Lycanthrope - Chapter 1/?
Title: Lycanthrope (or a Study in Insertional Retroviral Mutagenesis)* - Chapter 1/?
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Sherlock/John
Summary: John never once considered that his flatmate was hiding something like this from him.
Rating: Rated PG-13 now, NC-17 later
Spoilers: Some Season 2
Word count: Over 11,600 words and growing, 2379 in this part.
A response to this prompt on the kink meme asking for Werewolf!Sherlock who acts wolf-like when he is human.
* WIP, title my change
Translated into Korean by millute
“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end, will that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”
And so with that, a trip to the 221B, and the most ridiculous chase after in the backstreets of London that leaves them collapsed, sweaty, and laughing (and Sherlock is gorgeous when he is sweaty and laughing, John notes) against the inside of their front door, John thinks he has an idea of what he is getting himself into.
Until he goes home one day with the shopping and sees a giant black wolf in the living room.
The bags hit the floor with a crash and John is distantly aware of the sound of eggs breaking and himself yelling. The wolf steps closer and without thinking, John throws himself backwards and immediately trips over the detritus on the floor and his knee lands hard in a puddle of cold milk leaking from its carton, and pain lances up into his side. The black wolf leaps forward and crouches over him with its head down, staring at John with gold eyes. John frantically wishes his Browning is not uselessly upstairs in the drawer beside his bed. Stupid, stupid, he berates himself, cold sweat dripping down the back of his shirt. Despite a deep-seated urge to look away, John forces himself to fix his eyes on the massive head in front of him, his thigh muscles quivering with readiness to flee or fight.
The wolf suddenly backs off after what felt like an endless face-off, and John holds his breath. The wolf pads slowly backwards and without turning, John watches in horrified fascination as patches of fur begin to ripple and appear to retract under, revealing smooth, pale, human skin. Human shoulders form, paws lengthen and narrow into long fingers, and the face. The wolf’s muzzle and ears shrink back on itself, and forms a human face, nose, ears, cheekbones...
Where there was a gigantic black wolf earlier, now Sherlock is staring back at him, crouching, and looking remarkably wolf-like but with a curious tilt of the head. John gulps stuttering lungfuls of air, and collapses onto the floor.
“JESUS Christ” John bellows, and wipes a hand over his wet face, and directs a hysterical laugh at the ceiling. “I can’t believe it, you bloody sod... You’re a...a...”
“Homo lupus, John. But ‘lycanthrope’ is also a tolerable term to describe my state.” Sherlock is still sitting on his heels, or, John supposes, haunches, would be more appropriate.
“You could have said something earlier! Oh Jesus, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, you bloody...you nearly gave me a heart attack!” John can still feel his heart hammering against his ribs, and now that imminent danger is over, he feels nauseous and swallows convulsively. As he tries to control his breathing, John looks at Sherlock and realizes that he is naked. In their living room. While John is laying in a heap of broken eggs and spilt milk, Sherlock has folded up his long pale arms over his knees, as if this is a perfectly normal scenario on a Thursday afternoon. John feels emotionally upended, and starts to panic again. Meanwhile, Sherlock continues to talk in that way he does, and it should be familiar, but it’s somehow not.
“I am a registered lycanthrope in London, you could have easily made a request with housing authority to determine whether this flat is a lycan-inhabited dwelling. Even Mrs. Hudson could have informed you of my status if you asked. Lycanthropy is generally considered an undesirable trait in a flatmate. You may have said ‘it’s all fine,’ but I reluctantly admit to being wrong before about self-proclaimed social liberals who also happen to harbor deep-seated lycanphobia.”
“I am not lycanphobic,” John protests, grasping onto the first thing his fevered mind latches on to, but even as he is saying this, he realizes that he cannot come to terms with the fact that the man in front of him--his flatmate, his friend--is also a wolf. A senseless, unpredictable, killing machine like in the Jack London books he read as a child. Unbidden, images cascade behind his eyes of the bloodied, half-dead victims of wolf attacks he had seen and treated during his emergency room rotation and he burns with fury.
“And yet you are reacting as though you have never spent time around people living openly with ALV...”
“God, I can’t believe you!” he yells. “I can’t believe you kept this from me!” Sherlock’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth (plush and pink) but now John can’t stand it, can’t stand to hear Sherlock utter another word that will upset his world, and the small part of him that has hoped that there might be something between them.
“Shut up, shut up! God, Sherlock, if I mean anything, anything at all to you, you will shut up...and leave me alone. I can’t, I can’t...”
John scrambles to stand, slips, and finally gains traction on the floor, pulling himself up, aware that Sherlock is doing the same. John looks away, the expanse of Sherlock’s pale skin looming bright and hot in his peripheral vision and heads to their door.
He makes his way downstairs and out into the blessedly chilling air of Baker Street before he feels a modicum of sanity return. He becomes aware of a cold, wet patch clinging uncomfortably to his thigh, and realizes that a sludge of egg yolk is sliding down the front of his trousers.
He wipes angrily at it, and takes off towards the hospital. Halfway there, he is gripped by a fit of indecisiveness, and in his pique, he reaches for his mobile and dials Lestrade’s number. When Lestrade answers, John asks, “Lestrade...you knew Sherlock for five years. Did you ever know he is a...a...”
John cannot finish his question. He suddenly feels monumentally tired and slumps against the wall of the alley he ducked into. Something smells rancid. He waits for Lestrade to figure out what he is asking.
“That he is a lycie? Yeah, I knew.”
There is a suspended breath, and then he mutters, “God. Sally warned me that Sherlock had the makings of a serial killer. Anderson called him a psychopath. But this...I don’t know, Lestrade. I don’t know.”
There was silence. Then Lestrade says, “Come to my place and have a beer. It sounds like you could use one.” Lestrade gives him directions.
When John reaches Lestrade’s doorstep and knocks, he hears the deep, rumbling barks of dogs right behind the door. He hears Lestrade approach and speak to the dogs, “Alright you two, get back” and the door opens. “John! Come in,” Lestrade says invitingly, and John steps in around him.
“This is Mandy and Bear,” Lestrade says, pointing out two huge dogs, one tawny with white bits, and one solid brown. Both dogs sniffed eagerly at John’s thighs, tails wagging. “They’re real friendly. They won’t bite. Here, let them have a sniff at your hand, so they can say hello.” John reaches out his hand, and sure enough, the dogs approach and sniff. After a moment, Lestrade leads John to the living room, and the dogs follow.
“So, Sherlock did not disclose his status before you moved in. In fact, not for...three months? Four? How did he tell you? Not like a normal person, I am assuming,” Lestrade says, handing John a cold beer and they both settled onto the couch. The two dogs each take up their own positions on an arm chair and a huge distended cushion on the floor, respectively.
John takes a grateful swallow of his beer and recounts the story of how he came home with the shopping about an hour prior, and had been greeted with the nightmarish vision of a gigantic wolf in their living room. “It scared the bejesus out of me. I thought I was done for,” John says quietly.
Taking a swig of his beer, Lestrade says, shaking his head, “For a genius, Sherlock can be a monumental idiot.”
“What?”
“It’s obvious you have not been around dogs much, given the way you are around mine. And most people, not just you, have never been around lycans. So it’s not inconceivable that you would react badly. Well, knowing Sherlock’s history some, this is not the first time.”
“What, are people happy to discover their flatmate is a werewolf?” John scoffs disbelievingly.
Lestrade sinks back against the couch, and says, “You know, Sherlock has not got any proper friends, in the time I have known him. In the last three months, I noticed he seems, I don’t know, happier, well, in his own way. He seems comfortable around you. So I actually thought you were okay with his...um, condition.”
“He accused me of being lycanphobic.” John feels uncomfortable saying it out loud. It is so politically incorrect these days, with all the lycan rights movements. He had never taken a stand on either side of the issue, because he never thought it would affect him. Until it did, does.
“Well, you can’t help it if you don’t know any different. We were raised on hundreds of years of stories about blood thirsty werewolves, killing children, maiming and infecting people. That fear is deeply embedded in our history. Hell, I didn’t know until fairly recently that a lot of that were myths. And advances in lycan medicine has changed things. Not really something they have included in medical school curriculum, I guess.”
“No. Newly infected patients from the ER go straight to quarantine and the lycanology specialists take over. Actually, a branch of veterinary medicine, not human medicine, so lycanthrope health was never included in our studies. And incidents of werewolf-related trauma is a mandated report to Scotland Yard and Public Health.”
“Yeah, we get those from time to time. Not often, even for a place like London, since the population of lycanthropes is only about 1% in the UK. With the new viral suppression medications and the sentience ranking system, lycans can keep low if they want to. It’s still a very stigmatizing condition, so most of them do. Not Sherlock though. He’s quite obvious about who he is, if you know what to look for. I suspected from day one. Then it was just a matter of pulling up his registration records, and having him go through the human resources process to continue consulting with the Met.
“I suspect that most of my officers know about Sherlock’s status. But we don’t address it because we don’t need to. The Met has a zero tolerance policy for discrimination or harassment against non-violent lycanthropes. But it doesn’t mean they’re all accepting.”
“So...he’s a non-violent lycanthrope?” John asks tentatively, finally arriving at the crux of the matter. He worried the edge of the beer bottle label.
“Oh yeah,” as if it was obvious. Wasn’t obvious to him, John thinks, with Sally’s psychopath warning echoing in his ears. Lestrade pauses to take a draught from his beer. “One of the myths about lycans is they’re all mindless, senseless creatures when in wolf form. The last time I checked, Sherlock is a Class E wolf. That means he retains at least ninety percent sentience before, during, and after transformation. Now that he is sober -- knock on wood -- he is legally allowed to skip viral suppression completely. The acquired lycanthropy virus, ALV for short, is not highly transmissible in small quantities of blood exchange, which is why highly sentient lycans are allowed to forgo any sort of viral suppression.”
“Why would someone want to leave their virus unsuppressed?” John asks, curious.
Lestrade shrugs. “Different reasons. Some people experience side effects, others dislike taking unnecessary drugs long-term. Still a bit of a controversy, but people do have the right to have lycan children. Especially among those born with the ALV virus, the lycan community resents the widespread sentiment that their condition is a disability.
“But as a Met consultant, Sherlock is required to suppress his ALV levels to less than fifty percent active capacity. It’s an HSE thing, and I agree with it even though he’s never bitten anyone (John feels warm relief unfurl inside him). Because he’s an idiot and gets himself into some sort of scrape every other day. So, Sherlock is on the minimum, partial suppression. I believe he takes a monthly injection now as opposed to the patch. He hates it, but he likes consulting more than he hates the viral suppression.
“The worst was when he was actively using. His mental state was altered, which means his sentience was altered. And he was arrested for illegal drug possession, a relatively minor charge for him, but it did mean he had to submit to mandatory, one hundred percent, viral suppression for a minimum of six months. I don’t know how we survived it. He was staying with me--you must be a saint to be his flatmate--and I had to make sure he stayed clean, didn’t die, and take his daily suppression pill. The implant would have been easier, but he’s too vain.”
“So, you were never worried about, I dunno, accidentally getting infected?”
“Nah. He comes here a lot as a wolf, actually. He likes Mandy and Bear. Even when they roughhouse, I have no worries of accidental transmission. There would need to be a significant blood to blood exchange for that to happen. He can’t donate blood, that’s for sure. But nicks? Nosebleed? Unless you also have an open wound and he’s gushing into it, there’s no chance of transmission. And another common misconception: saliva does not transmit ALV. So if he drools all over your open wound, it’s not catching.”
Or if I kiss him or he kisses me. John tips his head back and chuckles. “I thought I would have to leave, Lestrade. I didn’t think I could handle living with him any longer. Sherlock owes you one. If I left, no one would make him tea.”
“Living with Sherlock is no walk in the park, that’s for sure. I tip my hat off to you.” Lestrade wiggles his fingers around the neck of his beer, and dips his head.
Chapter 2
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Sherlock/John
Summary: John never once considered that his flatmate was hiding something like this from him.
Rating: Rated PG-13 now, NC-17 later
Spoilers: Some Season 2
Word count: Over 11,600 words and growing, 2379 in this part.
A response to this prompt on the kink meme asking for Werewolf!Sherlock who acts wolf-like when he is human.
* WIP, title my change
Translated into Korean by millute
“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end, will that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”
And so with that, a trip to the 221B, and the most ridiculous chase after in the backstreets of London that leaves them collapsed, sweaty, and laughing (and Sherlock is gorgeous when he is sweaty and laughing, John notes) against the inside of their front door, John thinks he has an idea of what he is getting himself into.
Until he goes home one day with the shopping and sees a giant black wolf in the living room.
The bags hit the floor with a crash and John is distantly aware of the sound of eggs breaking and himself yelling. The wolf steps closer and without thinking, John throws himself backwards and immediately trips over the detritus on the floor and his knee lands hard in a puddle of cold milk leaking from its carton, and pain lances up into his side. The black wolf leaps forward and crouches over him with its head down, staring at John with gold eyes. John frantically wishes his Browning is not uselessly upstairs in the drawer beside his bed. Stupid, stupid, he berates himself, cold sweat dripping down the back of his shirt. Despite a deep-seated urge to look away, John forces himself to fix his eyes on the massive head in front of him, his thigh muscles quivering with readiness to flee or fight.
The wolf suddenly backs off after what felt like an endless face-off, and John holds his breath. The wolf pads slowly backwards and without turning, John watches in horrified fascination as patches of fur begin to ripple and appear to retract under, revealing smooth, pale, human skin. Human shoulders form, paws lengthen and narrow into long fingers, and the face. The wolf’s muzzle and ears shrink back on itself, and forms a human face, nose, ears, cheekbones...
Where there was a gigantic black wolf earlier, now Sherlock is staring back at him, crouching, and looking remarkably wolf-like but with a curious tilt of the head. John gulps stuttering lungfuls of air, and collapses onto the floor.
“JESUS Christ” John bellows, and wipes a hand over his wet face, and directs a hysterical laugh at the ceiling. “I can’t believe it, you bloody sod... You’re a...a...”
“Homo lupus, John. But ‘lycanthrope’ is also a tolerable term to describe my state.” Sherlock is still sitting on his heels, or, John supposes, haunches, would be more appropriate.
“You could have said something earlier! Oh Jesus, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, you bloody...you nearly gave me a heart attack!” John can still feel his heart hammering against his ribs, and now that imminent danger is over, he feels nauseous and swallows convulsively. As he tries to control his breathing, John looks at Sherlock and realizes that he is naked. In their living room. While John is laying in a heap of broken eggs and spilt milk, Sherlock has folded up his long pale arms over his knees, as if this is a perfectly normal scenario on a Thursday afternoon. John feels emotionally upended, and starts to panic again. Meanwhile, Sherlock continues to talk in that way he does, and it should be familiar, but it’s somehow not.
“I am a registered lycanthrope in London, you could have easily made a request with housing authority to determine whether this flat is a lycan-inhabited dwelling. Even Mrs. Hudson could have informed you of my status if you asked. Lycanthropy is generally considered an undesirable trait in a flatmate. You may have said ‘it’s all fine,’ but I reluctantly admit to being wrong before about self-proclaimed social liberals who also happen to harbor deep-seated lycanphobia.”
“I am not lycanphobic,” John protests, grasping onto the first thing his fevered mind latches on to, but even as he is saying this, he realizes that he cannot come to terms with the fact that the man in front of him--his flatmate, his friend--is also a wolf. A senseless, unpredictable, killing machine like in the Jack London books he read as a child. Unbidden, images cascade behind his eyes of the bloodied, half-dead victims of wolf attacks he had seen and treated during his emergency room rotation and he burns with fury.
“And yet you are reacting as though you have never spent time around people living openly with ALV...”
“God, I can’t believe you!” he yells. “I can’t believe you kept this from me!” Sherlock’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth (plush and pink) but now John can’t stand it, can’t stand to hear Sherlock utter another word that will upset his world, and the small part of him that has hoped that there might be something between them.
“Shut up, shut up! God, Sherlock, if I mean anything, anything at all to you, you will shut up...and leave me alone. I can’t, I can’t...”
John scrambles to stand, slips, and finally gains traction on the floor, pulling himself up, aware that Sherlock is doing the same. John looks away, the expanse of Sherlock’s pale skin looming bright and hot in his peripheral vision and heads to their door.
He makes his way downstairs and out into the blessedly chilling air of Baker Street before he feels a modicum of sanity return. He becomes aware of a cold, wet patch clinging uncomfortably to his thigh, and realizes that a sludge of egg yolk is sliding down the front of his trousers.
He wipes angrily at it, and takes off towards the hospital. Halfway there, he is gripped by a fit of indecisiveness, and in his pique, he reaches for his mobile and dials Lestrade’s number. When Lestrade answers, John asks, “Lestrade...you knew Sherlock for five years. Did you ever know he is a...a...”
John cannot finish his question. He suddenly feels monumentally tired and slumps against the wall of the alley he ducked into. Something smells rancid. He waits for Lestrade to figure out what he is asking.
“That he is a lycie? Yeah, I knew.”
There is a suspended breath, and then he mutters, “God. Sally warned me that Sherlock had the makings of a serial killer. Anderson called him a psychopath. But this...I don’t know, Lestrade. I don’t know.”
There was silence. Then Lestrade says, “Come to my place and have a beer. It sounds like you could use one.” Lestrade gives him directions.
When John reaches Lestrade’s doorstep and knocks, he hears the deep, rumbling barks of dogs right behind the door. He hears Lestrade approach and speak to the dogs, “Alright you two, get back” and the door opens. “John! Come in,” Lestrade says invitingly, and John steps in around him.
“This is Mandy and Bear,” Lestrade says, pointing out two huge dogs, one tawny with white bits, and one solid brown. Both dogs sniffed eagerly at John’s thighs, tails wagging. “They’re real friendly. They won’t bite. Here, let them have a sniff at your hand, so they can say hello.” John reaches out his hand, and sure enough, the dogs approach and sniff. After a moment, Lestrade leads John to the living room, and the dogs follow.
“So, Sherlock did not disclose his status before you moved in. In fact, not for...three months? Four? How did he tell you? Not like a normal person, I am assuming,” Lestrade says, handing John a cold beer and they both settled onto the couch. The two dogs each take up their own positions on an arm chair and a huge distended cushion on the floor, respectively.
John takes a grateful swallow of his beer and recounts the story of how he came home with the shopping about an hour prior, and had been greeted with the nightmarish vision of a gigantic wolf in their living room. “It scared the bejesus out of me. I thought I was done for,” John says quietly.
Taking a swig of his beer, Lestrade says, shaking his head, “For a genius, Sherlock can be a monumental idiot.”
“What?”
“It’s obvious you have not been around dogs much, given the way you are around mine. And most people, not just you, have never been around lycans. So it’s not inconceivable that you would react badly. Well, knowing Sherlock’s history some, this is not the first time.”
“What, are people happy to discover their flatmate is a werewolf?” John scoffs disbelievingly.
Lestrade sinks back against the couch, and says, “You know, Sherlock has not got any proper friends, in the time I have known him. In the last three months, I noticed he seems, I don’t know, happier, well, in his own way. He seems comfortable around you. So I actually thought you were okay with his...um, condition.”
“He accused me of being lycanphobic.” John feels uncomfortable saying it out loud. It is so politically incorrect these days, with all the lycan rights movements. He had never taken a stand on either side of the issue, because he never thought it would affect him. Until it did, does.
“Well, you can’t help it if you don’t know any different. We were raised on hundreds of years of stories about blood thirsty werewolves, killing children, maiming and infecting people. That fear is deeply embedded in our history. Hell, I didn’t know until fairly recently that a lot of that were myths. And advances in lycan medicine has changed things. Not really something they have included in medical school curriculum, I guess.”
“No. Newly infected patients from the ER go straight to quarantine and the lycanology specialists take over. Actually, a branch of veterinary medicine, not human medicine, so lycanthrope health was never included in our studies. And incidents of werewolf-related trauma is a mandated report to Scotland Yard and Public Health.”
“Yeah, we get those from time to time. Not often, even for a place like London, since the population of lycanthropes is only about 1% in the UK. With the new viral suppression medications and the sentience ranking system, lycans can keep low if they want to. It’s still a very stigmatizing condition, so most of them do. Not Sherlock though. He’s quite obvious about who he is, if you know what to look for. I suspected from day one. Then it was just a matter of pulling up his registration records, and having him go through the human resources process to continue consulting with the Met.
“I suspect that most of my officers know about Sherlock’s status. But we don’t address it because we don’t need to. The Met has a zero tolerance policy for discrimination or harassment against non-violent lycanthropes. But it doesn’t mean they’re all accepting.”
“So...he’s a non-violent lycanthrope?” John asks tentatively, finally arriving at the crux of the matter. He worried the edge of the beer bottle label.
“Oh yeah,” as if it was obvious. Wasn’t obvious to him, John thinks, with Sally’s psychopath warning echoing in his ears. Lestrade pauses to take a draught from his beer. “One of the myths about lycans is they’re all mindless, senseless creatures when in wolf form. The last time I checked, Sherlock is a Class E wolf. That means he retains at least ninety percent sentience before, during, and after transformation. Now that he is sober -- knock on wood -- he is legally allowed to skip viral suppression completely. The acquired lycanthropy virus, ALV for short, is not highly transmissible in small quantities of blood exchange, which is why highly sentient lycans are allowed to forgo any sort of viral suppression.”
“Why would someone want to leave their virus unsuppressed?” John asks, curious.
Lestrade shrugs. “Different reasons. Some people experience side effects, others dislike taking unnecessary drugs long-term. Still a bit of a controversy, but people do have the right to have lycan children. Especially among those born with the ALV virus, the lycan community resents the widespread sentiment that their condition is a disability.
“But as a Met consultant, Sherlock is required to suppress his ALV levels to less than fifty percent active capacity. It’s an HSE thing, and I agree with it even though he’s never bitten anyone (John feels warm relief unfurl inside him). Because he’s an idiot and gets himself into some sort of scrape every other day. So, Sherlock is on the minimum, partial suppression. I believe he takes a monthly injection now as opposed to the patch. He hates it, but he likes consulting more than he hates the viral suppression.
“The worst was when he was actively using. His mental state was altered, which means his sentience was altered. And he was arrested for illegal drug possession, a relatively minor charge for him, but it did mean he had to submit to mandatory, one hundred percent, viral suppression for a minimum of six months. I don’t know how we survived it. He was staying with me--you must be a saint to be his flatmate--and I had to make sure he stayed clean, didn’t die, and take his daily suppression pill. The implant would have been easier, but he’s too vain.”
“So, you were never worried about, I dunno, accidentally getting infected?”
“Nah. He comes here a lot as a wolf, actually. He likes Mandy and Bear. Even when they roughhouse, I have no worries of accidental transmission. There would need to be a significant blood to blood exchange for that to happen. He can’t donate blood, that’s for sure. But nicks? Nosebleed? Unless you also have an open wound and he’s gushing into it, there’s no chance of transmission. And another common misconception: saliva does not transmit ALV. So if he drools all over your open wound, it’s not catching.”
Or if I kiss him or he kisses me. John tips his head back and chuckles. “I thought I would have to leave, Lestrade. I didn’t think I could handle living with him any longer. Sherlock owes you one. If I left, no one would make him tea.”
“Living with Sherlock is no walk in the park, that’s for sure. I tip my hat off to you.” Lestrade wiggles his fingers around the neck of his beer, and dips his head.
Chapter 2