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John puts his hands on his hips and watches Sherlock mutter as he paces. He’s come to think of life with Sherlock in terms of the big cases and the consequences to John. There was the pink lady and John committing murder. There was the Chinese smuggling ring moonlighting as a theatre of the absurd that effectively ended any possibility of even friendship with Sarah. Then there were the terrified voices on the phone, a murderous giant, and a seemingly endless wait in the changing stall at a public pool before Sherlock’s showdown with “Jim from IT”.
The consequences to that scene at the pool haven’t quite fallen out yet, but John’s good at waiting. Something’s coming.
Something’s always coming when Sherlock’s around.
*
Not much surprises John anymore. People screaming at him, dying on him, or shooting at him desensitized him somewhat. What happened at the pool wasn’t even that humiliating, but it does trouble him. Moriarty could have kidnapped Molly or Mrs. Hudson — either one would have made an easier target and were of far more sentimental value to Sherlock — or Lestrade — admittedly more difficult to surprise and overwhelm but with a far longer history with Sherlock than John had. Instead he took John.
Why John?
Then Moriarty disappeared, leaving John with a brand new nightmare in rotation with the chart-toppers from Afghanistan, this one filled with explosive blasts and debris and chlorinated water burning his nostrils as he rugby-tackles Sherlock into the pool after he shoots the vest. At least in the dream he’s useful, rather than bait. He likes being useful.
Right now he doesn’t feel useful. He feels like a mum. Life with Sherlock after The Pool is like managing a toddler. Not that John has, but he’s seen observed the techniques at clinic. He’s deploying them all: calm voice, firm statements, distracting, redirecting, bribing with lollys, because Sherlock is bored. Moriarty made life so very, very interesting, but now he’s off making some poor sod either rich or into shoes.
Jesus. What kind of person lived in the hell between those options?
The detective whirls mid-pace and dives for the desk drawer. John snaps from reverie to sirens-wailing alert. “Sherlock, you can’t shoot — ”
A pause, silent except for the frantic thud of John’s heart because there’s some scrabbling and scuffling with a loaded weapon. John disarms Sherlock. His flatmate flops on the sofa and grinds the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
John watches him writhe. The Pool Incident, as he’s come to think of it, is weeks in the past. Sherlock can’t seem to let it go. At first John attributed this solely to Sherlock’s odd experiment with affection. He’s remarkably possessive about John, if demanding John’s near-constant presence and undivided attention equates with possessiveness. But after a while, John revises his conclusion. It’s not about John, or it might be. A little. A very little. But really it’s about Moriarty.
Sherlock considers himself married to his work.
Jim Moriarty is work.
He is most definitely work, in every sense of the word. He’s the consulting criminal behind at least one case, which makes him the sexy, smart, edgy colleague who livens up the shared bit of carpet: London’s back alleys and streets, wharves and bridges. Moriarty has captured Sherlock’s attention in a way John hasn’t, and can’t.
He’s not hurt by this. Not much, anyway. Mostly, John’s bewildered by Sherlock’s newfound obsession, because despite the extremely personal nature of getting manhandled into Semtex and a frankly too hot parka, John doesn’t find Moriarty all that interesting. John’s lived in a war zone. He’s seen crazy, psychopathic evil before. The details may vary but underneath, it’s boring. Banal. The sweat trickling down his back from the weight of his shirt and jumper, the vest, and the coat maddened him more than Moriarty’s stupid histronics. But that’s the difference between John and Sherlock. In a crisis John gets calmer, surer, more confident. On an ordinary day he couldn’t possibly shoot Jefferson Hope. But with a suicide pill inches from Sherlock’s mouth, he’s wicked ice, as the Americans medics from Boston used to say.
Until he can resolve a case, however, Sherlock gets more engaged. He can’t pace himself. He’s off or on, and Moriarty found new settings on Sherlock’s dial when he ended the Pool Incident on his terms, walking out of the pool and into thin air, leaving Sherlock to do what he doesn’t do well: wait. John’s left to manage an increasingly irritable, irascible, impatient consulting detective.
“Bored! Bored, bored, bored!”
“Sherlock, you can’t shoot the wall just because you're bored,” he finishes, clinging to his last nerve with his fingernails as he ejects the clip from the gun and stuffs it in his jeans pocket for safety. “I had a hell of a time explaining the gunshots to the police, and it frightens Mrs. Hudson.”
Another groan from the settee conveys the crashing dullness of John’s scruples.
John forges ahead. “What did you do before I moved in?”
“I danced.”
John blinks. “You — what?”
“I went to a club and I danced. After two months of rather tedious research I determined it the most efficient way to obtain a sexual partner for the night.”
John finds he’s still not all that surprised. “You went clubbing.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t done since I moved in.”
“I no longer need to go out in search of a blow job.”
Sherlock’s not getting one now, not like this. More to the point and less to the bait-John-into-seeing-blood-red portion of that statement, since John moved in, there’s been a string of cases. Good ones. Challenging ones.
Then Moriarty. Who’s gone. The bastard.
John quite likes dancing, but ever since he was invalided he struggles with the noise, crowded spaces, the frantic, flailing aimlessness of it all. On the other hand, it’s a relatively innocuous way to achieve a high.
He’s found his lolly. “Fine. Get dressed. We’re going clubbing.”
“What?”
“Except for the pull a stranger for a blow job part. That’s right out.”
“Dull,” Sherlock mutters, but it’s a formality because he bounds off the sofa, into his room.
John suffers a moment of self-consciousness about what to wear to go out with the best dressed, best looking man in London, then arrives at his most pragmatic decision. He’s going to sweat like squaddie on a twenty klick march and because he intends to remain sober, will end up wearing more beer than he drinks. Washable is the fashion watchword of the night. So he keeps on his jeans and exchanges his button down for a gray t-shirt, then laces his feet into sturdy brogues with thick soles.
When he reaches the sitting room Sherlock’s waiting for him, dressed in dark jeans, the tight white button down shirt that strains across his chest, and brown dress shoes. When he sees John his gaze narrows and he goes from tortured Gothic heroine to consulting detective in the blink of an eye. “You’re carrying yourself differently.”
“What? I’m not doing any — “
“Shut up.”
Sherlock’s one snapped answer away from getting punched. John tightens his grip on his last nerve and shuts his mouth. Sherlock circles John at a prowl, and John stands under the scrutiny. Heat radiates from Sherlock’s body, but it’s the attention that sends shivers along John’s spine.
“You’re carrying yourself like a soldier.”
He is. Without conscious thought he’d put on clothes he’d worn in red light districts all over Europe and Asia: jeans, t-shirt, shoes to back up his fists and elbows and knees if he and his mates ran into someone looking for a fight. All he needs is a strip of condoms in his pocket and a knife in his boot.
“I was a soldier. This is the sort of thing I’d wear on leave,” he says as he makes a conscious effort to relax his shoulders and slump his spine.
“No. Don’t.”
The hushed baritone eddies along his nerves. “Don’t what?”
Sherlock circles him again, trailing his fingers across John’s collarbone, across the scar tissue in his wounded shoulder, across his shoulder blades held tightly together, to his good shoulder. “Don’t be normal. I like this.”
Trust Sherlock to delete John’s military service (unless someone needs killing) until the kink possibilities become clear. But, John just got interesting. More interesting than Moriarty.
That’s more than fine with John. Moriarty may be dull, but John’s not quite right after the pool, either. What happens in a war zone isn’t personal. What happened at the pool also wasn’t personal, despite being full of murderous intention. No, he was just a way for Moriarty to get leverage against Sherlock. John won’t stop being that leverage, and being used to get to Sherlock incenses him.
Deliberately he turns his head and looks at Sherlock. The detective stands to John’s right, two fingers still resting in the hollow where John’s good shoulder meets his collarbone, applying just enough pressure to signal John should square up again. He’s not a man with a habit of looking in the mirror, but his body settles into a near-forgotten-but-still-familiar arrangement of skin over muscle and bone. It’s his I’m a soldier and a doctor so I can set your bones and stitch you up after you fuck with me and lose stance.
Sherlock’s eyelids droop, and one corner of his mouth lifts ever so slightly. Without a word he slides his phone into his front jeans pocket. There’s a delicious, heady surge of adrenalin as John does likewise, then follows Sherlock down the stairs. His body somehow knows that being a simple London doctor isn’t the right response to this situation, complex and amorphous as it is.
Sherlock’s texting as he strides out the door, barely looking up to hail one of the cabs that mysteriously appear for him. He gives an address to the cabbie, but says nothing to John. He focuses on London slipping past and keeps his phone in his hand. John copies his distant manner until his phone buzzes with an incoming text.
He pulls his phone from his pocket as Sherlock slips his away. I’ll find you.
Sherlock exits the cab as soon as it pulls to a stop in front of a nightclub, leaving John to pay the fare. When John reaches the door Sherlock is nowhere to be seen.
“Go on in, mate,” the bouncer says. “It’s been taken care of.”
Shocking. Sherlock rarely remembers to pay for groceries or cabs, much less John’s admission to a nightclub. John walks into a wall of sound and movement, and makes his way through the crush of bodies to the bar. He orders a pint, and waits. He’s good at it, and it even keeps him in character. The Army was excellent training in hurry up and wait.
While he waits he thinks about what brought them here. In John’s mind Moriarty’s disappearance was a calculated, purposeful move. But Sherlock’s still dancing to his tune, whether he realized it or not, which meant John’s dancing right along with him. He doesn’t mind being a tool, as long as he decides how he’s used, and by whom.
The list of approved puppeteers does not include a genuine psychopath.
It does, apparently, include one self-identified sociopath.
John drinks his beer, and waits.
*
Forty-five minutes later Sherlock materializes at his elbow. He lounges back against the bar and studies the crowd, his eyes flickering in what John’s come to see as his processing expression. He’s taking in data as fast as a super-computer, and John prays he keeps his deductions to himself. The bar’s patrons are drunk and raucous. John’s up to the task of extracting Sherlock from this room should his mouth get them into trouble, but he’d really rather not.
“Fancy a fuck?” Sherlock asks without looking at John.
John swallows his laugh, because it’s not a bit funny. Sherlock’s used that line successfully. “Looking for a bit of rough?”
“How did you know?”
John swallows what remains of his pint. “Toffs like you always are,” he says as he sets his glass on the bar.
The conversation strays a little too close to a dynamic they don’t discuss, likely because it wouldn’t occur to Sherlock unless it had bearing on a case. Sherlock has money, an education, a brain and the connections to work wherever and however he wants. Given an interest in mundane matters like money and status, Sherlock would own England. He’s living with John and solving cases because he gets off on it, and Moriarty is far more interesting than commodities or investment banks or the sodding global economy.
John’s employable. He has friends he can call if it comes to that, but none he’d inflict his wrecked self on, and none in the circles Sherlock could move in if he so chose. He could evaporate into London’s rarefied ether and out of John’s life like water in the desert.
“Do you oblige?” Sherlock asks lazily.
His shirt’s undone one more button down his chest than when they left the flat, and he’s using his plummiest Oxbridge accent. If John bit into it, juice would run down his chin, sticky sweet and fresh. It would drip from the heel of his hand until he licked it off his wrist.
“No,” John says flatly.
“Shame,” Sherlock says, and wanders off.
*
The next time John sees Sherlock he’s in the middle of the dance floor, and putting on quite the show. His partner’s almost as tall as he is, and the way they move together all but screams that they’ve fucked. The man has his hands on Sherlock’s hips, long fingers flexing as he spins Sherlock around, back to front. A whoop goes up from someone in the crowd, and the whole thing gets impossibly raunchier. The man wraps one arm around Sherlock’s waist; Sherlock lifts his arms over his head and swivels his hips against him. The man rests his chin on Sherlock’s shoulder and murmurs something in his ear.
Sherlock grins and turns to look at John. When their eyes meet, he winks. Bloody winks at his flatmate and lover as he slides his hand back to cup his partner’s head.
John sees red. Bright, blinding, signal red. What he does, however, is to shape a single word with his lips.
Bor-ing.
He turns to the barkeep. “Water,” he says.
“You sure, mate? Another pint looks like it would go down smooth.”
“Just the water.”
One of them should be in his right mind. Sherlock’s already out of his head with boredom, petulant like a child whose friend has taken his ball and gone home. He considers his options. He could stride onto the dance floor and pull Sherlock away. He’s a good dancer, and he knows how to make Sherlock move better than his current partner, who’s pretty enough, but has the wrong pace, the wrong attitude.
Or he could make Sherlock come to him.
A few minutes later, Sherlock reappears at John’s side. “Feel more obliging now?”
John still doesn’t look at him. “Maybe,” he says with a glance at the dance floor, not bothering to lower his voice, “Your little show was proof positive you need that attitude fucked right out of you.”
Sherlock relaxes back on his elbows, long frame lounging with his hips blatantly far forward. Sweat dampens his temples and the hollow of his throat. “Others have tried,” he says mildly. “And failed. You look like you might be up to the task, Captain.”
John just smiles at him. “What’s in it for me?”
One hand trails across John’s hip as Sherlock spins to face John, then leans into the bar, both arms bracketing John’s torso. John doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move. He also doesn’t shove Sherlock back, which is his first instinct in his current frame of mind. Sherlock notices, of course. His eyes, if possible, gleam even brighter as he leans forward.
“Risk,” Sherlock breathes into his ear. “The chance to fuck me.”
They’re the same thing, and John knows it.
Sherlock pushes away and strides off without a backwards glance.
John follows, but then he always does.
*
He takes an elbow to the kidney and steps on heels and toes before they find space on the dance floor. The music segues into a synth-pop song with a spangly keyboard opening notes before the drums and guitar kick in, and the vaguely military cadence to the drumbeat that seems appropriate. Sherlock drops low, bringing their hips in alignment and his mouth to John’s cheek. He reaches around to flatten his hands at John’s nape and the base of John’s spine. John weaves their legs together and mirrors Sherlock’s grip, carding his fingers through damp curls, fisting them in sweat-soaked cotton, the better to feel muscles moving in Sherlock’s back. As the drums beat and the vocalist sings about moods that change like the wind, they grind back and forth.
Hard to control when it begins/
The bittersweet between my teeth/
Trying to find the in between/
Fall back in love eventually
It’s not a performance designed to attract every eye in the place. It’s not a show. It’s chemistry so hot it threatens to incinerate the club and everyone in it, simple, raw, and as elementally sexual as they can get without being naked. John knows they will be naked before long. He’s half-hard, and Sherlock’s cock is thickening in his jeans. His face is flushed, his eyes glittering. The last time John saw him that alive was the moment at the pool when he looked at John with a question in his eyes, then aimed the gun at the vest.
Guns and fucking, danger and death, and dancing. This shouldn’t work. Wounded, weary, wary John Watson and the Freak. They shouldn’t work on the dance floor, or in the flat, or at crime scenes, or in bed. But they do. Now that the threat’s clear, anyway. Maybe Mycroft was right. John’s wired for this, been trained to like it. Need it. Get off on it.
Heat courses through his veins, and sweat trickles down his temple and spine. He sees the moment Sherlock loses himself in sensation, the noise and crush and pounding rhythm becoming a channel for the frenzy inside. He pulls Sherlock’s forehead down to his as the drum beats like a pulse.
“I’m going to fuck you,” he growls.
One corner of that improbable mouth lifts slightly. “Of course you are. I always get what I want.”
Sherlock leads him off the back of the dance floor and down a darkened hallway to a door at the end marked Office. He opens it to reveal an typical office: desk, chair, filing cabinet, dusty fake plants and one surprisingly healthy aspidistra, and a low settee upholstered in incongruous red velvet. The beat from the music thumps under their feet and through the walls.
The reason for his easy access to the bar becomes clear. “You know the owner,” John says.
“I identified the employees using the bar to distribute drugs,” Sherlock says as he locks the door. “He owes me a favor.”
John slumps back on the couch, laces his fingers together behind his head, and studies Sherlock. His medical and officer training are in play, so his natural deference is gone, as is his patience, and his grip on his temper. Sherlock’s got a thing for the uniform. Time to play.
“Shirt off.”
Sherlock complies. His hands are steady, but he’s watching John as he peels sweat-soaked cotton from his torso and drops it to the floor. John studies him. Christ, he’s gorgeous. Dressed he looks deceptively thin but under the clothes he’s heavy muscle and bone. The jeans ride low on his hips, and his dark curls cling to forehead and temples. Pale eyes focus on John as if he’s the only thing on Sherlock’s mind.
“On your knees.”
“Yes, Captain.”
It should sound like bad dialogue from a porn film. It should make John laugh. Instead it makes him helplessly hard, because Sherlock says them while he’s holding John’s gaze, then obeys. He kneels between John’s spread legs, folding the first crease in what will become the complicated origami of sex.
John doesn’t move. For a long minute he continues to study Sherlock, who’s not bothering to pretend to be deferential. Then John reaches out and traces that improbably full lower lip with the tip of his index finger. “You’ve a pretty mouth,” he says.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Use it on me.”
Sherlock doesn’t bother with preliminaries. He pushes John’s t-shirt up, plucks open his buckle and fly, then jerks jeans and pants down to John’s ankles. He leans into the space between John’s knees, rings thumb and forefinger at the base of John’s cock to draw it away from his abdomen, then licks around the ridge of his foreskin, working it back from his glans. John watches, heat pulsing in his veins. Sherlock licks his lips extravagantly and swallows John to the root before pulling back with enough suction to make John groan. Sherlock’s lovely mouth is nothing short of a miracle when John’s cock stretches his pink lips into a heart all the filthier for the sweetness of the shape.
“Again. Slow.”
As it should, his army command voice secures immediate obedience. Over the next few minutes the only adjectives John can call from his brain are wet and tight; Sherlock’s technique is perfectly calibrated to suck pressure and heat into John’s balls and up his shaft. He closes his eyes and sinks into luxurious sensation, until the edge draws too close for comfort.
“Stop.”
Sherlock stops. John opens his eyes to see Sherlock looking up at him, the tip of John’s cock lying against his tongue, perfectly framed by his red, swollen, wet mouth. He gives a closed-mouth groan and shifts his hips. “We need slick.”
Still holding his gaze and his glans in his mouth, Sherlock reaches into John’s front pocket and extracts a travel-sized tube.
“I didn’t bring that.”
Sherlock smiles at him. John remembers the way Sherlock’s wrist ghosted over his hip at the bar and just shakes his head. He takes the tube, then makes a beckoning motion with his fingers. “Give me your hand.”
Sherlock closes his mouth around the head of John’s cock as John drags a generous strip of lube across the tips of Sherlock’s fingers. John heels off his shoes and extracts one leg from his jeans. He lies back and grips the curved back of the sofa behind his head, and plants one foot on the edge of the sofa, exposing the cleft of his arse. “Keep going. Slow.”
Sherlock smears the lubricant against John’s anus, then pushes one finger in past the second knuckle. John groans again, this time unable to keep his mouth closed. “Je-sus.”
Sherlock finds John’s prostate with each gliding stroke, brushing it just enough to make John’s cock twitch in his mouth. He’s lightened his suction to compensate for the fingers, now two, now three, twisting in a wide arc every few strokes. John’s pulse beats hard at the base of his shaft before he once again orders Sherlock to stop.
“Unzip.”
Sherlock does. His cock flexes free, thick and red and leaking copiously. John smiles as he leans down to run the palm of his hand from tip to base, then firmly tug Sherlock’s balls down.
“Get up here and slick up,” he murmurs into Sherlock’s ear as Sherlock trembles.
Sherlock turns his head so his mouth rests against John’s ear. “Yes, Captain,” he murmurs back, low and dark and deceptively subordinate.
It’s John’s turn to quiver.
They change seats. Sherlock’s tight jeans slip low on his hips as he shifts his weight from his knees to his arse. He leans back, his hips once again lounging forward, and smears lubricant along his cock. John straddles him and trails his fingers over that long, elegant torso, along his sternum, down Sherlock’s abdomen to his hip.
“Hold yourself for me,” he says.
Sherlock reaches under John’s thigh. One hand grips his cock, as ordered, and the other grips John’s upper arm. He’s exposed like this, vulnerable, and John wants him that way, wants to break through the chaos in his mind, a process that’s easier if he keeps Sherlock off-balance. The length of his body is open and available. John’s got both hands braced on the sofa back on either side of Sherlock’s head as he plays a little, purposefully missing the mark, until Sherlock shifts under him.
They both groan when Sherlock’s cock finally pushes that first, sweet bit inside. John pins Sherlock’s hips to the couch while he works himself down. Sherlock opened him nicely but John still takes his time, absorbing every sparking sensation, shifting and circling until Sherlock’s head is tipped back against the wall, his throat straining, his mouth open in a silent groan.
Head still tilted against the wall, Sherlock grips the back of the sofa with one hand and John’s upper arm with the other as John rides him. The long lines of his exposed triceps, throat, and torso beautifully complement each other. When Sherlock begins to thrust up, John slows and holds his hips too high for Sherlock to get a satisfying thrust. The position works Sherlock’s sensitive glans where John can feel it most. Sherlock’s feet in their hard-soled shoes slip on the gritty floor until he gets them braced under his knees so he can lift his hips and rock up.
The sharp beat sends heat pulsing along John’s every nerve. He carefully situates himself so Sherlock doesn’t hit his prostate, keeping him near the edge but not at it. “Fuck, that’s…oh God, that’s good. Work for it, gorgeous.”
Sherlock’s head drops forward. One of his hands cards through his hair, then grips it as tightly as the other grips John’s arm. It’s a stress reaction, one John’s come to look for. Sherlock doesn’t have many tells but this one signals loud and clear that he’s dropped into a headspace where he can’t process, can’t control, analyze, sort. His eyes, were they to open, would be blown wide with shocked defenselessness, lost in heat and rhythm.
“Harder,” John growls. “Come on. Fuck. Now.”
Sherlock gasps and does as John orders. His head falls back again, exposing the long line of his throat and the etched muscles of his abdominal wall. John lifts one hand from the wall and closes his fingers around Sherlock’s neck, tight enough to feel his pulse, air working in and out of his taxed lungs, and vibrations so low they hum under the thumping bass, the sharp slaps and huffs of their fucking.
Sherlock’s releasing a big, brazen rumble of sound, and the only way John can sense it is to nearly cut off his air supply. “Jesus Christ,” he gasps.
Sherlock comes, arching for as much contact as he can get. At the first pulse John thuds down, using the rocking momentum to shove Sherlock’s hips hard against the red velvet, giving him the heat of his body, his full weight to push against. Sherlock’s grip on his biceps will surely leave a ring of finger bruises, but Sherlock’s flushed, open-mouthed, sobbing release makes it all worthwhile.
That’s better, John thinks. He’s rock hard, aching, leaking, but Sherlock’s fucking plastered to the couch.
Then Sherlock opens his eyes. The word predatory comes to mind, then disappears as quickly because it’s utterly inadequate. Feral might do. John scrabbles for the lubricant, stripes it across Sherlock’s palm. Sherlock grips John’s cock and John gasps as his vision explodes. Blind and desperate, he reaches out for whatever he can grip, which turns out to be Sherlock’s damp hair. He spreads his knees and drops his hips low for the sheer pleasure of feeling his balls rasp over Sherlock’s abdomen while he fucks Sherlock’s hand. Hard. Muscles bunch in Sherlock’s arm and shoulder as he provides uncompromising resistance.
He’s fuck it’s so good Jesus fuck slick tight getting close when he feels Sherlock’s softening cock slip out of him, to be replaced by two deft fingers that twist and stroke over his prostate. Sherlock’s come lubricates each stroke and seeps out around his fingers; if that’s not the hottest thing John’s ever felt, he doesn’t know what is. Groaning helplessly, he drops his head back and slows, trying to prolong it.
No use. Instinct swamps him. He grinds and drives and shoves until his vision goes black. His release feels like a giant fist reaches inside him and rips out his soul, handful by ferocious handful.
When he opens his eyes he sees come spattered to Sherlock’s collarbone and neck. Without thinking at all, he bends forward and sets his tongue to the slippery fluid, working it into Sherlock’s skin, into his pulse, before licking him clean. The sliding pressure of his tongue draws another rumbling groan from Sherlock’s chest.
*
Sherlock plucks a roll of paper towels from the top of the filing cabinet to John’s right. Side by side on the sofa they clean up, fasten clothing. John unknots his shoelaces, then loosens the eyelets. Next to him Sherlock drags his discarded shirt over his arms and buttons it.
“Better?” John asks as he works his foot into his left shoe.
“God, yes,” Sherlock purrs. He’s satiated, limp, a conduit for the bass pulsing in the walls and floor. The energy’s still there but dialed rather down, like a big cat after a good feed.
“Not going to go after my gun when we get home?” John asks, tightening the laces.
“Oh, I might,” Sherlock says, then lowers his voice. “Captain Watson.”
Filthy. Absolutely filthy. But they cannot explain away more gunshots to the Met, and it would be absolutely stupid to waste Lestrade’s supply of favors on something preventable. Knowing Sherlock, they’re going to need them later.
“Do that and you’ll get the fucking you’re asking for,” John says matter-of-factly, as he stomps into the second shoe.
Sherlock’s eyelids droop, his lashes thick and straight against the pale flush receding from his cheeks. A tremor rolls through his sprawled body, sending aftershocks through John’s. “The one I didn’t get tonight? Hands and knees, you pounding into me?”
“That’s the one,” John sings out as he snugs up the knots, then gets to his feet.
A fire blazes up in Sherlock’s eyes as he looks up at John from his sprawl on the sofa.
“Christ,” John says. “It’s an illegal firearm, not a sex toy, Sherlock.”
“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” Sherlock replies lazily.
That baritone caresses the vowels like his tongue caresses the tip of John’s cock. He makes a mental note to hide the clip, then takes a deep breath and tackles head-on what they’ve been dancing around for weeks. Because this isn’t about his gun, and they both know it. Sherlock’s burning too brightly to sustain this level of engagement.
“You have to let him go, Sherlock.” Sherlock’s expression darkens, draws inward, but John presses on. “Moriarty. He’s gone. For now. You must let it go. Because he’ll be back.”
“I can’t let him go, John.”
“Not forever, of course not, but a strategic retreat — ”
“On his part. Not mine.”
Sherlock’s ego just might be the death of him. John takes a firm hold on his temper. “Shut up and listen to me. First thing you learn in medical training, then in the Army. You rest when you can rest. Eat when you can eat. Keep your strength up for whatever’s coming, because something’s coming. While he’s occupied elsewhere, you need to focus on other things.”
“Don’t attempt to critique my methods, John.” Dismissive. Superior. As if John’s tiny little mind can’t understand.
But John does understand this. Sherlock knows how to win, but John’s fought battles to a draw, lost others to ignominious defeat. Trying to capture Moriarty is like trying to contain mercury, the drops splitting into smaller and smaller beads, toxic to handle. The same analogy could describe Sherlock, but John shoves that aside. “He’s tailor-made to prey on you.”
“He threatened you,” Sherlock snaps.
“Doesn’t count unless he kills me,” John says, repeating something he picked up from a group of commandos he treated after a firefight. Sherlock shoots him a narrow-eyed, assessing look John can’t decipher. “He threatened you, too. You were there.”
At that Sherlock all but rolls his eyes, as if when death comes for him he’ll deduce the Grim Reaper into buggering off. “He wasn’t going to blow himself up,” he says dismissively.
Moriarty had looked quite surprised when Sherlock leveled the gun at the vest, as if the thought of sacrifice hadn’t factored into his evil scheme. Sherlock is as unpredictable as Moriarty, but John…John is built for sacrifice. His nod gave heft to Sherlock’s threat, and Sherlock didn’t hesitate to use him that way.
“He played you with the countdown timers, and he’s playing you now.” Playing was too mild a word. Like the worst schoolyard bully, Moriarty has his claws in Sherlock’s brain for a sustained, rutting mindfuck.
“He has frankly appalling taste in music,” Sherlock muses, as if that’s as relevant as laser sights, and explosions, and helpless noncombatants in Semtex vests.
“Sherlock.”
“That ringtone. My God. So theatrical.”
John bites his tongue. “Sherlock.”
Sherlock looks at his interlaced hands, then up at John. “I’m alive, John,” he says.
The words vibrate much as Sherlock’s throat did under John’s hand, minutes before. He recognizes these fierce vibrations, from men who’ve survived IEDs, firefights, RPG attacks, so for a minute he thinks Sherlock means they survived the pool. Then he realizes Sherlock, like the soldiers he treated, needs this — the chase, the competition, the battle — to bring him most fully alive. He misses the war and he wasn’t even there.
John’s diaphragm spasms as if he’s had the wind knocked out of him.
Affection was nothing but a pipe dream. There will be no in between. Not now. Maybe not ever.
If he’s going to let go, now is the time to do it. Before it’s too late. He’s known men like this before. He was in the sodding Army, for Christ’s sake. At some level he is a man like this. He knows Sherlock, and what little he’s seen of Moriarty convinces him that however this crazy, entangled, destructive relationship ends, it will end with one of them dead. Their epic battle isn’t over. It’s just beginning.
But. After Lady Jane and the flats in Peckham he knows how damaged Sherlock is, how he expects people to use him, hurt him, abandon him. He sees it flickering at the back of Sherlock’s pale eyes, the presumption that people can’t understand, or won’t bother to try. He is, in a word, wounded.
Wounded.
John cares for the wounded. It’s what he does, who he is, his blood and bones. If ever anyone needed John Watson, it’s Sherlock Holmes.
John squares his shoulders, as if he’s going into battle. Because he is. He’s going into battle at Sherlock’s side. The familiarity settles over him like his Captain Watson persona, because whatever this is, whatever’s wrong with the both of them, keeps circling back for John, again and again and again. He’s not backing down; he’s not compromising. He’s committing. He’s in. All in. However it goes, wherever it ends — and it will end with Moriarty dead or in prison for life — he’s all in. For Sherlock.
From here forward, if Moriarty wants to get to Sherlock, he’s going to have to go through John.
Done.
“All right,” he says. Hands on his hips, he lifts his gaze to Sherlock’s. “All right. I’m in.”
Sherlock’s grey eyes blaze with a sudden intensity. He nods once.
*
They leave the club, get a cab home. As he exits the cab Sherlock tosses twenty quid at the driver, a pleasant change. John’s halfway up the stairs in his wake when clarity slices through his sex-satiated brain and he remembers what was in his front jeans pocket before Sherlock swapped it for the tube of slick.
The clip. The clip. His adrenaline-junkie, light-fingered flatmate swapped the lubricant for the Sig’s fucking clip.
Three things happen near-simultaneously: he hears the click of the magazine shoved home in the Sig’s grip; a heady mixture of fear, irritation, and white-hot arousal surges from his adrenal glands into his bloodstream; and his cock decides he’s not nearly forty but eighteen by hardening in three rapids thumps of his pulse. John clears the last two steps in one bound and shoves through the flat’s half-open door to see Sherlock, feet spread and planted, sighting along his extended arm as he ostentatiously takes aim at the wall.
He’s alive, burning like a pyre, as he looks at John. I always get what I want.
John finds he's still not surprised. He rolls his head on his neck to knock the tension from his shoulders. “You asked for it,” he growls.
Sherlock smiles. Bloody smiles.
John catches the door on the rebound and slams it shut.