Fic for cleflink: Graceless
Title: Graceless
Recipient: cleflink
Author: horologists
Beta: gilbertnorrells
Characters: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, OFC
Warnings: Mentions of non-explicit sex, some references to killing
Summary: John doesn’t mind so much. Sometimes he thinks that he is less the bullet and more the body, and that Sherlock is his entrance wound.
Author’s Note: Title from The National’s Graceless, played on repeat while writing.
London in October is a dreary rain, a sallow grey-brick sky weighted with the looming winter; four a.m, and Sherlock and John are under an awning, backs against a cement wall and breaths swirling around the drips of the overhang. It’s cold, they’ve been tracking a jewel thief and a possible murderer and are waiting for the Yarders, and John’s left his jacket in the flat.
A car honks in the distance. John shivers, and Sherlock places a hand between his shoulder blades, then wraps the right side of his coat around the curve of John’s back. He starts to hum. John closes his eyes and shifts underneath the edge of the coat. Sherlock breathes out.
-
John Watson functions, John works, John is proper and composed and all things that a man of war and a doctor of maladies should be - but put Sherlock Holmes in front of him, and John is utterly, inexplicably ruined. He thinks it happened in fragments, at first: the meeting, the moving, the crimes, then somewhere along the line the logical progression unfurled into a mishap of ridiculous proportions and now they - they - are something - something new. Different. John would flick his tongue out and taste the air between them if he could, catalogue it if possible, but it’s not, it’s not, and he thinks it would be poison if he tried.
Sometimes, when Sherlock has him pinned underneath, spine undulating in a sine wave and fingers pushing John’s hips deep into the bed, sometimes John thinks he can hear their hearts conversing; not in whispers, but in loud, low, pounding pulses; call and response, Sherlock had once told him, in music it’s called call and response. John can’t hear the music in it and can barely interpret the words exchanged - he only hears a frantic beating, hummingbirds trapped in cages trapped in a lion’s belly - but he thinks Sherlock must understand, if the tenderness in his eyes and rhythm of him inside John are any indication.
It sounds like thunder, John thinks. When we move on the sheets, it sounds like thunder.
-
An evening spent running and crashing and navigating rooftops and tiny back roads - then a quiet slip. It was months ago, but John remembers this clearly: how the burnt orange horizon silhouetted Sherlock’s frame against the windows of the flat, chiaroscuro from the lighted panes to the sharp curve of Sherlock’s left cheekbone; how John had felt like he’d swallowed something too warm and too large for his body, a spreading stretch and ache less from the come down of the night and more from a constant quiet war between two bodies, three words stuck frustratingly in the back of his throat and stubbornness and something more organic, more tender, more frightening, like a weight in his stomach.
It might kill him, the bad thing he’s swallowed. He just might let it.
-
The thief won’t stop, it seems - running a string of robberies from Tiffany’s to Van Cleef & Arpels, leaving locked rooms and stab wounds - and only after the fifth store and the seventh body does Sherlock truly throw himself into the case, neglecting to sleep or eat unless John forces him to, and snapping at anyone working too slow for his taste. So Thursday night, they are in Piaget on Bond St., staking out the next anticipated site, bodies pressed against each other in the cramped space behind a display.
“You’re on my coat.”
“Why do you wear such a bloody long coat?”
“Changing the topic does not make up for your inconvenient body size and obtrusive placement.”
A shuffle. “Git.”
Hours pass. Sherlock texts. John drums his fingers against his jeans. Sometimes he glances at Sherlock, who ignores him otherwise. Sometimes he stares out into the darkness of the store. At three a.m., Sherlock sends him to walk out of the store and into the nearest alleyway to scout out possible entrance routes. When John walks, he’s caught up in the sounds of the London night and the cricks in his joints from moving after stagnation - and he doesn’t hear the snicker from behind him, doesn’t feel the knife pressed against his throat until it’s too late.
“I’ve been watching you two,” a voice says behind his ear - female, John realizes, with a shiver. He’s backed into the alley, pressed against a wall and swung to face his attacker: all black, lithe slenderness with raven dark hair and wolf-white teeth. “Trying to hide in that tiny little store. Your friend, he’s….pretty. And you like pressing close to him.” She giggles.
John swallows. His throat bumps along the blade. “He is. But you find other things pretty too, don’t you? Jewelry. Diamonds.” Pause. “Dead bodies”.
She flashes her teeth again, shifts, pressing the blade a little deeper. John can feel a trickle of blood run down his throat, cooled by the wind.
“Don’t change the subject,” she says. “You want him, don’t you? The way you lean into him, how you look at him - there’s always a bruise on your face. You want him as much as I want diamonds. Maybe more. But….” She trails off, pauses to listen to something. John takes the moment to analyse her, to look at her face, map out points of weakness, routes of escape, and then opens his mouth to say - but she cuts him off, quirks her head, and add more pressure to the blade.
“No - no, no, no, that’s not right. You have him, but you’re bleeding for him. And you don’t know if he’d do the same”.
At this, John twists his mouth and turns his head away as the woman leans into him, bites his earlobe and whispers, “Then I hope these burn as much as his kisses must”.
Then three things happen very quickly: John feels two sharp points of pain warm and bloom in his torso; he hears a furious snarl and sees a flash of dark, dark black; and he hears screams. More screams.
He’s very cold, he realizes. He’s very cold and he is falling, falling, falling-
-
At times, John is hit with the realization of the sheer magnitude of the things he would do for Sherlock (get the shopping; make him tea; take a bullet; kill a man; kill many men), and is subsequently astounded by the curtness of the list of things he wouldn’t do for him (leave him; let him drown in his mind). It should shake him, he knows - it should worry him, or leave him a bit restless at night at least - but it doesn’t. These are facts. John knows he feels this way and knows that he would follow any path Sherlock traces, like the trajectory of a bullet and the powder in its wake. There’s something in his bones that rationalises every atrocity he is willing to commit, every word that his lips may form, every motion that his hands might carry out.
What John doesn’t know is how Sherlock feels - he knows Sherlock cares, knows that Sherlock likes to have him around, to talk to him, to fuck him - but where John is unwavering and steadfast and stoically reckless (but times truly afraid of the thing that beats out l-o-v-e in desperate Morse code in his chest at the mere sight of Sherlock), Sherlock is different: a mass of whipping night winds, mercurial and moody.
John doesn’t mind so much. Sometimes he thinks that he is less the bullet and more the body, and that Sherlock is his entrance wound.
-
He thinks he should be used to this, waking up in a white room to the click of a heart monitor. The grogginess of painkillers and the tightness of bandages across his chest are familiar bits of the past that shouldn’t be comforting, but are in a way.
Something heavy is holding his right hand down. He decides to look.
Sherlock is an inelegant sprawl on a plastic chair next to John’s bed, coat gone and suit rumpled, head cradled in his arms with one hand clasped tightly around John’s. From the tilt of Sherlock’s face, John can see the blackness around his eyes and the unhappy twist of his mouth, the mottled press of his curls into the frown lines on his forehead. It’s heartache to look at. John tries to extricate his hand from Sherlock’s clutches in an attempt to smooth away his discomfort, but - oh.
He hadn’t realized just how tightly Sherlock had been grasping his hand, and when John pulls it out and looks at the inside, he sees tiny indents lining in the bottom arch of his palm.
Nail marks. Stress marks.
And he realizes: What John would do for Sherlock is blaze and burn, all bright sparks and unmovable force; but Sherlock can’t be measured in the same way - he could be found in the quiet things, in the subtle and the unspoken. And when Sherlock grips his hand and leaves puncture wounds, he’s marking his place on the map of John’s body, a territorial mark of don’t you dare leave me after I’ve anchored myself to you.
John knows this. He knows this because if the tables were turned and he was the raven instead of the lion, he’d do the same.
He wonders what became of the thief, and he remembers the screams that crescendoed as he fell. John looks a little more closely at the marks on his palm, not the least bit faded despite being pulled away from Sherlock’s fingers for some time. There are flecks of dark red lining the indents. Blood, he thinks. He knows it’s not his.
Sherlock shifts then, and draws John’s right leg a bit closer to lean his head on. Mumbles something in his sleep. John’s chest gives another little throb at that, one distinct from the wounds that the bandages are covering, and he tenderly places his right hand back under Sherlock’s left and squeezes.
When Sherlock lifts his head, John squeezes once more and gives him a smile. “’Lo”.
He watches Sherlock’s face as it goes from its sleep-fresh softness to momentary confusion to concern, and then a tiny upward tilt at the corners of his lips - slightly more sadness than smile.
“You took your time,” Sherlock mutters, voice hoarse. “At the store, too. I’d wondered where you’d run off to.” And then lower, more desperate, “But John. If you’d- you must know that if- it would be immensely detrimental to me had you- ”
At this, John moves his hand from Sherlock’s fingers up to his wrist and tugs a bit. “I know. I know, I know, I know, but I didn’t.”
The room is quiet as Sherlock traces his fingers in meaningless patterns on John’s leg and John smooths his over Sherlock’s forearm. He hears his heart monitor beep, fingers Sherlock’s pulse through his wrist, and he thinks he hears their hearts pick up their whispers again from where they had left off, one murmuring in low tones and the other answering in quiet beats - and suddenly, he understands.
_
More notes, etc: Stress marks idea not mine; sourced instead from this amazing photograph. And if anyone’s interested, the song that inspired the jewel thief was Why Did We Fire the Gun? by Waldeck.
Recipient: cleflink
Author: horologists
Beta: gilbertnorrells
Characters: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, OFC
Warnings: Mentions of non-explicit sex, some references to killing
Summary: John doesn’t mind so much. Sometimes he thinks that he is less the bullet and more the body, and that Sherlock is his entrance wound.
Author’s Note: Title from The National’s Graceless, played on repeat while writing.
London in October is a dreary rain, a sallow grey-brick sky weighted with the looming winter; four a.m, and Sherlock and John are under an awning, backs against a cement wall and breaths swirling around the drips of the overhang. It’s cold, they’ve been tracking a jewel thief and a possible murderer and are waiting for the Yarders, and John’s left his jacket in the flat.
A car honks in the distance. John shivers, and Sherlock places a hand between his shoulder blades, then wraps the right side of his coat around the curve of John’s back. He starts to hum. John closes his eyes and shifts underneath the edge of the coat. Sherlock breathes out.
-
John Watson functions, John works, John is proper and composed and all things that a man of war and a doctor of maladies should be - but put Sherlock Holmes in front of him, and John is utterly, inexplicably ruined. He thinks it happened in fragments, at first: the meeting, the moving, the crimes, then somewhere along the line the logical progression unfurled into a mishap of ridiculous proportions and now they - they - are something - something new. Different. John would flick his tongue out and taste the air between them if he could, catalogue it if possible, but it’s not, it’s not, and he thinks it would be poison if he tried.
Sometimes, when Sherlock has him pinned underneath, spine undulating in a sine wave and fingers pushing John’s hips deep into the bed, sometimes John thinks he can hear their hearts conversing; not in whispers, but in loud, low, pounding pulses; call and response, Sherlock had once told him, in music it’s called call and response. John can’t hear the music in it and can barely interpret the words exchanged - he only hears a frantic beating, hummingbirds trapped in cages trapped in a lion’s belly - but he thinks Sherlock must understand, if the tenderness in his eyes and rhythm of him inside John are any indication.
It sounds like thunder, John thinks. When we move on the sheets, it sounds like thunder.
-
An evening spent running and crashing and navigating rooftops and tiny back roads - then a quiet slip. It was months ago, but John remembers this clearly: how the burnt orange horizon silhouetted Sherlock’s frame against the windows of the flat, chiaroscuro from the lighted panes to the sharp curve of Sherlock’s left cheekbone; how John had felt like he’d swallowed something too warm and too large for his body, a spreading stretch and ache less from the come down of the night and more from a constant quiet war between two bodies, three words stuck frustratingly in the back of his throat and stubbornness and something more organic, more tender, more frightening, like a weight in his stomach.
It might kill him, the bad thing he’s swallowed. He just might let it.
-
The thief won’t stop, it seems - running a string of robberies from Tiffany’s to Van Cleef & Arpels, leaving locked rooms and stab wounds - and only after the fifth store and the seventh body does Sherlock truly throw himself into the case, neglecting to sleep or eat unless John forces him to, and snapping at anyone working too slow for his taste. So Thursday night, they are in Piaget on Bond St., staking out the next anticipated site, bodies pressed against each other in the cramped space behind a display.
“You’re on my coat.”
“Why do you wear such a bloody long coat?”
“Changing the topic does not make up for your inconvenient body size and obtrusive placement.”
A shuffle. “Git.”
Hours pass. Sherlock texts. John drums his fingers against his jeans. Sometimes he glances at Sherlock, who ignores him otherwise. Sometimes he stares out into the darkness of the store. At three a.m., Sherlock sends him to walk out of the store and into the nearest alleyway to scout out possible entrance routes. When John walks, he’s caught up in the sounds of the London night and the cricks in his joints from moving after stagnation - and he doesn’t hear the snicker from behind him, doesn’t feel the knife pressed against his throat until it’s too late.
“I’ve been watching you two,” a voice says behind his ear - female, John realizes, with a shiver. He’s backed into the alley, pressed against a wall and swung to face his attacker: all black, lithe slenderness with raven dark hair and wolf-white teeth. “Trying to hide in that tiny little store. Your friend, he’s….pretty. And you like pressing close to him.” She giggles.
John swallows. His throat bumps along the blade. “He is. But you find other things pretty too, don’t you? Jewelry. Diamonds.” Pause. “Dead bodies”.
She flashes her teeth again, shifts, pressing the blade a little deeper. John can feel a trickle of blood run down his throat, cooled by the wind.
“Don’t change the subject,” she says. “You want him, don’t you? The way you lean into him, how you look at him - there’s always a bruise on your face. You want him as much as I want diamonds. Maybe more. But….” She trails off, pauses to listen to something. John takes the moment to analyse her, to look at her face, map out points of weakness, routes of escape, and then opens his mouth to say - but she cuts him off, quirks her head, and add more pressure to the blade.
“No - no, no, no, that’s not right. You have him, but you’re bleeding for him. And you don’t know if he’d do the same”.
At this, John twists his mouth and turns his head away as the woman leans into him, bites his earlobe and whispers, “Then I hope these burn as much as his kisses must”.
Then three things happen very quickly: John feels two sharp points of pain warm and bloom in his torso; he hears a furious snarl and sees a flash of dark, dark black; and he hears screams. More screams.
He’s very cold, he realizes. He’s very cold and he is falling, falling, falling-
-
At times, John is hit with the realization of the sheer magnitude of the things he would do for Sherlock (get the shopping; make him tea; take a bullet; kill a man; kill many men), and is subsequently astounded by the curtness of the list of things he wouldn’t do for him (leave him; let him drown in his mind). It should shake him, he knows - it should worry him, or leave him a bit restless at night at least - but it doesn’t. These are facts. John knows he feels this way and knows that he would follow any path Sherlock traces, like the trajectory of a bullet and the powder in its wake. There’s something in his bones that rationalises every atrocity he is willing to commit, every word that his lips may form, every motion that his hands might carry out.
What John doesn’t know is how Sherlock feels - he knows Sherlock cares, knows that Sherlock likes to have him around, to talk to him, to fuck him - but where John is unwavering and steadfast and stoically reckless (but times truly afraid of the thing that beats out l-o-v-e in desperate Morse code in his chest at the mere sight of Sherlock), Sherlock is different: a mass of whipping night winds, mercurial and moody.
John doesn’t mind so much. Sometimes he thinks that he is less the bullet and more the body, and that Sherlock is his entrance wound.
-
He thinks he should be used to this, waking up in a white room to the click of a heart monitor. The grogginess of painkillers and the tightness of bandages across his chest are familiar bits of the past that shouldn’t be comforting, but are in a way.
Something heavy is holding his right hand down. He decides to look.
Sherlock is an inelegant sprawl on a plastic chair next to John’s bed, coat gone and suit rumpled, head cradled in his arms with one hand clasped tightly around John’s. From the tilt of Sherlock’s face, John can see the blackness around his eyes and the unhappy twist of his mouth, the mottled press of his curls into the frown lines on his forehead. It’s heartache to look at. John tries to extricate his hand from Sherlock’s clutches in an attempt to smooth away his discomfort, but - oh.
He hadn’t realized just how tightly Sherlock had been grasping his hand, and when John pulls it out and looks at the inside, he sees tiny indents lining in the bottom arch of his palm.
Nail marks. Stress marks.
And he realizes: What John would do for Sherlock is blaze and burn, all bright sparks and unmovable force; but Sherlock can’t be measured in the same way - he could be found in the quiet things, in the subtle and the unspoken. And when Sherlock grips his hand and leaves puncture wounds, he’s marking his place on the map of John’s body, a territorial mark of don’t you dare leave me after I’ve anchored myself to you.
John knows this. He knows this because if the tables were turned and he was the raven instead of the lion, he’d do the same.
He wonders what became of the thief, and he remembers the screams that crescendoed as he fell. John looks a little more closely at the marks on his palm, not the least bit faded despite being pulled away from Sherlock’s fingers for some time. There are flecks of dark red lining the indents. Blood, he thinks. He knows it’s not his.
Sherlock shifts then, and draws John’s right leg a bit closer to lean his head on. Mumbles something in his sleep. John’s chest gives another little throb at that, one distinct from the wounds that the bandages are covering, and he tenderly places his right hand back under Sherlock’s left and squeezes.
When Sherlock lifts his head, John squeezes once more and gives him a smile. “’Lo”.
He watches Sherlock’s face as it goes from its sleep-fresh softness to momentary confusion to concern, and then a tiny upward tilt at the corners of his lips - slightly more sadness than smile.
“You took your time,” Sherlock mutters, voice hoarse. “At the store, too. I’d wondered where you’d run off to.” And then lower, more desperate, “But John. If you’d- you must know that if- it would be immensely detrimental to me had you- ”
At this, John moves his hand from Sherlock’s fingers up to his wrist and tugs a bit. “I know. I know, I know, I know, but I didn’t.”
The room is quiet as Sherlock traces his fingers in meaningless patterns on John’s leg and John smooths his over Sherlock’s forearm. He hears his heart monitor beep, fingers Sherlock’s pulse through his wrist, and he thinks he hears their hearts pick up their whispers again from where they had left off, one murmuring in low tones and the other answering in quiet beats - and suddenly, he understands.
_
More notes, etc: Stress marks idea not mine; sourced instead from this amazing photograph. And if anyone’s interested, the song that inspired the jewel thief was Why Did We Fire the Gun? by Waldeck.