Fic for detectivelyd: Emperors and Kings
Title: Emperors and Kings
Recipient: detectivelyd
Author: what-alchemy
Beta: ghoulkitten
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: cancer themes and some irreverent treatment thereof
Word count: ~4600 words
Summary: Billy the skull gets some company.
Notes: The condition described in this fic is based purely on personal experience and is not meant to reflect anyone else’s health, choices, or experience.
Early morning in the springtime - Sherlock was naked, mostly still asleep, and sunning himself face down in the patch of light that streamed in from the window. The sheets were tangled about his ankles and his nose was mashed into the pillow, but he was warm and languid and obscenely comfortable. They’d just solved a case the night before, John had buggered him into oblivion, and now Sherlock wanted nothing more than to be one with the mattress in a bliss that practically bordered on the narcotic.
Of course, John was scheduled for a shift at the surgery.
When John got up at some torturous hour, Sherlock gave a loud, thunderclap shout unintelligible in any language, which he nonetheless hoped would adequately express his disdain and displeasure at losing his very warm bedmate.
“Lazy git,” he heard John mutter, even as he smoothed a hand down the line of Sherlock’s back, followed closely by the brush of his lips. John indulged in one of his funny habits: the pad of his thumb lingered on each mole on Sherlock’s back until his hand had gone southerly enough to pass over the cheeks of his arse, which Sherlock had once photographed in all manner of positions to determine its mole content - it was blessedly free of the annoying little buggers. John spent some time giving Sherlock’s arse its due attention, and Sherlock sighed into the pillow. His cock stirred against the sheets, but John seemed to have no motive beyond worshipful appreciation.
Then, a reverberating smack landed on the swell of his arse.
“Oi!” Sherlock was fairly sure he’d never uttered such a sound before, but if ever a situation called for it, it was this. He twisted round to scowl up at John, but only succeeded in squinting against the light. John just looked terribly pleased with himself.
“Get up,” he said, far too cheerfully for such an early morning. “You’re coming with me today.”
Sherlock popped up in a surge of excitement. “Am I collecting phlegm from your patients to conduct a study of flu strains?” he asked, hands clasped together beneath his chin. Oh, it would be so useful, a map of London’s illnesses. John snorted and leaned in to pat down Sherlock’s hair and nudge Sherlock’s nose with his own.
“Call it a personal favour,” John said. Sherlock narrowed his eyes, but John was placid as ever, and Sherlock found himself distracted by the narrow cradle of John’s hips. John pulled Sherlock’s hands to rest on said distracting hips. “Shower with me?”
Tedious. Naked, slippery John always sounded more fun that it actually was - Sherlock found shower sex inconvenient and ultimately disappointing, though John seemed to like Sherlock wet, on his knees with John’s cock stuffed down his throat. And who could blame him, Sherlock wondered?
“Want to sleep,” Sherlock said, and threw himself back into bed. John stumbled and fell half on top of him, and they laughed even as the breath left them.
“Shower, Sherlock. I’ll not have you around the office stinking the place up.”
Sherlock gasped. “I do not smell!”
“Do, a bit.”
“Don’t!”
“Greasy, too.”
“No!”
“Yes. Fucking you last night was only a function of my total madness for you.”
“I’m insulted.”
“Get in the shower and I’ll apologise most thoroughly.”
Sherlock snarled and flipped round to present John with the best possible view of his spine. Mostly for show - and John knew it. He heard a soft laugh, then John slung an arm and a leg over Sherlock’s body and pressed his face into the ticklish spot Sherlock had between his shoulder blades.
“You’re dirty and smelly and I’m arse over tit for you,” John said. The vibration of his voice through Sherlock’s bones made his cock swell. “Please let me blow you in the shower, and please come to work with me.”
Sherlock grumbled. “No soap up my arse this time; that hurt.”
“No, I don’t think we’ll be repeating that particular experiment anytime soon.”
“Ever.”
“Yes, yes, all right, ever. Anyone ever tell you you’re high maintenance?”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Hmph.”
-
Sherlock had been betrayed. He’d been stabbed in the back most viciously by his closest companion, the one person to whom he had exposed his desiccated, ill-used heart. And worse - he’d never seen it coming. It was a profound breech of trust on top of being a gross professional oversight. Sherlock would never forgive him.
“I’m never forgiving you.”
John merely blinked big, guileless eyes at him and held out that ridiculous paper gown.
“It would make me feel better, Sherlock.”
Sherlock planted his hands firmly in his pockets.
“You’ve been planning this. An ambush!” And he’d been so distracted by the haze of sex and hormones and John - such an unacceptable laxity of vigilance could never happen again.
John sighed and walked around behind Sherlock. But Sherlock whipped round and scowled at him.
“I’ll not have you at my back!” he said. “God knows what you’ll do.”
John rolled his eyes. “David’s only in here once a month, and yes, I made you an appointment a while ago. Please do this for me, Sherlock.” He slid Sherlock’s suit coat off his shoulders, but paused to wrap his arms round Sherlock’s middle and prop his chin on a shoulder. “Please,” he said.
“Oh, hell.”
Sherlock felt the stretch of John’s smile, and John kissed him on the cheek. He stepped back and Sherlock turned around to face his vanquisher. This must have been what the Scots felt like at Flodden.
“Don’t look so tragic, Sherlock,” John said, unbuttoning Sherlock’s shirt. “It’ll be fine, and I’ve arranged it so you can keep the samples. I don’t even want to know what my colleagues think of me now, asking for something like that. It’s not on, you know.”
Samples? That mollified him slightly, but he’d never give John the satisfaction of knowing.
John had him down to his pants, then wrapped the flimsy gown around him. He smoothed down the shoulders as he would Sherlock’s collar.
“There,” he said. “Looking posh as ever, I promise.” Sherlock’s frown deepened into a heavy arc. John rubbed his thumb across Sherlock’s lips. “Don’t be like that.” He pressed a tiny kiss where his thumb had been, then stepped back and nodded for Sherlock to sit on the examination table. “David’ll be just a moment.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“You know better than that, Sherlock. I’ll see you after.”
He closed the door and Sherlock then was alone in the exam room, a draft chilling the exposed skin of his back, his legs, his everything. He crossed his arms, hands stuck in his pits. He swayed his legs about. He deduced the number of tongue depressors in the jar on the counter. He surveyed the pamphlets - diabetes, high blood pressure, weight loss - and dismissed them all without reading them. He wondered if purgatory was like waiting for a doctor.
There came a single sharp rap at the door, then it opened and a fit footballer-looking kind of man walked in with smile on and hand out. Sherlock pumped it once in greeting - firm, cool, personable but not overly familiar. He was in his late thirties, married, at least five years, and had a small child of indeterminate gender at home. Teeth were too perfect, artificially so - he’d had orthodontia, but why?
“Hello, hello,” he said, “I’m Dr. Kendrick, David, you can call me David.” Oh God, he was a babbler. “You must be Mr. Holmes.”
“Sherlock,” Sherlock said by force of habit. “Your parents cared about appearances, enough to get you braces when you were, what, twelve, thirteen? So - money, society, but not the same old stuffy peerage circles, no no no, this is something else, something decidedly more…visible.”
David blinked rather stupidly and said, “Ah,” in the way people had when they were too British to admit to being flabbergasted, and then he said, “Yes, John said you might dazzle me with your particular gift. I suppose I can just tell you it was-”
Sherlock flung his hands up, palms out, fingers splayed. “Don’t tell me! It doesn’t count if you just blab it all out like that.”
“Oh.” David put the clipboard with Sherlock’s chart on it under his arm, straightened, raised his brows and just generally appeared to submit to Sherlock’s perusal. Sherlock took it all in - his gleaming, freshly shined shoes, his posh-casual jeans and shirt, the near-perfect symmetry of his face. He began to fidget when Sherlock took too long; Sherlock scowled harder when he couldn’t suss it out. “It’s nothing, really. We should get on with your appointment.”
“Elocution lessons! By the roundness of your vowels and the very precise enunciation, but not RP - what was it, acting? Oh God, were you a child actor?”
David sighed and shifted foot to foot before approaching the examination table with a determined look about him.
“Yes, well - moving on,” he said. “John tells me you have moles?”
“How long were you an actor? Films, I assume? And Hollywood ones at that; the UK Film Council wouldn’t give a toss about some kid’s teeth.”
“If I answer just those particular questions, will you let me examine you now that I’m a licensed dermatologist?”
Sherlock pursed his lips. He didn’t need to know about David Kendrick that badly. He could probably look it up on the internet. And anyway, he didn’t actually care which films this doctor was in; the information was probably useless clutter for his brain anyway.
“And might I add,” David continued with arch, “that this isn’t a negotiation, and I’ll be looking at you regardless? He’s a good sort, your Dr. Watson. Can’t disappoint him.”
Sherlock huffed and looked away. He drew the neckline of the paper gown down and to the side a bit to expose a mole at the juncture where neck met shoulder.
“Thank you,” David said, and then his fingers were there, very lightly, but they were not John’s and Sherlock had to close his eyes to keep from squirming away. “Hmm.”
“I’ve always had them,” Sherlock said. “They’re the same as ever.”
“They might not be.”
“But they are. I am a very astute observer.”
“I can see that,” David said. He took a deep breath and gentled his tone. “And if it were John?”
“What?”
“If it were John here, with these moles. What would your advice be?”
Sherlock was silent. He hated hypotheticals - this would never happen to John, not the least because he didn’t even have moles. This would never happen to John because Sherlock needed him too much.
“Right,” David said softly. “I’m going to have to look at all of them.”
And so he did, discreetly moving the gown about to inspect the expanse of Sherlock’s skin. He touched the moles, all of them - the seven on his back, the nine littering his face and neck, the three on his front, the one in his right arm pit, the one on his scalp, the one on the sole of his left foot, even the one on his inner thigh and the one hiding in his pubic hair. Sherlock felt like his flesh would spring from his skin, his mole-ridden, imperfect skin, if it went on any longer, and then he’d be a muscle-bound skeleton walking around getting infections and no one would touch him at all, even John, and he wondered what skeleton-Sherlock would have to do to be less alarming so John would consent to spending time with him, and then David stopped.
He jotted some things down on his clipboard, then took a seat opposite Sherlock and levelled a polite, professional, plasticine smile at him. He probably thought that was reassuring - maybe it was even something he learned in child actor school. Sherlock rolled his shoulders inward.
“I’m afraid about four of them look irregular to me, and I’ll have to biopsy them. If those come back with abnormal cell growth, I might end up taking all of your moles. Don’t worry - I know John’s got some deal with the lab so you get to keep what I excise when the lab’s done with them.”
“I shall preserve them and line them up on the mantle to admire,” Sherlock said. “Right beside my skull.”
David’s smile faltered. He cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. Well, shall we get on with it then?”
“I don’t even go out in the sun.”
David crossed his legs and held his chin in one hand, looking thoughtful.
“I know it’s a lot to take. But it’s just a biopsy for now.”
“It’s not a lot to take, I’m just telling you: I hate the sun. All - burny, far away. I rarely subject myself to it, and never, ever these moley parts.”
David’s perfectly symmetrical smile came out again - a horrid, sympathetic thing.
“Unfortunately, it’s not always about that. A lot of things factor into it - genetics, environment, even minor sun exposure when you were very young. And let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Could be nothing, still. A bunch of jumped-up freckles, full of themselves.”
Sherlock hated the artifice of platitudes.
“Just get on with it,” he said.
-
Sherlock emerged fully clothed with eight stitches littered over his body and various bits of him missing. He left David rubbing the bridge of his nose in the exam room and jumped the reception queue, where he met the usual look of offended constipation.
“Sir, you’ll have to queue up-”
“John Watson, I must speak to him right now.”
“Look, there are other people waiting-”
“He said he’d see me after; now it’s after.” He drew himself up straight and tall and looked down his conveniently aristocratic nose at her. “I can and will barge into every exam room this surgery has.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” The nurse scowled and picked up the phone. Smoker, lungs in terrible shape, might end up with emphysema just in time for her husband to leave her for a slender young man twenty years her junior. Tedious. Sherlock began to tap his foot. “Yes, Dr. Watson. I see. Yes. All right.” She set down the phone and pinned Sherlock with another sour expression. “Exam room three. You’ll wait ’til he’s done with his current patient.”
Sherlock swept away to go sit directly in front of exam room three, but he’d cultivated a keen sense of hearing and caught it when the nurse at reception leaned in to hiss into another nurse’s ear: “That’s his lover apparently. God, can you imagine?”
Sherlock sat on the floor in front of exam room three. He took out his phone and toyed with the idea of texting John incessantly until he shoved his patient out the door and ushered Sherlock in, but John often revelled in being contrary and Sherlock would lay heavy odds on John prolonging the appointment with whatever geriatric illness he had in there just to spite him. He let out a sigh and let his head thump back against the wall.
Ages passed, aeons really, and finally (finally!) the door to exam room three opened and a small, slim woman with thick dark hair that fell past her shoulders walked out dabbing her nose.
“Thanks ever so, Dr. Watson,” she called back with far too much enthusiasm for someone who was poorly, and Sherlock instantly hated everything about her from her recent break-up to the way she took her tea - too milky, why even call it tea at that point? She paused when she saw him sitting there on the floor, but gave one of those polite non-smiles people had - Sherlock would never understand social niceties - and disappeared down the corridor. Sherlock darted in through the open door before some opportunistic sicky could seize the moment.
“And who was that - that harridan?”
“Oh shut it,” John said as he stood up and moved round the desk to manhandle Sherlock into a chair.
“You are pushy,” Sherlock said. “Literally. None of the gossiping nurses in here even know, just make cow eyes at you all day, I’d wager.”
“I think you have an inflated view of my popularity with the fairer sex.”
“I’m fair! Look, I even have skin cancer!” Sherlock pulled his collar down to expose the two tiny stitches at his neck.
John frowned and pulled his chair closer. He splayed his hand below the hollow of Sherlock’s throat.
“Don’t say that,” John said. “We’re just checking to be safe. Does it hurt?”
“I’m all stingy.” Sherlock tried on the tiniest of pouts - too much and John would know and so wouldn’t fuss over him. John bought it, apparently, because he let his breath out slowly and took Sherlock’s face in the cup of his hands and pressed a kiss to each eye.
“You can show me after work and I’ll kiss each one. But for now I have some doctoring to do and you, I’m sure, are bored.”
“Boredom can be terminal, you know.”
“Only to the people around you, Sherlock.”
John stood up and patted Sherlock on the shoulder.
“Seriously,” he said. “I’ll see you when I’m done here. Indian for dinner?”
“Bangladeshi.”
“All right, I’ll pick it up after work then.”
“Okay then.”
John pushed at his shoulders until he got up.
“Get out, light of my life,” he said.
“Pushy,” Sherlock muttered, and John grinned.
As he left the clinic, Sherlock’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and the reception nurse was lucky he was too occupied with Lestrade’s text to give her a look that would curdle milk.
-
Sherlock strode onto the crime scene, stopped short at the carnage, looked up at Lestrade and said, “Great nephew. Obvious. Why am I here?”
“Well we know it’s the great nephew, Sherlock, we are detectives,” Lestrade said.
Sherlock glanced at Donovan and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve yet to be convinced of that,” he said. Donovan rolled her eyes and crossed her arms before settling with her back against a wall beside Anderson. They whispered to each other too quietly for Sherlock to make out.
“Come off it,” Lestrade said. “What you need to tell us is where the bugger’s got to.”
Sherlock’s eyes darted around the living room, taking in every stray bit of dust and ink both relevant and not. It became a miasma of detail, rapidly piling up behind his eyelids.
Amidst the whirlwind and din of information, Donovan’s voice came, clear and reasonable.
“Yeah, I see what you mean. It’s only a matter of time before Dr. Watson moves on to saner pastures.”
“Well, let’s not be hasty,” Anderson said. “There’s something to be said for how eager this freak must be. Positively gagging for it. I mean, why else would it have lasted this long in the first place? It must do wonders for the ego.”
In his peripheral vision, Sherlock saw their sidelong glances, their sly, hyena smiles.
“Of course - far be it from me to begrudge the good doctor his bit of stuff. I suppose he is rather fit - if skinny, horse-faced and covered in moles is your thing.”
Sherlock stood abruptly and whirled around to meet their smirks.
“Jealousy looks good on you, Sally,” he said. “Brings a flush to your cheeks. All the practice with Anderson’s wife, I’d imagine. How is that whole ‘leaving her’ thing going for you, by the way, Anderson?” The smirks dropped from their faces and Sherlock wheeled around, calling out to Lestrade about the Orkneys.
“Don’t kid yourself, freak,” Donovan said behind him. Sherlock couldn’t help but pause and hear. “Someday, John will want peace and quiet. A wife and kids and a dog. And you’ll be here, with the blood and guts, the rubbish of society. Alone with your little deductions.”
Sherlock’s steps did not falter as he left the crime scene, chin up, scarf wound around him like armour.
-
The first night after the biopsies, John mapped Sherlock’s stitches, traced them with the lightest touch of his lips - No, I won’t lick them, Sherlock, do you want an infection? - and they had lain there in the monochrome of early evening simply being silent, being close. Of course this gave Sherlock the opportunity to catalogue every bit of John he had ever missed. He had spills of freckles like constellations, and a funny hair that grew in thicker and darker than the rest on his right arm, and a cowlick in his eyebrow, and all manner of things that had slipped by Sherlock when he was occupied taking in details large and small. These were details minuscule, but no less vital. They got their own trunk in the John annex of his mind palace.
It would take a week to get the results back, John had told him. In that week, Sherlock had taken a private case which had only looked interesting - it turned out to be so pedestrian as to be insulting - and he’d refused all the equally insulting cases Lestrade insisted on bothering him about. Every day in the interminable week in question, he’d lounged about in a state of undress, peering at his moles, poking his stitches, reading about all manner of cancers on the internet until John came home and found a way to berate him for being a lazy arse and to kiss him for being his best beloved in the same breath. Truly, John was a marvel. If Sherlock perished of sun spots, John would be all right in the end. Sherlock would make sure.
Which is how he found himself with a flat full of Mycroft and legal documents whilst John was at work.
“No reproach for being alarmist and oversensitive?” He sneered as Mycroft spread out the details of his estate before him. Mycroft only lifted one imperious brow, mouth sour.
“I do not find the prospect of my baby brother having cancer particularly inspiring of my natural inclination to poke him with a sharp stick, no,” he said. He took out a pen and uncapped it, but Sherlock waved it away. He had his own damned pen. “We should have done this years ago anyway,” Mycroft went on. “What I have in place in case of - ah, emergency is barely adequate.”
“As long as John is taken care of,” Sherlock said. He skimmed each document, barely reading, but he signed, he initialed, he did it over and over again on every bit of paper Mycroft presented him.
“I would have made sure of it regardless,” Mycroft said after a long while. Sherlock looked up from his task to find Mycroft eyeing the stitching at his trapezius, face haggard and drawn.
“Sentiment?” Sherlock said, voice low. “Now, Mycroft? Spare me.”
Mycroft’s mouth twisted in an ugly facsimile of a smile. It looked worse than usual.
“When you die, I will scatter catnip on your grave and you will be the finest litter box in all of Britain.”
Sherlock did smile then, real and big, complete with teeth.
“I expect nothing less, brother dear.”
-
Sherlock came out of the toilet on the seventh day post-biopsy only to find John on the sofa, home early from work and scrolling through Sherlock’s search history with a furrow in his brow.
He was there in two long strides, snatching the laptop from John’s grasp and snapping his shut.
“This is mine, John!” he snapped. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be diagnosing pensioners with the sniffles?”
John merely looked up at him as if Sherlock were the world’s most tragic puppy.
“Is this what you’ve been doing for a week?” he asked. “Obsessing and driving yourself insane? Why didn’t you just talk to me, Sherlock?”
“I have nothing to say,” Sherlock said, and without his volition his lower lip pushed just the slightest bit further out from his face. “What good is all your sensitive New Age modern man talk when I either have some kind of fatal cell mutation or don’t? It wouldn’t change anything.”
John sighed and stood with a shake of his head.
“You’re impossible,” he said. He reached out and smoothed Sherlock’s ratty t-shirt down over his chest.
“I am not,” Sherlock said. “I’m right here. You’re touching me.”
John smiled and put his arms around him, squeezing tightly. John was small but this was not a reason to underestimate him: Sherlock’s ribs ground together and his breath was expelled from his lungs by the force of John’s embrace.
“John.”
“Sorry, sorry,” John said. He stepped back and gave Sherlock a little smile before presenting a little bag full of glass vials. “Congratulations, Sherlock, you’re the proud father of pre-cancerous benign growths.”
Sherlock felt his face do something, he wasn’t sure what, but John grinned at him and he was tackled into the sofa and covered in stocky ex-rugby player before he knew what was happening. Sherlock got a handful of John’s arse and gave it a vicious pinch. John yelped, but he was laughing.
“Could have just texted,” Sherlock grumbled in between kisses.
“I was never going to text you your biopsy results, you arse.”
“The result would have been the same whether you told me in person or-”
John’s hand clamped over Sherlock’s mouth and muffled the rest of his sentence. In retaliation he licked the palm, but Captain John Watson, MD, was made of sterner stuff than Mycroft Holmes, ages twelve to nineteen.
“I was always going to be here, Sherlock. And inasmuch as a promise like this is humanly possible, I always will be. Deal with it.”
John’s hand slid off Sherlock’s mouth. John, propped up on Sherlock’s chest, smiled down at him, and he had the kindest eyes, and no one had ever looked at Sherlock as if they were just glad he was a person in the world before. Sherlock stretched his neck out to close the distance between their lips.
-
“What happens now?” Sherlock asked later, face mashed into John’s collarbone.
“We keep an eye on the rest,” John said, fingertips tracing light over Sherlock’s back. “As soon as one starts looking suspicious, you’ll pay David a visit. Which you will now do at least twice a year, regardless of shape and quality of your moles.”
Sherlock heaved a great sigh.
“David was in films,” he said. “As a child. Honestly, I’m embarrassed for him.”
“David is very good at what he does, Sherlock. Stop complaining.”
Sherlock flung an arm off the sofa and cast about for the discarded bag of excised moles. He took out the vials and admired each of them, little brown and red specks of flesh in formaldehyde.
“What shall we call them, John?”
“For God’s sake, Sherlock, they’re not our children.”
“You’ll hurt their feelings, spouting that kind of rubbish.”
John snorted out an unmanly giggle, which was one of Sherlock’s favourite sounds, and it forced him to blow a raspberry against John’s nipple, and then the vials were lost again in a flurry of limbs and curse words and moans.
Later, Sherlock would find them strewn across the rug. He would place them beside Billy the skull on the mantle, two on either side. He would name them after emperors and kings, and John would roll his eyes, shake his head, but not be able to contain the way his mouth would tilt up when he looked at him.
John would always be there.
-
John is there when Sherlock steps off the ledge. John has kept his impossible promise, and Sherlock, in turn, has kept his.
John will be all right. Sherlock has made sure.
End
Recipient: detectivelyd
Author: what-alchemy
Beta: ghoulkitten
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: cancer themes and some irreverent treatment thereof
Word count: ~4600 words
Summary: Billy the skull gets some company.
Notes: The condition described in this fic is based purely on personal experience and is not meant to reflect anyone else’s health, choices, or experience.
Early morning in the springtime - Sherlock was naked, mostly still asleep, and sunning himself face down in the patch of light that streamed in from the window. The sheets were tangled about his ankles and his nose was mashed into the pillow, but he was warm and languid and obscenely comfortable. They’d just solved a case the night before, John had buggered him into oblivion, and now Sherlock wanted nothing more than to be one with the mattress in a bliss that practically bordered on the narcotic.
Of course, John was scheduled for a shift at the surgery.
When John got up at some torturous hour, Sherlock gave a loud, thunderclap shout unintelligible in any language, which he nonetheless hoped would adequately express his disdain and displeasure at losing his very warm bedmate.
“Lazy git,” he heard John mutter, even as he smoothed a hand down the line of Sherlock’s back, followed closely by the brush of his lips. John indulged in one of his funny habits: the pad of his thumb lingered on each mole on Sherlock’s back until his hand had gone southerly enough to pass over the cheeks of his arse, which Sherlock had once photographed in all manner of positions to determine its mole content - it was blessedly free of the annoying little buggers. John spent some time giving Sherlock’s arse its due attention, and Sherlock sighed into the pillow. His cock stirred against the sheets, but John seemed to have no motive beyond worshipful appreciation.
Then, a reverberating smack landed on the swell of his arse.
“Oi!” Sherlock was fairly sure he’d never uttered such a sound before, but if ever a situation called for it, it was this. He twisted round to scowl up at John, but only succeeded in squinting against the light. John just looked terribly pleased with himself.
“Get up,” he said, far too cheerfully for such an early morning. “You’re coming with me today.”
Sherlock popped up in a surge of excitement. “Am I collecting phlegm from your patients to conduct a study of flu strains?” he asked, hands clasped together beneath his chin. Oh, it would be so useful, a map of London’s illnesses. John snorted and leaned in to pat down Sherlock’s hair and nudge Sherlock’s nose with his own.
“Call it a personal favour,” John said. Sherlock narrowed his eyes, but John was placid as ever, and Sherlock found himself distracted by the narrow cradle of John’s hips. John pulled Sherlock’s hands to rest on said distracting hips. “Shower with me?”
Tedious. Naked, slippery John always sounded more fun that it actually was - Sherlock found shower sex inconvenient and ultimately disappointing, though John seemed to like Sherlock wet, on his knees with John’s cock stuffed down his throat. And who could blame him, Sherlock wondered?
“Want to sleep,” Sherlock said, and threw himself back into bed. John stumbled and fell half on top of him, and they laughed even as the breath left them.
“Shower, Sherlock. I’ll not have you around the office stinking the place up.”
Sherlock gasped. “I do not smell!”
“Do, a bit.”
“Don’t!”
“Greasy, too.”
“No!”
“Yes. Fucking you last night was only a function of my total madness for you.”
“I’m insulted.”
“Get in the shower and I’ll apologise most thoroughly.”
Sherlock snarled and flipped round to present John with the best possible view of his spine. Mostly for show - and John knew it. He heard a soft laugh, then John slung an arm and a leg over Sherlock’s body and pressed his face into the ticklish spot Sherlock had between his shoulder blades.
“You’re dirty and smelly and I’m arse over tit for you,” John said. The vibration of his voice through Sherlock’s bones made his cock swell. “Please let me blow you in the shower, and please come to work with me.”
Sherlock grumbled. “No soap up my arse this time; that hurt.”
“No, I don’t think we’ll be repeating that particular experiment anytime soon.”
“Ever.”
“Yes, yes, all right, ever. Anyone ever tell you you’re high maintenance?”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Hmph.”
-
Sherlock had been betrayed. He’d been stabbed in the back most viciously by his closest companion, the one person to whom he had exposed his desiccated, ill-used heart. And worse - he’d never seen it coming. It was a profound breech of trust on top of being a gross professional oversight. Sherlock would never forgive him.
“I’m never forgiving you.”
John merely blinked big, guileless eyes at him and held out that ridiculous paper gown.
“It would make me feel better, Sherlock.”
Sherlock planted his hands firmly in his pockets.
“You’ve been planning this. An ambush!” And he’d been so distracted by the haze of sex and hormones and John - such an unacceptable laxity of vigilance could never happen again.
John sighed and walked around behind Sherlock. But Sherlock whipped round and scowled at him.
“I’ll not have you at my back!” he said. “God knows what you’ll do.”
John rolled his eyes. “David’s only in here once a month, and yes, I made you an appointment a while ago. Please do this for me, Sherlock.” He slid Sherlock’s suit coat off his shoulders, but paused to wrap his arms round Sherlock’s middle and prop his chin on a shoulder. “Please,” he said.
“Oh, hell.”
Sherlock felt the stretch of John’s smile, and John kissed him on the cheek. He stepped back and Sherlock turned around to face his vanquisher. This must have been what the Scots felt like at Flodden.
“Don’t look so tragic, Sherlock,” John said, unbuttoning Sherlock’s shirt. “It’ll be fine, and I’ve arranged it so you can keep the samples. I don’t even want to know what my colleagues think of me now, asking for something like that. It’s not on, you know.”
Samples? That mollified him slightly, but he’d never give John the satisfaction of knowing.
John had him down to his pants, then wrapped the flimsy gown around him. He smoothed down the shoulders as he would Sherlock’s collar.
“There,” he said. “Looking posh as ever, I promise.” Sherlock’s frown deepened into a heavy arc. John rubbed his thumb across Sherlock’s lips. “Don’t be like that.” He pressed a tiny kiss where his thumb had been, then stepped back and nodded for Sherlock to sit on the examination table. “David’ll be just a moment.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“You know better than that, Sherlock. I’ll see you after.”
He closed the door and Sherlock then was alone in the exam room, a draft chilling the exposed skin of his back, his legs, his everything. He crossed his arms, hands stuck in his pits. He swayed his legs about. He deduced the number of tongue depressors in the jar on the counter. He surveyed the pamphlets - diabetes, high blood pressure, weight loss - and dismissed them all without reading them. He wondered if purgatory was like waiting for a doctor.
There came a single sharp rap at the door, then it opened and a fit footballer-looking kind of man walked in with smile on and hand out. Sherlock pumped it once in greeting - firm, cool, personable but not overly familiar. He was in his late thirties, married, at least five years, and had a small child of indeterminate gender at home. Teeth were too perfect, artificially so - he’d had orthodontia, but why?
“Hello, hello,” he said, “I’m Dr. Kendrick, David, you can call me David.” Oh God, he was a babbler. “You must be Mr. Holmes.”
“Sherlock,” Sherlock said by force of habit. “Your parents cared about appearances, enough to get you braces when you were, what, twelve, thirteen? So - money, society, but not the same old stuffy peerage circles, no no no, this is something else, something decidedly more…visible.”
David blinked rather stupidly and said, “Ah,” in the way people had when they were too British to admit to being flabbergasted, and then he said, “Yes, John said you might dazzle me with your particular gift. I suppose I can just tell you it was-”
Sherlock flung his hands up, palms out, fingers splayed. “Don’t tell me! It doesn’t count if you just blab it all out like that.”
“Oh.” David put the clipboard with Sherlock’s chart on it under his arm, straightened, raised his brows and just generally appeared to submit to Sherlock’s perusal. Sherlock took it all in - his gleaming, freshly shined shoes, his posh-casual jeans and shirt, the near-perfect symmetry of his face. He began to fidget when Sherlock took too long; Sherlock scowled harder when he couldn’t suss it out. “It’s nothing, really. We should get on with your appointment.”
“Elocution lessons! By the roundness of your vowels and the very precise enunciation, but not RP - what was it, acting? Oh God, were you a child actor?”
David sighed and shifted foot to foot before approaching the examination table with a determined look about him.
“Yes, well - moving on,” he said. “John tells me you have moles?”
“How long were you an actor? Films, I assume? And Hollywood ones at that; the UK Film Council wouldn’t give a toss about some kid’s teeth.”
“If I answer just those particular questions, will you let me examine you now that I’m a licensed dermatologist?”
Sherlock pursed his lips. He didn’t need to know about David Kendrick that badly. He could probably look it up on the internet. And anyway, he didn’t actually care which films this doctor was in; the information was probably useless clutter for his brain anyway.
“And might I add,” David continued with arch, “that this isn’t a negotiation, and I’ll be looking at you regardless? He’s a good sort, your Dr. Watson. Can’t disappoint him.”
Sherlock huffed and looked away. He drew the neckline of the paper gown down and to the side a bit to expose a mole at the juncture where neck met shoulder.
“Thank you,” David said, and then his fingers were there, very lightly, but they were not John’s and Sherlock had to close his eyes to keep from squirming away. “Hmm.”
“I’ve always had them,” Sherlock said. “They’re the same as ever.”
“They might not be.”
“But they are. I am a very astute observer.”
“I can see that,” David said. He took a deep breath and gentled his tone. “And if it were John?”
“What?”
“If it were John here, with these moles. What would your advice be?”
Sherlock was silent. He hated hypotheticals - this would never happen to John, not the least because he didn’t even have moles. This would never happen to John because Sherlock needed him too much.
“Right,” David said softly. “I’m going to have to look at all of them.”
And so he did, discreetly moving the gown about to inspect the expanse of Sherlock’s skin. He touched the moles, all of them - the seven on his back, the nine littering his face and neck, the three on his front, the one in his right arm pit, the one on his scalp, the one on the sole of his left foot, even the one on his inner thigh and the one hiding in his pubic hair. Sherlock felt like his flesh would spring from his skin, his mole-ridden, imperfect skin, if it went on any longer, and then he’d be a muscle-bound skeleton walking around getting infections and no one would touch him at all, even John, and he wondered what skeleton-Sherlock would have to do to be less alarming so John would consent to spending time with him, and then David stopped.
He jotted some things down on his clipboard, then took a seat opposite Sherlock and levelled a polite, professional, plasticine smile at him. He probably thought that was reassuring - maybe it was even something he learned in child actor school. Sherlock rolled his shoulders inward.
“I’m afraid about four of them look irregular to me, and I’ll have to biopsy them. If those come back with abnormal cell growth, I might end up taking all of your moles. Don’t worry - I know John’s got some deal with the lab so you get to keep what I excise when the lab’s done with them.”
“I shall preserve them and line them up on the mantle to admire,” Sherlock said. “Right beside my skull.”
David’s smile faltered. He cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. Well, shall we get on with it then?”
“I don’t even go out in the sun.”
David crossed his legs and held his chin in one hand, looking thoughtful.
“I know it’s a lot to take. But it’s just a biopsy for now.”
“It’s not a lot to take, I’m just telling you: I hate the sun. All - burny, far away. I rarely subject myself to it, and never, ever these moley parts.”
David’s perfectly symmetrical smile came out again - a horrid, sympathetic thing.
“Unfortunately, it’s not always about that. A lot of things factor into it - genetics, environment, even minor sun exposure when you were very young. And let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Could be nothing, still. A bunch of jumped-up freckles, full of themselves.”
Sherlock hated the artifice of platitudes.
“Just get on with it,” he said.
-
Sherlock emerged fully clothed with eight stitches littered over his body and various bits of him missing. He left David rubbing the bridge of his nose in the exam room and jumped the reception queue, where he met the usual look of offended constipation.
“Sir, you’ll have to queue up-”
“John Watson, I must speak to him right now.”
“Look, there are other people waiting-”
“He said he’d see me after; now it’s after.” He drew himself up straight and tall and looked down his conveniently aristocratic nose at her. “I can and will barge into every exam room this surgery has.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” The nurse scowled and picked up the phone. Smoker, lungs in terrible shape, might end up with emphysema just in time for her husband to leave her for a slender young man twenty years her junior. Tedious. Sherlock began to tap his foot. “Yes, Dr. Watson. I see. Yes. All right.” She set down the phone and pinned Sherlock with another sour expression. “Exam room three. You’ll wait ’til he’s done with his current patient.”
Sherlock swept away to go sit directly in front of exam room three, but he’d cultivated a keen sense of hearing and caught it when the nurse at reception leaned in to hiss into another nurse’s ear: “That’s his lover apparently. God, can you imagine?”
Sherlock sat on the floor in front of exam room three. He took out his phone and toyed with the idea of texting John incessantly until he shoved his patient out the door and ushered Sherlock in, but John often revelled in being contrary and Sherlock would lay heavy odds on John prolonging the appointment with whatever geriatric illness he had in there just to spite him. He let out a sigh and let his head thump back against the wall.
Ages passed, aeons really, and finally (finally!) the door to exam room three opened and a small, slim woman with thick dark hair that fell past her shoulders walked out dabbing her nose.
“Thanks ever so, Dr. Watson,” she called back with far too much enthusiasm for someone who was poorly, and Sherlock instantly hated everything about her from her recent break-up to the way she took her tea - too milky, why even call it tea at that point? She paused when she saw him sitting there on the floor, but gave one of those polite non-smiles people had - Sherlock would never understand social niceties - and disappeared down the corridor. Sherlock darted in through the open door before some opportunistic sicky could seize the moment.
“And who was that - that harridan?”
“Oh shut it,” John said as he stood up and moved round the desk to manhandle Sherlock into a chair.
“You are pushy,” Sherlock said. “Literally. None of the gossiping nurses in here even know, just make cow eyes at you all day, I’d wager.”
“I think you have an inflated view of my popularity with the fairer sex.”
“I’m fair! Look, I even have skin cancer!” Sherlock pulled his collar down to expose the two tiny stitches at his neck.
John frowned and pulled his chair closer. He splayed his hand below the hollow of Sherlock’s throat.
“Don’t say that,” John said. “We’re just checking to be safe. Does it hurt?”
“I’m all stingy.” Sherlock tried on the tiniest of pouts - too much and John would know and so wouldn’t fuss over him. John bought it, apparently, because he let his breath out slowly and took Sherlock’s face in the cup of his hands and pressed a kiss to each eye.
“You can show me after work and I’ll kiss each one. But for now I have some doctoring to do and you, I’m sure, are bored.”
“Boredom can be terminal, you know.”
“Only to the people around you, Sherlock.”
John stood up and patted Sherlock on the shoulder.
“Seriously,” he said. “I’ll see you when I’m done here. Indian for dinner?”
“Bangladeshi.”
“All right, I’ll pick it up after work then.”
“Okay then.”
John pushed at his shoulders until he got up.
“Get out, light of my life,” he said.
“Pushy,” Sherlock muttered, and John grinned.
As he left the clinic, Sherlock’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and the reception nurse was lucky he was too occupied with Lestrade’s text to give her a look that would curdle milk.
-
Sherlock strode onto the crime scene, stopped short at the carnage, looked up at Lestrade and said, “Great nephew. Obvious. Why am I here?”
“Well we know it’s the great nephew, Sherlock, we are detectives,” Lestrade said.
Sherlock glanced at Donovan and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve yet to be convinced of that,” he said. Donovan rolled her eyes and crossed her arms before settling with her back against a wall beside Anderson. They whispered to each other too quietly for Sherlock to make out.
“Come off it,” Lestrade said. “What you need to tell us is where the bugger’s got to.”
Sherlock’s eyes darted around the living room, taking in every stray bit of dust and ink both relevant and not. It became a miasma of detail, rapidly piling up behind his eyelids.
Amidst the whirlwind and din of information, Donovan’s voice came, clear and reasonable.
“Yeah, I see what you mean. It’s only a matter of time before Dr. Watson moves on to saner pastures.”
“Well, let’s not be hasty,” Anderson said. “There’s something to be said for how eager this freak must be. Positively gagging for it. I mean, why else would it have lasted this long in the first place? It must do wonders for the ego.”
In his peripheral vision, Sherlock saw their sidelong glances, their sly, hyena smiles.
“Of course - far be it from me to begrudge the good doctor his bit of stuff. I suppose he is rather fit - if skinny, horse-faced and covered in moles is your thing.”
Sherlock stood abruptly and whirled around to meet their smirks.
“Jealousy looks good on you, Sally,” he said. “Brings a flush to your cheeks. All the practice with Anderson’s wife, I’d imagine. How is that whole ‘leaving her’ thing going for you, by the way, Anderson?” The smirks dropped from their faces and Sherlock wheeled around, calling out to Lestrade about the Orkneys.
“Don’t kid yourself, freak,” Donovan said behind him. Sherlock couldn’t help but pause and hear. “Someday, John will want peace and quiet. A wife and kids and a dog. And you’ll be here, with the blood and guts, the rubbish of society. Alone with your little deductions.”
Sherlock’s steps did not falter as he left the crime scene, chin up, scarf wound around him like armour.
-
The first night after the biopsies, John mapped Sherlock’s stitches, traced them with the lightest touch of his lips - No, I won’t lick them, Sherlock, do you want an infection? - and they had lain there in the monochrome of early evening simply being silent, being close. Of course this gave Sherlock the opportunity to catalogue every bit of John he had ever missed. He had spills of freckles like constellations, and a funny hair that grew in thicker and darker than the rest on his right arm, and a cowlick in his eyebrow, and all manner of things that had slipped by Sherlock when he was occupied taking in details large and small. These were details minuscule, but no less vital. They got their own trunk in the John annex of his mind palace.
It would take a week to get the results back, John had told him. In that week, Sherlock had taken a private case which had only looked interesting - it turned out to be so pedestrian as to be insulting - and he’d refused all the equally insulting cases Lestrade insisted on bothering him about. Every day in the interminable week in question, he’d lounged about in a state of undress, peering at his moles, poking his stitches, reading about all manner of cancers on the internet until John came home and found a way to berate him for being a lazy arse and to kiss him for being his best beloved in the same breath. Truly, John was a marvel. If Sherlock perished of sun spots, John would be all right in the end. Sherlock would make sure.
Which is how he found himself with a flat full of Mycroft and legal documents whilst John was at work.
“No reproach for being alarmist and oversensitive?” He sneered as Mycroft spread out the details of his estate before him. Mycroft only lifted one imperious brow, mouth sour.
“I do not find the prospect of my baby brother having cancer particularly inspiring of my natural inclination to poke him with a sharp stick, no,” he said. He took out a pen and uncapped it, but Sherlock waved it away. He had his own damned pen. “We should have done this years ago anyway,” Mycroft went on. “What I have in place in case of - ah, emergency is barely adequate.”
“As long as John is taken care of,” Sherlock said. He skimmed each document, barely reading, but he signed, he initialed, he did it over and over again on every bit of paper Mycroft presented him.
“I would have made sure of it regardless,” Mycroft said after a long while. Sherlock looked up from his task to find Mycroft eyeing the stitching at his trapezius, face haggard and drawn.
“Sentiment?” Sherlock said, voice low. “Now, Mycroft? Spare me.”
Mycroft’s mouth twisted in an ugly facsimile of a smile. It looked worse than usual.
“When you die, I will scatter catnip on your grave and you will be the finest litter box in all of Britain.”
Sherlock did smile then, real and big, complete with teeth.
“I expect nothing less, brother dear.”
-
Sherlock came out of the toilet on the seventh day post-biopsy only to find John on the sofa, home early from work and scrolling through Sherlock’s search history with a furrow in his brow.
He was there in two long strides, snatching the laptop from John’s grasp and snapping his shut.
“This is mine, John!” he snapped. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be diagnosing pensioners with the sniffles?”
John merely looked up at him as if Sherlock were the world’s most tragic puppy.
“Is this what you’ve been doing for a week?” he asked. “Obsessing and driving yourself insane? Why didn’t you just talk to me, Sherlock?”
“I have nothing to say,” Sherlock said, and without his volition his lower lip pushed just the slightest bit further out from his face. “What good is all your sensitive New Age modern man talk when I either have some kind of fatal cell mutation or don’t? It wouldn’t change anything.”
John sighed and stood with a shake of his head.
“You’re impossible,” he said. He reached out and smoothed Sherlock’s ratty t-shirt down over his chest.
“I am not,” Sherlock said. “I’m right here. You’re touching me.”
John smiled and put his arms around him, squeezing tightly. John was small but this was not a reason to underestimate him: Sherlock’s ribs ground together and his breath was expelled from his lungs by the force of John’s embrace.
“John.”
“Sorry, sorry,” John said. He stepped back and gave Sherlock a little smile before presenting a little bag full of glass vials. “Congratulations, Sherlock, you’re the proud father of pre-cancerous benign growths.”
Sherlock felt his face do something, he wasn’t sure what, but John grinned at him and he was tackled into the sofa and covered in stocky ex-rugby player before he knew what was happening. Sherlock got a handful of John’s arse and gave it a vicious pinch. John yelped, but he was laughing.
“Could have just texted,” Sherlock grumbled in between kisses.
“I was never going to text you your biopsy results, you arse.”
“The result would have been the same whether you told me in person or-”
John’s hand clamped over Sherlock’s mouth and muffled the rest of his sentence. In retaliation he licked the palm, but Captain John Watson, MD, was made of sterner stuff than Mycroft Holmes, ages twelve to nineteen.
“I was always going to be here, Sherlock. And inasmuch as a promise like this is humanly possible, I always will be. Deal with it.”
John’s hand slid off Sherlock’s mouth. John, propped up on Sherlock’s chest, smiled down at him, and he had the kindest eyes, and no one had ever looked at Sherlock as if they were just glad he was a person in the world before. Sherlock stretched his neck out to close the distance between their lips.
-
“What happens now?” Sherlock asked later, face mashed into John’s collarbone.
“We keep an eye on the rest,” John said, fingertips tracing light over Sherlock’s back. “As soon as one starts looking suspicious, you’ll pay David a visit. Which you will now do at least twice a year, regardless of shape and quality of your moles.”
Sherlock heaved a great sigh.
“David was in films,” he said. “As a child. Honestly, I’m embarrassed for him.”
“David is very good at what he does, Sherlock. Stop complaining.”
Sherlock flung an arm off the sofa and cast about for the discarded bag of excised moles. He took out the vials and admired each of them, little brown and red specks of flesh in formaldehyde.
“What shall we call them, John?”
“For God’s sake, Sherlock, they’re not our children.”
“You’ll hurt their feelings, spouting that kind of rubbish.”
John snorted out an unmanly giggle, which was one of Sherlock’s favourite sounds, and it forced him to blow a raspberry against John’s nipple, and then the vials were lost again in a flurry of limbs and curse words and moans.
Later, Sherlock would find them strewn across the rug. He would place them beside Billy the skull on the mantle, two on either side. He would name them after emperors and kings, and John would roll his eyes, shake his head, but not be able to contain the way his mouth would tilt up when he looked at him.
John would always be there.
-
John is there when Sherlock steps off the ledge. John has kept his impossible promise, and Sherlock, in turn, has kept his.
John will be all right. Sherlock has made sure.
End