The as-yet-unnamed Jealousy Fic, Chapter Three
Fandom: Sherlock BBC/Doctor WhoPairings: Sherlock/John, River/Eleven, (background) Rory/Amy
Warnings: Slash, het, drunkeness, oblivious geniuses and, in case you didn’t see that, crossover-ness.
Summary: River and John have a Plan. It’s a brilliant Plan, if a bit unoriginal. That’s alright though because the people they’re enacting the plan for take the term ‘socially retarded’ and prove exactly how much of an understatement it is. And, as capable as the Doctor and Sherlock are of adding one and one together, if the equation doesn’t involve actual quantifiable values, it goes straight over both of their heads. Which is rather why they had to resort to the Plan in the first place. Because hopefully their genius idiots know enough about emotions to know what to do when jealousy rears its ugly head…
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
When he woke up it was with a hangover and lots of curly hair in his face. For a moment John panicked. As slim as his chances might be with Sherlock, it didn’t seem right to get involved with anyone else. Perhaps it was foolish of him, but John was a romantic at heart.
But as he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and trying to calm his racing heart more and more of the previous evening started to filter back into his foggy mind. He’d considered it, he realised. Having sex with the woman now lying mostly on top of him. But it hadn’t happened. Because she was in love with someone else too. What a sorry pair they made, he thought, absently stroking her hair.
She squirmed a little, pushing against his hand in a wordless request for him to continue and rearranged herself so that a little more blood flow could get to John’s legs.
“What’re you thinking about?” she asked his chest. “Your heart rate increased rapidly but it’s calmed down again now.”
“Worried. Woke up with a strange woman. I’m in love with someone and, even if they’d never look twice at me, it seems wrong.”
She - River, his mind helpfully supplied - wiggled a bit again. “I know the feeling. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
John let out a croaky laugh and agreed, “Yeah, just a bit.”
“But you’re alright lying in bed cuddling?” she asked curiously, muffled a bit by the sleeping bags.
“Well, you’re in love with someone else and if it didn’t happen last night, it’s not going to, is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
They both considered this question for a moment before River retracted it. “No, of course not. Still, since we’re hopeless cases and all, it’s nice to have someone to cuddle, isn’t it?”
John agreed and continued petting her hair. He’d had a friend like that once before, back at University. Friendly girl, gay as the night is dark and more tactile than anyone John had ever met before or since. She’d latched onto him like a limpet - literally, in some cases - and rapidly become one of his closest friends. It was nice, they’d found, to be able to flirt with someone who wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Of course, then he’d introduced her to Harry and it had all gone downhill from there.
“I fancy a cup of tea,” he told River after they’d basked for a while more.
“Mm,” she’d responded, rolling away from him and burrowing into her sleeping back so only a few curly tips of hair were poking out. Somewhere in the grumbling there might have been a request for him to bring a cup for her too, so John decided to play the good Samaritan this time round.
Nudging his way out of his own sleeping bag and off the edge of the bed (noticing with some alarm that the world started spinning very rapidly and increasing the pain of his headache when he was upright) John stumbled from the room and made a very valiant effort to avoid collapsing against the doorway. It didn’t quite work, but he didn’t fall over or bash his head on it, so he considered that a plus.
“To look at you, you’d think you were only just discovering how to walk,” a bright, too-loud voice told him.
“Shush,” John ordered it, pulling at his pyjama bottoms a little self consciously and continuing his weaving journey top the kitchen. “Tea,” he pleaded. He was certain he’d been capable of more coherent speech only moments before.
Amy smothered a laugh and shooed him onto one of the barstools, popping on the kettle and getting down a couple of mugs.
“Need one for River too,” John requested. “Please,” he added politely.
Amy’s gaze turned sharper and her movements more tense as she reached for a third mug. “So. River. I’d noticed that she wasn’t in the room I’d left her last night.”
John started to nod and stopped just as quickly. “Yeah. She slept with me.”
The redhead’s irritated frown became a full blown scowl. “You-” she started to shout.
“No!” John interrupted hastily, making ‘shushing’ movements with his hands. “Not how it sounded, I swear! Me in my sleeping bag, River in hers. We just cuddled a bit. We’re both in love with stupid geniuses, see. We decided in our drunken states that commiserating together might be better than just moping individually.”
“And was it?” Amy asked, pouring out the hot water and pretending not to notice that John had withdrawn his hands from the countertop to a distance safe from potential splashes.
“Yeah. I think. Well, doesn’t make either of us anything other than fools in love still, but it was nice to have a bit of human contact.”
The scowl was back as John took the tea from Amy and he couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. Just the smell of the brew was making the hangover lessen.
“Just cuddling, Amy, I promise. I’ve done nothing to damage the virtue of your daughter.”
“My-”
“She introduced herself as River Melody Song-Pond. Rory mentioned something about time travel and his daughter marrying a genius idiot shortly before she appears - from nowhere, I might add - and starts moaning about being in love with a man who’s very smart, but a wee bit oblivious. I know that I was rather drunk last night, but it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.”
“You seem surprisingly unsurprised about the whole time travel business,” Amy said. It wasn’t really a question but it might have well have been.
John took a sip of tea and bit his lip to contain his moan - there was nothing that compared to the first cup of tea in the morning, especially when rather worse for wear after an evening of over-indulgence. “You see odd things when you go to war. Things that can’t be explained. People that live who should have died. People that died who should have lived. Guns that don’t fire bullets and bullets that aren’t bullets. As a surgeon I was faced with a lot of inexplicable things, but I did what I’d been trained to do - not to ask questions.”
He took the time to take another sip and pondered on this for a bit. “There wasn’t really time, when I was in Afghanistan, to think about it. When I got back there was too much time. Then there was chasing about after Sherlock. Somewhere, at some point down the line, I must have accepted the facts. I don’t consciously remember doing it. But you meet people, every once in a while, who aren’t human. They’re still people, just not as most people understand it.
“I didn’t know about the time travel part of it, but if there’re aliens, there must be spaceships and ways to travel faster than light. Not a great leap of logic.” John finished, mulling it over. It sounded stupid when he said it out loud, when he actively thought about it. It made him sound like one of those wacky American farmers that popped up in the news every now and then, claiming they’d been abducted. The surgeons saw more of the strange happenings than any other of the soldiers because of the nature of their job, but it was an unwritten rule throughout the forces that you just don’t talk about it. John suspected that many of the men were happy living in denial about the things they saw. And he wasn’t just talking about aliens.
“You’re in love with Sherlock,” Amy chose then to say, apropos of nothing.
“Rather,” John agreed amiably. There was no point denying it now. He’d tried to moderate the emotions that came across in his blog, but no matter how hard he tried it only fuelled the fire for the gossips. Sally Donavan had even gone so far as to offer her condolences for ‘falling tits over arse for a freak like him’. John hadn’t even bothered to tell her not to call Sherlock a freak; he’d long since realised that, as odd as it might seem to everyone else, it was more a term of endearment than anything else.
“River’s in love with the Doctor, of course,” Amy continued, staring absentmindedly out of the window now.
“Her stupid genius.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Amy answered anyway; “mine and Rory’s too. But, yes, River’s in particular.”
John considered that the conversation was getting a little too dreary for his tastes, so decided to lighten the tone a tad. “Does he refuse to eat sometimes?” he asked cheerily. “Your Doctor, I mean. As a medical man he should no better, but you know what true geniuses are like.”
“Idiots,” Amy agreed with a wicked grin. “He’s not a doctor in the traditional sense, though. At least, I don’t think he is. It’s just that he likes… saving people. It’s who he is, not what he is.” She paused and frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him eat, except for that one time at the beginning.”
“Oh? Do tell. There sounds like there’s a story there.”
Amy smothered a giggle into her hand and launched into the story - her story of the raggedy doctor and his desire for fish fingers in custard.
“Oh, mum, not again,” River cut in, not flailing quite as badly as John had been when he’d stumbled into the kitchen earlier. “Every time you meet someone - every time - you tell them this story. Half the neighbours think you’re loony.”
“I’m Scottish. The English think we’re loony by default.”
River rolled her eyes and snuggled up to John’s side as she reached around him to get to her cup of tea. It seemed only natural for him to wrap an arm around her as she did so. She had just enough height on him to make it an easy movement to do and rest his hand on her hip.
“Amy. Stop it,” River scolded, not looking up.
Amy huffed and blew a strand of hair from her face. “I can’t help it if you two are going to act all lovey-dovey in front of me. You’ve always been obsessed with the Doctor. Seeing you with someone else is… weird.”
“She’s not-”
“We’re not seeing -” River and John protested at the same time, causing another bout of giggles from the redhead, which before long set the both of them off two. There was a familiarity to the ridiculous giggling fit and in one quiet corner of his mind John wondered if these two women an equivalent to the inappropriate-at-a-crime-scene giggling fits he and Sherlock all too often indulged in.
“Although…” River began once they’d calmed down.
John hefted a sigh before she could continue, unwrapping his arm from her waist to cradle his now-empty tea mug with both hands. “I’m not going to like this, am I?” he remarked. Amy giggled in response and River ignored them in an exaggeratedly stately sort of way.
“We could pretend to be. It would certainly be no chore.”
John blinked. Well. At least she’d said ‘pretend’. If River had suggested actually going at he might have had to say no, closeted adrenaline junky or no. There were just some things that he didn’t want to risk, even if he never really had them in the first place. Rather than voicing any of this, however, what came out of his mouth was a spluttered, ‘what?’
River wrapped her arm around him and hugged him to her side (really, the extra height she gained from all those curls was ridiculous. As if he wasn’t short enough in comparison as it was) and smiled in a dangerous way. “Catch your man’s attention, no doubt,” she told him like it was a promise. “And it’ll definitely turn the Doctor’s head.”
“What, as in… make them jealous?” John said, spluttering again.
“Hmm,” River agreed wordless, ignoring the howls of laughter from her mother as Amy enjoyed the astonishment in John’s face.
John considered it for a moment. He knew, after all, that River would get her man. And what harm would it do his no-chances prospect with Sherlock? None at all. Still, the idea of actually pretending to date someone to make someone else jealous… it all seemed very adolescent. “No,” he finally settled on. “If I get asked directly if I’m dating you or seeing you or whatever, I’ll tell them the truth.”
“But?” River prompted, trying not to look too disappointed.
“It’s nice to be cuddled,” John admitted with a shrug and a smile that looked too sly for the caring face it was on.
River grinned back and gave John a smacking kiss on the forehead. “Brilliant!” she announced.
“Oh God,” Amy gasped around her continued laughter. “I feel like I’m the mother of two teenage girls who’ve just declared a hormone-driven war of subterfuge on the idiocy of boys in general,” she declared, ignoring John’s protests that he wasn’t a girl.
~To Be Continued~
NEXT>>
So. Christmas. Time of joy and merriness. Also, time of making excuses to escape having to spend 24 hours a day with relatives who you love but you rarely see so you don't really know all that well. And there is always someone awake and willing to have a natter over a cup of tea and more xmas pud. So. I have this chapter and the two following it finished. I'm half way through the one after that and then the one after that is the last one (that's seven chapters in all, if you were counting). Which, for me, is relatively short. But I have too many plot bunnies nomming on my brain and there was a lovely way to finish this off. If it works out how I want it to work out. Which, if I'm being honest, it probably won't. Anyway, enjoy the story and do let me know what you think, won't you?
Much love,
Yellow
xx