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Title: Prescience, Pranks, And Paybacks
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Ritchie Films
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mrs. Hudson
Word Count: 2,218
Disclaimer: ACD's Sherlock Holmes stories are public domain, but I mean no disrespect or illegality in my use of them as source material or the film adaptations directed by Guy Ritchie as source material.
Warnings: Men who love men, Manly smooches, Rampant silliness, Childish behaviour, Crack crumbs, Author untrammelled by common sense.
Original Prompt: July Writing Prompt #13: "A Tale Foretold. Watson comes across the first thing he ever wrote as a youth. It turns out to be prophetic. Good luck!- Watson's Woes
Summary: Holmes has gone through Watson's stored possessions from his childhood and found something interesting, hijinx most certainly ensue.
Author's Notes: OH MY GAAAAHHH!! I would have been on time if not for my &*#$(*@#&$)@$ dogs! *whinges poutily* Anyhoo, I just let the Muse grab whatever she liked and wrote it. Apparently she likes RDJ & JL's Holmes & Watson iteration being big silly boys. Don't in any way take any of this seriously, because OMG it's so very not. Also, I had Holmes find it instead of Watson, but I hope it still passes for the prompt.
Watson went up the stairs after greeting Mrs. Hudson and accepting her offer to bring up tea shortly. He had spent a few hours at his club that morning, having luncheon there with several club members whose company he enjoyed.
Entering the sitting room, Watson removed his outerwear as he called out, “Holmes?” He didn’t pitch his voice too loudly, but certainly at a volume Holmes would hear from anywhere in the sitting room or his bedroom. Receiving no answer by the time he’d hung his things properly, he took a cursory look around to see if perhaps Holmes was in, but occupied. Sometimes his dear friend concentrated so fully on something that he became oblivious to everything around him.
Watson’s curiosity was satisfied when he rounded the loveseat and nearly tripped over the man, sprawled out on the tiger skin rug before the unlit fireplace. “Holmes, why did you not answer when I called?”
“My location is hardly a mystery, old boy. I trusted you would find me in due course.” Holmes held a letter or some sort of document in one hand, resting it face-down upon his chest as he looked up at Watson musingly. “Tell me, my dear Watson, have you any insight into which horses might be likely to earn us a tidy sum at the races?”
Blinking and rearing his head back a bit, Watson planted his feet and gave Holmes a suspicious look and a suspicious tone, “What? You know very well you’re supposed to keep me from gambling, not encourage me.”
“Well, perhaps I was too hasty in that wise,” Holmes replied with that tone of slurring distraction he often had when thinking several different things at the same time as trying to speak about another. “It may be that we should apply your hidden gift to some of our cases, hm? Turn your thoughts toward General Burns’ missing nephew Mr. Bunbury; anything?”
“What in the world are you on about, Holmes?” Watson quickly took in the area around Holmes—cluttered with various papers and some small books, as well as a couple of battered cigar boxes which appeared quite old, and somewhat familiar—and then spun slowly in place, narrowed blue gaze alighting upon all the surfaces available. “Are you messing about with dangerous chemicals again? I warned you I would rake you over the coals for that if I caught you at it.”
“No, and that would require you catching me, but this, Watson,” he fluttered the piece of paper he’d been holding when Watson came into the room, “is the thing which has quite set me on my ear. I, the foremost consulting detective in the world—”
“In Britain,” cut in Watson with the air of a many-times-repeated discussion.
Holmes continued as if Watson hadn’t spoken, though his chin elevated a slight bit and his brows assumed the cant they often took when their owner decided to be superior and snide, only the rest of him hadn’t got there yet. “—would never have supposed I was close friends with a genuine psychic.”
“Psychic?” Watson knelt down next to Holmes with a little difficulty, letting out an irritated sigh. “Sit up and let me smell your breath.” Holmes gave him a scandalised glare of such obvious insincerity that Watson ignored it. “Come on, get it over with. You’re intoxicated, admit it.”
“I am intoxicated!” Holmes announced, lifting one finger in a flutter of unbuttoned shirt cuff. “Nay, invigorated! Invigorated with the possibilities of your gift, Watson. Come, now, confess. Tell me everything. Why have you kept it to yourself?”
“Holmes,” growled Watson warningly, tilting his head to offer up an equally warning frown.
“You’ve forgotten your abilities since your youth, I daresay.” Holmes held up his free hand in a staying gesture, holding the paper up so he could read it; and, in fact, went on to read it aloud.
Watson’s mouth fell open, eyes widening. “Where did you get that?”
Holmes shook his head, lifting one finger of the hand he still held out, palm toward Watson, and continuing to read.
“Give me that!” Watson leaned over to grab for the paper, but Holmes rolled out from under him and to his knees with nimble grace, reading more hastily as he knee-walked backwards at the same pace Watson was picking his way over the jumbled mess on the floor where Holmes had been stretched out.
Watson’s fingers very nearly closed on the paper, then Holmes’ wrist, but the detective eeled away and onto his feet, leaping over a hassock and around a chair to avoid Watson. To his credit, despite the limp his weaker leg gave him, Watson was quite quick and agile, himself. Holmes managed to read out the last of it, standing upon the table on which they normally took their meals, although Watson was not quite foolish enough to try hopping up onto the table as well.
“Clearly you have the ability to see the future!” Grinning like a naughty schoolboy, which was quite apropos considering his reading material, Holmes leapt off the table and headed for the door. Watson right on his heels.
“Holmes, you presumptuous ass!” he didn’t exactly shout. “You are not a pirate captain, if that’s what you’re alluding to. And what were you doing up in the attic going through those old trunks of mine?”
“Watson, really,” Holmes replied laughingly as he passed through the sitting room door, “how long have you known me?”
“Long enough to know where you’re ticklish, you… you… aha!” Watson caught the back of Holmes’ braces just before the other man made it to the head of the stairs. Unfortunately, Holmes was far too good at evading being caught—he’d had far too much practise—and slipped his arms free in an instant. After a brief, subdued tearing sound, Watson was suddenly left with a handful of slack braces.
With a triumphant laugh, Holmes dodged around Mrs. Hudson coming up the lower portion of the stairs with a full tea tray, snatched a biscuit, stuffing the biscuit into his mouth and the letter into his pocket before clambering out of the window at the landing like an overgrown circus monkey; only a circus monkey in trousers, shirt and—Watson belatedly realised—a borrowed waistcoat.
Mrs. Hudson stood on the landing, mouth open, looking bewildered, and Watson put his fists on his hips, glaring at the open window. With a gusty sigh of resignation, a moment later he strode to the window and leaned out, considering how much trouble he wanted to go to in order to get back at Holmes for digging out an essay from his school days. Mrs. Hudson made a little ‘hmpf’ sound as she went on past him and into the sitting room, settling the tea tray on the only slightly scuffed table.
Watson’s face broke into a smile, and then it increased into a grin; a moment later he shut the window with a thump and flipped the latch. Next he limped down the stairs and locked the front and back doors, as well as the small door from the kitchen to the little back garden where Mrs. Hudson grew her herbs and flowers. Once he was upstairs again, he explained to Mrs. Hudson that she was to latch all the windows, as he would do in his and Holmes’ rooms, as well as the sitting room.
“Certainly the more mature option, Dr. Watson,” she replied with an only slightly vindictive smile. “That’ll show him.”
Grinning, Watson nodded and sat down to enjoy afternoon tea without any disruptions.
Later that night, after some quiet little rattles and clicks, the side door to the kitchen opened stealthily. A shadowy shape slipped inside and closed the door silently. After a long pause, clearly to listen for other noises in the house, the darkness-cloaked person crept from the kitchen to the stairs, and then quite carefully up the stairs. All the lights in the house had been extinguished except a single gas lamp on the wall above the landing at the turn of the stairs, leaving almost every room black as pitch and the stairs a collection of deep shadows and barely-there amber light.
The sitting room door was locked, the key having been removed, as well, and the shadowy intruder hunkered down to poke and tinker as quietly as possible with the lock. Some more tiny sounds, metal on metal tinks and scrapes, presaged the sitting room lock’s telltale ‘click’ as it surrendered.
As the sitting room door slowly swung open, the lock-picking sneak slipped inside, momentarily illuminated by the stairwell’s lamp, but only just. Pausing again, surely listening hard, the man—shown by the faint glow of the lamp to be a rather familiar man in that house—eased the sitting room door shut with care and started across the room.
When he’d got about halfway, a portion of the shadow falling across one of the chairs rose up and tackled the man to the floor in a multi-part series of thumps and two breathy grunts from both parties.
“HA!” crowed Watson as he wrestled Holmes flat onto the floor, grinning wickedly. He wore only a shirt and trousers, the better to be unencumbered and flexible, as well as comfortable for the long wait.
“You were meant to be in bed!” Holmes protested breathily and he struggled. “I saw your lamp go out.”
“Yes, the lamp… did go out. Then so did I,” Watson answered, quickly switching between capturing and recapturing Holmes’ wrists and unbuttoning his shirt. “How did you not expect… no, no you don’t… how did you not expect retribution, you blasted sneak-thief?”
“It was only a little je-heh-heh-ss-ss-st, no, st-st-stop it, have s-some digniiity, mannnnoooo!” Holmes began to sound a little worried halfway through his not-quite-apology and then Watson’s questing fingers found the right patch of skin over Holmes’ ribs and he stuttered in between stifled titters and giggles, until his ability to speak at all broke off into helpless laughter.
“Dignity? That’s rich, coming from you… ha, no, come back here, you!” Watson chased Holmes’ wriggling, squirming, thrashing form all over the sitting room rug, with Holmes laughing breathlessly and Watson unable not to laugh, as well.
It was well known to both men that Holmes could have got free if he’d really wanted, and Watson could have done any number of cruel things if he’d really wanted, but in the end Holmes was still on the floor, flushed and panting, quavers of incipient laughter in each breath, and tears of laughter still trickling from the corners of his eyes. They had ended up in a line of indirect light from the streetlamps below, coming in through the sitting room windows, and so could see one other to a certain degree.
Watson still straddled Holmes’ hips, grinning and pink in the face, as well. He licked his lips and asked a little breathily, “Lesson learned?”
Holmes snorted, but he was still grinning, too, as he nodded. “Are we even, then, my dear?”
“Almost,” Watson drawled before leaning down and kissing Holmes thoroughly.
Chuckling softly into the kiss, Holmes brought his easily-freed hands up to wrap around Watson and pull him down. There followed a bit more rolling about on the rug, and some more laughter, as well as a few garments being tossed carelessly about, but it was apparent the matter had been satisfactorily settled.
~~~
.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Ritchie Films
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mrs. Hudson
Word Count: 2,218
Disclaimer: ACD's Sherlock Holmes stories are public domain, but I mean no disrespect or illegality in my use of them as source material or the film adaptations directed by Guy Ritchie as source material.
Warnings: Men who love men, Manly smooches, Rampant silliness, Childish behaviour, Crack crumbs, Author untrammelled by common sense.
Original Prompt: July Writing Prompt #13: "A Tale Foretold. Watson comes across the first thing he ever wrote as a youth. It turns out to be prophetic. Good luck!- Watson's Woes
Summary: Holmes has gone through Watson's stored possessions from his childhood and found something interesting, hijinx most certainly ensue.
Author's Notes: OH MY GAAAAHHH!! I would have been on time if not for my &*#$(*@#&$)@$ dogs! *whinges poutily* Anyhoo, I just let the Muse grab whatever she liked and wrote it. Apparently she likes RDJ & JL's Holmes & Watson iteration being big silly boys. Don't in any way take any of this seriously, because OMG it's so very not. Also, I had Holmes find it instead of Watson, but I hope it still passes for the prompt.
Watson went up the stairs after greeting Mrs. Hudson and accepting her offer to bring up tea shortly. He had spent a few hours at his club that morning, having luncheon there with several club members whose company he enjoyed.
Entering the sitting room, Watson removed his outerwear as he called out, “Holmes?” He didn’t pitch his voice too loudly, but certainly at a volume Holmes would hear from anywhere in the sitting room or his bedroom. Receiving no answer by the time he’d hung his things properly, he took a cursory look around to see if perhaps Holmes was in, but occupied. Sometimes his dear friend concentrated so fully on something that he became oblivious to everything around him.
Watson’s curiosity was satisfied when he rounded the loveseat and nearly tripped over the man, sprawled out on the tiger skin rug before the unlit fireplace. “Holmes, why did you not answer when I called?”
“My location is hardly a mystery, old boy. I trusted you would find me in due course.” Holmes held a letter or some sort of document in one hand, resting it face-down upon his chest as he looked up at Watson musingly. “Tell me, my dear Watson, have you any insight into which horses might be likely to earn us a tidy sum at the races?”
Blinking and rearing his head back a bit, Watson planted his feet and gave Holmes a suspicious look and a suspicious tone, “What? You know very well you’re supposed to keep me from gambling, not encourage me.”
“Well, perhaps I was too hasty in that wise,” Holmes replied with that tone of slurring distraction he often had when thinking several different things at the same time as trying to speak about another. “It may be that we should apply your hidden gift to some of our cases, hm? Turn your thoughts toward General Burns’ missing nephew Mr. Bunbury; anything?”
“What in the world are you on about, Holmes?” Watson quickly took in the area around Holmes—cluttered with various papers and some small books, as well as a couple of battered cigar boxes which appeared quite old, and somewhat familiar—and then spun slowly in place, narrowed blue gaze alighting upon all the surfaces available. “Are you messing about with dangerous chemicals again? I warned you I would rake you over the coals for that if I caught you at it.”
“No, and that would require you catching me, but this, Watson,” he fluttered the piece of paper he’d been holding when Watson came into the room, “is the thing which has quite set me on my ear. I, the foremost consulting detective in the world—”
“In Britain,” cut in Watson with the air of a many-times-repeated discussion.
Holmes continued as if Watson hadn’t spoken, though his chin elevated a slight bit and his brows assumed the cant they often took when their owner decided to be superior and snide, only the rest of him hadn’t got there yet. “—would never have supposed I was close friends with a genuine psychic.”
“Psychic?” Watson knelt down next to Holmes with a little difficulty, letting out an irritated sigh. “Sit up and let me smell your breath.” Holmes gave him a scandalised glare of such obvious insincerity that Watson ignored it. “Come on, get it over with. You’re intoxicated, admit it.”
“I am intoxicated!” Holmes announced, lifting one finger in a flutter of unbuttoned shirt cuff. “Nay, invigorated! Invigorated with the possibilities of your gift, Watson. Come, now, confess. Tell me everything. Why have you kept it to yourself?”
“Holmes,” growled Watson warningly, tilting his head to offer up an equally warning frown.
“You’ve forgotten your abilities since your youth, I daresay.” Holmes held up his free hand in a staying gesture, holding the paper up so he could read it; and, in fact, went on to read it aloud.
“Essay Question: ‘What do you wish to be when you grow up?’
Name: John Watson
When I grow up I wish to be a soldier. I will wear a flash uniform with a sword and a rifle. I will be a good shot and earn many medals for bravery, thow I might get shot at back and it might hurt. But I would be brave, in spite of the pain, because that is how soldiers are. Papa would be proud of me if I become a soldier.”
Watson’s mouth fell open, eyes widening. “Where did you get that?”
Holmes shook his head, lifting one finger of the hand he still held out, palm toward Watson, and continuing to read.
“However, if I cannot be a soldier, because of my mother told me she does not want me to go to war and perhaps die, then I wish to be a pirate. Not just any pirate, but the ship’s doctor on a pirate ship. I read a book at my friend Danny’s house that had an heroic and wise doctor who was invalyuble to the pirate ship’s captain. The ship’s doctor advised the captain when he was thinking of making a mistake, but was his friend, too. It would be ever so exiteing to be the captain, but I think that would still be like a soldier, and Mummy would not approve. So I think the next best would be the ship’s doctor.”
“Give me that!” Watson leaned over to grab for the paper, but Holmes rolled out from under him and to his knees with nimble grace, reading more hastily as he knee-walked backwards at the same pace Watson was picking his way over the jumbled mess on the floor where Holmes had been stretched out.
“I think if I cannot be a soldier or a ship’s doctor, perhaps I would wish to be an ordinary doctor. Papa’s doctor is very nice and makes Papa well every time he gets sick. He has a great musstash which he combs after meals at our house. Mummy thinks it is funny, but does not care to say so, because one must not hurt the feelings of others withoutcawscause. His name is Doctor Purdue.”
Watson’s fingers very nearly closed on the paper, then Holmes’ wrist, but the detective eeled away and onto his feet, leaping over a hassock and around a chair to avoid Watson. To his credit, despite the limp his weaker leg gave him, Watson was quite quick and agile, himself. Holmes managed to read out the last of it, standing upon the table on which they normally took their meals, although Watson was not quite foolish enough to try hopping up onto the table as well.
“To summerise, I wish to be a soldier or a pirate ship’s doctor, or an ordinary doctor when I grow up.”
“Clearly you have the ability to see the future!” Grinning like a naughty schoolboy, which was quite apropos considering his reading material, Holmes leapt off the table and headed for the door. Watson right on his heels.
“Holmes, you presumptuous ass!” he didn’t exactly shout. “You are not a pirate captain, if that’s what you’re alluding to. And what were you doing up in the attic going through those old trunks of mine?”
“Watson, really,” Holmes replied laughingly as he passed through the sitting room door, “how long have you known me?”
“Long enough to know where you’re ticklish, you… you… aha!” Watson caught the back of Holmes’ braces just before the other man made it to the head of the stairs. Unfortunately, Holmes was far too good at evading being caught—he’d had far too much practise—and slipped his arms free in an instant. After a brief, subdued tearing sound, Watson was suddenly left with a handful of slack braces.
With a triumphant laugh, Holmes dodged around Mrs. Hudson coming up the lower portion of the stairs with a full tea tray, snatched a biscuit, stuffing the biscuit into his mouth and the letter into his pocket before clambering out of the window at the landing like an overgrown circus monkey; only a circus monkey in trousers, shirt and—Watson belatedly realised—a borrowed waistcoat.
Mrs. Hudson stood on the landing, mouth open, looking bewildered, and Watson put his fists on his hips, glaring at the open window. With a gusty sigh of resignation, a moment later he strode to the window and leaned out, considering how much trouble he wanted to go to in order to get back at Holmes for digging out an essay from his school days. Mrs. Hudson made a little ‘hmpf’ sound as she went on past him and into the sitting room, settling the tea tray on the only slightly scuffed table.
Watson’s face broke into a smile, and then it increased into a grin; a moment later he shut the window with a thump and flipped the latch. Next he limped down the stairs and locked the front and back doors, as well as the small door from the kitchen to the little back garden where Mrs. Hudson grew her herbs and flowers. Once he was upstairs again, he explained to Mrs. Hudson that she was to latch all the windows, as he would do in his and Holmes’ rooms, as well as the sitting room.
“Certainly the more mature option, Dr. Watson,” she replied with an only slightly vindictive smile. “That’ll show him.”
Grinning, Watson nodded and sat down to enjoy afternoon tea without any disruptions.
Later that night, after some quiet little rattles and clicks, the side door to the kitchen opened stealthily. A shadowy shape slipped inside and closed the door silently. After a long pause, clearly to listen for other noises in the house, the darkness-cloaked person crept from the kitchen to the stairs, and then quite carefully up the stairs. All the lights in the house had been extinguished except a single gas lamp on the wall above the landing at the turn of the stairs, leaving almost every room black as pitch and the stairs a collection of deep shadows and barely-there amber light.
The sitting room door was locked, the key having been removed, as well, and the shadowy intruder hunkered down to poke and tinker as quietly as possible with the lock. Some more tiny sounds, metal on metal tinks and scrapes, presaged the sitting room lock’s telltale ‘click’ as it surrendered.
As the sitting room door slowly swung open, the lock-picking sneak slipped inside, momentarily illuminated by the stairwell’s lamp, but only just. Pausing again, surely listening hard, the man—shown by the faint glow of the lamp to be a rather familiar man in that house—eased the sitting room door shut with care and started across the room.
When he’d got about halfway, a portion of the shadow falling across one of the chairs rose up and tackled the man to the floor in a multi-part series of thumps and two breathy grunts from both parties.
“HA!” crowed Watson as he wrestled Holmes flat onto the floor, grinning wickedly. He wore only a shirt and trousers, the better to be unencumbered and flexible, as well as comfortable for the long wait.
“You were meant to be in bed!” Holmes protested breathily and he struggled. “I saw your lamp go out.”
“Yes, the lamp… did go out. Then so did I,” Watson answered, quickly switching between capturing and recapturing Holmes’ wrists and unbuttoning his shirt. “How did you not expect… no, no you don’t… how did you not expect retribution, you blasted sneak-thief?”
“It was only a little je-heh-heh-ss-ss-st, no, st-st-stop it, have s-some digniiity, mannnnoooo!” Holmes began to sound a little worried halfway through his not-quite-apology and then Watson’s questing fingers found the right patch of skin over Holmes’ ribs and he stuttered in between stifled titters and giggles, until his ability to speak at all broke off into helpless laughter.
“Dignity? That’s rich, coming from you… ha, no, come back here, you!” Watson chased Holmes’ wriggling, squirming, thrashing form all over the sitting room rug, with Holmes laughing breathlessly and Watson unable not to laugh, as well.
It was well known to both men that Holmes could have got free if he’d really wanted, and Watson could have done any number of cruel things if he’d really wanted, but in the end Holmes was still on the floor, flushed and panting, quavers of incipient laughter in each breath, and tears of laughter still trickling from the corners of his eyes. They had ended up in a line of indirect light from the streetlamps below, coming in through the sitting room windows, and so could see one other to a certain degree.
Watson still straddled Holmes’ hips, grinning and pink in the face, as well. He licked his lips and asked a little breathily, “Lesson learned?”
Holmes snorted, but he was still grinning, too, as he nodded. “Are we even, then, my dear?”
“Almost,” Watson drawled before leaning down and kissing Holmes thoroughly.
Chuckling softly into the kiss, Holmes brought his easily-freed hands up to wrap around Watson and pull him down. There followed a bit more rolling about on the rug, and some more laughter, as well as a few garments being tossed carelessly about, but it was apparent the matter had been satisfactorily settled.
~~~
.
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