(Reader warning: This fic takes place in the same universe as "The Second Mrs. Watson" and "A Letter for Mary." It is quite angsty porn with feelings and contains a canonical major character death. Please feel free to close if this is not your cup of tea)
John, after, will try desperately to remember this. Mostly he will fail. Possibly that is a blessing, some sort of self-protective gesture on the part of his brain to not see the things that will hurt it. That happens a lot, around then, and his memories are sharp-edged but unreliable. But another very real reason is that he's drunk, the last time.
He'd ordered a drink in the bar because it had been a long day, because he'd been shot at, because he'd had to deal with the police (always excruciatingly slow in these situations and made worse by the language barrier). He'd ordered another one because he had no idea what to do with his life, how his marriage could have gone so far south, so quickly. The third one was honestly because it was just very decent scotch for a country full of nominal teetotalers and he was sort of enjoying feeling like Bogart in "Casablanca."
Like that.
This is what he can only faintly recall.
John walks, carefully since he's wobbly, up to the room he shares with Mary. Rosamund. Mary. He lets himself in, but she isn't asleep. She's sitting on the small sofa, hands limp and upturned in her lap. Silent tears are streaming down her face and she smiles a tight-lipped grimace at him before resuming her focus on nothing.
Oh, right. Her friend came back from the dead, which he knows from experience is one hell of a thing all on its own, and probably made incalculably worse by the fact that he hated her and then died again, thinking she'd betrayed him.
He wants to go to sleep but he finds, more, that he wants to be the sort of man she believes that he is. The sort of man who supports his wife when she's hurting instead of sitting in a hotel lobby bar and drinking alone. So he sits on the sofa next to Mary, says, "Come here" and puts his arms around her. She's tense, for a second, but then she lets it go and buries her face in his shoulder.
The room is dim, lit by a single lamp, and they sit that way in silence for a long time. Eventually she draws a shaky breath, and lifts her head. Extremely gently, she nibbles at that sensitive spot on his neck, just below his ear. And she bloody well knows what that does to him.
John pulls back, says, "Mary…" though he doesn't know what he will say next.
I don't know if we can make this work.
You don't know what I've been doing.
I want us to trust one another but I think maybe neither of us should.
She interrupts him before he can say any of them, says, "John, please, I just want..."
And even in the dim light, even with tears staining her face, he can see that she does want, and that's… unusual, and despite all honorable intentions he can feel the blood rising in his cock.
It's not like their sex life completely stopped when Rosie was born, but even apart from the typical new-parent lack of sleep and privacy, her precipitous birth had done some damage to Mary. A consultant obstetrician had stitched her up and said it'd just be a matter of time and practice to get back to normal, but normal sometimes seems so far away.
He can't reliably make it good for her anymore. He can even hurt her, now, a fact which he wishes so devoutly he did not know. And so when Mary gamely volunteers John suspects that it's out of obligation, an item to tick off a mental list somewhere like:
-Feed high-needs infant daughter
-Pay gas bill
-Hoover living room carpets
-Get husband off
He doesn't like being an obligation to her, so he's sort of stopped asking. And then-
Right now, though, with the she-wolf he married throwing a leg over his lap to straddle him, John realizes with a sinking sensation that the gentle hints that other fathers have given him about this were actually right… that it would come back, as the breastfeeding hormones wore off and Rosie started sleeping through. That an evening out together without the baby and a quiet hotel room could really do the trick.
They probably wouldn't have included fleeing the country or engaging in a gun battle in their date night schemes. And fuck it if he doesn't even care about any of that, right now. Because Mary is filling his senses… the taste of sweet minty tea in her mouth, the slide of her lips on his, the flowers of Clair de la Lune overwhelming every other scent.
Still here, it all seems to say. Still alive. Still together. Still with you.
He's gripping her waist tightly, pulling her as close as he can manage, and when Mary (Rosamund) (Mary) rolls her hips expertly over his straining erection John moans into her mouth. It's not enough, it's never enough. He pulls her shirt over her head, buries his face in her cleavage, and Mary gasps and scratches her nails over his sensitized scalp.
Mary's fair skin gleams in the dim, and John realizes that she's as drunk on him as he is on the whiskey- which is really fairly drunk. And she's yanked the tail of his shirt out of his jeans and started laughing with just a hint of hysteria in her voice and saying, "I- I can't get this fucking thing off, John, help!"
He pulls back from her, rains gentle close-mouthed kisses on her face and shoulders.
"Get off me, then. Get on the bed."
She climbs off him, takes the three steps back to the bed, falls backwards into it and props herself on her elbows. John follows her more slowly, carefully undoing the buttons of his shirt. She's beautiful like this, all mussed hair and wide eyes. He knows he's not handsome: too short, too skinny, too scarred. Except Mary is looking at him like she could devour him alive and he hadn't realized how much he'd missed her wanting him until she wanted him again.
"Are you coming?" she inquires archly, and he replies "Eventually" and for just a second, they giggle together like children hearing a smutty joke. There's a sense of unreality about the Fez hotel room tonight, as if it's disconnected from the rest of the world. It's safe to laugh here and not think of who else might be after her, of his own reprehensible actions, of their tiny daughter apart from them and thousands of miles away. All he has to do here is join Mary on the bed and take her in his arms and kiss her until they're both breathless.
This isn't the real world. In the real world he can't unhook anybody's bra without fucking it up and fumbling around, but here he does. In the real world Mary's breasts belong to Rosie, now, not him, and he doesn't swirl his tongue around the hardening peak of her nipple and taste the faint sweetness of milk. He does, here, and she keens in response. In the real world she's disproportionately upset about the slight sagginess of her lower belly and feels uncomfortable when he touches her there. Here, she welcomes the brush of his lips.
With no grace at all they get Mary out of her trousers and knickers and she parts her thighs for him to kneel between them, a cushion beneath his knees. Her light brown pubic hair, normally waxed away, has grown out a bit since she's been on the run, and the sight of it gives John a fierce and nonsensical feeling of possessiveness. She does it for him, and nobody else.
And that's a fucking hypocritical miserable thought to have because there's been absolutely no reason to think that her being faithful was ever in doubt.
John nuzzles his nose into the fine fuzz, and slowly, carefully, licks down the length of her slit and Mary mumbles, "Oh, my." Because he is quite good at this, after all. The first time he'd gone down on her, on that first date, back when she was the fun and uncomplicated part of his life, she'd gasped out, "I'm definitely keeping you around."
This time he's gentler than she used to prefer, and it seems to work if the soft sighs she makes are any indication. Parting her labia with two fingers, he swirls his tongue around, teasing, not making direct contact with her clit. John loves this bit, where she's needy and he's still entirely in control of himself. Or not entirely, maybe… he drops a hand down and palms the bulge of his cock through his jeans, just enough to make sure it stays interested.
He keeps a firm grip on the supple skin of her thighs to remind her that he doesn't have to be gentle, but he keeps teasing until she starts to whimper, and then has mercy and presses the flat of his tongue to her clitoris and she actually shrieks a bit. Mary covers her mouth with her hand. The walls here are thin.
At this point she used to like something inside her, filling her up, except penetration is just the thing that gives Mary trouble nowadays. But he tries it anyway, just one finger. And then just crooking it up and rubbing, ever-so-carefully, on that certain spot. And then, oh God, she's coming, he can just feel it on his fingers and in his mouth and there's such pride and joy in it he doesn't know what to think. There is nothing in the world quite like the feeling of giving a woman an orgasm.
John pulls back, licks the taste of her off his lips. Mary stretches, an exercise in sensuality, and murmurs, "Get up here, you bastard." At which point John has to laugh, because something has just occurred to him and it's really quite funny and quite not-funny at the same time.
"What?" Mary asks.
"I didn't think to pack condoms," John giggles, resting his cheek on the smooth skin of her inner thigh, "Did you?"
"Well... no. I was hardly expecting to see you, was I? Don't you still keep one in your wallet?"
He doesn't, for much the same reason that he used to keep his single high-limit credit card locked up in Sherlock's desk. There's no point in making it easy for yourself to make stupid decisions, so the condoms live safely in the top drawer of Mary's nightstand.
He mutters, "Fuck."
Mary sighs, and says, "Just pull out."
Which… she's always been a bit intense about birth control, and probably with good reason. As best they can tell she got pregnant with Rosie about thirty seconds after stopping the pill. Certainly the last thing they need right now is to bring another innocent child into their insanely problematic menage… and his penis is saying,"She's really smart, isn't she? We're good. Go on."
Some vestige of conscience makes him ask, "If you're sure?"
"'Course I'm sure. Get up here."
John strips off jeans and pants, quicker than normal, and gets up there. She kisses him, soft and rather sloppy, tasting herself. His cock nudges against her entrance and Mary reaches down, positions him, and he pushes forward and bloody fuck that's still so bleeding good.
"You okay?" John whispers, because he really doesn't want to hurt her though he can never seem to avoid it.
"All kinds of okay. That's so goddamn good," Mary purrs in his ear, "Move."
John does, and thinks that it's actually probably helpful that he's been drinking. It numbs the sensation a bit, which is helping him keep from coming inside her within the first thirty seconds like a teenager. He'd never wear a condom if he didn't have to. He wouldn't pull out if he didn't have to either, but it is what it is.
And for now, it's good. Mary's cunt seems to pull him deeper and deeper, an invitation to stay inside her, live there, and it's not just sex anymore, is it, it's something more meaningful and profound. It's what it's supposed to be when you're married to someone you love and you are able to restrain the worst aspects of yourself in order to not burn your entire world down. Where you are actually the principal person in her life and the one she can and actually does come to when she is in trouble.
Where- Mary wraps one of her legs around his middle and digs her heel into his arse and disrupts his train of thought. It's nontrivial to get her to come untouched in this position and John wants her to go again before he does. The new angle should be hitting g-spot, so he picks up the pace and tries to think about the permutations of the leg-before-wicket rule.
Definitely, g-spot. Mary's panting, scratching his back, giving those soft little gasps that John loves to hear her make. He gives a few more staccato thrusts and with them, Mary push-pull-ripples around him and John pulls out. Mary reaches a shaking hand down to wrap around his cock and within a few seconds he's following her, three pulses of semen splattering her thighs and belly.
John collapses down at Mary's side, overheating and sated. When her breathing has leveled off, Mary stirs, takes a tissue from the box on the bedside table, and starts cleaning his come off herself.
"You should probably have a drink of water," she says, "Or you're going to have a headache tomorrow."
"I'm going to have a headache tomorrow," John agrees, but because she's entirely right he heads into the into the ensuite, drinking two plastic cups full of water before cleaning himself off with a wet flannel. Coming back into the room, he puts on his boxers and climbs back into the bed, under the covers this time. Mary switches off the lights, and they lie together in the dark, a wide space between them.
After some time, she stretches her foot out, her toes just touching his ankle. John puts a hand on her thigh.
Barely connected at those two points, Mary says to him, "I think… when we get home, we should sit down and… and really have a good talk, yeah?"
The knot that's in his chest loosens a little, and John says, "Yeah. We should. We will."
They will not. This is because in his own room on the other side of the hotel, Sherlock Holmes is calling his brother. This call, all unwilling, is the first thing that will set Mary's feet on the road to Samarra when she awakens tomorrow. This is the last time they'll share a bed, in any sense of the word, and neither of them know it. In less than twenty four hours, Mary will stop knowing anything at all.
And John won't properly be able to remember.