Dear reader: Please allow me an abject apology for missing the past week's update. 221BCon, I'd like to report, was both a riot and a pleasure, and you should all make an effort to attend next year. That's my only excuse! TheScienceOfObsession and SnogAndAGrope (both of whom I roomed with at the Con, and I love them even more in the flesh!) helped me get back on track, and here's the result. I also had a lovely talk with Science this morning, and we've got a few twists to throw out at you in the next chapter or so that I think will be lots of fun.
Chapter 11: Interlude
When they return to Baker Street, Mrs. Hudson, unnaturally red hair wispily afloat around her head, cheerfully hands over the key, and shoos them up the stairs, beaming and clucking. Sherlock drops his coat over the back of a faded armchair, rather pointedly deposits his lamp on the dresser in the downstairs bedroom, and then flings himself onto the sofa, hands tented against his lips.
John hovers in the kitchen, indecisive, and then heads up the stairs for the secondary bedroom, duffel over his right shoulder to balance out limp and thrice damned cane. He feels... strangely let down. But now there are two beds available, and, of course, they should use them. But the distance that it implies leaves him empty, and a little lonely, and he's glad to sit on the single bed upstairs for a bit. He gives himself a few minutes to brood, and then straightens his shoulders, gives a short nod, and stuffs it all back down. It's fine. Of course it's fine.
As a matter of fact, some of the things that had happened in the narrow bed back in the government flat were occasionally not fine at all, and he bitterly imagines that Sherlock feels relief.
But he kissed me last night, his more factual self interjects. Even if it did just seem to be a bizarre and intimate thank you for the day's excursion, for the opportunity to explore and study and... expand. And then, this morning. God. This morning. John presses his hand against his crotch, pushing against his cock as though he can forestall the flooding of blood there. Sherlock, this morning, arched on the bed, tongue dominant and demanding, the taut smooth feeling of him between John's hands. Like holding a dream, or an anthropomorphized whip of leather and silk. So hot, so tight beneath the callused press of his fingers.
John's cock is fat and heavy, and has the inclination to become harder yet, to be put to use, and so he quickly rises from the bed. Dwelling on this serves no good purpose, and he's been up here long enough. He joggles his legs while standing, to shake everything back into place, as if he can shuffle the blood back into arms and legs where it belongs. He grabs his bag of toiletries and carries it down to the shower. Sherlock may have kissed me, he tells himself, but he also told me about years of sexual abuse, and it's not ok to pursue him. It's just not done.
His leg twinges in response to his frustration, and he can feel the deep furrow between his eyebrows expressing his mood as he limps down the stairs.
Mrs. Hudson brings them roasted lamb and veg for dinner, and agrees to eat with them at John's invitation. "Thank you for the meal," he says, surprised and pleased. "I feel like I've moved into a five star B&B."
"Why thank you, dear." She grins as he takes the tray from her hands and begins to hunt for dishes. He's delighted with her, thinking that his new landlady is quite the charming elderly elf. She chides, "It's just this once, you understand. I'm not your housekeeper. And you don't have to worry about privacy, either," this with an arch look and a shameless segue to Mrs. Turner's 'married ones' next door.
Sherlock pushes his food around on his plate, seeming a million miles away, and leaves John and Mrs. Hudson to talk without any input on his part. She is an easy conversationalist, however, so it's no burden. Mrs. Hudson recounts her previous experience with Sherlock.
"I found him at an estate sale," she reminisces. "A flat down the street, actually. The owner had just passed away, and no family left, so they sold it all. I actually went in looking for a tea service. But then I saw the lamp, and I loved it." She puts down her fork and leans to give Sherlock a quick hug. "There you have it. Fate had plans for me." Sherlock tolerates the hug with a somewhat pained expression, but flashes a fragment of a smile back at their new landlady. "It was perfect timing," she continues. "My Harold was threatening to return to London, and I was afraid that it would soon become... unsafe for me."
"Yes?" John encourages. "Sherlock told me a little bit about it."
Mrs. Hudson recounts how he tracked down her murderous husband, gathered crucial evidence of his drug dealing and subsequent murders, and arranged for him to be captured in America with enough documentation to ensure he wound up on death row. All without using her wish. "I tried to, my dear. But it seems there are limits."
John nods and grimaces. "Yes, I'm aware of that."
"Ah." She smiles sadly. "Did you already try to wish him free, then? You seem like the type of nice young man who would do that." John chokes on his water and has to cough into his napkin; he isn't often called a 'nice young man'. Sherlock raises an eyebrow, looking distant and superior, and Mrs. Hudson radiates sympathy. She pats Sherlock on the shoulder. "We just have to believe that there's a greater purpose."
Right, John thinks sourly. He exchanges a speaking, cynical glance with Sherlock. Like my getting wounded and invalided serves a greater purpose. Like Sherlock being enslaved and abused for more than several lifetimes serves a purpose. But he keeps his mouth shut.
Mrs. Hudson asks about their plans for the evening, and John irritably reports that they are committed to a fancy dress party. "I'm not sure how we'll manage costumes-"
Mrs. Hudson laughs, "Oh! It's obvious, isn't it?"
Sherlock smirks, and John is the only one in the dark.
"What?" he asks, half frustrated and half smiling. "Have you got some spare outfits in the cupboard, then?"
"Don't be more obtuse than you have to be, John," Sherlock rumbles. "We'll be a genie and a soldier, obviously. Which we actually are. So finding clothes for 'dress up' should not be a problem."
Ah. Right.
Mrs. Hudson flutters out, hugging them both and fussing over Sherlock's lapels before giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. "I'm so happy for you, dear," she says, low, not meant to be overheard. "He seems such a nice young man." Sherlock gives a noncommittal hum and hurries her out the door.
John goes upstairs to get into his standard issue camouflage, complete with beret and dogtags. When he returns, Sherlock is again lounging on the sofa, but is now back in harem pants and cropped vest. To John's surprise (and sheepish relief) the jewels and bangles and earrings reappeared along with the vest and henna and curly shoes.
He wonders about that. How can the same jewels reappear all the time, and yet be traded for money? Will they disappear from the safe of the pawn shop owner? Did Sherlock produce funds in the same fashion in the 80's? That might explain why Mrs. Hudson hadn't accounted for money when she'd wished for ownership of the building on Baker Street.
For a moment he stands quietly, leaning on the door. Sherlock has not acknowledged his presence (deliberately or not, John is not quite sure). One velvet slipper dangles from his toes over the edge of the sofa, and his other leg is bent a bit, to place the sole of his foot firmly on the armrest. His hands are clasped, barely grazing his chin, bracelets fallen down almost to his elbows, marking the boundary of mehndi on his hands.
The purple vest has fallen open, indecorously framing his taut, rangy torso; the warm tones of the wandering henna, curling around his sides, tracing up his ribs and nuzzling up to his scantly furred navel, compliment the pale pink of perfectly rounded nipples, the amethyst in his belly. John licks his lips. Everything about the man is so pale, so long and lean, so very strong. He is the most graceful conduit of solidly supple sinew and heat and blood that it has ever been John's diffident pleasure to devour with his eyes.
He draws a sharp breath when he realizes he's measuring the shape and weight of the heavy mound delineated on Sherlock's closed thighs. He clears his throat, and pale eyes slowly open, staring at him sidelong, as if Sherlock can't be bothered with the energy to turn his head. "Shall we go?" John asks, proud that his voice doesn't crack.
Sherlock's brow twitches, and he doesn't speak, merely stands up and glides into his coat, wrapping his scarf and buttoning it up to his neck, gradually concealing his genie clothes. John experiences a reeling moment of disorientation: mundane superimposed over surreal. The jarring concurrence leaves him equally aroused and disconcerted. He has the galling thought that Sherlock is out of his league in either form.
They are quiet as they leave their new flat, and Sherlock quickly flags down a taxi. John gives the address to the driver and settles back, tucking his cane against the door. He stares at their reflections in the window; a genie and a soldier, albeit the curled shoes and bare henna'd ankles under the coat render one of them an apparently exotic flasher. John, in his uniform, feels distinctly normal in comparison. Which is good. It may be the only normal thing about tonight.
They are winding through empty, filthy streets in a run-down industrial area of the London docks, but John's thoughts catch on gold bracelets and henna'd hands instead of the dangerous part of town. He thinks of how long it has been since he's been dancing, since he's heard the nickname Three Continents Watson. He wonders if Sherlock knows how to dance.
Sherlock gazes out the taxi window and gives every impression of memorizing their route.
They arrive at The Wharf, and the cab drops them off in front of a very high chain-link fence, topped with angled barbed wire. It surrounds an expansive gravelled lot, filled with cars and weeds, and the strange sight of half-costumed, half-bundled up clubbers. A dark warehouse squats in the center of the enclosed space. Muffled bass thumping from inside confirms their destination.
They tramp past the gate person and stand in line to get in, huddled and stamping against the bitter cold. The cover charge is exorbitant, given the dilapidated condition of both the neighborhood and the club, but John has decided to let go of such considerations for the night. He looks around for Harry, but can't find her in the human crush; mostly his view is limited to chests and shoulders, and the dramatically made-up faces of women. He pats his back pocket, feeling the reassuring weight of his phone, set on vibrate, and relaxes a bit. They'll find her.
It's hot inside, air heavy with smoke and human humidity. John shrugs out of his coat, helps Sherlock out of his as well. "Can you stick them in the lamp?" he asks curiously. It would certainly be convenient if they could stash and retrieve stuff there all night. He nearly giggles at the thought of how he might have abused that ability ten years earlier.
Sherlock shakes his head. "Too far away," he explains. "I cannot access it from here, can't even feel it. No, I left it safely home at Baker Street."
John reminds himself again that he's not counting pennies and pounds tonight, and goes through coat check, pocketing the receipt. Sherlock is now practically naked, and John feels that all eyes in the vicinity are devouring him. He tries to control his bristling. Certainly he can neither blame them, nor stop them from staring. It isn't as if Sherlock is the only person there more revealed than concealed by his outfit. But he is certainly, John thinks without bias, the most striking. He sways as he walks, an unconscious response to the music, and the bracelets around slim wrists glimmer and chime.
A woman's voice sings so call me maybe, as they press their way into the massive space where everyone is dancing. It's as large as an airplane hanger, black-painted and disappearing into the distance. He keeps one hand on Sherlock's shoulder, so as not to lose him in the crowd, and watches Sherlock while his wide eyes dart rapidly over the other clubbers.
They are surrounded by more men than women, which isn't unusual for a gay club, if John recalls correctly. And certainly the men are far more colorful and outlandish in their costumes than the women are, many of them tottering around on 6-inch platforms, with bouffant wigs and outrageous hats. Sherlock, in his flat genie slippers, is far from the tallest man in the room. He actually seems rather muted, composed more of skin and dull flashing jewels than iridescent fabrics and glitter. In all, it's an amazing panoply of creativity, sex and elaborate dress. John is mostly confused, but can pick out several interpretations of Cher and Lady Gaga, for certain. A lot of the women he sees are dressed as dominatrices, professors and their kittenish students, or gangsters with their molls.
Sherlock's expression is riveted, tracking not only the costumes, but also the behavior of the couples. Everywhere he looks, there are men dancing, kissing, and rutting on one another, and women doing the same with other women. Judging from the look on his face, Sherlock appears to be in some sort of cultural anthropology heaven.
John feels miserably uncomfortable, not because he's surrounded by frotting homosexuals, but rather because they're doing things he wants desperately to do to the man at his side. Since John has never really married himself to the label of heterosexual, feelings that don't correlate to it are less disturbing than they could be. But he finds such compelling lust a disconcerting companion. This overwhelming want, and the urge to do something about it immediately, is almost frightening, after so many years of isolation. And he can't help but recall how Sherlock seems to blow hot and cold whenever he does make a move, and he's confused about whether or not it would be welcome. His grip on the cane tightens.
Sherlock watches as a man near them, a ginger bizarrely turned out as a vampire, licks a stripe up the back of a man evidently costumed to be his thrall. He wears a collar, and the vampire holds the leash tight in his hands. There's a clown over there, so androgynous as to be completely unidentifiable, with a man dressed as an African primitive beside him. Her. Whichever. Alice in Wonderland simpers by, and King Arthur grabs her (him?) by the waist and begins a determined grind to the pulsing beat.
Wildly waving laser lights in all colors slow down, then vanish as the song ends, and giant disco balls descend, scattering glittering fragments of white light over the entire room. T-shirts and teeth now glow, and John realizes that black lights have been turned on. Sherlock steps away, and John jolts and follows, reluctant to let him out of his sight, in case they should never find each other again. The club makes him nervous. It is far, far more vast than the pub-like places he's gone to with Harry in the past. There are easily 500 people dancing right now. He spares a moment to wonder how Sherlock must be processing this, if John himself is having so much trouble. Surely his experience of giant crowds writhing in the dark must be limited?
Sherlock reaches out a long arm and tugs him along in his wake.
John is fascinated, and surprised, when he shifts his gaze from the sea of dancers back to his companion, to note that the henna tattoos are glowing faintly yellow under the UV lights. Oh, lord have mercy. The luminous lines stretch and retract, twine and dance as Sherlock gracefully twists through the crowd. He cannot lift his eyes from the small of Sherlock's back, netted in yellow, hips rippling in more of a dance than a walk. It's hypnotic, and beckoning, and John follows, as helpless to resist the lure as a charmed snake.
John is shoved and jostled more than a few times, simply because of the sheer numbers in such a finite space; although there are a those who see his cane and apologize, stepping carefully aside. Which he hates. But he is far more intent on the men who are lurching into Sherlock. A man dressed as what can only be an old fashioned circus strongman brushes up against him and it looks aggressively deliberate to John. Sherlock is shoved off balance and the man catches him, large heavy hands splayed wide across the waist that obsesses John.
The obtruder's skin is nearly ebony, disappearing against the dark backdrop of the giant warehouse; and as he holds Sherlock, John is struck by their contrast, black hands spread over alabaster. John's instinct is to leap forward and push the man aside, get his hands off, OFF. But Sherlock is cocking an intrigued eyebrow, seems fascinated, and so John keeps his fist at his side, teeth clenched, leaning on his cane.
The man slides one hand down to grope Sherlock's arse, the other gliding up his stomach to rest on his chest. He says something that John cannot hear, and Sherlock's expression morphs to disdain. He twists aside with a condescending flicker of his eyes, and John happily, and quite roughly, shoulders his way past the large man, feeling relief and satisfaction at Sherlock's rebuff.
The whole incident takes less than a minute, but John wants to rub his hands over the skin that has been touched, erase the foreign oils and unction, to clean and recalibrate the genie as his own. His rueful, unverbalized thought, is that he hasn't touched that arse, that he's waited, as a gentleman should... Oh, wait. No, he hastouched it. On the morning of his immoral and uncontrolled rutting, and the memory of it leaps to center stage in his mind.
God dammit.
John is so focused on these thoughts, blindly following glowing trails of henna on milky blue skin, that he bumps into Sherlock from behind when he stops and turns around.
"I see Harry." Sherlock's deep voice cuts straight through the music; he doesn't need to shout. He jerks his head towards the side of the room that John assumes must contain the bar.
John nods acknowledgment, not attempting to make himself heard over the pounding bass, and they weave through a hundred more people before he can see the giant bar. Bottles of liquor shine like colored ice, lit with glittering halogens and arranged as art on glass shelves. Bartenders, mere silhouettes in tight black, dance back and forth, pouring and serving, smiling into the chaos. John has a better view once they're closer to the bar, and is finally able to spot his sister.
"Unimaginative," Sherlock grunts, breath washing warm around John's ear and curling into his hair and down his neck. John has to agree. Although, since he's wearing more or less the exact same thing, he has to wonder what that renders him. Harry is dressed as a soldier. So is her date, a tall, overweight girl who is wearing her standard issue. He can tell from the line of his sister's body that she's already had more than a few, and he frowns, steeling himself for an uncomfortable and awkward evening.
Harry leers at him, having caught his fixated focus on the rear end of his companion. Her grin is loose and twitching: she is well on her way to hammered.
Her lascivious stare switches to Sherlock, and she whistles, long and loud and obnoxious. Sherlock looks mildly confused. Harry leans back against the bar and grins. "Fucking hell!" she unabashedly goggles. "If you didn't have the wrong parts under all that delicious skin, I'd take you home and tie you down." She boorishly circles around him. She leans over and shouts into John's ear, "Bloody hell, Johnny. He's got an arse like two halves of a cantaloupe. Uhnf! So very round and juicy." She makes a move to pinch it, but Sherlock twitches himself out of her reach.
The soldier behind his sister bites her lip, looking angry and hurt, and drops her head so that her face is concealed.
"Shut up, Harry," John says tightly. Right. This is why he hadn't wanted to come. He shoots an apologetic look up at Sherlock, whose face is blank, and frowns again, edging his way forward until he stands slightly in front of his companion.
Harry laughs, although the music rises to a crescendo at that point, rendering her laugh bizarrely silent. She turns and waves over a bartender, a young woman with long, straight blond hair and a no-nonsense expression. John can tell, because experience with Harry isa guide, that the woman has been chatted up repeatedly by his drunken lech of a sister. But she remains professional, and John recalls that Harry tips very well. Always hopeful, his sister Harry.
He orders a gin and tonic for himself. Sherlock requests a whiskey, speaking directly into his ear, mouth brushing against the cartilage and voice so deep and throbbing that, in spite of the background noise, John can feel it reverberate clear to the base of his spine. His limber body is arched toward John as he speaks, and John watches the glowing traces of henna rearrange themselves as he coils, and catches a brief glint from the jewel in his navel. Oh, jesus fuck. This night may very well be the end of him.
John still feels amazed, when he pulls out his wallet, to be flush with cash for once. He's kept 200 pounds, tucking the remainder away with his gun, now (hopefully) safely at Baker Street. Harry indicates that they should follow her and catches the arm of the unhappy woman standing behind her, the soldier who is presumably Melissa. "We'll go where we can talk," she shouts at John as she passes him. John and Sherlock grab their drinks and follow.