Specialties
Title: Specialties
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: John develops genius deductive skills after a chemical incident.
Wordcount: 2,765
Other: written for an anon for the Sherlock kinkmeme. You can find the original prompt here and the original fill here.
“Perhaps that might have been possible, Lestrade, if it weren’t for the fact that Miss Fentam wasn’t poisoned,” John said, with an apologetic half-nod to Lestrade.
Sherlock hadn’t seen this coming.
He saw most everything coming, really, which was why this was such a complete upheaval to his world, but in all fairness, there were some things that even Sherlock Holmes himself could not have predicted.
That didn’t make it any easier. Not at all.
Lestrade had the same mildly bewildered look on his face that he got when Sherlock was the one making these sorts of uncanny deductions. But he’d gotten over the original shock at the situation last week. They all had. Once they had swallowed their initial surprise, Lestrade’s team had taken it surprisingly well. It was always better to have two genius consulting detectives than one, after all.
“Then how did she die? I don’t see any signs of attack.”
“She was electrocuted. Tortured, I’d even say. Probably extended over around twelve hours, though I’d have to get a better look at her in a morgue to verify that.”
“Exactly what makes you say that, again?”
Sherlock noted a brief flicker of John’s eyelids and a tightening at the corner of his lips, but that was the only sign of irritation at all that John displayed. He didn’t heave a chestful of sighs, he didn’t roll his eyes, and he certainly didn’t force Anderson to face the wall, not like Sherlock did. But then, neither did he contradict Sherlock when he’d ordered Anderson into the corner upon first arriving at the crime scene. Sherlock counted that as a victory.
“If you look at her hands and pull apart her fingers, there are tiny spots between them. They’re burns, third degree burns, to be exact. Careful examination shows a faint red circle around each, where the adhesive leads were attached. She was wired up very purposefully. But the burns are in different stages of healing. Some of them have barely begun to blister. They were produced closer to her death, until finally the last were peri- and post-mortem. These were not connected for one large, instantaneous shock. These were slow, disconnected shocks, with ample time between them. Judging by the burns, the dried tears, and the healing, I’d say about twelve hours. It’s the only logical answer.”
And it was. Sherlock might have perhaps mentioned the way the current had affected her jewelry, but John had hit all of the important points.
Lestrade raised and dropped his eyebrows in an impressed shrug, jotted it down in his notepad, and nodded. “Electrocution it is.”
Donovan glanced their way. “Why don’t you come have a look at these bottled specimens in the sitting room, Doctor.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He clambered to his feet and looked to Sherlock. “You’re all right for the rest of the scene?”
“Oh, yes. There’s quite enough here to entertain me.” Sherlock crossed his hands behind his back and did a slow pace of the room, drinking in the details.
“Good. Good. Give a shout if you need me.” With that, John followed Donovan off. Donovan was always requesting John’s help nowadays. She needed the genius expertise, but it was easier, far easier to get it from John. She’d always hated Sherlock, distrusted him the way some people were still convinced that their intelligent phones were plotting to kill them just because they were smarter and ran on batteries instead of blood.
Sherlock couldn’t entirely fault her. Now that the dust was finally settling, John had an advantage. It was strange to think of it so, but it was. John was a medical man; he could identify a shrapnel of bone as a patella with only the slightest sliver of it to work with. He knew his way around a body even better than Sherlock, which was a rare skill indeed. But even there, he and Sherlock stood on even ground. John had his specialty and Sherlock had everything else. John could hardly identify the brands of tobacco simply by their ashes, nor could he name by heart which streets could be reliably used by a half-blind flight risk to run from Charing Cross station. Expertise was expertise; knowledge and intelligence had always been easily separated. They were threads that frequently were woven together into the same patterns, but they were hardly mutually exclusive.
And John had always had a sort of intelligence that Sherlock had lacked. Sherlock was the logical one, the one that thought in numbers and puzzles and scattered points of data, tossed out amongst the black cavern of his mind like sparkling constellations waiting to be threaded together into meaningful patterns. Orion. Cassiopeia. Homicide. Accidental drowning.
But John had been the empathetic one. He understood people. He was never one of the mindless flock, sucked in by the whirls of emotions, but he could tell at a glance what someone felt and what exactly had made them feel that way. Sherlock had to piece together those sorts of thoughts bit by bit. There’s a down-turned mouth. There’s a wrinkle at the corner of the eye. That twist of the nose. That signals disgust, doesn’t it. It was a code, a code he’d learned to read but never to speak fluently. John was an expert. But it had been alright like that. They were two of a kind, opposites that fit together at their rough edges.
But now things were all different. It had just been one case, one stupid case, a boring one he wouldn’t have taken if it weren’t for Lestrade’s conviction that there was something fishy about the watchglass. And then John had disappeared from the clinic, vanished under everyone’s noses, and by the time Sherlock had hunted him down in a dank cellar laboratory, he’d been half conscious and insensible, drugged on a steady IV drip for nearly two days straight.
He’d woken up twelve hours later, exhausted and confused, but unharmed. The changes hadn’t presented themselves immediately. It wasn’t until they’d left the hospital and John made a passing comment about Sherlock eating more than takeaway wontons that they’d realized he’d deduced it entirely. He proceeded to divine the nature of the cabbie’s marriage - and extramarital affairs - simply from the little scars on his hands. The new curtains on the flat next door meant that they’d gotten a new puppy because Marietta was lonely, but it was still not toilet-trained.
John was a genius. A bona-fide, card-carrying genius. And though before they had balanced each other out, suddenly the scales were skewed. Sherlock was a genius, but John was a genius who could fit into society. Not a sociopath. He was irritated sometimes by their idiocy, but he never showed it to the others, not when he had enough energy and patience to stay cheery around them. He understood people, he could laugh with them about stupid things like reality shows on the telly, about lime jello, about the T-Rex cake they’d all gotten Anderson as a gag gift. And suddenly Sherlock was… less.
It was the drugs. Something in the drugs.
“Anything useful?” Lestrade interrupted.
“Miss Fentam was a drinker, borderline alcoholic, but still functioning. Went to church, didn’t believe it. Her killer was looking for something in her bookcase, but didn’t find it. Tortured Fentam in an attempt to force her to tell him where it was. He quite likes tweed. And I believe John already told you his shoe size.”
“Right. 45.”
Sherlock didn’t bother with more than a confirming grunt.
A glance through the doorway proved that John was chatting with Donovan. He had likely shared all the available evidence, and now was simply being… friendly. John was better at that sort of banality. Sherlock never saw the real point of small talk.
And that was really the problem, when he got down to it. John had admired his intellect. It was something he could never have, but could watch from afar. Sherlock had amused him, an erratic, unpredictable genius. His biggest draw was his intellect, and John hadn’t let his other flaws detract from that. But now John shared his intellect. Sherlock was no longer amusing. John was a brilliant, caring, committed man, a doctor and a veteran, loyal to a fault, dangerous, and bitingly witty when he wanted to be.
Sherlock was just a man who liked puzzles, who had liked to call him idiot.
What was there left that he could offer?
“I’ll put a few men on figuring out what she could have that would be interesting enough for someone to target her. Thanks, Holmes.”
Sherlock nodded briefly, impassively.
“Well, looks like we’re all done here,” John said from the doorway, and clapped his hands together. “Hope nobody minds if we clear out. Want to make the dinner rush.” He headed over to Sherlock and slipped into step beside him. Naturally. It was difficult for Sherlock to tell if this was social convention, to act like nothing was changed, or simply that John thought it hadn’t. Or was being too kind to tell Sherlock as much just yet.
They slipped off onto the street, breath puffing into the air, leaving little wisps behind them that faded off. Less permanent tracks than the dirty footprints they were leaving on the sidewalk. Neither were in the mood to overhear snatches of idle, moronic conversation from restaurant-goers, so they grabbed a hefty brown bag of Chinese to go and lugged it back to the flat. The warm smell of orange chicken and soy went a long way to cover the odors of Sherlock’s last experiments with decomposing tissue. John forced Sherlock to eat at least a box of fried rice under the threat of throwing out all of the petri dishes colonizing in the fridge. They ate pleasantly, draped over the furniture, tossing ideas between them between bites.
“It could be a ledger. Royles looked fishy, and he was starting to sweat when Donovan started poking around his files. She figured out something she wasn’t supposed to.”
“No,” Sherlock said, in his usual firm way, gesturing with a snow pea in his chopsticks, “Langley’s ledger showed all the signs of legitimate use. And Royles’ office décor is hardly befitting a man committing corporate graft.”
“No, but that could be caution. His car is a step above the others, at least.” John paused a moment, then continued. “No, never mind, scratch that. He’s obviously behind on the loans. You saw the windshield.”
Sherlock made a vague noise of agreement. He had seen the windshield.
At this, John cast him a more searching look. Sherlock took a long swallow of rapidly cooling tea and made a face at it.
“… Are you okay, there?”
Sherlock arched an eyebrow at him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’ve got that face on. You usually only get that face when Anderson’s talking.”
“Surely you can now understand the immortal pain that is the continued existence of Anderson, which so completely flies in the face of natural selection.”
John gave an ungainly snort. “No arguments on that one. He does try, though.”
“And fails. Miserably. To such a degree that sometimes he honestly surprises me with the depths of his inanity.”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“You’re looking for things that aren’t there.”
“You know, I don’t think I am. You’ve been acting off all week. I haven’t seen you this quiet during a case in a long time. You should be - you should be dragging me off across London by now! We’re eating Chinese.”
“The Chinese was your idea,” Sherlock pointed out drily.
“But you went along with it. That means you’re off.”
It was both amusing and aggravating to see logic applied to such an illogical field as feelings.
“Is that so.” John was never put off by changes of subject, and when Sherlock wasn’t able to outright lie to the man, his usual course of action had been to make vaguely intimidating questioning responses. They used to make John doubt himself enough to drop it. They didn’t anymore.
“Yes, it is, and you know it, so don’t give me that ‘Is that so,’” he said, with an eerily accurate mimic of Sherlock’s cultured drawl.
“Very well. Then perhaps you can explain to me this source of ‘offness’ that I seem to be displaying, because I certainly haven’t the foggiest.”
John rolled his eyes. It was funny, sometimes. His IQ would make a psychologist weep, but he was still taken to the same sorts of normal idiosyncrasies that he’d had before the chemicals had spread through him like ink in water.
“Very well. Shall I explain it in your terms?” he said archly, and didn’t stop to hear Sherlock’s inevitable snort. “First of all,” he counted on his fingers as he went, “like I said, somehow you’re managing not to run off to some new mousehole in London, making me chase after you. Second, you only actually let me force you to eat when you’re bothered by something, no matter what I threaten you with. Third, besides making Anderson turn around, you didn’t even say a word to him all evening. Fourth, you waited for me to change my mind about Langley’s car instead of telling me I was wrong. I could go on, Sherlock. I’m up to seventeen now.”
There was a moment of resounding silence for a moment, then the noise of Sherlock’s chopsticks scraping at the inside of the takeout box, without actually picking up food.
“I suggest Shouldham St.”
“Excuse me, what?”
“Shouldham St. For your new offices.”
“The clinic isn’t moving, Sherlock. You know that.”
“Don’t be stupid, John, you’re above that now. I’m not referring to your clinic offices. Your consulting detective offices.”
It was so obvious. Sherlock was no longer special, not to John. John had Sherlock’s brilliance, and his own empathy on top of it. He could easily start up his own business. He could rack in the cases with all of the detectives that had dealt with Sherlock one too many times, were weary of the ice and the sharp edges. John didn’t need him anymore. It was only logical that he would leave.
John’s eyes flickered with the spark of sudden understanding. Sherlock noticed that. He also noticed the way his tight grip on the box loosened as his brows shifted. He noticed the different note in his voice when he said, “Sherlock…” but it didn’t quite fit into his dichotomous key of emotions. Was that pity? Guilt? Shame?
“Sherlock, I’m not setting up my own consulting detective offices, and I don’t ever want to.”
“It’s illogical to hide behind me when you’re perfectly capable of standing on your own within the field.”
John’s lips quirked slightly in what might have been a smile. “Thank you,” he murmured. He was always good at finding the little backhanded compliments within Sherlock’s comments. “But I’m not hiding behind you. I’m standing next to you. There’s a difference.”
“I see.”
He didn’t.
“Sherlock - “ he started again, but broke off and set his orange chicken down, licking his lips. He pushed off of the sofa and moved over to Sherlock, balancing lightly on the armrest of his chair. “Sherlock, I’m not here just because you’re smart. Which means that I’m not going anywhere now just because I’m smart, too. If not p, then not q. I’m here because I want to be.”
There was something searching in John’s gaze, then, when he cast it over Sherlock, sliding slowly over his face, into each and every crack and crevice in his expression. Sherlock didn’t know what it was John was looking for, but he seemed to find it, because his expression turned decisive - decision, Sherlock knew that one - and then he leaned down and caught his mouth in a kiss.
There was a moment where it was all hesitation and soft plush confusion, and then Sherlock put an arm around John and pulled. And then there was nothing soft about it. It was hard, flat planes and pushing and static heat. They fought for dominance against each other’s lips, a battle stratagem in tongues and teeth, and it was a heady, thrilling thought to Sherlock, addictive in its novelty, that they could fight all they wanted, but they would always be equals. Always equals. So when he drove his hand into John’s hair and tugged him down, it wasn’t a fearful attempt to tie him there, keep him from running, but it was nothing more than the simple desire to hold him close.
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: John develops genius deductive skills after a chemical incident.
Wordcount: 2,765
Other: written for an anon for the Sherlock kinkmeme. You can find the original prompt here and the original fill here.
“Perhaps that might have been possible, Lestrade, if it weren’t for the fact that Miss Fentam wasn’t poisoned,” John said, with an apologetic half-nod to Lestrade.
Sherlock hadn’t seen this coming.
He saw most everything coming, really, which was why this was such a complete upheaval to his world, but in all fairness, there were some things that even Sherlock Holmes himself could not have predicted.
That didn’t make it any easier. Not at all.
Lestrade had the same mildly bewildered look on his face that he got when Sherlock was the one making these sorts of uncanny deductions. But he’d gotten over the original shock at the situation last week. They all had. Once they had swallowed their initial surprise, Lestrade’s team had taken it surprisingly well. It was always better to have two genius consulting detectives than one, after all.
“Then how did she die? I don’t see any signs of attack.”
“She was electrocuted. Tortured, I’d even say. Probably extended over around twelve hours, though I’d have to get a better look at her in a morgue to verify that.”
“Exactly what makes you say that, again?”
Sherlock noted a brief flicker of John’s eyelids and a tightening at the corner of his lips, but that was the only sign of irritation at all that John displayed. He didn’t heave a chestful of sighs, he didn’t roll his eyes, and he certainly didn’t force Anderson to face the wall, not like Sherlock did. But then, neither did he contradict Sherlock when he’d ordered Anderson into the corner upon first arriving at the crime scene. Sherlock counted that as a victory.
“If you look at her hands and pull apart her fingers, there are tiny spots between them. They’re burns, third degree burns, to be exact. Careful examination shows a faint red circle around each, where the adhesive leads were attached. She was wired up very purposefully. But the burns are in different stages of healing. Some of them have barely begun to blister. They were produced closer to her death, until finally the last were peri- and post-mortem. These were not connected for one large, instantaneous shock. These were slow, disconnected shocks, with ample time between them. Judging by the burns, the dried tears, and the healing, I’d say about twelve hours. It’s the only logical answer.”
And it was. Sherlock might have perhaps mentioned the way the current had affected her jewelry, but John had hit all of the important points.
Lestrade raised and dropped his eyebrows in an impressed shrug, jotted it down in his notepad, and nodded. “Electrocution it is.”
Donovan glanced their way. “Why don’t you come have a look at these bottled specimens in the sitting room, Doctor.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He clambered to his feet and looked to Sherlock. “You’re all right for the rest of the scene?”
“Oh, yes. There’s quite enough here to entertain me.” Sherlock crossed his hands behind his back and did a slow pace of the room, drinking in the details.
“Good. Good. Give a shout if you need me.” With that, John followed Donovan off. Donovan was always requesting John’s help nowadays. She needed the genius expertise, but it was easier, far easier to get it from John. She’d always hated Sherlock, distrusted him the way some people were still convinced that their intelligent phones were plotting to kill them just because they were smarter and ran on batteries instead of blood.
Sherlock couldn’t entirely fault her. Now that the dust was finally settling, John had an advantage. It was strange to think of it so, but it was. John was a medical man; he could identify a shrapnel of bone as a patella with only the slightest sliver of it to work with. He knew his way around a body even better than Sherlock, which was a rare skill indeed. But even there, he and Sherlock stood on even ground. John had his specialty and Sherlock had everything else. John could hardly identify the brands of tobacco simply by their ashes, nor could he name by heart which streets could be reliably used by a half-blind flight risk to run from Charing Cross station. Expertise was expertise; knowledge and intelligence had always been easily separated. They were threads that frequently were woven together into the same patterns, but they were hardly mutually exclusive.
And John had always had a sort of intelligence that Sherlock had lacked. Sherlock was the logical one, the one that thought in numbers and puzzles and scattered points of data, tossed out amongst the black cavern of his mind like sparkling constellations waiting to be threaded together into meaningful patterns. Orion. Cassiopeia. Homicide. Accidental drowning.
But John had been the empathetic one. He understood people. He was never one of the mindless flock, sucked in by the whirls of emotions, but he could tell at a glance what someone felt and what exactly had made them feel that way. Sherlock had to piece together those sorts of thoughts bit by bit. There’s a down-turned mouth. There’s a wrinkle at the corner of the eye. That twist of the nose. That signals disgust, doesn’t it. It was a code, a code he’d learned to read but never to speak fluently. John was an expert. But it had been alright like that. They were two of a kind, opposites that fit together at their rough edges.
But now things were all different. It had just been one case, one stupid case, a boring one he wouldn’t have taken if it weren’t for Lestrade’s conviction that there was something fishy about the watchglass. And then John had disappeared from the clinic, vanished under everyone’s noses, and by the time Sherlock had hunted him down in a dank cellar laboratory, he’d been half conscious and insensible, drugged on a steady IV drip for nearly two days straight.
He’d woken up twelve hours later, exhausted and confused, but unharmed. The changes hadn’t presented themselves immediately. It wasn’t until they’d left the hospital and John made a passing comment about Sherlock eating more than takeaway wontons that they’d realized he’d deduced it entirely. He proceeded to divine the nature of the cabbie’s marriage - and extramarital affairs - simply from the little scars on his hands. The new curtains on the flat next door meant that they’d gotten a new puppy because Marietta was lonely, but it was still not toilet-trained.
John was a genius. A bona-fide, card-carrying genius. And though before they had balanced each other out, suddenly the scales were skewed. Sherlock was a genius, but John was a genius who could fit into society. Not a sociopath. He was irritated sometimes by their idiocy, but he never showed it to the others, not when he had enough energy and patience to stay cheery around them. He understood people, he could laugh with them about stupid things like reality shows on the telly, about lime jello, about the T-Rex cake they’d all gotten Anderson as a gag gift. And suddenly Sherlock was… less.
It was the drugs. Something in the drugs.
“Anything useful?” Lestrade interrupted.
“Miss Fentam was a drinker, borderline alcoholic, but still functioning. Went to church, didn’t believe it. Her killer was looking for something in her bookcase, but didn’t find it. Tortured Fentam in an attempt to force her to tell him where it was. He quite likes tweed. And I believe John already told you his shoe size.”
“Right. 45.”
Sherlock didn’t bother with more than a confirming grunt.
A glance through the doorway proved that John was chatting with Donovan. He had likely shared all the available evidence, and now was simply being… friendly. John was better at that sort of banality. Sherlock never saw the real point of small talk.
And that was really the problem, when he got down to it. John had admired his intellect. It was something he could never have, but could watch from afar. Sherlock had amused him, an erratic, unpredictable genius. His biggest draw was his intellect, and John hadn’t let his other flaws detract from that. But now John shared his intellect. Sherlock was no longer amusing. John was a brilliant, caring, committed man, a doctor and a veteran, loyal to a fault, dangerous, and bitingly witty when he wanted to be.
Sherlock was just a man who liked puzzles, who had liked to call him idiot.
What was there left that he could offer?
“I’ll put a few men on figuring out what she could have that would be interesting enough for someone to target her. Thanks, Holmes.”
Sherlock nodded briefly, impassively.
“Well, looks like we’re all done here,” John said from the doorway, and clapped his hands together. “Hope nobody minds if we clear out. Want to make the dinner rush.” He headed over to Sherlock and slipped into step beside him. Naturally. It was difficult for Sherlock to tell if this was social convention, to act like nothing was changed, or simply that John thought it hadn’t. Or was being too kind to tell Sherlock as much just yet.
They slipped off onto the street, breath puffing into the air, leaving little wisps behind them that faded off. Less permanent tracks than the dirty footprints they were leaving on the sidewalk. Neither were in the mood to overhear snatches of idle, moronic conversation from restaurant-goers, so they grabbed a hefty brown bag of Chinese to go and lugged it back to the flat. The warm smell of orange chicken and soy went a long way to cover the odors of Sherlock’s last experiments with decomposing tissue. John forced Sherlock to eat at least a box of fried rice under the threat of throwing out all of the petri dishes colonizing in the fridge. They ate pleasantly, draped over the furniture, tossing ideas between them between bites.
“It could be a ledger. Royles looked fishy, and he was starting to sweat when Donovan started poking around his files. She figured out something she wasn’t supposed to.”
“No,” Sherlock said, in his usual firm way, gesturing with a snow pea in his chopsticks, “Langley’s ledger showed all the signs of legitimate use. And Royles’ office décor is hardly befitting a man committing corporate graft.”
“No, but that could be caution. His car is a step above the others, at least.” John paused a moment, then continued. “No, never mind, scratch that. He’s obviously behind on the loans. You saw the windshield.”
Sherlock made a vague noise of agreement. He had seen the windshield.
At this, John cast him a more searching look. Sherlock took a long swallow of rapidly cooling tea and made a face at it.
“… Are you okay, there?”
Sherlock arched an eyebrow at him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’ve got that face on. You usually only get that face when Anderson’s talking.”
“Surely you can now understand the immortal pain that is the continued existence of Anderson, which so completely flies in the face of natural selection.”
John gave an ungainly snort. “No arguments on that one. He does try, though.”
“And fails. Miserably. To such a degree that sometimes he honestly surprises me with the depths of his inanity.”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“You’re looking for things that aren’t there.”
“You know, I don’t think I am. You’ve been acting off all week. I haven’t seen you this quiet during a case in a long time. You should be - you should be dragging me off across London by now! We’re eating Chinese.”
“The Chinese was your idea,” Sherlock pointed out drily.
“But you went along with it. That means you’re off.”
It was both amusing and aggravating to see logic applied to such an illogical field as feelings.
“Is that so.” John was never put off by changes of subject, and when Sherlock wasn’t able to outright lie to the man, his usual course of action had been to make vaguely intimidating questioning responses. They used to make John doubt himself enough to drop it. They didn’t anymore.
“Yes, it is, and you know it, so don’t give me that ‘Is that so,’” he said, with an eerily accurate mimic of Sherlock’s cultured drawl.
“Very well. Then perhaps you can explain to me this source of ‘offness’ that I seem to be displaying, because I certainly haven’t the foggiest.”
John rolled his eyes. It was funny, sometimes. His IQ would make a psychologist weep, but he was still taken to the same sorts of normal idiosyncrasies that he’d had before the chemicals had spread through him like ink in water.
“Very well. Shall I explain it in your terms?” he said archly, and didn’t stop to hear Sherlock’s inevitable snort. “First of all,” he counted on his fingers as he went, “like I said, somehow you’re managing not to run off to some new mousehole in London, making me chase after you. Second, you only actually let me force you to eat when you’re bothered by something, no matter what I threaten you with. Third, besides making Anderson turn around, you didn’t even say a word to him all evening. Fourth, you waited for me to change my mind about Langley’s car instead of telling me I was wrong. I could go on, Sherlock. I’m up to seventeen now.”
There was a moment of resounding silence for a moment, then the noise of Sherlock’s chopsticks scraping at the inside of the takeout box, without actually picking up food.
“I suggest Shouldham St.”
“Excuse me, what?”
“Shouldham St. For your new offices.”
“The clinic isn’t moving, Sherlock. You know that.”
“Don’t be stupid, John, you’re above that now. I’m not referring to your clinic offices. Your consulting detective offices.”
It was so obvious. Sherlock was no longer special, not to John. John had Sherlock’s brilliance, and his own empathy on top of it. He could easily start up his own business. He could rack in the cases with all of the detectives that had dealt with Sherlock one too many times, were weary of the ice and the sharp edges. John didn’t need him anymore. It was only logical that he would leave.
John’s eyes flickered with the spark of sudden understanding. Sherlock noticed that. He also noticed the way his tight grip on the box loosened as his brows shifted. He noticed the different note in his voice when he said, “Sherlock…” but it didn’t quite fit into his dichotomous key of emotions. Was that pity? Guilt? Shame?
“Sherlock, I’m not setting up my own consulting detective offices, and I don’t ever want to.”
“It’s illogical to hide behind me when you’re perfectly capable of standing on your own within the field.”
John’s lips quirked slightly in what might have been a smile. “Thank you,” he murmured. He was always good at finding the little backhanded compliments within Sherlock’s comments. “But I’m not hiding behind you. I’m standing next to you. There’s a difference.”
“I see.”
He didn’t.
“Sherlock - “ he started again, but broke off and set his orange chicken down, licking his lips. He pushed off of the sofa and moved over to Sherlock, balancing lightly on the armrest of his chair. “Sherlock, I’m not here just because you’re smart. Which means that I’m not going anywhere now just because I’m smart, too. If not p, then not q. I’m here because I want to be.”
There was something searching in John’s gaze, then, when he cast it over Sherlock, sliding slowly over his face, into each and every crack and crevice in his expression. Sherlock didn’t know what it was John was looking for, but he seemed to find it, because his expression turned decisive - decision, Sherlock knew that one - and then he leaned down and caught his mouth in a kiss.
There was a moment where it was all hesitation and soft plush confusion, and then Sherlock put an arm around John and pulled. And then there was nothing soft about it. It was hard, flat planes and pushing and static heat. They fought for dominance against each other’s lips, a battle stratagem in tongues and teeth, and it was a heady, thrilling thought to Sherlock, addictive in its novelty, that they could fight all they wanted, but they would always be equals. Always equals. So when he drove his hand into John’s hair and tugged him down, it wasn’t a fearful attempt to tie him there, keep him from running, but it was nothing more than the simple desire to hold him close.