A/N: Look how good I am - I wrote most of this while my boss was out at a 'meeting'. Hey, if he's allowed to get paid to go on a tour of a fire-engine factory, I'm allowed to get paid for writing fanfiction. These are my terms. Also, parts of it got uncontrollably angsty, so there might be more feels in the next chapter than I'd wanted, but hey.
The scene was a mess; the bedside table had been knocked over, its contents strewn over the floor. The body was on the floor beside it, evidently having upended it when it fell off the bed. John whistled lowly.
"This is incredibly desperate," Sherlock remarked, peering down at the body. The man was in a similar state of dishabille to Montgomery, trousers unzipped just enough that a still condom-clad cock poked out of the vee left behind. "But from what I've seen of Charlotte Wilson, it wasn't the work of someone like her. It's very heat-of-the-moment, emotional - once she'd killed him she ran without any of the forensic countermeasures she's used in the past. Charlotte couldn't have done something this emotional and then flirted with someone in a bar hours later. Assuming that this wasn't done while she was with us, which it looks like it was."
He held out a hand and Lestrade filled it with a pair of latex gloves; Sherlock bent and peeled the condom away from the man's penis. "Do we have ID?" he asked.
"Andrew Pearson," Lestrade read off a piece of paper on the desk by the window. "Donovan, call the office and run that through the system."
There was a considerable amount of seminal fluid in the condom when Sherlock turned it inside-out, but not as much as he would have expected. "He didn't finish," he commented, flicking it deftly right-way-round again and slipping it into the evidence bag Lestrade handed him. "From the amount of pre-ejaculate I'd say she started strangling him when he was close - probably when he lost control of himself. Maybe he did something that reminded her too much of Stephens."
John looked oddly amused by Sherlock's evaluation of the condom. He lifted an eyebrow at him and the doctor shook his head and looked away, smiling slightly. Sherlock turned his eyes back to the body. "He put up a fair fight," he evaluated, looking up at the rumpled bedclothes. "Tried to gain the upper hand by rolling them over and that's how they fell off the bed." He felt the man's head with his gloved hands; one of them came away sticky with congealed blood. "She was probably only able to overpower him because he hit his head on the bedside table."
Sherlock picked up Pearson's hand to check his fingernails. "He was married," he noted with surprise, indicating the tan-line from a wedding ring. "Probably recently divorced, since he lived here by himself. Might want to check that anyway, they could only be separated and you'd need to notify the wife yourself." Lestrade looked at Donovan, who gave him her customary look of disapproval that Sherlock seemed to regard Lestrade's team as his own and the DI just went along with it, but her next question into the phone regarded Pearson's marital status anyway. "Blood under his fingernails," he assessed. "Tried to defend himself any way he could. I'd say in terms of style he was more like Trent."
"Violently dominant bordering on abusive?" Lestrade clarified. Sherlock gave him a sharp nod as he scanned the rest of the man's body, picking up a million details about his life and habits but nothing else useful to the case. "Forensics are on their way," he mentioned after a few more minutes of Sherlock's silence. "I'm heading back to the Yard, they can fill me in later. Try not to annoy them too much," the DI said wearily, giving Sherlock a stern look. "I'll go and take Charlotte home."
"Ask her if she knows Pearson," Sherlock called after him.
Donovan hung up the phone as her Inspector left the room. "He was a DCE with O2, two arrests for drunk and disorderly but nothing came of either of them. The divorce was finalised almost a month ago, so I'll get someone to tell the ex-wife when the sun comes up."
Sherlock nodded perfunctorily. "Thank you, Sergeant Donovan," he said politely. John's badly-hidden smile widened at a similar rate to Donovan's eyes, but neither said anything in reply. "We'll wait for forensics, but I doubt they'll find anything. All they can really do is DNA check the condom and fingerprint the rest of the house, and all that will prove is that it's the same killer as the others, which is obvious already. I think this is all we're going to get - she's devolving, and fast. Put something about her distressed behaviour in your press release, maybe someone will phone in their neighbour acting strangely."
He conducted a quick scan of the room just in case she had left something obvious, a cellphone or a handbag or a wallet, but he wasn't surprised to come up with nothing. They waited while the forensics team conducted a few tests, but Sherlock pulled John out of the room at the first sneer from Anderson, commanding Donovan to call him when they finished. He didn't think they would find anything, and he didn't want to sit around and watch them not find anything when he could be role-playing the situation with John back at home.
"I was so sure it was her," the doctor remarked in the cab back to Baker Street.
Sherlock shook his head distantly. "It was always a possibility, that there'd be more than one young blonde submissive with bruises all over her face. The fact that she'd dated all of the victims makes it more complicated. There's so much that was right about her that makes for a hell of a big coincidence considering she isn't the killer. It just doesn't make sense," he cursed, curling his hands into fists in frustration.
John put a comforting hand on Sherlock's thigh, which only served to completely distract his attention from the case. Another murder meant that they could role-play again. But there were so many things that he could be doing instead that would be more useful to the case, and he had just made up his mind to tell John what he really wanted and stop pretending.
The thing was, pretending was so much easier, and so much less risky. If he told John how he felt there was a possibility - a small one, but a possibility nonetheless - that John would turn him down and he'd never get to touch him again. He had an excuse to have John one more time before he had to put himself on the line, as it were, and wouldn't he be stupid not to take it?
He stared at the hand on his thigh until John shifted it uncomfortably, at which point Sherlock reached out and removed it. "That's not helping," he said quietly, turning to look out the window so that John wouldn't see the tiny pink flush he could feel creeping up his neck. He could feel John looking at him from the other side of the taxi and see the amused little smile in his mind's eye.
Charlotte, he forced himself to think. It was theoretically possible that she was working with someone, perhaps supplying them with the victims' names and whereabouts and letting the other person murder them, which would account for the smugness in her expression when she'd been arrested. But that smugness could also be explained by the fact that Trent, at the very least, had treated her badly and she was glad he was dead. She'd been unusually calm in the interrogation room, but that was unusual for the guilty as well as the innocent. People attempting to hide their guilt often overacted their anger at being arrested and their grief for the dead, but Charlotte had made no secret of the fact that Stephens was the only one whose death had really upset her, and once he and Lestrade had allowed her to see the fact that there were holes in their case against her she had relaxed considerably.
She couldn't have killed Montgomery, and he didn't believe that she would have killed Stephens. Was there an explanation that still involved her without implicating her at all? He had the irritating feeling that the answer was in the enormous shadow being cast by John at the forefront of his mind, because every time he tried to think about it he thought about John instead.
The cab pulled up outside Baker Street, jolting Sherlock out of his thoughts. He needed to find out whether Charlotte had known Andrew Pearson. If she hadn't, then he could consider dismissing her connections to the others.
And in the meantime, he may as well go over the murder with John.
The doctor dragged his feet a little up the stairs; Sherlock held the flat door open for him, his stomach jittering slightly with anticipation. John didn't meet his eyes as he walked past him into 221B.
"I have a theory," Sherlock exaggerated briskly, striding into the kitchen and filling the kettle. "But it relies on Charlotte knowing the latest victim. If she didn't, it's more likely that her knowing the others was just coincidence. While we wait for Lestrade to call it would be beneficial to go over the latest murder, perhaps get an idea of what it was that made her strangle him early."
John followed him into the kitchen and planted his feet, shoulders back, a glint of steel in his eyes. "No," he said flatly. "No, I won't."
Sherlock stared at him. "What do you mean?" he asked, floored. He felt rather like he had accidentally shifted to first gear instead of fifth in the middle of the A45. He had never even considered that John wouldn't want to role-play the scenario with him. What if John had never wanted to, and had only done it for the sake of the case, the way he reluctantly joined him on uncomfortable stake-outs or pretended to be drunk or infirm while Sherlock lured in suspects?
John crossed his arms, his eyes still blazing with finality and determination. "I mean I won't role-play with you anymore. This is ridiculous, and it's gone on for long enough."
"But…" Sherlock floundered, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. "But I need it. For the case, John."
He struggled to come up with a more coherent and less revealing argument, but his mind kept returning to the idea that John had never wanted to role-play with him, which meant that he had misread all of the signals he thought he'd been getting, which brought the likelihood that John wanted him down considerably. John was shaking his head, arms still crossed resolutely. "You don't need it," he said derisively. "You and I both know that role-playing these murders hasn't helped you in the slightest. Your reasons for doing it have got more and more flimsy and ridiculous since that first one and it's just stopping you from doing other things that might actually help you."
Sherlock didn't have an adequate response to that. It was completely true, and he knew it. "You could have had this case solved days ago if you hadn't been distracted by this, and you know it," John continued. "These role-plays are the only thing you've actually done to try and solve this case, and you know it's not up to your usual brilliance."
"I've done other things," Sherlock tried quietly. "I found Charlotte."
John snorted. "You called a few people in the hope that they could find something and then sat around waiting for them to come through. That's what I would have done. It's what Lestrade and Donovan would have done. Jake found Charlotte, and she's not even the person you were looking for."
There was silence while Sherlock tried and failed to find something to defend himself with. The kettle reached the boil noisily and clicked itself off.
"You know what the worst part is?" John said quietly, watching as Sherlock took down two mugs and the box of PG Tips just to have something to do with his hands. "I didn't want you to solve the case."
Sherlock dropped the box of teabags, the little packets skittering gleefully across the kitchen floor. "What?" he asked before he could stop himself.
John shrugged resignedly. "I wanted this to go on for as long as possible so we could keep role-playing. Every time someone else was murdered my heart leapt - I was happy that someone had died because it meant that I could pretend to sleep with you again."
Sherlock swallowed. "What are you saying?" he asked, his voice barely audible even to himself.
"Fuck, Sherlock, what do you think I'm saying?" John snapped, flapping his arms in frustration. "I want you. I want us, for real. I think I've always wanted you, I just didn't recognise it for a while. And then I thought you were… married to your work, so completely not interested that the idea of sex didn't even occur to you, so I stopped myself from wanting you. But…" He subsided, leaning against the doorframe, his entire demeanour changing. "Then that first murder, I found out that not only were you interested in sex, but you were interested in sex with men, and I got the tiniest glimpse of what it would be like if you were interested in sex with me. And that… that's a door I don't think I can close."
He realised his mouth was open and closed it before he started drooling. "You…" he started before he'd quite worked out how to finish. "You want sex with me."
"I want everything with you," John corrected. "And you know I do, Sherlock. You've known it for days now. And I've known you do for days too. And people are dying because we're pussyfooting around it instead of putting it out in the open and acknowledging it." He stepped forwards, taking a deep breath that shook slightly. "I want you," he said clearly. "And you want me." Sherlock said nothing, still scrambling to pull his thoughts together enough to form a coherent response, and John's face faltered slightly. "Don't you?" he asked.
Sherlock snapped back into action at the look on the doctor's face. "Of course I do," he almost shouted, flying forwards and pulling John into a tight, slightly clumsy hug, his feet slipping on a cluster of teabags. "I've always known I've wanted you. All of you, everything with you - I want to listen to your breathing as I fall asleep and hold your hand in the back of the taxi on the way to crime-scenes. I want sex with you, but it's secondary - I have fewer barriers with you than I do with anyone else. I want it to be acknowledged that there are no barriers between us, that I'm completely comfortable with you. I want complete physical and emotional intimacy." He paused, running his hands firmly up John's back, enjoying the feeling of him close, the warmth of them bleeding through their clothes until they shared the same warmth. "I know that's a lot to ask for."
John shook his head, his hair rubbing softly against Sherlock's neck. "We already have most of it," he said, a smile audible in his voice. "I don't think it's a lot at all."
They released each other, stepping apart, the air between them gaping awkwardly. Sherlock wanted to step forwards and kiss the doctor, but he wasn't quite sure how to.
"Well," John said, another smile creeping up on his face. "I think we should throw out the idea of role-playing sex as other people and just have sex as ourselves. With each other. And without clothes."
Sherlock grinned. "You know, John," he said conversationally, "sometimes I think I don't give you nearly enough credit for your good ideas."
John flashed a grin back. "I think that quite often, actually," he quipped, and then they were reaching for each other as though it was perfectly natural, John's hand sliding into the hair at the nape of Sherlock's neck, Sherlock's own taking up their previous position around the doctor's hips as their lips connected.
It was wonderful, slow and sweet but heavy, laden with relief and anticipation. Sherlock shuddered and crushed their bodies together, parting his lips and reasserting their mouths against each other until John was backed against the doorframe with Sherlock's hands on either side of his neck.
He wouldn't have called it chaste, what they were doing, but there was no urgency to it, a languid slide of lips on lips until Sherlock parted his further and touched at John's lower lip with his tongue.
John's hand got caught in Sherlock's hair and pulled, the doctor's hips rocking up against Sherlock's so that he could feel the stirring of his groin, and then suddenly there was urgency; Sherlock pressed John hard against the doorframe, claiming each other's mouths until their tastes combined and it still wasn't enough, he still needed more. He reached down and flicked open the button on John's trousers, earning a rich groan from the doctor and a sharp bite to his lower lip.
Sherlock's phone rang again.
The vibrations shook their ribcages together as Sherlock separated their lips angrily, sliding his own down John's delightfully flushed cheek. "For fuck's sake," he growled furiously. It was the ringtone he had assigned to Lestrade, probably answers to the questions he had forgotten about asking. The temptation to throw the phone across the room was immense, but he'd never build up the stock of contacts again if it broke.
"Don't answer it," John suggested, bending his head to kiss and bite at the soft underneath of Sherlock's jaw.
He moaned softly, but the phone was still ringing, distracting him. "It's Lestrade," he protested. "It'll be important."
John only bit him harder, but Sherlock pulled himself reluctantly away and yanked the phone out of his jacket pocket. "Lestrade?" he answered impatiently.
"Yeah," the DI replied. There was a funny sort of background noise on the other end of the phone; Sherlock guessed that he was calling from a police car. "Look, we just dropped Charlotte off, walked her right to the door, like we said - she did know Pearson, by the way, she says he was the man from the bar who gave her the bruises."
Sherlock took a sharp breath in and put his hand over John's where it was trailing cheekily down his stomach to stop it. "Three I could have dismissed as coincidence. Four I have more trouble with. She had no idea about the murders, so it must have been someone doing it for her, maybe to protect her…"
His eyes fell on John again and quite suddenly, jarringly, he remembered the casual look on John's face the day after they met, hours after John had shot a man to save Sherlock's life. "Oh." John removed his hand, his face turning taut with anticipation. Sherlock was rather relieved that he was still willing to drop everything for the case. "The flatmate."
Lestrade cleared his throat. "It was still only half six when we turned up, but she was sitting in the middle of the living room, sobbing. Blonde, with bruises all over her face, even worse than Charlotte's. And fresh scratches all down her arms."
"And you arrested her?" Sherlock prompted.
"Nah, we just left her there," the DI replied with an unnecessary level of sarcasm. "Of course we arrested her. We're on our way back to the Yard now."
Sherlock nodded, looking at John. "So are we," he said quickly, hanging up without waiting for a response. "It was Charlotte's flatmate," he explained to the doctor, starting to move past him before remembering that this might be considered rude and pausing in the doorway expectantly. "They've arrested her and they're on their way to the station, I said we'd meet them there. Is that… okay?"
John smiled, but there was disappointment in his eyes. "This has waited for so long I hardly think a few more hours to put a murderer away is going to kill it," he replied. "We've done the important bit now. Like you said, the sex is secondary."
"That doesn't mean I don't want it desperately," Sherlock reminded him, grinning. John just laughed in response, patting him on the arm in a consolatory manner and starting towards the door. "Why didn't you say something earlier?" Sherlock asked when they had their coats on, slipping his hand comfortably into John's as he pulled the door closed behind him.
John shrugged. "Why didn't you?" he shot back, tightening his fingers to squash Sherlock's between them. "Like I said, before that first role-play I didn't even know you were interested in sex. I didn't want to come on too strong and scare you away." He giggled suddenly as they stepped back out onto the street. "And then I thought, if a few violent and abusive bastards had to die so that you and I could get this right, then so be it."
Sherlock laughed. "Quite right, too," he assessed.
Charlotte had apparently ridden in the police car all the way back to the Yard when her flatmate was arrested, and was now standing at the viewing window with Donovan, picking nervously at her cuticles and watching her disheveled friend refusing to answer Lestrade's questions.
Sherlock entered quietly and closed the door behind him, leaving John outside with Charlotte and unobtrusively taking a seat in the corner of the room. Lestrade knew his interrogation strategies by now and cast him an irritated glare before ignoring him.
"Miss Lancaster," Lestrade continued as though Sherlock wasn't there, "we have your DNA at the laboratory. You were careful enough not to leave fingerprints, but several hairs were recovered from more than one crime-scene. Not telling us everything in this interview will only harm your defence when this goes to trial."
Amy Lancaster didn't seem to be listening, merely staring angrily at Sherlock. "Who's he? I saw that look you gave him when he walked in. Is he allowed to be here?"
Lestrade frowned at her. "Mr Holmes is a consultant with the police," he said sternly. "If he wasn't allowed to be here, I wouldn't have let him into the room."
Technically, Sherlock wasn't allowed to be there. He had no official agreement giving him the title of consultant for the police, which made him a civilian. It wasn't one of the Yard's most enforced rules. He merely smiled at the woman and crossed one leg over the other in a casual sort of way.
"As I say, Miss Lancaster, we are perfectly able to prove that you are the person we've been looking for. There is no reason not to come clean with us and every reason to do so. We know that at least two of the people you've killed were violent and abusive, and that these weren't random attacks. That could work in your favour if - but only if - you tell us the truth."
Amy sat back in her chair, still looking at Sherlock. "What do you think?" she asked, in the spirit of one determined to be contrary. "You're a consultant, doesn't that mean he should consult you before talking to me?"
Sherlock smiled again. "I'm a consulting detective, Miss Lancaster, not a consulting lawyer. You were offered one of those before this interview began, I'm assuming you turned it down, which was a little foolish of you." She shrugged again; Sherlock knew she'd always intended to tell the truth and was just stalling to have the illusion of control. "I think you should come clean, but not for him," he nodded towards Lestrade, "and not for yourself. I think you should come clean because Charlotte is standing outside watching, and she'll probably want to know exactly why you've been killing every man who's ever looked at her."
Her face fell. A little harsh, perhaps, using Charlotte to guilt-trip her, but Sherlock knew it was the most effective way to get everything from her. "None of this was Charlotte's fault," Amy said, looking directly at the viewing window. "She didn't know anything." She sighed heavily, glancing at Lestrade. "You should have seen her face when she realised that Montgomery prick was dead. He treated her like shit and she still got so upset."
"She's dated a lot of people who treated her like shit, from the sounds of things," Sherlock commiserated.
Amy nodded, still staring at the window. "And it was like she never realised how much more she deserved. She acted like Vincent was God, just because he never hit her. She'd go to that ridiculous club thing in Soho and come back with black eyes and cigarette burns like they were nothing, like that was something she had to do to get what she wanted, and I know she's not into BDSM for the pain. I've tried talking to her so many times… do you have any idea what it's like having someone so wonderful so close and knowing that they think they're absolutely worthless?"
"Yes," Sherlock replied truthfully. "I know several people who I believe fit that description." Molly, for example, seemed to constantly set her sights on men who wouldn't give her what she deserved, including Sherlock himself. He'd even thought that John could do a lot better than the vapid, self-absorbed women he seemed to attract, but he'd largely dismissed that opinion as biased by jealousy.
She nodded again, but this time she was looking intently at Sherlock with a tiny smile at the edge of her mouth. "Not easy, is it," she said sadly. Sherlock wondered what part of it she was talking about, the indignation at the way John was so willing to settle for those women or the wish that he'd realise he could get all of that from him. He wondered how much of it she saw in him.
"She came home after finding out about Trent with this little half-smile on her face," Amy said wistfully. "I went after Montgomery because he broke her heart. I wasn't going to kill him, just get close to him and then hurt him the way he hurt her - I didn't really have a plan, but if I had it wouldn't have been anything like what happened. Then when she heard about it and she came home with those bruises, I tracked down Trent because he was the last person I knew had hit her that badly. But then… killing Trent made her happy."
Sherlock resisted the urge to look at the viewing screen. From a scientific perspective he would have liked to have Charlotte inside the room, but it most likely would make things a lot harder for both women, so he didn't ask. He kept up his open, sympathetic expression instead, grateful that it was Lestrade who was running the interview and not someone less competent who wouldn't have the sense to keep quiet and let guilt and a need for Charlotte to know everything draw the whole truth out of her.
"I thought if I could show her how little she was upset by all the people she'd devoted so much of her life to dying, she'd realise that she shouldn't be dating them. That there were people out there whom she actually cared about, who actually cared about her."
"People like you," Sherlock finished quietly.
Amy smiled bitterly. "At first I just wanted her to see that it had to be possible for people to dominate her without being cruel to her. I didn't want it to be me who showed her, as long as she found out. Then I started thinking about how I might show her, about how maybe it had to be me who showed her because she'd never listen to anyone else. And then after a while I realised that even if she did find someone who loved her and who would treat her like the miracle she is, I wouldn't want to give her up."
Sherlock sympathised alarmingly well. He'd always known he was attracted to John, but at the start he never would have considered acting on it. Falling in love with John had happened so slowly he hadn't even noticed, just realised all of a sudden after that first pretend kiss that he was there and he'd been there for a while. He nodded slowly, a gesture for the woman to continue.
"I'd do anything for Charlotte," Amy said fiercely, staring at first Sherlock, then Lestrade as though daring them to challenge her. "I'd kill for her." Sherlock beat the amused smirk off his face, but the woman seemed to realise the irony in the statement herself. "I think I've proven that now," she said with a tiny smile. "I can be cruel and violent, I've shown that, but I wouldn't be, not to her."
Lestrade shifted slightly, unfolding his arms and leaning them against the table. "What did you think would happen when we found you?" he asked. "When Charlotte found out that you'd murdered her ex-boyfriends?"
Amy bit her lip and shrugged. "I didn't think about that," she admitted. "I couldn't. I didn't mean to kill Montgomery, and then after that it was already done. Do people usually think about that? Getting caught by you was the last thing on my mind. I was more worried about being caught by Charlotte without having a chance to explain myself."
She sighed, her eyes rising to the viewing window again before lowering to her cuffed hands. "I didn't do it to hurt her," she said, her voice small and pathetic. "I knew that it would, but that wasn't why I did it." Her hands twisted around each other as she stared at them. Then she took a deep breath and looked up at Lestrade. "Is that enough of a statement for you?" she asked. "I don't think I have anything else to say. I know murder was the wrong way to go about things and I didn't chose this road until I was halfway down it, but if it makes Charlotte realise how much she's worth - if it makes her think twice before she goes for someone like that again - then I don't regret it."
Sherlock uncrossed his legs unobtrusively. "I'm done," he said quietly. "I'll leave the rest to you, Inspector."
Lestrade nodded at him, so he stood up and quietly left the room. He hated when murderers were so human. This entire case he'd sympathised with her because of the calibre of man she was victimising, but actually meeting her in the flesh, hearing her doing it for the love of her best friend… the case was closed, and he wanted out.
John seemed to recognise his expression and stepped close to him, a subtle hand running reassuringly down his sleeve. "All right?" he asked, quietly so that Donovan wouldn't hear it.
Sherlock nodded minutely. "I'm sorry," he said to Charlotte. "Really, if there's anything I can do."
Ordinary circumstances would have seen him smirking at the bewildered look on Donovan's face. John always seemed to get annoyed at people's beliefs that Sherlock had no emotions or empathy, but Sherlock had worked rather hard to make them believe that in the first place; it wasn't his fault that John made his emotions a lot more obvious.
Charlotte smiled tremulously. "If she'd just told me," she said, her voice breaking. "I thought about it too. Of course I did. She's a naturally dominant person, I'm sure you noticed that. It's why I wanted to be friends with her all those years ago. I love her more than anything else in the world. But she was always so disgusted when we talked about BDSM that I didn't think I could mention it to her."
John let out a heavy breath that sounded a little bit like a curse. Sherlock's lips tightened. He'd suspected that this might be the case, but hearing it from Charlotte's ears in that defeated tone of voice was entirely different. He turned back to the window, searching for something else to say but coming up blank. Charlotte was crowding into him and John like a windbreak, destroying the hope he had had of walking away. He watched instead as Lestrade patted the table with an air of finality and stood, casting a glance towards them through the window. Donovan gestured to the officers standing by the door. "Will you be all right with these two?" she asked Charlotte. "They can show you to Detective Inspector Lestrade's office, and when everything's been processed you can speak to Amy. Or they can take you outside and put you in a cab."
"I want to see her," Charlotte said instantly.
They tried to leave once Donovan had taken Charlotte out of the office and back to the detention cells to speak to Amy, but Lestrade placed himself carefully between them and the door before shutting it firmly. Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Do we have to do this now?" he asked. All he wanted was to go home and continue where he and John had left off when he called in the first place. The hour they'd spent waiting in Lestrade's office had been enough for the looks between them to shift from reassuring to affectionate to something else entirely, and Sherlock hadn't been willing to rub everything in Charlotte's face by kissing him in front of her.
Lestrade folded his arms and leaned against the closed door. "Just think," he commented, his voice light but an extremely pointed tone to his body language. "This entire case could have been prevented if two people had just talked about their feelings."
Sherlock understood the implication straight away and smiled slightly to himself; John, on the other hand, stared at the DI. "Was that a hint?" he asked, sounding indignantly disbelieving. He straightened his shoulders slightly and took a pointed step closer to Sherlock. "We don't really need hints, do we, Sherlock?"
He reached out and took the hand that the doctor was subtly holding out to him. "Actually," he admitted, smiling at Lestrade, "I think a few hints a little earlier might have done me the world of good." He'd kept his attraction to the doctor so closely to his chest that he'd never bothered looking to see if it was returned; if someone had ever suggested to him that John wanted him, maybe he would have said something sooner. "You don't need a statement from us now, do you? John and I have some… secondary business to take care of."
John laughed gleefully, squeezing Sherlock's hand. Lestrade looked from one to the other with an expression that suggested he didn't know whether to be amused or disgusted so he'd gone for resigned instead. "Yeah, of course," he said, flapping his arms. "Come back to me when you don't look like you're about to jump each other in my office."
"Are you sure?" John asked playfully. "Jumping someone in a police Inspector's office has always been a fantasy of mine."
Lestrade's expression tipped over into something distinctly nauseated. "Please leave," he said quietly, though Sherlock could still hear the ghost of a smile in his voice. The two of them obeyed, laughing and holding onto each other's fingers and casting lascivious glances at each other just to hear the DI's groan.
"Secondary business, huh?" John repeated when they had left the Yard.
Sherlock made an affirmative humming noise. "Secondary, but desperately anticipated," he replied.
John laughed. "We'd best get onto that, then," he said happily, dropping Sherlock's hand in order to wind an arm around his hip inside his coat. Sherlock copied the gesture, dropping a kiss onto the top of John's head. "It sounds important."
A/N: I'd say you have no idea how badly I want to write real porn for this story, but you probably do. Best get onto that, then.