Work Text:
The honey was slowly trickling off Holmes’s bread and across the fingers of his left hand as he stared open-mouthed at the letter clasped in his right. It made for a comical picture across the breakfast table, Yuujin thought as he buttered his third slice of bread that morning. He felt almost compelled to scoop up the little puddle of honey that was slowly forming on Holmes’s plate to slather onto it, just so it wouldn’t go to waste—it was one of the first jars Holmes’s hives had produced.
His train of thought was derailed by the sound of Holmes’s jaw snapping shut. “I simply can’t believe it!” exclaimed he, then jabbed the letter towards Yuujin. “Read this and then please, do tell me that I am misunderstanding the contents of this letter, my dear!”
Setting his bread aside, Yuujin eyed first the sheet of paper, then his friend, wearily. “Whatever are you on about, Holmes?” he asked. Apprehensively, he plucked the letter from Holmes’s hand. “Is this someone requesting your services?”
Holmes leaned forward in his seat. “Read it.”
With a sigh, Yuujin picked up his reading glasses from where they were still resting atop the morning paper, then turned the sheet over. There, neatly centred and expertly calligraphed, the letter read:
Lord Barok van Zieks
announces the marriage of his niece
Iris Watson
to
Mr. Laurence Timothy Basil
on Saturday, June the tenth
nineteen hundred and twenty-two
at twelve o’clock,
Marylebone, London.
And below that, in the left-hand corner and somewhat smaller, was written An answer is requested.
“Oh.”
“Yes, my good man! Oh, indeed!” said Holmes, smacking his palms flat against the breakfast table. “My own daughter is conspiring against me!”
Yuujin pushed his glasses on top of his head to pinch the bridge of his nose. He was suddenly feeling rather dizzy and could already feel a headache coming on. “Has she ever spoken to you about—any of it? This Mr. Basil, for instance?”
“This is the first time I am seeing, hearing, or reading anything of a man by that name! Why, had I known that retiring to Sussex would mean my retirement from Iris’s life, I would never have—"
The table tilted slightly under Holmes’s weight, so heavily was he leaning on it. His honey-drenched hand was visibly stuck to the tablecloth, which did nothing to deter Yuujin from reaching out to cover it with his own. “Calm yourself, Holmes,” he said, meeting his friend’s eye. “I completely understand how shocked you are—believe me, I am too. But you aren’t doing anyone any favours by getting worked up like this.”
For a moment, Holmes stared blankly at Yuujin; then, he inhaled sharply and did as he was told. Slowly, creakingly, he sat back in his chair until the table, too, was once more stood firmly on the ground. He took a deep breath. “She didn’t tell me anything.”
“It is rather odd, isn’t it?” Yuujin mused and pulled his hand back. “But clearly Lord van Zieks knew of it.”
“What right does that man even think he has, giving away Iris’s hand in marriage?”
Yuujin sighed. “Perhaps, as her next of kin…”
Holmes scoffed and picked up the next letter from his stash of the morning mail, cutting it open with his honey-stained bread knife. “Her next of kin? No, Mikotoba, he is merely her closest blood-relation. But who knows, perhaps she will insist that he walk her down the aisle, too! Blood is thicker than water, et cetera. Who am I to dictate what she or Lord van Zieks do?”
Yuujin looked back at the invitation—blurry, now that he wasn’t wearing his glasses anymore. “Well, we might be considering it from the wrong perspective.”
“You mean that there might be a hidden message?” asked Holmes, suddenly perking up. “Why, yes, Iris might simply be playing a trick on us, and her meaning is hidden somewhere inside this fake invitation—”
“No, that’s not quite what I meant, Holmes,” interrupted Yuujin. He made sure to meet his friend’s eye across the table with a reassuring smile. “You are assuming that her engagement to this Mr. Basil has been a long time in the making. That she has been keeping it a secret, and that she and Lord van Zieks deliberately went behind your back to announce the wedding so suddenly. But Holmes, my love, please consider that dear Iris may have been just as surprised by this development as we are now.”
Holmes wrinkled his nose. “What are you saying? That she got engaged on accident?”
“Not quite,” said Yuujin, picking up his long-forgotten bread again, “but I could imagine that she might have been swept off her feet by the young man’s charms and fallen for him at once. A proposal could have followed soon after.”
He took a bite out of his bread and chewed thoughtfully as he watched Holmes turn the scenario over in his mind. A deep crease fell between his friend’s brows. “It would seem rather reckless of her to accept, if that were the case.”
Yuujin grinned. “Perhaps the notion is a little too far on the romantic side for you to understand,” he teased.
Holmes’s gaze dropped to the table. In one hand, he was still gripping an opened, though unread, letter. “I want to trust in Iris’s judgement. I really do. But it’s only natural that I would fear for her, no? Marriage is a rather big commitment, and I myself have no point of reference for it.”
Something soft unravelled inside Yuujin’s chest at once. He took one last bite off his bread and stood up slowly, his knees creaking in protest. “I wonder if you don’t, Holmes,” he said as he rounded the breakfast table to join Holmes where he sat. Gently, he drew his friend—his partner and the precious second love of his life—into his side.
Holmes leaned his head into him with a sigh and Yuujin at once felt compelled to comb a hand through his slowly thinning hair. “You know as well as I do that marriage is not in the cards for us, Mikotoba,” he mumbled into the robe Yuujin wore over his sleepwear. “The law will never recognise the way we live.”
Yuujin hummed. “In some cases, a marriage is little more than a contract.”
“And still, no notary will see to men like us.”
“Well, there are other contracts,” replied Yuujin, at last prying the forgotten letter that Holmes was, somehow, still holding onto, from his hand and placing it on the table. Holmes huffed a little laugh, his breath warm against Yuujin’s stomach.
“What contracts?”
“We bought this here cottage in shares, for example.”
Holmes glanced up at Yuujin at that, a smile dancing in his eyes. “I wonder which one of us truly struggles to understand romance. I, for one, find myself struggling to imagine anything less romantic than real estate law.”
“Perhaps the contract’s conclusion itself is indeed lacking in romance,” Yuujin acquiesced, “but all the same, I signed down my name to spend the rest of my days with you.”
“Oh,” breathed Holmes. It was all the reply he could manage, it seemed, as he continued to stare up at Yuujin with slowly moistening eyes.
“So? Do you not have a frame of reference for married life, after all?”
“Perhaps,” began Holmes, his voice cracking, “I do, after a fashion.”
Yuujin carefully disentangled himself from his friend, stepping back. “And do you believe Iris might be happy, under similar circumstances to our own?”
Holmes pursed his lips in thought, sizing Yuujin up from the corner of his eye. “Perhaps,” he said, “or perhaps not. I shall have to meet this Mr. Basil in person, and ideally, I will meet him before he marries my daughter.”
“They are requesting a reply,” answered Yuujin mildly. “We could send a telegraph today and start packing as early as this evening. Then, we could take the first train to London tomorrow morning.”
“The first train,” echoed Holmes, his face scrunching up in distaste. He picked the discarded, honey-stained letter back up and slipped it out of its envelope, clearly in a bid to give his hands something to do. “We will see about the precise time, but I don’t see why we should not. But first, let me go through the rest of the mail, and then…”
“Then what?”
“Then, I believe, I have two marriages to inform my bees about.”