![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
007 - Sherlock Holmes & John Watson - (wip)
There is a long hollowness in the evenings. They progress like copper pipes, and the smell and the taste of them only adds to that long, long emptiness, the long void. It's terrible, it's dangerous; there's room for all sorts to slip in, the sordid and the seemly in equal measure, and which is worse is measured by where they happen to land on the balance of happenstance, which is a messy state of affairs at best. One might walk long hallways of manufactured occupation, turn over in one's hand — eyes closed and reclined, air sluggish in one's lungs — a simulacrum of something gone by but that doesn't change that it has gone by, or seal up the gaps. Ozone still seeps in, and with it a fanciful caprice.
At times Sherlock Holmes would like to be generous. It arrives mostly in those long, hollow evenings, whenever there is time to examine the shape of himself, probe at it with a mind like clever fingers and find where it is lacking. Perhaps it would be more pleasing if it were just a bit more rounded here, a bit less sharp. There is a vague warmth to the idea of generosity; it has a fuzzy, nebulous shape, pillowed and soft. He can never see it head on — there is, after all, the deep chasm between generous intent and generous reality, and he's a chemist, not an architect. It hardly ever occurs to him to try to bridge the gap; successful attempts are enacted less often, and most of them are born here, in the foetid stillness of circumstantial pipes. It disgusts him, and he shifts under the uncomfortable weight of it on the sofa some nights, as though he can worm out from beneath his own fantastic notions, shed them like snakeskin.
He can't. He still looks at people — at one person, in all honesty, just one — and thinks that he'd like to be brilliant, always brilliant, always right, drag them — one, just one; the only one who'd care — along on his coattails into dark places so he can pull through and drag them out again; he'd like to be that, generous, do it all for the sake of making someone else's pulse jump in their throat rather than for himself, always himself, both heartbeats swallowed up jealously to bolster his self-satisfaction, his exhilaration, his...
He'd like to take John Watson apart, it occurs to him sometimes (long, hollow evenings), and examine every piece in equal detail, put him back together again right, maybe even better — that would be generous too. Wouldn't it? Sherlock's idea of better is being known and that says too much about him for him to examine it critically. It would though, surely it would; it's a kindness to devote one's mind to someone. He can't even bother to narrow it down for the cases sometimes, not completely, but he'd try for that project, for that brilliant and impossible task. And he'd like to excise all of John's troubles, eat up the nightmares for his own (they say so much, so very much), savour them on his tongue but that's wrong, that's all wrong: you're not supposed to be delighted by someone else's pain.
That, of course, is where sordid begins to blend with the rest. There is a more obvious wrongness: the contemplation of things like death and what they might be like, how other people might react if he were to suffer, what that would mean. What it would be like to have the opportunity to take the world and remake it in his image, like James Moriarty tried to do; it would be a lie to say it didn't occur to him sometimes to want it and it would be a greater lie to say that that desire is not at times deep and desperate. Burn it — long, hollow evenings especially — to the ground. All of it. Everything. Everyone. Especially Sherlock Holmes.
He is, of course, an idea. Sherlock Holmes; an idea created in the long hollowness of other people's evenings, beyond what may be contemplated, creeping into the impossibly obscure. There is a person, but whether or not the name fits anymore is anyone's guess. Sherlock himself wavers in regard to the answer. In practice it really doesn't matter. Of course, therein lies another desire, which too slips in among other fancies in moments of idleness: in an act more sordid and more seemly than any of the rest and therefore more deeply buried, he comes to wish that it did. That it might be permitted of him to be honest, really honest in the way people want him to be honest until he really is. To say it, perhaps: sometimes I think I want to know every single one of your cells. Nobody ever sees that. Nobody, not ever. Not even at the taking of the offhand comment, a grin, some other moment in which the space between the ideas of people is quickened and something vaguely approximating sameness starts to jump between them like an impulse in a synapse.
Like now. These are the things one — or at least Sherlock Holmes, singular — thinks about when faced with a smile like that — wide, mad (but not like Sherlock is mad), adrenaline-fueled and far from decent. This evening has been neither long nor hollow but somewhere in the fullness John has managed to find this acute reminder, forced it up out of that split lip with each heartbeat along with the blood. It's started drying now, gone a bit crusted over, but that smile has probably started it again just the slightest bit. Just a bit, and none of the things that Sherlock wants to do are generous. There is clarity in comparison; illumination comes best aimed brightly from across a room. Then nothing gets washed out. Nothing. Shame all of this is going to be, once John sets to doctoring himself.
"God," John says, a vague and meaningless profanity, "I feel like a crime scene. Can't imagine I look any better."
The answer, of course, is no. He looks like a crime scene too, the sort Sherlock flits about and absorbs, and his fingers itch to find the gloves in his pocket, slip them on out of a desire to preserve the sanctity as much as to avoid contamination. This is different, though, and even now, Sherlock is the one doing all the seeing. Maybe it's for the best: all that not-generosity must be there, crawling under the surface, all these selfish things, probably sick things; it isn't as though Sherlock has ever been able to tell. He is sick. He's been sick all his life, and that spoils perspective along with the fruit of his mind.
"No." He gives a sharp inclination of the head, an upward nod. Let me have a look at you. And like that, like clockwork, like it means something, like they're two neurons in a larger brain again, John does. It's more complex than that, always more complex, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking equal and opposite things, playing with opposite sides, with seeing and being seen. Sherlock does the seeing because he's good at it, and John is seen because he enjoys it. Has since the start, since St. Bart's. It was transparent then, and in the cab, and now it's something vaguely altered under the lights in the hall outside of the bathroom in this, their shared space. Something that's been brewing a long time, has picked up so many more complex connotations simply by osmosis, by virtue of their having spent so much more time dancing around the boundaries of one another.
Sherlock supposes theirs is a strange relationship. That supposition brews in the back of his mind as he leans forward slightly, just carefully, just so, so as not to block the light, and lets himself become the bloodhound. It's pure indulgence. He doesn't know whether or not John even notices that he's matching the little cut to the second knuckle of the man's fist, reading how it was compressed with startling rapidity against the lower right lateral incisor with sufficient force as to cause the skin to split, probably
the knuckle too, and for a moment he's deeply jealous of that matched sensation.
He tilts his head to one side, and John follows, indulgent, releasing a gust of air identifiable as a silent laugh in spite of its uncertainty, in spite of the fact that it has clearly been released to fill the air between them and obfuscate the less savoury aspects of what's happening. Even where he is now, tucked away into the parts of his head which govern the more ruthless, less selfless parts of himself, Sherlock can recognise that they stand on a razor's edge. It's deeply tenuous, and he shores them up with murmured observations:
"Left hand. You were expecting the right; a fair assumption, statistically more likely, but obviously wrong if you'd bothered to note the state of his knuckles and the development of the muscles of the thumb, which you didn't. You never do." It isn't critical, not quite. He's working, working at self-indulgence rather than the solution to the crime, which he already knows, but all the same it's work after a fashion and he loves his work. He's good at it, too, which is why he can't help but see the underlying current of trust in the complaisant tilt of John's head, in the exposed neck and the quiet impatience in the averted eyes. Get it done with. Like he's a mother to a child, rubbing away a scuff of dirt with a shirtsleeve.
"Yeah, cheers." As though they aren't standing on a tightrope, but the convulsion of the throat gives it away, the half-nervous swallow. They're wavering; the line shudders beneath them. Maybe he shouldn't say any more. Maybe neither of them should.
"It won't scar." Not unless I make it. I could make it. Sherlock runs his thumb over the pads of his fingers to stave off the urge to press it against the cut, to grind in, hard, for the exclamation and the sensation and whatever might follow. It wouldn't mean anything. It'd be the opposite of meaningful: he arrives for a split second at the decision that nobody else deserves to be commemorated in John's skin, this bubbling, jealous realization and it heats up the pit of his stomach, twists his insides in a way which isn't wholly unpleasant; he nearly startles before the alarms begin their blaring: Not Good. Not a bit Good.
Besides, he's already late. There are deeper scars than even he's willing to make. The sort that make John Watson dream of deserts, and Sherlock Holmes feel vicious towards men he's never met. Something about that, or maybe it's the invitation, practically gift-wrapped, which he is possibly just imagining, reading into the data to fit his own selfish inclinations, sets him to pressing his thumb to the indentation beneath John's lower lip, gripping the jaw with clinical gentleness and adjusting the angle of the man's head of his own accord. It's almost shocking; he forgets occasionally that living people are so warm. Warmth is a measure of time in his practical world, not of life; life is more obscure.
There's the huff of a laugh. Another compulsive swallow. You're a strange man, Sherlock Holmes.
Yes. Yes, of course. And the idle, fascinated sweep of his thumb over lightly-stubbled skin is even stranger. Usually he's got gloves on, usually it isn't this close. And people, living people, are never this indulgent. It feels deeply wrong to take advantage, and yet his hand shifts to conform itself to the shape of John's neck, fingers pressing firmly against the side and thumb exerting pressure on the edge of the jaw to encourage his head back further. Cartilage and muscle shift under his palm, an unusual amount of salivation which means that the tightrope is gone, slipped out from under them, and now he's not sure what they're standing on. Something finer and more tenuous still. Don't say a word.
It's probably superstitious, the perceived taboo against the breaking of some imaginary spell. Sherlock wouldn't know what to say anyway. Nobody else in the world would trust his hand around their throat. No, that isn't fair. John doesn't either, not quite, not completely, and that he's permitting it has as much to do with what sent him to Afghanistan as with what lets him sleep in a flat shared by a madman and leave the door to his room unlocked. They both know that Sherlock isn't murderous, true. True, but they also both know, or have some vague sense of, what this is.
And what it isn't.
It isn't stopping.
On the contrary: the pulse jumps. Sherlock's eyes drift to the shell of John's ear, fingers tightening almost imperceptibly in a vague fascination at the shape, brilliantly engineered and bearing such papery-fine skin, plus a handful of minor secrets of little use in isolation. Given the opportunity he could pick John's parents out in a crowd by the ears alone, his sister too, but somehow this is less about that (it should be about that; where they've gone wrong Sherlock will never know) and more about the flesh-and-blood of the here and now, all of the implications John carries beneath his skin. Who they are, jointly. Who he is alone. All of the hooks sunk into his flesh and tugging him this way and that, and the fact that somehow, inexplicably, unexpectedly the whole and the constituent parts have blended together and by osmosis, by natural law the importance of one has seeped into the other. I want to take you apart and put you back together again. I want to know everything about you. Everything.
The filthiest bit of it all is that the virtue of association makes it all worth knowing. Nothing is more shameful than sentiment.
John swallows again. Heightened pulse. Increased salivation. The most marginal edge of a flush to the ears, always the ears first, fine skin, and under Sherlock's attention at that -- embarrassment. It is embarrassing, being the object of the attention of a man like Sherlock Holmes. But there's something hovering vaguely at the precipice miles above hysteria in the sidelong glance that John gives him, just the flicker of a shared glance. Something has him licking his lips. That's nerves.
Nerves.
Sherlock wants to set them all alight, sink his teeth in. He can imagine the path of the impulse, racing up John's spine like a bullet from the barrel of a gun and ricocheting around in his head. What sparks when he says Sherlock's name?
Best, of course, not to think too hard about what his own are up to. Best not to touch on what parts of the brain light up at the sensation of warm, surprisingly soft skin. Whatever this is, his touch has to remain businesslike. Cursory. It's part of the arrangement of their association that he is businesslike and cursory whenever possible, indulging in companionship or caprice or whatever it occurs to him to indulge in only when he's earned it — and quite frankly no amount of brilliance will ever earn him this sort of indulgence. He's well aware he's accruing debt, but that doesn't mean he needs to reveal precisely how much.
So he hums. Softly, thoughtfully, the way he might do at a crime scene, maybe. Possibly. And John looks like one, is one, has been the entirety of their association so why not? They love crime scenes. On some level this is understood. Shared. Sherlock gently manoeuvres John's head in the other direction, to catch another angle, but he's sure there's no pretending that he's just looking at the cut anymore. No need to bother with that, then.
"What?" The question is impatient, the nervousness still in full swing. It occurs to Sherlock that this probably isn't the sort of dangerous with which John is comfortable, that he's probably overstepping some bounds, clumsily most likely, as is his wont. That's fair — Sherlock isn't certain it's the sort of dangerous with which he's comfortable either, mostly as he's not certain what sort of dangerous it is in the first place. This is a learning experience for all involved. That's part of what's so indecent about it.
"What are you looking for?" He hasn't answered. John is tense. What's left of the tightrope beneath them shudders violently.
"Anything. You." And then, for good measure: "Shut up."
It isn't cruel. It isn't even particularly forceful. Shut up, unless you want me to stop now. He curls his forefinger so that the nail is pressed just faintly against John's skin. Neither of them say anything.
It would be easier to ask. To outline what is and isn't, what can and cannot be but they've never operated on certainties. Sherlock isn't even convinced that they can operate on certainties, bound up as they are in the necessity of not knowing. If they were to know both where they are and how fast they're going, it might all fall apart, and the entanglement which keeps them moving in matched, mirrored patterns might unravel. John doesn't want to know anything about Sherlock, not really, and Sherlock... it's impossible, always changing, will never reach the end but if he did then there would be nothing left for him but elsewhere, somewhere and something new. And he would no longer be interesting. He would no longer be dangerous. There would be nothing binding John to him any more, all purposes no longer served. The contract would end.
In the interest, therefore, of remaining unpredictable he doesn't ask. Neither of them ask. Sherlock's heart, for inscrutable reasons, pounds.
They can't stagnate, either.
They have to reinvent themselves. Any formula requires variables. Sherlock's fingers drag into John's hair, businesslike. Always businesslike, even as he's sifting through the soft strands and is vaguely surprised to find them warm.
No particular predisposition to male-pattern baldness.
The brain, of course, is warm.
No swelling, no cuts, no splitting. Not even near the temple where Sherlock knows a glancing blow was struck.
It's hungry, the brain. Pulls greedily at the blood supply, steals under duress; the brain is precious. John's brain is, quite logically, all the more precious. His skull is smaller than expected; Sherlock's fingers press against it, sorting out its shape, and he receives for his trouble a huff of protest, but neither of them attempts to pull away.
He wonders how long this will be permitted to go on, what places he might possibly take it. There is profound curiosity. There is also something else, something far less savoury, something in the quiet exultation in being permitted to touch, which seems like such a simple thing but most people shrink and the ones that don't he doesn't trust. Not generally. Not with hands as sensitive as his. None of that even brushes against the inevitable entanglement of sentiment. Sherlock wishes it wouldn't. He can't address it; some things are too large for a body to hold.
He wishes that brushing his thoughts against it were like dragging his thumb over the torn edge of rough paper, something viscerally wrong and vaguely nauseating, something at which to wrinkle his nose and avoid doing ever again, instead of something that makes the pit of his stomach drop out and his viscera squirm like snakes, or twist like someone is wringing the love out of him like water from a towel. It would be more tolerable if it were to disgust him.
It doesn't. He disgusts himself, but the thoughts themselves hardly even flit around distaste, even (especially?) when he thinks they ought to. Not for the first time he wonders what another person — a normal person — might think, in a situation like this. What another person might read into the act of touching or into being touched, what John reads into the drag of Sherlock's fingernails across his scalp... but then John isn't normal, and worse than that, he knows him, has sussed out at the very least some fuzzy silhouette of Sherlock's mental form. What does it look like, the shape of him under the light the simple act of contact casts upon it?
They remain, of course, a few micrometres apart. Their atoms sense one another's presence, but only across distances, only by the force they exert on one another. They don't touch. Pass by one another, through empty space. If one looks closely enough, Sherlock isn't crossing any boundaries at all. Whether or not he wants to is another matter. That's where the normal people come in, the Real People, and all the things they want for the sake of wanting them, without thought, without implication, because they do, not because they've tangled themselves up such that they become a chain reaction. The knowing, the wanting to know. What it means to want to know, what it means to be allowed; how they all blend together, spun like fibres into yarn, into something usable, something which cannot easily be separated out again into its constituent pieces.
It follows a clear line, like the lengths of string tacked up against the maps pinned to the walls. A line runs from hand to brain, where it follows a snaking pattern from point to point. Nerves, neurons, some more nebulous concept like heartstrings escaping Sherlock, who knows better, but if perhaps he were someone more ordinary he might conceive of things that way, rather than knowing the brain for what it is.
It's possible to tell so much about someone by how they treat the space that might be occupied by those around them. People curl up on themselves like mice; mice are respectful or they're scared. Sherlock traces the patch of improbably smooth skin behind John's ear. What does that say about him? If he's not a mouse, what is he?
Ultimately it might be irrelevant, but a host of answers present themselves anyway, buzzing in the back of his brain. If not mouse or man then monster, perhaps; hyperbolic thoughts not worth entertaining, but somewhere in there is a useful shorthand. He's Sherlock Holmes, and no one should ever indulge Sherlock Holmes. But John Watson, who looks like a crime scene, is far from no one, and that's point one, the mental locus of this chain of nearly-simultaneous reactions. John Watson, who is not no one, who looks like a crime scene and is providing Sherlock with the opportunity to treat him like one, with all the tenderness with which he usually addresses only the dead. John, the texture of whose skin is a feature of its construction, of the ways in which his cells adhere to one another, cells which are alive with activity now, nurtured by the meals they've shared and the air they are both breathing and equally importantly sent into a flurry of activity by the touch of Sherlock's fingertips, which kill but also spark a set of chain reactions ultimately travelling the distance to John's brain, where they set off other things, fireworks, and a matched process is occurring in Sherlock now; they are mirrored, and John Watson is not no one, and everything he is is by extension important.
The weight of him, of all the concepts Sherlock has tied to him, are heavy in the moment. Sherlock wonders if John can even sense any of it, or if it's only him, back bent under the profound solemnity of that half-formed realisation as to what they are. He catches John's gaze, curious, embarrassed, plenty of other things as ill-defined as the fanciful notions of hollow evenings, and now this one too — somehow it holds. They are very close. It isn't startling: they are often very close. All the same he finds himself in the peculiar, almost uncomfortable positioning of noticing without reading, of realising in some visceral way, perhaps for the first time, the particular intricacies of the iris, the improbably fine layering of fibrovascular tissue. He is intent, focused; in some ways, almost quiet. Almost the crime scene sort of quiet. It's just as well that John feels like one.
There is a flick of the eyes vaguely downwards, nervous, a nervous glance at Sherlock's mouth; sand begins to fall through his mental hourglass, building realisation grain by grain. A dilation of pupils and capillaries. The licking of lips. An unwillingness to meet his eyes, or to break their gaze once met. To draw attention to the rest.
Sherlock is arrogant, but not sufficiently arrogant as to think that it has anything to do with him, with any of the qualities associated with the idea of him, with his manifest physical reality. It's always been about the brain, between them, now as much as ever — this is about knowing, and more essentially still it is about being known, scrutinized, held in attention. If all it would have taken is the appropriate combination of proximity and opportunity they'd have reached this point before now.
His fingers drop to John's collar, and flick the first button open unceremoniously. John swallows thickly and his lips part, eyebrows drawing down in a vague expression of offence, of momentary anger that dissipates with a telling rapidity into something like shock, but — and this is both most telling and most confusing of all — he says nothing. Not even when Sherlock flicks the next button open and tugs the collar of his shirt aside to expose the edge of old scar tissue, not even when he bends in, not quite daring to breathe, for a closer look. He can see John's pulse jumping in his throat, set in delicate relief by the light fixture overhead.
John's hand finds Sherlock's shoulder, and grips tightly. For the life of him Sherlock can't figure out if it's a warning, an admonishment, an attempt to keep him still, or a simpler but no less loaded grab, perhaps desperate, for stability. Either way, he's helpless but to keep pushing. No, God, that's not true, not in the slightest. It would be so much nicer if it were. So much kinder. So much less monstrous. He should by all rights have stopped before any of this had started indulging this strange and peculiarly loaded curiosity, never mind that it's mutual, never mind that John wants to see where he goes next as much as Sherlock does. Never mind the dare implicit in that, and when have they ever been very good at standing down when challenged? He presses his fingertips gently to the skin of John's shoulder and pulls the skin taut with equal gentleness. It's all there. From pin along rifling through a long stretch of open air to flesh and bone, skin splitting, bone snapping under the impact, the bullet shattering, bits of it lodging here, there. Cut out here, there. In between the soft murmur of his voice, assembling the puzzle pieces aloud for the both of them, this is for the both of them, Sherlock's breathing is shallow, silent, fascinated. John's is vaguely strained.
It's probably filthy. It certainly isn't normal; most people shrink under Sherlock's attention. It's possible he should even be offended, but he isn't. If anything, he thinks they understand one another at this moment more perfectly than they are wont. The impression is gone in a moment, in a ragged, dazed exhalation and an audible swallow — John is just as surprised about this as Sherlock is, which is relieving and confusing at once, and more guiltily deeply fascinating — but the effect lingers and he wants it back, wants to examine it in more detail. It must be in the body language somewhere. Somewhere underneath a silent oh, God — unspoken mortification in the way John's head is turned away, eyes shut — and he must know. Of course he knows. It's all so deeply obvious. His held breath seeps out gently, and he knows he's close enough now that it can be felt on John's collarbone.
None of that, not an instant of it matches the first wet press of Sherlock's tongue, eyelids falling fitfully shut as John releases a surprised, half-furious hiss, something that might have been a Jesus! had he been given more time to consider his options for blaspheming, a failure to launch more than made up for by the sudden and vicious grip he takes on Sherlock's hair, a sharp-edged pain and pressure not quite pulling him away. That should be enough to make Sherlock's gut clench, but oddly enough the mere sensation beats his idle realisations to the punch, shooting heat down his spine to blossom in the pit of his belly like poison. He's too distracted to address the implications, caught up in the taste of John's skin (faintly salty with sweat — they've been running — but also vaguely coppery where the hypertrophic tissue intersects uninjured flesh) and the finely-tuned topography he's mapping as though it means something, as though there's more to the act than pure desire, if not of the sort people normally entertain. He's hungry and he's monstrous and John clinging to him like an anchor only makes him more so.
At times Sherlock Holmes would like to be generous. It arrives mostly in those long, hollow evenings, whenever there is time to examine the shape of himself, probe at it with a mind like clever fingers and find where it is lacking. Perhaps it would be more pleasing if it were just a bit more rounded here, a bit less sharp. There is a vague warmth to the idea of generosity; it has a fuzzy, nebulous shape, pillowed and soft. He can never see it head on — there is, after all, the deep chasm between generous intent and generous reality, and he's a chemist, not an architect. It hardly ever occurs to him to try to bridge the gap; successful attempts are enacted less often, and most of them are born here, in the foetid stillness of circumstantial pipes. It disgusts him, and he shifts under the uncomfortable weight of it on the sofa some nights, as though he can worm out from beneath his own fantastic notions, shed them like snakeskin.
He can't. He still looks at people — at one person, in all honesty, just one — and thinks that he'd like to be brilliant, always brilliant, always right, drag them — one, just one; the only one who'd care — along on his coattails into dark places so he can pull through and drag them out again; he'd like to be that, generous, do it all for the sake of making someone else's pulse jump in their throat rather than for himself, always himself, both heartbeats swallowed up jealously to bolster his self-satisfaction, his exhilaration, his...
He'd like to take John Watson apart, it occurs to him sometimes (long, hollow evenings), and examine every piece in equal detail, put him back together again right, maybe even better — that would be generous too. Wouldn't it? Sherlock's idea of better is being known and that says too much about him for him to examine it critically. It would though, surely it would; it's a kindness to devote one's mind to someone. He can't even bother to narrow it down for the cases sometimes, not completely, but he'd try for that project, for that brilliant and impossible task. And he'd like to excise all of John's troubles, eat up the nightmares for his own (they say so much, so very much), savour them on his tongue but that's wrong, that's all wrong: you're not supposed to be delighted by someone else's pain.
That, of course, is where sordid begins to blend with the rest. There is a more obvious wrongness: the contemplation of things like death and what they might be like, how other people might react if he were to suffer, what that would mean. What it would be like to have the opportunity to take the world and remake it in his image, like James Moriarty tried to do; it would be a lie to say it didn't occur to him sometimes to want it and it would be a greater lie to say that that desire is not at times deep and desperate. Burn it — long, hollow evenings especially — to the ground. All of it. Everything. Everyone. Especially Sherlock Holmes.
He is, of course, an idea. Sherlock Holmes; an idea created in the long hollowness of other people's evenings, beyond what may be contemplated, creeping into the impossibly obscure. There is a person, but whether or not the name fits anymore is anyone's guess. Sherlock himself wavers in regard to the answer. In practice it really doesn't matter. Of course, therein lies another desire, which too slips in among other fancies in moments of idleness: in an act more sordid and more seemly than any of the rest and therefore more deeply buried, he comes to wish that it did. That it might be permitted of him to be honest, really honest in the way people want him to be honest until he really is. To say it, perhaps: sometimes I think I want to know every single one of your cells. Nobody ever sees that. Nobody, not ever. Not even at the taking of the offhand comment, a grin, some other moment in which the space between the ideas of people is quickened and something vaguely approximating sameness starts to jump between them like an impulse in a synapse.
Like now. These are the things one — or at least Sherlock Holmes, singular — thinks about when faced with a smile like that — wide, mad (but not like Sherlock is mad), adrenaline-fueled and far from decent. This evening has been neither long nor hollow but somewhere in the fullness John has managed to find this acute reminder, forced it up out of that split lip with each heartbeat along with the blood. It's started drying now, gone a bit crusted over, but that smile has probably started it again just the slightest bit. Just a bit, and none of the things that Sherlock wants to do are generous. There is clarity in comparison; illumination comes best aimed brightly from across a room. Then nothing gets washed out. Nothing. Shame all of this is going to be, once John sets to doctoring himself.
"God," John says, a vague and meaningless profanity, "I feel like a crime scene. Can't imagine I look any better."
The answer, of course, is no. He looks like a crime scene too, the sort Sherlock flits about and absorbs, and his fingers itch to find the gloves in his pocket, slip them on out of a desire to preserve the sanctity as much as to avoid contamination. This is different, though, and even now, Sherlock is the one doing all the seeing. Maybe it's for the best: all that not-generosity must be there, crawling under the surface, all these selfish things, probably sick things; it isn't as though Sherlock has ever been able to tell. He is sick. He's been sick all his life, and that spoils perspective along with the fruit of his mind.
"No." He gives a sharp inclination of the head, an upward nod. Let me have a look at you. And like that, like clockwork, like it means something, like they're two neurons in a larger brain again, John does. It's more complex than that, always more complex, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking equal and opposite things, playing with opposite sides, with seeing and being seen. Sherlock does the seeing because he's good at it, and John is seen because he enjoys it. Has since the start, since St. Bart's. It was transparent then, and in the cab, and now it's something vaguely altered under the lights in the hall outside of the bathroom in this, their shared space. Something that's been brewing a long time, has picked up so many more complex connotations simply by osmosis, by virtue of their having spent so much more time dancing around the boundaries of one another.
Sherlock supposes theirs is a strange relationship. That supposition brews in the back of his mind as he leans forward slightly, just carefully, just so, so as not to block the light, and lets himself become the bloodhound. It's pure indulgence. He doesn't know whether or not John even notices that he's matching the little cut to the second knuckle of the man's fist, reading how it was compressed with startling rapidity against the lower right lateral incisor with sufficient force as to cause the skin to split, probably
the knuckle too, and for a moment he's deeply jealous of that matched sensation.
He tilts his head to one side, and John follows, indulgent, releasing a gust of air identifiable as a silent laugh in spite of its uncertainty, in spite of the fact that it has clearly been released to fill the air between them and obfuscate the less savoury aspects of what's happening. Even where he is now, tucked away into the parts of his head which govern the more ruthless, less selfless parts of himself, Sherlock can recognise that they stand on a razor's edge. It's deeply tenuous, and he shores them up with murmured observations:
"Left hand. You were expecting the right; a fair assumption, statistically more likely, but obviously wrong if you'd bothered to note the state of his knuckles and the development of the muscles of the thumb, which you didn't. You never do." It isn't critical, not quite. He's working, working at self-indulgence rather than the solution to the crime, which he already knows, but all the same it's work after a fashion and he loves his work. He's good at it, too, which is why he can't help but see the underlying current of trust in the complaisant tilt of John's head, in the exposed neck and the quiet impatience in the averted eyes. Get it done with. Like he's a mother to a child, rubbing away a scuff of dirt with a shirtsleeve.
"Yeah, cheers." As though they aren't standing on a tightrope, but the convulsion of the throat gives it away, the half-nervous swallow. They're wavering; the line shudders beneath them. Maybe he shouldn't say any more. Maybe neither of them should.
"It won't scar." Not unless I make it. I could make it. Sherlock runs his thumb over the pads of his fingers to stave off the urge to press it against the cut, to grind in, hard, for the exclamation and the sensation and whatever might follow. It wouldn't mean anything. It'd be the opposite of meaningful: he arrives for a split second at the decision that nobody else deserves to be commemorated in John's skin, this bubbling, jealous realization and it heats up the pit of his stomach, twists his insides in a way which isn't wholly unpleasant; he nearly startles before the alarms begin their blaring: Not Good. Not a bit Good.
Besides, he's already late. There are deeper scars than even he's willing to make. The sort that make John Watson dream of deserts, and Sherlock Holmes feel vicious towards men he's never met. Something about that, or maybe it's the invitation, practically gift-wrapped, which he is possibly just imagining, reading into the data to fit his own selfish inclinations, sets him to pressing his thumb to the indentation beneath John's lower lip, gripping the jaw with clinical gentleness and adjusting the angle of the man's head of his own accord. It's almost shocking; he forgets occasionally that living people are so warm. Warmth is a measure of time in his practical world, not of life; life is more obscure.
There's the huff of a laugh. Another compulsive swallow. You're a strange man, Sherlock Holmes.
Yes. Yes, of course. And the idle, fascinated sweep of his thumb over lightly-stubbled skin is even stranger. Usually he's got gloves on, usually it isn't this close. And people, living people, are never this indulgent. It feels deeply wrong to take advantage, and yet his hand shifts to conform itself to the shape of John's neck, fingers pressing firmly against the side and thumb exerting pressure on the edge of the jaw to encourage his head back further. Cartilage and muscle shift under his palm, an unusual amount of salivation which means that the tightrope is gone, slipped out from under them, and now he's not sure what they're standing on. Something finer and more tenuous still. Don't say a word.
It's probably superstitious, the perceived taboo against the breaking of some imaginary spell. Sherlock wouldn't know what to say anyway. Nobody else in the world would trust his hand around their throat. No, that isn't fair. John doesn't either, not quite, not completely, and that he's permitting it has as much to do with what sent him to Afghanistan as with what lets him sleep in a flat shared by a madman and leave the door to his room unlocked. They both know that Sherlock isn't murderous, true. True, but they also both know, or have some vague sense of, what this is.
And what it isn't.
It isn't stopping.
On the contrary: the pulse jumps. Sherlock's eyes drift to the shell of John's ear, fingers tightening almost imperceptibly in a vague fascination at the shape, brilliantly engineered and bearing such papery-fine skin, plus a handful of minor secrets of little use in isolation. Given the opportunity he could pick John's parents out in a crowd by the ears alone, his sister too, but somehow this is less about that (it should be about that; where they've gone wrong Sherlock will never know) and more about the flesh-and-blood of the here and now, all of the implications John carries beneath his skin. Who they are, jointly. Who he is alone. All of the hooks sunk into his flesh and tugging him this way and that, and the fact that somehow, inexplicably, unexpectedly the whole and the constituent parts have blended together and by osmosis, by natural law the importance of one has seeped into the other. I want to take you apart and put you back together again. I want to know everything about you. Everything.
The filthiest bit of it all is that the virtue of association makes it all worth knowing. Nothing is more shameful than sentiment.
John swallows again. Heightened pulse. Increased salivation. The most marginal edge of a flush to the ears, always the ears first, fine skin, and under Sherlock's attention at that -- embarrassment. It is embarrassing, being the object of the attention of a man like Sherlock Holmes. But there's something hovering vaguely at the precipice miles above hysteria in the sidelong glance that John gives him, just the flicker of a shared glance. Something has him licking his lips. That's nerves.
Nerves.
Sherlock wants to set them all alight, sink his teeth in. He can imagine the path of the impulse, racing up John's spine like a bullet from the barrel of a gun and ricocheting around in his head. What sparks when he says Sherlock's name?
Best, of course, not to think too hard about what his own are up to. Best not to touch on what parts of the brain light up at the sensation of warm, surprisingly soft skin. Whatever this is, his touch has to remain businesslike. Cursory. It's part of the arrangement of their association that he is businesslike and cursory whenever possible, indulging in companionship or caprice or whatever it occurs to him to indulge in only when he's earned it — and quite frankly no amount of brilliance will ever earn him this sort of indulgence. He's well aware he's accruing debt, but that doesn't mean he needs to reveal precisely how much.
So he hums. Softly, thoughtfully, the way he might do at a crime scene, maybe. Possibly. And John looks like one, is one, has been the entirety of their association so why not? They love crime scenes. On some level this is understood. Shared. Sherlock gently manoeuvres John's head in the other direction, to catch another angle, but he's sure there's no pretending that he's just looking at the cut anymore. No need to bother with that, then.
"What?" The question is impatient, the nervousness still in full swing. It occurs to Sherlock that this probably isn't the sort of dangerous with which John is comfortable, that he's probably overstepping some bounds, clumsily most likely, as is his wont. That's fair — Sherlock isn't certain it's the sort of dangerous with which he's comfortable either, mostly as he's not certain what sort of dangerous it is in the first place. This is a learning experience for all involved. That's part of what's so indecent about it.
"What are you looking for?" He hasn't answered. John is tense. What's left of the tightrope beneath them shudders violently.
"Anything. You." And then, for good measure: "Shut up."
It isn't cruel. It isn't even particularly forceful. Shut up, unless you want me to stop now. He curls his forefinger so that the nail is pressed just faintly against John's skin. Neither of them say anything.
It would be easier to ask. To outline what is and isn't, what can and cannot be but they've never operated on certainties. Sherlock isn't even convinced that they can operate on certainties, bound up as they are in the necessity of not knowing. If they were to know both where they are and how fast they're going, it might all fall apart, and the entanglement which keeps them moving in matched, mirrored patterns might unravel. John doesn't want to know anything about Sherlock, not really, and Sherlock... it's impossible, always changing, will never reach the end but if he did then there would be nothing left for him but elsewhere, somewhere and something new. And he would no longer be interesting. He would no longer be dangerous. There would be nothing binding John to him any more, all purposes no longer served. The contract would end.
In the interest, therefore, of remaining unpredictable he doesn't ask. Neither of them ask. Sherlock's heart, for inscrutable reasons, pounds.
They can't stagnate, either.
They have to reinvent themselves. Any formula requires variables. Sherlock's fingers drag into John's hair, businesslike. Always businesslike, even as he's sifting through the soft strands and is vaguely surprised to find them warm.
No particular predisposition to male-pattern baldness.
The brain, of course, is warm.
No swelling, no cuts, no splitting. Not even near the temple where Sherlock knows a glancing blow was struck.
It's hungry, the brain. Pulls greedily at the blood supply, steals under duress; the brain is precious. John's brain is, quite logically, all the more precious. His skull is smaller than expected; Sherlock's fingers press against it, sorting out its shape, and he receives for his trouble a huff of protest, but neither of them attempts to pull away.
He wonders how long this will be permitted to go on, what places he might possibly take it. There is profound curiosity. There is also something else, something far less savoury, something in the quiet exultation in being permitted to touch, which seems like such a simple thing but most people shrink and the ones that don't he doesn't trust. Not generally. Not with hands as sensitive as his. None of that even brushes against the inevitable entanglement of sentiment. Sherlock wishes it wouldn't. He can't address it; some things are too large for a body to hold.
He wishes that brushing his thoughts against it were like dragging his thumb over the torn edge of rough paper, something viscerally wrong and vaguely nauseating, something at which to wrinkle his nose and avoid doing ever again, instead of something that makes the pit of his stomach drop out and his viscera squirm like snakes, or twist like someone is wringing the love out of him like water from a towel. It would be more tolerable if it were to disgust him.
It doesn't. He disgusts himself, but the thoughts themselves hardly even flit around distaste, even (especially?) when he thinks they ought to. Not for the first time he wonders what another person — a normal person — might think, in a situation like this. What another person might read into the act of touching or into being touched, what John reads into the drag of Sherlock's fingernails across his scalp... but then John isn't normal, and worse than that, he knows him, has sussed out at the very least some fuzzy silhouette of Sherlock's mental form. What does it look like, the shape of him under the light the simple act of contact casts upon it?
They remain, of course, a few micrometres apart. Their atoms sense one another's presence, but only across distances, only by the force they exert on one another. They don't touch. Pass by one another, through empty space. If one looks closely enough, Sherlock isn't crossing any boundaries at all. Whether or not he wants to is another matter. That's where the normal people come in, the Real People, and all the things they want for the sake of wanting them, without thought, without implication, because they do, not because they've tangled themselves up such that they become a chain reaction. The knowing, the wanting to know. What it means to want to know, what it means to be allowed; how they all blend together, spun like fibres into yarn, into something usable, something which cannot easily be separated out again into its constituent pieces.
It follows a clear line, like the lengths of string tacked up against the maps pinned to the walls. A line runs from hand to brain, where it follows a snaking pattern from point to point. Nerves, neurons, some more nebulous concept like heartstrings escaping Sherlock, who knows better, but if perhaps he were someone more ordinary he might conceive of things that way, rather than knowing the brain for what it is.
It's possible to tell so much about someone by how they treat the space that might be occupied by those around them. People curl up on themselves like mice; mice are respectful or they're scared. Sherlock traces the patch of improbably smooth skin behind John's ear. What does that say about him? If he's not a mouse, what is he?
Ultimately it might be irrelevant, but a host of answers present themselves anyway, buzzing in the back of his brain. If not mouse or man then monster, perhaps; hyperbolic thoughts not worth entertaining, but somewhere in there is a useful shorthand. He's Sherlock Holmes, and no one should ever indulge Sherlock Holmes. But John Watson, who looks like a crime scene, is far from no one, and that's point one, the mental locus of this chain of nearly-simultaneous reactions. John Watson, who is not no one, who looks like a crime scene and is providing Sherlock with the opportunity to treat him like one, with all the tenderness with which he usually addresses only the dead. John, the texture of whose skin is a feature of its construction, of the ways in which his cells adhere to one another, cells which are alive with activity now, nurtured by the meals they've shared and the air they are both breathing and equally importantly sent into a flurry of activity by the touch of Sherlock's fingertips, which kill but also spark a set of chain reactions ultimately travelling the distance to John's brain, where they set off other things, fireworks, and a matched process is occurring in Sherlock now; they are mirrored, and John Watson is not no one, and everything he is is by extension important.
The weight of him, of all the concepts Sherlock has tied to him, are heavy in the moment. Sherlock wonders if John can even sense any of it, or if it's only him, back bent under the profound solemnity of that half-formed realisation as to what they are. He catches John's gaze, curious, embarrassed, plenty of other things as ill-defined as the fanciful notions of hollow evenings, and now this one too — somehow it holds. They are very close. It isn't startling: they are often very close. All the same he finds himself in the peculiar, almost uncomfortable positioning of noticing without reading, of realising in some visceral way, perhaps for the first time, the particular intricacies of the iris, the improbably fine layering of fibrovascular tissue. He is intent, focused; in some ways, almost quiet. Almost the crime scene sort of quiet. It's just as well that John feels like one.
There is a flick of the eyes vaguely downwards, nervous, a nervous glance at Sherlock's mouth; sand begins to fall through his mental hourglass, building realisation grain by grain. A dilation of pupils and capillaries. The licking of lips. An unwillingness to meet his eyes, or to break their gaze once met. To draw attention to the rest.
Sherlock is arrogant, but not sufficiently arrogant as to think that it has anything to do with him, with any of the qualities associated with the idea of him, with his manifest physical reality. It's always been about the brain, between them, now as much as ever — this is about knowing, and more essentially still it is about being known, scrutinized, held in attention. If all it would have taken is the appropriate combination of proximity and opportunity they'd have reached this point before now.
His fingers drop to John's collar, and flick the first button open unceremoniously. John swallows thickly and his lips part, eyebrows drawing down in a vague expression of offence, of momentary anger that dissipates with a telling rapidity into something like shock, but — and this is both most telling and most confusing of all — he says nothing. Not even when Sherlock flicks the next button open and tugs the collar of his shirt aside to expose the edge of old scar tissue, not even when he bends in, not quite daring to breathe, for a closer look. He can see John's pulse jumping in his throat, set in delicate relief by the light fixture overhead.
John's hand finds Sherlock's shoulder, and grips tightly. For the life of him Sherlock can't figure out if it's a warning, an admonishment, an attempt to keep him still, or a simpler but no less loaded grab, perhaps desperate, for stability. Either way, he's helpless but to keep pushing. No, God, that's not true, not in the slightest. It would be so much nicer if it were. So much kinder. So much less monstrous. He should by all rights have stopped before any of this had started indulging this strange and peculiarly loaded curiosity, never mind that it's mutual, never mind that John wants to see where he goes next as much as Sherlock does. Never mind the dare implicit in that, and when have they ever been very good at standing down when challenged? He presses his fingertips gently to the skin of John's shoulder and pulls the skin taut with equal gentleness. It's all there. From pin along rifling through a long stretch of open air to flesh and bone, skin splitting, bone snapping under the impact, the bullet shattering, bits of it lodging here, there. Cut out here, there. In between the soft murmur of his voice, assembling the puzzle pieces aloud for the both of them, this is for the both of them, Sherlock's breathing is shallow, silent, fascinated. John's is vaguely strained.
It's probably filthy. It certainly isn't normal; most people shrink under Sherlock's attention. It's possible he should even be offended, but he isn't. If anything, he thinks they understand one another at this moment more perfectly than they are wont. The impression is gone in a moment, in a ragged, dazed exhalation and an audible swallow — John is just as surprised about this as Sherlock is, which is relieving and confusing at once, and more guiltily deeply fascinating — but the effect lingers and he wants it back, wants to examine it in more detail. It must be in the body language somewhere. Somewhere underneath a silent oh, God — unspoken mortification in the way John's head is turned away, eyes shut — and he must know. Of course he knows. It's all so deeply obvious. His held breath seeps out gently, and he knows he's close enough now that it can be felt on John's collarbone.
None of that, not an instant of it matches the first wet press of Sherlock's tongue, eyelids falling fitfully shut as John releases a surprised, half-furious hiss, something that might have been a Jesus! had he been given more time to consider his options for blaspheming, a failure to launch more than made up for by the sudden and vicious grip he takes on Sherlock's hair, a sharp-edged pain and pressure not quite pulling him away. That should be enough to make Sherlock's gut clench, but oddly enough the mere sensation beats his idle realisations to the punch, shooting heat down his spine to blossom in the pit of his belly like poison. He's too distracted to address the implications, caught up in the taste of John's skin (faintly salty with sweat — they've been running — but also vaguely coppery where the hypertrophic tissue intersects uninjured flesh) and the finely-tuned topography he's mapping as though it means something, as though there's more to the act than pure desire, if not of the sort people normally entertain. He's hungry and he's monstrous and John clinging to him like an anchor only makes him more so.