Fiction: The Great Wave
Title: The Great Wave
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: John/Sherlock
Warnings: None
Word Count: 221
Summary: A story written in the 221b format: 221 words, the last word beginning with the letter "b". Inspired by the color woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai known as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1831 approx).*
The Great Wave
The wave was majestic and powerful, nuanced and sublime, a rolling, shifting arc. Upon its surface swam countless tiny iterations of its own frothy form, looking like the fingers of children curled against the pale cheek of sky. These, too, were covered in smaller waves, and on those waves rode others, smaller still. The pattern was too deep, too restless to stop.
Often Sherlock felt that he was the wave, the product of some seismic shift, able to level any barrier by the strength of his will, by the force of his intellect. Other times he felt more like an observer, silent and detached, a lone mountain overlooking a seaside town, watching the wave as it moved from open ocean and into the shallows, where, finally gripping the seafloor, it compressed, rose higher, smashing all boats caught in its path. No malice. No pity. The wave was nature, dispassionate but alive with fearsome symmetry. The mountain, a dormant volcano itself, could appreciate that.
In John, Sherlock saw the wave again, the beautiful rhythm, the surging power, its pulse echoed by his own shivering skin, his own stuttering breath. Undulation upon undulation, the wave built to an astounding height before slamming, thundering, collapsing into shore. This time Sherlock was neither wave nor mountain. This time he was a small and fragile boat.
-fin-
* This print depicts several manned fishing boats about to be clobbered by an enormous wave. Mt. Fuji looms passively in the background. The wave, whose large form is repeated in miniature over its surface, is reminiscent of Mendelbrot sets, equations (fractals) that produce increasingly smaller iterations of the main form that go on and on into microscopic infinity. As it turns out, Mendelbrot sets and other fractals are very useful in describing the kinds of complicated forms produced in nature.
Link to The Great Wave off Kanagawa. http://www.ee.umanitoba.ca/~kinsner/about/gwave.html