John Watson's Twelve Days of Christmas (6/?)
Title - John Watson's Twelve Days of Christmas (6/?)
Author -earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - It's the holiday season. John Watson needs money. Sherlock Holmes needs something else.
Author's Notes - Thank you to dashcommaslash for poking through this for me!
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
On the day after Boxing Day, John woke to Sherlock screeching at the violin.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” he said, when John sat up, scowling.
“Of course I’m bloody well awake,” spat out John. “What the hell are you doing?”
“A serenade,” answered Sherlock.
“That is not a serenade. That is noise,” glared John.
“Everyone’s a critic,” rejoined Sherlock, mildly.
“Shut up and get out of this room,” John replied, and flung one of his pillows at him.
“But,” said Sherlock, dodging the pillow with no effort at all, “I have plans for us today.”
John, grumbling, retreated back to his remaining pillow. “Do they involve three French hens?”
“No,” answered Sherlock readily. “But they do involve going into town. I thought you might like to get out of the house for a bit.”
John considered this from underneath his pillow. He probably wasn’t going to get back to sleep at this point, so he might as well get up. And a town excursion seemed like a nice way to kill the day. And probably safer than sitting by a romantic fire again looking through evidence on Sherlock’s laptop while Sherlock dozed at his feet.
“Town could be nice,” John decided.
***
Sherlock had clearly learned a lot about the town in preparation for this excursion. He shared anecdotes and statistics with John as if he’d learned them by rote. But John didn’t care because the town was charming. Almost as charming as Sherlock’s clear desire that John enjoy himself. Even though most of Sherlock’s tour was taken up with criminal history. John supposed that was what Sherlock thought was interesting, but John also found it very interesting, and that was mostly because there was clearly something wrong with him.
Eventually Sherlock suggested tea, and John agreed because John almost never turned down an opportunity for tea, and Sherlock steered them to the tea shop on the town’s high street. It sat directly next to a music shop, and Sherlock stopped them in front of it and gestured to the window display and said, “Three French horns.”
“Oh, God,” said John, looking at the three French horns in the window. “That was terrible.” And Sherlock gave him that small smile of his.
Once settled in the shop for tea, Sherlock said, “I’ve been monopolizing conversation again. You should say something about yourself.”
“Oh,” said John, sipping his cup of tea, and thought about enlisting, about Afghanistan, about getting shot, about coming home, about limping and trembling when he didn’t want to but with no clear idea how to fix himself. John thought of all of that, took another sip of tea, then said, lightly, “My birthday is March 17.”
Sherlock’s eyes were sharp on John in that all-seeing way of his, cataloguing everything that John didn’t want him to know or see, and John hated that feeling. He sipped his tea again and looked out the front window of the tea shop.
“Tell me about James Bond films,” Sherlock said, suddenly.
John was surprised into looking back at him. “What?”
“James Bond films. You love them, correct?”
“I…Yeah, I do.”
“Fine. Then let’s discuss them. Which is your favorite?”
“Have you ever seen a James Bond movie?”
“Of course not,” said Sherlock, adding a don’t-be-an-idiot look to his tone, just for good measure.
“Then what does it matter which is my favorite? You won’t know it.”
“Tell me it anyway. Tell me its plot.” Sherlock sipped his tea and looked expectant.
“If you’ve never seen a James Bond movie, then the plot is going to sound ridiculous to you. Well,” John amended, “I suppose the plots are always ridiculous, it’s just…Say you had gold paint.”
And John went over the plot of Goldfinger, with Sherlock frowning and correcting the scientific inaccuracies of the plot, and then John said, “That plot looks like utter genius compared to, say, Moonraker,” which led to him going over the plot of Moonraker and Sherlock frowning and correcting even more scientific inaccuracies, and then Sherlock said, “And you like these movies?” and John answered, “Sometimes you like things for everything that makes them silly. That’s true love, I suppose. Acknowledging all the terrible bits, and loving something for those terrible bits.”
Sherlock looked thoughtful, as if John had just had some amazing insight into all of human civilization.
John looked out the window at the people hurrying along the high street, heads down against a biting cold wind that had moved in. “So,” he remarked. “Can you look at these people and just… know everything about them?”
Sherlock followed his gaze. “Most things worth knowing.”
“Aren’t you a show-off,” commented John.
“Yes,” Sherlock responded.
“Go on, then. Be impressive.”
And Sherlock was, rattling off a long, detailed array of deductions about the strangers passing by.
“How do we know any of this is true?” John asked, finally. “You’re probably just making it all up.”
“And you’d never know,” said Sherlock, with a satisfied smile, looking out the window still, “because I am a very good liar.”
“I’ve noticed. You’re doing an excellent job of coming up with romantic little dates.”
“Yes,” said Sherlock, suddenly very serious again, and drummed his fingers on the table impatiently.
John felt like he’d said something wrong, because Sherlock’s mood had plainly shifted radically. They had been wrapped in such cozy intimacy, and time had been flying by as usual, and John had been content enough to sit in that tea shop forever, but instead now John felt as if the record had skipped and the spell had been entirely broken.
“Bought you something,” John said, trying to salvage the conversation a bit, reaching into his bag.
Sherlock’s fingers stopped drumming. He looked over at John in obvious surprise. “What? For what?”
“I don’t know,” John said, because he didn’t. Fake boyfriends were excused from gift-giving, John thought.
“When did you get it?” asked Sherlock, curiously.
“When you were busy arguing about Schrödinger’s cat with that poor girl behind the counter.”
A look of horror crossed Sherlock’s face. “It isn’t Cluedo, is it? I told you not to buy that-”
“It isn’t Cluedo. I bought the Cluedo for me. Here.”
The book was a small and obviously very brief introduction to the history of the town and surrounding countryside, and Sherlock turned it over in his hands in evident bemusement.
“It’s a history of the town,” John told him, helpfully.
“Well, that I can tell,” Sherlock responded, with only a flash of irritation in his voice because he was busy staring down at the book with a look of astonished wonder. Sherlock opened it, and glanced at the first page, where John had hastily written an inscription while Sherlock had been busy arguing about the rules of chess with a little girl they’d encountered on the street: Everything I’m sure you already know. Waiting for you to correct it.
“Oh,” said Sherlock, still not looking up. “It’s…Oh.”
John wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “You already have it, don’t you?”
“Why would I have this?” asked Sherlock, closing the book. “I would never have bought something this silly myself.”
John passed over the description of his gift as “silly” and focused on the implication of Sherlock’s statement: He would never have bought it for himself, and who else would have bought it for him? John thought of Annabel’s father at church on Christmas Eve, so shocked that Sherlock might have a friend. And John thought of the game they’d just been playing, of Sherlock deducing everyone’s secrets as they strode down the high street. Sherlock was probably always like that; John could see it quite clearly. Clever and blunt, not the sort to make friends easily. Sherlock has a deep need to love and be loved, John heard Violet saying, and Sherlock had no one. Sherlock had hired someone to pretend to be a boyfriend, that’s how much “no one” Sherlock had. John suddenly felt that he should never have accepted Sherlock’s offer. He should have turned it down, forced Sherlock to be set up by his mother, allowing him the possibility of someone in his life to keep him from being so lonely.
“Sherlock,” said John, his voice faltering.
Sherlock looked up from the book, his expression as inscrutable as always.
What the hell did he even want to say? “Anyway,” said John, clearing his throat and trying not to fidget because Sherlock would notice. “I hope you like it.”
Sherlock nodded once, slowly, thoughtfully, eyes on John’s fingers where he was keeping them still and steady. Then he said, “It’s late. We should go.”
“Right,” John agreed, trying not to seem as awkward as he felt. “Yes. Absolutely.”
They were in the car, driving back to the Holmes estate, before Sherlock said, his hands tight on the steering wheel and his gaze strictly facing forward, “Thank you. For the book. I should have said. Thank you.” He said it uncertainly, as if he wasn’t quite sure it was what he ought to be saying at all, as if English were a strange language he’d just learned and he was worried he might have just said, Please may I marry your pig?
John replied, with no idea what else he could possibly say, “You’re welcome.”
***
Sherlock was in the shower when John woke the following morning. John spent a moment lying in bed not thinking of Sherlock, wet and naked, a few feet away. Then the shower turned off, and the bathroom door opened, and Sherlock walked out in nothing but a towel, his dark curls wet and dripping, and John gaped at the small of his back where it disappeared tantalizingly underneath the edge of the towel, and said, strangled, “Um.”
“It’s snowing,” Sherlock replied shortly, leaning over to pull some bit of clothing out of a dresser drawer.
John stared at his current view of Sherlock’s towel-clad posterior, translated Sherlock’s statement, and looked out the window instead. It was snowing, not heavily but steadily, and John wasn’t sure what that had to do with the nearly naked Sherlock he suddenly had on his hands.
John looked back at Sherlock, who had in the meantime strode back into the ensuite and shut the door behind him. John took a deep breath and stared up at the bloody cherubs.
The ensuite door opened again, and Sherlock emerged, more or less dressed. Well, in trousers at least, and a shirt that wasn’t buttoned yet. John had thought it would be an improvement but it was only worse. It made John want to nudge the fabric of the shirt aside with his nose, kissing his way up a greater and greater slice of chest.
“Are you all right?” Sherlock asked him negligently, buttoning his shirt and checking his reflection in the mirror.
“Fine,” lied John.
“Your breathing is elevated,” Sherlock continued, tucking his shirt in now and not really helping the rate of John’s breathing. “Not on the edge of a panic attack, are you?” Sherlock’s eyes, for the first time, shifted in the mirror to meet John’s.
The furthest thing from a panic attack, thought John. But then, considering his current position and how sodding complicated this all was, maybe a panic attack would be an appropriate response. “I’m fine,” said John.
Sherlock looked out the window and frowned thunderously. “It’s snowing,” he said.
***
Sherlock complained about the snow. He complained, and complained, and complained. By the second hour of the complaining, John asked, “Why do you hate snow so much?” and Sherlock responded, “I don’t. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t say ridiculous things. In fact, everyone stop talking.”
“You’re the only one who’s talking,” John pointed out. “You’re the only one who’s talked all morning. To complain. About the snow.”
“Shh!” commanded Sherlock.
John turned the page of the newspaper he was reading. “It’s been quite delightful, really. Do go on.”
Sherlock prowled around the library, looking for all the world like a caged animal. John, watching him surreptitiously, was reminded again of the way he’d looked like an exotic plumed bird in John’s flat. Maybe Sherlock hated the confinement of the snow; maybe he needed the ability to escape.
“There’s nothing you can do about the snow, Sherlock,” interjected Violet, calmly, from where she was sitting reading her own section of newspaper. “Until you invent a weather machine.”
“There’s something you could do,” suggested John.
“Bored,” complained Sherlock, and flung himself onto the sofa. “I am bored, and everything is boring, and it’s snowing.”
“You don’t say,” remarked Violet.
Sherlock sat up suddenly. “Where are the cigarettes?”
Violet blinked at him innocently. “What?”
“I know you hide some, in the house, so that Mycroft won’t know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“As if you could hide anything from Mycroft.”
“Perhaps we ought to take leave of the subject of secrets, Sherlock,” said Violet, a warning edge to her voice.
“I need a cigarette,” proclaimed Sherlock.
“Haven’t you any of your own?”
“No,” Sherlock sulked. “John destroyed them.”
“I won’t have the bedroom reeking of smoke like it did the other night,” replied John calmly, and looked out the window. It was still snowing steadily, and there was a decent accumulation on the ground, but the weather really wasn’t that bad yet, nowhere approaching the white-out conditions forecast for later in the day. The biggest snowstorm Northumberland had seen in fifty years, the meteorologists were saying with great relish. John and Sherlock had both been paying little attention to the weather reports. It was Mycroft who broke the news of the storm, over breakfast, and then had promptly disappeared because he was very busy and had much to handle, even more now that it was snowing, as he had announced superciliously, earning, like most things Mycroft said, a derisive snort from Sherlock.
“I still don’t see why we can’t go into town,” grumbled Sherlock from the sofa.
“Because you won’t make it back from town. And you can’t stay in town, you know there’s no room at the inn at this time of year.”
“We could check to see if the manger’s empty, but it might not be pleasant in a snowstorm,” joked John.
Sherlock and Violet both looked at him blankly.
“You know.” John gestured. “No room at the inn?” They continued to have no reaction. “Okay, never mind,” sighed John, and then, “We could take a walk, if you like.”
“A walk where?”
“The wilderness,” John suggested. “It isn’t bad out yet; it actually might be quite pretty.”
“Boring,” proclaimed Sherlock, waving a hand about.
“Less boring than sitting around here,” John pointed out, and anything that got Sherlock out of this room for a little while seemed like a good idea to John.
“Is it?” asked Sherlock, doubtfully.
“Yes,” John told him, firmly.
“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,” remarked Violet, blandly. “After all, John, with your leg, you could slip.”
John’s vision actually went a little red around the edges for a moment but he tamped down on his rage. He was furious that Violet should treat him like an invalid, but then, what was he if not an invalid? It was the only thing he was anymore. Not a soldier, not a doctor, just someone for other people to pity and worry about. And he was sick to death of it.
He stood and said, trying not to sound like he was biting it through his teeth in impatience, “I’ll be fine. Let’s go, Sherlock.” And then he limped out of the room in as dignified a manner as he could muster, head held high, shoulders back, and spine ramrod straight.
Sherlock caught up to him as he was putting his jacket on, and Sherlock didn’t say a word, just pulled his own coat on and knotted his scarf and pulled on his gloves, and then they set out.
The snow was thick, the flakes big and substantial, but it wasn’t unpleasant or disorienting. It was very quiet, the falling snow muffling all the sounds, and they walked without speaking for a little while, John following Sherlock’s lead determinedly and wishing he knew the trick to not limping. He could do it, he’d done it several times over the past few days, but he couldn’t do it at will.
They came to the edge of a small frozen pond, and Sherlock stood at its bank thoughtfully for a few seconds before putting an experimental foot on the ice. Then he turned to John and said, “Fancy some ice skating?”
“What?” asked John, because it had been a long time since they’d spoken, and it seemed to John to make no sense that the silence should be broken with an ice-skating invitation. The invitation seemed to come out of nowhere; John would not have supposed that Sherlock enjoyed ice skating.
“That ice is quite thick enough. It’s been below freezing here for quite some time, and the pond is small and shallow. We used to keep ice skates in the boathouse; I’m sure we still do.”
Sherlock nodded toward a structure John hadn’t noticed, a pretty little shed sitting by the edge of the pond. John wondered what sort of boat they could put in a pond this small. He thought calling the shed a “boathouse” seemed unnecessarily grand. He supposed this suited the Holmeses in general.
John licked his lips and was very conscious of the cane in his hand. “Sherlock, I can’t-”
“Ice skate? I’ll teach you,” said Sherlock, brusquely.
“No. Sherlock-”
“You’ll be quite fine,” insisted Sherlock. “Come along.”
John hesitated, watching Sherlock stride through the falling snow in the direction of the boathouse, feeling helpless. He wanted to be fine. He wanted to put on a pair of ice skates and do this very normal thing, like an uninjured, unpitiable person. He took a deep breath and limped his way after Sherlock.
The interior of the shed was dim and dusty and cold. Sherlock was weeding his way through a pile of ancient-looking ice skates.
“Here,” he said, thrusting a pair at John without looking at him. “These should fit you.”
John regarded them skeptically. “Did these come with the house when the Holmeses bought it in 1887?”
Sherlock looked at him, his face lighting up with a brief, pleased smile. “You remember.”
“Of course I do. There’s nothing wrong with my memory,” said John, a little sourly, because he was attempting to put the ice skates on while also leaning on the stupid bloody cane he needed to keep his balance and not topple over.
“Most people are idiots,” replied Sherlock. He sat right down on the dusty floor of the shed, heedless of the damage to his posh trousers and coat, and commenced pulling on his own pair of ice skates.
It took some doing, but eventually they were both skate-clad, and John found that he could manage to tramp down through the accumulating snow to the edge of the pond while wearing ice skates. It was as if he had to think about his balance so much on the ice skates that he forgot to limp all that much.
Sherlock glided out confidently onto the pond as soon as they reached the edge, and John thought that Sherlock had probably grown up ice-skating on this pond, and of course he looked as graceful as a sodding swan out there. John stood along the bank, undecided about whether his leg would hold if he tried to venture onto the ice.
“Come along,” said Sherlock, skating up to a stop in front of him, and then he reached out and took John’s hands in his as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do so.
“I really don’t think-” began John, and then Sherlock tugged, hard, and John stumbled forward, but instead of letting John go sprawling onto the ice, Sherlock held him upright, with a strength John wouldn’t have predicted, and then Sherlock was skating backward, picking up speed, and pulling John along with him. “Oh,” said John.
Sherlock was watching John’s feet, guiding himself and John effortlessly along the pond’s edge as if he had eyes in the back of his head. “Do you know how to skate?”
“Very vaguely. I dated a girl once who thought it would be romantic to go ice-skating on a date.”
“And was it?” asked Sherlock, still watching John’s feet.
“It was romantic afterward,” said John.
Sherlock glanced up with a twist of a smile on his face, and then back down at John’s feet. “It’s physics, you know. Mathematics. Maintaining your balance is, at heart, in all situations. You have to allow for the special properties of the ice vis-à-vis the blade, and these blades are quite dull, so that must be taken into account.”
“Sherlock,” said John. “There is no way I am going to be doing maths in my head while I’m worrying about toppling over.”
“You shouldn’t be worrying about that,” rejoined Sherlock, lightly, his gaze still on John’s feet. “I won’t let you fall.”
It struck John that not only had no one ever said those words to him before, but he’d also never before have believed them even if they had been said to him. Until that moment, he would never have trusted anyone not to let him fall. He had spent his entire life being the caretaker, the fixer, the one who made things better. His therapist said this was part of his problem, that he had trust issues, that he didn’t know how to let other people help him. And now here he was, with a fake boyfriend with whom he was so utterly besotted that he trusted him, not to let him fall, to keep him moving forward. He trusted him enough to actually forget to punish himself by limping.
John stared at the snow in Sherlock’s dark curls, at the level of concentration evident in the furrow on Sherlock’s brow as he watched John’s feet, and cleared his throat. “Have you ever taught anyone else how to skate?”
Sherlock snorted. “Don’t be absurd. Whom would I have taught to skate?”
“Who taught you?”
“My father. When I was a boy.”
“Your father’s dead,” prompted John, cautiously.
Sherlock’s eyes flickered briefly up to John, stony and cold. “My mother told you.”
“Yes,” John admitted.
“He’s dead,” agreed Sherlock, shortly.
Sherlock’s blades scissored sharply across the ice, and John’s blades made feeble whooshing sounds in response.
John said, “My father is dead, too.”
“Yes, I know,” responded Sherlock. “Died when you were in medical school.”
“Of course you know,” mumbled John.
“Skating is all about edges,” said Sherlock, changing the subject. “You need to learn how to catch your outside edges and your inside edges, shift your skates just a bit so that you’re not centered anymore, so that you’re leaning just a bit in or out. That’s the only way you’ll start being able to propel yourself of your own volition.”
And Sherlock spent the next little while trying to teach John how to transition his ice skates from inside edges to outside edges and back again, claiming that this motion was the first basic motion of ice-skating. By the end of the little lesson, John was tentatively moving forward on his own, his hands out instinctively so he could grab for Sherlock when his balance wobbled.
“You’d do better if you didn’t have your hands flailing all about,” Sherlock told him, when John caught at his sleeve to keep himself upright.
“Well, I’ll have to work on that next time,” John said, without thinking, and Sherlock said nothing, just helped John tramp off the ice and back into the boathouse, where they exchanged skates for shoes in silence.
There was hot cocoa waiting by the fire in the library when they walked in, but otherwise the room was deserted. John sank happily into the chair in front of the fire, letting the warmth lick at sore muscles he’d forgot existed. The cocoa was somehow the perfect temperature, and John thought the evidence was mounting that Harrison was simply a wizard.
“This is lovely,” John sighed in contentment, and opened his eyes to find Sherlock sitting by the fire, staring into it gravely. “Respectable substitute for a trip into town,” John said.
“I was going to take you to Angelo’s,” responded Sherlock, with a bit of a pouty downward turn of his lips.
“Angelo’s?”
“A restaurant in town. Owner owes me a favor.”
“Does Angelo’s have five gold rings?”
“Angelo once stole five gold rings,” said Sherlock, smiling, and sipped at his cocoa.
John laughed.
Next Chapter
Author -earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Sherlock, John
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - It's the holiday season. John Watson needs money. Sherlock Holmes needs something else.
Author's Notes - Thank you to dashcommaslash for poking through this for me!
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
On the day after Boxing Day, John woke to Sherlock screeching at the violin.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” he said, when John sat up, scowling.
“Of course I’m bloody well awake,” spat out John. “What the hell are you doing?”
“A serenade,” answered Sherlock.
“That is not a serenade. That is noise,” glared John.
“Everyone’s a critic,” rejoined Sherlock, mildly.
“Shut up and get out of this room,” John replied, and flung one of his pillows at him.
“But,” said Sherlock, dodging the pillow with no effort at all, “I have plans for us today.”
John, grumbling, retreated back to his remaining pillow. “Do they involve three French hens?”
“No,” answered Sherlock readily. “But they do involve going into town. I thought you might like to get out of the house for a bit.”
John considered this from underneath his pillow. He probably wasn’t going to get back to sleep at this point, so he might as well get up. And a town excursion seemed like a nice way to kill the day. And probably safer than sitting by a romantic fire again looking through evidence on Sherlock’s laptop while Sherlock dozed at his feet.
“Town could be nice,” John decided.
***
Sherlock had clearly learned a lot about the town in preparation for this excursion. He shared anecdotes and statistics with John as if he’d learned them by rote. But John didn’t care because the town was charming. Almost as charming as Sherlock’s clear desire that John enjoy himself. Even though most of Sherlock’s tour was taken up with criminal history. John supposed that was what Sherlock thought was interesting, but John also found it very interesting, and that was mostly because there was clearly something wrong with him.
Eventually Sherlock suggested tea, and John agreed because John almost never turned down an opportunity for tea, and Sherlock steered them to the tea shop on the town’s high street. It sat directly next to a music shop, and Sherlock stopped them in front of it and gestured to the window display and said, “Three French horns.”
“Oh, God,” said John, looking at the three French horns in the window. “That was terrible.” And Sherlock gave him that small smile of his.
Once settled in the shop for tea, Sherlock said, “I’ve been monopolizing conversation again. You should say something about yourself.”
“Oh,” said John, sipping his cup of tea, and thought about enlisting, about Afghanistan, about getting shot, about coming home, about limping and trembling when he didn’t want to but with no clear idea how to fix himself. John thought of all of that, took another sip of tea, then said, lightly, “My birthday is March 17.”
Sherlock’s eyes were sharp on John in that all-seeing way of his, cataloguing everything that John didn’t want him to know or see, and John hated that feeling. He sipped his tea again and looked out the front window of the tea shop.
“Tell me about James Bond films,” Sherlock said, suddenly.
John was surprised into looking back at him. “What?”
“James Bond films. You love them, correct?”
“I…Yeah, I do.”
“Fine. Then let’s discuss them. Which is your favorite?”
“Have you ever seen a James Bond movie?”
“Of course not,” said Sherlock, adding a don’t-be-an-idiot look to his tone, just for good measure.
“Then what does it matter which is my favorite? You won’t know it.”
“Tell me it anyway. Tell me its plot.” Sherlock sipped his tea and looked expectant.
“If you’ve never seen a James Bond movie, then the plot is going to sound ridiculous to you. Well,” John amended, “I suppose the plots are always ridiculous, it’s just…Say you had gold paint.”
And John went over the plot of Goldfinger, with Sherlock frowning and correcting the scientific inaccuracies of the plot, and then John said, “That plot looks like utter genius compared to, say, Moonraker,” which led to him going over the plot of Moonraker and Sherlock frowning and correcting even more scientific inaccuracies, and then Sherlock said, “And you like these movies?” and John answered, “Sometimes you like things for everything that makes them silly. That’s true love, I suppose. Acknowledging all the terrible bits, and loving something for those terrible bits.”
Sherlock looked thoughtful, as if John had just had some amazing insight into all of human civilization.
John looked out the window at the people hurrying along the high street, heads down against a biting cold wind that had moved in. “So,” he remarked. “Can you look at these people and just… know everything about them?”
Sherlock followed his gaze. “Most things worth knowing.”
“Aren’t you a show-off,” commented John.
“Yes,” Sherlock responded.
“Go on, then. Be impressive.”
And Sherlock was, rattling off a long, detailed array of deductions about the strangers passing by.
“How do we know any of this is true?” John asked, finally. “You’re probably just making it all up.”
“And you’d never know,” said Sherlock, with a satisfied smile, looking out the window still, “because I am a very good liar.”
“I’ve noticed. You’re doing an excellent job of coming up with romantic little dates.”
“Yes,” said Sherlock, suddenly very serious again, and drummed his fingers on the table impatiently.
John felt like he’d said something wrong, because Sherlock’s mood had plainly shifted radically. They had been wrapped in such cozy intimacy, and time had been flying by as usual, and John had been content enough to sit in that tea shop forever, but instead now John felt as if the record had skipped and the spell had been entirely broken.
“Bought you something,” John said, trying to salvage the conversation a bit, reaching into his bag.
Sherlock’s fingers stopped drumming. He looked over at John in obvious surprise. “What? For what?”
“I don’t know,” John said, because he didn’t. Fake boyfriends were excused from gift-giving, John thought.
“When did you get it?” asked Sherlock, curiously.
“When you were busy arguing about Schrödinger’s cat with that poor girl behind the counter.”
A look of horror crossed Sherlock’s face. “It isn’t Cluedo, is it? I told you not to buy that-”
“It isn’t Cluedo. I bought the Cluedo for me. Here.”
The book was a small and obviously very brief introduction to the history of the town and surrounding countryside, and Sherlock turned it over in his hands in evident bemusement.
“It’s a history of the town,” John told him, helpfully.
“Well, that I can tell,” Sherlock responded, with only a flash of irritation in his voice because he was busy staring down at the book with a look of astonished wonder. Sherlock opened it, and glanced at the first page, where John had hastily written an inscription while Sherlock had been busy arguing about the rules of chess with a little girl they’d encountered on the street: Everything I’m sure you already know. Waiting for you to correct it.
“Oh,” said Sherlock, still not looking up. “It’s…Oh.”
John wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “You already have it, don’t you?”
“Why would I have this?” asked Sherlock, closing the book. “I would never have bought something this silly myself.”
John passed over the description of his gift as “silly” and focused on the implication of Sherlock’s statement: He would never have bought it for himself, and who else would have bought it for him? John thought of Annabel’s father at church on Christmas Eve, so shocked that Sherlock might have a friend. And John thought of the game they’d just been playing, of Sherlock deducing everyone’s secrets as they strode down the high street. Sherlock was probably always like that; John could see it quite clearly. Clever and blunt, not the sort to make friends easily. Sherlock has a deep need to love and be loved, John heard Violet saying, and Sherlock had no one. Sherlock had hired someone to pretend to be a boyfriend, that’s how much “no one” Sherlock had. John suddenly felt that he should never have accepted Sherlock’s offer. He should have turned it down, forced Sherlock to be set up by his mother, allowing him the possibility of someone in his life to keep him from being so lonely.
“Sherlock,” said John, his voice faltering.
Sherlock looked up from the book, his expression as inscrutable as always.
What the hell did he even want to say? “Anyway,” said John, clearing his throat and trying not to fidget because Sherlock would notice. “I hope you like it.”
Sherlock nodded once, slowly, thoughtfully, eyes on John’s fingers where he was keeping them still and steady. Then he said, “It’s late. We should go.”
“Right,” John agreed, trying not to seem as awkward as he felt. “Yes. Absolutely.”
They were in the car, driving back to the Holmes estate, before Sherlock said, his hands tight on the steering wheel and his gaze strictly facing forward, “Thank you. For the book. I should have said. Thank you.” He said it uncertainly, as if he wasn’t quite sure it was what he ought to be saying at all, as if English were a strange language he’d just learned and he was worried he might have just said, Please may I marry your pig?
John replied, with no idea what else he could possibly say, “You’re welcome.”
***
Sherlock was in the shower when John woke the following morning. John spent a moment lying in bed not thinking of Sherlock, wet and naked, a few feet away. Then the shower turned off, and the bathroom door opened, and Sherlock walked out in nothing but a towel, his dark curls wet and dripping, and John gaped at the small of his back where it disappeared tantalizingly underneath the edge of the towel, and said, strangled, “Um.”
“It’s snowing,” Sherlock replied shortly, leaning over to pull some bit of clothing out of a dresser drawer.
John stared at his current view of Sherlock’s towel-clad posterior, translated Sherlock’s statement, and looked out the window instead. It was snowing, not heavily but steadily, and John wasn’t sure what that had to do with the nearly naked Sherlock he suddenly had on his hands.
John looked back at Sherlock, who had in the meantime strode back into the ensuite and shut the door behind him. John took a deep breath and stared up at the bloody cherubs.
The ensuite door opened again, and Sherlock emerged, more or less dressed. Well, in trousers at least, and a shirt that wasn’t buttoned yet. John had thought it would be an improvement but it was only worse. It made John want to nudge the fabric of the shirt aside with his nose, kissing his way up a greater and greater slice of chest.
“Are you all right?” Sherlock asked him negligently, buttoning his shirt and checking his reflection in the mirror.
“Fine,” lied John.
“Your breathing is elevated,” Sherlock continued, tucking his shirt in now and not really helping the rate of John’s breathing. “Not on the edge of a panic attack, are you?” Sherlock’s eyes, for the first time, shifted in the mirror to meet John’s.
The furthest thing from a panic attack, thought John. But then, considering his current position and how sodding complicated this all was, maybe a panic attack would be an appropriate response. “I’m fine,” said John.
Sherlock looked out the window and frowned thunderously. “It’s snowing,” he said.
***
Sherlock complained about the snow. He complained, and complained, and complained. By the second hour of the complaining, John asked, “Why do you hate snow so much?” and Sherlock responded, “I don’t. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t say ridiculous things. In fact, everyone stop talking.”
“You’re the only one who’s talking,” John pointed out. “You’re the only one who’s talked all morning. To complain. About the snow.”
“Shh!” commanded Sherlock.
John turned the page of the newspaper he was reading. “It’s been quite delightful, really. Do go on.”
Sherlock prowled around the library, looking for all the world like a caged animal. John, watching him surreptitiously, was reminded again of the way he’d looked like an exotic plumed bird in John’s flat. Maybe Sherlock hated the confinement of the snow; maybe he needed the ability to escape.
“There’s nothing you can do about the snow, Sherlock,” interjected Violet, calmly, from where she was sitting reading her own section of newspaper. “Until you invent a weather machine.”
“There’s something you could do,” suggested John.
“Bored,” complained Sherlock, and flung himself onto the sofa. “I am bored, and everything is boring, and it’s snowing.”
“You don’t say,” remarked Violet.
Sherlock sat up suddenly. “Where are the cigarettes?”
Violet blinked at him innocently. “What?”
“I know you hide some, in the house, so that Mycroft won’t know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“As if you could hide anything from Mycroft.”
“Perhaps we ought to take leave of the subject of secrets, Sherlock,” said Violet, a warning edge to her voice.
“I need a cigarette,” proclaimed Sherlock.
“Haven’t you any of your own?”
“No,” Sherlock sulked. “John destroyed them.”
“I won’t have the bedroom reeking of smoke like it did the other night,” replied John calmly, and looked out the window. It was still snowing steadily, and there was a decent accumulation on the ground, but the weather really wasn’t that bad yet, nowhere approaching the white-out conditions forecast for later in the day. The biggest snowstorm Northumberland had seen in fifty years, the meteorologists were saying with great relish. John and Sherlock had both been paying little attention to the weather reports. It was Mycroft who broke the news of the storm, over breakfast, and then had promptly disappeared because he was very busy and had much to handle, even more now that it was snowing, as he had announced superciliously, earning, like most things Mycroft said, a derisive snort from Sherlock.
“I still don’t see why we can’t go into town,” grumbled Sherlock from the sofa.
“Because you won’t make it back from town. And you can’t stay in town, you know there’s no room at the inn at this time of year.”
“We could check to see if the manger’s empty, but it might not be pleasant in a snowstorm,” joked John.
Sherlock and Violet both looked at him blankly.
“You know.” John gestured. “No room at the inn?” They continued to have no reaction. “Okay, never mind,” sighed John, and then, “We could take a walk, if you like.”
“A walk where?”
“The wilderness,” John suggested. “It isn’t bad out yet; it actually might be quite pretty.”
“Boring,” proclaimed Sherlock, waving a hand about.
“Less boring than sitting around here,” John pointed out, and anything that got Sherlock out of this room for a little while seemed like a good idea to John.
“Is it?” asked Sherlock, doubtfully.
“Yes,” John told him, firmly.
“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,” remarked Violet, blandly. “After all, John, with your leg, you could slip.”
John’s vision actually went a little red around the edges for a moment but he tamped down on his rage. He was furious that Violet should treat him like an invalid, but then, what was he if not an invalid? It was the only thing he was anymore. Not a soldier, not a doctor, just someone for other people to pity and worry about. And he was sick to death of it.
He stood and said, trying not to sound like he was biting it through his teeth in impatience, “I’ll be fine. Let’s go, Sherlock.” And then he limped out of the room in as dignified a manner as he could muster, head held high, shoulders back, and spine ramrod straight.
Sherlock caught up to him as he was putting his jacket on, and Sherlock didn’t say a word, just pulled his own coat on and knotted his scarf and pulled on his gloves, and then they set out.
The snow was thick, the flakes big and substantial, but it wasn’t unpleasant or disorienting. It was very quiet, the falling snow muffling all the sounds, and they walked without speaking for a little while, John following Sherlock’s lead determinedly and wishing he knew the trick to not limping. He could do it, he’d done it several times over the past few days, but he couldn’t do it at will.
They came to the edge of a small frozen pond, and Sherlock stood at its bank thoughtfully for a few seconds before putting an experimental foot on the ice. Then he turned to John and said, “Fancy some ice skating?”
“What?” asked John, because it had been a long time since they’d spoken, and it seemed to John to make no sense that the silence should be broken with an ice-skating invitation. The invitation seemed to come out of nowhere; John would not have supposed that Sherlock enjoyed ice skating.
“That ice is quite thick enough. It’s been below freezing here for quite some time, and the pond is small and shallow. We used to keep ice skates in the boathouse; I’m sure we still do.”
Sherlock nodded toward a structure John hadn’t noticed, a pretty little shed sitting by the edge of the pond. John wondered what sort of boat they could put in a pond this small. He thought calling the shed a “boathouse” seemed unnecessarily grand. He supposed this suited the Holmeses in general.
John licked his lips and was very conscious of the cane in his hand. “Sherlock, I can’t-”
“Ice skate? I’ll teach you,” said Sherlock, brusquely.
“No. Sherlock-”
“You’ll be quite fine,” insisted Sherlock. “Come along.”
John hesitated, watching Sherlock stride through the falling snow in the direction of the boathouse, feeling helpless. He wanted to be fine. He wanted to put on a pair of ice skates and do this very normal thing, like an uninjured, unpitiable person. He took a deep breath and limped his way after Sherlock.
The interior of the shed was dim and dusty and cold. Sherlock was weeding his way through a pile of ancient-looking ice skates.
“Here,” he said, thrusting a pair at John without looking at him. “These should fit you.”
John regarded them skeptically. “Did these come with the house when the Holmeses bought it in 1887?”
Sherlock looked at him, his face lighting up with a brief, pleased smile. “You remember.”
“Of course I do. There’s nothing wrong with my memory,” said John, a little sourly, because he was attempting to put the ice skates on while also leaning on the stupid bloody cane he needed to keep his balance and not topple over.
“Most people are idiots,” replied Sherlock. He sat right down on the dusty floor of the shed, heedless of the damage to his posh trousers and coat, and commenced pulling on his own pair of ice skates.
It took some doing, but eventually they were both skate-clad, and John found that he could manage to tramp down through the accumulating snow to the edge of the pond while wearing ice skates. It was as if he had to think about his balance so much on the ice skates that he forgot to limp all that much.
Sherlock glided out confidently onto the pond as soon as they reached the edge, and John thought that Sherlock had probably grown up ice-skating on this pond, and of course he looked as graceful as a sodding swan out there. John stood along the bank, undecided about whether his leg would hold if he tried to venture onto the ice.
“Come along,” said Sherlock, skating up to a stop in front of him, and then he reached out and took John’s hands in his as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do so.
“I really don’t think-” began John, and then Sherlock tugged, hard, and John stumbled forward, but instead of letting John go sprawling onto the ice, Sherlock held him upright, with a strength John wouldn’t have predicted, and then Sherlock was skating backward, picking up speed, and pulling John along with him. “Oh,” said John.
Sherlock was watching John’s feet, guiding himself and John effortlessly along the pond’s edge as if he had eyes in the back of his head. “Do you know how to skate?”
“Very vaguely. I dated a girl once who thought it would be romantic to go ice-skating on a date.”
“And was it?” asked Sherlock, still watching John’s feet.
“It was romantic afterward,” said John.
Sherlock glanced up with a twist of a smile on his face, and then back down at John’s feet. “It’s physics, you know. Mathematics. Maintaining your balance is, at heart, in all situations. You have to allow for the special properties of the ice vis-à-vis the blade, and these blades are quite dull, so that must be taken into account.”
“Sherlock,” said John. “There is no way I am going to be doing maths in my head while I’m worrying about toppling over.”
“You shouldn’t be worrying about that,” rejoined Sherlock, lightly, his gaze still on John’s feet. “I won’t let you fall.”
It struck John that not only had no one ever said those words to him before, but he’d also never before have believed them even if they had been said to him. Until that moment, he would never have trusted anyone not to let him fall. He had spent his entire life being the caretaker, the fixer, the one who made things better. His therapist said this was part of his problem, that he had trust issues, that he didn’t know how to let other people help him. And now here he was, with a fake boyfriend with whom he was so utterly besotted that he trusted him, not to let him fall, to keep him moving forward. He trusted him enough to actually forget to punish himself by limping.
John stared at the snow in Sherlock’s dark curls, at the level of concentration evident in the furrow on Sherlock’s brow as he watched John’s feet, and cleared his throat. “Have you ever taught anyone else how to skate?”
Sherlock snorted. “Don’t be absurd. Whom would I have taught to skate?”
“Who taught you?”
“My father. When I was a boy.”
“Your father’s dead,” prompted John, cautiously.
Sherlock’s eyes flickered briefly up to John, stony and cold. “My mother told you.”
“Yes,” John admitted.
“He’s dead,” agreed Sherlock, shortly.
Sherlock’s blades scissored sharply across the ice, and John’s blades made feeble whooshing sounds in response.
John said, “My father is dead, too.”
“Yes, I know,” responded Sherlock. “Died when you were in medical school.”
“Of course you know,” mumbled John.
“Skating is all about edges,” said Sherlock, changing the subject. “You need to learn how to catch your outside edges and your inside edges, shift your skates just a bit so that you’re not centered anymore, so that you’re leaning just a bit in or out. That’s the only way you’ll start being able to propel yourself of your own volition.”
And Sherlock spent the next little while trying to teach John how to transition his ice skates from inside edges to outside edges and back again, claiming that this motion was the first basic motion of ice-skating. By the end of the little lesson, John was tentatively moving forward on his own, his hands out instinctively so he could grab for Sherlock when his balance wobbled.
“You’d do better if you didn’t have your hands flailing all about,” Sherlock told him, when John caught at his sleeve to keep himself upright.
“Well, I’ll have to work on that next time,” John said, without thinking, and Sherlock said nothing, just helped John tramp off the ice and back into the boathouse, where they exchanged skates for shoes in silence.
There was hot cocoa waiting by the fire in the library when they walked in, but otherwise the room was deserted. John sank happily into the chair in front of the fire, letting the warmth lick at sore muscles he’d forgot existed. The cocoa was somehow the perfect temperature, and John thought the evidence was mounting that Harrison was simply a wizard.
“This is lovely,” John sighed in contentment, and opened his eyes to find Sherlock sitting by the fire, staring into it gravely. “Respectable substitute for a trip into town,” John said.
“I was going to take you to Angelo’s,” responded Sherlock, with a bit of a pouty downward turn of his lips.
“Angelo’s?”
“A restaurant in town. Owner owes me a favor.”
“Does Angelo’s have five gold rings?”
“Angelo once stole five gold rings,” said Sherlock, smiling, and sipped at his cocoa.
John laughed.
Next Chapter