"Did I say you could turn around yet, Holmes?"
Sherlock looked down at the captain, astonishment filling his wide grey eyes.
"No," he said in a soft voice, before carefully turning around to face the wall again.
"Hands on the wall, above your head, like before," Watson said curtly. He took a step closer to Holmes and put his hands on either side of the younger man's hips, curling his fingers around the prominent hipbones and holding tightly as he bent forward to breathe on the detective's neck again.
"Let me do this to you," John said, his voice somewhat looser than earlier.
"What are you going to do?" panted Sherlock.
"It's not about what I'm going to do, it's how I am going to do it," John said, slowly running his fingers upwards, along Sherlock's exposed ribs. The sensation was soft and soothing, in contrast to the almost violent eagerness with which John had brought Sherlock to the wall. "Anyone could do this to you," he continued, "anyone could touch your body—and though I shouldn't feel this way, I resent anyone who has touched this body, this beautiful, beautiful body of yours. I resent them for having something that they didn't appreciate, someone they didn't know how to love. They may have fucked you, Holmes, like I am going to fuck you, but that doesn't mean a thing. Or does it?" His last words were said in a low, cold voice, the doctor slipping again into the soldier.
"They didn't mean a thing," Sherlock said with a gasp. He brought his head backwards, allowing his curls to brush the front of John's forehead. But the doctor lifted Sherlock's head and made him face the wall again.
"You're not doing what I told you to do," Watson said. "I told you to stand facing the wall, your hands above your head. I wanted you to keep looking at the wall."
"Why?" Sherlock grumbled.
"Curiosity killed the cat. But if you really want to know: sensory deprivation. I don't want you to see anything except that wall, until I want you to see something else. Do you understand me? Surely something as simple as sensory deprivation is comprehensible to the Great Sherlock Holmes? Additionally, you can't see what I'm doing. You can't deduce me quite so easily when you can't see me."
Sherlock trembled slightly, and John did not overlook his response. Good, he thought, it's good to make Sherlock uncertain. Show him that he can fall, and he can trust me to catch him.
"I can still deduce you, you know," Sherlock said, a bit of his old confidence returning. "I know, for example, that your mouth is approximately six inches from the back of my neck—"
"Shut it," Watson said. "You said you would let me do this to you." He released one of Sherlock's hips, bringing his left hand upwards to rest on the nape of the other man's neck. John drew figure eights around the first cervical vertebra, sending a tingle down Sherlock's back. Next, John traced the length of Sherlock's spinal column, first down the middle, then rising again on the right hand side, and descending on the left.
"You have a mild scoliosis," he observed. "Have you ever had that looked at?"
Sherlock shook his head, then let it droop forwards as he felt John's fingers brush over the small of his back, catching in the dimples at the top of both buttocks. Almost imperceptibly, hoping that the doctor would not notice, Sherlock extended his arse backwards, seeking more consistent contact with Watson's torso.
"You don't obey orders very well," John observed. "What did I say about being against the wall?"
"Yes," Sherlock said. "Yes, John."
"Yes, sir, you might say next time." Sherlock snuck a glance backwards over his shoulder. He doesn't mean it, he thought. That's so clichéd. John caught him looking backwards and, in one swift motion, had his forearm pinned against the back of Sherlock's shoulders, pressing the taller man more tightly against the wall.
"This isn't going to work if you keep fighting me," he said into Sherlock's ear. Sherlock squirmed underneath him, then went still.
He listened. John was breathing heavily, though he had hardly exerted himself. Arousal, Sherlock thought. This arouses John. Another, unwelcome thought crossed his mind. It arouses me, too, to see this side of him. This must have been John before the injury, this must have been John at his height…what am I saying? Think, Sherlock, think. Think! Did you mean, 'at the height of his powers'? Are you really so daft as to believe that John is past his prime? That's what you thought when you first met him, just for an instant, when you realized that he was poor and wanted a roommate. You thought, 'washed up,' and you would have dismissed him if it hadn't been for that intriguing psychosomatic limp.
You are a liar, Sherlock. Liar Liar Pants on Fire. Time to be honest – if I can't be honest with myself, with whom can I be honest? The truth: you were intrigued by his military stance, and all the rest. The tan line, the shoulder injury – how many times did you stare at it when he shed his shirt last summer?
No, no, no! I never found him dull or washed up. That's what I wanted to believe, that is what I told myself when I realized that I needed him too much. I told myself that he was a has-been, that he meant nothing to me except as my assistant and Anderson-blocker. And now I can't imagine Baker Street without him, can't imagine solving cases without him, and – honest! Be honest! – I can't imagine living without him.
"Now you are very still," Watson said, interrupting his thoughts. "Which is all well and good. But I think you've gone somewhere else. And I very much need you here, with me, right in this moment. That is what this is all about."
Change of plans, John thought.
"May I speak?" Sherlock asked in a hesitant voice. He would do everything John told him to do, he decided.
"Yes."
"I – I don't know how to say this." Sherlock was stuttering now, and he hadn't stuttered since the case of the Hound, that night when they were sitting in front of the fire and Sherlock was overcome with terror in what may have been the first time in his life, for all that John knew.
"Try, Sherlock. Try. You have to say it." Definite change of plans. Now John pulled Sherlock back a few inches from the wall and wrapped his arms around his lover's chest, holding them closely together at last. Sherlock relaxed into John's arms but kept his eyes firmly fixed on the wall. It was easier, somehow, saying the words when he could not see John's dear, dear face.
"I'm scared," Sherlock said abruptly, then fell silent. John hugged him more tightly and nestled his nose against the back of Sherlock's ear.
"Tell me," he urged.
"What if you die," Sherlock said flatly, his question falling into a statement.
"Of course I will die," John said, not exactly in a light tone, but with something other than sorrow in his voice.
"What if you leave," Sherlock said, in the same flat tone. "If you leave, John—" his chest heaved abruptly, causing John to pull him even more deeply into his embrace. And then John released him, just as abruptly and Sherlock felt barren and abandoned and, still obeying orders, he remained facing the wall. He listened to the sounds in the room, those that he could hear above the pounding of his heart – he's gone he's gone he's gone – until he heard the rustle of fabric, the ring of a buckle against the floor, and he discerned what John was doing. Sherlock relaxed against the wall, accustomed now to its cool surface; revelling, even, in the predictability of the flat plane. John was behind him, and any second now John would return, warm and naked and his, all his, entirely Sherlock's, and –
"I will never leave you," John said, "and you know that this is a promise that I can make, with all of my heart, and at the same time, it is a promise that I cannot keep."
"John!" Sherlock cried out. "John." His chest began to heave, and for an instant, the doctor thought that he might have a panic attack in his arms, before he realised that Sherlock was crying, actually crying. And his sobs were terrible, dry, empty things, devoid of any soothing tears, devoid of sound: erratic tremblings and shakings and saccades that ran through first Sherlock's body, then John's, as the doctor held the younger man more tightly in his arms.
"I cannot keep the promise," John said softly, "because that kind of thing is out of my hands. And –" he took a deep breath, not knowing how to finish what he had started. You must say this, he thought. You must tell Sherlock this, because for all his brilliance and all his knowledge, he does not know this very simple human truth. And that is why he searches for it so desperately, among the dead. He thinks he'll find it there, but he's wrong. Death is what gives meaning to life, but it isn't in death that we find that meaning: it's here, in these fleeting, gorgeous moments, in the suppositionless now, where we forge our lives. And life is always, always lived in the shadow of death.
"This is the price we pay," John began again. "This is the price we pay, for living and for loving and for finding each other."
"I don't want this then," Sherlock said, and his voice was wretched, so sad that John could barely stand to hear it. "I don't want this. It hurts, John. Knowing I am going to lose you." He sniffed against the wall, his body still shaking with the sobs.
"Yes, Sherlock. It hurts." John reached back and upwards, grabbing Sherlock's shoulders, turning the detective around until their chests brushed against each other and their thighs touched. Sherlock, surprisingly, was still erect, and upon feeling the other man's long erection against his stomach, John noticed the stirring in his own groin.
"It hurts, Sherlock," the doctor repeated, reaching down to stroke gently around Sherlock's shaft. The detective arched his back against the wall, extending his groin forward and into John's hands. He shut his eyes, allowing his head to loll to one side, and he braced himself with his arms against the wall. "It hurts, and yet you're still aroused. You still want this, you still want me."
"Yes," he blurted, "and that's what is so painful. How can I want you so badly? How do people live with this kind of pain?"
John laughed, his face moving into a smile, reassuring Sherlock with the everydayness of his expression.
"You know what happens to the worst of us," John reminded him. "Murder and mayhem and all the rest." He took a deep breath, then looked down reverently at Sherlock's penis. "But others—the majority of us—take what we can get. We love now, because we don't know what will happen tomorrow. All we know is that it will be over, someday. And we want to love before it is all gone." He rubbed his thumb over Sherlock's foreskin, noticing how the skin on his hands caught on the skin of Sherlock's penis. John lifted his other hand to his mouth, making sure that Sherlock was following him with his eyes, and left a mouthful of saliva on his palm. Then he reached down and grabbed Sherlock's cock again. His hand glided more easily over the smooth skin, and the tremble that ran through Sherlock's body this time was not from fear. John tugged at his lover's erection, gently, gently, eliciting a small moan from above, before taking Sherlock by both hands and, walking backwards, leading the other man to the bedroom.
They did not stop looking at each other as they walked across the room. Sherlock steered John around the sofa and through the doorway. When John felt his knees against the edge of the bed, he stopped to change places with Sherlock, and laid him over the white eiderdown.
John pulled his eyes from Sherlock's long enough to look around the bedroom and catch a glance at the white roses on the table.
"There's another bouquet!" he exclaimed, pointing. Sherlock awkwardly turned his head, and then grumbled his brother's name. John let out a chuckle before he lowered himself over Sherlock, gazing into his lover's eyes.
When they kissed at last, Sherlock noticed the heat of their mouths coming together, and the moisture and the slick pressure that each of them exerted on the other. He noticed the hair along John's arms, where John was rubbing against him, and he noticed how he had parted his legs, opening himself up to John, willing John to take heed. He wanted John like this, over him, facing him, their chests tight against each other. Sherlock wrapped his legs around John's hips, pulling the doctor tight against him. John let out a moan when his penis rubbed against Sherlock's, and Sherlock moaned in return.
"I will do this every day you want to," John said. "Hell, I would do this twice a day."
"Be careful what you promise," Sherlock said. "I have been known to bite off more than I can chew."
"Meaning?"
"Probably more than you can chew, as well."
"I still don't understand this innuendo, Sherlock, but you are fit!" John rose slightly so that he could survey the length of Sherlock's body with his eyes. "You are like those medieval paintings of Christ – all long limbs and flat planes. And, no, I probably am not supposed to find that kind of image hot, but you definitely are hot."
"I don't know about that," Sherlock said.
"Shut up, you bastard. You know you're fantastic to look at." Sherlock raised an eyebrow.
"No, I meant that I don't know that those paintings weren't intended to be erotic. Passion of Christ and all that, you know. Bernini's Saint Theresa, caught up in divine ecstasy."
"Bugger all!" John said. "I'm not Catholic, but if I were…"
"Is what we're doing holy?" Sherlock interrupted.
John's jaw tightened. "Is what we're doing—Geez, Sherlock, the questions you ask!"
"I want to know."
"Depends on what you mean."
"Holy. Sacred. Blessèd. Which of these words don't you understand?"
"Yes to all of them, Sherlock. Yes to whatever goodness is out there. Yes to it all."
"Is that your final answer?"
"YES!" John ran his hands over Sherlock's chest, and then leaned down to take a nipple in his mouth. It never failed, that combination of tongue and teeth on his chest: Sherlock began to buck against John, wrapping his legs around him once more, urging the doctor to continue that delicious attention. He knows I like it, Sherlock thought.
"Yes, just like that. Like that, John, what you just did with your tongue there." Exactly. Right. Good. Ah. No! What? Not there. Not yet. But you are going there, you impossible man. I want your mouth down there, too, down on my cock. I want you to draw me in, up to the base if you can take it that deep, and I want you to suck me until I spend myself in your arms. John John John.
But John, before his mouth got any further than the top of Sherlock's pelvis, sat up suddenly, turning around and scooting backwards so that he sat next to Sherlock's head. He wouldn't, Sherlock thought. But he is. He's actually doing that.
Sherlock almost lost his breath when John raised his hips as he swung around to rest on his forearms over Sherlock's stomach, taking Sherlock's cock in his mouth as his own hovered just inches from Sherlock's face. Sherlock reached up to take John's penis in his hands, then brought him down closer, easing him slowly into his mouth. But the angle was wrong, because Sherlock's body was too long and John's was too short; their cocks and mouths eagerly sought each other but the strain was too much, the gap too frustrating. Sherlock blindly fumbled behind him, searching for a pillow, and when he found one he tucked it under his neck, at last raising his head so that he could bridge the space between them.
Sherlock still feared it might not work. He had had trouble when he had tried this position once before: the attention he needed to devote to the other man's cock was usually diverted by the intensity of the sensations on his own, or, conversely, he would get carried away in the attentions he paid to the other man, neglecting his own pleasure.
But as Sherlock sucked on John and John sucked on Sherlock, their bodies curled together in an ouroboros of pleasure, what began as two lone gestures turned, in the course of a few minutes, into synchronized movement. Sherlock, in John's mouth, was John in Sherlock's mouth; Sherlock felt, even if he did not understand, that this was one of the extraordinary instances of his life, to be filed up there among the day in childhood when he first understood calculus, or the time he first put the bow to the violin strings, and there alongside the first crime he solved, and the moment he met John at St. Bart's.
What was it that people called these moments? Could they be fixed, like a butterfly under glass, or along the lines of one of those precise, glowing still life paintings of the Dutch school? Or would he lose this moment as soon as it passed, when the neurons in his hippocampi imprinted the memory on the entorhinal cortex, transmitting it out into the cortical structures, allowing the memory to mix with all of the other commonplaces reminiscences he stored with him? Kandel's lab had determined that, every time a memory was recalled, the old memory was rewritten. The brain was a palimpsest, after all; this moment was only ever past, irrecoverable, lost. What then? Whither John? Whither Sherlock? Whither this time and place?
The climax existed in that space apart from memory. It pushed memory aside, laughed at it and at its old battle with oblivion. Orgasm, whether it came slowly or quickly, was a meaning unto itself. Sherlock could not argue with orgasm, could not argue against its pleasure, or even against its brevity. 'Surrender' was not a word that Sherlock would use to describe his actions, and yet there was no other word that came to his mind, as the orgasm threatened to overtake him; John's tongue was reaching out and around his cock, for the hundredth time taking him in and sucking and pulling and sucking again and does this feel the same for him as it does for me? What can I ever know of what it is like for him? I imagine it's the same and that's good enough for now, when the deep pleasure is building within me, when I feel it in the hum that John is making at the back of his throat, how it tickles me against my cock. That long stroke he just gave me – oh, teasing, tantalizing, trailing down to the base and over and under my balls and up again, till he has taken me completely in his mouth again, and I have taken him in mine, and we nibble and suck and suckle at each other, until – now now now, more, just a little more, John.
He wanted to shout these last words, but his mouth was full of John, and only John, and in just a few more seconds they would both spend themselves in saliva and semen, and would pull away from each other and be separate beings again, but for just this moment, Sherlock was John, and John was Sherlock, and Sherlock realized that it had been like that before, the hall of mirrors repeating upon itself and all that, and it could be like that, again. As soon as tomorrow, perhaps, or later that night.
"Opera!" John sang in a warbly voice from the bathroom, later that same day. "We're going to the o-per-a!" His voice bounced up and down, in an imitation of a recitative. "We're going to see men si-i-i-i-ng…Ho! Ho! Ho!"
Sherlock was lounging on the bed, his hair still damp from his shower, dripping onto his blue dressing robe. He fumbled idly through a copy of The New York Times, waiting for John to emerge from the shower.
"And women, too," the detective called out. And then, in a broad Queens accent, he said, "Don't forget the lay-dees."
John poked his head out of the bathroom door, a toothbrush in his hand.
"I thought we were going to see the male soprano."
Sherlock looked up from the bed. His long toes were twitching, John noticed. Beating out a rhythm, perhaps? Or maybe the lazy aftershocks of a good fuck…
"He has a minor role, a very minor role."
"A minor role for a minor man?"
"I have no idea if he is miniscule, or underage, or unimportant," Sherlock said drolly, "because I really couldn't care less about him." He looked up to see John brushing his teeth, and winked at the handsome doctor. "There are more important things on my mind these days." He glanced down idly at the Arts section. "John. If you don't finish grooming yourself, we'll be late. You still need to shave, you know."
"Ha!" John said, spitting out a spray of toothpaste as he spoke. "You're one to talk. Lazing around like you haven't anything better to do. Don't you have a tie to pick out for me?"
"You'll wear the gold. It goes well with the grey of your suit. I'm wearing a light purple one, myself."
"Purple and navy?" John frowned as best he could with a toothbrush in his mouth.
"Is that so odd? Purple running to pink." Sherlock's eyes met John's for a moment, before returning to the paper.
"Not odd at all," John assented. "Not odd at all."
Notes:
Your comments on my last chapter were just amazing. Thank you all for reading, and thank you especially to those who commented. You inspired me to sit down for another night of writing and give you the continuation of what I posted last night.
About the male soprano: this particular singer is someone who went to my college, and who lived in my courtyard during my first year. I remember how he used to sing scales at night, and how his voice would echo across the entire courtyard. For months I thought that he was a woman, until a suitemate told me otherwise. Now, eleven years later, he is singing at the Metropolitan Opera, alongside Plácido. Small world, indeed.
~Emma