Title: Unpredictable
Author: fengirl88
Sherlock/John slash. Rated T for profanity, drug reference, sexual theme.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters; story follows on from elements of A Study in Pink - BBC Sherlock series 1 episode 1. SPOILERS.
Summary: Sherlock wakes up with a strange bedfellow and finds that his brain is not working properly. It takes him a while to work out what's going on.
He wakes up knowing there is someone in the bed with him. He knows it's nearly dawn, and that he is at home in 221b Baker Street. But his brain - uncharacteristically - appears to be refusing to work. Will not tell him who it is in bed with him or how they got there. Of course he could just turn round and look, see who it is that's taking up space, who's stopping him from splaying his long limbs across the bed as usual. But for some reason he can't fathom, he doesn't want to do that.
The scent of this other person is not yet familiar to him and yet it's not completely strange either - he just doesn't expect it here. In his bedroom. In his bed. He associates it somehow with a conversation he can't quite pin down, not long ago. In a taxi. A different journey from the one he remembers more clearly, the one last night that took him so close to death. That thing he'd been half-wanting for so long: release from the sheer boredom of being alive and alone in a world of fools who see nothing, no, who understand nothing.
Not bored now, are you? The murderer's question, just last night; he remembers that all right. He wasn't bored then and he is not bored now. But he doesn't understand why his brain is not working properly. This never happens.
It's not a hangover - he knows, though not recently, what those are like. It's not the coming down after a high - or not a chemical one, anyway. He's thirsty, but that may be from eating Dim Sum late at night.
Dim Sum. His mind jolts as he looks at the shape he can just discern on the bedside table, a broken fortune cookie with a scrap of paper still inside it. He can't remember what it says; just an echo of conversation last night, something that feels like part of a sequence. His own voice, and another one.
- I can always predict the fortune cookies.
- No you can't.
- Almost can.
The new voice in his head, contradicting him: wearily amused and a bit exasperated and utterly matter-of-fact. It's the voice of the other person in the bed, he knows that now. The man he met for the first time the day before yesterday. The man who shot the murderer. Who saved his life. The man who seems to ask rather a lot of personal questions, given how indignant he gets when people think he and Sherlock are an item. His new flatmate. John Watson.
What he'd told John last night was true: he's married to his work. He doesn't go to bed with anyone, hasn't for years, though he and Lestrade have come close a few times after the end of some particularly taxing case. What's the point of wasting all those brain cells on sex? Sherlock may not know the workings of the solar system but he knows about Renaissance physiology and the science of humours, that theory that each orgasm brings you closer to death, drains your blood and your vital forces. Drains your creativity too: there goes another sonnet, as some poet or other apparently used to say.
So sex is a distraction he avoids, not least because he hasn't found a way to do it without consequences, a way that doesn't involve people, somehow, even if only in his mind. And there just isn't room for people in his mind. Their breath fogs the glass so he can't see properly any more.
He doesn't know why he thinks of breath, and then he does: the breath that's stirring the hairs on the back of his neck. The physical presence of John Watson, giving off more heat than a radiator, the man must be running a fever or - His mind snags again on a memory from last night, no, this morning, the small hours of this morning, after they'd come back still laughing from the restaurant and gone to their separate beds. Hearing the sounds of someone, not someone, this someone, John Watson, caught in a nightmare, Sherlock doesn't know what about. Doesn't know either why he went into John's room, shook him more or less awake, offered to share his own bed for the rest of the night. In the cold light of dawn this makes no sense at all.
But then much of what he's doing at the moment makes no sense, and making sense doesn't seem to be enough of a reason to do things any more. Something instinctual, animal almost, is reaching out from him to this damaged man with his unforgivable taste in clothes and his psychosomatic limp and his daft sense of humour.
It's taken a long time - measured against the speed his brain usually goes, it feels like years - but he finally understands why he's lying so still. He doesn't want to move because he doesn't want John to wake up and turn away, embarrassed, get out of bed as quickly as possible, as he knows John must. As he knows he would do, in the circumstances, except ... Except he hasn't done that. It's very perplexing and irrational, but he recognizes that he doesn't want this to stop. He wants to stay here with John's body next to his, the heat of him and the unfamiliar-becoming-familiar scent of him, and his breathing, the breathing of a man deep in sleep, not in nightmare now, Sherlock's doing, such a simple thing to take pleasure in, but he does.
John shifts a little, stirs, and Sherlock thinks this is it, he's going to turn away now - but instead something wholly unexpected happens. John's arm, heavy with sleep, flung over him. The shock of it would make him motionless if he weren't already trying so hard not to move.
John's arm is lying across him, and John's hand. Is lying. Almost. Now he can't even form a sentence. What the fuck is wrong with him?
He knows, and he doesn't want to know. Knows enough about therapy, in theory at least, to understand denial as the thing that's been blocking his memory, short-circuiting his brain. Knows, too, that you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect what's happening to his body, the way the blood rushes to that part of him so close to John's hand now.
He might like to think of himself as asexual or as married to his work, but his cock seems to have other ideas. John's hand, so close yet not quite close enough, almost touching him, and the ache of that almost is unbearable and he wants to move and he daren't because then it will all stop and he doesn't want it to stop.
In spite of himself, and in spite of his fear of waking John, Sherlock can't help letting out a little sound of frustration; barely a murmur. But he hears the change in John's breathing. Feels the arm lying across his body grow tense. Knows the man in bed with him is awake now.
Even in the last few minutes, the light in the room has grown stronger; it's already morning. For the first time in his life, he realizes, he has nowhere to hide and no idea what will happen next.