The Omega Sutra. Chapter 26/? A Hedge of Thorns
The Omega Sutra. Chapter Twenty-Six. A Hedge of Thorns
author: ghislainem70
rating: NC-17
word count:6,100 this chapter/141,r00 thus far
warnings: Omegaverse,mpreg, kink, angst
summary: In an Omegaverse/Paranormal AU, Sherlock has a secret life. John shouldn't want to be part of it.
disclaimer: I own nothing.
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
Track: BT, Smartbomb:
LISTEN TO SMARTBOMB HERE
After a long silence which Sherlock instinctively did not try to break, John stood up very carefully, regarding him with cold eyes. He began pacing the floor.
Sherlock instantly perceived that his limp had returned with a vengeance, and he literally bit his tongue to prevent himself remarking on it, deducing the cause. Anyway, the cause was obvious.
John’s walk was different too, and it wasn’t just the limp. This was an alert, coiled stride. His footfall was nearly silent but for the creaking of the floorboards: John was aware of the limp, then; and doing everything in his power to bring it under his control. John looked down into Baker Street and Sherlock watched the outline of his shoulders become rigid. The tension that crackled around John was wary and aggressive, like a wild animal.
John had been like this in the beginning, the first days and weeks after they met. Not so long ago, Sherlock reminded himself, it had been just six months since John Watson had walked into the lab at Barts: so quiet, so unassuming. So dangerous. It was in his eyes that Sherlock saw the danger below the surface, with a sharp, surprising thrill of covetousness. He had detected with a spike of interest the superb control that allowed John to keep his voice so steady, unthreatening and unafraid, even if he couldn’t control the limp, the tremor of his hand, the pain that radiated from his shoulder.
Slowly, John had relaxed into the environs of 221b and found an outlet for all that dangerous tension: the thrill of the chase with Sherlock Holmes, and his stupidly unworthy “dates” with females (mostly betas) when he should have seen the obvious -- that he was meant for something far, far better, and that something was Sherlock Holmes, Sociopathic Consulting Detective.
# # #
During those early days, John had built and encased himself in a protective wall that was adapted, Sherlock thought, to enable him to endure urban life generally and Sherlock Holmes specifically. After that first day, Sherlock knew without a doubt that dead bodies, murders, and even killing with his own hand were not sources of anxiety or pain for John Watson. But something was. John was tormented by nightmares whenever he fell asleep. Slowly they had loosened their grip, but they still lurked.
John displayed a wry, deadpan sense of humour, and almost never snapped at Sherlock, even when his conduct was so selfish and hurtful that even he could feel it, and he almost never felt anything. But none of this had deceived Sherlock.
Underneath the dry wit and the endless patience something terrible was hidden, something that John kept carefully locked away deep. It had something to do with Afghanistan, something to do with the scar on his chest that he had never let Sherlock examine until they were bonded, and something to do with the fact that when he thought it necessary, John could kill in the blink of an eye and smile about it.
Even now, Sherlock hadn’t discovered what it was. Despite the fact that John Watson’s intelligence, while superior, was by no means naturally inclined toward the science of deduction, he nevertheless had hair-trigger instincts when it came to what Sherlock thought of as “the fear.”
Because all the available evidence pointed to the fact that at the back of John’s carefully constructed defenses was something that he feared with a fear that was almost uncontainable, something he hadn’t been able to escape and clearly could not delete. The fact that he could contain it at all had at first been a source of puzzlement to Sherlock.
As a sociopath, fear was fundamentally unknown in his own personal experience. But Sherlock had observed ordinary people in the clutches of deep fear. They were unable to withstand it; they displayed a variety of dramatic, reflexive and generally useless responses, but none of them the still steady endurance with which John faced the fear, every day.
As he came to know John better, his puzzlement developed into something that he felt about almost nothing in this world, other than the music of a few composers of exceptional genius: admiration that bordered on awe.
All questions that circled around the edges of the problem brought forth the instantaneous protective wall that clamped down around this unnamed fear, repelling all weapons, and Sherlock had tried them all. Well, nearly all of them. He had nursed a secret hope that if he ever had the chance to be with John the way they were meant to be, this final barrier would fall away and he would finally know the truth.
Events since John had taken him for his own, binding Alpha to omega, had not favoured opening that door. Not yet. But in the midst of the horror that was all around them now, another door had unexpectedly opened.
Sherlock watched John standing at the window, vigilant and deadly, the walls of his defenses swiftly and almost visibly flying up around him. This brought forth a rare pleasant childhood memory: a fairy tale in an old volume of Perrault, in French to improve his grammar.
As a child, Sherlock had enjoyed fairy tales very much: the stories were satisfyingly full of crimes of the most gruesome and inventive sort. As such, he had committed them to memory, and had never yet had occasion to purge them from his mind palace:
. . . car il crût dans un quart d'heure tout autour du parc une si grande quantité de grands arbres et de petits, de ronces et d'épines entrelacées les unes dans les autres, que bête ni homme n'y aurait pu passer.
(. . . in a quarter of an hour's time there grew up all round about the park of the chateau such a vast number of trees, great and small, and hedges of brambles and thorns, all interlaced with one another, so that neither man nor beast could pass through.)
La belle au bois dormant.
Sleeping Beauty.
“No secrets,” John had said.
Time to break the spell.
# # #
Lestrade flashed his Yard badge and was escorted behind the scenes to one of the many secret hallways of Waterloo Station, a major international railway hub. Waterloo was provided with state of the art facilities for monitoring of the comings and goings of people through the vast station, to scan for contraband and weapons of all kinds, and to detain and interrogate suspicious persons.
Lestrade opened the door to a small room with an array of video screens displaying views from what he presumed were hidden CCTV cameras. Mycroft turned from the screens when he heard the door open. Lestrade didn’t even glance at whatever it was that Mycroft had been looking at. All he wanted to see was Mycroft.
The first thing he noticed was that Mycroft had a bruise on his cheekbone, and he swallowed hard. He had made that mark. He felt a rush of Alpha dominance that he knew he should be ashamed of, but wasn’t. Even if it wasn’t the sort of mark he wanted to leave, he had still marked Mycroft for everyone to see.
The second thing he noticed was that the room was close and warm and filled with the scent of Mycroft’s unsuppressed pheromone signature, so much stronger than it had been even at Hantswood Hall. In just a week, it had become overpoweringly bewitching, and he felt it knock him back like something inside had just detonated.
The cutting remark he had been about to throw out died on his lips.
They stared at each other. Lestrade’s heart was hammering and he thought that Mycroft’s breathing looked faster than it ought to. The silence felt electric, he knew he hadn’t felt this alive since the last time he had been in Mycroft’s arms. Even if he did have the muzzle of a gun at the back of his head.
Finally Mycroft broke the silence.
“Thank you for coming,” he said formally. “I’m looking for Critchley, and so far I’m not finding him. But before I tell you what I think he’s done, I’ll tell you why I think I can’t find him.”
“No,” Lestrade cut him off, scowling. “First, tell me about the officer in the panda car. Who was she? Where is she, is she going to be all right? I tried to find out, nobody will tell me anything except that it’s “classified” and that I’m on suspension so I should just piss off.”
Mycroft mentally kicked himself. Of course Lestrade’s first concern would be for his fellow officer. If Lestrade didn’t despise him already, he would now, thinking him heartless. Like Sherlock.
“It was a constable, an Elizabeth Stirling. Only a year on the force. She had been dating Critchley, apparently. She did not work with Critchley in Counter-Terrorism, of course. She was with Victim Support Services.”
“Was? Is she dead?”
“No. But she has not recovered from her coma, and the doctors don’t seem to think her condition is likely to change. She is stable, not degrading, not improving.”
“What happened to her? Did Critchley attack her? Was she drugged?”
“No drugs, she is perfectly clean and very healthy, other than her condition. There was not a mark on her. But yes, to answer your question, I do think Critchley attacked her.”
“What do you mean? An attack that put her in a coma and left no mark? Even suffocation with a cloth or pillow leaves signs -- she would have fought back, there would be skin under her nails, hemorrhage in the eyes.”
“None of that. What I am about to tell you is classified, and after you leave this room, you cannot repeat any of it.”
Lestrade glowered. “I’m no traitor. If it’s classified, my lips are sealed. Go on.”
“Elizabeth Stirling was the victim of a psychic attack. By Critchley. It put her in a coma. Something must have interrupted him, or she probably would be dead.”
Lestrade leaned back against the wall, away from Mycroft. The heady Alpha scent was making it hard to think. Why couldn’t he wear a masking spray, for god’s sake?
“A psychic attack. Now that I’ve not heard of. What do you mean?”
“I mean, Critchley attacked her by psychic means. I don’t mean psychic in the sense of a person telling the future, or second-sight, any of that. I mean, an attack upon her psyche. What makes up her consciousness, her spirit was . . . stolen from her. You could say her soul was taken.”
# # #
Sherlock remained very still so as not to disturb whatever mental state was gripping John now. He watched him was going to his desk drawer. Obviously to retrieve his gun -- stashed away just a few hours ago upon their return to 221b. He watched John take it into his hand, heard him swear softly and Sherlock knew that it was because he felt he didn’t have enough ammunition. Whatever enough was.
John checked it over quickly and resumed pacing, this time with the gun gripped in his hand.
“I’’m not sitting here in 221b like a -- a target -- waiting for this -- thing-- to come after me. Who knows if this thing - this psychic vampire -- keeps its bargains? It wanted you first, why would it stop with me? We need to find it. Now. Right now.”
John’s face was composed. His voice was soft and steady. No inflection. His eyes flickered with the fear, something in this was bringing it up, up to the surface, how could it not?
How could anybody not fear losing their soul?
“John,” he said carefully, “we will find a way. I know you won’t let anything happen to me again. And I won’t let anything happen to you. We’re going to find out how this thing, this soul vampire, if you will -- how it was made, how it works, and what it takes to stop it."
“Stop it?” John said in that affectless voice. “No, Sherlock. That is not what we are going to do. We are going to find it, and we are going to kill it. I don’t care how it was made. If it can’t be killed, we are going to send it back to where it came from.”
Sherlock was relieved that John was saying “we,” and then experienced a moment of intense guilt when he realised what he had done to John, going after Maxim alone.
“But we have to know how it works, how it was made, to know how to find it and how to destroy it,” Sherlock said calmly. Surely John could understand this. His methods in this would be no different than any other case. They had never failed him yet.
“You don’t have any idea at all how to do this, do you?” John asked bluntly. “No more than I do.
Sherlock wanted to disagree with that, he always had ideas, but only if he had data to back them up. Here, he didn’t. At least, what he knew didn’t seem to lead to any sort of hypothesis. “My first idea had been to consult with Dr Jesperson. He did win a Nobel Prize, you know.” he said. He himself put no store on such arbitrary awards, but he thought John might. However, John didn’t appear to be in the best frame of mind to discuss Jesperson’s curriculum vitae.
John was shaking his head. “Too long. I’m not waiting twelve hours or more to take the train, then the bloody ferry, to the Channel Islands to start getting a grip on this thing. Who knows if Jesperson can help at all? We start now. Get your coat on, come with me.” he commanded brusquely. Sherlock stood up warily.
“Now,” John ordered firmly when he saw that Sherlock was distracted by trying to deduce John’s intentions. John ignored him and was shrugging his coat on. He thrust his gun in his waistband. Then he went to the closet and rummaged in his old army duffle.
# # #
Sherlock watched John rummaging. What was John looking for in his duffle? He tried to remember his inventory of the contents of the duffle, but other than ammunition, and John’s tags which he had instantly purloined and still didn’t know if John knew or not, the contents were boring and useless and therefore, unmemorable.
John withdrew three dull metallic objects. One he thrust in the pocket of his jeans. He stepped in close to Sherlock, and very seriously put a chain about his neck. Sherlock looked down.
It was a plain silver cross.
John put an identical one around his own neck.
“John, I said it’s not that kind of vampire,” Sherlock said, fingering the cold metal. He wanted to ask why John had these crosses, when he had never seen John wear one.
When Sherlock first made a quick, furtive search of the contents of John's duffle -- just 12 hours after John had moved his pitifully scant belongings from his temporary housing unit to 221b -- he had seen the silver crosses in the bottom of the bag. He had theorised they were property of other soldiers; perhaps John had promised to return them to their grieving families. They were promptly forgotten the moment he discovered John's tags.
Once he saw the tags, he hadn't been able to stop thinking about them. It made him feel the a tingling sort of thrill that he experienced rarely-- when something was secret, or forbidden. Within four days after that, he snuck back into John's room, opened the duffle and pilfered the tags. Thinking about them now made him wish that he was wearing them instead of this strange cross.
John frowned slightly. “You don’t know that. The one thing I do know is that this thing, this vampire, whatever it is -- it agreed to take my soul in exchange for yours. Now that sounds like this thing operates under some kind of rules, even if we don’t know what they are. It made a bargain with me. We have a contract, apparently. If it can hear us right now, I figure it knows I don’t intend to keep up my end of the bargain. Since nothing bad is happening at the moment, I am assuming it can’t hear us right now.”
Sherlock tried not to gape at this display of what he had to admit was faultless logic.
“So, wear this for me. Just do it,” John said. “Now let’s go.”
Sherlock nodded, eyes wide. “Wait,” he said and went to his bedroom.
# # #
Lestrade let out a brief hard laugh of disbelief. But he saw the Mycroft was serious. Deadly serious.
“All right. . .” he said, not even trying to get his mind wrapped around the concept. “A psychic attack. “Classified.” So I guess this is what you haven’t been telling me. Am I right?”
Mycroft nodded. “You are a very good detective, Lestrade. Probably the best in London, excepting my brother.”
“All I needed was a little evidence. Real evidence, not lies.”
“I’m sorry. What I said before, about it being classified, it is. Highly. But . . . I have no choice but to put you in the picture now. You were present at the scene at Hantswood Hall. You shot Maxim Purcell. Critchley was on your team; he was from Counter-Terrorism. By the way, that's how he's evading CCTV. He's got an experimental jammer. Camera simply can't see him. It renders pixels around him, fills in the space as it should look if he weren't there. In holographic dimension. We are looking into how he accessed this device -- even in Counter-Terrorism, his clearance isn't that high. As for the case itself -- you saw and heard things that night that you don’t understand, isn’t that true, Greg?”
Mycroft looked at Greg with his best poker face. Which was very good indeed. He was betting that Greg had seen and heard quite a lot. That was the problem, really.
“You could say I saw and heard things I'll never forget," Lestrade said pointedly, confirming his suspicion. "I’m not answering the questions here, Holmes. I thought this was supposed to be some sort of confession. Wait -- you have no choice but to put me in the picture? I thought you were telling me because -- are you telling me you brought me down here because I’m a bloody witness? Because you still need me to make that statement? Somebody higher up ordered you to get me down here, is that it? Need to file your report?”
A flash of Alpha fury hit him, and he liked the feeling of it burning through his veins. He took a step into Mycroft's space, then another.
“And somebody higher up ordered you to bring me to Mumbai, too, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you’re going to tell me -- the whole thing: this case, you and me -- it was all just a setup?”
This close, he could smell every note on Mycroft’s skin. His tie was loose and his collar unbuttoned after what looked to have been a long day. His hair was a little mussed and his hands wanted to --something wasn’t right. Mycroft’s scent was making him drunk with aggression and need. Omegas experienced fight-or-flight reflexes when threatened or cornered. With Alphas, it was fight-or-fuck.
There was a low, elegant Omega scent, seeming to be wafting from the front of his suit jacket.
Female Omega.
Ripe Omega, coming on to her heat soon.
Lestrade bared his teeth. “You aren’t as torn up about all this as you’d like me to think, so you can drop the act. You’ve been busy since I saw you last. I can smell her on you. Your Omega. . . Or are you playing a game with her too -- if so, I pity her. How many can you juggle - me, Maxim Purcell, this Omega bitch that I can smell all over you?”
# # #
Mycroft coloured. Lestrade saw that he was starting to lose his temper too, and this made him glad. About time something got to the manipulative, smooth bastard, he thought.
Mycroft reached out and fingered the cuff of Lestrade’s shirt, which took some effort because he had to tug under his coat sleeve to get to it and then, his fingers had to brush the back of his hand. Mycroft dragged his hand up by the cuff and took a deep inhale.
“I’m not the only one whose been amusing himself with an Omega, Lestrade. I can smell her, right here on your sleeve. Before you washed your hands, you were touching her, your sleeve against her skin. You’ve been busy too. Would you like me to tell you who she was?”
Lestrade flashed on pushing Janet into the bedroom, into the bed, taking off her boots. He hadn’t changed his clothes. Ran right out of the flat when Mycroft called for him. No doubt her scent was still on his shirt. He was somewhat desensitised to it.
But the fact that Mycroft obviously knew it was Janet infuriated him that much more. He closed the distance, pushed his hand against Mycroft’s shoulder, hard. A definite Alpha move.
“You’re spying on me too, then? At my flat? And how long has that been going on? Before, or after Mumbai? Don’t you lie to me.”
Mycroft backed up, but not in fear or intimidation. It felt like an invitation for Lestrade to follow with a move of his own. And so he did.
Lestrade leaned one elbow against the wall beside Mycroft’s shoulder, effectively pinning him next to the long table against the wall. Mycroft looked at his arm, looked into his face, raised a cynical eyebrow, cool and composed as ever. Except for the flush in his face and the pulse in his neck. Lestrade was too good a detective not to see the signs, even if he hadn’t seen them this close and closer, in Mumbai.
“Before,” Mycroft said arrogantly.
“Bloody fucking hell, what gives you the right? I suppose you were ordered to spy on me, then? What’s this all about -- why the hell does MI5 give a damn about an overworked homicide detective?”
“It doesn’t. But I do.”
That stopped Lestrade in his tracks.
“It’s true. I had my own agenda for the Sleeping Beauties case. Specifically for Maxim.” Here Lestrade nearly snarled, and Mycroft moved his leg subtly so that their thighs touched, then interlaced his foot so that their legs were effectively locked.
“I’m prepared to tell you about it now. That’s why I brought you here. But I could have brought any detective to Mumbai, really. Anyone at all. I chose you. And yes, I’d had my eye on you from before. A long time before.”
Lestrade pushed back with one leg, he was nearly between Mycroft’s long legs now. Mycroft slid down a fraction, maybe unconsciously, to allow their hips to meet. Lestrade wasn’t ready for that yet, though, and he deliberately held himself back so that he didn’t just grind into him. His Alpha brain, rapidly losing all function, was screaming at him to do it already.
“Yeah? And why is that?” They were so close their breaths mingled, and their Alpha scents were almost toxic in density. In minute he wouldn’t be able to think at all, let alone breathe.
“Do you really need to ask?” Mycroft said, low and rough.
Lestrade smiled wickedly. “Maybe not. I think I’m getting the picture. But I still want to hear you say it. So yeah. Why were you watching me all that time?”
He put his free hand on the other side of Mycroft’s shoulder, and now Mycroft was entirely pinned, he’d have to break through to get free. The Omega notes between them buzzed and made him itch. He was going to make sure that Mycroft Holmes didn’t smell like anything but him, for days and days and days.
“Because I wanted to.”
“And?” Lestrade gave slight nudge of his hips against Mycroft’s own narrow hips, just enough to encourage him in the direction he wanted things to go.
“Because -- I wanted you,” he said, and then there was no distance between them at all.
# # #
In the back of one of Sherlock’s drawers was a folded stack of handkerchiefs. Inside were John’s tags.
He had folded the tags inside one of the handkerchiefs at the bottom of the stack because he knew that even if John ever rummaged in his drawers, which he knew John wouldn’t do unless he was ill or injured and John wanted to bring him clean clothes, John wouldn’t look twice at starched linen handkerchiefs embroidered “SH”, a gift from his mother.
He put the tags around his neck and looked in the mirror on the back of the door. They looked perfect, he had known that they would. He put the cross under his shirt.
The weight of the tags, slight but noticeable, felt good. The black rubber silencers he wanted to get rid of; he wanted to hear the sound of the tags rubbing together, a constant reminder of John. But John had needed these little strips of rubber at a time when he had sometimes been in grave danger, when the least noise could mean death. He kept them on.
He came back out and let John take in the view. A slight smile curled the edges of his lips, not much; but it was enough. Inside, Sherlock felt a flicker of warmth. He had made John happy, he had pleased John, if only for a moment. He catalogued this feeling. He wanted John to feel like this pretty much all the time.
“I wondered what had happened to them. I couldn’t figure it out. How long have you had my tags?”
Sherlock almost thought he would lie. But that would be worse than keeping a secret, and so he sighed, closed his eyes, and said:
“Five months, twelve days, five hours, thirty-two minutes.”
Astonished silence. John looked gobsmacked. “Wait -- that’s five days after I moved into 221b, Sherlock.” His face softened just a little, the smile got a little warmer. Sherlock was glad he hadn’t lied.
“That’s right. Look how much time we’ve wasted, John.” He moved toward John, he wanted to hold him and make the barrier part for him. He wasn’t letting John go back to what he was before. He wasn’t letting Maxim, this thing, take that from him, or from John.
John held out a hand to stop him, firm fingertips against his chest.
“Wait - Sherlock. Where is the cross? I gave it to you for a bloody reason. You can’t just substitute my tags because you feel like it.”
Sherlock gave a derisive snort. “Why not? If the idea is for me to be protected --”
“You and the baby,” John said in a warning tone.
“--for me and the baby to be protected, your tags make me feel much safer. After all, they came with you all the way back from -- the war.”
The flat dangerous look came back and the invisible wall of thorns got thicker. He had known that it would, but there was no way to get through the wall without sustained attack. Attacks that did not hurt, but wore away resistance. That is what he thought he ought to do, anyway. He still was not terribly competent at knowing when a thing that he said or did hurt John, but bonding had helped. John felt a pain now, not physical but in his spirit. Sherlock could feel it too, even with his eyes closed so that he couldn’t see John’s face closing up.
“Those aren’t my original tags. They gave me those in hospital. When they thought--” his quiet voice trailed off and whatever fact he had been about to reveal was reeled back inside and locked away again.
Sherlock was instantly fascinated. He had made an assumption. Wrong, wrong, wrong. What had happened to John’s other tags, his real tags? He had lost them. . .maybe given them away? He growled a little at that, imagining some omega field nurse wearing John’s tags-- and nothing else. He had noticed that the tags were too unmarked, too new-looking. Now he wished he had just asked John before. This was unbearable, suddenly everything was unbearable.
He ignored the thorns and put his arms carefully around John, who felt stiff and strong and smelled like pure Alpha. John just as carefully put his arms around Sherlock. He inhaled, let himself experience the deep security of this, John embracing him, John and him together.
“The cross is under my shirt. Next to my skin,” he said. “I’m putting your tags there too. I just... wanted to see how they looked. All this time, I never put them on. I knew couldn’t bear to take them off again, if I did. And so I waited until I could.”
John’s arms tightened around him, lips on his neck.
It was then he realised that he really was starting to lose his ability to think clearly. There was something else he needed to know.
He snaked his long fingers into John’s jeans pocket and felt around. John gave a small, surprised noise between protest and desire.
Sherlock’s fingers closed around the dull metal object, felt worn irregular edges, a circle with a hole.
“A key,” he breathed into John’s ear. “What is it to, John?”
# # #
John took Sherlock’s hand and dragged him to the door, and pushed Sherlock’s coat into his arms and waited for Sherlock to bundle himself well in coat and scarf.
“You said you always like to go to the highest source for any data. I think I know where to start looking,” John said, seeming more at ease now that they were on the move; taking action. But when he started down the stair, Sherlock could easily see that his posture was taut and guarded.
“All right, John. Do you want me to deduce it? Hand me the key.”
John handed over the key. “Don’t lose it. I can’t get another.”
Sherlock stopped at the foot of the stair. “You want to consult something, or someone, you think will give us data about this -- thing. If it’s a person you could just ring them up, you wouldn’t need a key. So, not a person. Something else. You said, it operates by rules. Where would one find rules pertaining to . . . the undead. To vampires, even soul vampires.”
He remembered the contents of the old volume, Malleus Maleficarum, ‘The Witches Hammer,’ that he had read all those years ago. That volume had been lent to him by a grateful antiquarian in recompense for solving a string of murders in the rare book community. ‘The Witches Hammer’ set forth rules for finding, punishing, and destroying witches.
Rules.
“It’s a key to a library. Or, a room in a library. You want to consult some books. Something. . . that you know can’t be found online, everything is online now. And therefore it must be something rare, something kept away from the public.”
John nodded, clearly enjoying watching his bonded mate deduce like lightning.
He had been unwilling, or unable to acknowledge other feelings for Sherlock for far too long, but from the very first John had openly showered him with unaffected admiration for his brilliant deductions, encouraging him to show off outrageously just to get that little spike of approval, even affection, that came when John praised the workings of his keen mind.
“That was amazing,” John said. “You’re right. It is a library. Well, a room in a library. And I’m not supposed to even have a key. Especially not this room.”
Sherlock’s face lit up.
“How fast can we get there?”
# # #
“If you’ve been spying on my flat, you know what really happened there tonight -- ” Lestrade said, allowing his lips to finally brush against Mycroft’s long elegant throat, temptingly exposed with his collar pulled open. As if he had been waiting for Lestrade to put his mouth there. He intended to oblige.
“-- and I hope you enjoyed the show.” He was filled with a hot wave thinking of it and there was no holding back, he let his hips go right where they wanted to go, grinding so hard, harder than he had in Mumbai, their cocks so hard it hurt.
Mycroft hesitated a fraction of a moment before pushing back just as hard, and now his long thigh was thrust perfectly between Lestrade’s own, bloody fantastic pressure against his balls. Lestrade clamped his teeth down on his collarbone and bit hard, harder than he had ever bitten Janet, or anyone. Harder than he had bitten Mycroft in Mumbai.
It was time to get everything crystal clear.
“It’s not like that -- I’d never watch you with some Omega. I’m not into self-torture,” Mycroft growled, writhing a little under his mouth, but not crying out. Lestrade smiled against his skin."I wasn't spying, not like that."
“Never, I'll never do that, not now, don't you get it? I never want to see you with some Omega either. I don’t want to see you with anyone. Not anyone, not ever, do you understand?”
He reapplied his mouth and teeth to the same bite, feeling the skin getting hotter under his lips. He sucked hard. Now Mycroft groaned. Lestrade smiled with triumph, thrust his hands into Mycroft’s hair, twisted hard, forced his mouth down and took it, teeth scraping, tongues tangling, moaning into each other’s mouths as though they were in pain. Mycroft brought his hand behind Lestrade’s head and crushed him in harder, taking the kiss deeper. Perfect.
Lestrade finally was forced to come up for air. Mycroft scent was like a drug, he was floating on it, high and weightless. He needed to get back down to earth.
“We need to get out of here,” Lestrade panted. “Or it’s going down right here and now.”
Mycroft mumbled something in return but Lestrade was kissing him again, running his hands up and down his lean body, obliterating whatever thought had been forming. All he could smell, all he could feel, all he could think about was Lestrade.
Finally Lestrade loosened his grip a bit. “Mycroft. It’s three in the morning. Whatever is going on with this case, everything you say you need to tell me -- it can wait a few hours. You told me that, once. Come on, come with me, and then you can tell me everything,” he pressed in with his hips again, his cock twitching and definitely ready for more despite his spectacular orgasm of just a few hours ago.
He looked into Mycroft’s eyes, their blue-green depths gorgeously dark, pupils wide with arousal and shining with lust. But behind the passion, something was held back.
“Don’t worry about Janet, it’s not what you think,” Lestrade said, guessing that was it. “We can’t go to Creechurch Lane, she’s still asleep. Let’s go, let’s go to your place. Come on. Don’t worry -- all I did was put her to bed. I never got into it with her. And I never will, not again. It’s over and done. Even if it wasn’t before, it would have been. Now there’s only you.”
He pulled Mycroft in tight, rubbing his entire body up and down the length of him, the beginning of scent markings that would only be finished when they were naked, skin to skin. His dick throbbed. He might just come right here in his jeans, he was so wound up with whatever it was that Mycroft Holmes did to his head and yes, his heart. Not to mention his cock.
He looked up at Mycroft again, expecting to see a desire that matched his own. Instead, there was that hesitant flicker there. It was doubt; uncertainty. Something there was making him hold back. Suddenly it felt as if there was a wall between them, coming out of nowhere, and a thorny one at that.
Lestrade felt a sudden shock as if someone had dumped a pail of cold water down his back. He stiffened and backed away.
“What, what is it? Don’t you want me? I thought you said --”
“I do, I do want you, Greg. You don’t know how much, or how long. I was in Creechurch Lane tonight, I was coming up to your flat. To try to show you. To try to explain. But then I saw Janet go up. I thought you'd gone back to her.”
Lestrade grinned happily. “You were there? You should have come anyway, I’d have sent her home in a heartbeat. Don't you get it?” He was about to dive in for another kiss. Mycroft stopped him with a hand to his chest, hand feeling that heartbeat, so strong and fast.
“So what’s the problem? Let’s get to it.” His blood was up, it was going to boil over. In about twenty seconds, Mycroft Holmes was going to be bent over this desk and he didn’t give a fuck if any of these cameras went both ways.
“The problem is that something has happened. Since I left Creechurch Lane. Something important.”
Lestrade froze. “Tell me,” he said. He already knew it was bad, just from the tension and even anguish in Mycroft’s voice.
“I’m getting married,” he said.
to be continued. . .