Right, so. First Sherlock FF, and first thing I´ve written in many, many years, so please be gentle. I may continue this, depending if you see it´s worth it, so please, all comments are welcomed.
Will, most likely if continued, take the direction of slash so if that´s not your cup of tea, don´t torture yourself.
Also English is not my 1st language, so any mistakes with the language are due to that.
All the usual disclaimers apply, naturally.
Watson thought he had woken up to the slight creak of the door.
He lay in the darkness which was practically pitch-black – November in London does that – with his eyes open and his breath as light as possible. He knew, where there someone in the room, they would be able to tell his transition from sleep to awake by the change in his breath.
He heard absolutely nothing, the silence was as complete as the darkness. When he cleared his throat it sounded like an explosion, and his voice, even when kept low, intruded the quiet like an air raid.
"Hello? Is somebody there?"
Nothing. The silence swallowed his words and ensued as if they never were.
John sighed and closed his eyes. It would have not been the first time he had woken up to an imaginary noises resulting from his own restless dreams, haunted still by the flashbacks of the war that had scarred him on the inside.
He turned to his side, and just as he did so he heard how someone moved in the room, synchronizing the moment of movement with the ruffle of the sheets.
John jumped up. "Who´s there?" Images of war flashed into his mind, attacks during night, and suddenly he was fully awake.
The reply came with a voice so soothing and deep it seemed to materialize from the darkness.
"Calm down, Watson, it´s only me".
And like his voice, so materialized the man as well – suddenly John saw Sherlock as clearly as it would have been day. His dark hair was slightly messy and his eyes looked slightly tired, yet there was a glint to them which revealed he was fully alert. He was wearing a robe and was bare-feet; in his hand he had a book John recognized as his.
"Sherlock, what on earth?"
He was startled by his own voice, it sounded thick and felt stuck in his throat. He realized his heart was beating slightly faster, and signed it off as a result of the unexpected wake-up and his body´s natural response to the thought of being threatened. Once a soldier, always a soldier.
Sherlock looked at him, tilting his head ever so slightly you couldn´t tell if it was there or not, and made a face which John assumed was supposed to resemble a smile.
"Sorry to have woken you, I tried to be quiet – just needed to check something from this book of yours." He waved the book nonchalantly in his hand.
John didn´t remove his stare from his eyes.
"Really? What could you possibly need to know from that subject?"
Sherlock glanced down and saw he was holding a self-help book about quitting drinking, a copy John had purchased earlier during the day for Harriet from her request and which had been waiting for shipping on John´s desk.
"Yes, I wanted to... I thought it´d help me to figure out something about this case I`m working on." There was no surprise or hesitation in his voice, as if it were perfectly normal to sneak around in his flatmate´s room in the middle of the night borrowing cheap new-age books John new he wouldn´t use even as a paperweight for the sheer stupidity of them.
"...Right." He wasn´t fooled for a second that the book would have been the real reason Sherlock was in his room, and he knew that he knew.
A few seconds they were locked like that, Sherlock standing less than two meters from his bed, he sitting there upright, tense, trying to figure out what was going on, their eyes never leaving the stare that bind them together and made the moment seem much longer than in it reality was.
John was suddenly very aware of the beating of his heart which seemed not to have slowed down but on the contrary, gained more momentum.
It was Sherlock who snapped out first, jerking his head back a bit as if waking up from deep thoughts.
"Yes, that´s it. My apologizies again for the disturbance. I´ll leave you be, then." While speaking his eyes strayed ever so slightly from John´s and travelled on his naked torso, visible from the waist up as he sat there, bewildered. It was fast, so fast he almost couldn´t be sure it was there, but John was able to sense it – not as much see in the darkness as feel it, his gaze running on him almost like fingers, burning and cooling at the same time.
Sherlock turned around on his heels and with two long steps was on the door, opened it without a sound and vanished from it to the equally dark corridor. He was gone so fast it almost felt he never was there, and for a second John wondered if it was indeed just a dream. Throwing himself on his back he let out a sigh and put his hands on his face, which felt hot under his palms.
Thoughts ran through his head, so fast and fierce he couldn´t even dream of capturing them, burning his brains as they made their way to the depths of his mind. He still felt it, his eyes on his skin, and his beating heart which could no longer have been explained by the startling wake-up. He felt the heat of his own skin, and for one fleeting moment he wondered whether Sherlock´s hands on him would provide an ease for this burn or if they would lit him on fire. Then the thought vanished from his conscious mind and gave room to the slumber which was already crawling in, dragging Watson into oblivion.
Behind the door, only meters away, Sherlock rested his head on the wall, his hands supporting him on the level of his shoulders. The surface felt cool and steady and he desperately needed something solid to lean on.
The book of bullshit he had snatched in order to cover up his intrusion to John´s room lay on the coffee table behind him where it would remain; Sherlock had zero interest for it.
He did not know what had gone into him. For a few times now he had done the same, went into his room in the hour he knew sleep was deepest, just stood there in the dark and looked at Watson. With all his analytic capabilities he could not see what made him behave this way, it was as if there were a force external of him that ordered him to devour the sight of the sleeping man.
He would need to think about it, truly. It was unacceptable of him to behave like this, in such an irrational way, and now, after almost being caught, he was determined to get to the bottom of this.
He would do what ever it would take.
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