Title: The Willow in the Bathroom, prompt 35-willow tree, Timothy Speedle/Horatio Caine, FRT
Title: The Willow in the Bathroom
Fandom: CSI Miami
Characters: Timothy Speedle/Horatio Caine
Prompt: 35 - underneath the willow tree
Word Count: 455
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: Not making any money here. The only thing I own is the creative muse.
Warning: Some slight implications of slash. If that kinda thing squiks you out then don't read this any further.
Author's Notes: Simple things mean a lot.
Speed wasn’t much of an art critic; he knew what he liked and there were one or two pieces of work he’d seen over the years that either fired his imagination or tugged at his heart in some way. He quite liked some modern photography; those dramatic moments in life, captured for all eternity by the all-seeing lens and the all-knowing eye, but art really wasn’t his thing.
Yet there was a simple little image on the wall of Horatio’s bathroom of all places, which he could almost step into and become a part of, and it wasn’t even art in the traditional sense of the word. It was a transfer of some kind, set on a ceramic tile. He could touch it; feel the plasticized surface that made up a myriad of simple lines to form the gentle sweeping curves of a willow tree dipping its branches over a river bank.
Someone had clearly spent a considerable amount of time customizing and crafting the minutely detailed scene that was reflected back in the mirrored door on the bathroom cabinet, and from there against the frosted glass of the window. When the room was steamy from the shower, or a little too much hot water in the sink, it seemed almost as though the tree were swaying with the ripple of that river flowing beside it.
Horatio caught him staring at the image one day, and he smiled to himself. When he’d been buying the house, the last owner had taken great pains to show him the willow tree tile in the bathroom; as the owner before that had done, and the owner before that.
He’d not thought much of it himself at first. It was just a picture rubbed on a tile and sealed with a heat gun, but gradually it had become a familiar, almost comforting kind of thing, a spot of quiet, serene beauty when his mind refused to be still and his head was filled with endless cruel images from days spent at crime scenes amidst bloody, often violent death and the inhumanity of man.
It was good to step inside, to sit for a while beneath the willow dappled shade and dip his feet in the water. It was good to just find a little inner peace when the rest of the world was going to hell, and to see Speed as captivated by it as he was himself, made him oddly happy.
Once more he congratulated himself for not removing that singular tile when he redecorated, and he swore that special little image would remain for as long as he could sit on the riverbank next to his beloved Tim and watch the sunlight dance through the willow tree. Challenge Chart