Boyfriend
John sighed as Sebastian's fingers slid through his hair. The more he thought about it, there was really only one thing standing in their way of being able to keep doing this without all this conflict and secrecy. He bit his lip for a moment. "Can't you kill him?"
"Who? Moriarty?" Sebastian tensed and stopped his fingers. "Are you fucking kidding me, John? You can't kill Moriarty. If you have the tiniest idea of what he's like, you know what an impossible question that is. He's set up a web of protection around himself, a bunch of men loyal to him, because one of us does something disloyal, he has someone else appointed to kill them, and so on and so on..." It was a complex web, one that not even Sebastian understood. Even if he did, would he be able to kill Moriarty? Jim Moriarty had swooped in and salvaged Sebastian when he'd been wild and reckless and an utter mess. He'd broken Sebastian down, owned him, and made Sebastian need him. Sebastia was loyal through and through because Moriarty had ensured it. He couldn't kill Jim. "I can't do it. I need him," he said reluctantly.
John frowned and sat up. "You need him? You NEED him? What the hell does that even mean?" he asked, looking down at him with repulsion.
"None of your fucking business," Sebastian said, irritably flicking his ash on the floor. He wasn't about to lie here and pour out his entire history with Moriarty, how fucking complicated it all was. He hadn't had a pleasant life, and under Jim's cruel hands, he hadn't stood a chance. He hated him, but he couldn't imagine life without him. "Anyway, what if I asked you to kill Sherlock? Would you do it? Of course fucking not!"
"You're damn right of course fucking not! Sherlock is a good man! Sherlock doesn't kill people for fun! Or strap bombs to people's chests!" John huffed, shocked that Sebastian would even hint at such a thing. John grit his teeth and climbed out of the bed and started pulling on what clothes hadn't been destroyed, intent on leaving.
"And you think I'm a good man?" Sebastian demanded, furious.
John grit his teeth and whirled back to yell at him, but Sebastian barreled on, cutting him off.
"I don't know who you were kidding, John, but wake the fuck up! I kill people for my job! I don't ask whether they deserved it or whether they have families or whether they are good or bad. I kill them, I get paid, and I like it. If you were expecting some kind of fucking 'redeem the baddie by winning his heart' thing to play out, go the fuck back to Disneyland!"
John's shoulders slumped and he swallowed hard. When Sebastian finished his rant, John looked at him for a long, quiet moment before he said softly, "...you didn't kill me."
Sebastian clenched his jaws. "No, I didn't," he said, a bit quieter. "I didn't, and I don't even fucking know why!" He got up irritably.
John felt a pang of hurt at that. Yes, he was angry at Sebastian, but he really couldn't say he had regretted anything they'd done. Clearly the feeling wasn't mutual. John swallowed thickly around the lump in his throat and set his jaw. "Right. Well, I guess that makes all of this a lot easier, then." He grabbed his coat from the floor, zipped it up all the way and headed out the door.
"What are you talking about, easier? Nothing about this is easy! I'm fucked." He'd hoped that after fucking John he'd be able to drop him and move on like he did with everyone else. But that wasn't happening. He wanted John to stay in the dingy little room with him. He yanked on his trousers and belt, stepping over to John. "This isn't easy at all," he murmured, grabbing John's face in his hands, then kissed him.
John growled and tried pushing him away, but Sebastian's hands on his skin and his hot lips sliding against John made his heart speed up, and before long he was kissing him back. After a minute, he pulled back and rested his forehead against Sebastian's shoulder. "What do we do?" he asked hopelessly. If Sherlock found out, he would be furious and betrayed, and John wouldn't blame him. If Jim found out, both Sherlock and John would probably die. Either option meant he would lose Sherlock, and he couldn't do that. If this were to continue, they would have to be extremely careful.
"We'll keep it a secret. We'll meet at places like this, and we'll cover our tracks. They'll never know..."
"How? Sherlock will be suspicious if I never bring you home. He'll follow me. And won't Moriarty wonder where you keep disappearing off to?"
Sebastian fell silent. "Well, I can't deal with not seeing you again, so you come up with something," he growled.
John sighed and pulled back, pressing his palms to his eyes. He wished he was Sherlock. Sherlock would have a plan for this sort of thing. There was probably some sort of glaring, obvious answer that he was missing. Some simple piece to the puzzle. He bit his bottom lip and looked up. "What if I did take you home? You could...disguise yourself sort of—not necessarily your appearance, but what you wear, clean up...Sherlock—I don't know how the hell he does it, but somehow he would be able to figure out who you were in a flash. What if you, I don't know, plant false evidence about who you are? Disguise who you are? He's never seen you before, so he wouldn't recognize your face, and that would at least make him less...I dunno...snoopy and curious about who you are. We could make you a false identity...?" John looked up at him grimacing a bit, unsure if the idea was as crap as it sounded.
Sebastian looked at him doubtfully for a moment. "You'd bring me home as what? Your boyfriend?"
"Well…yeah. That would be the most plausible," John said nervously.
Sebastian slowly nodded, a trace of smile appearing on his lips. "That could work." He didn't like the prospect of coming face to face with his enemy, having those cold gray eyes scrutinizing him, but John was right—if Sherlock was anything like Moriarty, he'd see right through it if John kept coming home and lying. "Okay. I guess I should be something I know about—what about a gun maker? Or a shooting range manager? Someone who works with guns...but more respectable. More law-abiding." He smiled down at John. "Far more dull..."
John gave a little laugh. "Yeah, all right. Boring shooting range manager..." he leaned up to give him a small kiss. "So...so what about Jim and me? I mean...do you ever bring people home? Or...or would that be weird?"
"Jim knows who you are. If you came home, he'd either kill you on the spot or keep you and torture you whenever he got bored, or use you as bait for Sherlock yet again."
"But…pretend it's not me—do you ever bring people home? Would it be weird if you said you were seeing someone but then didn't take them home every once in a while?'
"I never bring people home," Sebastian said. "And I don't date. I go out, and I fuck people, but never twice." He realized that wasn't true anymore. "Until recently," he muttered.
John pursed his lips and cleared his throat. "Right. So it won't really be all that suspicious if you're out some nights with me. Jim will just assume it's someone else every time...right?"
"Yeah, probably," Sebastian said. "You might have to switch up your deodorant from time to time, so that I don't smell like the same person every night. He notices little things like that."
"Um okay. Right, I can do that. Switch up my deodorant. Anything else?" he asked.
"I'm going to change your name in my phone to 'Harry Waits.' And when you text me, make sure you sound more...scuzzy and less like a good doctor. If that makes sense."
John chuckled a bit and nodded. "Chaz McDonald?"
"Ooh, awful. perfect."
John grinned. "Can you come by tomorrow?"
Sebastian agreed, and the next afternoon he cleaned himself up, donned some slacks and a long-sleeved button-down shirt to hide what scars he could, then came to meet John at Baker Street.
John was nervous as he sat in the living room of 221B. His fingers tapped constantly at the armrest of his chair. Sherlock, luckily, was too distracted at his microscope to notice. When the buzzer sounded, John practically jumped out of his chair and took the stairs down two at a time to answer it.
He opened the door and looked Sebastian over, pulling him inside to kiss him. "You look nice...different, but nice."
"Cheers," Sebastian said, biting John's ear playfully. "Let's get this over with." He wasn't looking forward to meeting Sherlock Holmes in person at all, but he followed John upstairs and into the flat. The place was untidy and chaotic. There were bullet holes in the wall, a knife holding a stack of correspondences on the mantel, headphones on a cow skull—and there was the detective himself, absorbed in his microscope. He was pale like Jim but the physical similarities there ended. Where Jim's power lay in his unassuming face, Sherlock's face was striking to the point of being intimidating, as was his tall, lanky physique. He waited nervously for John to introduce him.
"Sherlock?" he asked, to get the man's attention. "This is Sebastian...my boyfriend..." John hadn't had any boyfriends before and he idly wondered if Sherlock would remark on it, or even notice he was talking for that matter.
"Hmm?" Sherlock looked up from the microscope and gave Sebastian a cursory glance. "A military man—sensible choice. I didn't think you would date a smoker, John." He turned his attention back to the microscope.
Sebastian was relieved, but puzzled by Sherlock had known all that. "How'd he know that stuff?" he muttered to John.
Sherlock smiled to himself at the comment and stood up, circling him and staring down at him with calculating eyes.
"Sherlock, can we not?" John muttered, annoyed. Ever the show-off.
Sherlock didn't waver from his circling and rattled off in a monotone voice, "It's evident that you're a military man, or were, by your stance and the state of your shoes. Your yellow nail beds are dead giveaways that you smoke, as is the aroma of tobacco you brought into the flat." Sebastian stood stiffly, staring straight ahead. He was disliking Sherlock Holmes more and more. Sherlock paused to breathe in heavily, then continued, crossing behind him. "And you still work with guns on a daily basis, going by your thumbs and the mark near your eye suggests you regularly use sniper rifles with a telescope attachment." He frowned, stopping in front of him.
Now the man was staring directly at Sebastian with those strange, catlike eyes of his. He thought he was going to say more, but he merely flicked his eyes to John and returned to his microscope. "I hope this means you won't be masturbating so often anymore, John," he said mildly.
John's face flushed bright red as Sebastian smirked. "Um...right. Heh...he didn't mean that," John muttered, "We'll be upstairs." He grabbed Sebastian before Sherlock could say anything else and towed the man upstairs to his room, where he sunk down onto the bed in relief. "God, that was nerve wrecking."
"Well, he bought it," Sebastian sighed. "He's uh...don't be offended when I say I can see why not everyone likes him. He's a bit..." He didn't want to call Sherlock an asshole, but that name and lots of other colorful ones were dancing through his head.
"He can be a right asshole," John said baldly. "But he's the best friend I've ever known, and one of the best men in general. He's just not the most…socially adept."
"You called me your boyfriend back there," Sebastian noted as he held John's hips.
"I did." John smiled to himself, then frowned up at Sebastian. "That's okay, right? I just assumed it would be better...for...you know..."
"Yeah, it's fine, it's just...not a title that's usually attached to me. 'Boyfriend'...sounds so...cutesy." Sebastian grimaced, then leaned down and kissed John. "I'm not going to bother with hearts and roses, John, so if that's what you're looking for, better get off. But I like you."
"I was never a big fan of roses," John murmured as he leaned up to the kiss. His hands slid up to Sebastian's shoulders, and he began to slowly pull him backwards to the bed. "Mm….how's the gun range managing business, honey?" he asked, nipping at his jaw.
"Work's murder, darling," Sebastian murmured, tilting his head back and running his hands down John's arms as the back of John's legs hit the edge of the bed.
"I wish there was some way you could relax...relieve a bit of stress," he breathed, moving his head to the other side of Sebastian's jaw, peppering light kisses along it.
"You think that's a good idea while your friend is downstairs? He'll hear us," Sebastian murmured, beginning to bite up the side of John's ear, splaying a hand over the small of John's back and pulling him close.
"I don't think he'll notice...I've been talking to him all afternoon and he hasn't even looked up except for when you came in. I've no doubt he's back, caught up in his work," John said, moving his lips back to Sebastian's.
"In that case, honey..." Sebastian shoved him backwards onto the bed, then kicked off his shoes. "What did you have in mind that would relieve this stress of mine?"