Filling In the Details
Title: Filling In the Details
Author: ladyblahblah
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Contains slash
Summary: So, at one point in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box Holmes goes off on an extended monologue about how he figured things out. Not unusual, in and of itself, but for the fact that he is never--not once--interrupted by Watson. Not for a question or an interjection; nothing. So I began to wonder . . . just what is keeping Watson so uncharacteristically silent? And then, as often happens when I'm reading about hot Victorian men, my mind went to a dirty, dirty place.
“The case,” said Sherlock Holmes, as we chatted over our cigars that night in our rooms at Baker Street, “is one where, as in the investigations which you have chronicled under the names of the ‘Study in Scarlet’ and of the ‘Sign of the Four,’ we have been compelled to reason backward from effects to causes. I have written to Lestrade asking him to supply us with the details which are now wanting, and which he will only get after he has secured his man. That he may be safely trusted to do, for although he is absolutely devoid of reason, he is as tenacious as a bull-dog when he once understands what he has to do, and indeed, it is just this tenacity which has brought him to the top at Scotland Yard.”
“Your case is not complete then?” I asked.
“It is fairly complete in essentials. We know who the author of the revolting business is, although one of the victims still escapes us. Of course, you have formed your own conclusions.”
“I presume that this Jim Browner, the steward of a Liverpool boat, is the man whom you suspect?”
“Oh! it is more than a suspicion.”
“And yet I cannot see anything save very vague indications.”
“On the contrary, to my mind nothing could be more clear. Let me run over the principle steps.”
--The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
It was with great pleasure that I took up the reins of our game. It was a favorite with both of us, though we would never acknowledge as much to each other-to do so would have been to remove half of the sport. So as Holmes made an elaborate show of tapping the fine gray ash from the end of his cigar I snatched a pillow from the settee and knelt in front of his chair.
“We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage,” he said, seeming to take no note of my new position and regarding me with a calm, casual air. “We had formed no theories. We were there simply to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”
With a smirk that I confess I had copied from the very man at whose feet I knelt, I applied my lips to the soft skin beneath his jaw. He tilted his head slightly to give me better access, but otherwise continued his narration as though we were still seated decorously across the room from each other.
“What did we see first?” he asked rhetorically as my lips traversed the smooth column of his neck, leaving a trail of whisper-soft kisses. “A very placid and respectable lady, who seemed quite innocent of any secret, and a portrait which showed me that she had two younger sisters. It instantly flashed across my mind that the box might have been meant for one of these.”
I was pleased that he had merely slipped his dressing gown on as a replacement for his evening coat: it gave me the pleasure of undressing him, an intimacy which he only seldom allowed me. I untied the belt of the gown and set to work loosening his tie and collar, moving the attentions of my lips and tongue to the sensitive shell of his ear.
“I set the idea aside,” he said a touch breathlessly, “as one which could be disproved or confirmed at our leisure. Then we went to the garden, as you remember, and we saw the very singular contents of the little yellow box.”
I had shed his collar and tie and tossed his cuffs to the floor after them. I came now to a dilemma. I was unabashedly fond of the sight of Holmes’s bare skin, flushed with desire, peeking out from beneath his dressing gown. Unfortunately, there was no way to remove the rest of his clothing while he was wearing it. With an inward sigh I resigned myself to the inevitable: it would have to go. I pushed it from his shoulders and released the first button of his shirt, allowing my mouth to trace the lines of his collarbone while my fingers worked at the buttons of his waistcoat.
“The string was . . . of the quality which is used by sail-makers aboard ship, and at once a . . . a whiff of the sea was perceptible in our investigation.”
The man’s collarbone was singularly sensitive, and my attentions to it were affecting him as I had hoped they would. Still, he was stumbling awfully early in the game. I hoped he would not give out too soon; I had discovered early in our acquaintance the effect that his descriptions of his own brilliance had upon me, and since our relationship had progressed to the physical I took great pleasure in the power Holmes had to arouse me so thoroughly. His waistcoat was cast aside and his bracers slid from his shoulders with haste.
“When I observed that the knot was one which is popular with sailors, that the parcel had been posted at a port, and that the male ear was pierced for an earring which is so much more common among sailors than landsmen, I was quite certain that all the actors in the tragedy were to be found among our seafaring classes.”
Ah, he was rallying. Excellent. That was always the way of these encounters: his control was boosted by the loss of mine, at least for a time. I had worked his shirt open but did not entirely remove it yet, choosing instead to apply my mouth to his nipples as my hands snaked beneath the crisp linen to caress the warm skin of his back. We would see how long his control could last.
Holmes made a small sound of pleasure; one hand lifted to hold my head at his breast. Still, other than that small lapse and a faint, delicate tremor in his voice, he continued as before.
“When I came to examine the address of the packet I observed that it was to a Miss S. Cushing. Now, the older sister would, of course, be Miss Cushing, and although her initial was ‘S’ it might belong to one of the others as well. In that case we should have to commence our investigation from a fresh basis altogether.”
The fingers of one of my hands slipped past the waistband of his trousers to skim over the shallow cleft below his back, and his hips lifted slightly off of the chair. I withdrew my hands to skim them up his slim legs and loosen the garters that held his socks in place.
“I therefore went in to the house with the intention of clearing up this point.” My mouth moved steadily lower and his entire body tensed in anticipation. His voice, however, continued unabated. “I was about to assure Miss Cushing that I was convinced that a mistake had been made, when you may remember that I came suddenly to a stop. The fact was that I had just seen something which filled me with surprise, and at the same time narrowed the field of our investigation immensely.”
He cut off with a strangled sound-for good reason, as my own investigation had narrowed considerably as well. As he had talked my hands had been at work releasing his flies and, unable to wait any longer, I had engulfed his entire hard length, taking him into my throat with the ease of long practice. The smell and taste of him was ambrosia to my lusty senses, the feel of his shaft against my tongue more intoxicating than the finest scotch. I began to move slowly, savoring the taste and texture of Sherlock Holmes hot and full in my mouth.
“As a medical man, you are aware, Watson,” he panted out, his voice tinged with a hint of amusement, “that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear.” I would have disputed the fact but had been well trained since childhood not to speak with my mouth full. At the moment, however, I could think of one body part whose infinite variety was undoubtedly greater. “Each ear,” Holmes continued, “is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones.”
He rambled on for a time in this vein, but I could barely hear him above the roaring in my head. I was rock-hard and aching for him; his fingers were tangled in my hair, encouraging my increasingly rapid motions. With one swift motion I yanked his trousers down his hips, leaving him exposed to my questing fingers. As I fondled his sac his thighs tightened around my sides. Suddenly he pulled on my hair, forcing me to reluctantly release him from my mouth. I looked up and saw him staring down at me, his uneven breaths heaving his chest and his eyes smoldering.
Then his lips quirked and he reached out to loosen my tie.
“And now the matter had begun to straighten itself out wonderfully,” he whispered huskily. He loosed my collar and caressed my bare neck. “We had learned of the existence of this steward, an impulsive man, of strong passions-you remember that he threw up what must have been a very superior berth, in order to be nearer to his wife-”
As I slipped his shirt off I thought, immediately, of how I had abandoned my practice with alarming ease to follow Holmes once more upon his return. Passion, I supposed, must always move some more strongly than others.
“-subject, too, to occasional fits of hard drinking.”
It was not fair of me, I knew, to kiss him then. It went against the spirit of the game. But his hands slowly loosening my clothing were driving me mad, and I could at last no longer go on without a taste of his mouth.
The tang of tobacco exploded on my tongue, my palate having been so recently attuned to the flavor of Holmes at his most undiluted. No chaste kiss was this, but hard and rough and ready as I knew he preferred it when the mood was on him. There was no mistaking that it was on him now: the rest of my clothing was fairly torn from my body in our shared fever to feel each other flesh to flesh. When we finally pressed together from shoulder to thigh-for Holmes, in his haste, had slipped to his knees beside me-the air echoed with our mutual groan. My lips lowered to feast once more on his neck; so absorbed was I in my task that it was several moments before Holmes’s words registered.
“A second solution was at this stage obviously possible, and although I thought it exceedingly unlikely, I was determined to elucidate it before going further.” His voice wavered and broke, but continued at a steady pace. With a growl I pushed him to the floor. Let him go on with his narrative if he must, I thought, but I would have him regardless.
To my surprise I found myself a moment later pinned beneath him. His eyes were shining with an intensity that I had previously seen only when he pursued the most interesting and obscure of puzzles. He straddled my chest and pushed his shaft insistently against my lips. I opened without hesitation, desperate at that point if I could not bury myself within him, at least to have him inside of me in any way he would allow. I laved him with my tongue and took him as deeply in my mouth as I could in that position.
“An unsuccessful lover might have killed Mr. and Mrs. Browner,” he growled, thrusting ever more forcefully against my face, “and the ear might have belonged to the husband.” He withdrew, and I let out a moan of protest that quickly turned to breathless anticipation as he lifted my legs to rest over his shoulders. “There were many grave objections to this theory,” he panted, “but it was conceivable.”
I felt him pressing against my entrance and all of my attention became rooted upon that one spot. As he began to push inside of me, his passage eased by the wetness I had bestowed upon him, I was vaguely aware that he was still speaking, though his sentences were interrupted with the occasional groan or gasp for breath. I no longer cared, however, if he wanted to talk throughout. He could expound upon the case, upon Stradivarius violins; he could dictate a monograph on the chemical composition of Derbyshire mud for all I cared, so long as this glorious feeling continued.
He was fully within me now, and I relished the sensation of being so exquisitely full before he began to move. Every so often I caught a snatch of words, gritted out now between his teeth. Never more than “communicated . . . with the police already,” or “ah! understood its full significance . . .” Finally I lifted my hips and squeezed my inner muscles around him, and while his flow of words did not stop they abandoned all coherency in favor of, “John, John . . . my God, John . . .”
Fire was pooling at the base of my spine and I gripped my erection, yanking furiously as I felt Holmes’s thrusts growing ever more ragged. There was a split second of warning where my spine tingled as though it had been shot through with electricity before I shattered, spilling my release over my hand and onto my stomach. The feeling of Holmes so full inside of me, his shaft being squeezed as I came, set off a series of aftershocks nearly as powerful as the original orgasm. Moments later Holmes stiffened and I felt that telltale warmth inside of me that signaled his own climax.
He collapsed on top of me, only to roll aside immediately. I smiled at that. He was always so wary of crushing me; a laughable prospect, really, as lean as he was, but his concern was always endearing. I turned slightly and he allowed me to settle in against his side, slipping an arm around my shoulders. It was several minutes later that Holmes spoke again, his voice heavy with sated satisfaction.
“It had been ascertained at the shipping offices that Browner had left aboard of the May Day, and I calculate that she is due in the Thames to-morrow night.”
I managed to lift my head to stare incredulously at him. He offered me a lightning-quick grin. “I win.”
I snorted. “Hardly. I reduced you to nothing more than my name and some rather profound religious declarations,” I said, settling my head back on his shoulder. “Your narrative was interrupted. Picking back up where you left off does not negate the fact that you abandoned your explanation. The victory is mine.”
Holmes sighed and stretched luxuriously. “I suppose we shall have to declare it a tie.”
“Yet again,” I added. I raised my head once more and eyed him speculatively. “Perhaps you should commit to paper your suspicions as to the details of this case, that we might compare them with the facts once we have them from Browner. We can call it a tie breaker.”
He chuckled, and his eyes lit with the challenge. “Watson, I never do get your limits. Very well, but I shall expect a good forfeit when I win this little wager.” He brushed a kiss across my forehead. “When he arrives he will be met by the obtuse but resolute Lestrade, and I have no doubt that we shall have all our details filled in.”
END