#578 - [FIC] Agápe (John/Harry)
Title: Agápe
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2,544
Characters/Pairings: John/Harry Watson, brief mentions of other characters
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Harry keeps her demons at the bottom of a bottle. John carries them like twin scars over his heart, still fighting to make sense of two nights out of thirty-seven years.
Content Notes: Incest, dub-con (alcohol related), alcoholism, confused sexuality, unsafe sex, pegging, minor D/S undertones, first time
Author's Note: Thanks very much to piplover for looking this over. Originally written for this prompt at sherlockbbc-fic. Substantial edits have been made.
John has read the literature, of course. It may be outside the scope of his field, but he can recite the relevant psychological theories as easily as he takes a pulse, from adolescent sex-play to Freud to genetic sexual attraction and all the way down the list to the Westermarck Effect. They sound off when he’s in bed with other women, wedged somewhere between the creaking bed springs and thudding headboards where they’ll stay until John packs them up with the rest of his things.
Each time promises to be the time he finally susses out how it all connects, but it never is.
**
They’d been three sheets to the wind the first night, the both of them good and pissed after a pub crawl à la Harriet in honor of his acceptance into the program at Bart’s. They’d had all the makings of a proper mess between them from the beginning, but once Harry got that glint in her eye, there was no stopping her. She always looked that way before she was dragging him off on another one of her adventures---the sort that, in John’s experience, could only end in disaster or arrest.
That was Harry, who had told them all two years prior that she’d not only be reading history at Oxford, but rewriting it, one page at a time until it was spilling over with women like her. Maybe she’d even cast a bronze or two or burn a bra here and there, if it struck her fancy. John had only laughed and thrown his arms around her, knowing she would be brilliant and already feeling sorry for the poor bastards who would have to put up with her.
He’d counted himself among them often enough.
"Just a pint," Harry promised. "One pint to celebrate."
With Harry, it was never just one pint. Go out for a pint with Harry and you were lucky to come back. All John wanted was a few hours to do fuck all before they shipped him off.
"Harry, it’s late. I’m knackered, I’ve still got to pack---"
"Five quid says you’re still a virgin."
The worst part was that she was absolutely, maddeningly right. "Oh, piss off."
"Honestly, John," Harry said, "anyone would think you’d rather hang about watching telly and wanking yourself silly."
After that, John could only grab his coat and try to keep up. Harry led from there, flitting from one pub to the next as John followed, downing whatever she shoved at him in between trying to pull women who kept trying to pull Harry instead. When the last one slipped her number down the front of Harry’s shirt, John finished his pint and called it a night.
"What good is it," he asked as they staggered out of the pub, "having a big, queer sister if you can’t even help me get a leg over? No, don’t answer that. You do it on purpose. I know you do."
Harry half-patted, half-smacked his cheek. "Never send a man to do a woman’s job, Johnny."
"You," John said, "are a smug twat."
No sooner had he swung his arm around her shoulders than he was on his back in Harry’s bed, with her sat on his lap and no recollection of the time in between. She smelled like leather and sweat and whiskey and for once John hadn’t cared at all about the cigarette smoke caught in her red hair. He’d been too distracted by her knees digging into his sides, unable to stop running his hands over the swell of her hips under all that stiff, black leather.
He couldn’t focus on what Harry was saying or what she was doing to his shirt buttons with clumsy, impatient yanks over the noise. The sensation of lost time rolled his belly as Harry bent to kiss his shoulder and somehow wound up with a mouthful of him caught between her teeth. She threw her head back with a dark laugh when he bellowed, brought back to the forefront by the dull throb of pain.
"Christ, Harry," John winced, hand going to his shoulder. His fingers came away smeared red. "What was that for?"
"Battle scar."
"Harry---"
"Well, I can hardly send you off like this, can I? Not even knowing how a cunt feels," Harry scoffed, as if that was somehow more ridiculous than her straddling him with her skirt rucked up about her waist and no knickers on when she was his sister for chrissakes and dating some woman she’d met down the pub with a motorbike and too many tattoos besides. "I’ve got to make sure you’re looked after."
His trousers had still been halfway on when Harry pulled out his cock. Somehow they wound up in reverse, Harry bowed on her knees and John slumped over her back. His first thrust sent him sliding between her thighs.
"Easy now," Harry said. Her hand reached back to curl around him, guiding him in. "That’s it."
It had happened on its own from there, a sweet, warm blur punctuated by moments of terrifying clarity---tastes and sounds and the greedy, wet squeeze of his sister’s cunt as she rolled into the cradle of his hands. John had come too quickly watching the strain of her shoulders, and Harry had laughed---"Oh, you poor sod"---as he fumbled between her legs trying to bring her off in the few moments before he rolled off her.
He woke up on the floor with the hangover of the century and no sign of Harry or his missing shirt buttons. There was no one to see him off and he’d been left to sort out his feelings over exams and revision and people dying until he’d seen Harry again at Christmas.
"Oh, we were kids, John," Harry told him with a roll of her eyes, as if years had passed instead of months. "Kids do all sorts of mad, daft things."
**
There are times when John thinks his might not be the only secret crammed into the dusty corners of 221B. He’s never seen two people so perfectly attuned to one another’s every move as Sherlock and Mycroft are. More than once, John has caught them breathing in sync, so subtly and evenly that he imagines their pulses would beat out identical cadences if they ever let him close enough to test his hypothesis.
John has given up trying to figure out whether they do it for him or in spite of him, but he assumes they’ve deduced his secret, based on the way he takes his tea or what side of the bed he sleeps on or some other detail John has never thought too hard about. Some days he reads their synchronicity as a pardon, other days as a taunt, but there is never enough time to know for certain in the precious few seconds before one or the other catches him listening and staggers into the off beats.
If there were anyone who could understand, it would be Mycroft and Sherlock. Those two would crash into bed together just to survey the damage once the dust finally settled. That’s what John tells himself on the days when he needs to feel like someone out there is capable of forgiving him.
He’s a forgiving soul himself. Once is forgivable. Once is a mad mistake, but even John isn’t sure about twice.
**
He had been every bit as drunk the second time, but it wasn’t the drink that had done him in. It was the loneliness, and not knowing if he was sleeping with all the wrong women or simply in the wrong for sleeping with women at all. He’d been to coffee with a man in his anatomy lecture and nearly kissed him outside the cinema before panicking and leaving him with only a handshake. It hadn’t been the idea of kissing Sebastian at all, but the fear of what might come after, when Sebastian invited him back to his flat and John’s curiosity got the better of him.
Harry laughed when he told her, the way she always did. "It’s only a cock, John. You’ve got a cock, haven’t you?"
He sputtered, "Of course I have. Christ, Harry."
She’d always been able to cut through all his excuses and leave him gaping at her like an idiot. When he protested, saying he hadn’t the first idea what to do with another bloke’s cock and wouldn’t he look thick if he mucked it all up, she did it again.
"That’s your problem, John. You want to get it all right, right away." She pulled him off the sofa by the hand. "Well, come on, then. We’ll get you sorted."
John hadn’t known what she meant, not really. Not until she dropped it in his lap---all six, rubbery inches of it---and crossed her arms over her chest.
She looked expectantly at him. "Well?"
"You can’t honestly---Harry, I’m not using this. I don’t even know where it’s been."
"Nowhere yours hasn’t," she shot back. John couldn’t tell if she was genuinely cross or only trying to get a rise out of him. "If you want practice and you’re too much of a berk to pull a bloke, this is what you get."
"I’m not about to suck a disembodied cock, no matter what you say."
As far as John was concerned, that was the end of it, but Harry went back to rummaging in her bedside table---"Bloody ingrate"---and John had been fixed to the spot, watching her wriggle out of her jeans, then her pants, as casual as you please. He supposed he’d already seen her naked, but the brief flash of her cunt as she strapped in made him flush.
"Go on, then."
"Ridiculous," he told her. "Absolutely mad. You’re mad."
She cupped his cheek, voice low as she guided his mouth to her prick. "I said, go on."
John moaned, the last of his resolve crumbling when the head of her cock bumped his lips. Harry slid in along his tongue, her hand curled at the base to keep it steady for him. It tasted like rubber, but it was still skin-warm and thick and it felt like John imagined it would feel. His imagination did the rest.
"Tuck your teeth, pet," Harry told him, when he gave his first tentative suck. John’s cock throbbed at her voice, rich and dark. "That’s it. Close your eyes as well."
There was no reason to think as he relaxed into it, wound his lips around Harry’s cock and held onto her soft hips as she smoothed his hair over the back of his neck, encouraging him, feeding her cock to him with patient determination. She gave his hair a vicious tug and John groped at her soft arse, pulling her in until he felt her cock nudge the back of his throat. He sucked her until his jaw ached and the spit dripped down his chin and she told him he could stop. Her cock bobbed against his cheek, leaving a slick line of his own saliva. John had never been so hard, stiff and leaking in his trousers, able to feel the spreading damp where the head of his prick was pressed against his flies.
"You’d like more, wouldn’t you? Greedy little slag."
He shuddered. "God, yes."
It didn’t occur to him to question it when she told him to strip, or to lie down on the bed. John had always done what Harry had asked. It was easy to lie with his bare arse in the air when her hands were there spreading him open so her cock could slip along the cleft, dripping warm spit onto his balls and teasing him into pressing his arse back.
When she finally sunk into him, John laid his head down on his forearms and arched as deeply as he could, until his thighs brushed hers. He could smell Harry’s sheets and her behind him, smelling like she always did---a little bit like the pubs she liked and a little bit like the petrol from her girlfriend’s bike. Her hands were rough, not smooth like his. Workman’s hands. They weren’t big, but they were big enough and it was easy to think of Harry’s hands and her rubber cock as belonging to someone else with his eyes closed.
If there was something off about having his big sister teach him to suck cock and following it up with a lesson in how to take one, John hadn’t thought about it then. There had been nothing in his head but heat and need as she spread him, telling him how red and wet his arsehole looked stuffed full of her prick as her fingers traced the rim. She filled him in ways he’d only ever thought of in guilty, furtive sessions with his hand jammed in his pants and his conscience turned down.
Harry built to a punishing pace and John took it, easily and gladly. Maybe it was payback for their first drunken fuck or maybe it was something else entirely, but it felt right and fair and perfect. There was barely any friction in rubbing his aching cock on her cotton sheets, but John thought he might come all the same, pushed over the edge by nothing but the thought of her prick inside him. There was no reason for it to feel as good as it did, but that didn’t stop him from fucking back on Harry’s cock or moaning his throat raw until he lost his voice completely.
When he finally came, it hurt all the way down to the bone.
**
John has had other moments with Harry since then. Of course he has.
He is thirty-seven and Harry is almost forty and there is plenty more besides those two nights that they no longer talk about, like Harry’s drinking and John’s denial. Clara, who had been John’s before she’d ever met Harry, and Sebastian, who had stood on the pavement and shaken John’s hand instead of kissing him, before they both marched off to Afghanistan.
John had come back with a bullet wedged in his shoulder. Sebastian hadn’t come back at all.
There are times when John sits on Harry’s sofa with a cup of tea to keep his hands still and he can’t seem to convince himself that it isn’t all his fault---Harry’s failed marriage and every relationship he has ever had that ended before it really began. He knows how secrets keep people apart. He’s built a force-field out of them and set it between himself and the rest of the world; women who sometimes remind him of his sister and two men who are like no one John has ever met before or is likely to ever meet again except each other.
"We were kids," Harry had said.
Kids who had done all sorts of mad, daft things, who had grown into adults even madder and dafter than the children they had been. Harry keeps her demons at the bottom of a bottle. John carries them like twin scars over his heart, still fighting to make sense of two nights out of thirty-seven years.
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2,544
Characters/Pairings: John/Harry Watson, brief mentions of other characters
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Harry keeps her demons at the bottom of a bottle. John carries them like twin scars over his heart, still fighting to make sense of two nights out of thirty-seven years.
Content Notes: Incest, dub-con (alcohol related), alcoholism, confused sexuality, unsafe sex, pegging, minor D/S undertones, first time
Author's Note: Thanks very much to piplover for looking this over. Originally written for this prompt at sherlockbbc-fic. Substantial edits have been made.
John has read the literature, of course. It may be outside the scope of his field, but he can recite the relevant psychological theories as easily as he takes a pulse, from adolescent sex-play to Freud to genetic sexual attraction and all the way down the list to the Westermarck Effect. They sound off when he’s in bed with other women, wedged somewhere between the creaking bed springs and thudding headboards where they’ll stay until John packs them up with the rest of his things.
Each time promises to be the time he finally susses out how it all connects, but it never is.
**
They’d been three sheets to the wind the first night, the both of them good and pissed after a pub crawl à la Harriet in honor of his acceptance into the program at Bart’s. They’d had all the makings of a proper mess between them from the beginning, but once Harry got that glint in her eye, there was no stopping her. She always looked that way before she was dragging him off on another one of her adventures---the sort that, in John’s experience, could only end in disaster or arrest.
That was Harry, who had told them all two years prior that she’d not only be reading history at Oxford, but rewriting it, one page at a time until it was spilling over with women like her. Maybe she’d even cast a bronze or two or burn a bra here and there, if it struck her fancy. John had only laughed and thrown his arms around her, knowing she would be brilliant and already feeling sorry for the poor bastards who would have to put up with her.
He’d counted himself among them often enough.
"Just a pint," Harry promised. "One pint to celebrate."
With Harry, it was never just one pint. Go out for a pint with Harry and you were lucky to come back. All John wanted was a few hours to do fuck all before they shipped him off.
"Harry, it’s late. I’m knackered, I’ve still got to pack---"
"Five quid says you’re still a virgin."
The worst part was that she was absolutely, maddeningly right. "Oh, piss off."
"Honestly, John," Harry said, "anyone would think you’d rather hang about watching telly and wanking yourself silly."
After that, John could only grab his coat and try to keep up. Harry led from there, flitting from one pub to the next as John followed, downing whatever she shoved at him in between trying to pull women who kept trying to pull Harry instead. When the last one slipped her number down the front of Harry’s shirt, John finished his pint and called it a night.
"What good is it," he asked as they staggered out of the pub, "having a big, queer sister if you can’t even help me get a leg over? No, don’t answer that. You do it on purpose. I know you do."
Harry half-patted, half-smacked his cheek. "Never send a man to do a woman’s job, Johnny."
"You," John said, "are a smug twat."
No sooner had he swung his arm around her shoulders than he was on his back in Harry’s bed, with her sat on his lap and no recollection of the time in between. She smelled like leather and sweat and whiskey and for once John hadn’t cared at all about the cigarette smoke caught in her red hair. He’d been too distracted by her knees digging into his sides, unable to stop running his hands over the swell of her hips under all that stiff, black leather.
He couldn’t focus on what Harry was saying or what she was doing to his shirt buttons with clumsy, impatient yanks over the noise. The sensation of lost time rolled his belly as Harry bent to kiss his shoulder and somehow wound up with a mouthful of him caught between her teeth. She threw her head back with a dark laugh when he bellowed, brought back to the forefront by the dull throb of pain.
"Christ, Harry," John winced, hand going to his shoulder. His fingers came away smeared red. "What was that for?"
"Battle scar."
"Harry---"
"Well, I can hardly send you off like this, can I? Not even knowing how a cunt feels," Harry scoffed, as if that was somehow more ridiculous than her straddling him with her skirt rucked up about her waist and no knickers on when she was his sister for chrissakes and dating some woman she’d met down the pub with a motorbike and too many tattoos besides. "I’ve got to make sure you’re looked after."
His trousers had still been halfway on when Harry pulled out his cock. Somehow they wound up in reverse, Harry bowed on her knees and John slumped over her back. His first thrust sent him sliding between her thighs.
"Easy now," Harry said. Her hand reached back to curl around him, guiding him in. "That’s it."
It had happened on its own from there, a sweet, warm blur punctuated by moments of terrifying clarity---tastes and sounds and the greedy, wet squeeze of his sister’s cunt as she rolled into the cradle of his hands. John had come too quickly watching the strain of her shoulders, and Harry had laughed---"Oh, you poor sod"---as he fumbled between her legs trying to bring her off in the few moments before he rolled off her.
He woke up on the floor with the hangover of the century and no sign of Harry or his missing shirt buttons. There was no one to see him off and he’d been left to sort out his feelings over exams and revision and people dying until he’d seen Harry again at Christmas.
"Oh, we were kids, John," Harry told him with a roll of her eyes, as if years had passed instead of months. "Kids do all sorts of mad, daft things."
**
There are times when John thinks his might not be the only secret crammed into the dusty corners of 221B. He’s never seen two people so perfectly attuned to one another’s every move as Sherlock and Mycroft are. More than once, John has caught them breathing in sync, so subtly and evenly that he imagines their pulses would beat out identical cadences if they ever let him close enough to test his hypothesis.
John has given up trying to figure out whether they do it for him or in spite of him, but he assumes they’ve deduced his secret, based on the way he takes his tea or what side of the bed he sleeps on or some other detail John has never thought too hard about. Some days he reads their synchronicity as a pardon, other days as a taunt, but there is never enough time to know for certain in the precious few seconds before one or the other catches him listening and staggers into the off beats.
If there were anyone who could understand, it would be Mycroft and Sherlock. Those two would crash into bed together just to survey the damage once the dust finally settled. That’s what John tells himself on the days when he needs to feel like someone out there is capable of forgiving him.
He’s a forgiving soul himself. Once is forgivable. Once is a mad mistake, but even John isn’t sure about twice.
**
He had been every bit as drunk the second time, but it wasn’t the drink that had done him in. It was the loneliness, and not knowing if he was sleeping with all the wrong women or simply in the wrong for sleeping with women at all. He’d been to coffee with a man in his anatomy lecture and nearly kissed him outside the cinema before panicking and leaving him with only a handshake. It hadn’t been the idea of kissing Sebastian at all, but the fear of what might come after, when Sebastian invited him back to his flat and John’s curiosity got the better of him.
Harry laughed when he told her, the way she always did. "It’s only a cock, John. You’ve got a cock, haven’t you?"
He sputtered, "Of course I have. Christ, Harry."
She’d always been able to cut through all his excuses and leave him gaping at her like an idiot. When he protested, saying he hadn’t the first idea what to do with another bloke’s cock and wouldn’t he look thick if he mucked it all up, she did it again.
"That’s your problem, John. You want to get it all right, right away." She pulled him off the sofa by the hand. "Well, come on, then. We’ll get you sorted."
John hadn’t known what she meant, not really. Not until she dropped it in his lap---all six, rubbery inches of it---and crossed her arms over her chest.
She looked expectantly at him. "Well?"
"You can’t honestly---Harry, I’m not using this. I don’t even know where it’s been."
"Nowhere yours hasn’t," she shot back. John couldn’t tell if she was genuinely cross or only trying to get a rise out of him. "If you want practice and you’re too much of a berk to pull a bloke, this is what you get."
"I’m not about to suck a disembodied cock, no matter what you say."
As far as John was concerned, that was the end of it, but Harry went back to rummaging in her bedside table---"Bloody ingrate"---and John had been fixed to the spot, watching her wriggle out of her jeans, then her pants, as casual as you please. He supposed he’d already seen her naked, but the brief flash of her cunt as she strapped in made him flush.
"Go on, then."
"Ridiculous," he told her. "Absolutely mad. You’re mad."
She cupped his cheek, voice low as she guided his mouth to her prick. "I said, go on."
John moaned, the last of his resolve crumbling when the head of her cock bumped his lips. Harry slid in along his tongue, her hand curled at the base to keep it steady for him. It tasted like rubber, but it was still skin-warm and thick and it felt like John imagined it would feel. His imagination did the rest.
"Tuck your teeth, pet," Harry told him, when he gave his first tentative suck. John’s cock throbbed at her voice, rich and dark. "That’s it. Close your eyes as well."
There was no reason to think as he relaxed into it, wound his lips around Harry’s cock and held onto her soft hips as she smoothed his hair over the back of his neck, encouraging him, feeding her cock to him with patient determination. She gave his hair a vicious tug and John groped at her soft arse, pulling her in until he felt her cock nudge the back of his throat. He sucked her until his jaw ached and the spit dripped down his chin and she told him he could stop. Her cock bobbed against his cheek, leaving a slick line of his own saliva. John had never been so hard, stiff and leaking in his trousers, able to feel the spreading damp where the head of his prick was pressed against his flies.
"You’d like more, wouldn’t you? Greedy little slag."
He shuddered. "God, yes."
It didn’t occur to him to question it when she told him to strip, or to lie down on the bed. John had always done what Harry had asked. It was easy to lie with his bare arse in the air when her hands were there spreading him open so her cock could slip along the cleft, dripping warm spit onto his balls and teasing him into pressing his arse back.
When she finally sunk into him, John laid his head down on his forearms and arched as deeply as he could, until his thighs brushed hers. He could smell Harry’s sheets and her behind him, smelling like she always did---a little bit like the pubs she liked and a little bit like the petrol from her girlfriend’s bike. Her hands were rough, not smooth like his. Workman’s hands. They weren’t big, but they were big enough and it was easy to think of Harry’s hands and her rubber cock as belonging to someone else with his eyes closed.
If there was something off about having his big sister teach him to suck cock and following it up with a lesson in how to take one, John hadn’t thought about it then. There had been nothing in his head but heat and need as she spread him, telling him how red and wet his arsehole looked stuffed full of her prick as her fingers traced the rim. She filled him in ways he’d only ever thought of in guilty, furtive sessions with his hand jammed in his pants and his conscience turned down.
Harry built to a punishing pace and John took it, easily and gladly. Maybe it was payback for their first drunken fuck or maybe it was something else entirely, but it felt right and fair and perfect. There was barely any friction in rubbing his aching cock on her cotton sheets, but John thought he might come all the same, pushed over the edge by nothing but the thought of her prick inside him. There was no reason for it to feel as good as it did, but that didn’t stop him from fucking back on Harry’s cock or moaning his throat raw until he lost his voice completely.
When he finally came, it hurt all the way down to the bone.
**
John has had other moments with Harry since then. Of course he has.
He is thirty-seven and Harry is almost forty and there is plenty more besides those two nights that they no longer talk about, like Harry’s drinking and John’s denial. Clara, who had been John’s before she’d ever met Harry, and Sebastian, who had stood on the pavement and shaken John’s hand instead of kissing him, before they both marched off to Afghanistan.
John had come back with a bullet wedged in his shoulder. Sebastian hadn’t come back at all.
There are times when John sits on Harry’s sofa with a cup of tea to keep his hands still and he can’t seem to convince himself that it isn’t all his fault---Harry’s failed marriage and every relationship he has ever had that ended before it really began. He knows how secrets keep people apart. He’s built a force-field out of them and set it between himself and the rest of the world; women who sometimes remind him of his sister and two men who are like no one John has ever met before or is likely to ever meet again except each other.
"We were kids," Harry had said.
Kids who had done all sorts of mad, daft things, who had grown into adults even madder and dafter than the children they had been. Harry keeps her demons at the bottom of a bottle. John carries them like twin scars over his heart, still fighting to make sense of two nights out of thirty-seven years.