Holmes/Watson: Painted Fire, PG
Title: Painted Fire
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,300
Summary: On the subject of muses, and the eloquence of Dr. John Watson's writing.
Notes: Title from a Mark Twain quote, "Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself." My first proper Holmes/Watson fic. I'm sorry that this is ridiculously cheesy but it wouldn't let go of me until I finished writing it. :')
Painted Fire
Your prose is romantic.
Holmes often tells you so, criticisms uttered with a glint in his eye and a fond edge to the curve of his lips. You agree with him, mostly, except that you don’t. You don’t agree with him because life is full of romance and that is something beyond what you are able to capture on paper. But you receive his criticisms with an acknowledging nod of your head anyway, because just as your writing cannot portray the true romance of life, you cannot tell him what you really think.
Yes, you suppose that your prose must seem romantic indeed, but the words that flit through your mind sometimes are far more romantic than those in the scripts that make their way to the public in the end. It is as if your mind is a stage and your thoughts are like dancers on nimble feet, spinning and turning, all coy smiles and alluring curls of soft hair. They elude you when you sit to write in tranquility, but they flirt with you otherwise. The world would gasp and twist away from you if they ever could dissect the thoughts that fly through your head whenever you so much as catch the dark colour of Holmes’ coat out of the corner of your eye, or hear the fluttering notes of his violin rouse you at three in the morning.
You cannot even bear to think about how taking walks with him transforms your perspective of your surroundings, as if every birdsong is a symphony and you can taste the sweet nectar of the flowers without being a bee; the shouts of vendors and the rattling of the hansoms on the cobblestones unite as a rhapsody, and even the dull shades of the London skyline are worth painstakingly crafted odes, just because his arm is in your arm and his steps are synchronised with your steps.
It is he who renders you into a poet in the privacy of your own head, he who makes you weak at the knees with admiration for his acute observations and affection for his Bohemian quirks. You make him into an automaton on paper only because you are putting too much effort into stopping the embarrassing poetry from leaking into the ink on the page.
He is not unaffected by emotion. Perhaps he is less subject to his feelings than the average human being, but he is not entirely cold. You might not have known this, once upon a time, but now you grow more certain of it each day, as he reveals more of himself to you. Every time he attempts to sabotage your new relationship, every time he asserts that they are his rooms and his dog as much as they are yours, every time he simply looks at you imploringly-- all these things are little revelations on their own, and they may irritate you occasionally, frequently even, but together their implication is staggering.
He cannot deny his regard for you. He even fails to hide it fully.
Yet you cannot gauge the depth of this regard, the boundaries of it. You are friends, and you share lodgings, have done so for seven years, almost eight. You are his companion and biographer. You save his life once in a while, and he returns the favour. You are the person he steals clothes from, the person who reminds him to eat and sleep and wash and who drags reality back into his life when he has forsaken it for months.
Soon you will cease to be some of those things.
It will be for your own good. You require a breath of fresh air. You need those bursts of metaphor and simile to stop overwhelming you because they will suffocate you someday if you let them continue. You sit there in the armchair across from his and suddenly you find yourself contemplating the slant of golden sunlight in the forest of his wild hair, his dark stubble forming the bare ghost of a moustache, the faint smell of the chemicals he’s been working with, reminiscent of sour tangerines, his expression of intense focus as he peruses the paper, dirt and soot underneath his fingernails and a grey plaster around one knuckle, a cut near his right elbow where his rolled-up shirtsleeves stop short.
You begin to compare his presence in the room to the sun itself, and even as you realise that lunacy is overtaking you, the words keep flooding your mind, magnifying all your senses a thousandfold. His hand brushes carelessly against yours when he hands you a letter and this fleeting moment of warmth almost scorches you to the bone.
And you can tolerate it no longer. It drives you mad wondering whether he will ever notice your constant observation of him.
You have no idea what had overcome you when you referred to Miss Adler as his muse, but you have been spending so much time analysing that epithet that it worries you at night. You turn that word over and over in your mind and on your tongue, tasting it until each letter has individual significance.
His muse.
Although a man, he is your muse, more so than she is his. This is a truth you hold close to your heart, a truth that makes you reach for your pen even though you know writing to be an inadequate act, a pathetic replacement for the acts that you truly wish to commit.
If you could, you would stay with him forever. But that would be the path to insanity.
Mary wants to see some of your notes. You may be able to show her some of the earlier ones, but the most recent ones are forbidden locales that even you dare not revisit. You call them scribbles because that’s what they are, feverish fancies composed by candlelight in the secrecy of your room when the latest case was but a distant daylight memory and you were far more concerned with and enamoured of the strange sweet serenades that were sounding from Holmes’ room.
You chose Mary, but perhaps there was never a choice because Holmes had never presented himself as a possibility. Perhaps Holmes could never be a possibility, not in this world where people give shameful names to the desires you harbour.
You love Mary. She is not your muse but that does not make her any less important to you. You are drawn to her because of her strength and her confidence. She is not vulnerable and timid just because she has been wounded and abandoned by love in the past. She is perfectly willing to love you despite being informed of the risks, despite the chance that she may be, in a sense, widowed for a second time.
You cannot help but admire her bravery.
You have never been wounded by love and yet you are so afraid. You endure your old leg wound and all it reminds you of daily, you sustain new injuries from pursuing criminals often, and all these you bear with ceaseless courage. But this, oh, this steals all your valour from you in a heartbeat and exchanges it for useless words that do not have the ability to escape your lips.
No matter you will be sleeping in a new home tonight. Right now you are walking up the stairs at Baker Street 221b, having just caught Gladstone and seen Mary off, telling her that you have forgotten something with Holmes.
You are going to put those words to use, for once.
Clarkie passes you, on his way out, and nods politely at you. His kind smile soothes your nerves, if only a little, and you are glad.
You reach the top of the stairs and stand at the open door to the sitting room. Holmes is still at the window, outlined against the light. “Back again, Watson?” he asks, without turning around, surely having heard your distinctive footfalls on the stairs and counted them accurately without confusing them with the constable’s.
You had discussed the issue of Gladstone with him already, but you cannot remember what that discussion came to, in the end. In all likelihood it had dissolved in another futile argument. “I was just bringing Gladstone back.”
“My dog now, is he?” Holmes’ voice is pitched high, and you can hear the obvious accusation there. The guilt it causes you resembles the twinge that often plagues you when you have been abusing your leg too much, except it’s a pain buried in your chest, trapped inside your ribcage, like a small animal clawing its way out of you. You curse yourself for having pushed this aside for so long, that this has to happen now rather than months before when Mary Morstan was yet unknown to you.
“I still don’t trust you with him, you know,” you say, closing the door behind you, then putting Gladstone down on the floor carefully, where he scampers off to vanish under a table.
“Then you should keep him,” Holmes says, and you sigh, because of course he is right. You cannot see his face yet, but his profile is miserable and slightly hunched.
“Holmes,” you begin, and do not know how to finish, for there are too many words, and none of them will ever suffice. You wait for him to look at you, but he never does. Perhaps it would be best for you to say your farewell and leave, and the next time you see each other would be your wedding day, and by then it would be too late.
You cannot allow it.
You walk over to him. The strides you take to get there are the equivalent of crossing the Pacific, but you are there and he is there and your existence suddenly spirals down into the confines of this room. A dog whines, from somewhere far away. Your dog. His dog. They are the same thing.
You put your hand on his shoulder and savour the rough texture of the fabric under your palm, and he tilts his head. You can see half of his face. Here, right now and always, he is your muse. Certainly the Greek Calliope cannot be as beautiful as he, nor half as inspiring. So you latch onto this inspiration and you start to speak: “I apologise that it has taken so long, and I know this isn’t appropriate-- it never will be appropriate, I fear. I am a terrible man for doing this when I am getting married so soon, but even if I did not do it I would be a terrible man, so I may as well. Mary may never forgive me for what I am about to say, but I will say it.” You draw in a deep breath because you’re talking too quickly and you’re not even sure what words just tumbled out of your own mouth.
“She knows, Watson,” Holmes cuts in, and the world stills. You stare, in speechless wonder, as he continues, “She knows that I care for you as much as she does, and now I know for certain that you care for me in the same way.”
There is silence. He’s still facing the window and not you. You admire that he seems to be perfectly motionless until you observe his hand trembling minutely around his pipe. You shift your own hand across until your fingers caress his neck, the nervous pulse of his carotid artery under your forefinger.
“How can she know?” you whisper, and then you are laughing at yourself for underestimating her intelligence. Her shelves are lined with novels that are at times approximations of your life, and she enquires after both your adventures with Holmes and your medical practices with genuine interest and understanding. These are all partly why you adore her. There is a better question to be asked, here: “How can she know and yet love me still?”
“A good question, but I fear it is not one I am capable of answering,” he says. “The automaton of your biographies does not fare so well in picking apart the reasons behind human emotion.”
“You are no automaton,” you say. “I merely describe you as that because otherwise I am afraid I would spend all my time writing novels on the subject of your eyes or your hands or any other part of you, and I am not sure the public would be too thrilled with that.”
“You flatter me,” Holmes says, hoarsely, bowing his head. It is a sight which threatens to wrench you apart, because you cannot believe that a man as gorgeous as he is could possibly deny the truth of his beauty.
“With only the truth,” you reply softly, leaning in close so that you are pressed against his side and your lips are by his ear, your hand moving up to run through his hair now, and this moment is robbing your breath and your words from you.
He turns, at last, and your lips align with his, and you are drowning in a kiss that cannot be described with any of the words known to man.
Strange how your muse can teach you the rapture of all the words in the dictionary and then erase your mind clean of them with just one kiss. Now you know that writing can be no substitute for this, and the part of your soul which has made you crave the comfort of pen and paper will now learn to forever thirst for this, this heat that pricks every pore of your body, this mouth that yearns towards yours.
Oh, Muse, you think, and begin, in your mind, to embark on the first verse of this new poem.
“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention”
- William Shakespeare, Henry V
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,300
Summary: On the subject of muses, and the eloquence of Dr. John Watson's writing.
Notes: Title from a Mark Twain quote, "Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself." My first proper Holmes/Watson fic. I'm sorry that this is ridiculously cheesy but it wouldn't let go of me until I finished writing it. :')
Painted Fire
Your prose is romantic.
Holmes often tells you so, criticisms uttered with a glint in his eye and a fond edge to the curve of his lips. You agree with him, mostly, except that you don’t. You don’t agree with him because life is full of romance and that is something beyond what you are able to capture on paper. But you receive his criticisms with an acknowledging nod of your head anyway, because just as your writing cannot portray the true romance of life, you cannot tell him what you really think.
Yes, you suppose that your prose must seem romantic indeed, but the words that flit through your mind sometimes are far more romantic than those in the scripts that make their way to the public in the end. It is as if your mind is a stage and your thoughts are like dancers on nimble feet, spinning and turning, all coy smiles and alluring curls of soft hair. They elude you when you sit to write in tranquility, but they flirt with you otherwise. The world would gasp and twist away from you if they ever could dissect the thoughts that fly through your head whenever you so much as catch the dark colour of Holmes’ coat out of the corner of your eye, or hear the fluttering notes of his violin rouse you at three in the morning.
You cannot even bear to think about how taking walks with him transforms your perspective of your surroundings, as if every birdsong is a symphony and you can taste the sweet nectar of the flowers without being a bee; the shouts of vendors and the rattling of the hansoms on the cobblestones unite as a rhapsody, and even the dull shades of the London skyline are worth painstakingly crafted odes, just because his arm is in your arm and his steps are synchronised with your steps.
It is he who renders you into a poet in the privacy of your own head, he who makes you weak at the knees with admiration for his acute observations and affection for his Bohemian quirks. You make him into an automaton on paper only because you are putting too much effort into stopping the embarrassing poetry from leaking into the ink on the page.
He is not unaffected by emotion. Perhaps he is less subject to his feelings than the average human being, but he is not entirely cold. You might not have known this, once upon a time, but now you grow more certain of it each day, as he reveals more of himself to you. Every time he attempts to sabotage your new relationship, every time he asserts that they are his rooms and his dog as much as they are yours, every time he simply looks at you imploringly-- all these things are little revelations on their own, and they may irritate you occasionally, frequently even, but together their implication is staggering.
He cannot deny his regard for you. He even fails to hide it fully.
Yet you cannot gauge the depth of this regard, the boundaries of it. You are friends, and you share lodgings, have done so for seven years, almost eight. You are his companion and biographer. You save his life once in a while, and he returns the favour. You are the person he steals clothes from, the person who reminds him to eat and sleep and wash and who drags reality back into his life when he has forsaken it for months.
Soon you will cease to be some of those things.
It will be for your own good. You require a breath of fresh air. You need those bursts of metaphor and simile to stop overwhelming you because they will suffocate you someday if you let them continue. You sit there in the armchair across from his and suddenly you find yourself contemplating the slant of golden sunlight in the forest of his wild hair, his dark stubble forming the bare ghost of a moustache, the faint smell of the chemicals he’s been working with, reminiscent of sour tangerines, his expression of intense focus as he peruses the paper, dirt and soot underneath his fingernails and a grey plaster around one knuckle, a cut near his right elbow where his rolled-up shirtsleeves stop short.
You begin to compare his presence in the room to the sun itself, and even as you realise that lunacy is overtaking you, the words keep flooding your mind, magnifying all your senses a thousandfold. His hand brushes carelessly against yours when he hands you a letter and this fleeting moment of warmth almost scorches you to the bone.
And you can tolerate it no longer. It drives you mad wondering whether he will ever notice your constant observation of him.
You have no idea what had overcome you when you referred to Miss Adler as his muse, but you have been spending so much time analysing that epithet that it worries you at night. You turn that word over and over in your mind and on your tongue, tasting it until each letter has individual significance.
His muse.
Although a man, he is your muse, more so than she is his. This is a truth you hold close to your heart, a truth that makes you reach for your pen even though you know writing to be an inadequate act, a pathetic replacement for the acts that you truly wish to commit.
If you could, you would stay with him forever. But that would be the path to insanity.
Mary wants to see some of your notes. You may be able to show her some of the earlier ones, but the most recent ones are forbidden locales that even you dare not revisit. You call them scribbles because that’s what they are, feverish fancies composed by candlelight in the secrecy of your room when the latest case was but a distant daylight memory and you were far more concerned with and enamoured of the strange sweet serenades that were sounding from Holmes’ room.
You chose Mary, but perhaps there was never a choice because Holmes had never presented himself as a possibility. Perhaps Holmes could never be a possibility, not in this world where people give shameful names to the desires you harbour.
You love Mary. She is not your muse but that does not make her any less important to you. You are drawn to her because of her strength and her confidence. She is not vulnerable and timid just because she has been wounded and abandoned by love in the past. She is perfectly willing to love you despite being informed of the risks, despite the chance that she may be, in a sense, widowed for a second time.
You cannot help but admire her bravery.
You have never been wounded by love and yet you are so afraid. You endure your old leg wound and all it reminds you of daily, you sustain new injuries from pursuing criminals often, and all these you bear with ceaseless courage. But this, oh, this steals all your valour from you in a heartbeat and exchanges it for useless words that do not have the ability to escape your lips.
No matter you will be sleeping in a new home tonight. Right now you are walking up the stairs at Baker Street 221b, having just caught Gladstone and seen Mary off, telling her that you have forgotten something with Holmes.
You are going to put those words to use, for once.
Clarkie passes you, on his way out, and nods politely at you. His kind smile soothes your nerves, if only a little, and you are glad.
You reach the top of the stairs and stand at the open door to the sitting room. Holmes is still at the window, outlined against the light. “Back again, Watson?” he asks, without turning around, surely having heard your distinctive footfalls on the stairs and counted them accurately without confusing them with the constable’s.
You had discussed the issue of Gladstone with him already, but you cannot remember what that discussion came to, in the end. In all likelihood it had dissolved in another futile argument. “I was just bringing Gladstone back.”
“My dog now, is he?” Holmes’ voice is pitched high, and you can hear the obvious accusation there. The guilt it causes you resembles the twinge that often plagues you when you have been abusing your leg too much, except it’s a pain buried in your chest, trapped inside your ribcage, like a small animal clawing its way out of you. You curse yourself for having pushed this aside for so long, that this has to happen now rather than months before when Mary Morstan was yet unknown to you.
“I still don’t trust you with him, you know,” you say, closing the door behind you, then putting Gladstone down on the floor carefully, where he scampers off to vanish under a table.
“Then you should keep him,” Holmes says, and you sigh, because of course he is right. You cannot see his face yet, but his profile is miserable and slightly hunched.
“Holmes,” you begin, and do not know how to finish, for there are too many words, and none of them will ever suffice. You wait for him to look at you, but he never does. Perhaps it would be best for you to say your farewell and leave, and the next time you see each other would be your wedding day, and by then it would be too late.
You cannot allow it.
You walk over to him. The strides you take to get there are the equivalent of crossing the Pacific, but you are there and he is there and your existence suddenly spirals down into the confines of this room. A dog whines, from somewhere far away. Your dog. His dog. They are the same thing.
You put your hand on his shoulder and savour the rough texture of the fabric under your palm, and he tilts his head. You can see half of his face. Here, right now and always, he is your muse. Certainly the Greek Calliope cannot be as beautiful as he, nor half as inspiring. So you latch onto this inspiration and you start to speak: “I apologise that it has taken so long, and I know this isn’t appropriate-- it never will be appropriate, I fear. I am a terrible man for doing this when I am getting married so soon, but even if I did not do it I would be a terrible man, so I may as well. Mary may never forgive me for what I am about to say, but I will say it.” You draw in a deep breath because you’re talking too quickly and you’re not even sure what words just tumbled out of your own mouth.
“She knows, Watson,” Holmes cuts in, and the world stills. You stare, in speechless wonder, as he continues, “She knows that I care for you as much as she does, and now I know for certain that you care for me in the same way.”
There is silence. He’s still facing the window and not you. You admire that he seems to be perfectly motionless until you observe his hand trembling minutely around his pipe. You shift your own hand across until your fingers caress his neck, the nervous pulse of his carotid artery under your forefinger.
“How can she know?” you whisper, and then you are laughing at yourself for underestimating her intelligence. Her shelves are lined with novels that are at times approximations of your life, and she enquires after both your adventures with Holmes and your medical practices with genuine interest and understanding. These are all partly why you adore her. There is a better question to be asked, here: “How can she know and yet love me still?”
“A good question, but I fear it is not one I am capable of answering,” he says. “The automaton of your biographies does not fare so well in picking apart the reasons behind human emotion.”
“You are no automaton,” you say. “I merely describe you as that because otherwise I am afraid I would spend all my time writing novels on the subject of your eyes or your hands or any other part of you, and I am not sure the public would be too thrilled with that.”
“You flatter me,” Holmes says, hoarsely, bowing his head. It is a sight which threatens to wrench you apart, because you cannot believe that a man as gorgeous as he is could possibly deny the truth of his beauty.
“With only the truth,” you reply softly, leaning in close so that you are pressed against his side and your lips are by his ear, your hand moving up to run through his hair now, and this moment is robbing your breath and your words from you.
He turns, at last, and your lips align with his, and you are drowning in a kiss that cannot be described with any of the words known to man.
Strange how your muse can teach you the rapture of all the words in the dictionary and then erase your mind clean of them with just one kiss. Now you know that writing can be no substitute for this, and the part of your soul which has made you crave the comfort of pen and paper will now learn to forever thirst for this, this heat that pricks every pore of your body, this mouth that yearns towards yours.
Oh, Muse, you think, and begin, in your mind, to embark on the first verse of this new poem.
“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention”
- William Shakespeare, Henry V