Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Watson, I have a proposal for us,” said my old friend, his legs propped upon my lap and the both of us reclined on the velvet settee.

“But, I’m afraid it may be rather shocking if I don’t first preface my reasons for considering a change in our intimate relations,” Holmes added, his grey eyes sober and clear. The frankness of his language raised in me a thin needle of alarm, and I stole a glance towards the sitting room door.

“The room is quite locked, dear fellow, and Mrs. Hudson has gone to bed over half an hour ago. We are at liberty to speak without pretence,” said he.

In the nascent spring of 1895, Holmes’ precise read on my mind was no more shocking as it was a bit trying. As to what exactly annoyed me about it—I could not confess, for it would have been foolish to believe that three years’ absence would dull his great powers, no matter what I may have undergone in that bleak winter of my life. Sometimes I wished to be as inscrutable to him as he often was to me, especially in the uncertain waters of our rekindled partnership, so soon after his return.

“Speak, Holmes. What are you thinking of? Have I dissatisfied you?”

“No, not at all, not in the least,” Holmes assured me. “You could not ask that if you knew yourself as I do, Watson, you could not even think it. You are a gifted lover and a gallant gentleman, but the latter I always knew of you. What I have noticed is that you always take great pains to arrange a charming evening for us before seducing me to bed, a routine which I’ve quite enjoyed, for I wager it is your idea of a proper courtship. It goes as so: you notice a lull in my casework and procure us seats to a musician I’m fond of, or tables at a fine restaurant, or a gallery showing of some novelty, and when we return to Baker Street—myself thoroughly pleased with your selection and your generosity—only then do we make love. I say, Watson, you would have had a prolific career as one of those prancing tropical birds, so skilled are you in the romantic arts.”

I felt my face grow hot—I’d never stopped to consider my own amorous methods before Holmes unravelled them so coolly. Certainly, I could be described as rather traditional for the changing age, but I felt that it was no less than what Holmes deserved. I was certain that our dramatic tumble into an affaire de coeur was the very first of its kind to be admitted into his neat and controlled inner world. I wanted very much to treat him correctly.

“I suppose I’ve a conventional orthodoxy with such things,” said I. “Have my habits finally bored you?”

Holmes barked a short laugh and sidled even closer to me on the settee. He tossed one arm over the back of it and braced his cheek on his palm, giving me a studious once-over. I had grown too warm from his legs in my lap and the bright blaze in the hearth—and perhaps also from the conversation—but for his sake I tolerated my condition.

“Oh, my dear doctor, I could never tire of anything related to your good person. You and I are old dogs, after all—we can live without new tricks. No, Watson, I only wonder if you yourself are fully satisfied. For my sake, or for your own propriety, I should hate for you to be suppressing your natural appetite.”

“My appetite?”

“Well, yes, your libidinal drive, as the alienists might say. You are a man of broad and indiscriminate appetite with regard to your meals, and I dare say with your mates as well. It isn’t a complex induction to say you’ve a wider inventory in store as to your sexual… proclivities.” Holmes slipped the fingers of one hand into the lining of my waistcoat without breaking my gaze, a bit of light teasing he’d lately been prone to. “You must know that I trust you completely.”

The solemn note in his tone intrigued me. “It is an honour to hear you say so, Holmes,” I said. “But you are somewhat mistaken in your deduction.”

“My induction.”

“Your induction,” I corrected with a smile. “I’m not restraining myself as much as you may think. I really am a man of moderate tastes as to my private life, and it matters much less to me precisely what we do than that I am doing it with you.”

“But you are restraining yourself,” said Holmes, tugging gently on my lapel. As if to prove his point, I realized he had been picking idly over my person while my own hands remained folded in his lap.

He continued, “Is it because of my inexperience? No—the reasons why are secondary to the fact that you are doing it. I’ve noticed on occasion how your thoughts trail into indecent tangents when we are alone, or in public, though you are too good-natured to make haste on them. After such instances I can usually expect an invitation to dinner from you within the hour.”

I flushed. “Indecent—? What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, Doctor, I might flatter myself to say it, but you are always a shade pinker when I’m bent full over the windowsill, and I’ve long observed that you pay special attention to my mouth and my hands when we smoke. When in cases I’ve been compelled to dash after quarry, I notice your eyes on my dampened collar, where doubtlessly you are considering undoing my tie and—now, what was it? You are a man who leads with first his eyes and then his mouth, so I’d surmised you were thinking about the taste of my sweat, that’s right. As for your other habits, I know that you take to onanism always before breakfast—”

“That’s quite enough, thank you,” I interrupted. I should have been prepared to keep no more secrets from the man, but still I balked at having my private fancies exposed. Not that I had any particular design to hide them, for the both of us knew full well how I liked to take my pleasure when we were so involved.

“I hope you aren’t embarrassed, dear boy. If I hadn’t made it clear already, I am just as keen on you. Law and custom be damned, I relish the thought of taking you against every desk and surface in the city. Perhaps one day straight upon the altar—”

“Holmes!”

“Was that coarse of me? Well, that is why I am proposing this arrangement. It would be for a limited time, naturally, to first see how we may fare under the terms.”

I was at once skeptical and intensely piqued. Holmes moved his hand from my lapel and hooked one long finger around my necktie, angling me towards him. The firelight contoured his fine, angular face and glinted off his smooth hair. He looked every bit an ivory Galatea in my eyes. I gave him my assent to continue, and he stated his terms.

“For a week henceforth, I give you my full and earnest consent to do with me whatever you please. Should you wish to take yourself in hand, call upon me first. In every way you may seek to relieve yourself, do so with me, upon me, inside me. At any hour, in every setting, I will be yours for the taking. Do not bother to ask for my permission should the impulse strike you. You may use me liberally, or better yet—recklessly.”

For an indeterminate stretch of time I must have only stared dumbly at him.

“Holmes, that’s…” I finally started.

“Like having a live-in whore?” he suggested brightly.

“No, Holmes, you must know, you are…”

“A degenerated heathen?” The blasted man was still smiling.

“Well, yes. Abundantly. But even more so, Holmes, you are precious to me. You are asking me to take advantage of your trust, which I’m afraid goes against my nature.” Holmes stilled, looking braced for reproach. I continued, “Unless I can be assured you have means to object to my advances. I expect that part of your… private satisfaction at this arrangement will be your natural resistance to inconvenient trysts, and my attempts to overpower you. I must know when you want me to stop immediately.”

“You’d like your very own ‘Norbury’, then?”

“I suppose that’s just it. Something you would never, in a million years, be inclined to utter in bed, and it will stop the both of us in our tracks.”

“Detective Inspector Lestrade,” he said, with an air of finality.

I frowned just thinking of it—which seemed to prove the efficacy of Holmes’ selection—much to his uproarious laughter.

“Are you appeased by our terms? Will you swear to a brief week’s trial, at the very least?” asked Holmes. “In the spirit of inquiry, then. Help me satisfy this lech, or I may languish unenlightened, forevermore.”

“Now you are being quite dramatic.”

“But you will agree?”

He looked so eager and so enthused by the prospect that I could not see the harm in trying. With a warmth in my face which had spread to my chest, I was obliged to accept my part in his experiment.

“Then let us seal this contract in the traditional fashion of learned men,” said Holmes, leaning in for an open-mouthed kiss.

✑

I was sitting on the edge of my own bed that night, turning over Holmes’ unusual proposition in my mind. I was not a man taken to worrying overmuch, but Holmes was the perennial exception to my mores.

I had long suspected that somewhere in the far hinterlands of Holmes’ masterful personality, lay a deep and abiding desire to be himself conquered. It was nowhere evident in his proud and imperious manner, but from time to time I’m sure I glimpsed it in the way he spent himself over-quick when I braced him by the neck, or the way he reveled in his own pliancy when I carried him from bath to bed. Holmes could be a difficult man in many respects, and was more obstinate than a mule when the mood was upon him, but in intimate matters he lusted to be subjugated, to be silenced by my hand or pressed down by my weight. It was often easier to make him swallow my seed than to finish his breakfast.

It was one of the many contradictions which constituted the singular character of my old friend, and which utterly stupefied me from the first night of our adventurous affair. He bewildered me; I would not trade him for the world.

Still, I was gripped by fears beyond the very ken of reason. Not even a full year had passed since Holmes resurfaced in the world of the living and since I’d sold my practice to take up our old digs at Baker Street. I could count on one hand how many months up to then we’d been physically intimate, a turn in our friendship which I might have described as accidental, but which in retrospect was quite inevitable. If I was guilty of restraining myself as a lover, it was because the intensity of my feelings for him were at times indistinguishable from genuine mania, so confused were they with the unspent stores of my grief. Holmes’ disappearance had torn out something essential to the fabric of my being, and the mere fact of his return had not meant a clean or easy re-stitching.

Indeed, it was when he was in my arms that I was most prone to morbid thoughts. To feel his pulse under my lips or the warmth of his skin, to hear him breathe and make him shudder, to have him—made it all the easier to imagine losing him again. 

I knew very well the stillness and coolness of a corpse. When Holmes had vanished from Reichenbach, a corpse was all I wanted—solid, irrefutable proof of my failure to protect him. I had walked the entire downstream length of the River Aare, twice, searching for his remains, desisted only by the total exhaustion of my body. Returning to England without it was like carrying an open wound that bled profusely over every inch of my life. Now that he was most certainly alive, I knew I could not be so lucky as to mourn over an empty casket again.

If I was guilty of engaging him in a predictable or prosaic routine, perhaps it was that I clung fast to some protective shroud of normalcy around our tender relations, so close was I to complete nervous collapse in those times.

And yet—I had taken up his terms, however reluctantly. I knew he wanted something from this arrangement that I alone could give, though I had not come to exact terms as to what that was. Holmes made it out as a promise to surrender to my desires, but I was as suppliant to his thrall as I’d ever been. It was my natural imperative, after all, to be in service of that great man—the object of my reverence and the locus of all my frustrations. Even when I took up post as the active partner in his bed, I deferred to his caprices and obeyed the dictates of his whims. On occasion it did disturb me how desperately I ached to please him in each avenue of our lives, an eager subservience which I could not recall swearing to even the commanding officers of my campaigning days. I had always recognized something like fraternal kinship between the two of us, more intimate than if we were of one blood, but since last spring it had taken on a distinctly frantic edge. 

I wished dearly for him to find me useful, or better yet irreplaceable; lest the needle or another rushing cascade sweep clean his faith in me. Striving to use him in turn would be a challenge worth some pains.

✑

I was no less troubled by our fireside conversation come first light of the next day, but I was a touch less demure for the aching cockstand between my legs.

Holmes had been as astute as ever in his observations: when a morning’s occasion called for it, it was my habit to take myself in hand before washing and dressing, a boyhood practice which later became a matter of efficiency in the army. It was an ordinary enough habit, but I didn’t like to bother my lovers with the task—Holmes especially, who was a late riser and the very picture of princely irritation when he was prematurely roused.

The fact remained that I was laid up in bed, a loose curl of fingers around the base of my offending prick, heavy and throbbing for attention. And I was newly contract-bound to proffer it to a certain somebody, irregardless of the hour or circumstance. I fondled myself idly, thinking of his sleeping face and the toss of his soft dark hair upon his pillow. It did me good to see him at peace, not tormented by inaction but truly, deservedly relaxed. Like a blossom, affection for Holmes unfurled in my chest, and I dredged up the courage to rise from my sheets.

I escaped my quarters and crept carefully down the stairs. My ears pricked for signs of Mrs. Hudson, but the quiet meant she must have been occupied with the morning ablutions. And so there I was in Holmes’ bedroom, his doorknob fastened behind my back, before I’d gathered enough scruples to think better of my vulgar aim.

Holmes was fast asleep, curled tight on his side with a pillow compacted over his face, breathing soundly. His sleeping form was a rare treat to me, for we nearly always parted ways after making love, wary of inviting scrutiny from the new servants. I liked to see the alert lines of his body relax in slumber, the severe set of his features softened by a more benign influence than the infernal lethargy of the phial. I turned the lock and padded towards him, sitting gently at the very edge of his bedding.

It was commotion enough—I could tell he’d broken from sleep’s hold, though he’d given no sign of stirring save the tiniest catch of breath.

I leaned over him and pressed my lips to his swaddled shoulder. He smelled faintly of tobacco and firewood, of washed linens and old aftershave. I fell deeper into the crook of his trapezius, making for his neck. There, he savoured of nothing but the warm scent of skin. A covetous thrill ran through me, hot and electric.

From Holmes came a small, low whine. It would have shocked me to my senses if it weren’t for the touch of his fingers on my arm, weak but beckoning. His eyes were closed, lids fluttering.

“Holmes,” I murmured, searching his features for a sign, some secret signal that he had not yet forgotten or regretted our earlier agreement.

“Holmes,” I said again, recalling that he had forbidden me from asking permission. I was meant to take him at liberty, and while surveying his slack, yielding state, I could not deny the sick appeal of the thought. For the briefest interlude, I rallied against both my unflagging prick and my persistent conscience, before Holmes rescued me from both battles with a purposeful squirm.

He had still not opened his eyes, but he was blushing up to his ears.

I surrendered in an instant, palming myself with one hand while the other came to brace beside his pillow. He had exposed the long arch of his neck, and I dove to meet his carotids with my lips, kissing and nipping at the strong pulse. With my tongue I lapped down his throat, meeting the juncture of his clavicles. I longed to map the whole topography of his body with my mouth, as I was wont to do on long evenings, but on this particular morning I recalled that I was due to a colleague’s surgery in a handful of hours. I would need to make quick work of him.

There was a bottle of oil, near-empty, in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. I fetched it with practiced ease as Holmes sprawled onto his back, bleary eyes cracking open to regard me. He wore no expression save for a sort of flushed, sleepy eagerness, as if awaiting my ultimate designs upon him.

“Close your legs,” I told him gently. He did just that. I rucked his sheets aside and lathered two of my fingers in oil, searching under the hem of his nightgown for the warm seam where his thighs met. I travelled and caressed his stones, his perineum, before circling his furrowed hole. At this, Holmes gave a sigh, his lids shutting against the sensation. I could relish this part and give him a slow, methodical stretching—as much a step in the process as the show in itself. I knew with a clinician’s touch the very centre of his pleasure, how he loved a thorough massage until the stimulation had him spilling and gasping my name. All this I knew, but I was impatient and fit to bursting myself, so I caught his lax mouth in mine and shoved my fingers into his fundament, oiling his passage as far as I could go.

Holmes moaned, rough in his throat, and tasted of last night’s pipe. I applied more oil and rocked my fingers back inside him, pressing his knees shut to one side while he twisted feebly in my grasp. I drove into him with the deep, rhythmic verisimilitude of proper fucking, all the while my own cock tented and smeared the linens of my nightshirt. Holmes’ wiry limbs shuddered and folded like mousse, his silvering black hair streaked wildly over the sheets. He was the very avatar of wanting, his body my profane sacrament.

I pushed another finger inside and prodded until his passage was as velvet-soft as the inside of his mouth, and he was keening gently to my movements. The heat of him on my fingers and his drowsy moaning had spurred my cockstand into intolerable stiffness, so erect that it fairly throbbed in frustration.

“Holmes, dear,” I said, rearing up close behind him. He laid so indolently under me, his own prick a ruddy, drooling dart between his legs. I dropped my voice to a whisper, “I mean to fuck you. Is that understood?”

It was the closest I could get to acquiring some consent from him in this state without breaching the terms of our arrangement. He bit his lip and looked at me from between slitted eyes, giving a minute sound of acknowledgement. I loved and cherished the way that sex seemed to turn Holmes’ great mind inside-out, for if his sparkling capacity for conversation didn’t turn towards obscenity of the lowest order, it was shut off entirely; reduced to base animal verbiage.

“I’m going to enter you now,” I told him. I slipped off my nightshirt and exposed myself to the dim blue light, a view which put a sparkle into Holmes’ sidelong gaze.

He nodded and groaned when I fitted my leaking cock-head against his entrance, biting down on a cry as I plunged into the puckered opening, eased by an excess of oil. I heard my own moan from over the din of my beating heart—he was viciously tight still, clenching down on me like the clasp of a keyhole. We stalled briefly as he clutched the back of my neck, scratching soothingly at the small hairs there. I waited for him to relax and watched the slow unknitting of his brows.

“Am I hurting you?” I asked in one breath.

Holmes shook his head. I pressed a kiss to his stubbly cheek, near delirious with love.

“Did you sleep well?” I followed, compelled towards fond nonsense. He opened his mouth as if meaning to deliver a sardonic retort, but I interrupted him by thrusting the rest of the way in.

Before I could register much else, I was fucking him hard and proper, pressing him sideways and slamming into his body. My wits fled me in a wind, consumed as I was by the delicious constriction of his rim and the slippery, smooth squeeze of his insides. There was a wellspring of ecstasy within him, I was sure, as my desperate prick searched for it with deeper and faster thrusts, my hips moving as pistons to the task. The wet claps of our joining rang out into the cool morning air, punctuated by deep staccato moans and the insistent creak of Holmes’ ancient bed frame.

“Darling,” I panted against his shoulder. “My heart, my dear, Holmes.”

He answered with a drawn-out whine, rolling his hips to my time. His cock had thus far been left undisturbed, but it was rigid enough to bounce with my thrusts and paint wild arcs of pre-ejaculate over his sheets.

I squared my stance on his bed and redoubled my efforts, both hands riveting him to the mattress as I took my satisfaction from the depths of his body. With frantic, punching, strokes, we careened towards erotic oblivion. I felt my own sticky spend smearing along his inside walls, my stones drawing tighter with each thrust. Holmes had begun to babble—he gripped at my thigh as if he meant to sink his talons into me, his fine features twisted into a picture of sensual agony.

“You’re perfect, my love, so perfect for me,” I crooned at him, quite near to my brink.

“I’m yours, John,” he gasped out—his very first words of the day.

At that I went off like a shotgun, shoving as far into him as our bodies could physically withstand, so forceful I lifted his hips some distance off the mattress. Rapture coursed through my limbs and spurted out from my prick, flooding Holmes’ innards in a crude, hot rush, our voices rising as one sound.

The peak of it lasted for a minor infinity, and when I returned to myself I was racing for breath, still buried within Holmes, collapsed atop the limp pile of his arms and legs. I gathered some sense to extract my spent cock, half for his comfort and half to watch with shameless lechery the spill of my seed from his hole, before tumbling down beside him. Sometime during the heights of my ecstasy he had climaxed too, the evidence of it splattered over his sheets. I grabbed my discarded nightshirt to wipe at it fruitlessly, before accepting that we would once again be at discretion to replace our own bed dressings.

For the moment, I was content to hold Holmes against myself and breathe in the thick scent of our glory. I loved him helplessly in those minutes after orgasm; I felt close to him—to his thoughts and emotions—in a way I only pined after in our public lives. His body was a live wire through which ran his deepest and most unspeakable desires, conducting its charge through me and for me.

“Doctor,” he began, as I busied myself with kissing the damp skin of his back, “haven’t you an appointment to make today?”

His words jolted me to reason. I sat up to check Holmes’ bedside clock as he laughed lowly and reached for a smoke.

✑

“Mrs. Hudson, if I could bother you to prepare a hot bath for Holmes this morning, it would be much appreciated,” I said, shrugging on my coat while halfway out the threshold.

“Certainly, Doctor,” answered the dear old maid. “Mr. Holmes is well? There was a bit of a ruckus coming from his bedroom—”

“Ah, yes, thank you for your concern, he’s just had something of an accident. Good day to you, Mrs. Hudson, I’ll be home before supper.”

Mrs. Hudson waved me farewell as I made haste for the waiting cab outdoors. In a heartbeat I was clopping away, half-folded over my leather Gladstone with my face hidden in my sleeves. I am sure I made a sorry sight in that early morning traffic, but the fact was that despite my vigorous and altogether satisfying morning, I burned with uneasiness.

“Leave me, Watson,” Holmes had said, in all his naked languor, “I can wash myself just fine. Hurry on now, for if my studies of your habits are true, you are already five minutes late for your guest appearance at Dr. Murray’s operating theatre.”

It was not so much my unceremonious departure from his bed that irked me—that I was accustomed to, considering our flat’s propensity for untimely guests—but how unremarked upon the first act of our little experiment went. I used him at will, without preamble or pretence, though in the process he seemed to grasp at his own pleasure just fine. At least, I imagined he did.

I recognized before it started that I was headed towards that truly worthless sort of fretting which I hated myself for being prone to, and which Holmes had no patience for. Yet all the same I spent my lengthy cab ride plucking at figurative daisies over him, and what to make of our fledgling affair. I thought I’d known the full extent of his sexual and romantic history—or rather, the dearth of it—but perhaps there were formative liaisons I was not yet privy to that had accustomed him to being used in such a careless manner. In that case, might he only have been tolerating our pantomimes of courtship, waiting until he could propose a change in my manner? But I had seen him brought to soaring straits through my softer passions, nigh to tears on several occasions, so that could not be the solution.

Whatever the case may be, I drifted into self-reflection, recalling with a thrill how Holmes presented to me a total abandonment of his defenses. He who possessed all the strength and stubbornness of a stallion had lain prone and unresisting, for me, for my cock. And, by God, I liked it. More than that, it verged on addictive. But perhaps it was unmanly to admit that I was still troubled by this particular craving, and in my feeble state I wondered if Holmes might be better satisfied by some other man who took more easily to exerting his sexual dominance.

The thought of it occupied my imagination for all of two seconds before I felt sick in my throat. Completely alone, I had spurred myself into a fit of jealousy, and it was in that devilish temper that I arrived at St. Bart’s hospital, exactly seven minutes late.

✑

The operation came and went—a rather straightforward corrective surgery which required more narration than it did incisions—and the students were filing out of the theatre with a low murmur of relief.

I was rinsing a spot of blood from my hands when one student approached me, full of questions as to technique and procedure, which I was happy to entertain. I had nearly exhausted his litany of inquiry when the young man surprised me by requesting that I sign a book of his, which turned out to be the very collection I entitled The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published only a year and a bit ago .

“I promise I did not approach you with this ulterior motive,” said he, “but I felt the opportunity was altogether golden, so to speak. I have been an avid reader of Mr. Holmes’ exploits since that frightful case with Dr. Roylott’s poison snake.”

I handled his hardbound copy with much care as I scratched my signature into the inside cover. It was clearly a well-loved little tome.

“I’m honoured to have the readership of such a studious young fellow,” said I, heartened by the encounter.

“Pardon me my asking, Dr. Watson, but will you ever write of how Mr. Holmes survived his battle with Professor Moriarty? And how did he return to London? We’ve been so eager to prove our theories on the matter.”

“We?”

“Why, I and other fans of your good self. Nevermind that, I suppose I cannot force a confidence—I am just so very pleased that Mr. Holmes is back. For my part, I never lost hope that he still lived.”

The young man’s words shocked me; it was not my first meeting with admirers of my small works, but it had been some time since I made myself open to the occasion. Somehow, I did not like to receive condolences in multitude, and as such many of the hundreds of letters addressed to Baker Street following Holmes’ disappearance remained unopened.

“Well, I…” I wavered. I could not confess to the same faith in Holmes’ return, and it smarted my heart to realize. “I am as grateful as you are for his survival.”

“Mr. Holmes will remain in London for the time, then?”

“So he has assured me.”

“Then we shall patiently await whatever you may publish next, Dr. Watson,” he said, pressing my hand. “If I may flatter myself, I too have made a small study of Mr. Holmes’ methods, and have found them exceedingly practical in the diagnostic arts…”

✑

I returned home to Baker Street following a companionable luncheon with Murray, during which time I was fairly accosted by news of his wife and children. It brought great joy to my heart to hear of his family’s happy tidings, and not once did we reminisce of our bygone campaign days. The war was squarely behind us—now we could do nothing but stumble with hope towards the future.

“You’ll be glad for it, Dr. Watson,” said Mrs. Hudson, slipping my coat from my shoulders. “Mr. Holmes spent nearly half the day in the tub, and then he came to me to request a second serving of lunch. It was hardly my best fare, but he was famished like I’d never seen him.”

“A second portion? For Holmes? I should like a look at my cheque-book with such good fortune upon us,” I said in jest.

“Now, Doctor, no need to run for the races,” said Mrs. Hudson, before shooing me upstairs.

I found Holmes in a contemplative state in the sitting room, inert on the settee without even a pipe between his lips. Upon the breakfast table were the picked-at remains of his second lunch, about two-thirds of the way finished.

“Good afternoon, Holmes,” came my wary greeting. I locked the sitting room door behind me and rounded the settee, taking in the full measure of his sprawled-out form. He was wrapped in a velvet dressing gown the colour of ripe aubergines, secured at the waist and seemingly—I realized in a warm rush—wearing nothing beneath. His hair was loose and un-greased, falling in dark sweeps over his forehead.

“Watson,” said he, smiling lazily from atop a construction of pillows, “I see you and Dr. Murray enjoyed an overlong luncheon. Then you had a pleasant walk, did you? Possibly around St. Paul’s churchyard, where your pant legs fell prey to some over-excited black whirlwind of a mutt?”

I nodded in deference to his astuteness. “And I hear you had a rather indulgent morning, Holmes.”

With a glance I noticed that he was cradling one hand in the other, a fresh spot of plaster bandage applied to the flesh of one thumb. I looked to his chemical bench, and found his notebook of scientific observations laid open, various glass and metal instruments strewn across the desk.

“How was your experiment?” I asked.

He seemed satisfied at my paltry imitation of his methods. “My clever doctor,” he said slowly. “I think my little experiment went charmingly, though perhaps that small fellow in the jar wouldn’t agree. Apis mellifera are a noble race of critters, and I’m afraid to say one member of some nearby hive will be missed at suppertime this evening.”

“You stung yourself with a bee,” I concluded.

“There is a certain vasoconstrictor present in the serum of clotted blood that I have some suspicion may be responsible for a complex array of chemical functions in the brain, like sleep and hunger. I may even posit that it is sometimes involved in seemingly contradictory physiological responses.”

“Such as?”

“Stress and pain. And sex,” said Holmes, observing me through hooded eyes.

I could not make much of his placid expression. “And this has led to you stinging yourself with a bee,” I said.

“Well, Watson, there is some evidence to believe this same organic compound may be found in the barbs of our little pollinating friends, but as a chemical agonist. I can at least confirm with you that whatever it is, it is indeed agonizing.”

I shook my head in mild exasperation, and moved to sit beside him. I took his bandaged hand in mine, lifting the plaster mold from where it was applied hastily. The sting was a reddened blot with a pinprick centre upon his palm, mildly inflamed in the shape of a small ink stain.

“You removed the barb?” I asked.

“Of course. I hoped to preserve at least a bit of the venom as well, but it proved too—”

Without thinking twice of it, I brought his hand to my mouth and sucked gently.

His skin scented of floral soap, from the bathing set I gifted him last Christmas. It was a light, airy jasmine lather, and tasted of nothing in particular on my tongue. I alternated idly between sucking and nipping at the sting, as if I might extract the poison myself and relieve his pain. All this I did on impulse—on simple instinct.

When I lifted my head I found Holmes staring at me with hawkish intensity, breathing slowly and shallowly.

“Watson,” he murmured.

“You were satisfied this morning?” I asked.

“What?”

“With how I came into your room and… relieved myself.”

“I thought I spent rather copiously, didn’t I?”

“That doesn’t mean you were satisfied.”

“My dear Watson, you are one of the most inscrutable men I’ve ever encountered, let alone invited into my bed.”

“I thought I was fairly transparent to you.”

“That is merely what I like to think. There are really unexplored depths to you, old fellow. What is it exactly that is troubling you?”

I had no real answer to offer him. My mind was spread out in several directions at once, like leaves scattered on the ground. So I asked, “You’ll tell me if you don’t like it anymore, will you?”

“Only if you bugger me like that again.”

“Like how?”

“Like you own me.”

Heat diffused through my groin. I took in the languid sight of him: the porcelain shard of his bare chest, the boyish mop of his hair, his long calves crossed one over the other. Only a fool could claim ownership over that which was clearly of divine making, and I wanted very badly to be a fool.

I wondered how I’d refrained so fastidiously in all those years of our early alliance, for I always knew Holmes to be a striking and singular beauty. Of course, he was a handsome man: made of sharp, masculine shapes, carved finely with a master’s stencil and coloured in with the ink of a raven’s feather. In stillness he cut a regal image, but in movement he possessed a distinctly feminine elegance—one that was somewhat suppressed in his public dealings. It was subtle but evident to me in the graceful looseness of his hips and in his reflexively supine habits. I could not stop noticing it once I started, for the duelling nature present in his contrasting manners was of intense attraction to me.

I recalled that the sitting room door was locked, and the linen blinds drawn together. Most importantly, I still had a handful of hours before supper—enough time to take him apart and savour the taste.

My right hand moved of its own accord, towards the curve of his neck, where a triangle of moles clustered together. Without a collar or shirt in the way, I drew my fingertips down the fluttering path of his large arteries. One sleeve slipped easily from his shoulders and exposed a mostly smooth terrain of skin, gently pockmarked by years of cuts and scrapes. Pectoralis major, latissimus dorsi, serratus anterior, I recited silently, running my fingers down his sides.

“Say it again,” I beckoned.

“Say what, Doctor?”

“That you’re mine.”

“Am I? Evidence is inconclusive on that front.”

“Are you requesting that I furnish you with more evidence?”

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know.”

I smiled against myself and pinched a nipple. “You are a minx.”

“Says the man who seems intent on killing me with anticipat—ahn! ” I twisted his nipple with some cruelty, and surged upon him on the settee.

“But you are,” said I, pressing his wrists above his head. “Greeting me without even so much as a pair of drawers on, you scandalous thing. You would have done better conducting your little experiment entirely naked, then presenting to me on all fours.”

He whined and spread his legs around my waist. “It would not be decent,” he breathed, “What if we had a client?”

“You would let a client see you like this?” I whispered into his ear, drawing the soft shell between my teeth.

“What does it matter what I wear, so long as I satisfy their intellectual inquiries? My brain is quite suitably dressed for any occasion, encased as it is in my skull.” At that, I nearly broke away to laugh—he retained his bizarre humour even while his prick strained against mine.

“And if the client were an unsavoury sort of man, you’d let him see you like this? Would that excite you, tempting another man in my absence?”

“Would it upset you very much if I said yes?”

I thought on it for only a moment. “It would.”

“Then yes,” he all but purred.

I kissed him roughly, parting his lips for my intruding tongue. My hands travelled southward over his body, undoing the poor excuse of a knot that held his dressing gown together. It fell apart like gift wrapping, and beneath it lay my prize: his cockstand at half-mast, sat within a thick bushel of hair which trailed up to his navel in delightful black whorls. I loved his cock—I could say this sincerely. Without flattering myself I had, at the very least, more experience than Holmes in all matters of handling genitalia, and yet I still felt that his had a unique appeal. It was as long and slender as he was, and flushed a deep ruddy pink, one large vein snaking through its underside. More simply, I loved it for being an instrument of his pleasure, one that I could administer and which did not come from a phial.

To my surprise, Holmes drew up one leg and draped it over my shoulder in a tantalizing show of flexibility. “This hypothetical unsavoury client,” he said, “should he have been so waylaid by my state of undress, would have found himself quite lucky to advance upon me today.”

“I wouldn’t say lucky, per se. I am not disposed to rows, but…” The words fled me as I alighted to his deeper meaning. Holmes lifted his hips, and I saw then the unmistakable slick trail between his legs, staining the inner lining of his dressing gown.

“See? Quite lucky, I say.” Holmes favoured me with a smirk which held all the mischief under the sun.

“You were in the bath, you…” I floundered. 

“I may have exhausted our last bottle of oil, John. Would you care to replenish it on your next trip to the general store?”

I kissed him silly, until his breath came in ragged puffs and I was severely taxing the buttons of my trousers. Before long I had his cock in my mouth and my fingers in his arse, stretching him patiently while suckling in time. I had never taken him in the sitting room before, nor without a cover of darkness, but all the same I wanted him keening for me, sweat-soaked and senseless. I could not be more grateful for the clopping and clattering of our London streets, so useful were they for covering Holmes’ incessant moans.

At one point there came a knock on our sitting room door, and then the voice of the new servant girl, Jennie.

“Mr. Holmes, I’ve your order of fresh sheets!” she called out.

We froze together—myself with a mouthful of Holmes’ cock and three fingers up his fundament, and Holmes stripped to the buff and pink as a peach. In the profound unwiseness of arousal, I just swallowed him down farther, despite the protesting grip on my head. His attempts to tug me off were rather fruitless, truth be told. I loved to have my hair pulled by his fingers.

“Occupied, Jennie!” he shouted, gathering his voice back into its normal range. “I am not—ngh, available! Do come back later!”

“Shall I leave the sheets on your bed, sir?”

“No!” he choked out. I was rubbing tight little circles into his prostate, a move which seemed to nearly bring him to crisis. “Just leave it, mph, ah—leave it!”

“Leave it where, sir?”

“In the hallway! In a basket, or a—oh, blast the thing!” he shouted, attempting to still my head while simultaneously arching for more. That seemed to appease the servant girl, for we heard no more of her save creaking steps down the staircase.

“You—Watson, you fiend,” Holmes groaned. I didn’t care for his reproach, giving his cock one last suck from its shaft to its drooling tip, where the salty bitterness of his seed could pool on my tongue. Tasting his issue with relish, I pulled him bodily off the settee with only a yelp of resistance. I stole a few pillows from his jerrybuilt fortress and threw them to the hearthrug, along with him cradled in my arms.

“So am I ‘John’ when you like me, and ’Watson’ when you are displeased?” I asked, my voice reduced to gravel tones. With slippery fingers I undid my flies and released my cock—stiff as a fire poker—with a dull slap against his thigh. Holmes made a low thrilled noise and reached for my crotch, like a child with his favourite plaything.

“You are whatever I say you are, so long as you stop dawdling and—”

“Get on your hands and knees,” I commanded.

Holmes’ breath cut short, and he turned over without another word. I had him prostrate on the floor, my hands in a vice around his wickedly narrow waist, my mouth pressed to the top of his spine. I kissed him there—I kissed him near everywhere—before I remembered my task and directed myself blindly into his entrance, and for the second time that day I was breaching Sherlock Holmes in one smooth, full thrust.

In that same instant I bore my teeth down on the meat of his shoulder, not hard as to break skin, but firm enough to tell him he was in my powers. Holmes warbled insensibly, clenching around me with an exquisite grip. I set to fucking the writhing, wet clutch of him, with such a punishing pace that I might impress the shape of my cock into his body. Light-headed from lust and exertion, I found myself devolved into a grunting, hungry thing, sweating through my shirtsleeves and damn near choked by my own necktie. I pulled it off in a sweeping motion and then, before he had the wherewithal to object, secured it between Holmes’ jaw as if it were a horse’s bit.

I yanked his head backwards with my improvised reins, bearing his weight down onto my cock. He cried a broken, inarticulate sound, and grasped at my arms with shaking fingers, bucking his hips against me like a defiant colt.

“Give me a nod, Holmes, tell me you’re alright,” I pleaded into his ear, regaining some sense even as I ground insistent patterns into his arse. Holmes moaned around the tie and nodded just once, so I jerked his head back hard and stamped his cheek with an adoring kiss.

“Good man, good fellow,” I said, rewarding him with a sharp thrust angled to fairly wallop his guts. “Say, my love, did you really clean it out of you?”

Holmes made a lilting note of confusion.

“My semen, from this morning,” I breathed. “I shot it deep inside your belly, I know I did. Was it difficult to clean out? Could you reach that far, on your own? Or did you ask for your bath water replaced because you’d soiled the first tub with all my spend falling out of you? Poor you, my poor darling.”

A full-body shiver rippled through Holmes and he wriggled uselessly, back onto my cock and then away from it, though I chased him through every fleeting inch he tried to put between us. It was like breaking a mustang—I had all his wiry strength speared on my member, all his pride and sovereignty brought to ecstatic surrender.

I continued roughly. “So it’s just as I thought. You wanted a second helping of my seed, even with my first dose sloshing around inside you, you filthy little tart.” I punctuated my words with exacting thrusts, each deep pitch forcing out a whine from between his gag. “I could hold you like this and fill you every morning, if you’re so keen for it—make an awful mess of your innards and force you to hold it inside your greedy cunt—”

That was enough for Holmes, it seemed. He lurched and tumbled into his crisis, untouched, with a dramatic arch backwards and a wail of delight that would have damned us both had I not sealed his mouth with my hand. It was this singular moment that I craved in my every fantasy—when the whole line of his body would go taut and squeeze my throbbing prick, from root to head, bringing me to that narrow paradise only sinners knew. Letting the tie fall from my grasp, I caught his limp body before he could topple to the hearthrug, and fucked him through enervating waves of euphoria.

“Please, John,” he whispered, constricted in my arms, “please. Take me, oh, take me—mmh!”

His voice was broken by the one-two marching drum of my hips, but through a moan I thought I heard it. Like a whore, he pleaded in rough, gasping syllables. Take me like a whore. My body complied without question, driven by the perfunctory obedience Holmes had cultivated in my every instinct and action. But my mind—and my heart, in rare lockstep—screamed its own song of rejection. 

No, I almost dared to cry out. Never. I shall never, ever—

But all the same, Holmes made such a pretty sleeve for my cock, and such a delicious repository for my seed, which was spilling madly into him as I vaulted skyward into ecstasy. And all the same, I had played my part in our whimsical little act, for in that delirious borderland between truth and fantasy I was also glad for it. I could be his John, if he so wanted me to be, and he could be my whore—mine and only mine. Thus the irony of the entire situation passed my notice, torn from the shores of my concern by a crashing tide of bliss.

✑

Afterwards, I unpeeled my damp clothes from my skin and settled against Holmes, flat as a pancake on the rug. I rested my cheek on his chest and listened to him control his breathing in that fashion he apparently learned while abroad. There was a certain time signature to it, I’d noticed, where he would inhale, hold, and exhale for four beats each. Like a silent song. Neither of us retained any capacity for speech for a long while.

It was Holmes who spoke first, just as I was wavering on the threshold of sleep and wakefulness.

“I may have stained the rug,” he admitted. “Might it be suspicious to have accidentally spilled water soluble dyes onto more than one personal effect today?”

I gave a drowsy smile into his shoulder.

“Poor Jennie. We use her overmuch,” I murmured. “Holmes, I...”

There was silence, and the distant clamber of hooves on the street.

“What is it, Watson?”

“Today, in Murray’s class... A student asked me about you. You are still much beloved among young readers. Meeting him made me recall some of the letters I used to receive from children, about our stories.”

“Your stories, Doctor. I refuse to claim an inch of your very special powers.” This he said with a sardonic edge. “I have not forgotten your withering response to my write-up of the James Dodd case—I remind you that it is merely a draft, and not at all a true demonstration of my literary abilities.”

“You have given me perhaps the most roundabout compliment ever delivered in the English language.”

I felt his chuckle against my cheek. “And so? What of your young readers, Watson?”

“Well. You are quite the hero, Holmes. It is a real joy of mine that the public finally credits you as I have always credited you.”

“Not exactly as you do, I hope,” he said, gesturing at our present nakedness.

“Yes, that was the crux of the thought. While this young fellow was going on and on, singing your praises to me, I suddenly recalled sodding you sideways some two or three hours prior. I refrained from some very sudden and inappropriate laughter, I hope you know.”

Holmes gave a hearty bark himself, fairly shaking with amusement. “Oh, really, that is—” he squirmed and lifted his hips, reaching between his legs, “I should not—I cannot laugh in this state, I’m damn near oozing like a basted chicken. Help me, John.”

I moved to his aid, stumbling into his bedroom and returning with a wash basin and terry cloth. It was quick work to wipe down his damp skin and clear my issue from where it dribbled out of his dark, puckered rim. Regular use of the orifice had changed its colour and shape since the first time I had taken him and not the reverse, which gave me a vulgar thrill to realize. My labors of lust had changed something physical to him, something only I knew of his body. It was as good as inking my name into his skin.

Holmes tipped his head back and moaned very softly when I inserted my fingers into his passage, scooping out what I could of the milky excess. The gentle requiem of passion that could be ignited during cleaning was an especial joy of mine—though often it meant more cleaning in a hopelessly self-defeating cycle. It was only after I was satisfied with my work that I set aside the wash basin and kissed him deeply, our mouths moving together in a slow dance.

“You'll need another bath for the rest of it,” I whispered when we broke apart.

“Mrs. Hudson would not forgive me.”

“You already live like a prince under her care, what’s one more bath to round off the day?” 

I covered him in a thin blanket and rolled again to his side, taking in the lingering flush in his cheeks, radiant with an air of Bacchanal luxury. I was pleased to note that he had been without a serious case for about a week at that time and did not seem all too worse for wear, save the self-inflicted bee sting. My thoughts floated to second servings and refilled bathtubs, and what lewd things Holmes must have gotten up to while I was demonstrating proper suturing technique on intra-abdominal viscera.

“Holmes, I have to ask...” I started.

“Hm?”

“You have ordered me to take you at my liberty, and yet seem prepared always to be taken. What, then, is the object of this arrangement?”

Holmes’ drooping eyes met mine, his stillness betraying a rapid stream of thought. “Dear boy, might I suggest that some questions are liable to over-complication, wherein the simplest answer is in fact the truest?”

“And what is the simplest answer?”

He blinked very slowly, like an overfed cat. Then he said, in a quiet and near reverential tone, “The simple answer is that I have always been yours for the taking, John Watson. It is only you who must take.”

I had no response to this confession of his—or rather, it did not even feel meant for my ears. So I let his words drift away into the din, holding him as he slipped into an easy and peaceful slumber, until at last we were startled by the clang of the dinner bell.