[fic] sherlock - us against
Title: us against
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4,934
Characters/Pairing: John/Sherlock
Summary: He thinks maybe he should change his name because this is a life he cannot have any more. Teenage!AU
Warnings: child abuse/neglect, mention of suicidal thoughts
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
Author's Note: Written with this prompt in mind. I. This fic. I'm not sure where it came from. But credit where credit is due: inspired by elements in Curse of the Starving Class which a friend and I saw on a whim. And I seriously don't know where I would be without anonbegone who betaed/britpicked this fic and is eternally patient with my neuroticism. ♥ Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own fault.
Translation:
Chinese translation provided by bsz
i.
Five thirty in the morning and John’s woken up by the sound of glass breaking and the slam of the back door. He stares up at the ceiling where he’s stuck glow in the dark stars against cracking plaster and he hears it-the shout of his dad’s voice, the slam of the car door and the engine starts up. John closes his eyes and grips the edge of his duvet tight.
The front door slams shut. His mum sobs in the kitchen. The birds start up in the pre-dawn light.
_____
ii.
Harry holds on to the end of her sleeves with her fingertips when she slouches towards them at the end of the day when they come to pick her up and doesn’t say anything as she stops in front of them.
“Who was it?” John demands, “I’ll beat the bloody hell out of them.”
“Don’t,” Harry says looking up at him and John sees that her lip is split.
“Two of them,” Sherlock says, leaning against his car, “Thistle seeds on your socks, so back behind the north wing which means they’re in your biology class.”
“Shut up,” Harry snarls.
Sherlock looks at her.
“I just want to leave,” Harry says.
John puts his arm around her shoulders and catches Sherlock’s eye over the top of her head. Sherlock opens the backseat door.
They drive home with the radio announcer counting down the top hits of the year and Adele crooning through the static. Harry leans her head against the window and John stares at his fists clenched in his lap.
_____
“We could,” Sherlock says over microwave-heated leftover pizza in the Watson living room. John doesn’t know where his mum has gone and his dad has a late shift again. Even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be at home-he’d be down at The Red Lion with his mates.
“What?” John asks, half watching crap telly and not at all giving Joseph Heller the respect he deserves. His lips have an uncomfortable film of grease from the pizza and he’s sick of trying to call Harry down to eat but he’s too lazy to get her himself.
“We could get out of here,” Sherlock says, and John looks at him. What?
“I’ve got Harry though,” John says and looks back at his book. Sherlock draws his knees up to his chest and looks back at the television (he’s already read the book and boring, dull, predictable). John hadn’t realized how close Sherlock had been sitting until he moved away.
_____
iii.
Sherlock is always invited when they’ve forgotten how much of a prick he is and only remember that he drives a Mercedes with diplomatic plates and never gets stopped by the police for only having a provisionary licence. They remember that he lives in a mansion and that his parents are famous in high society. Someone had once started the rumour that he was distantly related to royalty and Sherlock hadn’t bothered to correct it.
And John is never invited but Sherlock insists on taking him anyway. His clothes are mostly second-hand and his dad sold his mobile two years back. He’s only at the selective school on scholarship and doesn’t belong in their world in the slightest so he sits on the back steps with a can of cheap beer and stays out of their way until Sherlock gets thrown out of the party for revealing far too much about who is sleeping with whom.
John thinks that this is really why they invite him, because they’re all starved for teenaged drama. And he hates the way that Sherlock smiles when they leave, the way that he stands a bit taller at school the next day until they cut him back down, call him freak to his face. Because they always do and John is tired of watching Sherlock set himself up for destruction.
_____
The only rule John ever established in their friendship was that Sherlock was never to deduce anything about his parents. He knows that Sherlock can read it in his face and the way that Harry flinches sometimes at loud sounds, but Sherlock never says anything aloud which is exactly how John wants it.
_____
iv.
His job at the cinema pays him less than four pounds an hour and he’s barely on the schedule at all. It’s only ever really worth it when he helps Sherlock sneak in. It’s not that Sherlock can’t afford the ticket-it’s just more exciting looking the other way and knowing that they could get caught.
Ms. Myers pays him thirty quid to trim the hedges lining the front of her yard. Mr. Russell doesn’t have time to give his garden a proper hoeing before he starts planting next week so he pays John fifty to do the whole lot.
It’s not much but it’s enough to buy frozen vegetables and bread at the shop. Harry keeps asking for ice cream but they just don’t have enough, not if John wants to put some of it away in savings because the summer jobs are going to dry up eventually.
_____
“John,” his mum says one Sunday as she grabs the keys off the counter and he’s cracking eggs into a pan for his and Harry’s breakfast. “Do you have any money on you?”
She looks okay, manicured with a hint of mascara. Her hair is in a neat French braid and she has on a nice white dress. Must be between boyfriends, though, if she’s asking him for money.
“No,” he says, “Are you going to church?”
“Never mind that,” she says, studying her reflection in the glare of the television and tucking away a wisp of stray hair, “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know,” John says.
“Tell him to pay the damn bills if you see him,” she instructs and sweeps out the front door.
_____
Sometimes a pizza delivery man or someone delivering Chinese takeaway will show up and drop off two large pizzas (cheese for Harry and some atrocious combination of flavours on the other because Sherlock likes picking combinations of toppings at random) or three orders of Mongolian beef. Sherlock usually shows up thirty minutes later, when the food already half cold-not that he eats much anyway.
John’s pride wants to send the delivery people away sometimes. But they always tell him that the food is already paid for and he keeps thinking about when September is going to come and he’ll have to be in school again and then what will they eat when Sherlock isn’t around?
_____
When their dad comes home, John tells Harry to stay in her room.
He smells like beer and piss as he stumbles into the first floor bathroom and vomits onto the floor at the base of the toilet. John drags him out of the bathroom and spends five minutes pulling the sweat-and-vomit soaked shirt off limp arms, dodging the backhand that swings his way.
“Don’t touch me woman,” his dad snarls and John stays away for a full thirty seconds before gathering the courage to turn him on his side, right there, in the hallway. His dad’s breathing evens out into rhythmic snoring.
John picks up the phone and dials a number by heart. He says, “Don’t come over, not tonight, please,” and hangs up.
He sleeps sitting against his sister’s door with a baseball bat close to hand. He’s going to protect her; he’s never going to let it happen again.
_____
The electricity goes out first. Harry whines about not being able to watch television until he gives her the copy of the third Harry Potter book he accidentally never returned to the library. She’s read it already but she stops complaining anyway.
Sherlock comes to pick them up and the air conditioning in his car feels amazing when they shut the doors after themselves. He’s playing something appalling on the stereo-a truly awful dubstep version of Beethoven’s third. John crinkles his nose and says, “I cannot believe you’re listening to this.”
“My violin tutor would have an aneurysm,” Sherlock agrees. John knows that he’s been bored with Paganini for the last week. Sherlock makes no move to change the music so John grabs his iPod and flips it over to the classic rock he’s loaded onto it next to Sherlock’s concertos and strangely hipster taste in bands.
“Come live with me,” Sherlock says and John can’t remember the last time he had said us.
_____
She’s crying when Sherlock hands the phone over to John.
“Mum?” he asks, pressing the phone into his ear hard as if it would help hear her words better. But she doesn’t say anything at all, just keeps crying softly into the phone until he hears a click and the phone goes dead.
_____
v
Sherlock is visiting relatives in London proper and John never feels comfortable in the Holmes mansion without Sherlock there, no matter how often he’s been there. There’s still no electricity to the Watson household and John’s afraid of when they’ll turn off the water too. He’s burning an old mosquito repelling candle that he found in the garage on the coffee table to ward off the darkness. Harry sleeps curled up on the sofa in one of their dad’s old t-shirts and John studies the Krebs cycle in the dim light in effort to get ahead on schoolwork.
A car nears and then John hears the loose gravel on the driveway crunch under tires. His heart speeds up and he sets his notebook down-dad. A slam of the car door and John shakes his sister awake, an urgent whisper, “Harry.”
Footsteps on pavement. Harry opens her eyes and tenses.
“Go to your room,” John says. She slips off the sofa and hurries up the stairs as John blows out the candle.
A knock on the door. John can hear the other person breathing through the open front window. A dog barks in the distance.
“John,” the man says, “I know you’re in there. I saw the light.”
John moves into the hallway, looks at the outline of the man through the frame of the door.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s not here,” John says.
“Your father owes us money,” the man says and he tries to turn the doorknob. It’s locked. John doesn’t even have the time to react as the man slams a brick through the glass of the door.
John runs back into the kitchen, looking for their kitchen knife-the dull piece of shit that they haven’t sharpened in months, but the only weapon John can think of. The man is halfway up the stairs and John thinks Harry.
_____
The man knows exactly what room is Harry’s.
Later, John will wonder why.
_____
The only regret he has while he stands over the man with the knife in his hand and the terrifying taste of blood in his mouth-the only regret he has is that Harry saw him like that.
_____
“Is he dead?” Harry asks.
“Shh,” John says. The moonlight glitters off the water running from the tap while John washes his hands. He spreads his fingers and washes under his nails. He cleans the knife and dries it.
“What are we going to do?”
John puts the knife back into the drawer and then he remembers to wash the blood off his face.
_____
“I’m coming back now,” Sherlock says.
John’s hands are shaking as he puts the phone back into its cradle. Harry sits at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her eyes are open wide in the dark.
_____
“Thug,” Sherlock says, holding the candle over the dead man.
“I got that,” John says, eyes fixed on a spot over Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Cocaine addict,” Sherlock says, nudging the man’s hand with his foot, “No family. Someone wanted this man on a tight lead.”
John breathes out through his nose and doesn’t look away from the wall. Sherlock touches his shoulder with his arm.
“Thank you,” John says.
_____
John takes the man’s car keys and the money from his wallet. He’s careful to use gloves.
“I’m coming with you,” Sherlock says.
“What about your parents? Your brother?”
Sherlock tilts his head and smiles, “They won’t notice.”
_____
vi
Rainstorm. John rolls down all of the car windows and plays Lostprophets at top volume. Harry covers her face with her hands and turns away from the rain. Sherlock drives, right arm on the sill, sleeve of his expensive shirt getting soaked.
If John is crying, nobody says anything. The thunder rolls above and almost drowns out the song: if we’re going nowhere.
_____
They stop for petrol. Sherlock hands John cash and makes him go fill the car. He does.
He doesn’t see Sherlock rummage through the dashboard and he doesn’t see Sherlock find two photographs of the dead man’s son.
He turns around when Sherlock shuts the car door and says, “Going to the toilet.”
When Sherlock comes back, he has a cigarette in one hand. His fingertips are smudged with black and an acrid scent lingers on his clothes. John doesn’t comment on it; he just tells Sherlock to smoke out the window. They start driving again.
_____
The hotel room smells like stale smoke and static cling. Harry climbs onto one of the beds and curls up on her side. She quietly cries herself to sleep with John’s hand on her shoulder.
“You shouldn’t,” John whispers. He’s laying on his side, facing Sherlock and they’re both listening to the rush of traffic come in through the open window, “Your parents will be worried.”
“Good,” Sherlock whispers back. His palm is pressed against John’s forearm and he’s stroking the inside of John’s wrist with his fingertips.
“Stop worrying,” Sherlock orders, tugging John closer. John goes, rolling onto his stomach and Sherlock tucks his chin over John’s shoulder, hand settling on his back.
“What do I do?” John asks and it’s more of a vibration than actual words. Sherlock doesn’t answer, just presses his nose into John’s neck and breathes.
_____
vii
John half thinks that the only reason why anyone picks them up is because Harry looks so pitiful standing at the edge of the road with her thumb in the air. He doesn’t know if they’re better or worse off. No idea when or where they’re going to get their next meal but maybe that’s not that much different. They’re at the mercy of strangers, he supposes. But Sherlock’s here and they don’t have to worry about their dad. If he and mum will accidentally be home at the same time again. That’s better than John could have imagined.
They only have fifty pounds left between the two of them. School is only three weeks away from starting again and John doesn’t know if he or Harry can ever go back but he knows that Sherlock has to.
Sometimes they sleep sitting in the chairs at train stations, Harry with her head on John’s shoulder and Sherlock flipping through a stolen pamphlet on lockpicking.
This isn’t the life that Harry deserves, John thinks.
_____
“I killed a man,” John tells himself in the mirror. The fluorescent light of the public bathroom washes out the colour in his face and makes him look dead.
_____
The first time they kiss, they’re hiding in an abandoned barn and Harry has already fallen asleep. Sherlock has his head tilted up against the moonlight coming in through the high window. He’s smiling for some reason that John can’t remember. All he remembers is the surge of want crackling at the edges of his frayed nerves, a shift under his skin simmering for so many months-and it was only natural for him to lean forward and kiss Sherlock.
_____
Later, Sherlock moves against him and they’re both breathing hard and trying to keep quiet. John bites the inside of his lip to stop from making any noise but Sherlock plays his body like he does his violin, deft fingers sweeping over every inch of him and he can feel Sherlock’s cock through his trousers, grinding insistently against his thigh and Sherlock’s kissing him and his entire body is singing with fire.
_____
“John Watson,” John says to his reflection after splashing water on his face. The library toilets even smells like books and he thinks maybe he should change his name because this is a life he cannot have any more.
_____
viii
He doesn’t remember her name but she’s his mum’s sister and he feels small, standing on her front door as she looks at them with the door half closed already.
“You can stay for the night if you need to,” she says, “But we can’t take you in. We don’t have the money.”
John stares at the embroidered edge of her apron. When he was twelve, she had come and visited them once. He remembers that she had chastised his mum about how she was raising them and they had screamed at each for half an hour until she left in a squeal of tires. He doesn’t blame her, maybe, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling angry.
“What if it was just Harry?” John asks, tugging Harry forward.
“I’m sorry,” she says as she takes another step back. She’s ready to retract her invitation altogether and close the door on them, John can tell. “What happened to your mum anyway?”
John hates them both, his mum and this vile woman, but he hates his mum less so he says, “Nothing.”
After the door shuts, Harry holds his hand tight but doesn’t look at him when she asks, “What now?”
Sherlock touches the back of John’s elbow before settling his hands on Harry’s shoulders and saying, “You wouldn’t have wanted to live with her anyway. She’d make you clean her bathrooms and take care of her four cats and tell you every day how grateful you should be that she took you in.”
Later when they’re on the bus and Harry’s sleeping against John’s side, he reaches across the aisle and holds Sherlock’s hand. He mouths thank you and the syllables of each word are illuminated in flashes of orange-gold streetlight.
_____
Two in the morning and Sherlock brackets John in with his arms against the humming laundry machines. He kisses John under the buzz of the bright fluorescent lights in the laundrette. John fists his hands into Sherlock’s curls and drags him in until their teeth click, propriety be damned.
_____
“We could go to France,” Sherlock says.
“Je ne sais pas,” John replies, exaggerating the terrible accent.
“You’d fit right in,” Sherlock agrees.
“We don’t have the money to do that,” John says looking at Sherlock’s profile in the setting sun as they wait for oncoming traffic, “We don’t have any money at all.”
Sherlock laughs softly, “Isn’t it exciting?”
_____
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Harry asks John.
“Who?”
“Mum and dad.”
John squeezes her hand, “Dunno.”
_____
ix
For John’s sixth birthday, his mum had baked him a strawberry cake and iced it with whipped cream. His dad brought home a toy fire engine with real lights and sirens that turned on and the hose that shot real water if he filled up the pouch in the back. The lights lasted all of four days before John immersed the entire thing in water while trying to fill up the back and fried the electronics.
And somewhere between his sixth birthday and his fourteenth birthday, something must have changed because he spent his fourteenth birthday sitting on the back porch, listening to his dad smash plate after plate on the hardwood floor of the hallway. Harry covered her ears and cried into his shoulder, getting snot all over her teddy bear. John wanted to do the same but he had one arm around her shoulders so he wasn’t spared the way that his mum had screamed, well then, why don’t we get a divorce? Let’s get a fucking divorce, you bastard.
_____
Despite the number of times John has been to the Holmes mansion, he has never met Sherlock’s parents. He knows what they look like-anybody who reads the papers knows what they look like. The closest that John had ever been to meeting one of them was watching Sherlock stood in the doorway of the study with stiff shoulders and hearing a woman’s voice coming from within the room.
He met Sherlock’s brother, once. He and Sherlock were separated by eight years. He had come by personally to pick Sherlock up the week he was graduating from university. He had barely spared John a glance. Sherlock and John had only been fourteen at the time so they hadn’t known each other very well.
Sherlock doesn’t talk about his parents and John doesn’t ask.
_____
x
They get to sleep with blankets for the first time in a week and an half when they knock on the door of their dad’s sister. She’s forty-something with no husband and a one-room flat in Cardiff and John doesn’t know how Sherlock found her address.
“I remember when you were just a baby,” she tells Harry, as she makes them dinner: pasta with a bit of mince that looked more brown than pink. It doesn’t matter though because it’s hot food and the best they’ve eaten in what feels like forever.
The best part is standing under the shower, letting the water beat against his back, washing away the sweat and the greasy feel of scent more thoroughly than washing at a sink ever could. He doesn’t hear the door open or close with his forehead pressed against the cool tile wall and the patter of water at his feet-but then there’s a hand at his hip and Sherlock’s stepping into the shower with him-
He’s about to say something, maybe remind him that they’re guests but Sherlock puts a finger on his lips and crowds John out of the water. The flutter of Sherlock’s eyes as the water hits his skin silences any objections that John might have had and he pushes wet fingers into Sherlock’s hair and moves to catch Sherlock’s lower lip between his teeth.
It’s infuriatingly stupid how much Sherlock turns him on. Sherlock leans forward to trap John up against the wall and his hip barely slides against John’s cock and John gasps into Sherlock’s mouth, an involuntary whine rising at the back of his throat. He can’t help the way that his hips move of their own accord, thrusting against Sherlock until he reaches down and pins John’s hip against the wall, palm pressed against John’s hipbone. He mouths at John’s ear and rubs his cock into the crease of John’s inner thigh, smearing pre-come against the soft skin there.
John is already half out of his mind when Sherlock drops to a crouch and John barely has any warning to brace himself against the wall as Sherlock takes his cock in his mouth. He doesn’t know where the fuck Sherlock learned to do this, all wet heat and no teeth as he swirls his tongue around the head of John’s dick. The back of John’s head hits the tiled wall and he’s trying so hard to be quiet, using all of his self control not to scream and Sherlock pulls away and fucking laughs at him, lips pressed against the side of John’s cock and actually laughing. John is torn between telling him to fuck off and begging him to finish. When he looks down, Sherlock is back on task, cheeks hollowed with the effort and there are drops of water caught in his eyelashes. But what makes John come is the realization that Sherlock’s other hand is on his own cock, that he’s getting off on giving John a blowjob and that’s just-
The pleasure uncoils from the base of his spine, bright liquid fire that fills him until he thinks he’s going to die. His jaw is clenched shut and he’s trying not to breathe with the effort of keeping quiet but a whimper escapes him anyway. When he comes down, Sherlock is lapping at the head of his cock, pink tongue slipping out between his lips like obscene pornography.
He pats John’s hip and rises to his feet. He kisses John and John feels boneless and grateful for the wall behind him before he panics about reciprocating. Sherlock’s not hard though-which means he must have gotten himself off.
“You owe me a blowjob,” Sherlock says against John’s lips and he smiles, catlike, before reaching for the soap.
_____
Harry is asleep on the sofa in the living room while John sits at the dining room table with a glass of cold water while his aunt pours tea for Sherlock and herself in the kitchen.
“I need to know,” she says after setting the mugs of tea down on the table and sitting down across from John. Sherlock pours milk into his tea but John knows he won’t actually drink it.
John looks over at the sofa to make sure that his sister is still sleeping. And then he starts from the beginning.
_____
Morning light illuminates the white blinds over the kitchen window. The tea has gone cold.
His aunt went to sleep hours ago. But the important thing is that she’ll take Harry in.
John wants to sleep. Instead, he sits on the kitchen counter with warm coffee in his hands and listens to the tap leak drop by drop onto the unwashed plates.
Sherlock appears in the kitchen doorway. He watches John.
“I have his name,” John says.
Sherlock pauses before he says, “John is the most common male name in the western hemisphere.”
“No,” John says, “I have his name.”
Sherlock steps into the kitchen.
“I killed a man,” John says. It’s the second time he’s said it out loud. It doesn’t sound any less stupid than the first.
“In self-defence.”
“I didn’t even flinch.”
Sherlock pulls the mug from his hands and tries to pull John down from the worktop.
“There was-” John says, pulling his hands away from Sherlock, “-a lot of blood.”
Sherlock looks up at him, hands settling on the counterspace around his legs.
“I didn’t feel a thing, Sherlock,” John says, and his voice breaks, “I’m going to grow up to be an alcoholic. I’m going to grow up to beat my wife.”
“No,” Sherlock says, “No.”
“I’m going to grow up to rape my daughter,” John forces the words out past the lump in his throat, past the hatred burning in his chest, and he’s fucking sobbing. His vision is blurred with tears, “I’m going to be the splitting image of him.”
Sherlock grabs his head, keeps him still, “No. I know you.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” John says, “His blood was on my face and I just kept stabbing him.”
“Listen to me,” Sherlock says, “You are the most caring person I know. You only did those things because he was going to hurt your sister.”
John hates it, hates the way that he’s crying now, great heaving sobs that make him feel like he’s not getting enough oxygen. Sherlock pulls him close and lets him muffle his sobs in his shoulder.
_____
The afternoon sun slants through the frosted bathroom window. When Sherlock speaks, it is hushed.
“Listen John, you saved my life.
“I didn’t have any friends and then I met you. I was a prat back then-I told you that I wasn’t interested in making friends with commoners. And you just looked at me and you just asked if what they said about me was true, that I could figure people out from just looking at them. So being the bastard that I was, I said that you came from an abusive household and you punched me in the face and told me that this was why nobody liked me. Because I saw the worst in them and pointed it out to their faces. And that would have been it except you helped me off the floor and asked if I wanted to eat lunch with you.
“I was lonely but too proud to admit it. You saw through me. What you didn’t know was that I had really been thinking about disappearing. About running away to starve to death on the streets of London. About slitting my own throat with violin strings, about walking into the ocean and never looking back. At first it was because I wanted to make my parents sorry they hadn’t paid more attention to me. And then when I realized that they wouldn’t care at all if I were alive or dead-that was when I think I started to consider things more seriously.
“You had perfect timing. I needed a friend then. And you were kind enough to be one to me.”
John slips his hand into Sherlock’s.
And neither of them speak after that.
_____
xi
A rumble of thunder crawls low across the sky. The warm summer rain beats against the ground. Neither John nor Sherlock have an umbrella.
_____
xii
Much later, John will sit across from Sherlock’s brother. He will look at the paperwork printed in triplicate.
Sherlock’s brother will say, “This is my offer.” He will say, “As a favour for my brother.”
And John will not want to but he will have no choice but to sign his life away for queen and country.
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4,934
Characters/Pairing: John/Sherlock
Summary: He thinks maybe he should change his name because this is a life he cannot have any more. Teenage!AU
Warnings: child abuse/neglect, mention of suicidal thoughts
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
Author's Note: Written with this prompt in mind. I. This fic. I'm not sure where it came from. But credit where credit is due: inspired by elements in Curse of the Starving Class which a friend and I saw on a whim. And I seriously don't know where I would be without anonbegone who betaed/britpicked this fic and is eternally patient with my neuroticism. ♥ Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own fault.
Translation:
Chinese translation provided by bsz
i.
Five thirty in the morning and John’s woken up by the sound of glass breaking and the slam of the back door. He stares up at the ceiling where he’s stuck glow in the dark stars against cracking plaster and he hears it-the shout of his dad’s voice, the slam of the car door and the engine starts up. John closes his eyes and grips the edge of his duvet tight.
The front door slams shut. His mum sobs in the kitchen. The birds start up in the pre-dawn light.
_____
ii.
Harry holds on to the end of her sleeves with her fingertips when she slouches towards them at the end of the day when they come to pick her up and doesn’t say anything as she stops in front of them.
“Who was it?” John demands, “I’ll beat the bloody hell out of them.”
“Don’t,” Harry says looking up at him and John sees that her lip is split.
“Two of them,” Sherlock says, leaning against his car, “Thistle seeds on your socks, so back behind the north wing which means they’re in your biology class.”
“Shut up,” Harry snarls.
Sherlock looks at her.
“I just want to leave,” Harry says.
John puts his arm around her shoulders and catches Sherlock’s eye over the top of her head. Sherlock opens the backseat door.
They drive home with the radio announcer counting down the top hits of the year and Adele crooning through the static. Harry leans her head against the window and John stares at his fists clenched in his lap.
_____
“We could,” Sherlock says over microwave-heated leftover pizza in the Watson living room. John doesn’t know where his mum has gone and his dad has a late shift again. Even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be at home-he’d be down at The Red Lion with his mates.
“What?” John asks, half watching crap telly and not at all giving Joseph Heller the respect he deserves. His lips have an uncomfortable film of grease from the pizza and he’s sick of trying to call Harry down to eat but he’s too lazy to get her himself.
“We could get out of here,” Sherlock says, and John looks at him. What?
“I’ve got Harry though,” John says and looks back at his book. Sherlock draws his knees up to his chest and looks back at the television (he’s already read the book and boring, dull, predictable). John hadn’t realized how close Sherlock had been sitting until he moved away.
_____
iii.
Sherlock is always invited when they’ve forgotten how much of a prick he is and only remember that he drives a Mercedes with diplomatic plates and never gets stopped by the police for only having a provisionary licence. They remember that he lives in a mansion and that his parents are famous in high society. Someone had once started the rumour that he was distantly related to royalty and Sherlock hadn’t bothered to correct it.
And John is never invited but Sherlock insists on taking him anyway. His clothes are mostly second-hand and his dad sold his mobile two years back. He’s only at the selective school on scholarship and doesn’t belong in their world in the slightest so he sits on the back steps with a can of cheap beer and stays out of their way until Sherlock gets thrown out of the party for revealing far too much about who is sleeping with whom.
John thinks that this is really why they invite him, because they’re all starved for teenaged drama. And he hates the way that Sherlock smiles when they leave, the way that he stands a bit taller at school the next day until they cut him back down, call him freak to his face. Because they always do and John is tired of watching Sherlock set himself up for destruction.
_____
The only rule John ever established in their friendship was that Sherlock was never to deduce anything about his parents. He knows that Sherlock can read it in his face and the way that Harry flinches sometimes at loud sounds, but Sherlock never says anything aloud which is exactly how John wants it.
_____
iv.
His job at the cinema pays him less than four pounds an hour and he’s barely on the schedule at all. It’s only ever really worth it when he helps Sherlock sneak in. It’s not that Sherlock can’t afford the ticket-it’s just more exciting looking the other way and knowing that they could get caught.
Ms. Myers pays him thirty quid to trim the hedges lining the front of her yard. Mr. Russell doesn’t have time to give his garden a proper hoeing before he starts planting next week so he pays John fifty to do the whole lot.
It’s not much but it’s enough to buy frozen vegetables and bread at the shop. Harry keeps asking for ice cream but they just don’t have enough, not if John wants to put some of it away in savings because the summer jobs are going to dry up eventually.
_____
“John,” his mum says one Sunday as she grabs the keys off the counter and he’s cracking eggs into a pan for his and Harry’s breakfast. “Do you have any money on you?”
She looks okay, manicured with a hint of mascara. Her hair is in a neat French braid and she has on a nice white dress. Must be between boyfriends, though, if she’s asking him for money.
“No,” he says, “Are you going to church?”
“Never mind that,” she says, studying her reflection in the glare of the television and tucking away a wisp of stray hair, “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know,” John says.
“Tell him to pay the damn bills if you see him,” she instructs and sweeps out the front door.
_____
Sometimes a pizza delivery man or someone delivering Chinese takeaway will show up and drop off two large pizzas (cheese for Harry and some atrocious combination of flavours on the other because Sherlock likes picking combinations of toppings at random) or three orders of Mongolian beef. Sherlock usually shows up thirty minutes later, when the food already half cold-not that he eats much anyway.
John’s pride wants to send the delivery people away sometimes. But they always tell him that the food is already paid for and he keeps thinking about when September is going to come and he’ll have to be in school again and then what will they eat when Sherlock isn’t around?
_____
When their dad comes home, John tells Harry to stay in her room.
He smells like beer and piss as he stumbles into the first floor bathroom and vomits onto the floor at the base of the toilet. John drags him out of the bathroom and spends five minutes pulling the sweat-and-vomit soaked shirt off limp arms, dodging the backhand that swings his way.
“Don’t touch me woman,” his dad snarls and John stays away for a full thirty seconds before gathering the courage to turn him on his side, right there, in the hallway. His dad’s breathing evens out into rhythmic snoring.
John picks up the phone and dials a number by heart. He says, “Don’t come over, not tonight, please,” and hangs up.
He sleeps sitting against his sister’s door with a baseball bat close to hand. He’s going to protect her; he’s never going to let it happen again.
_____
The electricity goes out first. Harry whines about not being able to watch television until he gives her the copy of the third Harry Potter book he accidentally never returned to the library. She’s read it already but she stops complaining anyway.
Sherlock comes to pick them up and the air conditioning in his car feels amazing when they shut the doors after themselves. He’s playing something appalling on the stereo-a truly awful dubstep version of Beethoven’s third. John crinkles his nose and says, “I cannot believe you’re listening to this.”
“My violin tutor would have an aneurysm,” Sherlock agrees. John knows that he’s been bored with Paganini for the last week. Sherlock makes no move to change the music so John grabs his iPod and flips it over to the classic rock he’s loaded onto it next to Sherlock’s concertos and strangely hipster taste in bands.
“Come live with me,” Sherlock says and John can’t remember the last time he had said us.
_____
She’s crying when Sherlock hands the phone over to John.
“Mum?” he asks, pressing the phone into his ear hard as if it would help hear her words better. But she doesn’t say anything at all, just keeps crying softly into the phone until he hears a click and the phone goes dead.
_____
v
Sherlock is visiting relatives in London proper and John never feels comfortable in the Holmes mansion without Sherlock there, no matter how often he’s been there. There’s still no electricity to the Watson household and John’s afraid of when they’ll turn off the water too. He’s burning an old mosquito repelling candle that he found in the garage on the coffee table to ward off the darkness. Harry sleeps curled up on the sofa in one of their dad’s old t-shirts and John studies the Krebs cycle in the dim light in effort to get ahead on schoolwork.
A car nears and then John hears the loose gravel on the driveway crunch under tires. His heart speeds up and he sets his notebook down-dad. A slam of the car door and John shakes his sister awake, an urgent whisper, “Harry.”
Footsteps on pavement. Harry opens her eyes and tenses.
“Go to your room,” John says. She slips off the sofa and hurries up the stairs as John blows out the candle.
A knock on the door. John can hear the other person breathing through the open front window. A dog barks in the distance.
“John,” the man says, “I know you’re in there. I saw the light.”
John moves into the hallway, looks at the outline of the man through the frame of the door.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s not here,” John says.
“Your father owes us money,” the man says and he tries to turn the doorknob. It’s locked. John doesn’t even have the time to react as the man slams a brick through the glass of the door.
John runs back into the kitchen, looking for their kitchen knife-the dull piece of shit that they haven’t sharpened in months, but the only weapon John can think of. The man is halfway up the stairs and John thinks Harry.
_____
The man knows exactly what room is Harry’s.
Later, John will wonder why.
_____
The only regret he has while he stands over the man with the knife in his hand and the terrifying taste of blood in his mouth-the only regret he has is that Harry saw him like that.
_____
“Is he dead?” Harry asks.
“Shh,” John says. The moonlight glitters off the water running from the tap while John washes his hands. He spreads his fingers and washes under his nails. He cleans the knife and dries it.
“What are we going to do?”
John puts the knife back into the drawer and then he remembers to wash the blood off his face.
_____
“I’m coming back now,” Sherlock says.
John’s hands are shaking as he puts the phone back into its cradle. Harry sits at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her eyes are open wide in the dark.
_____
“Thug,” Sherlock says, holding the candle over the dead man.
“I got that,” John says, eyes fixed on a spot over Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Cocaine addict,” Sherlock says, nudging the man’s hand with his foot, “No family. Someone wanted this man on a tight lead.”
John breathes out through his nose and doesn’t look away from the wall. Sherlock touches his shoulder with his arm.
“Thank you,” John says.
_____
John takes the man’s car keys and the money from his wallet. He’s careful to use gloves.
“I’m coming with you,” Sherlock says.
“What about your parents? Your brother?”
Sherlock tilts his head and smiles, “They won’t notice.”
_____
vi
Rainstorm. John rolls down all of the car windows and plays Lostprophets at top volume. Harry covers her face with her hands and turns away from the rain. Sherlock drives, right arm on the sill, sleeve of his expensive shirt getting soaked.
If John is crying, nobody says anything. The thunder rolls above and almost drowns out the song: if we’re going nowhere.
_____
They stop for petrol. Sherlock hands John cash and makes him go fill the car. He does.
He doesn’t see Sherlock rummage through the dashboard and he doesn’t see Sherlock find two photographs of the dead man’s son.
He turns around when Sherlock shuts the car door and says, “Going to the toilet.”
When Sherlock comes back, he has a cigarette in one hand. His fingertips are smudged with black and an acrid scent lingers on his clothes. John doesn’t comment on it; he just tells Sherlock to smoke out the window. They start driving again.
_____
The hotel room smells like stale smoke and static cling. Harry climbs onto one of the beds and curls up on her side. She quietly cries herself to sleep with John’s hand on her shoulder.
“You shouldn’t,” John whispers. He’s laying on his side, facing Sherlock and they’re both listening to the rush of traffic come in through the open window, “Your parents will be worried.”
“Good,” Sherlock whispers back. His palm is pressed against John’s forearm and he’s stroking the inside of John’s wrist with his fingertips.
“Stop worrying,” Sherlock orders, tugging John closer. John goes, rolling onto his stomach and Sherlock tucks his chin over John’s shoulder, hand settling on his back.
“What do I do?” John asks and it’s more of a vibration than actual words. Sherlock doesn’t answer, just presses his nose into John’s neck and breathes.
_____
vii
John half thinks that the only reason why anyone picks them up is because Harry looks so pitiful standing at the edge of the road with her thumb in the air. He doesn’t know if they’re better or worse off. No idea when or where they’re going to get their next meal but maybe that’s not that much different. They’re at the mercy of strangers, he supposes. But Sherlock’s here and they don’t have to worry about their dad. If he and mum will accidentally be home at the same time again. That’s better than John could have imagined.
They only have fifty pounds left between the two of them. School is only three weeks away from starting again and John doesn’t know if he or Harry can ever go back but he knows that Sherlock has to.
Sometimes they sleep sitting in the chairs at train stations, Harry with her head on John’s shoulder and Sherlock flipping through a stolen pamphlet on lockpicking.
This isn’t the life that Harry deserves, John thinks.
_____
“I killed a man,” John tells himself in the mirror. The fluorescent light of the public bathroom washes out the colour in his face and makes him look dead.
_____
The first time they kiss, they’re hiding in an abandoned barn and Harry has already fallen asleep. Sherlock has his head tilted up against the moonlight coming in through the high window. He’s smiling for some reason that John can’t remember. All he remembers is the surge of want crackling at the edges of his frayed nerves, a shift under his skin simmering for so many months-and it was only natural for him to lean forward and kiss Sherlock.
_____
Later, Sherlock moves against him and they’re both breathing hard and trying to keep quiet. John bites the inside of his lip to stop from making any noise but Sherlock plays his body like he does his violin, deft fingers sweeping over every inch of him and he can feel Sherlock’s cock through his trousers, grinding insistently against his thigh and Sherlock’s kissing him and his entire body is singing with fire.
_____
“John Watson,” John says to his reflection after splashing water on his face. The library toilets even smells like books and he thinks maybe he should change his name because this is a life he cannot have any more.
_____
viii
He doesn’t remember her name but she’s his mum’s sister and he feels small, standing on her front door as she looks at them with the door half closed already.
“You can stay for the night if you need to,” she says, “But we can’t take you in. We don’t have the money.”
John stares at the embroidered edge of her apron. When he was twelve, she had come and visited them once. He remembers that she had chastised his mum about how she was raising them and they had screamed at each for half an hour until she left in a squeal of tires. He doesn’t blame her, maybe, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling angry.
“What if it was just Harry?” John asks, tugging Harry forward.
“I’m sorry,” she says as she takes another step back. She’s ready to retract her invitation altogether and close the door on them, John can tell. “What happened to your mum anyway?”
John hates them both, his mum and this vile woman, but he hates his mum less so he says, “Nothing.”
After the door shuts, Harry holds his hand tight but doesn’t look at him when she asks, “What now?”
Sherlock touches the back of John’s elbow before settling his hands on Harry’s shoulders and saying, “You wouldn’t have wanted to live with her anyway. She’d make you clean her bathrooms and take care of her four cats and tell you every day how grateful you should be that she took you in.”
Later when they’re on the bus and Harry’s sleeping against John’s side, he reaches across the aisle and holds Sherlock’s hand. He mouths thank you and the syllables of each word are illuminated in flashes of orange-gold streetlight.
_____
Two in the morning and Sherlock brackets John in with his arms against the humming laundry machines. He kisses John under the buzz of the bright fluorescent lights in the laundrette. John fists his hands into Sherlock’s curls and drags him in until their teeth click, propriety be damned.
_____
“We could go to France,” Sherlock says.
“Je ne sais pas,” John replies, exaggerating the terrible accent.
“You’d fit right in,” Sherlock agrees.
“We don’t have the money to do that,” John says looking at Sherlock’s profile in the setting sun as they wait for oncoming traffic, “We don’t have any money at all.”
Sherlock laughs softly, “Isn’t it exciting?”
_____
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Harry asks John.
“Who?”
“Mum and dad.”
John squeezes her hand, “Dunno.”
_____
ix
For John’s sixth birthday, his mum had baked him a strawberry cake and iced it with whipped cream. His dad brought home a toy fire engine with real lights and sirens that turned on and the hose that shot real water if he filled up the pouch in the back. The lights lasted all of four days before John immersed the entire thing in water while trying to fill up the back and fried the electronics.
And somewhere between his sixth birthday and his fourteenth birthday, something must have changed because he spent his fourteenth birthday sitting on the back porch, listening to his dad smash plate after plate on the hardwood floor of the hallway. Harry covered her ears and cried into his shoulder, getting snot all over her teddy bear. John wanted to do the same but he had one arm around her shoulders so he wasn’t spared the way that his mum had screamed, well then, why don’t we get a divorce? Let’s get a fucking divorce, you bastard.
_____
Despite the number of times John has been to the Holmes mansion, he has never met Sherlock’s parents. He knows what they look like-anybody who reads the papers knows what they look like. The closest that John had ever been to meeting one of them was watching Sherlock stood in the doorway of the study with stiff shoulders and hearing a woman’s voice coming from within the room.
He met Sherlock’s brother, once. He and Sherlock were separated by eight years. He had come by personally to pick Sherlock up the week he was graduating from university. He had barely spared John a glance. Sherlock and John had only been fourteen at the time so they hadn’t known each other very well.
Sherlock doesn’t talk about his parents and John doesn’t ask.
_____
x
They get to sleep with blankets for the first time in a week and an half when they knock on the door of their dad’s sister. She’s forty-something with no husband and a one-room flat in Cardiff and John doesn’t know how Sherlock found her address.
“I remember when you were just a baby,” she tells Harry, as she makes them dinner: pasta with a bit of mince that looked more brown than pink. It doesn’t matter though because it’s hot food and the best they’ve eaten in what feels like forever.
The best part is standing under the shower, letting the water beat against his back, washing away the sweat and the greasy feel of scent more thoroughly than washing at a sink ever could. He doesn’t hear the door open or close with his forehead pressed against the cool tile wall and the patter of water at his feet-but then there’s a hand at his hip and Sherlock’s stepping into the shower with him-
He’s about to say something, maybe remind him that they’re guests but Sherlock puts a finger on his lips and crowds John out of the water. The flutter of Sherlock’s eyes as the water hits his skin silences any objections that John might have had and he pushes wet fingers into Sherlock’s hair and moves to catch Sherlock’s lower lip between his teeth.
It’s infuriatingly stupid how much Sherlock turns him on. Sherlock leans forward to trap John up against the wall and his hip barely slides against John’s cock and John gasps into Sherlock’s mouth, an involuntary whine rising at the back of his throat. He can’t help the way that his hips move of their own accord, thrusting against Sherlock until he reaches down and pins John’s hip against the wall, palm pressed against John’s hipbone. He mouths at John’s ear and rubs his cock into the crease of John’s inner thigh, smearing pre-come against the soft skin there.
John is already half out of his mind when Sherlock drops to a crouch and John barely has any warning to brace himself against the wall as Sherlock takes his cock in his mouth. He doesn’t know where the fuck Sherlock learned to do this, all wet heat and no teeth as he swirls his tongue around the head of John’s dick. The back of John’s head hits the tiled wall and he’s trying so hard to be quiet, using all of his self control not to scream and Sherlock pulls away and fucking laughs at him, lips pressed against the side of John’s cock and actually laughing. John is torn between telling him to fuck off and begging him to finish. When he looks down, Sherlock is back on task, cheeks hollowed with the effort and there are drops of water caught in his eyelashes. But what makes John come is the realization that Sherlock’s other hand is on his own cock, that he’s getting off on giving John a blowjob and that’s just-
The pleasure uncoils from the base of his spine, bright liquid fire that fills him until he thinks he’s going to die. His jaw is clenched shut and he’s trying not to breathe with the effort of keeping quiet but a whimper escapes him anyway. When he comes down, Sherlock is lapping at the head of his cock, pink tongue slipping out between his lips like obscene pornography.
He pats John’s hip and rises to his feet. He kisses John and John feels boneless and grateful for the wall behind him before he panics about reciprocating. Sherlock’s not hard though-which means he must have gotten himself off.
“You owe me a blowjob,” Sherlock says against John’s lips and he smiles, catlike, before reaching for the soap.
_____
Harry is asleep on the sofa in the living room while John sits at the dining room table with a glass of cold water while his aunt pours tea for Sherlock and herself in the kitchen.
“I need to know,” she says after setting the mugs of tea down on the table and sitting down across from John. Sherlock pours milk into his tea but John knows he won’t actually drink it.
John looks over at the sofa to make sure that his sister is still sleeping. And then he starts from the beginning.
_____
Morning light illuminates the white blinds over the kitchen window. The tea has gone cold.
His aunt went to sleep hours ago. But the important thing is that she’ll take Harry in.
John wants to sleep. Instead, he sits on the kitchen counter with warm coffee in his hands and listens to the tap leak drop by drop onto the unwashed plates.
Sherlock appears in the kitchen doorway. He watches John.
“I have his name,” John says.
Sherlock pauses before he says, “John is the most common male name in the western hemisphere.”
“No,” John says, “I have his name.”
Sherlock steps into the kitchen.
“I killed a man,” John says. It’s the second time he’s said it out loud. It doesn’t sound any less stupid than the first.
“In self-defence.”
“I didn’t even flinch.”
Sherlock pulls the mug from his hands and tries to pull John down from the worktop.
“There was-” John says, pulling his hands away from Sherlock, “-a lot of blood.”
Sherlock looks up at him, hands settling on the counterspace around his legs.
“I didn’t feel a thing, Sherlock,” John says, and his voice breaks, “I’m going to grow up to be an alcoholic. I’m going to grow up to beat my wife.”
“No,” Sherlock says, “No.”
“I’m going to grow up to rape my daughter,” John forces the words out past the lump in his throat, past the hatred burning in his chest, and he’s fucking sobbing. His vision is blurred with tears, “I’m going to be the splitting image of him.”
Sherlock grabs his head, keeps him still, “No. I know you.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” John says, “His blood was on my face and I just kept stabbing him.”
“Listen to me,” Sherlock says, “You are the most caring person I know. You only did those things because he was going to hurt your sister.”
John hates it, hates the way that he’s crying now, great heaving sobs that make him feel like he’s not getting enough oxygen. Sherlock pulls him close and lets him muffle his sobs in his shoulder.
_____
The afternoon sun slants through the frosted bathroom window. When Sherlock speaks, it is hushed.
“Listen John, you saved my life.
“I didn’t have any friends and then I met you. I was a prat back then-I told you that I wasn’t interested in making friends with commoners. And you just looked at me and you just asked if what they said about me was true, that I could figure people out from just looking at them. So being the bastard that I was, I said that you came from an abusive household and you punched me in the face and told me that this was why nobody liked me. Because I saw the worst in them and pointed it out to their faces. And that would have been it except you helped me off the floor and asked if I wanted to eat lunch with you.
“I was lonely but too proud to admit it. You saw through me. What you didn’t know was that I had really been thinking about disappearing. About running away to starve to death on the streets of London. About slitting my own throat with violin strings, about walking into the ocean and never looking back. At first it was because I wanted to make my parents sorry they hadn’t paid more attention to me. And then when I realized that they wouldn’t care at all if I were alive or dead-that was when I think I started to consider things more seriously.
“You had perfect timing. I needed a friend then. And you were kind enough to be one to me.”
John slips his hand into Sherlock’s.
And neither of them speak after that.
_____
xi
A rumble of thunder crawls low across the sky. The warm summer rain beats against the ground. Neither John nor Sherlock have an umbrella.
_____
xii
Much later, John will sit across from Sherlock’s brother. He will look at the paperwork printed in triplicate.
Sherlock’s brother will say, “This is my offer.” He will say, “As a favour for my brother.”
And John will not want to but he will have no choice but to sign his life away for queen and country.