[fic] for liza
title: coming a cropper
fandom: bbc Sherlock
pairing: Sherlock/Lestrade
warnings: violence
disclaimer: all this business is the property of the bbc and the estate of sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I am just making a nasty mess.
notes: written as a Christmas present for stratospherique; she made very specific requests & to the best of my knowledge I've fulfilled them.
221B Baker Street was, at Inspector G. Lestrade’s estimation, a battlefield between the sensibilities of an ex-army man accustomed to neatness and the ongoing experiment in allegedly organised chaos that was the apparent prerogative of the world’s only consulting detective. He didn’t exactly relish calling upon Sherlock for help, and he relished it even less when civilised methods of communication like “sending a grumpy text message” failed to achieve a response and he was forced to go and annoy Mrs Hudson into letting him in.
There was a very rotten orange in a bowl on the kitchen table.
Lestrade bent over it to inspect it more closely. The odds on it being an experiment versus it being some attempt at healthy eating instigated by John which had been summarily ignored were roughly even. It stank to the high heavens, and as he watched a fruit fly wandered around the skin of it like a lost tourist.
He shrank back from it, holding his breath, and, failing to spot Sherlock or even John, idly scooped up the riding crop that was resting against the coffee table. The coffee table itself was piled high with stacks of printed paper, although Lestrade could see the tell-tale corner of a Papa John’s pizza box poking out from under the print-outs. It suggested … probably … that John had made an effort with keeping them both fed but that both had been too busy to keep up the pretence of living like normal human beings…
Feeling rather pleased with himself, he took a step back, and nearly cracked his head against Sherlock’s chin.
“Yes I got your text,” Sherlock said irritably, moving out of his way and into the room without anything resembling grace or dignity; Lestrade gripped the handle of the riding crop a little more tightly and tapped it against his knee in frustration as Sherlock swayed past him with an air of contempt. “The fact I didn’t answer it didn’t suggest to you that the case is impossibly dull and uncomplicated and not worth wasting my time with?”
Lestrade sighed, watching Sherlock circumnavigate (a word he’d learnt from him, in fact) the coffee table and pick up a copy of the TV Guide; such a prosaic publication that Lestrade nearly lost his internal balance at the sight of it.
Sherlock, clad in a silk dressing gown and the very slight additional rumpling of his unruly curls that suggested he’d been indulging in one of his very rare and not always voluntary sleeps, folded himself into a sitting position and glared at him from his armchair.
“You never answer your texts,” Lestrade pointed out. He wafted the riding crop through the air at his side and thought idly of laying a stripe across the bugger’s nose to shock him out of his sneering. The subsequent tightening of his throat made him think better of it.
“Tells you something about the quality of your cases, doesn’t it,” Sherlock muttered, eyeballing him ferociously. He rarely made eye contact with people who weren’t suspects, Lestrade - and almost everyone else - had noticed, but on the occasions that he did it was like being autopsied with a glance.
“I’d have thought an old locked room mystery would be right up your alley,” Lestrade said, trying to inject a little humour into the situation and failing as desperately as he always did; he tapped the riding crop against the wall behind him, his face reddening. Probably just the usual embarrassment of having a quip fall flat on the stony silence of Sherlock’s stare, but he could definitely feel his cheeks getting hotter.
“It’s hardly a locked room if there’s a window,” Sherlock snapped, picking up something from the coffee table and watching - Lestrade followed his gaze without meaning to - the motion of the riding crop as if hypnotised.
“It’s a four inch by five inch window,” said Lestrade, not bothering to ask how Sherlock had known about the window in the first place; he was by now resigned to the idea that Scotland Yard was a leaking ship, and at least, pest though he was, Sherlock wasn’t a journalist.
“Cat,” Sherlock said dismissively, and licked his lips. The movement was so sudden and unexpected that Lestrade flinched the riding crop into his own leg with a thwack, and felt his face redden again.
“I beg your - what?”
“A trained cat, or a ferret,” Sherlock said in the tones of impatient condescension that Lestrade had rarely heard him stop using around anyone. He looked, Lestrade thought - not that he had been paying particularly close attention - slightly pinker than he had when he came in. Perhaps the room was warm. It would explain - thwack - why he was starting to feel a little like he’d acquired a sunburn indoors. His skin felt a little too small and a lot too hot.
“Have you ever tried to train a cat?” he scoffed, waving the end of the riding crop for emphasis. “I’ve got three. You can just about persuade them not to shit on the floor.”
“Check the window sill for hairs,” Sherlock said in a bored voice, watching the riding crop not entirely unlike a cat himself, “and see for yourself. It won’t have been microchipped, so you’ll have to check breeders. It’s not a rescue animal.”
“Are you sure it’s not a ferret -?” Lestrade began, and checked himself with another impatient swish of the riding crop. He knew as well as ever that he was entertaining this nonsense because of who had suggested it - Sherlock was after all almost never wrong - but like always he couldn’t help a sensation of having his leg pulled.
“There’s a small possibility but it’s more likely to be a cat. If a ferret had been in there you’d have been able to smell it. Anderson certainly would, with that beak,” Sherlock said, his eyes tracking the tip of the riding crop as if attached to it.
Lestrade tightened his grip on the handle for reasons he couldn’t give a concrete explanation for, even to himself, and said, “If you’re sure.”
Swish, thwack.
“Why,” Sherlock asked, getting to his feet and holding his dressing gown closed around himself with an imperious and huffy preservation of dignity that would normally have made Lestrade stifle a laugh, “are you fondling my riding crop?”
For a moment they maintained an impasse; Sherlock was uncomfortably close - not just for Lestrade, but presumably for himself too what with his avowed dislike of having anyone in his personal space - and staring Lestrade directly in the eye. Lestrade found himself breathing unevenly, and from what he could make out over the sudden thunder of blood in his ears and the glowing red heat of his face, it didn’t appear that Sherlock was breathing normally either. Then again, what did he do that was normal? He didn’t even eat.
“I …” Lestrade began, trying to wrack his brains and coming up with a smooth white blank where wracking ought to take place. “Will. Check the window sill.” He dropped the riding crop awkwardly into Sherlock’s hands and took off down the stairs as quickly as he could without actually running away.
In his time as Inspector, Lestrade had come to regard with a certain wariness any padded packages delivered to him at work. One or two had contained body parts, one or two just excrement - happily he’d managed to farm the opening of letters out to underlings, particularly any which squished or smelled funny - and one had exploded and taken out his desk. This had fortunately taken place while he was at lunch, but there had been a policy put in place that all packages addressed to specific members of the force now got screened for bomb residue, poison, and organic materials before being passed up to his desk.
It was therefore safe to assume that if the brown packet sitting on his desk and addressed in a meticulous slanting script to his full name and title contained something incendiary, it was only in the metaphorical sense.
Even so, he wasn’t particularly in a hurry to open it. He made a point of checking his emails, replying to some of his emails, and even chicken-pecking half of a departmental assessment response on the intranet before the pointed innocuousness of the package in his in tray got the better of him.
He slit the top of the envelope with a pair of nail scissors someone had thoughtfully dropped on the floor down the side of his desk, and peered inside with a certain amount of trepidation. Nestling in the bubble-wrapped darkness were a small sheet of paper, which he extracted from the envelope with scissored fingers and laid on the desk beside him, and a pair of police issue handcuffs. He took them out and stared at them for a minute before giving in to the whim and checking the intranet for the list of missing stock.
The serial number on the cuffs matched a pair registered as missing yesterday.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that this was just a civic-minded individual doing his duty,” Lestrade muttered to himself, and he picked up the sheet of paper, fully expecting some lurid selection of cut-out letters or a printed warning from some swollen-headed criminal twerp who fancied himself a mastermind.
Near enough, Lestrade thought sourly when he recognised the handwriting.
Yours, I believe. S.
“Charming,” said Lestrade to the desk. “Bloody charming.” He’d received his wallet back in similar fashion enough times to know that this was more of Sherlock’s bloody pick-pocketing.
“You could have sent a text,” Lestrade grumbled when he’d made it all the way up the stairs to 221B and stood wheezing a little on the rug (he might not have been so out of breath had he not given up on the taxi and ploughed onward on foot from Marylebone with the kind of high-speed determination he couldn’t seem to help adopting any more). “Normal people send texts. You send texts. ‘Come at once if convenient. If not, come anyway’. I’ve seen you do it. What’s this cryptic rubbish about?”
Sherlock looked up from his gargoyle coil around a laughably small laptop and said, “Ah, you’re here. Took you a while. Didn’t think you’d be able to resist your curiosity for that long but I suppose you don’t have as much of it as an intelligent person.”
“Yes, alright, thank you,” Lestrade grumbled. John was there, but in the process of putting his coat on, his eyes averted from the whole scene as if he was trying not to take any of it in, and he wondered what precisely he’d stepped into. Lovers’ quarrel, perhaps. The general feel around the department - aside from Anderson’s long-running vendetta - was that they were “probably shagging”. “What exactly was the point in nicking a set of our handcuffs and posting them to me? Bit cryptic, Sherlock. And we need those. You know, on the occasions we actually manage to catch someone? It does help if we can keep them still.”
“I’ll be, I’ll just go and get the milk,” John said firmly, nodding at Lestrade with a thin line of not-smile drawn onto his face by a determined hand. It was an odd expression and one Lestrade couldn’t really place.
“The riding crop is under the sofa at the moment,” Sherlock said without looking up from his skittering, spiderish typing.
“I beg your --?”
“So I’ll see you later then,” John said, raising his voice indignantly. “Sherlock. I’m off. Call me if you need anything.”
“Yes, I won’t, goodbye, goodbye,” Sherlock muttered, waving him away with absurdly long-fingered hands and impatient indifference permeating his every word.
“Would you mind explaining,” Lestrade began, but Sherlock rolled his eyes at him like a wild horse and threw his laptop aside with a careless gesture.
He was dressed, this time - the downstairs door slammed shut with an infuriated timbre - although this didn’t make it seem any less as though Lestrade had walked into his bedroom while he was sleeping. Sherlock’s preposterously well-cut purple shirt was open at the cuffs, missing both cufflinks, and he hadn’t got so far as putting on shoes or even socks on his enormous and bony feet.
“The riding crop is under the sofa,” Sherlock repeated in a bored voice. He had somehow built on his usual derision for Lestrade’s intellect and was now addressing him with the same utter contempt that he might have reserved for Anderson. “I don’t suppose you brought the cuffs.”
“As a matter of fact, no,” Lestrade said stiffly. “What the hell is going on? Some sort of indication that you haven’t completely lost what remains of your mind would be appreciated.”
“Oh well, no matter, plenty more,” Sherlock said, swivelling on his thick heel and delving into the lower drawer of a desk Lestrade had always assumed to be John’s. He returned from his excavations almost immediately, burdened with an identical set of police issue handcuffs dangling from his forefinger.
“How … many … pairs of our cuffs do you have?” Lestrade asked, pointing at them.
“Enough,” Sherlock said pleasantly. “The riding crop is under the sofa. Do you want me with, or without shirt?”
Realisation, not always the speediest in coming to Lestrade when people were circling the point rather than getting to it, struck him like a hammer blow to the knee and jerked a response from him before he had a chance to close his mouth. “You bastard,” he hissed, wishing for a hot-headed moment that he really did have the riding crop in his bloody fucking hand.
“Exactly how unobservant do you think I am?” Sherlock smirked, swinging the cuffs backward and forward idly. “I admit it’s taken me a while, it wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind but on Thursday you might as well have just stood there and bellowed it at me.”
“Is this your idea of a joke?” Lestrade snapped, his face hotter than ever.
“I don’t suppose it’s crossed your abnormally small mind that I might be in earnest,” Sherlock drawled, placing the cuffs in Lestrade’s unresisting hands with his usual care not to touch any part of him. The metal was warm where it had touched his hand. “Shirt or no shirt?”
“Let me get this strai-“
“Stop talking,” Sherlock groaned, and he ducked abruptly beside the sofa. Straightening again too fast for Lestrade to think of making any exit, he thrust the riding-crop handle first into palms already occupied and knocked both the riding crop and the handcuffs onto the floor.
“Well now what -?” Lestrade began, but Sherlock had already sighed and unbuttoned the first of his shirt buttons.
“It’s expensive,” Sherlock explained, which Lestrade didn’t doubt, and, “funny though John’s expression of dismay usually is.”
In contravention of this, he turned at the waist, hurled the purple shirt carelessly in the vague direction of his armchair, and came back to staring Lestrade in the eye with an unflinching intensity that made Lestrade want to either run away or, irrationally, bite his face.
“You dropped the cuffs,” he added helpfully.
Lestrade held his breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Don’t pretend I’ve misread you,” Sherlock said, impatient again. “I never misread anyone.”
Ignoring the arrogance of this assertion, Lestrade grimaced and said, “About sex, though. Not really your area.”
“No one said anything about fucking,” Sherlock said, putting so much emphasis on the word that Lestrade knew it was troublesome to him, regardless of what he might pretend. “This is a beating. I’m sure you know the difference.”
“I know that there isn’t one,” Lestrade said under his breath, but he inhaled as deeply as he could, stooped to pick up the crop - and how easily it fitted into his hands - and cuffs. “On your knees then, if you’re serious.”
“I’m always serious,” Sherlock said, rather fatuously in Lestrade’s view, but he took to his knees and, without prompting, his pale soles pointing back at Lestrade like flags.
He twitched the riding crop in his hand, considering slashing it across the soles of his feet, just to take him by surprise, but that was not how these things worked. For one -as he well knew - the pace and tone were not his to set, for all that he wielded the crop, and for the other - as he also well knew - there was no taking Sherlock by surprise.
Lestrade stooped instead to handcuff the wrists proffered behind their owner’s back, heavy-boned and fatless, at precisely the right distance apart. He muttered, “Is there any point in me cuffing you?”
Sherlock was, after all, liable to be out of his cuffs in under five minutes if he felt like it, as he had demonstrated before - once for example, and once for no purpose Lestrade had been able to divine that went beyond “to piss me off”.
“Yes there’s a point,” Sherlock said quite clearly to the room in front of him, “I want you to.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to ask nicely,” Lestrade sighed, clicking the cuffs closed, cold and impersonal, around those bony wrists. He left Sherlock’s arms to fall, his knuckles brushing his own betrousered buttocks, taking care not to touch the man’s skin himself. Though he knew this was about as much impediment as wrapping a lion in a loose blanket, he couldn’t help a brief surge of warm security at the sight of cuffed arms.
“No,” Sherlock said sharply. “That won’t happen.”
“What?”
“I’m not asking for anything,” he said, just as sharp, and he bent his head to touch his knees, leaving an unmarked, sharp-spined curve of back and the architecture of his ribcage exposed to both Lestrade’s eyes and the cold light of the flat.
“When do you ever,” Lestrade muttered with wryness born of experience, and for a moment he forgot that he was shuffling a riding crop in his hand with the intention of thrashing Sherlock with it and thought only about his incredible inability to just ask nicely. He tried to imagine Sherlock begging, but the mental image was profoundly disturbing and just made him think the man would have to have been drugged, hypnotised, and possibly replaced by a doppelganger.
He looked almost like a statue, bent up into an uncomfortable ball in what seemed to be meditative repose, his bare skin too warm to be marble and too cold, almost, to be human.
“I’m not going to ask,” Sherlock repeated, his irritation muffled by his knees, and Lestrade clenched and unclenched his hand around the handle of the riding crop, trying for a good position.
Twice he lifted his arm, ready to bring the crop down, before deciding it wasn’t quite the right place, and shuffling sideways, much to Sherlock’s evident anger.
“Will you fucking get on with it,” he growled into his knees.
“Alright, calm down,” Lestrade muttered, as much to himself as to the impatient statue-still figure grumbling on the carpet before him. He stole another glance at the yellow-white soles of his unhealthy bare feet and considered once more smashing Sherlock’s toes with the crop for the enraged noise he’d make.
He lifted the crop again, got his balance rather less gracefully than he’d have hoped, and brought it down with a thwack across Sherlock’s shoulder-blades that echoed in the empty flat and made his arm tremble. Lestrade took a sharp breath - his head already spun - and lifted the crop from Sherlock’s back.
There was a hot red imprint with a corona of pinkened skin already on the pale expanse of his back.
Lestrade took another steadying breath and repositioned his feet on the carpet. He was familiar with the thoughts that accompanied this - this too-infrequent thing, with other people - the sense of power in seeing someone’s skin break out in welts, the sound of their ragged breathing, their pain; then the sense of having violated himself by enjoying it so much; and the incontrovertible fact that after one strike against a willing antagonist he was already flush-faced and breathing as if he’d run a country mile.
He readjusted his stance again. His trousers -
Lestrade brought the crop down on Sherlock’s back, hard, a second time. The lie of the crop against his flesh criss-crossed the first mark like an illiterate signing his name.
He lifted the crop: there was some kind of traffic altercation outside, taxis and busses honking at each other and someone had just called someone else a “fucking cunt” directly downstairs, loudly enough to carry -
With a brisk, hard overarm motion that pulled on his lateral muscles as well as his tricep (and made his wrist click), Lestrade brough the crop down again, watching with a blurry fascination that failed to detach itself fully from his uneven breaths, as the crop ploughed a brief furrow into Sherlock’s skin. He was sure that, slowed down, a ripple would pass through what little fat the man had.
Sherlock made a quiet, apparently involuntary noise, and Lestrade smashed the crop into his back so hard that his own wrist ached at it.
“Harder,” Sherlock muttered.
“Harder,” Lestrade echoed, his face burning. “I’ll give you fucking harder-“
“That was the idea,” Sherlock informed his own kneecaps.
Lestrade rolled his shoulder, took three quick breaths, and lashed downward a handful of times. He kept his eyes open: the pink rash of agitated flesh spread like fire through newspaper over the unmarked curve of Sherlock’s back. With each strike he saw flesh ripple, skin darken, and the tempo of Sherlock’s inflating and deflating lungs change as he held his breath against the coming pain.
With each strike his own breathing came in abrupt jets from between his teeth. “Fucking harder is it,” he muttered, cracking the crop across an already-reddened junction of the crop-welts, and he was rewarded with a sound forced from Sherlock’s mouth that sounded a lot like “wuh”.
He didn’t stop, although he was in danger of losing his breath completely, and his face was unbearably hot; Lestrade made his shoulder ache with the ferocity of the blows. He choked on the concern that spread in his chest when he saw the outlines of where the bruises would form, but the concern was devoured by a far less well-meaning feeling immediately afterward, and he had to chew the inside of his mouth to keep from groping himself.
The blow that broke Sherlock’s skin - sending a rash of red dots rising to the surface as he whipped the crop away, which welled from pinpricks to spots and slithered into each other before running carefree over the ridge of his back - gave him pause. Lestrade stepped back, hand to mouth, and tried to think through the burning sensation that had engulfed most of the front of his body and narrowed his focus to crop-arm-back-dick.
“NOT. FINISHED,” Sherlock barked in an unusually guttural, desperate-sounding voice, and Lestrade took this as encouragement enough to bring the crop down again in a violent swipe across the man’s kidneys.
He had been told repeatedly in basic training that this was a dangerous place to strike, and like as not to do serious damage to internal organs.
Sherlock made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a sob of pain, and he redirected his energies northward, making a not-wholly-mental note of how much suffering it seemed to have induced in him and just how much it had made his dick twitch inside its confines.
“Harder?” Lestrade suggested, trying not to make it a risible sing-song threat.
“No,” Sherlock said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“Stop fucking talking.”
Lestrade extended his free hand to the convex slopes of Sherlock’s beaten back and with maybe an inch between his palm and the red surface of his skin, felt the heat of pain rising from his blood like a beckoning finger. He bit again at the inside of his own mouth and for one very long moment contemplated what might happen if he let his hand drop and stroked the evidence of his work for a moment.
Sherlock’s fingers twitched and his wrists pulled for a moment against the heavy metal cuffs, and Lestrade stepped back from him as if he’d been stung, clasping the crop in both hands.
“That,” Sherlock said in a breathy, unsteady voice, “will do for now.”
Will it, thought Lestrade grimly, his mind full of scenarios where he ignored this and continued thrashing Sherlock until he begged for mercy.
He put the crop down and said with all the sarcasm his thick tongue could currently muster, “I suppose I can leave you to get yourself out of those.”
Lestrade did not wait for a smart reply, or for Sherlock to demonstrate precisely how good he was at getting out of police handcuffs, or to stand up slowly on wobbling legs to reveal just how successful Lestrade had been in beating him off; he only bolted for the bathroom as quickly as he could without stumbling or smacking what felt like unfeasibly clumsy elbows off every doorframe he passed through.
Safely locked - or as safe as he could be in the home of an inveterate lock-picker - in the smallest room, Lestrade leaned heavily on the door and failed to catch his breath. He squinted below his belt; there was little hope that an erection this persistent was going to get bored and bugger off, leaving him in peace to regret his poor decision-making.
Lestrade sighed, fidgeted his dick from out of his trousers as quickly as he could, and tried to think about nothing in particular as he coaxed the wretched thing to orgasm. He failed in the regard that, as he came, he found himself preoccupied with the twitching fingers and total silence with which Sherlock had greeted his own bloody orgasm.
As the blood receded from his ears he caught the remnants of a one-sided conversation downstairs:
-- not sure what you mean by ‘safe’ but yes you can come back now, did you get the milk? Well why didn’t you get the bloody milk--
Lestrade stuffed himself back into his trousers as quickly as he could, wiping his hand furtively on the toilet roll and trying without success to close off his mind from the last however many minutes of his life.
--more or less, wanking in the bathroom I think. Why not take a look for yourself?
Lestrade splashed as much water onto his face as he could without looking as if he’d been on an impromptu snorkling holiday, tugged the door open, and fled down the stairs as quickly as he could.
fandom: bbc Sherlock
pairing: Sherlock/Lestrade
warnings: violence
disclaimer: all this business is the property of the bbc and the estate of sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I am just making a nasty mess.
notes: written as a Christmas present for stratospherique; she made very specific requests & to the best of my knowledge I've fulfilled them.
221B Baker Street was, at Inspector G. Lestrade’s estimation, a battlefield between the sensibilities of an ex-army man accustomed to neatness and the ongoing experiment in allegedly organised chaos that was the apparent prerogative of the world’s only consulting detective. He didn’t exactly relish calling upon Sherlock for help, and he relished it even less when civilised methods of communication like “sending a grumpy text message” failed to achieve a response and he was forced to go and annoy Mrs Hudson into letting him in.
There was a very rotten orange in a bowl on the kitchen table.
Lestrade bent over it to inspect it more closely. The odds on it being an experiment versus it being some attempt at healthy eating instigated by John which had been summarily ignored were roughly even. It stank to the high heavens, and as he watched a fruit fly wandered around the skin of it like a lost tourist.
He shrank back from it, holding his breath, and, failing to spot Sherlock or even John, idly scooped up the riding crop that was resting against the coffee table. The coffee table itself was piled high with stacks of printed paper, although Lestrade could see the tell-tale corner of a Papa John’s pizza box poking out from under the print-outs. It suggested … probably … that John had made an effort with keeping them both fed but that both had been too busy to keep up the pretence of living like normal human beings…
Feeling rather pleased with himself, he took a step back, and nearly cracked his head against Sherlock’s chin.
“Yes I got your text,” Sherlock said irritably, moving out of his way and into the room without anything resembling grace or dignity; Lestrade gripped the handle of the riding crop a little more tightly and tapped it against his knee in frustration as Sherlock swayed past him with an air of contempt. “The fact I didn’t answer it didn’t suggest to you that the case is impossibly dull and uncomplicated and not worth wasting my time with?”
Lestrade sighed, watching Sherlock circumnavigate (a word he’d learnt from him, in fact) the coffee table and pick up a copy of the TV Guide; such a prosaic publication that Lestrade nearly lost his internal balance at the sight of it.
Sherlock, clad in a silk dressing gown and the very slight additional rumpling of his unruly curls that suggested he’d been indulging in one of his very rare and not always voluntary sleeps, folded himself into a sitting position and glared at him from his armchair.
“You never answer your texts,” Lestrade pointed out. He wafted the riding crop through the air at his side and thought idly of laying a stripe across the bugger’s nose to shock him out of his sneering. The subsequent tightening of his throat made him think better of it.
“Tells you something about the quality of your cases, doesn’t it,” Sherlock muttered, eyeballing him ferociously. He rarely made eye contact with people who weren’t suspects, Lestrade - and almost everyone else - had noticed, but on the occasions that he did it was like being autopsied with a glance.
“I’d have thought an old locked room mystery would be right up your alley,” Lestrade said, trying to inject a little humour into the situation and failing as desperately as he always did; he tapped the riding crop against the wall behind him, his face reddening. Probably just the usual embarrassment of having a quip fall flat on the stony silence of Sherlock’s stare, but he could definitely feel his cheeks getting hotter.
“It’s hardly a locked room if there’s a window,” Sherlock snapped, picking up something from the coffee table and watching - Lestrade followed his gaze without meaning to - the motion of the riding crop as if hypnotised.
“It’s a four inch by five inch window,” said Lestrade, not bothering to ask how Sherlock had known about the window in the first place; he was by now resigned to the idea that Scotland Yard was a leaking ship, and at least, pest though he was, Sherlock wasn’t a journalist.
“Cat,” Sherlock said dismissively, and licked his lips. The movement was so sudden and unexpected that Lestrade flinched the riding crop into his own leg with a thwack, and felt his face redden again.
“I beg your - what?”
“A trained cat, or a ferret,” Sherlock said in the tones of impatient condescension that Lestrade had rarely heard him stop using around anyone. He looked, Lestrade thought - not that he had been paying particularly close attention - slightly pinker than he had when he came in. Perhaps the room was warm. It would explain - thwack - why he was starting to feel a little like he’d acquired a sunburn indoors. His skin felt a little too small and a lot too hot.
“Have you ever tried to train a cat?” he scoffed, waving the end of the riding crop for emphasis. “I’ve got three. You can just about persuade them not to shit on the floor.”
“Check the window sill for hairs,” Sherlock said in a bored voice, watching the riding crop not entirely unlike a cat himself, “and see for yourself. It won’t have been microchipped, so you’ll have to check breeders. It’s not a rescue animal.”
“Are you sure it’s not a ferret -?” Lestrade began, and checked himself with another impatient swish of the riding crop. He knew as well as ever that he was entertaining this nonsense because of who had suggested it - Sherlock was after all almost never wrong - but like always he couldn’t help a sensation of having his leg pulled.
“There’s a small possibility but it’s more likely to be a cat. If a ferret had been in there you’d have been able to smell it. Anderson certainly would, with that beak,” Sherlock said, his eyes tracking the tip of the riding crop as if attached to it.
Lestrade tightened his grip on the handle for reasons he couldn’t give a concrete explanation for, even to himself, and said, “If you’re sure.”
Swish, thwack.
“Why,” Sherlock asked, getting to his feet and holding his dressing gown closed around himself with an imperious and huffy preservation of dignity that would normally have made Lestrade stifle a laugh, “are you fondling my riding crop?”
For a moment they maintained an impasse; Sherlock was uncomfortably close - not just for Lestrade, but presumably for himself too what with his avowed dislike of having anyone in his personal space - and staring Lestrade directly in the eye. Lestrade found himself breathing unevenly, and from what he could make out over the sudden thunder of blood in his ears and the glowing red heat of his face, it didn’t appear that Sherlock was breathing normally either. Then again, what did he do that was normal? He didn’t even eat.
“I …” Lestrade began, trying to wrack his brains and coming up with a smooth white blank where wracking ought to take place. “Will. Check the window sill.” He dropped the riding crop awkwardly into Sherlock’s hands and took off down the stairs as quickly as he could without actually running away.
In his time as Inspector, Lestrade had come to regard with a certain wariness any padded packages delivered to him at work. One or two had contained body parts, one or two just excrement - happily he’d managed to farm the opening of letters out to underlings, particularly any which squished or smelled funny - and one had exploded and taken out his desk. This had fortunately taken place while he was at lunch, but there had been a policy put in place that all packages addressed to specific members of the force now got screened for bomb residue, poison, and organic materials before being passed up to his desk.
It was therefore safe to assume that if the brown packet sitting on his desk and addressed in a meticulous slanting script to his full name and title contained something incendiary, it was only in the metaphorical sense.
Even so, he wasn’t particularly in a hurry to open it. He made a point of checking his emails, replying to some of his emails, and even chicken-pecking half of a departmental assessment response on the intranet before the pointed innocuousness of the package in his in tray got the better of him.
He slit the top of the envelope with a pair of nail scissors someone had thoughtfully dropped on the floor down the side of his desk, and peered inside with a certain amount of trepidation. Nestling in the bubble-wrapped darkness were a small sheet of paper, which he extracted from the envelope with scissored fingers and laid on the desk beside him, and a pair of police issue handcuffs. He took them out and stared at them for a minute before giving in to the whim and checking the intranet for the list of missing stock.
The serial number on the cuffs matched a pair registered as missing yesterday.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that this was just a civic-minded individual doing his duty,” Lestrade muttered to himself, and he picked up the sheet of paper, fully expecting some lurid selection of cut-out letters or a printed warning from some swollen-headed criminal twerp who fancied himself a mastermind.
Near enough, Lestrade thought sourly when he recognised the handwriting.
Yours, I believe. S.
“Charming,” said Lestrade to the desk. “Bloody charming.” He’d received his wallet back in similar fashion enough times to know that this was more of Sherlock’s bloody pick-pocketing.
“You could have sent a text,” Lestrade grumbled when he’d made it all the way up the stairs to 221B and stood wheezing a little on the rug (he might not have been so out of breath had he not given up on the taxi and ploughed onward on foot from Marylebone with the kind of high-speed determination he couldn’t seem to help adopting any more). “Normal people send texts. You send texts. ‘Come at once if convenient. If not, come anyway’. I’ve seen you do it. What’s this cryptic rubbish about?”
Sherlock looked up from his gargoyle coil around a laughably small laptop and said, “Ah, you’re here. Took you a while. Didn’t think you’d be able to resist your curiosity for that long but I suppose you don’t have as much of it as an intelligent person.”
“Yes, alright, thank you,” Lestrade grumbled. John was there, but in the process of putting his coat on, his eyes averted from the whole scene as if he was trying not to take any of it in, and he wondered what precisely he’d stepped into. Lovers’ quarrel, perhaps. The general feel around the department - aside from Anderson’s long-running vendetta - was that they were “probably shagging”. “What exactly was the point in nicking a set of our handcuffs and posting them to me? Bit cryptic, Sherlock. And we need those. You know, on the occasions we actually manage to catch someone? It does help if we can keep them still.”
“I’ll be, I’ll just go and get the milk,” John said firmly, nodding at Lestrade with a thin line of not-smile drawn onto his face by a determined hand. It was an odd expression and one Lestrade couldn’t really place.
“The riding crop is under the sofa at the moment,” Sherlock said without looking up from his skittering, spiderish typing.
“I beg your --?”
“So I’ll see you later then,” John said, raising his voice indignantly. “Sherlock. I’m off. Call me if you need anything.”
“Yes, I won’t, goodbye, goodbye,” Sherlock muttered, waving him away with absurdly long-fingered hands and impatient indifference permeating his every word.
“Would you mind explaining,” Lestrade began, but Sherlock rolled his eyes at him like a wild horse and threw his laptop aside with a careless gesture.
He was dressed, this time - the downstairs door slammed shut with an infuriated timbre - although this didn’t make it seem any less as though Lestrade had walked into his bedroom while he was sleeping. Sherlock’s preposterously well-cut purple shirt was open at the cuffs, missing both cufflinks, and he hadn’t got so far as putting on shoes or even socks on his enormous and bony feet.
“The riding crop is under the sofa,” Sherlock repeated in a bored voice. He had somehow built on his usual derision for Lestrade’s intellect and was now addressing him with the same utter contempt that he might have reserved for Anderson. “I don’t suppose you brought the cuffs.”
“As a matter of fact, no,” Lestrade said stiffly. “What the hell is going on? Some sort of indication that you haven’t completely lost what remains of your mind would be appreciated.”
“Oh well, no matter, plenty more,” Sherlock said, swivelling on his thick heel and delving into the lower drawer of a desk Lestrade had always assumed to be John’s. He returned from his excavations almost immediately, burdened with an identical set of police issue handcuffs dangling from his forefinger.
“How … many … pairs of our cuffs do you have?” Lestrade asked, pointing at them.
“Enough,” Sherlock said pleasantly. “The riding crop is under the sofa. Do you want me with, or without shirt?”
Realisation, not always the speediest in coming to Lestrade when people were circling the point rather than getting to it, struck him like a hammer blow to the knee and jerked a response from him before he had a chance to close his mouth. “You bastard,” he hissed, wishing for a hot-headed moment that he really did have the riding crop in his bloody fucking hand.
“Exactly how unobservant do you think I am?” Sherlock smirked, swinging the cuffs backward and forward idly. “I admit it’s taken me a while, it wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind but on Thursday you might as well have just stood there and bellowed it at me.”
“Is this your idea of a joke?” Lestrade snapped, his face hotter than ever.
“I don’t suppose it’s crossed your abnormally small mind that I might be in earnest,” Sherlock drawled, placing the cuffs in Lestrade’s unresisting hands with his usual care not to touch any part of him. The metal was warm where it had touched his hand. “Shirt or no shirt?”
“Let me get this strai-“
“Stop talking,” Sherlock groaned, and he ducked abruptly beside the sofa. Straightening again too fast for Lestrade to think of making any exit, he thrust the riding-crop handle first into palms already occupied and knocked both the riding crop and the handcuffs onto the floor.
“Well now what -?” Lestrade began, but Sherlock had already sighed and unbuttoned the first of his shirt buttons.
“It’s expensive,” Sherlock explained, which Lestrade didn’t doubt, and, “funny though John’s expression of dismay usually is.”
In contravention of this, he turned at the waist, hurled the purple shirt carelessly in the vague direction of his armchair, and came back to staring Lestrade in the eye with an unflinching intensity that made Lestrade want to either run away or, irrationally, bite his face.
“You dropped the cuffs,” he added helpfully.
Lestrade held his breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Don’t pretend I’ve misread you,” Sherlock said, impatient again. “I never misread anyone.”
Ignoring the arrogance of this assertion, Lestrade grimaced and said, “About sex, though. Not really your area.”
“No one said anything about fucking,” Sherlock said, putting so much emphasis on the word that Lestrade knew it was troublesome to him, regardless of what he might pretend. “This is a beating. I’m sure you know the difference.”
“I know that there isn’t one,” Lestrade said under his breath, but he inhaled as deeply as he could, stooped to pick up the crop - and how easily it fitted into his hands - and cuffs. “On your knees then, if you’re serious.”
“I’m always serious,” Sherlock said, rather fatuously in Lestrade’s view, but he took to his knees and, without prompting, his pale soles pointing back at Lestrade like flags.
He twitched the riding crop in his hand, considering slashing it across the soles of his feet, just to take him by surprise, but that was not how these things worked. For one -as he well knew - the pace and tone were not his to set, for all that he wielded the crop, and for the other - as he also well knew - there was no taking Sherlock by surprise.
Lestrade stooped instead to handcuff the wrists proffered behind their owner’s back, heavy-boned and fatless, at precisely the right distance apart. He muttered, “Is there any point in me cuffing you?”
Sherlock was, after all, liable to be out of his cuffs in under five minutes if he felt like it, as he had demonstrated before - once for example, and once for no purpose Lestrade had been able to divine that went beyond “to piss me off”.
“Yes there’s a point,” Sherlock said quite clearly to the room in front of him, “I want you to.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to ask nicely,” Lestrade sighed, clicking the cuffs closed, cold and impersonal, around those bony wrists. He left Sherlock’s arms to fall, his knuckles brushing his own betrousered buttocks, taking care not to touch the man’s skin himself. Though he knew this was about as much impediment as wrapping a lion in a loose blanket, he couldn’t help a brief surge of warm security at the sight of cuffed arms.
“No,” Sherlock said sharply. “That won’t happen.”
“What?”
“I’m not asking for anything,” he said, just as sharp, and he bent his head to touch his knees, leaving an unmarked, sharp-spined curve of back and the architecture of his ribcage exposed to both Lestrade’s eyes and the cold light of the flat.
“When do you ever,” Lestrade muttered with wryness born of experience, and for a moment he forgot that he was shuffling a riding crop in his hand with the intention of thrashing Sherlock with it and thought only about his incredible inability to just ask nicely. He tried to imagine Sherlock begging, but the mental image was profoundly disturbing and just made him think the man would have to have been drugged, hypnotised, and possibly replaced by a doppelganger.
He looked almost like a statue, bent up into an uncomfortable ball in what seemed to be meditative repose, his bare skin too warm to be marble and too cold, almost, to be human.
“I’m not going to ask,” Sherlock repeated, his irritation muffled by his knees, and Lestrade clenched and unclenched his hand around the handle of the riding crop, trying for a good position.
Twice he lifted his arm, ready to bring the crop down, before deciding it wasn’t quite the right place, and shuffling sideways, much to Sherlock’s evident anger.
“Will you fucking get on with it,” he growled into his knees.
“Alright, calm down,” Lestrade muttered, as much to himself as to the impatient statue-still figure grumbling on the carpet before him. He stole another glance at the yellow-white soles of his unhealthy bare feet and considered once more smashing Sherlock’s toes with the crop for the enraged noise he’d make.
He lifted the crop again, got his balance rather less gracefully than he’d have hoped, and brought it down with a thwack across Sherlock’s shoulder-blades that echoed in the empty flat and made his arm tremble. Lestrade took a sharp breath - his head already spun - and lifted the crop from Sherlock’s back.
There was a hot red imprint with a corona of pinkened skin already on the pale expanse of his back.
Lestrade took another steadying breath and repositioned his feet on the carpet. He was familiar with the thoughts that accompanied this - this too-infrequent thing, with other people - the sense of power in seeing someone’s skin break out in welts, the sound of their ragged breathing, their pain; then the sense of having violated himself by enjoying it so much; and the incontrovertible fact that after one strike against a willing antagonist he was already flush-faced and breathing as if he’d run a country mile.
He readjusted his stance again. His trousers -
Lestrade brought the crop down on Sherlock’s back, hard, a second time. The lie of the crop against his flesh criss-crossed the first mark like an illiterate signing his name.
He lifted the crop: there was some kind of traffic altercation outside, taxis and busses honking at each other and someone had just called someone else a “fucking cunt” directly downstairs, loudly enough to carry -
With a brisk, hard overarm motion that pulled on his lateral muscles as well as his tricep (and made his wrist click), Lestrade brough the crop down again, watching with a blurry fascination that failed to detach itself fully from his uneven breaths, as the crop ploughed a brief furrow into Sherlock’s skin. He was sure that, slowed down, a ripple would pass through what little fat the man had.
Sherlock made a quiet, apparently involuntary noise, and Lestrade smashed the crop into his back so hard that his own wrist ached at it.
“Harder,” Sherlock muttered.
“Harder,” Lestrade echoed, his face burning. “I’ll give you fucking harder-“
“That was the idea,” Sherlock informed his own kneecaps.
Lestrade rolled his shoulder, took three quick breaths, and lashed downward a handful of times. He kept his eyes open: the pink rash of agitated flesh spread like fire through newspaper over the unmarked curve of Sherlock’s back. With each strike he saw flesh ripple, skin darken, and the tempo of Sherlock’s inflating and deflating lungs change as he held his breath against the coming pain.
With each strike his own breathing came in abrupt jets from between his teeth. “Fucking harder is it,” he muttered, cracking the crop across an already-reddened junction of the crop-welts, and he was rewarded with a sound forced from Sherlock’s mouth that sounded a lot like “wuh”.
He didn’t stop, although he was in danger of losing his breath completely, and his face was unbearably hot; Lestrade made his shoulder ache with the ferocity of the blows. He choked on the concern that spread in his chest when he saw the outlines of where the bruises would form, but the concern was devoured by a far less well-meaning feeling immediately afterward, and he had to chew the inside of his mouth to keep from groping himself.
The blow that broke Sherlock’s skin - sending a rash of red dots rising to the surface as he whipped the crop away, which welled from pinpricks to spots and slithered into each other before running carefree over the ridge of his back - gave him pause. Lestrade stepped back, hand to mouth, and tried to think through the burning sensation that had engulfed most of the front of his body and narrowed his focus to crop-arm-back-dick.
“NOT. FINISHED,” Sherlock barked in an unusually guttural, desperate-sounding voice, and Lestrade took this as encouragement enough to bring the crop down again in a violent swipe across the man’s kidneys.
He had been told repeatedly in basic training that this was a dangerous place to strike, and like as not to do serious damage to internal organs.
Sherlock made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a sob of pain, and he redirected his energies northward, making a not-wholly-mental note of how much suffering it seemed to have induced in him and just how much it had made his dick twitch inside its confines.
“Harder?” Lestrade suggested, trying not to make it a risible sing-song threat.
“No,” Sherlock said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“Stop fucking talking.”
Lestrade extended his free hand to the convex slopes of Sherlock’s beaten back and with maybe an inch between his palm and the red surface of his skin, felt the heat of pain rising from his blood like a beckoning finger. He bit again at the inside of his own mouth and for one very long moment contemplated what might happen if he let his hand drop and stroked the evidence of his work for a moment.
Sherlock’s fingers twitched and his wrists pulled for a moment against the heavy metal cuffs, and Lestrade stepped back from him as if he’d been stung, clasping the crop in both hands.
“That,” Sherlock said in a breathy, unsteady voice, “will do for now.”
Will it, thought Lestrade grimly, his mind full of scenarios where he ignored this and continued thrashing Sherlock until he begged for mercy.
He put the crop down and said with all the sarcasm his thick tongue could currently muster, “I suppose I can leave you to get yourself out of those.”
Lestrade did not wait for a smart reply, or for Sherlock to demonstrate precisely how good he was at getting out of police handcuffs, or to stand up slowly on wobbling legs to reveal just how successful Lestrade had been in beating him off; he only bolted for the bathroom as quickly as he could without stumbling or smacking what felt like unfeasibly clumsy elbows off every doorframe he passed through.
Safely locked - or as safe as he could be in the home of an inveterate lock-picker - in the smallest room, Lestrade leaned heavily on the door and failed to catch his breath. He squinted below his belt; there was little hope that an erection this persistent was going to get bored and bugger off, leaving him in peace to regret his poor decision-making.
Lestrade sighed, fidgeted his dick from out of his trousers as quickly as he could, and tried to think about nothing in particular as he coaxed the wretched thing to orgasm. He failed in the regard that, as he came, he found himself preoccupied with the twitching fingers and total silence with which Sherlock had greeted his own bloody orgasm.
As the blood receded from his ears he caught the remnants of a one-sided conversation downstairs:
-- not sure what you mean by ‘safe’ but yes you can come back now, did you get the milk? Well why didn’t you get the bloody milk--
Lestrade stuffed himself back into his trousers as quickly as he could, wiping his hand furtively on the toilet roll and trying without success to close off his mind from the last however many minutes of his life.
--more or less, wanking in the bathroom I think. Why not take a look for yourself?
Lestrade splashed as much water onto his face as he could without looking as if he’d been on an impromptu snorkling holiday, tugged the door open, and fled down the stairs as quickly as he could.