Author's Notes: This fic starts where Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" (canon: DYIN) ended. The discussion about breeding oysters refers to this line: "... Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem. Ah, I am wandering! Strange how the brain controls the brain! What was I saying, Watson?"
The story is AU in regards to Mary Morstan whom Watson had already married in 1890 in ACD canon.
Oyster Under the Looking Glass
It's a funny thing how seeing a friend and long-time companion in the throes of a deadly disease (even if the disease turns out to be of his own design and deception) allows one to look at the man with different eyes. We had shared a flat for many years, we've had breakfast together many times. And yet I've never been so relieved to see Sherlock Holmes alive as when I stepped by Baker Street the morning after the arrest of Culverton Smith.
He stood from the small rosewood table at the window, a tall man bordering on forty. His face was even thinner than usual, and the three day fast was discernable in his bearing that still bore the marks of an invalid. But the light in his keen, expressive eyes had returned, and he greeted me with a wry smile.
I had spent the night tossing and turning, poised between wakefulness and nightmares of Holmes fighting that final enemy which not even he could defeat. Now, seeing him in the light of day, I could not stop myself from taking him by the shoulders and enfolding him in my arms. It was an unusual display of affection for we had never been overly physical with each other. So when I felt Holmes stiffen, I retreated immediately and settled myself on my usual chair. He watched me then, curiously, and stood for long moments before he also took his seat.
I read out the Times headlines to him, all dedicated to the monstrous murderer of Victor Savage. He pointed out to me a small advert in the Classified section that would lead to a case I have recounted someplace else, as the Adventure of the Unlucky Horseshoe.
Life seemed to continue in its usual paths and yet, following his charade posing as a dying detective, there was a change in Sherlock Holmes. My spontaneous embrace and his reaction had been but the first harbinger of it. During the next days I would catch him at odd moments – moments that before he had spent observing an item ostensibly plain and ordinary, or contemplating some unfathomable mystery. But now, such moments were dedicated to the observation, and – it seemed to me, the contemplation – of none other than... myself.
His attention made me highly uncomfortable – his piercing gaze felt like the softest touch on my skin. And in the rare (yet not so rare anymore) instances when he would actually touch me – linking arms during our walks, or laying his hand on my shoulder when we studied a letter or book – his touch would feel in equal parts like a comforting warmth and a sharp tingling that even I – a life-long admirer of the fairer sex – could not mistake for the thrill of mere friendship or a student's admiration for his beloved master.
After a fortnight of unacknowledged stares and hardly casual touches, I could not stand it anymore. I wanted Sherlock Holmes back, the inapproachable mammoth of cold reason. And yet, I wanted him, this new friend whose eyes lit up with such joy whenever they fell on me, and whose voice acquired a deep-felt warmth I had only ever heard from Holmes when he spoke about things in the most abstract – the wonder that was the city of London, the human potential for goodness, classical music played in exquisite perfection. I could not believe I was addressed in such a tone and yet I longed for it.
It was a Friday, the day that according to Holmes saw the highest number of crimes in the whole of the week. Inspector Morton had given Holmes a sulphur-soaked puzzle to work on, and after breakfast he barricaded himself behind his armoury of test tubes and vials. I had planned to spend the day at the club where I had arrangements made to have a rare medical journal delivered for reading. But something made me linger in Baker Street with another cup of coffee and the back sections of the newspaper.
For a while I heard the clinking of glass; the room slowly filled with the faint, bitter odour of chemicals. Then came a long period of silence from the workbench. Wood screeched on the parquet flooring – Holmes had moved his chair. The metallic snap of a switch – Holmes had turned off the Bunsen burner he used to heat whatever concoction he was brewing. A soft sigh – and I just had to lower the newspaper and glance over to him.
He was staring at me as he had so often during those last weeks. A soft smile graced his mouth. It is a testament to the strain Holmes' odd behaviour took on me that my own glance dropped to his pink lips rather than confront him eye to eye.
From where I sat I could see his left hand, tapping a slow tattoo onto the wooden surface of the workbench. I found myself reacting to the toneless rhythm as well as the sight of those pale long fingers, and that was when I finally broke down.
I dropped the paper with more force than necessary, and Holmes startled at the clatter of the tableware.
"Why oysters?" I demanded.
I had asked myself this very question during more sleepless hours than I care to admit. Now I was determined to get an answer out of the mystery that was Sherlock Holmes.
He blinked and seemed to come out of an entirely different train of thought (not surprisingly). "I beg your pardon?"
"Why oysters? Why, if you wished to present some random delirious thought, did you chose oysters? Breeding ones, at that."
It was the one time in our lifelong partnership that I saw Holmes blush. The faint natural colour suited him, I couldn't help but note, much more so than the sickly rouge of his deceptive guise as a dying detective not that long ago.
"First thought that came to mind," he mumbled. And Sherlock Holmes never mumbled. His speech was the epitome of distinct pronunciation of His Majesty's British. But on this Friday morning Holmes blushed and he mumbled. I knew right then that things between us had changed irrevocably.
"An odd thought to cross your mind, wouldn't you say?" I remarked.
Holmes' mouth twitched but the blush on his cheeks only intensified. "The brain is a mysterious place."
"The brain?" If he thought I'd let him off the hook that easily, he was mistaken. "Oysters, breeding, the bottom of the ocean, Holmes. One does not need a consultation with the fashionable Doctor Freud from Vienna to notice a theme. All these are signifying the erotic, even the feminine. I cannot imagine this is your brain speaking." I did not normally use such frank language with him. But I was a doctor and it is a doctor's job to be frank sometimes, even when it is he himself that the symptoms at hand are concerned with.
If Holmes was shocked it did not register on his face. There still was colour to his cheeks when he got up – a touch too fast perhaps – and crossed the room to sit opposite of me at the table. Our feet immediately touched, both of us still in our slippers, and for once we did not move apart with muttered apologies. Holmes poured himself another cup of coffee – the third if I was not mistaken – but whether his hands shook, I did not see.
"Not the feminine, I'm afraid," he said.
It struck me then that some deeply hidden part of this formidable man regretted that he could not be the female counterpart he thought I wished for. How little Sherlock Holmes knew of the affairs of the heart!
I realised, of course, what he was offering – I was a doctor, an army doctor at that, and not much of humanity is unknown to the medical man. And yet, Holmes was still unsure, not of his own desires, but whether they were reciprocated. I refrained from rolling my eyes but barely, and only because you simply did not roll your eyes at Sherlock Holmes. And yes, these things were not discussed amongst gentlemen. But I would have thought that all of my touches and looks were easily deciphered by a mind as keen as his. That a man like Holmes may need something as simple as reassurance touched me deeply.
Something of what I was feeling must have transpired, for Holmes mustered me closely, and finally laid his arm across the table, palm facing up. I did not hesitate to take his hand. Below the table I slid out of my right slipper and let my socked foot slide up Holmes' leg, burrowing underneath the folds of his dressing gown and in between his thighs. I am not usually a man who plays such daring games of seduction. But something in Holmes' demeanour – forbidding and full of longing at once – made me throw caution in the wind and follow my baser instincts.
A twitch of his lips was all the reaction I got. Perhaps (but I could not be sure) a slight stiffening of posture, a fleeting squint of the eye – nothing more. The cup in his hand did not tremble when he brought it to his mouth, nor did he return it to the saucer with a clatter of nervousness. I was rubbing the sole of my foot against his groin, stroking him slowly. He was soft and warm and smaller than I imagined. Not that I had done much imagining. You simply do not imagine such things about Sherlock Holmes. But I cannot deny that my own blood rushed South at the thought of touching him there with more than just a socked foot and feel him grow hard underneath my hands and tongue.
We sat like this for a while, the circling movements of my foot so small that nobody could have detected them without looking underneath the table. Holmes leaned forward a bit and extracted his hand from where we still held each other. He brought it to my foot between his thighs, touching and massaging each single toe with utmost precision and care. I was wearing a black pair of socks, and the vision of pale fingers caressing black wool sprang into my mind, unasked for and with a sensual power I hardly expected.
I gasped quite against my will. Holmes laughed out loud, free and a bit breezy but not from (feigned) pain or (self-induced) exhaustion. He quickly pressed himself against my foot, a deliberate grinding of his hips, deliberately sexual, too, and I could feel how hard he had got.
I retreated at the same moment that Holmes gently pushed my foot onto the floor. We grinned at each other. I found my right slipper on the carpet, and Holmes passed me Mrs Hudson's home-made marmalade. Picking up the paper, I made a mental note to read up on foot fetishes.
A little later Holmes suggested a walk to the Strand, and I gave up all my plans of catching up on medical reading in the club and accompanied him. That night we each retired to our own bedroom but I had had the first taste of Holmes' lips, and he of mine. As I went up the stairs I heard him hum softly in the bathroom. Of my dreams that night I remember only my old army colt and the wide blue sea.
- fin -