[fic] Happy Valentine's Day! I brought you some fluff!
Which I am after all capable of writing. Hah!
Title: we are salmon in the stream after years at sea
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Words: 5,770
Warnings: None it is quite clearly curtainfic.
Disclaimer: Entirely the property and business of the BBC and the estate of ACD, I am sure.
Notes: Your mom’s a note.
“The one who buggers a fire burns his penis,” Sherlock said without looking up from his laptop. He wasn’t doing anything especially inspiring with it, just poking listlessly at what John suspected was his under-visited website, hunched up in the peculiar gargoyle-like pose he liked to employ instead of sitting like a normal and well-balanced human being.
John felt his habitual look of confusion wander across his face and get stuck behind his eyebrows. “…Are you trying to tell me something?”
It was, even as Sherlock’s gnomic utterances went, quite inexplicable.
“The graffiti,” Sherlock said irritably, although John knew him well enough now to recognise the smugness and the slight soupcon of showing off in his voice, along with the irritation. “It’s Latin. It says the one who buggers a fire burns his penis. Or sodomises. The translation would be accurate either way.”
“What,” John asked, staring into the abyss that was Sherlock’s attention directed elsewhere, “are you talking about?”
“The postcard from Harry,” Sherlock said in a very bored voice, still prodding the keys on his laptop as if they’d personally offended him, “which you have in your coat pocket. She’s in Rome. She sent it on Wednesday. Sober, surprisingly. She’s been getting friendly with someone else who is there on holiday, possibly also English, but they haven’t slept together yet.”
John put his hand reflexively on his coat pocket, where Harry’s as-yet unread postcard sat. “Alright, how? I’ve only just picked it up, and unless you’ve suddenly developed X-ray vision there’s no way -“
Sherlock finally looked up from the laptop, for the sole purpose of giving John a rather pitying look. “It’s been downstairs on the doormat all day,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you bring it up here?”
“Not mine,” Sherlock said, returning to jabbing at the keyboard with apathetic fingers.
John said, “I don’t suppose you got any more milk in the ten hours I’ve been gone?”
Sherlock looked up again, temporarily non-plussed. “Wha-… oh. No.”
He might possibly have remonstrated with Sherlock about the milk, but truthfully he’d expected this to happen, although not sufficiently to stop at the shops on his way back and buy some himself. Sherlock was exceptional at remembering bizarre things like which shop Lestrade bought his socks from (well enough to deduce that someone else had started buying them, and speculate over the possibility that he’d managed to patch things up sufficiently with his wife), but rather less brilliant at remembering that people who weren’t Sherlock and therefore didn’t sustain themselves entirely on cocaine, nicotine patches, bloody-mindedness and a breath-takingly petty desire to annoy their siblings required calories occasionally. And food storage areas that weren’t prone to suddenly acquiring decomposing human ears.
The other reason he didn’t say something rude about Sherlock’s inability to disengage his arse from the flat for long enough to get milk, bread, eggs, and bleach despite John having more or less attached the shopping list to his face before leaving that morning was that one of the dizzy spells came over him and knocked him onto the sofa as if someone had taken a cricket bat to his head.
They only really hit him when he got back from work, and John attributed them with the lazy imprecision that made him such a wild hit as a locum GP to the working hours and his erratic food intake. At worst, he supposed, they had a gas leak somewhere in the flat that … never affected Sherlock or Mrs Hudson (the one time he’d asked Mrs Hudson she’d thought he was hinting about a dreadful smell and had become quite upset). There wasn’t much chance that there was something wrong, especially, and there was no point in mentioning it to Sherlock; Sherlock despised problems that weren’t readily solvable with external evidence and wasn’t interested in medical conditions that were neither fatal nor attached to someone who had committed at least a 6.
John cupped his forehead in his hands and as he waited for the room to stop spinning he heard Sherlock say, “You’ll be pleased to hear that the Tesco delivery is going to be here in an hour.”
“What Tesco-“ John began, trying to raise his head, but the low blood sugar or sleep deprivation (although he slept like a log these days, so it couldn’t be that; just force of habit to include it on the list) or gas leak or brain cancer or whatever it was had other ideas and left him drooped woozily over his own knees.
“You wanted milk,” Sherlock said.
John agreed with this in theory, but he also knew that unless he wanted to break up a fight between an aggrieved delivery man and a perplexed Sherlock, he was going to have to get the delivery anyway - it was hardly fair on Mrs Hudson to ask her to bring it up - and the problem there was that he was sure he was going to fall asleep.
"If I go to bed," John said into his palms, without a great deal of hope, "will you collect the shopping without insulting the delivery man this time?"
"I didn't insult the last one," Sherlock objected, and John could hear him tapping idly at the laptop as if he was trying to get a tune from it. He was probably bored. If he was thinking he wouldn't be answering, and the violin would be out. The laptop only got this much attention when Sherlock was somewhere between bored and bored enough to start shooting things. "I only pointed out that he was wise in combining trip purposes and using the Tesco lorry to transport his own little side business of cheap ketamine."
"Yes well," John said, trying to stand up and only succeeding in sinking further into the sofa, "just take the shopping, say thank you, and come back up here without telling him anything else."
"Why are you going to bed anyway?" Sherlock asked, although from the tone - or lack of it - of his voice, you'd never have guessed it was a question. "It's not dark yet."
"Because I'm tired," John said impatiently, finally getting to his feet - the flat dipped and spun, even when he closed his eyes, and the air against his face felt greasy and hot - "and I've got a headache."
The headache was a lie, but he'd never been very comfortable with the idea of unexplained giddiness. He'd checked his own blood pressure recently, and nothing there was out of the ordinary; better to call it a headache than imply he was some sort of Victorian heroine prone to swooning at nothing.
He nearly tripped over air getting to bed, but at least still had the presence of mind and hand-eye coordination to take off his clothes before getting under the covers. Unlike Sherlock, who, on the rare occasions that he actually slept ("Sleep is dull and wastes valuable time.") did so fully-clothed, face-down, and often quite abruptly.
John found that despite his wooziness, getting to sleep was surprisingly hard, and for a moment only lay on his back blinking blearily at a continually-swaying ceiling. It occurred to him that, pride be damned, he might want to consult one of his colleagues about these spells.
It then occurred to him that this would involve answering a lot of questions about his private life, and he decided that he'd just sleep it off instead.
John wasn't sure what woke him. On Baker Street it could have been any one of a number of things; the traffic, sirens, drunk idiots spilling out of late-opening pubs, violent domestics taking place in the street... but then again all of these things were so commonplace as to not disturb his sleep. After all, he was used to sleeping through far worse sounds.
He lay with his eyes shut for a moment, trying to recapture the last vestiges of a dream, until he recalled that the dream had included gunfire and decided that he didn't want to remember it after all. John pried open a sleep-sticky eyelid.
There was nothing any different about his room, save for the fact it was the middle of the night and orange streetlight came in a gloomy stripe through the gap in his curtains, illuminating the thin fabric like some sodium-based sun.
He had, however, a dull stinging sensation on his chest, and John hoped as he shoved the duvet back from his body that it wasn't another trapped horsefly. There were few things quite so irritating as a horsefly bite: just painful enough to be impossible to ignore, but not quite painful enough to be worth making a fuss about.
The stinging point on his chest - which stung far less now the duvet wasn't touching it - was not a fly bite but rather something much less pleasant. John strained his neck trying to look at it, and eventually gave up and got out of bed.
In the mirror, even in the low orange light of a London night (at Baker Street there were rarely any stars, but in London it almost never really got dark), the mark was visible. John pulled at the skin around it, making sure not to touch the thing directly and very much aware that his hands were unwashed and ungloved.
It looked a little like a burn after the blister had been prematurely removed. John wondered if he'd somehow burned himself on something or if ... the alternative suggested that Sherlock had come in and stood over him with a lit cigarette for reasons best known to himself, which was so mind-bendingly odd even for Sherlock that he rejected it out of hand.
John squinted at his reflection. He looked pale, which was becoming normal, and he looked tired, which had always been normal, and he looked prematurely aged, which Harry had informed him was normal too.
The mark on his chest where several layers of skin had come away and exposed his flesh to the air was little bigger than a fifty pence piece, but it was certainly too big to be a cigarette burn anyway. John stared at its reflection, shadowed by the curtains and the angle of his body: it didn't look like impetigo, and the location - and the fact that he was almost never still for long enough - ruled out bedsores somewhat.
Well, whatever it was, he'd take a proper look at it in the morning, and if necessary get someone else to look at it too rather than just demanding they write him a prescription for some penicillin.
He stumbled back to bed, taking care to lie on his back, and drew the duvet up to his navel. In the morning. It wasn't as if he wasn't going to forget a sodding great sore on his sternum.
Three days later, John was on the Saturday morning shift, covering for someone whose name he hadn't actually caught, who was covering for the person who was supposed to be covering for him. The intricate (and impenetrable) complexities of being an NHS locum, which invariably led to spending more time trying to determine how many hours he was supposed to bill for than actual hours spent, were at the forefront of his mind when someone - possibly-Dawn - pressed a mug of coffee into his hands.
She drew back, squinting at his wrist. "What's up there, then?"
"Mm?" John said, interrupted half-way through a heartfelt if distant thank you for the caffeine.
“On your wrist,” Dawn said, pointing hesitantly. “Might want to loosen your watch a bit, it looks … really uncomfortable.” She frowned, one of the special frowns-of-concern John found he elicited from women with worrying frequency.
"What?" John put the coffee down reluctantly, and rolled down his shirt sleeve. It was the opposite side to the arm that bore the watch: John realised that not everyone was quite as terrifyingly observant as Sherlock, but occasionally he forgot and was surprised when they missed little things like that.
There was, nestling just behind the bony inner knob on his wrist, what looked like an unhealed wound. Though he couldn't remember catching his wrist on something, it looked a great deal like he'd injured himself and then knocked the scab off some time later. The dent was yellow-red, but there was no inflammation.
"Yuck," Dawn said. "Do you want me to get you a plaster?"
John refrained from pointing out that he was a) a doctor and b) sitting in a doctor's office in a doctor's surgery, and that what with one thing and another, he was probably alright to find his own plaster, antiseptic swabs, needles, and if entirely necessary his own spare stash of codeine. He only smiled a wan and exhausted smile and told Dawn he was fine, and thanked her for the tea.
Once she'd gone he opened the topmost drawer in the borrowed desk, but only found a scientific calculator and two leaflets about what to do with a needle-stick injury.
John opened the opposite top drawer and found a proliferation of doodled-on prescription pads - whomever he was covering for (and he remained hazy on that front) was a fan of horses - several biros, and an inexplicable box of staples.
He sat back and pulled his cuff back down over his wrist. There was a lot of paperwork to be waded through, and a cup of coffee in front of him. He'd deal with it later.
John's next dizzy spell came to him when he was undressing for a shower. He'd just opened his shirt with the intention of removing it, caught sight of his unrelentingly haggard face in the mirror and made a mental note to eat something containing a vegetable this week, when the floor dipped.
He had sufficient presence of mind to stagger backward and flop down onto the toilet seat, still clothed, although he nearly missed it entirely. John grabbed at the toilet roll holder (the toilet roll of course sitting on the floor by his feet, because Sherlock always manifestly failed to actually put the thing on the central holder even though it took at most thirty seconds to do); he saved himself from an ignominious descent into the toilet itself, and slumped against the wall in defeat.
"For fuck's sake," John muttered, his forehead against the tiles. He exhaled slowly, and with the same brand of stubbornness that had seen him trudge through some truly unpleasant situations without pause, he began shrugging off his shirt anyway. He would just have to sit in the shower.
He was distracted three times: once by a ten pence piece-sized sore on his wrist which he had a vague recollection of intending to do something about; once by a worryingly large sore on his chest which he was quite sure he couldn't have seen before or he'd have been worried about it still; and once by an alarming area of his tricep which was roughly half the size of the average postcard and which seemed to be missing all of its skin.
"This isn't normal," John muttered, resting his spinning head against the wall and trying to squint at his own arm.
"John," Sherlock said, outside the bathroom door, "if you're not using the shower get out of there."
"I'm having a shit," John shouted.
"Hurry up," Sherlock instructed.
"Can't hurry nature."
"On the contrary --"
"If you even think about feeding me laxatives," John said, inspecting the stripped area of his triceps with eyes that refused to stay in focus; was it necrosis? Necrotising fasciitis? It bore none of the symptoms, none of the smell... "I will make sure you have to sit around for the results."
He released his arm and, after two or three attempts, got up and went to the medicine cabinet. Being a medicine cabinet shared between a drug addict and a doctor, it was fairly well-stocked in an esoteric variety of pharmaceuticals, cocaine capsules labelled "no", and more pairs of surgical scissors than John felt a domestic bathroom strictly needed. He couldn't find any Savlon, and couldn't really remember - his current state not allowing admittedly for the most thorough ransacking of either the cabinet or his memory - when he'd last seen any.
"John," Sherlock repeated from outside, "hurry up."
"Yes, all right," John grumbled, closing the bathroom cabinet and yanking open the door instead with so much force that he nearly over-balanced.
Sherlock, wrapped in his silk dressing gown and sense of self-importance (most probably), regarded John with narrowed eyes and said, "You need to eat more."
"Oh that's fine, coming from you," John muttered, wobbling past him in the narrow confines of the doorway. Sherlock's eyes raked over him like searchlights, returning to his face with a look of suspicion.
"Digestion distracts me," Sherlock said dismissively, "You need food."
"Did you want the bathroom for something specific or do you just have some sort of problem with me being in here with your drugs?" John asked in what would have been scathing tones if he hadn't been concentrating on remaining upright and not slumping down the wall.
Sherlock ignored him, and tramped into the bathroom carrying what was unmistakably, even with the giddy loss of focus and the sudden, pressing lethargy, a goldfish in a plastic bag.
John shook his head, which turned out to be a bad idea, and stumbled away to his bedroom.
The night in Marylebone was dirty brown and filled with the sounds of a half-asleep city when John woke into the middle of it. Cars crawled grumbling towards the flyover; someone further down Baker Street called someone else a slag; carrying with unusual tenacity through the foggy blanket of the night, foxes bickering in Regents Park drifted in through the cracked-open window as if they were standing on the window ledge for their fight.
John woke from a dream of cordite smells and tensed muscles to find himself as relaxed as he had ever been, his body wilting like an under-watered plant. He was in a bizarre position, one arm raised above his head, exposing his armpit to the world, and he lay on his back.
He was sure he could hear a low, constant hum close by, and he opened his eyes slowly to the stillness of his bedroom.
This time, Sherlock's hair hung about eight inches above his eyes, his head bent, and his hands out of John's sight - though the angle of his elbows left them likely to be in a position John didn't think was very platonic.
Had he considered this as a possibility John would probably have imagined himself shouting something witty like, "Oi, get off!", maybe shoving Sherlock off him or maybe hitting him and telling him to keep his hands to himself. If he'd imagined with a little more honesty he might even have thought he would exchanges some sort of look of forgiveness and some saliva.
What he did was to lie as still as if he'd been frozen in place, and watch with a bleary detachment as Sherlock's hair moved out of the way.
Sherlock's left hand pulled away from his lower abdomen, and John saw in the low light the circle of tiny claws lifting up a chunk of what appeared to be skin. Sherlock changed the angle of his palm, and John watched him run his hand very gently over the spot he had just touched.
From where John was lying, oddly calm in the gloomy bedroom, it looked as if thousands of tiny cilia - like the lining of a gut wall - were brushing over the fresh wound.
Oh, thought John with a kind of relief, I'm still dreaming. This is weird.
But he thought the words this is weird without an accompanying sense of disturbance. Everything seemed to be very far away, as if he was watching the scene unfolding on a cinema screen without the infuriating distraction of other cinema-goers.
Apparently satisfied with his work on John's abdomen, Sherlock placed the palm of his hand over John's chest - where a chunk of skin already seemed to be missing - and once more the cilia began to move.
This was how John knew for sure he was dreaming: the sensation of those impossible cilia brushing in waves across the face of an open wound, an open sore, should have reduced him to paroxysms of poorly-suppressed sweating pain. Instead he felt a not entirely horrid tickling sensation and a far-off feeling of childhood and protection, the idea that everything was going to be alright. It was something he hadn't really experienced since he was small, and the comfort of it wrapped around his mind like a warm towel.
Sherlock moved his hand to the underside of John's arm.
Huh, John thought, in the process of drifting back to sleep, funny that I slept like this.
He watched Sherlock's strange, furred-looking palm tend to the wide and skinless dip in his triceps until his eyelids began to droop once more.
"Are you alright, dear?" Mrs Hudson asked, passing John a packet of Nice biscuits with a kind of surreptitious wink that wouldn't have snuck past a three year old unnoticed. "You look awfully pale."
"Work," John said, opening the packet almost immediately. "Do you mind if I --?"
"Not at all, that's what they're for," Mrs Hudson said cheerfully, sitting back in the opposite chair with an expression of what John recognised with impatience as 'concern'. "You should really work less hours, you know."
"Fewer," Sherlock snapped from the living room.
"What?" Mrs Hudson frowned.
"Fewer hours, Mrs Hudson, not 'less'."
Mrs Hudson sighed the long-suffering sigh of almost anyone who had to interact with Sherlock's endless corrective interjections, and reached forwards to pat John on the back of the hand that wasn't stuffing a biscuit into his mouth.
"Still, I suppose the extra money'll come in handy for that holiday," Mrs Hudson said reassuringly, withdrawing her hand again. "You can get some colour back in your cheeks."
John stopped with a second biscuit close to his lips, and frowned. "What holiday?"
"I thought you were going to see your sister?" Mrs Hudson said, now also looking somewhat confused. "You said it'd do you good. This morning! I ran into you outside before you went to work, you asked me about the bins, remember?"
"Oh, no," John said, trying to recall and coming up against a foggy labyrinth that informed him he'd spent so long trying to calculate which pay scale he was supposed to be billing from that his brain had capsized with the loss of all on board for the day, "I can't go on holiday at the moment." He put the biscuit back down. The back of his hand was itching. "I've got a lot of work on."
"Oh, that's a shame," Mrs Hudson said sympathetically. "If you don't mind me saying, John, you look like you could use a holiday, you're getting awfully frayed around the edges."
"So are you," Sherlock snapped from the living room.
"Sherlock," John sighed.
"It's this moisturiser," Mrs Hudson confided without much apparent offense. "It says it'll take ten years off but it's not doing anything except make my eyebrows curl, would you believe."
"Of course it's not doing anything," Sherlock muttered, "they don't work."
"Sherlock," John repeated, scratching the back of his hand. "Enough."
"Well," said Mrs Hudson, getting up, "I've got the builder coming round in about half an hour to look at the leak in the attic." She stared at Sherlock as she passed through the living room. "Try not to upset this one, could you? I'd like the roof fixed."
As she went slowly down the stairs (favouring, John thought with a certain smugness at having worked it out, her right side), John reached for the biscuits again. Nice biscuits were no one's favourite, but he'd evidently forgotten to eat very much today, and his stomach was growling.
John gave a small start. Something in the back of his hand was moving.
For a moment he almost laughed at himself: of course something moved in his hand when he reached for something and shifted his fingers, they were called tendons - was he a doctor or not?
Then the squirming shape under his skin resurfaced crossways to the lie of his tendons, and John laid his hand very, very carefully on the table.
He was tired. He was overtired. Even Mrs Hudson had remarked on how tired he looked. It was all this work, all these mornings. He should probably be working fewer hours. Or sleeping more.
People hallucinated all the time when they were tired. He'd seen bugs crawling around at the corners of his vision plenty of times when he was studying for his exams. No sleep for a couple of days would do that to a man. He was just tired.
And his hand was itching because Mrs Hudson was addicted to hand creams and something in this one was probably an allergen.
John picked up another biscuit and carefully neglected to think that the hand she'd touched was not the one which was itching.
"Go home and get some rest," Dr Tailor said the moment John walked into the surgery. "You look like death."
"I thought he was supposed to have a skull instead of a head?" John said with what he thought was a joking smile but which must have come off wrong as Dr Tailor just shook her head and folded her arms.
"Have you looked in the mirror recently?" she asked. "In the right light Hamlet could use you for a soliloquy." She squinted at his neck so intently that John felt compelled to lean back from her, and she made an exasperated noise. "Dr Watson, you have a lesion on your neck. For god's sake at least put a dressing on it! You'll make the patients nervous, they'll be off filling out complaints forms before you can say 'infectious welts'."
John touched the spot she was staring at, and saw her flinch.
"Please," Dr Tailor sighed, "Get yourself a course of Aztreonam or something, put a dressing on that before it starts weeping onto your shirt collar, and don't come back in until you stop looking like you have advanced syphilis."
"Oh come on, syphilitic sores look nothing like this-"
"The patients don't know that," Dr Tailor said firmly, still peering at his neck in what John recognised as professional judgement rather than layperson's horror. "Go home. And try eating something that contains a vitamin at some point, you look appalling."
That evening John found himself in bed before it got dark, once again. Dr Tailor was probably right, he probably needed to rest. He didn't feel especially bad, just tired, and mildly disquieted by the way people of his acquaintance (except, of course, for Sherlock) were starting to stare at him.
It was a very particular combination of concern, pity, and disgust, and it made him ever so slightly resentful.
Dr Tailor had said something else, John thought, sitting down on the bed to remove his socks as the late afternoon light warmed his back and made him conscious of how absurd it was to be getting ready for sleep. Doctors didn't just get sent home for looking drained and overworked or there'd be no one on hospital wards.
He couldn't quite bring to mind what it was.
John undid his trousers - they were sitting a little less snugly than they had been - and unrolled them to the floor. Habitually he'd have folded them over the back of the chair, army neatness drilled into him by rote and piled on top of medical training, but he was distracted by his thighs.
There was a mark, a depression in his thigh where the skin had been pulled away. The edges of the abrasion - it went several layers deep - were very lightly crusted with something which might or might not have been pus but certainly wasn't blood. John leaned closer to it, wondering how he'd managed to miss such an angry-looking infraction; it was about the size of a 2p coin and the surface of the skinless area glistened as if it had been freshly-made.
"Better put a dressing on that," John mumbled, pulling his feet out of his trousers. Despite the movement of this thigh muscles and the apparent wetness of the sore, nothing trickled out.
As he leaned down to unhook the waistband of his trousers from his heel, John spotted movement in his flesh. It wasn't the flexing of thigh muscles, but rather a squirming movement under the uppermost layers of skin, similar to the bulge of a needle entering a vein but more sinuous.
"No," John said, and covered his face with his hands. "I am going to sleep. Come on. This is ridiculous."
He peered between his fingers at his leg, drawn back to the hole in his thigh, and the sight of something squirming beneath his skin quite close to it squeezed his eyes shut again.
"Okay, no," John said, flopping backwards onto the bed with his underwear and shirt still on. "No, no."
After a while of lying on his back with his hands over his face, muttering "no" to himself, John began to feel somewhat silly, and extremely drowsy. He drew his feet up onto the bed, and without bothering to remove any more clothes, shut the curtains, or pull the duvet over himself, John rolled into a ball and went to sleep as if a switch had been flipped in his mind.
He had a vague sensation of something tugging him, some undefined period of time later, but it was not uncomfortable enough to wake him.
Sometime after that, his dreams changed from fragmented memories of Afghanistan, from the lapping of chlorinated water on tiled walls and the weight of a bomb on his chest, to a different weight. Something was crushing down on him; he was being buried under a heavy animal, under very fat woman.
What woke him, in the end, was a sharp piercing pain across his chest, from armpit to armpit, in several lines as if a three or four bar heater had been pushed against his torso. Instead of burning, it jabbed, and a moment later - when his eyes flung open and his mind tried to lever itself from the cloying fug of dreams - the pain was gone entirely.
John tried to focus in the darkness, but the crushing sensation had followed him out of his dreams. Hypnogogia, he told himself with weak determination. The Night Hag.
Something wet, warm, and slow trickled down from his chest and over his ribs. He was having difficulty expanding his ribcage enough to draw the laboured breaths his body seemed to feel he needed.
John looked up into black and depthless eyes that held no iris, no white, and apparently no end.
"It'll be over soon," Sherlock said, with the same impatient not-quite-reassurance as ever.
He lay full-length along John's body - quite when John had been undressed he wasn't sure - naked as a new-born baby and heavier than he looked. Like this, John could see the tiny waving cilia on his face, on his shoulders; he could feel them moving gently against his leg, against his arm as Sherlock pinned him amiably to the mattress.
John strained his neck, trying to see what, precisely was running down the sides of his rib cage. He had an inkling it might be blood.
"What will?" he muttered, thick-tongued and feeling more stupid - contentedly stupid - than anything Sherlock had ever said before had left him.
"Another week and you'll fruit," Sherlock said with irritated impatience in his voice. He sounded no different to countless times he'd told John to "Think, John" while pacing excitedly around a crime scene, and John had tried valiantly to stop him from upsetting the police even farther than before.
"Fruit?"
"The incubation process will be over," Sherlock said, as if he wasn't lying naked on top of John with jagged manibles visible every time he opened his mouth to speak, and John felt the vast flat claws in his stomach slowly withdraw. "Go back to sleep."
But, John protested, inside his own head, I'm really not enjoying this.
As he drifted out of consciousness again, he felt the blood on his ribcage begin to cool in the night air.
"Where did John get to?" Mrs Hudson asked, peering around the living room as if she expected him to pop out from behind the door. "He said he'd take a look at my shoulder, it's been an absolute nuisance all week."
"Still on holiday, Mrs Hudson," Sherlock said, hunched over his microscope in the kitchen, his hair a wild thicket anchored to his head, and his shirt open to the elbows. The kitchen table looked as if several experiments had piled up against each other and were starting to thrust tendrils into each other's outcomes.
"Well I hope he's having a good time," Mrs Hudson sighed. "The Italian post service is terrible, isn't it? No postcards or anything."
"Mm," Sherlock said with the annoyed harmonics of a man who wants to be let out of a conversation he didn't ask to be dragged into. "Oh, I'll probably be joining him there soon."
"Will you? Oh, that's nice. Bring me back some Grappè." Mrs Hudson wrinkled her nose and, failing to achieve the desired effect, pulled her hanky over her nose and mouth with a grimace of disgust. "That smell still hasn't gone."
"That's why I'm going on holiday," Sherlock agreed, not looking up.
In John Watson's bedroom, the crust of blue-green fungi advanced across the bed like a slow tide, spreading towards the edges of the mattress. A foot, discoloured to purple and grey, lay propped at the outskirts of what was becoming soup; at the opposite end of the bed, in the tangle of bone-white tendrils that had woven together in a lacy lattice of fibres like the inside of a bird's bone, John's skull sat. An eye drooped, blackened and swollen, from its orbit, and a trail of dark spores in their gelatinous protective casing trekked down the remainder of his cheek muscle like a parody of a tear.
"Very good idea, Sherlock." Mrs Hudson's voice was muffled by her handkerchief. "I hope he's enjoying his holiday," she repeated. "He looked so tired."
This is what happens when people fixate on a particular and inappropriate adjective when talking about the shit I write.
PS: I apologise for any medically improbable terms, I didn’t have the chance to run this by either of my doctor-betas.
Title: we are salmon in the stream after years at sea
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Words: 5,770
Warnings: None it is quite clearly curtainfic.
Disclaimer: Entirely the property and business of the BBC and the estate of ACD, I am sure.
Notes: Your mom’s a note.
“The one who buggers a fire burns his penis,” Sherlock said without looking up from his laptop. He wasn’t doing anything especially inspiring with it, just poking listlessly at what John suspected was his under-visited website, hunched up in the peculiar gargoyle-like pose he liked to employ instead of sitting like a normal and well-balanced human being.
John felt his habitual look of confusion wander across his face and get stuck behind his eyebrows. “…Are you trying to tell me something?”
It was, even as Sherlock’s gnomic utterances went, quite inexplicable.
“The graffiti,” Sherlock said irritably, although John knew him well enough now to recognise the smugness and the slight soupcon of showing off in his voice, along with the irritation. “It’s Latin. It says the one who buggers a fire burns his penis. Or sodomises. The translation would be accurate either way.”
“What,” John asked, staring into the abyss that was Sherlock’s attention directed elsewhere, “are you talking about?”
“The postcard from Harry,” Sherlock said in a very bored voice, still prodding the keys on his laptop as if they’d personally offended him, “which you have in your coat pocket. She’s in Rome. She sent it on Wednesday. Sober, surprisingly. She’s been getting friendly with someone else who is there on holiday, possibly also English, but they haven’t slept together yet.”
John put his hand reflexively on his coat pocket, where Harry’s as-yet unread postcard sat. “Alright, how? I’ve only just picked it up, and unless you’ve suddenly developed X-ray vision there’s no way -“
Sherlock finally looked up from the laptop, for the sole purpose of giving John a rather pitying look. “It’s been downstairs on the doormat all day,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you bring it up here?”
“Not mine,” Sherlock said, returning to jabbing at the keyboard with apathetic fingers.
John said, “I don’t suppose you got any more milk in the ten hours I’ve been gone?”
Sherlock looked up again, temporarily non-plussed. “Wha-… oh. No.”
He might possibly have remonstrated with Sherlock about the milk, but truthfully he’d expected this to happen, although not sufficiently to stop at the shops on his way back and buy some himself. Sherlock was exceptional at remembering bizarre things like which shop Lestrade bought his socks from (well enough to deduce that someone else had started buying them, and speculate over the possibility that he’d managed to patch things up sufficiently with his wife), but rather less brilliant at remembering that people who weren’t Sherlock and therefore didn’t sustain themselves entirely on cocaine, nicotine patches, bloody-mindedness and a breath-takingly petty desire to annoy their siblings required calories occasionally. And food storage areas that weren’t prone to suddenly acquiring decomposing human ears.
The other reason he didn’t say something rude about Sherlock’s inability to disengage his arse from the flat for long enough to get milk, bread, eggs, and bleach despite John having more or less attached the shopping list to his face before leaving that morning was that one of the dizzy spells came over him and knocked him onto the sofa as if someone had taken a cricket bat to his head.
They only really hit him when he got back from work, and John attributed them with the lazy imprecision that made him such a wild hit as a locum GP to the working hours and his erratic food intake. At worst, he supposed, they had a gas leak somewhere in the flat that … never affected Sherlock or Mrs Hudson (the one time he’d asked Mrs Hudson she’d thought he was hinting about a dreadful smell and had become quite upset). There wasn’t much chance that there was something wrong, especially, and there was no point in mentioning it to Sherlock; Sherlock despised problems that weren’t readily solvable with external evidence and wasn’t interested in medical conditions that were neither fatal nor attached to someone who had committed at least a 6.
John cupped his forehead in his hands and as he waited for the room to stop spinning he heard Sherlock say, “You’ll be pleased to hear that the Tesco delivery is going to be here in an hour.”
“What Tesco-“ John began, trying to raise his head, but the low blood sugar or sleep deprivation (although he slept like a log these days, so it couldn’t be that; just force of habit to include it on the list) or gas leak or brain cancer or whatever it was had other ideas and left him drooped woozily over his own knees.
“You wanted milk,” Sherlock said.
John agreed with this in theory, but he also knew that unless he wanted to break up a fight between an aggrieved delivery man and a perplexed Sherlock, he was going to have to get the delivery anyway - it was hardly fair on Mrs Hudson to ask her to bring it up - and the problem there was that he was sure he was going to fall asleep.
"If I go to bed," John said into his palms, without a great deal of hope, "will you collect the shopping without insulting the delivery man this time?"
"I didn't insult the last one," Sherlock objected, and John could hear him tapping idly at the laptop as if he was trying to get a tune from it. He was probably bored. If he was thinking he wouldn't be answering, and the violin would be out. The laptop only got this much attention when Sherlock was somewhere between bored and bored enough to start shooting things. "I only pointed out that he was wise in combining trip purposes and using the Tesco lorry to transport his own little side business of cheap ketamine."
"Yes well," John said, trying to stand up and only succeeding in sinking further into the sofa, "just take the shopping, say thank you, and come back up here without telling him anything else."
"Why are you going to bed anyway?" Sherlock asked, although from the tone - or lack of it - of his voice, you'd never have guessed it was a question. "It's not dark yet."
"Because I'm tired," John said impatiently, finally getting to his feet - the flat dipped and spun, even when he closed his eyes, and the air against his face felt greasy and hot - "and I've got a headache."
The headache was a lie, but he'd never been very comfortable with the idea of unexplained giddiness. He'd checked his own blood pressure recently, and nothing there was out of the ordinary; better to call it a headache than imply he was some sort of Victorian heroine prone to swooning at nothing.
He nearly tripped over air getting to bed, but at least still had the presence of mind and hand-eye coordination to take off his clothes before getting under the covers. Unlike Sherlock, who, on the rare occasions that he actually slept ("Sleep is dull and wastes valuable time.") did so fully-clothed, face-down, and often quite abruptly.
John found that despite his wooziness, getting to sleep was surprisingly hard, and for a moment only lay on his back blinking blearily at a continually-swaying ceiling. It occurred to him that, pride be damned, he might want to consult one of his colleagues about these spells.
It then occurred to him that this would involve answering a lot of questions about his private life, and he decided that he'd just sleep it off instead.
John wasn't sure what woke him. On Baker Street it could have been any one of a number of things; the traffic, sirens, drunk idiots spilling out of late-opening pubs, violent domestics taking place in the street... but then again all of these things were so commonplace as to not disturb his sleep. After all, he was used to sleeping through far worse sounds.
He lay with his eyes shut for a moment, trying to recapture the last vestiges of a dream, until he recalled that the dream had included gunfire and decided that he didn't want to remember it after all. John pried open a sleep-sticky eyelid.
There was nothing any different about his room, save for the fact it was the middle of the night and orange streetlight came in a gloomy stripe through the gap in his curtains, illuminating the thin fabric like some sodium-based sun.
He had, however, a dull stinging sensation on his chest, and John hoped as he shoved the duvet back from his body that it wasn't another trapped horsefly. There were few things quite so irritating as a horsefly bite: just painful enough to be impossible to ignore, but not quite painful enough to be worth making a fuss about.
The stinging point on his chest - which stung far less now the duvet wasn't touching it - was not a fly bite but rather something much less pleasant. John strained his neck trying to look at it, and eventually gave up and got out of bed.
In the mirror, even in the low orange light of a London night (at Baker Street there were rarely any stars, but in London it almost never really got dark), the mark was visible. John pulled at the skin around it, making sure not to touch the thing directly and very much aware that his hands were unwashed and ungloved.
It looked a little like a burn after the blister had been prematurely removed. John wondered if he'd somehow burned himself on something or if ... the alternative suggested that Sherlock had come in and stood over him with a lit cigarette for reasons best known to himself, which was so mind-bendingly odd even for Sherlock that he rejected it out of hand.
John squinted at his reflection. He looked pale, which was becoming normal, and he looked tired, which had always been normal, and he looked prematurely aged, which Harry had informed him was normal too.
The mark on his chest where several layers of skin had come away and exposed his flesh to the air was little bigger than a fifty pence piece, but it was certainly too big to be a cigarette burn anyway. John stared at its reflection, shadowed by the curtains and the angle of his body: it didn't look like impetigo, and the location - and the fact that he was almost never still for long enough - ruled out bedsores somewhat.
Well, whatever it was, he'd take a proper look at it in the morning, and if necessary get someone else to look at it too rather than just demanding they write him a prescription for some penicillin.
He stumbled back to bed, taking care to lie on his back, and drew the duvet up to his navel. In the morning. It wasn't as if he wasn't going to forget a sodding great sore on his sternum.
Three days later, John was on the Saturday morning shift, covering for someone whose name he hadn't actually caught, who was covering for the person who was supposed to be covering for him. The intricate (and impenetrable) complexities of being an NHS locum, which invariably led to spending more time trying to determine how many hours he was supposed to bill for than actual hours spent, were at the forefront of his mind when someone - possibly-Dawn - pressed a mug of coffee into his hands.
She drew back, squinting at his wrist. "What's up there, then?"
"Mm?" John said, interrupted half-way through a heartfelt if distant thank you for the caffeine.
“On your wrist,” Dawn said, pointing hesitantly. “Might want to loosen your watch a bit, it looks … really uncomfortable.” She frowned, one of the special frowns-of-concern John found he elicited from women with worrying frequency.
"What?" John put the coffee down reluctantly, and rolled down his shirt sleeve. It was the opposite side to the arm that bore the watch: John realised that not everyone was quite as terrifyingly observant as Sherlock, but occasionally he forgot and was surprised when they missed little things like that.
There was, nestling just behind the bony inner knob on his wrist, what looked like an unhealed wound. Though he couldn't remember catching his wrist on something, it looked a great deal like he'd injured himself and then knocked the scab off some time later. The dent was yellow-red, but there was no inflammation.
"Yuck," Dawn said. "Do you want me to get you a plaster?"
John refrained from pointing out that he was a) a doctor and b) sitting in a doctor's office in a doctor's surgery, and that what with one thing and another, he was probably alright to find his own plaster, antiseptic swabs, needles, and if entirely necessary his own spare stash of codeine. He only smiled a wan and exhausted smile and told Dawn he was fine, and thanked her for the tea.
Once she'd gone he opened the topmost drawer in the borrowed desk, but only found a scientific calculator and two leaflets about what to do with a needle-stick injury.
John opened the opposite top drawer and found a proliferation of doodled-on prescription pads - whomever he was covering for (and he remained hazy on that front) was a fan of horses - several biros, and an inexplicable box of staples.
He sat back and pulled his cuff back down over his wrist. There was a lot of paperwork to be waded through, and a cup of coffee in front of him. He'd deal with it later.
John's next dizzy spell came to him when he was undressing for a shower. He'd just opened his shirt with the intention of removing it, caught sight of his unrelentingly haggard face in the mirror and made a mental note to eat something containing a vegetable this week, when the floor dipped.
He had sufficient presence of mind to stagger backward and flop down onto the toilet seat, still clothed, although he nearly missed it entirely. John grabbed at the toilet roll holder (the toilet roll of course sitting on the floor by his feet, because Sherlock always manifestly failed to actually put the thing on the central holder even though it took at most thirty seconds to do); he saved himself from an ignominious descent into the toilet itself, and slumped against the wall in defeat.
"For fuck's sake," John muttered, his forehead against the tiles. He exhaled slowly, and with the same brand of stubbornness that had seen him trudge through some truly unpleasant situations without pause, he began shrugging off his shirt anyway. He would just have to sit in the shower.
He was distracted three times: once by a ten pence piece-sized sore on his wrist which he had a vague recollection of intending to do something about; once by a worryingly large sore on his chest which he was quite sure he couldn't have seen before or he'd have been worried about it still; and once by an alarming area of his tricep which was roughly half the size of the average postcard and which seemed to be missing all of its skin.
"This isn't normal," John muttered, resting his spinning head against the wall and trying to squint at his own arm.
"John," Sherlock said, outside the bathroom door, "if you're not using the shower get out of there."
"I'm having a shit," John shouted.
"Hurry up," Sherlock instructed.
"Can't hurry nature."
"On the contrary --"
"If you even think about feeding me laxatives," John said, inspecting the stripped area of his triceps with eyes that refused to stay in focus; was it necrosis? Necrotising fasciitis? It bore none of the symptoms, none of the smell... "I will make sure you have to sit around for the results."
He released his arm and, after two or three attempts, got up and went to the medicine cabinet. Being a medicine cabinet shared between a drug addict and a doctor, it was fairly well-stocked in an esoteric variety of pharmaceuticals, cocaine capsules labelled "no", and more pairs of surgical scissors than John felt a domestic bathroom strictly needed. He couldn't find any Savlon, and couldn't really remember - his current state not allowing admittedly for the most thorough ransacking of either the cabinet or his memory - when he'd last seen any.
"John," Sherlock repeated from outside, "hurry up."
"Yes, all right," John grumbled, closing the bathroom cabinet and yanking open the door instead with so much force that he nearly over-balanced.
Sherlock, wrapped in his silk dressing gown and sense of self-importance (most probably), regarded John with narrowed eyes and said, "You need to eat more."
"Oh that's fine, coming from you," John muttered, wobbling past him in the narrow confines of the doorway. Sherlock's eyes raked over him like searchlights, returning to his face with a look of suspicion.
"Digestion distracts me," Sherlock said dismissively, "You need food."
"Did you want the bathroom for something specific or do you just have some sort of problem with me being in here with your drugs?" John asked in what would have been scathing tones if he hadn't been concentrating on remaining upright and not slumping down the wall.
Sherlock ignored him, and tramped into the bathroom carrying what was unmistakably, even with the giddy loss of focus and the sudden, pressing lethargy, a goldfish in a plastic bag.
John shook his head, which turned out to be a bad idea, and stumbled away to his bedroom.
The night in Marylebone was dirty brown and filled with the sounds of a half-asleep city when John woke into the middle of it. Cars crawled grumbling towards the flyover; someone further down Baker Street called someone else a slag; carrying with unusual tenacity through the foggy blanket of the night, foxes bickering in Regents Park drifted in through the cracked-open window as if they were standing on the window ledge for their fight.
John woke from a dream of cordite smells and tensed muscles to find himself as relaxed as he had ever been, his body wilting like an under-watered plant. He was in a bizarre position, one arm raised above his head, exposing his armpit to the world, and he lay on his back.
He was sure he could hear a low, constant hum close by, and he opened his eyes slowly to the stillness of his bedroom.
This time, Sherlock's hair hung about eight inches above his eyes, his head bent, and his hands out of John's sight - though the angle of his elbows left them likely to be in a position John didn't think was very platonic.
Had he considered this as a possibility John would probably have imagined himself shouting something witty like, "Oi, get off!", maybe shoving Sherlock off him or maybe hitting him and telling him to keep his hands to himself. If he'd imagined with a little more honesty he might even have thought he would exchanges some sort of look of forgiveness and some saliva.
What he did was to lie as still as if he'd been frozen in place, and watch with a bleary detachment as Sherlock's hair moved out of the way.
Sherlock's left hand pulled away from his lower abdomen, and John saw in the low light the circle of tiny claws lifting up a chunk of what appeared to be skin. Sherlock changed the angle of his palm, and John watched him run his hand very gently over the spot he had just touched.
From where John was lying, oddly calm in the gloomy bedroom, it looked as if thousands of tiny cilia - like the lining of a gut wall - were brushing over the fresh wound.
Oh, thought John with a kind of relief, I'm still dreaming. This is weird.
But he thought the words this is weird without an accompanying sense of disturbance. Everything seemed to be very far away, as if he was watching the scene unfolding on a cinema screen without the infuriating distraction of other cinema-goers.
Apparently satisfied with his work on John's abdomen, Sherlock placed the palm of his hand over John's chest - where a chunk of skin already seemed to be missing - and once more the cilia began to move.
This was how John knew for sure he was dreaming: the sensation of those impossible cilia brushing in waves across the face of an open wound, an open sore, should have reduced him to paroxysms of poorly-suppressed sweating pain. Instead he felt a not entirely horrid tickling sensation and a far-off feeling of childhood and protection, the idea that everything was going to be alright. It was something he hadn't really experienced since he was small, and the comfort of it wrapped around his mind like a warm towel.
Sherlock moved his hand to the underside of John's arm.
Huh, John thought, in the process of drifting back to sleep, funny that I slept like this.
He watched Sherlock's strange, furred-looking palm tend to the wide and skinless dip in his triceps until his eyelids began to droop once more.
"Are you alright, dear?" Mrs Hudson asked, passing John a packet of Nice biscuits with a kind of surreptitious wink that wouldn't have snuck past a three year old unnoticed. "You look awfully pale."
"Work," John said, opening the packet almost immediately. "Do you mind if I --?"
"Not at all, that's what they're for," Mrs Hudson said cheerfully, sitting back in the opposite chair with an expression of what John recognised with impatience as 'concern'. "You should really work less hours, you know."
"Fewer," Sherlock snapped from the living room.
"What?" Mrs Hudson frowned.
"Fewer hours, Mrs Hudson, not 'less'."
Mrs Hudson sighed the long-suffering sigh of almost anyone who had to interact with Sherlock's endless corrective interjections, and reached forwards to pat John on the back of the hand that wasn't stuffing a biscuit into his mouth.
"Still, I suppose the extra money'll come in handy for that holiday," Mrs Hudson said reassuringly, withdrawing her hand again. "You can get some colour back in your cheeks."
John stopped with a second biscuit close to his lips, and frowned. "What holiday?"
"I thought you were going to see your sister?" Mrs Hudson said, now also looking somewhat confused. "You said it'd do you good. This morning! I ran into you outside before you went to work, you asked me about the bins, remember?"
"Oh, no," John said, trying to recall and coming up against a foggy labyrinth that informed him he'd spent so long trying to calculate which pay scale he was supposed to be billing from that his brain had capsized with the loss of all on board for the day, "I can't go on holiday at the moment." He put the biscuit back down. The back of his hand was itching. "I've got a lot of work on."
"Oh, that's a shame," Mrs Hudson said sympathetically. "If you don't mind me saying, John, you look like you could use a holiday, you're getting awfully frayed around the edges."
"So are you," Sherlock snapped from the living room.
"Sherlock," John sighed.
"It's this moisturiser," Mrs Hudson confided without much apparent offense. "It says it'll take ten years off but it's not doing anything except make my eyebrows curl, would you believe."
"Of course it's not doing anything," Sherlock muttered, "they don't work."
"Sherlock," John repeated, scratching the back of his hand. "Enough."
"Well," said Mrs Hudson, getting up, "I've got the builder coming round in about half an hour to look at the leak in the attic." She stared at Sherlock as she passed through the living room. "Try not to upset this one, could you? I'd like the roof fixed."
As she went slowly down the stairs (favouring, John thought with a certain smugness at having worked it out, her right side), John reached for the biscuits again. Nice biscuits were no one's favourite, but he'd evidently forgotten to eat very much today, and his stomach was growling.
John gave a small start. Something in the back of his hand was moving.
For a moment he almost laughed at himself: of course something moved in his hand when he reached for something and shifted his fingers, they were called tendons - was he a doctor or not?
Then the squirming shape under his skin resurfaced crossways to the lie of his tendons, and John laid his hand very, very carefully on the table.
He was tired. He was overtired. Even Mrs Hudson had remarked on how tired he looked. It was all this work, all these mornings. He should probably be working fewer hours. Or sleeping more.
People hallucinated all the time when they were tired. He'd seen bugs crawling around at the corners of his vision plenty of times when he was studying for his exams. No sleep for a couple of days would do that to a man. He was just tired.
And his hand was itching because Mrs Hudson was addicted to hand creams and something in this one was probably an allergen.
John picked up another biscuit and carefully neglected to think that the hand she'd touched was not the one which was itching.
"Go home and get some rest," Dr Tailor said the moment John walked into the surgery. "You look like death."
"I thought he was supposed to have a skull instead of a head?" John said with what he thought was a joking smile but which must have come off wrong as Dr Tailor just shook her head and folded her arms.
"Have you looked in the mirror recently?" she asked. "In the right light Hamlet could use you for a soliloquy." She squinted at his neck so intently that John felt compelled to lean back from her, and she made an exasperated noise. "Dr Watson, you have a lesion on your neck. For god's sake at least put a dressing on it! You'll make the patients nervous, they'll be off filling out complaints forms before you can say 'infectious welts'."
John touched the spot she was staring at, and saw her flinch.
"Please," Dr Tailor sighed, "Get yourself a course of Aztreonam or something, put a dressing on that before it starts weeping onto your shirt collar, and don't come back in until you stop looking like you have advanced syphilis."
"Oh come on, syphilitic sores look nothing like this-"
"The patients don't know that," Dr Tailor said firmly, still peering at his neck in what John recognised as professional judgement rather than layperson's horror. "Go home. And try eating something that contains a vitamin at some point, you look appalling."
That evening John found himself in bed before it got dark, once again. Dr Tailor was probably right, he probably needed to rest. He didn't feel especially bad, just tired, and mildly disquieted by the way people of his acquaintance (except, of course, for Sherlock) were starting to stare at him.
It was a very particular combination of concern, pity, and disgust, and it made him ever so slightly resentful.
Dr Tailor had said something else, John thought, sitting down on the bed to remove his socks as the late afternoon light warmed his back and made him conscious of how absurd it was to be getting ready for sleep. Doctors didn't just get sent home for looking drained and overworked or there'd be no one on hospital wards.
He couldn't quite bring to mind what it was.
John undid his trousers - they were sitting a little less snugly than they had been - and unrolled them to the floor. Habitually he'd have folded them over the back of the chair, army neatness drilled into him by rote and piled on top of medical training, but he was distracted by his thighs.
There was a mark, a depression in his thigh where the skin had been pulled away. The edges of the abrasion - it went several layers deep - were very lightly crusted with something which might or might not have been pus but certainly wasn't blood. John leaned closer to it, wondering how he'd managed to miss such an angry-looking infraction; it was about the size of a 2p coin and the surface of the skinless area glistened as if it had been freshly-made.
"Better put a dressing on that," John mumbled, pulling his feet out of his trousers. Despite the movement of this thigh muscles and the apparent wetness of the sore, nothing trickled out.
As he leaned down to unhook the waistband of his trousers from his heel, John spotted movement in his flesh. It wasn't the flexing of thigh muscles, but rather a squirming movement under the uppermost layers of skin, similar to the bulge of a needle entering a vein but more sinuous.
"No," John said, and covered his face with his hands. "I am going to sleep. Come on. This is ridiculous."
He peered between his fingers at his leg, drawn back to the hole in his thigh, and the sight of something squirming beneath his skin quite close to it squeezed his eyes shut again.
"Okay, no," John said, flopping backwards onto the bed with his underwear and shirt still on. "No, no."
After a while of lying on his back with his hands over his face, muttering "no" to himself, John began to feel somewhat silly, and extremely drowsy. He drew his feet up onto the bed, and without bothering to remove any more clothes, shut the curtains, or pull the duvet over himself, John rolled into a ball and went to sleep as if a switch had been flipped in his mind.
He had a vague sensation of something tugging him, some undefined period of time later, but it was not uncomfortable enough to wake him.
Sometime after that, his dreams changed from fragmented memories of Afghanistan, from the lapping of chlorinated water on tiled walls and the weight of a bomb on his chest, to a different weight. Something was crushing down on him; he was being buried under a heavy animal, under very fat woman.
What woke him, in the end, was a sharp piercing pain across his chest, from armpit to armpit, in several lines as if a three or four bar heater had been pushed against his torso. Instead of burning, it jabbed, and a moment later - when his eyes flung open and his mind tried to lever itself from the cloying fug of dreams - the pain was gone entirely.
John tried to focus in the darkness, but the crushing sensation had followed him out of his dreams. Hypnogogia, he told himself with weak determination. The Night Hag.
Something wet, warm, and slow trickled down from his chest and over his ribs. He was having difficulty expanding his ribcage enough to draw the laboured breaths his body seemed to feel he needed.
John looked up into black and depthless eyes that held no iris, no white, and apparently no end.
"It'll be over soon," Sherlock said, with the same impatient not-quite-reassurance as ever.
He lay full-length along John's body - quite when John had been undressed he wasn't sure - naked as a new-born baby and heavier than he looked. Like this, John could see the tiny waving cilia on his face, on his shoulders; he could feel them moving gently against his leg, against his arm as Sherlock pinned him amiably to the mattress.
John strained his neck, trying to see what, precisely was running down the sides of his rib cage. He had an inkling it might be blood.
"What will?" he muttered, thick-tongued and feeling more stupid - contentedly stupid - than anything Sherlock had ever said before had left him.
"Another week and you'll fruit," Sherlock said with irritated impatience in his voice. He sounded no different to countless times he'd told John to "Think, John" while pacing excitedly around a crime scene, and John had tried valiantly to stop him from upsetting the police even farther than before.
"Fruit?"
"The incubation process will be over," Sherlock said, as if he wasn't lying naked on top of John with jagged manibles visible every time he opened his mouth to speak, and John felt the vast flat claws in his stomach slowly withdraw. "Go back to sleep."
But, John protested, inside his own head, I'm really not enjoying this.
As he drifted out of consciousness again, he felt the blood on his ribcage begin to cool in the night air.
"Where did John get to?" Mrs Hudson asked, peering around the living room as if she expected him to pop out from behind the door. "He said he'd take a look at my shoulder, it's been an absolute nuisance all week."
"Still on holiday, Mrs Hudson," Sherlock said, hunched over his microscope in the kitchen, his hair a wild thicket anchored to his head, and his shirt open to the elbows. The kitchen table looked as if several experiments had piled up against each other and were starting to thrust tendrils into each other's outcomes.
"Well I hope he's having a good time," Mrs Hudson sighed. "The Italian post service is terrible, isn't it? No postcards or anything."
"Mm," Sherlock said with the annoyed harmonics of a man who wants to be let out of a conversation he didn't ask to be dragged into. "Oh, I'll probably be joining him there soon."
"Will you? Oh, that's nice. Bring me back some Grappè." Mrs Hudson wrinkled her nose and, failing to achieve the desired effect, pulled her hanky over her nose and mouth with a grimace of disgust. "That smell still hasn't gone."
"That's why I'm going on holiday," Sherlock agreed, not looking up.
In John Watson's bedroom, the crust of blue-green fungi advanced across the bed like a slow tide, spreading towards the edges of the mattress. A foot, discoloured to purple and grey, lay propped at the outskirts of what was becoming soup; at the opposite end of the bed, in the tangle of bone-white tendrils that had woven together in a lacy lattice of fibres like the inside of a bird's bone, John's skull sat. An eye drooped, blackened and swollen, from its orbit, and a trail of dark spores in their gelatinous protective casing trekked down the remainder of his cheek muscle like a parody of a tear.
"Very good idea, Sherlock." Mrs Hudson's voice was muffled by her handkerchief. "I hope he's enjoying his holiday," she repeated. "He looked so tired."
This is what happens when people fixate on a particular and inappropriate adjective when talking about the shit I write.
PS: I apologise for any medically improbable terms, I didn’t have the chance to run this by either of my doctor-betas.