holmes_minor | Fic: Stolen Kiss at Midnight: Teen (Reply)

Title: Stolen Kiss at Midnight (New Year’s Eve)
Length: 500
Rating: Teen (for titular smooch)
Notes: Holmes/Watson; this is chapter 3 of my Season of Giving fic; the two previous chapters are EXPLICIT
Summary: Holmes decries superstition (until he doesn’t).
Author’s Note: I made cursory attempt to put it within the December prompt but, nah. Also I’d just like to point out that I learned that the Feast of Asses is January 14, for all of us who get our prompts from the ecclesiastical calendar.

The hansom cab rattled along through dark streets, the London of a new day and a new year.

Having considered our ration of liberties already spent, I took none, keeping myself, knees, boots, and billowing overcoat, carefully sequestered on the right side of the cab’s tiny interior.

Neither of us spoke until I declared,

“Rash.”

“Indeed,” agreed Holmes.

“If it had been Hopkins—”

“It was not Hopkins. Lestrade has many admirable qualities. Imagination, he lacks. Why, he almost invites misdirection!”

We fell back into silence. I listened to clip-clop of hooves until Holmes remarked,

“Your words, Watson.”

“Oh, the rubbish? Superstition, you said. With a sneer, I might add. On par with Sussex vampires and hell-hounds on the moor, you said. Condescendingly, I might add, you—”

“You’re adding quite a bit, aren’t you?” he snapped.

“—made a disparaging comment concerning paganism, the Church of Rome, and the intelligence of my ancestors.”

“For the last, I apologise.” He waved a hand.

I harrumphed and crossed my arms over my chest.

“But Sussex vampires, moorland hell-hounds, though fictitious, have their power, do they not, my dear Watson?”

“If that girl had been seriously injured—”

“There was a very competent doctor on the scene, was there not?”

“There was. And I don’t suppose she’ll do it again.”

“What, climb a ladder to dust the top of a closed library door whilst the master of the house is being denounced logically, rationally, and, might I add—”

“Now who’s salting the stew, my dear man?”

“—cleverly, as a murderer and jewel thief before the mistress of the house and their children as well as a senior member of Scotland Yard and a very competent doctor—”

“At the stroke of midnight—”

“At the stroke of midnight,” Holmes echoed.

“The timing of it all,” I mused. “If you had turned to crime, Holmes—”

“Oh, but I did.”

I looked at him for the first time since we’d started our return journey.

“I stole a kiss,” he explained. “Rake, cad, etcetera, guilty as charged.”

I gave a nod. “You stole a kiss in front of a half a dozen witnesses, including a murderer and thief who, at the precise moment that you hurled your flash power and unleashed that explosion, unleashed his own mounting frustration at being caught, red-handed, on the admirable—”

“Imagination-less, but conveniently positioned—”

“—Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard. The girl falls off the ladder and screams, contributing to the chaos and—”

“—as the old year passed away and the new year was ushered in, I was doing that which I wish to be doing for the rest of the year: being clever, solving puzzles, showing off and—”

“—taking a liberty.”

“Quite.”

We spoke no more. Upon our return, each retired to his own bedroom with an exchanged grunt of perfunctory well-wishing and leave-taking.

But I fell asleep, smiling, with the ghost of a stolen kiss upon my lips.