Sherlock fic: Inbetween
I haven't done this kind of thing in years...
BBC Sherlock fic.
Spoilers/ Warnings: Oblique spoilers for A Study in Pink. Only PG if badly-made tea disturbs you. Gen.
Summary: John is having nightmares and Sherlock decides to wake him up.
A/N: originally posted anon over at sherlockbbc-fic, a semi-fill of a prompt by blamethecupcake The rest of the mess is mine. All mine.
“I brought you a cup of tea.”
John dragged himself up to rest on his elbows, blinking blearily in the bright light from the landing that now fell directly across his face, and tried to work out what was wrong. Not the nightmares, not having woken drenched in sweat with blood behind his eyes - that was normal enough, although it was the first time in this house, in this bed. He had probably made half a grab towards the bedside table, also, the one that was too far away, where his revolver so pointedly wasn’t: so far, so normal.
His breathing was coming more than a little fast and he was acutely aware of the tearstains on his cheeks, but then again there was sweat enough that he could still hope forlornly they wouldn’t be all that obvious.
“I thought you would prefer tea to water; tea is meant to be more comforting, after all.” A pause. “Isn’t it?”
Ah, that was it. John tried to effect an irritated glance at the figure loitering in the doorway, and then narrowed his eyes both against the light and the figure’s stance, which was looking, his half-awake brain insisted, shifty.
“What time is it?” he said, voice cracking.
“Oh, some god-awful hour in the middle of the night. You interrupted my thinking, not that it was going anywhere, by the way, so I made you a cup of tea.”
John stared at Sherlock, who shifted a little more.
“I don’t think it’s a bad cup of tea. I can make tea, you know. I’ve made tea several times before. It’s probably not as good as Mrs Hudson makes, or even as good as you would make, I daresay, but it’s -”
“Yes,” John was finally awake enough to interrupt that particular uncomfortable tirade, and struggled up into a sitting position, swinging his feet out from where they had become completely entangled in the blankets. “Tea. Thank you. Yes.”
Sherlock still waited, on the threshold of the room, holding the cup of tea as if it were actually his own, before all but lurching forward and leaving it on the bedside table, right in the space next to where the gun would have been. John waited for him to retreat to leaning against the door jamb again before reaching out to take it. It wasn’t very warm, for some reason that escaped him.
“Sorry,” he said hoarsely, running one hand through his hair before wrapping it around the mug, “didn’t mean to -”
“Well of course you didn’t mean to,” Sherlock cut in sarcastically, instantly more at ease - although he was still gazing at John intently, so John obligingly took a sip of the stuff, and then found he had to keep the mug up, half covering his face, as a shield for spitting it straight back out again. Not, he realised, being groggy from a nightmare and also observed by Sherlock Holmes, that he was going to conceal that. He lowered the mug to find Sherlock looking somehow bereft.
“Wrong?”
“I think the milk’s off,” John used the first excuse he could think of. What had Sherlock done to this? Brewed it up in the microwave? Impossible - he never used the microwave for cooking, more as a room-temperature storage unit for various body parts. Although come to think of it, that was in fact his use for almost the entire kitchen… John reached over and turned his lamp on, blinking furiously at this further assault of light, and peered down at the tea.
“Off? I opened a new carton, it can’t possibly be off. How long does it take for milk to go off?”
“Look,” John said wearily, “if it’s off, it’s off. No need to get upset about it.”
“No need! There is every need! Not that I am upset, why should I be upset? It’s only milk,” Sherlock was setting off again at high speed, and John finally decided his nightmares must have intruded at a very important point of a particularly knotty problem to be causing this much consternation.
“Can I help you with something?” he offered. “Er, skull replacement?”
“No, no, it’s not the milk.” Sherlock was staring at him. “I’ll be right back.” And he gave his silk dressing gown a dramatic flourish and whisked himself off down the stairs.
John stared at the mug of tepid liquid for a while, and then limped across the corridor - damn leg, never responded well to a nightmare - to the bathroom. He was limping back again when there was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, followed by an excitable volley of cursing.
“Sherlock?” John called down the stairs with, he felt, more trepidation than was strictly necessary.
“I’m fine, I’m fine, take no notice, I’ll be up in a bit, just trying to sort out the - uh - damn and blast it - ” There was another crash. “Don’t - come - down! Everything’s under control, and you’ll just make it worse.”
John sighed, and started to make his way down the stairs.
“It’s just - an experiment - nothing - terribly important, nothing that can’t be fixed - just - an experiment - an experiment.” Sherlock was booting broken glass under the table in the kitchen, and John, without the help of the banister, decided there wasn’t much he could be in the way of help. “If the kettle’s boiled,” he suggested, “I could just -”
Sherlock stopped what he was doing and gave him a very nasty look. “Sit down,” he said coldly, “before you fall down.”
“All right,” said John, irritable mostly because he knew it was true, and collapsed thankfully into his armchair, which had the decided disadvantage of having its back to the kitchen so he couldn’t see precisely what was going on, even when twisting and peering around the seat back, which was murder on his shoulder, not to mention his leg, so in the end he gave up and stared at the room instead. He found himself cataloguing the familiar signs - the lights on above the sofa; the kicked-off shoes in the middle of the room; discarded nicotine patches on the floor; the violin bow rosined past the point of all reason, leaving white stripes scuffed along the back of the sofa, presumably as Sherlock had fallen to cogitating without actually getting to the point of playing - the middle of the night and his being asleep he already knew wouldn’t have affected Sherlock’s decision at all, and he found himself wishing that he had played a sonata tonight, as a little Bach, or Brahms, or some other composer beginning with B, tended to lessen the impact of nightmares considerably. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of classical music, per se, but more that such kinds of music distracted his brain, he supposed, jarring it away from the mental images and giving him the distance he needed for a relatively quiet night’s sleep.
The steaming noise and subsequent click of the kettle a few minutes later made him start, and then lean back in the chair with a wry, unamused chuckle.
“There isn’t any more milk!” Sherlock yelled from the kitchen, with another noise that sounded like something was being kicked repetitively. The next sentence sounded as if he was mimicking someone else, although John had no idea who it might be. “I’ll go out and get some more, won’t be a minute.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, at this time of the night?” John looked around for the newspaper. He’d read it all, but was determined to settle in down here before Sherlock could order him back up to bed.
“There’s a shop on the corner of the Marylebone Road that’s open all night. I wouldn’t object to a walk, and you take milk.”
“Well I’ll just take it without this once!” he grumbled back, unwilling to be left alone and even more unwilling to admit that.
“But then how would you be an Englishman, John? Taking your tea without milk.”
“I’d be an Englishman drinking tea at three o’clock in the morning when there isn’t any milk.”
“Two fifty-three.”
“Sorry?”
“Two fifty-three, I said. The time. Not three o’clock, not quite. And it’s not the milk, anyhow, so I shall just put milk in and it will be a proper cup of tea for an English gentleman and that will be the end of it.”
“And a sugar,” John said, half in relief, half with the unshakable feeling that he was being mocked.
“I’m your flatmate, my dear John, not your landlady,” They both laughed for a moment, giggling like schoolboys, although when Sherlock came out with his second attempt at tea in his hand, he gave John a very careful look that the latter found even more uncomfortable than the one to which he had awoken.
“Stop trying to be perceptive at two fifty-three -“
“I’m always perceptive, I refuse to stop, and it’s two fifty-four -”
“Whatever, and don’t mind me, just go back to what you were doing. I shan’t disturb you now. Oh, and thanks for.” He lifted his mug in salute, shook out the paper, and settled back, pausing after a few seconds and glancing up to find Sherlock still staring at him. “Well?” he said.
“The tea,” Sherlock prompted.
“Is hot,” said John irritably, “so unless you want me to burn my mouth you will have to wait until it is three o’clock - or thereabouts,” he added quickly. He wasn’t sure if it was easier or harder to deal with Sherlock when he was awake or half-asleep, or whether feeling perfectly comfortable right here, right now, just meant he was getting used to dealing with the younger man’s idiosyncrasies.
Sherlock started pacing up and down the other half of the room.
“You’ve put the skull away,” John said, in an effort to start a conversation, seeing as Sherlock looked on the verge of descending into a thoroughly bad mood, and on balance John wasn’t sure he wouldn’t rather take the nightmare, which had the advantage of being more familiar.
“It was looking at me funny,” Sherlock glared at the space on the mantelpiece where the skull wasn’t. “And it can’t even make tea any better than I can, so I put it in a drawer. Perhaps you should keep your cane at the bottom of the stairs, even though you don’t actually need it and I shouldn’t encourage you.”
“I don’t need it,” John said, nettled, and then, wondering if this fuss wasn’t actually just caused by interest in his nightmares, said, “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it tonight.”
“Why would you need to talk about it at all?” Sherlock said. “I can guess at what you dream about quite reasonably enough to satisfy my curiosity, even without all the shouting, so there is utterly no need for me to ask you. Besides, I shouldn’t dream of telling you my dreams, so there’s absolutely no reason I would insist on you telling me yours. There. You can have your secrets; I don’t know everything.”
“You do actually sleep then?” John did his best to ignore Sherlock’s air of having bestowed a great favour upon him, and surveyed the wreck of the living room. He admitted to himself that he sometimes quite liked it, the mess; his own quarters - room, he kept reminding himself - being functional and tidy by virtue of being mostly bare. Being surrounded by other people’s clutter was a reminder: this is your world now, this is how you are going to have to live. He wasn’t entirely sure that the nightmares weren’t actually a reaction to that fact, a clinging to his world - to his previous world.
“Of course I sleep,” Sherlock sniffed in a rather affected manner, as if John had entirely missed the point.
“I can’t see you going to a doctor for sedatives, somehow,” John found himself commenting.
Sherlock shot him a startled look, and then began to laugh. “It’s three o’clock,” he said
“Hm? Oh, the tea.”
Sherlock was the last man you could call military, and yet there were some things - the precision, the lack of explanations, the need to live on the edge - that made this world something that hung in the inbetween, in the twilight hours, something very particular, and different, and familiar.
John took a sip of the tea, which still tasted slightly strange - he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the mug had previously held - but, if he didn’t think about it too much, bearable, and nodded. “That’ll do,” he said, and was rewarded with one of Sherlock’s cheeky, all-too-knowing grins.
[2,101]
BBC Sherlock fic.
Spoilers/ Warnings: Oblique spoilers for A Study in Pink. Only PG if badly-made tea disturbs you. Gen.
Summary: John is having nightmares and Sherlock decides to wake him up.
A/N: originally posted anon over at sherlockbbc-fic, a semi-fill of a prompt by blamethecupcake The rest of the mess is mine. All mine.
“I brought you a cup of tea.”
John dragged himself up to rest on his elbows, blinking blearily in the bright light from the landing that now fell directly across his face, and tried to work out what was wrong. Not the nightmares, not having woken drenched in sweat with blood behind his eyes - that was normal enough, although it was the first time in this house, in this bed. He had probably made half a grab towards the bedside table, also, the one that was too far away, where his revolver so pointedly wasn’t: so far, so normal.
His breathing was coming more than a little fast and he was acutely aware of the tearstains on his cheeks, but then again there was sweat enough that he could still hope forlornly they wouldn’t be all that obvious.
“I thought you would prefer tea to water; tea is meant to be more comforting, after all.” A pause. “Isn’t it?”
Ah, that was it. John tried to effect an irritated glance at the figure loitering in the doorway, and then narrowed his eyes both against the light and the figure’s stance, which was looking, his half-awake brain insisted, shifty.
“What time is it?” he said, voice cracking.
“Oh, some god-awful hour in the middle of the night. You interrupted my thinking, not that it was going anywhere, by the way, so I made you a cup of tea.”
John stared at Sherlock, who shifted a little more.
“I don’t think it’s a bad cup of tea. I can make tea, you know. I’ve made tea several times before. It’s probably not as good as Mrs Hudson makes, or even as good as you would make, I daresay, but it’s -”
“Yes,” John was finally awake enough to interrupt that particular uncomfortable tirade, and struggled up into a sitting position, swinging his feet out from where they had become completely entangled in the blankets. “Tea. Thank you. Yes.”
Sherlock still waited, on the threshold of the room, holding the cup of tea as if it were actually his own, before all but lurching forward and leaving it on the bedside table, right in the space next to where the gun would have been. John waited for him to retreat to leaning against the door jamb again before reaching out to take it. It wasn’t very warm, for some reason that escaped him.
“Sorry,” he said hoarsely, running one hand through his hair before wrapping it around the mug, “didn’t mean to -”
“Well of course you didn’t mean to,” Sherlock cut in sarcastically, instantly more at ease - although he was still gazing at John intently, so John obligingly took a sip of the stuff, and then found he had to keep the mug up, half covering his face, as a shield for spitting it straight back out again. Not, he realised, being groggy from a nightmare and also observed by Sherlock Holmes, that he was going to conceal that. He lowered the mug to find Sherlock looking somehow bereft.
“Wrong?”
“I think the milk’s off,” John used the first excuse he could think of. What had Sherlock done to this? Brewed it up in the microwave? Impossible - he never used the microwave for cooking, more as a room-temperature storage unit for various body parts. Although come to think of it, that was in fact his use for almost the entire kitchen… John reached over and turned his lamp on, blinking furiously at this further assault of light, and peered down at the tea.
“Off? I opened a new carton, it can’t possibly be off. How long does it take for milk to go off?”
“Look,” John said wearily, “if it’s off, it’s off. No need to get upset about it.”
“No need! There is every need! Not that I am upset, why should I be upset? It’s only milk,” Sherlock was setting off again at high speed, and John finally decided his nightmares must have intruded at a very important point of a particularly knotty problem to be causing this much consternation.
“Can I help you with something?” he offered. “Er, skull replacement?”
“No, no, it’s not the milk.” Sherlock was staring at him. “I’ll be right back.” And he gave his silk dressing gown a dramatic flourish and whisked himself off down the stairs.
John stared at the mug of tepid liquid for a while, and then limped across the corridor - damn leg, never responded well to a nightmare - to the bathroom. He was limping back again when there was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, followed by an excitable volley of cursing.
“Sherlock?” John called down the stairs with, he felt, more trepidation than was strictly necessary.
“I’m fine, I’m fine, take no notice, I’ll be up in a bit, just trying to sort out the - uh - damn and blast it - ” There was another crash. “Don’t - come - down! Everything’s under control, and you’ll just make it worse.”
John sighed, and started to make his way down the stairs.
“It’s just - an experiment - nothing - terribly important, nothing that can’t be fixed - just - an experiment - an experiment.” Sherlock was booting broken glass under the table in the kitchen, and John, without the help of the banister, decided there wasn’t much he could be in the way of help. “If the kettle’s boiled,” he suggested, “I could just -”
Sherlock stopped what he was doing and gave him a very nasty look. “Sit down,” he said coldly, “before you fall down.”
“All right,” said John, irritable mostly because he knew it was true, and collapsed thankfully into his armchair, which had the decided disadvantage of having its back to the kitchen so he couldn’t see precisely what was going on, even when twisting and peering around the seat back, which was murder on his shoulder, not to mention his leg, so in the end he gave up and stared at the room instead. He found himself cataloguing the familiar signs - the lights on above the sofa; the kicked-off shoes in the middle of the room; discarded nicotine patches on the floor; the violin bow rosined past the point of all reason, leaving white stripes scuffed along the back of the sofa, presumably as Sherlock had fallen to cogitating without actually getting to the point of playing - the middle of the night and his being asleep he already knew wouldn’t have affected Sherlock’s decision at all, and he found himself wishing that he had played a sonata tonight, as a little Bach, or Brahms, or some other composer beginning with B, tended to lessen the impact of nightmares considerably. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of classical music, per se, but more that such kinds of music distracted his brain, he supposed, jarring it away from the mental images and giving him the distance he needed for a relatively quiet night’s sleep.
The steaming noise and subsequent click of the kettle a few minutes later made him start, and then lean back in the chair with a wry, unamused chuckle.
“There isn’t any more milk!” Sherlock yelled from the kitchen, with another noise that sounded like something was being kicked repetitively. The next sentence sounded as if he was mimicking someone else, although John had no idea who it might be. “I’ll go out and get some more, won’t be a minute.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, at this time of the night?” John looked around for the newspaper. He’d read it all, but was determined to settle in down here before Sherlock could order him back up to bed.
“There’s a shop on the corner of the Marylebone Road that’s open all night. I wouldn’t object to a walk, and you take milk.”
“Well I’ll just take it without this once!” he grumbled back, unwilling to be left alone and even more unwilling to admit that.
“But then how would you be an Englishman, John? Taking your tea without milk.”
“I’d be an Englishman drinking tea at three o’clock in the morning when there isn’t any milk.”
“Two fifty-three.”
“Sorry?”
“Two fifty-three, I said. The time. Not three o’clock, not quite. And it’s not the milk, anyhow, so I shall just put milk in and it will be a proper cup of tea for an English gentleman and that will be the end of it.”
“And a sugar,” John said, half in relief, half with the unshakable feeling that he was being mocked.
“I’m your flatmate, my dear John, not your landlady,” They both laughed for a moment, giggling like schoolboys, although when Sherlock came out with his second attempt at tea in his hand, he gave John a very careful look that the latter found even more uncomfortable than the one to which he had awoken.
“Stop trying to be perceptive at two fifty-three -“
“I’m always perceptive, I refuse to stop, and it’s two fifty-four -”
“Whatever, and don’t mind me, just go back to what you were doing. I shan’t disturb you now. Oh, and thanks for.” He lifted his mug in salute, shook out the paper, and settled back, pausing after a few seconds and glancing up to find Sherlock still staring at him. “Well?” he said.
“The tea,” Sherlock prompted.
“Is hot,” said John irritably, “so unless you want me to burn my mouth you will have to wait until it is three o’clock - or thereabouts,” he added quickly. He wasn’t sure if it was easier or harder to deal with Sherlock when he was awake or half-asleep, or whether feeling perfectly comfortable right here, right now, just meant he was getting used to dealing with the younger man’s idiosyncrasies.
Sherlock started pacing up and down the other half of the room.
“You’ve put the skull away,” John said, in an effort to start a conversation, seeing as Sherlock looked on the verge of descending into a thoroughly bad mood, and on balance John wasn’t sure he wouldn’t rather take the nightmare, which had the advantage of being more familiar.
“It was looking at me funny,” Sherlock glared at the space on the mantelpiece where the skull wasn’t. “And it can’t even make tea any better than I can, so I put it in a drawer. Perhaps you should keep your cane at the bottom of the stairs, even though you don’t actually need it and I shouldn’t encourage you.”
“I don’t need it,” John said, nettled, and then, wondering if this fuss wasn’t actually just caused by interest in his nightmares, said, “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it tonight.”
“Why would you need to talk about it at all?” Sherlock said. “I can guess at what you dream about quite reasonably enough to satisfy my curiosity, even without all the shouting, so there is utterly no need for me to ask you. Besides, I shouldn’t dream of telling you my dreams, so there’s absolutely no reason I would insist on you telling me yours. There. You can have your secrets; I don’t know everything.”
“You do actually sleep then?” John did his best to ignore Sherlock’s air of having bestowed a great favour upon him, and surveyed the wreck of the living room. He admitted to himself that he sometimes quite liked it, the mess; his own quarters - room, he kept reminding himself - being functional and tidy by virtue of being mostly bare. Being surrounded by other people’s clutter was a reminder: this is your world now, this is how you are going to have to live. He wasn’t entirely sure that the nightmares weren’t actually a reaction to that fact, a clinging to his world - to his previous world.
“Of course I sleep,” Sherlock sniffed in a rather affected manner, as if John had entirely missed the point.
“I can’t see you going to a doctor for sedatives, somehow,” John found himself commenting.
Sherlock shot him a startled look, and then began to laugh. “It’s three o’clock,” he said
“Hm? Oh, the tea.”
Sherlock was the last man you could call military, and yet there were some things - the precision, the lack of explanations, the need to live on the edge - that made this world something that hung in the inbetween, in the twilight hours, something very particular, and different, and familiar.
John took a sip of the tea, which still tasted slightly strange - he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the mug had previously held - but, if he didn’t think about it too much, bearable, and nodded. “That’ll do,” he said, and was rewarded with one of Sherlock’s cheeky, all-too-knowing grins.
[2,101]