Title: To Darkness and To Me

Rating: G

Word Count: 232

Warnings: none

Summary: Out on a case on a chilly autumn evening, Watson reflects on the night... and on one particular creature of the night.

Author's Note: A short written for the Watson's Woes prompt of chilly autumn evening. Enjoy! Again, I have been asked to expand this sometime, and I probably will -- after NaNoWriMo, as that great event is currently taking up most of my writing time and my thought processes.

Also, the poem quoted is one my Thomas Gray -- #453: Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. You can find it by searching the first line that I quote. I came across it in a history book -- supposedly Wolfe quoted it before invading Quebec -- and thought it would be fun to use it here.

The wind blew sharp about them as they crouched in the shadow of the great manor house, with a thousand fingers itching to see them helpless at her feet. Watson shuddered from the cold, looked up over his shoulder at the sun setting behind the nearly-skeletal trees, and shuddered for a different reason. It would be night soon.

Night, at this time of year, in this place, seemed to take on more than just a name. It was a personality, a great, formidable being, and on occasion when the silence grew too deep, his wild imagination though he could hear it breathing. The sunset was a warning, reading, “You, mortal, do not belong here when the night comes to call. You ought to turn back.”

But then he looked back at Holmes, crouched and tense against the ancient stone, his gray eyes gleaming darkly like some great cat of prey, and he was reassured. Whatever saying applied to ‘mere mortals’ did not, in this case, apply to Holmes. He was also a creature of the night. He was in his element, and they had nothing to fear.

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” he murmured, more thinking the poem than speaking it aloud. “…And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

Holmes glanced up with a twitch of his eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“Oh, nothing,”

They fell into silence again, waiting.