"Dum Spiro" (SH fanfic, rated G), 2014 JWP Practice Prompt #8
Title: Dum Spiro
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Vampire AU)
Word Count: 1143
Rating: G
Summary: Breathing - fake it ‘til you make it.
Author's Notes: For the 2014 JWP Practice Prompt #8: Emily Dickenson’s poem “I BREATHED enough to learn the trick”. This story takes place in my Vampire!Holmes series that includes the story Many Wounds and the drabble But You Have a Kinder Heart.)
I BREATHED enough to learn the trick,
And now, removed from air,
I simulate the breath so well,
That one, to be quite sure
The lungs are stirless, must descend
Among the cunning cells,
And touch the pantomime himself.
How cool the bellows feels!
--Emily Dickinson
Retirement. What a foolish notion for one such as I! But Watson was growing older - joints stiffer, reflexes slower, body taking longer to heal after harm or stress. His medical practise was by now only a distant memory. Further, the cases we had amassed were of such a volume that it would require years uninterrupted by any other work for him to write them all down. We had sufficient capital to walk away from everything and do precisely that. So Watson went to Sussex - and where Watson goes there go I.
I had to adapt to the change. After the bustle and throb of London, the pulse of death beating its enticing song in four million breasts, we were now only us two, for days and weeks at a time. I looked in bemusement at how my long and savage existence now ended with the hum of bees and the splash of sea-water. Here too no one would look askance at Watson grown old alongside a man whose hair never greyed and whose back never bent with age.
I read everything in the local library, attempted to write my own account of a case or two (to my Boswell’s great amusement), tended the garden - and after a long bout of persuasion, joined Watson in his morning swims where the sea lapped at the base of the cliff wherein our cottage lay. He laughed at his own apprehension when I would explore the sea-bottom for long stretches of time, collecting shells and looking at the varieties of fish, sometimes not resurfacing for an hour or more. “All this time,” he said ruefully, looking at the white scars along his wrists, “and I still react as if you were a man like any other, Holmes. The illusion is perfect.” I smiled my cold, moon-thin smile in response to the sun-like warmth of his own.
I fed as I have always done, the little kills that kept the vermin from our cottage better than the best mouser could do. The peaceful pace of cottage life, the drag of ennui, also abated my hunger. And of course I fed from Watson as I have since the night we became inseperable - but fewer feedings and lighter than the ones we shared at the height of our time. Perhaps I too felt this retirement in my body and bones.
Life is what Watson has always given me, from the very first. Death had been my portion to dole out to mortal creatures, lurking in my still chest and empty-bellows lungs, my glittering eyes that saw only nourishment in their lives sundered under my teeth and hands. Then all my centuries of hunting and survival with my brother and all the others of our fiendish kind were destroyed the night he’d caught me taking my evening meal courtesy of Mrs. Hudson’s dying dog - and instead of my well-deserved destruction re-offered his friendship with this knowledge between us. The anniversary of the night, giddy with the shared victory of another successful case, that he first offered me his blood of his own free will, I hold as the most sacred date of the calendar year. The blood that sustains me beats unceasingly from his inexhaustible heart; his living heat warms my clay-cold flesh; his breath gives both of us this shared life.
So one morning when a great shadow passed over me, darkening the sun-struck water, I looked up at the immense drifting phantom and saw death shared - Watson’s and then mine, for the moon goes black when the sun dies. Cyanea capillata, heading for the cove.
I tore off my lead ankle-weights and swam at top speed for the sheltered pool where Watson took his daily swim. I surfaced, and saw the man thrashing once before sinking; I tore through the very cloud of the beast, its stings like swimming through fire and teeth, to pull the convulsing Watson clear of its tentacles and back toward the surface.
By the time I’d dragged Watson from the water - the creature lurking in the shallows nearby, beautiful and deadly - and laid him on the sand he was no longer breathing. I laid two fingers on his still lips, felt no warmth nor stir of motion from mouth nor nose. He was as cold as I, as breathless. His heart throbbed feebly, starved of air, and soon would go still as well. He too would have a clay-cold silent breast, lungs like empty bellows.
Bellows.
I was no living thing to give Watson his life again. I was a pair of bellows.
I drew a deep breath, and forced it over Watson’s mouth. When my first breath only resulted in ejected sea water and nasal mucus spraying my cheek I realised my folly, and clamped his nostrils shut with my fingers. Trachea, tilt the mouth back, free the passage from the slack tongue. And I blew into his lungs, matching the rhythm I had committed to memory decades ago.
For the next forty-seven seconds I did more deliberate breathing than I had in the last four months. And when Watson coughed, vomited sea-water on me and began to breathe once again I sat still and breathless, heedless of the sun branding my back and shoulders, watching him do so.
The battle I had just won echoed in my flesh; the hunger rose in me - frantic, wild, savage. Not for years had it roared in me so powerfully (Killer Evans was indeed lucky to receive only my snarled invective in his face and not my incisors). I needed to feed to the death on something living, take its entire life into myself.
The same urge that had turned my wits to punishing evildoers and bringing justice turned my head. I smiled my cold cobra smile at the drifting lion’s-mane jellyfish. By the time Watson was able to sit up, I had brought his would-be murderer to justice and quelled the howling need until my true source of life was recovered enough to resume our exchange.
***
Watson lived; he breathed, his heart beat, and his blood flowed like our bees’ honey in my mouth. He resumed his swimming when he had recovered, amused by the way I swam alongside him and only returned to my undersea explorations when he had finished and returned to the shore.
“For a creature incapable of drawing breath of life, Holmes, you did a remarkable simulation,” he said not long after the incident, sitting on the floor and sorting a box full of his notes.
“Enlightened self-interest, my boy,” I retorted, tuning my violin. “I have no wish to end my existence a moment earlier than is necessary.”
He laughed. “A man who shares my own heart on the subject.” He stiffly pulled himself to his feet to head to the kitchen and the teakettle. I could only nod.
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Vampire AU)
Word Count: 1143
Rating: G
Summary: Breathing - fake it ‘til you make it.
Author's Notes: For the 2014 JWP Practice Prompt #8: Emily Dickenson’s poem “I BREATHED enough to learn the trick”. This story takes place in my Vampire!Holmes series that includes the story Many Wounds and the drabble But You Have a Kinder Heart.)
I BREATHED enough to learn the trick,
And now, removed from air,
I simulate the breath so well,
That one, to be quite sure
The lungs are stirless, must descend
Among the cunning cells,
And touch the pantomime himself.
How cool the bellows feels!
--Emily Dickinson
Retirement. What a foolish notion for one such as I! But Watson was growing older - joints stiffer, reflexes slower, body taking longer to heal after harm or stress. His medical practise was by now only a distant memory. Further, the cases we had amassed were of such a volume that it would require years uninterrupted by any other work for him to write them all down. We had sufficient capital to walk away from everything and do precisely that. So Watson went to Sussex - and where Watson goes there go I.
I had to adapt to the change. After the bustle and throb of London, the pulse of death beating its enticing song in four million breasts, we were now only us two, for days and weeks at a time. I looked in bemusement at how my long and savage existence now ended with the hum of bees and the splash of sea-water. Here too no one would look askance at Watson grown old alongside a man whose hair never greyed and whose back never bent with age.
I read everything in the local library, attempted to write my own account of a case or two (to my Boswell’s great amusement), tended the garden - and after a long bout of persuasion, joined Watson in his morning swims where the sea lapped at the base of the cliff wherein our cottage lay. He laughed at his own apprehension when I would explore the sea-bottom for long stretches of time, collecting shells and looking at the varieties of fish, sometimes not resurfacing for an hour or more. “All this time,” he said ruefully, looking at the white scars along his wrists, “and I still react as if you were a man like any other, Holmes. The illusion is perfect.” I smiled my cold, moon-thin smile in response to the sun-like warmth of his own.
I fed as I have always done, the little kills that kept the vermin from our cottage better than the best mouser could do. The peaceful pace of cottage life, the drag of ennui, also abated my hunger. And of course I fed from Watson as I have since the night we became inseperable - but fewer feedings and lighter than the ones we shared at the height of our time. Perhaps I too felt this retirement in my body and bones.
Life is what Watson has always given me, from the very first. Death had been my portion to dole out to mortal creatures, lurking in my still chest and empty-bellows lungs, my glittering eyes that saw only nourishment in their lives sundered under my teeth and hands. Then all my centuries of hunting and survival with my brother and all the others of our fiendish kind were destroyed the night he’d caught me taking my evening meal courtesy of Mrs. Hudson’s dying dog - and instead of my well-deserved destruction re-offered his friendship with this knowledge between us. The anniversary of the night, giddy with the shared victory of another successful case, that he first offered me his blood of his own free will, I hold as the most sacred date of the calendar year. The blood that sustains me beats unceasingly from his inexhaustible heart; his living heat warms my clay-cold flesh; his breath gives both of us this shared life.
So one morning when a great shadow passed over me, darkening the sun-struck water, I looked up at the immense drifting phantom and saw death shared - Watson’s and then mine, for the moon goes black when the sun dies. Cyanea capillata, heading for the cove.
I tore off my lead ankle-weights and swam at top speed for the sheltered pool where Watson took his daily swim. I surfaced, and saw the man thrashing once before sinking; I tore through the very cloud of the beast, its stings like swimming through fire and teeth, to pull the convulsing Watson clear of its tentacles and back toward the surface.
By the time I’d dragged Watson from the water - the creature lurking in the shallows nearby, beautiful and deadly - and laid him on the sand he was no longer breathing. I laid two fingers on his still lips, felt no warmth nor stir of motion from mouth nor nose. He was as cold as I, as breathless. His heart throbbed feebly, starved of air, and soon would go still as well. He too would have a clay-cold silent breast, lungs like empty bellows.
Bellows.
I was no living thing to give Watson his life again. I was a pair of bellows.
I drew a deep breath, and forced it over Watson’s mouth. When my first breath only resulted in ejected sea water and nasal mucus spraying my cheek I realised my folly, and clamped his nostrils shut with my fingers. Trachea, tilt the mouth back, free the passage from the slack tongue. And I blew into his lungs, matching the rhythm I had committed to memory decades ago.
For the next forty-seven seconds I did more deliberate breathing than I had in the last four months. And when Watson coughed, vomited sea-water on me and began to breathe once again I sat still and breathless, heedless of the sun branding my back and shoulders, watching him do so.
The battle I had just won echoed in my flesh; the hunger rose in me - frantic, wild, savage. Not for years had it roared in me so powerfully (Killer Evans was indeed lucky to receive only my snarled invective in his face and not my incisors). I needed to feed to the death on something living, take its entire life into myself.
The same urge that had turned my wits to punishing evildoers and bringing justice turned my head. I smiled my cold cobra smile at the drifting lion’s-mane jellyfish. By the time Watson was able to sit up, I had brought his would-be murderer to justice and quelled the howling need until my true source of life was recovered enough to resume our exchange.
***
Watson lived; he breathed, his heart beat, and his blood flowed like our bees’ honey in my mouth. He resumed his swimming when he had recovered, amused by the way I swam alongside him and only returned to my undersea explorations when he had finished and returned to the shore.
“For a creature incapable of drawing breath of life, Holmes, you did a remarkable simulation,” he said not long after the incident, sitting on the floor and sorting a box full of his notes.
“Enlightened self-interest, my boy,” I retorted, tuning my violin. “I have no wish to end my existence a moment earlier than is necessary.”
He laughed. “A man who shares my own heart on the subject.” He stiffly pulled himself to his feet to head to the kitchen and the teakettle. I could only nod.