The Bang and the Clatter (16/36)
Jun. 6th, 2013 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - The Bang and the Clatter (16/36)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - John, Sherlock, Anthea, Mycroft
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it's a baseball AU.
Author's Notes - Full disclosure: I didn't research how baseball players room on road trips. I fail. So I just made it up. Because I'm lazy like that.
Many, many thanks to arctacuda, for helping with the writing and for uncomplainingly beta-ing when I whine.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Sherlock hated road trips. The hotel proprietors were always touchy if you shot holes in their walls, and the maids were always destroying the careful experiment conditions of the baseballs he left in the bathtub. Initially Sherlock had gone on road trips out of curiosity, but when they turned out to be the dullest things imaginable he had stopped, and Lestrade had raised no protest. Sherlock suspected the team had probably wanted him to stop tagging along on road trips, and normally Sherlock would have striven to annoy the rest of the team as much as possible, but it was much nicer to sprawl on his sofa and sulk at the world.
Now, however, the idea of sprawling on the sofa and sulking at the world had lost a bit of its appeal if John wasn’t there to experience the sulk with him. So, if John was going on the road trip, Sherlock decided he would go on the road trip, too, and sulk from John’s suite. Hesitant and halting, John said something about them needing to have separate suites, and Sherlock had understood John’s need to hide them and had agreed to separate suites with no intention of spending any time at all in his own.
Which meant he was indeed in John’s suite when his brother walked in. Sherlock had been sprawled on John’s sofa, staring at the unfamiliar light pattern on the ceiling. John was at the field, getting ready for a night game. Sherlock thought he would probably attend because he had nothing better to do. He now wished he’d gone to the field with John, even though it had been ridiculously early, because it might have saved him a visit from Mycroft.
Sherlock scowled at the ceiling, thinking that even he recognized that as being wishful thinking on his part. If Mycroft wanted to speak with somebody then Mycroft spoke with that person. Sherlock had spent his entire life trying to avoid that truth. He’d never once been successful.
“Isn’t this a cozy picture?” said Mycroft, silkily.
“It’s a fairly standard picture, Mycroft, really,” Sherlock replied, without looking away from the ceiling.
“You on the sofa in a teammate’s suite?”
Sherlock tried to refuse to be goaded. “Me on the sofa.”
There was a moment of blessed silence.
“Well, this is very interesting,” said Mycroft.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Indeed it is. The thing about Mummy is that she worries about you so very much. Always asking me if you’ve succumbed yet to all the temptations she imagines are around you. How silly of her to be worried about drugs when she should have been worried about John Watson.”
“Stop it,” said Sherlock.
“Sherlock, you know what this is. It’s transference. You have an addictive personality, and this ‘Doctor’ Watson is the latest obsession to drift across your consciousness. You’re prone to this, and you know it. You’ll grow bored with him the way you grow bored with everything, only he’s a person, not a game, not a controlled substance.”
“Stop it,” said Sherlock, again.
“What are you going to do when he stops being interesting to you? What are you going to do with him?”
Sherlock decided to say nothing to that. To say stop it again would be mocked, he thought.
“You don’t do anything by halves. You never have. You’ll want to possess him, all of him. You’ll want to keep him. Do you think he wants to be kept, your Doctor Watson?”
“If you say his name again, I’ll shoot you. I’ve a gun under this pillow.”
Mycroft had the nerve to sound amused when he replied, “I’ve no doubt.” Mycroft took a deep breath, a preface, Sherlock knew, to departure, thank God. “Well. You’re looking well, aside from this destructive relationship you’ve embarked on. Mostly destructive for him, of course. You’ll find a way to pull through just fine, you always do. I should put some money aside to give him for therapy afterward.” Mycroft’s voice was dry. He seemed to think Sherlock was going to say something in response to this. Sherlock kept staring at the ceiling. “Pitch well tomorrow,” he said, apparently acknowledging the extent of Sherlock’s stubbornness.
Sherlock listened to the door click shut as Mycroft departed. He did not look away from the ceiling.
***
Sherlock never showed up at the field. John wasn’t exactly surprised by that. Sherlock was never going to actually enjoy being at the field, and Sherlock was always going to be vague about being the places he said he was going to be, thought John. Lestrade had said that he never missed a start but, other than that, Lestrade had never seen Sherlock unless he was in the middle of causing some sort of problem. As John had now spent enough time with Sherlock to know that the closest thing he had to a friend was Mrs. Hudson, John thought Sherlock must have been spending a lot of time alone, and, although he thought Sherlock would probably deny it, he had probably been incredibly lonely. No wonder he had wanted John to move in almost immediately. Sherlock had probably wanted to leap on the chance of finding someone he could bear to be around.
So John wasn’t alarmed when Sherlock didn’t show up at the field. But he was confused when Sherlock wasn’t in his suite. He walked through it, calling his name, although he’d expected Sherlock to be directly on the sofa, where John had left him. Sherlock didn’t move much unless compelled. John thought of it in terms of physics: A Sherlock at rest tended to stay at rest.
John stood in the middle of his empty suite, thought, and went to Sherlock’s suite, knocking on the door. “Sherlock?” he called, but there was no answer, and John thought that he didn’t much want to stand around in the hotel hallway making a ruckus at Sherlock’s door. People would definitely talk then. So he pulled out the key Sherlock had given him. They had split their keys up, one to each of them, almost as soon as they had checked in.
Sherlock was on the sofa in his suite, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move a muscle in reaction to John opening the suite’s door.
This was not at all unusual, in John’s experience, so John simply said, “Hello. You didn’t come to the field tonight.”
Sherlock didn’t reply. Again, not unusual. John glanced at him as he walked over to the suite’s window to draw the curtains. A sulk? Or just deep in thought planning for his start the next day?
John walked over to stand directly behind Sherlock’s head, looking down at him. Sherlock’s gaze stayed focused on the ceiling. “You’re pitching tomorrow. Do you know what that means? Superstition: We’ve got to start the day off with three hundred and seven seconds worth of really good sex.” He grinned and leaned over to brush an upside-down kiss over Sherlock’s unresponsive mouth.
Which was when Sherlock said, “We have to talk.”
John drew back but did not entirely straighten. “Okay, now, see, for someone who isn’t supposed to have much relationship experience, you’ve perfected the opening to the break-up conversation,” John remarked, calmly, and then he walked over to the room’s armchair and sat in it.
Sherlock shifted on the couch a bit, enough to face him. “I’m serious.”
John turned the television on. “No, you’re not. You think you’re serious, but I’m not the only one in this relationship with a skewed self-perception, and, as the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, I feel that I ought to inform you that you like me quite a lot.”
“Oh my God,” said Sherlock, his voice containing so much disgust that John actually looked at him in surprise. “You say that as if that’s all there is to it.”
“That is all there is to it, Sherlock,” said John, evenly.
“You’re hiding us,” Sherlock bit out. “You’re afraid to be seen with me, you’re so worried what people might think.”
“We’ll figure all the complications out.” John shut off the television and gave Sherlock his full attention. “Is that what this is about?”
“No,” said Sherlock.
“Then what? You like me, I like you. The end. That actually happens far less frequently than you might think.”
“I don’t just like you. Do you understand? I am incapable of ‘liking’ people. That isn’t how I operate. I… You…” Sherlock made his ugh noise and turned onto his back and ruffled agitatedly at his hair. “You’re the foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes. You tell me.”
John looked across at him and thought of things he hadn’t brought up yet. “Tell me about the drugs, Sherlock.”
Sherlock made a dismissive noise.
“You need to tell me—”
“That has nothing to do with anything.” Sherlock turned his head suddenly, fixing John with a piercing, squirming, colorless glare. “You want to connect dots in your feeble little brain. You want to make this all textbook psychology, like every strop I have must be connected to my damaged, recovering-addict psyche.”
“Or whatever caused the addiction in the first place. Am I wrong about that?”
“I didn’t realize your medical degree was in psychiatry.” The sarcasm was scathing. “And the drugs have nothing to do with this. This is about you. You are…ridiculous. Do you realize? Do you see?” Sherlock sat up suddenly, jumpy with the force of his conviction in what he was saying. “I am not this person, John. I am not this person who has ‘relationships,’ exchanges casual, aimless kisses, and flirts about three hundred and seven seconds of good sex.”
“You could have fooled me,” inserted John, still calm.
Sherlock ignored him, caught up in his rant. “I possess things. I keep them. I don’t let them belong to anyone else. I don’t share. You say I like you, as if it’s that simple, as if I can keep it that simple. Yes. I like you. The way I like baseball. The way I’ve liked any number of things. So I will take you, and I will conquer you. I will puzzle you out, I will strip you bare, until I and only I know every single little thing there is to know about you, until you are mine, completely, inexorably. I will need you to belong to me entirely. And then, when I am done, you will bore me. Do you understand? Can you understand? Are you capable of it?”
“I’m not stupid, Sherlock,” John said, more sharply than he’d said anything else so far in this conversation.
“Where do you get that idea?” Sherlock rejoined, dry as dust. “So then, you understand. Let us stop, here, now, before it goes any further.”
There was silence in the suite. John considered. “Because you like me too much,” he concluded. Sherlock liked him too much to hurt him later down the line. Sherlock was doing this preemptively, that much was obvious.
“Because this is already tedious,” spat out Sherlock, and then energetically flopped back onto the couch, turning his back to John and drawing his dressing gown around him like blue silk armor.
John sat and blew out an exhale. His fingers drummed against his knees. He counted to ten and kept his anger down and tried to consider how to get Sherlock out of this latest bullheaded idea of his. And then an insidious little voice curled up inside him. Did he want to get Sherlock out of this? Was he just going to spend this entire relationship refusing to let Sherlock break up with him? What sort of relationship was that? Where was his self-esteem, his sense of self-preservation? He was embarrassingly in love with Sherlock, and had been for a while now. Maybe it was time to stop making an idiot of himself over someone who kept trying to push him away.
John didn’t want to believe that. He didn’t think he believed that. Sherlock cared about him, possibly more than he’d ever cared about anyone before, astonishingly. John couldn’t let that go. John couldn’t let Sherlock let that go. At least, he thought he couldn’t. And was that his job? Protecting Sherlock Holmes from himself?
John stood up. “I need some air,” he announced, but it had probably been a waste of air to say anything, because there was no response from the figure on the couch.
***
John had no real idea where he was going in search of the air he’d announced he’d needed. He stepped out of the hotel into the brisk April night and stood there, frowning and contemplating what he ought to do. He couldn’t turn right around, march back into Sherlock’s room, and kiss him. But he also couldn’t turn around and go to his own room. He liked neither of these options. He kind of wanted Sherlock to follow him out of the hotel and apologize, but it seemed more likely that he would get struck by lightning while waiting for him.
“Good evening, Doctor Watson,” said a woman to his left.
John looked at her. She was vaguely familiar. When the black car slid up, he placed her and rolled his eyes. John didn’t wait for the door to open, he leaned over and jerked it open and said to Sherlock’s brother, “You.”
Mycroft Holmes looked at him with mild interest. “And how are you this evening, Doctor?”
“I am not a doctor. You realize that, right? And what are you doing here?”
“I merely wanted to ascertain that you were all right,” replied Mycroft, smoothly.
John looked at him, and something clicked into place for him. Why wouldn’t he be all right? On tonight as opposed to any other night, why would Mycroft Holmes think he wasn’t all right? “Wait a minute,” he said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Mycroft lifted his eyebrows.
“You went to see him today and you got this idea in his head that, I don’t know, he’s going to destroy me or something if he lets himself love me the way he—”
“Get in the car,” Mycroft snapped, and John considered it a bit of a victory that he’d gotten Mycroft to snap at him.
He got into the car, closing the door behind him, and it slid away immediately.
“You’ve just left Anthea back there,” John pointed out.
“Anthea can handle herself,” Mycroft clipped out. “There are things you need to know about my little brother.” He said the phrase little brother the way one might say wart with the hair growing out of it.
John frowned. “No,” he said, “there’s really not. Nothing I could learn from you, at any rate. You don’t even like him.”
“He is a difficult man to like.”
“I’ve found him to be the opposite.”
The corner of Mycroft’s mouth turned up in what might have been a smile on someone else but was merely a sneer on him. “Yes, isn’t that…remarkable.” His tone was flat.
“He is much more than you give him credit for being, you know. He is much more than you let him be. Because that’s where he’s getting it from, isn’t it? This strange…reluctance in him, he’s getting it from you, you’re messing with his head.”
Mycroft looked almost bored. “You’re giving me far too much credit.”
“Did you go see him today?”
Mycroft hesitated.
“What did you tell him?” John demanded.
“John—” Mycroft started.
“What did you say to him?” John interrupted, his voice deadly quiet.
Mycroft regarded him for a long moment, narrowing his eyes. “You are…not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Mycroft’s eyes flickered over his face. “Not you.” Mycroft took a deep breath. “He will inevitably grow bored with you. He does with everything, you know. Even the drugs. It’s how he ended up in an overdose situation in the first place: trying to recapture the blush of first romance.”
There was a shuddering creep under John’s skin at the way Mycroft’s accent, edged in sarcasm, turned the words into sharp weapons. John shook it off. He was going to get out of this car and go back to Sherlock’s room and crawl onto him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him until the sound of the word overdose stopped reverberating through his brain, kiss him until Sherlock knew, Sherlock understood, that the possibility that John might never have met him was an unacceptable one.
“I am not a drug,” John said. “I am much tougher to shake than a drug. I am much more stubborn than cocaine or heroin or whatever the bloody hell it was. And the only thing ‘wrong’ with Sherlock is that he has feelings, something you clearly don’t have.”
Mycroft was looking at him in something that might have been a very pale shadow of astonishment. “Your file has alarming gaps,” he murmured. “But, of course…I should have seen… You thrive on unpredictability, on challenge, of course…”
John decided he wasn’t going to sit here and get talked about instead of talked to. He leaned over and thumped his fist against the dividing wall behind which was the driver. “Stop this car!” he shouted, hoping the driver could hear him.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to your brother, to tell him that you’re an idiot.”
“We’re not through here—”
The car had pulled to a halt. John opened the door and put one foot on the pavement, to make sure the car didn’t take off again. Not that he thought it would stop Mycroft or the driver, but it might give them pause. “We are most definitely through. You come near him again, you will be amazed at how much you’re underestimating me. Are we clear, Mr. Holmes?”
Mycroft regarded him evenly for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth tipped up, and this time it did look like a smile. “Very. Good evening, Doctor Watson.”
John stepped out of the car, slammed the door, and stepped back as it slid smoothly away.
Then he looked around and wondered where the hell he was and how he was getting back to the hotel.
***
John walked into Sherlock’s hotel room and didn’t wait for Sherlock to react. He didn’t expect him to react. Sherlock would surely just ignore him, that was Sherlock’s standard operating procedure. So John didn’t wait for anything. The suite was dark, the lights from the city outside barely filtering through the drapes John had imperfectly closed earlier. John nonetheless walked swiftly across the suite to the couch, where Sherlock was still lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
John leaned over Sherlock. He got a moment’s satisfaction of seeing Sherlock register surprise before he was too close for Sherlock to be in focus, and then what he did was kiss him, catching in his mouth the sound Sherlock tried to make, whatever its purpose had been. And, after a heart-stopping second, Sherlock responded. John had thought that he would. Sherlock was an absurdly responsive kisser. It made Sherlock the best kisser John had ever encountered. John had thought, naively, about the other people he’d kissed in terms of their technique. He wished he’d known that he should have been looking for the one person who, when kissed by John Watson, sighed and kissed back as if the continued turning of the Earth depended on the depth of their kiss.
John lifted his hands to frame Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s cheeks seemed shockingly hot, but John knew it was more that his hands were cold from the long walk. Sherlock didn’t flinch, though. Sherlock rolled toward him, squirming on the couch, lifting a hand to the back of John’s neck to try to pull him more firmly onto him. John tried to comply but the hotel couch was much too narrow and much too small, and he ended up half-draped over the couch and half-sprawled on the floor. And God, his neck was probably going to start protesting if they kissed in this position much longer, but he Didn’t. Bloody. Care.
When he thought that there was no way Sherlock would let him pull back, he pulled back. He was right. Sherlock nearly tumbled completely off the couch in an effort to recapture his mouth.
“You don’t get to preemptively break up with me,” John told him. “That’s not how it works.”
“Shut up,” Sherlock responded, annoyed, and tried to kiss him again.
“No.” John pressed a finger over Sherlock’s lips, used it to push Sherlock slightly away from him.
Sherlock scowled at him, that bow of a mouth petulant and pouting, his eyes pale sparks in the room’s half-light, and John loved him so much he couldn’t…couldn’t.
“Sodding hell,” John breathed, or sighed, or prayed.
Sherlock drew his eyebrows together, drew in breath to speak, and John knew it was going to be a question. John didn’t want questions, he wanted Sherlock.
John leaned forward, rested his forehead against Sherlock’s, closed his eyes, took a deep, trembling breath, and Sherlock went silent at the action. “I am yours,” John told him. “Don’t worry about keeping me. You’ve got me. That’s fine with me. I’d like to see you try to get me to leave you.”
Sherlock was silent for another moment. Then he said, his voice deep in the stillness of the room, “Well, don’t make it a challenge, John.”
“I’m serious,” John said. “I’m so very serious.”
Sherlock fluttered a sigh that drifted over John’s cheek. “John Watson.” Sherlock nosed his way behind John’s ear. “You’re an idiot.”
John thought that he wasn’t. John thought that he was the cleverest person he knew, because he was, somehow, the only person to have looked at Sherlock Holmes and have seen Sherlock Holmes. “I’m keeping you right back,” John informed him. “That makes me a genius.”
“No, still an idiot,” Sherlock responded.
“Let’s go to bed,” John suggested.
“Three hundred and seven seconds?”
“Much, much, much longer.”
“That’s optimistic of you, John.”
“Shut up,” said John, and kissed him again to make sure he did.
***
John woke to Sherlock playing the violin in a chair at the foot of the bed. It was John’s favorite piece, the one Sherlock tended to play when he was trying to be nice to John. John thought it would have been nicer not to be woken in the middle of the night by the violin, but, well, it was Sherlock, so you took what you could get.
Sherlock watched John. John watched Sherlock finish playing and then lower the violin and bow. Sherlock looked thoughtful. He wore his dressing gown, hastily pulled on and loosely knotted, and nothing else. His dark hair was even more of a riotous mess than usual, sex-pushed-and-pulled into knots. It made John think filthy thoughts. Well, the dressing gown made John think filthy thoughts. The hair wasn’t helping matters. Sherlock’s eyes were helping even less, picking up the gleam of city lights through the window and staring steadily at John.
“What is that piece?” John asked, finally, clearing his throat.
“It’s Tchaikovsky.”
“It’s pretty.”
“You have terrible taste, John.”
“Especially in sleeping partners. Speaking of which, come back to bed.”
Sherlock inhaled deeply through his nose, then carefully put the violin and bow down and crawled his way onto the bed.
“You should ditch the dressing gown,” John suggested.
Sherlock didn’t answer. He settled on his pillow and looked at John, that same steady, assessing gaze.
John resisted the urge to say What? He wanted desperately to know what was going on in Sherlock’s hyperactive brain, but he also didn’t want to disturb it before the train of thought was settled, the conclusion reached. “So now you don’t even bother to leave the room to play the violin in the middle of the night,” John noted. “Should I be taking this as a good sign or a bad one?”
“You cheated,” Sherlock answered. His tone was mild, curious, not accusatory.
John lifted his eyebrows. “When?”
“Tonight. With all of this. You cheated. You said to me the other night: I am not nearly as cold and calculating as I would like to think. You know that because of how I kiss you. What is it about how I kiss you?”
John shook his head. “I don’t want you to change a single thing about how you kiss me.”
“It isn’t fair. You know if you kiss me I don’t think properly. I told you that. You’ve been exploiting it. I’d rather you didn’t.”
That, thought John, was a fair point, and he experienced a twinge of guilt over it. “Sorry. I am sorry. But I don’t want you to think about this. Think about the start tomorrow, or later today, I guess. Think about that all you want. Don’t think about this, about me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re all I can think about.” Sherlock sounded impatient and disgusted.
John smiled. “Can I kiss you?”
“No. What did Mycroft say to you?”
John blinked. “How did you know I talked to Mycroft?”
“You fell asleep and stopped kissing me,” Sherlock remarked, dryly. “Big mistake, John, because then I started thinking again.”
“You know, one of us did play a baseball game today,” John defended himself.
“You played a baseball game yesterday now, John, and tell me what Mycroft said.”
“Your brother’s an idiot, Sherlock.”
“I’ve always thought so,” Sherlock agreed, approvingly.
“You want to be happy. You want to be joyful. It’s so obvious about you. Do you want to know what it is about the way you kiss me? That’s what it is about the way you kiss me. I’ve never met anyone who kisses with as much want as you kiss. Not passion or lust or desire, it’s… You want this, you want me, more than anyone I’ve ever met. I have no idea why, but if you think I’m going to let that slip through my fingers… I don’t understand how no one beat me to this, to you. Who told you that you shouldn’t be you? I can only imagine it was Mycroft. Well, he’s wrong. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re amazing. It’s just that you have more heart than he does, and he doesn’t understand it. But you are remarkable and incredible and fantastic, and don’t let Mycroft tell you otherwise.” John stopped speaking.
Sherlock stared at him. “That’s not what people normally say,” he announced, finally.
“What do people normally say?”
“Piss off.”
John smiled. “And you like me quite a lot. Don’t even try to deny that.”
“You got all that from how I kiss?” Sherlock asked, sounding impressed.
“Not how you kiss,” John corrected. “How you kiss me. What do you get from how I kiss you?”
Sherlock appeared to give this serious consideration. “That I don’t mind having your saliva in my mouth.”
John shouted with laughter.
“Well, you needn’t get all…smug,” Sherlock pouted a bit. “It’s a stupid thing to be making deductions about. The whole thing is stupid.”
John grinned and then snuggled up to him, fitting himself against him with a yawn. “Can we sleep now?”
“And I don’t have a large enough sample size,” Sherlock continued, and John could hear the frown in his voice. “I’d need to collect more data—”
“If collecting more data means kissing people who aren’t me, forget about it,” John said, sleepily, and, eyes already closed, nuzzled Sherlock’s shoulder.
“It wouldn’t mean anything—”
“Not even for science.”
Sherlock huffed his John is so unreasonable sigh. “Fine,” he said, belligerently.
“I’ll tell you all the data you need to know, right now.”
“Oh, really?” Sherlock’s voice was mocking.
“You know how it feels when you kiss me? That’s not how it would feel if you kissed someone else.”
Sherlock was silent for a bit. “And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Think about it and tell me in the morning,” said John, and tucked his head into Sherlock’s neck.
Next Chapter
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Teen
Characters - John, Sherlock, Anthea, Mycroft
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it's a baseball AU.
Author's Notes - Full disclosure: I didn't research how baseball players room on road trips. I fail. So I just made it up. Because I'm lazy like that.
Many, many thanks to arctacuda, for helping with the writing and for uncomplainingly beta-ing when I whine.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Sherlock hated road trips. The hotel proprietors were always touchy if you shot holes in their walls, and the maids were always destroying the careful experiment conditions of the baseballs he left in the bathtub. Initially Sherlock had gone on road trips out of curiosity, but when they turned out to be the dullest things imaginable he had stopped, and Lestrade had raised no protest. Sherlock suspected the team had probably wanted him to stop tagging along on road trips, and normally Sherlock would have striven to annoy the rest of the team as much as possible, but it was much nicer to sprawl on his sofa and sulk at the world.
Now, however, the idea of sprawling on the sofa and sulking at the world had lost a bit of its appeal if John wasn’t there to experience the sulk with him. So, if John was going on the road trip, Sherlock decided he would go on the road trip, too, and sulk from John’s suite. Hesitant and halting, John said something about them needing to have separate suites, and Sherlock had understood John’s need to hide them and had agreed to separate suites with no intention of spending any time at all in his own.
Which meant he was indeed in John’s suite when his brother walked in. Sherlock had been sprawled on John’s sofa, staring at the unfamiliar light pattern on the ceiling. John was at the field, getting ready for a night game. Sherlock thought he would probably attend because he had nothing better to do. He now wished he’d gone to the field with John, even though it had been ridiculously early, because it might have saved him a visit from Mycroft.
Sherlock scowled at the ceiling, thinking that even he recognized that as being wishful thinking on his part. If Mycroft wanted to speak with somebody then Mycroft spoke with that person. Sherlock had spent his entire life trying to avoid that truth. He’d never once been successful.
“Isn’t this a cozy picture?” said Mycroft, silkily.
“It’s a fairly standard picture, Mycroft, really,” Sherlock replied, without looking away from the ceiling.
“You on the sofa in a teammate’s suite?”
Sherlock tried to refuse to be goaded. “Me on the sofa.”
There was a moment of blessed silence.
“Well, this is very interesting,” said Mycroft.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Indeed it is. The thing about Mummy is that she worries about you so very much. Always asking me if you’ve succumbed yet to all the temptations she imagines are around you. How silly of her to be worried about drugs when she should have been worried about John Watson.”
“Stop it,” said Sherlock.
“Sherlock, you know what this is. It’s transference. You have an addictive personality, and this ‘Doctor’ Watson is the latest obsession to drift across your consciousness. You’re prone to this, and you know it. You’ll grow bored with him the way you grow bored with everything, only he’s a person, not a game, not a controlled substance.”
“Stop it,” said Sherlock, again.
“What are you going to do when he stops being interesting to you? What are you going to do with him?”
Sherlock decided to say nothing to that. To say stop it again would be mocked, he thought.
“You don’t do anything by halves. You never have. You’ll want to possess him, all of him. You’ll want to keep him. Do you think he wants to be kept, your Doctor Watson?”
“If you say his name again, I’ll shoot you. I’ve a gun under this pillow.”
Mycroft had the nerve to sound amused when he replied, “I’ve no doubt.” Mycroft took a deep breath, a preface, Sherlock knew, to departure, thank God. “Well. You’re looking well, aside from this destructive relationship you’ve embarked on. Mostly destructive for him, of course. You’ll find a way to pull through just fine, you always do. I should put some money aside to give him for therapy afterward.” Mycroft’s voice was dry. He seemed to think Sherlock was going to say something in response to this. Sherlock kept staring at the ceiling. “Pitch well tomorrow,” he said, apparently acknowledging the extent of Sherlock’s stubbornness.
Sherlock listened to the door click shut as Mycroft departed. He did not look away from the ceiling.
***
Sherlock never showed up at the field. John wasn’t exactly surprised by that. Sherlock was never going to actually enjoy being at the field, and Sherlock was always going to be vague about being the places he said he was going to be, thought John. Lestrade had said that he never missed a start but, other than that, Lestrade had never seen Sherlock unless he was in the middle of causing some sort of problem. As John had now spent enough time with Sherlock to know that the closest thing he had to a friend was Mrs. Hudson, John thought Sherlock must have been spending a lot of time alone, and, although he thought Sherlock would probably deny it, he had probably been incredibly lonely. No wonder he had wanted John to move in almost immediately. Sherlock had probably wanted to leap on the chance of finding someone he could bear to be around.
So John wasn’t alarmed when Sherlock didn’t show up at the field. But he was confused when Sherlock wasn’t in his suite. He walked through it, calling his name, although he’d expected Sherlock to be directly on the sofa, where John had left him. Sherlock didn’t move much unless compelled. John thought of it in terms of physics: A Sherlock at rest tended to stay at rest.
John stood in the middle of his empty suite, thought, and went to Sherlock’s suite, knocking on the door. “Sherlock?” he called, but there was no answer, and John thought that he didn’t much want to stand around in the hotel hallway making a ruckus at Sherlock’s door. People would definitely talk then. So he pulled out the key Sherlock had given him. They had split their keys up, one to each of them, almost as soon as they had checked in.
Sherlock was on the sofa in his suite, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move a muscle in reaction to John opening the suite’s door.
This was not at all unusual, in John’s experience, so John simply said, “Hello. You didn’t come to the field tonight.”
Sherlock didn’t reply. Again, not unusual. John glanced at him as he walked over to the suite’s window to draw the curtains. A sulk? Or just deep in thought planning for his start the next day?
John walked over to stand directly behind Sherlock’s head, looking down at him. Sherlock’s gaze stayed focused on the ceiling. “You’re pitching tomorrow. Do you know what that means? Superstition: We’ve got to start the day off with three hundred and seven seconds worth of really good sex.” He grinned and leaned over to brush an upside-down kiss over Sherlock’s unresponsive mouth.
Which was when Sherlock said, “We have to talk.”
John drew back but did not entirely straighten. “Okay, now, see, for someone who isn’t supposed to have much relationship experience, you’ve perfected the opening to the break-up conversation,” John remarked, calmly, and then he walked over to the room’s armchair and sat in it.
Sherlock shifted on the couch a bit, enough to face him. “I’m serious.”
John turned the television on. “No, you’re not. You think you’re serious, but I’m not the only one in this relationship with a skewed self-perception, and, as the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, I feel that I ought to inform you that you like me quite a lot.”
“Oh my God,” said Sherlock, his voice containing so much disgust that John actually looked at him in surprise. “You say that as if that’s all there is to it.”
“That is all there is to it, Sherlock,” said John, evenly.
“You’re hiding us,” Sherlock bit out. “You’re afraid to be seen with me, you’re so worried what people might think.”
“We’ll figure all the complications out.” John shut off the television and gave Sherlock his full attention. “Is that what this is about?”
“No,” said Sherlock.
“Then what? You like me, I like you. The end. That actually happens far less frequently than you might think.”
“I don’t just like you. Do you understand? I am incapable of ‘liking’ people. That isn’t how I operate. I… You…” Sherlock made his ugh noise and turned onto his back and ruffled agitatedly at his hair. “You’re the foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes. You tell me.”
John looked across at him and thought of things he hadn’t brought up yet. “Tell me about the drugs, Sherlock.”
Sherlock made a dismissive noise.
“You need to tell me—”
“That has nothing to do with anything.” Sherlock turned his head suddenly, fixing John with a piercing, squirming, colorless glare. “You want to connect dots in your feeble little brain. You want to make this all textbook psychology, like every strop I have must be connected to my damaged, recovering-addict psyche.”
“Or whatever caused the addiction in the first place. Am I wrong about that?”
“I didn’t realize your medical degree was in psychiatry.” The sarcasm was scathing. “And the drugs have nothing to do with this. This is about you. You are…ridiculous. Do you realize? Do you see?” Sherlock sat up suddenly, jumpy with the force of his conviction in what he was saying. “I am not this person, John. I am not this person who has ‘relationships,’ exchanges casual, aimless kisses, and flirts about three hundred and seven seconds of good sex.”
“You could have fooled me,” inserted John, still calm.
Sherlock ignored him, caught up in his rant. “I possess things. I keep them. I don’t let them belong to anyone else. I don’t share. You say I like you, as if it’s that simple, as if I can keep it that simple. Yes. I like you. The way I like baseball. The way I’ve liked any number of things. So I will take you, and I will conquer you. I will puzzle you out, I will strip you bare, until I and only I know every single little thing there is to know about you, until you are mine, completely, inexorably. I will need you to belong to me entirely. And then, when I am done, you will bore me. Do you understand? Can you understand? Are you capable of it?”
“I’m not stupid, Sherlock,” John said, more sharply than he’d said anything else so far in this conversation.
“Where do you get that idea?” Sherlock rejoined, dry as dust. “So then, you understand. Let us stop, here, now, before it goes any further.”
There was silence in the suite. John considered. “Because you like me too much,” he concluded. Sherlock liked him too much to hurt him later down the line. Sherlock was doing this preemptively, that much was obvious.
“Because this is already tedious,” spat out Sherlock, and then energetically flopped back onto the couch, turning his back to John and drawing his dressing gown around him like blue silk armor.
John sat and blew out an exhale. His fingers drummed against his knees. He counted to ten and kept his anger down and tried to consider how to get Sherlock out of this latest bullheaded idea of his. And then an insidious little voice curled up inside him. Did he want to get Sherlock out of this? Was he just going to spend this entire relationship refusing to let Sherlock break up with him? What sort of relationship was that? Where was his self-esteem, his sense of self-preservation? He was embarrassingly in love with Sherlock, and had been for a while now. Maybe it was time to stop making an idiot of himself over someone who kept trying to push him away.
John didn’t want to believe that. He didn’t think he believed that. Sherlock cared about him, possibly more than he’d ever cared about anyone before, astonishingly. John couldn’t let that go. John couldn’t let Sherlock let that go. At least, he thought he couldn’t. And was that his job? Protecting Sherlock Holmes from himself?
John stood up. “I need some air,” he announced, but it had probably been a waste of air to say anything, because there was no response from the figure on the couch.
***
John had no real idea where he was going in search of the air he’d announced he’d needed. He stepped out of the hotel into the brisk April night and stood there, frowning and contemplating what he ought to do. He couldn’t turn right around, march back into Sherlock’s room, and kiss him. But he also couldn’t turn around and go to his own room. He liked neither of these options. He kind of wanted Sherlock to follow him out of the hotel and apologize, but it seemed more likely that he would get struck by lightning while waiting for him.
“Good evening, Doctor Watson,” said a woman to his left.
John looked at her. She was vaguely familiar. When the black car slid up, he placed her and rolled his eyes. John didn’t wait for the door to open, he leaned over and jerked it open and said to Sherlock’s brother, “You.”
Mycroft Holmes looked at him with mild interest. “And how are you this evening, Doctor?”
“I am not a doctor. You realize that, right? And what are you doing here?”
“I merely wanted to ascertain that you were all right,” replied Mycroft, smoothly.
John looked at him, and something clicked into place for him. Why wouldn’t he be all right? On tonight as opposed to any other night, why would Mycroft Holmes think he wasn’t all right? “Wait a minute,” he said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Mycroft lifted his eyebrows.
“You went to see him today and you got this idea in his head that, I don’t know, he’s going to destroy me or something if he lets himself love me the way he—”
“Get in the car,” Mycroft snapped, and John considered it a bit of a victory that he’d gotten Mycroft to snap at him.
He got into the car, closing the door behind him, and it slid away immediately.
“You’ve just left Anthea back there,” John pointed out.
“Anthea can handle herself,” Mycroft clipped out. “There are things you need to know about my little brother.” He said the phrase little brother the way one might say wart with the hair growing out of it.
John frowned. “No,” he said, “there’s really not. Nothing I could learn from you, at any rate. You don’t even like him.”
“He is a difficult man to like.”
“I’ve found him to be the opposite.”
The corner of Mycroft’s mouth turned up in what might have been a smile on someone else but was merely a sneer on him. “Yes, isn’t that…remarkable.” His tone was flat.
“He is much more than you give him credit for being, you know. He is much more than you let him be. Because that’s where he’s getting it from, isn’t it? This strange…reluctance in him, he’s getting it from you, you’re messing with his head.”
Mycroft looked almost bored. “You’re giving me far too much credit.”
“Did you go see him today?”
Mycroft hesitated.
“What did you tell him?” John demanded.
“John—” Mycroft started.
“What did you say to him?” John interrupted, his voice deadly quiet.
Mycroft regarded him for a long moment, narrowing his eyes. “You are…not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Mycroft’s eyes flickered over his face. “Not you.” Mycroft took a deep breath. “He will inevitably grow bored with you. He does with everything, you know. Even the drugs. It’s how he ended up in an overdose situation in the first place: trying to recapture the blush of first romance.”
There was a shuddering creep under John’s skin at the way Mycroft’s accent, edged in sarcasm, turned the words into sharp weapons. John shook it off. He was going to get out of this car and go back to Sherlock’s room and crawl onto him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him until the sound of the word overdose stopped reverberating through his brain, kiss him until Sherlock knew, Sherlock understood, that the possibility that John might never have met him was an unacceptable one.
“I am not a drug,” John said. “I am much tougher to shake than a drug. I am much more stubborn than cocaine or heroin or whatever the bloody hell it was. And the only thing ‘wrong’ with Sherlock is that he has feelings, something you clearly don’t have.”
Mycroft was looking at him in something that might have been a very pale shadow of astonishment. “Your file has alarming gaps,” he murmured. “But, of course…I should have seen… You thrive on unpredictability, on challenge, of course…”
John decided he wasn’t going to sit here and get talked about instead of talked to. He leaned over and thumped his fist against the dividing wall behind which was the driver. “Stop this car!” he shouted, hoping the driver could hear him.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to your brother, to tell him that you’re an idiot.”
“We’re not through here—”
The car had pulled to a halt. John opened the door and put one foot on the pavement, to make sure the car didn’t take off again. Not that he thought it would stop Mycroft or the driver, but it might give them pause. “We are most definitely through. You come near him again, you will be amazed at how much you’re underestimating me. Are we clear, Mr. Holmes?”
Mycroft regarded him evenly for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth tipped up, and this time it did look like a smile. “Very. Good evening, Doctor Watson.”
John stepped out of the car, slammed the door, and stepped back as it slid smoothly away.
Then he looked around and wondered where the hell he was and how he was getting back to the hotel.
***
John walked into Sherlock’s hotel room and didn’t wait for Sherlock to react. He didn’t expect him to react. Sherlock would surely just ignore him, that was Sherlock’s standard operating procedure. So John didn’t wait for anything. The suite was dark, the lights from the city outside barely filtering through the drapes John had imperfectly closed earlier. John nonetheless walked swiftly across the suite to the couch, where Sherlock was still lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
John leaned over Sherlock. He got a moment’s satisfaction of seeing Sherlock register surprise before he was too close for Sherlock to be in focus, and then what he did was kiss him, catching in his mouth the sound Sherlock tried to make, whatever its purpose had been. And, after a heart-stopping second, Sherlock responded. John had thought that he would. Sherlock was an absurdly responsive kisser. It made Sherlock the best kisser John had ever encountered. John had thought, naively, about the other people he’d kissed in terms of their technique. He wished he’d known that he should have been looking for the one person who, when kissed by John Watson, sighed and kissed back as if the continued turning of the Earth depended on the depth of their kiss.
John lifted his hands to frame Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s cheeks seemed shockingly hot, but John knew it was more that his hands were cold from the long walk. Sherlock didn’t flinch, though. Sherlock rolled toward him, squirming on the couch, lifting a hand to the back of John’s neck to try to pull him more firmly onto him. John tried to comply but the hotel couch was much too narrow and much too small, and he ended up half-draped over the couch and half-sprawled on the floor. And God, his neck was probably going to start protesting if they kissed in this position much longer, but he Didn’t. Bloody. Care.
When he thought that there was no way Sherlock would let him pull back, he pulled back. He was right. Sherlock nearly tumbled completely off the couch in an effort to recapture his mouth.
“You don’t get to preemptively break up with me,” John told him. “That’s not how it works.”
“Shut up,” Sherlock responded, annoyed, and tried to kiss him again.
“No.” John pressed a finger over Sherlock’s lips, used it to push Sherlock slightly away from him.
Sherlock scowled at him, that bow of a mouth petulant and pouting, his eyes pale sparks in the room’s half-light, and John loved him so much he couldn’t…couldn’t.
“Sodding hell,” John breathed, or sighed, or prayed.
Sherlock drew his eyebrows together, drew in breath to speak, and John knew it was going to be a question. John didn’t want questions, he wanted Sherlock.
John leaned forward, rested his forehead against Sherlock’s, closed his eyes, took a deep, trembling breath, and Sherlock went silent at the action. “I am yours,” John told him. “Don’t worry about keeping me. You’ve got me. That’s fine with me. I’d like to see you try to get me to leave you.”
Sherlock was silent for another moment. Then he said, his voice deep in the stillness of the room, “Well, don’t make it a challenge, John.”
“I’m serious,” John said. “I’m so very serious.”
Sherlock fluttered a sigh that drifted over John’s cheek. “John Watson.” Sherlock nosed his way behind John’s ear. “You’re an idiot.”
John thought that he wasn’t. John thought that he was the cleverest person he knew, because he was, somehow, the only person to have looked at Sherlock Holmes and have seen Sherlock Holmes. “I’m keeping you right back,” John informed him. “That makes me a genius.”
“No, still an idiot,” Sherlock responded.
“Let’s go to bed,” John suggested.
“Three hundred and seven seconds?”
“Much, much, much longer.”
“That’s optimistic of you, John.”
“Shut up,” said John, and kissed him again to make sure he did.
***
John woke to Sherlock playing the violin in a chair at the foot of the bed. It was John’s favorite piece, the one Sherlock tended to play when he was trying to be nice to John. John thought it would have been nicer not to be woken in the middle of the night by the violin, but, well, it was Sherlock, so you took what you could get.
Sherlock watched John. John watched Sherlock finish playing and then lower the violin and bow. Sherlock looked thoughtful. He wore his dressing gown, hastily pulled on and loosely knotted, and nothing else. His dark hair was even more of a riotous mess than usual, sex-pushed-and-pulled into knots. It made John think filthy thoughts. Well, the dressing gown made John think filthy thoughts. The hair wasn’t helping matters. Sherlock’s eyes were helping even less, picking up the gleam of city lights through the window and staring steadily at John.
“What is that piece?” John asked, finally, clearing his throat.
“It’s Tchaikovsky.”
“It’s pretty.”
“You have terrible taste, John.”
“Especially in sleeping partners. Speaking of which, come back to bed.”
Sherlock inhaled deeply through his nose, then carefully put the violin and bow down and crawled his way onto the bed.
“You should ditch the dressing gown,” John suggested.
Sherlock didn’t answer. He settled on his pillow and looked at John, that same steady, assessing gaze.
John resisted the urge to say What? He wanted desperately to know what was going on in Sherlock’s hyperactive brain, but he also didn’t want to disturb it before the train of thought was settled, the conclusion reached. “So now you don’t even bother to leave the room to play the violin in the middle of the night,” John noted. “Should I be taking this as a good sign or a bad one?”
“You cheated,” Sherlock answered. His tone was mild, curious, not accusatory.
John lifted his eyebrows. “When?”
“Tonight. With all of this. You cheated. You said to me the other night: I am not nearly as cold and calculating as I would like to think. You know that because of how I kiss you. What is it about how I kiss you?”
John shook his head. “I don’t want you to change a single thing about how you kiss me.”
“It isn’t fair. You know if you kiss me I don’t think properly. I told you that. You’ve been exploiting it. I’d rather you didn’t.”
That, thought John, was a fair point, and he experienced a twinge of guilt over it. “Sorry. I am sorry. But I don’t want you to think about this. Think about the start tomorrow, or later today, I guess. Think about that all you want. Don’t think about this, about me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re all I can think about.” Sherlock sounded impatient and disgusted.
John smiled. “Can I kiss you?”
“No. What did Mycroft say to you?”
John blinked. “How did you know I talked to Mycroft?”
“You fell asleep and stopped kissing me,” Sherlock remarked, dryly. “Big mistake, John, because then I started thinking again.”
“You know, one of us did play a baseball game today,” John defended himself.
“You played a baseball game yesterday now, John, and tell me what Mycroft said.”
“Your brother’s an idiot, Sherlock.”
“I’ve always thought so,” Sherlock agreed, approvingly.
“You want to be happy. You want to be joyful. It’s so obvious about you. Do you want to know what it is about the way you kiss me? That’s what it is about the way you kiss me. I’ve never met anyone who kisses with as much want as you kiss. Not passion or lust or desire, it’s… You want this, you want me, more than anyone I’ve ever met. I have no idea why, but if you think I’m going to let that slip through my fingers… I don’t understand how no one beat me to this, to you. Who told you that you shouldn’t be you? I can only imagine it was Mycroft. Well, he’s wrong. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re amazing. It’s just that you have more heart than he does, and he doesn’t understand it. But you are remarkable and incredible and fantastic, and don’t let Mycroft tell you otherwise.” John stopped speaking.
Sherlock stared at him. “That’s not what people normally say,” he announced, finally.
“What do people normally say?”
“Piss off.”
John smiled. “And you like me quite a lot. Don’t even try to deny that.”
“You got all that from how I kiss?” Sherlock asked, sounding impressed.
“Not how you kiss,” John corrected. “How you kiss me. What do you get from how I kiss you?”
Sherlock appeared to give this serious consideration. “That I don’t mind having your saliva in my mouth.”
John shouted with laughter.
“Well, you needn’t get all…smug,” Sherlock pouted a bit. “It’s a stupid thing to be making deductions about. The whole thing is stupid.”
John grinned and then snuggled up to him, fitting himself against him with a yawn. “Can we sleep now?”
“And I don’t have a large enough sample size,” Sherlock continued, and John could hear the frown in his voice. “I’d need to collect more data—”
“If collecting more data means kissing people who aren’t me, forget about it,” John said, sleepily, and, eyes already closed, nuzzled Sherlock’s shoulder.
“It wouldn’t mean anything—”
“Not even for science.”
Sherlock huffed his John is so unreasonable sigh. “Fine,” he said, belligerently.
“I’ll tell you all the data you need to know, right now.”
“Oh, really?” Sherlock’s voice was mocking.
“You know how it feels when you kiss me? That’s not how it would feel if you kissed someone else.”
Sherlock was silent for a bit. “And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Think about it and tell me in the morning,” said John, and tucked his head into Sherlock’s neck.
Next Chapter
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Date: 2013-06-07 03:53 am (UTC)I love how John understands Sherlock so well. Even better (if not much better) than Sherlock understands himself. Like...the way he plays baseball is what he does - all analytical and logical - but the way he kisses John is who he *is* - passionate and desperate for happiness.
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Date: 2013-06-07 12:42 pm (UTC)John at this point definitely does understand Sherlock better than Sherlock understands himself, because I think Sherlock doesn't think of himself as being at all like how John sees him. He is so confused by the things John says about him, he just doesn't see it.
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Date: 2013-06-07 06:28 am (UTC)MYCROFT HOLMES GET YOUR NOSY BUTT OUT OF OUR SHIP AND JUST GO GET TO KNOW LESTRADE ALREADY!!
He thinks he knows everything, but as many of your stories (notably the schoolboy saga) have proven, he REALLY doesn't know his brother as well as he thinks he does and right now I just want to smack his head and ship him back to England. Although I have to wonder if Lestrade won't try to do that for me if the drama starts affecting Sherlock or John's games.
No wonder this story has 36 chapters...
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Date: 2013-06-07 04:44 pm (UTC)And yes, my reading of Mycroft is always consistent, no matter how sympathetically I write him: He thinks he knows Sherlock, but he doesn't.
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Date: 2013-06-07 12:08 pm (UTC)Sherlock and John have a chance because in his way John is as stubborn if not more so than Sherlock.
I love it. Thanks.
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Date: 2013-06-07 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 12:25 pm (UTC)Everyone should have a John when they're starting out on a relationship - he's so wise, full of love and - for once - now he's the one deducing things about Sherlock . . .
I'm enjoying this story so much - all the baseball side of it (not that I truly understand!! *grin*) but all the relationship side of it too. They're so human in their reactions, but Sherlock's not quite ready to admit it yet. Soon, though, I hope!
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Date: 2013-06-07 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 01:22 pm (UTC)I like how you're not making him a sympathetic figure, because, really, he's not. If you think about it he is constantly harassing Sherlock. Every second of every day Sherlock is (or at least could be) monitored by Mycroft, which is, more than a little creepy.
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Date: 2013-06-07 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 02:28 pm (UTC)“He is much more than you give him credit for being, you know. He is much more than you let him be. - LOVE this line. It explains so much about the John/Sherlock dynamic, I think- that all his life Sherlock has had all of these expectations about who he is supposed to be, while in reality those expectations are only limiting who he truly is. Enter John, who is able to pull that real, true Sherlock out- I just love it!!
(Also, of course, I am imagining that they are in Chicago on their road trip. Because being at Wrigley Field makes everything better!)
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Date: 2013-06-07 05:39 pm (UTC)Sherlock has, like, the opposite of great expectation. It's like no one expected good things of him, and so he never got to be the better person he was inside, because no one wanted him to be that way, until John showed up and saw to the heart of him.
And they could be in Chicago! I didn't bother to place the city, but it's someplace that's still cold in April. :-)
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Date: 2013-06-07 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 10:48 pm (UTC)Go John!
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Date: 2013-06-07 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 12:59 am (UTC)That's better than human eyes in the microwave.
You’re prone to this, and you know it. You’ll grow bored with him the way you grow bored with everything, only he’s a person, not a game, not a controlled substance. [...] Mostly destructive for him, of course. You’ll find a way to pull through just fine, you always do. I should put some money aside to give him for therapy afterward.
I wonder if he wants to spare John, to protect Sherlock or to manipulate him to keep him under his control. In other words, I wonder if I must like him or hate him at this moment. :D
Do you think he wants to be kept, your Doctor Watson?
OH YES HE DOES! :D
Sherlock listened to the door click shut as Mycroft departed. He did not look away from the ceiling.
He was already so insecure, and now... Oh dear.
Sherlock had probably wanted to leap on the chance of finding someone he could bear to be around.
Yep. It's the only reason obviously.
Which was when Sherlock said, “We have to talk.”
He means talking about this and that, saying tender words, doesn't he? *smiles nervously* Oh dear.
DarknessAngst is coming.You like me, I like you. The end.
Er...
I don’t just like you
Ha!
I possess things. I keep them. I don’t let them belong to anyone else. I don’t share.
Fine by me. I love possessive!Sherlock.
So I will take you, and I will conquer you. I will puzzle you out, I will strip you bare, until I and only I know every single little thing there is to know about you, until you are mine, completely, inexorably. I will need you to belong to me entirely.
The next chapters are very promising. ;-)
Maybe it was time to stop making an idiot of himself over someone who kept trying to push him away.
*looks at you with a bit of worry*
And was that his job? Protecting Sherlock Holmes from himself?
Saving Sherlock Holmes! :D
He couldn’t turn right around, march back into Sherlock’s room, and kiss him.
It's a brilliant plan nevertheless.
“I merely wanted to ascertain that you were all right,” replied Mycroft, smoothly.
Or that you plan worked, you devious man!
He said the phrase little brother the way one might say wart with the hair growing out of it.
Right. I made my choice, I hate him. :D
He was going to get out of this car and go back to Sherlock’s room and crawl onto him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him
*cheers and applauds*
You come near him again, you will be amazed at how much you’re underestimating me. Are we clear, Mr. Holmes?
Ah, I love BAMF!John!
Mycroft regarded him evenly for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth tipped up, and this time it did look like a smile. “Very. Good evening, Doctor Watson.”
Hmm. I think I'm going to stop hating him for a while. Maybe he has good intentions after all, and understands at last that only John can make Sherlock happy.
John leaned over Sherlock. He got a moment’s satisfaction of seeing Sherlock register surprise before he was too close for Sherlock to be in focus, and then what he did was kiss him
Yay!
And, after a heart-stopping second, Sherlock responded.
YAY! :D
"I am yours,” John told him. “Don’t worry about keeping me. You’ve got me."
Did I already say "yay"? Because I love these lines.
“Let’s go to bed,” John suggested.
Excellent conclusion.
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re all I can think about.”
Aww!
You want to be happy. You want to be joyful. It’s so obvious about you.
I quite agree! That's how I see him in the show.
John stopped speaking.
If after what he's just said Sherlock doesn't propose to him immediately... :D
“That I don’t mind having your saliva in my mouth.”
Always the romantic...
Great chapter! I'm very happy the angst didn't last long. I love Sherlock who sacrifices himself to spare John, and John who fights to protect his love. I'm not sure about what I must think about Mycroft (yes, I know you do that on purpose!) but I definitely know what I must think about this fic. :-)
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Date: 2013-06-08 01:14 am (UTC)Mycroft is tricky in this fic. Intentionally so. :-)
Saving Sherlock Holmes! Didn't even realize that!
I love BAMF!John, too!
I really do think Sherlock on the show has so much JOY in him. It just never gets let out very much!
Nope, the angst was quickly resolved this chapter, because John just understands Sherlock *so* *well.*
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Date: 2013-06-08 03:29 am (UTC)Hey, the way I see it, if I'm overly attached to Mycroft as a sentimental character, it's ENTIRELY your fault anyway.
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Date: 2013-06-08 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 09:57 am (UTC)I stumbled across Nature and Nurture purely by accident and I love it. Then I started reading this fic and I love it too! ♥ This Sherlock is so adorable. Brain tumor, honestly. *snorts* He's the most adorable thing.
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Date: 2013-06-08 02:26 pm (UTC)(And I do have an AO3 account as well, if you prefer things there.)
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Date: 2013-06-08 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 09:31 pm (UTC)The Sherlock in this story is recognizable as what Sherlock in SSH would have been without John and a kinder, loving Mycroft. I mean to say, your various Sherlocks are all so believably transformed by their circumstances, and yet are all Sherlock at the core. It's lovely and you are a lovely writer. I'm so glad you're in this fandom.
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Date: 2013-06-10 03:55 pm (UTC)And I'm so glad all my Sherlocks seem different but Sherlockian at the core, which is exactly what I was going for and I always worry I don't make it. So thank you!
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