Eventually I'll commit to something longer than a couple thousand words
Title: Under Construction
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,092
Summary: Like most buildings, Sherlock's mind palace has a floor plan. It's a work in progress. John wants to see it anyway.
A/N: It may be contrary to the spirit of the show, but I'm only human and sometimes I have to write unmitigated fluff. Sorry.
Sherlock was in a black mood, alternating between pacing and making a racket, flinging things about the flat like a toddler in a tantrum, and languishing on the sofa while a nearly palpable storm of tortured thoughts swarmed overhead. John tried his best to ignore it, knowing there wasn't much he could do, but by day three, he suspected neither of them could take much more.
He dedicated the entire morning paper, seen but unread, to brainstorming a way to keep Sherlock occupied for at least an hour so that they both could have some peace.
"Do you feel like going for a walk?"
"No."
"Fancy a game of Cluedo, then? I'll even promise not to complain if you don't follow the rules."
"No."
"I picked up this book on the origins of forensic pathology if you'd be interested in--"
"No."
John gave up and went to make them some lunch, hoping to at least persuade Sherlock to eat something. While he was in the kitchen he heard a thud and a flutter that indicated Sherlock's new book was in a heap against the living room wall. With a sigh, John presented Sherlock with a cup of tea, half a sandwich, and a look that said doctor's-orders-don't-make-me-force-feed-you before going to collect the abused book.
While in the process of straightening pages (and forcing himself to disregard the sound of Sherlock's teacup shattering against the fridge), John's eye caught an illustration, and he paused for a closer look. It was the floorplan of a building, with clues to a murder marked off with circles.
John had an idea.
"Sherlock, can you draw at all?"
Sherlock raised his head from where it lolled lifelessly on the back of his chair and narrowed his eyes, presumably wondering what John was up to. "Stupid question," he declared after a moment's scrutiny, and dropped his head again. "Everyone can draw as long as they've got hands and functional motor skills. Ask me if I'm any good at it."
"All right," said John, who, in spite of Sherlock's imperious attitude, couldn't help but crack a tiny smile to hear his flatmate being himself again, "are you any good at drawing?"
"Yes," Sherlock said. He stood up and circled around to pluck the book from John's hands, which he pretended to examine closely (upside down) for a moment before blithely tossing it over his shoulder. "I took several art and art history classes at university in order to learn how to detect a forgery, among other things. I picked up some technique along the way, though I haven't had much cause to use any of it since, so I imagine I've gotten a bit rusty." He shot John a significant look before dropping back into his chair. "But we both know I never really forget anything."
John picked up the book, which had gone from looking brand new to "well-loved" in under ten minutes. "About that, actually," he said, slotting the poor volume into the bookcase before Sherlock could do it any more damage, "I was wondering. If I asked you to draw out what your mind palace looks like, would that be an invasion of privacy?"
The look on Sherlock's face indicated that, under normal circumstances, it would be. He met John's eyes for a moment and then stood, his dressing gown swirling like a cape. "I'll have to find something big enough to draw on," he announced, stalking off to his bedroom.
John wondered what made this an abnormal circumstance, and waited.
**
Half an hour's rummaging later, Sherlock moved the dinner table aside so that he could spread an enormous roll of what appeared to be photograph paper out on the floor, upside down, to present a surface rough enough to draw on. John did not ask where Sherlock had acquired the paper, but he did suggest that Sherlock simply lay the paper out on the table. Sherlock dismissed this suggestion out of hand. It was, John admitted to himself, rather amusing to watch a grown man sketching industriously away on the floor like a child in school, though it was hardly the silliest thing he'd witnessed during his stint as Sherlock's colleague.
The outline of the mind palace took up the entire length and breadth of the paper, which was easily the size of a card table. John didn't find this surprising.
Once Sherlock had drawn the palace and marked off all the rooms, he began to label them: there were wings for broad subjects like science and history, containing rooms for subsets thereof, such as taxonomy, chemistry, the Renaissance. Some of the rooms had closets or bureaus that held very specialized information. John was particularly interested in the rooms for human behavior; it was instructive to see which aspects mattered to Sherlock. Tells for lying, where a person looked when remembering versus fabricating, and response to trauma were all important. How to offer comfort or prioritize someone else's needs over one's own were apparently not.
John noticed that Sherlock was hesitant to label some of the rooms. There was a small wing to the left of "climate patterns" that was called "family" in a hasty scrawl. This contained rooms for Mycroft, Sherlock's mother and father (John noticed that the room for his father was much smaller than the others, but didn't comment), someone called Grandmère, and, endearingly, Mrs. Hudson. There was no room for John. He wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but he couldn't come up with an interpretation that didn't make him feel wounded, nor could he conjure a way to casually ask about it.
He recovered somewhat, however, when he noticed that Sherlock had just - quite matter-of-factly, without timidity nor fanfare - labeled a room "sex" and moved on to sketch a closet into the adjoining chamber.
"You actually think about sex?" John asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his tone.
Sherlock shot him a dry look and went back to his work. "Easily 37% of the crimes I solve are sexually motivated," he pointed out. "And furthermore, I need to know the difference between autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong and a murderer's idea of a clever red herring."
"Ah," John agreed, though he found Sherlock's answer unsatisfactory for reasons he chose not to dwell on.
There was a wing at the end of the building, quite a large one, that had no individual rooms. "Is that all one room?" John asked, pointing.
"No," said Sherlock, sounding somehow distant, almost as though he were embarrassed, which John couldn't quite wrap his head around. "It's under construction."
As if to illustrate this, Sherlock's hand hovered over the wing for a moment before he began to draw in a set of rooms. Then, for the first time since he'd started, Sherlock huffed in annoyance and furiously erased the whole lot of them. He started over and got four rooms into a different arrangement before snarling, scribbling them out, and tossing the pencil across the room, where it struck the mantelpiece and snapped in two.
"Hey, no need for that," said John. He reached out to Sherlock, who was glaring daggers at his drawing, but thought better of it and drew back. "It's fine; you can just try again once you have it sorted."
"But it's important," Sherlock snapped. He got to his feet and began to pace. "It's been there for months and months and everything is still constantly shifting around no matter how often I sit down to organize it. It's all just a jumble of information strewn about like garbage and I can't have that because this," he pointed at the drawing, "is where I put everything useful, everything I need, and the entire point is for me to be able to find things quickly when I have to, like a birthday or a school graduation or whose turn it is to do the washing up and every time I go there I get lost just looking through box after box trying to find what I need but sometimes I never find it at all because I get distracted by something better and spend all afternoon just thinking about it, and this bloody--"
Sherlock cut himself off with a growl, repeatedly scrubbed his hands through his hair, and kicked his desk.
For a long moment, John watched Sherlock seethe. He decided he'd better say something or Sherlock's mood would be even worse than before, and the rest of the afternoon would be nothing but discordant violin and broken glassware.
He was tired of watching his best friend suffer.
"Sherlock," he said, keeping his voice low in an attempt to be somewhat soothing. "What is this wing actually for? Maybe I can help."
Sherlock glanced down at him and froze, knuckles pressed to his lips. John had only seen Sherlock afraid once, but, impossibly, he thought he was seeing it again.
"Listen, if you don't want to say…" John trailed off and watched as Sherlock went to the fireplace and stooped to pick up the writing end of the broken pencil that lay there. He came back and sat down beside the drawing of his mind palace, and there he faltered, hand poised unmoving in the air. "Sherlock?"
Sherlock tilted his head up so that he could make eye contact with John if he so chose, but didn't, and opened his mouth to speak. After a few long seconds, he closed it and looked back down. John heard him swallow.
Then, Sherlock scrawled one word over the whole of the empty wing.
John.
John's heart thumped violently where it was trapped in his throat. He felt hot, suddenly, every inch of his skin prickling. He looked up to find that Sherlock had turned away.
"I spend so much time trying to organize it," he said quietly, twisting the hem of his dressing gown. "It's a disaster area. Stray information everywhere. I've tried setting up rooms, closets, anything, but every time I go there I end up picking through all the things I know about you and getting distracted, and in the end I'm in the middle of piles and piles of your favorite places to eat and where you buy your socks and the story you told me about your sister's eighteenth birthday, just looking at all of it, and I think that even if I spent all my time there I'd never get it sorted, because it feels as if I spend all my time there already." Sherlock swallowed audibly. "And I hope you don't think ill of me for it, because I act as though your opinion doesn't matter, but I think it must if I spend so much time thinking about you--"
John had put his hand on the side of Sherlock's neck. He rested his thumb on the fluttering pulse there, feeling it elevated, the skin hot and faintly flushed. Sherlock's eyes were wide, unblinking, and John met them and said "Shut it, you bloody moron," and pulled Sherlock in to kiss him.
Sherlock's hands were indecisive, roaming John's arms and shoulders and gripping at his back, and his mouth was clumsy against John's own, hot and frenzied and with little idea what it was doing. John didn't think his heart had ever beat harder; didn't think he'd ever been so turned on by so little, his blood on fire and his brain a mess of white noise. He tugged on Sherlock's lower lip with his teeth and was met with a groan like he'd punched the man in the gut.
Sherlock wrenched away from him and scrabbled blindly at the floor until his fingers found the broken pencil where he'd dropped it. Breathing hard, he scribbled at the paper, his body blocking John's view. "What--" John asked, still reeling, but Sherlock moved away and sat-half-fell on the floor beside him.
He'd scribbled out the entire room labeled "sex" and redrawn it in the corner of John's wing.
When John tackled Sherlock to the ground, they were both laughing.
**
Hours later, John drifted back to consciousness on the sofa and turned to see Sherlock sat on the floor beside him, dark head bent over a book. As if sensing his wakefulness, Sherlock turned to prop a bare arm next to John's shoulder and shot him a disapproving look.
"John, if you were going to get me a book as a gift, you could have at least chosen a copy without so many torn pages," he scolded.
Sleepily, and without malice, John hit him.
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,092
Summary: Like most buildings, Sherlock's mind palace has a floor plan. It's a work in progress. John wants to see it anyway.
A/N: It may be contrary to the spirit of the show, but I'm only human and sometimes I have to write unmitigated fluff. Sorry.
Sherlock was in a black mood, alternating between pacing and making a racket, flinging things about the flat like a toddler in a tantrum, and languishing on the sofa while a nearly palpable storm of tortured thoughts swarmed overhead. John tried his best to ignore it, knowing there wasn't much he could do, but by day three, he suspected neither of them could take much more.
He dedicated the entire morning paper, seen but unread, to brainstorming a way to keep Sherlock occupied for at least an hour so that they both could have some peace.
"Do you feel like going for a walk?"
"No."
"Fancy a game of Cluedo, then? I'll even promise not to complain if you don't follow the rules."
"No."
"I picked up this book on the origins of forensic pathology if you'd be interested in--"
"No."
John gave up and went to make them some lunch, hoping to at least persuade Sherlock to eat something. While he was in the kitchen he heard a thud and a flutter that indicated Sherlock's new book was in a heap against the living room wall. With a sigh, John presented Sherlock with a cup of tea, half a sandwich, and a look that said doctor's-orders-don't-make-me-force-feed-you before going to collect the abused book.
While in the process of straightening pages (and forcing himself to disregard the sound of Sherlock's teacup shattering against the fridge), John's eye caught an illustration, and he paused for a closer look. It was the floorplan of a building, with clues to a murder marked off with circles.
John had an idea.
"Sherlock, can you draw at all?"
Sherlock raised his head from where it lolled lifelessly on the back of his chair and narrowed his eyes, presumably wondering what John was up to. "Stupid question," he declared after a moment's scrutiny, and dropped his head again. "Everyone can draw as long as they've got hands and functional motor skills. Ask me if I'm any good at it."
"All right," said John, who, in spite of Sherlock's imperious attitude, couldn't help but crack a tiny smile to hear his flatmate being himself again, "are you any good at drawing?"
"Yes," Sherlock said. He stood up and circled around to pluck the book from John's hands, which he pretended to examine closely (upside down) for a moment before blithely tossing it over his shoulder. "I took several art and art history classes at university in order to learn how to detect a forgery, among other things. I picked up some technique along the way, though I haven't had much cause to use any of it since, so I imagine I've gotten a bit rusty." He shot John a significant look before dropping back into his chair. "But we both know I never really forget anything."
John picked up the book, which had gone from looking brand new to "well-loved" in under ten minutes. "About that, actually," he said, slotting the poor volume into the bookcase before Sherlock could do it any more damage, "I was wondering. If I asked you to draw out what your mind palace looks like, would that be an invasion of privacy?"
The look on Sherlock's face indicated that, under normal circumstances, it would be. He met John's eyes for a moment and then stood, his dressing gown swirling like a cape. "I'll have to find something big enough to draw on," he announced, stalking off to his bedroom.
John wondered what made this an abnormal circumstance, and waited.
**
Half an hour's rummaging later, Sherlock moved the dinner table aside so that he could spread an enormous roll of what appeared to be photograph paper out on the floor, upside down, to present a surface rough enough to draw on. John did not ask where Sherlock had acquired the paper, but he did suggest that Sherlock simply lay the paper out on the table. Sherlock dismissed this suggestion out of hand. It was, John admitted to himself, rather amusing to watch a grown man sketching industriously away on the floor like a child in school, though it was hardly the silliest thing he'd witnessed during his stint as Sherlock's colleague.
The outline of the mind palace took up the entire length and breadth of the paper, which was easily the size of a card table. John didn't find this surprising.
Once Sherlock had drawn the palace and marked off all the rooms, he began to label them: there were wings for broad subjects like science and history, containing rooms for subsets thereof, such as taxonomy, chemistry, the Renaissance. Some of the rooms had closets or bureaus that held very specialized information. John was particularly interested in the rooms for human behavior; it was instructive to see which aspects mattered to Sherlock. Tells for lying, where a person looked when remembering versus fabricating, and response to trauma were all important. How to offer comfort or prioritize someone else's needs over one's own were apparently not.
John noticed that Sherlock was hesitant to label some of the rooms. There was a small wing to the left of "climate patterns" that was called "family" in a hasty scrawl. This contained rooms for Mycroft, Sherlock's mother and father (John noticed that the room for his father was much smaller than the others, but didn't comment), someone called Grandmère, and, endearingly, Mrs. Hudson. There was no room for John. He wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but he couldn't come up with an interpretation that didn't make him feel wounded, nor could he conjure a way to casually ask about it.
He recovered somewhat, however, when he noticed that Sherlock had just - quite matter-of-factly, without timidity nor fanfare - labeled a room "sex" and moved on to sketch a closet into the adjoining chamber.
"You actually think about sex?" John asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his tone.
Sherlock shot him a dry look and went back to his work. "Easily 37% of the crimes I solve are sexually motivated," he pointed out. "And furthermore, I need to know the difference between autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong and a murderer's idea of a clever red herring."
"Ah," John agreed, though he found Sherlock's answer unsatisfactory for reasons he chose not to dwell on.
There was a wing at the end of the building, quite a large one, that had no individual rooms. "Is that all one room?" John asked, pointing.
"No," said Sherlock, sounding somehow distant, almost as though he were embarrassed, which John couldn't quite wrap his head around. "It's under construction."
As if to illustrate this, Sherlock's hand hovered over the wing for a moment before he began to draw in a set of rooms. Then, for the first time since he'd started, Sherlock huffed in annoyance and furiously erased the whole lot of them. He started over and got four rooms into a different arrangement before snarling, scribbling them out, and tossing the pencil across the room, where it struck the mantelpiece and snapped in two.
"Hey, no need for that," said John. He reached out to Sherlock, who was glaring daggers at his drawing, but thought better of it and drew back. "It's fine; you can just try again once you have it sorted."
"But it's important," Sherlock snapped. He got to his feet and began to pace. "It's been there for months and months and everything is still constantly shifting around no matter how often I sit down to organize it. It's all just a jumble of information strewn about like garbage and I can't have that because this," he pointed at the drawing, "is where I put everything useful, everything I need, and the entire point is for me to be able to find things quickly when I have to, like a birthday or a school graduation or whose turn it is to do the washing up and every time I go there I get lost just looking through box after box trying to find what I need but sometimes I never find it at all because I get distracted by something better and spend all afternoon just thinking about it, and this bloody--"
Sherlock cut himself off with a growl, repeatedly scrubbed his hands through his hair, and kicked his desk.
For a long moment, John watched Sherlock seethe. He decided he'd better say something or Sherlock's mood would be even worse than before, and the rest of the afternoon would be nothing but discordant violin and broken glassware.
He was tired of watching his best friend suffer.
"Sherlock," he said, keeping his voice low in an attempt to be somewhat soothing. "What is this wing actually for? Maybe I can help."
Sherlock glanced down at him and froze, knuckles pressed to his lips. John had only seen Sherlock afraid once, but, impossibly, he thought he was seeing it again.
"Listen, if you don't want to say…" John trailed off and watched as Sherlock went to the fireplace and stooped to pick up the writing end of the broken pencil that lay there. He came back and sat down beside the drawing of his mind palace, and there he faltered, hand poised unmoving in the air. "Sherlock?"
Sherlock tilted his head up so that he could make eye contact with John if he so chose, but didn't, and opened his mouth to speak. After a few long seconds, he closed it and looked back down. John heard him swallow.
Then, Sherlock scrawled one word over the whole of the empty wing.
John.
John's heart thumped violently where it was trapped in his throat. He felt hot, suddenly, every inch of his skin prickling. He looked up to find that Sherlock had turned away.
"I spend so much time trying to organize it," he said quietly, twisting the hem of his dressing gown. "It's a disaster area. Stray information everywhere. I've tried setting up rooms, closets, anything, but every time I go there I end up picking through all the things I know about you and getting distracted, and in the end I'm in the middle of piles and piles of your favorite places to eat and where you buy your socks and the story you told me about your sister's eighteenth birthday, just looking at all of it, and I think that even if I spent all my time there I'd never get it sorted, because it feels as if I spend all my time there already." Sherlock swallowed audibly. "And I hope you don't think ill of me for it, because I act as though your opinion doesn't matter, but I think it must if I spend so much time thinking about you--"
John had put his hand on the side of Sherlock's neck. He rested his thumb on the fluttering pulse there, feeling it elevated, the skin hot and faintly flushed. Sherlock's eyes were wide, unblinking, and John met them and said "Shut it, you bloody moron," and pulled Sherlock in to kiss him.
Sherlock's hands were indecisive, roaming John's arms and shoulders and gripping at his back, and his mouth was clumsy against John's own, hot and frenzied and with little idea what it was doing. John didn't think his heart had ever beat harder; didn't think he'd ever been so turned on by so little, his blood on fire and his brain a mess of white noise. He tugged on Sherlock's lower lip with his teeth and was met with a groan like he'd punched the man in the gut.
Sherlock wrenched away from him and scrabbled blindly at the floor until his fingers found the broken pencil where he'd dropped it. Breathing hard, he scribbled at the paper, his body blocking John's view. "What--" John asked, still reeling, but Sherlock moved away and sat-half-fell on the floor beside him.
He'd scribbled out the entire room labeled "sex" and redrawn it in the corner of John's wing.
When John tackled Sherlock to the ground, they were both laughing.
**
Hours later, John drifted back to consciousness on the sofa and turned to see Sherlock sat on the floor beside him, dark head bent over a book. As if sensing his wakefulness, Sherlock turned to prop a bare arm next to John's shoulder and shot him a disapproving look.
"John, if you were going to get me a book as a gift, you could have at least chosen a copy without so many torn pages," he scolded.
Sleepily, and without malice, John hit him.