Chapter Text
Holmes adores it when I read aloud to him. I think it might have something to do with how the act of listening forces his magnificent racehorse of a brain to slow down. I have, of course, during our time together observed him reading by sight many times. Whether it were a telegram or newsprint, client correspondence or a scientific monograph, it always appeared to me as if his eyes were voracious; as if he were unable to stop himself from greedily taking in all the words on the page at once. And, as if in gulping them down all together, they became jumbled up upon one another, lodging themselves in a tangled and indigestible heap. Consequently, this morass took more time to sort out than his impatient nature could tolerate.
Words, so much more than the singular qualities of tobacco ash or the presence of a particular kind of mud upon a carpet, bring with them too much pre-assigned context to be swallowed whole so hungrily. Facts might be rotated, turned around, slotted together in many configurations; but words can only arrange themselves in a few, in accordance with grammar and intelligibility. They contain meaning that must be parsed in situ, as they come, and are not interpreted by reshuffling as runes; pieces of a puzzle to be sorted and catalogued by his own arcane system of clockwork logics. Their meanings are not decoded solely by him under iron laws of physics, their import not decided by deduction and inference as he does the clues of a case. They are figurative and dependent upon the context of common human experience to make intelligible. All of this makes text mightily annoying to him.
When I read to him, he closes his quicksilver eyes, poses his elegant, chemical-stained and catgut-calloused fingertips prayerfully upon his lips, and awaits my next pronouncement as if a supplicant at an alter. I understand my role in such times as interpreter, as a regulator of language, much like poor Mister Melas in the affair of the Greek Interpreter, and in the same manner as he, take the duty of this sacred art very seriously.
As such, I restrain myself from putting too much English on the ball, so to speak. However, I cannot stop from, on occasion, expressing an exclamation or from other emotion creeping into my tones, given the contents of the text Holmes has me read to him and my own entirely sentimental, if not romantic nature. Much as I attempt to keep inflection from my narration, lest I bias his data gathering with my own no doubt erroneous assumptions, it cannot be kept entirely out.
It is not lost on me that even as our relationship has taken something of a sentimental and romantic significance, Holmes still is largely dismissive and uncomprehending of the values of such context to his work.
In this particular instance , it seemed, that context was even more unwelcome than usual.
"Watson, please refrain from embellishing the facts of the case with your overwrought reactions! They are quite distracting. It's enough that you pepper your recitation with groans, sighs and hums — from which, my good man, I might deduce your thoughts on the text as if it were plainly written commentary — inserting additional emotional ejaculations is quite extraneous, I assure you."
Slightly miffed, I cleared my throat, shook out the newspaper and shifted in my seat before continuing to read, attempting to regulate any inflection and refrain from inserting what I felt was entirely appropriate emotion.
"Evans stands accused of the aforementioned robbery, several murders as well as the grievous assault of an unnamed citizen assisting Scotland Yard in his capture"
Holmes scoffed from his pose on the setee, then opened his eyes to peer over at me, seated as I was at the now-cleared breakfast table.
"Unnamed, pah!" It seemed that it was only I that was to refrain from any emotional outbursts.
All at once I grew weary of the paper, its subject and Holmes himself. Suffocating a sigh before it arose, I folded the newsprint and set it on the table, turning to face Holmes as I did so.
"Holmes, perhaps we should..."
Holmes shot up from his languid pose as if galvanized, and was over to the coat-rack taking his Ulster and hat from the hook before I even knew to pause my sentence.
"Terribly sorry, old fellow, I just recalled I must pick up some reagent I ordered today before the chemist closes." and with that, he was off and down the seventeen steps to Baker Street like a shot.
With this terrible, and terribly transparent excuse, I was left with my placating hand in the air mid-gesture, feeling altogether quite foolish.
I looked at my extended arm for a moment, then sighed and ran my hand through my hair, then over my face, skimming lightly over small plasters on my brow and cheekbone and one larger bandage around my head that was mostly unnecessary at this point. I had been thankfully left largely uninjured by our most recent altercation with the criminal classes, but I could not shake the feeling that something between Holmes and I was very amiss.
Since his Return and my recovery from the effects of both his absence and my other tragic bereavements on my health, we had reconciled and come to be close in more ways than I had ever considered possible. Even so, it seemed to me that our relationship remained, at its core, unchanged. Because in many ways he was ever mysterious to me in his machinations and inner workings, sometimes that was more reassuring than others.
Holmes, as affectionate and expressive as he was during our more intimate moments, still kept much of himself private. I found that as much as I understood him, there were often aspects of him I could make neither head nor tails of; and many times I found myself wishing that he'd walk me through his emotions and reactions, explaining them in his succinct manner as if they were clues on a case. Alas, I was left to decipher his obtruse and esoteric responses as if decoding a long-dead cipher left in charred fragments of the burned library of Alexandria. Mere hints of a trove ever beyond my reach, encoded in a manner beyond my abilities to unravel.
As if Holmes were himself the dancing man employed by Elsie Cubitt and Abe Slaney to communicate, and I, husband Hilton, left in the dark and worried sick - without the capacity to interpret his ominous semaphore.