Chapter Text
The first time, John had to admit, was a bit of a disaster.
They had talked about it. He certainly had fantasised about it. He had planned for it. Prepared for it.
But the thing was, it was still a first time. He had expected it to be like the way that he imagined it; that it would be tender and slow and sensual and really fucking arousing. And it was. But it also hurt, which he wasn’t quite as prepared for as he had thought.
He had known it would hurt a little. He did. And John was no stranger to pain. But it was a new kind of pain, one he hadn’t experienced before.
(And yes, alright, it was a bit of a turn up for the books. John ‘Not Gay’ Watson, extremely naked, sporting a raging hard-on, one leg wrapped around Sherlock’s waist and the other propped over his shoulder. Very much willing to take it up the arse from a man he loved beyond reason.)
Very willing indeed, until Sherlock had tentatively pushed a little deeper and John instinctively resisted; his body rebelling against the intrusion.
Sherlock had taken one look at his tense face, the lip bitten in an attempt to keep from gasping; and had pulled away violently, his eyes wide. John did gasp then, his breath hissing out as his leg slipped from Sherlock’s shoulder to land clumsily on the bed.
“Oh god, John! John, John… John, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Sherlock whispered, his hands convulsively clenching and unclenching at his sides. John could see the long elegant fingers trembling as they reached out to touch his hips then withdrawing again, as if Sherlock couldn’t quite bring himself to touch him.
“Ah! Calm down, Sherlock. I’m fine.” He muttered, wincing as he sat up. “Although I wish you hadn’t whipped away like that. I think slower would definitely have been better in the circumstances.”
“John-“ Sherlock whispered, his face tense. He kept running his eyes up and down John’s body, anywhere but his face.
(And it’s not as if he can even see where it hurts from that angle. Shit. Ah, Christ. That smarts a bit.)
John reached out and grabbed Sherlocks arm, and his heart sank a little as the detective instinctively flinched away. He sighed, and persevered; holding his hand out until Sherlock reluctantly laid his hand in Johns.
“Sherlock. Look at me, come on. I’m fine. Look at me, please? Sherlock!”
Sherlock finally managed to tear his gaze away from the sheets, and John swallowed hard when he saw how the odd, pale eyes were too bright.
“We just got a little ahead of ourselves, alright?” he said gently. “My bloody fault, really. I did tell you to hurry up.”
Sherlock merely stared at him, and John knew that he didn’t trust himself to speak just yet.
“We’re still getting used to each other this way, okay? Darling idiot.” He smoothed his palm along the pale length of Sherlock’s thigh and sighed. “And it’s all completely new to me. I’m frankly amazed that everything’s gone so well until now, really. We were bound to trip up at some point.”
“I was bound to hurt you at some point.” Sherlock finally said, flatly.
“Sherlock, I could give you a long fucking list of every time something went wrong in my bedroom. It happens. It happens a lot. Especially when two people are still getting to know each other and it’s all new. I’ll give you examples, if you like.”
“I swore to myself that I’d never, ever hurt you like that.” Sherlock muttered, viciously digging his thumbnail into the skin of his bare knee. John caught it with his other free hand and held tight until Sherlock stopped struggling.
“You would never hurt me like that.” John said quietly, after a moment. “You never could.”
The silence hung there, thick and heavy. They sat unmoving, Sherlock staring down at the crumpled blue sheets and John trailing soothing circles on Sherlock’s palms with his thumbs.
The bedroom began to feel a little chilly, naked as they were. John shivered slightly, determinedly ignoring the ache in his arse and the way a tear had persistently trailed down the line of Sherlock’s knife-edge cheekbone. He wasn’t going to call attention to it.
“Come here, you.” He said eventually, leaning forward and wrapping his arms around Sherlock’s stiff shoulders. Sherlock slowly reached around, engulfing John in his long arms and bringing his face to rest in the crook of John’s neck.
“I’m sorry.” Sherlock breathed into his skin. John swallowed hard and shook his head. He held on to the man in his arms tightly.
“You don’t have to be sorry about this. It’s not-“ he broke off. (A big deal? To you, no. In his head? What the hell do you think he’s remembering right now? Of course it’s a fucking big deal.)
“It’s not a problem, and we’ll get past it.” He pressed a kiss to the side of Sherlock’s neck, which smelt of fresh, cooling sweat and sandalwood soap and home. “Come on, let’s get dressed and go for a walk. We’ll go to Borough market and eat xiolongbao and you can annoy the tourists with deductions. You know how that always cheers you up.”
***
Unfortunately, it didn’t look like there was going to be a second time.
John had felt a slight twinge for no more than an hour or two after the first attempt, and was annoyed at himself for not coping better with the situation.
(If only I could have kept it showing on my face. I’d have gotten used to it, probably. If only I’d stayed face down; he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell, would he? Oh, god. I bet this has put a bloody enormous spanner in the works, hasn’t it? What if he decides that he doesn’t want to sleep together anymore? What if he thinks it’s too complicated and-)
At this point, Sherlock had stopped walking. They were around half way across the Millennium bridge, heading towards the market. It was a chilly, damp afternoon and the light was already fading from the sky. London seemed noisy, jarringly modern and a little frenetic compared to the refined outskirts of Edinburgh. They had been walking for twenty minutes, close but silent, both lost in their own thoughts.
“What is it?” John asked, retracing the few steps he had taken before realising Sherlock was no longer at his side. The detective was staring into the greyish depths of the Thames, his knuckles white as he grasped the railing. He didn’t speak straight away, and John came to stand against his shoulder; leaning into his side.
“I spend so much time wondering what it’s like inside your head, you know.” John remarked conversationally, gazing out over the river and darkening skyline. “I mean, I suppose nobody can ever understand what it’s like inside somebody else’s mind. The way their thoughts fit together. But you… I worry, a bit. I like to think that I understand a lot about you, but sometimes I reckon there’s whole universes of stuff going on in your head that I can’t fathom.”
“Probably.” Sherlock said, a little grimly. John elbowed him gently.
“So, sometimes I have to just think about what would be going through my head, if I were you. What I’d want to know, but maybe couldn’t bring myself to ask.” He reached out and covered Sherlock’s hand on the smooth metal railing. It was cold and dry, the knuckles prominent and slightly knobbly under his fingers. “And all I can say to you is that I’m really, honestly fine. It did hurt a bit, but that was because we sort of got ahead of ourselves. Jumped the gun, a bit. Both of us. I think we were both kind of....er....over-eager. And I told you to get a move on. Because I wanted it so badly.” He felt his face flush in the cold air, and stared into the water below. He lowered his voice, leaning in a little closer. “Wanted you. It’s really bloody exciting, Sherlock – you have no idea. This is all so new to me and it’s sort of like discovering sex all over again… well. And the fact that it’s with you? That’s the best part of all. Because, as I keep bloody reminding you, I love you. I love your ridiculous, amazing mind. I love your face. I love your body. Christ, Sherlock – I-“ he trailed off, wishing Sherlock would just turn his head and look at him. He seemed frozen. “I’ll always want you. But if you decide that you don’t want that side of things, I’ll understand. I won’t walk away from you over this. I never would.”
“I can’t understand how you can just say these things!” Sherlock snapped suddenly, finally meeting John’s eyes. “How does it work?”
“What do you mean?” John asked, after a few seconds bewilderment.
“How can you just open your mouth and these words come out?” Sherlock said tersely. “I’ve just got so many things warring in my mind, I keep rearranging them and trying to decide the right order in which to say them and they keep getting muddled and disordered and then I can’t say them because the words just don’t work together, they don’t make sense, John! And then you just open your mouth and you say those things and it’s honest and true and it’s beautiful and I hate that I can’t tell you what I need you to know!”
John opened his mouth, and then shut it again. Sherlock kept staring at him, his brow furrowed. In the dimming afternoon light he looked hawkish and beyond frustrated; his cheeks were pale and his hair blew messily across his face.
John reached up and ran his hand around the back of Sherlock’s neck, inside the collar of his coat. His skin was cool under John’s fingers, and he pulled him down until their foreheads were pressed together. Sherlock didn’t resist, but his expression didn’t lighten.
“How about this, then.” John said in a low voice. “I know that you love me. It took me long enough to realise it; but I know that, in my bones.”
Sherlock inhaled sharply, and shut his eyes. Eventually he nodded a little jerkily, and murmured: “Yes.”
“Do you still want to have sex with me?”
This time, the silence stretched on for considerably longer. John became aware that they were garnering some attention from passers-by, standing as close as they were. Some small part of him was faintly surprised by just how little he cared; pressed up against a man in public.
“Yes.” Sherlock said, suddenly. “Yes, I do. But I don’t want to try that again.”
John’s heart sank a little, deeply relieved as he was. “Alright. We’ll leave it for now, eh?”
“I mean it, John.” Sherlock insisted, gripping his arm. “I don’t want to risk hurting you like that.”
His first instinct was to argue, to tell Sherlock that he was overreacting. To say that he didn’t care if it hurt a bit, if it meant that he got to have Sherlock inside him. But then, he wasn’t going to see it that way, was he? John might have some romantic notion about the act of penetration, that it had some special significance of trust and love in a relationship. But it wasn’t as if Sherlock had ever known it that way. He hadn’t ever understood sex in that context. No wonder he was shying away from it, if all he associated with it was discomfort and possession.
“Then that’s sorted.” John said firmly. “That’s all I need to know, for now. Just out of interest, were you planning on getting around to kissing me any time soon?”
***
Things had been sort of alright after that.
Sherlock seemed much more relaxed, if still a little quiet as they continued on to the Borough market. Despite claiming that he wasn’t in the least hungry, he stole at least half of John’s cardboard tray of steaming dumplings and then complained that they were too hot. He infuriated a stall holder by remarking loudly upon the fact that the colour of the huge pan of paella he was stirring relied much more on tartrazine than the rare saffron listed on his sign. He foiled a pickpocket with a bored look on his face, and completely ignored the profuse thanks he received from a grateful German tourist. After half an hour or so he plucked at John’s sleeve and headed for the gate, not letting go of the fabric until they had cleared the crowds of the market.
That night they had gone to bed in Sherlock’s room, as they had done the night before following their return from Edinburgh. The deep blue sheets were still disordered and John retrieved one of the pillows that had been carelessly kicked onto the dark wooden floor. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Sherlock changed into a loose pair of grey pajama bottoms, dropping his clothes carelessly onto the floor.
“You sure you’re alright with me sleeping down here?” John asked, hesitating before beginning to undress.
“I rather hoped we’d be doing more than sleeping, my dear John.” Sherlock said quietly, switching off the lights and moving slowly through the shadows towards him.
***
And it was frequently glorious, it really was. Sherlock still littered the flat with terrible detritus from his experiments, didn’t sleep for days on end and was regularly snappish and irritable. He was still a caged tiger when cases were thin on the ground, and he was frequently unforgivably rude to all and sundry.
John didn’t hesitate to shout at him, and more than once he needed to take long walks around Regents Park to clear his head and to stop himself smacking Sherlock.
In short, it was life just as they liked it. There were chases through dark streets, and tedious stake outs followed by midnight take outs, and squabbling over who used the last of the tea bags.
But there was also the experience of drifting awake at three in the morning, hearing Sherlock’s clothes dropping to the bedroom floor with a soft thump. Feeling his chilly limbs winding around John’s sleep warmed body, the line of his cheekbone pressed into his shoulder. The beat of the mans heart under John’s palm, the lazy wet kisses drifting down his collarbone.
“Mmm, it’s only been three days since you last slept, darling idiot.” John murmured. “You’re slipping.”
“Shut up. Who said-“ a sharp hiss of breath as John’s lips found his nipple. “-anything about sleeping?”
Sherlock seemed to delight in studying John; his reactions to stimuli and how he could reduce him to a shivering, moaning wreck. He was content to spend entire afternoons exploring John’s body, tracing every freckle and scar, every line and curve. John was fairly sure that Sherlock was taking some kind of mental note of all of these things, had heard the man murmuring quietly to himself about the precise depth of John’s suprasternal notch and his varying reflex reactions, the difference of skin texture between his calves and forearms.
It was… odd. And sort of romantic, or at least their kind of romantic. Sherlock didn’t remember John’s birthday, but he knew to the last minute the anniversary of their first meeting at Barts.
John had never fancied himself as the kind of chap who would welcome flowers or poetry. But something in his heart melted a bit when he overheard Sherlock explaining in great detail to a determinedly straight-faced Mrs. Hudson about how she shouldn’t bring them fruit cake any more because John didn’t like sultanas, that what John really liked best of all was coconut macaroons.
Sherlock was still frankly rubbish at talking about things. Following that afternoon on the Millennium bridge, John had suggested that he write down what he wanted to say. That it might be easier, that Sherlock could reorder his thoughts on paper and then just give them to John to read.
He had assumed that Sherlock had decided not to hear this suggestion, as he hadn’t responded in any way and John hadn’t wanted to push the matter. But a week later, when he was cleaning out the ash grate in the fireplace he found some charred scraps of paper, criss-crossed with Sherlock’s dense hasty scrawl. He couldn’t make out many of the words on the blackened remnants, beyond:
“-can’t know the depths to which-“
“-ind of recognition but that is obviously ludicrou-“
“-but not in a cannibalistic fashion, I assure-“
“-of telling you but I am inestimably glad that-“
“-you, John. With all my-“
John had hastily stolen this last scrap and resumed sweeping out the grate, hearing Sherlock’s feet bounding up the stairs.
He later hid the ash-stained, blackened paper in his wallet, hoping against hope that it had originally said what he thought it did.