"...lines were crazy. The Friday of a bank holiday weekend is bloody awful for shopping. I don't remember London being half this crowded. I swear, if it's this bad come Christmas, I'm not letting you out of the house. You'd punch someone and Lestrade would arrest you and I'd spend my gift money bailing you out."
Not moving from the sofa, Sherlock let the words wash over him. John had a habit of speaking when he was annoyed, though he was careful not to indulge in front of anyone other than Sherlock. He was such a polite, unobtrusive flatmate that Sherlock had been at first inclined to dismiss him. He'd mistaken John's respect for boundaries as a sign of weakness, only to be proved incredibly, absurdly wrong before forty-eight hours had passed, when John had shot a man and then pretended innocence so well that he'd fooled a small army of idiot detectives and emergency personnel.
Sherlock opened his eyes just enough to watch John ball up the plastic bags and bin them on his way out of the kitchen. He'd go upstairs, take off his shoes and socks, possibly take off his jumper — the flat was warm — and then come back down to start cooking dinner, which would inevitably involve food wrappers and chopped vegetable scraps and other waste that would go into the bin on top of the bags.
So Sherlock was up off the sofa in seconds, crossing into the kitchen at a run. He snatched the plastic bags out of the bin and shoved them into the pocket of his dressing gown. Before John was back downstairs, Sherlock was in the privacy of his own bedroom, door closed.
As quietly as he could, he unrolled the plastic bags, searching through them until he found the treasure that John always hid there: the shopping list.
Throwing the shopping bags aside, Sherlock smoothed the paper over his leg, looking at the loops and lines of John's handwriting. By looking at each squiggled 'e', he could tell that John had written the first several items all at once, as each 'e' was less neatly printed than the previous. The last few items had all been added one at a time, as John remembered them.
Sherlock traced the letters, feeling the imprint where the ballpoint pen had dug deep as John rushed to scrawl the last couple of additions before he'd left. He could hear John in the kitchen, but he stayed on the edge of the bed with the note in his hands, a stolen bit of intimacy that John would never discover.
It had begun innocuously enough, when Sherlock had found a scrap of paper under the armchair that had become reserved solely for John's use. Sherlock Holmes, it read, with 221B Baker Street underneath.
Not exactly concerned with neatness, Sherlock had almost thrown it aside and resumed his search for the rosin that had dropped out of his violin case. But instead, he'd looked at the unfamiliar handwriting, studying it intently. The paper was torn from the notepads issued to students at Barts. The handwriting wasn't Mike Stamford's, which meant that John had written this, probably right after Sherlock had given his name and address the very first day they'd met.
Instead of tossing the paper away, Sherlock had stuck it in his pocket and forgot about it until late that night. His dry cleaner was tolerant, but only up to a point, so Sherlock had taken to searching his pockets whenever he undressed, lest he have another incident like the one with the beaks. He'd found the scrap and set it on his bedside table along with his wallet, two razor blades, and the book of matches he'd taken to carrying, judging that fire could be useful in almost any situation.
The next morning, he'd found the note again. He still hadn't binned it; instead, for reasons he didn't care to examine, he'd put it into his sock drawer. And soon, it had been joined by others.
Phone messages. Reminders. Appointments. Receipts bearing John's signature. One self-addressed envelope. Every single sample of John's handwriting went into Sherlock's sock drawer, stolen from pockets and rubbish bins and even John's room whenever Sherlock thought he could get away with the theft.
He told himself that it was logical. What if he needed to forge John's signature? What if he needed to prove John's handwriting in the event of a kidnapping? He could always use it for research. Most handwriting analysis was little better than numerology, fortune telling practiced by charlatans who were no better than the so-called phrenologists of a past age, but Sherlock had become something of an expert in handwriting identification.
So he studied John's handwriting and pretended that it was practice, that he was using John as a baseline, a control group of one. He learned to equate the strokes of a pen with John's mood, to read John's schedule in the way his letters were rushed or carefully drawn. When John was tired, his handwriting slanted almost unreadably to the left. When he was cold, his letters were tiny.
It was all for science.
That was what Sherlock told himself, anyway.
"Remind me never to take an overnight train again," John said wearily. He dropped his laptop bag on the end of the sofa and switched the small suitcase to his right hand. "I need a shower and about thirty hours of sleep that doesn't involve sitting up."
"I told you it would be boring," Sherlock said smugly, glancing sidelong at the laptop bag. As expected, the outside pocket was crammed with papers.
"The conference was good. The train was the bloody awful part." John lifted the suitcase, winced when it strained his back, and ignored the pain with a grunt. He headed for the stairs with slow, stiff steps.
Sherlock watched, biting back the impulse to offer to see if he could unknot the strained muscles. And as soon as John was out of sight, Sherlock threw himself on the sofa and attacked the papers in the laptop bag.
Conference schedule, lectures of interest circled in blue, no actual writing. Receipts signed at the bottom. Business cards from other doctors — Sherlock would burn those later to forestall any ideas of taking a high-paying job that would remove John from Baker Street.
Then he found a veritable goldmine: John's conference notes. Grinning to himself, he folded his legs under himself and leaned sideways against the back of the sofa, running a finger over the lines of handwriting. He didn't care about the content so much as the hand that had held the pen. He could almost feel John's interest wax and wane as he moved from one lecture to another. His excitement was plainly visible in the quick, bold strokes of his pen when he lost himself in the subject. The more boring lectures merited only a few hasty words, some of which trailed off into doodles — spirals and blacked-in squares and geometric shapes.
The last three days were all there for Sherlock to feel under his fingertips. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to indulge shamelessly, just for a few precious minutes. John might not notice if Sherlock filched the odd receipt or reminder, but he'd surely notice the loss of his entire notepad. Once the conference was a distant memory, Sherlock would be able to sneak into John's room to steal the whole notepad, but that might take a month or more.
He never heard John's return, because it shouldn't have happened. John was exhausted and in pain from trying to sleep while sitting up. Once upstairs, he should've stayed there to sleep on a proper mattress. At most, he should've come down only to take a hot, relaxing shower.
Instead, when Sherlock finally opened his eyes, he nearly jumped out of his skin because John was right there, standing next to the couch and looking down at him with an odd expression.
To Sherlock's horror, he realized his hand was splayed out over the page, fingers moving in little circles over the imprint of John's handwriting. It was intimate and sensual and absolutely no explanation came to mind.
John's lips twitched, his face shifting at the tiniest smile, crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes as his head tipped fractionally to the side.
"I'd no idea you were that interested in trauma surgery," he said, breaking the silence with his gentle, steady voice.
"Boring," Sherlock drawled, though inside, he was panicking. He shoved the notepad at John and rose, expecting John to back away, but he didn't, which left them face-to-face, separated by less than two inches of air that had taken on an electrical charge like a power station transformer about to explode. Violently. Spectacularly.
With a deceptively soft laugh, John tossed the notepad down on the sofa behind Sherlock. "You all right?" he asked, only then stepping back.
The crackling energy drained away, leaving Sherlock momentarily dazed, blinded by the aftermath of a lightning hit in the dead of night. "Fine," he snapped defensively, and retreated to his bedroom with what little dignity he retained.
"John." Sprawled on the sofa, Sherlock didn't move except to drape his arm across his eyes, blacking out the hateful, over-familiar sight of the living room. He was sick to death of the wallpaper and the furniture and the bland view out the windows and was seriously thinking that it would all be improved with the application of fire.
"Hm?"
"Go shoot someone. Be creative about it."
"No."
Sherlock sighed and draped his arm across his eyes. "My brain is rotting, John. Go rob a bank."
"No."
"Do something interesting!"
He felt a faint stab of hope as John's armchair creaked. He was getting up, walking across the flat. Sherlock almost lowered his arm, but that would be cheating. Not that Sherlock had much hope that John could rob the corner store in a creative way, but at this point, anything was better than this stagnation. His last case had been three weeks ago and had taken less than an hour to solve. Hell, it had taken longer for him to deposit the check than to solve the crime, and that was only because apparently it was payday somewhere and no one on the bloody planet had ever heard of electronic deposit. He really needed to have his clients start making their checks out to John instead.
A touch on his wrist brought his wandering thoughts sharply into focus. John's hands were small but incredibly strong, and he pressed down just hard enough to effectively trap Sherlock against the couch. The sleeve of his dressing gown had slid up to his elbow, exposing his forearm.
Another touch, this one delicate soft enough to make Sherlock gasp, started just below his elbow. A sharp line, top to bottom, hooked at the bottom. The touch disappeared and came back a bit lower on his arm, spiraling in a messy circle.
Sherlock's arm tensed and he forgot to breathe. John pressed harder with his right hand, clamped around Sherlock's wrist, holding him steady as he wrote, left-handed, using a felt-tipped pen: the letter J followed by a lowercase o.
It's his name, Sherlock thought, and the entire world narrowed down to the point of the pen sliding over his skin and John's hand on his wrist.
After the h, John started on the n and said, "It took me a while to realize it" — a bit of space — "but then I found your collection" — a capital H and an a, and that was the start of his middle name — "and then it took even longer" — an m, i, s, and h and then another space — "for me to figure out the connection" — and he took his time with the W, making it perfect. "I thought it was what I was writing" — the a followed quickly, with a flourish to cross the t before he started on the s — "but we can't all be you, so it's not my fault it took so long" — he drew the last o carefully. "It's just me, isn't it?" he asked, and drew the last n.
Then he let go, and Sherlock shivered as his whole body seemed to go cold in the absence of John's touch.
"It doesn't even matter what I write, does it?" John asked, his fingertips pressing gently down on Sherlock's. The tip of the pen pressed into Sherlock's palm, drawing a smooth circle. "Answer me."
"No," Sherlock said, though it came out as a strangled sort of noise rather than a proper word.
"Then why?"
In the small corner of his mind that still worked, Sherlock thought about explaining his scientific analysis of John's handwriting, of how he could read John's mood and energy and health in the way he shaped his letters, but that was too complicated, too detailed.
"Sherlock?" John asked very softly, touching the pen to his skin once, twice, before drawing an arc — the caricature of a smiling face, matching the one spray painted to the wall. The strokes were fast. Confident.
Happy?
The sofa cushions shifted as John sat on the very edge, hip pressed against Sherlock's ribs. Then he took hold of Sherlock's left hand and moved it off his chest. "Are you going to say anything?"
He opened his mouth to answer, but his inhale turned into another gasp as John pushed up Sherlock's worn T-shirt. John leaned over and touched the pen to his ribs, low on his chest. He began writing, swift and sure, too fast for Sherlock to form a mental picture of the letters.
"You see everything but what's right in front of you," he said. Sherlock could hear the smile in his voice. "Have you read anything I've written?"
Sherlock found his voice. He moved his arm up, letting it hang over the end of the sofa, and blinked down at John in a daze. "Everything."
John flicked his gaze up, grinning now. He never stopped writing. "To paraphrase a particularly smug bastard I know well, you read but you don't comprehend."
"What —" Sherlock cut off, squirming as the pen dropped lower onto his belly, tickling him interminably.
"Don't move," John warned. "So what have you read?" Sherlock tensed and John flattened a hand on his chest, pinning him in place. "Tell me," John insisted.
Trying to ignore the pen and John's hand and his closeness, Sherlock said, "Receipts. Notes."
"And what haven't you seen?" John asked before Sherlock could remember anything else.
Sherlock stared at him, but John was looking down, watching the felt-tipped pen leave a trail of black ink across Sherlock's stomach. "I don't — What —"
"My final rent cheque," he said. Sherlock started in alarm, but John pressed him back down, saying calmly, "No, Sherlock. That's what you haven't seen. You leave body parts in the fridge —"
"Experiments —"
"The kitchen is a hazardous chemical dumping ground —"
"Safe — labelled —"
"I can't keep a girlfriend to save my life —"
"None of them are — You don't —"
"You try to get me killed on an almost weekly basis — "
"You need the excitement or you'd stagnate —"
"And yet," John interrupted as he tossed the pen aside, "I'm still here, Sherlock. What you haven't seen is me saying I'm going anywhere without you."
Sherlock stared up at John as he tested his memory, examining their every interaction in this new light. And John was telling the truth. He was telling the absolute, complete truth, and every thought Sherlock had shifted to accommodate this new angle.
One last time, Sherlock fought to sit up, and this time, John permitted it, though he didn't move away. Sherlock pulled up his shirt and looked down at himself, reading upside-down.
Property of John Hamish Watson. If found, please return to 221B Baker Street. Do not feed.
Slowly, he started to laugh, looking up only when John touched his face with ink-stained fingertips. "Because you keep wandering off without me," John explained.
"Would you prefer I didn't?" Sherlock asked, feeling a grin spread across his own face.
"I rather like knowing where you are at all times. How else can I keep you safe?"
Sherlock leaned into John's touch, looking into his eyes for any sign of hesitation or discomfort. "Safe is boring."
John laughed quietly. His free hand dropped to the fresh letters traced over Sherlock's stomach. "Then I'll have to keep you entertained," he said, and leaned in to press a kiss to Sherlock's lips.