"Sherlock! Your brother is here."
Mycroft, on the other side of the door, could undoubtedly hear him, but with tensions always so high between the brothers and with Sherlock in such an off kilter state, John didn't want to take any chances. Also, John was possibly just as unsociable at times as his flatmate was, but because he tucked those bits of himself away while Sherlock tended to flaunt them, the contrast made people remember John as something gentler than he was.
John climbed back up the stairs. "Did you hear me, I said –" and stopped abruptly, as he found Sherlock with one hand twisted in his hair and several deep-furrow frown lines across his face.
"Tell him to leave, please."
John didn't argue; he turned on his heel and trotted right back down. When he opened the door, he eased his way out without opening the door very wide. "Hello, Mycroft."
Mycroft nodded curtly at him. "Doctor Watson," he said, acknowledgement without greeting.
"How can I be of service?" John said, pleasantly, unphased by Mycroft's attempts to loom. John hadn't been intimidated by him the first time he'd dragged him off to a warehouse to threaten him, and the fact that he was trying now was just silly.
"I thought I would visit with my petulant little brother. He's been rather conspicuously absent for a number of days." Mycroft said, rather delicately. His brolly today was a deep shade of navy with a sandalwood handle. John had noticed several different models on his person, but never one that seemed to match his suit and inner lining of his jacket so perfectly. He wondered for the first time if Mycroft had them custom made.
"Oh, I'm afraid Sherlock isn't seeing anyone at the moment," John said with a shrug.
"I thought as much." Mycroft said, mouth tight at the corners. "In which case I was hoping you'd come with me."
"No can do." John said, turning to lock the door behind him. He added, on a lark: "You're welcome to follow me to Tescos, if you like."
Mycroft's expression turned grim, as if presented with a much more terrible option than coming along to the corner store and he nodded stiffly, falling into step with John.
John had not planned on actually shopping at Tescos while Mycroft hovered behind him like a dour mosquito, managing to convey his displeasure with the soft snick of expensive shoes behind him.
By the time they had arrived, Mycroft had arrived at his point, which was, as always, Sherlock. "My brother," he said, as they neared the entrance. "and I have had a strained relationship since he was fourteen."
"I'm going to stop you there," John said, putting a hand up, feeling at the end of his fuse earlier than he normally did. "You wanted to drop by today to remind your brother and I that you know everything, and we have no privacy, etc. The message has been received. I'm not interested in you detailing Sherlock's personal history to me. It's not very brotherly. You might stop blaming your rocky relationship on whatever fight you lads had back in '95 and start looking at the fact that your brother is a grown man and you cannot stop lording the fact that you have him under literal twenty-four hour surveillance and have no sense of personal boundaries. You know, in the present."
Mycroft's mouth snapped closed after an undignified period of time.
"If that'll be all?"
"For the moment, Doctor Watson, I suppose that will be sufficient."
John paced through the store, doing the shopping that had been neglected and depleted all week, until the tremor in his hand faded.
He'd overshot, in the end, propelled forward by his lingering anger and desire to postpone going home, and he'd kept picking up items as he wandered through the store. When he finally returned, both shoulders were aching.
"Sherlock?" he called softly from the stairs. The flat was in some semblance of order when he made it over the threshold, papers shuffled into stacks and all of the miscellany back in the pantry. He dropped off his bags in the kitchen, everything but the lotion he'd purchased for Sherlock.
"Up here," Sherlock's voice said from above, voice muffled by walls and carpets and possibly a pillow, and John started up to his room.
Sherlock, wrapped in his sheet, didn't look up at John. His door was open, though, and John tapped his knuckles lightly on it. "Hey."
Sherlock didn't say come in but he didn't say stay out either. John moved into his room.
"I'm sure he was careful not to embellish. Mycroft is particular about facts and compulsive about oversharing. He spent his whole childhood getting both of us in the soup."
Sherlock looked embarrassed, and worn, like he still hadn't recovered from his heat. John waited just inside the doorway. "Are you finished?"
"I don't want to discuss your newfound insight into my childhood trauma," Sherlock said. "I am trying to tell you that it came from a reputable source. Assimilate the information as you wish and we can go back to the way things were two weeks ago."
"Is it my turn?" John asked.
Sherlock hadn't looked at him yet, having chosen instead to fiddle with his massive collection of keys. "Do you require one?"
"I would like to say something, yes," John said. He felt bruised inside, soft spaces carved out of him by the tone in Sherlock's voice. John had never heard him sound defeated before, not even during the tear-stained catastrophe of his heat. At least that had been about his body and chemicals, not shame and… disappointment.
John was sure it was there. Hope flared into life inside of his bones. "I didn't let your brother tell me anything about you," he said, and Sherlock's head swiveled to him like a spotlight. "You can, if you like. Or not. That's the thing about your past; it belongs to you. And we can continue going on as we were, because I've never had a mate like you," John said, suddenly feeling like he was skinless – made completely of exposed nerves and transparent thoughts – but determined to see things through. He'd dug shrapnel out of bloody men with his fingernails; he could talk about the things he wanted in secret: "But also, I'd be fine if we didn't. It's hardly a secret that I'm mad about you. It took Moriarty three seconds in a lab for him to see it."
Sherlock made the beginnings of a sound and then faltered, blinking and twitching his mouth, for several long minutes.
"So what you're in fact, saying is," Sherlock said, just as John, humiliated to his toes, was about to make a subtle retreat.
"Yes?" John coaxed.
"That I'm your, that you." Sherlock hadn't stopped blinking.
"Yes," he confirmed, and he'd be amused if he didn't feel taut as a piano wire. "You are. I am."
"Outside of…"
"Before that, and if it never happens again. If nothing sexual ever happens again."
"And if I wanted someth—no, don't answer that." Sherlock rubbed his face. "I need a moment to access some files," he said, and John tossed him the smallest Tesco's bag before he left him alone, feeling the hot swirl of anxiety as he closed the door behind him.
By the time Sherlock came down from his room, half dressed in pajama trousers and his dressing gown, it had been about an hour.
"My mind palace had to be reorganized," Sherlock said, by way of greeting. John looked up from the crossword he was trying to unsuccessfully solve from the table, and he hovered from foot to foot. "A lot of old entries had to be reexamined."
"All is calm on the homefront, then?" John asked in a careful voice.
"I put the renovations on hold. I was trying to revisit my sexuality. It is… troublesome. All of the pertinent facts are in vaults."
"Are they in vaults because you'd prefer not to think about them?"
"Obviously, John."
"Then maybe you could leave them there." John gave his words several moments to land as Sherlock angled his head as if readying himself to protest, but then failed to. He went on, "Skip the case study. If you don't want to think of what the subject did or wanted, you can check with the subject to see what he wants now."
"What if the subject doesn't know? Should he fill out a survey?"
John moved out of his chair and to Sherlock, stopping just shy of stepping on his toes. John brought his hand up, slowly, giving Sherlock time to flinch or duck out of the way, and meeting the warm skin of his face with his fingertips when he failed to do so. Sherlock closed his eyes. "Does the subject find this pleasant?"
Sherlock let out a little breath, and leaned into the touch. "He would give it a seven, on the scale of desirable sensations."
"That's a good start," John said, moving away, feeling almost buoyant as he went to fill the kettle from the tap. "If the subject wants to head back into his vaults, that's fine, but let him know if the subject wants to get snogged on the sofa, that option is also open."
"John," Sherlock said, his dressing gown pinched at his middle, where Sherlock had crossed his arms. One of them was wrapped tightly around the other elbow. John wasn't Sherlock Holmes but he could see the nervous tension in every line of his body. "Somehow, you have become… essential to the work. To me. I have a great fondness, for you."
John looked at him, patiently, with the start of a smile uncoiling. "I'll be on the sofa."
Sherlock followed in a few minutes, after John had turned the telly on. Sherlock focused on the makeover show like it was a crime scene. John let him, smiling as he watched along, content to sit with one leg in contact with Sherlock's from knee to dressing gown for half an hour.
"Well?" Sherlock finally demanded, as if John was the limiting agent here, and John laughed.
"Come here, you," he said, reeling him in warmly, by the cloth at his shoulders. John felt like a teenager, heart tapping out an amplified code in his ears. He met Sherlock's mouth with a bump, and huffed a soft laugh as he went in again. Sherlock went immediately limp against him, like something liquid, as he mirrored John's mouth.
It wasn't the first time he'd kissed Sherlock, but it was the first time he didn't have to worry about taking something he hadn't been invited to. John brought a hand up to Sherlock's neck, scratching gently at the skin above the omega scent gland turned pleasure receptor as he lost himself in the slow, delicious press of their mouths, all indulgent lips and a little slide of Sherlock's tongue against his bottom lip. John opened his mouth and Sherlock prodded it with the same thoroughness he applied to everything he was interested in.
And he was. Interested. When Sherlock pulled away, he almost took John's shirt with him, so tight was his clawed grip around the back hem of it. Sherlock's eyes were comically wide.
"A nine," Sherlock declared, not letting go of John. "Again?"
