holmestice | Fic for garonne: The Horse's Hoof

Title: The Horse's Hoof
Recipient:

garonne
Author: [to be revealed]
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson (ACD canon)
Rating: Adult
Warnings: None
Summary: A slight injury during a case gets an extreme reaction from Holmes, and Watson is determined to know the reason why (although he believes he already does).

Kudos to [redacted] for the beta. Happy holidays!

The Horse's Hoof

If I had had any say in the matter– which, of course, I did not, being that Holmes had been occupied with this particular case for an unheard of number of weeks (three), and he had requested my presence at the culmination of all his hard work– it would not be where I would have chosen to spend Christmas Eve, 1895. I was not as young as I used to be, and my patience for waiting crouched in the cover of the forest in the middle of the night in the snow had waned considerably. I had bundled myself (and Holmes, though there had been the usual protests) up as warmly as I could for the night's watch, but the falling snow settled on our shoulders and the ground was frozen under our knees, and there was only so much winter weather my bad leg could take.

But I was not complaining, the dear Lord knows, because Holmes had pressed a long finger over my lips and said, 'Now silence, old boy, and we'll have him in our hands.'

That had been an hour ago. We had gone from waiting with bated breath to mild anticipation to outright boredom. Even Holmes was dragging, his chin propped up on his hand, his breath puffing out of him in faint clouds. I was shivering, and I was about to demand that we find somewhere warmer to wait out our culprit when Holmes suddenly perked up. His eyes were bright and keen, and I shifted uncomfortably and tried to hear what had caught his attention.

The sound of hooves was faint, but it grew as the horse approached. No doubt Holmes could tell the weight of its rider by the tread of its shoes on the hard-packed dirt road, for he began to smile in triumph. He made a signal to the local police who had accompanied us to this dark stretch of road, and I saw the branches all around us shiver.

Things progressed very quickly after that. The horse and rider came into view, and the police and Holmes sprang out of the underbrush, I following somewhat less gracefully and dramatically. The horse reared, whinnying in surprise, and began to stamp wildly, turning in circles as if trying to throw its rider. The rider stayed astride the frightened horse with skill, his knees clamped tight around its sides, and drew a pistol. He began to fire, first in any direction to scare us off, and then after his third shot directly at the policemen. The blasts from the pistol were deafening, and the horse screamed, obviously not used to this kind of commotion. I grabbed for its bridle, braving its wild hooves to gain control, and should have been prepared for the swift kick it gave me, right into the crest of my right hip.

I went down, instantly certain that my hip had been broken, and rolled out of the way. Holmes shouted my name, and I pulled myself to the edge of the road.

Within a minute, the horse had been subdued and the rider dragged from his perch, but instead of standing over him to gloat about his conclusions, Holmes was falling to his knees at my side. My hip was not broken, I had concluded, I had only overreacted to the shock of pain. It would bruise spectacularly, though, and I was lucky that the horse had struck bone and not the tender paunch of my abdomen.

'Watson,' he gasped, patting my face with his icy hands, 'Watson, speak to me.'

'Holmes,' I said, pushing his hands away, 'I'm all right.'

'Are you shot? Tell me you are not shot, dear Watson, please.'

'Holmes,' I said again, more firmly, and caught him by the collar so that he would stop fretting. 'I am not shot, merely knocked about. Now get back there and tell them what you know about Robertson.'

Holmes let me go, reluctant and embarrassed, and returned to his duty as consulting detective. I lay back on the snowy road and caught my breath, staring at the spindly, empty branches of the tree above me that cut into the midnight sky. I could hear Holmes's voice, firm and direct, muted by the snow. Flakes landed on my face, and collected in my moustache, and I shook it off and tried to sit up.

An officer, name of Braxton, took my hand in his and lifted me from the ground. The pain in my hip was overwhelming, radiating down my no-longer-good leg and up into my stomach and spine, but I steadied myself on Braxton's shoulder and muttered my thanks.

'That detective of yours,' Braxton said, 'is something, isn't he?'

'He is,' I said, wondering at the assumption of my ownership. 'He has quite the reputation.'

'I've never seen someone work through the strings of a murder so neatly,' Braxton said, never taking his eyes off Holmes. His voice had a tone of awe in it. 'I'd like to talk to him sometime, understand his methods.'

'He's written a monograph,' I said, suddenly feeling possessive. Holmes didn't explain his reasoning to anyone but me, not in the kind of detail this officer was hinting at. Holmes always said that revealing his tricks would make the public think less of him, but to me he was willing to go through it again, to work backwards from conclusions to deductions, so that I could write it down, and so that I would always be able to understand his reasoning.

'I shall look it up,' the officer said, not noticing my ungenerous change in attitude, and shook my hand. 'It was good to meet you, Doctor. I hope that horse didn't get you too badly.'

'Not at all,' I lied, gritting my teeth as I shifted my weight.

Holmes approached us, and waved the officer away without a second glance, the whole of his intense attention focused on me. He took hold of my shoulders and squeezed, eyes fixed on my face.

'How are you feeling?' he asked, dropping his voice. I'd never seen him so concerned, I thought, and it unnerved me. I'd been in much more dangerous situations at his bidding; a swift kick from a domestic animal was of no consequence.

'I'm fine,' I said. 'It was only a glancing blow.'

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I could feel him assessing my stance with the hands he still had on my shoulders. 'You're not fine,' he said. 'I suppose it's good that beast got your other hip, eh?'

I shrugged. It was entirely probable that had I been struck on the left, I would be totally incapacitated. The wound to my thigh had never given me peace, and when it was cold it was worse. An extra, fresh injury on top of it might put me out of commission for good. Holmes knew that, as much as I regretted it. I hated to be fragile in his eyes.

'Come,' he said, offering me his arm, 'I am quite finished here. The inn isn't far.'

The inn was quite far. We were staying in town, had been in residence for three days now tying up all the loose ends, and we had to walk a fair distance to reach our point of ambush. I gritted my teeth and limped, my war wound stiff and my kicked hip protesting, and Holmes would stop every hundred metres or so and point something out in the woods, something that was supposed to be relevant to his science of deduction or his knowledge of natural forces, but was merely calculated to let me rest.

When the lights of town came into view, I forced myself to increase my pace, now desperate for the warmth of the inn and the softness of my borrowed bed. Holmes let me lean on him, without complaint, and held the door open for me when we finally reached it.

He called for cold compresses when the housekeeper poked her head out of the back, indignant at our late arrival, and did it with such charm and force that she would be hard-pressed to ignore him. He helped me up the stairs, one step at a time, and the whole time my leg seized and my hip ached hotly.

Holmes let us into our room– two beds on either side of a little stove and wash basin– and I held onto his crooked arm as I sat down on mine. He took off his hat and hung up his coat before helping me with mine, and I was far enough beyond dignity to protest. There was refusing to look weak, and then there was being petulant. I let Holmes strip me of my jacket and jumper as well, and lay back when he nudged my shoulder. He knelt at my feet and took off my wet boots, and lined them up beside his own by the stove.

'How is it now?' he asked, indicating my hip. I shrugged, unbuttoning my trousers and unfastening my braces. I untucked my shirt and drew it up below my ribs, and then pushed my trousers and smalls down to bare the crest of my ilium. It was swollen and tender, and already beginning to bruise. I looked up at Holmes, and was surprised to find him faintly flushed, colour rising in his cheeks. We had seen one another in various states of undress before now– living with a man with little regard for propriety meant that I had been burst in upon in my bedroom at more than one inopportune moment, when I was sleeping or dressing or shaving– and I realised his discomfort was no doubt related to the fact he had deduced about me perhaps a month earlier, with the help of a photograph.

I pulled my smalls back up, about to apologise, when a light tap on the door interrupted us. Holmes turned on his heel and cracked the door open, accepted the cooled towels and bucket of snow, and returned to my side.

'I suppose you don't want anything for the pain,' he said.

'Certainly not,' I replied, taking the towels and laying them over my hip. Morphine had been my vice after my discharge from the army, and I was adamant about never taking it again. It shouldn't have surprised me that Holmes had a little packed away in his valise, but there were things about Holmes that always managed to surprise me.

The cold of the towels and ice helped somewhat, but the phantom pain still gnawed at my thigh and at my back. The kick had shaken me, physically, and my body protested now at the violence of it. I closed my eyes, breathing slowly against the pain and the chill, and listened to Holmes puttering about, dressing for bed.

The photograph in question had been tucked, I thought safely, away into a book of mine that I kept in my bedroom. Holmes had been looking for something, some pamphlet, and he had ventured into my room to search the bookshelf. He had found the book, opened it, and the photograph had fallen out. It wasn't a particularly damning photograph, nor very suggestive, but it had featured myself and a chap from university with whom I'd had something of an intimate relationship. His name was Stevens, Hector Stevens, and we had not been in love. We had been roommates in my second year, and we had been closer than two boys ought to be– physically as well as emotionally– but I would never have called it love.

I found the photograph in the wrong place and had known that he'd seen it. When I confronted him about it, he blushed and stammered and protested, and I knew that he knew.

'Holmes,' I said, my heart in my throat, 'I will not deny anything you have deduced from the photo, but I beg that if you must throw me out of the house on those grounds you will give me twenty four hours to pack my things.'

'Watson, no,' he said instantly, 'never in life!'

'You wish me to go this minute?'

He glared at me. 'I wish you to put it out of your mind entirely. First, that you would imagine I would forget every moment of our friendship in the face of one meager detail, and second, I am not the sort of person who ought to be condemning you on... on those grounds.'

It was not quite an admission of his own guilt, but it was close. I stared at him for a long minute, my hands trembling, and then I put the photograph back into the book. He was very still, both of us silent, and then he let out a little huff of laughter and shook his head.

'Well,' he said, 'that wasn't very unpleasant.'

I had laughed too, weak with relief, and we had gone about our day almost as if the conversation had never been had.

The truth was, he hadn't deduced everything from the photograph, because the entirety of my secret was not contained in that one image. It lived in my stories about him, the way I followed him from danger to danger, my possessiveness of his friendship, and my grief for him when I had believed he had been dead. I had loved Holmes since we first shared digs, and I had always hidden it better than I expected to. At first it had been unbearable, bubbling under my skin and feeling like it was tearing me apart. After a few years, it had settled into a slow simmer, deep affection replacing the agony of being unable to express myself, and I had grown comfortable with the role of biographer and friend in place of the role of lover. It saddened me sometimes, that I would never be able to tell him the truth, and after his 'death' I had wallowed in it considerably.

But then he had returned, and things had fallen back into place, and I was whole again. I no longer needed the confirmation of my romantic tendencies, just the assurance that he would stay by my side.

After the incident with the photograph, however, things had begun to change. They changed slowly, and it had been four long weeks of lingering glances and a slight increase in the duration of our casual physical contact, but once or twice I had caught Holmes looking at me with true heat in his eyes. He had glanced away, casual, but I had not lived with him for fourteen years (give or take those questionable three) to not be able to read him.

Now the blush on his cheeks was the same as it was in those moments, but I was in too much pain to appreciate it. I lay with my eyes closed for some time, listening to Holmes move about the room, and then the touch of his hand on my knee startled me.

'Is there anything else I can do?' he asked.

I smiled at him, wan and sore. 'No, but I thank you for the offer.'

'Then I'll put out the light,' he said, and did so. The room fell into darkness, and I eased the cold compress off my hip and pulled my blankets over myself. I was not entirely prepared for bed, but the chill of the night and the shock of the blow had sapped me of my strength. I fell into a light sleep, distracted by the ache, and at some point I dreamed that I was walking in the woods again, looking for Holmes and unable to find him, convinced that he had been swept away by horse and rider. I kept hearing the hooves thundering towards me and ducking out of the way, only to discover that the road was empty and I was alone.

I awoke with the sun in my eyes and my body stiff. I tried to sit up and stifled a yelp of pain as my hip protested, and Holmes appeared above my bed.

'Not so fast,' he said, smiling and sitting down beside me. 'I've brought you breakfast, and I insist that you eat it without moving.'

'I have to sit up,' I huffed, trying again, and this time he took hold of my shoulders and helped me right myself despite my aching body. I was certainly not as young as I had been, and I was back to being embarrassed by my show of weakness.

There was a pot of tea on the tray he had set beside my bed, as well as a plate of eggs and bacon and toast. Surely he hadn't expected to hand-feed me my meal. If it had been merely the toast, I would have understood.

Actually, he had expected to share it with me, which he did by taking a bite of my eggs and then offering one to me. Because I spent more time worrying over him eating enough than does a mother with a picky child, I let it slide and accepted the bite. We cleaned the plate this way, me trying to take the fork out of his hands and him dodging and feeding me like a babe, and by the end I was laughing too hard to put up much of a fight. He was pink with his silent form of mirth, and when he put the plate down finally I felt the distinct shift in the atmosphere of the room that heralded something quite unusual.

'Holmes,' I said, 'you were quite upset last night when you believed I'd been shot.'

He rolled his eyes. 'I was quite put out,' he said, 'that you would do something so rash as put yourself in the murderer's line of fire.'

'No,' I said, reaching for his hand, 'I rather think you panicked.'

'I never panic,' he said, not moving his hand from under mine, and going rather red. He might have been panicking right then.

I curled my fingers around his, brushing my thumb over the back of his hand.

'I have already lost you once,' he said softly, meaning the time after Richenbach we had spent apart, when half my soul had been missing, 'and I thought, just for one moment, that if I had lost you again in so ridiculous circumstances, all of my own doing, I would almost certainly follow you.'

There wasn't anything else to be done about it: I took his hand in mine, pulled him to me, and kissed him. His mouth was half open in surprise, and he leaned hard on the bed to keep his balance, but once he had recovered himself he pulled back to blink at me, out of his element.

My heart was thundering in my chest, and I had never felt so brave and terrified in my life. Afghanistan was nothing compared to facing the man I'd loved for over a decade and finally admitting it. It could go so badly from here.

It didn't. A hesitant, unfamiliar smile crooked his mouth, and then he was leaning in and kissing me in return. I caught him in my arms, opening myself to him, and I kissed him until he was breathless. He tasted like the breakfast we had shared, and sweeter tea than he liked, with an undercurrent of uncertainty. As I kissed him it all faded, until I could merely taste myself in his mouth. He shifted on the bed, drawing out of my arms far enough to rid himself of his jacket, but never moving far enough away to cease kissing me. Then he crawled right in with me, one knee between my thighs, and he made to lie down beside me.

I jolted, pain radiating from the point of my hip, and he fairly shot off the bed.

'I'm so sorry,' he said, scrambling, 'I'd forgotten, oh no, oh, Watson you've gone grey.'

I felt it. I swallowed hard against the pain and eased the blankets down around my knees. Holmes sat back down beside me, and his hands hovered awkwardly as I untied my smalls again and pushed one side down to reveal my hip. I nudged my half-hard cock aside subtly, hoping he wouldn't see, and grimaced at the bruise that had formed.

It was exactly the shape of the horse's shoe, as big as my hand, and an ugly, mottled purple. The edges were red and tender, and Holmes paused only for a moment before bending his head.

'Not there,' I said.

He changed course, and pressed the kiss that had been meant for my fresh bruise to my belly instead. I shivered, letting go of my smalls to slide a hand into his dark hair, and when he looked up at me his eyes were almost black with desire.

'Watson,' he said, 'I am not well versed in... the arts of love, as you are–'

'Oh, stop,' I said, embarrassed, and pulled him up for another kiss to which he submitted easily. This time he leaned over me as I slid down in the bed, and when he went to lie beside me again he slotted himself in against my side, rather than directly on top of my tender hip. He rested his right hand on my abdomen and pressed his forehead to mine, and I kissed him sweetly. 'The arts of love are meaningless,' I said, 'when it comes to how out of sorts I am about you.' It was a great admission, and it was out of my mouth before I had thought about it, but he only blushed and smiled.

'I feel like a boy in his first encounter,' he whispered, and as he said it he pressed his hips tentatively into my side. I could feel his desire hard and obvious in his trousers, and heat rushed through my body and stiffened my own cock.

My breath hitched in my chest, and he looked down my body to see the traitorous organ twitch. I felt his smile against my cheek, and his hand inched down my belly to the flies of my small clothes.

'John,' he said, a mere breath in my ear, 'may I–?'

'Yes,' I said, swallowing hard. The use of my Christian name was so unfamiliar and so right it made me tremble. I felt him stiffen his resolve, and I turned my head to kiss him again as his hand covered me. He rubbed me like that, through my pants, slowly at first to test the waters, and then more vigorously as I squirmed and panted into his mouth. I reached down to grip his wrist and plunge his hand into my smalls, and the touch of his fingers on my bare flesh was heaven. He gripped me tentatively, then firmly, and as he stroked me he rocked against my hip, rubbing himself off on my body. I wanted to touch him, have him cover me with his body and pin me to the bed, have him fuck me until I sobbed; I wanted everything. I had held back so long, watched him from afar, and now he was in my arms, biting at my mouth and gasping softly as I clutched his back and urged him on.

'More,' I said, dragging his shirt up his back so that I could get my hands on skin, and he ducked his head and began to bite my neck and worry a mark into the skin of my throat. My cock was leaking over his hand, slipping in his grip, and he stroked me faster as I moaned my pleasure to the ceiling.

'Shh,' he murmured, moving up to kiss me again to stifle me, 'hush, oh lord you're beautiful, but you mustn't–'

'I know,' I said, 'I know, I just–' I felt the first threatening tremors of my orgasm, and I dug my fingers into his lean back. 'Holmes, I'm– you have to–'

'Yes,' he hissed against my cheek, 'yes, let me feel you–'

I spilled myself with a groan, spurting over his fingers, and he bit my shoulder to silence his own moan of pleasure. I felt him twitching against my hip, the wet patch that formed on the front of his trousers, and his shallow panting against my neck. He nuzzled his nose into the curve of my throat and removed his hand slowly from my smalls. I grasped his wrist and wiped my seed from his fingers with the edge of the bedsheet.

'Well, old boy,' he said after a moment of silence, 'that was unexpected.'

'Was it?' I asked, brushing my lips across his once more.

'No,' he admitted. 'Quite a long time coming, I'd say.'

'Longer than a month?'

He nodded.

'Good,' I said, warmth and pleasure filling my chest. 'I dare say we have a bit of time to make up, then?'

'Oh, yes,' he agreed, sitting up and grimacing at the crotch of his trousers, 'but perhaps we'd better do it in Baker Street, lest we find ourselves acting rashly again.'

'God forbid,' I said, stretching languidly. 'Merry Christmas, by the way.'

'Ah,' he said, surprised, 'so it is. What a gift you've given me, my dear.'

'No, no,' I said, stroking a hand down his back, revelling in being allowed to do so, 'it's I who have been given a gift.'

'We will argue this all day,' he said fondly, and touched my cheek with his clean left hand. 'Instead, let us agree that we have both benefitted, if I'm not too far off in my deduction of that expression you are wearing, and be home in time for Christmas supper.'

'Agreed,' I said, and sat up. My hip still ached, and the bruise would probably take three weeks to fade entirely, but it was worth it. With Holmes, it was always worth it.