of panicked claustrophobia.
Feeling like a thief in the night, Watson extricated himself from the tangle of Holmes' sleep-heavy limbs, standing beside the bed on unsteady feet. He re-clothed himself with as little noise as he could manage to produce, and left the room. Holmes did not wake, or even stir.
Watson never could remember how he made his way home that night. It was quite indecently late – late to the point of being, in truth, early. He resolutely did not consider Holmes, left behind in that disreputable district to wake or sleep as he would, alone. Exhausted by physical activity, by the intensity of the night and by the dramatic implications it bore, Watson returned to Baker Street practically asleep on his feet, and falling into his familiar bed he slept the rest of the night without dreams.
He did not hear Holmes come in, but in when he rose in the morning he found him perched on the sofa in the sitting room. His legs were drawn up to his chest, a cup of tea cooling on the bookcase beside him, and his violin was held loosely in one of his long-fingered hands. These trembled ever so slightly, so slightly as to be almost imperceptible to human sight. He was not dressed, but neither was he particularly disheveled. He looked as ordinary as it was possible for a man to look, who had sodded his best friend in an anonymous brothel the night before.
"Good morning, Watson," he said, dropping his eyes quickly away.
Watson could have played along with Holmes' farce, could have welcomed the new morning in equally bathetic and conventional language; could, in short, have left the events of the past night to dissipate like so many nameless ghosts. He did not know why he did not. But his confused anxiety, his sense of imbalance and instability, rose in his throat and turned to heat.
“You're an abject fool,” he said instead. “Why, for the love of God, put yourself at such a terrible risk? To offer your own body up for sale? Holmes, it's insane! You have wealth enough to purchase a catamite, if that's what you want – after last night's actions, I can scarcely speak to you of the legality of the practice. But to go into such a place as a vendor! To allow men of all kinds unfettered access to your person – it borders on suicide.”
During this speech, Holmes had progressively lost his hold on his prosy facade; his complexion had paled, and the resolutely cheerful cast of his features melted into weariness, anxiety, and what might have been hope. “I had not thought you'd wish to speak of the matter, my dear,” he said.
“I see very little value in hiding from a known reality. I'm amazed that you'd be willing to tolerate such a fabrication.”
He could practically see Holmes' mind parsing, interpreting, constructing truths out of an ill-patched cloth. “You did not know, then,” he said slowly, “that I would be there? It was nothing more than coincidence? I confess that I am surprised: not at the coincidence, which has the same appallingly humorous nature that so often characterizes cases such as these, but that you should have acted upon a homosexual urge. It's most unlike you; in the time that I have known you, you have never before responded to such feelings.”
Watson laughed joylessly. “Of course you knew what I am. You've known all along, and said nothing.”
“There ought to be very little mystery in that,” said Holmes, his face grim, set, hard. “Having discovered that you found it equally easy to love women and men alike – that is, that you were not such an utter and irredeemable mandrake as myself – I was determined to let you have the happy normalcy that you seemed capable of supporting.”
He paused, and then raised an arched and sardonic brow. “Inversion is neither so holy nor so legal that I would wish any man not already forced to do so to share its confines with myself.”
“And yet,” Watson countered, trying to couch his vehemence in logic and failing utterly, voice slowly rising from a reasonable level into something more resembling a shout, “I think it not so much to say that such practices are only truly hellish when you sell your favors on the street like a common whore, with no sense as to the danger to yourself!”
“I cannot think,” Holmes said, frosty, aloof, controlled, “being that you are neither my father nor my wife, why you would presume to have any authority to -”
“Because if I do not, who will?”
“It is not as if,” he fired off with a sideways look, “you did not participate in last night's debauchery every bit as much as I. It is not as if you, also, did not seek that place out. Certainly, your anatomy was more actively involved in sodomy than was my own, which feat I fancy you scarcely could have managed had it not been to your liking. How long have you suppressed desire for me? How long have you lied to us both, merely to preserve the semblance of a respectability you've never had?”
The cold rationality with which he spoke of it - debauchery - hit Watson like a blow. Pained himself, he bit back with all the power he could muster: “As true as that may be, at least I was the buyer and not the bought! I retained the power of rational choice in the matter. I could, for instance, have chosen to leave you there, when I recognized you. I'm beginning to wish that I had.”
“John! - ” Holmes cried, strained, desperate. His hands were clenched around the arm of the sofa, knuckles white, sinews extended. “I've never had any choice.It is because I could not have you,” he continued, as though the words had been dragged from his tongue with a hook. “It's you that I want, my dear. But you I cannot have, and so I have tried to stop myself from wishing.”
The revelation might have rocked Watson to the core, had it not been presaged by both such shocking risk and such shocking intimacy. Now, it merely twisted his heart and fed his anger. “If you mean to say,” Watson said with the quiet of a battlefield before the first blast of powder is ignited, “that loving me has forced you into depravity and degradation, I really must question the nature of your feelings. Destroying yourself is a poor way to serve me. If you cannot want me and remain whole, it would be better for your feelings to die than for you yourself to do so.”
It ought to have been a romantic speech: the first iteration of the eleusinian word “love,” the overwhelming force of Watson's concern for his friend's welfare. But it was not. Watson's voice carried more aggression than he had intended. He inwardly winced as each word fell, harsh and accusatory and leaden, into the customarily quiet atmosphere of morning at Baker Street.
Holmes' face drained to the lips, but the bloodlessness seemed to strengthen rather than to enervate him, as if his veins being emptied of life had been re-filled with molten steel. His shoulders straightened, his lips thinned. “I am very sorry to hear that you think so, old boy – for I cannot, I find, agree with your low valuation of my regard for you. I fear that I weigh it rather more heavily, more heavily than any other part of my being. You speak of my survival without that feeling as though it were possible, when I could more readily believe in the wildest phantasmagoria than I could conceive of myself continuing to exist and not being in love with you.”
He stood gracefully, crossing to the still-curtained window. His shoulders and back were set in inflexible lines of pride. “You asked me,” he said magisterially, “why I did not simply purchase myself a whore, and save myself the trouble of becoming one. In fact, I believe the term you used was catamite, and in that word you may find your answer: I have no desire for a catamite. I do not wish to be - serviced - by some pretty child who has no real inclination towards me, but merely obeys.”
Holding up a hand to forestall Watson's objection, which he had somehow perceived even with his back turned, he said, “Little more do I want the kind of liaison which might be found with a social equal in such a house. Pleasure purchased with money is dependent upon the whim of the purchaser, and I do not want such pleasure. Better to be taken by paying men, to seek to please them, than to receive the obsequiousness of a bought partner. Irrational it may be, senseless to the point of literal criminality, but there it is.”
Watson protested, “But the danger to yourself – of abuse, of contagion – surely those risks are not worth -”
Holmes rounded on him, fierce as a bird of prey, his eyes radiant as cooling coals. “Do you have any idea,” he said, “what it's been for me to live with you, to spend each day beside you, to love you as I do and to say nothing? I have been the Tantalus to your clear water,” he cried, voice cracking under the weight of emotion with which he invested it. “Compared to that, of what import risk? And now – now that I know you to be willing to lie with me, at least, if not to love me – it is many hundreds of times worse.”
He looked squarely at Watson, as open-faced as his friend had ever seen him, his expression speaking of absolute honesty shot through with almost total despair. “Having you, I should need nothing else,” he said. “Not having you, there is nothing else worth having. I gave you the plain truth when I said that I had no choice. I am what I am, Watson, comprehensible to you or not. As our two conclusions are so clearly unresolvable, I shall leave you to contemplate their paradox. I find that I cannot bring myself to care.”
He crossed the room in four steps, shoved a sleepy and phlegmatic Gladstone out of the way with his foot, and very nearly slammed to door of his private room shut behind him; a moment later he re-emerged, silently snatched up his violin from where it had remained reclining on the sofa, and retreated again. Watson clearly heard the key turn in his lock, and then all was still.
No coherent music emerged from Holmes' room that afternoon, only pizzicato chromatics and occasional perturbed fragments of Grieg's newer Vals, clumsily transposed out of its native instrumentation. The jarring notes communicated to Watson a sense of deepest misery, as well as a sort of rootless chaos.
He himself tried to work, and then to read, but found all occupations equally nonabsorbent. At last, unable to bear the aching discontent of the sounds, he put on his hat and coat and fled the scene, striking out into the overcast afternoon in search of the populated warmth of a public house – in search of corporeality, sustenance, some sign that the world continued to rotate on its axis.
As he made his lonely way through the crowded street, Watson was pursued by the nagging realization that Holmes had not eaten anything all day, and that unless the pitcher in his room was filled he'd likely had no drink either. The idea nipped at his heels like a dog, and when he sat down to his own supper the food turned to ash in his mouth.
Despite this, when he at last returned to Baker Street as the evening gathered in, he was somewhat refreshed: his heart and mind were quieter, and his nerves were no longer quite so unbearably sensitized has they had been.
Mrs. Hudson met him at the door. “Mr. Holmes wouldn't take any dinner, Doctor, and he did look terribly worn when I took up his tea. Is everything all right?”
“If it is not, I will surely see that it becomes so,” he reassured her; he meant every word of it, for he not only felt up to the task of managing Sherlock Holmes, but was also impressed with the idea that if he did not do so, he stood to lose something very important.
All of the various reasons he'd held to, before, all of the risk evaluations and rationalizations, were suddenly meaningless, turned to so much dust and ash in the face of the potent heat he'd felt in Holmes' arms. As his shock had cleared, so too had his various misperceptions: nothing else, in truth, mattered except for that connection. He did not care a fig for the law, or for propriety, or for pride.
He took the stairs nimbly enough, and entered to find that Holmes' door was shut, that there was tea cooling in a china cup on the table, and that nothing else had perceptibly changed since he'd left. He nevertheless received the strong impression that Holmes had spent the afternoon wandering the full confines of the apartment, and had bolted back to isolated safety when he heard Watson's step on the seventeen stairs. The space of seventeen stairs was more than enough time to allow Sherlock Holmes to erase his presence; the man was nothing if not excellently good at hiding.
It was an apt enough way of putting it, Watson reflected. Holmes had hidden from him. He had hidden himself away so masterfully that Watson still could not entirely reconcile the image of sexual decadence Holmes had made the night before with the commonplace reality of their life together – but the frisson between those two conceptualizations of the man, instead of disturbing him, fascinated him utterly. He wanted above all things to discover the ligatures which bound the two personas together, to be able to examine at leisure the interaction of them in forming his friend's existence.
He'd expected on seeing the closed and doubtless locked door to have to drag Holmes out of his sanctuary kicking and protesting. But the detective surprised him by emerging of his own will not long after he'd made his entrance. He stood dark and saturnine in the doorway, his face both calm and cold. “Good evening, Watson,” he said suavely. “Shall I warm you some tea? I've been watching the fog roll in over the last hour or so, and it can not but have chilled you.”
Watson did not budge as Holmes swept by him to put the kettle back on the hob. “Holmes,” he said, “you implied this morning that, if you were my lover, you would not be driven to seek other masculine company – in a sexual sense, that is.” He felt damnably awkward, but soldiered on. He could see no other way. “Did you – was it only the passionate nature of the quarrel we were engaged in that drove you to say that, or does it still remain true?”
“The truth,” Holmes said hoarsely, not looking at him. “Nothing more or less than the absolute truth.”
The rough confession sent a warm rush coursing through him. Watson's first impulse was to cross the room to Holmes, take him into his arms, and kiss him thoroughly, to steal away his detachment and to run disordering possessive fingers through his neat dark hair. But he restrained himself. He'd already made such a gesture of spontaneous physical passion, and had in doing so failed to communicate in any way the solidity of his own feelings toward his friend. It had been a chemical reaction, and as so many reactions did when in the proximity of Holmes, it had quite exploded, leaving them both metaphorically shaky and soot-covered.
For a moment they stood suspended, the tall severe man brittle and cold supporting himself against the mantle, the stocky fair one standing in uncertainty beside the door. Holmes' famous opposition to sentiment constrained Watson's tongue: how could he talk of love to Sherlock Holmes? The situation was so very delicate, the bond of their companionship already frayed by inopportune silences and ill-weighed words.
Stepping to Holmes' side, taking his long-fingered hand in his own, he said softly, “I am glad, Holmes, to hear you say plainly that you love me, though 'by my troth, it is no addition to your wit, nor no great argument of your folly, for I will be horribly in love with you' – that is, if you will have me.”
It was as if some unseen hand had cut through the strings that were unseen supporting Holmes' tall frame. Watson caught him as he curled forward as if in a faint, helping him to a chair. Back bent harshly, Holmes buried his face in shaking hands. “I did not want to lose you, you see,” he said at last, voice muffled. “I needed you to still be here, and I could not be sure that you would not wish to put as much space between yourself and me as possible, if you knew in what ways I looked at and thought of you.”
Kneeling at his feet, Watson reached up to caress Holmes' face, at last indulging his wish to stroke and tousle his birdwing-soft hair. “I would have done the same,” he said, looking up into that beloved hawk-featured face. “Do not think that I could abide the loss any more than you could, my dear. You mean a great deal to me.”
“You are quite sure?” Holmes said, brow wrinkled in anxiety. “I am not an easy person to love, Watson. I am peculiar and ill-tempered and cynical, and it is far too easy for me to fall into being cruel. Have you truly considered what it will mean, not only for you to remove yourself from acceptable society, but to give your heart into the keeping of such a despicable fool as I can be?”
“You tell me nothing that I don't already know. I've lived with you this long. I suspect I've seen your worst, or near enough as is no difference. You have not yet driven me from your side, Holmes.”
It was a strange angle at which to kiss, though in Watson's opinion not an unpleasurable one. And there was a permanence, a reality, to it which he found almost more erotic than the fevered sensuality of the kisses they had exchanged in the bordello. There was no doubt as to the fact that John Watson was kissing Sherlock Holmes quite passionately, having dragged him from his chair down onto the hearthrug of their shared quarters, and that Sherlock Holmes was responding in kind, pressing the length of his body so closely against Watson that he seemed to be trying to climb inside of him.
“Watson,” Holmes panted, “Watson, please, this is scarcely the place for this,” and then he bit Watson's earlobe, the tip of his nose pressing against the sensitive skin at Watson's temple, and Watson found that he quite agreed with him.
Together they tumbled rather gracelessly down into Holmes' bed, Watson having first hastily kicked half-a-dozen papers and a tin of rosin off of the coverlet. He slipped Holmes' braces loose from his shoulders and then started on the buttons of his loose, rather wrinkled linen shirt. The fabric was soft against his fingers, but not nearly so soft as the pale skin beneath it.
“Yours too, Watson,” Holmes said, sounding impossibly suave for a man so nearly out of breath. He hesitated, and Holmes with a wry twist of his voluble mouth and that rather blinding insight that so often seemed to be somehow more than natural, said to him, “It is quite absurd, dear, for you to be shy about the scar. For the first: I have already seen it. For the second: you surpass me in total loveliness as much as the goldfinch does the gore-crow. And for a third: you know quite well that I am absolutely besotted with you, and it is thus highly unlikely that I should bar you from my bed, having once got you here, because of a few traces of old wounds long healed.”
“This,” Watson said, pulling off his shirt and proceeding to pin Holmes to the mattress, “is why I refused to let you speak the last time. You are possessed of entirely too many words.”
Holmes' eyes flickered dark at the positioning of their bodies, but he managed to hold his voice urbane and steady as he said, “Stop my mouth, then,” in such a way that it was very nearly a dare.
“I should rather you stop mine,” Watson said, and was gratified by the rush of hectic color that suffused Holmes' sallow face in response. “Let me please you,” he whispered into Holmes' ear, and was rewarded with a shudder, a moan, and the slight of Holmes' long dark lashes fluttering closed in erotic anticipation.
He took Holmes' length into his mouth, and was gratified to find that he had not entirely lost the skill through disuse as Holmes shouted and grasped at his hair. He did not last long, despite his usually iron control; Watson could not help but smile internally at that, well pleased by the compliment to his prowess. Later, after they had both recovered somewhat from that spectacular exertion, Holmes spent quite some time engaged in a thorough and systematic investigation of Watson's every erogenous response, murmuring categorizations under his breath as he made use of his dexterous hands and clever tongue. Through such touch alone he succeeded in bringing Watson to the peak of glory more than once, and the entire exercise left them both highly sensitive and quite out of breath.
Their love-making outlasted the afternoon, wandering languidly into the early hours of the night.
At last, worn out and satiated, almost purring with sensual satisfaction, Holmes dropped his dark head against Watson's shoulder. He sighed softly and closed his eyes, sleepy and trusting. Watson's fingers were idly carding through his disarranged hair. “Can I ask you a question?” he said, and Holmes hummed his assent against his ribs. “How did you come to be at the brothel? I understand something of why, now, but very little of how.”
“Simple, dear fellow,” Holmes said drowsily, with the trace of a laugh hanging about his voice. “I am not the usual sort employed in such business, but a few coins in the hand of the proprietor, and the assurance of my protection for his establishment gained me entrance. I was not engaged there long,” he said, peering up earnestly. “And I suffered no hardship, save for a quiet sort of misery that the men touching me were not you. I was lucky, and careful as well.”
“You needn't justify yourself to me, dear fellow. If you were rash, I was blind. There's enough blame to go around.”
“I do not think I can find any culpability to be had,” Holmes said softly, “in an affair with such a perfect outcome as this. Any different choice might not have led us here; therefore, I must call those that we made good ones, or risk the loss of that which I've gained through them.”
They were silent for a moment, Watson seemingly lost in thought. Then he raised his head, saying, “I do not think, Holmes, that you have eaten enough today. I upset you greatly this morning, and I am heartily sorry for it. I am sure that, during the time when I was out, you did not treat yourself well. Abstention at the very least, and restless nervous excitation, and very possibly morphia to boot. Will you let me take care of you now? Some food, and maybe a hot bath?”
Holmes' face was filled with a deep, inchoate longing, a longing that was somehow akin to contentment. It was, strangely enough, the happiest Watson had ever seen him. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I think I could do that. Yes.” And he rose from the bed, wrapping his dressing gown around himself, and followed Watson out into their rooms, where Watson had gone ahead of him to light the lamps.