Within This Frail Crucible of Light (1/2) (Sherlock/John, NC-17)
Title: Within This Frail Crucible of Light (1/2)
Beta, Britpicking: vector_nyu, grassle, omletlove
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 11,500
Warnings: Some BDSM Themes
Spoilers: All of them, just to be safe.
Disclaimer: BBC Sherlock belongs to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC. I am making no profit from their awesomeness.
A/N: This is the second story in The Cold Song series, and the sequel to I Hear Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned which should be read first. (Thinky Smut [omg so much smut], BDSM Themes, Romance, Character Study, Psychological Drama. The series has a definite plot.) Please, do not get offended by any of the words I put in someone’s mouth concerning high functioning autism/Asperger’s. I am Asperger’s on the spectrum.
Series Summary:
When Moriarty told Sherlock that he would cut the heart out of him, he failed to mention that someone of his acquaintance already had. (He was saving that little tidbit for later.)
Story Summary:
Sherlock is bored. Bored with no cases, bored with life, bored with everything. But he promised John, promised,that drugs were off the table.
And just because he is asking John for too much in return, doesn’t mean that John isn’t willing to give it.
Within this frail crucible of light
Like a chrysalis contained
Within its silk oblivion.
How lucky is this little light,
It knows her nakedness
And when it's extinguished
It envelops her as darkness
Then lies with her at night.
Loveliness like this is never chaste;
If not enjoyed, it is just a waste.
From The Rape of Lucretia
Composer: Benjamin Britten
Librettist: Arnold Duncan
Within This Frail Crucible Of Light
It was Phillip Glass’s Sonata for Violin and Piano today.
John entered the flat and could immediately hear the mournful strains of Sherlock’s violin being coaxed into the same malaise that seemed to be swallowing Sherlock. John sighed and squared his shoulders before trudging up the stairs and entering the flat. He knew Sherlock had probably heard him at the door, but the music continued even as he tossed his keys in a dish, a discordant clang that was at odds with the haunting lament Sherlock was playing with a taped piano accompaniment. Sherlock barely looked up before his eyes fluttered shut again and he turned in place, presenting his back and one shoulder to John. John could just make out the crescent of his eyelash, and the plane of his cheekbone. Sherlock was wearing a thin T- shirt, and John could see every movement of the bow in the flex of the fine muscles of his traps, delts and lats under the fine knit. Perfection of the human machine.
Sherlock was brilliant like a diamond, and John had seen too many people brought low by less than what Sherlock had been playing with.
Harry had been like that once. Not Sherlock intelligent-- no one was, but she had been alive and vital and had taken pleasure in things that weren’t at the bottom of a bottle. John hadn’t considered her drunken clubbing a problem in the beginning. It wasn’t as if they had a history of alcoholism in the family, just prescription pill popping and benign neglect from a flighty artist of a father, and the platitudinal admonishments of a schoolteacher mum. Nothing that most people hadn’t grown up with. Even coming out had been a bit of an anti-climax for Harry-- John’s military plans had created more of a stink.
She’d been considered odd and occasionally depressive before her formal diagnosis, and John’s resentment surely didn’t help, but that was supposed to be managed with therapy, psych drugs, something rational and medically approved, not...
So he hadn’t noticed when a few drinks with the girls had turned into nightly drinks with the girls, and then eventually leaving the girls behind. Finally, she had stopped going out altogether, since alcohol was cheaper at home, and there was nothing to interfere with the drinking, and no platform to showcase her irritating social awkwardness.
She hid it well at first. They talked on the phone more, managing to cover up the fact that they met less. She called him earlier and earlier, and never in the evening. She sounded brighter and happier than he’d ever heard. Everything was going swimmingly with Susan or Mary or whoever the girlfriend was at the time. Everything was fine, fine, fine.
It was too bright and happy. False. She didn’t work that way, never had.
But he still didn’t catch on, until one day he ran into Margaret? Margery? He ran into her in the middle of Tesco’s (horrible things always happened at Tesco’s), and was alarmed at the bags under her eyes, and the fragility of her face, which crumpled like she did, against his coat. Tears and snot and heaving gulps of air against his chest in the middle of the aisle as he frantically looked around, patting her back in an awkward there-there, and he had no idea what was going on until she’d started pouring out her problems with Harry.
Harry.
He still felt gut sick thinking about it, even now. He didn’t like to think about the fact that he had missed so much. And him an almost-doctor. His own family. His sister.
John paused, dithering. Should he say something to Sherlock? He wasn’t sure what, though. He wasn’t going to apologise for demanding sobriety from his friend. And Sherlock’s quick dismissal and about-face had been a concise way of indicating just how much Sherlock wanted to speak to John.
Well Sherlock could stuff it, because John wasn’t letting anything of his get into that state again.
John stuck his chin in the air and went up the stairs to his own room.
He thought he only imagined the accusatory bent the music had taken as it followed him up the steps.
***
This had been going on for a week, progressively getting worse and worse. They were between cases and everything was “boring, tedious, dull, insipid, tiresome, stupid,” and about a hundred other synonyms for what amounted to the same thing. It had been two weeks since Sherlock had thrown away the detritus of his habit and the drugs themselves. John didn’t fool himself that Sherlock hadn’t taken a last hit. He’d been too bird bright and practically vibrating with tension from the high, but John wasn’t going to quibble over one final injection when Sherlock was quitting for good.
John didn’t fool himself into thinking that Sherlock had quit for him, either. Drug use didn’t work that way. You quit for yourself or you didn’t quit at all. Sherlock had been changing since John had known him, taking the raw potential everyone saw in him and forming it into the current work in progress-- everyone had commented on it. The decision to quit had probably already been made, even if Sherlock wasn’t really aware of it on a conscious level. John had just given Sherlock the excuse he needed.
And Sherlock wouldn’t have lied about something like this. Not that Sherlock didn’t lie. He lied fairly regularly, but not about something he considered trivial and mundane. And he definitely considered drug use trivial and mundane. He lied about meeting people at goddamn pools, not sobriety-- that would be a waste of time and effort. In fact, Sherlock’s problem was that he was usually entirely too truthful at awkward times. A common side effect of...
‘Your mouth looks too small now...’
‘Considering the state of her knees...’
‘Psychosomatic limp...’
“Gay.”
John cringed.
He’d told Sherlock that he’d help, but John wasn’t sure what to do, since Sherlock wasn’t talking about it at all-- was mostly ignoring him. For the past few days he’d been lost in increasingly sad or frantic music.
Music, he’d found, was Sherlock’s emotional barometer.
Sherlock’s face, with all of it’s strange alien symmetry, was usually inscrutable, even to John. But what his face didn’t reveal, the music did.
When John first moved in he had thought that Sherlock was a violin hobbyist that would play the occasional Mozart, but Sherlock’s life revolved around music, just as much as murder. Sherlock did play Mozart occasionally, and other pieces that John recognised from his own time playing the clarinet. Some Brahms, definitely. Mendelssohn, yeah. Some pretty, flirty piece he’d heard in a film or three but couldn’t remember the name of. But Sherlock was serious about the violin, and more than once John had entered the flat to a furious Sarasate that amazed him with its brilliance. Sherlock had almost scared him then-- not because of his virtuosity, no, but because of the look on his face-- fierce, haunted, pursued. It was at odds with the music.
People who considered Sherlock an emotionless robot had obviously never heard Sherlock play, and had never heard Sherlock play Paganini. Sherlock wasn’t the most technically proficient with the Caprices, which probably irked him, but he played with such passion and emotion that his skill could not be denied. Sherlock loved music, got lost in music, played like he was in pain.
And it wasn’t just the violin.
Sherlock’s digital music collection was housed in a terabyte external hard drive with another as backup. His CDs were kept in a large cupboard, and never tossed around with the lassez-faire disdain he used on almost everything else. John had gone looking once, early in their association, thinking to find some classical to play, and was amazed by the variety. There was classical, yes, but John was familiar enough to know that most people chose a genre or two that they really liked, and stuck with that. Sherlock had it all, though, separated by genre, and then by composer and artist. And then there was jazz, and blues, and klezmer and bhangra. Rock music and punk and really gay 80’s pop.
Sherlock had everything and anything, and John became an expert at reading Sherlock through his musical choices.
This past week...
Sherlock played the violin like a fighter. The next day, like a funeral dirge.
The day after that...he didn’t play the violin at all.
Nor the next day. Nor the next.
John was a doctor. He knew the signs of cocaine withdrawal. They weren’t the dramatic physical symptoms of an opiate low, no Trainspotting moments for Sherlock, but in many ways they could be worse, especially for someone who prided themselves on mind over transport-- cocaine withdrawal was all in the brain. Depression, anxiety, agitation, suspicion. He’d fucked with the re-absorption of dopamine in his brain, and it would take time for his head to get back to normal.
For a given value of normal, anyway.
John knew the clinical signs, but when Sherlock stopped playing the violin, he knew things were coming to a head. He was brooding on the sofa, listening to CDs.
On Monday, Sherlock was playing Arvo Part’s Cantus-- funereal and haunting. On Tuesday, Berg’s Wozzeck-- easily some of the most disturbing music John had ever listened to. Wednesday, Jim Thirlwell’s Descent Into The Inferno-- the voice of a devil. Thursday, Devotchka, Dearly Departed-- depressing as all hell, and the blank look Sherlock slanted his way when John walked in the door gave him the willies, a creeping sensation down to his bones that raised the hair on his arms in a fear response that he thought had died due to attrition. There was something deep there. Dark and ugly, and it made him want to hit things to make Sherlock better, because this was as close to dead inside as John had ever seen him.
Friday...Christ. Friday John came home to a war zone.
When he walked in the door he could hear the discordant crash of guitar and drum, the alien bend of a synthesizer, quick and furious. There was a scattering of sheet music that he stepped around as he walked up the stairs. When he opened up the door he was hit with a wall of sound like an angry fist, barely human vocals vibrating with nihilist rage. He registered the noise first, then the mess. Books and papers had been rifled through with little regard for order, some torn from their shelves, some ripped in two. Projects that had been labeled in-progress had been swept aside, and broken beakers decorated the floor and tables.
John crunched through one, doing a slow turn in the middle of the room to take in all of the destruction. One chair, thankfully not his favorite, had a gash in the back that was hemorrhaging stuffing and a spring torn from its mooring. Knives, probably all of the ones in the flat, decorated the wall in a pattern around the grotesque happy face that was already there. The guest mugs were tossed in the fireplace, shards of ceramic decorating the grate like headstones.
John gaped at the mess, but wasn’t actually surprised. He’d expected Sherlock to cave in at some point, and given his penchant for melodramatics, this was not the worst case scenario John had built up in his head.
He was looking for the remote to turn off the blaring sound when he finally found Sherlock. He’d thought that the throw blanket had been laying oddly where it was tossed in front of the sofa, but it was actually Sherlock wrapped up like a cocoon.
John ignored the noise, which seemed to be reaching a crescendo of American punk angst, and fell to his knees next to Sherlock, who didn’t even look up to acknowledge him.
“Sherlock?” It was a stupid question, since the music was turned up so loud and John had practically whispered it, but Sherlock’s eyes flickered towards him for a moment before returning to their fascinated perusal of the wall. The blanket tightened around him a fraction.
The music suddenly came to an abrupt halt, and John breathed a short lived sigh of relief before the same music started again-- must be on a loop. Sherlock could have been listening to the same angry ranting all day.
“Sherlock.”
John reached out but didn’t touch him, instead he hovered a hand over Sherlock’s arm, shoulder, chest, wanting to touch but not sure if that would help or hinder his effort to understand what was going on.
The music wasn’t helping. It was too loud, too angry. The singer’s voice was distorted almost beyond recognition, except for the repeated refrain of ‘I hate everything that is not myself.’ John found it disturbing, considering the state of Sherlock and the flat.
“Please?”
Sherlock gave him a look that withered, then suddenly flounced up into something that wasn’t quite a kip-up, but had him on his feet anyway. The sudden spasm of movement surprised John, and he fell back a bit. Sherlock had retained the duvet, and was now at the window, staring into the late afternoon, trailing the blanket behind him like a ghost’s shroud. He was agitated, but trying not to show it. Sherlock normally paced when he was bothered, but now he only twisted those long fingers in the fabric wrapped around him, wringing it.
John finally found the remote for the player and hit the Power button, abruptly ceasing the cacophony in favour of a tense silence.
John still didn’t know what to say, but that didn’t matter, because the moment to speak was upon him.
“Sherlock...”
“Save me your insipid platitudes.”
“You’re repeating yourself. That’s the tenth insipid in the past two days.”
“Well if everything wasn’t so--”
“What, Sherlock? What?” John knew that Sherlock would get increasingly bitchy, but it didn’t make the lashing out hurt any less. Besides, Sherlock thrived on argument, so John didn’t fight the instinct to rebut at all. “Insipid? Boring? Like I’m boring?” John crossed his arms and tapped his chin, pretending to think. “Oh, I know...juvenile. Isn’t that what you called me yesterday?”
“Sophomoric.” Sherlock was pacing now. Quick strides of those ridiculous legs as he gazed into his own head, blanket whipping behind him when he turned, the dramatic twat.
“And name calling isn’t? We both know what this is about. No need to take it out on me.”
“Oh, yes. ‘We both know what this is about,“ Sherlock parroted, “and yet you once again fail to grasp the point.” His glower was typical.
“Fail to...I’m not a damned mind reader!”
“You told me anything! Anything at all, you said.” Sherlock was building up a head of rage. He span towards John and ran one hand through his hair, making it stand up in flippant Lynchian disarray. “But you haven’t delivered at all, and I’m...”
“I’m supposed to become your punching bag while you dry out? Is that your definition of help?”
He’d said anything. He’d meant anything. But not if the cure was worse than the disease. Not if Sherlock traded something monstrous for becoming a monster.
“Don’t you-- Can’t you--” Sherlock seemed to find the end of his tether and snap it, because suddenly Sherlock was coming at him, Sherlock was pushing him, hands on John’s shoulders and shoving him, and John couldn’t believe it, couldn’t stop himself from ingrained reaction, couldn’t stop the need to defend himself. John grabbed Sherlock’s wrists with both hands, but Sherlock struggled like a wild thing, so he pushed his knee into Sherlock’s abdomen, taking that momentum to propel his weight into Sherlock, managing to stumble them over the table and into the sofa with Sherlock pinned under him in a tight hold, and John was just beginning to freak, just beginning to loosen his hands when he got a look at Sherlock’s reaction, and--
“Oh.” He hated it when Sherlock was right and he was wrong, because God, God, he had been stupid, so stupid, and Sherlock was...
“Yes,” Sherlock hissed as he saw the cresting light of comprehension in John’s eyes. Sherlock’s own eyes had given him away. Grey eyes, pupils dilating without the benefit of drugs, ringed in a dark hue like a Hubble nebula ringed in space, expanding with the universe.
And his mouth, that mobile bow of pink that was usually curled into a sneer or ironic smile when not flattened into a line, that mouth was parted and red and wet.
“Jesus.” John suddenly realised where he was, how he was, and released Sherlock’s hands, aborting the wave-like movement Sherlock had tried against his whole body. John rabbited over to the far end of the sofa, running his fingers through his hair, trying to make sense of bizzarro Sherlock and his own --carried away, too physical, too much -- reaction. “You don’t want me to be the punching bag at all. You...” John trailed off into a small laugh that had a touch of hysteria and absolutely no humour. He knew what Sherlock wanted. Knew it from the deep tug of reciprocity in his gut just how Sherlock wanted it, sense and muscle memory filling in the blanks of how it would be.
He couldn’t do this again. Couldn’t open himself up to this, not when Sherlock was so...
Sherlock lay where he had landed for a moment, glaring, awkward and hot, before levering himself up to lean into the arm of the sofa. The blanket was still miraculously with him, and he tightened it round like it had been when John had first found him. Sherlock’s eyes were boring into him, and John was trying not to look, but John could feel it, and the phantom feeling of all of Sherlock pressed against him, the ghosts of Sherlock’s wrists in his hands as he clenched down on him, and...
“You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.”
“There’s nothing to talk myself out of.” There wasn’t. He wasn’t stupid, whatever Sherlock said on a tear. Sherlock might think he needed this now, but what happened when John wasn’t enough?
John had divorced himself from that world entirely-- having nothing was better than having bread and water while looking with envy at the feast laid out for everyone else. He had a small part of Sherlock, and that trumped any fleeting pleasure he could take from this whatever-it-was that Sherlock was proposing. He couldn’t-- wouldn’t-- let himself get more invested than he was.
Not when Sherlock could find something else more interesting at any time. John didn’t want to be a...failed experiment.
“You know exactly what I mean.” Sherlock just stared at him, willing him to agree.
“I mean it. I don’t...” John was shaky, and ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t do this now.”
“You think tomorrow would be any better? You might like to try fooling yourself, but we both know that you aren’t...uninterested.” Sherlock’s eyes molested their way down John’s front to hover below his waistline.
“Sherlock. I don’t. I haven’t...”
Sherlock sneered. “John Watson. Attractive but not stunningly so. A nice bloke, most people think. Lost his virginity at an early age to an older girl who liked to think she was corrupting the innocent. But you’d had enough stories from an older sister who liked to think she was shocking you with her behavior. So he tried it on, everything the girl wanted, and John Watson found he liked the power of being on top, liked...the accouterments. He dived into sex and its more esoteric related subheadings head-first-- and found a taste for danger there. Addicted to adrenaline even then.“
John had thought he was used to Sherlock pulling information from thin air, but it hadn’t been turned on himself with such precision since that first meeting, and even then the assessment hadn’t been so deeply personal.
“Not the receiving end, but giving, yes, that makes so much sense. A doctor, you see, likes to ‘take care of others’. That’s a phrase that covers so much territory, don’t you agree?” He raised a supercilious eyebrow.
“How did you know?”
“We know our own. Don’t pretend differently.” Sherlock sniffed. “There are also clues if you know enough to look for them. You haven’t recoiled from anything related to sadomasochism. Instead, you gave me an intrigued look when I mentioned the crop at our first meeting, then you actually showed up here, later. And you’ve been extremely comfortable around anyone with an alternative lifestyle that we’ve interviewed.” Sherlock, lost in thought, spidered a finger down the line of his own cheek, and not for the first time John cursed the fact that Sherlock’s hands were so expressive, so...
“But it goes deeper than that, even. You have a strong feeling of hierarchy, yet you automatically buck against anyone who challenges you for top status...look at your first meeting with my brother. You are a doctor acclimatised to field surgery during brutal conflict, yet you always err on the side of extreme gentleness. Most doctors of my acquaintance prefer brisk efficiency.”
“Oh, c’mon...”
“You know you enjoy inflicting pain, so you take great steps to make sure you aren’t the cause of it.”
“It’s not like that. I’m not a sadist. I don’t think about my patients like-- I don’t enjoy--”
“No. But it has become habitual. You enjoy some pain, so you fear enjoying all pain.”
There wasn’t really anything John could say to that. It sounded so horrible when said out loud.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
That was probably the nicest thing Sherlock had ever said to him. He knew, intellectually, that it was quite common, that there was nothing inherently wrong with it, but that didn’t seem to stop the small bubble of shame that lodged in his craw whenever he thought of it. He’d taken an oath, even though he’d never been able to properly define harm.
Would it be harm, to give Sherlock what he wanted? Physically, it would be nothing that wouldn’t heal. But mentally? He didn’t know.
“Dear John, sweet John, dominant John, found himself going to clubs, meeting people, and shagging himself rotten to the tune of their cries.”
John looked over at Sherlock, at the want that spread over his face for just a fraction of a second. John’s mouth was dry, but he licked his lips all the same and tried to find the words as he wiped his now sweaty palms against his trousers. “I don’t think...”
“Why’d you stop? Was it an accident?” John went to answer, but Sherlock answered his own question. “No, something deeper, something that keeps you from pursuing it, even now. Even though you’ve thought of this. Us.” Sherlock gave him a keen stare as if he had just unlocked all of John’s secrets. Probably had. “Ah.”
“Ah?” The smug bastard. Didn’t he know that John couldn’t afford that kind of emotional tangle? He’d been fragile enough before pink had overthrown the natural boring order of things. He didn’t need to go courting unrequited--
“You are a doctor, aren’t you? Through and through.”
John looked away. “You’re guessing.”
“We both know that it isn’t just about sex.”
John cleared his throat and replied because Sherlock seemed to expect it. “No. It’s not.”
“It was a good guess.” Sherlock was pleased with himself, a far cry from the madman tearing through the room not ten minutes previously. As if John had given him a mystery. “It’s about transcending the ordinary, but it’s surprising just how few people realise that. They think they want a titillating shag, when what they really want is knowledge. That’s how it is for you, isn’t it?”
“And if it is?”
“You think I deduced it, but I didn’t extrapolate from data John.”
“No?”
“I hoped.” Sherlock sat up, leaned forward and let the blanket drop away, as intent as John had ever seen him.
John could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise with the small thrill that danced through his central nervous system.
“Reaching subspace by pushing and surpassing perceived human boundaries to achieve enlightenment. When you think about it in that context, it almost becomes a humanist imperative, don’t you think? ” Sherlock focused on something John couldn’t see and nodded to himself. “It’s a powerful thing. Pity so few people take advantage of it.” He looked pensive, almost lost for a moment before looking back up at John, wearing something that on anyone else would be called uncertainty. “Is that how it is for you?”
“Yes.” Sherlock’s powers of perception had never really frightened him before, not before this at any rate. The point of being a top was to not be vulnerable, to own someone else’s vulnerability in your hands. Yet here he was, naked.
“You really do like to take care of others. Isn’t it awful, being a therapist of sorts when none of your charges get better? Just marking time till the session is up and they come back just as naked and wrong as before. No growth, just hamsters on a treadmill hoping for a little slap and tickle before they die.” Sherlock was looking at him, really looking at him, and John thought he saw a quiver of something there, like hope. All he could do is look back, stony faced, just the way he’d got through several military debriefs. Better that than seeing what he wanted to see, rather than what was.
But he couldn’t stop himself from answering truthfully. “Yes.”
“Isn’t it terrible, knowing that you need to make each moment count, each movement memorable and worthy, when all they want to do is get into the thick of it so they can get off, as if the orgasm is the release?”
“Do you?” Just two words, but Sherlock would know what he meant. Is that how it was for Sherlock as well? Had Sherlock looked for something greater and found everything, everyone, wanting? Had he given up, like John? How did he know the disappointment of...
“I see it. I see it all the time. It’s all good, John? Try none of it good. I don’t eat because the food doesn’t satisfy.”
“Because they are stupid and ordinary.”
Sherlock inclined his head. “Because they are stupid and ordinary.”
“But--”
“You’re never ordinary.”
John snorted, despite the gravity that bore down on him. Even during a massive tectonic relationship shift, trust Sherlock to deny his ordinariness, but not his stupidity.
“You said anything,” Sherlock said as he rose. “I don’t need the drugs, but I need my perceptions challenged.” He seemed to hesitate, looking for the right words, maybe the best way to convince him. “I don’t want to be bored. I want you to think about that.”
John didn’t think that was what he was originally going to say, and could only shake his head in an inadequate denial that Sherlock just ignored. Ignored! Even though nothing could be the same between them after this.
High altitude free fall.
Shooting a man to save a patient.
The first crack of a whip.
“Think about it. And ask me tomorrow. You won’t be bored either.”
“Ask you what?”
But Sherlock didn’t answer him, just looked at him with those almond eyes narrowed and his head tilted back exposing the column of his vulnerable throat, and John’s brain shorted for a brief moment. When he came back to himself, Sherlock was already making his way to his room.
John stayed cornered on the sofa for a long time before shaking himself out of his stupor and crunching his way through glass to the stereo to see what godawful music had been playing. He’d never heard of it, and if it was something Sherlock only resorted to in that kind of mood, John wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to hear it again.
He didn’t see Sherlock at all the rest of the night. Not while he cleaned. Not while he pretended to watch telly. Not as he went to bed.
He didn’t sleep for a long time. Instead, he stared at his dark ceiling and thought.
Continued in part two: http://eldritchhorrors.livejournal.com/66789.html#cutid1
Beta, Britpicking: vector_nyu, grassle, omletlove
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 11,500
Warnings: Some BDSM Themes
Spoilers: All of them, just to be safe.
Disclaimer: BBC Sherlock belongs to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC. I am making no profit from their awesomeness.
A/N: This is the second story in The Cold Song series, and the sequel to I Hear Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned which should be read first. (Thinky Smut [omg so much smut], BDSM Themes, Romance, Character Study, Psychological Drama. The series has a definite plot.) Please, do not get offended by any of the words I put in someone’s mouth concerning high functioning autism/Asperger’s. I am Asperger’s on the spectrum.
Series Summary:
When Moriarty told Sherlock that he would cut the heart out of him, he failed to mention that someone of his acquaintance already had. (He was saving that little tidbit for later.)
Story Summary:
Sherlock is bored. Bored with no cases, bored with life, bored with everything. But he promised John, promised,that drugs were off the table.
And just because he is asking John for too much in return, doesn’t mean that John isn’t willing to give it.
Within this frail crucible of light
Like a chrysalis contained
Within its silk oblivion.
How lucky is this little light,
It knows her nakedness
And when it's extinguished
It envelops her as darkness
Then lies with her at night.
Loveliness like this is never chaste;
If not enjoyed, it is just a waste.
From The Rape of Lucretia
Composer: Benjamin Britten
Librettist: Arnold Duncan
Within This Frail Crucible Of Light
It was Phillip Glass’s Sonata for Violin and Piano today.
John entered the flat and could immediately hear the mournful strains of Sherlock’s violin being coaxed into the same malaise that seemed to be swallowing Sherlock. John sighed and squared his shoulders before trudging up the stairs and entering the flat. He knew Sherlock had probably heard him at the door, but the music continued even as he tossed his keys in a dish, a discordant clang that was at odds with the haunting lament Sherlock was playing with a taped piano accompaniment. Sherlock barely looked up before his eyes fluttered shut again and he turned in place, presenting his back and one shoulder to John. John could just make out the crescent of his eyelash, and the plane of his cheekbone. Sherlock was wearing a thin T- shirt, and John could see every movement of the bow in the flex of the fine muscles of his traps, delts and lats under the fine knit. Perfection of the human machine.
Sherlock was brilliant like a diamond, and John had seen too many people brought low by less than what Sherlock had been playing with.
Harry had been like that once. Not Sherlock intelligent-- no one was, but she had been alive and vital and had taken pleasure in things that weren’t at the bottom of a bottle. John hadn’t considered her drunken clubbing a problem in the beginning. It wasn’t as if they had a history of alcoholism in the family, just prescription pill popping and benign neglect from a flighty artist of a father, and the platitudinal admonishments of a schoolteacher mum. Nothing that most people hadn’t grown up with. Even coming out had been a bit of an anti-climax for Harry-- John’s military plans had created more of a stink.
She’d been considered odd and occasionally depressive before her formal diagnosis, and John’s resentment surely didn’t help, but that was supposed to be managed with therapy, psych drugs, something rational and medically approved, not...
So he hadn’t noticed when a few drinks with the girls had turned into nightly drinks with the girls, and then eventually leaving the girls behind. Finally, she had stopped going out altogether, since alcohol was cheaper at home, and there was nothing to interfere with the drinking, and no platform to showcase her irritating social awkwardness.
She hid it well at first. They talked on the phone more, managing to cover up the fact that they met less. She called him earlier and earlier, and never in the evening. She sounded brighter and happier than he’d ever heard. Everything was going swimmingly with Susan or Mary or whoever the girlfriend was at the time. Everything was fine, fine, fine.
It was too bright and happy. False. She didn’t work that way, never had.
But he still didn’t catch on, until one day he ran into Margaret? Margery? He ran into her in the middle of Tesco’s (horrible things always happened at Tesco’s), and was alarmed at the bags under her eyes, and the fragility of her face, which crumpled like she did, against his coat. Tears and snot and heaving gulps of air against his chest in the middle of the aisle as he frantically looked around, patting her back in an awkward there-there, and he had no idea what was going on until she’d started pouring out her problems with Harry.
Harry.
He still felt gut sick thinking about it, even now. He didn’t like to think about the fact that he had missed so much. And him an almost-doctor. His own family. His sister.
John paused, dithering. Should he say something to Sherlock? He wasn’t sure what, though. He wasn’t going to apologise for demanding sobriety from his friend. And Sherlock’s quick dismissal and about-face had been a concise way of indicating just how much Sherlock wanted to speak to John.
Well Sherlock could stuff it, because John wasn’t letting anything of his get into that state again.
John stuck his chin in the air and went up the stairs to his own room.
He thought he only imagined the accusatory bent the music had taken as it followed him up the steps.
***
This had been going on for a week, progressively getting worse and worse. They were between cases and everything was “boring, tedious, dull, insipid, tiresome, stupid,” and about a hundred other synonyms for what amounted to the same thing. It had been two weeks since Sherlock had thrown away the detritus of his habit and the drugs themselves. John didn’t fool himself that Sherlock hadn’t taken a last hit. He’d been too bird bright and practically vibrating with tension from the high, but John wasn’t going to quibble over one final injection when Sherlock was quitting for good.
John didn’t fool himself into thinking that Sherlock had quit for him, either. Drug use didn’t work that way. You quit for yourself or you didn’t quit at all. Sherlock had been changing since John had known him, taking the raw potential everyone saw in him and forming it into the current work in progress-- everyone had commented on it. The decision to quit had probably already been made, even if Sherlock wasn’t really aware of it on a conscious level. John had just given Sherlock the excuse he needed.
And Sherlock wouldn’t have lied about something like this. Not that Sherlock didn’t lie. He lied fairly regularly, but not about something he considered trivial and mundane. And he definitely considered drug use trivial and mundane. He lied about meeting people at goddamn pools, not sobriety-- that would be a waste of time and effort. In fact, Sherlock’s problem was that he was usually entirely too truthful at awkward times. A common side effect of...
‘Your mouth looks too small now...’
‘Considering the state of her knees...’
‘Psychosomatic limp...’
“Gay.”
John cringed.
He’d told Sherlock that he’d help, but John wasn’t sure what to do, since Sherlock wasn’t talking about it at all-- was mostly ignoring him. For the past few days he’d been lost in increasingly sad or frantic music.
Music, he’d found, was Sherlock’s emotional barometer.
Sherlock’s face, with all of it’s strange alien symmetry, was usually inscrutable, even to John. But what his face didn’t reveal, the music did.
When John first moved in he had thought that Sherlock was a violin hobbyist that would play the occasional Mozart, but Sherlock’s life revolved around music, just as much as murder. Sherlock did play Mozart occasionally, and other pieces that John recognised from his own time playing the clarinet. Some Brahms, definitely. Mendelssohn, yeah. Some pretty, flirty piece he’d heard in a film or three but couldn’t remember the name of. But Sherlock was serious about the violin, and more than once John had entered the flat to a furious Sarasate that amazed him with its brilliance. Sherlock had almost scared him then-- not because of his virtuosity, no, but because of the look on his face-- fierce, haunted, pursued. It was at odds with the music.
People who considered Sherlock an emotionless robot had obviously never heard Sherlock play, and had never heard Sherlock play Paganini. Sherlock wasn’t the most technically proficient with the Caprices, which probably irked him, but he played with such passion and emotion that his skill could not be denied. Sherlock loved music, got lost in music, played like he was in pain.
And it wasn’t just the violin.
Sherlock’s digital music collection was housed in a terabyte external hard drive with another as backup. His CDs were kept in a large cupboard, and never tossed around with the lassez-faire disdain he used on almost everything else. John had gone looking once, early in their association, thinking to find some classical to play, and was amazed by the variety. There was classical, yes, but John was familiar enough to know that most people chose a genre or two that they really liked, and stuck with that. Sherlock had it all, though, separated by genre, and then by composer and artist. And then there was jazz, and blues, and klezmer and bhangra. Rock music and punk and really gay 80’s pop.
Sherlock had everything and anything, and John became an expert at reading Sherlock through his musical choices.
This past week...
Sherlock played the violin like a fighter. The next day, like a funeral dirge.
The day after that...he didn’t play the violin at all.
Nor the next day. Nor the next.
John was a doctor. He knew the signs of cocaine withdrawal. They weren’t the dramatic physical symptoms of an opiate low, no Trainspotting moments for Sherlock, but in many ways they could be worse, especially for someone who prided themselves on mind over transport-- cocaine withdrawal was all in the brain. Depression, anxiety, agitation, suspicion. He’d fucked with the re-absorption of dopamine in his brain, and it would take time for his head to get back to normal.
For a given value of normal, anyway.
John knew the clinical signs, but when Sherlock stopped playing the violin, he knew things were coming to a head. He was brooding on the sofa, listening to CDs.
On Monday, Sherlock was playing Arvo Part’s Cantus-- funereal and haunting. On Tuesday, Berg’s Wozzeck-- easily some of the most disturbing music John had ever listened to. Wednesday, Jim Thirlwell’s Descent Into The Inferno-- the voice of a devil. Thursday, Devotchka, Dearly Departed-- depressing as all hell, and the blank look Sherlock slanted his way when John walked in the door gave him the willies, a creeping sensation down to his bones that raised the hair on his arms in a fear response that he thought had died due to attrition. There was something deep there. Dark and ugly, and it made him want to hit things to make Sherlock better, because this was as close to dead inside as John had ever seen him.
Friday...Christ. Friday John came home to a war zone.
When he walked in the door he could hear the discordant crash of guitar and drum, the alien bend of a synthesizer, quick and furious. There was a scattering of sheet music that he stepped around as he walked up the stairs. When he opened up the door he was hit with a wall of sound like an angry fist, barely human vocals vibrating with nihilist rage. He registered the noise first, then the mess. Books and papers had been rifled through with little regard for order, some torn from their shelves, some ripped in two. Projects that had been labeled in-progress had been swept aside, and broken beakers decorated the floor and tables.
John crunched through one, doing a slow turn in the middle of the room to take in all of the destruction. One chair, thankfully not his favorite, had a gash in the back that was hemorrhaging stuffing and a spring torn from its mooring. Knives, probably all of the ones in the flat, decorated the wall in a pattern around the grotesque happy face that was already there. The guest mugs were tossed in the fireplace, shards of ceramic decorating the grate like headstones.
John gaped at the mess, but wasn’t actually surprised. He’d expected Sherlock to cave in at some point, and given his penchant for melodramatics, this was not the worst case scenario John had built up in his head.
He was looking for the remote to turn off the blaring sound when he finally found Sherlock. He’d thought that the throw blanket had been laying oddly where it was tossed in front of the sofa, but it was actually Sherlock wrapped up like a cocoon.
John ignored the noise, which seemed to be reaching a crescendo of American punk angst, and fell to his knees next to Sherlock, who didn’t even look up to acknowledge him.
“Sherlock?” It was a stupid question, since the music was turned up so loud and John had practically whispered it, but Sherlock’s eyes flickered towards him for a moment before returning to their fascinated perusal of the wall. The blanket tightened around him a fraction.
The music suddenly came to an abrupt halt, and John breathed a short lived sigh of relief before the same music started again-- must be on a loop. Sherlock could have been listening to the same angry ranting all day.
“Sherlock.”
John reached out but didn’t touch him, instead he hovered a hand over Sherlock’s arm, shoulder, chest, wanting to touch but not sure if that would help or hinder his effort to understand what was going on.
The music wasn’t helping. It was too loud, too angry. The singer’s voice was distorted almost beyond recognition, except for the repeated refrain of ‘I hate everything that is not myself.’ John found it disturbing, considering the state of Sherlock and the flat.
“Please?”
Sherlock gave him a look that withered, then suddenly flounced up into something that wasn’t quite a kip-up, but had him on his feet anyway. The sudden spasm of movement surprised John, and he fell back a bit. Sherlock had retained the duvet, and was now at the window, staring into the late afternoon, trailing the blanket behind him like a ghost’s shroud. He was agitated, but trying not to show it. Sherlock normally paced when he was bothered, but now he only twisted those long fingers in the fabric wrapped around him, wringing it.
John finally found the remote for the player and hit the Power button, abruptly ceasing the cacophony in favour of a tense silence.
John still didn’t know what to say, but that didn’t matter, because the moment to speak was upon him.
“Sherlock...”
“Save me your insipid platitudes.”
“You’re repeating yourself. That’s the tenth insipid in the past two days.”
“Well if everything wasn’t so--”
“What, Sherlock? What?” John knew that Sherlock would get increasingly bitchy, but it didn’t make the lashing out hurt any less. Besides, Sherlock thrived on argument, so John didn’t fight the instinct to rebut at all. “Insipid? Boring? Like I’m boring?” John crossed his arms and tapped his chin, pretending to think. “Oh, I know...juvenile. Isn’t that what you called me yesterday?”
“Sophomoric.” Sherlock was pacing now. Quick strides of those ridiculous legs as he gazed into his own head, blanket whipping behind him when he turned, the dramatic twat.
“And name calling isn’t? We both know what this is about. No need to take it out on me.”
“Oh, yes. ‘We both know what this is about,“ Sherlock parroted, “and yet you once again fail to grasp the point.” His glower was typical.
“Fail to...I’m not a damned mind reader!”
“You told me anything! Anything at all, you said.” Sherlock was building up a head of rage. He span towards John and ran one hand through his hair, making it stand up in flippant Lynchian disarray. “But you haven’t delivered at all, and I’m...”
“I’m supposed to become your punching bag while you dry out? Is that your definition of help?”
He’d said anything. He’d meant anything. But not if the cure was worse than the disease. Not if Sherlock traded something monstrous for becoming a monster.
“Don’t you-- Can’t you--” Sherlock seemed to find the end of his tether and snap it, because suddenly Sherlock was coming at him, Sherlock was pushing him, hands on John’s shoulders and shoving him, and John couldn’t believe it, couldn’t stop himself from ingrained reaction, couldn’t stop the need to defend himself. John grabbed Sherlock’s wrists with both hands, but Sherlock struggled like a wild thing, so he pushed his knee into Sherlock’s abdomen, taking that momentum to propel his weight into Sherlock, managing to stumble them over the table and into the sofa with Sherlock pinned under him in a tight hold, and John was just beginning to freak, just beginning to loosen his hands when he got a look at Sherlock’s reaction, and--
“Oh.” He hated it when Sherlock was right and he was wrong, because God, God, he had been stupid, so stupid, and Sherlock was...
“Yes,” Sherlock hissed as he saw the cresting light of comprehension in John’s eyes. Sherlock’s own eyes had given him away. Grey eyes, pupils dilating without the benefit of drugs, ringed in a dark hue like a Hubble nebula ringed in space, expanding with the universe.
And his mouth, that mobile bow of pink that was usually curled into a sneer or ironic smile when not flattened into a line, that mouth was parted and red and wet.
“Jesus.” John suddenly realised where he was, how he was, and released Sherlock’s hands, aborting the wave-like movement Sherlock had tried against his whole body. John rabbited over to the far end of the sofa, running his fingers through his hair, trying to make sense of bizzarro Sherlock and his own --carried away, too physical, too much -- reaction. “You don’t want me to be the punching bag at all. You...” John trailed off into a small laugh that had a touch of hysteria and absolutely no humour. He knew what Sherlock wanted. Knew it from the deep tug of reciprocity in his gut just how Sherlock wanted it, sense and muscle memory filling in the blanks of how it would be.
He couldn’t do this again. Couldn’t open himself up to this, not when Sherlock was so...
Sherlock lay where he had landed for a moment, glaring, awkward and hot, before levering himself up to lean into the arm of the sofa. The blanket was still miraculously with him, and he tightened it round like it had been when John had first found him. Sherlock’s eyes were boring into him, and John was trying not to look, but John could feel it, and the phantom feeling of all of Sherlock pressed against him, the ghosts of Sherlock’s wrists in his hands as he clenched down on him, and...
“You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.”
“There’s nothing to talk myself out of.” There wasn’t. He wasn’t stupid, whatever Sherlock said on a tear. Sherlock might think he needed this now, but what happened when John wasn’t enough?
John had divorced himself from that world entirely-- having nothing was better than having bread and water while looking with envy at the feast laid out for everyone else. He had a small part of Sherlock, and that trumped any fleeting pleasure he could take from this whatever-it-was that Sherlock was proposing. He couldn’t-- wouldn’t-- let himself get more invested than he was.
Not when Sherlock could find something else more interesting at any time. John didn’t want to be a...failed experiment.
“You know exactly what I mean.” Sherlock just stared at him, willing him to agree.
“I mean it. I don’t...” John was shaky, and ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t do this now.”
“You think tomorrow would be any better? You might like to try fooling yourself, but we both know that you aren’t...uninterested.” Sherlock’s eyes molested their way down John’s front to hover below his waistline.
“Sherlock. I don’t. I haven’t...”
Sherlock sneered. “John Watson. Attractive but not stunningly so. A nice bloke, most people think. Lost his virginity at an early age to an older girl who liked to think she was corrupting the innocent. But you’d had enough stories from an older sister who liked to think she was shocking you with her behavior. So he tried it on, everything the girl wanted, and John Watson found he liked the power of being on top, liked...the accouterments. He dived into sex and its more esoteric related subheadings head-first-- and found a taste for danger there. Addicted to adrenaline even then.“
John had thought he was used to Sherlock pulling information from thin air, but it hadn’t been turned on himself with such precision since that first meeting, and even then the assessment hadn’t been so deeply personal.
“Not the receiving end, but giving, yes, that makes so much sense. A doctor, you see, likes to ‘take care of others’. That’s a phrase that covers so much territory, don’t you agree?” He raised a supercilious eyebrow.
“How did you know?”
“We know our own. Don’t pretend differently.” Sherlock sniffed. “There are also clues if you know enough to look for them. You haven’t recoiled from anything related to sadomasochism. Instead, you gave me an intrigued look when I mentioned the crop at our first meeting, then you actually showed up here, later. And you’ve been extremely comfortable around anyone with an alternative lifestyle that we’ve interviewed.” Sherlock, lost in thought, spidered a finger down the line of his own cheek, and not for the first time John cursed the fact that Sherlock’s hands were so expressive, so...
“But it goes deeper than that, even. You have a strong feeling of hierarchy, yet you automatically buck against anyone who challenges you for top status...look at your first meeting with my brother. You are a doctor acclimatised to field surgery during brutal conflict, yet you always err on the side of extreme gentleness. Most doctors of my acquaintance prefer brisk efficiency.”
“Oh, c’mon...”
“You know you enjoy inflicting pain, so you take great steps to make sure you aren’t the cause of it.”
“It’s not like that. I’m not a sadist. I don’t think about my patients like-- I don’t enjoy--”
“No. But it has become habitual. You enjoy some pain, so you fear enjoying all pain.”
There wasn’t really anything John could say to that. It sounded so horrible when said out loud.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
That was probably the nicest thing Sherlock had ever said to him. He knew, intellectually, that it was quite common, that there was nothing inherently wrong with it, but that didn’t seem to stop the small bubble of shame that lodged in his craw whenever he thought of it. He’d taken an oath, even though he’d never been able to properly define harm.
Would it be harm, to give Sherlock what he wanted? Physically, it would be nothing that wouldn’t heal. But mentally? He didn’t know.
“Dear John, sweet John, dominant John, found himself going to clubs, meeting people, and shagging himself rotten to the tune of their cries.”
John looked over at Sherlock, at the want that spread over his face for just a fraction of a second. John’s mouth was dry, but he licked his lips all the same and tried to find the words as he wiped his now sweaty palms against his trousers. “I don’t think...”
“Why’d you stop? Was it an accident?” John went to answer, but Sherlock answered his own question. “No, something deeper, something that keeps you from pursuing it, even now. Even though you’ve thought of this. Us.” Sherlock gave him a keen stare as if he had just unlocked all of John’s secrets. Probably had. “Ah.”
“Ah?” The smug bastard. Didn’t he know that John couldn’t afford that kind of emotional tangle? He’d been fragile enough before pink had overthrown the natural boring order of things. He didn’t need to go courting unrequited--
“You are a doctor, aren’t you? Through and through.”
John looked away. “You’re guessing.”
“We both know that it isn’t just about sex.”
John cleared his throat and replied because Sherlock seemed to expect it. “No. It’s not.”
“It was a good guess.” Sherlock was pleased with himself, a far cry from the madman tearing through the room not ten minutes previously. As if John had given him a mystery. “It’s about transcending the ordinary, but it’s surprising just how few people realise that. They think they want a titillating shag, when what they really want is knowledge. That’s how it is for you, isn’t it?”
“And if it is?”
“You think I deduced it, but I didn’t extrapolate from data John.”
“No?”
“I hoped.” Sherlock sat up, leaned forward and let the blanket drop away, as intent as John had ever seen him.
John could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise with the small thrill that danced through his central nervous system.
“Reaching subspace by pushing and surpassing perceived human boundaries to achieve enlightenment. When you think about it in that context, it almost becomes a humanist imperative, don’t you think? ” Sherlock focused on something John couldn’t see and nodded to himself. “It’s a powerful thing. Pity so few people take advantage of it.” He looked pensive, almost lost for a moment before looking back up at John, wearing something that on anyone else would be called uncertainty. “Is that how it is for you?”
“Yes.” Sherlock’s powers of perception had never really frightened him before, not before this at any rate. The point of being a top was to not be vulnerable, to own someone else’s vulnerability in your hands. Yet here he was, naked.
“You really do like to take care of others. Isn’t it awful, being a therapist of sorts when none of your charges get better? Just marking time till the session is up and they come back just as naked and wrong as before. No growth, just hamsters on a treadmill hoping for a little slap and tickle before they die.” Sherlock was looking at him, really looking at him, and John thought he saw a quiver of something there, like hope. All he could do is look back, stony faced, just the way he’d got through several military debriefs. Better that than seeing what he wanted to see, rather than what was.
But he couldn’t stop himself from answering truthfully. “Yes.”
“Isn’t it terrible, knowing that you need to make each moment count, each movement memorable and worthy, when all they want to do is get into the thick of it so they can get off, as if the orgasm is the release?”
“Do you?” Just two words, but Sherlock would know what he meant. Is that how it was for Sherlock as well? Had Sherlock looked for something greater and found everything, everyone, wanting? Had he given up, like John? How did he know the disappointment of...
“I see it. I see it all the time. It’s all good, John? Try none of it good. I don’t eat because the food doesn’t satisfy.”
“Because they are stupid and ordinary.”
Sherlock inclined his head. “Because they are stupid and ordinary.”
“But--”
“You’re never ordinary.”
John snorted, despite the gravity that bore down on him. Even during a massive tectonic relationship shift, trust Sherlock to deny his ordinariness, but not his stupidity.
“You said anything,” Sherlock said as he rose. “I don’t need the drugs, but I need my perceptions challenged.” He seemed to hesitate, looking for the right words, maybe the best way to convince him. “I don’t want to be bored. I want you to think about that.”
John didn’t think that was what he was originally going to say, and could only shake his head in an inadequate denial that Sherlock just ignored. Ignored! Even though nothing could be the same between them after this.
High altitude free fall.
Shooting a man to save a patient.
The first crack of a whip.
“Think about it. And ask me tomorrow. You won’t be bored either.”
“Ask you what?”
But Sherlock didn’t answer him, just looked at him with those almond eyes narrowed and his head tilted back exposing the column of his vulnerable throat, and John’s brain shorted for a brief moment. When he came back to himself, Sherlock was already making his way to his room.
John stayed cornered on the sofa for a long time before shaking himself out of his stupor and crunching his way through glass to the stereo to see what godawful music had been playing. He’d never heard of it, and if it was something Sherlock only resorted to in that kind of mood, John wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to hear it again.
He didn’t see Sherlock at all the rest of the night. Not while he cleaned. Not while he pretended to watch telly. Not as he went to bed.
He didn’t sleep for a long time. Instead, he stared at his dark ceiling and thought.
Continued in part two: http://eldritchhorrors.livejournal.com/66789.html#cutid1