Points of Light Chapter 2
Title: Points of Light Chapter 2: The Chemical Composition of Tears (follows on from Prologue and Chapter 1)
Author: pennypaperbrain
Beta: Chloe and eldritchhorrors
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: depression, PTSD, suicide attempt, masturbation, BDSM (all wrapped up in a literate romance)
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Wordcount: 2,700 for this chapter; about 7,000 for the whole fic so far
Spoilers: First three episodes
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Sherlock and John have been sharing a flat since the events of A Study in Pink, but the initial spark between them seems to have died away. And that's fine with John, who has a new girlfriend and is busy trying to be as normal as possible and not have fantasies about his flatmate. Because life owes him a rest, dammit. Except Sherlock thinks otherwise.
Also contains Rodent Experimentation: the director’s cut.
Also on AO3
In Afghanistan, he thought in terms of life and death. But as John clocks up another month in London, he comes to remember that there’s a third state available: the mundane.
The mundane is so bloody good when you’re still getting used to an improbable new life chasing criminals and you need to stop and take stock. The mundane has tea and telly and chat. You can get comfortable there; swaddle yourself so firmly you never find the way out. You don’t want to find the way out. Even with Sherlock bloody Holmes looking down his patrician nose at you and making snide remarks.
Whatever reared its head between them after the night with the… cabbie, has slipped. Sherlock is stupidly gorgeous, but he’s bonkers and apparently asexual, and John is a bit eccentric these days as well but definitely not asexual, and stir all that together and you get seventy shades of mangling disaster. So John shut it all down.
And now he’s met Sarah.
Sarah is lovely. She likes the things she likes, just because she likes them, and that’s simple and appealing and a direct route to John’s respect. She enjoys soft kisses and nuzzles, and it’s gentle and healing - he’s high on how gentle and healing it is.Do that again, Sarah, oh Christ yes it feels nice, do it again yes YES, I’m getting off on this stuff, what a relief…
He lost so much of himself in the depression and pain, and he’s got some of it back, and some is enough right now. The rest… he’s not repressing it, it’s just not in use. John will never stop being a soldier, but why pick fights. A breather, that’s all he asks.
Sherlock uses him as an intellectual punchbag all the way through the Chinese smuggling case, and John resents it like hell. But it seems they’re stuck this way. Moments of connection spark between them, but don’t add up.
The nightmares still visit. He drugs himself with tea and housework and grumbling patients and the smell of Sarah’s hair.
Then he has to comfort her after she gets dragged into Sherlock’s world. Yes she copes bravely, but why should she have to, she wasn’t made for it, her head doesn’t go icy clear and her pulse start racing and something dark uncoils inside him and sniffs the air when there’s danger and thrill and Sherlock…
No.
*
Sherlock is not one to bother hiding his disdain. Anyone who commits murder, however justified, earns a modicum of his interest; but John has not followed through.
‘Don’t worry about the jar with the eyeballs,’ John deadpans one afternoon, after slamming around the flat for a couple of minutes, complaining about mess. ‘I just washed it and put it carefully back in the fridge.’
‘Good,’ says Sherlock. He’s trying to conduct a delicate procedure, and John is making the floorboards shake.
There’s a heavy sigh.
‘Fine,’ says John. ‘Dead bodies are more interesting than people. I get that.’
Instead of a reply, Sherlock refocuses his attention on the tiny corpse from the mousetraps he’s set up in the corridor leading to 221C. There are a number of interesting conclusions to be drawn from the process of cauterising the creature’s entrails.
John is watching him, but Sherlock won’t look round. He’s not about to justify himself; he has kept certain memories unredacted to remind him of the cost of that mistake.
As a teenager, before he accepted his own otherness and made it into a weapon, he did try to believe in the value of friends. He hobbled himself, crawled at the pace of those around him in an attempt to belong, and they stared at him and laughed. They were human, and he was else.
He hanged himself in a disused storeroom. He came round choking, sprawled under the snapped rope, the noose tight enough that he still hoped for death. Instead the world dragged him back, first to a lengthy fumble with the jammed knot then a stumbling return to the dormitory, wheals slathered in drama cupboard makeup, to bear what would happen next.
No-one noticed.
From this Sherlock gained new understanding of how abjection averts attention. Strict codes govern what it is permissible to comprehend.
Sherlock lives by violating them.
John was supposed to understand that.
Sherlock realises that he is standing motionless with a scalpel between his fingers, while his flatmate presumably waits for a response in accordance with the laws of verbal joust. Instead he turns his stare on John before slitting open another section of hindquarter.
The stench thereby released is promisingly foul, and causes John to retreat from the room. The man is extremely manipulable. And idiotic. And now somewhere else.
*
Late evening, and John should be preparing to go to bed. Instead, he’s watching Sherlock surf the net. Though ‘ransack’ might do better than ‘surf’, for him.
The remains of a takeaway are sitting on the table. Sherlock ate some of it - half a dish at any rate. A process John watched with an interest which he rigorously channelled through the doctorish part of his brain, the details of the interaction between slurpy noodles and Sherlock’s lips being by the by.
Diagnosis of friends and relatives is a bit of a dirty habit, but John can’t help trying to pigeonhole Sherlock sometimes: anorexic? obsessive-compulsive? Nothing quite fits. And he’s had a bit to drink this evening and it’s making him flippant, so he runs through a few scene labels as well: S.A.M.? brat? angling for a take-down?
It’s not like he’s forgotten that first comment, I left my riding crop in the mortuary, even if he’s sometimes tried. There had to be something in it. So often Sherlock seems to be pushing him to…
Fuck, he needs to stop that train of thought. He thinks of Sarah, who’s visiting her parents tonight, but the silence in the room is still growing larger, even though his rational mind tells him he’s the only one who feels it or cares.
‘You enjoyed that, then,’ he says, gesturing at the congealing dish beside Sherlock’s laptop.
‘Transport requires fuel,’ his flatmate says, typing away probably faster than John can think. ‘I’m going to Minsk tomorrow.’
Oh. Right. What’s he supposed to say to that?
Sherlock shoots John the briefest of looks over his laptop.
‘And fuelling the plane with noodles?’ John suggests, cracking a smile.
‘Ah, a witticism,’ Sherlock responds. ‘I’d score it one out of ten.’
John takes a deep breath. This is just a normal conversation. You have those, with people you… like. ‘Minsk’s in Russia, right? Sounds a bit chilly. I’ll stay here in the warm if you don’t mind.’
More silence.
‘Right?’
Sherlock keeps typing. ‘Belarus, John.’ A pause. ‘When you say something intelligent, I will respond in kind.’
John goes hot and cold. He reins in his anger and hurt feelings - just about - then thinks, what’s the point? Sherlock’s probably deduced more about him than he knows himself. The bastard doesn’t care, is all.
To hell with it.
‘Jesus Christ, I could find a use for that bloody riding crop of yours sometimes, you know that?’ He gets up. ‘Just... send me a postcard from wherever. I’m going to bed.’
He doesn’t see Sherlock’s lashes flicker, or his head turn just slightly to watch John go.
*
0309. Sherlock is sprawled on his bed in the blue dressing gown, making contemptuous margin notes in A History of Fingerprint Techniques. He finishes a chapter, sets the book aside, takes a split-second mental inventory of the room: what next?
He knows well enough. Maintenance. Sordid but necessary, if his concentration is not to be impaired by ongoing irruptions of desire. He has concluded that John was flirting earlier, expressing towards Sherlock the interest in topping which he deduced the moment they met, but if there is a way to switch gears from disdain to invitation, Sherlock has never reliably found it.
He pushes the word ‘freak’ out of his head. At the age of 34, he knows what he is, and how to manage it with the least fuss.
Sherlock leans over the edge of the bed and fishes around underneath it before drawing out a small case. From this, he extracts four clamps of medium severity. As he fits them to his nipples and balls his already half-hard cock stiffens to attention, and two minutes of stimulation bring him near to completion, imprecise non-sequential sense-images of his bound wrists, gagged mouth, reddened flesh, John’s teeth tongue hand penis strobing in his head.
His rational mind stops him, not without effort, when it discerns that muffled sounds are coming from the other side of the wall.
*
John is weeping.
He’s propped up on his elbow, forehead to the coolness of the wall, hand massaging his cheekbone. He can’t lapse back into sleep, can’t quite drag himself out of it. Nightmares are waiting: a corporal’s screams and splintering bone. At moments like this nothing quite matches the pull of war, for all that he generally, now, chooses the present over the past.
His will, the thing that’s kept him alive for this long, is currently refusing to engage. It’s obvious he has to deal with what’s inside him, the whole ambivalent raging morass of it, but he is fucking tired, and he just wants to be let off for once. Just make it better. Someone.
He’s broken, and when he wakes in the dark like this he knows he’ll never be completely fixed. Stuck back together differently, perhaps.
‘John?’
The sound anchors him in the present.
It’s still dark but his bedroom door has opened a crack, letting in a spill of streetlight from the uncurtained landing window. Sherlock, a tall silhouette, pushes open the door further, revealing a tooth glass full of water glimmering in his hand.
‘Are you all right? I heard noises,’ Sherlock says.
John considers. Part of him wants to dredge up a denial, but that part isn’t in charge right now. It was never his favourite, anyway.
Instead he grunts, and takes a moment to rub a hand over his face. Then he switches on the bedside lamp.
‘Awful bloody nightmares. Again,’ he says, and nods at the glass, with Sherlock’s long fingers curling around its rim. ‘Oh, thanks.’
With the light on, the world seems a bit more rational and solid, but there’s still something odd happening. It starts with the fact of Sherlock acting concerned, and only intensifies when he puts the glass of water on the nightstand, sits down on the floor and reaches out to touch John’s face - or more precisely, the tracks of his tears.
‘What are you doing?’ John asks as levelly as he can. Sherlock’s breathing is off-balance. His fingertips scrape gently downwards, gathering moisture, and when the tiny pressure passes John feels colder than before.
‘What do you cry for?’ Sherlock demands. Moisture glints on a fingernail as he tucks his hand into the folds of his dressing gown.
‘Come on, you can’t ask a question like that,’ John protests aloud. He squirms into a more comfortable position and hears the quite ordinary creak and rustle of mattress and bedding.
But his flatmate is serious. He’s got that answer me or I’ll kill you with my brain expression again.
John sighs. ‘People I liked are dead,’ he explains as best, and as briefly, as he can. ‘And here I am; and what’s it all in aid of anyway? That’s about the size of it.’
Or at any rate it’s all he’s saying now, even though it’s 3am and John’s filters aren’t quite working properly and the hungry fascination in Sherlock’s intense gaze is starting to... Oh god, I fancy my flatmate because he’s even more fucked up than I am, is there even a word for that?
‘Futility troubles you,’ Sherlock says. He’s fiddling with the belt of his dressing gown. Winding it around his hand. ‘We all die in the end. But you should… try.’
‘Try what?’ is the best riposte John can manage at this time of the morning.
Sherlock, however, shakes himself a little and gets up.
‘The chemical composition of tears is sodium chloride, calcium phosphate, mucus and water,’ he tells the wall above John’s head as he moves towards the door. Then, by the sound of it, he retreats to his own room.
John turns the light off and stares at the dark ceiling. What he actually sees is Sherlock’s wrist wrapped in the silk belt of the dressing gown. Imagination takes the scenario onwards.
But in the following days, Sherlock goes to Minsk and back, shoots the wall, spars with Mycroft and generally behaves like a nutter. If he thinks anything happened between them at 3am, he doesn’t let it show; in fact he seems to be behaving as badly as possible as if to make clear his disdain.
What’s most likely happened is Sherlock’s edited everything out; after all he can cut the solar system out of his memory, and John’s not egotistical enough to think he’s bigger than that. He goes round to Sarah’s, because she makes some bloody sense.
Then a case comes up.
‘I’d be lost without my blogger,’ Sherlock says.
That’s the closest he ever gets to a come-on. John follows him out of the door.
*
Sherlock has tried shooting the wall, and John just took away the gun.
Sherlock has left John a severed head, and John rubbed his forehead and looked pained.
Sherlock has summarised all the things that are wrong with John’s blog.
Nothing. Not a reaction in sight.
So he gives up. There’s no provoking some people. And more to the point it doesn’t matter, because there are others who don’t even need to be provoked.
Moriarty. The name has a taste to it at last: challenge, triumph and collateral death. John disapproves but that is illogical as Sherlock is playing within the rules: no murder or suicide, on his part. We all die and pass into void eventually, so why not spend himself in the chase? The humans have their food and fucking, and Sherlock has this.
‘I’m sure you’d be very happy together,’ says John, stomping away from a TV report about the tower block deaths.
It takes a moment, but Sherlock registers that one.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘There are lives at stake, Sherlock. Actual human lives. Just so I know, do you care about that at all?’
John is disappointed; he’s angry enough to momentarily snag Sherlock’s interest again. But not to really affect him now. Even the Powers case, his first failure, is redeemed and drawn into the pattern, the great game which he plays with a skill beyond the imagination of anybody alive, except one. Moriarty, a force of unseen elegance, splays the world for Sherlock to study, and he deduces and masters and wins, wins, wins.
Until he discovers that he doesn’t want Moriarty, he wants John. Everything breaks, then.
*
When Moriarty steps out of the shadows, he’s actually rather a disappointment. Small and risibly unstable, the man tries so hard. He is compelling, yes, but it’s a fascination that begins and ends with the rifle trained on John’s heart.
Sherlock has been chasing a revelation, and the one he has found is not the one he expected. Even while he trains the gun on their enemy and calculations cascade through his head, it’s the sight of John wrapped in semtex that draws his gaze again and again.
Moriarty is a cracked and magnificent mind, but Sherlock already has one of those. John is patience, nightmares, judgement, comfort, anger, touch, dead cabbies, friendship, the promise of sex.
Extraordinary.
All his life murder-suicide was a valid option, and he is still Sherlock so he appreciates the beauty of the sniper’s light dancing on John’s chest. Yet now he just wants to live. With John.
He lowers his own gun to the wired-up jacket, the most logical gambit left.
If they can just survive for another few minutes, he will work out what comes next.
***
A/N: There has already been cursing from betas on the subject of leaving it at this point, but I’m waiting for A Scandal in Belgravia. If that doesn’t joss me into paralysis (I am praying quite intensely for an intelligent canon treatment of the subject of BDSM; a stupid/scoffing one would fuck badly with my head) then the thinky kinky smut is coming next.
On to Chapter 3
Author: pennypaperbrain
Beta: Chloe and eldritchhorrors
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: depression, PTSD, suicide attempt, masturbation, BDSM (all wrapped up in a literate romance)
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Wordcount: 2,700 for this chapter; about 7,000 for the whole fic so far
Spoilers: First three episodes
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Sherlock and John have been sharing a flat since the events of A Study in Pink, but the initial spark between them seems to have died away. And that's fine with John, who has a new girlfriend and is busy trying to be as normal as possible and not have fantasies about his flatmate. Because life owes him a rest, dammit. Except Sherlock thinks otherwise.
Also contains Rodent Experimentation: the director’s cut.
Also on AO3
In Afghanistan, he thought in terms of life and death. But as John clocks up another month in London, he comes to remember that there’s a third state available: the mundane.
The mundane is so bloody good when you’re still getting used to an improbable new life chasing criminals and you need to stop and take stock. The mundane has tea and telly and chat. You can get comfortable there; swaddle yourself so firmly you never find the way out. You don’t want to find the way out. Even with Sherlock bloody Holmes looking down his patrician nose at you and making snide remarks.
Whatever reared its head between them after the night with the… cabbie, has slipped. Sherlock is stupidly gorgeous, but he’s bonkers and apparently asexual, and John is a bit eccentric these days as well but definitely not asexual, and stir all that together and you get seventy shades of mangling disaster. So John shut it all down.
And now he’s met Sarah.
Sarah is lovely. She likes the things she likes, just because she likes them, and that’s simple and appealing and a direct route to John’s respect. She enjoys soft kisses and nuzzles, and it’s gentle and healing - he’s high on how gentle and healing it is.Do that again, Sarah, oh Christ yes it feels nice, do it again yes YES, I’m getting off on this stuff, what a relief…
He lost so much of himself in the depression and pain, and he’s got some of it back, and some is enough right now. The rest… he’s not repressing it, it’s just not in use. John will never stop being a soldier, but why pick fights. A breather, that’s all he asks.
Sherlock uses him as an intellectual punchbag all the way through the Chinese smuggling case, and John resents it like hell. But it seems they’re stuck this way. Moments of connection spark between them, but don’t add up.
The nightmares still visit. He drugs himself with tea and housework and grumbling patients and the smell of Sarah’s hair.
Then he has to comfort her after she gets dragged into Sherlock’s world. Yes she copes bravely, but why should she have to, she wasn’t made for it, her head doesn’t go icy clear and her pulse start racing and something dark uncoils inside him and sniffs the air when there’s danger and thrill and Sherlock…
No.
*
Sherlock is not one to bother hiding his disdain. Anyone who commits murder, however justified, earns a modicum of his interest; but John has not followed through.
‘Don’t worry about the jar with the eyeballs,’ John deadpans one afternoon, after slamming around the flat for a couple of minutes, complaining about mess. ‘I just washed it and put it carefully back in the fridge.’
‘Good,’ says Sherlock. He’s trying to conduct a delicate procedure, and John is making the floorboards shake.
There’s a heavy sigh.
‘Fine,’ says John. ‘Dead bodies are more interesting than people. I get that.’
Instead of a reply, Sherlock refocuses his attention on the tiny corpse from the mousetraps he’s set up in the corridor leading to 221C. There are a number of interesting conclusions to be drawn from the process of cauterising the creature’s entrails.
John is watching him, but Sherlock won’t look round. He’s not about to justify himself; he has kept certain memories unredacted to remind him of the cost of that mistake.
As a teenager, before he accepted his own otherness and made it into a weapon, he did try to believe in the value of friends. He hobbled himself, crawled at the pace of those around him in an attempt to belong, and they stared at him and laughed. They were human, and he was else.
He hanged himself in a disused storeroom. He came round choking, sprawled under the snapped rope, the noose tight enough that he still hoped for death. Instead the world dragged him back, first to a lengthy fumble with the jammed knot then a stumbling return to the dormitory, wheals slathered in drama cupboard makeup, to bear what would happen next.
No-one noticed.
From this Sherlock gained new understanding of how abjection averts attention. Strict codes govern what it is permissible to comprehend.
Sherlock lives by violating them.
John was supposed to understand that.
Sherlock realises that he is standing motionless with a scalpel between his fingers, while his flatmate presumably waits for a response in accordance with the laws of verbal joust. Instead he turns his stare on John before slitting open another section of hindquarter.
The stench thereby released is promisingly foul, and causes John to retreat from the room. The man is extremely manipulable. And idiotic. And now somewhere else.
*
Late evening, and John should be preparing to go to bed. Instead, he’s watching Sherlock surf the net. Though ‘ransack’ might do better than ‘surf’, for him.
The remains of a takeaway are sitting on the table. Sherlock ate some of it - half a dish at any rate. A process John watched with an interest which he rigorously channelled through the doctorish part of his brain, the details of the interaction between slurpy noodles and Sherlock’s lips being by the by.
Diagnosis of friends and relatives is a bit of a dirty habit, but John can’t help trying to pigeonhole Sherlock sometimes: anorexic? obsessive-compulsive? Nothing quite fits. And he’s had a bit to drink this evening and it’s making him flippant, so he runs through a few scene labels as well: S.A.M.? brat? angling for a take-down?
It’s not like he’s forgotten that first comment, I left my riding crop in the mortuary, even if he’s sometimes tried. There had to be something in it. So often Sherlock seems to be pushing him to…
Fuck, he needs to stop that train of thought. He thinks of Sarah, who’s visiting her parents tonight, but the silence in the room is still growing larger, even though his rational mind tells him he’s the only one who feels it or cares.
‘You enjoyed that, then,’ he says, gesturing at the congealing dish beside Sherlock’s laptop.
‘Transport requires fuel,’ his flatmate says, typing away probably faster than John can think. ‘I’m going to Minsk tomorrow.’
Oh. Right. What’s he supposed to say to that?
Sherlock shoots John the briefest of looks over his laptop.
‘And fuelling the plane with noodles?’ John suggests, cracking a smile.
‘Ah, a witticism,’ Sherlock responds. ‘I’d score it one out of ten.’
John takes a deep breath. This is just a normal conversation. You have those, with people you… like. ‘Minsk’s in Russia, right? Sounds a bit chilly. I’ll stay here in the warm if you don’t mind.’
More silence.
‘Right?’
Sherlock keeps typing. ‘Belarus, John.’ A pause. ‘When you say something intelligent, I will respond in kind.’
John goes hot and cold. He reins in his anger and hurt feelings - just about - then thinks, what’s the point? Sherlock’s probably deduced more about him than he knows himself. The bastard doesn’t care, is all.
To hell with it.
‘Jesus Christ, I could find a use for that bloody riding crop of yours sometimes, you know that?’ He gets up. ‘Just... send me a postcard from wherever. I’m going to bed.’
He doesn’t see Sherlock’s lashes flicker, or his head turn just slightly to watch John go.
*
0309. Sherlock is sprawled on his bed in the blue dressing gown, making contemptuous margin notes in A History of Fingerprint Techniques. He finishes a chapter, sets the book aside, takes a split-second mental inventory of the room: what next?
He knows well enough. Maintenance. Sordid but necessary, if his concentration is not to be impaired by ongoing irruptions of desire. He has concluded that John was flirting earlier, expressing towards Sherlock the interest in topping which he deduced the moment they met, but if there is a way to switch gears from disdain to invitation, Sherlock has never reliably found it.
He pushes the word ‘freak’ out of his head. At the age of 34, he knows what he is, and how to manage it with the least fuss.
Sherlock leans over the edge of the bed and fishes around underneath it before drawing out a small case. From this, he extracts four clamps of medium severity. As he fits them to his nipples and balls his already half-hard cock stiffens to attention, and two minutes of stimulation bring him near to completion, imprecise non-sequential sense-images of his bound wrists, gagged mouth, reddened flesh, John’s teeth tongue hand penis strobing in his head.
His rational mind stops him, not without effort, when it discerns that muffled sounds are coming from the other side of the wall.
*
John is weeping.
He’s propped up on his elbow, forehead to the coolness of the wall, hand massaging his cheekbone. He can’t lapse back into sleep, can’t quite drag himself out of it. Nightmares are waiting: a corporal’s screams and splintering bone. At moments like this nothing quite matches the pull of war, for all that he generally, now, chooses the present over the past.
His will, the thing that’s kept him alive for this long, is currently refusing to engage. It’s obvious he has to deal with what’s inside him, the whole ambivalent raging morass of it, but he is fucking tired, and he just wants to be let off for once. Just make it better. Someone.
He’s broken, and when he wakes in the dark like this he knows he’ll never be completely fixed. Stuck back together differently, perhaps.
‘John?’
The sound anchors him in the present.
It’s still dark but his bedroom door has opened a crack, letting in a spill of streetlight from the uncurtained landing window. Sherlock, a tall silhouette, pushes open the door further, revealing a tooth glass full of water glimmering in his hand.
‘Are you all right? I heard noises,’ Sherlock says.
John considers. Part of him wants to dredge up a denial, but that part isn’t in charge right now. It was never his favourite, anyway.
Instead he grunts, and takes a moment to rub a hand over his face. Then he switches on the bedside lamp.
‘Awful bloody nightmares. Again,’ he says, and nods at the glass, with Sherlock’s long fingers curling around its rim. ‘Oh, thanks.’
With the light on, the world seems a bit more rational and solid, but there’s still something odd happening. It starts with the fact of Sherlock acting concerned, and only intensifies when he puts the glass of water on the nightstand, sits down on the floor and reaches out to touch John’s face - or more precisely, the tracks of his tears.
‘What are you doing?’ John asks as levelly as he can. Sherlock’s breathing is off-balance. His fingertips scrape gently downwards, gathering moisture, and when the tiny pressure passes John feels colder than before.
‘What do you cry for?’ Sherlock demands. Moisture glints on a fingernail as he tucks his hand into the folds of his dressing gown.
‘Come on, you can’t ask a question like that,’ John protests aloud. He squirms into a more comfortable position and hears the quite ordinary creak and rustle of mattress and bedding.
But his flatmate is serious. He’s got that answer me or I’ll kill you with my brain expression again.
John sighs. ‘People I liked are dead,’ he explains as best, and as briefly, as he can. ‘And here I am; and what’s it all in aid of anyway? That’s about the size of it.’
Or at any rate it’s all he’s saying now, even though it’s 3am and John’s filters aren’t quite working properly and the hungry fascination in Sherlock’s intense gaze is starting to... Oh god, I fancy my flatmate because he’s even more fucked up than I am, is there even a word for that?
‘Futility troubles you,’ Sherlock says. He’s fiddling with the belt of his dressing gown. Winding it around his hand. ‘We all die in the end. But you should… try.’
‘Try what?’ is the best riposte John can manage at this time of the morning.
Sherlock, however, shakes himself a little and gets up.
‘The chemical composition of tears is sodium chloride, calcium phosphate, mucus and water,’ he tells the wall above John’s head as he moves towards the door. Then, by the sound of it, he retreats to his own room.
John turns the light off and stares at the dark ceiling. What he actually sees is Sherlock’s wrist wrapped in the silk belt of the dressing gown. Imagination takes the scenario onwards.
But in the following days, Sherlock goes to Minsk and back, shoots the wall, spars with Mycroft and generally behaves like a nutter. If he thinks anything happened between them at 3am, he doesn’t let it show; in fact he seems to be behaving as badly as possible as if to make clear his disdain.
What’s most likely happened is Sherlock’s edited everything out; after all he can cut the solar system out of his memory, and John’s not egotistical enough to think he’s bigger than that. He goes round to Sarah’s, because she makes some bloody sense.
Then a case comes up.
‘I’d be lost without my blogger,’ Sherlock says.
That’s the closest he ever gets to a come-on. John follows him out of the door.
*
Sherlock has tried shooting the wall, and John just took away the gun.
Sherlock has left John a severed head, and John rubbed his forehead and looked pained.
Sherlock has summarised all the things that are wrong with John’s blog.
Nothing. Not a reaction in sight.
So he gives up. There’s no provoking some people. And more to the point it doesn’t matter, because there are others who don’t even need to be provoked.
Moriarty. The name has a taste to it at last: challenge, triumph and collateral death. John disapproves but that is illogical as Sherlock is playing within the rules: no murder or suicide, on his part. We all die and pass into void eventually, so why not spend himself in the chase? The humans have their food and fucking, and Sherlock has this.
‘I’m sure you’d be very happy together,’ says John, stomping away from a TV report about the tower block deaths.
It takes a moment, but Sherlock registers that one.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘There are lives at stake, Sherlock. Actual human lives. Just so I know, do you care about that at all?’
John is disappointed; he’s angry enough to momentarily snag Sherlock’s interest again. But not to really affect him now. Even the Powers case, his first failure, is redeemed and drawn into the pattern, the great game which he plays with a skill beyond the imagination of anybody alive, except one. Moriarty, a force of unseen elegance, splays the world for Sherlock to study, and he deduces and masters and wins, wins, wins.
Until he discovers that he doesn’t want Moriarty, he wants John. Everything breaks, then.
*
When Moriarty steps out of the shadows, he’s actually rather a disappointment. Small and risibly unstable, the man tries so hard. He is compelling, yes, but it’s a fascination that begins and ends with the rifle trained on John’s heart.
Sherlock has been chasing a revelation, and the one he has found is not the one he expected. Even while he trains the gun on their enemy and calculations cascade through his head, it’s the sight of John wrapped in semtex that draws his gaze again and again.
Moriarty is a cracked and magnificent mind, but Sherlock already has one of those. John is patience, nightmares, judgement, comfort, anger, touch, dead cabbies, friendship, the promise of sex.
Extraordinary.
All his life murder-suicide was a valid option, and he is still Sherlock so he appreciates the beauty of the sniper’s light dancing on John’s chest. Yet now he just wants to live. With John.
He lowers his own gun to the wired-up jacket, the most logical gambit left.
If they can just survive for another few minutes, he will work out what comes next.
***
A/N: There has already been cursing from betas on the subject of leaving it at this point, but I’m waiting for A Scandal in Belgravia. If that doesn’t joss me into paralysis (I am praying quite intensely for an intelligent canon treatment of the subject of BDSM; a stupid/scoffing one would fuck badly with my head) then the thinky kinky smut is coming next.
On to Chapter 3