FIC: The Illusion of Free Will (5/?)
Title: The Illusion of Free Will 5/?
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times? Messing with (what we can work out of) the canon timeline? Is sexual content a warning still?
Summary: 2nd March 2002 (John is 37, Sherlock is 21).
Everything seems to jut out of Sherlock’s papery skin, everything inside him trying to get out. He’s particularly skinny at this age, living off stimulants and attitude, most prominently delicate at the wrists that let him play the violin, turn the wheels of a microscope, shoot up.
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
2nd March 2002 (John is 37, Sherlock is 21)
Showing up naked outside the entrance of a Cambridge college is not high on John Watson’s list of his finer moments.
Especially when his next magic trick is to throw up quite spectacularly on the cobblestones by the doors.
It’s definitely Cambridge; his surroundings look familiar because he’s been there before. There’s the same stone with the letters TCN inscribed on it, a memorial to one of the Fellows of the college. So it seems like he’s landed outside the great gate of Trinity College where Sherlock must be milling about somewhere, perpetually bored, occasionally high, and university aged. Well, sort of. He’ll be either twenty or twenty-one seeing as he went late and left early, ever the atypical git that John is used to. He lied when he said he was going at eighteen in another of his attempts to seduce John, ever the manipulative git that John is used to.
John stands up straight, or rather, he attempts to stand up straight, lurches to one side and ends up dry heaving. Fucking time travel.
When he gets his body back under control, he moves to the following item on the agenda: he needs clothes. It’s dark, and the gate to the college is closed, but that certainly does not mean the entrance is going to remain quiet and empty as it is now. It won’t be long before drunk, rowdy students return to harass the no doubt enormously patient porter.
The last time he visited Cambridge he found himself in an alley somewhere initially, where he prevented a mugging and managed to get himself a nice set of mugger’s clothes. Vile, but better than being arrested for public indecency like the other guy.
He prevented another attack that night, though he cared far more about the second almost-victim and thus dealt the would-be culprit a far more exacting punishment than just letting the police have him.
John blows a warm breath into his cupped, mercifully vomit-free hands, deciding how to proceed. He can’t enter the college without a stitch on, that would be disgraceful. His mother would turn in her grave.
God, this would be so much easier if he didn’t have to arrive sans clothing and possessions every time he travels. He’d always carry a phone for starters if that were so. He would permanently dress in a coat, with gloves and maybe a scarf for good measure. He laughs as he thinks it. I’d dress like Sherlock.
It’s a cold night, but he’s had worse. It feels like late winter, which corresponds to a particular date on the list that he’s not been looking forward to.
Sherlock has the list, so he must know John is here. Please don’t let him be engrossed in an experiment, John thinks, either in a lab or on himself, please.
“Come on, Sher-”
The gate begins to creak open and John stops his half-hearted muttering to dart out of immediate sight a second too late. He’s been seen. Fuck, fuck, maybe he can-
“John?”
Oh thank God, it’s Sherlock.
Holding a wadded up sheet. Brilliant.
John edges back around the corner of the building he’d ineffectively hidden behind and takes the proffered sheet, draping it around himself and holding it closed at the front. It’s warm, the area of heat too big to be from Sherlock’s hands as they carried it. John bends his head and sniffs. A familiar scent of faded aftershave, smoke, and chemicals. That confirms it: this is Sherlock’s recently-laid-in bed sheet. The conclusion brings a rush of blood to his cheeks.
He must look ridiculous.
He looks at Sherlock properly then, taking in his smile, his own red-tinged cheeks, nose and ears. He’s dressed in a shirt and trousers, but the residual heat of the duvet against John’s skin suggests he wouldn’t have had time to get dressed before coming out to meet him, which in turn suggests Sherlock had either been sleeping in his clothes (which John has always disapproved of), or that he had been clothed in bed but not asleep. John shakes his head - this is why he leaves the deductions to Sherlock.
Sherlock’s sleeves are rolled up, revealing pale forearms littered with goosebumps. John squints, but he knows the track marks don’t come until later and they’ll be slightly higher up than the point where Sherlock’s folded cuffs currently rest.
A never fully dormant ache flares up in John’s chest at the thought. He reaches out with the hand not holding the sheet together and takes hold of Sherlock’s wrist, rubbing a thumb over his pulse, his veins and tendons and bones (styloid process of the radius, the styloid process of the ulna under his own metacarpals).
Everything seems to jut out of Sherlock’s papery skin, everything inside him trying to get out. He’s particularly skinny at this age, living off stimulants and attitude, most prominently delicate at the wrists that let him play the violin, turn the wheels of a microscope, shoot up.
There’s a phantom tingle in John’s fingers around Sherlock’s forearm. It’s going to be a fairly quick visit, even though it’s one that should be extended, drawn-out. The last meeting they’ll have for eight long years.
They should do this inside.
“Is your room clean?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Yes, mother.”
John laughs, swipes his thumb over Sherlock’s warm inner wrist a final time and takes his hand back to clutch the sheet tighter around himself. It’s a little late; the material has been gaping open for the last minute or so since the wind blew. Sherlock neglected to tell him.
“No toxic experiments on the desk, dead things in the bed?”
“None,” Sherlock promises. “My bed is completely empty. At the moment.”
There’s only a flicker of innuendo in Sherlock’s tone, a pale comparison to two or three years ago when he was practically begging John with every glance to exploit him. John frowns. Perhaps it’s not a come-on but a hint that there have been people in Sherlock’s bed…
John ducks his head down as another wave of nausea hits. There’s nothing left in his stomach though, and he merely shudders and heaves once before straightening back up again, panting and wiping his dry mouth.
“Let’s go in before the porter wakes up,” he says. “It wouldn’t do to be caught outside with a naked man wrapped in a sheet at this hour.”
----
The room Sherlock leads him to is immaculate. John gapes as he crosses the threshold, wondering what’s happened to all the chaos he saw last time in Sherlock’s previous (next?) room. He’s not sure whether the mess has been cleared away or just not accumulated yet.
“What are you, twenty or twenty-one?”
“Twenty-one,” Sherlock says, sweeping through the door ahead of John and flopping back onto his coverless mattress where he lifts each leg in turn and divests himself of his shoes and socks, throwing them into opposite corners of the room. “I cleaned up this time as a thank you for the gallant rescue of yesteryear.”
Ah, he’s got his timings right then. His last visit is in Sherlock’s past. It’s not something John really wants to revisit.
“No need to thank me.” John eyes the cupboard, assessing the likelihood of glassware and books tumbling down on him if he were to open the door.
It’s very likely that Sherlock’s idea of cleaning up is the same as shutting everything away out of sight.
Best not to open that door.
John walks in gingerly, giving the circular purple stain by the desk a wide berth and coming to sit at the end of Sherlock’s bed, still holding the sheet around himself.
Sherlock’s eyes are closed, his hands pressed together beneath his chin. “A fly-in visit, the list says.”
John nods, and then realises Sherlock can’t see him. “Yeah.”
“It’s also the last date on the list, I noticed.”
“Yeah.”
Sherlock’s eyes flick open and straight to John as he glares at him. “John. I’ve been extremely good about not questioning you on this before, the least you could do now is offer more than ‘yeah’.”
Sighing heavily, John leans back on his elbows, letting the sheet fall around him as he releases his grip on it. He’s still covered at the waist, not that it really matters anymore.
Sherlock extricates his feet from beneath him with a soft grunt of annoyance and then lays them against John’s arm, flexing his toes.
“Am I not going to see you again?” he asks quietly before John can form a more adequate response for him. “Did you lie when you said I would?”
John’s heart clenches at the matter-of-fact tone that Sherlock uses to cover up a world of hurt. “No, Sherlock,” he says, desperate for Sherlock to believe him. “I’ve never lied, not to you. You will see me, but it’s going to be eight years before you do.”
There’s a long pause. Sherlock’s toes flex again. John moves his elbow over them, presses down. He turns his head and doesn’t see the expected smile but a grimace.
“Eight years? Why eight years? What’s happened? Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere, not really. It’s just the way things turn out with the time travel. I next meet you when you’re twenty-nine.”
“The longest it’s been before now is three years, why has it suddenly deviated from the pattern?”
“Sherlock, it’s never been an exact science. Why do I always show up in places where you are or where you’ve been?”
Sherlock throws his hands away from his face in irritation and crosses them over his chest. “I don’t know. Science doesn’t have a word for what you can do, or what you are. If I hadn’t seen you interact with other people I’d still be half-convinced that I made you up.” Sherlock’s brow furrows. “I’m still not entirely sure that I didn’t, sometimes.”
John takes his elbow off of Sherlock’s feet and grasps an ankle instead (too thin like his wrists, too thin for his liking). “I’m only as real as I think I am, and I’m not convinced myself.”
“You felt real when you kissed me,” Sherlock says, voice soft and low, eyes closed again when John looks over to him.
“I really did.”
Neither of them says anything for a moment. John strokes his fingertips along Sherlock’s ankle and then skims them down over the arch of his foot. Sherlock squirms and gasps. “Don’t.”
John stops; he knows how much Sherlock hates to be tickled. “In eight years time,” he says, “you’ll need to give me a list of the dates that I dictated to you when you first met me, because this time I’ll be meeting you for the first time.”
That gets Sherlock’s attention, his eyes snap open and he sits bolt upright, knees bent to bring their faces closer. “That’s when we meet in your present?”
John sits up a little to match him and nods, watching as Sherlock’s look of excitement fades into one of disappointment. “So you won’t know me, then.”
“But I will do. Give me time, Sherlock, and I’ll get to know you. Be patient with me if I’m not the John you remember. You make me the John you know, after all.”
He reaches out a hand and lays it on Sherlock’s cheek, huffing out a laugh when Sherlock turns his face into the contact like a cat and then presses a brief kiss to his palm, eyes on John the whole time.
“You told me once that we’d be flatmates, and when we first met you said we were best friends, but we’ll be lovers too, won’t we?”
The old-fashioned word elicits a little curl of warmth in John’s stomach, a gentle tug of deep affection. No, John thinks, it’s love, call it what it is. He loves the Sherlock he’s left behind in the present, he loves this one that he’s about to leave in the past and all the others he’s left before. They’re the same man at different stages, and they all love him back. God knows why, but he’ll never question it too thoroughly in case someone notices the incredible gift he’s been given, the mistake that’s been made, and takes it all away.
He gives Sherlock a sad smile, moving his hand to press his tingling index finger against Sherlock’s lips. “That would be telling.”
Sherlock’s hand comes up to take his and brings it down from his mouth, gripping it between their chests. “You know I do though,” he says, eyes bright and intense. “You have to know that, even you couldn’t miss the signs.”
Sherlock has made a leap in his head, the declaration doesn’t follow on, but John understands him perfectly as always. He can’t say it back though, because he never does, he never did. He never will. Sherlock has told him so in the future: he never knew. John can’t change that. It feels like his heart is tearing itself in half, but he can’t make his mouth shape the words.
“I know,” he says instead. “I’ll see you soon, Sherlock.”
“Tell me your last name.” Sherlock squeezes his hand until it hurts. “I know you’ve been in the army, I know you’re a doctor. Just tell me your last name and I can find you. Whatever Arab countries you’re going to invade in the future, you haven’t gone there yet, so you must be here somewhere right now.”
John shakes his head, trying to pull his hand from Sherlock’s grip and failing. “You know you can’t find me. You don’t, not for eight years. That’s how it happens, so don’t make this any harder, please. Just say goodbye to me and take care of yourself, all right?”
“No.”
“Sherlock.”
“I’m not saying it.”
The tingling in John’s hand intensifies, though it could just be Sherlock’s death grip cutting off the blood supply. “Please,” he says. “I don’t want to leave with you hating me.”
Sherlock’s mouth opens just slightly in disbelief. “Hating you? Did you not just hear what I said?”
Before John can answer, his hand goes slack in Sherlock’s and he fades away.
----
13th April 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 38 and, elsewhere, 33)
It’s been over a week since the resolution of the case.
John is on a date with the GP he met through Mike Stamford tonight, the one he took to the Chinese circus.
Sherlock grits his teeth just thinking about it. This whole situation is getting to him in ways he never imagined it might. It has been since he took John to the bank with him, introduced John unthinkingly as ‘friend’, and John rebuffed him.
Colleague.
As if there was nothing else between them. That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? As far as John knows, there is nothing between them. They’re not friends, and they’re certainly nowhere near being anything more intimate than that.
And then the GP, Sarah, came into the picture.
Sherlock almost groans aloud. He’s been such a fool. It’s intolerable to him, when he knows how intelligent he is, just how incredibly stupid he’s being. He’d opened himself up to rejection yet again when John felt the need to explain what a date was to him. Why did he have to say it?
“That’s what I was suggesting.”
“No, it wasn’t. At least I hope not.”
After that, he told John about the circus because he knew that he could ruin the date - he could invite himself along and entice John away from Sarah with the promise of danger. Danger and exhilarating chases and intricate deductions that John would call brilliant in a way that Sherlock had come to depend upon as a kind of sustenance (breathing and eating were boring).
Of course, then John went and got himself kidnapped, along with Sarah, and instead of running in the other direction after almost being killed, she had consented to a second and now a third date. Even Sherlock (though he may pretend otherwise when it suits him) is aware of convention. He knows what third dates result in.
So John will probably be with Sarah all night.
Sherlock sighs, pushing his face against the arm of the sofa until his eyes start to sting in protest.
All night.
The thought is resisting deletion.
It’s just another example of John’s incontrovertible heterosexuality, really. It makes sense now, the rejection on his eighteenth birthday - it wasn’t some sense of honour because of their respective ages that stayed John’s hand, it was that he simply never had, and never would feel for Sherlock all that Sherlock was sure he felt for John.
He did love John, he must do. There could be no other name for these feelings that he’d held onto for so long, it must be love. This precise weakness fits all the criteria of love, which has proved itself to be just as destructive as he’d always been warned it was.
Love is the cause of his distraction and it will be his ruin. Mycroft is right. Damn him.
The rejection makes sense, and so does the consolation prize. John’s kiss when he was eighteen was nothing more than an offering of pity from a man who would come to be his dearest friend, his closest companion and confidante, but who would inevitably find someone else to fill that particular role for him.
Sherlock wonders if John is kissing Sarah right now. They’ve probably progressed beyond that already, knowing John.
He’s imagined John as a lover countless times before - he knows enough of John’s body and character to be sure he is accurate in his fantasies. John would be experienced where Sherlock was lacking, certainly. But he’d also be attentive where Sherlock was demanding, generous where Sherlock was selfish, restrained where Sherlock was consuming.
He imagines John with Sarah now: attentive where she was flattered, generous where she was grateful, restrained where she was demonstrative.
Sarah will not have to wonder whether she is in love with John or not, when the time comes. Sherlock hates her for that, if nothing else.
----
The John who arrives in Sherlock’s bedroom later that night is one of the older versions Sherlock has met, between thirty-seven and forty by the look of him. There are the usual physical indicators of John at that age: lines around the eyes (fatigue), weight dropped around the waist (stress). Tired, strained, sad.
Something happens to John at thirty-seven. Sherlock just hasn’t figured out what yet.
John clears his throat, still abashed by his nudity after all these years. He awkwardly covers himself, half turning away from Sherlock.
Sherlock wants to be the one to turn away this time. He’s seen John arrive naked so many times that he knows John’s body (by sight, at least) almost as well as his own. Today, the sight is unbearable when he knows what his John - in a similar state of undress - must be doing elsewhere. Sherlock rolls onto his side, putting John out of his line of vision completely.
“Clothes upstairs,” he says, a low rumble that carries in the darkness, voice thick with the interruption of a rare attempt at a few hours’ sleep.
The footsteps he hears seem to be approaching the bed though, rather than walking away from it. The covers lift, there’s a heavy dip in the mattress, a creak of springs and then a body aligns itself with his.
Sherlock, who had been sleeping in just his pyjama bottoms, tenses at the first touch of John’s skin, the cold chest (John must have been outside before his jump) pressing against his back, still warm from sleep.
No one has climbed into Sherlock’s bed since childhood - the last person to do so was Mycroft after he had a nightmare at age five and Mummy was on the tablets that stopped her waking even during screams.
Friends don’t often crawl into each other’s beds. Sherlock is aware of convention.
Humid breath blows along the back of his neck, a damp chin fits over his shoulder. John’s jaw works as though grinding his teeth, his breaths hitching and shuddering.
“You’re upset,” Sherlock points out. It isn’t his sharpest deduction, granted.
John huffs in exasperation. “You could become a detective with observation skills like that,” he says. “How old are you? Thirty, thirty-one?”
The question is abrupt, but not unexpected. John’s over-estimated him this time though, which is interesting. Should he lie? He could probably fool John now. It was a lot less of a challenge for him when Sherlock’s face betrayed his age. Now, Sherlock can add a year and John will be none the wiser. John won’t be cagey with the details for a time period that hasn’t passed yet. That’s tempting.
Sherlock has always had issues with impulse control.
“Thirty-one,” he says, smooth as ever, “it’s April 2012.”
“And where am I tonight?” John asks immediately.
John’s heart rate picks up against Sherlock’s back. Fear? This would be so much easier if Sherlock could see his face.
“A jump. You’ve left me alone, again.”
John’s grip on him slackens, allowing Sherlock to turn in his arms and face him. John looks stricken, and Sherlock finds himself reaching out a hand to trace the fine lines by John’s eyes as he often does (checking for age), fingers trailing through moisture that’s not usually there.
“You know I don’t mean to.” John’s voice is hoarse. He’s been crying or shouting recently. Perhaps both.
Sherlock shrugs one shoulder and goes to draw his hand back. John catches his wrist, positions Sherlock’s palm flat over his cheek. He lets Sherlock’s arm go and shuts his eyes.
The gesture is so startlingly intimate - his hand, placed deliberately on John’s face, John’s eyes closed in apparent contentment - that Sherlock’s breath catches in his throat.
His mind races, an engine constantly rocketing forwards towards oblivion, only it’s suddenly come to the end of the line, there is no more track laid out. What does he do here? John is naked in his bed, John is touching him, he is touching John. They don’t do this. Do they? In the future, is this a normal occurrence?
He has to play his part; he has to see where this goes. He has to know.
“Of course you don’t mean to,” Sherlock says, “but- but it hurts just the same.”
A warning bell goes off in his head as he says it. That’s not playing the part, that’s showing his hand. Acting is made up of a thousand little truths, but there are some he can’t afford to give away for a mere performance.
John opens his eyes, and Sherlock instantly wishes he hadn’t. The depth of regret and sorrow there, it simply isn’t to be borne. It’s too much. It says John understands, why does he understand?
John, what happens to you at thirty-seven?
The expression melts away, replaced as quickly as it had first appeared over John’s features. He smiles, but there’s something missing. Pain lingers in the lack of creases around his eyes. “Thirty-one, you say?”
Sherlock nods.
“Thank God,” John says, and then he leans forward to close the last few centimetres of space remaining between them and kisses Sherlock.
Sherlock’s eyes remain open wide in shock for a moment, his hands move uselessly though the air by John’s head and he draws in a harsh, reflexive breath through his nose. John’s mouth is hot and insistent against his, pressing forward inexorably, and Sherlock’s eyes flutter closed as he presses back, hoping he’s more technically proficient this time around.
It’s only his second kiss though, and he still feels somewhat at sea with the whole thing. It’s overwhelming, how is he meant to think about what he’s doing? His senses are all filled with John: the image of his face seared onto Sherlock’s eyelids, the sounds of their scant breaths and the slick movements of their mouths, the sweetness of the lips that part his, John’s scent - earthy and fresh like grass after rain.
John pulls back, panting. Sherlock’s lips drag, open and wet, down from John’s mouth and over his jaw before he is pushed away with two hands at his shoulders.
“How old are you, really?” John asks. He is furious.
Sherlock scowls - caught out by a kiss. He must have been completely inept. His lack of familiarity in this area is humiliating, even though it is all John’s fault.
“Twenty-nine,” he answers. “What does it matter?” He’s already reaching for John again but John’s hands come up to encircle his wrists, stopping him.
“So we’re not…” John trails off, eyes skating away from Sherlock’s intense stare.
That answers the question nicely. Thirty-one. When Sherlock is thirty-one, he and John do this.
“So we will.”
John meets his eyes again. “Of course we will,” he says. “Hadn’t you already figured that out?”
“No. When?” It comes out more desperate than Sherlock intended.
There’s a pause, and then a dull smack as John swipes at his own forehead in realisation. “I’m with Sarah tonight, that’s why you’re so wound up, right?”
It isn’t a question, not really. It’s John’s own history, so he should have an idea where he was at roughly this time. The bit about him being wound up, well… John always has been perceptive, not in the way that Sherlock is, of course, but of the two of them, he is definitely the more knowledgeable one when it comes to matters of the heart.
Sherlock says nothing. John can read his silence easily enough.
“I’m on Sarah’s sofa tonight, Sherlock, not in her bed. I never did sleep with her, in the end.”
Something in Sherlock calms at that and goes back to rest. His pulse slows, good, excellent, and then it races again as thinks about it and says: “Well, we still could, you know.”
John’s brow furrows. “We could what?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse, you know I hate that.”
Sherlock shuffles closer, brings a pyjama-clad leg up and hooks it over John’s naked one, pressing their lower halves together. He’s been aroused since the first touch of John’s lips to his, and he can feel now that John is in a similar predicament. This is just silly, he thinks, they might as well do something about it.
John groans, head tipping back. Sherlock blinks at the exposed line of John’s throat. He has the most ridiculous urge to lean in and bite and mark and claim and he does so, a scrape of teeth that’s just on the wrong side of gentle, and the movement presses them even more firmly together at the waist.
John’s hands are still around his wrists, tight enough now to cause him pain. “No, we can’t.”
“Why not?” Sherlock asks. “You can’t tell me you don’t want this. I can feel that, John.”
To demonstrate his point, he rocks his hips against John’s.
John lets out a choked sound, oh, and releases Sherlock’s forearms to take his face in his hands and kiss him again.
Sherlock tries to keep up with the pace, but John is ahead of him here - both in age and experience. He has no idea what he is supposed to do, and so instead does what he wants to do, opening his mouth to John’s tongue and running a hand down from John’s shoulder to press against his chest, feeling the elevated heart rate that matches his own.
It’s the middle of spring and while the weather is turning warmer, Sherlock knows he shouldn’t be feelings as hot as he is. John’s skin has warmed up and Sherlock is already burning all over. He feels light-headed, dizzy. Is the burning from oxygen deprivation in his muscles? They’re still kissing, John’s tongue stroking his, he’s not getting enough air. Breathing’s boring, he doesn’t need oxygen to live, he needs this. His palms feverishly take in all the sense-memory they can - the difference between skin that’s dry and skin that’s filmed with a thin sheen of sweat, the difference between unmarred skin and skin that’s been broken, stitched, healed.
Sherlock doesn’t stray below the waist with his hands, but John still sighs into his mouth as he explores. The need is suddenly so sharp, so deep that it almost feels like pain.
Sherlock is aching. He knew, he just knew it would be like this.
“We haven’t-” John is breathless as he breaks them apart to speak, the hushed words spilling over Sherlock’s lips, still close enough to touch. “At this time, we haven’t yet.”
“All the more reason to do it now,” Sherlock replies, like it’s already decided.
John tips his head forward and rests his brow against Sherlock’s. He laughs. “Our first time, I knew it couldn’t be your first time with me. You knew me too well, you knew what I like.”
There’s a feeling like a jerk, a distinct downward tug of something in Sherlock’s stomach. It’s something he has no reference for, no name. Physically, it feels like falling when there’s nothing to catch you, when you don’t know how far there is left to fall.
“As you know me.”
John lays a hand against Sherlock’s face, pulls back enough that he can look at him as he sweeps his thumb tenderly, repeatedly over a cheekbone. “As I know you.”
Sherlock searches John’s expression: there’s love in the gaze, certainly, but the grief is still equally palpable. It chills him, despite the heat of John’s body against his. It’s incongruous; it doesn’t belong here now with them together like this.
He’s figured it out.
“I’m not with you, in your time,” he says. “What’s happened?”
John’s hand combs through Sherlock’s hair, the fingertips light against his scalp. Don’t ask anymore, the touch says.
For once, Sherlock won’t, because he’s distracted by the way John’s face sets, heated determination in his eyes now like he’s made up his mind about something.
“Have you done this with anyone?” John asks. “I know you hadn’t at eighteen, there wasn’t really time when you were twenty-one and then it was eight years until we met again…”
John reaches down between them, the first teasing touch of his hand to Sherlock’s navel making him jump slightly. John takes his hand away, an apology already in his eyes, and Sherlock catches his wrist, attempting to guide him back towards the anticipated destination. He rolls his eyes when John resists.
“Don’t ask when you know I haven’t wanted to do this with anyone but you. You must know that, I must have told you at some point.”
“You might have done.”
John’s eyes slip closed and he shifts his hips against Sherlock’s, grinds his bare erection against Sherlock’s covered one. The gasp Sherlock lets out at that is stolen from him, taken by John’s lips as they slant eagerly over his.
“I don’t-” Sherlock starts when John breaks the kiss, faltering when John begins mouthing his way down Sherlock’s jaw. “I don’t know-”
John continues his path downwards, trailing warm, open-mouthed kisses along Sherlock’s sternum, across the quivering muscles in his abdomen. He tucks his fingers under the waistband of Sherlock’s pyjama bottoms but doesn’t pull them down; he just strokes the backs of his fingers along the sensitive skin of Sherlock’s pelvis. Back and forth, back and forth. Below that, the intermittent movement of the cotton of his pyjamas against his cock is maddening.
Sherlock can easily label this as the most erotic thing to have ever been done to him, although he knows that his past experience is inexistent, and he has an idea that this label is going to undergo many revisions as they go along.
“Come on,” he huffs when John repeats the move with a smirk, not progressing any further.
John laughs but obliges, pulling the bottoms down past Sherlock’s knees and then off. He comes back up to align his hips with Sherlock’s again, easing himself down between legs that spread for him almost automatically.
He stops just before their skin can touch, no barriers between them now. He catches Sherlock’s half-lidded, glazed stare.
“Sherlock?”
Sherlock meets his eyes, reads the question in them. He knows John’s intention and he wants to struggle, almost. He wants to struggle and writhe and get away because it’s too much, it’s too intense. At the same time, he also wants to stay stock-still and let John do whatever he wants to him, because it’s not enough, it can never be enough. He aches for John, and he just needs-
Two hands find and take hold of his. John’s fingers fit into the spaces between Sherlock’s, his palms push until Sherlock moves his arms out, until his elbows are bent and pinned to the mattress by his sides. It makes him feel grounded, and he relaxes momentarily.
“It’s okay,” John says, looking down at him. “Calm down. Remember: I know you.”
Sherlock relaxes further at the words. John knows him. John has done this before. With him. Many times, probably. Oh, that’s-
“I’ll take care of you,” John is murmuring as he squeezes Sherlock’s hands. “I know every single inch of you. I know what you like.”
Vaguely, in some bizarre section of his mind that can’t even lose awareness when he is about to have sex, Sherlock feels that he should be complaining. The sort of lust-addled, possessive sentiments dripping from John’s lips are not something he would ordinarily want to hear.
Right now though? They’re glorious. Close and intimate and knowing. John’s soft words and quickened breaths ghosting over his ear and making him shiver. It’s getting to him because no one knows him like John. No one could ever know him the way John does, or will.
The thought is intoxicating, and the dizzying high it produces is more potent than anything he’s ever injected into his body. Sherlock’s head is spinning, but the usual whirling chaos has been exchanged for heady focus. He’s never been so affected before without there being chemicals involved. But there are chemicals at work here, aren’t there? Hormones and neurotransmitters and it’s all just chemistry except for how it really isn’t - he’s never felt like this with anyone else, never imagined it with anyone else. Only John. For all these years, it’s only ever been John. Because he loves John.
He does, of course he does. How could he doubt it? How could he question it?
“I know what makes you come.” John is still speaking, his voice getting louder, rising in confidence. “I know what makes you beg to come, Sherlock. Tell me that you want me to show you. Tell me you want that.”
John is barely touching him, but Sherlock is panting as if he’d just chased down two serial killers. John leans down slightly, finally, so that their erections meet. There’s still tension in his back though as he holds his body above Sherlock’s, not pressing down with his full weight.
He stays still for a moment, as if letting Sherlock adjust.
Sherlock isn’t sure he’ll ever adjust.
“Please,” he says, eyelashes just brushing his cheeks as he closes his eyes. “John.”
John knows what he likes, and he wants to be shown because he doesn't even know that. He wants to learn what John likes, ready for when his John- or is this his John? Aren’t they all his?
Yes, he thinks fiercely, and untangles his fingers from John’s to move his hands to John’s back. He digs his fingernails in, and John’s shoulderblades shudder under his palms. He uses his grip to bring John’s body into his, as close as they can be while still being separate, while still being individuals, wrapped in their own skin.
Right now, he wants to fuse their bones, their blood vessels, their flesh. He could breathe John’s air, share John’s scars. He could live inside John, perfect and invincible and whole. His incomparable brain and John’s steadfast heart. If ever two people were made to be one, surely it was them.
John responds to him - he pushes as Sherlock pulls, pushes his cock against Sherlock’s and moans at the friction, the sensation. John should be used to this, Sherlock thinks, he shouldn’t be this eager.
“Oh God,” John says, the words cut off and strangled as he swallows to cover another moan.
He reaches down again to curl his hand around Sherlock, who lets out a shaky breath and jerks his hips. He’s incredulous when he realises he didn’t consciously mean to do either of those things.
This is the first touch of a hand that isn’t his own, and it is indescribable. It shouldn’t be - by all rights, John’s hand is not that different from his, the only changes being his slightly smaller palm, his shorter fingers, callouses in different places - but it is, because it’s John and he moves his hand just so, he twists it over the head, he swipes his thumb languorously over the slit on the downstroke. Sherlock knows what he’s going to do to himself; he has no clue what John is going to do to him at any given moment. It’s thrilling, and so, so much better.
Sherlock insinuates his own hand between them, scratches his nails lightly through the hair that runs from John’s navel down to his groin, and brushes the backs of his knuckles against John’s erection. He’s enjoying (loving) being pressed so close to John, but the downside is he can’t see all of him. A lot of data is being denied to him. He’ll have to ask for John’s measurements - flaccid and erect, of course, though he’s got a good idea about flaccid already from John’s numerous arrivals - later on.
“Now is not the time to get your measuring tape out, Sherlock,” John gasps the words, breathless and amused.
Sherlock raises his head from where he’s been trying to get a proper look at John’s cock, mouth opening in surprise.
“Not a mind reader,” John assures him, eyes pinching shut and mouth opening to match Sherlock’s when Sherlock moves his hand and closes it around him. “I just know you.”
That phrase again. Sherlock feels a rush of pleasure just hearing it.
He catalogues the things he can’t see with his palm and fingers. Girth, length, and shape are easily estimated. He finds them all to be fairly average, according to the knowledge he’s garnered from books. Typical John, hiding his extraordinary self in his ordinary exterior.
He catalogues John’s responses as he goes too, finding that John seems to like the attention as Sherlock runs his inquisitive fingertips lightly along his glans, the corona, and particularly when he spreads pre-come from the tip down on his way to caress the frenulum.
“Jesus,” John breathes out, his eyes still closed, “do that again.”
Sherlock does, and then moves his attention back to the shaft and head, copying the technique John is using on him. John continues to stroke him in return, speeding up from his previous slow, torturous pace. He’s getting impatient.
“I forgot how quiet you were when we first started doing this,” John says abruptly. “Open your mouth, let me hear you.”
Until now, Sherlock has been taking quick breaths through his nose, not trying to be silent but managing it compared to John’s moans and sighs. He opens his mouth, ragged breaths audible as he pants against John’s neck. If anything, it heightens his arousal, hearing the effect of their exertions, hearing what John does to him.
“John, I’m-” he can’t get the words out.
“Are you close?” John asks urgently. “Your voice, God, it always gets me there. I am, I am so close, Sherlock. Nearly there.”
Sherlock has been teetering on the edge for some time, he barely touches himself, and this is the object of his desire since his teenage years touching him for the first time and telling him how close he gets him to orgasm. Sherlock knew he wasn’t going to last long.
When he goes to reply, all he manages is to gasp out John before stiffening, and then spasming uncontrollably as he comes with a low, drawn-out groan.
“That’s it,” John is saying above him, mumbling nonsense as he strokes and squeezes him through it. “That’s it, you’re there now.”
Sherlock slumps back against the mattress when it’s over, head turning to one side and his grip around John loosening as he loses just about all the tension in his body. John pushes into his slack fist a couple of times anyway and then there’s a spurt of fluid over his hand as John comes too. “Oh fuck, Sherlock-”
John collapses against his chest after, breathing hard and fast for a moment before he begins to relax and come back to himself.
“Christ.”
Sherlock’s reply is a sated, deeply content “mmm” from his throat. He feels very sleepy all of a sudden.
The rumbled syllable reverberates through John and he laughs. “I’d forgotten how much sex makes you stupid.”
“Not stupid,” Sherlock says, but it’s a half-hearted attempt at sounding affronted.
He closes his eyes and turns his face upwards for a kiss, and John indulges him. Their mouths meet and move lazily for several minutes, Sherlock still learning all the while. They break apart only to come back together again and again, initially trading brief closed-mouth kisses before one of them feels the need to deepen them.
Eventually, John finds himself doing more and more of the work as Sherlock decreases in responsiveness.
“Tired?” he asks fondly.
That “mmm” noise again. Sherlock’s eyes remain closed.
John presses a last lingering kiss to Sherlock’s soft, pliant mouth and then rests his head against Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Sleep then, and I’ll be gone and the other me will be home before you wake up.”
“Sticky,” Sherlock complains weakly.
“Easily fixed later. Sleep.”
And Sherlock does, one hand carefully grasping John’s until that particular version of John fades out of the time period.
Sherlock doesn’t wake when he goes.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings/Spoilers: Bastardising of canon dialogue at times? Messing with (what we can work out of) the canon timeline? Is sexual content a warning still?
Summary: 2nd March 2002 (John is 37, Sherlock is 21).
Everything seems to jut out of Sherlock’s papery skin, everything inside him trying to get out. He’s particularly skinny at this age, living off stimulants and attitude, most prominently delicate at the wrists that let him play the violin, turn the wheels of a microscope, shoot up.
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
2nd March 2002 (John is 37, Sherlock is 21)
Showing up naked outside the entrance of a Cambridge college is not high on John Watson’s list of his finer moments.
Especially when his next magic trick is to throw up quite spectacularly on the cobblestones by the doors.
It’s definitely Cambridge; his surroundings look familiar because he’s been there before. There’s the same stone with the letters TCN inscribed on it, a memorial to one of the Fellows of the college. So it seems like he’s landed outside the great gate of Trinity College where Sherlock must be milling about somewhere, perpetually bored, occasionally high, and university aged. Well, sort of. He’ll be either twenty or twenty-one seeing as he went late and left early, ever the atypical git that John is used to. He lied when he said he was going at eighteen in another of his attempts to seduce John, ever the manipulative git that John is used to.
John stands up straight, or rather, he attempts to stand up straight, lurches to one side and ends up dry heaving. Fucking time travel.
When he gets his body back under control, he moves to the following item on the agenda: he needs clothes. It’s dark, and the gate to the college is closed, but that certainly does not mean the entrance is going to remain quiet and empty as it is now. It won’t be long before drunk, rowdy students return to harass the no doubt enormously patient porter.
The last time he visited Cambridge he found himself in an alley somewhere initially, where he prevented a mugging and managed to get himself a nice set of mugger’s clothes. Vile, but better than being arrested for public indecency like the other guy.
He prevented another attack that night, though he cared far more about the second almost-victim and thus dealt the would-be culprit a far more exacting punishment than just letting the police have him.
John blows a warm breath into his cupped, mercifully vomit-free hands, deciding how to proceed. He can’t enter the college without a stitch on, that would be disgraceful. His mother would turn in her grave.
God, this would be so much easier if he didn’t have to arrive sans clothing and possessions every time he travels. He’d always carry a phone for starters if that were so. He would permanently dress in a coat, with gloves and maybe a scarf for good measure. He laughs as he thinks it. I’d dress like Sherlock.
It’s a cold night, but he’s had worse. It feels like late winter, which corresponds to a particular date on the list that he’s not been looking forward to.
Sherlock has the list, so he must know John is here. Please don’t let him be engrossed in an experiment, John thinks, either in a lab or on himself, please.
“Come on, Sher-”
The gate begins to creak open and John stops his half-hearted muttering to dart out of immediate sight a second too late. He’s been seen. Fuck, fuck, maybe he can-
“John?”
Oh thank God, it’s Sherlock.
Holding a wadded up sheet. Brilliant.
John edges back around the corner of the building he’d ineffectively hidden behind and takes the proffered sheet, draping it around himself and holding it closed at the front. It’s warm, the area of heat too big to be from Sherlock’s hands as they carried it. John bends his head and sniffs. A familiar scent of faded aftershave, smoke, and chemicals. That confirms it: this is Sherlock’s recently-laid-in bed sheet. The conclusion brings a rush of blood to his cheeks.
He must look ridiculous.
He looks at Sherlock properly then, taking in his smile, his own red-tinged cheeks, nose and ears. He’s dressed in a shirt and trousers, but the residual heat of the duvet against John’s skin suggests he wouldn’t have had time to get dressed before coming out to meet him, which in turn suggests Sherlock had either been sleeping in his clothes (which John has always disapproved of), or that he had been clothed in bed but not asleep. John shakes his head - this is why he leaves the deductions to Sherlock.
Sherlock’s sleeves are rolled up, revealing pale forearms littered with goosebumps. John squints, but he knows the track marks don’t come until later and they’ll be slightly higher up than the point where Sherlock’s folded cuffs currently rest.
A never fully dormant ache flares up in John’s chest at the thought. He reaches out with the hand not holding the sheet together and takes hold of Sherlock’s wrist, rubbing a thumb over his pulse, his veins and tendons and bones (styloid process of the radius, the styloid process of the ulna under his own metacarpals).
Everything seems to jut out of Sherlock’s papery skin, everything inside him trying to get out. He’s particularly skinny at this age, living off stimulants and attitude, most prominently delicate at the wrists that let him play the violin, turn the wheels of a microscope, shoot up.
There’s a phantom tingle in John’s fingers around Sherlock’s forearm. It’s going to be a fairly quick visit, even though it’s one that should be extended, drawn-out. The last meeting they’ll have for eight long years.
They should do this inside.
“Is your room clean?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Yes, mother.”
John laughs, swipes his thumb over Sherlock’s warm inner wrist a final time and takes his hand back to clutch the sheet tighter around himself. It’s a little late; the material has been gaping open for the last minute or so since the wind blew. Sherlock neglected to tell him.
“No toxic experiments on the desk, dead things in the bed?”
“None,” Sherlock promises. “My bed is completely empty. At the moment.”
There’s only a flicker of innuendo in Sherlock’s tone, a pale comparison to two or three years ago when he was practically begging John with every glance to exploit him. John frowns. Perhaps it’s not a come-on but a hint that there have been people in Sherlock’s bed…
John ducks his head down as another wave of nausea hits. There’s nothing left in his stomach though, and he merely shudders and heaves once before straightening back up again, panting and wiping his dry mouth.
“Let’s go in before the porter wakes up,” he says. “It wouldn’t do to be caught outside with a naked man wrapped in a sheet at this hour.”
----
The room Sherlock leads him to is immaculate. John gapes as he crosses the threshold, wondering what’s happened to all the chaos he saw last time in Sherlock’s previous (next?) room. He’s not sure whether the mess has been cleared away or just not accumulated yet.
“What are you, twenty or twenty-one?”
“Twenty-one,” Sherlock says, sweeping through the door ahead of John and flopping back onto his coverless mattress where he lifts each leg in turn and divests himself of his shoes and socks, throwing them into opposite corners of the room. “I cleaned up this time as a thank you for the gallant rescue of yesteryear.”
Ah, he’s got his timings right then. His last visit is in Sherlock’s past. It’s not something John really wants to revisit.
“No need to thank me.” John eyes the cupboard, assessing the likelihood of glassware and books tumbling down on him if he were to open the door.
It’s very likely that Sherlock’s idea of cleaning up is the same as shutting everything away out of sight.
Best not to open that door.
John walks in gingerly, giving the circular purple stain by the desk a wide berth and coming to sit at the end of Sherlock’s bed, still holding the sheet around himself.
Sherlock’s eyes are closed, his hands pressed together beneath his chin. “A fly-in visit, the list says.”
John nods, and then realises Sherlock can’t see him. “Yeah.”
“It’s also the last date on the list, I noticed.”
“Yeah.”
Sherlock’s eyes flick open and straight to John as he glares at him. “John. I’ve been extremely good about not questioning you on this before, the least you could do now is offer more than ‘yeah’.”
Sighing heavily, John leans back on his elbows, letting the sheet fall around him as he releases his grip on it. He’s still covered at the waist, not that it really matters anymore.
Sherlock extricates his feet from beneath him with a soft grunt of annoyance and then lays them against John’s arm, flexing his toes.
“Am I not going to see you again?” he asks quietly before John can form a more adequate response for him. “Did you lie when you said I would?”
John’s heart clenches at the matter-of-fact tone that Sherlock uses to cover up a world of hurt. “No, Sherlock,” he says, desperate for Sherlock to believe him. “I’ve never lied, not to you. You will see me, but it’s going to be eight years before you do.”
There’s a long pause. Sherlock’s toes flex again. John moves his elbow over them, presses down. He turns his head and doesn’t see the expected smile but a grimace.
“Eight years? Why eight years? What’s happened? Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere, not really. It’s just the way things turn out with the time travel. I next meet you when you’re twenty-nine.”
“The longest it’s been before now is three years, why has it suddenly deviated from the pattern?”
“Sherlock, it’s never been an exact science. Why do I always show up in places where you are or where you’ve been?”
Sherlock throws his hands away from his face in irritation and crosses them over his chest. “I don’t know. Science doesn’t have a word for what you can do, or what you are. If I hadn’t seen you interact with other people I’d still be half-convinced that I made you up.” Sherlock’s brow furrows. “I’m still not entirely sure that I didn’t, sometimes.”
John takes his elbow off of Sherlock’s feet and grasps an ankle instead (too thin like his wrists, too thin for his liking). “I’m only as real as I think I am, and I’m not convinced myself.”
“You felt real when you kissed me,” Sherlock says, voice soft and low, eyes closed again when John looks over to him.
“I really did.”
Neither of them says anything for a moment. John strokes his fingertips along Sherlock’s ankle and then skims them down over the arch of his foot. Sherlock squirms and gasps. “Don’t.”
John stops; he knows how much Sherlock hates to be tickled. “In eight years time,” he says, “you’ll need to give me a list of the dates that I dictated to you when you first met me, because this time I’ll be meeting you for the first time.”
That gets Sherlock’s attention, his eyes snap open and he sits bolt upright, knees bent to bring their faces closer. “That’s when we meet in your present?”
John sits up a little to match him and nods, watching as Sherlock’s look of excitement fades into one of disappointment. “So you won’t know me, then.”
“But I will do. Give me time, Sherlock, and I’ll get to know you. Be patient with me if I’m not the John you remember. You make me the John you know, after all.”
He reaches out a hand and lays it on Sherlock’s cheek, huffing out a laugh when Sherlock turns his face into the contact like a cat and then presses a brief kiss to his palm, eyes on John the whole time.
“You told me once that we’d be flatmates, and when we first met you said we were best friends, but we’ll be lovers too, won’t we?”
The old-fashioned word elicits a little curl of warmth in John’s stomach, a gentle tug of deep affection. No, John thinks, it’s love, call it what it is. He loves the Sherlock he’s left behind in the present, he loves this one that he’s about to leave in the past and all the others he’s left before. They’re the same man at different stages, and they all love him back. God knows why, but he’ll never question it too thoroughly in case someone notices the incredible gift he’s been given, the mistake that’s been made, and takes it all away.
He gives Sherlock a sad smile, moving his hand to press his tingling index finger against Sherlock’s lips. “That would be telling.”
Sherlock’s hand comes up to take his and brings it down from his mouth, gripping it between their chests. “You know I do though,” he says, eyes bright and intense. “You have to know that, even you couldn’t miss the signs.”
Sherlock has made a leap in his head, the declaration doesn’t follow on, but John understands him perfectly as always. He can’t say it back though, because he never does, he never did. He never will. Sherlock has told him so in the future: he never knew. John can’t change that. It feels like his heart is tearing itself in half, but he can’t make his mouth shape the words.
“I know,” he says instead. “I’ll see you soon, Sherlock.”
“Tell me your last name.” Sherlock squeezes his hand until it hurts. “I know you’ve been in the army, I know you’re a doctor. Just tell me your last name and I can find you. Whatever Arab countries you’re going to invade in the future, you haven’t gone there yet, so you must be here somewhere right now.”
John shakes his head, trying to pull his hand from Sherlock’s grip and failing. “You know you can’t find me. You don’t, not for eight years. That’s how it happens, so don’t make this any harder, please. Just say goodbye to me and take care of yourself, all right?”
“No.”
“Sherlock.”
“I’m not saying it.”
The tingling in John’s hand intensifies, though it could just be Sherlock’s death grip cutting off the blood supply. “Please,” he says. “I don’t want to leave with you hating me.”
Sherlock’s mouth opens just slightly in disbelief. “Hating you? Did you not just hear what I said?”
Before John can answer, his hand goes slack in Sherlock’s and he fades away.
----
13th April 2010 (Sherlock is 29, John is 38 and, elsewhere, 33)
It’s been over a week since the resolution of the case.
John is on a date with the GP he met through Mike Stamford tonight, the one he took to the Chinese circus.
Sherlock grits his teeth just thinking about it. This whole situation is getting to him in ways he never imagined it might. It has been since he took John to the bank with him, introduced John unthinkingly as ‘friend’, and John rebuffed him.
Colleague.
As if there was nothing else between them. That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? As far as John knows, there is nothing between them. They’re not friends, and they’re certainly nowhere near being anything more intimate than that.
And then the GP, Sarah, came into the picture.
Sherlock almost groans aloud. He’s been such a fool. It’s intolerable to him, when he knows how intelligent he is, just how incredibly stupid he’s being. He’d opened himself up to rejection yet again when John felt the need to explain what a date was to him. Why did he have to say it?
“That’s what I was suggesting.”
“No, it wasn’t. At least I hope not.”
After that, he told John about the circus because he knew that he could ruin the date - he could invite himself along and entice John away from Sarah with the promise of danger. Danger and exhilarating chases and intricate deductions that John would call brilliant in a way that Sherlock had come to depend upon as a kind of sustenance (breathing and eating were boring).
Of course, then John went and got himself kidnapped, along with Sarah, and instead of running in the other direction after almost being killed, she had consented to a second and now a third date. Even Sherlock (though he may pretend otherwise when it suits him) is aware of convention. He knows what third dates result in.
So John will probably be with Sarah all night.
Sherlock sighs, pushing his face against the arm of the sofa until his eyes start to sting in protest.
All night.
The thought is resisting deletion.
It’s just another example of John’s incontrovertible heterosexuality, really. It makes sense now, the rejection on his eighteenth birthday - it wasn’t some sense of honour because of their respective ages that stayed John’s hand, it was that he simply never had, and never would feel for Sherlock all that Sherlock was sure he felt for John.
He did love John, he must do. There could be no other name for these feelings that he’d held onto for so long, it must be love. This precise weakness fits all the criteria of love, which has proved itself to be just as destructive as he’d always been warned it was.
Love is the cause of his distraction and it will be his ruin. Mycroft is right. Damn him.
The rejection makes sense, and so does the consolation prize. John’s kiss when he was eighteen was nothing more than an offering of pity from a man who would come to be his dearest friend, his closest companion and confidante, but who would inevitably find someone else to fill that particular role for him.
Sherlock wonders if John is kissing Sarah right now. They’ve probably progressed beyond that already, knowing John.
He’s imagined John as a lover countless times before - he knows enough of John’s body and character to be sure he is accurate in his fantasies. John would be experienced where Sherlock was lacking, certainly. But he’d also be attentive where Sherlock was demanding, generous where Sherlock was selfish, restrained where Sherlock was consuming.
He imagines John with Sarah now: attentive where she was flattered, generous where she was grateful, restrained where she was demonstrative.
Sarah will not have to wonder whether she is in love with John or not, when the time comes. Sherlock hates her for that, if nothing else.
----
The John who arrives in Sherlock’s bedroom later that night is one of the older versions Sherlock has met, between thirty-seven and forty by the look of him. There are the usual physical indicators of John at that age: lines around the eyes (fatigue), weight dropped around the waist (stress). Tired, strained, sad.
Something happens to John at thirty-seven. Sherlock just hasn’t figured out what yet.
John clears his throat, still abashed by his nudity after all these years. He awkwardly covers himself, half turning away from Sherlock.
Sherlock wants to be the one to turn away this time. He’s seen John arrive naked so many times that he knows John’s body (by sight, at least) almost as well as his own. Today, the sight is unbearable when he knows what his John - in a similar state of undress - must be doing elsewhere. Sherlock rolls onto his side, putting John out of his line of vision completely.
“Clothes upstairs,” he says, a low rumble that carries in the darkness, voice thick with the interruption of a rare attempt at a few hours’ sleep.
The footsteps he hears seem to be approaching the bed though, rather than walking away from it. The covers lift, there’s a heavy dip in the mattress, a creak of springs and then a body aligns itself with his.
Sherlock, who had been sleeping in just his pyjama bottoms, tenses at the first touch of John’s skin, the cold chest (John must have been outside before his jump) pressing against his back, still warm from sleep.
No one has climbed into Sherlock’s bed since childhood - the last person to do so was Mycroft after he had a nightmare at age five and Mummy was on the tablets that stopped her waking even during screams.
Friends don’t often crawl into each other’s beds. Sherlock is aware of convention.
Humid breath blows along the back of his neck, a damp chin fits over his shoulder. John’s jaw works as though grinding his teeth, his breaths hitching and shuddering.
“You’re upset,” Sherlock points out. It isn’t his sharpest deduction, granted.
John huffs in exasperation. “You could become a detective with observation skills like that,” he says. “How old are you? Thirty, thirty-one?”
The question is abrupt, but not unexpected. John’s over-estimated him this time though, which is interesting. Should he lie? He could probably fool John now. It was a lot less of a challenge for him when Sherlock’s face betrayed his age. Now, Sherlock can add a year and John will be none the wiser. John won’t be cagey with the details for a time period that hasn’t passed yet. That’s tempting.
Sherlock has always had issues with impulse control.
“Thirty-one,” he says, smooth as ever, “it’s April 2012.”
“And where am I tonight?” John asks immediately.
John’s heart rate picks up against Sherlock’s back. Fear? This would be so much easier if Sherlock could see his face.
“A jump. You’ve left me alone, again.”
John’s grip on him slackens, allowing Sherlock to turn in his arms and face him. John looks stricken, and Sherlock finds himself reaching out a hand to trace the fine lines by John’s eyes as he often does (checking for age), fingers trailing through moisture that’s not usually there.
“You know I don’t mean to.” John’s voice is hoarse. He’s been crying or shouting recently. Perhaps both.
Sherlock shrugs one shoulder and goes to draw his hand back. John catches his wrist, positions Sherlock’s palm flat over his cheek. He lets Sherlock’s arm go and shuts his eyes.
The gesture is so startlingly intimate - his hand, placed deliberately on John’s face, John’s eyes closed in apparent contentment - that Sherlock’s breath catches in his throat.
His mind races, an engine constantly rocketing forwards towards oblivion, only it’s suddenly come to the end of the line, there is no more track laid out. What does he do here? John is naked in his bed, John is touching him, he is touching John. They don’t do this. Do they? In the future, is this a normal occurrence?
He has to play his part; he has to see where this goes. He has to know.
“Of course you don’t mean to,” Sherlock says, “but- but it hurts just the same.”
A warning bell goes off in his head as he says it. That’s not playing the part, that’s showing his hand. Acting is made up of a thousand little truths, but there are some he can’t afford to give away for a mere performance.
John opens his eyes, and Sherlock instantly wishes he hadn’t. The depth of regret and sorrow there, it simply isn’t to be borne. It’s too much. It says John understands, why does he understand?
John, what happens to you at thirty-seven?
The expression melts away, replaced as quickly as it had first appeared over John’s features. He smiles, but there’s something missing. Pain lingers in the lack of creases around his eyes. “Thirty-one, you say?”
Sherlock nods.
“Thank God,” John says, and then he leans forward to close the last few centimetres of space remaining between them and kisses Sherlock.
Sherlock’s eyes remain open wide in shock for a moment, his hands move uselessly though the air by John’s head and he draws in a harsh, reflexive breath through his nose. John’s mouth is hot and insistent against his, pressing forward inexorably, and Sherlock’s eyes flutter closed as he presses back, hoping he’s more technically proficient this time around.
It’s only his second kiss though, and he still feels somewhat at sea with the whole thing. It’s overwhelming, how is he meant to think about what he’s doing? His senses are all filled with John: the image of his face seared onto Sherlock’s eyelids, the sounds of their scant breaths and the slick movements of their mouths, the sweetness of the lips that part his, John’s scent - earthy and fresh like grass after rain.
John pulls back, panting. Sherlock’s lips drag, open and wet, down from John’s mouth and over his jaw before he is pushed away with two hands at his shoulders.
“How old are you, really?” John asks. He is furious.
Sherlock scowls - caught out by a kiss. He must have been completely inept. His lack of familiarity in this area is humiliating, even though it is all John’s fault.
“Twenty-nine,” he answers. “What does it matter?” He’s already reaching for John again but John’s hands come up to encircle his wrists, stopping him.
“So we’re not…” John trails off, eyes skating away from Sherlock’s intense stare.
That answers the question nicely. Thirty-one. When Sherlock is thirty-one, he and John do this.
“So we will.”
John meets his eyes again. “Of course we will,” he says. “Hadn’t you already figured that out?”
“No. When?” It comes out more desperate than Sherlock intended.
There’s a pause, and then a dull smack as John swipes at his own forehead in realisation. “I’m with Sarah tonight, that’s why you’re so wound up, right?”
It isn’t a question, not really. It’s John’s own history, so he should have an idea where he was at roughly this time. The bit about him being wound up, well… John always has been perceptive, not in the way that Sherlock is, of course, but of the two of them, he is definitely the more knowledgeable one when it comes to matters of the heart.
Sherlock says nothing. John can read his silence easily enough.
“I’m on Sarah’s sofa tonight, Sherlock, not in her bed. I never did sleep with her, in the end.”
Something in Sherlock calms at that and goes back to rest. His pulse slows, good, excellent, and then it races again as thinks about it and says: “Well, we still could, you know.”
John’s brow furrows. “We could what?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse, you know I hate that.”
Sherlock shuffles closer, brings a pyjama-clad leg up and hooks it over John’s naked one, pressing their lower halves together. He’s been aroused since the first touch of John’s lips to his, and he can feel now that John is in a similar predicament. This is just silly, he thinks, they might as well do something about it.
John groans, head tipping back. Sherlock blinks at the exposed line of John’s throat. He has the most ridiculous urge to lean in and bite and mark and claim and he does so, a scrape of teeth that’s just on the wrong side of gentle, and the movement presses them even more firmly together at the waist.
John’s hands are still around his wrists, tight enough now to cause him pain. “No, we can’t.”
“Why not?” Sherlock asks. “You can’t tell me you don’t want this. I can feel that, John.”
To demonstrate his point, he rocks his hips against John’s.
John lets out a choked sound, oh, and releases Sherlock’s forearms to take his face in his hands and kiss him again.
Sherlock tries to keep up with the pace, but John is ahead of him here - both in age and experience. He has no idea what he is supposed to do, and so instead does what he wants to do, opening his mouth to John’s tongue and running a hand down from John’s shoulder to press against his chest, feeling the elevated heart rate that matches his own.
It’s the middle of spring and while the weather is turning warmer, Sherlock knows he shouldn’t be feelings as hot as he is. John’s skin has warmed up and Sherlock is already burning all over. He feels light-headed, dizzy. Is the burning from oxygen deprivation in his muscles? They’re still kissing, John’s tongue stroking his, he’s not getting enough air. Breathing’s boring, he doesn’t need oxygen to live, he needs this. His palms feverishly take in all the sense-memory they can - the difference between skin that’s dry and skin that’s filmed with a thin sheen of sweat, the difference between unmarred skin and skin that’s been broken, stitched, healed.
Sherlock doesn’t stray below the waist with his hands, but John still sighs into his mouth as he explores. The need is suddenly so sharp, so deep that it almost feels like pain.
Sherlock is aching. He knew, he just knew it would be like this.
“We haven’t-” John is breathless as he breaks them apart to speak, the hushed words spilling over Sherlock’s lips, still close enough to touch. “At this time, we haven’t yet.”
“All the more reason to do it now,” Sherlock replies, like it’s already decided.
John tips his head forward and rests his brow against Sherlock’s. He laughs. “Our first time, I knew it couldn’t be your first time with me. You knew me too well, you knew what I like.”
There’s a feeling like a jerk, a distinct downward tug of something in Sherlock’s stomach. It’s something he has no reference for, no name. Physically, it feels like falling when there’s nothing to catch you, when you don’t know how far there is left to fall.
“As you know me.”
John lays a hand against Sherlock’s face, pulls back enough that he can look at him as he sweeps his thumb tenderly, repeatedly over a cheekbone. “As I know you.”
Sherlock searches John’s expression: there’s love in the gaze, certainly, but the grief is still equally palpable. It chills him, despite the heat of John’s body against his. It’s incongruous; it doesn’t belong here now with them together like this.
He’s figured it out.
“I’m not with you, in your time,” he says. “What’s happened?”
John’s hand combs through Sherlock’s hair, the fingertips light against his scalp. Don’t ask anymore, the touch says.
For once, Sherlock won’t, because he’s distracted by the way John’s face sets, heated determination in his eyes now like he’s made up his mind about something.
“Have you done this with anyone?” John asks. “I know you hadn’t at eighteen, there wasn’t really time when you were twenty-one and then it was eight years until we met again…”
John reaches down between them, the first teasing touch of his hand to Sherlock’s navel making him jump slightly. John takes his hand away, an apology already in his eyes, and Sherlock catches his wrist, attempting to guide him back towards the anticipated destination. He rolls his eyes when John resists.
“Don’t ask when you know I haven’t wanted to do this with anyone but you. You must know that, I must have told you at some point.”
“You might have done.”
John’s eyes slip closed and he shifts his hips against Sherlock’s, grinds his bare erection against Sherlock’s covered one. The gasp Sherlock lets out at that is stolen from him, taken by John’s lips as they slant eagerly over his.
“I don’t-” Sherlock starts when John breaks the kiss, faltering when John begins mouthing his way down Sherlock’s jaw. “I don’t know-”
John continues his path downwards, trailing warm, open-mouthed kisses along Sherlock’s sternum, across the quivering muscles in his abdomen. He tucks his fingers under the waistband of Sherlock’s pyjama bottoms but doesn’t pull them down; he just strokes the backs of his fingers along the sensitive skin of Sherlock’s pelvis. Back and forth, back and forth. Below that, the intermittent movement of the cotton of his pyjamas against his cock is maddening.
Sherlock can easily label this as the most erotic thing to have ever been done to him, although he knows that his past experience is inexistent, and he has an idea that this label is going to undergo many revisions as they go along.
“Come on,” he huffs when John repeats the move with a smirk, not progressing any further.
John laughs but obliges, pulling the bottoms down past Sherlock’s knees and then off. He comes back up to align his hips with Sherlock’s again, easing himself down between legs that spread for him almost automatically.
He stops just before their skin can touch, no barriers between them now. He catches Sherlock’s half-lidded, glazed stare.
“Sherlock?”
Sherlock meets his eyes, reads the question in them. He knows John’s intention and he wants to struggle, almost. He wants to struggle and writhe and get away because it’s too much, it’s too intense. At the same time, he also wants to stay stock-still and let John do whatever he wants to him, because it’s not enough, it can never be enough. He aches for John, and he just needs-
Two hands find and take hold of his. John’s fingers fit into the spaces between Sherlock’s, his palms push until Sherlock moves his arms out, until his elbows are bent and pinned to the mattress by his sides. It makes him feel grounded, and he relaxes momentarily.
“It’s okay,” John says, looking down at him. “Calm down. Remember: I know you.”
Sherlock relaxes further at the words. John knows him. John has done this before. With him. Many times, probably. Oh, that’s-
“I’ll take care of you,” John is murmuring as he squeezes Sherlock’s hands. “I know every single inch of you. I know what you like.”
Vaguely, in some bizarre section of his mind that can’t even lose awareness when he is about to have sex, Sherlock feels that he should be complaining. The sort of lust-addled, possessive sentiments dripping from John’s lips are not something he would ordinarily want to hear.
Right now though? They’re glorious. Close and intimate and knowing. John’s soft words and quickened breaths ghosting over his ear and making him shiver. It’s getting to him because no one knows him like John. No one could ever know him the way John does, or will.
The thought is intoxicating, and the dizzying high it produces is more potent than anything he’s ever injected into his body. Sherlock’s head is spinning, but the usual whirling chaos has been exchanged for heady focus. He’s never been so affected before without there being chemicals involved. But there are chemicals at work here, aren’t there? Hormones and neurotransmitters and it’s all just chemistry except for how it really isn’t - he’s never felt like this with anyone else, never imagined it with anyone else. Only John. For all these years, it’s only ever been John. Because he loves John.
He does, of course he does. How could he doubt it? How could he question it?
“I know what makes you come.” John is still speaking, his voice getting louder, rising in confidence. “I know what makes you beg to come, Sherlock. Tell me that you want me to show you. Tell me you want that.”
John is barely touching him, but Sherlock is panting as if he’d just chased down two serial killers. John leans down slightly, finally, so that their erections meet. There’s still tension in his back though as he holds his body above Sherlock’s, not pressing down with his full weight.
He stays still for a moment, as if letting Sherlock adjust.
Sherlock isn’t sure he’ll ever adjust.
“Please,” he says, eyelashes just brushing his cheeks as he closes his eyes. “John.”
John knows what he likes, and he wants to be shown because he doesn't even know that. He wants to learn what John likes, ready for when his John- or is this his John? Aren’t they all his?
Yes, he thinks fiercely, and untangles his fingers from John’s to move his hands to John’s back. He digs his fingernails in, and John’s shoulderblades shudder under his palms. He uses his grip to bring John’s body into his, as close as they can be while still being separate, while still being individuals, wrapped in their own skin.
Right now, he wants to fuse their bones, their blood vessels, their flesh. He could breathe John’s air, share John’s scars. He could live inside John, perfect and invincible and whole. His incomparable brain and John’s steadfast heart. If ever two people were made to be one, surely it was them.
John responds to him - he pushes as Sherlock pulls, pushes his cock against Sherlock’s and moans at the friction, the sensation. John should be used to this, Sherlock thinks, he shouldn’t be this eager.
“Oh God,” John says, the words cut off and strangled as he swallows to cover another moan.
He reaches down again to curl his hand around Sherlock, who lets out a shaky breath and jerks his hips. He’s incredulous when he realises he didn’t consciously mean to do either of those things.
This is the first touch of a hand that isn’t his own, and it is indescribable. It shouldn’t be - by all rights, John’s hand is not that different from his, the only changes being his slightly smaller palm, his shorter fingers, callouses in different places - but it is, because it’s John and he moves his hand just so, he twists it over the head, he swipes his thumb languorously over the slit on the downstroke. Sherlock knows what he’s going to do to himself; he has no clue what John is going to do to him at any given moment. It’s thrilling, and so, so much better.
Sherlock insinuates his own hand between them, scratches his nails lightly through the hair that runs from John’s navel down to his groin, and brushes the backs of his knuckles against John’s erection. He’s enjoying (loving) being pressed so close to John, but the downside is he can’t see all of him. A lot of data is being denied to him. He’ll have to ask for John’s measurements - flaccid and erect, of course, though he’s got a good idea about flaccid already from John’s numerous arrivals - later on.
“Now is not the time to get your measuring tape out, Sherlock,” John gasps the words, breathless and amused.
Sherlock raises his head from where he’s been trying to get a proper look at John’s cock, mouth opening in surprise.
“Not a mind reader,” John assures him, eyes pinching shut and mouth opening to match Sherlock’s when Sherlock moves his hand and closes it around him. “I just know you.”
That phrase again. Sherlock feels a rush of pleasure just hearing it.
He catalogues the things he can’t see with his palm and fingers. Girth, length, and shape are easily estimated. He finds them all to be fairly average, according to the knowledge he’s garnered from books. Typical John, hiding his extraordinary self in his ordinary exterior.
He catalogues John’s responses as he goes too, finding that John seems to like the attention as Sherlock runs his inquisitive fingertips lightly along his glans, the corona, and particularly when he spreads pre-come from the tip down on his way to caress the frenulum.
“Jesus,” John breathes out, his eyes still closed, “do that again.”
Sherlock does, and then moves his attention back to the shaft and head, copying the technique John is using on him. John continues to stroke him in return, speeding up from his previous slow, torturous pace. He’s getting impatient.
“I forgot how quiet you were when we first started doing this,” John says abruptly. “Open your mouth, let me hear you.”
Until now, Sherlock has been taking quick breaths through his nose, not trying to be silent but managing it compared to John’s moans and sighs. He opens his mouth, ragged breaths audible as he pants against John’s neck. If anything, it heightens his arousal, hearing the effect of their exertions, hearing what John does to him.
“John, I’m-” he can’t get the words out.
“Are you close?” John asks urgently. “Your voice, God, it always gets me there. I am, I am so close, Sherlock. Nearly there.”
Sherlock has been teetering on the edge for some time, he barely touches himself, and this is the object of his desire since his teenage years touching him for the first time and telling him how close he gets him to orgasm. Sherlock knew he wasn’t going to last long.
When he goes to reply, all he manages is to gasp out John before stiffening, and then spasming uncontrollably as he comes with a low, drawn-out groan.
“That’s it,” John is saying above him, mumbling nonsense as he strokes and squeezes him through it. “That’s it, you’re there now.”
Sherlock slumps back against the mattress when it’s over, head turning to one side and his grip around John loosening as he loses just about all the tension in his body. John pushes into his slack fist a couple of times anyway and then there’s a spurt of fluid over his hand as John comes too. “Oh fuck, Sherlock-”
John collapses against his chest after, breathing hard and fast for a moment before he begins to relax and come back to himself.
“Christ.”
Sherlock’s reply is a sated, deeply content “mmm” from his throat. He feels very sleepy all of a sudden.
The rumbled syllable reverberates through John and he laughs. “I’d forgotten how much sex makes you stupid.”
“Not stupid,” Sherlock says, but it’s a half-hearted attempt at sounding affronted.
He closes his eyes and turns his face upwards for a kiss, and John indulges him. Their mouths meet and move lazily for several minutes, Sherlock still learning all the while. They break apart only to come back together again and again, initially trading brief closed-mouth kisses before one of them feels the need to deepen them.
Eventually, John finds himself doing more and more of the work as Sherlock decreases in responsiveness.
“Tired?” he asks fondly.
That “mmm” noise again. Sherlock’s eyes remain closed.
John presses a last lingering kiss to Sherlock’s soft, pliant mouth and then rests his head against Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Sleep then, and I’ll be gone and the other me will be home before you wake up.”
“Sticky,” Sherlock complains weakly.
“Easily fixed later. Sleep.”
And Sherlock does, one hand carefully grasping John’s until that particular version of John fades out of the time period.
Sherlock doesn’t wake when he goes.