Author's Note: I'm back! Just saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which, along with a prompt by DreamsofPari, inspired this. It was supposed to be cute, but then I got a little distracted, and then the conversation got out of hand and then... well, you can read for yourself. If you like, remember to review!
Disclaimer: Since this chapter contains a direct quote from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, I just want to remind everyone that I don't own anything.
The Desolation of Sherlock
Chapter Ten: Inside Information
The ideal way to learn about dragons, John thought, would be to ask one. It was just too bad his resident dragon refused to answer any questions. Even seemingly harmless ones, like "Can you breathe fire?" or "Is Mycroft a dragon, too?" were met with evasion and a swift change of subject—or, if John persisted, firm instructions to sod off. As John pointed out, this was a bizarre attitude to take. If Sherlock wouldn't satisfy his curiosity, he would have to turn to the Internet, which was sure to provide him with unflattering and untrue information. But Sherlock was unmoved.
The Internet, although informative, proved unhelpful. John found images of dragons that looked like snakes, or lizards, or had three heads, or only two feet, or no wings. He f0und dragons that could breathe fire, or were venomous. Most were evil, and some liked to ravage towns or kidnap maidens. None quite resembled Sherlock—unless he was keeping a few maidens in his closet that John didn't know about.
After John exhausted Wikipedia, he turned to literature. He struggled through Beowulf and, feeling he'd earned a treat after all that Old English, dug out his battered copy of The Hobbit. The paper cover was bent from being stuffed into various shelves and piles and bags through the years, and the spine was so creased it threatened to split in several places. When he was young, John had seen himself in Bilbo: a simple, unassuming man who possessed unexpected strengths and would leave his home to perform great deeds. Now older and much wiser, John still saw himself as Bilbo, but in a new way: a simple man who had gone out into the world and discovered that performing great deeds was not all it was cracked up to be—but who nonetheless longed for more adventure.
And he found, as he turned the dog-eared pages, that he saw a little of Sherlock in Smaug, too: arrogant, boasting, yet clever, skilled at deduction, and fond of puzzles. When Bard shot Smaug out of the sky with his black arrow, John wondered if Sherlock, too, had some secret, unarmored place close to his heart. He hoped that if Sherlock did, no one would ever find it.
The first time John really noticed it was only a few months after the Baskerville case, when their latest case ended disastrously.
"It wasn't a disaster," Sherlock said dismissively. "The mystery was solved. That's all that matters."
"Rucastle was mauled by a dog," John protested. "He could have died!"
But Sherlock only shrugged and said, "He shouldn't have starved the thing."
After the ambulance left with Rucastle, an officer came to take their statements—or rather, John's statement, as Sherlock only tapped his foot impatiently and didn't speak except to correct John in the most aggravating way possible. The officer caught John's eye, tilted her head toward Sherlock, and smiled as if to say, The things you have to put up with. She had honey-colored skin, dark curling hair, and plenty of curves. John smiled engagingly back.
They exchanged more smiles, and their conversation became less interrogative and more friendly. The officer leaned toward John, twisted her hair around her fingers. Sherlock stopped tapping his foot and looked sharply at them. Then he took a half-step forward, so he stood a little between John and the officer, and turned on the charm.
During the next fifteen minutes, John watched the officer lose all interested in him and become completely infatuated with Sherlock. The change in both of them was remarkable. John had seen Sherlock act before, seen him pretend to feel emotions John knew he didn't feel in order to manipulate people. John had just never seen him so... efficient at a it. He smiled, he asked inane questions, he was polite, he was charming, he flirted. The officer ate it up, while John crossed his arms and fumed helplessly, barely able to get a word in edgewise.
Unable to bear any more, John hooked his hand under Sherlock's elbow, made a brusque farewell to the officer, and towed Sherlock toward the street, leaving the Copper Beeches house behind them.
"What was that?" he hissed.
"What was what?" Sherlock scanned the street, apparently looking for a taxi. Since they were in the middle of the country, John figured this was just an excuse not to meet his eyes.
"You just... cock-blocked me." And John couldn't believe he just said that, to Sherlock of all people.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"You aren't seriously going to pretend that didn't happen."
"It's not pretending if it didn't actually happen."
That Sherlock would butt in on John's flirtation was merely annoying; that he would lie about it afterward was infuriating. John struggled with the urge to hit Sherlock in the face. After a moment, feeling he was losing the battle, he turned and began walking back to town. If he couldn't see Sherlock's face, he couldn't punch it.
That was the first time John noticed it, but not the last time it happened—nor, when he stopped to consider it, the first time. After sitting down with a pad of paper, he worked out that it happened more often, and with less subtlety, after Sherlock revealed he was a dragon, but that there had been a few occasions before, as well. Sometimes he used charm, sometimes blatant rudeness, but always he contrived to keep John from getting a pretty girl's number.
Sherlock's actions baffled John. As far as he could tell, Sherlock was completely uninterested in sex with either gender. It seemed impossible that he was genuinely interested in the women John flirted with—or that he was interested in John himself. A few times, John could put it down to Sherlock's customary indifference to social norms, like during John's disastrous date with Sarah at the Chinese circus. For the rest, there seemed no explanation.
The answer came to him while reading The Hobbit.
"Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically for ever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it."
John stuck his finger in the book to mark his spot and leaned back in the armchair, pondering what he had just read. It was evening; the curtains were drawn, and he could hear Sherlock doing something in the kitchen that might explode later. The flat felt warm and comfortable, which was the opposite of how he felt at the moment.
Was Sherlock flirting with these women, not because he truly wanted them, but because they were something he could steal? It didn't sit right with John. Sherlock wasn't St. George's dragon, devouring maidens; it wasn't like he did anything with the women, besides stop John from talking to them.
The image of Sherlock's dragon-self curled up on a great pile of half-naked women, steam curling from his nostrils, like Smaug in his treasure room, passed through John's head. He smiled despite himself. Sherlock didn't seem to horde anything, unless you counted stacks of paper as treasure.
...besides stop John from talking to them.
The thought returned unexpectedly to John's head. What if Sherlock wasn't trying to accumulate more, but only keep what he already had? What if it was jealousy, just not the sexual kind: Sherlock didn't want anyone to come between John and himself?
John felt hot with anger and annoyance. Before he realized what he was doing, he was out of the armchair, The Hobbit still clutched in his hand, marching into the kitchen. Under the glare of the fluorescent light, the table was covered with chemistry apparatus: a Bunsen burner, a rack of test tubes, beakers and graduated cylinders and pipettes. Sherlock was adding something to a beaker one drop at a time, and did not look up when John came in.
"Is this a dragon thing?" John asked bluntly.
"What?" Sherlock still did not look up. "I'm working on a titration of—"
"Not this. I mean the past few weeks. Every time I try to chat up a girl, you sabotage me. I want to know why."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
John reached down and snatched the beaker out from under Sherlock's nose. The next drop from the pipette landed on the table and Sherlock finally looked up, annoyed. "John—"
John stepped back, taking himself and the beaker out of Sherlock's reach. "Why?" If this was some dragon thing, if Sherlock just saw him as some possession to be horded merely for the sake of hoarding, unvalued but still guarded... he wasn't sure what he would do, but it would probably be drastic.
Sherlock's eyes moved from the beaker, clutched in one of John's hand, to the book, clutched in the other. He straightened slowly. "You've been doing research."
"Well, you wouldn't tell me anything, so, yeah, I have."
Sherlock's frown remained in place, and John could practically hear his brilliant mind whirring away inside his head. Deducing where someone had been, or what he had done, from a smear on his napkin or a scuffmark on his shoe—that was elementary for Sherlock. To deduce another human being's emotions or thoughts from a book held in his hand was far more difficult.
"You think I'm stealing your girlfriends?" Sherlock shook his head impatiently. "John, you know—"
"Wrong," John interrupted. "Try again."
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. John knew Sherlock hated being called wrong, but couldn't bring himself to care much about Sherlock's feelings right now. Then an series of emotions flitted across Sherlock's face, too fast for John to catch them.
"You think I'm stealing you."
When he said it like that, it sounded so cheesy, so much like something out of chic-flick, that John's anger faltered. He hastily set the beaker on the table and said, "You know what, never mind. Forget I said anything." He turned to leave.
"You're right."
John stopped in the doorway. He'd asked for this, he'd brought it up, he'd forced an emotional confrontation, and now he realized he didn't want it. He'd wanted to vent his anger, to yell at Sherlock, to be righteously furious. He hadn't wanted an uncomfortable emotional revelation.
He forced himself to turn around. "Why?"
"It is a 'dragon thing', as you put it," Sherlock admitted. "I told you once I don't have friends—only one. And I am... greedy."
As an explanation, it was poor. As an apology, it was even worse. "Humans get jealous, too, Sherlock. And you know what? They're told to get over it."
"This isn't human jealousy," Sherlock said scornfully. "You cannot begin to understand what I feel."
John felt his anger returning. "Why? Because I'm human?"
"Yes."
"That's bullshit!"
John didn't realize he'd shouted until he heard the silence that followed. His heart was pounding, far harder than their argument warranted.
"You're scared," Sherlock said quietly. "I can smell it. You're scared because you don't want to think of me as inhuman. You don't want to think of me feeling emotions you can't feel, possessing senses you cannot possess. You want me to be human. I'm sorry, John, but I cannot be human. I am a dragon. And dragons are... greedy."
He was right. John swallowed and stared into Sherlock's eyes and knew he was right. Sherlock the man was his flatmate, his friend. He was arrogant and rude and eccentric, but John knew him and trusted him. Sherlock the dragon was... other, unknown. If he felt inhuman greed, if he could smell John's fear—what else about him was unknown, or unknowable?
"You should have told me," John said hoarsely. "You should have answered my questions."
Sherlock shook his head. "If you knew, you would be more afraid. Humans have always been afraid of the darkness. I should never have told you what I was."
"We're afraid of the darkness because we can't see what's in it," John said. He knew that in a way most people couldn't. He knew what it was like to be away from the comfort of street lights, to know that something out there was hunting you, trying to kill you, and you might never see it coming. Afghanistan haunted him still. "We need light, Sherlock. I need a light."
"A light," Sherlock repeated. So softly, John didn't think he was meant to hear it, he added, "I can't let you go."
"I'm not yours to keep," John said sharply. "Which you'll find out if you're not straight with me."
Sherlock offered him a thin smile. "Very well. I shall endeavor to keep my jealous tendencies in check."
It was what John had wanted, but it felt somehow anticlimactic. "Right," he said, feeling irrationally cheated of the emotional revelation he hadn't wanted. "I'll just let you get back to your... titration, then." Once again, he turned to leave.
Once again, Sherlock stopped him in the doorway. "John," he said. "Mycroft is also a dragon. As were our parents. And I can't breathe fire. Not yet, anyway."
John stared at Sherlock in shock. "Not yet?!"