Eleven days, eight peaceful meals, and seventeen damnably heartfelt adagios after his relapse, Sherlock felt ready to make his request.
"If you were to recommend a tattoo artist for me, who would it be?" Sherlock fingered the strings of his beloved instrument in absent resolve. This choice was right, he was sure of it. The world at large had learned to watch him carefully when he was sure.
John flicked his attention from the latest paternity debacle on Jeremy Kyle to watch Sherlock. "What do you need with an artist?"
"Irrelevant. Answer the question." Sherlock strummed in legato, pondering the beauty of a waltz.
"Not until I get a straight answer out of you." John tossed the remote aside to angle his body toward Sherlock. "What are you planning?"
"Nothing, I'm merely curious to meet this person whom you hold in such high regard. Failing that, one of his colleagues." Sherlock paused momentarily. "Or her colleagues. Never let it be said I'm not an equal-opportunity consumer."
John ignored the digression. "That's all?"
"Yes."
"I'm no detective—"
"Obviously."
"Piss. Off. I'm no detective, but I can pick up on an easy lie as well as the next idiot. Sherlock, tell me you're not thinking of a getting a tattoo just because I've got a few."
"I'd hardly call that veritable shirt of ink you carry around 'a few,' John. Anyway, of course not! What I want's got nothing to do with you." Sherlock surged up from the couch to tend to his latest experiment, violin in hand. Well, he said 'latest,' but he hadn't looked at the thing for days. It had proved less enlightening than he'd hoped.
"Sherlock," John droned as he took up hot pursuit, voice all a-warning on the approach.
"Be serious, John. You aren't the first person to think of commemorating an event with an external symbol, you won't be the last. Don't act as though you've got a monopoly on the thing."
John lifted his hands in an attempt at placating him. "That isn't what I'm doing."
Sherlock levied his bow in John's direction. "That's exactly what you're doing."
John visibly reined in his quick temper, reaching back to scratch at his hairline. An anxious tic. "I just want you to do it for the right reasons."
"And who are you, pray tell, to decide what those reasons are? What makes your motives worthier than mine?" He'd expected that John would protest when he got wind of his plan. He hadn't expected the fact to bother him as much as it did.
"Nothing," John conceded in blink, as he tended to when in the wrong. He backed up to put distance between them. "I didn't mean anything by it."
Sherlock banged one beaker and a flask about his makeshift lab station. "That doesn't quite ring true on either side, does it?"
John performed a shoddy about-face in his haste to exit the kitchen. "Right. I'll get that number for you."
Sherlock didn't follow his departure. "No, you'll take me there. Introduce me yourself." He knocked distractedly on the table's scrubbed wood surface. "If they're as trustworthy as you claim, I'm sure they've heard all about me, haven't they?" It felt like a confidence violated. He hated it.
John puffed softly in what must have been resignation, what might have been regret. "Yeah, they have."
Their appointment was made within the hour.
"They're willing to meet with you during lunch."
"A personal favour?"
"Yup. Get ready, we're not keeping them waiting."
"Fine." Sherlock showered and dressed quickly after days of doing neither. He donned his coat, scarf, and gloves while John turned off the telly, shut the window, and checked the appliances. Sherlock hailed the cab, John locked the front door. They accomplished this without more than necessary chatter.
It was miserable. Sherlock was beginning to remember why fighting with John was never any fun.
John inhaled deeply, usually a sign that he was preparing himself for an argument. Sherlock shifted in horrid anticipation.
"Doing what I did isn't for everyone, Sherlock. There isn't some standard you have to meet to be considered tough enough."
Sherlock could have laughed. "I've never cared about standards."
"You've always cared about standards, just enough to be able to confound them. You can play ignorant with people who don't know you well, but don't pull that with me."
"You think you know me that well?"
"I think we wouldn't be going where we're going together if I didn't. You'd have snuck the number from my phone, hailed a cab, and left me none the wiser." Not a terrible idea in hindsight, Sherlock mused. "That's what you do to people whose opinions don't matter to you one way or another. I should know. I used to be one of them."
"You were never one of them."
"I think...that might prove my point."
The remainder of the drive was conducted in silence.
They pulled up to a nondescript storefront, which announced itself to passersby as GHQ. John paid the fare and ushered Sherlock into the tinted glass entrance. The waiting area boasted a full complement of mixed chairs and benches bordering the walls, some of them occupied. None of those in queue gave in indication of being frustrated at the wait, leading Sherlock to conclude the turnaround was fairly quick and that some weren't paying customers at all. The ambient temperature was comfortable, the air smelling of a combination of black coffee, powdered cocoa, tea.
John went straight to the front desk to speak with the receptionist. "We're here for Donnie."
"Yeah, I got your call. Some kind of emergency?"
"When you live with this one, everything's an emergency. Let me know when Don's ready."
"He said to send in the...just go in."
Sherlock made a mental note of the self-censoring. She'd abruptly shifted topics when he glanced in her direction. Petite, well-muscled, military bearing. Former enlisted. He turned away completely. It was clear she'd heard of him.
"Sherlock, you can head back. Go straight through the door in front of you. Donnie'll meet you on the other side."
Seeing as the only other doors led to a lavatory or the street, Sherlock had deduced that at once. John would have known that had he put his instinctual situational awareness to good use.
Sherlock heard John clucking behind his back with the spectacled receptionist, Torrance.
"Isn't he charming?"
"He's an acquired taste." Sherlock knew that John would be leaning toward the former staff sergeant to impart instructions. Sherlock lingered in the reception area under the pretence of silencing his phone. "He's a bit—okay, a lot—much but he's mine. Tell everybody to go easy on him, would you?"
"Loud and clear, Cap. I'll hand down on the word."
Sherlock tucked put his phone away into his inner pocket and proceeded into the consultation lounge, something like levity in his stride. The room was medium sized with an octagonal floor plan. Of the eight walls, one was devoted to entry from reception while the one directly opposite led into the workshop. The remaining six were divided among six artists, each of whom had semi-enclosed stalls in which to consult with prospective clients. The ceiling bore the Crown Jewels and Carry Ons etched amid epic war poetry, amid ballads and your quaint honour turned to dust, splashed above a Robinson map projection that made Sherlock itch. The eyes of Watson and Crick stared inquisitively downward with Marie Curie and the Sphinx. Sherlock saw why a man of the world might retreat here, when the world had retreated from him.
John's Donnie, his Donald Camden, stepped out from his alcove to beckon Sherlock in. They shook hands and sat down to business.
"Tell us what you want."
Sherlock could give nary a response. John, I want John. No, that wasn't entirely right. He wanted John the way he was wanted by John. He wanted him commemorated, emblazoned, and immortalized where Sherlock would always dwell. Keepsakes could be misplaced and walls papered over, but skin remained unless maimed to obscurity. Although Sherlock might ultimately find himself mutilated, he would never forget. It would be John, how could he?
His bafflement must have been writ all over him. Camden took pity.
"Are you thinkin' somethin' small? Small-ish? How much ground do you want to cover? Placement?"
Sherlock considered the sheer amount of skin allotted to the human body. Nothing on the face or hands. Sherlock's ability to work was predicated on his ability to go unnoticed. Society made body modification its business, thus people tended to note when someone with the extravagant variety was in their midst. Cosmetics could be of use in those instances. All the same, Sherlock rather liked the idea of something that only he and John would see, something secret between them like what John kept close.
"Nothing above the neck and the forearms are out."
"Not for public consumption, I s'ppose."
"No, definitely not. Just John and I."
"We can do that. Any thoughts on what you'd like to see?"
"Some kind of animal might be acceptable. Nothing pretentious or tasteless."
"That's angel doves and peacocks right out."
Mycroft would laugh him into exile. Sherlock covered his face in pre-emptive terror. "Not even to joke."
Camden's craggy grin traversed his cheeks like the Serpentine did Hyde Park. "If it's any help, we've got a sample wall and a Lookbook if you'd like to give that a going-over."
Sherlock had seen the wall and wasn't satisfied with the offerings, however talented the hands by which they were drawn.
"No, no, I want something no one else has had." Sherlock flipped through his mental databanks—Chrysocolaptes lucidus socialis (flameback woodpecker—no),bubo virginianus (great horned owl—clever creature but the name, best not), Haliaeetus leucocephalus (sea eagle—I loved the sea once but it lacked pirates). He discarded twenty-six avian genii and species before coming to one he found least objectionable. "A raven, I think. Cliché, I suppose, but poignant enough to be forgivable." Sherlock had often been likened to birds of prey in the past, rendering the symbolism meaningful if not distinctly flattering. "Make of that what you can."
Camden nodded the nod of one already preoccupied with his task, scratching out a doodle Sherlock couldn't exactly make out on the corner of his desk blotter. "If you don't mind me asking, what're you getting this for? What do you want it to show to whomever you want to see it?" He flipped his drawing pencil like a baton for the twirling. There was an expectant quality to the asking.
"That they're important, vital, essential to me." Sherlock still had something to prove .
"I know you may have a hard time believing this, but we get this a lot, so there's some questions you're going to want to ask yourself: One, will this person be happy about this? Two, do they feel the same? Three, will you regret this if they don't?"
Sherlock stilled his twitching wrists, momentarily deleted the violin strings he longed to pluck from his mind. Nervous tics. He knows.
"All I'm saying is it's a commendable thing getting a mark of affection tattooed on you, but it's a not a patch on a leaky schooner. The relationship'll still sink if it's dinged. You'll just be stuck with a reminder you don't want after it's done."
"If it's done, it's all I'll have and I'd rather that than nothing."
"Blimey, you have got it bad."
Sherlock's mouth hitched in a droll arc. "The worst."
"That means we'll have to see about setting you up with something the size of how you feel." Camden reached into his angled art desk to retrieve a large A3 drawing pad. Sherlock's mind was full to bursting with possibilities. How much is too much?
"What makes you think I'd want it that large?"
"You don't strike me as the subtle type."
"Fair guess."
Camden rolled his shoulder. "More like experience. You don't do this as long as I have without learning to pick a Romeo from a crowd of Johns, if you'll forgive the pun."
Sherlock sniffed. "Romeo was a lust-addled juvenile delinquent bent on getting off with the first willing maiden."
"You've got 'lust-addled delinquent' down pat."
"I assure you my regard for John has a more potent basis than mere lust." He didn't protest the 'delinquent' epithet; he had the arrest record to match.
"I'm glad to hear that, because John is barmy over you and I'd be damned upset if it turned out you were leading him on, or god forbid pulling another of your tricks."
Sherlock's mouth puckered up in a snit. "I don't perform tricks."
Camden flicked an inattentive hand in his general vicinity. "Experiments, then? That's what you call 'em, isn't it? John makes a good lab rat. He thinks so, too, laughs with us about it." The artist spun the drawing tablet 180 degrees and slashed four long reproachful lines in graphite. "It's not too funny, far as I'm concerned." He went in for detail, his dominant hand steady as the hand of a master equestrian at the reins. Sherlock was under-armed here; he hadn't known the battlefield to be so deceptive in its welcome.
"It was never funny." John in peril brought out the very best and the very worst in Sherlock, more so than ever when Sherlock was the danger.
"No, you've got that part right." The lines were gentler at the centre. Sherlock watched him work but was no more enlightened to see his request brought to life. The sentiment of him was fogging his senses.
"Why don't you say what you're obviously thinking? You don't think I'm good enough for John."
What had been broad strokes became shadow became shade became depth and dimension. Sherlock began to see himself in the work. He began to see John.
"I think love is a dangerous game of chicken to play with a masochist."
"That doesn't nearly answer my question." John is not a masochist. John is...mine.
"Was that a question? I hadn't noticed." Camden tore off his sketch and handed it to Sherlock. "This is all I've got to say about that. P.S. Don't fuck it up."
Camden clapped him on the shoulder and went out to meet John in the reception area, leaving Sherlock the fold the drawing into neat fours and slip it into his coat pocket. The results of this meeting remained to be seen, his initial impressions were inconclusive.
Sherlock was beginning to see why John kept this world private; Sherlock didn't fit here at all, not even near the seams.
...
Sherlock emerged in time to see the reunion.
The two acquaintances exchanged perfunctory pleasantries that belied the undemanding clasp of their hands. John's were the smaller yet he was heedless of Camden's sheer overwhelming hand span. Where angels and sane men fear to tread, John fears not at all.
Camden was tall and stout, hair burnished the colour of wheat by a love of the sun with skin damage to match. John laughed over his peeling ears.
"Look like somebody's still addicted the Isle of Wight. Sunscreen, mate, it'll do you wonders."
Camden grumbled amiably. Repetition had worn the exchange smooth. Sherlock could have vanished for all that habit tuned them to their proprietary frequency.
John and Camden groused over the antics of some Everett and Cedes, the injuries of a Murray and Rhade, and mutual comrade Moran's evidently unsurprising dismissal from service with the nonchalance due friends of old. John had slipped into his former posture, shoulders back, chin inclined, and steady right to the soles of his run-in boots. The shop's litter of patrons held him in reverence, a reverence he returned tenfold. Sherlock was the oddity here, he was the strange thing. This wasn't a revelation, he was always the eccentric, but he had yet to see anyone regard John as Sherlock did. It was gratifying and distressingly isolating.
On leaving, they boarded the taxi where Sherlock retreated into his deductive process to manage his unsettled internal state.
"He's a former military man, that's why you respect him." John watched the sluggish traffic shunting them to and fro. Sherlock watched John.
"Emergency services, actually. His dad served in Korea, so he's got a soft spot for a soldier having a rough go of it after coming out. And, for what it's worth, I respect him because he respects me. Not everyone does." John was so good as to disregard the mistaken deduction. There's always something, Sherlock reminded himself.
"War isn't a popular subject." Sherlock wanted to grab whatever thoughts his friend let drift unmoored behind his eyes as he snorted in response to Sherlock's profound understatement.
"Nor are the people who've been involved in it. It's a godsend to be able to go somewhere and talk about it."
"You could talk to me."
John favoured him with a sardonic nod of assent, mouth curved for effect. "I know." He echoed the sentiment, "You could talk to me, too, about anything. You know that, don't you?"
Sherlock ruminated briefly before presenting his friend with a brisk nod. "Thank you."
Sherlock might yet pack gold-leafed volumes with affection he lacked the vocabulary to express, but it would be no less genuine for all that it remained improperly declared. You amaze me. Stay. Moriarty was right about us, about you. What are your thoughts on Sussex in springtime or the company of bees? Spend forty-one years with me. I promise not to get bored—often.
They shimmered like chemicals not spilled or promises he'd yet to break. Their unfulfilled potential for failure could curdle milk.
...
"You're all Semtex and my violin strings, and all I could think to get was a bloody raven on my back. What does that say about me?" John came from the washing-up with sleeves pushed up high. Sherlock's heart muscle thunked. He covered his chest for fear John would see. But he never does.
"Let me see that."
Sherlock clutched the drawing in his hand, resistant to laying it bare under John's discerning eye. John understood hearts and ink and people, he'd understand what the drawing meant. Sherlock did not believe he was ready to be understood.
"It's fine, you don't have to show me. Just," John faltered in place, "don't fret about it. If it isn't a fit for you, it isn't a fit. Go back to him when you're feeling differently and work out a new sketch. Or I can have him refer you to someone with a different aesthetic. You're not required to like him because I do. Something like this has got to feel right or it'll become something you regret."
"Do you regret yours?"
"Regret that I had my hopes and fears drawn on the biggest canvas I own?"
Sherlock hated the hysterical prose of the thing though he saw the purpose. He acquiesced in a nod.
"Not at all. If I hadn't done it, I'd have gone mad. Writing it down didn't help. Talking about it was like pulling teeth. This way, my story's told regardless of whether anyone knows the meaning. I can breathe like this."
Sherlock felt doubts he'd thought put to bed take hold again. He hadn't been normal when he'd been indistinguishable from the Harrow schoolboys around him, he wasn't normal now and who better to compare with than John?
He proffered the outline of his proposed tattoo to his friend. "I don't know that I can breathe with this." John took it in hand with care, as though it was something that ought to be cherished instead of tossed in the hearth and set ablaze the way Sherlock would prefer.
"It's beautifully drawn."
"Some would say so."
"You don't like the style? 'S funny, I always thought gothic would suit you."
Sherlock was at a loss to name his reservations. The eyes of the raven were beetle-black and keen to his damnable envy. The wings were glossy in stark relief to the endless matte darkness of each feather, set to curl 'round his shoulders as the curious, feasting avian peered over him while he worked. Sherlock would never be alone again with it and he'd already lost his breath.
"He's pecking at my heart."
"I noticed that. Thought it a touch poetic, all things considered." John didn't understand, not that anyone should have.
"Why's that?"
"Well, you convinced someone who hadn't known you an hour before that you had a heart. What might we deduce about that?"
"That you're a terrible influence." This was possibly his most loathsome scowl yet.
"That you're a better man than you think and people are beginning to notice." Smiling wanly, John offered the drawing back. Sherlock refused to take possession of it. John laid it on the coffee table.
"I'm not a good man, John." He had six damning thoughts before breakfast on a given day.
"No, you're a great one." John rubbed his shoulder before rising to make tea. Sherlock watched him go, unable to fabricate a pithy retort. Who better to know than John?
John returned carrying two mugs of his panacea. He handed one to Sherlock and kept the second for himself, taking it along with him to his customary chair. Sherlock drank in preference to speaking. The tea was sugary as he liked it.
"Why's it bother you exactly, if you don't mind me asking."
Sherlock did mind. Sherlock minded to the meaningless moon and back. But John had bared his back and mind, wasn't it customary to reciprocate such a confidence?
"It's mocking me." He felt more the fool for confessing.
John's brow furrowed instantly. "What makes you say that?"
"Look at it, it's obvious. Your artist thinks I'm a bird of prey pecking you to bits."
"What have I got to do with this?"
"Don't be stupid. It's plain what the heart's supposed to be. Moriarty said it himself."
John's brows approached his hairline or vice versa. With John, it was never easy to judge. "You think that's me?"
"I don't see how it could be anything, or anyone, else."
"You don't think that says more about you than it does about him?" John abandoned his tea to perch on the low table directly before Sherlock. "The heart goes directly above your actual heart." John tapped his index finger over the drawing's admirably-replicated aortic valve. "Donnie's good for this sort of thing since he's studied anatomy for work. He likes to put everything in its place. Maybe he does think that's me, but there's no way to know for sure unless you ask him." John rubbed his bent knee. "Sherlock, sometimes a heart is just a heart."
"And a raven only a raven?"
"Nah, that's definitely you. Look at the beak." A tease, a joke. Sherlock was reluctantly soothed.
"I'll have you know this nose is a family trait passed down on my mother's side."
"And Mycroft's your father's?"
"No idea. I've yet to be convinced he wasn't found in the compost heap as an infant."
John stifled a giggle into his wrist. "You two may be the maddest pair of brothers I've had the dubious honour of knowing personally."
"We aren't even the worst our family's got to offer. You should meet our grand-uncles."
"Do I want to know?"
"You might, it's an interesting enough story if you like fraternal betrayal and limitless intrigue. Suffice it to say, it ended either in a duel gone awry or a murder-suicide. It's never been clear as to which."
"I'll be sure to hide the potential weapons more carefully the next time he comes to visit."
"As though you could."
John cut him a chastising glare. "Considering how regularly you insult my intelligence, the fact that I haven't knocked you flat more than once is astounding."
Sherlock sank into the back of the couch, smiling a small smile and burying his toes in the leather upholstery. "Indeed. Some would say it's love."
"They might."
John didn't bother to deny it and Sherlock didn't see a reason why he should. Another point to the Woman. He worried that he hadn't heard from her, he worried that he would.
"Sometimes a raven is just a raven?"
"And sometimes a bad sketch is just bad. Nothing to lose sleep over."
John swiped Sherlock's tea for himself, though it wasn't made the way he liked. He grimaced through it.
"It wasn't a bad sketch."
"Maybe it was a bad day for it, though."
"Maybe." Sherlock hesitated. "Do you think I ought to get it?"
"I think you ought to be sure it's what you want before you commit to it. This isn't a one-day ordeal and it will hurt, even for someone with your pain tolerance. Something like what you've got there can take up to four separate parlour visits, maybe more depending on how intricate it becomes later on. This tat isn't easy on and would be hell removing. Be sure."
"Ravens are considered ill omens to the superstitiously-inclined."
"You mean to idiots. No need to sensor yourself for my benefit." John took another questing sip. "People see them hovering about the dead and dying, and think them cruel for it. They're scavengers, yes, but you and I both know there isn't anything personal about a scavenger. They're curious about the dead, hungry to a fault, and intelligent as all get out. How terrifying must that be for people too afraid to look any further than skin-deep?"
"Are you calling me a scavenger, John?" His smile hurt for the poorly exercised muscles it pulled. John's exasperation made the twinges worthwhile.
"Why am I surprised that I go to the trouble to say all that and this is what you take away from it?"
"Haven't the foggiest. Did you know that in Celtic animal symbolism, ravens are closely associated with battle, and that their presence on the battlefield is sometimes considered a portent of a battle's outcome?" (1)
"That—did you Google that?"
He furrowed his brow in false pensiveness. "Might have done. I don't remember." John placed Sherlock's teacup on the floor near his feet and immediately forgot it.
"That's rubbish and you know it. This bothered you enough that you put effort into researching it. Don't do this to yourself. Don't cut yourself with an insult. That's something I'll intervene to stop, even if it means going to Mycroft to do it."
He dismissed John's condemning hand gestures even as he committed them to his mind palace. "Theatrics aren't your forte."
"Pot. Kettle. Black. End of." John grabbed the sheet of tracing paper and popped up in search of destruction. He moved in every direction for want of a destination. "Should I burn this? Or would you prefer to douse it in hydrochloric acid? It's up to you, but it can't be here anymore, clearly, as you've taken leave of yours senses because of it!" John's enraged stamping made a ringing in Sherlock's ears.
"I'm fine!" Sherlock hated coddling, always had done.
"You're right, you are. There's nothing wrong with you. Not a thing, nothing at all. Now, forget this. Delete it. Delete the entire concept of tattoos, if you need to. This is nothing. It's ink on paper, not a revelation." The crisp paper crinkled further in his grasp.
"Come off it. It's me. He spoke to me all of seven minutes, sketched that for fifteen, and he had me sussed out. I'm a predator, a scavenger, too curious by half and repelling."
"Okay, so maybe you are. That isn't new. It's who you've been all along, why's it such a problem now?"
Sherlock frowned, struck broadside by John's frankness and his own lack of ready reply. The days preceding John's entry into Sherlock's life had been static, unchanging with scarcely little to commend them between cases. Not much had changed since, save for his tendency to avoid the siren's call of hard drugs and the welcome presence of a friend, a mate. He led much the same life; it was he, the man he was that was changing. There lay his epiphany. Never leave an amateur to do a detective's work. Scotland Yard doesn't consult amateurs.
"It isn't, I just thought..." He released a gusty breath and dragged his fingers through his disagreeable snarls of hair. "I don't know what I thought."
John ambled back to him, grinding his fingers along his nape as though it hurt him. Tension headache, he gets those from me.
"Look, Sherlock, it's normal to see enemies everywhere when that's all you've ever had. It's normal to expect mockery when that's the usual response from people you meet. But that won't be every time. Donnie respects you because I do. That he's even thinking about taking you on means you've gained his respect in your own right." He placed the wrinkled page where Sherlock's curled toes ended. Sherlock observed that he unconsciously favoured one leg over the other.
"The raven isn't there to mock you. It's there to keep you safe when I can't, to cover your back when I'm not there. It's there to be as smart as you are when nobody is. If that heart really is me, Sherlock, the raven isn't picking me apart; it's getting to know me the only way it knows how: by striking me right at the centre. That's fine by me, it's all fine by me. I'm not afraid of it any more than I am of you."
"You don't hate it?" You don't hate that I do that to you? He discarded the entire thing as emotional nonsense. It lingered contrary to his objective.
"Nope, but I won't be angry if you do. Skin is armour. That's why we rally behind those with the thick stuff and take the piss out anybody whose skin is too thin. You have to pick what yours is made out of and pick what you colour it with, if you decide to colour it with anything."
"Yours is war paint." He was disgusted with himself even as he said it. I've resorted to trite cliché. What's happening to me? Blaming John for the man Sherlock was becoming was easiest, so he was all to blame.
John smirked as if he knew. "Battle colours more like. But yours doesn't need to be."
"I can't have him picking at you, John. Can't have it. Won't."
"Then, don't." John beat his calluses along the notch of Sherlock's ankle. "If you leave off the heart and keep the raven, you've got yourself a hell of a self-portrait, here."
Sherlock couldn't find it in himself to disagree. "It is an inspired reproduction."
"He had the best possible model."
"I've got the best possible heart." Oh, hell. He slung an arm over his face, enough to see but not be seen.
"I know. I've seen it in action." John licked his lips, his expression shifting to a thoughtful one. "Say, here's a thought. Why don't you put this in a drawer for bit? Wait a while, give it some thought. A few months down the line, if you think you're still up for it, I'll drag you someplace new and we can try this all over again." He swept his hand to the unfeeling, scarred skin on Sherlock's leg. "I like your skin the way it is. No 'war paint' necessary." Sherlock flexed, the solidity of the hold an anchor to save him drifting.
"I think you've got enough for us both."
"All right by me."
"And me."
And it was. Fine, that is. A public accountant had been abducted and by Sherlock's deductions found. Lestrade received a third-hand tiepin for his birthday and Sherlock fell asleep on John's good shoulder more nights than he powered through. Irene finally texted him, this time from Istanbul. Soon after, Sherlock found another scrap of sketch paper in the desk beside his own. A tattoo of a cracked stained glass pane meant for a thigh. Faith cracked but unbroken.
'All right?' said the note John had left him to find.
Everything was perfectly all right.
...
The death throes of spring were miserable, on this day more so than on others. This day ran hot and long. Too hot for the master thieves and murderers of London to bother plying their trade. Too long for any respectable man to reject wakefulness for the imagined relief of an overheated sleep. Sherlock, having no respectability to lose, lay recumbent on the couch at high noon, face to the open window, set to rob any innocent, passing breeze. John wandered in carrying two perspiring glasses of ice water, ostensibly mummified in long sleeves.
John tried to give him water.
"Not thirsty."
"Ah." John made to take back the glass but lost his grip, spilling most of the glass's contents onto Sherlock's bare stomach.
Sherlock hissed. "Bloody fu—hell, that's cold!" Sherlock rocketed forward to bowl his body round the spill lest it wet the couch. He was moderately successful. John didn't appear sorry despite the untimely nature of his accident. "What was that about?"
"You're going to get heat stroke. Drink." He proffered the same glass again.
Sherlock took the glass this time and finished the half-cup still inside. He felt reluctantly quenched. "There, done."
"You look better already. You don't even have to thank me." John's body language was smugly triumphant.
"Thank you for being an intolerable bully out to dictate my life and body? Please, by all means, continue." He chose to hand it over instead of 'clumsily' shatter it on the floor. John sat it there anyway on his way down.
"I will, thanks. Now, budge over. You aren't the only one here who likes to languish on days like this."
Sherlock budged. A lanky body and a compact one entwined took up a considerable amount of leg room. John's dishwater hair caught in the grooves of Sherlock's front teeth. Sweat-soaked, in need of a wash.Sherlock knew himself to be in a worse state up top.
"John, it's too hot." The positive result of his impromptu shower was evaporating rapidly.
"Agreed." John moved to roll off Sherlock's arm where'd tucked his head inside the bend.
"Not just yet. Come here." Sherlock pulled at John till they were sprawled nose to nose with John on top, his appendages interposed around furniture and body to Sherlock's liking. Their position cast the rest of the world out, as was Sherlock's wont. This was only for them.
"This looks familiar."
"As it should. I'm attempting to partially recreate our initial intimate encounter. I intend to go about it correctly this go-round."
"There was nothing wrong with the last one."
"There was: me."
"I was there, too."
"I ran, you didn't turn me away, which is what I deserved for my behaviour that afternoon."
"You're not the first one to take one look at me and run. Anyway, you came back."
"Yes and I'd like the chance to do this right."
"Is this you trying to be romantic?"
"This is me doing whatever it takes to have you stay."
"All you have to do is be here."
"Is this you being romantic?"
"You have to admit I'm worlds better at it than you."
"Debatable."
"I don't think so."
"You don't think at all. Your mind's turned to dust. You'd best leave the higher-level cognitive functions to me."
"You are rubbish at this wooing bit," he complained, but his mouth had gone curled up at the ends. His face gave away the game.
"I believe I can prove my worth at the sport." Sherlock let his fingers travail cloaked ink green scales up to where the starburst scar loomed like a penumbra from behind. "It may surprise you to discover that I'm right, yet again. Through rigorous self-assessment, I have confirmed that I am in love with you andI have been for months now." Sherlock was victorious in the sense that he'd solved this—another human milestone conquered by empiricism. He was also mildly troubled, because John seemed to have malfunctioned. "That is all right, isn't it?"
John had seemed fine with the odd kiss that Sherlock initiated and, since the parlour visit, they'd been closer. Sherlock didn't have any reason to believe he'd interpreted John's desires wrongly, but he wasn't awash in experience on the matter. Maybe John would prefer a more casual relationship? The term made Sherlock queasy. Casual meant there would be others and Sherlock didn't think he could withstand 'others' seeing what he saw any longer, touching what he'd claimed as his to touch.
"Months." John's eyes followed an unseen metronome, flitting left and right. In search of escape? Sherlock didn't know, but John didn't leave, remaining a heavy, wanted burden on his hips. "Months? I can't say I was expecting that. But, are you sure about this? I mean, love's a pretty serious chemical defect and you don't like to lose. You're a bloody awful sport about it, in fact." His stiff upper lip was coming back to him, the giddiness of it—of happiness?—diffusing under his skin.
Sherlock jutted out his stubborn jaw. "It doesn't qualify as losing when I've won." The prizes varied. "Besides, I consider it more as a mutually-beneficial compromise." Not to mention a lethal disadvantage. For all that he did not carry it on his skin, Sherlock wore his heart on his sleeve, now.
John rolled sighed. "Mr. Punchline to the last, of course you'd come up with something like that."
"Is that all right?"
"You tell me." He was too shrewd by half tonight.
Sherlock hitched his naked shoulders. John traced the grooves that defined his pectorals. Sherlock keenly ached to return the gesture of affection, but was unsure of his welcome. His friend, more tonight, was far from a wilting flower, nevertheless, there were parts of John left tender by Sherlock's predecessors and he couldn't be sure of treading over the landmines they'd planted behind them.
John curved to kiss the glass curves of his cheeks. He harboured a scarcely concealed attraction to all that made Sherlock the odd in the eyes of strangers. Sherlock revered all that made John plain.
When John began again, his hand was over Sherlock's heart, thudding acquisitive, the wires binding the intellectual to the mind crossed with the sentimental heart's function.
"You need to know these are the only warning you get." John gestured at the cloaked mural on his arms and chest. "I can be damned petty and passive aggressive. I won't tell you if something's wrong till I'm plum sick of putting up with it and my things are taped in boxes. I will fall for you and it won't be a small thing. I don't love that way, Sherlock. I can't be 'your idiot' at home and just any idiot at other places. I'm an awful flirt—'Three Continents' is pushing it though not far—but I am faithful. I don't sleep well, but better than I used to, better with you."
This was nothing Sherlock hadn't observed in their first month of cohabitation, notes he amended by the day. "Why are you telling me this?"
"To knock some sense into you. People walk because they realize all this isn't just decoration to me. This is me and they don't always like what they see. I can't say that I blame them, but it does hurt. If you take me as I am right now and leave me after, I'll live, I'll get over it eventually, but it will hurt like nothing else has, because I'm falling for you like I haven't fallen for anyone."
"You're warning me not to disappoint you."
"No, I know you won't. You couldn't. I'm just asking. This is me asking you to think this through."
Sherlock clumsily shuffled upward underneath John's weight. "You don't need to ask! I don't need warning. I am fully cognizant of what we've started. John, barring murder, terminal illness, or unexpected calamity, you have approximately forty-one years left to live. Spend them with me."
John blinked off-kilter, left then right. Shell-shocked. "You've counted?"
"To the day, the hour, the minute; seconds are tedious but, yes, also to the second. We're wasting time."
"We have time."
"Not enough." He grabbed John's terribly earnest, rudely handsome face in his hands and offered him a reverent kiss. "You astonish me."
"Have you hit your head? Maybe fallen down? Because this sounds like a mild to moderate concussion catching up to you." John combed his hands through Sherlock's curls in search of lumps. Sherlock trapped John's hands behind his neck.
"Don't! Don't." Sherlock pressed their foreheads together. "Don't make light of what you mean to me. I did not expect to feel like this for anybody in my lifetime, but you showed up and, well, I'm nothing if not adaptable."
"I didn't know there was anyone like you in the world. I'm ludicrously fortunate to have found the only one. Doubt anybody else would agree, but there you are."
Sherlock ignored the last, as he did the majority of John's failed comedic efforts. "The only consulting detective?"
"Nope. The only Sherlock Holmes."
"Oh." Sherlock wrinkled his nose. "I ought to be embarrassed at how quickly we progressed to the saccharine drivel stage of this relationship."
"Could be worse, you could be getting down on one knee to propose."
"Not if I was offered unimpeded access to the morgue of every London hospital for a year."
John bumped his perspiring forehead on Sherlock's collarbone, giggling as Sherlock did at the absurd picture they made together.
"Do you sweet talk all your prospective beaus like this?"
"Only the crack shot ex-army doctors with psychosomatic limps." Sherlock found he was gradually learning the playful tongue of affection. He prayed he might one day wake up fluent.
"Met a lot of those, have you?"
"Only one who mattered."
"And you say you're not human."
"Not human enough, actually. Apparently, there's a distinction. And it isn't me saying it. It's said plenty enough on my behalf."
"Morons that can't see past the end of their noses. Any idiot could see that even tin men have tin hearts." More contemptible metaphors, Sherlock mused. Nevertheless truer words were still waiting to be spoken.
"Funny, you're curiously warm for steel."
John's answering look was one so alight with grudging fondness Sherlock had to kiss him in reply. There was neither will in his body to refuse, nor want. How horrifically easy he is to kiss. How distracting. Sherlock kept his level head even as his romantic heart, poor doomed animal that it was, slipped out of his body into unfailing hands.
Sherlock's mobile rang out from wherever he'd left it, a shrill disfigurement of the chorus of Killer Queen.
John huffed, parting from him. "I'm more surprised you actually know Queen than anything. Can't hold on to heliocentrism, but Freddy Mercury, him you make room for in that hundred-acre brain attic of yours."
"Any musician with the ability to offend my brother's sartorial sensibilities and aggravate his antipathy for gross flamboyance merits a share of memory space."
Rolling his eyes, John swatted him. "Answer him, it could be important."
"It won't be."
"But it could be."
Sherlock peeled himself off John and grumbled his way to the dial.
"What?"
"The fox has been released, or shall we say the hound?" Large room, quiet: Diogenes Club. Idiotic analogy: must be Tuesday.
"How long ago?"
"Long enough."
Sherlock brought the call to a swift end lest he say something truly damning. Officious, egoistic tub of lard.
Moriarty was waiting in the wings. Mycroft was manning the strings. Sherlock was the bloody marionette jigging on a rotted stage.
"My brother is a fool." Sherlock gave what warning he felt he could, imbuing his words with frivolous annoyance to the nth degree. "He'll be the death of me."
"Not without your help." John's look was sly, fox like. Sherlock slithered nearer, reading him for foreknowledge, for the odds that John might foresee. He thought, but he could be sure!
"Since when are you clever?"
"I dunno. You might be rubbing off on me a bit." John pinched forefinger to thumb. "Tiny bit. A smidgeon."
"A positively microscopic amount at best."
"All right, smartass. The dating bit means you have to pretend to be nice to me."
"And here I thought romantic relationships relied on honesty. More fool me."
Sherlock didn't allow himself to ask what he'd surmised was true. Wishful thinking might have rendered null his capabilities and he couldn't chance being sidetracked with foolish hope. Mycroft would keep him abreast of the latest. The game was now a waiting one. John was right, I should have sat a degree in patience. He wouldn't have completed that one, either.
A text arrived at six.
He's returning to London. MH
Their story was reaching its climax.
Sherlock was becoming painfully aware he now had something to lose.
...
Another day, another front page. Sherlock had the ill fortune of discovering how right John was in his concerns about the press. Sherlock's growing notoriety was already becoming steadily evident in the calibre of case he was being offered from public figures and the lack from London's more private denizens. He didn't care for the change as it made moving about unobtrusively quite difficult.
The abduction of a middle class public accountant was supposed to bore our admirers, not provoke them! Just on the way back from Bart's, he'd had to fake a head injury to skive off autographing blurred headshots of himself. The uninspired tiepin he'd fobbed off on Lestrade was a more than adequate punishment for a man who hadn't tied a Windsor knot since his twilight flight from Harrow in a purloined delivery cart.
"'The Reichenbach Hero Rides Again,'" greeted his return to 221b. "Oh, god. We're superheroes. Well, you're a superhero. How the hell did thathappen?" Sherlock mustered the resolve not to be offended.
"Fate, god, luck. Choose your groundless fairytale."
"Watch it, 'Net Dec.'"
Sherlock bemoaned his fate as he shucked his shoes and jacket and coat. "That is the most asinine headline the Guardian's run in a year of asinine headlines. Why did it have to be my picture attached?"
"Someone not-so-secretly hates you?"
More than keen to change the subject, Sherlock shammed a chuckle. "Ha, and what's your secret identity, Bachelor John Watson?
"You're serious?" John scrambled to stave off Sherlock's calling him a clot. Clot. "I guess my superhero name would be 'Blogger' whereas you'd be 'Hatman.'" John cut him off twice. "Not a word, you asked. Yes, you'd definitely be the man with the earflaps. All posh and polished and that voice. That voice is your superpower but it's that mind behind it that makes you devastating."
Sherlock was unspeakably flattered, thus he didn't speak it. "Hatman is a dismal contribution. Even you can do better than that." He sidestepped a stack of case files to flop into his chair.
"I couldn't do any better than you."
A tidal flush crept up his throat. John wasn't garrulous. He said only what he believed needed saying, even when it was wrong.
"Likewise." Sherlock had had the dubious honour of seeing John totter from one moonstruck infatuation to another, but still he wondered. "Do you talk like this with the women you date?" When you've dated men? No, no, I'm the first. I'll be the only.
John assumed a demonstrably cagey air. Not trepidation, as in the past, rather the waffling of a man who had seen roughly five relationships sunken under a like utterance's heft.
"There isn't a right or wrong answer."
"Not bloody likely. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a thousand times and I am, in fact, the stupidest man on Earth."
"Don't be absurd, you're not the stupidest. Stupidity entails your being either incapable or unwilling to learn. You have neither impediment."
"That might be the nicest thing you've said to me."
"I've observed that relationships in which the participants exchange regular compliments have a 32 percent greater chance of long-term success."
"You pulled that out of your arse."
"Immaterial to the point I was attempting to make, try to stay focussed. You're not the stupidest man in London, much less on the planet. Please refrain from needless exaggeration."
Eyebrows up. "Only if you'll refrain from being an unmitigated arse—to Donovan, Anderson, Molly, and Mycroft." Sherlock may have conceded were it not for that last. Forever the fly in the ointment, Mycroft.
"I suppose some hyperbole is permissible, but only in rare instances." He used John's old cane, found half-stuck under his chair, to swat at the fluttering back pages of John's paper. John kicked at his ankle.
"How about I say whatever I like, whenever I like and I don't start refusing to make the tea, do the shopping, and clean up after your lazy arse on principle? I do promise not to shout it in your ear, though."
Sherlock stuck out his lip, displeased if aware he was beaten. "Unsatisfactory but tolerable."
"Welcome to relationships, Sherlock. You've just survived your first ever compromise. Should I get out the shock blanket?" His dark blue eyes were bracketed in a laugh lines Sherlock could have scripted notes in. There's still a ballad I've yet to write.
Sherlock sensed a prime opportunity rid them of that detestable mauve monstrosity. "You could lend me your cardigan."
"And give you a head start on that battery 'experiment'? Pull the other one."
Sherlock fiddled with the jumper's darned hem. John's clothes earned their keep in keeping him hale and healthy. Sherlock had no reason to hate them for doing their due diligence. What he hated was the very real fashion in which they kept John cinched in tight, how they made John feel secure when Sherlock still made him scarper.
"I...want to see you. Nothing like before, just to see you." His head would rule his hands; he swore it. John didn't ask him for even that much.
"Idiot." John was as putty in Sherlock's hands as Sherlock was in his.
John tossed over the Guardian and began stripping down to the short-sleeved crewneck he wore under. There was only the partial serpent, bomb, and the maps were highly abridged. John's lungs were relegated to that sacred space beneath his clothes, but Sherlock made himself content with this much he had when every inch was ground he coveted.
For the sake of his ruse, Sherlock wrangled himself into John's jumper, which stretched across his sternum and gapped around his stomach, exposing a hintof shirt where it stopped short of his belt. The knit fabric had come off John warmed to his body temperature. Sherlock avariciously stole John's heat back from it.
Stooping to kneel in front of John's chair, Sherlock walked his fingers from Arghandab to Chawnay, grazed Loy Wiyala and was reminded of the Trocadero, passed a hand over Shirkati Mewa to cover Kabul Darwaza. He thought of soldiers with worse aim than John and that there was no predictor for death but chance.
"Never go back."
John followed the path, his changing micro-expressions narrating the tale. "I'm no good to anybody there."
"Not true. I've read the guidelines. Your Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has minimal effect and there's surely some good you could do on the home front if not at the front lines." Mycroft's briefing notes were more detailed than any the public could access.
"Haven't you heard, there aren't any more front lines?"
"Political double speak. As long as there are government interests, there will be a front line. I don't want you there." Mycroft would have a fight if the army tried absconding with his blogger again.
"Where do you want me?" He swayed a hair's breadth nearer, drifted into Sherlock's gravity.
"Here. Baker Street. This is where you belong, now." Sherlock couldn't hold his hands still. They trailed along inked skin, embraced fabric; carefully, so carefully cosseted John's throat and slunk into his hair. Were Sherlock a mapmaker, he would make a map of this man to record the lay of him, his nonpareil topography. Sherlock had no interest in cartography, but he might take to pencil and protractor over GPS and moaning mobiles just for this.
"Look at you. God, I almost love you like this." John mimicked his actions, thumbs at pulse and over heart, caught in the decadent whisper of clothing trapped between flesh. He was forgetting how to worry. Sherlock didn't want him to worry or to doubt.
"Only almost?" This strange, courtly abstinence he'd been cultivating would be the end of him.
John held off; John gave in. "More than almost." He leant up to kiss Sherlock languorous and deep.
Sherlock grabbed John's careworn undershirt by fistfuls, slotting easily between gripping thighs. How much more than 'almost'?
John drove his hands into Sherlock's hair, tugging him securely in place to stroke his tongue across his palate. Sherlock moaned into John's mouth, jeopardizing his peace of mind for one taste and another. I won't hurt him. He won't break. His mantra didn't drive the trembling out him, but he had manipulated volatile chemicals through rounds of detox, he would persevere.
John retreated an inch. "Is this all right? The kissing, can I kiss you?"
Sherlock's excited nod brought his mouth fumbling for John's. "Fine, it's fine."
He buried himself in the sweetness of that kiss. Saliva, predictable, tea and toast, an ice lolly John thought Sherlock hadn't seen him sneak. He was the complete informational experience: taste, scent, the space he occupied in Sherlock's arms. He was incontestably real, solid, Sherlock's in every conceivable way.
"There's something I need to say," John interjected, which didn't stop him clutching Sherlock close and chuckling down into his mouth as though he didn't believe himself. He twiddled disorienting curlicues over Sherlock's sacrum, hands shoved up under silk, cotton, and wool alike, invasive and thoroughly welcome.
Sherlock scrabbled at him like a gaunt stray to an auspicious slab of meat, but he tried to press his mind to the arduous task of conversation to prove that he could. "Say it, say anything." He bombarded the side of John's face with kisses—temple, zygoma, jaw, the rapturous angle of his mouth gone gorgeously claret at Sherlock's attentions, the crest of his ear. John was all colours: tan, claret, ash blond and grey. Sherlock had fallen in love with his colours. "Say it."
The scrape of a stubbled jaw, the sheer intransience of bone under musculature and integumentary tissue—
"If the drugs come back, that's it, these go away." John cupped Sherlock's cheek and peppered kisses along his jaw line. "I'll stay for now, but I won't watch you kill yourself. You can't make me do that. I walked out on my sister because she decided she loved the bottle more than anyone. I won't stick around long enough to get left behind, not again. I've done that."
Sherlock quietened for another kiss, a procensuring press of lips. "I would pick you."
"You didn't that night."
"An unforgivable lapse in judgement."
"Forgivable, not forgettable."
Sherlock heard the unsaid, counted himself forewarned. Never again.
"John, it cannot be disputed that I'm, to put it frankly, pants with expressions of sentiment, but I think you should know that if I had to feel the way I do, I'm glad I met you first." John's eyes flickered to where Sherlock had once stored Irene's phone. "No one else, not even who you're thinking right this second."
"You don't know who I'm thinking about."
"Let's assume, for the sake of expediency, that this is my area. I'm considered something of a professional."
"You know, I think I might have heard that online, from some blog or something. I don't really follow that kind of thing, you know." His aspect lightened with doubt receding.
Sherlock pursed his lips in a tight smile, forced himself not to cling equally tight. "Did I say the right thing?"
John tugged gently at his jumper's stretched stitches. "Sherlock, you are shamelessly unprofessional, indiscriminately and unaccountably cruel, and the most brilliant man in London to get paid for it that isn't Stephen Fry. I don't think I could to love you back more if I tried really, really hard." He drew his gaze over Sherlock's face. Sherlock hadn't the faintest what he must have seen; he was preoccupied fighting this strange swelling in his breast. "Did I say the right thing?"
Sherlock supposed what he was feeling must be happiness. He hadn't had much of that, until now.
"Almost always." He pulled John into his arms to begin again. This man was his for the taking, finally, and he intended to have all at once.
"Inesperata floruit, John." He curled his fingers behind John to caress the most gracious lungs to breathe oxygen while nuzzling his lips along the hours of the unchanging clock. Hours and hours spent with you isn't nearly enough, not at all.
Hours later, when the season had given over to night and John to rest, Sherlock read his texts in the dark.
I behaved most indecorously. Forgive me. MH
Watch over him for me and there will be nothing left to forgive. SH
Their groundless fairytale was ending right at the start.
Chapter title from Stanzas to Augusta (2) by Lord Byron