"My dear Watson."
All he can do is stand there, grinning like an idiot at the blushing woman on the other side of the kitchen hatch. She's so lovely like this, all peaches-and-cream and lovely hair and glowing skin, but it's her eyes that reach into his heart and grip.
He flashes back to a chilly night two years ago, watching her effortlessly command - and that she had been in command in that room, he has never doubted - the saving of a mother and two children. He remembers leaning against his old, battered car as the sun came up over Poplar, watching her turn to him, blushing, to ask for a cigarette, and for a moment the habit and veil had vanished and all he could see was a woman. A brilliant, lively, utterly surprising woman, who had ensnared him body and soul without even knowing she was doing it.
He sees that woman gazing at him now, a blush colouring her lovely cheeks. It's so easy to forget her genius, now that she's a mother and housewife and medical secretary - and yet it is impossible, too, because the brilliant midwife, the accomplished nurse, the medical professional is still there, in the midnight conversations about cases, in her instant comprehension of why he might be out all night, in the way her pointed, astonishingly insightful comments can grant him a blinding clarity that is missing whenever he cannot bounce his theories off someone who can truly follow him.
This is the woman he married, and this is why he married her - because genius might take a step back, might choose to remain quiet, for reasons of its own - but it never leaves, informing action and shaping character in irretrievable ways. It is her ever-fixed mark as much as her love for him and his for her, the one thing that will never change whether she is an active midwife or loving mother or - perhaps someday - both at once.
Holmes and Watson, he thinks dizzily, and a fragment of prose comes back to him from long ago.
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
If she is not luminous now, he thinks, it is only because she has chosen not to be, has chosen to be his conductor of light instead - and the pleasure in her eyes tells him why without question or regret.
"My dear Watson," he says again, a wealth of meaning in the words, and crosses to her there in the kitchen, takes her face in his hands and kisses her without ceremony.
"You are brilliant," he murmurs against her mouth, and feels her knees go unsteady beneath her. The curl of his arm around her waist is instinctive, and he feels those small, delicate, competent hands curl in his hair as he sweeps her off her feet.
She pulls her lips from his to look at him, breathless with pleasure. "Take me to bed," she says, her voice rough like she'd just stolen a puff or three of his Henleys, and he can only bury his face in her shoulder and grope blindly for the staircase.
By the time they re-emerge, the sky is flaming sunset.
