FIC: "Three Instances in Bed" (BBC Sherlock, Sherlock/John, NC-17)
Title: Three Instances in Bed
Author: Ark / et_in_arkadia
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17; Slashy slash slash slash
Words: ~4800
Summary: “If we do this I won't go back,” John says before he can stop himself from making that clear.
The first time they share a bed it's because John won't stop screaming. It must've gone on for some time to actually rouse Sherlock from his room and drag himself exaggeratedly down the hall. The thin hours of early morning after he's only just gone to sleep never look good on him.
But he goes in because John won't stop screaming, and though he knows better Sherlock touches John's shoulder to ease the mournful noise. He should have poked at him from a distance, with only a gingerly extended toe.
John, half-awake, half-asleep, but no longer screaming, seizes Sherlock's wrist; luckily doesn't break it; flips his attacker over and down the way they taught him and trained him and the way he's had to do it before and pins the long intruding body immobile beneath his. John wakes up some more and then he blinks at Sherlock blinking back, Sherlock's ever-bright eyes evaluating.
“A particularly adept example of combat technique,” says Sherlock appreciatively. “You will have to show me that one. I think I could have countered, but I'd rather you retained use of your collarbone.”
“Sorry,” John says. He makes his hands loosen their death-grip, harder to do than it should be. His adrenaline's up, pulse beating hot behind his ear, happy not to have to strangle anyone (though Sherlock's composed amusement makes for a tempting case), but sleep is wrecked. Not that he is over-hasty to go back there, if the same scenes waited.
He rolls over, leaving Sherlock along the edge where John had pinned him. Sherlock crosses his arms behind his head and crosses his feet, which are shod in fluffy slippers. Sherlock is acting like that hadn't just happened and like they're at the breakfast table, and John doesn't mind the company, so they lie there a while.
“Your nightmares sound interesting,” Sherlock says, an observation.
Some friends would ask out of pity. Some would seek to soothe him. Some would want to hear heroic tales where there had been few. Sherlock asks because he is curious. Strange experiences he hasn't had or plans to have pique his insatiable investigation into human nature.
“They are,” John says. “Tell me a different story.”
Next to him in the dark Sherlock considers, like it's a perfectly reasonable request.
“Three headless bodies of Brighton beach or the Stratford serial killer six?” he asks.
John falls asleep eventually to gleeful descriptions of bloody murder wearing boxers and an old t-shirt that's coming apart at the seams. Sherlock stays on top of the sheets in dressing-gown and fuzzy slippers. Neither of them snore, and there is no more screaming.
In the morning John is surprised how unguarded Sherlock looks sleeping, how peacefully different. No masks. He may as well have been another man.
He wakes up only a half-breath after John does and shifts back.
* * *
The second time they share a bed it's because he'd pulled Sherlock from the Thames, already freezing in a grey October. Sherlock had sworn he could do it, had, in fact, done it; but the six minutes he'd spent submersed in filthy cold dark before John could drag him to the deck were considerably exaggerated moments for them both.
Sherlock had gotten the sample he'd needed from the underside of the murderer's boat easily enough, but the man's premature return necessitated an underwater adventure that ended with Sherlock expelling riverwater fifty yards away, legs splayed inelegantly, John's hand striking his back insistently to help.
Sherlock coughed up enough, swore that the temperature had been three point nine degrees warmer than the threat of hypothermia, and declined John's offer of hospital.
“You're a doctor; if you can't cure me of a dip in the Thames you're a rather poor one, John,” Sherlock pointed out, rubbing long fingers together to press out any hint of threatening blue. “Anyhow I can hold my breath much longer than that. I'm perfectly fine.”
But Sherlock is not a superhero; Sherlock catches a cold, a nasty one, and will likely be rather nasty about it. He's generally John's least-favorite patient, which is unfortunate because he's the most frequent.
His friend despises nothing so much as forced confinement and inactivity, God forbid some boredom should slip in, and John already knows tomorrow will be a sort of special purgatory wherein he'll fetch various books and brews of tea with a steady plodding patience that will fast vanish if Sherlock brings out the bell that is sometimes in his bedside table.
Once only the fortuitous appearance of Mrs. Hudson had saved both the bell and the wall above Sherlock's head from John the time Sherlock Holmes twisted his elongated ankle.
That night after his swim, Sherlock is too exhausted and too triumphant that he's cracked the case to be as sniffy as he'll be in the morning. His hair is still hanging wet across his brow like black paint. His skin is paper-pale, pushing translucent, and he shivers even wrapped in two dressing-gowns. Their garish colors clash and make him appear waxlike in their midst.
He curls up on the bed once John gets him there. He waits to hear John's call to Lestrade that they have the evidence now, hears how Lestrade says he'll go and get the warrant after all, and then he asks John, shakily, to turn off the light. John knows Sherlock doesn't want to show that he's still shaking and has been since the river.
John's hands, plunging, searching through icy, enveloping, endless depths, John's fingers finally ohgodpleaseyespleasegodpleaseyes there fisting into the caught collar of Sherlock's shirt. Warmth uncovered in the cold. John pulling him up into air again, both of them gasping about it.
Sherlock is right, as he almost always is, and the threat of hypothermia's low. But Lord knows what other foul beasties could have been picked up from Old Father Thames, and even what seems a mild cold can worsen in the night. Tiny beads of fever-sweat already bead Sherlock's brow beneath the dark hair. His eyes, when he opens them again, are brighter and bluer than ever.
When John climbs into the bed beside him Sherlock doesn't move. Says, only, “Don't. You'll catch it--” but John is the doctor here. It's John's prescription.
He's glad about the lack of hypothermia. It's an urban legend that a mate should strip down to help out their hypothermic mate, strip nude and share a sleeping bag, two bodies clinging together for warmth. That would be the wrong thing to do.
In a real-life situation the sleeping bag trick would faster strip the healthy person of their body heat and leave you with two naked people with hypothermia. Still, it made for a good story and that's likely why it spread. The image proffered is oddly appealing.
But Sherlock is only cold down to his bones, not dangerous with it, so John pulls the blankets in closer and tucks tight corners. He gathers the ridiculous floppy length of Sherlock's hair up in his hands and squeezes out the last of the wet.
He lies down and puts his arms around the slender circumference of Sherlock's body, keeping his own body rigid. Only slowly does he unbend. His warmth warms them.
“Thank you, John,” Sherlock says. His voice has fever in it. “It was good of you to be there. I was surprised to find I needed you. Your assistance, after all.”
“Glad that you got close when you did,” John says. He's honest about it. “I was about to go into the bloody river.”
Sherlock turns his head. They forbear to remark on the weighty stretch of John's arm across his belly. Sherlock seems to be considering him in the normal way but then he tilts quite purposefully and kisses John, which is not the norm.
It is not the sort of kiss that speaks of sex or fucking or pitched arousal. It is cold lips, Sherlock's against John's, speaking of things that have no proper phrasing so must be communicated in perfect silence. They press their mouths together until the blood is back showing along Sherlock's cheekbones and his lips are flushed red with it.
Then Sherlock drops his head heavily into the pillow and John lets his arm draw a tighter line, and they stay that way exactly as though it's a twin bed until the sun comes up and finds them.
They both get the cold and get cranky and nasty with it. Mrs. Hudson hides all of the bells in the flat and bans their visitors from bringing any new ones.
* * *
The third time they share a bed goes a little differently. It isn't a bed, precisely.
John runs out of excuses to look for, so in the end he stops looking.
In the end, it isn't after the heat of a chase that nearly burns them, or after a knife or a bullet cuts too close. Everything changes around them all the time and sometimes things explode but it isn't after an explosion. Occasionally one of them is made to disappear but they always make their way back. It isn't after the jovial rush of surviving a kidnapping.
In the end it is an evening as close as they got to normality. Quiet outside, for London, with only far-off sirens.
John is typing words into sentences at the table, and Sherlock is diagonal on the couch fitting bone-fragments together on a dark wooden tray. Both are enjoying their puzzles.
They happen to look up at each other at the same moment; then John writes a nonexistent word and Sherlock bends his attention back. In the end it only takes that.
Sherlock says, “John! The bones--”
And John manages to spare the tray somehow and set it aside somewhere and then Sherlock is back to looking unconcerned and intrigued and
Sherlock's mouth, his impossibly smart mouth, smarting John's neck; Sherlock's too-clever hands helping to peel away his tee-shirt. John is half-naked, straddling his wiry, wily flatmate against leather, hands digging into the finely-carved jut of Sherlock's shoulderblades as though he'll try to slither free.
John knows he can, knows he knows a hundred ways and twelve ways to throw John off.
Sherlock willingly caught, then. His fascinating body is a lithe responsive arc under John. Generous lips parted below that impossibly prim nose, cheekbones chiseled by a master sculptor in marble. Hard brilliant ever-curious eyes on John from beneath him.
John holds him still, drags his mouth across Sherlock's cheek until they're kissing again, and this time Sherlock's lips are not cold. He's hot and wet and receptive to John's tongue. Sherlock kisses without panache but with acute unsettling certainty.
John breaks away but doesn't go far. If this is going to be one night and forgotten he'll take it but he won't be quick about it. He tells Sherlock, “I don't pretend I'm so good an actor that I've fooled you. You know I've wanted you a while.”
“Yes,” Sherlock agrees readily enough. Unexpurgated honesty is his master trademark, endearing and entirely maddening. “It was rather touching to watch that unfold.”
John applies direct suction over the artery on the curve of Sherlock's neck, and some decisive teeth. Sherlock makes a sound, his body rising against John's, then quiets. John says, “You might have told me you didn't mind. That you might --. I never know what you're thinking -- it's usually boot-imprints or the color cerulean when I ask.”
Sherlock's eyelashes are dangerously long for someone who spent so much time around Bunsen burners, and he blinks them, a ridge of black against fair skin. The lack of guile or game in his gaze is unnerving. “You never asked, John. I assumed that meant you were uninterested in anything save the overt physical admiration from afar. The night after the river I explained myself as best I knew how, but you haven't come back to bed.”
“Christ,” John says, “I am a complete fucking wanker.”
Sherlock shrugs like he doesn't entirely disagree, but smiles a little to smooth it. “Don't be so dramatic. I'm told I'm hard to interpret. A cypher in disguise. You write that of me enough. Maybe I should have been more forthcoming.”
“How would you have said it?” John asks his ear. John undoes a long sequence of buttons. He only doesn't split the seams in a shower of tiny opalescent circles because the shirt is one of Sherlock's favorites. A long time ago, a life ago, John Watson learned some discipline that can be called upon, sometimes.
Sherlock thinks about it like he's thought about it. “I believe that the imperative, 'Fuck me, John,' would be more effective in this scenario than the more inquisitive 'John, fuck me?', if I'm not mistaken. Yes, I see so.”
John makes a noise that's too close to a growl for comfort, tugs at the long lean body beneath him so that Sherlock will slip his shirt. The smooth planes of his bare chest are scattered with scars John's seen before but never touched outside of treatment. He lets his fingertips span Sherlock's revealed skin, the graceful lengths of fingers and arms and fine ribs dipping toward hard-muscled stomach, Sherlock's odd hybrid of well-bred delicacy and sinewy strength.
Sherlock should be fencing in a wood-paneled hall somewhere surrounded by family crests, sipping brandy at the ancestral fireplace by the tapestries, not riding the push of John's hips in jeans with John still molding him into the leather of their couch.
“If we do this I won't go back,” John says before he can stop himself from making that clear. The truth is better; he knows how he'll be, after. He knows how he's been until now, consumed. Sherlock should be able to read and interpret this from the way John's hands return to gripping and pushing and shaping him, making the improbable angles of their bodies slot up like the best sort of puzzle.
Already it's impossible for John to go back. It'd been impossible since Sherlock's hand on John had stopped his awful dreaming, since Sherlock's river-cold lips had thanked John for being who he was. Since Sherlock had turned around in a laboratory and John had seen him.
Now he'll never be able to erase how Sherlock's legs hook around him, how his pale skin is the ideal canvas for bruising bites and bloodbruises like spilled ink, how his lower lip wedges just so between John's. He keeps speaking truths. “I can't, Sherlock. Won't. But I don't snore, and I only steal the bed-covers sometimes; I give a good blow job or what have you and I sleep better with someone else there.”
“Less screaming?” Sherlock guesses, carefully sarcastic to mask the continued unpredictability of his eyes. They flash with strange emotion John hasn't seen present before: uncertainty, hesitancy, needful want that is new indeed to glimpse but fits him rakishly well.
“That depends,” John answers. “Some screaming can be good screaming.”
Sherlock swallows, the pale column of his throat working; then he says hurriedly, “No one wants my bed after my body, John. I get sulky and self-indulgent; I kick, I'm told; my dreams are sometimes very bad as well; the blankets stay with me; you can never know I won't get bored and dissect you in the middle of the night --”
The last sounds like something Sherlock's been addressed with, and with an unkind edge, so John does two things. “I'm not no one,” he says first, and for confirmation undoes Sherlock's zipper to find Sherlock's cock, long and aroused and well-made as the rest of his body, finds how well Sherlock's cock fits John's hand, even better than the rest of him so far. Then John says to startled eyes and arching hips, amused, “You get sulky and self-indulgent? My god, man, what do you think you are like before it?”
“I am told I am somewhat different entirely,” Sherlock responds, not taking the bait, but laying another, “while in the act itself.”
John had sworn he wouldn't be quick about this but it's hard not to be fast, over-hasty, somewhat rough and greedy with his spoils. He's never been a patient man, and he's waited long enough. To have Sherlock gamely agreeable under him sets John's adrenaline buzzing like he's armed and out on the front lines. He shows Sherlock his surest maneuvers. Sherlock, ever-curious to follow military activities, proves an apt recruit.
John has been achingly hard since he was sitting at the table really watching the couch and now that he's on the couch and on Sherlock he flicks the buttons on his jeans and pushes them halfway down his thighs. It's too much space and time away to take them all the way off.
They're very different but they tend to be sympathetic to the same ideas, and John slides up Sherlock's body the same moment that Sherlock's fingers, his skill-callused hand, ghosts down John's cock and brushes along his balls.
An initial sweep seems to uncover satisfactory results, and the hand returns with sure, encouraging strokes. John groans but isn't dissuaded from his initial plan. Sherlock doesn't disagree with it; Sherlock goes up on his arms on the tan leather; the bow of Sherlock's lips is undone.
John pushes his cock in slowly, the close warmth of Sherlock's mouth around him, growing warmer, not a motion to rush or hurry. He could watch himself doing this for a long time, wants video, wants proof that this is happening in a place outside of John's imaginings in a lonely bed.
Sherlock's eyes looking up at him as his lips round to accommodate John's considerable length. It'd be slow going anyway, and John doesn't hide his smirk well that he's able to surprise and please the indomitable consulting detective with this as-yet-unseen detail.
When Sherlock said he'd been told he behaved apart from what was normal for him in bed it was probably this: this utterly new abandon, the unhidden excitement, the display of erotic knowledge that was considerable even if it felt more studied than put to frequent practice.
When John can thrust between Sherlock's lips and down his throat he does, quieting him somewhat at last in the best conceivable fashion. His fingers curl into the curl of Sherlock's hair and hold him there in a way he's long wanted to try. Sherlock hums low around him, musical about it, bold eyes still on John, proving that his tongue is able even when thus constricted.
It's too much; he'll have to revisit it; looking down any longer will end John much too soon. He pulls back, pleased that Sherlock appears against that decision, at least until John drops his weight back down. He only moves to tug linen over the turn of Sherlock's hip-bones, down long legs, too unfairly long, so that Sherlock kicks his pants free and John's jeans remain at his thighs.
He climbs back up and over Sherlock and in this time, trailing friction. “Find me something,” John tells the crook of Sherlock's neck. “Please.” It's more plea than request, and also as close as John came to issuing commands in these decommissioned days.
Somewhere by the bone tray there is one of Sherlock's work-kits, and he gropes for it sideways, his arm on the floor, John glad of its sure reach. Sherlock doesn't look but finds by touch only, and he passes John a small bottle, saying, “This compound should be fine. It's essentially in gelatinous form at certain temperatures, used to suspend--”
“Tell me later,” John murmurs. “I'll write it down.”
Sherlock opens up and unlocks underneath him, beautifully, the way everything he did had a certain terrible beauty, even the mad impetuous indecipherable things. John makes him ready for a very long time, longer than he thought he'd take, until Sherlock's eyes show glazed along with keen rapport.
But even with all the preparation and the easiness of it -- another surprise, or perhaps not -- after the first breach Sherlock has to be soothed down from gasping, and John waits and waits and doesn't let his biceps shake and doesn't let himself and doesn't let himself and doesn't let himself fuck the living shit out of Sherlock like he wants until he's ready. There's a lot more of John to take and if Sherlock keeps moaning and moving about like that they won't get very far.
John eases in a little more, gentles himself and his machine-gun pulse somehow and says it to Sherlock's eyes, which haven't dimmed. Sherlock's lips, too red, twisted, show pleasure and pain locked together like they are. John says, “You haven't done this before, have you? Don't lie to me again, Sherlock Holmes. You're tight as a princess in a pantry with the footman before her wedding night. If I'd known--”
“I didn't lie,” Sherlock snaps, then bites his lip sharply when John's capable fingers hold him in place and John's all-to-capable cock thrusts further. His rapid-fire speech is punctuated by John's movement. “I did -- nothing of the sort. I've been in beds -- with people before, John -- John -- though you seem to have thought me an eunuch; have committed acts -- acts -- that would astonish even army-grizzled you. Had you been privy to the knowledge that in this alone I am untested -- Good God, Watson -- would it have changed your course of action?”
“I don't know,” John says, buried halfway in tight, slick, impossibly petulant heat. Then he says, “No. No, it wouldn't have.”
He presses down, insistent, and makes Sherlock fight him a little in it which is all the better. Pins those drawn-out arms and elegant wrists up over Sherlock's head, anchoring him to the cushions. Thrusts home at long last though Sherlock's teeth are sunk into John's shoulder as he does it.
When they can move freely together it's good and odd and mysteriously bizarre and absolutely exquisite and rather genius really in all the ways John had thought it might be, all the ways that were like Sherlock himself. It takes a bit for John as it always does to discover the right push and pull, the right pressures, the other places to touch while he inquires into Sherlock. They sweat silently against the couch, not talking for once, not aloud at least.
They've proved to be a good team in concert, an excellent one at that, and they know how to predict one another. John knows that Sherlock can probably see his moves from five moves ahead, so he mixes in some unpredictability.
When Sherlock's mouth is quirked with pleasure and lessened pain John fucks him deep and hard and not gently, the way that Sherlock's eyes instruct. But he also shows Sherlock what it means to be wanted, what it means to want more than just his lovely surface cloaked in riddles.
John had sometimes peered beneath, and now he shows Sherlock the ways that he knows him. This is past cataloguing his friend's bizarre breadth of knowledge and uncanny abilities. This is past describing their mutual adventures.
John shows Sherlock how he knows his left wrist is sensitive from a fracture years ago, a miss-timed aim for a roof-ledge. John holds Sherlock's hands clasped over his head but cradles the left in a gentler grip.
John is harder than he's felt in years and held more tightly and even when he speeds them it takes a while each time for Sherlock to retake and reaccustom to his girth. While they wait John shows Sherlock how he has guessed the spot behind his right ear is meant to be touched, since Sherlock absently touches there while reading; and Sherlock's head digs into leather when John's lips seek to test his hypothesis.
He makes a feast of Sherlock, exploring every known and unknown whorl and swerve and all his other pointed geometry, and he keeps on propelling them together until the strength of it shoves Sherlock along the couch and maybe makes a permanent impression in the upholstery.
“John,” Sherlock is saying, “John,” and John likes that a lot and keeps fucking Sherlock like that, exactly like that, only he loosens his hands at last and pins Sherlock's sneaky snaking-up hips instead.
Grinds down against Sherlock, presses Sherlock's straining cock between their merged bodies; Sherlock with his hands free scratches precisely chaotic lines down John's back and buttocks. The marks will show red, John knows.
John pulls out nearly all the way and and shoves back in as quickly but Sherlock doesn't stop scratching. They come together not out of romantic inclination but out of well-oiled precision, John's tight grip on Sherlock's cock almost as tight as Sherlock's on John. John's consummate thrusts timed perfectly now, Sherlock's refined hips perfectly aligned.
They don't kiss their way through it, not really, and Sherlock doesn't say his name again when his body tight-tenses and his eyes close and he looks the way he had the first time they'd shared a bed, before he'd woken up, but their mouths are close by and sometimes touch, wet and open, beneath the panting.
Maybe this was close as Sherlock got to quieted, got to being away from himself, John thinks, watching Sherlock's face change, watching satisfaction spread on his expression like the warmth spreading from his cock between them, his cock in John's fist.
Then John doesn't think very much at all just delves in one more time (not the last, he won't let it be the last), and gives in to ragged breathing and all-encompassing heat and the kindest hunger he's known and comes saying Sherlock's name so that there's no mistake about it. Sherlock is enigmatic but John is not subtle. John is done with subtlety and subterfuge unless they're in an alleyway with Anderson and Lestrade and Mycroft also.
He takes a while in pulling them apart. Does it slowly and without haste. Shows that he wasn't kidding around with the speech before and drops behind Sherlock on the sweat-slicked confines of the couch. Hand to Sherlock's hip, settling him, when John sees the rangy muscles start to tense.
“Any sort of bed will do,” says John.
Sherlock is nearly almost gentled. “It's cold,” he says vaguely. “We're a mess.”
“We'll make it warm,” John says. With his back pressed to cushions, he draws Sherlock into a different sort of body-puzzle. Somehow they fit. It's sticky and wet but they're neither of them shy of bodily fluids and anyway -- “I'd forgotten that I'm fucking the poster boy for cleanliness. I'll tell Mrs. Hudson that you've changed your stripes. She'll be over the moon.”
“Are you now,” says Sherlock, pointed, like it's a full sentence.
“Am I?” John returns, game.
“Fucking me,” Sherlock finishes. It shouldn't sound hesitant but it does to John's ear, trained to catch out a patient's hidden vices and uncover buried secrets.
“Evidence would indicate,” John says, stretching. “I told you, I won't go back to before.”
“Forward, next time,” Sherlock agrees, like they're talking about something else entirely, then proceeding to do exactly that. “On the floor with me on my hands and knees, I think, and you seeing how far across the room you can drive us. I have a case I'm looking into that concerns rug and wood drag-burns on a sexually compromised corpse, and with your assistance the tests I need to run will go faster and be more efficient. The results should demonstrate that--”
“Such sweet poetry, Holmes,” John says, covering a yawn, then covering as much of Sherlock as he can with his broader frame. “I could listen to it the whole night through.”
Only of course that gets Sherlock actually talking about the case, the dragged body and the rug-burns, all at an excited clip, and John doesn't get to sleep for a while.
But when they sleep, it's a good sort of sleep on the couch, naked and with no blankets to worry about yet; although Sherlock is right, as he usually is, and sometimes he kicks.
Author: Ark / et_in_arkadia
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17; Slashy slash slash slash
Words: ~4800
Summary: “If we do this I won't go back,” John says before he can stop himself from making that clear.
The first time they share a bed it's because John won't stop screaming. It must've gone on for some time to actually rouse Sherlock from his room and drag himself exaggeratedly down the hall. The thin hours of early morning after he's only just gone to sleep never look good on him.
But he goes in because John won't stop screaming, and though he knows better Sherlock touches John's shoulder to ease the mournful noise. He should have poked at him from a distance, with only a gingerly extended toe.
John, half-awake, half-asleep, but no longer screaming, seizes Sherlock's wrist; luckily doesn't break it; flips his attacker over and down the way they taught him and trained him and the way he's had to do it before and pins the long intruding body immobile beneath his. John wakes up some more and then he blinks at Sherlock blinking back, Sherlock's ever-bright eyes evaluating.
“A particularly adept example of combat technique,” says Sherlock appreciatively. “You will have to show me that one. I think I could have countered, but I'd rather you retained use of your collarbone.”
“Sorry,” John says. He makes his hands loosen their death-grip, harder to do than it should be. His adrenaline's up, pulse beating hot behind his ear, happy not to have to strangle anyone (though Sherlock's composed amusement makes for a tempting case), but sleep is wrecked. Not that he is over-hasty to go back there, if the same scenes waited.
He rolls over, leaving Sherlock along the edge where John had pinned him. Sherlock crosses his arms behind his head and crosses his feet, which are shod in fluffy slippers. Sherlock is acting like that hadn't just happened and like they're at the breakfast table, and John doesn't mind the company, so they lie there a while.
“Your nightmares sound interesting,” Sherlock says, an observation.
Some friends would ask out of pity. Some would seek to soothe him. Some would want to hear heroic tales where there had been few. Sherlock asks because he is curious. Strange experiences he hasn't had or plans to have pique his insatiable investigation into human nature.
“They are,” John says. “Tell me a different story.”
Next to him in the dark Sherlock considers, like it's a perfectly reasonable request.
“Three headless bodies of Brighton beach or the Stratford serial killer six?” he asks.
John falls asleep eventually to gleeful descriptions of bloody murder wearing boxers and an old t-shirt that's coming apart at the seams. Sherlock stays on top of the sheets in dressing-gown and fuzzy slippers. Neither of them snore, and there is no more screaming.
In the morning John is surprised how unguarded Sherlock looks sleeping, how peacefully different. No masks. He may as well have been another man.
He wakes up only a half-breath after John does and shifts back.
* * *
The second time they share a bed it's because he'd pulled Sherlock from the Thames, already freezing in a grey October. Sherlock had sworn he could do it, had, in fact, done it; but the six minutes he'd spent submersed in filthy cold dark before John could drag him to the deck were considerably exaggerated moments for them both.
Sherlock had gotten the sample he'd needed from the underside of the murderer's boat easily enough, but the man's premature return necessitated an underwater adventure that ended with Sherlock expelling riverwater fifty yards away, legs splayed inelegantly, John's hand striking his back insistently to help.
Sherlock coughed up enough, swore that the temperature had been three point nine degrees warmer than the threat of hypothermia, and declined John's offer of hospital.
“You're a doctor; if you can't cure me of a dip in the Thames you're a rather poor one, John,” Sherlock pointed out, rubbing long fingers together to press out any hint of threatening blue. “Anyhow I can hold my breath much longer than that. I'm perfectly fine.”
But Sherlock is not a superhero; Sherlock catches a cold, a nasty one, and will likely be rather nasty about it. He's generally John's least-favorite patient, which is unfortunate because he's the most frequent.
His friend despises nothing so much as forced confinement and inactivity, God forbid some boredom should slip in, and John already knows tomorrow will be a sort of special purgatory wherein he'll fetch various books and brews of tea with a steady plodding patience that will fast vanish if Sherlock brings out the bell that is sometimes in his bedside table.
Once only the fortuitous appearance of Mrs. Hudson had saved both the bell and the wall above Sherlock's head from John the time Sherlock Holmes twisted his elongated ankle.
That night after his swim, Sherlock is too exhausted and too triumphant that he's cracked the case to be as sniffy as he'll be in the morning. His hair is still hanging wet across his brow like black paint. His skin is paper-pale, pushing translucent, and he shivers even wrapped in two dressing-gowns. Their garish colors clash and make him appear waxlike in their midst.
He curls up on the bed once John gets him there. He waits to hear John's call to Lestrade that they have the evidence now, hears how Lestrade says he'll go and get the warrant after all, and then he asks John, shakily, to turn off the light. John knows Sherlock doesn't want to show that he's still shaking and has been since the river.
John's hands, plunging, searching through icy, enveloping, endless depths, John's fingers finally ohgodpleaseyespleasegodpleaseyes there fisting into the caught collar of Sherlock's shirt. Warmth uncovered in the cold. John pulling him up into air again, both of them gasping about it.
Sherlock is right, as he almost always is, and the threat of hypothermia's low. But Lord knows what other foul beasties could have been picked up from Old Father Thames, and even what seems a mild cold can worsen in the night. Tiny beads of fever-sweat already bead Sherlock's brow beneath the dark hair. His eyes, when he opens them again, are brighter and bluer than ever.
When John climbs into the bed beside him Sherlock doesn't move. Says, only, “Don't. You'll catch it--” but John is the doctor here. It's John's prescription.
He's glad about the lack of hypothermia. It's an urban legend that a mate should strip down to help out their hypothermic mate, strip nude and share a sleeping bag, two bodies clinging together for warmth. That would be the wrong thing to do.
In a real-life situation the sleeping bag trick would faster strip the healthy person of their body heat and leave you with two naked people with hypothermia. Still, it made for a good story and that's likely why it spread. The image proffered is oddly appealing.
But Sherlock is only cold down to his bones, not dangerous with it, so John pulls the blankets in closer and tucks tight corners. He gathers the ridiculous floppy length of Sherlock's hair up in his hands and squeezes out the last of the wet.
He lies down and puts his arms around the slender circumference of Sherlock's body, keeping his own body rigid. Only slowly does he unbend. His warmth warms them.
“Thank you, John,” Sherlock says. His voice has fever in it. “It was good of you to be there. I was surprised to find I needed you. Your assistance, after all.”
“Glad that you got close when you did,” John says. He's honest about it. “I was about to go into the bloody river.”
Sherlock turns his head. They forbear to remark on the weighty stretch of John's arm across his belly. Sherlock seems to be considering him in the normal way but then he tilts quite purposefully and kisses John, which is not the norm.
It is not the sort of kiss that speaks of sex or fucking or pitched arousal. It is cold lips, Sherlock's against John's, speaking of things that have no proper phrasing so must be communicated in perfect silence. They press their mouths together until the blood is back showing along Sherlock's cheekbones and his lips are flushed red with it.
Then Sherlock drops his head heavily into the pillow and John lets his arm draw a tighter line, and they stay that way exactly as though it's a twin bed until the sun comes up and finds them.
They both get the cold and get cranky and nasty with it. Mrs. Hudson hides all of the bells in the flat and bans their visitors from bringing any new ones.
* * *
The third time they share a bed goes a little differently. It isn't a bed, precisely.
John runs out of excuses to look for, so in the end he stops looking.
In the end, it isn't after the heat of a chase that nearly burns them, or after a knife or a bullet cuts too close. Everything changes around them all the time and sometimes things explode but it isn't after an explosion. Occasionally one of them is made to disappear but they always make their way back. It isn't after the jovial rush of surviving a kidnapping.
In the end it is an evening as close as they got to normality. Quiet outside, for London, with only far-off sirens.
John is typing words into sentences at the table, and Sherlock is diagonal on the couch fitting bone-fragments together on a dark wooden tray. Both are enjoying their puzzles.
They happen to look up at each other at the same moment; then John writes a nonexistent word and Sherlock bends his attention back. In the end it only takes that.
Sherlock says, “John! The bones--”
And John manages to spare the tray somehow and set it aside somewhere and then Sherlock is back to looking unconcerned and intrigued and
Sherlock's mouth, his impossibly smart mouth, smarting John's neck; Sherlock's too-clever hands helping to peel away his tee-shirt. John is half-naked, straddling his wiry, wily flatmate against leather, hands digging into the finely-carved jut of Sherlock's shoulderblades as though he'll try to slither free.
John knows he can, knows he knows a hundred ways and twelve ways to throw John off.
Sherlock willingly caught, then. His fascinating body is a lithe responsive arc under John. Generous lips parted below that impossibly prim nose, cheekbones chiseled by a master sculptor in marble. Hard brilliant ever-curious eyes on John from beneath him.
John holds him still, drags his mouth across Sherlock's cheek until they're kissing again, and this time Sherlock's lips are not cold. He's hot and wet and receptive to John's tongue. Sherlock kisses without panache but with acute unsettling certainty.
John breaks away but doesn't go far. If this is going to be one night and forgotten he'll take it but he won't be quick about it. He tells Sherlock, “I don't pretend I'm so good an actor that I've fooled you. You know I've wanted you a while.”
“Yes,” Sherlock agrees readily enough. Unexpurgated honesty is his master trademark, endearing and entirely maddening. “It was rather touching to watch that unfold.”
John applies direct suction over the artery on the curve of Sherlock's neck, and some decisive teeth. Sherlock makes a sound, his body rising against John's, then quiets. John says, “You might have told me you didn't mind. That you might --. I never know what you're thinking -- it's usually boot-imprints or the color cerulean when I ask.”
Sherlock's eyelashes are dangerously long for someone who spent so much time around Bunsen burners, and he blinks them, a ridge of black against fair skin. The lack of guile or game in his gaze is unnerving. “You never asked, John. I assumed that meant you were uninterested in anything save the overt physical admiration from afar. The night after the river I explained myself as best I knew how, but you haven't come back to bed.”
“Christ,” John says, “I am a complete fucking wanker.”
Sherlock shrugs like he doesn't entirely disagree, but smiles a little to smooth it. “Don't be so dramatic. I'm told I'm hard to interpret. A cypher in disguise. You write that of me enough. Maybe I should have been more forthcoming.”
“How would you have said it?” John asks his ear. John undoes a long sequence of buttons. He only doesn't split the seams in a shower of tiny opalescent circles because the shirt is one of Sherlock's favorites. A long time ago, a life ago, John Watson learned some discipline that can be called upon, sometimes.
Sherlock thinks about it like he's thought about it. “I believe that the imperative, 'Fuck me, John,' would be more effective in this scenario than the more inquisitive 'John, fuck me?', if I'm not mistaken. Yes, I see so.”
John makes a noise that's too close to a growl for comfort, tugs at the long lean body beneath him so that Sherlock will slip his shirt. The smooth planes of his bare chest are scattered with scars John's seen before but never touched outside of treatment. He lets his fingertips span Sherlock's revealed skin, the graceful lengths of fingers and arms and fine ribs dipping toward hard-muscled stomach, Sherlock's odd hybrid of well-bred delicacy and sinewy strength.
Sherlock should be fencing in a wood-paneled hall somewhere surrounded by family crests, sipping brandy at the ancestral fireplace by the tapestries, not riding the push of John's hips in jeans with John still molding him into the leather of their couch.
“If we do this I won't go back,” John says before he can stop himself from making that clear. The truth is better; he knows how he'll be, after. He knows how he's been until now, consumed. Sherlock should be able to read and interpret this from the way John's hands return to gripping and pushing and shaping him, making the improbable angles of their bodies slot up like the best sort of puzzle.
Already it's impossible for John to go back. It'd been impossible since Sherlock's hand on John had stopped his awful dreaming, since Sherlock's river-cold lips had thanked John for being who he was. Since Sherlock had turned around in a laboratory and John had seen him.
Now he'll never be able to erase how Sherlock's legs hook around him, how his pale skin is the ideal canvas for bruising bites and bloodbruises like spilled ink, how his lower lip wedges just so between John's. He keeps speaking truths. “I can't, Sherlock. Won't. But I don't snore, and I only steal the bed-covers sometimes; I give a good blow job or what have you and I sleep better with someone else there.”
“Less screaming?” Sherlock guesses, carefully sarcastic to mask the continued unpredictability of his eyes. They flash with strange emotion John hasn't seen present before: uncertainty, hesitancy, needful want that is new indeed to glimpse but fits him rakishly well.
“That depends,” John answers. “Some screaming can be good screaming.”
Sherlock swallows, the pale column of his throat working; then he says hurriedly, “No one wants my bed after my body, John. I get sulky and self-indulgent; I kick, I'm told; my dreams are sometimes very bad as well; the blankets stay with me; you can never know I won't get bored and dissect you in the middle of the night --”
The last sounds like something Sherlock's been addressed with, and with an unkind edge, so John does two things. “I'm not no one,” he says first, and for confirmation undoes Sherlock's zipper to find Sherlock's cock, long and aroused and well-made as the rest of his body, finds how well Sherlock's cock fits John's hand, even better than the rest of him so far. Then John says to startled eyes and arching hips, amused, “You get sulky and self-indulgent? My god, man, what do you think you are like before it?”
“I am told I am somewhat different entirely,” Sherlock responds, not taking the bait, but laying another, “while in the act itself.”
John had sworn he wouldn't be quick about this but it's hard not to be fast, over-hasty, somewhat rough and greedy with his spoils. He's never been a patient man, and he's waited long enough. To have Sherlock gamely agreeable under him sets John's adrenaline buzzing like he's armed and out on the front lines. He shows Sherlock his surest maneuvers. Sherlock, ever-curious to follow military activities, proves an apt recruit.
John has been achingly hard since he was sitting at the table really watching the couch and now that he's on the couch and on Sherlock he flicks the buttons on his jeans and pushes them halfway down his thighs. It's too much space and time away to take them all the way off.
They're very different but they tend to be sympathetic to the same ideas, and John slides up Sherlock's body the same moment that Sherlock's fingers, his skill-callused hand, ghosts down John's cock and brushes along his balls.
An initial sweep seems to uncover satisfactory results, and the hand returns with sure, encouraging strokes. John groans but isn't dissuaded from his initial plan. Sherlock doesn't disagree with it; Sherlock goes up on his arms on the tan leather; the bow of Sherlock's lips is undone.
John pushes his cock in slowly, the close warmth of Sherlock's mouth around him, growing warmer, not a motion to rush or hurry. He could watch himself doing this for a long time, wants video, wants proof that this is happening in a place outside of John's imaginings in a lonely bed.
Sherlock's eyes looking up at him as his lips round to accommodate John's considerable length. It'd be slow going anyway, and John doesn't hide his smirk well that he's able to surprise and please the indomitable consulting detective with this as-yet-unseen detail.
When Sherlock said he'd been told he behaved apart from what was normal for him in bed it was probably this: this utterly new abandon, the unhidden excitement, the display of erotic knowledge that was considerable even if it felt more studied than put to frequent practice.
When John can thrust between Sherlock's lips and down his throat he does, quieting him somewhat at last in the best conceivable fashion. His fingers curl into the curl of Sherlock's hair and hold him there in a way he's long wanted to try. Sherlock hums low around him, musical about it, bold eyes still on John, proving that his tongue is able even when thus constricted.
It's too much; he'll have to revisit it; looking down any longer will end John much too soon. He pulls back, pleased that Sherlock appears against that decision, at least until John drops his weight back down. He only moves to tug linen over the turn of Sherlock's hip-bones, down long legs, too unfairly long, so that Sherlock kicks his pants free and John's jeans remain at his thighs.
He climbs back up and over Sherlock and in this time, trailing friction. “Find me something,” John tells the crook of Sherlock's neck. “Please.” It's more plea than request, and also as close as John came to issuing commands in these decommissioned days.
Somewhere by the bone tray there is one of Sherlock's work-kits, and he gropes for it sideways, his arm on the floor, John glad of its sure reach. Sherlock doesn't look but finds by touch only, and he passes John a small bottle, saying, “This compound should be fine. It's essentially in gelatinous form at certain temperatures, used to suspend--”
“Tell me later,” John murmurs. “I'll write it down.”
Sherlock opens up and unlocks underneath him, beautifully, the way everything he did had a certain terrible beauty, even the mad impetuous indecipherable things. John makes him ready for a very long time, longer than he thought he'd take, until Sherlock's eyes show glazed along with keen rapport.
But even with all the preparation and the easiness of it -- another surprise, or perhaps not -- after the first breach Sherlock has to be soothed down from gasping, and John waits and waits and doesn't let his biceps shake and doesn't let himself and doesn't let himself and doesn't let himself fuck the living shit out of Sherlock like he wants until he's ready. There's a lot more of John to take and if Sherlock keeps moaning and moving about like that they won't get very far.
John eases in a little more, gentles himself and his machine-gun pulse somehow and says it to Sherlock's eyes, which haven't dimmed. Sherlock's lips, too red, twisted, show pleasure and pain locked together like they are. John says, “You haven't done this before, have you? Don't lie to me again, Sherlock Holmes. You're tight as a princess in a pantry with the footman before her wedding night. If I'd known--”
“I didn't lie,” Sherlock snaps, then bites his lip sharply when John's capable fingers hold him in place and John's all-to-capable cock thrusts further. His rapid-fire speech is punctuated by John's movement. “I did -- nothing of the sort. I've been in beds -- with people before, John -- John -- though you seem to have thought me an eunuch; have committed acts -- acts -- that would astonish even army-grizzled you. Had you been privy to the knowledge that in this alone I am untested -- Good God, Watson -- would it have changed your course of action?”
“I don't know,” John says, buried halfway in tight, slick, impossibly petulant heat. Then he says, “No. No, it wouldn't have.”
He presses down, insistent, and makes Sherlock fight him a little in it which is all the better. Pins those drawn-out arms and elegant wrists up over Sherlock's head, anchoring him to the cushions. Thrusts home at long last though Sherlock's teeth are sunk into John's shoulder as he does it.
When they can move freely together it's good and odd and mysteriously bizarre and absolutely exquisite and rather genius really in all the ways John had thought it might be, all the ways that were like Sherlock himself. It takes a bit for John as it always does to discover the right push and pull, the right pressures, the other places to touch while he inquires into Sherlock. They sweat silently against the couch, not talking for once, not aloud at least.
They've proved to be a good team in concert, an excellent one at that, and they know how to predict one another. John knows that Sherlock can probably see his moves from five moves ahead, so he mixes in some unpredictability.
When Sherlock's mouth is quirked with pleasure and lessened pain John fucks him deep and hard and not gently, the way that Sherlock's eyes instruct. But he also shows Sherlock what it means to be wanted, what it means to want more than just his lovely surface cloaked in riddles.
John had sometimes peered beneath, and now he shows Sherlock the ways that he knows him. This is past cataloguing his friend's bizarre breadth of knowledge and uncanny abilities. This is past describing their mutual adventures.
John shows Sherlock how he knows his left wrist is sensitive from a fracture years ago, a miss-timed aim for a roof-ledge. John holds Sherlock's hands clasped over his head but cradles the left in a gentler grip.
John is harder than he's felt in years and held more tightly and even when he speeds them it takes a while each time for Sherlock to retake and reaccustom to his girth. While they wait John shows Sherlock how he has guessed the spot behind his right ear is meant to be touched, since Sherlock absently touches there while reading; and Sherlock's head digs into leather when John's lips seek to test his hypothesis.
He makes a feast of Sherlock, exploring every known and unknown whorl and swerve and all his other pointed geometry, and he keeps on propelling them together until the strength of it shoves Sherlock along the couch and maybe makes a permanent impression in the upholstery.
“John,” Sherlock is saying, “John,” and John likes that a lot and keeps fucking Sherlock like that, exactly like that, only he loosens his hands at last and pins Sherlock's sneaky snaking-up hips instead.
Grinds down against Sherlock, presses Sherlock's straining cock between their merged bodies; Sherlock with his hands free scratches precisely chaotic lines down John's back and buttocks. The marks will show red, John knows.
John pulls out nearly all the way and and shoves back in as quickly but Sherlock doesn't stop scratching. They come together not out of romantic inclination but out of well-oiled precision, John's tight grip on Sherlock's cock almost as tight as Sherlock's on John. John's consummate thrusts timed perfectly now, Sherlock's refined hips perfectly aligned.
They don't kiss their way through it, not really, and Sherlock doesn't say his name again when his body tight-tenses and his eyes close and he looks the way he had the first time they'd shared a bed, before he'd woken up, but their mouths are close by and sometimes touch, wet and open, beneath the panting.
Maybe this was close as Sherlock got to quieted, got to being away from himself, John thinks, watching Sherlock's face change, watching satisfaction spread on his expression like the warmth spreading from his cock between them, his cock in John's fist.
Then John doesn't think very much at all just delves in one more time (not the last, he won't let it be the last), and gives in to ragged breathing and all-encompassing heat and the kindest hunger he's known and comes saying Sherlock's name so that there's no mistake about it. Sherlock is enigmatic but John is not subtle. John is done with subtlety and subterfuge unless they're in an alleyway with Anderson and Lestrade and Mycroft also.
He takes a while in pulling them apart. Does it slowly and without haste. Shows that he wasn't kidding around with the speech before and drops behind Sherlock on the sweat-slicked confines of the couch. Hand to Sherlock's hip, settling him, when John sees the rangy muscles start to tense.
“Any sort of bed will do,” says John.
Sherlock is nearly almost gentled. “It's cold,” he says vaguely. “We're a mess.”
“We'll make it warm,” John says. With his back pressed to cushions, he draws Sherlock into a different sort of body-puzzle. Somehow they fit. It's sticky and wet but they're neither of them shy of bodily fluids and anyway -- “I'd forgotten that I'm fucking the poster boy for cleanliness. I'll tell Mrs. Hudson that you've changed your stripes. She'll be over the moon.”
“Are you now,” says Sherlock, pointed, like it's a full sentence.
“Am I?” John returns, game.
“Fucking me,” Sherlock finishes. It shouldn't sound hesitant but it does to John's ear, trained to catch out a patient's hidden vices and uncover buried secrets.
“Evidence would indicate,” John says, stretching. “I told you, I won't go back to before.”
“Forward, next time,” Sherlock agrees, like they're talking about something else entirely, then proceeding to do exactly that. “On the floor with me on my hands and knees, I think, and you seeing how far across the room you can drive us. I have a case I'm looking into that concerns rug and wood drag-burns on a sexually compromised corpse, and with your assistance the tests I need to run will go faster and be more efficient. The results should demonstrate that--”
“Such sweet poetry, Holmes,” John says, covering a yawn, then covering as much of Sherlock as he can with his broader frame. “I could listen to it the whole night through.”
Only of course that gets Sherlock actually talking about the case, the dragged body and the rug-burns, all at an excited clip, and John doesn't get to sleep for a while.
But when they sleep, it's a good sort of sleep on the couch, naked and with no blankets to worry about yet; although Sherlock is right, as he usually is, and sometimes he kicks.