FIC: "How John Watson Comes Home" (BBC Sherlock, Sherlock/John, NC-17)
Title: How John Watson Comes Home
Author: Ark / et_in_arkadia
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating/Category: NC-17; Slash; Angst, Mild BDSM; Futurefic
Words: ~6600
Notes: For the Porn Quorum, for encouraging.
Summary: They had tried, they really had, but the innate physicality between them was something even Sherlock couldn't describe in terms of chemistry.
Sherlock meets him at Victoria station by a dusty bust of the old Queen. A small rolling suitcase is tilted nearby at an angle. It is maroon-red, the bag, wine-dark, yet still it is meant to hint after pink.
They don't shake hands in greeting, no gripping yet, just move in doubled tandem toward the exit away from all the other people.
In the cab to Baker Street the bag sits on the floor between them. Sealed into boxy silence, Sherlock's hand finds John's thigh and holds there. His eyes are trained on the passing streets past window-glass. He helps hold him down.
“Yeah,” John admits. “Yes. It's been a bit bumpy.”
Worse than that, much worse, and Sherlock already knows of course. Knew from the first sight of John stepping down the metal steps of the train. Sherlock had watched how he came off of it, how he was moving, how there was the faintest ugly shadow of something like a limp in John.
Sherlock's hand presses now below John's hipbone as the taxi turns corners to show that there is nothing else there but that (Sherlock's hand, no phantoms). He anchors John into old and new realities.
Sherlock Holmes would have known immediately in infinitesimal ways that things were really wrong this time, would have taken John Watson apart with cutting eyes. Saw the wrinkled mustard-colored shirt under his worn leather jacket first, of course, that one was easy -- no time for washing-up or ironing and no loving help in it.
The outdated clothes, like John had stopped bothering at all these days, away from the ire of Londoners who would glare on the Tube when you weren't styled after Sienna Miller. Like John had stopped caring almost entirely about how he looked or was looked at.
But the sturdy dark shoes, shiny, are a pair that John had once worn years ago, here, maybe in another cab with Sherlock a world away. The shoes are in better shape, as though John has kept them up at least, which tells Sherlock other things too.
But John knows the dozens of indicators about him lighting up and flashing through Sherlock's head make a profile but not an explanation for this, so he keeps talking, making himself talk. London traffic will never change, never, and they sit in it awhile.
“She kicked me out,” John says, as flat as he can make it. “For good this time.”
It's been five months since he saw Sherlock last and nearly two years since the day Sherlock had stood beside John, both of them in dapper suits, Sherlock handing John his wedding ring as was his best man's duty. Sherlock's smile stamped-on, the ring in both their hands.
They'd planned to stop before and after John's wedding and had sworn on it even, deciding it would probably be unfair to John's new bride and John's new life.
But a few months after the honeymoon Sherlock had texted imploring John to help out on a case that required his exact field of expertise, wouldn't John come, he could close up or hand over the practice for a couple of days, it was exceedingly important and all immediate haste was necessary. A couple of days in town became a week again on Baker Street saving London and then they had found it much better not to stop.
John has several scenes on his mind at once, at odds. Scenes he knows well, bickering over the growing bills, the garbage disposal, the maintenance on the cars; scenes of tear-filled anguish and wrenched words and tiny figurines thrown. A partnership pressed thin on patience and worn out, worn down by dull days.
Then he sees what Sherlock had looked like in bed when they told themselves it was the last time, a week before John got married, what he had done to John and felt like, and then John sees what Sherlock's face had looked like when John came back for the first case of what would become a string of freelancing cases. He sees Sherlock the way Sherlock smiled when John let himself into the flat, and how they had torn into each other will almost no pause whatsoever, and what that had looked and felt like.
“You're lying,” says Sherlock from the other end of the cab. They still manage to make the carriage space small between them. Sherlock is watching people open dark umbrellas in the sudden misty rain on the street outside.
John opens his mouth, closes it. Of course. “How did you know?” he asks, the old patterns so easy.
Sherlock is being as patient with him as Sherlock can be patient, so he doesn't quite sigh. He doesn't even roll his eyes, great restraint indeed. “No divining of splash-marks or thinking about the Sutton clay on your pant's hem. I hardly have to try. Sometimes you're like child's play for me to read, John, you're a children's book.”
“Lovely,” John interjects, muttering something about a snobbish talking steam engine.
Sherlock continues unruffled. “You have your favorite shoes on, which indicates that you chose them on purpose and with care, though I cannot say the same of the rest of your outfitting. You have a sizable rucksack, your moving-bag of choice, packed yourself since no one else can manage the damned military thing, and packed full enough that you thought about that as well. You've never had many worldly possessions, John. Also you haven't slept for at least thirty-five hours; you've been thinking. You tore out a small patch of hair at one point in the process.”
John scrubs a hand over bloodshot eyes, and John's the one who sighs. “Okay. Yes. Sorry. I knew I should have come in my Anderson disguise.”
Sherlock just waits, until John gathers up a full breath and lets it out with: “You're right. Spot-on. I lied. I left her.”
Then Sherlock turns from watching the umbrellas, his unrelenting hold on John's upper thigh somehow tightening, like he'd wanted to hear John say it.
John says, “She didn't want me to go, and I did; there was some shouting; and I still say it's for good.”
“You've said that before,” says Sherlock.
The first time was somewhere in the first muddled year of marriage. The perfect thrill of catching crazed killer and rescuing the intended victim in just the nick of time together, their shared triumph and laughter afterward. The transcendence of their united bodies.
John later wrapping around all of Sherlock's lean varied points and angles saying he didn't quite feel like going back, didn't want to go back really, this was it, but in the morning Sherlock had gone with him to the station when he'd gone.
“Well.” He'll have time to explain why this case is different. The cab's at least moving now, rounding into more familiar geography, they're nearly home. Home. John exhales. That had rather been the problem all along so anyway -- “You deciphered my rucksack just brilliantly. So what's in the bag?” It lies on the floor, a bloodier red removed from bright station lights.
“The essential supplies,” Sherlock says calmly, turning back to the window as though that will hide his smile from John when John can taste his grins blindfolded across a room. “Figure it for yourself for a go.”
So John gives it a go, and with his face to the glass Sherlock smiles wider as he speaks. “It's, well, it looks like a new case, but sort of cheaply made, and, uh, there's not much drag on the wheel yet but you've used it somewhat. So, I'd guess you could have picked it up in Chinatown this morning because you still smell like Plum Valley's dim sum, and then maybe you went to the lab, since you have your good coat on; but considering the skinny jeans and fancy loafers you never wear unless you're on a case or something, I'd guess you went to the sex stores in Soho so you wouldn't stand out. I'm hoping the last, at least.”
John gets the sense that if Sherlock could clap his hands together without drawing the attention of their driver, who is studiously trying not to hear them through plexiglass, John would receive some sort of applause, or perhaps a genuinely fond pat on the head. “Oh, John, really well done. Remind me to reward you for that. You were wrong about where I got the bag of course but rather right about Soho and anyway it doesn't matter, that was an excellent turn for you, you should have told me you've been practicing paying more attention, and oh now would you look there it's Mrs. Hudson herself to greet you.”
The cab slides into the space by 221b. Mrs. Hudson is indeed at indicated door, a little older and showing it like all of them save Sherlock, but her smile is exactly the same as it's always been, and her embrace even warmer, as though she's guessed why John is here. Sherlock comes up the steps carrying both bags, and they all go inside together.
It's an unwitting echo of a scene that had played out on the same stairs more than a half-decade ago, with everything and all of them completely the same and profoundly altered.
* * *
Mrs. Hudson stays for two-and-a-half cups of Earl Grey, chattering happily in the kitchen, flitting between her boys.
John makes vague correct noises and polite answers he thinks and Sherlock has decided to act charming in the way he sometimes could to settle psychopaths or stray cats, so he indulges in a flourish of tea-making and setting out a biscuit-selection in the shape of a dodecahedron for distraction. They watch each other move in the spaces between her words.
Mrs. Hudson chatters that the upstairs bedroom is John's of course so long as he needs it despite her persistent plans to set up a proper sewing-room; she'll only have to take out a couple of her effects, it's no trouble at all, and anyway Sherlock was always making it insufferable for her to work in there with his blasted experiments.
When the tea is drained dry and the last biscuit consumed she bustles out to go shopping for their supper ingredients, just this once, mind you lads, special occasion and all, she still isn't keeping house for anybody but herself please and thank you.
John sees her out of the flat, intensely fond but intensely glad for the abrupt quiet of her wake. His head is splitting, overwhelmed, his grip on the well-known doorknob painful. He wants to cry and laugh and scream and dance and wreck the place.
He wants to tear pillows from chairs, rip blankets by their seams, smash all the porcelain in the kitchen, knock everything free from the mantle, make it a war zone. He wants to stay standing right there in the messy perfection of it all forever, never moving, like a fly caught in solidifying amber. He wants to never move again, to only stand there by the door and look at this space that started everything.
It's nearly almost exactly the same, with the addition of new years of strange specimens and elaborate contraptions, and more dust; without John to reign in the worst of it Sherlock's hoarding instinct has grown and spread and precarious piles of curious things are scattered about, some leaning at improbable angles for physics.
The furniture has a few tears and is rubbed shinier in some places than it once was, and there is a beechwood rocking chair that is new. John's bag has already been tucked into a closet and there is only the red one standing in the den.
John is about to say something, but then Sherlock is in front of him blocking John's view of everything else as he is best at doing, and Sherlock doesn't say anything.
Sherlock leans down in the purposeful silence of the room and kisses John, very hard, flattening him back against the door. Sherlock kisses him deeper, sharper, tenderness mated with bruising force, his hands with their too-fine fingers coming up to frame John's face. His hold is not gentle.
He presses the kiss out of John, claims it and drags it out of him, won't let him go, threatens breathing.
There is a certain three-three-three rule of thumb when it comes to basic human survival. It's isn't exact but it's never bad to keep in mind: healthy people can generally still live without three minutes of fresh oxygen, three days without proper water, and three weeks without solid nourishment. Sherlock has begun testing them on the first one.
John has to tear away at last, just for the air, though Sherlock barely lets him; only looms from his luminous height and says, “You will forgive that my welcome somewhat diverges from Mrs. Hudson's, doctor,”
and he shoves John to the painted wood again even harder than he'd kissed him and blows John against the door with John still shaking, lips nearly blooded from the kiss, lungs swimming for breath, his hands trembling Sherlock's hair.
The flat is a little stuffy without the windows open this time of year and it smells like Sherlock, like old arcane books and rich damp wool and the rolling tobacco he still keeps squirreled in little hidden boxes just in case a problem couldn't be countered by a nicotine patch, and John thinks with his cock halfway down Sherlock's throat maybe it's still like him in here too, tangy residue of gunpowder and whiskey and the ghostly click of keys.
It's good that Mrs. Hudson has gone out because John is not being quiet at all now, especially when Sherlock gracefully arises like it's been a fine bit of performance theatre at the worst possible moment in the history of the world and doesn't let John come in his mouth.
He leans for the red bag instead with one hand, and reaches for John's cock with the other, and he takes them to bed. They go to Sherlock's room because Sherlock murmurs something about needing to sort out some things in John's first, something possibly about snakes. In the history of the world it is probable clothing has never been removed quite so quickly, nor with such damage done, especially to skinny jeans and John's terrible mustard shirt.
* * *
In bed, in the shaded light from the lamp, which Sherlock has kept on, John says, “I think I need you to--”
“Tell me, John.” Sherlock blinks only a little surprise at the divergence, his eyes blue-grey-green under John, his pliant body also. “I'm all ears and my hearing is excellent. I test high above average.”
“Let's not like this,” John says. “I want you to.”
“Ah,” says Sherlock, making it an entire sentence. John hadn't quite managed. “You know you said, one year six months fifteen days ago, that you really rather preferred--”
“I know what I said,” John says, low, trying to be more amused and aroused than impatient. “Just trust me, okay?”
It's the wrong thing to say so early starting out in bed, and this time in bed in particular. Sherlock goes still, and then with an unaccountable twist of motion moves to upend them, rolling over onto John.
John is rolled. Sherlock sits John's lower body with the too-easy gait of a gifted horseman. He crosses long arms in at the elbows. “Tell me why I should in this,” says the pert set of his impetuous mouth. It goes unspoken that trust is not questioned elsewhere. “Lay out the evidence, John. It's not that I'm implying you lied when you said you wanted to stay before. I think you were telling the truth in fact; I'm good at decoding human and animal emotional vocal intonations. But you're a good man and you want a good marriage, and that's why--”
That's why indeed. John hisses breath from out from beneath the firm, stubborn weight belting him. Sherlock alone of everyone he knows looks unchanged, looks young still, looks forever caught in time. There are heavier circles dug under John's eyes than he'd had in war and too much grey in his sandy hair. Time found John.
He closes his eyes and then opens them and then he interrupts to say, “I told her things, Sherlock, that there isn't going back on. It can't be taken back now, all right? I made it that way on purpose.”
Sherlock stills his slow-taunting hips. His mask has suddenly slipped into place, face less expressive than a statue's. “Told her what?” he says at last, hating not to know exactly, for once unwilling to guess.
“What happened,” says John.
Sherlock blinks nude above him, statuesque. “Well. Some of what happened,” John amends. “Just enough, you know.”
He hadn't told her everything of course:
how they'd met flat-sharing on Baker Street because it was convenient
and fought improbable impossible crimes and killed and caught nasty bits of humanity
for their ever-friendly friends at Scotland Yard and also the government and the Queen and
how they had lived and liked living together, found themselves very amenable indeed,
and then one day found and fully admitted that they'd rather like to have sex as well,
that they were good at it together the way they were good at everything else, together,
and wasn't the living arrangement considerably convenient after all.
For years they had passed days and nights together, eaten nearly every meal and usually the same one across from the other, cursed early morning wake-ups and crafted energized, sometimes life-threatening evenings, shared minutes and hours,
and then there was one middle of the night in March in a year better forgotten with London warm for once; and John had asked Sherlock the same sort of question he would go on to ask someone else, because Sherlock had tipped back his chin and laughed in the dark and pushed him down on the bed and they had sex and Sherlock never said anything or mentioned it again and after that John's insides had started to feel like they were filling up with shrapnel.
Sherlock can't help looking like the incomprehensible mix of things he is, so he does, appearing half a medievalist's dream of a knight in a tapestry and a theologian's vision of a fallen angel from a scroll. His new expression, however, surprising naivete bounded by curious intrigue, is all doomed romantic poet. He's nearly gone pale enough to rival the consumptives.
“Is that what happened?” says Sherlock. Because for some reason John has spoken much of this aloud, eyes trained on the old known ceiling with the same cracks running across it as he recites, telling Sherlock more than he told her. Sherlock a statue slowly melting.
Still: just enough.
“It happened to me,” John says.
Sherlock's hands are on John's shoulders, curved with only the precise pressure to make them present. “John,” he says, soft in the light. “That was not my experience.”
“No?” Now John admits to curiosity, too.
“No, although certainly your own analysis has quite some validity being in that it is your unique perspective: valuable of course for solving a problem but never providing the whole of it. You know we always interview as many potential witnesses as we can about a crime scene, as everyone has seen something different, and will have something different to say. It's the old Rashomon effect. Don't you see, John?”
“Crime scene,” John repeats, not seeing. He pushes his thighs up for punctuation.
Sherlock waves that away. “Yes. No. Perhaps it was one. I think,” he says, slowing suddenly from breakneck speed, “I think that we suffered an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“You have a unique gift for over and understatement at the same time,” John says. “It is fully remarkable.” Sherlock's hands are compressing him harder to the bed, his pointed gaze alight above John.
Sherlock is thinking behind his eyes, John can see the whirring, and then Sherlock seems to decide and lean in closer, forehead touching John's, then not.
Still close, making their eyes meet, he reasons, a ramble, “John, it was not infrequent, at that time, that in an exuberant burst of enthusiasm or sexual excitement you would ask me to marry you. You once declared it after a thorough neck massage. It is strange for me to hear you say these things, as surely my response on the day you indicate must have seemed strange, if your intentions were as you said; but it is still strange. I remember the night, of course, and how it had been relaxed with the dinner you made after the park, and I. Ah.” Sherlock stops and swallows and makes the sound in the span of seconds, then works his jaw and says, “And I remember that I was pleased of course and that your voice sounded serious and that pleased me, but I never thought--”
Caught in such roundabout logic, over-think on overload, Sherlock pauses longer. “I never really thought you'd want to do that sort of old hidebound Henry VIII fossilized waltz with me -- no, I apologize, John, that's unfair -- I only mean to say I hadn't understood then what it meant to you and that you meant it, that you could possibly want to parade me as your plus-one.”
“I asked you to spend the rest of your life with me,” John corrects, the words in clenched teeth.
Spend the rest of your life with me, marry me, Sherlock Holmes, never change, never go, and we'll go away to Sweden where the domestic partnership benefits are better and scarves can be worn year-round.
They have a Queen to work for too you know.
And Sherlock had tilted back and laughed in the dark --
“You see how I thought it was funny at the time?” Sherlock pleads. “Just another lovely joke, John, to lure me back to bed after I told you I was going downstairs to work on the website,” and they look at each other in the green glow from the lamp nearby and then Sherlock says, “Anyway, I had planned to already, and I thought that was made perfectly clear.”
“Planned to?” John says, not really asking now, wanting both to weep and break something, again.
“Never go,” Sherlock returns. He spreads his hands across John's bare skin. “And I haven't.”
“I did,” John says, saying it for them. “I'm sorry.”
“You did and you didn't, really,” Sherlock says, trying to turn that away, as though he turns it over in his mind a lot when his bed is empty. “You often used to say you wanted to be married and maybe have a family and you proved it. You met her easily enough and got the offer for the practice in the suburbs and it was easy and it seemed like it would be an easy life and I didn't say anything against it though I occasionally deduced that you wanted me to.”
If tongues are really bit in dismay, John watches it happen. Sherlock keeps talking on with a bit tongue. “I could see the reasons why you should marry, when I thought about it like that, that your life would be easy, that you'd be safe; you would be safer away from here even considering suburban crime-rates. And you'd have some sort of title to make it more official and harder to end like you seemed to care for. All of it was much too distracting to allow for proper casework so I tried not to seem distracted. I told you at our first dinner exactly what I was married to: the puzzle pieces mad people leave for me in the dark. But then you came back, John; you always have, and then you go back again, and now you want me to believe that you won't. The evidence, however--”
Sherlock's zig-zagging monologue washes up against him in a steady revealing tide. John splashes onto stage.
“Have me here,” John says, also another sort of invitation, “and I swear I'll leave a different looney clue under your pillow every night.” That lies between them, John slipping his hand toward the pillowcase as though he's about to start.
Sherlock kisses him then, not so hard as he had done at the door, but with more determined teeth. He says, bitingly, “If you were to leave now I would track you and stay in Sweden,” and then they kiss again and forgive themselves and each other for being such stubborn fool idiot bastards.
At least they'd retained the genius to be together like this despite John's legally obligated absence. They had tried, they really had, but the innate physicality between them was something undeniable, inherent, instinctive, inborn, something even Sherlock couldn't describe in terms of chemistry. It crackled across rooms and followed them around street-corners.
It had first sent them smashing spectacularly up against the walls and furniture and then fumblingly to bed. Now they are very old hands at it and their hands are older but there is always something new. That's part of it, too.
“I never feel like it's cheating,” John had said once, lying and not, with Sherlock still panting shallowly against him. Sherlock had been silent afterward, busy gathering up bits of his brain from having been fucked out his ears. “I never do because it's you, and you were the first and only one in this, like this I mean, and you're something different, you don't cheat or posture you just exist. And we're like this, we always get on like this. It would be more unnatural if we didn't. It's part of what we do, you know? It's part of it.”
“Quite,” Sherlock had agreed, then curled up on his side and went to sleep.
Now John has severed the last ties that have kept him from here. He'd told her he was sorry at the last. He'd attempted to be who and what she wanted for a length of time that had felt infinite, acted an alien part in a distant play. She was a good woman, and he cared for her still, especially as it wasn't her fault for marrying the wrong man. But he had told her enough of it to make her understand.
“I told her,” John says quietly, “I told her, 'He's post-brilliant and mad as a hatter and he needs me there to slow him down, and I'm slower but brave and shoot better and I need to be there to do that,' and I told her how I love you, Sherlock Holmes, as I never quite got around to telling you.”
Sherlock reacts the way he always does in situations he hasn't precisely foreseen, with a flurry of more reaction and action. Down, he presses down onto John, laying out the languid lengths of his body, threading their limbs together, the abrupt open heat of his mouth on John's like a furnace.
“Like this,” Sherlock says, urging John onto his side, slipping free from straddling but locking in close beside him. “Like this, this time,” he says, as though they've been discussing sexual positioning and not the heavy heady words John's lips made. “You want us like this, John?”
“I told you I needed you to,” John answers, too raspy despite the cups of tea. Sherlock then busy with more activity that climbs up his spine to hack John's brainstem.
Sherlock's hands, his skillful sensitive sensing fingers everywhere all over in on pressing scratching pushing probing dragging gripping stroking loosing John, Sherlock's fingers dipping into John's mouth to feel the wetness there and the vibration of his moan.
Sherlock positioned hard too hard and entirely too big which was part of the problem really flush against John. Sherlock's hand now cupping his thigh, urging his leg higher. Sherlock saying, “You won't leave again, I won't have it,” and John says “But you know I never really did,” and then Sherlock precipitates himself into John rather hastily.
Pinned to Sherlock by his tricky arms, his back to the leaner planes of Sherlock's chest, shot clean through, John groans without restraint. Takes pleasure and punishment, both burning, both earned, with unbridled enthusiasm; pushes his head with its damned grey-blond strands and tucks in under Sherlock's chin. Cants his lower body at the right angle and tries to shut off his brain to accommodate, to help them both.
Sherlock has kept moving through John's movement, and at his groan thrusts harder, cleaves sideways into John. John is suddenly sweating and scrabbling for purchase, further unbalanced when the fingers Sherlock had used to keep John's captured hip steady transfer instead to sheath John's cock. Sherlock's fingers, shapely and chalk-white with ink and rosin and John's scent under his nails, long nails meant to scrape sneaked samples.
For a long time it's a longer and slower sort of fuck than the manic energy they're used to. Coming off of cases, their adrenaline up, they would often damage the furniture and wreck experiments, leaving rooms in lusty ruin.
They had spent enough time together though of course and had seen many frightful days and worse depressing nights, and sometimes they were careful and reassuring with each other, their touches lingering and considerate. There were times when they'd hardly touched at all, or only slept with an arm or leg thrown across the other for comfort. Most times there had been laughter and easy accord and general agreement when they were naked on the bedsheets.
Now Sherlock has his tightly-held lips pressed to the seam of John's scalp, his cock, too big to make this sort of reversal frequent but glorious all the same, his cock unyielding. They're quiet about it, except John, sometimes.
With Sherlock fully finally in him stretching him taking him too much too much just enough not enough John says, “Don't go--” so Sherlock doesn't, just holds there and rolls his rider's hips in minute circles to keep them going.
John finds he can breathe again but doesn't really want to bother, just wants to feel this, breathing occupies far too many other faculties of the body. He closes his eyes and lets himself be entirely surrounded.
Claimed and invaded in the finest English empiric imperial fashion. Sherlock moving with tiny dips and pulls, trying not to go, one hand on John's screaming cock and the other keeping John a perfect parallel.
“Go,” John lets out at last, and Sherlock fucks him like there's never been anything else but Baker Street and this bed where they were first together and this, this.
It isn't slow, after that, and it is seldom gentle, though there are mixed quieter spaces that come before explosive propulsion; at one point there is the threat of blood from John's bitten lip, the wet in his eye because of it, he tells Sherlock.
There are thrusts that are ragged and roughly wrought, territorial, and other incursions so tortuously slow they speak of teased affection, then also the twist of Sherlock's fingertips on his nipple that doesn't go away and won't and won't no matter what and leaves John to discover that he grunts. Something new every time.
The air Sherlock has breathed warming John's neck, the way they have lined up to breathe in sync together as though trying to fall asleep.
But it's like the door again. It's some of the best sensation ever lit up in John literally in John but Sherlock won't let him come and won't let him come and won't let him, strong fingers a dissenting 'O' around the base of John's cock.
“Not yet,” Sherlock chides, his pink tongue to the pink shell of John's ear.
“When? When? Damn you, when?” John rides back on Sherlock's cock and is ridden and every part of him needs to absolutely break apart immediately and it's been days since he even touched himself and months, months, since anyone else --
Sherlock takes himself out and away with a sound that John thinks sounds like wrenched or maybe that's the sound John makes and leaves the bed. Pads straight across the room, spine straighter, tousled hair resplendent, cock still as stiff as a Buckingham Palace guard and his eyes electric. He's bending for the dark red bag, unzipping it.
John's muscles are like marmalade but he manages to go up on one elbow, not daring to grip his own twitching cock under Sherlock's watch. John raises an eyebrow that is meant to inquire but primarily begs.
“When you're ready,” says Sherlock. “You think you are but we've only just started. I've had a long time to think about this, John; am generally thinking about it on some level as I go about daily activity; I couldn't possibly think of allowing you to orgasm after a mere bout of fucking, no matter how splendidly engaging.”
“Splendid, eh,” tries John, to keep himself from tearing into handfuls of sheet or Sherlock.
Sherlock's round color-shifting eyes are lidded; the outline of his brilliant form is cut out against the wall, ivory in shadow. He should be made illegal looking like that, branded walking, stalking sex.
He rakes a casual hand through blue-black hair, worn even shaggier than in younger years, because John is watching him do it. “We'll revisit, certainly. But not until you're ready and have fully resumed your place here, John.”
When he paces back to bed, he brings the riding crop with him from the suitcase.
Since he begins with that, John knows that he has a ways to go before Sherlock will be satisfied that his return in this case is no illusion. John shows him that there is no indecision in it at least, going onto his hands and knees with the pillow ready to go between his teeth.
But not until he asks Sherlock for the first strike, which lands nearly in the same breath John drew in request.
Mrs. Hudson has blessedly stayed out shopping but it's a shame about their neighbors and the tinny walls. They ignore the banging protests from next door with outmatching racket.
* * *
They use the crop, and longer whips, and there are ties and cuffs and chains; there are bright toys and wicked tools John had forgotten about but soon remembers; there are gags for mouths and and dark blindfolds for eyes. There is truth and agony and ecstasy received in parceled bits like the Gods' own ambrosia, there is cruel denial and extreme fulfillment. No one but they will ever know what passes there.
* * *
By the time they can hear Mrs. Hudson puttering around downstairs with the cooking Sherlock is slowly untying John's legs from the bedposts. He'd tied them tightly.
John's legs and John still bound up by his hands are a quivering mess, then a body arched and jerking, when Sherlock climbs back up the length of him and slides smoothly down onto John's aching cock. There is barely seconds' pause between actions, zero hesitation.
He must have made himself ready for it when John could see only silken darkness, blink-black, John's pleas silenced by another knot. Then John knows he's ready, too.
It hardly takes more than Sherlock fully seating himself to make John come harder than he's ever come and anyone's ever come since particles first created the universe, and Sherlock, damn him, keeps moving above John all mercurial tight wet friction until John pants his name, “Sherlock,” only not shouting it for the noise, knowing full well Sherlock can hear him shouting all the same.
John's arms test and fight the ropes Sherlock had fixed and he manages to yank free of one in a move to make Her Majesty's Armed Forces proud. He uses his freed hand to grab for Sherlock's cock, a luxury he hasn't been allowed in a while now.
It fits straining in John's fist, and he strokes with Sherlock's favorite pressure and Sherlock's favorite finger of John's circling the tip.
Sherlock has come a few times already but he's somehow still hard under John's stroking and somehow comes a good bit again with John still clinging to him in him and John urging it out of him with his hand and his eyes. His unchanged face is most beautiful at release, unmasked. The mane he's made of his hair falls low and sweeps John's neck as he tilts close. John hears his own name quietly said but said.
They lie collapsed in a body-tangle with one of John's hands still bound by rope to the headboard. Somewhere below the floor beneath Mrs. Hudson clangs pots around on the stove for supper.
* * *
“Can you hear me, John?”
Sherlock is crouching by the bedside. John on his belly with his head on a pillow he'd somehow found. Moving, breathing an effort. Seeing hard, too. Hearing including a faint ringing echo. The room in partial shadow from the knocked-over lamp.
Sherlock has unknotted the last soft white rope, its width thin but strong, and he holds the free end in his hand. John's wrist is still bound by it.
“Sort of,” John says. He rubs his eyes and makes himself roll over to face Sherlock, Sherlock on his knees by the bed. “Somewhat.”
Sherlock says, tone too slowly serious for post-coital, for post-what has occurred, “This is how I would have wanted to do it. There used to be a sort of union of mutual consent and sexual congress that could be conceived between two people. No authorization necessary and no interfering contracts and no witnesses present to make it a spectacle. The Church did away with the practice eventually, of course.”
As he speaks, he begins to slow-wrap the rope around his wrist. It coils in shades of white against milk-pale skin. “The Germans would say, Hände fest halten; that is, 'to hold hands firmly and fixedly,'” and more of the rope goes up Sherlock's arm until there's little space left between and they're pressing palms.
Sherlock's fingers slide over John's and fit into the channels between John's fingers and then fold over, holding. “The Old Norse would be hand-festa, that is -- 'to strike a bargain by joining hands.' A choice between two people, John Watson, bound up with only joint decision and ribbon.”
Bondage rope works too. Sherlock on the floor by the bed, on his knees, his hand taking John's.
John swallowing, gripping back as hard as he can, hard enough to hurt, saying, “Sign me up--” for the rest of my life and Sherlock knotting the last knot around them, tying it tight.
Sherlock moves up and back over John, hiding the fullness of his eyes behind charcoal-dark hair but not their gleam, and when he's settled down again John crooks his free arm over and around him.
“Does this mean we've,” John starts, but Sherlock's face uncovered is all delicious shades of grin, and John pauses.
“Ask me again later,” Sherlock suggests, sly, "And you will like the answer.”
They lie tethered together by their hands and lips until Mrs. Hudson calls from the staircase that food is ready and getting cold on the table. They don't undo the bindings but cut them loose, keeping a thin coiled sliver on each wrist that only Lestrade and Mycroft ask about. In time they tell others.
John does go back, but just the once, to collect the few things there that had always belonged on Baker Street.
Author: Ark / et_in_arkadia
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating/Category: NC-17; Slash; Angst, Mild BDSM; Futurefic
Words: ~6600
Notes: For the Porn Quorum, for encouraging.
Summary: They had tried, they really had, but the innate physicality between them was something even Sherlock couldn't describe in terms of chemistry.
Sherlock meets him at Victoria station by a dusty bust of the old Queen. A small rolling suitcase is tilted nearby at an angle. It is maroon-red, the bag, wine-dark, yet still it is meant to hint after pink.
They don't shake hands in greeting, no gripping yet, just move in doubled tandem toward the exit away from all the other people.
In the cab to Baker Street the bag sits on the floor between them. Sealed into boxy silence, Sherlock's hand finds John's thigh and holds there. His eyes are trained on the passing streets past window-glass. He helps hold him down.
“Yeah,” John admits. “Yes. It's been a bit bumpy.”
Worse than that, much worse, and Sherlock already knows of course. Knew from the first sight of John stepping down the metal steps of the train. Sherlock had watched how he came off of it, how he was moving, how there was the faintest ugly shadow of something like a limp in John.
Sherlock's hand presses now below John's hipbone as the taxi turns corners to show that there is nothing else there but that (Sherlock's hand, no phantoms). He anchors John into old and new realities.
Sherlock Holmes would have known immediately in infinitesimal ways that things were really wrong this time, would have taken John Watson apart with cutting eyes. Saw the wrinkled mustard-colored shirt under his worn leather jacket first, of course, that one was easy -- no time for washing-up or ironing and no loving help in it.
The outdated clothes, like John had stopped bothering at all these days, away from the ire of Londoners who would glare on the Tube when you weren't styled after Sienna Miller. Like John had stopped caring almost entirely about how he looked or was looked at.
But the sturdy dark shoes, shiny, are a pair that John had once worn years ago, here, maybe in another cab with Sherlock a world away. The shoes are in better shape, as though John has kept them up at least, which tells Sherlock other things too.
But John knows the dozens of indicators about him lighting up and flashing through Sherlock's head make a profile but not an explanation for this, so he keeps talking, making himself talk. London traffic will never change, never, and they sit in it awhile.
“She kicked me out,” John says, as flat as he can make it. “For good this time.”
It's been five months since he saw Sherlock last and nearly two years since the day Sherlock had stood beside John, both of them in dapper suits, Sherlock handing John his wedding ring as was his best man's duty. Sherlock's smile stamped-on, the ring in both their hands.
They'd planned to stop before and after John's wedding and had sworn on it even, deciding it would probably be unfair to John's new bride and John's new life.
But a few months after the honeymoon Sherlock had texted imploring John to help out on a case that required his exact field of expertise, wouldn't John come, he could close up or hand over the practice for a couple of days, it was exceedingly important and all immediate haste was necessary. A couple of days in town became a week again on Baker Street saving London and then they had found it much better not to stop.
John has several scenes on his mind at once, at odds. Scenes he knows well, bickering over the growing bills, the garbage disposal, the maintenance on the cars; scenes of tear-filled anguish and wrenched words and tiny figurines thrown. A partnership pressed thin on patience and worn out, worn down by dull days.
Then he sees what Sherlock had looked like in bed when they told themselves it was the last time, a week before John got married, what he had done to John and felt like, and then John sees what Sherlock's face had looked like when John came back for the first case of what would become a string of freelancing cases. He sees Sherlock the way Sherlock smiled when John let himself into the flat, and how they had torn into each other will almost no pause whatsoever, and what that had looked and felt like.
“You're lying,” says Sherlock from the other end of the cab. They still manage to make the carriage space small between them. Sherlock is watching people open dark umbrellas in the sudden misty rain on the street outside.
John opens his mouth, closes it. Of course. “How did you know?” he asks, the old patterns so easy.
Sherlock is being as patient with him as Sherlock can be patient, so he doesn't quite sigh. He doesn't even roll his eyes, great restraint indeed. “No divining of splash-marks or thinking about the Sutton clay on your pant's hem. I hardly have to try. Sometimes you're like child's play for me to read, John, you're a children's book.”
“Lovely,” John interjects, muttering something about a snobbish talking steam engine.
Sherlock continues unruffled. “You have your favorite shoes on, which indicates that you chose them on purpose and with care, though I cannot say the same of the rest of your outfitting. You have a sizable rucksack, your moving-bag of choice, packed yourself since no one else can manage the damned military thing, and packed full enough that you thought about that as well. You've never had many worldly possessions, John. Also you haven't slept for at least thirty-five hours; you've been thinking. You tore out a small patch of hair at one point in the process.”
John scrubs a hand over bloodshot eyes, and John's the one who sighs. “Okay. Yes. Sorry. I knew I should have come in my Anderson disguise.”
Sherlock just waits, until John gathers up a full breath and lets it out with: “You're right. Spot-on. I lied. I left her.”
Then Sherlock turns from watching the umbrellas, his unrelenting hold on John's upper thigh somehow tightening, like he'd wanted to hear John say it.
John says, “She didn't want me to go, and I did; there was some shouting; and I still say it's for good.”
“You've said that before,” says Sherlock.
The first time was somewhere in the first muddled year of marriage. The perfect thrill of catching crazed killer and rescuing the intended victim in just the nick of time together, their shared triumph and laughter afterward. The transcendence of their united bodies.
John later wrapping around all of Sherlock's lean varied points and angles saying he didn't quite feel like going back, didn't want to go back really, this was it, but in the morning Sherlock had gone with him to the station when he'd gone.
“Well.” He'll have time to explain why this case is different. The cab's at least moving now, rounding into more familiar geography, they're nearly home. Home. John exhales. That had rather been the problem all along so anyway -- “You deciphered my rucksack just brilliantly. So what's in the bag?” It lies on the floor, a bloodier red removed from bright station lights.
“The essential supplies,” Sherlock says calmly, turning back to the window as though that will hide his smile from John when John can taste his grins blindfolded across a room. “Figure it for yourself for a go.”
So John gives it a go, and with his face to the glass Sherlock smiles wider as he speaks. “It's, well, it looks like a new case, but sort of cheaply made, and, uh, there's not much drag on the wheel yet but you've used it somewhat. So, I'd guess you could have picked it up in Chinatown this morning because you still smell like Plum Valley's dim sum, and then maybe you went to the lab, since you have your good coat on; but considering the skinny jeans and fancy loafers you never wear unless you're on a case or something, I'd guess you went to the sex stores in Soho so you wouldn't stand out. I'm hoping the last, at least.”
John gets the sense that if Sherlock could clap his hands together without drawing the attention of their driver, who is studiously trying not to hear them through plexiglass, John would receive some sort of applause, or perhaps a genuinely fond pat on the head. “Oh, John, really well done. Remind me to reward you for that. You were wrong about where I got the bag of course but rather right about Soho and anyway it doesn't matter, that was an excellent turn for you, you should have told me you've been practicing paying more attention, and oh now would you look there it's Mrs. Hudson herself to greet you.”
The cab slides into the space by 221b. Mrs. Hudson is indeed at indicated door, a little older and showing it like all of them save Sherlock, but her smile is exactly the same as it's always been, and her embrace even warmer, as though she's guessed why John is here. Sherlock comes up the steps carrying both bags, and they all go inside together.
It's an unwitting echo of a scene that had played out on the same stairs more than a half-decade ago, with everything and all of them completely the same and profoundly altered.
* * *
Mrs. Hudson stays for two-and-a-half cups of Earl Grey, chattering happily in the kitchen, flitting between her boys.
John makes vague correct noises and polite answers he thinks and Sherlock has decided to act charming in the way he sometimes could to settle psychopaths or stray cats, so he indulges in a flourish of tea-making and setting out a biscuit-selection in the shape of a dodecahedron for distraction. They watch each other move in the spaces between her words.
Mrs. Hudson chatters that the upstairs bedroom is John's of course so long as he needs it despite her persistent plans to set up a proper sewing-room; she'll only have to take out a couple of her effects, it's no trouble at all, and anyway Sherlock was always making it insufferable for her to work in there with his blasted experiments.
When the tea is drained dry and the last biscuit consumed she bustles out to go shopping for their supper ingredients, just this once, mind you lads, special occasion and all, she still isn't keeping house for anybody but herself please and thank you.
John sees her out of the flat, intensely fond but intensely glad for the abrupt quiet of her wake. His head is splitting, overwhelmed, his grip on the well-known doorknob painful. He wants to cry and laugh and scream and dance and wreck the place.
He wants to tear pillows from chairs, rip blankets by their seams, smash all the porcelain in the kitchen, knock everything free from the mantle, make it a war zone. He wants to stay standing right there in the messy perfection of it all forever, never moving, like a fly caught in solidifying amber. He wants to never move again, to only stand there by the door and look at this space that started everything.
It's nearly almost exactly the same, with the addition of new years of strange specimens and elaborate contraptions, and more dust; without John to reign in the worst of it Sherlock's hoarding instinct has grown and spread and precarious piles of curious things are scattered about, some leaning at improbable angles for physics.
The furniture has a few tears and is rubbed shinier in some places than it once was, and there is a beechwood rocking chair that is new. John's bag has already been tucked into a closet and there is only the red one standing in the den.
John is about to say something, but then Sherlock is in front of him blocking John's view of everything else as he is best at doing, and Sherlock doesn't say anything.
Sherlock leans down in the purposeful silence of the room and kisses John, very hard, flattening him back against the door. Sherlock kisses him deeper, sharper, tenderness mated with bruising force, his hands with their too-fine fingers coming up to frame John's face. His hold is not gentle.
He presses the kiss out of John, claims it and drags it out of him, won't let him go, threatens breathing.
There is a certain three-three-three rule of thumb when it comes to basic human survival. It's isn't exact but it's never bad to keep in mind: healthy people can generally still live without three minutes of fresh oxygen, three days without proper water, and three weeks without solid nourishment. Sherlock has begun testing them on the first one.
John has to tear away at last, just for the air, though Sherlock barely lets him; only looms from his luminous height and says, “You will forgive that my welcome somewhat diverges from Mrs. Hudson's, doctor,”
and he shoves John to the painted wood again even harder than he'd kissed him and blows John against the door with John still shaking, lips nearly blooded from the kiss, lungs swimming for breath, his hands trembling Sherlock's hair.
The flat is a little stuffy without the windows open this time of year and it smells like Sherlock, like old arcane books and rich damp wool and the rolling tobacco he still keeps squirreled in little hidden boxes just in case a problem couldn't be countered by a nicotine patch, and John thinks with his cock halfway down Sherlock's throat maybe it's still like him in here too, tangy residue of gunpowder and whiskey and the ghostly click of keys.
It's good that Mrs. Hudson has gone out because John is not being quiet at all now, especially when Sherlock gracefully arises like it's been a fine bit of performance theatre at the worst possible moment in the history of the world and doesn't let John come in his mouth.
He leans for the red bag instead with one hand, and reaches for John's cock with the other, and he takes them to bed. They go to Sherlock's room because Sherlock murmurs something about needing to sort out some things in John's first, something possibly about snakes. In the history of the world it is probable clothing has never been removed quite so quickly, nor with such damage done, especially to skinny jeans and John's terrible mustard shirt.
* * *
In bed, in the shaded light from the lamp, which Sherlock has kept on, John says, “I think I need you to--”
“Tell me, John.” Sherlock blinks only a little surprise at the divergence, his eyes blue-grey-green under John, his pliant body also. “I'm all ears and my hearing is excellent. I test high above average.”
“Let's not like this,” John says. “I want you to.”
“Ah,” says Sherlock, making it an entire sentence. John hadn't quite managed. “You know you said, one year six months fifteen days ago, that you really rather preferred--”
“I know what I said,” John says, low, trying to be more amused and aroused than impatient. “Just trust me, okay?”
It's the wrong thing to say so early starting out in bed, and this time in bed in particular. Sherlock goes still, and then with an unaccountable twist of motion moves to upend them, rolling over onto John.
John is rolled. Sherlock sits John's lower body with the too-easy gait of a gifted horseman. He crosses long arms in at the elbows. “Tell me why I should in this,” says the pert set of his impetuous mouth. It goes unspoken that trust is not questioned elsewhere. “Lay out the evidence, John. It's not that I'm implying you lied when you said you wanted to stay before. I think you were telling the truth in fact; I'm good at decoding human and animal emotional vocal intonations. But you're a good man and you want a good marriage, and that's why--”
That's why indeed. John hisses breath from out from beneath the firm, stubborn weight belting him. Sherlock alone of everyone he knows looks unchanged, looks young still, looks forever caught in time. There are heavier circles dug under John's eyes than he'd had in war and too much grey in his sandy hair. Time found John.
He closes his eyes and then opens them and then he interrupts to say, “I told her things, Sherlock, that there isn't going back on. It can't be taken back now, all right? I made it that way on purpose.”
Sherlock stills his slow-taunting hips. His mask has suddenly slipped into place, face less expressive than a statue's. “Told her what?” he says at last, hating not to know exactly, for once unwilling to guess.
“What happened,” says John.
Sherlock blinks nude above him, statuesque. “Well. Some of what happened,” John amends. “Just enough, you know.”
He hadn't told her everything of course:
how they'd met flat-sharing on Baker Street because it was convenient
and fought improbable impossible crimes and killed and caught nasty bits of humanity
for their ever-friendly friends at Scotland Yard and also the government and the Queen and
how they had lived and liked living together, found themselves very amenable indeed,
and then one day found and fully admitted that they'd rather like to have sex as well,
that they were good at it together the way they were good at everything else, together,
and wasn't the living arrangement considerably convenient after all.
For years they had passed days and nights together, eaten nearly every meal and usually the same one across from the other, cursed early morning wake-ups and crafted energized, sometimes life-threatening evenings, shared minutes and hours,
and then there was one middle of the night in March in a year better forgotten with London warm for once; and John had asked Sherlock the same sort of question he would go on to ask someone else, because Sherlock had tipped back his chin and laughed in the dark and pushed him down on the bed and they had sex and Sherlock never said anything or mentioned it again and after that John's insides had started to feel like they were filling up with shrapnel.
Sherlock can't help looking like the incomprehensible mix of things he is, so he does, appearing half a medievalist's dream of a knight in a tapestry and a theologian's vision of a fallen angel from a scroll. His new expression, however, surprising naivete bounded by curious intrigue, is all doomed romantic poet. He's nearly gone pale enough to rival the consumptives.
“Is that what happened?” says Sherlock. Because for some reason John has spoken much of this aloud, eyes trained on the old known ceiling with the same cracks running across it as he recites, telling Sherlock more than he told her. Sherlock a statue slowly melting.
Still: just enough.
“It happened to me,” John says.
Sherlock's hands are on John's shoulders, curved with only the precise pressure to make them present. “John,” he says, soft in the light. “That was not my experience.”
“No?” Now John admits to curiosity, too.
“No, although certainly your own analysis has quite some validity being in that it is your unique perspective: valuable of course for solving a problem but never providing the whole of it. You know we always interview as many potential witnesses as we can about a crime scene, as everyone has seen something different, and will have something different to say. It's the old Rashomon effect. Don't you see, John?”
“Crime scene,” John repeats, not seeing. He pushes his thighs up for punctuation.
Sherlock waves that away. “Yes. No. Perhaps it was one. I think,” he says, slowing suddenly from breakneck speed, “I think that we suffered an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“You have a unique gift for over and understatement at the same time,” John says. “It is fully remarkable.” Sherlock's hands are compressing him harder to the bed, his pointed gaze alight above John.
Sherlock is thinking behind his eyes, John can see the whirring, and then Sherlock seems to decide and lean in closer, forehead touching John's, then not.
Still close, making their eyes meet, he reasons, a ramble, “John, it was not infrequent, at that time, that in an exuberant burst of enthusiasm or sexual excitement you would ask me to marry you. You once declared it after a thorough neck massage. It is strange for me to hear you say these things, as surely my response on the day you indicate must have seemed strange, if your intentions were as you said; but it is still strange. I remember the night, of course, and how it had been relaxed with the dinner you made after the park, and I. Ah.” Sherlock stops and swallows and makes the sound in the span of seconds, then works his jaw and says, “And I remember that I was pleased of course and that your voice sounded serious and that pleased me, but I never thought--”
Caught in such roundabout logic, over-think on overload, Sherlock pauses longer. “I never really thought you'd want to do that sort of old hidebound Henry VIII fossilized waltz with me -- no, I apologize, John, that's unfair -- I only mean to say I hadn't understood then what it meant to you and that you meant it, that you could possibly want to parade me as your plus-one.”
“I asked you to spend the rest of your life with me,” John corrects, the words in clenched teeth.
Spend the rest of your life with me, marry me, Sherlock Holmes, never change, never go, and we'll go away to Sweden where the domestic partnership benefits are better and scarves can be worn year-round.
They have a Queen to work for too you know.
And Sherlock had tilted back and laughed in the dark --
“You see how I thought it was funny at the time?” Sherlock pleads. “Just another lovely joke, John, to lure me back to bed after I told you I was going downstairs to work on the website,” and they look at each other in the green glow from the lamp nearby and then Sherlock says, “Anyway, I had planned to already, and I thought that was made perfectly clear.”
“Planned to?” John says, not really asking now, wanting both to weep and break something, again.
“Never go,” Sherlock returns. He spreads his hands across John's bare skin. “And I haven't.”
“I did,” John says, saying it for them. “I'm sorry.”
“You did and you didn't, really,” Sherlock says, trying to turn that away, as though he turns it over in his mind a lot when his bed is empty. “You often used to say you wanted to be married and maybe have a family and you proved it. You met her easily enough and got the offer for the practice in the suburbs and it was easy and it seemed like it would be an easy life and I didn't say anything against it though I occasionally deduced that you wanted me to.”
If tongues are really bit in dismay, John watches it happen. Sherlock keeps talking on with a bit tongue. “I could see the reasons why you should marry, when I thought about it like that, that your life would be easy, that you'd be safe; you would be safer away from here even considering suburban crime-rates. And you'd have some sort of title to make it more official and harder to end like you seemed to care for. All of it was much too distracting to allow for proper casework so I tried not to seem distracted. I told you at our first dinner exactly what I was married to: the puzzle pieces mad people leave for me in the dark. But then you came back, John; you always have, and then you go back again, and now you want me to believe that you won't. The evidence, however--”
Sherlock's zig-zagging monologue washes up against him in a steady revealing tide. John splashes onto stage.
“Have me here,” John says, also another sort of invitation, “and I swear I'll leave a different looney clue under your pillow every night.” That lies between them, John slipping his hand toward the pillowcase as though he's about to start.
Sherlock kisses him then, not so hard as he had done at the door, but with more determined teeth. He says, bitingly, “If you were to leave now I would track you and stay in Sweden,” and then they kiss again and forgive themselves and each other for being such stubborn fool idiot bastards.
At least they'd retained the genius to be together like this despite John's legally obligated absence. They had tried, they really had, but the innate physicality between them was something undeniable, inherent, instinctive, inborn, something even Sherlock couldn't describe in terms of chemistry. It crackled across rooms and followed them around street-corners.
It had first sent them smashing spectacularly up against the walls and furniture and then fumblingly to bed. Now they are very old hands at it and their hands are older but there is always something new. That's part of it, too.
“I never feel like it's cheating,” John had said once, lying and not, with Sherlock still panting shallowly against him. Sherlock had been silent afterward, busy gathering up bits of his brain from having been fucked out his ears. “I never do because it's you, and you were the first and only one in this, like this I mean, and you're something different, you don't cheat or posture you just exist. And we're like this, we always get on like this. It would be more unnatural if we didn't. It's part of what we do, you know? It's part of it.”
“Quite,” Sherlock had agreed, then curled up on his side and went to sleep.
Now John has severed the last ties that have kept him from here. He'd told her he was sorry at the last. He'd attempted to be who and what she wanted for a length of time that had felt infinite, acted an alien part in a distant play. She was a good woman, and he cared for her still, especially as it wasn't her fault for marrying the wrong man. But he had told her enough of it to make her understand.
“I told her,” John says quietly, “I told her, 'He's post-brilliant and mad as a hatter and he needs me there to slow him down, and I'm slower but brave and shoot better and I need to be there to do that,' and I told her how I love you, Sherlock Holmes, as I never quite got around to telling you.”
Sherlock reacts the way he always does in situations he hasn't precisely foreseen, with a flurry of more reaction and action. Down, he presses down onto John, laying out the languid lengths of his body, threading their limbs together, the abrupt open heat of his mouth on John's like a furnace.
“Like this,” Sherlock says, urging John onto his side, slipping free from straddling but locking in close beside him. “Like this, this time,” he says, as though they've been discussing sexual positioning and not the heavy heady words John's lips made. “You want us like this, John?”
“I told you I needed you to,” John answers, too raspy despite the cups of tea. Sherlock then busy with more activity that climbs up his spine to hack John's brainstem.
Sherlock's hands, his skillful sensitive sensing fingers everywhere all over in on pressing scratching pushing probing dragging gripping stroking loosing John, Sherlock's fingers dipping into John's mouth to feel the wetness there and the vibration of his moan.
Sherlock positioned hard too hard and entirely too big which was part of the problem really flush against John. Sherlock's hand now cupping his thigh, urging his leg higher. Sherlock saying, “You won't leave again, I won't have it,” and John says “But you know I never really did,” and then Sherlock precipitates himself into John rather hastily.
Pinned to Sherlock by his tricky arms, his back to the leaner planes of Sherlock's chest, shot clean through, John groans without restraint. Takes pleasure and punishment, both burning, both earned, with unbridled enthusiasm; pushes his head with its damned grey-blond strands and tucks in under Sherlock's chin. Cants his lower body at the right angle and tries to shut off his brain to accommodate, to help them both.
Sherlock has kept moving through John's movement, and at his groan thrusts harder, cleaves sideways into John. John is suddenly sweating and scrabbling for purchase, further unbalanced when the fingers Sherlock had used to keep John's captured hip steady transfer instead to sheath John's cock. Sherlock's fingers, shapely and chalk-white with ink and rosin and John's scent under his nails, long nails meant to scrape sneaked samples.
For a long time it's a longer and slower sort of fuck than the manic energy they're used to. Coming off of cases, their adrenaline up, they would often damage the furniture and wreck experiments, leaving rooms in lusty ruin.
They had spent enough time together though of course and had seen many frightful days and worse depressing nights, and sometimes they were careful and reassuring with each other, their touches lingering and considerate. There were times when they'd hardly touched at all, or only slept with an arm or leg thrown across the other for comfort. Most times there had been laughter and easy accord and general agreement when they were naked on the bedsheets.
Now Sherlock has his tightly-held lips pressed to the seam of John's scalp, his cock, too big to make this sort of reversal frequent but glorious all the same, his cock unyielding. They're quiet about it, except John, sometimes.
With Sherlock fully finally in him stretching him taking him too much too much just enough not enough John says, “Don't go--” so Sherlock doesn't, just holds there and rolls his rider's hips in minute circles to keep them going.
John finds he can breathe again but doesn't really want to bother, just wants to feel this, breathing occupies far too many other faculties of the body. He closes his eyes and lets himself be entirely surrounded.
Claimed and invaded in the finest English empiric imperial fashion. Sherlock moving with tiny dips and pulls, trying not to go, one hand on John's screaming cock and the other keeping John a perfect parallel.
“Go,” John lets out at last, and Sherlock fucks him like there's never been anything else but Baker Street and this bed where they were first together and this, this.
It isn't slow, after that, and it is seldom gentle, though there are mixed quieter spaces that come before explosive propulsion; at one point there is the threat of blood from John's bitten lip, the wet in his eye because of it, he tells Sherlock.
There are thrusts that are ragged and roughly wrought, territorial, and other incursions so tortuously slow they speak of teased affection, then also the twist of Sherlock's fingertips on his nipple that doesn't go away and won't and won't no matter what and leaves John to discover that he grunts. Something new every time.
The air Sherlock has breathed warming John's neck, the way they have lined up to breathe in sync together as though trying to fall asleep.
But it's like the door again. It's some of the best sensation ever lit up in John literally in John but Sherlock won't let him come and won't let him come and won't let him, strong fingers a dissenting 'O' around the base of John's cock.
“Not yet,” Sherlock chides, his pink tongue to the pink shell of John's ear.
“When? When? Damn you, when?” John rides back on Sherlock's cock and is ridden and every part of him needs to absolutely break apart immediately and it's been days since he even touched himself and months, months, since anyone else --
Sherlock takes himself out and away with a sound that John thinks sounds like wrenched or maybe that's the sound John makes and leaves the bed. Pads straight across the room, spine straighter, tousled hair resplendent, cock still as stiff as a Buckingham Palace guard and his eyes electric. He's bending for the dark red bag, unzipping it.
John's muscles are like marmalade but he manages to go up on one elbow, not daring to grip his own twitching cock under Sherlock's watch. John raises an eyebrow that is meant to inquire but primarily begs.
“When you're ready,” says Sherlock. “You think you are but we've only just started. I've had a long time to think about this, John; am generally thinking about it on some level as I go about daily activity; I couldn't possibly think of allowing you to orgasm after a mere bout of fucking, no matter how splendidly engaging.”
“Splendid, eh,” tries John, to keep himself from tearing into handfuls of sheet or Sherlock.
Sherlock's round color-shifting eyes are lidded; the outline of his brilliant form is cut out against the wall, ivory in shadow. He should be made illegal looking like that, branded walking, stalking sex.
He rakes a casual hand through blue-black hair, worn even shaggier than in younger years, because John is watching him do it. “We'll revisit, certainly. But not until you're ready and have fully resumed your place here, John.”
When he paces back to bed, he brings the riding crop with him from the suitcase.
Since he begins with that, John knows that he has a ways to go before Sherlock will be satisfied that his return in this case is no illusion. John shows him that there is no indecision in it at least, going onto his hands and knees with the pillow ready to go between his teeth.
But not until he asks Sherlock for the first strike, which lands nearly in the same breath John drew in request.
Mrs. Hudson has blessedly stayed out shopping but it's a shame about their neighbors and the tinny walls. They ignore the banging protests from next door with outmatching racket.
* * *
They use the crop, and longer whips, and there are ties and cuffs and chains; there are bright toys and wicked tools John had forgotten about but soon remembers; there are gags for mouths and and dark blindfolds for eyes. There is truth and agony and ecstasy received in parceled bits like the Gods' own ambrosia, there is cruel denial and extreme fulfillment. No one but they will ever know what passes there.
* * *
By the time they can hear Mrs. Hudson puttering around downstairs with the cooking Sherlock is slowly untying John's legs from the bedposts. He'd tied them tightly.
John's legs and John still bound up by his hands are a quivering mess, then a body arched and jerking, when Sherlock climbs back up the length of him and slides smoothly down onto John's aching cock. There is barely seconds' pause between actions, zero hesitation.
He must have made himself ready for it when John could see only silken darkness, blink-black, John's pleas silenced by another knot. Then John knows he's ready, too.
It hardly takes more than Sherlock fully seating himself to make John come harder than he's ever come and anyone's ever come since particles first created the universe, and Sherlock, damn him, keeps moving above John all mercurial tight wet friction until John pants his name, “Sherlock,” only not shouting it for the noise, knowing full well Sherlock can hear him shouting all the same.
John's arms test and fight the ropes Sherlock had fixed and he manages to yank free of one in a move to make Her Majesty's Armed Forces proud. He uses his freed hand to grab for Sherlock's cock, a luxury he hasn't been allowed in a while now.
It fits straining in John's fist, and he strokes with Sherlock's favorite pressure and Sherlock's favorite finger of John's circling the tip.
Sherlock has come a few times already but he's somehow still hard under John's stroking and somehow comes a good bit again with John still clinging to him in him and John urging it out of him with his hand and his eyes. His unchanged face is most beautiful at release, unmasked. The mane he's made of his hair falls low and sweeps John's neck as he tilts close. John hears his own name quietly said but said.
They lie collapsed in a body-tangle with one of John's hands still bound by rope to the headboard. Somewhere below the floor beneath Mrs. Hudson clangs pots around on the stove for supper.
* * *
“Can you hear me, John?”
Sherlock is crouching by the bedside. John on his belly with his head on a pillow he'd somehow found. Moving, breathing an effort. Seeing hard, too. Hearing including a faint ringing echo. The room in partial shadow from the knocked-over lamp.
Sherlock has unknotted the last soft white rope, its width thin but strong, and he holds the free end in his hand. John's wrist is still bound by it.
“Sort of,” John says. He rubs his eyes and makes himself roll over to face Sherlock, Sherlock on his knees by the bed. “Somewhat.”
Sherlock says, tone too slowly serious for post-coital, for post-what has occurred, “This is how I would have wanted to do it. There used to be a sort of union of mutual consent and sexual congress that could be conceived between two people. No authorization necessary and no interfering contracts and no witnesses present to make it a spectacle. The Church did away with the practice eventually, of course.”
As he speaks, he begins to slow-wrap the rope around his wrist. It coils in shades of white against milk-pale skin. “The Germans would say, Hände fest halten; that is, 'to hold hands firmly and fixedly,'” and more of the rope goes up Sherlock's arm until there's little space left between and they're pressing palms.
Sherlock's fingers slide over John's and fit into the channels between John's fingers and then fold over, holding. “The Old Norse would be hand-festa, that is -- 'to strike a bargain by joining hands.' A choice between two people, John Watson, bound up with only joint decision and ribbon.”
Bondage rope works too. Sherlock on the floor by the bed, on his knees, his hand taking John's.
John swallowing, gripping back as hard as he can, hard enough to hurt, saying, “Sign me up--” for the rest of my life and Sherlock knotting the last knot around them, tying it tight.
Sherlock moves up and back over John, hiding the fullness of his eyes behind charcoal-dark hair but not their gleam, and when he's settled down again John crooks his free arm over and around him.
“Does this mean we've,” John starts, but Sherlock's face uncovered is all delicious shades of grin, and John pauses.
“Ask me again later,” Sherlock suggests, sly, "And you will like the answer.”
They lie tethered together by their hands and lips until Mrs. Hudson calls from the staircase that food is ready and getting cold on the table. They don't undo the bindings but cut them loose, keeping a thin coiled sliver on each wrist that only Lestrade and Mycroft ask about. In time they tell others.
John does go back, but just the once, to collect the few things there that had always belonged on Baker Street.