A/N: This was written for the Summer 2012 Commfest on the sherlockbbc community on livejournal. My anonymous requester asked for an AU in which Sherlock is a vampire, and nothing else changes from the BBC-verse. Warnings for angry!John, vampires, and non-explicit sex including bondage. My blood facts come from that ever reliable source, Wikipedia.
x
This guy is your standard tall, pale, handsome type with tangle-your-fingers-in-it hair and the collar and first button of his shirt undone, obviously, because John's heterosexuality really needs men like this around, unfair men like this. He's saying something about the violin, and about how he doesn't talk sometimes for days on end, and his voice is as sinful as those fucking perfect fingers that John just wants to take into his mouth. John listens to him, and clenches his teeth tight together until they hurt. Something is happening, something akin to walking through a minefield. He leans on his cane and thinks about all of the things he cannot do because I'm sorry Dr Watson and nerve damage and limp, and when the stranger says that flatmates should know the worst about each other, the first thing he thinks is how did he know that, then, and the second is what is the worst there is to know about me?
He's a fucking lazy sod adrift on his own life, for one. The whole building will be able to hear the worst of his nightmares when we wakes up shouting from them, and then of course there are the nights when he doesn't sleep at all and just wanders about like some sort of ghost, damning the sharp pains of his leg that keep him from slipping away into unconsciousness, and later dozing off on random pieces of furniture in the middle of the day and cursing all hell when he wakes up and his back hurts and how did it get to be evening already again—
Oh and he's bitter. A bit bitter.
But he doesn't say any of this.
x
The truth is that Sherlock Holmes doesn't sleep either.
(Who names their son Sherlock? he asks him once, and for a reply, he's asked, Who doesn't name their son John?)
Sherlock doesn't sleep and he doesn't eat, or rather, he doesn't let John see him eat (you'll find it foul; most people do), and he was almost comically mistaken if he thought that some inconveniently timed violin playing was the worst of his flatmate sins. Sprawling experiments, chronic rudeness, serial killers at the front door—he's a mess. The perfect mess for John, but still, a mess.
Sherlock is also a liar. A selfish, manipulative liar. A beautiful, exquisite liar. His falsehoods are too perfect, come to him too easily, for him ever to be counted trustworthy, and yet John trusts him implicitly from the first day they meet—and what does that say about John? He doesn't question it. He's done enough self-reflection in therapy, thanks. None of it did as much good for him as a good chase across rooftops and the familiar feel of a trigger under his finger, and fuck but he thought the next time he felt that he'd be pointing the damn thing at his own head.
So in a way Sherlock rather saved his life.
When John tells him this, much later, he says it's rather funny isn't it—most people would think so anyway. Saving lives isn't exactly what his kind is known for.
x
Sherlock waits until John's bound to him, attached to him, entranced by him, all but incapable of leaving him even if he wanted to, before he mentions that he is, technically, dead. They have been living together for eight days. John gives him a good long stare. Then he returns to the sports section of the morning paper.
"You're not dead. I'm a doctor. I should know."
"John, look at my teeth."
"Sherlock, I'm ignoring you."
"John."
His paper has been knocked down, a bit crumpled and torn now, and Sherlock's face is leering into his face across the table, and it's true his teeth are terribly pointed. Also he has, now that John feels at his wrist and his neck, almost no pulse. Also if anyone that John knows were to turn out to be a vampire, it would be Sherlock bloody Holmes.
It isn't as difficult to take in as one would think.
He asks several questions, chief among them "Are you going to kill me, then?" and Sherlock answers them with impatience. Yes, he can go out in sunlight. No, he doesn't like it. Yes, he drinks blood. No, not from live humans. Blood banks, usually. B positive tastes the best. No, he doesn't see why that's funny. And no, of course he's not going to kill anyone, and certainly not John, he's a consulting detective, not a murderer, and if John were dead who would he share the flat with?
It's a reasonable train of thought. John nods and says, "Okay then," and finds he doesn't have anything else to say.
x
When nightmares wake him (it happens still), he doesn't bother trying to back to sleep. He yells a bit, a string of harsh and jagged swear words up at the ceiling, and then he drags himself downstairs, grumbling all the way, and starts banging around the kitchen and making tea. Sherlock is always there to watch him, floating up first to the doorway, later settling at their table, where he leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers underneath his chin and traces each of John's movements like he's memorizing them, and maybe he is. The first time this happens, the first time he turns to see Sherlock's pale skin shining out like a ghost from the shadows, he jumps straight up out of his socks. Starts swearing again, too, loud enough to wake the neighbours because you just don't do that, all right, lurk around in the dark like that, especially not when you're sharing rooms with an ex-soldier with PTSD whose instinct is to fuck up and try to kill anything he thinks might be about to hurt him.
"You're not a threat to me," Sherlock murmurs calmly, voice like hypnotism.
"Yeah, you wanna bet?" he yells. His voice sounds obscenely loud, disgustingly loud, echoing in their small kitchen in the middle of the night.
"No."
John takes an ugly looking mug and smashes it on the kitchen tiles. Good. Just great. Then he turns away and sets about to make two persons' worth of tea. He picks the most goddamn strong high caffeine like you might as well be able to taste it all bitter on the back of the tongue tea they have, because he likes it, and fuck sleep, okay, it fucked with him first.
Later, when he's calmer, when the flat is all night sounds and a single bright overhead light and the feel of tile beneath his bare feet and he's thinking about Sherlock's skin again and wondering how many years he's wandered this dull and boring earth, a thought comes to him. "You don't eat," he says, "or drink anything, and you subsist on blood. But you drink tea?"
"John," Sherlock answers, "I may be a vampire, but I am still British."
x
One day, the edge of spring, four months after he moves in, he finds himself awake at 3:32 in the morning, his fingertips pressed gently against Sherlock's neck. They are sitting on the couch with their knees touching. He feels the slow beat beat of Sherlock's pulse, and he finds himself holding his breath, anticipating each new pulse under the skin, his tongue caught between his teeth. "Two hundred years," Sherlock saying. "You've wondered how long—two hundred years."
"That's a long time."
Damn the way he whispers. Damn the way his throat feels dry.
"It isn't as long as it seems," Sherlock answers. Then he frowns. Corrects himself. "Actually, sometimes it's interminable." The corner of his mouth tilts up. He reaches up and covers John's hand with his own.
Somehow John's sure that this is the end, the end of something he hadn't realized until now had begun, but instead of pushing him away Sherlock puts John's hand on his leg and then pulls him forward with a hand to the back of his neck and kisses him. His lips, John thinks, are so cold. But that doesn't mean the kiss doesn't burn.
John grabs Sherlock by the back of his neck, too, and pulls them closer together, smashes them together, crushes them together. They push and tug and grip and tangle and all but fall sideways wrestling like little kids do, gracelessly and without tactic or plan. Sherlock is undoubtedly, inevitably, the stronger of the two, and yet he holds back, lets John take a greater and greater advantage until Sherlock is trapped on his back on the couch beneath John's weight, John's fingers tight-tangled in his hair. John's lungs ache. He does not ask what they're doing or what this means. He does not ask any questions to which he already knows the answers. He stares at Sherlock's sharp cheekbones and storm-coloured eyes and he feels the way Sherlock's fingers are tracing light, subtle circles into the small of his back, such an incongruous gentle touch.
He considers an attack, considers bites and bruises and nails. He considers the way that tongues wrap together during slow and languorous take-your-time kisses; he imagines romance. It's been such a very long time. He is not rusty. He reads Sherlock's desire, all of the details of it, the footnotes, the minutiae, in just the same way that Sherlock reads crime scenes.
He gives him a kiss, a slow deep kiss like a challenge, and then whispers into Sherlock's mouth, "What are the rules?"
"What rules?"
In this question, breathed out all sharp edges and sighs, John hears it, and he knows, oh, he'll be easy. Pull one thread and he comes undone. His fingers are already scrabbling at John's hips.
"The rules about you, about the…." He doesn't say vampire. "Being undead thing."
John's eyes are closed now, but he can feel Sherlock shaking his head slightly, hear the sound of it, slight and small. "I don't hurt you," he says. "That's the only rule."
x
Sherlock is curled on his side, dressing gown wrapped tight around him, facing the wall. He is silent. John is tired. It's been a long day, getting rejected from job after job—he helped bring two murderers to justice last week but sometimes he still feels so useless somehow—and his shoulder's been acting up again. He makes himself dinner. Sherlock sits with him, watches him, but doesn't speak, and John doesn't speak, and later John shoves the dishes in the sink and Sherlock returns to his place on the sofa and John closes all the doors and kneels down on the floor next to him and takes to exploring Sherlock's body with his hands. Shoulders, shoulder blades, hip, legs, ankles, and the soles of his feet. Yes. He tells him stories about the human body. Just so. He tells him about blood. Eight per cent of human body weight, of a similar density to water, made up of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Among its functions: to supply oxygen and nutrients, to regulate pH and body temperature, to transport hormones.
He wraps his hand around Sherlock's thin, bare ankle. He pretends that it is cold in the way that John's own feet sometimes are cold.
After a few minutes, Sherlock turns, slowly folding his whole long body onto its other side, so that he faces John, so that he can look at him. "I ate today," he says. His voice is cracked and quiet, probably from no more than disuse, but it sounds as if he's whispering some great secret.
John's voice, too, sounds like rust when he asks, "How did it taste?"
Sherlock reaches up, swipes his thumb across John's lips. "Delicious," he says, smiling just wide enough to show the perfect sharp points of his teeth.
x
Sometimes they play: Sherlock spread out and splayed against the white of his sheets, his wrists tied to the headboard of the bed he never sleeps in, and all the lights on so John can see every last bit of him. So John can catalogue him. So John can tease him. So John can be rough with him.
People aren't made like this anymore, he thinks, as he sucks marks into Sherlock's skin, as he bites the soft bit of flesh at his side, as he pinches and twists his nipples and Sherlock writhes under him, strains up under him, calls out for him. There's something ancient and subtle and undefinable about him. If John loves him then it is this, he thinks, that he loves most.
He uses his hands and his fingers and his tongue to tease, to bring Sherlock to a place that only John can share with him, where he yanks against the knots that bind him and moans out mournful deep noises and incoherencies, where he becomes more lovely than any human being has ever been before. Or at least this is what John believes.
He kneels over him—they're nose to nose now—and wraps his hands around Sherlock's wrists, over the ropes. They share breaths. John tells Sherlock to open his eyes. He does and they search over John's face, reading him, maybe, or simply looking at him, enjoying him. His pupils are wide and black and open. Sherlock doesn't beg, never begs, but he cants up his hips, he invites, and John whispers, "Soon," so quietly, the slightest and most iron promise and then traces one finger across Sherlock's cheek, and down his nose. He traces his lips. He parts them with his fingertip and runs his index finger over Sherlock's teeth, those sharp canines and he thinks of asking him, do you want me, is that what you want of me, to taste me, do you wonder what I taste like, do you fantasize about it?
But he doesn't ask, because he does not want to know the answer, because maybe it will be mundane—you sexualize everything John, it's quite unnecessary. But maybe it will be the answer he imagines, the one that makes a tight fist form deep in his gut, that certain squeeze of muscle that warns danger, that beckons danger.
Sherlock is murmuring his name, chanting his name again and again, calling him back. He returns. He comes back to him, a hand running down his side, a long and searching kiss. "Do you want me?" he whispers. "Now? Are you ready?" and Sherlock twists up to kiss him again. They are still kissing, hard biting kisses and sweet gentle kisses and their tongues mixed up and wet between each other's mouths, when John finally pushes into him, enters him, and the noises Sherlock makes, the small mmms and ohs he makes, are so gorgeous that John just has to swallow them, as if he needed them to live, as if it were only by this act that he survives.