Crunch

R

Word count: 876

Holmes/Watson UST, Unrequited lust/love; Watson/Toast. For lj user=tinzelda and the other two or three of you perverts who asked for this :-)

Warning: Victorian attitudes towards homosexuality

White bread consists of one hundred per centum fine wheat flour; add to this approximately sixty parts per centum water, four parts per centum Saccharomyces cerevisiae, five parts per centum animal fats, two parts per centum salt. The observant will readily notice the peculiarities of what is termed 'baker's percentage'.

When a slice of this confection is exposed to radiant heat for between three and five minutes, it loses some twenty per centum of its weight by evaporation and the outermost layer becomes crisp , brown and faintly aromatic. In short, it is seared.

Toast.

When consumed at breakfast in a certain Baker Street sitting room, it becomes a unique instrument of wholly unwitting torture.

Watson is very fond of toast. He told me once that it is, for him, a matter of texture and contrast: the crisp crunch of the first bite; an anointing of butter melting into the still-warm, still-soft-underneath crumb; the smoky tang of sugared, still-bitter Seville oranges on the tongue.

I am very fond of Watson. Fond in the way he suspects, though I cloak it in barbs and high-handedness and frightened cruelty. In the way he does not suspect, that he is not merely a magnifying lens turned on me, but is himself a subject worthy of fascinated and close study. In the way he cannot suspect, a 'cannot' both of probability and necessity.

He would be kind to me, I am certain. Kind with that hateful, condescending curiosity that the normal have for the abnormal, the healthy, and especially doctors, for the sick – for by the lights of all his training, all the learned journals and experts in their fields, I am sick. That I have been so for as long as I can recall, that I can no more conceive of being 'well' in that way than I can of not noticing that a man's boots are on the wrong feet and that he works in a fish cannery, is of no matter to them.

I do not want kindness; I do not want to be made well. I want John Watson. I want him dreaming and waking and in the half-light between when, hands moving on my own insistent flesh, I think of the impossible bliss of having him . I want to watch him sweat at the baths, ruddy with heat and life - flushed in a simulacrum of carnal desire and its satisfaction. I want to watch him take out a weapon – a gun, a scalpel, a butter knife, it makes no matter, only that I can picture thereby some other taking out, some other display of his agency and his manhood.

I want to watch him eat toast.

He lingers over the task, thorough, as he might linger over a certain other task which, in the remotest deserts of my mind, he performs with that well-shaped mouth, descending with lips and tongue over one corner of the slice and drawing in a slick portion of butter-and-marmalade before he bites down with a crisp crunch. Biting (at least not in connection with that particular sexual act) is not part of my fantasies: I edit out that sound, and forge straight ahead to admire the strength in movement of his freshly shaven jaw and how chewing purses his mouth to the shape of a cherub's under the neat, sandy moustache. Kiss the air, Watson, as you will never kiss me; I will harvest the impression you leave on the atmosphere of the room, take it next door to my chamber and grind it against my skin, gasping for breath.

He is used, when I am up in time for breakfast at all, to a somnolent companion, eyes half-closed, drawing silently upon the first (second or third, in truth, dear fellow) cigarette of the day. I can watch, sideways, from beneath drooping lids with nary a fear that he will notice and wonder why.

I can hear him, in the sunny quiet of the morning, making little noises of appreciation and pleasure: senses alert to taste and touch; the greedy, unapologetic grunt as he decides to polish off all but the last slice. He is not ashamed of his appetites as I am ashamed of mine: the great rationalist enslaved to base feeling, to - yes, admit it Sherlock Holmes, if you ever claimed to prize the truth - emotion. For, in my fever dreams, we are tender and passionate both, and as extraordinary as it seems when I drag those scenes into the light of day and the conscious mind, in them the man who should never think to marry is, and has, as faithful and devoted a spouse as ever there may be.

He is licking at his fingers now, dabbing away crumbs and smears from around his mouth with a pure white linen napkin, twisting it in his hands as linen sheets might be twisted by two bodies wrestling together in the pursuit of ecstasy and conquest, by desperate hands grasping for any purchase at the moment before climax, when pleasure is screwed to a height near the meeting point with pain and all that remains is the fall...

"There's just a little more left. Sure you're not hungry, Holmes?"

Ravenous.