If Music be the Food of Love
Summary: It's a rainy night in London, and John can't stand the sound of it anymore. Sherlock offers to play for him, and John thinks of something else he wants Sherlock to offer him. It isn't about them getting together - they always were. If their relationship is a symphony, this is just the next movement. And it plays on.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
(Chapter 1/2)
It was another rainy day on Baker Street.
The rain fell onto the sidewalk outside, loudly enough that John was too distracted to read. It wasn't even really one noise, that would be more easily ignored… No, the rain had to pour like a bloody drummer, slamming down on concrete with millions of little water droplets slapping onto the ground.
All right, perhaps that was a strange comparison, and one that didn't make that much sense, but cut him some slack! John had been sitting at his laptop for the better part of an hour now, he noted as he checked, and he had nothing to show for it. The rain had been too distracting, and writing was hopeless.
With a loud exhale, John shut the laptop, and the loud click of it was almost enough to overpower the rain for a second. Almost.
"The rain bothering you?" Sherlock's voice didn't even try to, though, not in terms of volume. But Sherlock had always known how to play his voice, whether he was acting like a normal bloke for a case, or threatening someone who had information they needed. This time, Sherlock's voice was lower than usual, and the timbre of it made John shudder. Not in an unpleasant way, either.
"It's worse than your violin," John remarked wryly, instead. Sherlock snorted. They both knew John didn't have a problem with his playing, it had been one of the first few things he'd learned about the detective. It was just one of a few inside jokes they had, things that were stupid and inane, but familiar and pleasant because of that. It was like wearing a very comfortable old sweater, John mused.
"Would you prefer I play?" Sherlock asked abruptly, getting up from where he'd been lying down on the sofa. They were in a lull between cases, and so all the mad genius had to ponder were the philosophies of life, and he'd long since concluded that the egg had come first. Obviously, whatever had evolved into a chicken had not begun as a chicken, and the first 'chicken' as people knew it was the first of its specie. Boring.
John's lips tightened in thought, and there was a pause before he agreed. Sherlock, of course, already had his violin out; he hadn't stopped moving to wait for an answer. The git even had the gall to smirk at him, John thought amusedly, bloody know-it-all. The funny thing was that with most things, Sherlock really did know it all.
Not just about the academic things, either, like where a particular sort of soil could be found, or what a certain bird's migration patterns were. Those were a given. Most would say that Sherlock's plethora of that sort of trivia was balanced by an unhealthy ignorance of who was currently in government, or how to play certain sports. And to be truthful, when John had met the man, he had been severely lacking in that sort of knowledge.
Not to say that he wasn't now, of course. On the odd day Sherlock would let himself be dragged along to the pub for Quiz Night, he would lose quite spectacularly. Current affairs? Celebrity gossip? Who's who? No, thank you.
But Sherlock had learned a few things since John had moved in with him. He could remember nearly four seasons' worth of Doctor Who information, for example, after watching the episodes with John in a telly marathon. He knew how John liked his tea, two sugars and a large splash of milk. He knew where to get the best cable-knit sweaters in London, after John had brought him along shopping.
And didn't that say something about them? John wondered idly, tapping his fingers on the desk to the beat. Sherlock was playing Paganini's Caprice 24, and his arms – usually all over the place, gesticulating to emphasize a point – were all controlled, now, perfectly and fluidly executing the mind's orders. And Sherlock had a brilliant mind. The music danced across John's senses, and a lesser man would have closed his eyes, to get a better feel for the symphony.
But John's darkened blue eyes were very much open. Sherlock, normally, was gorgeous – a sharp contrast of pale skin and dark hair, cheekbones so sharp you could cut yourself on, and a body of angles you wanted to… measure.
Sherlock like this, though? John was ninety-eight percent sure that Sherlock was showing off. He'd picked one of the most difficult pieces he knew, the kind that made his movements rigidly controlled, and just so happened to accentuate his angles. Sherlock closed his eyes when he played like this, and while this would normally be a not as good, as it hid away his eyes, Sherlock's lashes would flutter when his playing sped up. Much of the difficulty in this piece was the quickness of the bow, in many parts of the symphony.
What this meant, to John, was that instead of being distracted from his thought process by the rain, as he had been earlier, he was now distracted by how good Sherlock looked.
John was now long-since acclimated to the fact that he found his flatmate and partner-in-solving-crime rather attractive. It had taken a while, and numerous protestations at people that they were not a couple, thanks very much, but over time he'd simply come to terms with it. They might not be a pair in the conventional 'meet then date then marry then babies' sort of way, but John had finally admitted that the conventional relationship just wasn't something he was interested in anymore.
He had tried, of course; he'd gone out with Sarah for a while, and then there was that woman with the dog, and Jessica-or-Janica… But it was like trying to go from being a surgeon to a general practitioner, from a soldier to an invalid. It wasn't PTSD, and he wasn't looking for a nice, safe existence of a life.
John wanted excitement, and adventure, and adrenaline! He wanted to be running through the streets, chasing down criminals, solving murders, and getting caught in shoot-outs! Well, all right, not so much that last one, but you got the idea. Sherlock had shown him a whole new side to London, to life… To himself, even, going back to the thought of being attracted to Sherlock.
With everything they did, John and Sherlock were practically a couple already. They lived together, they did the Work together (and Sherlock would never say, but John knew what it meant for the genius to share his life's Work with him), they went out for dinner together, they went shopping together… You could see the general picture. Add in the brush strokes of neither of them having anyone else that would even come close, and what you got was a portrait of the situation.
John wasn't entirely sure what Sherlock's romantic history was, if he even had any, but he was very much out of his depth. He firmly maintained that he didn't like men, and he never had, not even when he'd been in the army, and far away from anyone of the fairer sex. Far away from sex, in essence. A few of the other guys he'd known had turned to each other, and while those never turned into anything lasting, many of those men had walked away from it conscious of being less than picky, in terms of sex, when the situation required it.
John was picky. He didn't like to drink tea without milk, he didn't eat anything with cilantro in it, and he only dated women of a certain type. He'd lived the entirety of his romantic life only being with pretty, above-average women who enjoyed watching crap telly and romantic comedies. He'd been looking for someone to come home to, he reasoned, someone who would wait for him while he was on duty, someone to be a mother to the children he supposed he'd have one day.
And then he'd gotten wounded in Afghanistan, and he revised that to 'someone to come home to after working at the clinic'.
And then he'd found Sherlock, and the picture of the stereotypical girl he'd been looking for went up in smoke. Somewhere between all the cases, Sherlock chasing his girlfriends away, and John getting more and more comfortable in 221B Baker Street… Somewhere along there, they'd become what they were now.
Two halves of a whole. Even Donovan at Scotland Yard was accustomed to seeing the two together, now, and didn't insult Sherlock nearly as often. With John around, anyone who did tended to get on the receiving end of the ex-military man's glares, and he hadn't been an officer in the army for nothing.
Sherlock drew his bow across the strings for one last note, stretching it out, and the note hung in the air in front of them, like so many other things did. Sherlock's eyes opened then, slow and sensual – and John was now a hundred percent sure he was doing this on purpose. And then Sherlock smiled, one side higher than the other, dimpled cheekbones and a dark glint in his eyes, and he raised an eyebrow at him.
Author's Note: I know I should be working on Stern, but this just begged me to be written. I've decided to make more time for writing, so it's likely I'll have a lot more of these shots in the future. :) Reviews are rewarded with cookies of love.