John opens the bedroom door and saunters in, tearing his sweaty T-shirt off. He flings it in the general direction of a chair, missing it. While passing the dressing table that Sherlock, the preening tosser, had insisted on having, John grabs a small remote from it, presses a button and the mid-morning sunshine streaming through the windows disappears as the electronic control mechanism of the heavy curtains kicks into action.
He doesn't even bother taking off his socks before planting himself face-first onto the billion threadcount Egyptian cotton sheets Sherlock insisted they absolutely had to splurge on. 'All the cheaper varieties itch, John' had been the explanation.
John haphazardly pulls a corner of a duvet onto his aching and slightly swollen legs. He's been on-call for twenty-four hours straight, and every one of those hours has been hell. He has dealt with several odorously very unpleasant intestinal occlusion cases, one of which had projectile vomited on his clogs, a trauma call due to a three-year old being run over by a tractor wheel, several troublesome pain consults from wards, the evacuation of a spinal hematoma resulting from an epidural catheter complication, a disastrous airway during an emergency caesarean section, talking to the family of a patient whose fatal head injury had been the result of a suicide attempt... The list goes on.
John is emotionally drained, physically exhausted and completely incapable of enjoying his day off, because most of it will be spent in a half-comatose state. Whatever free time remains after he has slept for most of the day he will likely spend in a cranky and apathetic state.
It's Monday. After today there's still almost all of the workweek left.
John drifts off to dreamless sleep which, with any luck, will last until at least early afternoon.
He is awarded no such luxury. After ten minutes, John wakes up to the sound of the door flinging wide open and hitting the wall. Then the mattress next to him descends, the bedsheets rustle, and then there's something poking his ribs.
He groans.
The poking continues. It must be a finger. John grabs a pillow and buries his head underneath it, hoping his dismissive grunts will convey a clear enough message.
Something excruciatingly cold touches his toes and he cringes, pulling his knees up underneath the duvet. It's no use, because soon the back of his knees are being assaulted with what he now recognizes as Sherlock's icy toes. He yelps and shoves his... boyfriend to the other side of the bed.
The word still gives John pause. Part of the hesitancy is excitement and awe, because how could he possibly have conquered such a beautiful, delicate, brilliant creature like Sherlock. The other side of the coin is that he still can't fully wrap his brain around his new life. His new identity.
"You're awake," Sherlock concludes and sits up, wrapping his arms around his knees. The room is quite dark due to the curtains still being closed, but enough light is shining in from the hallway through the open door that John can make out Sherlock's triumphant smirk when he lifts the pillow from his face.
That damned smile. John knows exactly what it means.
"Excellent," Sherlock announces, "I should like us to repeat that thing we did on Wednesday, where you reach around me and-"
"Sherlock, no. I'm fucking spent. You can go do some more research and put more stuff on your stupid list, just let me sleep."
When it comes to sex, Sherlock is certainly making up for his inexperience with borderline manic enthusiasm. Like a proper man of science, he has been spending an inordinate amount of time online researching all manner of acts they can experiment with prior to more... invasive things, as Sherlock had succinctly put it, while twirling a forkful on spaghetti against his lips in a manner that was driving John crazy.
Crazy in more ways than one. In all honesty, as certain John is that he is very much in love with this man and Sherlock lights his fire like no other human being ever has, he can't say he's completely happy.
It's not just the issue of this being the first time that John has ever been involved with a man or the fact that it's the first time that Sherlock has been involved with anyone, that is keeping them from going all the way. It's also the fact that sex is the only thing in their lives in which John still has the upper hand experience-wise. As pathetic as it feels, John likes holding onto that little bit of leverage, because everything else in his life has been taken over by the menace that's currently standing - or more precisely sitting - between him and the sleep John so desperately craves.
Sherlock leans back to lean onto his outstretched arms, looking sulky. John closes his eyes.
A Sherlock who doesn't get what he wants is a Sherlock in a foul mood.
Usually John would try to placate, but he's too worn out to care at the moment.
"Well make me French toast, then," Sherlock says accusingly.
"I'm not making you fucking French toast. Get off my sheet," John snarls and pulls it from underneath Sherlock's thigh so he can properly bury himself under the covers.
"Sexual release can be a good way in which to relieve stress and burn off excess energy," Sherlock suggests. Where on Earth he's gotten the idea that John might currently have strenght to spare, John has no idea.
"If you've got so much excess bloody energy, you can find the hoover in the cupboard and do something about the mess downstairs."
"The housekeeping has admittedly been quite lackluster lately," Sherlock says absentmindedly, wiggling his bare toes.
"There is no 'housekeeping', Sherlock, there's just me. I've half to mind to hire someone, though."
Sherlock harrumphs and slides off the bed. "You're not fun at all today."
It's two in the afternoon when John finally manages to keep his eyes open. His mouth tastes like an old sock and he desperately needs a glass of water.
He drags himself off the bed, grabs one of Sherlock's silk dressing gowns and pads downstairs, yawning and scratching his left armpit as he enters the kitchen.
There are two half-eaten containers of Indian food left on the stainless steel counter next to Sherlock's ferrari-red espresso machine that is probably about to go on strike for overwork. John peers into the styrofoam containers.
When he's this tired post-call he often loses his appetite.
"I ate your naan," Sherlock announces somewhat loudly from the sofa. He has headphones on and John can hear a very quiet, rhytmic din coming from them. Probably one of Sherlock's beloved early Baroque albums.
Sherlock is on research leave for a month. He has mostly been spending it in various positions on their black leather sofa. The sofa which John thinks looks weird and feels way too firm. These factors together with a very low backrest make it infuriatingly uncomfortable. On the other hand, Sherlock's lanky features seem to be a perfect match for its angled contours.
Apart from emulating a headphone-wearing sloth on the sofa, Sherlock has also spent a couple of afternoons trying to perfect his experimental ventricular shunt design by cutting open a pig's head and sticking various drinking straws into it.
Sherlock had actually recently managed to get John to perk up his own research career. He had told John that if a physician wanted others to do things his way, he'd need to back up his claims with some original articles. John didn't have Sherlock's compulsion of beinding everyone to his will, but he did find himself enjoying breaking new ground and testing his own preconceptions on what was beneficial to patients in his working habits and what was not.
John had asked Sherlock a week ago if he was even going to actually look at the data he was supposed to be writing an article from, Sherlock had looked at him incredulously and announced that he would only require two hours for such an easy endeavour, and that he could well leave it to the last day of his leave.
"So you're just going to faff about for four weeks, then?" John had inquired, naively hopeful that this might mean that Sherlock would have time to partake in the upkeep of their frankly ridiculously big flat.
No such luck.
Sherlock grabs his laptop from the coffee table and begins clicking away with gusto.
John warms up the Indian take-away, eats half of it and then find himself standing in the sitting room, having a hard time deciding what to do.
"I should think Courchevel," Sherlock announces without looking up.
"Excuse me?" John asks.
Sherlock purses his lips. "Courchevel. For Easter. You'll like it. They've added a new lift to former Olympic slopes and there's a new Michelin two-star in the village."
It takes a moment for John to decipher all of this. "I don't actually ski, Sherlock," he says resignedly, curling his toes on the drafty floor before stepping onto the fluffy white alpaca wool carpet next to the coffee table, "Would have preferred somewhere warmer," John mutters.
He's still cold. Sherlock's thin dressing gowns don't exactly perform all that well in terms of body heat conservation.
"Nonsense," Sherlock says - his standard answer everytime John tries to partake in any decisions about their lives.
John trudges to work the next morning, bitter for having to leave a soft, warm bed full of soft, warm Sherlock behind. The man had been fast asleep when John had quietly slid off the bed and exited the bedroom to take a shower.
He arrives at the hospital a few minutes late. After swapping his own clothes for the nondescript light blue scrubs all operative field physicians and nurses wear, he quickly skims through the records of the patients he's been assigned to. When he spots his first patient being wheeled into the operating theatre floor he enters the induction area of his assigned theatre, yawning.
His first case is a healthy thirtysomething male, an electrician who's had the misfortune of developing a slipped disc in his lumbar spine that's threatening to cause paralysis in his left leg.
It takes over an hour to put the patient to sleep and then cart him into the OR, flip him over and arrange all the wires and tubes so that they won't get compressed during the surgery when the patient is lying face down on the operating table. John takes his time making sure the patient's face isn't being compressed against the operating table but arranged safely into a specially designed foam pillow.
Althought the case isn't very challenging in terms of the technical aspects of the anaesthesia, John is glad for a change of pace. Lately he's mostly been working with children - handling the anaesthesia for Sherlock's paediatric brain tumour surgeries.
With a little help from John, Sherlock has actually developed quite a good reputation in the paeds unit. Parents are still often aghast at his blunt bedside manner, but children appreciate his honesty and his uncanny ability to win them over by not shying away from difficult subjects and talking to them in a manner suggesting that they are competent decision-makers when it comes to their own bodies.
John never gets tired of witnessing Sherlock interacting with these children. It seems that the fact that the surgeon never flinches when faced with death and despair prevents him from being so shocked by the realities of what these families are facing, that he's capable of making the tough calls and having the difficult conversations that can reduce both parents and other staff members to tears.
John had once discovered Sherlock in an empty patient room, playing cards with a thirteen year old glioblastoma patient. They both grinned when John entered, visibly keen to share their secret pastime.
"What on Earth are you doing?" John had asked Sherlock warily.
"We're playing for Dr Holmes' lunch money," the patient told him.
"Sherlock, you can't gamble with kids," John had told both of them, raising his brows.
"Why?" the two of them had asked him in unison.
"It's illegal, for starters, for minors to gamble," John had replied, aware that there were two against one and he was in the minority.
"Who's going to know? Besides, it's not likely that he's ever going to get to try it at an age when it would be legal."
"Yeah, 'cause I'm terminal," the boy tells John so matter-of-factly that he could have been talking about the weather, and turns his attention back to Sherlock.
John had shaken his head, smiling, and left the room.
All in all, work had been mostly fun recently until the rumours started. Rumours that the hospital was about to shut down its entire children's unit, including the surgical wards, because they had not won their bid for foundation status and had thus lost a significant portion of their public funding.
While Sherlock's career seemed to be soaring, John felt as though his own was beginning to wither and stagnate. Even if the paediatric cases disappeared, there would be plenty of other subspecialty surgeries for an up-an-comer surgeons such as Sherlock to focus on. John, on the other hand, felt as though he had lost his footing. He had never held a permanent position in the hospital, even though he'd been employed there ever since he'd reached consultancy. If there were going to be cutbacks, his position would be likely to sink among the first ones. His stint as a children's neuroanaesthetist had largely been due to the maternal leave of his colleague Natalie Temple, who was going to return to work in a few months. She had a steady position in the roster, unlike John.
He had once complained about the state of things at work to Sherlock over a glass of pinot at their new favourite Italian restaurant. Sherlock had told him that they could well survive on his salary only, since he was without a doubt the main breadwinner with his patent royalties. John had scowled and finished the rest of his spaghetti in a passive aggressive silence. Sherlock hadn't even noticed he was upset.
Before Sherlock had bulldozed into his life John had been considering going abroad or signing up for another military tour. Now he couldn't imagine leaving, because in some way that was probably unhealthy, he felt responsible for Sherlock. Even when he tried to remind himself that Sherlock had gone through his adolescence, survived university and gotten through registrar training all without John, the desire to be there for Sherlock and to try to protect the man from the consequences of his social blunders still persisted.
John has seen glimpses of how much Sherlock must have struggled because gradually Sherlock has allowed him into those aspects of his life he carefully hides from other. Where others see a brat with a brilliant brain, John sees a person trying hard to overcome the social challenges of navigating life as a person with non-typical neuropsychology and an IQ in the range of intimidatingly intelligent.
John just wants to make things easier for him because he loves Sherlock. And during the time they've been living together Sherlock has seemed so happy it's downright frightening. Sometimes Sherlock even smiles at his patients. Others at the hospital have begun to notice.
And talk. Which is why they have an agreement: No publicizing the nature of their relationship until John explicitly tells Sherlock he's ready.
Sherlock seems to grasp the letter of the agreement but not the spirit of it. He seems completely oblivious to that fact that some innocent-sounding things can be read by others in a certain way that does not reflect well on John, or in a way that hints at the true nature of their relationship.
During an afternoon surgery of Sherlock's, while checking in on the registrar handling the case, John had tried to talk to Sherlock about the next morning's M&M meeting. Sherlock, who didn't give a toss about said meeting and had vocally let this fact be known, had judged it acceptable to interrupt John by asking what John was planning to prepare him for dinner. John had stormed out after noticing the nurses snickering.
John had long ago made peace with the fact that as an anaesthetist he would likely never be the star in the patients' eyes or in the tales they told of their surgeries to friends and relatives. He was fine with it. What he is not fine with, however, is people getting the idea that he is a servant at the beck and call of Sherlock Holmes, the department drama queen.
John suspects that it's only a matter of time before Anderson and the others can no longer resist the temptation of rent boy jokes.
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Notes:
Oh, the joy of post-call blues... It's part of the lifestyle of all doctors in fields where call is taken. In the ideal scenario you've gotten enough uninterrupted sleep that the post-call day can be spent on relaxing and having fun but for the most part, you are a useless zombie.
M&M Meeting = Morbidity (=pertaining to illness) and mortality (=pertaining to death) meeting. A meeting during which recent patient deaths and significant care-related events are discussed. They provide a chance for doctors to air their grievances, discuss case management and receive peer support. We don't really have these in my country, but in the UK they seem to be a common thing.
Ventricle shunt = a device planted into a patient's brain to vent out excessive amount of cerebrospinal fluid