Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock are not mine, nor is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I make no monetary profit from this.

Note: A modern retelling of The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, with various elements taken from The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez and The Adventure of the Abbey Grange. And I would like to take this opportunity to say that this is my first time to write fanfiction for television instead of written material I could read and re-read (though I did watch and re-watch), so I hope I got it right.

Summary: To stop a blackmailer, Sherlock Holmes enters unfamiliar territory. But not before practicing on John Watson.

The Seduction of John S. Willoughby

Part Two

John Watson couldn't hide that he was more than a little irritated by Sherlock's unwavering assumption that he'd do anything asked of him. But he had done the shopping. And there was the tea (what had happened to the biscuits, John did not want to know – Sherlock had said that he was bored, not that he had eaten them). So he stood up with a curt, "Right, yes, whatever you say" that hadn't come out quite as cuttingly sarcastic as he'd have liked. He supposed that he should be allowed some measure of impatience. Dealing with Sherlock could sometimes be worse than babysitting a particularly bloody-minded two-year-old.

A bloody-minded two-year-old with a tendency to bring home dead things in various stages of decay and, thought John viciously as he filled a glass, a conviction that everybody else is stupid. Which was, yes, a lot like the toddlers he knew, only in relation to Sherlock everybody else actually was stupid.

And John was shocked out of that train of thought by the kitchen sink.

The kitchen sink off 221B was the home to a veritable mountain of dirty…things…that had probably stopped being dishes in the past couple of weeks. John refused to touch them out of respect for the new ecologies and, possibly civilizations and empires that had grown up among the bits of food and the remains of Holmesian experiments. And Sherlock, for the most part, just couldn't be bothered. His brain would probably stagnate fatally if he so much as soaped a teacup.

But the sink was clean now. There were still a couple of nasty looking beakers and flasks, but they were soaking in what smelled like a dilute solution of lemon-scented bleach. This was too much. For a brief, shining moment, John considered that maybe it could have been Mrs. Hudson, but she had said that she wouldn't do any more kitchen cleaning for them after a gooey mass of something had actually moved when she tried to throw it away. Sherlock, he decided, had to be possessed. By the spirit of an obsessive-compulsive housewife.

Considerably dazed, he turned to go back to the sitting room and found Sherlock leaning against the kitchen table (it was almost a relief to see that he hadn't bothered to move his improbable chemistry glassware from there). He nearly dropped the glass.

"God, you gave me a scare."

Sherlock gave a little sideways jerk of his head as if to say Eh, well, that's life for you. "You were taking your time."

"I got distracted by the kitchen sink. Do you realize how many new species you might have killed when you cleaned that out?"

"An exaggeration."

"They probably had kingdoms, Sherlock, and written language."

"You're overreacting. I happen to need the sink." He reached over to take the glass of water from John, his fingers brushing against the doctor's as he did so.

"Civilization be damned then, eh?" John Watson meant to go back to his armchair and turn on the telly and maybe catch the news or something. He really did. But Sherlock somehow contrived to lean against the table in such a way that he blocked the entire space between that and the kitchen counter.

And then he drank. Everything. In one long, slow gulp.

John felt that it was the longest drink he had ever witnessed. And the singularly most uncomfortably sensual one. Sherlock had his head tilted back so that he could see how the muscles of his throat - further exposed by the top three buttons of his shirt being undone - moved with every swallow. A drop of water dribbled from the corner of his mouth, and trailed down his chin to his neck. And when he was done, he closed his eyes, let out a, a satisfied sound (John refused to categorize it as a moan), and slowly wiped his upper lip dry with a thumb. If it had been a woman in the same position, John was prepared to bet that he'd be a pretty happy, if slightly uncomfortable, man. As it was his male flatmate, however, it was just wrong.

Then Sherlock looked at him, his eyes for once not measuring, observing, deducing, somehow simply looking for once, and he handed the glass back. John took it with limp fingers.

"Thanks. You're a lifesaver. The heat's been deadly." Sherlock smiled, and it wasn't his I've-just-figured-it-out-and-I'm-a-pretty-self-satisfied-git smile, or his small, pleasant one, or even the one he used on Molly to get his chemicals and cadavers. It was practically predatory.

John took a few seconds to review the conversation they'd had at Angelo's, waiting for that mad cab driver to show up. Sherlock had said that women were not his area. And he'd said that he wasn't interested, wasn't looking for a relationship (and it still embarrassed John, deeply and unequivocally, that Sherlock had thought that he, John Watson, was trying to pick him up). Sherlock had also said that he knew that having a boyfriend was fine, though that bit came before he'd said he wasn't interested in anything that wasn't the work to which he was married. John didn't have any trouble with that. The cold hard fact of the matter was that Sherlock Holmes didn't think of anything but his work, and could thus not be trying to look…sexy, for lack of a better word…in front of his flatmate on purpose. It was probably just the heat.

"Did I do something wrong? Were you perhaps getting attached to your pets?"

"My pets? If they were anybody's, Sherlock, they'd be yours. I don't think ordinary leftovers would do the things they did without your chemicals doing" –John waved his hands around for emphasis—"things to them."

"Well, it was time for them to go. I needed the sink," Sherlock repeated. He turned sharply on his heel. "I'm going out, John, and you could wash out my glassware after it's soaked for another hour."

And John was left to contemplate life by himself.

xxx

That had been in the afternoon. Sherlock had returned in the early evening in considerably less impeccable clothes than those he had left in (John would have said workman's clothes if he hadn't known better), a set of well-used plumbing tools of all things, and dinner, Thai takeaway.

John had already managed to convince himself that he was being paranoid about what had transpired earlier – it was just a drink, for God's sake – but he couldn't help eyeing his flatmate askance over his Gang Panang.

Sherlock, however, didn't do anything else out of the ordinary - at least, nothing out of what was ordinary for him – that evening. When asked where he'd been, he said curtly that he'd been working, and he communicated nothing else about the matter, except for a smug grin when John inquired whether the said work was on his plan to crush Charles A. Milverton.

"I'll see if it works tomorrow, John. I've invested quite a lot in this venture, and stand to put in much more work, but it's the best line that I can take. I have several alternatives, of course, but this one's less risky than the rest, seeing as Milverton's not actually done anything criminal yet. Now shut up, I need to think." Whereupon Sherlock shouldered his violin and began to play discordantly, sending John up the stairs with his laptop to escape the noise.

He didn't manage to blog though, and spent most of the night worrying what his mad flatmate was up to now.

xxx

That evening, John Willoughby turned the plumber's card over in his hand. The kitchen sink had inexplicably clogged up that afternoon, and the man had said to call, and maybe someone he met personally was better than someone he'd pick out of the phone book, and Escott probably wouldn't get lost this time since he'd been to the house before, and damned if he wasn't sure he wouldn't have done something to block up the sink himself if it hadn't done so on its own.

Yes, he would give Escott a call. His boss needed a plumber. Escott was a plumber. And never mind the fact that he was gorgeous, or that John Willoughby got all hot and bothered just remembering the man drink.