The Play
Fandom, Pairing: Sherlock BBC. John/Sherlock
A/N: I realize I haven't updated my other story in the same pace I was expecting to, it might even come down because I'm pretty unsatisfied with a couple of things (for a re-write, not a total abandonment though). In the meantime, please enjoy a new fic 'verse! I'll be writing ficlets for this one, not a long story, just interconnected plot bunnies. Haaa…
Art for the last scene here: www . kaidreil . deviantart . com/#/d3c8wub
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It was a cruelly cold night down in Paddington; the teeth of early January were just setting its canines into the lonely pedestrians unlucky enough to be out in such conditions. There were trickles of the working class making their way home to their electric baseboards and blockbusters on the telly. It being just after eight o'clock put the winter night into quite the pitch of darkness as well, as if it was the only time of the year that the streets of London could assert their power over its residents. The crunching of frost and thin snow took up the night sounds as rubber soles passed over, leaving only slight tracks. It was too hard and too much like the precursor of black ice to be beautiful.
Taking a breath would freeze the lungs from the inside out – it was like repeated torture, and John Watson couldn't wait to get to the tube entrance. Only half a block more, his feet knew. Always the same route, the fastest, the most efficient. Maybe before he would have been the type to take a meandering path, but January blocked all thoughts of peering in window panes.
Breathing in was physically uncomfortable, caused the diaphragm to hitch. Breathing out froze the dental nerves and the nose hairs, depending on whether he was catching his breath or not.
He rushed into the underground with hands halfway to Shanghai in his coat pockets.
The ride was claustrophobic and jostling, like it always was. But in the summer, there were more students. There were more smiling people. In the winter John could sit down and feel his feet expand in his shoes from too much centralized pressure there for the day. A doctor's job was not spent on a comfortable chair he'd like to inform the world.
The stations whirred past him like a slot machine on the Bakerloo line, Edgware Road, Marylebone…ah. Baker Street.
It took him only a few minutes more to sprint to the receiving door of Mrs. Hudson's flats. He glanced longingly at the closed sandwich shop – he could have gone for a bit of a bite. No matter, there should be something upstairs, he hoped on the account of his stomach.
His shoes made the stairs sound so hollow every time he ran up them. The boards were not in their prime years, but their charm was a homestead vintage. It suited him.
"I'm back," he announced, pushing their door open (it hadn't been closed properly). The flat was quiet and not even the air here could escape the brush of chill.
There sat a wispy figure on their overstuffed chair, gazing out one of the windows in a deceivingly absent way. It gave no notice to John as it received an audience. Of course, this was customary.
"Dear god, but people are slow sometimes," John muttered as he shed his layers and moved towards the kitchen at the same time. He said it more to hear something than to begin a proper conversation. "One would think to try the pharmacy before coming to wait hours for advice on colds." The watery sound of milk splashing into a mug was followed by a crinkle of cellophane. Biscuits and milk for dinner, not entirely unacceptable. "And then they complain about wait times. Not sure my time should be paid for answering their questions, sometimes."
"Come off it. Sarah just refuses to speak to you after the Chinese circus incident, isn't that it?"
"Hum, life appears to still inhabit the husk of Sherlock Holmes. Wonderful, I was looking for a talk show buddy tonight."
"Oh, spare me, please. I don't need distractions; there's a case tonight, John." Sherlock turned around, the unmistakable glint of the game in his eyes.
John settled into the couch, copying his flatmate's habit of using the armrest as a foot support, after he placed the plate and glass on the table in front of him, amidst the clippings and a skull. "Is there? Well, don't hold back on my account."
Sherlock only closed his eyes and turned around again, only his hair showing above the chair's back in John's line of sight. "Maybe after, I'm onto something right now."
The remote was snatched up and their small thick tube was flicked on, regardless of the expressed disinterest. John wanted to unwind after many stressful mothers and uncooperative children. Apocalypse Now was on, to his great enjoyment. And so, some hours were passed without communication, just a calm sort of quiet, minus the dialogue on the TV.
John was barely paying attention as the program ended, and dozed a little on the mangy loveseat of a couch. He switched the screen off as an afterthought, wanting the think, to engage in what Sherlock would call mind work. There were a few out of place symptoms surfacing in quite a few bronchitis victims and other, more exotic pathologies were now under consideration. After a full day though, this valiant attempt was silently taken over by a light nap that crept its way into John's tense body.
He never woke to a noise, or the exhale of slow breath, but to the illusion of heat. Groaning a bit, John flexed his soldier hands, doctor hands, and stretched. A release of stale air, and his eyes opened smoothly. He had been dreaming, his body still remembering the tickle of skin on skin.
As a practical man, John let the sleep stupor see itself out. A glance behind him revealed the time to be a nick past two. Another look exposed Sherlock yet to move from the same position he had been in since before John came home.
There was something pressed to the back of John's mind. Something was not leaving his lungs, his ribcage was achingly tight.
John brushed his sleeve aside to verify the time on his wristwatch. Yes, it was actually well into the early morning. With a shake of his head, he got up from the creaking wood frame sofa and came over to where the detective was still.
The moon having departed from the sky view ages ago, Sherlock's skin was left to be solely illuminated by pale streetlights; London was too polluted to have stars. Even then he didn't move, didn't open his eyes when John knew he knew he was right there. The night silence held back his words. Sherlock's muss of hair, and composure held back any objections to the time.
A pointed tongue snuck out, wetting Sherlock's lips as he continued to think. A wave ran down John's spine.
Was it wrong to be jealous of the work? Of the criminals that had the narrow vision of this man's mind focused on them, their capture. Their cornering in the traps they had lain themselves, helpless.
Without a thought, John extended his hand to touch the jawline covered in sodium light from below. Aching soft, as he expected.
Sherlock opened one eye, quizzically peering at John standing over him, his offending hand not yet moved quite away. "I'm alive, if that's what you're checking up on." His observer only shook his head. It left Sherlock in something of a muddle, and forced the other lid open. "John,"
As if it had been an invitation, John, with his hands supporting his weight on the chair arms, moved down and breathed the side of Sherlock's cricked neck; it was so warm, and the flat was so offensively cold.
"John, what is this? I'm working." Sherlock's voice faltered. As if that was the only excuse; his grand rebuttal to the closest invasion of his personal space by another person for years.
"Your sex appeal, Sherlock, should be the reason you are considered constantly armed, and dangerous."
Paralysis struck, pinning Sherlock to his spot, his eyes looked like they might if a cadaver had stood up and walked out of the morgue on its own. He found he couldn't move as John's calloused hand cupped his neck, and the complimentary lips descended on the exposed flesh of the other side. He was at a loss for action when fluttering kisses changed to aggressive nips, and there appeared a knee under his lotus folded legs, purportedly to stabilize John's stance.
If he had been asked to describe what his thought process had been at the time, John would have been hard pressed to come up with an answer. All he knew was the distinct scent of Sherlock, and the bitter taste of skin on the tip of his tongue. The driving force that moved his leg as was the entire existence of his mind, and he again pressed Sherlock further into the stuffed chair, enveloping him more by body every moment,
Then it happened that Sherlock found his voice and at least a fraction of his brain again, "John, what are you doing?" A wet tongue had found the deep fissure between his neck and clavicle, and involuntarily he let a light moan escape from his lips, his forehead fell forwards onto John's hard shoulder. This was not how he had envisioned this night going at all, how any night should have gone at all. There was no reprieve, only John moving his other hand onto Sherlock's side, curious fingers pulling at the tucked lavender shirt he had on today, and Sherlock's arms were then lethargically around John's neck, still higher than his own head, used only as a support. Neither noticed the pair of plastic patches on the underside, it wasn't important. The undressing hand then pushed his unbalanced body to the side, so Sherlock was leaning against only one half of the chair, his legs unfolding beneath him.
"Whatever you can imagine me doing is what'll happen." John moved his both his hands up Sherlock's shirt just then, watching it ride up as far as the tailoring would allow, just touching skin. Shivering, stressed, satin skin. He knew what he was looking for; his fingertips brushed hard nibs on smooth pectorals and he pressed with his thumbs down, roughly.
Sherlock could only say John's name is a rush of breath, he could barely keep himself somewhat up by holding onto John's neck. Then when he thought maybe he would lose this pathetically one-sided battle between his mind and body, there was an absence of heat, and touches. John had stood up and withdrawn across the room to the kitchen entrance.
Not much of an end-goal, he just leaned against the frame, and surveyed the situation. Sherlock hadn't moved from his position of half-falling out of the chair, and he combed back dirty blonde hair with his hands.
"It's fine, Sherlock. Just, ah, think of that as one of your experiments."
The man in question slid upright, and threw an arm across the back of the chair. "I always see my experiments through, John." Then he was up, and his shirt undone, somehow (he must have been working at it out of view). He was simply not used to not having the upper hand in anything in his thirty-five years of life, and Sherlock was damned if this would be the exception.
Exploiting his height advantage to its full potential, he trapped John in an array of lanky limbs and door jamb. "You know, when I mentioned it wasn't my area," Sherlock kneed John's legs open and pressed his thigh upwards, "I only meant relationships."
The pressure was driving the heat hotter in John's groin and he readjusted to fist the front of Sherlock's open shirt, directed a devious smile to his human cage. "I suppose then, sex for its own sake is entire within your realm?"
"Oh, quite." They were the last words to be mentioned for the rest of the night.