FIC: The Illusion of Free Will (8/?)
Title: The Illusion of Free Will 8/?
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17 overall
Warnings/Spoilers: None.
Summary: 15th September 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 33).
Add Sherlock’s reticence and mood swings to John’s growing picture of their relationship up to the point where he actually met Sherlock at Bart’s and it all makes thinking about the pool incident that much harder, because he could start to get the wrong idea about just what Sherlock is hiding, he really could.
Disclaimer: This is the bit where they make me say I don't own anything. Sherlock is the property of the BBC, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and, of course, the one and only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to Audrey Niffenegger.
On AO3
15th September 2010 (John is 33, Sherlock is 29)
It’s been around three and a half months when it happens.
During those three and a half months, Sherlock and he have been getting back into the swing of things, whatever that may mean. They’re back to solving cases and, thanks to his blog, they’ve become something of an overnight sensation, complete with camera flashes, headlines, and ridiculous hats that everyone now seems to think they wear every time they leave the flat.
Hat-man and Robin. John wishes the press were more imaginative with their titles. He at least thinks about hisones. (He’s still quite proud of The Speckled Blonde, whatever Sherlock may have to say about it.)
They’re also back to their unconventional, mostly unspoken friendship, getting along almost as they did before Moriarty strapped a bomb to John’s chest. It’s been three and a half months without a single mention of what Moriarty said or what he made John say at the pool.
There may not have been a mention of the incident between them, but that’s not to say there haven’t been thoughts about it. John gets stuck on a different part of that night nearly every day. He tries to work out Moriarty’s reasoning behind all that he said, he tries to make sense of the look in Sherlock’s eyes when that first laser point must have positioned itself over the front of the vest, over John’s heart.
He thinks in circles and he gets nowhere.
Visits to the past have been infrequent in the meantime, but he knows he’s already become far too attached to all of the younger versions of Sherlock he’s met now. There’s something inexplicably wonderful about leaving behind a short-tempered Sherlock who refuses to be interrupted while thinking and finding himself in a wildflower meadow with a boy who never tires of seeing him. A boy who lacks Sherlock’s sharp edges and cold silences. A boy who steals the cook’s cat because he’s bored, with not even a notion of, say, shooting a wall instead. A boy who steals the cook’s cat seemingly just to play with it for an afternoon, rather than to experiment on it or dissect it as he probably would in the present.
The thing he remembers most vividly from his last visit is the way Sherlock smiled so shyly, so sweetly at him, aged just seven, as John cleaned a graze on his knee, gave him the list of future visits to write down (having finally memorised it well enough himself), and listened to him talk quite neutrally about how he knew his father was having an affair.
He cherishes those memories when Sherlock is being an arse now. He knows that Sherlock almost worshipped him, once upon a time, and he knows that Sherlock lied to him when they met about how close they must have been in his childhood.
The odd part is: most of the moments when Sherlock is being an arse typically correspond with when John has just come back from a visit.
If he didn’t know better, he would say that Sherlock was simply embarrassed to remember his younger self and the admiration he held for John. But they’ve been flatmates and friends for nearly six months now, and he’s starting to believe that he knows Sherlock. He knows what Sherlock looks like when he’s hiding something. Or, rather, he knows how Sherlock acts when he wants to hide something: he’s either deliberately difficult and engineers an argument to deflect attention from the matter at hand or he just point-blank refuses to talk about it.
Most of the time, he doesn’t want to talk about John’s visits to him. He cuts John off when he tries with a dismissive wave of his hand and an irritable murmur: “I know, I was there.”
Add Sherlock’s reticence and mood swings to John’s growing picture of their relationship up to the point where he actually met Sherlock at Bart’s and it all makes thinking about the pool incident that much harder, because he could start to get the wrong idea about just what Sherlock is hiding, he really could.
His own reaction to that isn’t something he thinks about at all.
Not until it’s been three and a half months and a helicopter takes him to Buckingham Palace, that is.
----
When he arrives at the Palace and finds Sherlock still clad only in his bed sheet, he’s not surprised. He wishes he could say he were. The surprising thing is the way John starts to wonder what might be under the sheet.
“Are you wearing any pants?”
In their time as flatmates, he’s realised that, despite Sherlock’s never-ending supply of shirts and designer suits, he’s far more comfortable lounging around in pyjamas (evenings when he doesn’t go out) or in his bed sheets (mornings when he doesn’t go out). He’s also discovered that, despite Sherlock’s fondness for his pyjamas, he actually sleeps nude.
It can only mean one thing.
“No.”
It’s wildly inappropriate, but they laugh like schoolboys together and John writes off his bizarre attention to any outlines in the sheet as sleep deprivation after Dublin. It’s been a busy two days, sue him.
Then Mycroft steps on the sheet and it falls away, right down to Sherlock’s waist. Aside from the time at the end of May when he arrived back from Cambridge in Sherlock’s bedroom, it’s as much of Sherlock’s body as John has really seen properly (had the opportunity to look at properly), even in six months of living in each other’s pockets. He can’t blame sleep deprivation on the way his eyes linger on Sherlock’s broad shoulders, the moles littering the pale skin of his back, the glimpse of the soft swell at the bottom of his spine…
John alters his stance, straightens his own spine, and looks away while Mycroft hisses at Sherlock to put his clothes on. He breathes hard through his nose, palms sweating and heart racing.
Sherlock is attractive, anyone can see that, straight man or otherwise. Sherlock turns heads when he walks into the room because the aura surrounding him is one of force and purpose. He’s undeniably the most charismatic person John has ever met, all rudeness aside. Even if his unusual face and wiry body aren’t conventionally attractive, there’s just something about him.
He’s a paradoxical mix of elegance and strength. His features are delicate but harsh, from the proud tilt of his chin to the line of his nose to those ridiculously sharp cheekbones. He moves like water, graceful and smooth and unstoppable. Even his hands, so adept at handling his chemistry equipment, so gifted to be able to wring a torturous melody from his violin, are capable of bending the poker by their fireplace.
His mind is beautiful, but his tongue is acidic. His lines of deduction are brilliant and he goes through them all at a breakneck speed, coming to a conclusion that’s near miraculous when all he had to go on was something as apparently insignificant as a single hair out of place.
At the end of the day, Sherlock is just magnetic, and everyone around him is an iron filing. John came to terms long ago with his attraction to Sherlock, content in the knowledge that other people, men and women, felt it too. It’s not a problem because it’s not a sexual sort of attraction.
(Although Lestrade may once have admitted, under duress and also under the influence, that he had Sherlock on his list. They may have toasted this and then ‘forgot’ about it afterwards.)
His racing heart this time isn’t in line with that safe variety of attraction. Nor was the drop in his stomach.
He thinks about how many times Sherlock must have seen him naked. He wonders how it makes him feel, if it makes him feel anything.
Sherlock puts his clothes on and John breathes easy again until Mycroft decides it’s a good time to have a dig at his younger brother.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he says as Sherlock shuffles the pictures of Irene Adler in his hands and contemplates her being a dominatrix. “It’s to do with sex.”
“Sex doesn’t alarm me,” Sherlock retorts at once and Mycroft smirks.
“How would you know?”
John watches Sherlock as he relaxes back into the sofa, quirking an eyebrow and giving his brother an answering smirk of his own.
“Oh,” he says, “I know.”
John coughs, loud and obvious in the stunned silence following that low remark. He’s choking on his last mouthful of tea because Jesus, Jesus. Ever since their first conversation of girlfriends, boyfriends, and everything in between, Sherlock has shown every sign of being as completely disinterested in both sexes and in relationships in general as he said he was on that first evening together. Extrapolating from a few choice comments and a few blank looks here and there, and John was certain that Sherlock was celibate, and either a virgin or at the least very inexperienced.
Seems he was wrong.
Ordinarily, Sherlock would have given him an unimpressed look for such an undignified outburst, but he hasn’t broken his staring match with Mycroft, who looks both shocked (it’s subtle but there in the slightly raised eyebrows) and faintly disgusted (the curl of his upper lip).
“Finally, then,” Mycroft says after a moment, flicking a completely unreadable glance in John’s direction before looking back to his brother.
“I’m disappointed to hear you didn’t already know.” Sherlock tuts and Mycroft’s eyes narrow further. He opens his mouth to reply but Sherlock cuts him off.
“John,” he says without turning his head, “you might want to put that cup back in your saucer now.”
John looks down to where his hand is frozen, cup half-raised from earlier when he choked.
“Right, yeah.”
“Back to the woman, if you please, Mycroft.”
----
6th January 2011 (Sherlock is 30, John is 36)
Birthdays mean very little to Sherlock Holmes, along with holidays like Christmas and New Year, which have both just passed. People place so much significance on dates on the calendar. Pointless.
John doesn’t know it’s his birthday, or he might not have gone out on a date tonight. Or perhaps he would have out of lingering annoyance after Sherlock was the cause of the spectacular failure of his relationship with Jeanette. John moves quickly, she only dumped him on Christmas Eve.
Sherlock spends the evening quietly, dodging a phone call from his mother, not expecting one from his brother. No one else knows and, besides John, no one else cares, so he begins to think he’s safe from any misplaced good intentions or disruptions.
He’s wrong.
Halfway through answering (dismissing) the cries for help that have accumulated on his website, Sherlock hears a muffled thump that sounds like someone flopping down onto the sofa.
He looks up, expecting a sour-faced John returned from a date gone bad.
He finds John, but not the one he’s expecting. He’s naked for one thing.
“Clothes upstairs,” Sherlock says without missing a beat, and returns to his typing. “Age?”
“Hello, Sherlock, how are you? Oh I’m fine, Sherlock, thanks for asking.” The amused reply decreases in volume and becomes distant as John heads up to his room to dress. “And thirty-six, if you must know.”
Thirty-six, so younger than the John who had sex with him last April. Unlikely that he’ll get a repeat performance then, considering how that John was unaware at the time that he would have sex with Sherlock before the John of Sherlock’s present.
Sherlock grins at the memory.
There’s a soft, distinctive set of footfalls as John comes back downstairs and loiters in the doorway, fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt. It’s plain white, one that the present John wouldn’t usually wear without a button-up shirt over the top.
“Happy birthday, Sherlock,” he says. Sherlock’s head snaps up from his computer screen, and John smiles at his surprised expression. “You told me before I left that I was coming back to a special day. Can I give you your present?”
“You can’t travel with anything,” Sherlock says, a frown wrinkling his brow.
John’s smile becomes wider. “I managed to keep my mouth with me though. I’m told it’s quite talented.”
He walks into the kitchen where he leans across the table and gently shuts the lid of Sherlock’s laptop, giving him plenty of time to either protest or free his fingers. Sherlock says nothing, and removes his fingers from the keys in a slow drag, holding John’s heated gaze as he does.
“What do you-” he starts, and John shakes his head to cut him off.
“This will help you,” he says. “Trust me?”
Sherlock does, of course. He stands up and John comes around the back of the table to meet him, walking right into his personal space as he stands close enough that Sherlock can feel the warmth radiating off his body through his clothes.
John reaches out and lays a hand on the nape of Sherlock’s neck, lacing his fingers through the curls there. He tugs until Sherlock walks forward, until Sherlock is pressing him against the kitchen counter next to the sink, and then he keeps tugging until Sherlock’s mouth meets his.
Sherlock pulls back before the kiss can get underway and John gives him a quizzical, disappointed look that turns into one of satisfaction as Sherlock lifts him to sit on the kitchen counter (with a loud crashing sound as he pushes mugs, dishes, and chemistry equipment out of the way) and comes to stand between John’s open legs. They’re more level now.
John leans forward, placing his left hand where he had it before to pull Sherlock’s head back down to his and presses their lips together again. The kiss is firm and dry as John sets the pace, brushing his mouth teasingly over Sherlock’s, moving his head this way and that as though he can’t decide the best angle.
His free hand finds its way to Sherlock’s waist, splaying over his hip, and the hand twisted in his hair carefully extricates itself and goes to rest on the opposite side. His thumbs sweep over Sherlock’s hipbones repeatedly, and Sherlock opens his mouth to let out a long, shaky breath.
John lets him breathe for a moment, moving his hands around to Sherlock’s lower back, clutching the silky fabric of his shirt between his fingers one moment, dipping them just below the waistband of Sherlock’s trousers the next.
“Happy birthday,” he says, right against Sherlock’s lips, his voice pitched deliberately low.
“It is now,” Sherlock agrees.
Sherlock is the one to initiate things the next time, kissing John deeply while his own hands roam before coming to rest on John’s waist, urging him closer.
Their lips move slowly, tongues meeting and sliding against each other as they kiss for an amount of time that Sherlock loses track of after the first minute. When they’re together like this, he doesn’t have to think beyond what he’s feeling. He feels surrounded, overwhelmed. He feels as if he might come around to birthdays if this is going to be the sort of gift he starts receiving.
He’s just scraping his teeth over John’s lower lip and debating whether or not he should lift John off the counter and carry him to bed (timelines be damned) when he hears it:
“Oh my God.”
Sherlock freezes, eyes open wide at the familiar voice that can’t possibly come from the man in front of him with his mouth occupied as it is. He pulls back just enough that his mouth comes free with a wet noise that’s positively obscene in the silence after John spoke.
John.
“Shit, sorry,” the voice continues. “I had no idea you’d have someone- I had no idea there was someone- I’m. I’ll just go up to my own room and leave you… No, actually, I think I’ll go out again and I’ll- I’ll leave you to it. Oh God. Sorry, really.”
Sherlock doesn’t move until he hears the door slam, at which point he shoves himself away from John and staggers backwards until his back hits the kitchen table.
“That should do it,” John says as he hops down so his feet are on the floor again, breathing heavily and rubbing a contemplative thumb over his red, kiss-swollen lower lip.
“You just saw yourself-”
“No,” John holds out a placating hand, “I just saw you with your back to me, kissing a man - could have been any man, I don’t have a clue at this point - and then I left in a fit of confused jealousy.”
Sherlock had been covering John with his body, their heads close enough together that the present John wouldn’t have been able to make out his features. Someone, John said, I had no idea there was someone.
How long is he going to have to put up with John’s misapprehension for?
“You said this would help me,” he says. “What was this then, some sort of catalyst to get you to realise your feelings for me?”
John nods. “And after everything with Irene Adler, at this point in time, I really needed that kick up the arse. I’ll be obsessing over seeing you actually kissing someone for weeks now.” He gives a grimace and shrug. “Not my finest hour.”
Oh brilliant, so he’s going to have a jealous, oblivious John on his hands, and he can’t tell him the truth. Or can he?
“I don’t suppose-”
“No, Sherlock, you can’t tell me. I have to figure things out for myself.”
Sherlock scoffs and folds his arms, but he knows better than to argue by now about the natural order of things. Free will, what a funny notion.
“So,” he says after a pause, “about that talented mouth of yours…”
John smiles, but it’s rueful rather than promising. He holds up his left hand and waves it, and Sherlock sighs in resignation. “Sorry. It won’t be long now. This helps, really. I just have to sort myself out first.”
“How long?”
John angles his head to one side and raises an eyebrow that very clearly asks: Really?
“Come on,” he says. “Don’t make me say it, I know how you hate it when I do.”
“Yes, it would be telling, I know.” Sherlock huffs out his displeasure. “Fine. I understand.”
There’s a brief silence as they regard each other from across the kitchen. John’s t-shirt is deliciously crumpled, Sherlock thinks, and he resolves to go look in a mirror once John is gone to see just how ruffled he looks right now. Such a shame, such a dreadful shame.
John won’t tell him how long it will be before his John finally gets his act together, but he can facilitate things. Starting by not fixing his hair or clothes and waiting for John to come home and find him in this state. Maybe he should arrange himself on the sofa, artfully drape himself over it in some provocative pose?
“Go easy on me,” John says with a wince, as if reading his mind. “Now that you know it’ll be soon.”
Sherlock smiles, shark-like. “Oh John, the fact that you’ve even asked means you know I’m not going to do that.”
Provocation will be the key over the next few weeks, or however long it takes. Oh, don’t let it be more than a few weeks, Sherlock isn’t sure he can take it anymore. It’s like he’s constantly balanced on a wire. He’s always teetering just on the edge of something, just ready to fall over. But he needs to take John with him.
He’s waited, and he’s done with the waiting game now. It’s his turn.
“Worth a try,” John says as he fades out. He’s grinning as he goes.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17 overall
Warnings/Spoilers: None.
Summary: 15th September 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 33).
Add Sherlock’s reticence and mood swings to John’s growing picture of their relationship up to the point where he actually met Sherlock at Bart’s and it all makes thinking about the pool incident that much harder, because he could start to get the wrong idea about just what Sherlock is hiding, he really could.
Disclaimer: This is the bit where they make me say I don't own anything. Sherlock is the property of the BBC, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and, of course, the one and only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to Audrey Niffenegger.
On AO3
15th September 2010 (John is 33, Sherlock is 29)
It’s been around three and a half months when it happens.
During those three and a half months, Sherlock and he have been getting back into the swing of things, whatever that may mean. They’re back to solving cases and, thanks to his blog, they’ve become something of an overnight sensation, complete with camera flashes, headlines, and ridiculous hats that everyone now seems to think they wear every time they leave the flat.
Hat-man and Robin. John wishes the press were more imaginative with their titles. He at least thinks about hisones. (He’s still quite proud of The Speckled Blonde, whatever Sherlock may have to say about it.)
They’re also back to their unconventional, mostly unspoken friendship, getting along almost as they did before Moriarty strapped a bomb to John’s chest. It’s been three and a half months without a single mention of what Moriarty said or what he made John say at the pool.
There may not have been a mention of the incident between them, but that’s not to say there haven’t been thoughts about it. John gets stuck on a different part of that night nearly every day. He tries to work out Moriarty’s reasoning behind all that he said, he tries to make sense of the look in Sherlock’s eyes when that first laser point must have positioned itself over the front of the vest, over John’s heart.
He thinks in circles and he gets nowhere.
Visits to the past have been infrequent in the meantime, but he knows he’s already become far too attached to all of the younger versions of Sherlock he’s met now. There’s something inexplicably wonderful about leaving behind a short-tempered Sherlock who refuses to be interrupted while thinking and finding himself in a wildflower meadow with a boy who never tires of seeing him. A boy who lacks Sherlock’s sharp edges and cold silences. A boy who steals the cook’s cat because he’s bored, with not even a notion of, say, shooting a wall instead. A boy who steals the cook’s cat seemingly just to play with it for an afternoon, rather than to experiment on it or dissect it as he probably would in the present.
The thing he remembers most vividly from his last visit is the way Sherlock smiled so shyly, so sweetly at him, aged just seven, as John cleaned a graze on his knee, gave him the list of future visits to write down (having finally memorised it well enough himself), and listened to him talk quite neutrally about how he knew his father was having an affair.
He cherishes those memories when Sherlock is being an arse now. He knows that Sherlock almost worshipped him, once upon a time, and he knows that Sherlock lied to him when they met about how close they must have been in his childhood.
The odd part is: most of the moments when Sherlock is being an arse typically correspond with when John has just come back from a visit.
If he didn’t know better, he would say that Sherlock was simply embarrassed to remember his younger self and the admiration he held for John. But they’ve been flatmates and friends for nearly six months now, and he’s starting to believe that he knows Sherlock. He knows what Sherlock looks like when he’s hiding something. Or, rather, he knows how Sherlock acts when he wants to hide something: he’s either deliberately difficult and engineers an argument to deflect attention from the matter at hand or he just point-blank refuses to talk about it.
Most of the time, he doesn’t want to talk about John’s visits to him. He cuts John off when he tries with a dismissive wave of his hand and an irritable murmur: “I know, I was there.”
Add Sherlock’s reticence and mood swings to John’s growing picture of their relationship up to the point where he actually met Sherlock at Bart’s and it all makes thinking about the pool incident that much harder, because he could start to get the wrong idea about just what Sherlock is hiding, he really could.
His own reaction to that isn’t something he thinks about at all.
Not until it’s been three and a half months and a helicopter takes him to Buckingham Palace, that is.
----
When he arrives at the Palace and finds Sherlock still clad only in his bed sheet, he’s not surprised. He wishes he could say he were. The surprising thing is the way John starts to wonder what might be under the sheet.
“Are you wearing any pants?”
In their time as flatmates, he’s realised that, despite Sherlock’s never-ending supply of shirts and designer suits, he’s far more comfortable lounging around in pyjamas (evenings when he doesn’t go out) or in his bed sheets (mornings when he doesn’t go out). He’s also discovered that, despite Sherlock’s fondness for his pyjamas, he actually sleeps nude.
It can only mean one thing.
“No.”
It’s wildly inappropriate, but they laugh like schoolboys together and John writes off his bizarre attention to any outlines in the sheet as sleep deprivation after Dublin. It’s been a busy two days, sue him.
Then Mycroft steps on the sheet and it falls away, right down to Sherlock’s waist. Aside from the time at the end of May when he arrived back from Cambridge in Sherlock’s bedroom, it’s as much of Sherlock’s body as John has really seen properly (had the opportunity to look at properly), even in six months of living in each other’s pockets. He can’t blame sleep deprivation on the way his eyes linger on Sherlock’s broad shoulders, the moles littering the pale skin of his back, the glimpse of the soft swell at the bottom of his spine…
John alters his stance, straightens his own spine, and looks away while Mycroft hisses at Sherlock to put his clothes on. He breathes hard through his nose, palms sweating and heart racing.
Sherlock is attractive, anyone can see that, straight man or otherwise. Sherlock turns heads when he walks into the room because the aura surrounding him is one of force and purpose. He’s undeniably the most charismatic person John has ever met, all rudeness aside. Even if his unusual face and wiry body aren’t conventionally attractive, there’s just something about him.
He’s a paradoxical mix of elegance and strength. His features are delicate but harsh, from the proud tilt of his chin to the line of his nose to those ridiculously sharp cheekbones. He moves like water, graceful and smooth and unstoppable. Even his hands, so adept at handling his chemistry equipment, so gifted to be able to wring a torturous melody from his violin, are capable of bending the poker by their fireplace.
His mind is beautiful, but his tongue is acidic. His lines of deduction are brilliant and he goes through them all at a breakneck speed, coming to a conclusion that’s near miraculous when all he had to go on was something as apparently insignificant as a single hair out of place.
At the end of the day, Sherlock is just magnetic, and everyone around him is an iron filing. John came to terms long ago with his attraction to Sherlock, content in the knowledge that other people, men and women, felt it too. It’s not a problem because it’s not a sexual sort of attraction.
(Although Lestrade may once have admitted, under duress and also under the influence, that he had Sherlock on his list. They may have toasted this and then ‘forgot’ about it afterwards.)
His racing heart this time isn’t in line with that safe variety of attraction. Nor was the drop in his stomach.
He thinks about how many times Sherlock must have seen him naked. He wonders how it makes him feel, if it makes him feel anything.
Sherlock puts his clothes on and John breathes easy again until Mycroft decides it’s a good time to have a dig at his younger brother.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he says as Sherlock shuffles the pictures of Irene Adler in his hands and contemplates her being a dominatrix. “It’s to do with sex.”
“Sex doesn’t alarm me,” Sherlock retorts at once and Mycroft smirks.
“How would you know?”
John watches Sherlock as he relaxes back into the sofa, quirking an eyebrow and giving his brother an answering smirk of his own.
“Oh,” he says, “I know.”
John coughs, loud and obvious in the stunned silence following that low remark. He’s choking on his last mouthful of tea because Jesus, Jesus. Ever since their first conversation of girlfriends, boyfriends, and everything in between, Sherlock has shown every sign of being as completely disinterested in both sexes and in relationships in general as he said he was on that first evening together. Extrapolating from a few choice comments and a few blank looks here and there, and John was certain that Sherlock was celibate, and either a virgin or at the least very inexperienced.
Seems he was wrong.
Ordinarily, Sherlock would have given him an unimpressed look for such an undignified outburst, but he hasn’t broken his staring match with Mycroft, who looks both shocked (it’s subtle but there in the slightly raised eyebrows) and faintly disgusted (the curl of his upper lip).
“Finally, then,” Mycroft says after a moment, flicking a completely unreadable glance in John’s direction before looking back to his brother.
“I’m disappointed to hear you didn’t already know.” Sherlock tuts and Mycroft’s eyes narrow further. He opens his mouth to reply but Sherlock cuts him off.
“John,” he says without turning his head, “you might want to put that cup back in your saucer now.”
John looks down to where his hand is frozen, cup half-raised from earlier when he choked.
“Right, yeah.”
“Back to the woman, if you please, Mycroft.”
----
6th January 2011 (Sherlock is 30, John is 36)
Birthdays mean very little to Sherlock Holmes, along with holidays like Christmas and New Year, which have both just passed. People place so much significance on dates on the calendar. Pointless.
John doesn’t know it’s his birthday, or he might not have gone out on a date tonight. Or perhaps he would have out of lingering annoyance after Sherlock was the cause of the spectacular failure of his relationship with Jeanette. John moves quickly, she only dumped him on Christmas Eve.
Sherlock spends the evening quietly, dodging a phone call from his mother, not expecting one from his brother. No one else knows and, besides John, no one else cares, so he begins to think he’s safe from any misplaced good intentions or disruptions.
He’s wrong.
Halfway through answering (dismissing) the cries for help that have accumulated on his website, Sherlock hears a muffled thump that sounds like someone flopping down onto the sofa.
He looks up, expecting a sour-faced John returned from a date gone bad.
He finds John, but not the one he’s expecting. He’s naked for one thing.
“Clothes upstairs,” Sherlock says without missing a beat, and returns to his typing. “Age?”
“Hello, Sherlock, how are you? Oh I’m fine, Sherlock, thanks for asking.” The amused reply decreases in volume and becomes distant as John heads up to his room to dress. “And thirty-six, if you must know.”
Thirty-six, so younger than the John who had sex with him last April. Unlikely that he’ll get a repeat performance then, considering how that John was unaware at the time that he would have sex with Sherlock before the John of Sherlock’s present.
Sherlock grins at the memory.
There’s a soft, distinctive set of footfalls as John comes back downstairs and loiters in the doorway, fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt. It’s plain white, one that the present John wouldn’t usually wear without a button-up shirt over the top.
“Happy birthday, Sherlock,” he says. Sherlock’s head snaps up from his computer screen, and John smiles at his surprised expression. “You told me before I left that I was coming back to a special day. Can I give you your present?”
“You can’t travel with anything,” Sherlock says, a frown wrinkling his brow.
John’s smile becomes wider. “I managed to keep my mouth with me though. I’m told it’s quite talented.”
He walks into the kitchen where he leans across the table and gently shuts the lid of Sherlock’s laptop, giving him plenty of time to either protest or free his fingers. Sherlock says nothing, and removes his fingers from the keys in a slow drag, holding John’s heated gaze as he does.
“What do you-” he starts, and John shakes his head to cut him off.
“This will help you,” he says. “Trust me?”
Sherlock does, of course. He stands up and John comes around the back of the table to meet him, walking right into his personal space as he stands close enough that Sherlock can feel the warmth radiating off his body through his clothes.
John reaches out and lays a hand on the nape of Sherlock’s neck, lacing his fingers through the curls there. He tugs until Sherlock walks forward, until Sherlock is pressing him against the kitchen counter next to the sink, and then he keeps tugging until Sherlock’s mouth meets his.
Sherlock pulls back before the kiss can get underway and John gives him a quizzical, disappointed look that turns into one of satisfaction as Sherlock lifts him to sit on the kitchen counter (with a loud crashing sound as he pushes mugs, dishes, and chemistry equipment out of the way) and comes to stand between John’s open legs. They’re more level now.
John leans forward, placing his left hand where he had it before to pull Sherlock’s head back down to his and presses their lips together again. The kiss is firm and dry as John sets the pace, brushing his mouth teasingly over Sherlock’s, moving his head this way and that as though he can’t decide the best angle.
His free hand finds its way to Sherlock’s waist, splaying over his hip, and the hand twisted in his hair carefully extricates itself and goes to rest on the opposite side. His thumbs sweep over Sherlock’s hipbones repeatedly, and Sherlock opens his mouth to let out a long, shaky breath.
John lets him breathe for a moment, moving his hands around to Sherlock’s lower back, clutching the silky fabric of his shirt between his fingers one moment, dipping them just below the waistband of Sherlock’s trousers the next.
“Happy birthday,” he says, right against Sherlock’s lips, his voice pitched deliberately low.
“It is now,” Sherlock agrees.
Sherlock is the one to initiate things the next time, kissing John deeply while his own hands roam before coming to rest on John’s waist, urging him closer.
Their lips move slowly, tongues meeting and sliding against each other as they kiss for an amount of time that Sherlock loses track of after the first minute. When they’re together like this, he doesn’t have to think beyond what he’s feeling. He feels surrounded, overwhelmed. He feels as if he might come around to birthdays if this is going to be the sort of gift he starts receiving.
He’s just scraping his teeth over John’s lower lip and debating whether or not he should lift John off the counter and carry him to bed (timelines be damned) when he hears it:
“Oh my God.”
Sherlock freezes, eyes open wide at the familiar voice that can’t possibly come from the man in front of him with his mouth occupied as it is. He pulls back just enough that his mouth comes free with a wet noise that’s positively obscene in the silence after John spoke.
John.
“Shit, sorry,” the voice continues. “I had no idea you’d have someone- I had no idea there was someone- I’m. I’ll just go up to my own room and leave you… No, actually, I think I’ll go out again and I’ll- I’ll leave you to it. Oh God. Sorry, really.”
Sherlock doesn’t move until he hears the door slam, at which point he shoves himself away from John and staggers backwards until his back hits the kitchen table.
“That should do it,” John says as he hops down so his feet are on the floor again, breathing heavily and rubbing a contemplative thumb over his red, kiss-swollen lower lip.
“You just saw yourself-”
“No,” John holds out a placating hand, “I just saw you with your back to me, kissing a man - could have been any man, I don’t have a clue at this point - and then I left in a fit of confused jealousy.”
Sherlock had been covering John with his body, their heads close enough together that the present John wouldn’t have been able to make out his features. Someone, John said, I had no idea there was someone.
How long is he going to have to put up with John’s misapprehension for?
“You said this would help me,” he says. “What was this then, some sort of catalyst to get you to realise your feelings for me?”
John nods. “And after everything with Irene Adler, at this point in time, I really needed that kick up the arse. I’ll be obsessing over seeing you actually kissing someone for weeks now.” He gives a grimace and shrug. “Not my finest hour.”
Oh brilliant, so he’s going to have a jealous, oblivious John on his hands, and he can’t tell him the truth. Or can he?
“I don’t suppose-”
“No, Sherlock, you can’t tell me. I have to figure things out for myself.”
Sherlock scoffs and folds his arms, but he knows better than to argue by now about the natural order of things. Free will, what a funny notion.
“So,” he says after a pause, “about that talented mouth of yours…”
John smiles, but it’s rueful rather than promising. He holds up his left hand and waves it, and Sherlock sighs in resignation. “Sorry. It won’t be long now. This helps, really. I just have to sort myself out first.”
“How long?”
John angles his head to one side and raises an eyebrow that very clearly asks: Really?
“Come on,” he says. “Don’t make me say it, I know how you hate it when I do.”
“Yes, it would be telling, I know.” Sherlock huffs out his displeasure. “Fine. I understand.”
There’s a brief silence as they regard each other from across the kitchen. John’s t-shirt is deliciously crumpled, Sherlock thinks, and he resolves to go look in a mirror once John is gone to see just how ruffled he looks right now. Such a shame, such a dreadful shame.
John won’t tell him how long it will be before his John finally gets his act together, but he can facilitate things. Starting by not fixing his hair or clothes and waiting for John to come home and find him in this state. Maybe he should arrange himself on the sofa, artfully drape himself over it in some provocative pose?
“Go easy on me,” John says with a wince, as if reading his mind. “Now that you know it’ll be soon.”
Sherlock smiles, shark-like. “Oh John, the fact that you’ve even asked means you know I’m not going to do that.”
Provocation will be the key over the next few weeks, or however long it takes. Oh, don’t let it be more than a few weeks, Sherlock isn’t sure he can take it anymore. It’s like he’s constantly balanced on a wire. He’s always teetering just on the edge of something, just ready to fall over. But he needs to take John with him.
He’s waited, and he’s done with the waiting game now. It’s his turn.
“Worth a try,” John says as he fades out. He’s grinning as he goes.