Fic for billiethepoet: Battle Stratagem for the Domesticated British Male
Title: Battle Stratagem for the Domesticated British Male
Recipient: billiethepoet
Author: [to be revealed]
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John, cameos from Mycroft and Mike Stamford
Wordcount: ~8,000
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none
Summary: Age happens. This is not Sherlock’s area.
Battle Stratagem for the Domesticated British Male
It began with John in a heap at the foot of the stairs.
Or, it began with that last case, with John doubled over, clutching at his hip, hissing for Sherlock to go on without him, to catch the suspect.
Or, it began that very first time decades ago, a breathless cab chase, an abandoned cane, an exchange of smiles, giggles.
Or, it began in Afghanistan, or at boot camp, or during all those rugby games.
Or, or, or. It didn’t matter, beginnings and endings - John was in a heap at the foot of the stairs and Sherlock’s strength was failing him.
“Just- Let me get my arm-”
“Fuck off, Sherlock,” John snapped, and shoved him away. Sherlock’s head thunked against the wall, and he watched without the luxury of touch as John struggled to a sitting position and covered his eyes with one hand, his left hip with the other. His breath was laboured and contained the fuzzy notes of a wheeze. They passed interminable minutes in that almost-silence until John dropped his hands into his lap and said, lowly, “I don’t think I can move.”
“I’ll do the shopping,” Sherlock said. It seemed the helpful, logical, magnanimous thing - that’s where John had been going, after all. But John had a particular look, seething and bitter, poorly hidden beneath his impression of stoicism, that he levelled at Sherlock whenever Sherlock had disappointed him gravely, and that was the expression he wore upon Sherlock’s offer.
“Sod the bloody shopping, Sherlock, and help me get up.”
Sherlock got to his feet and held his hands out for John to grip. It took more effort than he anticipated to lever John up, but John was a bit sensitive about his weight recently so he kept his mouth shut. John sagged against him, clutching at his torso, and gasped.
“Christ, when did I get so old?”
Sherlock tightened his arm around him. “You’re hardly in your dotage,” he said. “Come along.”
Seventeen steps loomed before them, seemingly insurmountable, but together they managed to get John back into their flat and installed in his favoured chair. When Sherlock went to make some tea, he found the carton of milk empty. He’d been the one to shake the last drops out the night before.
Sherlock had to go down to the shops, and it only got worse from there.
-
Sherlock thinks that the dean of medicine at such a posh hospital should consider getting a less miserable waiting room. Its tranquil blue motif has faded to cheerless greys, and honestly, who would be comforted by such disturbing still life wall art? The only magazines are aimed at pensioners and the parents of small children, and Sherlock requires neither exciting new porridge recipes nor educational means of entertaining a toddler on a long car ride. The chairs are threadbare, cushions collapsed under the wear of countless lounging buttocks, wooden frames cheap and prone to instability. Sherlock has contorted in the narrow space of one such offensive chair, his feet propped up against the wall, his shoulder stuck beneath an armrest, and his head dangling off the end of the seat. He alternately steeples his hands beneath (above?) his chin and lets them hang any which way they find themselves. He does a lot of sighing.
A woman in the far corner is rather pointedly ignoring him, feigning engrossment in one of the grubby, out of date magazines. She isn’t even interesting: her husband is here for a knee surgery - no, lumbar - but she is preoccupied by thoughts of her child minder, who is someone she doesn’t trust, but had left her children with due to a lack of other options. She is so dull Sherlock can’t bear to look at her a moment longer. He closes his eyes and lets his breath leave his lungs.
From the corridor there comes the tap of a familiar cadence - the affectation of a ubiquitous umbrella, the slow, precise gait of one used to making others wait - and Sherlock huffs, snapping his arms across his chest and screwing his eyes shut. That ponderous presence draws closer until it stands before him, radiating chagrin.
“Honestly, Sherlock. Is there no limit to your shameless histrionics?”
Sherlock does his best to tuck his head into his underarm in an attempt to block the great git out, but his presence is as corpulent as he is and twice as heavy - there is no escaping him. Sherlock hears a put-upon sigh, and the ill-made chair beside him creaks under new weight.
“Sit up like a civilised human being, Sherlock, for God’s sake. It won’t be long now.”
“What do you even care?”
“He’s my family too, you know.”
Sherlock spins upright in his chair and the world rights itself even as his blood sloshes roughshod around his head. He blinks away the starbursts that threaten to overwhelm his vision and turns to scowl at his brother.
“He’s going to be fine. They do these surgeries all the time. You can leave.”
Mycroft only arches a brow, leans forward, and casts his gaze to the mess of magazines on the coffee table, as if any of them could possibly pique his interest. Sherlock straightens his spine and squares his shoulders when he catches sight of Mycroft’s pate, shining through his thinning silvered hair. Sherlock himself still has a thick shock of curls, for all that it had gone salt and pepper, heavy on the salt. He makes sure to preen in Mycroft’s peripheral vision, and when the corner of Mycroft’s mouth tightens, Sherlock throws himself back into the chair with a triumphant smirk.
“Juvenile,” Mycroft mutters. He shakes open a magazine and pretends to read it. Sherlock slouches beside him, pulling his chin close into his chest. He draws his knees up and presses his feet against the armrest he shares with Mycroft. Mycroft sighs and flips a page without having read it.
Like that, they wait for John to come out of surgery.
-
At first, physical therapy improved matters. John went dutifully each weekday morning - even when a case was on, because he was utterly useless for zipping around London on foot like this - and he would come back little over an hour later, stiff from pain, lines carved into his face, but with improved motility and the words, “It’s not fun, but I think it helps,” on his lips. He’d make himself a cup of tea and subside into his chair, and if no interesting cases had crossed their paths, they would be companionably silent while John got his bearings and Sherlock thought, or organised data, or observed an experiment, or whatever he was doing that day.
But then, physical therapy stopped helping. The pain worsened. John grew drawn, prone to bouts of punishing silence and sudden outbursts of aimless hostility. One day, John came home with a medical-grade cane, suspiciously similar to the one he’d discarded at Angelo’s all those years ago, and picked a fight with Sherlock over nothing; that is, he snapped over the fruit fly larvae Sherlock had grown in a mostly-empty jar of cherry preserves.
“What the fuck is this?” John bellowed from the kitchen. Of late, his vocabulary had devolved to include more expletives than it had in the time Sherlock privately referred to as AC: Ante Coxa, or Before the Hip.
Sherlock, lounging deep in thought on the sofa, only hummed out a questioning note.
John stumped into the living room, the cane a hideous, arrhythmic punctuation for his graceless gait. John stuck a plate of toast beneath Sherlock’s nose, just barely keeping the cherry-and-larvae-smeared slices from spilling onto his person.
“My experiment!” Sherlock sat up and gaped in dismay at the carnage. “John, it’s ruined! Why did you put it on your toast?”
John’s mouth pinched into a tiny little orifice, white and angry, and his blue eyes glinted.
“Why did I- Why did I put your larvae on my toast? I don’t know, Sherlock, could it be because they were in the last of my bloody cherry preserves?”
John dropped the plate into Sherlock’s lap and spun around to stomp away, but drama seemed too much for his poorly hip and he staggered. It was the only warning Sherlock had before he watched John crumple to the floor as if imploding, and Sherlock wasn’t quick enough to stop it.
“John!”
He cast the plate of toast aside and moved to where John lay just in time to duck the cane John sent hurtling through the air with a stream of invective. The cane shattered a lamp on its arcing trajectory to the floor, where it clattered with anticlimactic impotence, and no one’s problems were solved.
-
The surgeons let Sherlock and Mycroft visit John in the recovery room, where he would stay an hour before being moved into his own room. He would stay there for up to a week for recovery - a week Sherlock is already dreading. What would he do without John shuffling about, snuffling in his sleep, cold nose on the back of Sherlock’s neck? The thought of it sends ice through Sherlock’s gut. Even with all his plans to occupy him, the prospect is a bleak one.
Maybe he should just take up residence in John’s room with him. Yes - it should have occurred to him earlier. He would bring his webpad and a duffle full of clothing and set himself up right next to John’s bed and continue about his business without ever having to endure an entire week without John’s company. That never ends well, anyway. Sherlock recalls conferences and cases and unforeseeable circumstances that had resulted in temporary parting of company, and - well. They don’t bear dwelling upon, though they had often ended with John’s body plastered as close to Sherlock’s own as was possible without merging into a single entity, and that would soothe the sting of separation. But not enough.
“Are you woolgathering?” comes Mycroft’s voice, deceptively light. He is delighted at the prospect, the utter bastard.
Sherlock snaps away from his ruminations, from his long gaze at the bit of tarnished fringe that lies on John’s forehead, to pin Mycroft with a scowl.
“No,” he snaps. “I’m preparing a list of what I will bring when I take up residence here until John’s discharge.”
Mycroft lumbers through the privacy partitions to join him at the chairs beside John’s bed. John is still unconscious, and Sherlock twists his fingers together in his lap. Mycroft lets out a great gusty sigh.
“Just take his hand, Sherlock.”
Sherlock doesn’t want to take John’s hand, and he is sour with the knowledge that he wishes Mycroft knew that. He doesn’t want to take John’s hand because if he were to do so, he would be incapable of stopping himself from crawling into that hospital bed with him, pressing his face into the soft expanse of John’s belly, inserting himself bodily into John’s chest cavity and closing John’s skin tight around himself, breathing tasting chewing all that John is and had been and could ever be. Sherlock can’t take John’s hand because doing so would make his own heart burst with the restraint of it.
John is recovering from major surgery. He wouldn’t be able to withstand the onslaught of Sherlock’s consumptive affections this way.
Then, Mycroft’s hand closes warm around the back of Sherlock’s neck, a gentle pressure.
“You’ll feel better,” he says, voice pitched very low. “And he’ll appreciate it.”
Sherlock feels all his dread flutter into tranquility when he places his hand on John’s. His spine sags with the relief of it, and Mycroft’s own hand slips away.
Sherlock cradles John’s hand in both of his. He worries each of John’s fingers, stroking and memorising the quality of John’s skin, his bones, his nails, his cuticles. He runs his own fingers over and over the deep arc of John’s long lifeline. After long minutes in careful data collection, John’s hand twitches, and Sherlock looks up to see John’s eyelids make a bleary, unsynchronised attempt at opening. He slurs Sherlock’s name, and Sherlock pulls his chair closer to the head of the bed and leans in.
“I’m here, John.” He continues to palpate John’s hand. John’s face softens into an anaesthetised smile, and he squeezes back. He murmurs an indistinct greeting. “Hello,” Sherlock says back. “Hello.”
-
Shortly after the Cane Incident, Sherlock was surprised to be summoned to Mike Stamford’s office at Bart’s with explicit instructions not to bring John. Surprised and then suspicious.
He opened the door to Mike’s office with great force, and it clattered against the wall. He was about to storm in and harangue Mike about his motives when he noted boxes stacked in corners, half empty bookshelves, walls bare of Mike’s degree and the ubiquitous, ancient art from his long-grown children. Mike looked up from his desk, unruffled, and Sherlock’s hanging mouth snapped shut.
“You’re retiring?” he asked, a note of horror creeping into his voice. “Whatever for?”
Mike closed the book in his lap with a thud. He had gone jolly and white as he’d aged, ruddy about the face though he was not given to overindulging in drink. He looked enough like Father Christmas that he’d taken to donning a beard and volunteering as such in the children’s ward when the season struck.
“Because I’m sixty-seven years old, Sherlock, and I think I’ve quite earned it,” he said. “I’ve got grandkids to enjoy, you know. Have a seat.”
Sherlock swept in and sat down with all the casual imperiousness he could muster amid the detritus of an entire career strewn about him. He folded his arms in his lap and fixed Mike with his best unblinking stare.
Mike remained unfazed. He rocked back in his chair and gave Sherlock a considering look.
“John’s not well,” he said.
“Redundant.” Obvious, boring, a waste of Sherlock’s time.
Placidly, Mike continued. “I consulted with an orthopaedic surgeon on his case. We’re recommending total hip replacement. Did he tell you?”
Sherlock’s heart stumbled in its rhythm. John had, in fact, not told him any such thing, and had been so stony and sullen since the Cane Incident that Sherlock couldn’t even deduce him. He left the room when Sherlock entered it, closed doors between them, pulled the covers over his head when the time came to share their bed. Sherlock had been alone in a way that he really hadn’t been for thirty years. It unnerved him.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
Mike sighed. He bent and rummaged in a desk drawer for his webpad. He poked at the screen, and after a moment, Sherlock’s mobile buzzed in his coat pocket.
“I’ve sent everything - the technique we’re going to use, its benefits, the painkillers, anticoagulants and antibiotics he’ll need to take, the physical therapy regimen.” He paused. “The aftercare.” Mike peered at him with the same kind of earnest gravity Sherlock imagined he reserved for giving some patient Very Bad News. “He’s going to need you, Sherlock, even if he says he doesn’t. If you can’t do this for him, you need to hire someone temporarily.”
A churning miasma of offence and resentment began to stir Sherlock’s innards. Mike had always been so benign and innocuous, and this was what he truly thought of Sherlock? That he’d abandon John precisely when he needed him?
Sherlock stood abruptly.
“Thank you, Dr. Stamford. This has been most illuminating.”
“Sherlock-”
“I’ll contact you if I have questions.”
He left with Mike’s voice calling at his back, but he wasn’t listening. He had plans to make, and they buzzed about his brain like bees in a great hive.
-
“Today you’ll do some breathing exercises - we’ll get a nurse in here to demonstrate as soon as possible - then ankle exercises, then you might do some sleeping, John. You’ve a catheter, so there’s no need to get up just yet, we’ll wait a couple days, give the area a rest until - John are you listening?”
“Sherlock, I’m tired.”
Sherlock’s mouth seals in petulant downward arc he knows John finds as endearing as he finds it irritating. He looks John over; indeed, John looks diminished and greatly aged. The bags under his eyes have upgraded to full-on luggage, and when he blinks up at Sherlock there is a defeated weariness there that had never been present before. Sherlock sags back into the chair, and he hears Mycroft shift before drawing in a breath to prepare for liftoff, the great hot air balloon that he is.
Mycroft’s hand settles on Sherlock’s shoulder.
“We should give Dr. Watson a bit of time, Sherlock,” he says. “Aren’t there things you should pick up at your flat? Errands to run?”
Sherlock sends him a mutinous look and wrenches out from under the weight of his hand. He stands and makes a show of straightening his suit. He leans over John and taps with two fingertips the bit of John’s clavicle exposed by his hospital gown.
“Won’t be long,” he says. “You’ll be installed in your own room by the time I get back, though. I’ll bring some cold case files for entertainment.”
“You’re staying here?”
“Of course.”
John’s eyes close. “You don’t have to,” he says.
Mycroft disappears behind the curtains, and Sherlock’s hand drops from where it had curled around the rail of the hospital bed.
“What else would I do?”
“Work a case. Make your own tea. Clean up your socks. Leave me in peace, maybe, for once in your life.”
Sherlock feels his breath leave him and his throat close. John face is turned away from him, and he has a pinched look about him.
“What-” Sherlock swallows and tries again. Nothing comes out.
John is silent for so long Sherlock would have believed he’d succumbed to the painkillers if he hadn’t made a thorough study of the difference between John’s sleep-breath and his waking-breath throughout their years together. Then,
“Just go, Sherlock,” John says. “And there’s no need to come back.”
-
The boxes in Mike’s office began to stack and tumble behind Sherlock’s eyelids. A forty year career, dismantled to its constituents and packed not-so-neatly away. Had it come to this? White hair and liver spots, localised arthritis? Hip arthroplasty?
Mike’s medical literature detailed recovery at first day by day then month by month. John could expect full range of motion to be restored by three months, though full recovery could take as long as six.
John would hate that, the inaction. Worse, John would chafe to be left behind while Sherlock was off chasing the criminal classes of London. Was already chafing, fiercely in fact. Stupid, Sherlock thought. Should have seen it in the line of his back - hurt, not physical. Resentment. Fear. The silence and tension that had marked their life together for the past several weeks would only grow and then snap when the strain grew too much. That was just physics.
As Sherlock paced the paths of Regents Park - the brisk autumnal air was good for brain work - he ignored the curious gazes of onlookers and those who were carefully avoiding him in his mutterings and gesticulations. He was working through something very large and nebulous, and it was not unlike trying to swim through treacle. Occupied thus, he was not overly concerned with what au pairs and idle bench sitters thought of him.
He shouldn’t have left the skull at home.
“Think!” The sharp clap of his voice sent passersby scattering, and a flock of pigeons took to the air. On a nearby bench, an elderly couple sent him twin looks of disapproval before standing and moving elsewhere, the wife matching the slow, uneven stride of the husband, offering unobtrusive support with an elbow.
Oh.
Oh.
Sherlock could have the work, or he could have John.
There was only one thing for it, and he tugged at his hair in frustration at the realisation: he’d have to pay a visit to the Diogenes Club.
This was not Sherlock’s area.
-
221B without John is a desolate, lightless vacuum. Untidy as well, since John had been feeling poorly. Sherlock steps over a rolled up bear pelt, strewn bottles of spray paint, several mould cultures and a dismantled hoover to get to his place on the sofa. It occurs to him that he’d have to call off the movers he’d hired, get rid of the boxes he’d hidden, call his solicitor - there was so much to do, so much to undo.
He strips his clothes off along the way to the sofa, and by the time he plants himself in his usual space, he is down to his smalls. He unearths his dressing gown from between the cushions and unfurls it in a cascade of wrinkled silk, which he slings on without care to its unkempt appearance.
He fishes out a laptop from beneath a stack of cold case files he’d nicked from Dimmock and opens it. As it warms up, Sherlock’s spreadsheets, his plans and preparations, pop up to mock him. The estate agents’ website, too. No amount of furious clicking will make them disappear whilst the thing takes its time booting up, whirring away like an ancient, labouring air conditioner reduced to blowing out hot, stale air.
Sherlock scowls at the skull, balanced precariously on the arm rest.
“I need a new computer,” he says. At six months old, it’s practically a dinosaur. He pokes frantically at the trackpad to no avail; all of it remains stubbornly affixed to his desktop as the cursor continues its infuriating little “one moment please” spinning.
Laid out in orderly columns are the contents of his and John’s combined finances: John’s meagre army pension, Sherlock’s sprawling trust, the savings they’d managed to amass over thirty years worth of cases and the occasional touch of doctoring John still entertained. The professionals he consulted had all straightened at the sight and called the state of Sherlock and John’s finances “comfortable,” the starchy euphemism toffs used for “filthy, immorally rich - bloody well rolling in it.” Each had advised a certain yearly budget, one Sherlock, even at his most extravagant, could never hope to breach even if he lived to be a hundred and twenty years old; it is, he supposes, one of the perks of being the son of an earl - rather, brother of an earl (Mycroft as peer had always struck Sherlock as amusing in the extreme, and even forty years after Father’s death, he cannot think of Mycroft as Lord Holmes, of all ridiculous things). He doesn’t understand why John would fret about money so; Sherlock had always been keen to reassure him of their security. John even has access to the aforementioned trust, for pity’s sake, though he seems to enjoy pretending he’s forgotten about it all the time.
But it isn’t the money, or even John’s habitual middle-class anxiety about the money, that so weights his chest now. It’s the bungalow - the cottage, Sherlock was intent on calling it - that he’d chosen for the two of them to retire to. It’s lovely and secluded and has acres of land perfect for an apiary, and John would like the bit of overgrown garden it has all around, and John could get some kind of smelly companion animal, and John would get on with the neighbours, and John is sure to love the surprise and look at Sherlock in that soppy way he saved for when Sherlock is particularly good. Sherlock may or may not have learned to cultivate that look through contrived, deliberate action on his part - he is unwilling to say.
John, however, is not in his chair, or bed, or anywhere in Baker Street, or in this cottage they might never name together as planned; he is in hospital, and he’d ordered Sherlock away from him. Sherlock despairs of ever getting a glimpse at John’s soppy look again.
Finally, the cursor is resurrected, and all of the browsers and programs wink from the screen as if they’d never been, as if they hadn’t just tormented him with the future he’d planned so fruitlessly.
His phone goes off.
You should just tell him, for God’s sake.
“Piss off, Mycroft,” he says.
-
“No need to look so bloody pleased,” Sherlock said as Mycroft levelled that insipid smile of his at him.
“I’m not pleased,” Mycroft replied. “Why would I be pleased that my emotionally constipated baby brother is making such a plain gesture of affection for his partner of thirty years? For the patient, long-suffering, saint-like love of his life?”
Sherlock huffed and threw himself back into the chair opposite Mycroft’s desk.
“You are insufferable,” he said. “And John’s not a saint. You should see what he calls me when I’ve committed the great sin of leaving a ring in the tub.”
Mycroft crossed his legs and linked his hands atop his knees, dipped his head and raised his brows in admonishment. Sherlock burned, hating him.
“That wasn’t a ‘ring,’ Sherlock, that was acid eating away at the ceramic.”
Sherlock batted a hand, dismissive, and pursed his lips.
“Semantics. My point is this: John is occasionally a terror.”
“Both a symptom of having spent a lifetime with you and the reason for having done so in the first place, no doubt.”
“Listen, are you going to help me or just sit there being smug?”
Mycroft made a tuneless humming to indicate deliberation between the choices, and Sherlock heaved another great sigh and contorted in the chair.
“What, precisely, do you need?”
Sherlock seethed. Mycroft was enjoying this, the great lump - Sherlock requiring his assistance. He’d never let Sherlock forget it. Sherlock gritted his teeth and thought about John. John, staying home on a case. John, keeping his pain quiet. John, rubbing his hip. John, with pillow lines etched into his face, thinning hair licking upward and haloed by early morning light. John.
“Financial advisors. Solicitors. Accountants. Whoever it is one speaks to in order to retire and to get one’s affairs in order. And an estate agent.”
Mycroft produced a sleek webpad with an oversized screen - government issue, the prat, not available to civilians - and began to flick his fingertips over it.
“Where?”
“Essex.”
“What will you be doing with 221?” Mycroft had never been able to keep the sour note of distaste from his voice when he referred to Sherlock’s address. But the question, even as light and inconsequential as Mycroft delivered it, had a gravity that had dogged Sherlock since the seed of retirement had taken root in his brain. Mrs. Hudson was gone now, though most of her ashes remained in an aubergine urn on the mantle, and she had left the whole of the house to Sherlock and John. There was no one they could entrust it to, and, truth be told, Sherlock wanted to hold onto it for a bit longer. It was where he and John had made their lives together. It was where he had come alive, truly. The touch of sentimentality was something Sherlock blamed John for entirely.
“I should like to keep it,” Sherlock said, “for trips to the city.” Until they were so old their bones were too brittle to make the trip.
Mycroft occupied himself prodding his webpad. Sherlock occupied himself deducing the exact amount of Mycroft’s most recent weight gain.
“Almost a whole stone in a month, Mycroft, well done.”
Mycroft sent him a thundercloud look, poked his screen most viciously, and in his pocket Sherlock heard his phone ping.
“It’s all set. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings, Sherlock, and you won’t miss a single one or I’ll tell John the truth about last year’s Christmas present.”
The truth was that Sherlock had bought John a fat little bull pup and hidden it in 221C, where it had frozen to death on Christmas Eve courtesy of a suddenly faulty radiator. Frantic, he’d run into the street with the stiff corpse tucked underneath his coat, and Mycroft had pulled up ever so coolly and exchanged the body for a pair of tickets to Majorca. John had been overjoyed, but Sherlock had been unable to shake the feeling of dead dog in his arms, not to mention the distasteful knowledge that he owed Mycroft something.
“Fine,” he bit out as he stood and gathered his coat about him fussily. “Do watch your waistline, Mycroft - you’re positively bursting the seam of your trousers.”
He left the Diogenes club with exactly the kind of dramatic coat swirl that he knew Mycroft envied.
-
Sherlock has never been broken up with before. Granted, he’s not had much opportunity - before John, there had been only Sebastian, whom he’d kicked out of bed for fretting so much about his sexuality that he could barely get a hard-on, and Victor, who had been what Mrs. Hudson might once have called a “free spirit,” and whose presence in Sherlock’s life was as brief as it had been illuminating and ephemeral. So, having little data to support the theory that he’d been broken up with, Sherlock decides there is only one thing for it: break into John’s hospital room and gather more.
It isn’t too difficult to procure a janitor’s uniform, though he has to sacrifice one of his women’s wigs by chopping the hair off into what passed for a men’s style, since John had seen all his wigs before. He gives himself a paunch and a stoop and a bristly grey moustache that droops completely over his mouth, plus a bulbous prosthetic nose. He is very convincing in the space of his own mirror. He has a foolproof plan: get in there with a West Country accent, strike up small talk, ask if John had experienced any tumultuous life changes recently.
He pushes a rubbish bin around the hospital corridors for a bit establishing his disguise before finally entering John’s room. The telly is on, but the sound is muted, and John is staring listlessly through a well-thumbed paperback - some crap legal thriller lent by a kindly nurse with an Elektra complex - but not reading it.
“Won’t be but a moment,” Sherlock says, pitching his voice gruff and gravelly. He shuffles to John’s own little rubbish bin and makes a show of dumping its contents into the large one. He hears John’s familiar, put-upon sigh and the smack of the book being laid face-down on his lap.
“I know that’s you, Sherlock, I’m not that bloody thick.”
Sherlock pauses, then straightens and gathers his dignity about himself.
“What gave me away?”
John rolls his eyes. “It’s been more than thirty years, Sherlock. I know your body. I know how it moves. You can’t hide it from me.”
Sherlock pulls the wig off, the nose and the moustache, and clutches them to his side. He meets John’s eyes and finds that he can’t read them. It unsettles something dark and nauseating in his gut.
“I needed the data,” he says.
“What data?”
“Why you broke up with me.”
John drops his gaze and lifts the book back up to not-read. “Funny,” he says, “from the world’s only consulting detective.”
Sherlock stomps his foot and surprises himself, but John is so unfazed by the outburst that he doesn’t even look up.
“Enlighten me then, John,” Sherlock says. “Since you know so much more than I do.”
John turns a page and tucks his chin close to his chest. He doesn’t look up.
“You’re the one who broke up with me, Sherlock.”
-
“You’ve been busy lately,” John remarked over porridge the day Sherlock was scheduled to tour cottages with the only estate agent Mycroft could get to work with him. Sherlock, occupied with the spreadsheets on his webpad, only grunted. “Haven’t seen much of you, is all.”
“You’re here all the time, with that hip of yours,” Sherlock said into the screen. “It’s erroneous to state that you ‘haven’t seen much of me’ when really, the only people you ever see is me and your physical therapist.”
John set down his mug of tea with too much force. Sherlock didn’t have to look up to know which expression John wore: that sour pinch of his lips, the narrowed, disgruntled slit of his eyelids. He preferred not to see that particular permutation of John’s face.
“Yes, thank you for the reminder of my infirmity. I mean you’re out of the flat all the time. What’s got you in such a lather? Is there some new case you’re not telling me about?”
Sherlock had wished to keep his plans for a cottage as a surprise - John liked surprises as long as they didn’t involve eyeballs. Even those, he had grown to like, in his way. This would be the biggest surprise since that time Sherlock wasn’t dead. He would be ecstatic, and Sherlock could commit to memory the exact quality of the creases his grin wrought. As for all the meetings about closing up shop and looking after their financials, well - it was something John was so often tetchy about, and he was especially irascible now that he couldn’t trek the whole of London alongside Sherlock in pursuit of dastardly deeds, and Sherlock preferred the cleanliness of keeping all of it a surprise rather than just the cottage.
Telling John would serve both to ruin his plans and to stir John’s late ire. He’d do no such thing.
“Sherlock?” John prompted. “Don’t just ignore me.”
“Are you asking me something, John, or are you just being maddeningly oblique?” Sherlock hated when John engaged in the mind games other people seemed to get so caught up in. Sherlock never understood them, their nuances and subtleties escaped him, and so often his failure to glean what had not been said resulted in someone becoming upset when really, it was their own fault for not just telling him whatever it was they thought he should know about their emotional state. One of John’s virtues was his willingness to be plain when Sherlock required it - and the way he had seemed to understand that without the messiness of trial and error, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Occasionally, though, John proved merely mortal, and Sherlock was bitterly disappointed.
John’s hand spread wide on the screen of Sherlock’s webpad and it clattered to the table.
“Hey!”
“I’m trying to have a conversation with you. You will bloody well look at me, Sherlock Holmes.”
Sherlock scowled up at him and snatched the webpad out from under the weight of his hand before he could ruin his own surprise.
“I’m busy!”
“I’ve noticed.”
“So be useful for once and let me be, you idiot!”
John sat back with a decisive little nod. He looked a bit grey, and not just his hair. Sherlock huffed and stood, slinging the webpad beneath an arm.
“I’ve meetings all day, maybe all night. Don’t bother waiting up.”
He stalked from the kitchen and didn’t hear John’s parting words.
-
“I? Broke up with you? What the hell are you on about?”
John looks diminished in his hospital bed, a small colourless curl of a man beneath the sheets, hooked up to intravenous antibiotics and painkillers and myriad monitors. He feigns absorption in his book, but he worries at the corner of a sheet with his fingers.
“Look,” he says, and Sherlock’s own heart rate spikes to hear the gruff, broken quality of John’s voice as he attempts to remain composed. “I know I’ve been - a liability lately. I know I can’t keep up with you, and you’ve gone off me. I won’t pretend it’s okay on my end, but it’s - all I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy, Sherlock. For a while, you were happy with me, and that was like a dream. Now that that’s over, it would probably be best if we just… make a clean break of it. I’ll need to rest up a bit at Baker Street, but once I’m mobile again-”
“Don’t,” Sherlock says, and it comes out in a terrible croak, like a hot bubble from his throat, unexpected. John looks up at him, finally. “Don’t do this.”
John clenches his jaw, and Sherlock watches the progress of his Adam’s apple as he swallows convulsively.
“I’m trying to make this easier on both of us.”
“How can this be easier? How can I-” There is no conclusion to that sentence that John would find acceptable, and Sherlock swallows all the options.
John passes a hand over his eyes. His breath comes out shaky.
“You’ll be fine. You’ll have the work.” He drops his hand and blinks rapidly. His eyes gleam. “The work comes first, right?”
“I’ve retired,” Sherlock blurts, unbidden. “We’ve retired. It’s all official.”
John’s brow furrows, and his mouth arcs downward.
“You love detecting,” he says faintly.
“I love you.”
The words echo in the silent space of John’s private room, the sharp edges of the sentiment something Sherlock cannot call back, no matter how his heart quakes in his chest. John stares at him, book forgotten. Sherlock swallows with some difficulty.
“You know,” John says after a moment, “you’ve never said that to me. Not once.”
Sherlock shifts, tries to stand even straighter.
“Yes I have,” he says.
“No you haven’t.”
“Have.”
“Haven’t.”
“Have.”
“Name one time.”
One time? How could Sherlock quantify thirty-one years worth of making his affections plain? Four hundred thousand nuzzles to the underside of John’s belly, three million maps of John’s skin by fingertip, two thousand sleepless nights chasing criminals, seven thousand crap shows on the telly, head on shoulder, legs entwined? He’d never thought to count them, never thought John would ask for an accurate reckoning someday.
“Not in words, John,” Sherlock scoffs, flinging a hand outward. “Pitiable, inadequate things. Never words.”
John’s face crumples, and he casts his gaze down so Sherlock can’t see him. Sherlock finds himself rooted, unable to approach John’s bed.
“God, Sherlock,” John says, voice raw. “God.”
“Undo it,” Sherlock says. “We’ll go back to how it was, you and me. Reset.”
John looks up then, and he is smiling a watery smile, though he’d loosed no tears.
“I thought I spoke your language after all these years,” he says, “but I find now that I’m missing basic translations.”
Sherlock takes a careful step forward.
“I might know a good tutor.”
“Yeah?”
“He comes highly recommended.”
“Handsome bugger too, I’d imagine.”
“I’ve heard tales.”
“You’re a berk.”
“You make poor deductions based on faulty assumptions.”
“Yes, yes, the gravest of sins.” John shifts to one side. “Get in bed, then.”
Sherlock climbs in and tucks himself around John, who puts an arm around him and seems to sag with the passing of months - years? - worth of tension from his body into the ether. Sherlock presses his face into John’s shoulder and tightens his arm around John’s torso. He smells a bit like hospital, but mostly like himself, and Sherlock shudders to feel his own tension, heretofore unacknowledged, drain away.
“Did you really think me so inconstant?” he asks lowly.
John is silent. Then, “I’m never sure where I stand with you. Never.”
Another idea begins to bud, tender and fragile. It had never seemed necessary before, but now it seems essential, elemental.
“Marry me,” Sherlock says.
John’s breath leaves him in a single gust.
“Okay,” he says.
-
Throughout the day, the estate agent had progressed from professionally cordial to coldly distant to plainly irate, and now she seemed to have settled on despairing.
“You don’t have to pick one today,” she said. “The market’s unpredictable - something perfect might come up in weeks. Months, even.”
“Of course I have to pick it today!” Sherlock said with an expansive gesticulation that seemed to encompass all of Essex. “John’s surgery is next week and I won’t have time to look anymore. Just take me to these last three.” He held up his webpad and tapped the screen for her attention. The estate agent tugged at her own hair. “Trichotillomania is a very serious affliction,” he said. “You should seek a professional.” He whirled around and tucked himself back into the passenger’s seat of the estate agent’s car. There was nothing interesting in it, but for some cat hair, which she didn’t seem to realise she was allergic to. Sherlock sighed and cast his gaze out the window instead of mentioning it. One of the most important lessons he’d learned in the course of his life was that some people didn’t want to be helped by revelations of the truth he could see so plainly.
The first bungalow - “Cottage! Honestly, who even says ‘bungalow?’” - was too near other people, and had only half an acre, and was plagued by wood worms, no matter how much the estate agent insisted otherwise. “Pathetic,” Sherlock said. “Moving on.”
The second was called cozy, which was an estate euphemism for cramped, and while Sherlock might not mind living tucked right into John’s nooks and crannies, he did object to the damp and the wood stove heating. “The last owner was fond of cooking roadkill,” he said. “You’ll never get that smell out of the walls.”
But the third - the nineteenth, really - was exactly what he’d envisioned. Modest but spacious, rustic with a clean, modern aesthetic, ensconced in a cluster of birches and poplars with a listing willow along the path, it came with five acres and at least half a mile’s walk to the nearest neighbour. He and John would walk this path together, squabble about tea in that bit of garden, tend to the bees under that tree cover. This is where they would grow old together, and pass the rest of their days in contentment. Sherlock hoped most fervently that he would be the first to go, when the time came.
“This is it,” he told the estate agent. “John will love this.”
*
Coda
“The Alvarium,” Sherlock says.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s perfect.”
“No.”
“Fine. The Tectum.”
“Sherlock! What did we talk about?”
“You talked; I agreed to nothing.”
“We are not naming our house after parts of the brain.”
Sherlock lets his fingertips skitter over the hard bones of John’s skull. John’s eyes flutter shut. They are entwined on the sofa before a fire John insisted on building - “It’s a fireplace we can use, Sherlock, so let’s bloody well use it!” - to celebrate their first night in Essex. It took months of negotiations for the deed to pass hands, and by the time they moved John was fully recovered and Sherlock’s extensive plans to surprise him were shot to hell anyway. But he’d got what he wanted: John’s face, lit with joy at something Sherlock had given him.
Regardless of the means, they are here now, together in the quiet of the country. They are languid from a bottle of wine, and Sherlock wonders if his fingers can get drunk on the feel of John’s hair.
“I like your brain,” he says. John’s got his back against Sherlock’s chest, and he lays his head against John’s even as he traces the sutures of John’s skull. He feels John’s soft laugh in the pit of his belly.
“Well, unless ‘John Watson’s Corpus Collosum’ can fit on a little signpost out front, then you keep the suggestions coming.”
Sherlock’s hands trail down John’s body until they reach the elastic of his pyjama bottoms. Sherlock nudges his nose against John’s jawline, his ear.
“Up for it, Dr. Watson-Holmes?”
In answer, John tugs Sherlock’s hand farther down and rocks his groin into the cup of Sherlock’s palm; he’s not hard yet, but yes, he’s up for it. Sherlock pushes a hand beneath John’s cotton t-shirt and rubs over John’s nipple. John sighs and links his fingers with Sherlock’s over the firming column of his cock. Sherlock shifts beneath him and spreads his legs, and John turns over to face him. He props himself up over Sherlock’s body, their cocks stirring against one another.
“If you’re trying to make me agree to some hideous anatomical name under the influence of sexual euphoria, I must inform you that that hasn’t worked on me for at least twenty-five years.”
Sherlock swept his hands down John’s sides until he could reach the handfuls of his arse and squeeze them appreciatively.
“Must I have an ulterior motive for pleasuring my husband?”
John gives a slantways smile.
“Part and parcel,” he says, and leans down to kiss him. John doesn’t taste like mystical John essentials or starfall and rainbows - he’s a bit sour from a full day, and mostly tastes like the wine they just drank - but it’s perfect, and this precise kiss they’re sharing is what they’ve built the foundation of their partnership upon, and more than anything Sherlock loves it, loves all it represents. He hopes John understands. “Love you,” John says, and Sherlock smiles into the kiss.
They are patient, and they take their time. John seems unwilling to stop kissing Sherlock for any significant duration, and that’s perfectly fine with Sherlock. When they are both blessedly nude, Sherlock produces some lube from between the cushions - he is nothing if not prepared - and readies John by touch sense alone.
“Enough,” John grunts when Sherlock has three fingers inside him up to the third knuckle. John rises up and steadies Sherlock’s prick at the slack ring of his arse before sinking down with a breathy groan of relief. Sherlock inhales sharply and clutches at John’s hips. John braces himself with hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, and when he begins to move, he stares open-mouthed into Sherlock’s eyes, and time compresses into a single, burning flare - the totality of their union.
Time is a funny thing. They’ve had so much - and so little. Not enough. Sherlock surges upward to catch John’s lips in a kiss, and he swallows John’s resultant moan.
“Never stop,” John murmurs.
“Never, never,” Sherlock answers.
They are quiet in their coupling as a force of habit - for so long there was Mrs. Hudson, and the hideous neighbours. Now there is no one to disturb, but they remain restrained. It will not always be this way - someday soon they will fill the walls of this cottage with the cacophany of their indiscreet affections, and the meandering quality of their conversations, and the acerbic bite of their arguments. For now, they enjoy each other, and they are slow and thorough and cannot stop kissing.
John comes first, a short grunt, the crinkling of his eyes and the pained ecstasy of his face heralding the modest spurts of ejaculate that pool on Sherlock’s belly. Sherlock follows with a choked off gasp, and when John slumps onto him, he tucks his head into the space between John’s shoulder and neck and locks his arms around him with no intention of letting go, come hell, high water, or dried semen. John dislodges Sherlock’s cock from his arse and arranges himself such that his much-abused hip is less extended by splayed legs, but he remains in the circle of Sherlock’s arms.
“I miss 221B,” John whispers after a long while. Sherlock strokes his back and the embers in the fireplace crackle.
“I know,” Sherlock says, and tightens his hold on him.
In the end, the cottage is named 221D, and the neighbours never manage to puzzle out why.
End
Recipient: billiethepoet
Author: [to be revealed]
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John, cameos from Mycroft and Mike Stamford
Wordcount: ~8,000
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none
Summary: Age happens. This is not Sherlock’s area.
Battle Stratagem for the Domesticated British Male
It began with John in a heap at the foot of the stairs.
Or, it began with that last case, with John doubled over, clutching at his hip, hissing for Sherlock to go on without him, to catch the suspect.
Or, it began that very first time decades ago, a breathless cab chase, an abandoned cane, an exchange of smiles, giggles.
Or, it began in Afghanistan, or at boot camp, or during all those rugby games.
Or, or, or. It didn’t matter, beginnings and endings - John was in a heap at the foot of the stairs and Sherlock’s strength was failing him.
“Just- Let me get my arm-”
“Fuck off, Sherlock,” John snapped, and shoved him away. Sherlock’s head thunked against the wall, and he watched without the luxury of touch as John struggled to a sitting position and covered his eyes with one hand, his left hip with the other. His breath was laboured and contained the fuzzy notes of a wheeze. They passed interminable minutes in that almost-silence until John dropped his hands into his lap and said, lowly, “I don’t think I can move.”
“I’ll do the shopping,” Sherlock said. It seemed the helpful, logical, magnanimous thing - that’s where John had been going, after all. But John had a particular look, seething and bitter, poorly hidden beneath his impression of stoicism, that he levelled at Sherlock whenever Sherlock had disappointed him gravely, and that was the expression he wore upon Sherlock’s offer.
“Sod the bloody shopping, Sherlock, and help me get up.”
Sherlock got to his feet and held his hands out for John to grip. It took more effort than he anticipated to lever John up, but John was a bit sensitive about his weight recently so he kept his mouth shut. John sagged against him, clutching at his torso, and gasped.
“Christ, when did I get so old?”
Sherlock tightened his arm around him. “You’re hardly in your dotage,” he said. “Come along.”
Seventeen steps loomed before them, seemingly insurmountable, but together they managed to get John back into their flat and installed in his favoured chair. When Sherlock went to make some tea, he found the carton of milk empty. He’d been the one to shake the last drops out the night before.
Sherlock had to go down to the shops, and it only got worse from there.
-
Sherlock thinks that the dean of medicine at such a posh hospital should consider getting a less miserable waiting room. Its tranquil blue motif has faded to cheerless greys, and honestly, who would be comforted by such disturbing still life wall art? The only magazines are aimed at pensioners and the parents of small children, and Sherlock requires neither exciting new porridge recipes nor educational means of entertaining a toddler on a long car ride. The chairs are threadbare, cushions collapsed under the wear of countless lounging buttocks, wooden frames cheap and prone to instability. Sherlock has contorted in the narrow space of one such offensive chair, his feet propped up against the wall, his shoulder stuck beneath an armrest, and his head dangling off the end of the seat. He alternately steeples his hands beneath (above?) his chin and lets them hang any which way they find themselves. He does a lot of sighing.
A woman in the far corner is rather pointedly ignoring him, feigning engrossment in one of the grubby, out of date magazines. She isn’t even interesting: her husband is here for a knee surgery - no, lumbar - but she is preoccupied by thoughts of her child minder, who is someone she doesn’t trust, but had left her children with due to a lack of other options. She is so dull Sherlock can’t bear to look at her a moment longer. He closes his eyes and lets his breath leave his lungs.
From the corridor there comes the tap of a familiar cadence - the affectation of a ubiquitous umbrella, the slow, precise gait of one used to making others wait - and Sherlock huffs, snapping his arms across his chest and screwing his eyes shut. That ponderous presence draws closer until it stands before him, radiating chagrin.
“Honestly, Sherlock. Is there no limit to your shameless histrionics?”
Sherlock does his best to tuck his head into his underarm in an attempt to block the great git out, but his presence is as corpulent as he is and twice as heavy - there is no escaping him. Sherlock hears a put-upon sigh, and the ill-made chair beside him creaks under new weight.
“Sit up like a civilised human being, Sherlock, for God’s sake. It won’t be long now.”
“What do you even care?”
“He’s my family too, you know.”
Sherlock spins upright in his chair and the world rights itself even as his blood sloshes roughshod around his head. He blinks away the starbursts that threaten to overwhelm his vision and turns to scowl at his brother.
“He’s going to be fine. They do these surgeries all the time. You can leave.”
Mycroft only arches a brow, leans forward, and casts his gaze to the mess of magazines on the coffee table, as if any of them could possibly pique his interest. Sherlock straightens his spine and squares his shoulders when he catches sight of Mycroft’s pate, shining through his thinning silvered hair. Sherlock himself still has a thick shock of curls, for all that it had gone salt and pepper, heavy on the salt. He makes sure to preen in Mycroft’s peripheral vision, and when the corner of Mycroft’s mouth tightens, Sherlock throws himself back into the chair with a triumphant smirk.
“Juvenile,” Mycroft mutters. He shakes open a magazine and pretends to read it. Sherlock slouches beside him, pulling his chin close into his chest. He draws his knees up and presses his feet against the armrest he shares with Mycroft. Mycroft sighs and flips a page without having read it.
Like that, they wait for John to come out of surgery.
-
At first, physical therapy improved matters. John went dutifully each weekday morning - even when a case was on, because he was utterly useless for zipping around London on foot like this - and he would come back little over an hour later, stiff from pain, lines carved into his face, but with improved motility and the words, “It’s not fun, but I think it helps,” on his lips. He’d make himself a cup of tea and subside into his chair, and if no interesting cases had crossed their paths, they would be companionably silent while John got his bearings and Sherlock thought, or organised data, or observed an experiment, or whatever he was doing that day.
But then, physical therapy stopped helping. The pain worsened. John grew drawn, prone to bouts of punishing silence and sudden outbursts of aimless hostility. One day, John came home with a medical-grade cane, suspiciously similar to the one he’d discarded at Angelo’s all those years ago, and picked a fight with Sherlock over nothing; that is, he snapped over the fruit fly larvae Sherlock had grown in a mostly-empty jar of cherry preserves.
“What the fuck is this?” John bellowed from the kitchen. Of late, his vocabulary had devolved to include more expletives than it had in the time Sherlock privately referred to as AC: Ante Coxa, or Before the Hip.
Sherlock, lounging deep in thought on the sofa, only hummed out a questioning note.
John stumped into the living room, the cane a hideous, arrhythmic punctuation for his graceless gait. John stuck a plate of toast beneath Sherlock’s nose, just barely keeping the cherry-and-larvae-smeared slices from spilling onto his person.
“My experiment!” Sherlock sat up and gaped in dismay at the carnage. “John, it’s ruined! Why did you put it on your toast?”
John’s mouth pinched into a tiny little orifice, white and angry, and his blue eyes glinted.
“Why did I- Why did I put your larvae on my toast? I don’t know, Sherlock, could it be because they were in the last of my bloody cherry preserves?”
John dropped the plate into Sherlock’s lap and spun around to stomp away, but drama seemed too much for his poorly hip and he staggered. It was the only warning Sherlock had before he watched John crumple to the floor as if imploding, and Sherlock wasn’t quick enough to stop it.
“John!”
He cast the plate of toast aside and moved to where John lay just in time to duck the cane John sent hurtling through the air with a stream of invective. The cane shattered a lamp on its arcing trajectory to the floor, where it clattered with anticlimactic impotence, and no one’s problems were solved.
-
The surgeons let Sherlock and Mycroft visit John in the recovery room, where he would stay an hour before being moved into his own room. He would stay there for up to a week for recovery - a week Sherlock is already dreading. What would he do without John shuffling about, snuffling in his sleep, cold nose on the back of Sherlock’s neck? The thought of it sends ice through Sherlock’s gut. Even with all his plans to occupy him, the prospect is a bleak one.
Maybe he should just take up residence in John’s room with him. Yes - it should have occurred to him earlier. He would bring his webpad and a duffle full of clothing and set himself up right next to John’s bed and continue about his business without ever having to endure an entire week without John’s company. That never ends well, anyway. Sherlock recalls conferences and cases and unforeseeable circumstances that had resulted in temporary parting of company, and - well. They don’t bear dwelling upon, though they had often ended with John’s body plastered as close to Sherlock’s own as was possible without merging into a single entity, and that would soothe the sting of separation. But not enough.
“Are you woolgathering?” comes Mycroft’s voice, deceptively light. He is delighted at the prospect, the utter bastard.
Sherlock snaps away from his ruminations, from his long gaze at the bit of tarnished fringe that lies on John’s forehead, to pin Mycroft with a scowl.
“No,” he snaps. “I’m preparing a list of what I will bring when I take up residence here until John’s discharge.”
Mycroft lumbers through the privacy partitions to join him at the chairs beside John’s bed. John is still unconscious, and Sherlock twists his fingers together in his lap. Mycroft lets out a great gusty sigh.
“Just take his hand, Sherlock.”
Sherlock doesn’t want to take John’s hand, and he is sour with the knowledge that he wishes Mycroft knew that. He doesn’t want to take John’s hand because if he were to do so, he would be incapable of stopping himself from crawling into that hospital bed with him, pressing his face into the soft expanse of John’s belly, inserting himself bodily into John’s chest cavity and closing John’s skin tight around himself, breathing tasting chewing all that John is and had been and could ever be. Sherlock can’t take John’s hand because doing so would make his own heart burst with the restraint of it.
John is recovering from major surgery. He wouldn’t be able to withstand the onslaught of Sherlock’s consumptive affections this way.
Then, Mycroft’s hand closes warm around the back of Sherlock’s neck, a gentle pressure.
“You’ll feel better,” he says, voice pitched very low. “And he’ll appreciate it.”
Sherlock feels all his dread flutter into tranquility when he places his hand on John’s. His spine sags with the relief of it, and Mycroft’s own hand slips away.
Sherlock cradles John’s hand in both of his. He worries each of John’s fingers, stroking and memorising the quality of John’s skin, his bones, his nails, his cuticles. He runs his own fingers over and over the deep arc of John’s long lifeline. After long minutes in careful data collection, John’s hand twitches, and Sherlock looks up to see John’s eyelids make a bleary, unsynchronised attempt at opening. He slurs Sherlock’s name, and Sherlock pulls his chair closer to the head of the bed and leans in.
“I’m here, John.” He continues to palpate John’s hand. John’s face softens into an anaesthetised smile, and he squeezes back. He murmurs an indistinct greeting. “Hello,” Sherlock says back. “Hello.”
-
Shortly after the Cane Incident, Sherlock was surprised to be summoned to Mike Stamford’s office at Bart’s with explicit instructions not to bring John. Surprised and then suspicious.
He opened the door to Mike’s office with great force, and it clattered against the wall. He was about to storm in and harangue Mike about his motives when he noted boxes stacked in corners, half empty bookshelves, walls bare of Mike’s degree and the ubiquitous, ancient art from his long-grown children. Mike looked up from his desk, unruffled, and Sherlock’s hanging mouth snapped shut.
“You’re retiring?” he asked, a note of horror creeping into his voice. “Whatever for?”
Mike closed the book in his lap with a thud. He had gone jolly and white as he’d aged, ruddy about the face though he was not given to overindulging in drink. He looked enough like Father Christmas that he’d taken to donning a beard and volunteering as such in the children’s ward when the season struck.
“Because I’m sixty-seven years old, Sherlock, and I think I’ve quite earned it,” he said. “I’ve got grandkids to enjoy, you know. Have a seat.”
Sherlock swept in and sat down with all the casual imperiousness he could muster amid the detritus of an entire career strewn about him. He folded his arms in his lap and fixed Mike with his best unblinking stare.
Mike remained unfazed. He rocked back in his chair and gave Sherlock a considering look.
“John’s not well,” he said.
“Redundant.” Obvious, boring, a waste of Sherlock’s time.
Placidly, Mike continued. “I consulted with an orthopaedic surgeon on his case. We’re recommending total hip replacement. Did he tell you?”
Sherlock’s heart stumbled in its rhythm. John had, in fact, not told him any such thing, and had been so stony and sullen since the Cane Incident that Sherlock couldn’t even deduce him. He left the room when Sherlock entered it, closed doors between them, pulled the covers over his head when the time came to share their bed. Sherlock had been alone in a way that he really hadn’t been for thirty years. It unnerved him.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
Mike sighed. He bent and rummaged in a desk drawer for his webpad. He poked at the screen, and after a moment, Sherlock’s mobile buzzed in his coat pocket.
“I’ve sent everything - the technique we’re going to use, its benefits, the painkillers, anticoagulants and antibiotics he’ll need to take, the physical therapy regimen.” He paused. “The aftercare.” Mike peered at him with the same kind of earnest gravity Sherlock imagined he reserved for giving some patient Very Bad News. “He’s going to need you, Sherlock, even if he says he doesn’t. If you can’t do this for him, you need to hire someone temporarily.”
A churning miasma of offence and resentment began to stir Sherlock’s innards. Mike had always been so benign and innocuous, and this was what he truly thought of Sherlock? That he’d abandon John precisely when he needed him?
Sherlock stood abruptly.
“Thank you, Dr. Stamford. This has been most illuminating.”
“Sherlock-”
“I’ll contact you if I have questions.”
He left with Mike’s voice calling at his back, but he wasn’t listening. He had plans to make, and they buzzed about his brain like bees in a great hive.
-
“Today you’ll do some breathing exercises - we’ll get a nurse in here to demonstrate as soon as possible - then ankle exercises, then you might do some sleeping, John. You’ve a catheter, so there’s no need to get up just yet, we’ll wait a couple days, give the area a rest until - John are you listening?”
“Sherlock, I’m tired.”
Sherlock’s mouth seals in petulant downward arc he knows John finds as endearing as he finds it irritating. He looks John over; indeed, John looks diminished and greatly aged. The bags under his eyes have upgraded to full-on luggage, and when he blinks up at Sherlock there is a defeated weariness there that had never been present before. Sherlock sags back into the chair, and he hears Mycroft shift before drawing in a breath to prepare for liftoff, the great hot air balloon that he is.
Mycroft’s hand settles on Sherlock’s shoulder.
“We should give Dr. Watson a bit of time, Sherlock,” he says. “Aren’t there things you should pick up at your flat? Errands to run?”
Sherlock sends him a mutinous look and wrenches out from under the weight of his hand. He stands and makes a show of straightening his suit. He leans over John and taps with two fingertips the bit of John’s clavicle exposed by his hospital gown.
“Won’t be long,” he says. “You’ll be installed in your own room by the time I get back, though. I’ll bring some cold case files for entertainment.”
“You’re staying here?”
“Of course.”
John’s eyes close. “You don’t have to,” he says.
Mycroft disappears behind the curtains, and Sherlock’s hand drops from where it had curled around the rail of the hospital bed.
“What else would I do?”
“Work a case. Make your own tea. Clean up your socks. Leave me in peace, maybe, for once in your life.”
Sherlock feels his breath leave him and his throat close. John face is turned away from him, and he has a pinched look about him.
“What-” Sherlock swallows and tries again. Nothing comes out.
John is silent for so long Sherlock would have believed he’d succumbed to the painkillers if he hadn’t made a thorough study of the difference between John’s sleep-breath and his waking-breath throughout their years together. Then,
“Just go, Sherlock,” John says. “And there’s no need to come back.”
-
The boxes in Mike’s office began to stack and tumble behind Sherlock’s eyelids. A forty year career, dismantled to its constituents and packed not-so-neatly away. Had it come to this? White hair and liver spots, localised arthritis? Hip arthroplasty?
Mike’s medical literature detailed recovery at first day by day then month by month. John could expect full range of motion to be restored by three months, though full recovery could take as long as six.
John would hate that, the inaction. Worse, John would chafe to be left behind while Sherlock was off chasing the criminal classes of London. Was already chafing, fiercely in fact. Stupid, Sherlock thought. Should have seen it in the line of his back - hurt, not physical. Resentment. Fear. The silence and tension that had marked their life together for the past several weeks would only grow and then snap when the strain grew too much. That was just physics.
As Sherlock paced the paths of Regents Park - the brisk autumnal air was good for brain work - he ignored the curious gazes of onlookers and those who were carefully avoiding him in his mutterings and gesticulations. He was working through something very large and nebulous, and it was not unlike trying to swim through treacle. Occupied thus, he was not overly concerned with what au pairs and idle bench sitters thought of him.
He shouldn’t have left the skull at home.
“Think!” The sharp clap of his voice sent passersby scattering, and a flock of pigeons took to the air. On a nearby bench, an elderly couple sent him twin looks of disapproval before standing and moving elsewhere, the wife matching the slow, uneven stride of the husband, offering unobtrusive support with an elbow.
Oh.
Oh.
Sherlock could have the work, or he could have John.
There was only one thing for it, and he tugged at his hair in frustration at the realisation: he’d have to pay a visit to the Diogenes Club.
This was not Sherlock’s area.
-
221B without John is a desolate, lightless vacuum. Untidy as well, since John had been feeling poorly. Sherlock steps over a rolled up bear pelt, strewn bottles of spray paint, several mould cultures and a dismantled hoover to get to his place on the sofa. It occurs to him that he’d have to call off the movers he’d hired, get rid of the boxes he’d hidden, call his solicitor - there was so much to do, so much to undo.
He strips his clothes off along the way to the sofa, and by the time he plants himself in his usual space, he is down to his smalls. He unearths his dressing gown from between the cushions and unfurls it in a cascade of wrinkled silk, which he slings on without care to its unkempt appearance.
He fishes out a laptop from beneath a stack of cold case files he’d nicked from Dimmock and opens it. As it warms up, Sherlock’s spreadsheets, his plans and preparations, pop up to mock him. The estate agents’ website, too. No amount of furious clicking will make them disappear whilst the thing takes its time booting up, whirring away like an ancient, labouring air conditioner reduced to blowing out hot, stale air.
Sherlock scowls at the skull, balanced precariously on the arm rest.
“I need a new computer,” he says. At six months old, it’s practically a dinosaur. He pokes frantically at the trackpad to no avail; all of it remains stubbornly affixed to his desktop as the cursor continues its infuriating little “one moment please” spinning.
Laid out in orderly columns are the contents of his and John’s combined finances: John’s meagre army pension, Sherlock’s sprawling trust, the savings they’d managed to amass over thirty years worth of cases and the occasional touch of doctoring John still entertained. The professionals he consulted had all straightened at the sight and called the state of Sherlock and John’s finances “comfortable,” the starchy euphemism toffs used for “filthy, immorally rich - bloody well rolling in it.” Each had advised a certain yearly budget, one Sherlock, even at his most extravagant, could never hope to breach even if he lived to be a hundred and twenty years old; it is, he supposes, one of the perks of being the son of an earl - rather, brother of an earl (Mycroft as peer had always struck Sherlock as amusing in the extreme, and even forty years after Father’s death, he cannot think of Mycroft as Lord Holmes, of all ridiculous things). He doesn’t understand why John would fret about money so; Sherlock had always been keen to reassure him of their security. John even has access to the aforementioned trust, for pity’s sake, though he seems to enjoy pretending he’s forgotten about it all the time.
But it isn’t the money, or even John’s habitual middle-class anxiety about the money, that so weights his chest now. It’s the bungalow - the cottage, Sherlock was intent on calling it - that he’d chosen for the two of them to retire to. It’s lovely and secluded and has acres of land perfect for an apiary, and John would like the bit of overgrown garden it has all around, and John could get some kind of smelly companion animal, and John would get on with the neighbours, and John is sure to love the surprise and look at Sherlock in that soppy way he saved for when Sherlock is particularly good. Sherlock may or may not have learned to cultivate that look through contrived, deliberate action on his part - he is unwilling to say.
John, however, is not in his chair, or bed, or anywhere in Baker Street, or in this cottage they might never name together as planned; he is in hospital, and he’d ordered Sherlock away from him. Sherlock despairs of ever getting a glimpse at John’s soppy look again.
Finally, the cursor is resurrected, and all of the browsers and programs wink from the screen as if they’d never been, as if they hadn’t just tormented him with the future he’d planned so fruitlessly.
His phone goes off.
You should just tell him, for God’s sake.
“Piss off, Mycroft,” he says.
-
“No need to look so bloody pleased,” Sherlock said as Mycroft levelled that insipid smile of his at him.
“I’m not pleased,” Mycroft replied. “Why would I be pleased that my emotionally constipated baby brother is making such a plain gesture of affection for his partner of thirty years? For the patient, long-suffering, saint-like love of his life?”
Sherlock huffed and threw himself back into the chair opposite Mycroft’s desk.
“You are insufferable,” he said. “And John’s not a saint. You should see what he calls me when I’ve committed the great sin of leaving a ring in the tub.”
Mycroft crossed his legs and linked his hands atop his knees, dipped his head and raised his brows in admonishment. Sherlock burned, hating him.
“That wasn’t a ‘ring,’ Sherlock, that was acid eating away at the ceramic.”
Sherlock batted a hand, dismissive, and pursed his lips.
“Semantics. My point is this: John is occasionally a terror.”
“Both a symptom of having spent a lifetime with you and the reason for having done so in the first place, no doubt.”
“Listen, are you going to help me or just sit there being smug?”
Mycroft made a tuneless humming to indicate deliberation between the choices, and Sherlock heaved another great sigh and contorted in the chair.
“What, precisely, do you need?”
Sherlock seethed. Mycroft was enjoying this, the great lump - Sherlock requiring his assistance. He’d never let Sherlock forget it. Sherlock gritted his teeth and thought about John. John, staying home on a case. John, keeping his pain quiet. John, rubbing his hip. John, with pillow lines etched into his face, thinning hair licking upward and haloed by early morning light. John.
“Financial advisors. Solicitors. Accountants. Whoever it is one speaks to in order to retire and to get one’s affairs in order. And an estate agent.”
Mycroft produced a sleek webpad with an oversized screen - government issue, the prat, not available to civilians - and began to flick his fingertips over it.
“Where?”
“Essex.”
“What will you be doing with 221?” Mycroft had never been able to keep the sour note of distaste from his voice when he referred to Sherlock’s address. But the question, even as light and inconsequential as Mycroft delivered it, had a gravity that had dogged Sherlock since the seed of retirement had taken root in his brain. Mrs. Hudson was gone now, though most of her ashes remained in an aubergine urn on the mantle, and she had left the whole of the house to Sherlock and John. There was no one they could entrust it to, and, truth be told, Sherlock wanted to hold onto it for a bit longer. It was where he and John had made their lives together. It was where he had come alive, truly. The touch of sentimentality was something Sherlock blamed John for entirely.
“I should like to keep it,” Sherlock said, “for trips to the city.” Until they were so old their bones were too brittle to make the trip.
Mycroft occupied himself prodding his webpad. Sherlock occupied himself deducing the exact amount of Mycroft’s most recent weight gain.
“Almost a whole stone in a month, Mycroft, well done.”
Mycroft sent him a thundercloud look, poked his screen most viciously, and in his pocket Sherlock heard his phone ping.
“It’s all set. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings, Sherlock, and you won’t miss a single one or I’ll tell John the truth about last year’s Christmas present.”
The truth was that Sherlock had bought John a fat little bull pup and hidden it in 221C, where it had frozen to death on Christmas Eve courtesy of a suddenly faulty radiator. Frantic, he’d run into the street with the stiff corpse tucked underneath his coat, and Mycroft had pulled up ever so coolly and exchanged the body for a pair of tickets to Majorca. John had been overjoyed, but Sherlock had been unable to shake the feeling of dead dog in his arms, not to mention the distasteful knowledge that he owed Mycroft something.
“Fine,” he bit out as he stood and gathered his coat about him fussily. “Do watch your waistline, Mycroft - you’re positively bursting the seam of your trousers.”
He left the Diogenes club with exactly the kind of dramatic coat swirl that he knew Mycroft envied.
-
Sherlock has never been broken up with before. Granted, he’s not had much opportunity - before John, there had been only Sebastian, whom he’d kicked out of bed for fretting so much about his sexuality that he could barely get a hard-on, and Victor, who had been what Mrs. Hudson might once have called a “free spirit,” and whose presence in Sherlock’s life was as brief as it had been illuminating and ephemeral. So, having little data to support the theory that he’d been broken up with, Sherlock decides there is only one thing for it: break into John’s hospital room and gather more.
It isn’t too difficult to procure a janitor’s uniform, though he has to sacrifice one of his women’s wigs by chopping the hair off into what passed for a men’s style, since John had seen all his wigs before. He gives himself a paunch and a stoop and a bristly grey moustache that droops completely over his mouth, plus a bulbous prosthetic nose. He is very convincing in the space of his own mirror. He has a foolproof plan: get in there with a West Country accent, strike up small talk, ask if John had experienced any tumultuous life changes recently.
He pushes a rubbish bin around the hospital corridors for a bit establishing his disguise before finally entering John’s room. The telly is on, but the sound is muted, and John is staring listlessly through a well-thumbed paperback - some crap legal thriller lent by a kindly nurse with an Elektra complex - but not reading it.
“Won’t be but a moment,” Sherlock says, pitching his voice gruff and gravelly. He shuffles to John’s own little rubbish bin and makes a show of dumping its contents into the large one. He hears John’s familiar, put-upon sigh and the smack of the book being laid face-down on his lap.
“I know that’s you, Sherlock, I’m not that bloody thick.”
Sherlock pauses, then straightens and gathers his dignity about himself.
“What gave me away?”
John rolls his eyes. “It’s been more than thirty years, Sherlock. I know your body. I know how it moves. You can’t hide it from me.”
Sherlock pulls the wig off, the nose and the moustache, and clutches them to his side. He meets John’s eyes and finds that he can’t read them. It unsettles something dark and nauseating in his gut.
“I needed the data,” he says.
“What data?”
“Why you broke up with me.”
John drops his gaze and lifts the book back up to not-read. “Funny,” he says, “from the world’s only consulting detective.”
Sherlock stomps his foot and surprises himself, but John is so unfazed by the outburst that he doesn’t even look up.
“Enlighten me then, John,” Sherlock says. “Since you know so much more than I do.”
John turns a page and tucks his chin close to his chest. He doesn’t look up.
“You’re the one who broke up with me, Sherlock.”
-
“You’ve been busy lately,” John remarked over porridge the day Sherlock was scheduled to tour cottages with the only estate agent Mycroft could get to work with him. Sherlock, occupied with the spreadsheets on his webpad, only grunted. “Haven’t seen much of you, is all.”
“You’re here all the time, with that hip of yours,” Sherlock said into the screen. “It’s erroneous to state that you ‘haven’t seen much of me’ when really, the only people you ever see is me and your physical therapist.”
John set down his mug of tea with too much force. Sherlock didn’t have to look up to know which expression John wore: that sour pinch of his lips, the narrowed, disgruntled slit of his eyelids. He preferred not to see that particular permutation of John’s face.
“Yes, thank you for the reminder of my infirmity. I mean you’re out of the flat all the time. What’s got you in such a lather? Is there some new case you’re not telling me about?”
Sherlock had wished to keep his plans for a cottage as a surprise - John liked surprises as long as they didn’t involve eyeballs. Even those, he had grown to like, in his way. This would be the biggest surprise since that time Sherlock wasn’t dead. He would be ecstatic, and Sherlock could commit to memory the exact quality of the creases his grin wrought. As for all the meetings about closing up shop and looking after their financials, well - it was something John was so often tetchy about, and he was especially irascible now that he couldn’t trek the whole of London alongside Sherlock in pursuit of dastardly deeds, and Sherlock preferred the cleanliness of keeping all of it a surprise rather than just the cottage.
Telling John would serve both to ruin his plans and to stir John’s late ire. He’d do no such thing.
“Sherlock?” John prompted. “Don’t just ignore me.”
“Are you asking me something, John, or are you just being maddeningly oblique?” Sherlock hated when John engaged in the mind games other people seemed to get so caught up in. Sherlock never understood them, their nuances and subtleties escaped him, and so often his failure to glean what had not been said resulted in someone becoming upset when really, it was their own fault for not just telling him whatever it was they thought he should know about their emotional state. One of John’s virtues was his willingness to be plain when Sherlock required it - and the way he had seemed to understand that without the messiness of trial and error, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Occasionally, though, John proved merely mortal, and Sherlock was bitterly disappointed.
John’s hand spread wide on the screen of Sherlock’s webpad and it clattered to the table.
“Hey!”
“I’m trying to have a conversation with you. You will bloody well look at me, Sherlock Holmes.”
Sherlock scowled up at him and snatched the webpad out from under the weight of his hand before he could ruin his own surprise.
“I’m busy!”
“I’ve noticed.”
“So be useful for once and let me be, you idiot!”
John sat back with a decisive little nod. He looked a bit grey, and not just his hair. Sherlock huffed and stood, slinging the webpad beneath an arm.
“I’ve meetings all day, maybe all night. Don’t bother waiting up.”
He stalked from the kitchen and didn’t hear John’s parting words.
-
“I? Broke up with you? What the hell are you on about?”
John looks diminished in his hospital bed, a small colourless curl of a man beneath the sheets, hooked up to intravenous antibiotics and painkillers and myriad monitors. He feigns absorption in his book, but he worries at the corner of a sheet with his fingers.
“Look,” he says, and Sherlock’s own heart rate spikes to hear the gruff, broken quality of John’s voice as he attempts to remain composed. “I know I’ve been - a liability lately. I know I can’t keep up with you, and you’ve gone off me. I won’t pretend it’s okay on my end, but it’s - all I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy, Sherlock. For a while, you were happy with me, and that was like a dream. Now that that’s over, it would probably be best if we just… make a clean break of it. I’ll need to rest up a bit at Baker Street, but once I’m mobile again-”
“Don’t,” Sherlock says, and it comes out in a terrible croak, like a hot bubble from his throat, unexpected. John looks up at him, finally. “Don’t do this.”
John clenches his jaw, and Sherlock watches the progress of his Adam’s apple as he swallows convulsively.
“I’m trying to make this easier on both of us.”
“How can this be easier? How can I-” There is no conclusion to that sentence that John would find acceptable, and Sherlock swallows all the options.
John passes a hand over his eyes. His breath comes out shaky.
“You’ll be fine. You’ll have the work.” He drops his hand and blinks rapidly. His eyes gleam. “The work comes first, right?”
“I’ve retired,” Sherlock blurts, unbidden. “We’ve retired. It’s all official.”
John’s brow furrows, and his mouth arcs downward.
“You love detecting,” he says faintly.
“I love you.”
The words echo in the silent space of John’s private room, the sharp edges of the sentiment something Sherlock cannot call back, no matter how his heart quakes in his chest. John stares at him, book forgotten. Sherlock swallows with some difficulty.
“You know,” John says after a moment, “you’ve never said that to me. Not once.”
Sherlock shifts, tries to stand even straighter.
“Yes I have,” he says.
“No you haven’t.”
“Have.”
“Haven’t.”
“Have.”
“Name one time.”
One time? How could Sherlock quantify thirty-one years worth of making his affections plain? Four hundred thousand nuzzles to the underside of John’s belly, three million maps of John’s skin by fingertip, two thousand sleepless nights chasing criminals, seven thousand crap shows on the telly, head on shoulder, legs entwined? He’d never thought to count them, never thought John would ask for an accurate reckoning someday.
“Not in words, John,” Sherlock scoffs, flinging a hand outward. “Pitiable, inadequate things. Never words.”
John’s face crumples, and he casts his gaze down so Sherlock can’t see him. Sherlock finds himself rooted, unable to approach John’s bed.
“God, Sherlock,” John says, voice raw. “God.”
“Undo it,” Sherlock says. “We’ll go back to how it was, you and me. Reset.”
John looks up then, and he is smiling a watery smile, though he’d loosed no tears.
“I thought I spoke your language after all these years,” he says, “but I find now that I’m missing basic translations.”
Sherlock takes a careful step forward.
“I might know a good tutor.”
“Yeah?”
“He comes highly recommended.”
“Handsome bugger too, I’d imagine.”
“I’ve heard tales.”
“You’re a berk.”
“You make poor deductions based on faulty assumptions.”
“Yes, yes, the gravest of sins.” John shifts to one side. “Get in bed, then.”
Sherlock climbs in and tucks himself around John, who puts an arm around him and seems to sag with the passing of months - years? - worth of tension from his body into the ether. Sherlock presses his face into John’s shoulder and tightens his arm around John’s torso. He smells a bit like hospital, but mostly like himself, and Sherlock shudders to feel his own tension, heretofore unacknowledged, drain away.
“Did you really think me so inconstant?” he asks lowly.
John is silent. Then, “I’m never sure where I stand with you. Never.”
Another idea begins to bud, tender and fragile. It had never seemed necessary before, but now it seems essential, elemental.
“Marry me,” Sherlock says.
John’s breath leaves him in a single gust.
“Okay,” he says.
-
Throughout the day, the estate agent had progressed from professionally cordial to coldly distant to plainly irate, and now she seemed to have settled on despairing.
“You don’t have to pick one today,” she said. “The market’s unpredictable - something perfect might come up in weeks. Months, even.”
“Of course I have to pick it today!” Sherlock said with an expansive gesticulation that seemed to encompass all of Essex. “John’s surgery is next week and I won’t have time to look anymore. Just take me to these last three.” He held up his webpad and tapped the screen for her attention. The estate agent tugged at her own hair. “Trichotillomania is a very serious affliction,” he said. “You should seek a professional.” He whirled around and tucked himself back into the passenger’s seat of the estate agent’s car. There was nothing interesting in it, but for some cat hair, which she didn’t seem to realise she was allergic to. Sherlock sighed and cast his gaze out the window instead of mentioning it. One of the most important lessons he’d learned in the course of his life was that some people didn’t want to be helped by revelations of the truth he could see so plainly.
The first bungalow - “Cottage! Honestly, who even says ‘bungalow?’” - was too near other people, and had only half an acre, and was plagued by wood worms, no matter how much the estate agent insisted otherwise. “Pathetic,” Sherlock said. “Moving on.”
The second was called cozy, which was an estate euphemism for cramped, and while Sherlock might not mind living tucked right into John’s nooks and crannies, he did object to the damp and the wood stove heating. “The last owner was fond of cooking roadkill,” he said. “You’ll never get that smell out of the walls.”
But the third - the nineteenth, really - was exactly what he’d envisioned. Modest but spacious, rustic with a clean, modern aesthetic, ensconced in a cluster of birches and poplars with a listing willow along the path, it came with five acres and at least half a mile’s walk to the nearest neighbour. He and John would walk this path together, squabble about tea in that bit of garden, tend to the bees under that tree cover. This is where they would grow old together, and pass the rest of their days in contentment. Sherlock hoped most fervently that he would be the first to go, when the time came.
“This is it,” he told the estate agent. “John will love this.”
*
Coda
“The Alvarium,” Sherlock says.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s perfect.”
“No.”
“Fine. The Tectum.”
“Sherlock! What did we talk about?”
“You talked; I agreed to nothing.”
“We are not naming our house after parts of the brain.”
Sherlock lets his fingertips skitter over the hard bones of John’s skull. John’s eyes flutter shut. They are entwined on the sofa before a fire John insisted on building - “It’s a fireplace we can use, Sherlock, so let’s bloody well use it!” - to celebrate their first night in Essex. It took months of negotiations for the deed to pass hands, and by the time they moved John was fully recovered and Sherlock’s extensive plans to surprise him were shot to hell anyway. But he’d got what he wanted: John’s face, lit with joy at something Sherlock had given him.
Regardless of the means, they are here now, together in the quiet of the country. They are languid from a bottle of wine, and Sherlock wonders if his fingers can get drunk on the feel of John’s hair.
“I like your brain,” he says. John’s got his back against Sherlock’s chest, and he lays his head against John’s even as he traces the sutures of John’s skull. He feels John’s soft laugh in the pit of his belly.
“Well, unless ‘John Watson’s Corpus Collosum’ can fit on a little signpost out front, then you keep the suggestions coming.”
Sherlock’s hands trail down John’s body until they reach the elastic of his pyjama bottoms. Sherlock nudges his nose against John’s jawline, his ear.
“Up for it, Dr. Watson-Holmes?”
In answer, John tugs Sherlock’s hand farther down and rocks his groin into the cup of Sherlock’s palm; he’s not hard yet, but yes, he’s up for it. Sherlock pushes a hand beneath John’s cotton t-shirt and rubs over John’s nipple. John sighs and links his fingers with Sherlock’s over the firming column of his cock. Sherlock shifts beneath him and spreads his legs, and John turns over to face him. He props himself up over Sherlock’s body, their cocks stirring against one another.
“If you’re trying to make me agree to some hideous anatomical name under the influence of sexual euphoria, I must inform you that that hasn’t worked on me for at least twenty-five years.”
Sherlock swept his hands down John’s sides until he could reach the handfuls of his arse and squeeze them appreciatively.
“Must I have an ulterior motive for pleasuring my husband?”
John gives a slantways smile.
“Part and parcel,” he says, and leans down to kiss him. John doesn’t taste like mystical John essentials or starfall and rainbows - he’s a bit sour from a full day, and mostly tastes like the wine they just drank - but it’s perfect, and this precise kiss they’re sharing is what they’ve built the foundation of their partnership upon, and more than anything Sherlock loves it, loves all it represents. He hopes John understands. “Love you,” John says, and Sherlock smiles into the kiss.
They are patient, and they take their time. John seems unwilling to stop kissing Sherlock for any significant duration, and that’s perfectly fine with Sherlock. When they are both blessedly nude, Sherlock produces some lube from between the cushions - he is nothing if not prepared - and readies John by touch sense alone.
“Enough,” John grunts when Sherlock has three fingers inside him up to the third knuckle. John rises up and steadies Sherlock’s prick at the slack ring of his arse before sinking down with a breathy groan of relief. Sherlock inhales sharply and clutches at John’s hips. John braces himself with hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, and when he begins to move, he stares open-mouthed into Sherlock’s eyes, and time compresses into a single, burning flare - the totality of their union.
Time is a funny thing. They’ve had so much - and so little. Not enough. Sherlock surges upward to catch John’s lips in a kiss, and he swallows John’s resultant moan.
“Never stop,” John murmurs.
“Never, never,” Sherlock answers.
They are quiet in their coupling as a force of habit - for so long there was Mrs. Hudson, and the hideous neighbours. Now there is no one to disturb, but they remain restrained. It will not always be this way - someday soon they will fill the walls of this cottage with the cacophany of their indiscreet affections, and the meandering quality of their conversations, and the acerbic bite of their arguments. For now, they enjoy each other, and they are slow and thorough and cannot stop kissing.
John comes first, a short grunt, the crinkling of his eyes and the pained ecstasy of his face heralding the modest spurts of ejaculate that pool on Sherlock’s belly. Sherlock follows with a choked off gasp, and when John slumps onto him, he tucks his head into the space between John’s shoulder and neck and locks his arms around him with no intention of letting go, come hell, high water, or dried semen. John dislodges Sherlock’s cock from his arse and arranges himself such that his much-abused hip is less extended by splayed legs, but he remains in the circle of Sherlock’s arms.
“I miss 221B,” John whispers after a long while. Sherlock strokes his back and the embers in the fireplace crackle.
“I know,” Sherlock says, and tightens his hold on him.
In the end, the cottage is named 221D, and the neighbours never manage to puzzle out why.
End