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The Laws of Celestial Mechanics dictate that when two objects collide, there is always damage of a collateral nature…
Right… because God forbid he catches a cold before you throw him off a waterfall
“Everyone likes Fry no matter what he does. He takes his clothes off in this film, and people seem to like that too.”
— Guy Ritchie
I do not wish to expend too many words on the three hours we spent in that darkened ballroom, for while Holmes may rightly accuse me of harbouring a sentimental streak, I have never wished to sound maudlin. It was, however, one of the most magical nights of my life. He had managed to scrounge up five different recordings, and while most of them were waltzes, there were occasional minuets, polkas, and gavottes. And of course, as I had theorized and longingly contemplated the night before, the man was a breathtakingly graceful dancer. There is nothing which is not graceful about Sherlock Holmes. I ought to have assumed he’d been justified in his remarks, having watched him fence, but the sight of him fencing was nothing compared to the power in his long, lean legs, the subtle guiding of his hands, the way his slim waist twirled and turned, and above all the look of delight which had entirely filled that beloved face. It took me far, far less time to grow accustomed to following than I imagined it would, because following Holmes is second nature to me and my friend leads on a dance floor as effortlessly as he leads criminal investigations. We danced until we could no longer breathe, and then we sat down on the bare floor for five minutes until we could dance again. We danced the Viennese waltz spinning with furious determination, and we danced tenderly at a third of that tempo when the candles had burned down and the darkness threatened. We danced until weak in the legs. We danced until our hands began to wander of their own accord, and then we blew out the candles, replaced them in the bag, and spent the rest of that sleepless night in Holmes’ room. And that is the story of how Sherlock Holmes chose to win the argument that he was a far superior dancer to any of the men we had witnessed the night before, and how I wholeheartedly came to agree with him.
