Chapter Text
"I didn't kill Jonas Oldacre," John McFarlane protests wearily, his eyes glazed with despair. "I didn't even know Jonas Oldacre until he walked into my office in the City and asked me to alter his will for him. He was an old flame of mum's, back in the day. I'm not a murderer."
"Like hell you aren't. Your fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. Bludgeoned to death with a hammer. What this world is coming to, I don't know," Anderson sniffs.
"It's coming to certain proof that reverse evolution exists, and that the most brainless specimens tend to be hired by the Yard," Sherlock remarks. "Can we discuss this in the proper order, please?"
Sherlock, John, Lestrade, and Lestrade's loathesome forensics tech Anderson, who worked the case, are sitting around a white plastic table in a fluorescently lit beige room in the south London facility where McFarlane is being held. Styrofoam cups full of bad coffee rest before Lestrade and John. The murder suspect is flaxen-haired and handsome in a washed-out, negative way, and his hands are lightly trembling. There's a certain weakness about his mouth that makes Sherlock skeptical he is capable of tying his own shoes, let alone murdering a near-stranger. He's a solicitor by trade, and was asked suddenly and without warning by the dead man to create a will naming himself--McFarlane--the sole beneficiary of Oldacre's fortune, which was made some time ago during the boom in the construction industry. Back when Oldacre was still in love with McFarlane's mother. This all interests Sherlock to no end, for which he is grateful.
Jim Moriarty, after years of crude torment, is no longer boring. He is fascinating.
The detective is also grateful that, by the time they obtained Met clearance to see McFarlane and found Lestrade and called the bomb squad and read up on the case, he was no longer high. He makes a point of never being high when he is working, not merely because if Lestrade were ever to find out, he'd likely go ballistic (Lestrade is small-minded the way most policemen are about such matters as chemical manipulation) but also because, when confronted with a new problem of note, Sherlock's brain sparks and glimmers like one of those glass balls filled with blue live wires of electricity that shoot to your fingertips when you touch the surface. Being high would be superfluous. Sherlock is positively aglow.
"Oldacre engaged you to alter his will, claiming he'd no other relations or close ties and that he had always held something of a torch for your mother," Sherlock says. "Then he invited you down to his construction company in Norwood after hours to introduce you to exactly what sort of business you'd be inheriting."
"Suspect by his own account arrived at Oldacre Urban Solutions at around nine in the evening," Lestrade confirms. "Oldacre gave McFarlane here a tour, then opened a safe in the office and they went through more paperwork. There was a few hundred quid in cash in the safe."
"And McFarlance killed him over it, as well as the inheritance. This is a waste of time," Anderson grouses.
Lestrade stands, crossing his arms in a judicious pose. His boyish face is grave in a way Sherlock has never seen before. And that didn't happen when he was told his case was bolloxed. It happened sometime previously. He looks...he looks anxious. Drawn. Lestrade never looks this worried. And he keeps shooting little flickering glances at Sherlock. He's doing it now. Almost as if he's concerned about...no. That can't be right.
The bomber, of course, Sherlock concludes, he's worried about death and destruction.
"I can be as wrong as the next detective, which is what seems to be the case here," Lestrade sighs. "Sherlock has to sort this, or a woman dies. I don't call that a waste of time, Anderson."
"It's sorted already!"
"Yes, sorted by morons," Sherlock says coldly, "or else I wouldn't be here, or do I have to explain again that Moriarty is tied to the case somehow? We've been over this. Are you deaf or brain damaged?"
"Do I really have to take insults from a psychopathic freak?" Anderson demands, his hawklike face purpling.
"I'm not a psychopath," Sherlock snaps.
"Prove it."
Sherlock can't, and it hurts that he can't, in this juvenile conversation with this juvenile man over this juvenile taunt, it hurts not to have been taken into the mental health clinic by his frigid snob of a father and tested and thus know whether he's psychopathic or bipolar or borderline personality disorder or merely an asexual genius with an addictive bent, it hurts and burns and aches in front of John with his gentle face and his eyes beginning to crease angrily, it hurts like a stone in his chest, so he puts on his haughtiest glare and wills Anderson to die on the spot. Anderson chuckles nastily.
"Now, there's an expression worn by a psycho if I ever saw one."
"I may want to kill you right now, but that is a manifestly logical urge when confronted with cockroaches," Sherlock hisses. "I am not a psychopath."
"I notice you didn't say you weren't a freak, though."
"Oi, watch the tone," John orders gruffly, clapping his hands together. "And the word choice. You know, watch the speech. Just watch everything from here, the lot of it, there's a good lad."
"Why the hell should you get shirty about it?" the tech sneers.
"Dunno. Hobby of mine, the shirtiness. You'll want to look out for that. I also tend to chin people who push me too far. So look out for that too."
"Sherlock, you can't bully him into listening to you. Anderson, shut it, you're giving me a headache," Lestrade sighs.
"Why should McFarlane have killed his benefactor when he could just wait it out and inherit a fortune?" John questions thoughtfully.
A mottled flush of pink covers the suspect's face. McFarlane's mouth opens, but nothing emerges.
"He's in debt to his eyeballs," Anderson reports, going to the coffee pot and pouring himself a cup. "Lawyers and their bright ideas about stock trading. Classic."
"That doesn't mean I just upped and snuffed someone," McFarlane cries. "And he tossed me that hammer and I caught it, he said that it was the hammer that struck the first nail in his first building, that's why my prints were on it, I didn't--"
"What did Oldacre's holdings come to in the end?" Sherlock questions.
"Less than they might have done," Lestrade admits, leaning back against the wall. "We found out a week or two back that he'd transferred a major portion of his assets to a charity."
"Recently?"
"Yeah. To a nonprofit foundation called Cornelius Group. Fella might have wanted McFarlane to inherit, but apparently not that large a fortune. Reasonable, I guess, since they didn't actually know each other."
"Why now?" Sherlock steeples his fingers before his lips and closes his eyes. "Oldacre was fifty-eight. Why make a new will, donate a significant sum to charity, as if he were an old man?"
"Might have been terminally ill and not told anyone," Lestrade says easily. "People do that sort of thing all the time. Tie up loose ends, give loved ones a leg up. Seemed like a lonely enough sort, if his ex's son was the only person he could think of to inherit. He wanted to make things right with the mum, maybe."
"Why?"
"Sentiment, I s'pose."
"No." Sherlock shakes his head. "No, people don't relieve themselves of all their worldly possessions and give the remainder to the offspring of their former lovers."
"Well, this bloke did sure enough."
Sherlock is silent, eyes still gently shut. He is in the garden of his mind palace, the grave garden where no flowers or vegetables grow, the garden where corpses from the cases he has worked on since childhood are laid out end to end in silent rows on the soft green grass, with paths between the bodies, waiting there for Sherlock until he needs them. Dozens of dead men and women, arranged like petunia beds.
"The body was found in a pile of lumber at Oldacre Urban Solutions, doused with chemicals and charred past DNA recognition. You ID'ed the corpse with dental records?" Sherlock's eyes open and dart to Anderson, who has seated himself across the table once more, coffee cup steaming.
"No," Anderson admits.
"Excuse me?" Sherlock drawls.
"I said no."
"Laziness, or did you forget how that's done?"
"I said bludgeoned to death with a hammer, you lunatic," Anderson shoots back. "The jaw and teeth were smashed to pieces. Totally useless, the coroner told us."
Oh, Sherlock thinks, huffing out a small breath of air.
The others stare at him, a bit wide-eyed. Sherlock has no idea what face he's making, but he knows he is exceedingly pleased by this news.
Clever.
That is so very, very clever.
Fixing things for people, Jim said. Dear Jim, will you fix it for me to get away from it all. Dear Jim, for an extra charge, can that include revenge against the woman who once threw me over for another man?
Dear Jim, help me to fly.
Remarkable.
"Something other than a whim made you identify Oldacre," Sherlock muses. He smiles enigmatically, which always infuriates Anderson, which is always satisfying. Anderson duly scowls. "What was it?"
"His ring was intact. He always wore it. Titanium. He was also wearing his steel-toed boots, which were in bad shape but enough to give us a clue."
"You," Sherlock intones, shaking his head sadly as he rises to his full height, "have no clue whatsoever."
"Sherlock?" John says, curious.
"That man is innocent," Sherlock declares, pointing a long finger at the unhappy John Hector McFarlane. The young solicitor's blond head raises hopefully. "Why should McFarlane kill a man with a hammer and then viciously shatter his teeth and jaw? There would have been blood. A lot of it. There would have been work involved. A lot of it. All this over a stranger?"
"That doesn't prove--" Anderson attempts.
"Shut up and learn something if you are capable, which I sincerely doubt. McFarlane had definitely not visited Oldacre Urban Solutions previously. A convenient lumber pile he might have found on his own, I grant you, but the exact chemicals capable of destroying a mutilated corpse? You think he entered a strange environment, killed a man, took his time over bashing his face in, not a bit worried over being discovered, and then just happened upon the right materials for arson? McFarlane is guilty of being framed by a criminal mastermind, and of being bad with finances. But he is entirely innocent of murder."
"What are you on to, then, Sherlock?" Lestrade urges with an encouraging half-smile, propping his hands on his hips. "We're after a different murderer?"
"Correct."
"Any idea who that might be?"
"Jonas Oldacre."
Anderson's lip curls up in disgust. "You think a suicide due to a terminal illness or some such killed himself with a hammer and then dragged his own corpse to a wood pile and lit himself on fire?"
"No. Only you could conceive of such a ridiculous notion." Sherlock turns up his coat collar as John stands. The sleuth heads for the door and throws it open.
"Anderson, take McFarlane back to his cell. Sherlock, where are we off to?" Lestrade asks.
"To Scotland Yard. To find the Norwood builder," Sherlock says as he sweeps out the door.
It takes hours.
Hours ticking along like the time bomb they know is out there, hours sweating like racehorses, hours piling up up up up up one after another like the bricks walling in the doomed man in the Poe story Sherlock read at John's suggestion.
Techs discovered CCTV footage of Oldacre leaving his construction company quickly enough, and the time stamp proved that he was alive when the fire started. Jim Moriarty, Sherlock is certain, came up with the master plan of providing Oldacre with a corpse which would then be rendered identity-free and dressed as the construction company owner. Oldacre's money by then would have been transferred almost entirely to a fake charity by the name of Cornelius Group, which Sherlock is reasonably sure has since been emptied into yet another account, but they are waiting on the bank for confirmation.
Once provided with a new identity, Oldacre would simply have vanished. Into thin air, with a fortune, some of which would go to Moriarty. And John McFarlane would be punished for a crime no one committed.
"Elegant," Sherlock whispers.
"Sorry?" says John.
Sherlock is sitting before a computer next to John as the other Yard officers fly around them in a flurry of activity, scouring airline records and CCTV and everything else they can think of. The detective's fingers are flying over the keys in search of relevant social media. Jonas Oldacre had been on Facebook but not Twitter, and interestingly, he had made passing mention of Morocco a few weeks before his death--about never having seen it, and wanting to. The police are duly researching flights around the time of Oldacre's "death" from London to Casablanca as Sherlock continues digging for leads.
Meanwhile, Sherlock's brain feels like a lightning rod, sucking energy from the skies and from the very static in the air around them. He hasn't been this impressed by a case in years.
"The frame job," Sherlock answers. "Elegant. The vengeance, the escape all in one. Moriarty is good at this."
When John doesn't answer, Sherlock glances at him. John's lips are doing peculiar new things which Sherlock duly catalogs as he tries to comprehend what has put his colleague in a snit.
"Not good?" he asks at last, returning his attention to the screen.
"Bit not good, yeah," John admits. "I mean, this crazy son of a bitch might want you to think it's a game, but we both know it's just a way to fuck with your head some more. And meanwhile, real people are getting hurt."
"Doesn't make it any less elegant," Sherlock mutters. "And at least it isn't boring. And no one has been hurt yet in any meaningful fashion."
"What about the unidentified corpse?"
"What about it?" Sherlock is scrolling through Oldacre's timeline, eyes taking in everything at a glance.
"Sherlock, Jesus, they could have murdered someone. Someone else, I mean. That person, whoever it was in the woodpile, died."
"Factually true, but irrelevant. I texted Mycroft. The grave robbing trick appears to have been practice in anticipation of sending me the severed head--when a pattern emerges, it always behooves one to follow the trail of said pattern to its fullest extent. The corpse was an ad executive who died three days before McFarlane was framed. Heart attack. He was a divorced father of two who cheated on his taxes. Mycroft says the perpetrators didn't even bother to hide the fact they'd snatched the corpse just after burial. Left an empty coffin and a hole in the ground, as they did with Carl Powers. I was meant to find the link."
"All right," John sighs at Sherlock's elbow, "that's better than it might have been. But you shouldn't... I'm glad you seem all right after--better than this morning, anyhow. Everything's going to be fine. But I'm a little disturbed that you're enjoying this so much. I mean, this crime is pretty sick. Just...so personal. Oldacre wanted McFarlane's life ruined, and his mother's by proxy."
"Uniquely vindictive," Sherlock concedes absently, eyes flicking over pixels.
John is silent for a while, and then sighs again. "He'd probably have let her know somehow he was behind it, later. Just to rub it in that much more. It's disgusting. No wonder Moriarty took the job, it's right up his street. Watching someone suffer."
Sherlock stills. He remains frozen for exactly four seconds. Then he whirls to John, catching him by the shoulders. John's deeply blue eyes widen in surprise.
"John Watson, you are brilliant, you are fantastic, yes, thank you, thank you, oh, you are perfect."
"What did--where--"
"Lestrade! Quickly!" Sherlock bellows, pushing and elbowing past startled detectives and technicians and finally racing into the hallway where Lestrade is having a quiet word with Sally Donovan.
"Yeah, what is it, Sherlock?" Lestrade asks, interrupting her. She frowns but subsides.
"McFarlane's mother's house. It's wired, probably in multiple rooms. Video feed, audio. Search it. Carefully. There will have been some sort of repair work recently--bad cable, the wireless not working, something like that. Find the bugs and trace them to Oldacre. He wants to watch his punishment as it unfolds, don't you see? This is obsession at its darkest. He wants to watch Mrs. McFarlane falling apart without her son. Find where the camera feed is going, use my brother's technical people if it's faster, and I guarantee you'll find Oldacre."
Lestrade's face lights up. "Let's move, people, you heard the man," he calls out, and then they are running again, out of the Yard, into a police car, John at his heels racing straight and steady and without a cane, John cradled in the detective's shadow even though Sherlock hasn't looked back and cannot see him.
John.
John who wouldn't let Anderson call Sherlock a freak even though he manifestly is one, John whose insight into human nature may have just given them the lead they desperately needed.
John who is in terrible danger.
John.
Sherlock swallows the lump in his throat as he dives headfirst into the police car and the sirens start blaring.
"That was incredible," John says breathlessly.
The chase led them to a hotel not far from Heathrow Airport. Oldacre hadn't been present at first, but they had prevailed upon the hotel staff even without a warrant and waited exactly twenty-seven minutes before his return with a boxed sandwich and three pornographic magazines. Oldacre turned out to be a wizened, wiry man with a truly odious face--crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-grey eyes and white eyelashes. Sherlock had loathed him on the spot.
There had been rather a lot of bother afterward. The arrest, Oldacre protesting tearfully that it had only been a practical joke, Sherlock dashing with John again at his heels down to the office and appropriating the hotel's computer to log into The Science of Deduction, posting to his forum that Oldacre had been found and arrested for falsifying his own death.
And then, as Sherlock cannot for the life of him forget, no matter that he has tried to delete it three times now, there was his phone instantly ringing and the voice of the hostage at the other end.
Well done, you, she'd said, sobbing.
Sherlock stares into his glass of neat scotch. He's sitting at the darkened hotel bar with John, both with necessary drinks in their hands, recovering as a football game plays in silence on the telly above them. The detective in the recent absence of Lestrade and his team feels triumphant but lightheaded, as well as a bit sick. Because that had been touch and go for a moment. He'd stopped the clock, but with little time to spare. And then he'd listened to a victim of Jim Moriarty's weeping frantic, terrified tears into his mobile.
Come and get me, she'd gasped.
It was horrible.
John, just to his left, is watching the match but thinking about Sherlock, Sherlock knows, while he sips his own glass of spirits. The doctor keeps saying things like really unbelievable that have nothing to do with blocks or goals.
Sherlock shoots the rest of his drink.
Where are you? Tell us where you are, Sherlock had said with seeming calm.
He wasn't calm, though. He wasn't even close to being calm. She'd sounded half dead of fear. She'd sounded just precisely the way Sherlock will doubtless sound in Jim's company, after two or three years of--
"You okay, mate?" John says, glancing at the empty glass. "Fancy another?"
Standing, Sherlock throws twenty pounds on the marble bar and tugs at John's sleeve. "Come."
"What, now?"
"Now."
John downs his own whiskey, and he follows.
Five minutes later, they are back in Oldacre's room on the third floor. It is now dark. The sliding door to the balcony remains open, as it was before, and Sherlock shuts it. He draws the cheap maroon curtains and flicks the bedside lamp on. The Norwood builder's laptop he'd been using for surveillance of Mrs. McFarlane was seized instantly, but Oldacre's toiletries are still in the loo, the sandwich still on the table, his clothing still in the drawers. Hateful traces of a hateful man. Sherlock can't give a damn at the moment. John is still in the tiny foyer when the hall door slowly clicks shut.
"Why did you keep Oldacre's key card?" he wonders. "He left it on the table when they arrested him."
"Sentiment."
"Are you...collecting more evidence? I thought we'd--"
In a single fluid motion, Sherlock spins John around and brings his hands up against the wall, lacing their fingers together.
"I...oh," John breathes as Sherlock's mouth descends to the back of his neck. "That sort of sentiment. Right."
John tastes like lemon there, like London rain, like the sweet and salty crust of a perfectly baked pie, like the desert wind, Sherlock registers as he mouths across John's nape. His tongue emerges, questing, and John's breathing quickens. Then Sherlock has John's fragile snappable spine between his teeth, biting softly before going back to dragging kisses, and John chuckles in a low register.
"This is a bad idea."
"No," Sherlock purrs, "this is a very good idea."
"We could go home--"
"Boring."
"If Lestrade comes back--"
"He won't. Shut up."
Backing away a little, Sherlock unlaces their fingers and pulls John's light green coat off his back. It hits the badly carpeted floor. Next is a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and he strips that off too as John continues to face the wall. Then Sherlock shrugs out of his Belstaff and goes back to what he was doing before, this time with an arm snaking around John's naked waist and his other hand sweeping up John's warm breakable vulnerable ribs. John's forearm hits the papered wall, and he rests his tousled head against it with a highly pleased sound humming through his perfectly formed nose.
"Don't ever stop doing that," John sighs.
"Ever?"
"Um. You are hereby granted permission to do that for years. If not decades."
"I want to tell you something," Sherlock murmurs against the freckles on John's shoulder, running his fingertips strongly up and down the small man's sides.
"Yeah?"
"Because you didn't want Anderson to call me a freak..."
"Ugh, could we not talk about that wanker right now?"
"...Even though technically he was correct. And that was...good. Good of you."
"If you mean freak like a bloody giant diamond or a rare breed of mountain lion, fine," John growls possessively, lifting one hand behind himself to brush at Sherlock's curls. "If you mean it like the Elephant Man, I will slap you."
"And because you helped solve the case," Sherlock adds. His breathing is growing laboured. Why is that? Why, when he is only kissing John's back, when he is only running his sensitive lips over the raised skin of the exit wound, why does he feel like his chest is too tight? Why does he feel like the crying woman, shivering and vulnerable and liable to explode at any moment? "That was brilliant, the remark about watching suffering, brilliant. So I want to tell you."
"So tell me."
"I'm telling you now. Are you listening?"
"Yeah," John breathes. His voice is gentle, caressing, like a warm summer breeze. "Yeah, I'm listening pretty hard right now."
"Good, because I'm telling you, I'm telling you now, you have to listen to me," Sherlock repeats, helpless to stop himself.
He reaches blindly around as he's tasting John's shoulder blades to unbutton and unzip his trousers. Tucking his thumbs into the waistband of John's pants and pulling forward away from his body slightly, he tugs down in a smooth motion, freeing John's cock into the air. Dizzy at the fact that he can touch even more of John now, he crowds forward, passing his palms up and down John's strong thighs, curving them back to the swell of his arse and kneading as he returns to lightly kissing his neck, sweeping his hands forward over the soldier's hips and then sinking them down toward his pelvis.
"Okay, yep, that's, ah, arousing," John pants.
"Are you listening?" Sherlock demands, growing jagged-edged and desperate.
"Yes, I promise, I swear I am."
Gently, Sherlock flips John around and his back hits the wall, his body swaying slightly due to the constriction of the clothing pooling at his thighs. Sherlock hits the floor. He hears John suck in a small breath of surprise, but that's senseless, John was warned this would happen. Perhaps he'd forgotten.
Sherlock nudges between John's knees. He's at approximate eye level with John's arousal now, musky and darkly flushed and pulsing in tiny echoed heartbeats, and Sherlock wonders how anyone can stand sex when they're aroused at the same time as a loved one, it would be awful, how could anyone contain such feelings while wanting to have an orgasm in the same time and space as the object of their total devotion? It would be like the collision of atoms that precipitates a nuclear event, it would be a pair of racecars colliding at full speed, it would be gruesome. It would end him entirely. Nosing into the soft nest of hair, Sherlock breathes in.
"Oh god," John, gasps. "You are, uh, actually going to do this. Christ. Sherlock, will you take your shirt off, please?"
Pressing tiny kisses into the soft skin of John's thigh, Sherlock fumbles with buttons. His hands are shaking.
Why are your hands shaking, you done this plenty of times with total nitwits, you ridiculous creature, he'll think you're frightened and stop you, and you aren't, or not of him, not of giving him what he wants even if he won't ever tell you he wants it, not of learning him better or taking him inside you, you're only concerned that the throbbing in your chest might literally break your heart.
Wrestling his shirt off and tossing it aside with the rest of the rumpled clothing on the floor, Sherlock wills himself to breathe deeply. In and out, in and out, like a normal person. A sane person. Like a person who likes doing this with people to whom they are attracted. It happens every day, all over London, between stupid people. Nice people. This is no different on a technical level.
Reaching up, he cups John's thighs just where they meet his arse and then slowly skims his mouth along the hard ridge leading from John's hip to his pelvis. John's hands come down to card very softly through his hair again.
"Are you going to say something unbearably stupid like do you really want to?" Sherlock asks a bit unevenly.
Because if you did, I think at this point it might actually finish me.
"Nope," John says, and Sherlock can hear a smile layered on top of the bottomless affection.
Thank god, Sherlock thinks, letting out the breath he was holding. "Are you thinking something stupid along those or similar lines?"
"No." John brushes his nails across Sherlock's scalp. "I'm thinking you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
Sherlock's eyes wince shut and he buries his face in John's smooth thigh, trying to force the trembling to stop. How John could imagine that to be true is beyond him completely, but it's too much, he's not aroused and isn't ever going to be by this sort of thing but somehow it's already devastating, it's--
"Hey, hey. Sherlock. Baby, look at me. Just because you really want something doesn't mean you can't change your--oh, fuck."
Sherlock has only the tip of John's cock in his lips, his right hand lightly circling the heated flesh, both aiming it and caressing it, thinking it's perfect he's perfect and I'm not supposed to have this and making every practical effort he can not to have a stroke then and there. He pulls off with soft suction and mouths over the tip again, tasting briny moisture, lapping at cells produced by John, who he loves so much that it just might kill him. When he swallows them, they will creating new cells inside Sherlock, and John will be more a part of him than ever. John shivers violently when Sherlock leans in further, pressing the tight, hot skin against the roof of his mouth.
"Oh, shit, that is perfect, god, yes, thank you. Please, just like that. Jesus, Sherlock. Oh my god."
In his momentary nervousness, Sherlock hadn't hazarded a glance up. Now he does, angling his eyes ceilingward to meet John's partly shadowed face. John is watching proceedings with such an expression of tenderness that Sherlock exhales a muffled little moaning sound.
"Your mouth. God, Sherlock, your mouth. You're..." One of John's hands leaves Sherlock's hair, and he traces his finger around where his prick is encircled by Sherlock's lips, reverently following the bow of the detective's mouth. He looks very sad suddenly. He looks as sad as Sherlock has ever seen him.
"What's wrong?" Sherlock questions, pulling back a little. John's fingers follow his lips as if to lose contact with them now would be ruinous and Sherlock catches two, tonguing up the first knuckles, scraping his teeth along the tiny ridges as John watches in a sort of pained awe.
"I can't believe you," John whispers. "I still can't believe you. I try, trust me. But. It's all so bloody unreal. Before I moved in, I thought every morning that probably I'd only dreamed you before I double checked on my phone. And sometimes before that day at the Friesland I'd wake up in your bed alone and think it was maybe my flat, just my flat, and I invented you, that being so isolated had just...snapped me. I didn't, though, did I? You're here."
This, Sherlock thinks as his eyes shut again and a deep shudder goes through him, is completely unacceptable. Pull yourself together, Sherlock Holmes. It's sex. It's just sex.
Don't panic.
Sex doesn't alarm you.
Orgasms and feelings, though, Sherlock realizes. He should have known as much, deduced it about himself. Both orgasms and feelings alarm him tremendously.
Tightening his grip and diving forward once more, he begins to bob his head in earnest. John gasps, and then sighs luxuriously, muttering "God yes, Sherlock, amazing, fuck, you're amazing, please," as Sherlock takes him further down his throat. Reaching up, Sherlock cups one side of John's arse firmly and pulls him in that much deeper, earning a growl from the doctor, who is sliding bonelessly down the wall.
Sherlock increases the suction for long moments, tongues at the slit as his fingers tighten and pump during others, worships the person before him thinking only, I love you, are you listening, are you hearing that, because I do, I love you, listen to me telling you that I love you. It's when John's thighs start to tremble and his panting breaths grow faster that Sherlock makes a truly shocking realization.
He doesn't want it to stop.
Pulling off with a strange sound he wasn't aware he was capable of, Sherlock kisses John's belly, kisses his upper thigh and the crease of his leg, running his left hand all the while over John's skin, the right still circling his cock, but now without discernible pressure. John's hands in his hair tighten, knead lovingly, not hurrying him, just stroking, letting him delay the inevitable, and Sherlock remembers being yanked by the curls on multiple occasions and wills himself not to fall to pieces. He kisses everywhere and nowhere for long minutes until he can breathe relatively normally. Then he plunges down on John's now painful-seeming erection again, all the way and without warning this time, and John makes a noise like he's dying.
"You're so bloody good," John moans. "You're a fucking miracle, you are. So good, Sherlock."
"It's important to be good," Sherlock admits without thinking, raising his head.
"Why?"
"Because the better I am at it, the sooner--"
Sherlock stops himself milliseconds before the utter train wreck of a statement he'd been about to make emerges to ruin everything.
--the sooner it's over.
"The sooner you'll want me to do it again," he says, meeting John's eyes.
It's the truth, which is the only reason Sherlock gets away with it. John laughs, tracing his fingers over Sherlock's left ear.
"I will never stop wanting you to do this, if you like it," he says softly. "When and where you want."
Sherlock could collapse in relief. But that won't do, so instead he smirks his wickedest smirk and says, "Where I want? Is that wise?"
"God, Sherlock, I don't give a shit if it's wise. Yes. All right? Train stations, public parks, banking queues. Yes. My answer to your question, supposing the topic is blow jobs, is now officially yes."
For a little while, Sherlock stares as John rubs a thumb along his cheekbone. But the moment arrives all too quickly when Sherlock cannot look up at John any longer, cannot see him smiling and approving from above, radiating fondness and patience.
So Sherlock takes John in his mouth again, fully aware he's hiding, and this time means to finish what he began.
It doesn't take long. A minute or two (imprecision in time measurement, what has become of you, appalling), deep pushing of his head while stroking firmly over John's sack (but I don't want to end it even now, I never want it to stop, and at this point in my life every time may be the last time), his lips starting to feel pleasantly battered and his throat growing sore (he could do anything he wanted to me and I'd probably thank him for it, how ridiculous) and John is shuddering and muffling a thin cry with one hand as he comes, thick and pulsing hotly, down Sherlock's throat. The detective swallows most of it. A little remains in his mouth and he swallows again.
John's legs are shaking, Sherlock realizes seconds later, and he seems about ready to collapse. So Sherlock staggers to his feet and slides his arms around the small doctor and in a few stumbling steps tips them together onto the coverlet of the neatly made single bed by the door, rolling them fully onto the mattress.
Slowly, silently, John recovers his breath. Then he shifts to rearrange them, lying on his back and pulling Sherlock half on top of him, Sherlock's leg thrown over John's disarrayed trousers, John planting small kisses along his brow.
It doesn't take long for John to realize there is something very amiss.
He is not the only one shaking. Sherlock had thought that the tremors would go away when it was over. They haven't. He's shivering as if it's freezing in here, and the room is perfectly climate controlled. And now John has noticed.
"Sherlock, what's the matter? That was...I don't have words for what that was. Did I hurt you?"
Sherlock shakes his head. "No. But I made a terrible mistake," he whispers.
He can feel John freeze in horror, no no no no no, not like that, so Sherlock scrambles to his elbows, hovering over the doctor's lined face.
"I wanted to tell you, I wanted for you to hear me, I needed you to realize, but then I think I said the wrong thing," Sherlock babbles. He's past any semblance of coherence now, but maybe John will still understand and the frown between his dark eyes will disappear. "I mean, I meant that as well, what I said to you, it wasn't a lie, god it wasn't, but I meant to tell you..."
Biting his lip for a moment, Sherlock leans down. He kisses John feather-softly, on his cheeks and his eyelids and his forehead. He kisses him as if he were the most precious thing in the world now, because it's true. And John needs to know.
When Sherlock pulls away, John's eyes are very bright.
"Did you hear me?" Sherlock whispers. "Were you listening?"
"Yeah," John replies hoarsely. Reaching, up he pulls Sherlock's head down, and kisses him ever so sweetly between his eyes. "Yeah, I was listening. I heard you."