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Fic: Pure Logic is the Ruin of the Spirit
Title: Ruin of the Spirit
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (2009 Movie)
Rating: T
Pairing: Holmes/Watson past relationship.
Warnings: Second person.
Wordcount: 4,010
Author's Notes: At the end!
You have grown used to waking and finding Holmes either missing, still asleep, or locked in his rooms engaged in moping or experimenting; both on occasion when time between cases is long and diversions such as violin recitals are few. In any event, as a habitually early riser, you have grown used to watching his breakfast get cold while you drink his share of the coffee that Mrs. Hudson brings up. She will bring a second pot when he has risen, returned, or emerged - but she never risks leaving him entirely without something hot to drink as he gears up to face the world.
While you are a creature of habit - in as much as Holmes' eccentric company allows - you have come to expect anything from your compatriot. This morning, when he appears to be (still) awake in time for breakfast, you do not question it - or the ponderous dark circles that have come to hang more often and more heavily as of late beneath your friend's eyes. He sits with a brisk motion, dressed in nothing but his tattered housecoat - it was red once, perhaps, and more of a smoking jacket than a house coat but now it is suited for nothing else but indoor use and barely suited for that.
You arch your brows but before you can ask any sort of question he is stuffing pieces of your toast into his mouth - your toast being already covered in your preference of butter and jam both. Briefly - at the discovery of butter underneath the jam, Holmes winces, but continues to eat your breakfast as if he was entitled to it.
"That sort of night?" You ask, more amused than irritated - Holmes does not share the same definition of possession as you. In the scope of things, there are always more things to worry about than Holmes inconveniencing you by taking the food you'd prepared for yourself. After all, his toast - though it is colder now than your own - will serve just as well. You retrieve it, pushing your plate into the empty space his has made. He answers with a noise that might be vaguely grateful - though it may just as well be an expression of upset at the shower of sticky crumbs he unleashes onto himself. Holmes likes his toast less done than you do, though more thickly covered in Jam. All of these imperfections - the butter and the overdoneness - he will endure if he does not have to do the work of preparing the food himself.
For Holmes, food is an order of magnitude well below most other manners of business. You have seen him go for days without, and then seem upset at his own body's weakness and complaints. He has an entire triangle of your toast before he answers.
"I was up pondering the effects of certain flammables on fabric - in the case of industrial workers, I imagine that a repeated exposure to such substances could do any number of things to their worn garments. It was remarkably similar to the effects of such on hair - but again altered by the different contents of the fabric in question. For example, a duckcloth cloak was obviously more resistant to absorbing formaldehyde than a woolen vest. As-" And here he pauses, looking up over his next bite of toast to meet your eyes and make sure that you have not yet fallen off the tracks that his train of thought has twisted along - and you have never yet, though at times you wonder how that selfsame train does not plummet directly over a cliff and down into inanity. He seems satisfied that you are following his logic - though you doubt that this particular experiment will serve him any better than a number of his others involving the effects of certain substances on himself, at least work with chemicals seems to occupy his shallow attention span.
"As hair is made entirely of keratin, a sort of protein, it is regardless of origen, almost identically reactive in whatever solution." He continues. There is some kind of triumph in his gray eyes for the fact that he has occupied himself so wholly for another night without drugs or self destruction. You - despite your skepticism - are deeply glad.
"With allowances for diet and personal habits." You answer. "For example, traces of cocaine show up in the hair of even the occasional user for up to three months past the last ingestion or injection of the compound."
If it is a pointed reference, you are fairly certain he will not take it too badly. He knows his faults are practically intolerable, that you do not approve. You certainly have had the argument before - and times enough that you doubt he will bother to revisit it before Tea. Holmes allows you your victory - though you hate yourself for the barb after you have jabbed it forth.
"Indeed." Holmes says, his appetite disappearing immediately. He casts aside the scraps of your toast as you lift the cold slices into your fingers and push butter into the crevices with your knife. He will eat nothing else for the rest of the day. You will eat nothing for the rest of the meal, you think. The knowledge that you have again said something wrong, hurtful, has turned your stomach into a clenched fist. You fiddle with the toast anyway, to fill the silence that descends and returns you to your thoughts.
To say that things have gone faintly sour between the pair of you since the initial strike of your relationship would be to delicately understate the matter. The incompatibility feels like a personal weakness on your part, as most of the burden of actually feeling the lack there had fallen to your shoulders. Holmes needed a mental equal - and that you were not it was already something you felt deeply upset about. However, the friendship had not ended - though it had changed in pitch and tone - when the intimate relationship had.
Here in the smoking ruins of what had once been an unparalleled closeness, you find that the two of you can almost cope. Certainly, you cannot unlearn what you know about Sherlock - blessed little that it is. Even the theory of Holmes' brain attic - a finite space within which to contain one's knowledge - still required that space to be filled to bursting before facts were pushed out into the void of unknown.
That Holmes is a quiet, but overwhelmingly enthusiastic and focused bed partner, or that he often hums a little to himself when he is lost in thought. The smallest habits of his, and his extreme comfort in your presence - even his usual lack of paranoia in some smaller matters - these are things that cannot be unlearned. It is like breathing or speaking, more instinct than knowledge, so rooted has it become in your very persona. At times, your hands touch him familiarly - on the shoulder, or the small of his back - without even your thoughts to guide them. He has not yet protested, but you scold yourself for it.
Upon returning from Afghanistan, it took you some time to recover. You were damaged in more than one way - though your health was quite the frailest it had ever been. Holmes appears to exist on the very razor edge of descending into a state quite worse than you had been all the time. His energy - sustained as it was by only his irregular birdlike meals and self abuse in boredom - failed him at times. You cannot imagine living in such a state, but the result is that his needs for intimacy have declined into what amounts to practical nonexistence.
By nature, you are an affectionate person. You have given up a lot of your need for the attention of someone you care about - and not unjealously. Holmes will always be more devoted, time and attention, to strangers. They are puzzles, enigmas, and quite needy. It is perhaps his greatest weakness that a need unfilled - from an unknown quantity, you should qualify, as your own needs have been enough in light of Holmes' attitude toward them to make you feel quite ashamed of them. You are also the sort to seek physical contact, or at the very least, a mutual sharing of time.
Beyond what you have documented, Holmes is obsessed with occupying himself in his own endeavors. It is not that you are unable to occupy yourself in similar endeavors, simply that you believe that part of a relationship involves time. It is not unworkable, the both of you prove that for some years, but it is also unsustainable without some major change in both of your characters. Holmes - though he is capable of incredible lengths of thought, deduction, and observation, is only able to affect changes in himself very slowly.
It is the task of occupying his mind that takes up so much of his attention. You, though it makes you feel vastly inferior to admit, are incapable of providing that occupation. It is less of a hurt to you when you discover that the only one who had been able to engage Holmes' attention fully was a thief and a liar, and good enough at both to trick the great consulting detective at his own game. If that is what you must become, you do not have it in you.
When it comes to the ground of needs, you know his category is very different. It is not that you have not ever engaged in the more carnal of them, simply that you would say of Holmes' appetites in the area that they were nonexistant. He barely looked at women. He barely looks at you, also, with intent. You do not force the issue - initially there is nothing to mind, you are of ill health and you feel fragile about your memories. Frustration creeps up so slowly that you do not even have a mind to it until Holmes remarks offhandedly, in discussion, that he does have needs in the dead of night, but that which he ignores because of the temper you can display upon rising early or not getting enough sleep.
What, exactly, you are supposed to make of this information, you are unsure. How you do take it, at first, is to dislike him for so petty and difficult an excuse. You cannot refute that your mood does depend often on getting enough rest to keep it charitable. On the other hand, your irritations are equally quick to bristle in frustration - as they bristled then when he said it. You have become a profesional at smoothing them over. The dislike transfers to yourself - as if you could help how you were made, how your body works. It becomes a burden, one that you try your hardest to correct, but that Holmes never remarks upon advancing or declining. There is no indicator as to your progress in the matter. Heavier and heavier it hangs on your shoulders until you find that the only way to survive is to cast aside any cares for the matter. You can simply live without, it is not the end of the world, even if you are young and able.
Things such as this pile against each other, but it is never Holmes you ultimately end up despising for them. He is charismatic, in the first, and in the second you know what he is perhaps the best of anyone. In that you know him intimately, you are quite honored to be allowed to be as close to him as you are - in a way it is the one intimacy only you will ever have. If this intimacy comes with such an amount of pressure to change yourself as it may be unbearable, and an equally unbearable inability to measure the efficiency with which you are progressing - you gladly pay that price until it practically destroys you.
Holmes is, in so many ways, a machine. There is no denying that he is a particularly clever, human machine, with impeccable manners. As to his dealings with other humans, they are limited only to what he can do for them. He allows no one to do anything for him, save you, and only because you have been set aside into the one special place of 'known quantity' in his life. Holmes understands that he needs the audience - there is a great showman in him, that needs reassurance in a predictable reaction. Because he can wrench from you, even though you know his methods and how he works so well from long exposure, the same wondering disbelief at his uncanny abilities, your presence is almost a requirement after a time.
You are a reassurance. It is not reassuring. You often feel taken for granted, if only because of the sharp rift in his attention.
Contrary to this, he guards your time and person curiously. Should you be at his disposal, he would not bother to spend the time on you. Now that you have begun to divide it with Mary, he has reacted with concern. It would be more humorous, were it not such a sore point in your history.
"You have, as of late, been spending tremendous amounts of time with a woman." Holmes observes, with a touch of jealousy you would miss were you anyone else. Though you do not ask, he walks you through his perceptions anyway - in a longstanding habit. He anticipates the question you would usually, though did not today intend to ask.
"First, your tie is the straightest and most crisply pressed I have ever observed it - as is your suit. I know that you do not iron - your shoulder quite prevents the freedom of movement to make such a task easy for you. Mrs. Hudson has a lighter touch with the press - and these lines are quite sharp. Secondly, you smell strongly of a woman's french perfume. Such a heavy application can't have been come by save for long exposure."
You cut off the rest of his reasoning - you have taken to shaving twice a day, and paid sharp attention to your hair. You have also, repeatedly, attempted to reconcile Mary and Holmes to meet. "I am engaged, Holmes. To Mary."
You never call him Sherlock. He hates his given name, and you have only heard it used affectionately for him once - by Ms. Addler. You are not certain what special permission she has to use it, but you do not. On the turn of the coin, he is only fair in using your surname - which you admit you vastly prefer to the commonly given name that is your first. Watson is simply what Holmes calls you, and if that has made you more fond of it, you cannot discard that fact now.
"Ah yes." He says, lifting his elegant hands together to press finger-tips together. The grace of the movement is quite spoiled by the fact that he has dragged his sleeves through the remains of the jam on your claimed and conquered plate. "Miss Morstan."
You wonder how long it will take him to learn to say 'Mrs. Watson', but even in your mind, it seems a bit ludicrous. It has become so solely your name that now that you must begin to consider sharing it, it is very faintly mortifying.
"You could meet her, Holmes." You suggest, again, but his expression closes at that. His attention simply goes away - to whatever realm his thoughts occupy when they are going around in a great whirlwind. His opinion of women has always been, while not without respect, that they could and should simply be done without.
"I could." He concedes, but with the strongest of implications in his tone that he won't.
You blame his history for that, though you know only what scant scraps Holmes has given you of his past and what you can deduce - by his own methods - from the voids in information you have perceived. Though to do so is, in his words 'a folly'. You are guessing in advance of facts you shall never have, and so you forgive yourself. Your wheels of logic do not turn as quickly as his, and he simply beats you at the game - he is far better at it and quite able to reason you around in circles when he suspects - as if by singular ability to mind read - that you are thinking on his past and what you can make of it.
Slumping, with your chin impacting your palm firmly and the tips of your fingers pressing in to your cheek, you give the conversation up as hopeless. All that's left to save the day is to move on to other topics. Holmes watches you fidget with the post. There are two requests for help - one seeking a lost pet, which Holmes clucks his tongue over and concludes 'deceased', and one personal letter for you.
It is, of course, from Mary - as he no doubt deduces from her flowery script and your first name on the envelope - a more expensive fold of paper than your patients usually bother sending with their inquiries. However, when he asks about it, you answer falsely that it is simply from one of your surgeries, enquiring about the regularity of some symptoms, which you will reply to assure them are quite normal.
Holmes may as well have been a stranger in that moment, when he leaned back coolly. There is no hope for it, you conclude. No matter where you set your foot, it ends up in your mouth - your answer was more a jibe. Holmes did not ever need to ask questions of you - he could already deduce by your expression, by your manner of breathing or the way you had eaten your eggs, every notion that went through your brain.
"You could at least do me the courtesy of answering me truthfully." Here, in Holmes, is the hunter. This darker persona which many mistake for violence, eccentricity, or even insanity - you know it full well to simply be his ungentled nature. He is a hunter, at heart, and though he covers over with all manner of disguise to facilitate his profession, it is to this calculating machine it all came down.
He has shown by his clever disguise that he could dissappear entirely at any time - and yet possibly even remain within feet of you when you thought him gone or dead. You wonder often if the man you know is not a disguise himself - if your entertainment is not some convenient exercise in the stranger points of humanity with which he must familiarize himself in order to continue to coexist within the confines of the species. Holmes needs you far less than you require him. While your fretting and careful pointing toward a healthier path has perhaps caused his life to be some little bit better, you are well aware that he is a man grown, and quite self sufficient. You are not - your tendency is to spend freely and perhaps to over-enjoy the expensive company of others. Holmes' solitude would be far less expensive save for the constant experiments on either his health or the various compounds he devised.
Beneath all of this knowledge, all of these learnings of how Holmes works on the inside, a deep insecurity has taken hold. Are you not, then, just another puzzle? Some small occupation? Un-needed, but tolerated? Catted about, trapped between the paws of the feline while he attempts to coax from somewhere deep within himself an understanding of the phenomenon of love - perhaps because he thinks the scientific understanding of it a necessary tool for his trade?
You get angry quickly, but he understands the reason just as fast. It is possible Holmes anticipates the reason that your normally quiet attitude suddenly enflames.
"Damn it all, is it only a game to you? Practice?" Your tone is louder than you would like, but you are not shouting. You wish you were silent, but you are not capable of it.
"Is it any less or more to you?" Holmes redirects the question, petulantly. He refers to how carefully you had handled yourself on your return from Afghanistan - how inwardly withdrawn you were, while maintaining outwardly the very careful guise of very false cheer. You were hollowly sociable, if only to throw off worry. Holmes of course had seen through your mask of a relation to him - no disguise could fool the master.
He wets his lips at your sullen silence.
"I have long guessed at your reasons for upset, Watson." He says, sternly - his own version of anger. Holmes does not break down emotionally - when he does submit to a mental upset, it is of the logical kind. "But since you were coming along so promisingly upon the path of reason, I figured you would eventually work the matters out. Instead I see that you are tearing yourself apart over matters you could have long resolved within yourself."
"You know me to be a master of disguise, and deeply fond of solitude. And yet, that you know these things about me also must grant some equal measure of reassurance to your unease. I have not made it a point to allow anyone I intend to fool with my disguises - however amusing your reactions are when I catch you unawares - to know how adept I am at them. I am quite fond of close guarding my secrets, which is also a fact in your repertoire.
In further point, you know the color of my soul to be somewhat mechanical - it is a point that I can tell concerns you, as to your relation with me. I can only assure you that you would not have such an intimate knowledge of how deeply inhuman I can be should I wish to keep that from you. It is this very lack of obscurity that should put you more at ease.
As to the matter of my personality being more inclined to solitude - it is simply the way I am, and does not reflect on the unpleasantness of your company as opposed to any other. If I seem to focus more on individuals who know me less, it is because I can be more false with them, which is generally less taxing than the policy of overwhelming honesty I have adopted in your particular case."
The logic is sound. It rings in your mind like a bell, and you recoil as if you were slapped - of course these things would never come to you, trapped as you are in the fits and starts of your own emotion. It is Holmes' machine-like intellect that allows him to be so much more understanding of your particular plight than you could ever be of his. It is frustrating, certainly.
More than that dark emotion, however, you feel beyond disappointed in yourself. You could not possibly deserve the kindness that you have in your inability to understand, squandered. Your eyes meet his, and there is that spark of something there, unreadable. Even now, even with his logic laid bare before you as if that were his very soul for you to understand, you are incapable. The knowledge is crushing.
"Holmes." You say flatly. You have to detach from the matter, clinically. There is nothing that you want so much as to go back to the earliest time in your relationship, before you two had puzzled out so much of each other as to foster your self-doubts, and probably his own. If it was the truth that had destroyed you, as a pair, you would take a thousand lies if it meant you could trust your own mind to be still when you lay curled together as a two, his chill skin slowly heating to your own. He must know this. And somehow you let that fact keep you from screaming it, every second of every day.
"Here's your next case." You push the envelope at him, and then retire from the common room.
Author's Notes: I am really in love with the film, even if it is the strangest pile of selective canon I have ever witnessed. Since I love detectives, that I am a Sherlock Holmes fan already follows. Anyway, when I saw the movie, all I could think was 'dear lord there is the smoking ruin of a long relationship'. This is my clumsy and I feel entirely ineffectual attempt to express it. I'm pretty sure this fic is entirely without merit.
The title is from a quote by the author of 'The Little Prince', Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (2009 Movie)
Rating: T
Pairing: Holmes/Watson past relationship.
Warnings: Second person.
Wordcount: 4,010
Author's Notes: At the end!
You have grown used to waking and finding Holmes either missing, still asleep, or locked in his rooms engaged in moping or experimenting; both on occasion when time between cases is long and diversions such as violin recitals are few. In any event, as a habitually early riser, you have grown used to watching his breakfast get cold while you drink his share of the coffee that Mrs. Hudson brings up. She will bring a second pot when he has risen, returned, or emerged - but she never risks leaving him entirely without something hot to drink as he gears up to face the world.
While you are a creature of habit - in as much as Holmes' eccentric company allows - you have come to expect anything from your compatriot. This morning, when he appears to be (still) awake in time for breakfast, you do not question it - or the ponderous dark circles that have come to hang more often and more heavily as of late beneath your friend's eyes. He sits with a brisk motion, dressed in nothing but his tattered housecoat - it was red once, perhaps, and more of a smoking jacket than a house coat but now it is suited for nothing else but indoor use and barely suited for that.
You arch your brows but before you can ask any sort of question he is stuffing pieces of your toast into his mouth - your toast being already covered in your preference of butter and jam both. Briefly - at the discovery of butter underneath the jam, Holmes winces, but continues to eat your breakfast as if he was entitled to it.
"That sort of night?" You ask, more amused than irritated - Holmes does not share the same definition of possession as you. In the scope of things, there are always more things to worry about than Holmes inconveniencing you by taking the food you'd prepared for yourself. After all, his toast - though it is colder now than your own - will serve just as well. You retrieve it, pushing your plate into the empty space his has made. He answers with a noise that might be vaguely grateful - though it may just as well be an expression of upset at the shower of sticky crumbs he unleashes onto himself. Holmes likes his toast less done than you do, though more thickly covered in Jam. All of these imperfections - the butter and the overdoneness - he will endure if he does not have to do the work of preparing the food himself.
For Holmes, food is an order of magnitude well below most other manners of business. You have seen him go for days without, and then seem upset at his own body's weakness and complaints. He has an entire triangle of your toast before he answers.
"I was up pondering the effects of certain flammables on fabric - in the case of industrial workers, I imagine that a repeated exposure to such substances could do any number of things to their worn garments. It was remarkably similar to the effects of such on hair - but again altered by the different contents of the fabric in question. For example, a duckcloth cloak was obviously more resistant to absorbing formaldehyde than a woolen vest. As-" And here he pauses, looking up over his next bite of toast to meet your eyes and make sure that you have not yet fallen off the tracks that his train of thought has twisted along - and you have never yet, though at times you wonder how that selfsame train does not plummet directly over a cliff and down into inanity. He seems satisfied that you are following his logic - though you doubt that this particular experiment will serve him any better than a number of his others involving the effects of certain substances on himself, at least work with chemicals seems to occupy his shallow attention span.
"As hair is made entirely of keratin, a sort of protein, it is regardless of origen, almost identically reactive in whatever solution." He continues. There is some kind of triumph in his gray eyes for the fact that he has occupied himself so wholly for another night without drugs or self destruction. You - despite your skepticism - are deeply glad.
"With allowances for diet and personal habits." You answer. "For example, traces of cocaine show up in the hair of even the occasional user for up to three months past the last ingestion or injection of the compound."
If it is a pointed reference, you are fairly certain he will not take it too badly. He knows his faults are practically intolerable, that you do not approve. You certainly have had the argument before - and times enough that you doubt he will bother to revisit it before Tea. Holmes allows you your victory - though you hate yourself for the barb after you have jabbed it forth.
"Indeed." Holmes says, his appetite disappearing immediately. He casts aside the scraps of your toast as you lift the cold slices into your fingers and push butter into the crevices with your knife. He will eat nothing else for the rest of the day. You will eat nothing for the rest of the meal, you think. The knowledge that you have again said something wrong, hurtful, has turned your stomach into a clenched fist. You fiddle with the toast anyway, to fill the silence that descends and returns you to your thoughts.
To say that things have gone faintly sour between the pair of you since the initial strike of your relationship would be to delicately understate the matter. The incompatibility feels like a personal weakness on your part, as most of the burden of actually feeling the lack there had fallen to your shoulders. Holmes needed a mental equal - and that you were not it was already something you felt deeply upset about. However, the friendship had not ended - though it had changed in pitch and tone - when the intimate relationship had.
Here in the smoking ruins of what had once been an unparalleled closeness, you find that the two of you can almost cope. Certainly, you cannot unlearn what you know about Sherlock - blessed little that it is. Even the theory of Holmes' brain attic - a finite space within which to contain one's knowledge - still required that space to be filled to bursting before facts were pushed out into the void of unknown.
That Holmes is a quiet, but overwhelmingly enthusiastic and focused bed partner, or that he often hums a little to himself when he is lost in thought. The smallest habits of his, and his extreme comfort in your presence - even his usual lack of paranoia in some smaller matters - these are things that cannot be unlearned. It is like breathing or speaking, more instinct than knowledge, so rooted has it become in your very persona. At times, your hands touch him familiarly - on the shoulder, or the small of his back - without even your thoughts to guide them. He has not yet protested, but you scold yourself for it.
Upon returning from Afghanistan, it took you some time to recover. You were damaged in more than one way - though your health was quite the frailest it had ever been. Holmes appears to exist on the very razor edge of descending into a state quite worse than you had been all the time. His energy - sustained as it was by only his irregular birdlike meals and self abuse in boredom - failed him at times. You cannot imagine living in such a state, but the result is that his needs for intimacy have declined into what amounts to practical nonexistence.
By nature, you are an affectionate person. You have given up a lot of your need for the attention of someone you care about - and not unjealously. Holmes will always be more devoted, time and attention, to strangers. They are puzzles, enigmas, and quite needy. It is perhaps his greatest weakness that a need unfilled - from an unknown quantity, you should qualify, as your own needs have been enough in light of Holmes' attitude toward them to make you feel quite ashamed of them. You are also the sort to seek physical contact, or at the very least, a mutual sharing of time.
Beyond what you have documented, Holmes is obsessed with occupying himself in his own endeavors. It is not that you are unable to occupy yourself in similar endeavors, simply that you believe that part of a relationship involves time. It is not unworkable, the both of you prove that for some years, but it is also unsustainable without some major change in both of your characters. Holmes - though he is capable of incredible lengths of thought, deduction, and observation, is only able to affect changes in himself very slowly.
It is the task of occupying his mind that takes up so much of his attention. You, though it makes you feel vastly inferior to admit, are incapable of providing that occupation. It is less of a hurt to you when you discover that the only one who had been able to engage Holmes' attention fully was a thief and a liar, and good enough at both to trick the great consulting detective at his own game. If that is what you must become, you do not have it in you.
When it comes to the ground of needs, you know his category is very different. It is not that you have not ever engaged in the more carnal of them, simply that you would say of Holmes' appetites in the area that they were nonexistant. He barely looked at women. He barely looks at you, also, with intent. You do not force the issue - initially there is nothing to mind, you are of ill health and you feel fragile about your memories. Frustration creeps up so slowly that you do not even have a mind to it until Holmes remarks offhandedly, in discussion, that he does have needs in the dead of night, but that which he ignores because of the temper you can display upon rising early or not getting enough sleep.
What, exactly, you are supposed to make of this information, you are unsure. How you do take it, at first, is to dislike him for so petty and difficult an excuse. You cannot refute that your mood does depend often on getting enough rest to keep it charitable. On the other hand, your irritations are equally quick to bristle in frustration - as they bristled then when he said it. You have become a profesional at smoothing them over. The dislike transfers to yourself - as if you could help how you were made, how your body works. It becomes a burden, one that you try your hardest to correct, but that Holmes never remarks upon advancing or declining. There is no indicator as to your progress in the matter. Heavier and heavier it hangs on your shoulders until you find that the only way to survive is to cast aside any cares for the matter. You can simply live without, it is not the end of the world, even if you are young and able.
Things such as this pile against each other, but it is never Holmes you ultimately end up despising for them. He is charismatic, in the first, and in the second you know what he is perhaps the best of anyone. In that you know him intimately, you are quite honored to be allowed to be as close to him as you are - in a way it is the one intimacy only you will ever have. If this intimacy comes with such an amount of pressure to change yourself as it may be unbearable, and an equally unbearable inability to measure the efficiency with which you are progressing - you gladly pay that price until it practically destroys you.
Holmes is, in so many ways, a machine. There is no denying that he is a particularly clever, human machine, with impeccable manners. As to his dealings with other humans, they are limited only to what he can do for them. He allows no one to do anything for him, save you, and only because you have been set aside into the one special place of 'known quantity' in his life. Holmes understands that he needs the audience - there is a great showman in him, that needs reassurance in a predictable reaction. Because he can wrench from you, even though you know his methods and how he works so well from long exposure, the same wondering disbelief at his uncanny abilities, your presence is almost a requirement after a time.
You are a reassurance. It is not reassuring. You often feel taken for granted, if only because of the sharp rift in his attention.
Contrary to this, he guards your time and person curiously. Should you be at his disposal, he would not bother to spend the time on you. Now that you have begun to divide it with Mary, he has reacted with concern. It would be more humorous, were it not such a sore point in your history.
"You have, as of late, been spending tremendous amounts of time with a woman." Holmes observes, with a touch of jealousy you would miss were you anyone else. Though you do not ask, he walks you through his perceptions anyway - in a longstanding habit. He anticipates the question you would usually, though did not today intend to ask.
"First, your tie is the straightest and most crisply pressed I have ever observed it - as is your suit. I know that you do not iron - your shoulder quite prevents the freedom of movement to make such a task easy for you. Mrs. Hudson has a lighter touch with the press - and these lines are quite sharp. Secondly, you smell strongly of a woman's french perfume. Such a heavy application can't have been come by save for long exposure."
You cut off the rest of his reasoning - you have taken to shaving twice a day, and paid sharp attention to your hair. You have also, repeatedly, attempted to reconcile Mary and Holmes to meet. "I am engaged, Holmes. To Mary."
You never call him Sherlock. He hates his given name, and you have only heard it used affectionately for him once - by Ms. Addler. You are not certain what special permission she has to use it, but you do not. On the turn of the coin, he is only fair in using your surname - which you admit you vastly prefer to the commonly given name that is your first. Watson is simply what Holmes calls you, and if that has made you more fond of it, you cannot discard that fact now.
"Ah yes." He says, lifting his elegant hands together to press finger-tips together. The grace of the movement is quite spoiled by the fact that he has dragged his sleeves through the remains of the jam on your claimed and conquered plate. "Miss Morstan."
You wonder how long it will take him to learn to say 'Mrs. Watson', but even in your mind, it seems a bit ludicrous. It has become so solely your name that now that you must begin to consider sharing it, it is very faintly mortifying.
"You could meet her, Holmes." You suggest, again, but his expression closes at that. His attention simply goes away - to whatever realm his thoughts occupy when they are going around in a great whirlwind. His opinion of women has always been, while not without respect, that they could and should simply be done without.
"I could." He concedes, but with the strongest of implications in his tone that he won't.
You blame his history for that, though you know only what scant scraps Holmes has given you of his past and what you can deduce - by his own methods - from the voids in information you have perceived. Though to do so is, in his words 'a folly'. You are guessing in advance of facts you shall never have, and so you forgive yourself. Your wheels of logic do not turn as quickly as his, and he simply beats you at the game - he is far better at it and quite able to reason you around in circles when he suspects - as if by singular ability to mind read - that you are thinking on his past and what you can make of it.
Slumping, with your chin impacting your palm firmly and the tips of your fingers pressing in to your cheek, you give the conversation up as hopeless. All that's left to save the day is to move on to other topics. Holmes watches you fidget with the post. There are two requests for help - one seeking a lost pet, which Holmes clucks his tongue over and concludes 'deceased', and one personal letter for you.
It is, of course, from Mary - as he no doubt deduces from her flowery script and your first name on the envelope - a more expensive fold of paper than your patients usually bother sending with their inquiries. However, when he asks about it, you answer falsely that it is simply from one of your surgeries, enquiring about the regularity of some symptoms, which you will reply to assure them are quite normal.
Holmes may as well have been a stranger in that moment, when he leaned back coolly. There is no hope for it, you conclude. No matter where you set your foot, it ends up in your mouth - your answer was more a jibe. Holmes did not ever need to ask questions of you - he could already deduce by your expression, by your manner of breathing or the way you had eaten your eggs, every notion that went through your brain.
"You could at least do me the courtesy of answering me truthfully." Here, in Holmes, is the hunter. This darker persona which many mistake for violence, eccentricity, or even insanity - you know it full well to simply be his ungentled nature. He is a hunter, at heart, and though he covers over with all manner of disguise to facilitate his profession, it is to this calculating machine it all came down.
He has shown by his clever disguise that he could dissappear entirely at any time - and yet possibly even remain within feet of you when you thought him gone or dead. You wonder often if the man you know is not a disguise himself - if your entertainment is not some convenient exercise in the stranger points of humanity with which he must familiarize himself in order to continue to coexist within the confines of the species. Holmes needs you far less than you require him. While your fretting and careful pointing toward a healthier path has perhaps caused his life to be some little bit better, you are well aware that he is a man grown, and quite self sufficient. You are not - your tendency is to spend freely and perhaps to over-enjoy the expensive company of others. Holmes' solitude would be far less expensive save for the constant experiments on either his health or the various compounds he devised.
Beneath all of this knowledge, all of these learnings of how Holmes works on the inside, a deep insecurity has taken hold. Are you not, then, just another puzzle? Some small occupation? Un-needed, but tolerated? Catted about, trapped between the paws of the feline while he attempts to coax from somewhere deep within himself an understanding of the phenomenon of love - perhaps because he thinks the scientific understanding of it a necessary tool for his trade?
You get angry quickly, but he understands the reason just as fast. It is possible Holmes anticipates the reason that your normally quiet attitude suddenly enflames.
"Damn it all, is it only a game to you? Practice?" Your tone is louder than you would like, but you are not shouting. You wish you were silent, but you are not capable of it.
"Is it any less or more to you?" Holmes redirects the question, petulantly. He refers to how carefully you had handled yourself on your return from Afghanistan - how inwardly withdrawn you were, while maintaining outwardly the very careful guise of very false cheer. You were hollowly sociable, if only to throw off worry. Holmes of course had seen through your mask of a relation to him - no disguise could fool the master.
He wets his lips at your sullen silence.
"I have long guessed at your reasons for upset, Watson." He says, sternly - his own version of anger. Holmes does not break down emotionally - when he does submit to a mental upset, it is of the logical kind. "But since you were coming along so promisingly upon the path of reason, I figured you would eventually work the matters out. Instead I see that you are tearing yourself apart over matters you could have long resolved within yourself."
"You know me to be a master of disguise, and deeply fond of solitude. And yet, that you know these things about me also must grant some equal measure of reassurance to your unease. I have not made it a point to allow anyone I intend to fool with my disguises - however amusing your reactions are when I catch you unawares - to know how adept I am at them. I am quite fond of close guarding my secrets, which is also a fact in your repertoire.
In further point, you know the color of my soul to be somewhat mechanical - it is a point that I can tell concerns you, as to your relation with me. I can only assure you that you would not have such an intimate knowledge of how deeply inhuman I can be should I wish to keep that from you. It is this very lack of obscurity that should put you more at ease.
As to the matter of my personality being more inclined to solitude - it is simply the way I am, and does not reflect on the unpleasantness of your company as opposed to any other. If I seem to focus more on individuals who know me less, it is because I can be more false with them, which is generally less taxing than the policy of overwhelming honesty I have adopted in your particular case."
The logic is sound. It rings in your mind like a bell, and you recoil as if you were slapped - of course these things would never come to you, trapped as you are in the fits and starts of your own emotion. It is Holmes' machine-like intellect that allows him to be so much more understanding of your particular plight than you could ever be of his. It is frustrating, certainly.
More than that dark emotion, however, you feel beyond disappointed in yourself. You could not possibly deserve the kindness that you have in your inability to understand, squandered. Your eyes meet his, and there is that spark of something there, unreadable. Even now, even with his logic laid bare before you as if that were his very soul for you to understand, you are incapable. The knowledge is crushing.
"Holmes." You say flatly. You have to detach from the matter, clinically. There is nothing that you want so much as to go back to the earliest time in your relationship, before you two had puzzled out so much of each other as to foster your self-doubts, and probably his own. If it was the truth that had destroyed you, as a pair, you would take a thousand lies if it meant you could trust your own mind to be still when you lay curled together as a two, his chill skin slowly heating to your own. He must know this. And somehow you let that fact keep you from screaming it, every second of every day.
"Here's your next case." You push the envelope at him, and then retire from the common room.
Author's Notes: I am really in love with the film, even if it is the strangest pile of selective canon I have ever witnessed. Since I love detectives, that I am a Sherlock Holmes fan already follows. Anyway, when I saw the movie, all I could think was 'dear lord there is the smoking ruin of a long relationship'. This is my clumsy and I feel entirely ineffectual attempt to express it. I'm pretty sure this fic is entirely without merit.
The title is from a quote by the author of 'The Little Prince', Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
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Loved this set of lines in particular:
He casts aside the scraps of your toast as you lift the cold slices into your fingers and push butter into the crevices with your knife. He will eat nothing else for the rest of the day. You will eat nothing for the rest of the meal, you think.
Love the pacing and symmetry of them, they set such a great sense of tone and atmosphere for the dynamic between Holmes and Watson here. Also a great ending. Wonderful piece, thank you for writing it. :)
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Thank you for taking the time to read it, and I am glad that you did like it.
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Thank you for reading, and your kind comment.