Dearly Departed
Title: Dearly Departed
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: R
Word Count: 3700
Warnings: Slight gore, disturbing themes.
Disclaimer: In no way mine, or anything to do with me, I own nothing.
Summary: There's a dead body in the bath, and it's looking at him.
AN: The very last story in the challenge I've been doing with goldenusagi which has been immense fun. goldenusagi's story is called Amaranthine.
There's a dead body in the bath.
There's a dead body in the bath, and it's looking at him.
John adjusts the tie on his bathrobe and sighs.
"Sherlock."
There's a rustling noise from somewhere else in the flat, and then the sound of footsteps, before Sherlock eventually appears in the doorway.
"Body." John points, to where the dead man - because it is quite clearly a man - is slumped naked against the tiled wall. He looks sad, and ever so slightly surprised. Offputtingly so, if John's being entirely honest. Because, really, the poor man didn't ask to be canted into the taps, one arm folded back up the wall, the other trailing out and hanging in mid-air. Any more than John asked to be confronted with as much while only wearing a bathrobe.
"It's clean," Sherlock says. As if he can't see what the problem is. John has to wonder how exactly he ranks 'things which may be disturbing to others' in his head. Assuming of course that there is any sort of list at all. "It's been through processing, unclaimed, no family."
"It's in the bath," John clarifies, because he feels that's the most important part at the moment. The part Sherlock seems to have missed. "Just lying there. Naked and surprising."
"You would have preferred him naked and surprising on the sofa? Or perhaps propped at the table?" Sherlock looks amused now, because of course he does.
"I was going to have a bath." There's more quietly disappointed than angry and disturbed in that statement. Which John suspects means this has probably all gone wrong somewhere. Being quietly disappointed about a dead body in the bath, this is where his life has brought him.
Sherlock's smile is pointed from every angle.
"I'm sure he'd budge up a little."
John glares at him.
"Not funny. Not in any way funny." He's avoiding looking at the dead man because quite frankly now he looks both sad and accusing. Not in Sherlock's direction though, no the accusation is fixed firmly in John's completely innocent direction. He forces down anything that will encourage Sherlock to make puns and tries for supportive. "I understand you have to eat regularly, I do -"
"Unless you'd like to see me devolve and ravage my way across London, yes. Dead bodies are something of a necessity."
John sighs.
"But could you not leave them lying in the bath, like a zombie that's just decided to have a quick dip before bed, it's disconcerting."
"There was nowhere else to put him, and you know chasing always makes me hungry, chasing with you always makes me hungry. Ghouls generally hunt in packs you know." Sherlock mutters something after that. Probably something put out at John's continued refusal to come out and dig things up with him - which no, not even at his most drunk and especially influence-able.
"But you hate other people," John tries. That's a statement of fact, Sherlock does hate other people, regularly and obviously.
"Other people are hateful, it's understandable."
So that apparently didn't help at all.
"So, it's just me that you inflict them on then?"
Sherlock gives him a look, which John has come to understand means he's being slow and Sherlock doesn't want to point it out.
"What -" It occurs to him that this might be Sherlock attempting to be subtle. There may be some sort of attempt to consider feelings here. John's usually quicker at spotting that. "Are you taking dead people from the hospital and stashing them round the flat so you don't think about eating me, is that what this is about?" John mostly regrets that after he asks. He's been thinking about the possibility of it for a while but had decided it was something he wasn't going to probe, just in case. He definitely had no intention of just blurting it out.
Sherlock sniffs and pokes the dead man in the bath - avoidance tactic, or possibly he's just hungry and distracted - until John smacks him on the arm.
"Of course not, I take them from the hospital because it's the most expedient method of acquiring fresh dead."
John winces.
"Please don't call them 'fresh dead,' we're not in a nineteenth century vampire novel."
Sherlock sits on the edge of the bath, entirely uncaring when the dead man's arm ends up slung over his leg, fingers folded in a disturbingly friendly fashion across Sherlock's knee.
"I'm not going to pretend I haven't thought about eating you - though I suppose indulged in the idea of it is a better description, everything is more...visceral now, and sexual if I'm to be honest. However, eating you would defeat the very purpose of our relationship. You'd be gone and I'd be forced to find someone else to partner with. I'm rather attached to you, and it would be a terrible waste." There's a small pause. "You're usually dead at the time, if that's any consolation."
That - that doesn't really help at all. Sherlock seems to think it does.
"Yes, I'm going to pretend you didn't just admit to fantasising about eating me there. For my own peace of mind." The pause goes on for long enough to make John suspicious, he glances sideways. "Stop looking at me - stop thinking about it."
Sherlock laughs, deep in his throat, reaches down and digs his nails under the corpse's chin, dragging him out of the bath like he weighs a third of what he actually does.
John can hear him dragging the body off through the flat.
This isn't quite the 'it's complicated' that his mother warned him about when it came to relationships.
~~~
Six months ago Sherlock had died...and then come back as a corpse-devouring member of the undead, possibly through sheer force of will as much as dark magic. It hadn't been entirely surprising, if John was being honest - not the corpse-devouring, just the coming back. Sherlock did hate to leave things unfinished.
But no matter how hard John pretends that they are, things haven't been the same between them since. Even though on a good day, on a very good day - and if Sherlock doesn't open his mouth - he looks the same. On a bad day John tends to shut himself in his room and try to ignore the growling, and the angry crunching of bones.
They hadn't exactly been - not in any sort of traditional way - for all that everyone had assumed. There was just an extreme sort of mutual co-dependence, a familiarity with each other, an odd and completely unexplainable sort of understanding that they came as a team.
...
John stares into his mug of slowly cooling tea and tells himself to stop lying. Because they had been, or close enough to it that denial was pointless.
But things are different now.
The violin ended up in the rubbish three days after Sherlock came back, strings broken, neck splintered. Apparently his ears were too sensitive to bear the screeching now. John had muttered something about him being fine with it before. Which had made Sherlock laugh, dry and unexpected, and the twisting nauseous horror that had been churning in John's gut since he saw him again, since he realised what had happened to him, had slowly unwound.
A day after that Sherlock had been back out with the police, scarf pulled up high over his mouth and Lestrade keeping a careful distance - and not quite pointing his gun at him.
Things like this didn't happen in the city, they happened out in the countryside, where the ground was still seeped in death magic from the war. It wasn't supposed to happen in urban areas, not for almost a thousand years. Though it really shouldn't be so surprising that Sherlock Holmes would find a way to come back from the dead however he could.
For the first week or so John had treated him the same as he always did, and he honestly hadn't been sure if it had been a sort of numb denial, or genuine relief at having him back. Eventually it had become normal - or he'd made it normal.
Or he'd gone mad and become the sort of person who wasn't surprised to find dead people in bathtubs, waiting to be eaten?
Sherlock's most recent investigation is into a series of disappearances in London tube stations. People seem to bring their murders and mysteries to him as frequently as they did before - more frequently perhaps, though they tend stare harder and stand further away now. This case involves a lot of late nights, a lot of walking in the darkness (where John bumps into things and Sherlock doesn't) and a rather unpleasant amount of unexpected diversions that lead to the disused (and occasionally not so disused) sewer systems.
So John's taking more baths than usual, sometimes two in a row. There hasn't been a repeat of the bathtub incident yet. Which doesn't stop John from having the lingering suspicion that there's a dead body somewhere in the flat. That there's a dead body hidden somewhere in the flat - under the floor perhaps?
But he's managed to wrangle his way into some clothes, and his hair is almost dry when Sherlock stalks out of his room in his dressing gown and trousers, the lack of shirt making his prominent ribs and collarbones something of a talking point. Ghouls tend to burn through calories fast. He's trailing opened envelopes, and a familiar air of barely restrained amusement. He slides close, almost close enough to touch, and six months ago he would have clasped John's shoulder, would have leaned some of his weight there. In a way John had never really protested. All sharp fingers and strangely unfamiliar indulgence, that not-really-together-but-not-apart - he's not sure how to describe it in a way that doesn't make it sound silly.
John misses it.
He eyes the fancy notecard Sherlock sets on the table instead, with its over-achieving swirls of calligraphy.
"Stop inviting Mycroft to dinner. It's unkind."
"And miss these personally written and incredibly polite notes of refusal?"
John tilts the card open and reads the short but carefully scripted message.
"They are very polite."
Sherlock wanders past him, and he doesn't steal John's tea any more, but he always looks like he wants to. John tends to leave it near the edge of the table anyway.
"I'm enjoying the fact that I unnerve him now. I'm enjoying the fact that my brother can be unnerved. Besides it's not as if he came to dinner before."
"You never invited him before, hence the suspicion I suspect."
"Maybe if you invited him to dinner?" Sherlock's lifted eyebrow suggests he's genuinely considering it.
"Do you actually want Mycroft to come to dinner? And if the answer to that is yes my next question will almost certainly be why?"
Sherlock's frown seems not to know the answer to that.
"I'm not sure I should turn that over in my head too much. We had, as you're aware, something of an adversarial relationship, we pushed each other. Unfortunately competitiveness is rather too intimately linked with biting now."
John nods.
"So, that's a no on the dinner invitation then?"
"I suspect my choice of main course would disagree with him."
"I suspect watching you eat it would disagree with him more," John counters.
"Maybe Christmas then?"
John absolutely does not smile at him over the paper.
"How's your case going?"
"Trains are unfortunately loud, bad for the concentration." Sherlock throws himself onto the sofa, which protests quietly. "Which has led me to try another avenue, something unexpected, something daring, I'm expecting it to come off brilliantly."
"The last time you revelled in your over-confidence Moriarty killed you." John points out, and every time he says it it gets a little easier.
"Whereupon I dragged my way out of the grave and ate his face off, yes."
John rubs the space between his eyes and sighs, loudly.
"It's disturbing how you always say that with a smile on your face, you realise that."
"It was surprisingly satisfying, if inordinately messy, sudden desire for human flesh aside. I decided to consider it a win."
"You consider being a ghoul a win?"
"Moriarty is dead, my ability to solve crime hasn't been impaired. If anything my improved ability to smell death has made my work easier. Also, the expression on Mycroft's face when I arrived at his house composed almost entirely of blood, dirt and teeth - yes, that was more than worth it."
"I'm still disappointed I wasn't there for that," John admits. At the time he would probably have been horrified, but seeing Mycroft in that sort of state might have made up for it.
"And Moriarty's criminal network seems unenthusiastic about continuing their harassment of me."
John makes a dubious noise in his throat.
"They did send an assassin," he reminds him. "You ate him."
Sherlock steeples his fingers and grins over them. John is going to have to tell him to stop doing that, it's so much more threatening than it used to be.
"I remember. Vividly. "
So did John. Sherlock hadn't started at anything vital and it had taken...a while. He folds the paper, heads to find his coat.
"I have to go to work, try not to do anything too gruesome - or should that be don't get caught doing anything gruesome. Which by the way is not encouragement. I am not tacitly encouraging...anything."
"Certainly not." He can tell by the tone Sherlock is mocking him. But then he slips close, faster than he used to be, and John ends up with a scarf wrapped round his throat, not one of his own, and it smells very strongly like Sherlock used to, expensive and human and faintly of cigarettes. "I forget what it's like to be cold," Sherlock mutters, hands slipping free. "I barely paid attention at the time, but I was aware of it."
He's still very close, familiar and yet very much not. His smile is different now, wider, sharper, strangely more alive. Or possibly just hungrier, John gets confused sometimes. He clears his throat, with some difficulty.
"Thanks. So, I'll expect you back late then. And I don't need to tell you to be careful, since you won't. But be careful anyway."
The sharp smile grows wider at one side.
"My regenerative capabilities -"
John waves him quiet with considerable enthusiasm.
"Are as marvellous as they are disgusting. Just, yes, be careful."
Sherlock grumbles something that John thinks is meant to mean he will be as reckless and wilful as always but appreciates the sentiment. It's a collection of syllables he's started hearing in his sleep.
~~~
The flat remains dark and silent even after John gets in, makes himself tea and eventually drags himself to bed. It's some strange nebulous number of hours later that he finds himself awake and staring at half the blurred face of a clock. He lifts his head from the pillow and discovers that it's nearly half past two in the morning.
There are bare feet moving on carpet, moving but not dragging. John isn't entirely surprised when they drift in the direction of his room, until there's cold air trailing in and John's looking straight at Sherlock by the moonlight that's streaking in through the curtains. He's so pale John can almost see through his skin, and his hair looks like dark gashes in his face. He has smears and spatters of red up both his bare arms, streaked carelessly down chin and neck. He doesn't come further than the end of the bed.
"Did you catch the murderer?" John asks, half up on his elbows, tired but curious. Willing to be a part of Sherlock's slow spiral down from success.
"Of course," Sherlock says, like there was never any doubt. There are clicks in his throat, where it's still rearranging itself from screeching back to talking.
John moves his legs pointedly, and Sherlock makes a rough noise of what sounds like surprised approval and makes himself comfortable on the end of John's bed.
"Was it the father-in-law?"
Sherlock makes an agreeable noise.
"I'm happy for you," John tells him, and means it, if only because they won't have to crawl through any more sewers.
"There was a chase." Sherlock looks far too pleased by the memory. "You would have liked it. You wouldn't have been able to keep up but you would have liked it."
John sighs and resist the urge to shove him off the bed. Sherlock looks an awful lot like he notices the restraint. He's smiling again, something halfway between his old, awkward, not-quite-natural smile and his new, vicious, making-room-for-his-teeth, smile.
"You are remarkable, you realise that?"
John does frown at that.
"Am I? Funnily enough I rarely feel remarkable. I feel many things but remarkable is almost never one of them." He's managing tired right now, relieved, slightly confused, and an edge of thirsty. Definitely no remarkable though.
"Trust me, I'm always right," Sherlock nails drum silently on his own legs. "Almost always, sometimes I just think I'm right but we always manage to make that fine too. Can I...?"
"Yes," John says, before he even really knows what Sherlock's asking.
What he gets is closeness, the cold of Sherlock's skin and the click of teeth, and the weight of him against legs and hip and chest. There's a carefully closed mouth against his, brief - frightening for just a second and then something else entirely and then...gone.
"I wondered," Sherlock says, and then doesn't continue, doesn't explain. "Not helpful, worse if anything."
John thinks he's found enough breath for a reply, or a question, something. But doesn't get it out before Sherlock leans in again, more curious, mouth softer. John doesn't push him away. Doesn't even try, wonders if he should, but the very idea of it seems wrong. That seems important, worrying, sort of inevitable.
Sherlock makes a quiet noise, considering.
"Don't think that comes naturally to us - didn't come naturally to me before, truth be told. Couldn't stop thinking though. It seemed something you might allow, but I couldn't decide if that was just me."
The words are cold and confused, but some of it makes sense. It turns this quiet, strange new dynamic they have into something quieter and stranger still.
"You were never like this before," John says slowly. "We were never...before."
Would they have been, if Sherlock had been willing...capable? Had John wanted it then? He'd thought about it, of course he had, it had been hard not to. But it had just been - a thought experiment, not real. Not a thing that would ever really happen. Sherlock had always been too...not quite like everyone else.
It seems like a very long time ago now.
"No," Sherlock admits. His nails are gliding across the prickled flesh of John's arm, as if testing the skin. Leaving faint smears of red. "I was never this aware of you. Shockingly, I didn't think you'd like it, it's too -" Whatever he means to say never comes. "Everything feels like hunger now. It makes things less complicated than they used to be, but more dangerous, more distracting."
"And you're covered in blood," John says instead. Because he thinks that's a fair point. He thinks that's more helpful than asking why this is easier now, when Sherlock's no longer human. When he's something sharper and harder.
Sherlock hums in his throat. John suspects the blood may have been a catalyst, and he's aware of what Sherlock eats, and how quickly he can become something terrifying, and the exact pounds per inch strength of Sherlock's jaws now, but somehow it doesn't quite matter. It doesn't matter because Sherlock's here, and John has become far too used to following him wherever he goes.
"I'm quite possibly insane," John murmurs, quiet, so quiet. He pulls Sherlock's mouth closer. Careful, so bloody careful. He can feel his teeth, barely there, not quite shut away.
Sherlock is still cold, he hasn't pulled in any warmth from inside, and he tastes of cold air and tin, and the wet darkness of meat - and John immediately stops kissing him and eases away. It's not a jerk, more of a sway, realisation making this suddenly a little more disturbing.
"Have you been eating people?"
Sherlock's mouth does something complicated.
"It was only a hand, well an arm - not past the elbow, before the police subdued him. I had the oddest urge to bring you something, but didn't think you'd appreciate it -"
Sherlock is definitely aware of him leaning further away. Though to be fair John's trying not to laugh at the same time, and he knows it's probably an inappropriate laugh, morbid, slightly hysterical.
"Not good?" Sherlock asks.
"Not exactly good, no," John admits, even though he hasn't quite moved out of reaching distance.
"So I have to stop kissing you?" Sherlock sounds disappointed, but not surprised.
John sighs, because honestly his brain isn't telling him anything he doesn't already know. He can't quite say no, even though he should almost certainly say no.
"You could probably stop leaving bloody fingerprints all over my face."
"I was rather enjoying that part." The admission comes out easily. Sherlock never bothered to feel shame before but now John thinks he's learned how to rather enjoy that too. In his own way.
"You don't really want me to smell like food, do you?" John's not sure he wants to know the answer to that. There are far too many teeth in Sherlock's expression, more than there used to be, and there's something stretched about him that still suggests hunger.
"Part of me does, part of me wants to bite you, a rather large part as it happens. Of course none of you would grow back."
"We're not listening to that part?" John says, just to make sure.
There's a rush of cool air when Sherlock exhales in amusement.
"No, I still have enough higher brain function for that to be just one of a number of curious desires."
John, half against his better judgement, lets Sherlock kiss him again, and there are more teeth in it than is probably safe this time. But then he's never been one for safe, not really.
"Just for the record, I'm never putting anything near your mouth."
"That seems eminently sensible," Sherlock agrees.
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: R
Word Count: 3700
Warnings: Slight gore, disturbing themes.
Disclaimer: In no way mine, or anything to do with me, I own nothing.
Summary: There's a dead body in the bath, and it's looking at him.
AN: The very last story in the challenge I've been doing with goldenusagi which has been immense fun. goldenusagi's story is called Amaranthine.
There's a dead body in the bath.
There's a dead body in the bath, and it's looking at him.
John adjusts the tie on his bathrobe and sighs.
"Sherlock."
There's a rustling noise from somewhere else in the flat, and then the sound of footsteps, before Sherlock eventually appears in the doorway.
"Body." John points, to where the dead man - because it is quite clearly a man - is slumped naked against the tiled wall. He looks sad, and ever so slightly surprised. Offputtingly so, if John's being entirely honest. Because, really, the poor man didn't ask to be canted into the taps, one arm folded back up the wall, the other trailing out and hanging in mid-air. Any more than John asked to be confronted with as much while only wearing a bathrobe.
"It's clean," Sherlock says. As if he can't see what the problem is. John has to wonder how exactly he ranks 'things which may be disturbing to others' in his head. Assuming of course that there is any sort of list at all. "It's been through processing, unclaimed, no family."
"It's in the bath," John clarifies, because he feels that's the most important part at the moment. The part Sherlock seems to have missed. "Just lying there. Naked and surprising."
"You would have preferred him naked and surprising on the sofa? Or perhaps propped at the table?" Sherlock looks amused now, because of course he does.
"I was going to have a bath." There's more quietly disappointed than angry and disturbed in that statement. Which John suspects means this has probably all gone wrong somewhere. Being quietly disappointed about a dead body in the bath, this is where his life has brought him.
Sherlock's smile is pointed from every angle.
"I'm sure he'd budge up a little."
John glares at him.
"Not funny. Not in any way funny." He's avoiding looking at the dead man because quite frankly now he looks both sad and accusing. Not in Sherlock's direction though, no the accusation is fixed firmly in John's completely innocent direction. He forces down anything that will encourage Sherlock to make puns and tries for supportive. "I understand you have to eat regularly, I do -"
"Unless you'd like to see me devolve and ravage my way across London, yes. Dead bodies are something of a necessity."
John sighs.
"But could you not leave them lying in the bath, like a zombie that's just decided to have a quick dip before bed, it's disconcerting."
"There was nowhere else to put him, and you know chasing always makes me hungry, chasing with you always makes me hungry. Ghouls generally hunt in packs you know." Sherlock mutters something after that. Probably something put out at John's continued refusal to come out and dig things up with him - which no, not even at his most drunk and especially influence-able.
"But you hate other people," John tries. That's a statement of fact, Sherlock does hate other people, regularly and obviously.
"Other people are hateful, it's understandable."
So that apparently didn't help at all.
"So, it's just me that you inflict them on then?"
Sherlock gives him a look, which John has come to understand means he's being slow and Sherlock doesn't want to point it out.
"What -" It occurs to him that this might be Sherlock attempting to be subtle. There may be some sort of attempt to consider feelings here. John's usually quicker at spotting that. "Are you taking dead people from the hospital and stashing them round the flat so you don't think about eating me, is that what this is about?" John mostly regrets that after he asks. He's been thinking about the possibility of it for a while but had decided it was something he wasn't going to probe, just in case. He definitely had no intention of just blurting it out.
Sherlock sniffs and pokes the dead man in the bath - avoidance tactic, or possibly he's just hungry and distracted - until John smacks him on the arm.
"Of course not, I take them from the hospital because it's the most expedient method of acquiring fresh dead."
John winces.
"Please don't call them 'fresh dead,' we're not in a nineteenth century vampire novel."
Sherlock sits on the edge of the bath, entirely uncaring when the dead man's arm ends up slung over his leg, fingers folded in a disturbingly friendly fashion across Sherlock's knee.
"I'm not going to pretend I haven't thought about eating you - though I suppose indulged in the idea of it is a better description, everything is more...visceral now, and sexual if I'm to be honest. However, eating you would defeat the very purpose of our relationship. You'd be gone and I'd be forced to find someone else to partner with. I'm rather attached to you, and it would be a terrible waste." There's a small pause. "You're usually dead at the time, if that's any consolation."
That - that doesn't really help at all. Sherlock seems to think it does.
"Yes, I'm going to pretend you didn't just admit to fantasising about eating me there. For my own peace of mind." The pause goes on for long enough to make John suspicious, he glances sideways. "Stop looking at me - stop thinking about it."
Sherlock laughs, deep in his throat, reaches down and digs his nails under the corpse's chin, dragging him out of the bath like he weighs a third of what he actually does.
John can hear him dragging the body off through the flat.
This isn't quite the 'it's complicated' that his mother warned him about when it came to relationships.
~~~
Six months ago Sherlock had died...and then come back as a corpse-devouring member of the undead, possibly through sheer force of will as much as dark magic. It hadn't been entirely surprising, if John was being honest - not the corpse-devouring, just the coming back. Sherlock did hate to leave things unfinished.
But no matter how hard John pretends that they are, things haven't been the same between them since. Even though on a good day, on a very good day - and if Sherlock doesn't open his mouth - he looks the same. On a bad day John tends to shut himself in his room and try to ignore the growling, and the angry crunching of bones.
They hadn't exactly been - not in any sort of traditional way - for all that everyone had assumed. There was just an extreme sort of mutual co-dependence, a familiarity with each other, an odd and completely unexplainable sort of understanding that they came as a team.
...
John stares into his mug of slowly cooling tea and tells himself to stop lying. Because they had been, or close enough to it that denial was pointless.
But things are different now.
The violin ended up in the rubbish three days after Sherlock came back, strings broken, neck splintered. Apparently his ears were too sensitive to bear the screeching now. John had muttered something about him being fine with it before. Which had made Sherlock laugh, dry and unexpected, and the twisting nauseous horror that had been churning in John's gut since he saw him again, since he realised what had happened to him, had slowly unwound.
A day after that Sherlock had been back out with the police, scarf pulled up high over his mouth and Lestrade keeping a careful distance - and not quite pointing his gun at him.
Things like this didn't happen in the city, they happened out in the countryside, where the ground was still seeped in death magic from the war. It wasn't supposed to happen in urban areas, not for almost a thousand years. Though it really shouldn't be so surprising that Sherlock Holmes would find a way to come back from the dead however he could.
For the first week or so John had treated him the same as he always did, and he honestly hadn't been sure if it had been a sort of numb denial, or genuine relief at having him back. Eventually it had become normal - or he'd made it normal.
Or he'd gone mad and become the sort of person who wasn't surprised to find dead people in bathtubs, waiting to be eaten?
Sherlock's most recent investigation is into a series of disappearances in London tube stations. People seem to bring their murders and mysteries to him as frequently as they did before - more frequently perhaps, though they tend stare harder and stand further away now. This case involves a lot of late nights, a lot of walking in the darkness (where John bumps into things and Sherlock doesn't) and a rather unpleasant amount of unexpected diversions that lead to the disused (and occasionally not so disused) sewer systems.
So John's taking more baths than usual, sometimes two in a row. There hasn't been a repeat of the bathtub incident yet. Which doesn't stop John from having the lingering suspicion that there's a dead body somewhere in the flat. That there's a dead body hidden somewhere in the flat - under the floor perhaps?
But he's managed to wrangle his way into some clothes, and his hair is almost dry when Sherlock stalks out of his room in his dressing gown and trousers, the lack of shirt making his prominent ribs and collarbones something of a talking point. Ghouls tend to burn through calories fast. He's trailing opened envelopes, and a familiar air of barely restrained amusement. He slides close, almost close enough to touch, and six months ago he would have clasped John's shoulder, would have leaned some of his weight there. In a way John had never really protested. All sharp fingers and strangely unfamiliar indulgence, that not-really-together-but-not-apart - he's not sure how to describe it in a way that doesn't make it sound silly.
John misses it.
He eyes the fancy notecard Sherlock sets on the table instead, with its over-achieving swirls of calligraphy.
"Stop inviting Mycroft to dinner. It's unkind."
"And miss these personally written and incredibly polite notes of refusal?"
John tilts the card open and reads the short but carefully scripted message.
"They are very polite."
Sherlock wanders past him, and he doesn't steal John's tea any more, but he always looks like he wants to. John tends to leave it near the edge of the table anyway.
"I'm enjoying the fact that I unnerve him now. I'm enjoying the fact that my brother can be unnerved. Besides it's not as if he came to dinner before."
"You never invited him before, hence the suspicion I suspect."
"Maybe if you invited him to dinner?" Sherlock's lifted eyebrow suggests he's genuinely considering it.
"Do you actually want Mycroft to come to dinner? And if the answer to that is yes my next question will almost certainly be why?"
Sherlock's frown seems not to know the answer to that.
"I'm not sure I should turn that over in my head too much. We had, as you're aware, something of an adversarial relationship, we pushed each other. Unfortunately competitiveness is rather too intimately linked with biting now."
John nods.
"So, that's a no on the dinner invitation then?"
"I suspect my choice of main course would disagree with him."
"I suspect watching you eat it would disagree with him more," John counters.
"Maybe Christmas then?"
John absolutely does not smile at him over the paper.
"How's your case going?"
"Trains are unfortunately loud, bad for the concentration." Sherlock throws himself onto the sofa, which protests quietly. "Which has led me to try another avenue, something unexpected, something daring, I'm expecting it to come off brilliantly."
"The last time you revelled in your over-confidence Moriarty killed you." John points out, and every time he says it it gets a little easier.
"Whereupon I dragged my way out of the grave and ate his face off, yes."
John rubs the space between his eyes and sighs, loudly.
"It's disturbing how you always say that with a smile on your face, you realise that."
"It was surprisingly satisfying, if inordinately messy, sudden desire for human flesh aside. I decided to consider it a win."
"You consider being a ghoul a win?"
"Moriarty is dead, my ability to solve crime hasn't been impaired. If anything my improved ability to smell death has made my work easier. Also, the expression on Mycroft's face when I arrived at his house composed almost entirely of blood, dirt and teeth - yes, that was more than worth it."
"I'm still disappointed I wasn't there for that," John admits. At the time he would probably have been horrified, but seeing Mycroft in that sort of state might have made up for it.
"And Moriarty's criminal network seems unenthusiastic about continuing their harassment of me."
John makes a dubious noise in his throat.
"They did send an assassin," he reminds him. "You ate him."
Sherlock steeples his fingers and grins over them. John is going to have to tell him to stop doing that, it's so much more threatening than it used to be.
"I remember. Vividly. "
So did John. Sherlock hadn't started at anything vital and it had taken...a while. He folds the paper, heads to find his coat.
"I have to go to work, try not to do anything too gruesome - or should that be don't get caught doing anything gruesome. Which by the way is not encouragement. I am not tacitly encouraging...anything."
"Certainly not." He can tell by the tone Sherlock is mocking him. But then he slips close, faster than he used to be, and John ends up with a scarf wrapped round his throat, not one of his own, and it smells very strongly like Sherlock used to, expensive and human and faintly of cigarettes. "I forget what it's like to be cold," Sherlock mutters, hands slipping free. "I barely paid attention at the time, but I was aware of it."
He's still very close, familiar and yet very much not. His smile is different now, wider, sharper, strangely more alive. Or possibly just hungrier, John gets confused sometimes. He clears his throat, with some difficulty.
"Thanks. So, I'll expect you back late then. And I don't need to tell you to be careful, since you won't. But be careful anyway."
The sharp smile grows wider at one side.
"My regenerative capabilities -"
John waves him quiet with considerable enthusiasm.
"Are as marvellous as they are disgusting. Just, yes, be careful."
Sherlock grumbles something that John thinks is meant to mean he will be as reckless and wilful as always but appreciates the sentiment. It's a collection of syllables he's started hearing in his sleep.
~~~
The flat remains dark and silent even after John gets in, makes himself tea and eventually drags himself to bed. It's some strange nebulous number of hours later that he finds himself awake and staring at half the blurred face of a clock. He lifts his head from the pillow and discovers that it's nearly half past two in the morning.
There are bare feet moving on carpet, moving but not dragging. John isn't entirely surprised when they drift in the direction of his room, until there's cold air trailing in and John's looking straight at Sherlock by the moonlight that's streaking in through the curtains. He's so pale John can almost see through his skin, and his hair looks like dark gashes in his face. He has smears and spatters of red up both his bare arms, streaked carelessly down chin and neck. He doesn't come further than the end of the bed.
"Did you catch the murderer?" John asks, half up on his elbows, tired but curious. Willing to be a part of Sherlock's slow spiral down from success.
"Of course," Sherlock says, like there was never any doubt. There are clicks in his throat, where it's still rearranging itself from screeching back to talking.
John moves his legs pointedly, and Sherlock makes a rough noise of what sounds like surprised approval and makes himself comfortable on the end of John's bed.
"Was it the father-in-law?"
Sherlock makes an agreeable noise.
"I'm happy for you," John tells him, and means it, if only because they won't have to crawl through any more sewers.
"There was a chase." Sherlock looks far too pleased by the memory. "You would have liked it. You wouldn't have been able to keep up but you would have liked it."
John sighs and resist the urge to shove him off the bed. Sherlock looks an awful lot like he notices the restraint. He's smiling again, something halfway between his old, awkward, not-quite-natural smile and his new, vicious, making-room-for-his-teeth, smile.
"You are remarkable, you realise that?"
John does frown at that.
"Am I? Funnily enough I rarely feel remarkable. I feel many things but remarkable is almost never one of them." He's managing tired right now, relieved, slightly confused, and an edge of thirsty. Definitely no remarkable though.
"Trust me, I'm always right," Sherlock nails drum silently on his own legs. "Almost always, sometimes I just think I'm right but we always manage to make that fine too. Can I...?"
"Yes," John says, before he even really knows what Sherlock's asking.
What he gets is closeness, the cold of Sherlock's skin and the click of teeth, and the weight of him against legs and hip and chest. There's a carefully closed mouth against his, brief - frightening for just a second and then something else entirely and then...gone.
"I wondered," Sherlock says, and then doesn't continue, doesn't explain. "Not helpful, worse if anything."
John thinks he's found enough breath for a reply, or a question, something. But doesn't get it out before Sherlock leans in again, more curious, mouth softer. John doesn't push him away. Doesn't even try, wonders if he should, but the very idea of it seems wrong. That seems important, worrying, sort of inevitable.
Sherlock makes a quiet noise, considering.
"Don't think that comes naturally to us - didn't come naturally to me before, truth be told. Couldn't stop thinking though. It seemed something you might allow, but I couldn't decide if that was just me."
The words are cold and confused, but some of it makes sense. It turns this quiet, strange new dynamic they have into something quieter and stranger still.
"You were never like this before," John says slowly. "We were never...before."
Would they have been, if Sherlock had been willing...capable? Had John wanted it then? He'd thought about it, of course he had, it had been hard not to. But it had just been - a thought experiment, not real. Not a thing that would ever really happen. Sherlock had always been too...not quite like everyone else.
It seems like a very long time ago now.
"No," Sherlock admits. His nails are gliding across the prickled flesh of John's arm, as if testing the skin. Leaving faint smears of red. "I was never this aware of you. Shockingly, I didn't think you'd like it, it's too -" Whatever he means to say never comes. "Everything feels like hunger now. It makes things less complicated than they used to be, but more dangerous, more distracting."
"And you're covered in blood," John says instead. Because he thinks that's a fair point. He thinks that's more helpful than asking why this is easier now, when Sherlock's no longer human. When he's something sharper and harder.
Sherlock hums in his throat. John suspects the blood may have been a catalyst, and he's aware of what Sherlock eats, and how quickly he can become something terrifying, and the exact pounds per inch strength of Sherlock's jaws now, but somehow it doesn't quite matter. It doesn't matter because Sherlock's here, and John has become far too used to following him wherever he goes.
"I'm quite possibly insane," John murmurs, quiet, so quiet. He pulls Sherlock's mouth closer. Careful, so bloody careful. He can feel his teeth, barely there, not quite shut away.
Sherlock is still cold, he hasn't pulled in any warmth from inside, and he tastes of cold air and tin, and the wet darkness of meat - and John immediately stops kissing him and eases away. It's not a jerk, more of a sway, realisation making this suddenly a little more disturbing.
"Have you been eating people?"
Sherlock's mouth does something complicated.
"It was only a hand, well an arm - not past the elbow, before the police subdued him. I had the oddest urge to bring you something, but didn't think you'd appreciate it -"
Sherlock is definitely aware of him leaning further away. Though to be fair John's trying not to laugh at the same time, and he knows it's probably an inappropriate laugh, morbid, slightly hysterical.
"Not good?" Sherlock asks.
"Not exactly good, no," John admits, even though he hasn't quite moved out of reaching distance.
"So I have to stop kissing you?" Sherlock sounds disappointed, but not surprised.
John sighs, because honestly his brain isn't telling him anything he doesn't already know. He can't quite say no, even though he should almost certainly say no.
"You could probably stop leaving bloody fingerprints all over my face."
"I was rather enjoying that part." The admission comes out easily. Sherlock never bothered to feel shame before but now John thinks he's learned how to rather enjoy that too. In his own way.
"You don't really want me to smell like food, do you?" John's not sure he wants to know the answer to that. There are far too many teeth in Sherlock's expression, more than there used to be, and there's something stretched about him that still suggests hunger.
"Part of me does, part of me wants to bite you, a rather large part as it happens. Of course none of you would grow back."
"We're not listening to that part?" John says, just to make sure.
There's a rush of cool air when Sherlock exhales in amusement.
"No, I still have enough higher brain function for that to be just one of a number of curious desires."
John, half against his better judgement, lets Sherlock kiss him again, and there are more teeth in it than is probably safe this time. But then he's never been one for safe, not really.
"Just for the record, I'm never putting anything near your mouth."
"That seems eminently sensible," Sherlock agrees.