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Sherlock and Irene, describing the world
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avanti_90 asked for Sherlock as Time Lord and song #2, which is The Great Curve by The Talking Heads. And as soon as I saw that I knew Irene had to be in it too, because she is The Woman. And so this happened, this very strange thing, and if I had to post it somewhere I wouldn't know whether to call it Sherlock/Irene or Sherlock/John or Sherlock/Earth, but luckily I don't have to choose, I can just dance with it. What it is with dancing today, I don't know, especially since I can't do it, and I love dancing to this song.
Anyway.
*
"Some companion you are; you won't even make me a cup of tea."
He was standing, staring out the open door of the TARDIS at the great globe hanging beneath them, his intent pose not remotely a match for the petulant words. Irene came up behind him, let him feel her breath on his neck.
"You're perfectly capable of making your own cup of tea," she said, reprimanding him as if he were a child. Well, he was: a little boy for all that he was six hundred and fifty-four years old and over-endowed in the brain department. "And I'm not your companion, dear."
"You sound like Mrs. Hudson," he groused, but he put his shoulders back in response to her breath.
"You don't have companions. Well, you have a companion. But he's down there." She snaked an arm past him, not pointing at the Earth but cupping it in her outstretched hand, feeling for a moment that only the force field kept her from gathering it in. The door swung gently on its hinges, with its own small windows, the handle, the safety grab bar. She'd been tickled, then intrigued, then oddly concerned when she'd seen what external form Sherlock's TARDIS had taken, apparently permanently. The London taxi: the endless cycle of driving away and returning home again. Even if it was never really home.
"And he's one of the reasons you keep coming back. But only the most important of many." And now he was curious; now she could put her hand on his waist and turn him, like daybreak slipping slowly into morning. "We fascinate you. Because you can't explain us, not ever. You can answer our questions and solve our mysteries, you can analyze and post data and send out supercilious text messages, but you never" -- she tapped the broad forehead -- "really" -- stroked down the nose -- "know" -- thumbed the lovely mouth. And now you'll be trying to analyze that, the series of gestures and words. Stop making sense, she chided him. Just think and feel for once.
"It's all so very dark," he said, closing his eyes as if he could only ever be literal. "Every direction I look."
"There's a great big ball of light out your window," she said. "Traffic signals and menorahs and IEDs and jellyfish and diamonds and heart monitors and love. And in here, there's a universe of it." Brighter on the inside. He, or the TARDIS itself, had thrown consistency to the solar winds in the interior decoration, but the leitmotif was lamps: Victorian and postmodern, tiny and huge, ostentatious and tasteful, all the colors of every rainbow, like stars, like Diwali and Christmas every day; but somehow, though there were no dark corners, she couldn't sense illumination. He'd forgotten to include shadows, perhaps. It was like hiding the self in nakedness; she knew the feeling well.
"So which are you going to choose?" she said. "Back or forward?" and she shifted her hips to illustrate. "Up or down? In or out? Or do any of those words mean anything?" His eyes were still shut, but she knew he could feel her body moving close to his. He didn't answer, though. "Well, then," she went on. "Ask. Ask the TARDIS to give you a problem to solve. Something to rush off into the galaxy to do, to fix. There's no end to people's problems. People in the broad sense. And a lot of them are not at all boring." He made a little noise in his throat. She was normally expert at deciphering these, but this one she couldn't… a sound of protest, perhaps. "It doesn't have to take any time, after all. Though it might be best for both of us to keep our heads down for a while. Or up, as the case may be."
He opened his eyes; looked down at her, amused. "Does everything you say contain sexual innuendo?" he asked.
"The thing about innuendo," she told him, "is that it distracts you from end points in favor of connections. Of course, I think that's a good thing. I've always thought the questions were more important than the answers, too. Which questions someone asks, I mean."
"It's valuable data," he half-agreed. "For example" -- and he reproduced, in exact mimicry and complete failure to emulate, her hip movements of a minute ago, to which he'd been apparently blind -- "'Back or forward?' As if it were an either/or. We both know, and you expressed a moment later, that it's not." His words came faster, tumbled over one another. "I'm a Time Lord; I have a TARDIS; I can go away for as long as I wish and come back and not really leave" -- a slight hiccup; a word missing -- "and it won't be any later than, well a few hours at least to be safe, one wouldn't want to overlap because of accident, but not much later than--"
"It will be for you. I don't care how nonlinear your existence is, or how long, you still have to live through it; it takes time. You'll be a different person. Even if you look the same. Why do you? If you died."
"I didn't. Die."
She smiled, slowly. "I see." Looking down at her own red-silk-clad torso -- the TARDIS had quite a wardrobe, tucked away in a well-lit corner -- she moved her hips again, now in a graceful sweep.
"A parabola?" he said; a question, but somehow he'd still got the point immediately. Or… the connection. She didn't know what the point was, not yet.
"Yes," she agreed. "Although if you prefer the thrust, I'm certainly not saying no. But it's not as interesting an equation. Or as good a dance move. I'd like to offer you this dance, Mr. Holmes."
He studied her for a full thirty seconds, curiosity and suspicion and a touch of fear in his face; but curiosity won out, as it always did with him, and he reached for her hands. She planted one of them firmly on her waist and let him lead her, the music of silence echoing through the vast chamber, into the steps of some nursery dance he'd been taught long ago, as long ago as Gallifrey perhaps. A very back-and-forth sort of dance, simple and agonizing. She could see him, a solemn child with sweaty palms, stepping out with a young Time Lady. Or with Mycroft; that was a lovely vision. He clearly hadn't forgotten the steps; she wondered if he knew that they were stored in muscle and bone as much as in the database of his brain, even through the reincarnations that were part of his nature.
And we dance, until night falls and everything changes, light to dark and dark to light, and the storm and the holocaust. She whispered, and the silent music altered, and it was her turn to lead: wild drumming and syncopation and sex, and he could feel it with her, though he didn't know the steps for this, this… questioning. It was not, not this time, a battle to be won or lost. She came close, her hips sidling in parabolas and loops, a constantly shifting pattern but a pattern nonetheless, a mathematics that he could decipher as she could break the code of his fingers tightening on the silk that guarded her skin. Desire, and fear, but most of all, curiosity. What are we doing, Irene? he asked with his hips, now moving smoothly in unison with hers; and she replied: Asking a question. Finding an answer. Describing an arc. Defining our terms.
Not deciding. Though he was, with growing, arrogant confidence, leading her, moving their feet in S-curves -- he'll be spelling out his name next, she thought, and wondered if it would be in English or Gallifreyan -- toward the still-open door; she would have fought back on principle, but she found that his geometry suited her, and there would be time, there was always time for gaining the upper hand, later. Her hands liked where they were, for now. For a moment, she put her cheek against his chest; both his hearts were beating hard, in syncopation with the silent music.
They danced on, and the lamps went out one by one on the TARDIS, and the shadows were ghosts of darknesses remembered, of alleys and warehouses and rooftops, of running from fear and inevitability, of the cloister of a London taxi far, far bigger on the inside, of madness and of puzzles without solutions and of the grave. They moved, describing the world, all the worlds and the one that he could never leave behind, and all the time it hung there, the great curve, blue eye and teardrop waiting to fall, defying definition, delaying decision, dancing with them in the dark.
avanti_90 asked for Sherlock as Time Lord and song #2, which is The Great Curve by The Talking Heads. And as soon as I saw that I knew Irene had to be in it too, because she is The Woman. And so this happened, this very strange thing, and if I had to post it somewhere I wouldn't know whether to call it Sherlock/Irene or Sherlock/John or Sherlock/Earth, but luckily I don't have to choose, I can just dance with it. What it is with dancing today, I don't know, especially since I can't do it, and I love dancing to this song.Anyway.
*
"Some companion you are; you won't even make me a cup of tea."
He was standing, staring out the open door of the TARDIS at the great globe hanging beneath them, his intent pose not remotely a match for the petulant words. Irene came up behind him, let him feel her breath on his neck.
"You're perfectly capable of making your own cup of tea," she said, reprimanding him as if he were a child. Well, he was: a little boy for all that he was six hundred and fifty-four years old and over-endowed in the brain department. "And I'm not your companion, dear."
"You sound like Mrs. Hudson," he groused, but he put his shoulders back in response to her breath.
"You don't have companions. Well, you have a companion. But he's down there." She snaked an arm past him, not pointing at the Earth but cupping it in her outstretched hand, feeling for a moment that only the force field kept her from gathering it in. The door swung gently on its hinges, with its own small windows, the handle, the safety grab bar. She'd been tickled, then intrigued, then oddly concerned when she'd seen what external form Sherlock's TARDIS had taken, apparently permanently. The London taxi: the endless cycle of driving away and returning home again. Even if it was never really home.
"And he's one of the reasons you keep coming back. But only the most important of many." And now he was curious; now she could put her hand on his waist and turn him, like daybreak slipping slowly into morning. "We fascinate you. Because you can't explain us, not ever. You can answer our questions and solve our mysteries, you can analyze and post data and send out supercilious text messages, but you never" -- she tapped the broad forehead -- "really" -- stroked down the nose -- "know" -- thumbed the lovely mouth. And now you'll be trying to analyze that, the series of gestures and words. Stop making sense, she chided him. Just think and feel for once.
"It's all so very dark," he said, closing his eyes as if he could only ever be literal. "Every direction I look."
"There's a great big ball of light out your window," she said. "Traffic signals and menorahs and IEDs and jellyfish and diamonds and heart monitors and love. And in here, there's a universe of it." Brighter on the inside. He, or the TARDIS itself, had thrown consistency to the solar winds in the interior decoration, but the leitmotif was lamps: Victorian and postmodern, tiny and huge, ostentatious and tasteful, all the colors of every rainbow, like stars, like Diwali and Christmas every day; but somehow, though there were no dark corners, she couldn't sense illumination. He'd forgotten to include shadows, perhaps. It was like hiding the self in nakedness; she knew the feeling well.
"So which are you going to choose?" she said. "Back or forward?" and she shifted her hips to illustrate. "Up or down? In or out? Or do any of those words mean anything?" His eyes were still shut, but she knew he could feel her body moving close to his. He didn't answer, though. "Well, then," she went on. "Ask. Ask the TARDIS to give you a problem to solve. Something to rush off into the galaxy to do, to fix. There's no end to people's problems. People in the broad sense. And a lot of them are not at all boring." He made a little noise in his throat. She was normally expert at deciphering these, but this one she couldn't… a sound of protest, perhaps. "It doesn't have to take any time, after all. Though it might be best for both of us to keep our heads down for a while. Or up, as the case may be."
He opened his eyes; looked down at her, amused. "Does everything you say contain sexual innuendo?" he asked.
"The thing about innuendo," she told him, "is that it distracts you from end points in favor of connections. Of course, I think that's a good thing. I've always thought the questions were more important than the answers, too. Which questions someone asks, I mean."
"It's valuable data," he half-agreed. "For example" -- and he reproduced, in exact mimicry and complete failure to emulate, her hip movements of a minute ago, to which he'd been apparently blind -- "'Back or forward?' As if it were an either/or. We both know, and you expressed a moment later, that it's not." His words came faster, tumbled over one another. "I'm a Time Lord; I have a TARDIS; I can go away for as long as I wish and come back and not really leave" -- a slight hiccup; a word missing -- "and it won't be any later than, well a few hours at least to be safe, one wouldn't want to overlap because of accident, but not much later than--"
"It will be for you. I don't care how nonlinear your existence is, or how long, you still have to live through it; it takes time. You'll be a different person. Even if you look the same. Why do you? If you died."
"I didn't. Die."
She smiled, slowly. "I see." Looking down at her own red-silk-clad torso -- the TARDIS had quite a wardrobe, tucked away in a well-lit corner -- she moved her hips again, now in a graceful sweep.
"A parabola?" he said; a question, but somehow he'd still got the point immediately. Or… the connection. She didn't know what the point was, not yet.
"Yes," she agreed. "Although if you prefer the thrust, I'm certainly not saying no. But it's not as interesting an equation. Or as good a dance move. I'd like to offer you this dance, Mr. Holmes."
He studied her for a full thirty seconds, curiosity and suspicion and a touch of fear in his face; but curiosity won out, as it always did with him, and he reached for her hands. She planted one of them firmly on her waist and let him lead her, the music of silence echoing through the vast chamber, into the steps of some nursery dance he'd been taught long ago, as long ago as Gallifrey perhaps. A very back-and-forth sort of dance, simple and agonizing. She could see him, a solemn child with sweaty palms, stepping out with a young Time Lady. Or with Mycroft; that was a lovely vision. He clearly hadn't forgotten the steps; she wondered if he knew that they were stored in muscle and bone as much as in the database of his brain, even through the reincarnations that were part of his nature.
And we dance, until night falls and everything changes, light to dark and dark to light, and the storm and the holocaust. She whispered, and the silent music altered, and it was her turn to lead: wild drumming and syncopation and sex, and he could feel it with her, though he didn't know the steps for this, this… questioning. It was not, not this time, a battle to be won or lost. She came close, her hips sidling in parabolas and loops, a constantly shifting pattern but a pattern nonetheless, a mathematics that he could decipher as she could break the code of his fingers tightening on the silk that guarded her skin. Desire, and fear, but most of all, curiosity. What are we doing, Irene? he asked with his hips, now moving smoothly in unison with hers; and she replied: Asking a question. Finding an answer. Describing an arc. Defining our terms.
Not deciding. Though he was, with growing, arrogant confidence, leading her, moving their feet in S-curves -- he'll be spelling out his name next, she thought, and wondered if it would be in English or Gallifreyan -- toward the still-open door; she would have fought back on principle, but she found that his geometry suited her, and there would be time, there was always time for gaining the upper hand, later. Her hands liked where they were, for now. For a moment, she put her cheek against his chest; both his hearts were beating hard, in syncopation with the silent music.
They danced on, and the lamps went out one by one on the TARDIS, and the shadows were ghosts of darknesses remembered, of alleys and warehouses and rooftops, of running from fear and inevitability, of the cloister of a London taxi far, far bigger on the inside, of madness and of puzzles without solutions and of the grave. They moved, describing the world, all the worlds and the one that he could never leave behind, and all the time it hung there, the great curve, blue eye and teardrop waiting to fall, defying definition, delaying decision, dancing with them in the dark.
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