Distraction
Warnings: mild swearing, boykissing, run-on sentences, laptop abuse, confuzzled!John, very little context, SO MUCH SCHMOOPINESS ZOMG
Notes: More of a scene than a full story. Trying to get John's voice in my head. Only posting for the HOLY CRAP I FINALLY WROTE SOMETHING factor and because Gray is sick. The things I do for friendship, let me tell you.
Standard Disclaimer:Not my characters; they just happen to have taken up residence in my head. Apologies to Arthur Conan Doyle and the Moffat/Gatiss machine, but if you wanted to avoid this sort of thing you really shouldn't have made it so damned easy.
"Go away. You're terribly distracting."
John snorts, sits down, opens the paper, and tries to read. He very purposefully doesn't look up, but it's like his ears have filtered out every noise save the sound of Sherlock's fingers tapping on the keys. When it stops John thinks irrationally for a moment of a heart monitor suddenly going monotone.
"I mean it," Sherlock says.
"You remember I pay half the rent?" John says mildly. "I think that gives me the right to sit in the living room now and then."
"Piss off," Sherlock says, and it's a remark, like, Funny weather we're having, only John can hear the edge just under the surface.
He folds the paper (wasn't really reading it anyway), lays it down, laces his hands together, and looks over at Sherlock, whose face is faintly blue in the light of the laptop monitor. He hasn't looked up.
"Something on?" John asks.
"Yes. No. Oh, hell, there goes my train of thought, thank you very much."
John raises an eyebrow and says nothing.
Sherlock jumps to his feet, slamming the laptop closed as he goes, a darkness that's more than a shadow on his face. To John's great surprise, he raises the computer like he's going to smash it to the ground, and that's more than John's frugal army pension mentality can take. He's up and grabbing it from Sherlock before his brain's caught up with his body.
"Oi, watch the hardware!"
"Hell with the hardware," Sherlock grumbles, turning away, fingers tangled in his hair. John realizes he's looking as rumpled as he ever does, which is to say, nothing that most people would notice: a few wrinkles in his collared shirt, pale hands smudged with the aftermath of some experiment (John thinks it might've involved the tongues in the butter dish, and he does not want to know), slight bit of stubble on the jawline like he was too busy thinking to shave properly this morning. Aside from that, of course, he looks completely posh, which is just further evidence that the universe is entirely unfair.
John's not sure he's up for genius hysterics on the weekend as well as all week, but it's Sherlock, so he says, "What's wrong?"
Sherlock is still turned away, one hand on his hip, the other tugging at his hair, like he's trying to physically hold himself together...or tear himself apart. "Nothing," he says. "Everything. You just-you don't even know-"
"Tell me, then."
Sherlock finally looks at him, and there's a brief flash of something completely alien in his eyes, something John's seen on the battlefield a hundred times or more, something easy to spot at A&E, something he's never seen in Sherlock Holmes' eyes because, quite frankly, they weren't made for it.
Panic.
It's gone an instant later, and John might be able to convince himself that he imagined it, except he's seen it before, a tiny flicker in gray eyes that later bore down on a mad Irish bomber but for one moment stared at John all trussed up in semtex and didn't know what to make of it.
Anyway, it's gone now; Sherlock's eyes are hard and inscrutible again, just like always, and he's opening his mouth to say something cutting and awful and a bit not good, and that's when something in John's chest just snaps.
"What?" he hisses.
"It's impossible," Sherlock says.
John seriously considers strangling him for about three blissful seconds. Then he comes to his senses and starts in again (which may or may not be evidence of having truly come to his senses). "Sherlock-"
"It's impossible to concentrate with you around."
John blinks several times, slowly closes his mouth. He feels strangely numb, which is probably why the next muddled thought actually makes it past his brain: "I thought...you said I was..." What, exactly? About as useful as talking to a skull? Less so? Of course he's just a nuisance; of course the great Sherlock bloody Holmes doesn't need-
"It's impossible to concentrate with you around because I'm constantly thinking about how much I want to kiss you."
John thinks, quite clearly, that something's wrong with his hearing, because he can't have heard what he just heard. He's stuck on that non-thought for entirely too long before he manages to sputter a very coherent, "What?"
Sherlock looks away, moves away while John stands there numbly in the empty space he's left, testing to see if gravity's actually reversed itself or if that's just his brain exploding.
But the moment passes, and John Watson is nothing if not cool under pressure. And his hand isn't shaking. "You said you're married to you work."
"I am."
"You said this...wasn't your area."
"It's not."
"That the rest is transport."
Sherlock waves a hand angrily. "Yes, yes, my memory's perfectly sound, thanks. Nothing's changed, so obviously this is all your fault."
"My fault? You're the one who-"
But John makes the mistake of looking at him then, and he's so exactly the picture of a petulant four-year-old that something bubbles up in John's chest, something that threatens to choke him, so all he can do is laugh. He's laughing, and Sherlock is somehow still turning away, and then John's nearly choking for real, this time on his own stupidity, because that look-
"Sherlock-"
"Forget it. Delete it." He's moving toward the door, back turned, a hunch in his shoulders that wasn't there before, that's neverbeen there before.
And John's smaller, of course, but he's quick when he needs to be, and he grabs Sherlock's arm and spins him around. Sherlock, because he's an idiot, starts to say something, but John pulls him in so their foreheads are resting against each other. Then, because he's sometimes not sure that Sherlock really knows, he says, "You're an idiot."
Sherlock snorts. "That's hardly an accurate-"
"Idiot," John insists, and then he's kissing him.
Kissing Sherlock Holmes, it turns out, is a bit of a mess. Their mismatched heights are awkward, and neither of them quite knows what he's doing (not gay, not his date, sexual identity crisis obviously on the horizon except it's absolutely unimportant right now because Sherlock seems to have caught up and is pulling him closer and God, doing something with his tongue-)
Eventually John's brain begins to get tetchy about the lack of oxygen, and he pulls away just enough to breathe his own air (which he finds, as Sherlock once said, really is quite boring). He's not exactly sure how he's still standing or just how properly freaked out he ought to be at this moment, so it's as much a surprise to him as it must be to Sherlock when he says with a bit of a grin, "Still distracted?"
"Completely," Sherlock says. "Still your fault. Kiss me again."