"aren't you tired of writing hurt/comfort?" I'm sorry, are you tired of taking a hot shower when you get cold? are you tired of sleeping when you're exhausted? no. the soul requires someone to carefully tend to an injured hero's wounds while whispering 'you idiot, you could have died' and I will be partaking until the sun burns out.
Watson was startled out of a deep sleep by skeletous fingers on his neck.
"Watson!" came the urgent voice of Sherlock Holmes.
"What is it?! Holmes?"
"I am thinking..."
Watson groaned, and fell back into the pillows. It was all fine and good for Holmes to lie awake and think his thoughts in the deepest middle of the night, but ever since they shared their beds frequently, he had learned that these late-night brain sessions now apparently required an obligatory audience. At least he wasn't smoking his goddarned pipe this time.
"What are you thinking?" he asked reluctantly. Truthfully, he did not care to know. But he was trapped, and knew it. There was only one way out, and it was through.
"I am thinking about earth."
"Oh good God," Watson muttered into the air, and turned to his side, away from the nuisance of a man.
"If I were, hypothetically," Sherlock raised his voice, and Watson's eyelids fluttered open and he stared sufferingly into the night, "to shed this mortal coil, and contort my flesh body, transform it, so to speak, into that of a burrowing creature that might with its limbless unseeing body glide through different types of soil and distinguish them by their taste..."
What the fuck, thought Watson, borrowing an expression from the future as he transcended space and time in an effort to get away from this conversation.
"I am only contemplating how much easier it would be to write a monograph about Soil Types as Relating to Footprints, Mud Splatters and Urban Geographies... if I were a nematode, or perhaps an annelid."
"How long have you been awake, Holmes?" After a pause pregnant with sleep-deprivation, he pointed out, thoughtfully, "You couldn't write if you had no limbs."
"I could dictate to you."
"......right."
"But then it occured to me: if I were thus transformed, you might not wish to sleep next to me as you do now."
"I am very much not sleeping, Holmes."
Watson turned to face him, then, and saw the poor man did indeed look terribly troubled by his questions. Perhaps he was delirious, or lucid, or deep in somnambulism. Or... he was just being himself. Watson sighed, and reached for his hand.
"What do you want, Holmes?"
"Watson - would you still love me if I was a worm?"
Watson, having lost the plot, transformed into an early bird and fled the nest. (But caught his worm - by the lips.)
