I don't own any of the characters or stories from the BBC's Sherlock, but hey, a girl can dream.
My first attempt at a Sherlock fic, really surprisingly from the point of view of character I identify the least with. Please forgive my attempts to analyze like him. The real Sherlock would be unimpressed to say the least. Not to mention that the fluffiness might make him want to shoot holes in a wall.
Meant to be a one-shot, but I might add chapters if it's well received. I'll be eager to see if this is interpreted in a more slashy or a more friendship-y way.
Please critique.
The cab is threading its way through the city at night, colored lights towering buildings a million cars a million adverts a million people under a pitch black sky London, tracing along a crooked line that'll lead it back to the flat.
Sherlock tilts his face to the car's grey ceiling and breathes. It's been a taxing case; not too difficult to solve, took only fifty or so hours for him to get it, but most of those hours have been spent awake and thinking on his feet, one night of reading about ancient Roman architecture at the library until four, another of standing outside a flat until dawn, drinking terrible take-away coffee and mocking John for getting stuck on hints in his book of crossword puzzles, waiting for a skinny Indian museum guide that never turned up because he didn't exist. Then, less than an hour ago back at the gallery, everything had finally come together just as a large belligerent guard—who had reason to want them gone, as all of security was in on the scheme—was dragging him and John away by their collars. He'd shouted out the answer, and there'd been the usual need to explain the obvious and the usual fuss over the mundane, but now they're finally headed back to Baker Street, where no doubt John will be writing up something melodramatic with a catchy title for his blog and Sherlock will criticize it and John will post it anyways and then maybe they'll actually be able to relax. The adrenalin and the nicotine patches and the niggling feeling of not understanding have been enough to combat the need to eat and sleep for the past two days, but now that the rush is over and his last patch is almost drained and he understands everything absolutely perfectly, he finds himself thinking about having the biscuits that are probably still out on the counter from tea the day before yesterday (they'll be stale but fine if the ants aren't back) and stretching out on the couch in his dressing gown for a few hours (his bed is covered in the Roman architecture books he'd tricked Watson into lifting from the library and a few popsicle stick models and the large puddle of model glue that had happened when he'd gotten frustrated).
They've stopped at a crossing, and, not for any useful reason but because when he's just been on a case it becomes almost automatic, his eyes fall on one young woman in the group that strides out in front of them and he sees foot fetishist, pet cat, on her way to break up with her boyfriend—or girlfriend, he mustn't forget the mistake with John's sister. If anyone needs proof that gays are people too, they just have to ask Sherlock: he'll tell them that the little signs of when people are stupid with love or heartbreak are practically identical between orientations. It's all about people needing people, people hurting people; boy and girl have nothing to do with it.
As the taxi jerks forward again, he watches the woman walk briskly off down the street with her pedicured toenails peeking out from her BDSM shoes, her face clear and calm but a teary smudge of mascara on the back of her right hand (which has bitten, unkempt nails; the final tip off to the fetish) and a fifteen minute old scratch on her thigh from when she had yelled into her phone and her cat had jumped away in alarm.
You're a completely open book, by the way, he feels like calling after her.
Thinking that he's a little dry too, he says to John, "I'll tell you what that three-word phrase in thirty-one down is if you'll make the tea when we get back." He smiles to himself, sure he'll get a laugh or at least an annoyed grunt for that one, but instead there's only silence from next to him. "John?" he asks, and still gets nothing, which means John's preoccupied by the date he has the next day or still angry about Sherlock tricking him into stealing the library books or not in the cab at all, which is actually possible because they were just stopped and Sherlock wasn't paying attention, and he turns quickly to look and then berates himself because as usual, the real explanation is that he's forgotten John is a human being.
The doctor's eyes are shut and his lips are a little parted as he breathes gently in his sleep. He's so worn out that he looks almost comatose, his limbs completely limp, his head nestled into the corner between the headrest and window. The slight rising and falling of his chest, the color in his face, and the patch of foggy window where he's been breathing are the differences between him and a corpse.
Sherlock reaches out with one gloved finger and taps John's face lightly. John's nose twitches and he mumbles something that might be "stoppit, Harry" or "stoppit, Sherlock", Sherlock will never know, not unless he does it again, which he does, and it's definitely a slurred, irritated "bugg'roff, Sherlock" as John squirms away a little and then relaxes into his deep sleep again.
Sherlock flips quickly back through the past couple of days and almost immediately finds images of John rubbing at his eyes under the warm glow of the library's lamp, nodding then jerking awake while leaning over a huge book with tiny print, John lingering a little by a bakery with a longing look on his face at the smell of bread and Sherlock yanking him past it, telling him they've got to keep moving, John close to drifting off as he sits against a brick wall huddled in his jacket, just as Sherlock decides the museum guide isn't coming and kicks at a rubbish bin and yells at his friend, who's sat up straight and is blinking in the light of the rising sun, that they've wasted a night. All of them signs that John is famished and exhausted that Sherlock had passed over because they weren't important to him at the time, because when they're in the heat of things John really is like a skull to talk at, albeit one with abilities that are sometimes useful like running and shooting and very occasionally thinking. But now that it's done and they're on their way back to the flat, Sherlock has finally remembered that even if he can go days without food or rest and be alright, John can't, and John always ends up getting dragged right along with Sherlock, wherever he may be going.
There's the thought that Sherlock repeats in the most rational part of his mind, the thought that makes this an all right way for the two of them to live, when he sees John gag at the spleen experiment that's sitting on the kitchen counter, when he sees John swallow back a hurt expression at something Sherlock's said without thinking, when he looks over at the stocky blond man crouching with him behind a parked car, panting and clutching a gun: he chooses this. Sherlock shouldn't feel guilty because John can always find a better flat mate, find a better friend, find a less exciting thing to do with his weekend, but he chooses this.
But it's not a choice for most people, is it? Sherlock remarks to himself. Just ask the kinky cat girl, she'll tell you.
Sherlock is very good at observing to understand, better than anyone, but finds himself somewhat unpracticed in observing just to observe. It's a different experience, so much less practical, as he takes in the way the patterned light of a blue and red sign passes over John's face, the different places (neck, temple, wrist) that he can make out a pulse if he watches hard enough, the small motions of John's dreaming eyes behind his lids and the bone structure underneath his skin. He doesn't worry about John waking up to find himself being studied. Maybe he'd have a moment of annoyance, but then he'd move to resigned acceptance, as he always does. In situations where there are endless social cues and rules that Sherlock doesn't have the time for, where the pressure of all of the ways he's expected to know how to handle people at the least gives him a headache and at the most makes him rage and shout until everybody leaves him alone, John is the one that rolls his eyes and forgives him, that apologizes for Sherlock and calls him an insensitive prick and then is ready to listen to Sherlock's newest monologue as if nothing's happened. It's part of why he's valuable, why this man with an infuriatingly normal brain and a boringly simple story whom Sherlock has known for less than four months, this man who is the kind of person Sherlock has never felt anything about but slight annoyance and boredom, is important in an alarming way.
It's a weakness. He's aware of that that. There are few people Sherlock would feel even a pang for in death, even fewer he'd feel genuine sadness or anger over, and yet there he'd stood that night, looking at John in the rippling blue light of the swimming pool and trying not to let any of the panic and anger and this isn't playing fair out because if he lost control it could kill them both, searching for a clever way out and finding none and realizing that this what real fear and powerlessness are like, when someone else has bombs strapped to him and a sniper's rifle pointed at his heart and you're the one completely immobilized. And as uncaring as he tried to appear, as little as he tried to look at John, Jim Moriarty was smiling because he understood the depth of this new weakness as much as Sherlock suddenly did.
He has a plan, now. After that night with Moriarty, after realizing what could happen to him if John dies (not if, when, it's always when), he's thought out what he'd do: he'd go away to the quietest emptiest place he could find, a deep forest or an uninhabited island, and spend a year forgetting, a year letting go a little more each day until by the end he'd be as empty as he was of John Watson back before he knew the man existed. He's completely sure that he can survive and thrive without him, that he can live his life alone, because up until a very short time ago that's what he did, and he'd been doing well by anyone's standards. There wouldn't be beige jumpers and bad cologne and there wouldn't be the running joke about the subtle complexities of the automated checkout machine at the grocery and there wouldn't be bickering over whether or not there was any point in playing another round of Monopoly when Sherlock had clearly rigged it somehow and there wouldn't be anyone calm and curious to talk to anymore, just the frenzied feverish arguments with himself that leave him craving the serenity of nicotine and opiates. But once all the associated memories are gone, once he's alone in his head again, going without these parts of life with John will only be a dull ache, just like the dull ache of when he hasn't slept or eaten, a feeling he can walk around with in the pit of him and easily ignore. All Sherlock needs to continue on living are cases and as long as death is still a when and not an if he'll have them.
He knows that normal friendships aren't calculated like this, but normal friendships aren't potentially fatal for both people involved. Normal friendships aren't with Sherlock Holmes.
As he looks at the sleeper beside him, idly counts the number of slow soft breaths per second and deduces what stores they're passing by the different colors and shapes that move over his face, he makes himself believe that John would understand it if John could see the inside of Sherlock's head like Sherlock can see the inside of everyone else's. That he'd see the significance of the fact that Sherlock's allotted him a full year, not the concentrated week it'd take for Lestrade or the months it'd take for Mrs. Hudson but more than three times longer than the two men have known each other, an entire orbit of the earth around the bloody sun (he isn't able to delete that particular useless fact anymore) to really be rid of the crippling handicap that he's seen hundreds of times in the widows and children and best friends of the murdered, the thing he can't let himself imagine being a part of, the grief.
And if John was really looking, like Sherlock really looks, maybe he'd see the thought that Sherlock repeats in the darkest part of his mind, the thought that makes his concrete plan dangerously close to a fantasy, the doubt that leaving and hiding and forgetting would work. That a year, or ten, or a lifetime, would be enough to stop the needing and hurting Sherlock's recently discovered.
Moriarty got it wrong. That's what people do. And after less than four months of Doctor John Watson as a flat mate and one night at a swimming pool, it turns out that Sherlock might be a person, after all.
And then John's eyelids move a little, and then they open slowly, and he sees Sherlock staring hard at him, and he smiles his tired smile, with a question in it, as if asking if everything is all right.
Suddenly, his eyebrows knot together, and then his eyes light up, and he says, "'Partners-in-crime', that's what bloody thirty-one down was, wasn't it, you smug bastard?"
"Exactly right," says Sherlock.
John grins. "Two days of hell were worth it for that." He shifts his shoulders to another position, crossing his arms, his head coming to rest on the windowsill so his hair gets a little mussed. "You're definitely making the tea when we get back," he yawns, and still smiling, his eyes drift shut again.
Sherlock looks down at the man who is the best flat mate, friend, person to have along with him on an exciting weekend he knows of. The man who trusts Sherlock enough to fall asleep in a taxi cab with him when everyone else would stare nervously at him and wonder if this is the day he'll become the murderer. The man who is willing to lie there vulnerable, because unlike everyone else on earth, the scared angry stupid people who try to hide, he chooses to be an open book to Sherlock Holmes.
And as the cab winds its way through a city that is totally black and blindingly bright, looming with modern architecture that will someday crumble to ancient Roman ruins, full of lovers and full of killers, Sherlock realizes they're not on their way back to the flat. That for better or for worse, they're on their way home.