Song and DANC
DISCLAIMER: I do not have any rights to the Sherlock Holmes stories, obviously—the creatorship belongs to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
KS: This was inspired by Monty Twain's little fic "Humming to Ourselves". It's an expansion of a paragraph from DANC, which you undoubtedly will recognise intermingled with my own writing. It's just a little ficlet. It isn't, of course, what really happened…no, it's more of a…what could have been. XDD
Enjoy.
Sherlock Holmes preserved his calm professional manner until our visitor had left us, although it was easy for me, who knew him so well, to see that he was profoundly excited. The moment that Hilton Cubitt had left us, my friend rushed to the table and laid out all of the slips of paper containing dancing men before him, and threw himself into an intricate and elaborate calculation.
I could tell by the intensity of his sharp features that he would desire silence, and so I took up my notebook and observed him from a distance. For two hours I watched as he covered sheet after sheet of paper with figures and letters. So completely absorbed in his task was he that he had evidently forgotten my presence. This was nothing new—he had powers of concentration as I had never seen before, especially in those pieces of work that he found especially congenial to his problem-loving nature.
Sometimes he was puzzled as he tried to decipher these strange figures, and would sit for long spells with a furrowed brow and a vacant eye. When he was progressing at a good pace, he would sometimes whistle or sing.
Sherlock Holmes could carry a tune, but by far he was not the best singer in the world, especially when he was not concentrated on singing, but was doing it rather absentmindedly. The whistling was not so unbearable, but the singing was beginning to annoy me greatly. But so deeply focused was he in his work, I was loath to interrupt.
Finally, I reached a point where I thought I could take it no longer. I stood and went to the door of our sitting-room, intending on going up to my room until Holmes was finished. I turned the handle to open the door, and Holmes nearly jumped out of his seat. He turned to me quickly, a look of puzzlement on his face.
"Watson, where are you going?" he asked.
"I was just going up to my room," said I.
"Why? Aren't you going to wait and hear what I come up with?"
"I will hear from you later, I was just going to give you a little privacy for now."
"Oh, don't worry about that, Watson. You were perfectly silent—I wasn't even taking any notice of you."
I hesitated, not knowing what to say. I certainly didn't want to tell him that I wished to leave because of his preoccupied singing.
"What is it?" my companion asked after seeing my expression, raising an eyebrow in question.
"Well, Holmes…" I began reluctantly, "your singing was beginning to get on my nerves just slightly."
Holmes's face grew more perplexed.
"I have sung a few times before, and you never complained about it then."
"Well, you haven't done it so absentmindedly before." I explained, hoping I would not have to elaborate.
"Ah…I see."
I could tell that he was somewhat hurt by what I had said.
"You may go on to your room, Watson. I can continue without you."
He turned his chair back toward the desk and resumed his work.
"Holmes…" I started apologetically.
I could not think of what to say, and my friend seemed to be ignoring me.
"I was trying to be easy about it, Holmes. I was just going to leave and not say anything about it."
No reply.
"I don't even say anything about your violin-playing. I do try to be considerate."
As soon as I said it, I knew I had made a mistake. My friend stiffened in his chair, and then turned to me.
"What is wrong with my violin-playing?" he asked.
Never in all the years I had spent with my friend had I seen him look so wounded by words.
"Nothing is wrong with your violin-playing," I said quickly.
"You just implied there was."
"I…That's not what I meant. I was referring to when you scrape at it—when you think with it."
Another pause.
"I'm sorry, Holmes."
Holmes's thin lips were pressed into a line as he scrutinised me with his grey eyes, a stiffness to his manner that displayed a guarded demeanour. I could feel the tension in the air. Finally he turned once more to his desk and scribbled something down on a piece of paper.
"I believe I have it almost entirely deciphered." he said. "You may be useful if you wish to stay and take notes."
I smiled.
Returning to my seat, I took up my notebook, and allowed him to detail how he was breaking the code of the dancing men.
KS: I started this with the intent on making something funny, but it leaned away from that until it wasn't….XD
'Twas a random boredom sort of writing. And I edited it, tried to re-save the document...and the internet failed. So if you see any flow/grammatical errors, it's because I was too lazy/annoyed to go back and look for them again. XDD
But I hope you enjoyed anyway. Review, please!