John walked into the room and sighed. He often did when he came home. Half of it was the harrowing climb up the narrow staircase leading up to the famed 221 Baker Street apartment. The other half was just how cold and dewy London got in the winter, and yet another aspect to the whole conundrum was how oft times John could already hear the orchestrations of something most probably dangerous and undisputably shady transpiring on the second floor as he made his way up those punishing stairs. Today, it was banging—plain and simple, but no less foreboding.
"Have you no respect for the dead?"
"Lately you've gotten into the irritating habit of stating the obvious, John."
Sherlock barely moved as he said it. He was staring at a skull that was sitting unceremoniously on the coffee table. A hammer shifted in his hands like a bat might in the hands of a batter stepping up to the plate. John inhaled as if to speak, and was abruptly interrupted by the crashing of the hammer rending its way through the skull, bursting through the eye socket, and finishing its destructive flight inside the skull's grinning mouth. Sherlock leaned back and began to chew his thumbnail.
"What in heaven's sake are you doing?"
"Experimenting," Sherlock replied coolly. Without warning, he stood up and strode quickly into the kitchen. "Unveiling. Performing. Cogitating."
"What's wrong?" John asked, eying Sherlock carefully.
Anybody else who had walked in on this particular scene would have seen nothing special about it. Here was Sherlock doing what Sherlock was wont to do—conducting grotesque experiments with little or no remorse and acting like a serious dick. Only John saw through the usual shroud of asshollery into something else, something deeper. He always had. Perhaps this is why Sherlock kept him around.
Or maybe, John thought to himself, this is why I can't seem to leave.
"Nothing," Sherlock replied curtly. He picked up a teapot and angled it over a dirty cup. Maybe three drops of cold tea trickled from the spout, plummeting into the cup one at a time. Sherlock stared at the teapot in livid disapproval before dropping it into the sink with a resonating bang.
"Sherlock!" John cried, throwing his bag on the chesterfield. "For god's sake, what's your problem?"
"My problem?" Sherlock asked slowly. He turned around and fixed John with one of those fake smiles he usually kept on reserve for the police, his clients, his brother, anybody other than John. There wasn't a hint of sarcasm in it. His eyes were cold, icy-grey, failing to divulge one speck of warmth, failing to conceal their dislike of whomever Sherlock chose to excoriate at any given moment. "What gave you the impression that I had a problem?"
"Sherlock..."
"Problems are things that can be solved. No, John, I don't have a problem. If it were a problem, it wouldn't exist anymore, because I would have eliminated it."
John balled and unballed his hands nervously at his sides. "So if you don't have a problem, what do you have?"
"Nothing," Sherlock snapped, storming past John to the window, where he gripped the sill with two hands and stared down imperiously into the street. "No cases, no puzzles, nothing interesting—not even a problem. I haven't got anything, John, and that isn't something a person can solve so facilely as a stupid problem. If I had a problem, I might have told you about it by now. Furthermore, if I had a problem with something you were doing, I would've abruptly brought it to your attention. No, John, there are no problems here—only musings, undefined and vague as an empty casket."
"For god's sake," John muttered. He poured himself a glass of water and threw himself into a chair, sighing once again. "Is this about Nancy?"
Sherlock rolled his shoulders as if he were preparing for a boxing match, still staring out the window. "Nancy?"
"Oh, don't be intentionally dense. Nancy. Baker Nancy. My girlfriend Nancy."
"Oh yes," Sherlock said icily. "I think I remember now."
"I don't know what it is with you and my love interests. It isn't like I let them interfere with the work we do."
"You don't see me off cavorting with some tart every time the weekend rolls around."
"Excuse me?" John demanded. "Did you just call my girlfriend a ta—"
"What I meant to say," Sherlock interrupted, "is that it's an enormous nuisance endeavouring to take care of business when you aren't around."
John quirked his head to the side. "Did I just hear you admit that you need me?"
"Cases aren't solved on a schedule, John," Sherlock railed on. "One never knows when that particular molecule of importance will fall into place, and when it does, if all of my... resources... are not at hand, it can engender quite a lot of inefficiency in the procedure as a whole."
"You're babbling," John said. "Besides, you just said you didn't have any cases at the moment."
Sherlock turned around, slower this time, and fixed John with another stare. Something had changed in the detective's eyes. They were just as icy, brimming over with just as much dislike, but for a fleeting instant, John wondered if the dislike was aimed at someone other than himself. What if the iciness John saw in Sherlock's eyes was there because Sherlock disliked himself?
John shook his head. Where had his sanity gone to? Here he was speculating that the world's greatest egotist had self-esteem issues.
"If it helps anything, Nancy broke up with me tonight."
"What?"
"Said I wasn't giving it my all." John sighed. "Said I was too distracted."
"Oh John, I'm so sorry," Sherlock said mockingly. "I know you were so attached to her, all those fourteen days that you knew each other."
"Don't," John muttered. He took a sip of his water. After a moment he glanced up at Sherlock. "Well, you certainly seem to have cheered up."
"What do you mean?"
"You're smiling," John pointed out. "Does it really make you that happy to see me alone and miserable?"
Something in Sherlock's face shifted. He walked to the couch and sat down opposite John. The coffee table rested between them like a haunted island hovering between two ghost ships, littered with bits of wood and metal and skull. Certainly the mood suddenly felt tense enough to belong to a scary movie.
"Alone?" Sherlock asked.
John watched his friend warily.
"If you're alone, what does that make me?"
"Sherlock..."
"If you're alone, even when..." Sherlock looked away, the space above his upper lip twitching, as though he could barely stand to acknowledge what he was about to utter next, "...when you have me, how could I be anything other than a fool?"
"Sherlock," John repeated, almost a whisper this time. The glass felt numb in his hand. "What do you mean?"
"Don't make me spell it out for you," Sherlock growled. "God knows you aren't the brightest bulb in the pack, but even you couldn't be stupid enough to miss what I just said."
"Sherlock. But I never..."
"You don't swing that way, I know," Sherlock rejoined. "You're not my boyfriend. We're not together. You are not gay. I know. For fuck's sake, I know. I've heard you say it about a thousand times."
"That's not what I was going to say."
Sherlock paused, catching John's look. It seemed for once John was capable of derailing Sherlock with a simple phrase, as opposed to vice versa. John might've revelled in it if he himself hadn't been so on edge.
"I was going to say that I never knew," John said quietly. "I never knew you saw me that way."
"Oh, that's rich."
"No, really," John pushed on hurriedly. "Surely everybody makes jokes, but you've never once said anything about it yourself. You always brush it off. Hell, the first time we sat down together for a meal, you told me that you were married to your work, that you could never—"
"Things change," Sherlock said. His eyes flashed dangerously. "I've gotten to know you a lot better than that evening in the diner, John Watson."
Something about the way Sherlock uttered John's entire name, enunciating every syllabic nuance with painstaking exactitude sent shivers down Johns back. He swallowed audibly, staring into Sherlock's eyes like a dog awaiting punishment—though, Sherlock's discipline was rarely as simple as a rolled up paper or a swat across the snout. God know's John's life would've been a lot simpler if it was.
"Sod this," he breathed. "You're just fooling me again. I know it."
Though it was intended as a statement, the way John said it came off more like a question. He couldn't help it. He was coming to pieces under the heat of Sherlock's look.
Then Sherlock was moving, crawling over the coffee table, knocking bits of bone all over the carpet. John wondered how his friend managed to look so eloquent even whilst staining the knees of his britches with dust and toast crumbs. Sherlock's face was getting ever closer and John could do nothing except to sit there with his hands in his lap like a student awaiting roll call on his first day at school.
Sherlock stopped once their faces were still far enough apart that John could see his friend clearly, but close enough that Sherlock's eyes were slightly crossed as he looked up at John with his lancinating glare.
"A slight hue appearing across the cheeks and over the bridge of the nose," Sherlock observed, under his breath. "Hands held with the palms downwards, so as to surreptitiously remove the sweat that has formed there onto one's slacks. Rapid rise and fall of the chest. An audible catch in the throat on the intake."
"Sherlock," John scolded helplessly.
Sherlock reached up and ran his thumb down the side of John's face, catching the corner of John's mouth. John inhaled sharply once again, cursing himself as he did.
"Body temperature mildly elevated," Sherlock said, his voice so low it was more of a husk. "Pupils dilated, pulse quickening, and mouth..." Sherlock's eyes stopped their roving on John's mouth. "Oh Jesus Christ, you have a fine mouth. Oh, John..."
He leaned forward keenly, catching John's lips in his own, and John whimpered. Sherlock's mouth was so full, so hot, so Sherlock. As John's dreams became realities, and his fantasies became ridiculous manifestations enacted upon the chesterfield's expensive upholstery, John could only hope that Mrs. Hudson would wait a little while to come up with tea and dainties.
After it was over, Sherlock neatly resumed the task at hand, not even bothering to zip up his britches before picking up the hammer and arranging a skull in between the flower vase and a stack of unused coasters. The symphony of splintering bone serenaded their flat once again.
John waited a little longer to move. Once his breathing had settled down, he too stood up and made his way into the kitchen. Making sure he was decent, he resurrected the teapot from the sink and made tea. He knew Sherlock would treat him like a dunce again. He knew he'd weather the magnitude of Sherlock's brilliance over and over, for the rest of his life, if he had his way, but he would never forget what Sherlock had said just moments past, breathless and urgent and desperate as the detective's need for release.
Never alone.
Sherlock...!
If you say that you are once again, I will have to fiendishly punish you, doctor. What complete and utter nonsense.
Sher—
You know it better than I.
John dropped two teabags into the pot and allowed himself a small, guilty smile.
As long as I am alive, you will never be alone.
FIN