So I decided to expand this into somewhat of a story. This is just a pet project that I will not compromise my studies for. That being said, I am beginning to love these characters, so I hope you enjoy another chapter. There will be more to come!
It had been two weeks. Two weeks since the night that the great Sherlock Holmes finally let one of his darkest memories stop haunting him. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes were finally completely open with each other from the simplest disagreements or quarks to the deepest, most intimate memories or desires. It seemed weird to think that a few months ago, they were still single men, one asexual, in practice and possibly theory, and one questioning the idea that he was, most likely, bisexual instead of straight.
In the time period since Sherlock stopped referring to himself as a virgin, they had had two cases, two cases that took the genius less than two days combined to solve. To say the least, Sherlock was beginning to get a touch bored. In fact, the boredom had surpassed the normal dismembered body parts in the kitchen for experiments and was beginning to approach shoot-the-wall boredom.
John hadn't seen the detective this bored for a while. Not much was amusing him anymore. They tried lazy days in bed just focused on each other. That lasted for a whole ten hours before Sherlock declared himself bored again. John had tried to convince him to go for a walk around the city with him. The two of them could explore the place they lived a little more and maybe get some dinner. Sherlock wouldn't even entertain that idea past its ill-fated conception. John even allowed a few games of Cluedo before he almost strangled Sherlock. The world's only consulting detective was extremely, excruciatingly bored, and everyone who knew Sherlock knew that it would not end well if he didn't have something to occupy that brilliant mind.
Sherlock had been awake for a few hours before the doctor crawled out of bed and stumbled to the shower. Sherlock had always been an early riser, but without a case, he was so bored that he wasn't sleeping. Instead, he was just lying around for hours after John drifted to sleep. He claimed it was because he hadn't been able to tire himself out during the day, so he wouldn't be able to sleep until he was busy again even though he wouldn't sleep much when he was on a case either. John was beginning to wonder if Sherlock was some form of android with extremely human-like features. This lack of sleep and eating was simply not normal.
After a shower that Sherlock always deemed too hot and too long, John came down to a cup of tea already poured and ready for him. He looked to the curly-haired genius and got a simple smile, "I heard you start the shower, and I figured you would appreciate it."
John nodded as he sampled the tea only to find it free from poisons and other contaminates. He filed that into the back of his mind. Sherlock was being a genuinely nice person this time instead of trying to figure out of there was anything in the sugar. Maybe a bored Sherlock was a nice Sherlock.
Just as the thought crossed Johns mind he looked up to see a glint of excitement in the younger man's eyes. He sighed and asked the dreaded question, "Sherlock, what do you have planned?"
Sherlock sprang to life and rattled off something about the morgue, a body with an interesting disease that he had always wanted to witness the effects of in person, and Molly securing the body for a few hours. John was a doctor. He understood how interesting diseases could be. In fact, sometimes he picked up one of his old medical reference books and brushed up on his infectious or rare disease knowledge. It was a way to relax and learn something he had forgotten because, well, in the military, it isn't so much about infectious disease so much as it is about stopping bleeding and saving limbs.
"Sherlock, which disease are we talking about here? Is there a possibility that either one of us could be infected?" asked a rather concerned Dr. Watson.
Sherlock looked at him with a tinge of disbelief, "do you think I would put you into harms way? Of course it isn't contagious, merely interesting."
"Sherlock, what did the man die from?"
"Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis," stated Sherlock as he reached for his scarf and the Belstaff. "Come on John. It'll be fascinating."
John reached out and grabbed Sherlock's wrist to stop him for a couple of seconds. He pulled him closer and looked him straight in the eye, "you are bored, and you want to go look at the corpse of a patient that had their skin practically melt off? Really Sherlock, there isn't anything else you would rather do?"
"His skin formed blisters under the epidermis that got so big and numerous that they fuse together and cause the layer of skin to slide off! How could that not be fascinating?" asked a confused Sherlock. His face was lit up like a child's that was just told they were heading to the zoo or thee park. If John didn't know any better, he would suspect that Sherlock were giddy.
John had no idea how such a revolting disease got into a London morgue, or how one Sherlock Holmes could possibly find this disease interesting enough to spend a few hours playing with a corpse.
"Sherlock, if my memory serves me right, that disease causes most of the mucosal membranes to deteriorate to the point that the bowels start hemorrhaging, the nasal passages seem to melt out of a person, and, in rare cases, the genitals to swell and deteriorate in a gruesome fashion. This is what you want to do to amuse yourself?"
Sherlock still looked confused. Why didn't John understand that he needed to do something, anything, to occupy his mind for a few hours before he could come back to the flat and relax? He needed to do something!
"John, it is a disease that desiccates the mucosal membranes! Think about how that could look inside and out! Please let me go," begged a Sherlock that was beginning to look a lot like a disgruntled adolescent.
The hand that was holding Sherlock's wrist captive moved down to grip the agile hand of the man-child standing before the doctor. John was tempted to smack Sherlock on the back of the head with his other hand, but he managed to suppress that urge. "Sherlock, if I let you go and play with a corpse for a few hours, will you agree to an actual date afterwards? Not me ordering take away and us lying on the couch until I fall asleep, but rather us going out to a nice restaurant where we both eat a nice meal, and then we go back to the flat and shag until neither one of us can walk. Is that an acceptable compromise?"
The grip surrounding John's hand tightened a measurable amount, and the corners of Sherlock's mouth turned into a slight smile. He nodded his head eagerly and tried to release John's hand to finish buttoning his coat, but John needed an actual, verbal answer from the detective.
"Sherlock," he started "I need you to actually say yes. Not nod your head and forget about it in five minutes. I want to have a normal evening with my boyfriend, if that is indeed what you are. I want one evening without you acting like a robot. You have to actually say yes."
Sherlock looked slightly taken aback by what John had just said. They actually hadn't ever muttered the word boyfriend to each other. They hadn't labeled what they were yet and somehow it seemed like they didn't need to. Everyone that had spent any time around the two of them in the last year or so could easily see that they weren't just flatmates that solved crimes together, but the fact still remained, neither one of them had called the other their boyfriend.
"Dinner with my boyfriend? That seems rather benign," responded Sherlock with a low timbre to his voice.
"Sherlock, just once I would like to believe that underneath the consulting detective façade that you show the world is a man who actually cares about the people who are close to him. Prove me right just once?" replied John.
Sherlock looked like he was readying to argue with his favorite doctor, but instead he just smiled and nodded his head, "of course I will join you for a proper date after I thoroughly explore this corpse. I am also not complaining about what you propose we do after the meal."
John smirked and nodded. He released the younger man's hand and grabbed his own coat before he followed Sherlock out the door and into a cab.
The quick ride over to the morgue was spent in comfortable silence while Sherlock drew circles on the back of John's hand. Sherlock had said he did this because he wanted to memorize he patterns of John's skin. He wanted to know what he felt like without looking. These quiet moments were normally nice between the two of them because when things weren't quiet it meant they were either being shot at or running across busy streets. These moments of peace were rare, and John quite enjoyed them.
When they pulled up outside of the morgue, Sherlock almost bolted out of the cab. John had to pay the driver before Sherlock completely left him behind. The genius was so bored that dissecting a body that would appear to the untrained eye to have the top layer of many of the body's membranes melting away was a good way to spend the afternoon. Sherlock would need a case soon or he would be deducing the lives of the people he ran into on the street. He would surely end up in jail if he continued to be this bored.
The body ended up being that of a sixty-seven year old white male. He had developed the severe case of TEN due to a reaction to an anticonvulsant medication he was given after he had his first seizure a few months prior. The reaction was quite severe, but he just thought it was a reaction to a new soap he had been using, so he neglected the blisters for a few weeks until they got to the point that the skin was sliding off in the middle of he night. He was admitted to the hospital approximately a week ago and died this morning. The condition is generally treatable if caught before chunks of skin are torn off.
What killed the man took Sherlock all of ten minutes looking at his internal organs to figure out. The man had allowed the disease to progress so far that his internal membranes were separating, and he ended up hemorrhaging early in the morning. They rushed him to surgery to try to locate and stop the bleeding, but the tissue was too deeply decomposed to even attempt to repair it. The man was pronounced dead at 03:39. The body was very fresh and Molly had just started the preliminary work up, but Sherlock had to see this for himself, so he took it upon himself to dissect a few portions of the bowels.
After John was finally able to drag the pouting Holmes out of the morgue while thanking Molly for entertaining the child for a few hours, John eventually got Sherlock to a restaurant without plastic coated tablecloths and the option for take away. They sat down at a quiet table in the back and perused the menus. John was debating the ethicacy of shoving food down Sherlock's throat we he announced he was actually planning on eating. The great Sherlock Holmes was actually going to eat something.
"Wait what did you just say Sherlock?" retorted a rather confused Watson.
"You heard me. I'm not going to repeat myself," stated a calm Sherlock.
John sat up a little straighter in his chair and looked the detective straight in the eye, "you are actually going to eat dinner without me shoving it down that glorious throat of yours?"
Sherlock set aside the menu he was still holding in one hand and looked straight back at his doctor, "you can stop acting so surprised John. I am human. I do have to eat sometimes."
"Oh really? Because I was under the assumption that you were an android who only ate food to keep up appearances because, as you put it, digestion slows you down," snapped John.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and smirked at that last part, "well when I am on a case, it does slow me down, but seeing as we have not had any interesting cases in quite some time, I think I am safe to eat right now."
John just laughed at the clinical-like explanation Sherlock had given as to why it was okay for him to eat that night, but he would take what he could get with this man. It was rare to see him actually eating without being absolutely forced to do so.
They continued the night in a similar fashion. The quips and sarcasm didn't stop at the ordering or even the small glass of wine Sherlock decided to sample. John had never even seen Sherlock with any fluid besides tea. John always sworn this man was going to die of dehydration on an almost daily occasion. Sherlock claimed he simply didn't want to waste his time and energy on such a boring task such as selecting and consuming a beverage even though the brilliant, sometimes chemist, knew how important water was to the basic chemical reactions that drove every single process in his body.
As the night progressed, both men relaxed into their newly found relationship. They had eaten out together before but never on a proper date. John was fairly sure that Sherlock had never been on a date at all, but he seemed to be a natural at it. They both kept the conversation relatively light in the beginning. Well as light as the detective and his doctor could. They talked about the weird cases that had handled, and the ridiculous ones including the three young men who ran the website that led them to believe that comic book characters were coming to life. That was a weird one that reaffirmed the belief that normal people's lives were very dull.
The time at the restaurant came to an end after Sherlock actually consumed a respectable amount of food, and John was pretty sure he would be regretting the heavy, cream-based dish he had just consumed later on in the evening, or at least, he hoped he would.
The two men grabbed a cab back to the flat and spent to whole time just enjoying each other. They tried to ignore the cabbie's not-so-subtle coughs to stop it. The two started by only holding hands, but that only lasted until John had leaned over to steal what was supposed to be a quick kiss from Sherlock. That quick kiss turned into the beginning of what they both hoped would be a long night of snogging.
By the time the cab pulled up outside of 221B, neither man was in a good enough state to pay the driver, but John did his best because he knew Sherlock wouldn't. In fact, the second the cab had stopped, Sherlock jumped out of the vehicle like it was on fire and headed straight for the door. He had his key in the lock before John had told the cabbie to keep the change from the wad of cash he handed him. John followed right after Sherlock into the flat and attacked him after the door was closed behind him.
Sherlock leaned most of his weight onto the sturdy door behind him as John pushed his body flush against the detective's. He reached around to grab a handful of dark hair. He pulled the head that the curls were attached to infinitely closer to him until he heard a sound from the flat that occupied the first floor of the complex. They pulled apart as Sherlock mouthed 'Mrs. Hudson.' John nodded and turned on his heels to sprint up the stairs, taking them two, almost three, at a time.
The men barreled through the door and landed on top of each other as John tripped over the rug that had been placed at the entrance of their flat to make it feel more like a "home" as Mrs. Hudson called it. Their welcome home would be a fresh set of bruises tomorrow morning. Sherlock hopped to his feet, pulling John along with him, and bounded off to the their shared bedroom. They slammed the door shut as both of their cell phones chimed. Both men reached to their own pockets to take out the offending device and chuck it across the room. There would be no more distractions tonight, only Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, together.