Partners in Crime
Title: Partners in Crime
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: PG
Characters/pairings: John, Sherlock
Warnings (including spoilers): None
Wordcount: 335 words
Summary: John cares that everyone in London thinks he’s sleeping with Sherlock, but she doesn’t. Originally written for the prompt ‘Alwaysagirl!Sherlock/John, "Partners in Crime”’ on comment_fic, before I realized that I had not only not included the requested ship, but I actually made a point of not including it.
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It annoyed John. It didn’t annoy Sherlock, well, things like that never did. So fine, maybe he was a bit old-fashioned, but he wanted to protect his friend’s reputation. That wasn’t an easy thing to do when half of London was convinced you were shagging and she couldn’t care less.
He’d lost count of the number of times that officers at the Yard had made comments like ‘Keep your bird under control’ or ‘I thought my girlfriend was crazy.’ He’d nearly attacked the man who asked if Sherlock even shut up while she was being fucked, and since then Lestrade had been laying down the law.
The public was just as unwilling to accept the truth. Everyone from the newspapers to the cashier at the corner store thought they were a couple, and a thousand repetitions of ‘This isn’t a date’ and ‘We’re just flatmates’ and even ‘I’m dating someone else’ couldn’t convince the world otherwise. Eventually even Sarah stopped believing him, and at that point the war was basically lost.
Sherlock didn’t care what others thought, John knew. She was amused when the tabloids began stirring mystery about their relationship, but since it didn’t affect her brain she wasn’t interested. The rumors didn’t make her stop bringing John to candle-lit restaurants, or tugging him by the hand through the streets of London at night, or giving him long, thoughtful looks that always made Sally Donavon tease him about eyesex.
Sometimes, John wished Sherlock was a man. Not that it would have made much of a difference to him, but then maybe the population of London would actually believe that they weren’t shagging. But when John watched her as she solved a murder in less than a minute, or leaped from roof to roof across an alley, or stomped around their flat for days on end muttering about being bored, he knew he wouldn’t change her for the world.