BBCSH 'The Comfort of Touch'
Author: tigersilver
Pairing: S/J
Word Count: A clean 1,000 a day till we're done, as posted, as approved by the inner Tiger. I do like writing serials, really. I have no Beta for this. Blame me for everything, okay? Oh, good!
Summary/Warnings: This is a post-Mary Fix It fic. Specifically, Mary (and John's child) have died, expired and passed on, all Off-stage Right! Sherlock has come to the rescue of his friend and carried him back off to Baker Street. As such, the story will lead to romance and bromance and all sorts of odd feelings, some good and some not so. It will lead, and I promise, to happy endings, and it will be AU. Of course it will; I've no idea what the next Season will bring but I can certainly appreciate canon. In canon Mary dies in childbirth. Naturally. So? What comes next, then? I have nothing better to do with my time but to speculate and I am preternaturally inspired, and then of course someone needs to write the fluff, and I volunteer, out of the blue. Yes? Yes! As we go on, then. Let's see where I take us. I have no idea, really. WIP. Be warned.
"Hmm," John hums when Sherlock comes to sit next to him on the very ancient divan.
Not merely 'next to', though. More invasive than that but also oddly comforting, the manner in which Sherlock presses his immaculately tailored warmth up against John's side. He's quite at home there and John considers a smile. It dies too quickly, as they all do. "Tea?" was the question just posed by his flatmate and John pulls himself away from his reverie and considers it a little more deeply.
Tea? He doesn't want tea. Although he should leap upon the opportunity as something previously very rare, but that's changed as well. It is John's contrary flatmate who is the one who most often offers it, these days.
These days. No, John doesn't want tea. Nor anything, really, as he can no longer have what he needs.
"Or an early supper," Sherlock carries on, clearly discontent with waiting upon John's vagueness. "Yes, definitely."
"John!" Vagueness. Not quite connected, not quite….all there. It's a new habit of his, John is aware, but it seems to help him somehow, that fuzzy distance he's created between him and the world, and sometimes he positively hates Sherlock for assiduously poking holes in it. "Angelo's, now," Sherlock announces and by some sleight-of-hand and devious leverage he has John up and off the couch, stumbling to the doorway. Propelled; he positively hates that Sherlock is the larger. Ah…no, not really. "That's best, a nice pasta? You need proteins and carbs and some complex sugars bunged in you. I'm bored to tears of you drifting around the flat like an undernourished waif. Doesn't suit. Off we go."
Truly, the tables have turned with a vengeance. John scoffs, even as he's being forcibly shoved into his coat by a burbling detective. "No," he begins, though he's not really fighting it. "I don't want—"
"Yes, you do." Sherlock is adamant. "Or you should and you know that, Doctor, so don't carry on so over it, just come. Come along."
"Fuck off." Stumbling down the stairwell, Sherlock's hand curved round the crook of his elbow so the combined breadth of their shoulders barely fit the narrow passage and it's all awkward as fuck to even move properly, John huffs his burgeoning discontent. He's not a child. No, not. "I'm not in the slightest bit hungry, Sherlock."
"Shut up. I don't care," Sherlock throws over his shoulder, releasing John's elbow and forging ahead at last. "You say nothing to the point. This is transport." Carelessly, he slams open the door and bounces down the steps of Baker Street to hail a cruising taxi. John follows behind, mainly due to momentum. "Transport, John. Stop fussing."
"I don't—"
"Shh! You are, actually. And you'll eat, if only not to waste the food. Yes, thank you, George," Sherlock nods to the cabbie, who John is beginning to suspect is yet another of Sherlock's satisfied clients, as the man positively haunts Baker Street and appears to be the detective's beck-and-call twenty-four seven. "Angelo's, please. You know the route." Turning to John the detective both tugs and shoves at him, spinning John off balance sufficiently to insert him into the purring warmth of the vehicle. "Now John. In with you. Here we go."
"So done with you, Sherlock." Given no choice in the matter, John grumbles under his breath all the way to Angelo's, chin turned determinedly toward the flashing view of passing streets and alleys, crammed with traffic and shoppers on this early spring evening. His minder—self-chosen that role, the wanker, that bloody officious wanker—stolidly ignores him. "One hundred and ten percent!"
It's the first time John's felt something all day. Purely due to Sherlock, who seems to have made his personal agenda, to 'make John Watson feel'.
Mostly, it's not a problem. John can ignore it. He can sleep and he can dream. He can dream, can't he?
"Oi, eh?" Except for the hand, gloved as always, that appears on John's kneecap. Caressing. It startles him enough so that he jerks his head about to stare at Sherlock. "Pardon?" he says, but it's not particularly polite. "Excuse you?"
Silence, and a Sherlockian grin, barely visible in the dim of the taxi's interior. The hand settles in, fingertips in leather rubbing tiny circles about the jut of John's bent limb. John can feel the warmth straight through all the layers; he shivers under it. It's a rather smooth move and John would admire it in maybe some other lifetime but he's in no mood to, not in this one. "Get off," he tells Sherlock, but halfheartedly. John knows by now Sherlock won't.
"As if." Sherlock doesn't bother with a 'Make me', he just lounges back against the squabs, entirely unfazed under the weight of John's burning glare.
"Interfering, insufferable, overweening mad bast—"
"Yes, thank you, all of the above, John," Sherlock smirks out the other window and the hand doesn't budge. "Noted." If anything his fingers curl even more possessively into the flesh of John's knee. "Hmm. I think I shall have the gnocchi tonight. You?"