Thursday
John woke up with a start. He reached for his mobile in the darkness and checked the time: still 6 in the morning. Too fucking early!, he muttered. But as there was no way he was falling asleep again, John sighed and got up. Instead of going through all his morning routines, he decided that caffeine was vital right away. While he waited for the coffee machine to get ready, he heard a noise coming from their dark sitting room. He poked his head out the glass doors and, indeed, there was a big consulting detective curled on the sofa. At least, thought John with a grin, Sherlock has deigned to change into his pyjamas that night. He prepared two mugs of coffee and went to sit on the side table in front of his sleeping flatmate. He noticed, smiling so wide that it almost hurt, the lovely curve of Sherlock's cheekbones and the defined and manly shape of his nose. He placed the mugs next to him and grabbed Sherlock's shoulder.
"Sherlock. Sherlock!"
His friend opened an eye, startled. On seeing John, he just made a guttural low sound.
"You should go to bed, Sherlock; it's still very early. A couple of hours in your bed would do wonders to your back. But there's coffee, too, if you'd rather prefer".
Sherlock reached blindly for his mug; John giggled as he helped him. After the first sip, however, Sherlock seemed to turn again to himself and started to talk as fast as his awake self.
"I have the case almost wrapped, John: it was so obvious, in fact! I might have been too distracted to realise the truth in front of my eyes. But now I only have to wait until some people answer my emails, and Lestrade can close successfully another case."
"Really? You weren't close to a conclusion last night!"
"Ah, but that was last night! I only needed some peace of mind and time to think…" Suddenly, he opened his eyes wide. "John… Don't read your blog".
"What? Why?"
"Just don't. Do as I say!"
Sherlock sat up and turned to reach for John's laptop, but John was faster and took it from the chair it was sitting on. Sherlock caught the laptop from the other side, and they struggled for a while for the appliance. At last, John resorted to pretend he was giving in, only to throw himself on top of Sherlock and start tickling him. Sherlock defended himself with blind kicks, but John won over the laptop and ran towards the kitchen with it. He typed his blog's address, trying to regain his breath, when Sherlock came on his heels but froze in the doorframe, his face an unreadable mask (but that nerve trembling on his jaw was unmistakable for John: it was the same face that Sherlock wore when he knew John was about to open the fridge and find something that would arise some yelling).
John took a fast glance to the more than a thousand comments on his blog. He was prepared for that, but he had to bit his lip to avoid laughing when he saw that a great deal of them where from Sherlock!
"Sherlock", he said in a calmer voice. "Have you passed the night arguing with my blog followers?"
Sherlock blinked, hesitant.
"Yes?", he said at last.
John couldn't help but to laugh at that.
"This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen you do!"
"You didn't see me; I made sure of waiting until you went to bed."
John glared at him, and then turned his attention back to the comments.
"Why did you even do that? Were you trying to defend my honour?"
Sherlock shifted anxiously and left the kitchen.
"Hey! Don't leave! It's okay, you idiot! Just… unnecessary, and possibly the most stupidly emotional thing you have ever done… but it's okay! Look, the amount of followers has increased since last night. And I have explained in my stories how you are, so your reaction surely didn't come as a shock to anybody."
Sherlock was curling on the sofa again, hugging the cushion. John added, sitting by his side:
"And the video has been removed, and YouTube won't allow it again on the site. Just give it a bit of time, and everybody will forget about it. I promise."
Sherlock didn't answer, but he seemed relieved now that he knew John wasn't freaking out. So when John asked for more details about the case, he complied gladly, and they sat down at the kitchen with a good breakfast and their laptops.
Lestrade popped in at nine in the morning, and they had barely moved. He handed Sherlock the additional reports the detective had demanded via email, and smiled slyly looking from one to the other.
"Oh, no, Greg, you too?", John groaned, rubbing his face.
"Not my fault at all! You are giving another sense to the term "internet phenomenon"! God, when I saw those gifs…"
Both heads snapped in his direction.
"Those… what?", John muttered.
Lestrade looked uncomfortable now, but there wasn't any chance for him to recoil. None at all.
"The… gifs. An officer showed them to me; there's that page, Tumblr, and it's literally wallpapered with gifs of you two…"
John felt the heat on his face; in fact, he felt as if he was going to explode from anger. Sherlock, on the other hand, looked calm, and his reaction was just typing the offending new name on his browser.
"No, without an 'e' on the last syllable… Like that, yes."
John stood up and watched Sherlock's laptop with wide eyes. He didn't know what exactly he was looking at.
"Tumblr is a website that hosts blogs…", Lestrade explained. "They are usually from teenagers, don't get so upset… I mean, they don't seem to be potential clients of yours…"
John raised his eyebrows.
"That doesn't seem exactly teenagers' diaries, or things have changed a lot from when I was in my teens…"
Lestrade took a peek, grinned, and then noticed John's angry eyes fixed on him and tried to look embarrassed. Sherlock closed the laptop's lid with a hand.
"Well, thank you for the information and the reports. Now, if you please, I think you know exactly where the door is."
John was so bewildered that he didn't even apologise to Lestrade as he would have done normally. He waved him goodbye, and joined Sherlock in the search of those gifs extracted from the manip. There were only two, thank God, but they were repeated again, and again, and again on Tumblr.
The rest of the day… well, it wasn't very usual or very peaceful. John wrote a long entry on his blog, explaining in detail what happened, and how distressed he felt about it. He deleted all the previous comments on the matter. As the day went by, however, new comments appeared, as a neverending dripping, and at first he tried to answer all of them, but then he got tired and the comments were so repetitive that he gave up. Harry sent a worried comment in the afternoon.
"Why are all these people harassing you, Johnny?"
Then she had seen the gifs, or perhaps a copy of the video that they hadn't found, who knows, and commented again:
"SO THAT'S WHAT YOUR DETECTIVE AND YOU DO IN YOUR FREE TIME? Such a naughty boy, Johnny, and you always with that stupid "I'm not gay" singsong… :P Mom will be happy to see you settling down, though!"
"What?!", John said aloud.
He took his phone and had a long and enervating conversation with his sister. He hung up even angrier: stubborn Harry didn't believe a word of what he said, and insisted of being offended because she had to find out about his relationship that way…
Sherlock decided to chase the source of their woes again: he found the Tumblr user who had isolated the gifs from the video and denounced to the website. Then he left acidic comments to all the blogs that had reblogged the damn thing. He felt a little better after it, but when he opened his mouth to make a cheerful comment to John, his friend was all but throwing fire through his nose, so he let him be.
They ate their dinner (precooked spaghetti carbonara from Tesco, again) in tense silence. Afterwards, they sat down on the sofa with their laptops (nothing worthy on the telly). Some funny cat videos and criminal articles later, Sherlock clicked on one of their gifs. John looked askance at it.
"It could be worse", Sherlock said, trying to sound objective to a gif of him being mightily fingered by John.
"Yes", John agreed, "it could be me the one being fucked".
Sherlock glared at him, his mouth a tight straight line. John hurried to fix his slip:
"I mean, if it was me, it would look half as sexy as it looks now".
His friend pale cheeks blushed all of a sudden, but his mouth relaxed visibly.
"If that was a compliment, John Watson… well, it was one of the weirdest compliments that have ever been directed at me".
"Now you have me wondering what the weirdest one was!", John grinned.
The tension was lighter somehow, but Sherlock stood up with his laptop, still blushing.
"I think I will do an early retire tonight; the sofa is comfortable, but my back is complaining, as you predicted. Good night."
John decided he could keep on reading in bed, so he took his laptop upstairs and lay snugly over the covers. Now that he was alone, he opened the document where he had filed last night's deleted comments. He read them again, skipping most of them but focusing in Sherlock's interventions. He smiled fondly when the first aloof and patronizing comments changed the tone, as Sherlock turned angrier, becoming childish, insulting and oddly protective when they mentioned John. It was a new face of his friend, and one that John found strangely appealing.
He took a fast and guilty glance to his closed door, and then looked for the two gifs again. The first was the one with a fingered and mute-moaning Sherlock ("And oh, that's hot!", John thought), and the second had him (well, not him, but a bit of imagination could help there) fucking Sherlock from behind, slamming into his arse with mighty pumps… Pumps that John was emulating into his hand right now, unable to stop, the two gifs running on a loop on his screen. The false Sherlock was about to come in the second gif, and John regretted that the gifs didn't have sound. His friend's face, though, contorted and with his eyes closed tight, brought to his mind the load groans of the original video, and the shot of pleasure almost came as a surprise, powerful and satisfying. He cleaned himself, closed his laptop and turned off the light with a smile, refusing to feel any kind of guilt.