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After some quick thinking and a few close calls while dodging their way out of the abandoned warehouse filled with Moriarty’s various unsavoury henchmen, including one fire fight (luckily, Sherlock brought John his handgun) during which John precisely and cleanly wounded (but did not kill) three armed men while hearing no fewer than five bullets pass so close to his head that he could hear them singing through the air past his ear, Sherlock and John found themselves in the same sort of circumstances they usually did after one or both of them had been in great danger: surrounded by patrol cars with flashing lights, anxious police and ambulance attendants with hundreds of questions, bright orange blankets draped on their shoulders, angry-looking men carted off in handcuffs around them, and the requirement to tell the story “from the beginning” several times over. John has to do a lot of his own storytelling this time, which takes him longer than usual, so long that he ends up sitting on the back of an ambulance, not minding the orange blanket so much, with his hands wrapped around a welcome cup of tea. Of course Sherlock has his own details to recount, which he does with great relish, in between dashing off to confront various police and officials and then returning to interject another key detail. It is chaotic and more than a little exhausting. John feels like he’s sleepwalking, dreaming, granted a reprieve.
For the adrenaline junkies they are, the high is spiking.
None of this is a surprise to John nor, certainly, could it possibly be to Sherlock; John had been certain he was about to die, which, as usual, launches him body and mind into a kind of bizarre otherworld of emotional highs, skyrocketing libido, hypersensitivity and a heightened devil-may-care boldness. The world seems brighter, louder, sharper, with more edges and colours. Its boundaries spread out and spill over, as if the universe is suddenly and inexplicably larger, with more details, more depths than it had before; the world is always bigger after Sherlock saves his life. He wonders, briefly, if Sherlock feels the same when their roles are reversed. Is it always like this? He doesn’t think he’s been so aware of it before, aware that he knows what’s going to happen when he gets home, how the rush is going to play out. He knows, and suddenly he’s nervous. Performance anxiety. He has questions. He feels things. How has this never happened before?
“That’s astounding, Sherlock,” John overhears Mycroft saying, and he’s surprised. It’s usually only John who finds the time to praise him.
Finished with explaining the details of how he was abducted, stashed in the boot of a car, rattled around for some hours, punched repeatedly in the stomach, locked into a supply closet and then finally rescued by a heroic and oddly understated Sherlock, with the adrenaline high still keeping his heart rate in the stratosphere, Lestrade waves them both into a cab.
“That’s enough for one night,” he says, closing the car door for John. There’s a concerned look on his face that John doesn’t have time to think more about.
*
A bit of rain begins to fall in streaks across the windows of the cab, and the distorted streetlights draw strange lines across Sherlock's face, his hands, across his slightly-rumpled shirt. His eyes look blank in the half-light, obscured by shadow. Unreadable, impossible, not entirely human. John feels as though he's on the edge of an epiphany, but nearly being killed can do that to you.
“I don’t believe your ethics could ever be called into question,” Sherlock says. John struggles to recall what might have brought that statement on. He remembers the three wounded men and shrugs.
“Self-defense,” John says. “I only wounded them.”
“You have a very good moral compass,” Sherlock goes on, staring at his fingernails. “I don’t have any doubts about it. You shouldn’t either.”
“Thanks, I think,” John says. “Lestrade didn’t seem too concerned. They were shooting at us, remember.”
They share an amiable silence, and Sherlock crosses his arms, looking out the window. After a moment he takes out his phone, and the dull glow of it illuminates the back of the cab, giving Sherlock’s drawn face a bluish glow.
John regrets what he wrote in his notebook now, sitting in the cab, feeling anxiety clawing inside his gut. Clearly, he’s gotten a little too comfortable with writing; it’s starting to encourage him in less than ideal ways. While he's become a pretty decent blogger, writing about his feelings is still not something John feels terribly comfortable doing, and no matter what his (ex) therapist says, he doesn’t want to and doesn’t think it would be in any way helpful to him. The blog was a good idea; just not for the same reason his (ex) therapist thought it was. John doesn't bother writing about feelings. His blog posts are about the cases, and writing them up doesn't require John to display any emotion other than confusion (unthreatening; easy) and awe (natural). Writing about feelings seems too close to poetry, and John is most certainly not a poet.
He regrets putting all that fear-induced angst in writing because he did not die as he expected to, he is now as safe as he can rationally be and thus can't harbor fantasies that Sherlock will read his earnest words after his death with a single unlikely tear creeping down his cheek. (What is he, a fourteen year old girl?) The stark reality of sitting in a cab on the way back home to Baker Street, just like any other night, makes the content of that little notebook in his pocket seem outrageous. Indulgent. Inappropriate. Embarrassingly silly. Mad. And suddenly, completely stuck in his mind, unforgettable. He moves a finger to rub against the notebook in his pocket pressed against his thigh; he is reassured that it's still there, untouched, unread, still his secret. He feels reassured, but troubled by its presence. That bit of random stream of consciousness was a stupid, overly-emotional thing to do. He's going to need to destroy it as soon as possible. It won't take Sherlock long to get his hands on it, and that would be too painfully awkward to contemplate. He simply couldn’t bear it. Burning it tonight would not be too soon. The status quo was just fine before he started to question it; he can’t quite understand why, in a moment of distress, he felt otherwise. And now he’s gone and wrecked it. He wishes he could burn the memory of writing it just as easily as he could burn the pages.
The bluish glow from Sherlock’s phone is extinguished suddenly, and the cab is plunged into rain-pocked semi-darkness.
John closes his eyes, lets the light from the street play on the insides of his eyelids. He feels Sherlock press against him, yank up his shirt, his fingers forcing their way under his jumper to get access to John's skin. Unusual. Sherlock usually controls his urges until the doors are closed behind them, and they spring at each other like pistons. But this, Sherlock’s fingers against his stomach, his chest, lingering against his ribs, is fairly subtle with the cover of darkness. He chooses an equally subtle retaliation largely without thinking about it; He leans into Sherlock's lanky frame as if he's about to whisper in his ear, but instead buries his face in Sherlock's shoulder like the mentally- and emotionally-exhausted man he is. Sherlock hands move against him like a cross between a caress and looking for damage. John nuzzles into Sherlock’s neck and breathes him in.
The smell of Sherlock that both calms him and arouses him isn't the smell of concrete or oily lighter fluid or the vague background smell of iodine and iron that often accompanies him. It's the buttery undertone that is exclusively Sherlock's smell, the one that doesn't come from crime-deducing or a bottle, but from his pores, his very genes. Blindfolded, John would recognize Sherlock from this smell alone. John's cold nose traces a small pattern on the base of Sherlock's neck as he breathes: his skin smells rich, smooth, a little like marzipan and beef broth. Reassuringly Sherlock. In spite of his fears, nothing has changed; he's not dead, he hasn't unburdened himself of any uncomfortable or compromising feelings, and they're both on their way home in a cab, just like any other day. But not quite. Sherlock withdraws his hand from the inside of John’s shirt, smoothes it down, then rests his hand on John’s neck, lightly cradling John against him.
“I think,” Sherlock says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle but sending a startling jolt through John, “You’ll always be worth more alive.”
John opens his eyes. They never speak once they’ve started touching each other. John finds himself embarrassed, but Sherlock’s hand is stroking his neck, keeping him, however gently, where he is.
“He wasn’t going to kill you,” Sherlock says.
John watches the light from the streetlights move and stretch from the front the back of the cab in slow motion, constantly uncovering them huddled together like this, then drenching them in darkness again. “You think so?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Didn’t feel like it this time.” John feels his stomach quirk at the memory. Sherlock’s fingers against his neck, his warm palm, are soothing.
“It’s surely valuable to him that you imagine yourself about to die,” Sherlock went on. “It’s an act of terrorism, designed to break you. It might prompt you to do something...rash.” Sherlock shifts slightly and places the palm of his hand on John’s knee. John can feel the warmth of it through the denim. “Of course he doesn’t know you very well.”
John doesn’t know what to say in response, so he says nothing; just breathes in the smell of Sherlock and closes his eyes. The rashest thing John could think of to do was compose an impromptu blog post with a pen and paper. A small act, under the circumstances, frivolous even, but damaging enough. He winces a little, thinking about it. Could that have been Moriarty’s plan? To force John to make an ill-fated admission that would change his relationship to Sherlock? Make them both more vulnerable, less trusting of each other? Was his purpose not to kill John or even antagonize Sherlock, but to upset their carefully-constructed status quo? If so, it might have worked.
John can't seem to entirely swallow back his own words and it's irritating. He can still feel them, pressed against his thigh and hanging in the air in front of him. Is it just the very-near death experience? Sherlock suddenly feels even more precious to him than usual. Normally, at this stage in the night, every instinct he has feels absolutely right and there’s no need to question them, think about them at all. But just now his desires seem out of sync. He wants Sherlock to wrap his arms around him and hold him so tight he can barely breathe. He wants to bury his face in Sherlock's chest. He wants to kiss Sherlock, and take his time about it, consciously, deliberately enjoy it, in spite of being in public, the cabbie, the high probability of being caught on London's ever-present CCTV cameras. In their secret, furtive moments, they don’t tend to spend a lot of time kissing. Perhaps it is too intimate for their torrid, adrenaline-fueled rutting? Or, in a sense, not intimate enough? John doesn’t know. He holds back, uncertain and uncomfortable.
Sherlock, for his part, seems a little on edge as well, but it had hardly been a usual night. To have impressed Mycroft is indeed an unusual and unique feat. It makes sense to John that Sherlock is gleefully buoyed by the experience; he is smugly and quite rightly delighted with his own brilliance, Lestrade’s frank compliments, and the momentarily startled look on Mycroft’s face. He has exceeded everyone’s expectations. And that goes some way toward explaining why Sherlock seems to be unable to restrain himself even to their usual propriety in a public place; he has one hand on John’s hip and another is wrapped around the back of John’s neck. He feels rather than sees Sherlock lower his head, his lips brushing against John’s face, his teeth against John’s jaw. He has that manic edge that a close encounter with Moriarty always gives him, and he shares it, as if through skin-to-skin contact, with John. His hands never stop moving. The world seems huge and John is dangling over its surface. Everything feels different.
“Of course there were,” Sherlock mumbles into John’s neck. John has no idea what it means. He doesn’t really care, either, at the moment. “Clues.” Sherlock is still mumbling. “Everywhere.”
John hums lightly, unsurprised that Sherlock is still reliving his triumphant rescue, and whispers, “Only to you.” Sherlock hardly needs John’s awed contributions at this stage; he’s riding high on praise, but John can’t help it. No one else could possibly have recognized any signs of John’s distress, but to Sherlock, they were everywhere, subtle but obvious to him. Sherlock sucks hard on John’s throat and slides his fingers under John’s belt buckle.
“You’re my blogger,” Sherlock breathes against his ear. “I need you.” John presumes this is Sherlock’s way of coping with John’s near-death experience. He is never as calm when John’s life is threatened as he is when its his own. John forgets he’s in a cab, he forgets about CCTV and Mycroft and the strong likelihood that at least one of Lestrade’s people is following in a police car directly behind them. He even stops caring about whether this is the wrong thing to do. He slides a hand into Sherlock’s hair, pulls him up slightly, and kisses him. He doesn’t even try to restrain himself, to hide that extra edge of compulsion he’s feeling. He can’t help it.
That bit of writing he did, damn those words no one will ever read, they’ve changed John and he knows it. He knows it by how he’s kissing Sherlock. There is something more deliberate, more vulnerable, more needy in him now, and he hates it. He feels like he’s lying, even as he rolls his tongue around Sherlock’s; he’s riding on the commonplace here, standing on the borders of a ritualized routine and taking more than is truly offered. It feels like the most dangerous thing he’s done tonight.
Sherlock, however, keeps up, and doesn’t push him back, or stop him. It feels like a gift, and John takes it. He can’t stop his brain from whirring and wondering; his heart is overfull and it’s beating painfully loudly. John is genuinely surprised; Sherlock doesn’t seem to object at all.
John’s nerves are raw and his lips are slick by the time they stumble out of the cab at Baker Street. His heart is still pounding. The rain falls like stinging cold pins pelting against his skin and he shivers. Sherlock takes his hand in his (do they really hold hands now?) and in a flash they're up the stairs, door shut behind them, coats on the floor, and John finds himself pressed against the sofa under Sherlock's wiry weight.
This, of course, is nothing unusual and should not be surprising, given their history. Finding himself in this position (perhaps not this exact position, truthfully) after an encounter with Moriarty is as expected as the the sun rising in the morning. How could it be otherwise?
As far as John knows it’s never deliberately planned, no matter how unsurprising it is in retrospect; they have never been ready with condoms, or anything actually designed to be used as a lubricant (not that either of these things has ever stopped them, which John realizes is colossally stupid and just goes to show how distinct and at war his rational mind and his lascivious lizard brain are). It’s as if, even after the very first time when neither of them could have known, there is always an element of surprise about it, as if they are either certain it will never happen again until it does, or they are unwilling to give it enough conscious thought to plan ahead, make purchases, place products in key locations where they can be grabbed in a spur of the moment encounter. That would involve acknowledging that spur of the moment encounters occur in the first place, and apparently neither of them have been willing to do so. It seems as though they are always just moments prior to the first time; for all that it’s become as regular as clockwork, it is still constantly a surprise. John has walked past the condom rack at Boots a hundred times without even considering whether he needed any, as if none of this happens to him, as if he is still just a single straight man in want of a girlfriend. It’s all in sharp focus now. He’ll never be able to forget it again. (Damn that bloody little notebook, with its bloody honest words written in the bloody eleventh hour.)
“There is nothing average about you,” Sherlock says, hovering over John’s lips as he says it so that John feels the words on his skin as much as he hears them. He can feel them rumbling in his chest through Sherlock’s, which is pressed against him. He can feel the vibrations of it on Sherlock’s skin under his palms. The sofa cushion shifts slightly beneath him as Sherlock leans down a few centimetres and kisses him. After that, he stops thinking.
*
The little notebook had fallen very slightly out of John’s pocket since the night before. John stands over it, absolutely still, staring at the pile of clothes dropped haphazardly onto the carpet. A couple of millimetres of the notebook are showing outside of the pocket of his jeans, a tiny sliver of beige with a rounded edge. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t see it at all. You wouldn’t notice. It’s a small notebook, so thin you can barely see it in his pocket. He knows better than to simply presume that Sherlock didn’t see it in the night with those laser eyes of his, with that insatiable curiosity. But the odds are at least somewhat favourable that he didn’t. They fell asleep upstairs this time, in John’s bed, so he could at least account for Sherlock’s whereabouts for a few hours. He couldn’t be certain about the entire night, though; Sherlock was prone to insomnia, digging through John’s things, disregarding John’s personal privacy, and an unquenchable desire to know things that are hidden from him. Sherlock is still asleep now, though, just where John left him: splayed out on John’s bed like a starfish.
John’s not used to Sherlock staying in his bed into the morning. Not that Sherlock isn’t accustomed to spending some of his nights there; he falls asleep there, sometimes. He comes in when he wants too, when he needs to. He’s woken John in the wee hours of the morning in a state of ecstasy, having solved a puzzle alone in the darkness. John ends up reacting half asleep, and in his memory Sherlock against him takes on the sheen of a dream. He’ll sleep there for a while until he wakes and starts pacing, texting, experimenting on body parts in the kitchen. John’s not used to seeing Sherlock’s distinctive profile against his pillow in the light of the morning, though, the frankly shocking paleness of his skin. He doesn’t usually see Sherlock undressed in the daylight. Truth be told, John spent the first hour of his morning just staring at him.
It was a late night, though, and Sherlock’s sleep patterns are erratic. He might sleep until two in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d managed to get in the last few nights. Sherlock still asleep in his bed suggests to John that he did not wake up in the night. If he had, he would have fallen asleep again in his own bed rather than John’s. Why would he have climbed up the stairs again and risked waking John if he wanted to read the notebook? That settles it. John is ninety percent convinced that Sherlock did not find his notebook and read it in the night. If he had, it would probably be sitting in some prime location this morning, say, in the middle of the sink, or propped open on the kitchen table, with some key sentence highlighted in yellow, or balanced on top of the skull on the mantelpiece.
John needs to get rid of this thing. He didn’t have a chance last night, so first thing this morning it is. John gingerly pulls it out of his pocket as if it might explode and curled it into his palm, in case Sherlock, still asleep and unmoving upstairs in John’s bed, might somehow manage to read it from a distance, sneak a glimpse of a page as it very slightly flaps open in his hand. He pulls on his coat, grabs some matches from the kitchen, and steps as quietly as he can down the stairs, avoiding the seventh step (which squeaks), and walks outside.
A average person with a average life and an average flatmate would not be required to burn his possessions in order to get a modicum of privacy. But as Sherlock helpfully pointed out last night, there is indeed nothing average about John anymore. He glances up at the window to see if Sherlock is watching, somehow recording the contents of the notebook from three floors up. The window is empty. John stands over an available bin, lights a match, and holds the notebook by the bottom corner. He touches the flame to the pages, and watches them burn.
He sees a few of his words as the paper curls; he tries very hard not to read them. He burns the notebook until there is nothing left of it but the staples from the binding. The blackened bits that were formerly paper he crushes into ash with his foot. There is nothing in modern science that can bring that notebook back. John tries to feel a sense of finality about it, but his doubts linger. He fears that the words are written on him somehow. Writing is far more dangerous than he realized.
*
When John returns from Tesco with bags of groceries, Sherlock is awake, dressed, and sitting on the sofa. He is staring at his phone. Not texting, just staring. His clothes are no longer in a pile on the floor, and he’s wearing a freshly ironed shirt.
“Case?” John asks, putting the bags on the table and taking off his coat.
“What?” Sherlock asks, his eyes lingering on his phone for a few seconds longer before looking at John. “Oh. No.” He puts the phone in his pocket and stands. There’s a pause as John crosses the room. Sherlock clears his throat. John hangs his coat in the cupboard and watches Sherlock, curious. For a moment he looks as if he’s about to give a speech. “I’ve never dated anyone. Never had a relationship with anyone, in the way you mean when you say that.”
“Oh?” John feels a momentary shock to his system; blood rises to his skin in a burst of heat and then recedes, like he’s just discovered that he’s in being shot at. He feels like he missed the first half of this conversation. He wills his legs to move and walks back into the kitchen. Sherlock promptly sits down on the sofa again. John tries to behave as if this is a perfectly normal conversation. “Why’s that?” he asks, keeping his voice steady. He’s not sure what else to say.
“Never saw the point.”
“I see,” John says, concentrating on the Tesco bags. He takes items out one by one and places them on the table. Bread, eggs, tea; they are not distracting enough.
“I experimented with sex at Cambridge, of course,” Sherlock goes on. John digs deeper in the bags and pulls out a bottle of milk, a package of biscuits, then peers into the bag again, as if the right response to that might be found somewhere under the lettuce and chicken broth. Sherlock pulls his phone back out of his pocket and stares at it again. “It wasn’t that interesting.”
John tries to breathe and swallow at the same time and it comes out as a cough. “Women, or...”
“Both,” Sherlock says. His voice is resolutely neutral. “Two of each.”
“I see,” John says. He turns and starts putting the groceries away into the cupboards. It keeps his hands busy, at least, gives him the appearance of being absorbed with something else. He’d just put the milk into the fridge, avoiding looking at Sherlock’s latest experiments, and suddenly he realizes what Sherlock just said. “When you say ‘experimented’....you really mean it, don’t you. Experimental conditions and everything?”
“Largely, yes. How else could I gather relevant comparative data?”
John laughs. “Maybe that’s why it wasn’t very interesting.”
“Science is fascinating,” Sherlock protests. “But I suppose you may have a point. I was more interested in stimulating my mind. You think my scientific rigour might have put a bit of a damper on the mood?” His sentence tails off into a giggle, and it feels to John very much like they are laughing at a crime scene. The crime scene that is Sherlock’s sexual history, dotted with four very likely confused and pissed off Cambridge undergraduates.
“It might have,” John says, laughing. It’s hard to imagine that Sherlock had actually mellowed out a bit with age, but it seems to be the case. “I hope you didn’t try and publish the results.”
“I couldn’t find a journal that was interested,” Sherlock concedes, and John laughs so hard he feels tears welling up in his eyes. Sherlock is laughing too, something John wouldn’t have imagined he’d do, laugh at himself. John shakes his head slowly and wipes tears from the corners of his eyes.
“That’s it, really. Nothing more to tell. Bit of a dull story, really. And now,” Sherlock puts feet up on the coffee table, opens his laptop, “you know everything.” He starts typing. John steps into the sitting room for a moment, and sees that Sherlock appears to have finished with this conversation. John thinks perhaps Sherlock is slightly embarrassed, and he feels a bit badly for finding his history so funny. Sherlock’s eyes are darting across the screen; he is lost in another world already.
“Did you ever get lonely?” John asks. “It sounds a bit lonely.”
Sherlock leans back against the sofa and looks up at the ceiling for a moment, as if the answer were pinned there, ready for just such a moment. He looks over at John. “A fish doesn’t know it’s in water, does it.”
“So they say.”
“Bit of a surprise when it finds out.” Sherlock goes back to his screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
John has a strong urge to kiss him again, more affectionately than anything else. But he resists. It seems inappropriate. That notebook: in spite of being burned into nothing, it still haunts John. He curses under his breath and goes back to putting the groceries away.
*
Later that afternoon, a pile of papers appears on Sherlock’s desk.
“Could you--” Sherlock starts, holding three file folders. John takes them, glances at the labels. Thamesmead, Battersea, Hampton Wick. “Thanks.”
Sherlock shuffles through the papers, most of which look like chemical reports or a series of faxes, then picks up a photograph.
“Are you,” John starts. “Are you actually organising your papers?”
“Not all of them,” Sherlock studies the photograph for a moment, then drops it on top of a handful of reports. He quirks an eyebrow at John and glances down at the various stacks of random papers festooning the edges of the room. “The rest of them are perfectly well organised. I’m just sorting these,” he says. “Battersea.” He picks up the pile of paper and the photograph and shoves them at John, who puts down the folders for a moment to take it. The photograph is of a bucket of mud. John recognizes it; it was one of the buckets of mud in Sherlock’s bedroom months ago. John feels another sharp blast of heat as his capillaries open wide and then rapidly sqeeze shut in anticipation of an assault. He recognizes those buckets of mud. He came perilously close to knocking one of them over whilst in a compromising position on the floor of Sherlock’s bedroom.
“And these,” Sherlock says, not looking up, just turning a report around the right side up, a photograph in his left hand, “Hampton Wick.”
John recovers quickly, shoves the Battersea documents into the folder labeled Battersea, and grabs the next set of documents. “Hampton Wick,” John says, looking at another photograph of a bucket of mud. “What’s there?”
“Mud, mostly,” Sherlock says. He thumbs through the rest of the documents rapidly. “Here’s another Battersea,” he says, passing John a map with a greasy sheet of carbon paper stapled to it. “And the rest of these,” he gathers the last reports together with a flourish, dropping a photograph on them, “Thamesmead.”
John puts the documents neatly into their respective folders, then hands all three folders back to Sherlock. “What are you going to do with them now?” John had failed to notice anything as sensible as a filing cabinet in their flat thus far.
Sherlock takes the folders from John, and looks momentarily confused. His eyes briefly scan the book case, but then disregard it. Then he drops the files on the floor next to the sofa, and pushes them underneath it with his foot. He smiles at John, then sits back down on the sofa and pulls out his phone.
“Well, I’m glad those will be easy to find now,” John says. “ I so often need to know the chemical composition of the mud in Hampton Wick.”
“It’s important to have a system,” Sherlock agrees. “I’d be loath to put you in the position of not being able to identify one bucket of mud from another.”
John just shakes his head.
*
That night, John gets into bed with a book. He’s only read a handful of pages when his bedroom door opens. Sherlock, in his pajamas, looking, for a least a few seconds, a bit sheepish. When John eyes him the look vanishes, and Sherlock smiles like he’s just won a spelling bee. John lays the book face down on his lap. He can feel his pulse speeding up, and wonders idly if being Sherlock’s surreptitious lover might be bad for his heart in more ways than one.
Sherlock glides into the room, pulls back the bedclothes on the opposite side of the bed and climbs in. John merely watches, stunned. There have been no cases, no puzzles, no adrenaline whatsoever. In fact it’s been a perfectly ordinary, dusty, domestic, boring day. So much so that John finds himself completely exhausted from the tedium of it. As far as John is aware, Sherlock cannot become aroused at all without the adrenaline. At one time John thought the same might be true of him, but he was reassured (is that the right word?) to discover that that was not the case one day some weeks ago when Sherlock leaned his back against John’s knees on the sofa as they watched telly. But if its true for Sherlock, John can’t imagine what on earth he’s doing in John’s bedroom at the respectable hour of not even 11 o’clock at night. Sherlock lies down on John’s bed, under John’s bedclothes, his hair spreading out against the pillowcase, and looks up at him.
“Do you mind?”
“Mind what?”
“If I sleep here. With you. Tonight.”
John sighs. “Sherlock, what exactly is going on?”
There’s a pause. Sherlock licks is lips. “You nearly died.”
“You said he wouldn’t kill me.”
“Semantics,” Sherlock says, waving his hand in the air. “You thought you were going to die. I thought you were going to die.”
“Did you?”
“Momentarily.”
“This,” John grasps for the words. He motions to Sherlock, and to himself, and to the general area of his bed. “This is unusual.”
“Well, let’s be honest. It’s really not, is it?”
John is silent for a moment. He’s been feeling as though this was about to come up all day. He’d wanted it to, really. Wouldn’t it be good to finally get it out, be clear about what’s going on? Break the ice, get out of denial? It’s harder than it looks. He tries to think about what it is he wants here: to make it stop, or make happen more frequently? He’s fairly certain, lying here with Sherlock next to him, that he doesn’t want it to stop. “No,” he says at last. “It’s not. The sleeping part, that’s unusual.”
“True,” Sherlock acknowledges. “An unfortunate oversight.”
John stares.
“But I don’t think it’s against any rules, no matter what you say,” Sherlock says. “I don’t think there are any rules, actually. Who would set them? Surely you and me, or, presumably, you or me. I haven’t set any such rule, so unless you did, well, then it certainly isn’t against any rules I’m aware of.”
“...what?” John is thoroughly confused.
“You said,” Sherlock says, routing around for under the blankets for his pockets, where he finds his phone, “We have never talked about it, or really acknowledged it in the daylight. I don’t even let myself think about it too long, as if that too is against the rules. I just don’t think you’re quite right about that. Granted, it’s not actually daylight, but the lamp’s on. And I’ve been trying to talk about it all day.”
“I most certainly did not say that, Sherlock.” John feels as though the floor could open up at any moment and swallow him whole.
“Well, you wrote it, that’s even better! I can refer back to it with perfect accuracy.”
“Sherlock...”
“It’s too bad you burnt the original, but it’s alright, I snapped pictures with my phone.” Sherlock flipped his phone around so John could see the screen; it was a photo of one of the pages of his notebook, his scrawled words as clear as anything. Sherlock shifted the image with his thumb; he had a picture of every single page. Sherlock pulled the phone back and stared at it again. “I hope you’re aware of the fact that you don’t actually have a gizzard. That’s metaphorical, is it?”
“How...” John felt his throat seize up a bit.
Sherlock looks perplexed for a moment and then sighs. “Are you going to be all funny about this?”
John is fairly certain his stomach can’t independently detach from his body, fall through the mattress and collapse with a bruising thump onto the floor beneath him, then perhaps burrow through the floorboards in order to fall a further ten feet to land in a bloody mass beside the sofa downstairs, but it certainly feels as though it just did. He feels his face grow hot. He feels pinpricks of heat behind his eyes. He sees stars. He thinks he can feel his veins constricting, cutting off the circulation to his extremities. He’s experiencing a fight-or-flight response.
“How did--” he starts to ask, but then he realizes. He was so careful in the cab home, and so suspicious that morning, staring at that cursed notebook poking out the pocket of his jeans. He burned it before Sherlock was even conscious again. But by then it was already too late. Sherlock’s curiosity couldn’t wait until they made it to the cab, not when it took nearly John three-quarters of an hour to faithfully recount the story of the past twenty-four to the satisfaction of their friends from the Met. John remembers sitting on the back on the ambulance, the orange blanket draped over his shoulders, a kind cup of tea in his hands, and Sherlock, sitting a bit too close, patting John down a bit too much. He hadn’t felt Sherlock’s hand slip into his pocket and pinch the notebook, nor did he feel Sherlock manage to somehow sneak it back in, which would be impressive if it weren’t so terribly irritating. Lestrade must have known; that look he gave John, that concerned, exasperated look. Sherlock must have only walked a few feet off to snap the photos, page by page. Knowing Sherlock, he probably read them through at the same time, speeding through all of John’s deepest secrets, his inmost, heartfelt truths like flashcards.
“Did I not suggest,” John says in a voice far calmer than he thought he would manage to muster, “that I didn’t want you reading it?” The whole time, from the moment John began to feel safe again, Sherlock had been taking apart his confession piece by piece. He had been exposed, stripped naked, lain bare, all without him having a clue. John replays it all in a moment: the conversation in the cab; John’s questionable ethics (was that a reference to his supposition that he was behaving inappropriately with Sherlock?), the discussion about being “worth more alive” to Moriarty, even, John realizes, “You’re my blogger, I need you.” The frankly bizarre announcement about Sherlock’s sexual history, even (John very nearly laughs out loud when he realizes) the three unidentified buckets of mud. “Did I not imply,” John goes on, “ that I didn’t want you reading it? Did it occur to you at any time that it might be personal?”
“Not really, no,” Sherlock says mildly. “It seemed important. Life or death situations bring out important information.”
“Tell me you didn’t abduct me yourself just to squeeze information out of me.”
There is an awkward pause, one that goes on significantly longer than it should. “Now that would have been really clever, “ Sherlock muses. “But no, I did no such thing. I wasn’t aware that there was information I didn’t already have. I stand corrected.”
Sherlock sounds a bit humbled. It seems John was wrong about his capacity to hide things from Sherlock; he appears to have hidden a great deal from him. For someone who can tell a computer programmer by his tie and an airline pilot by his left thumb, Sherlock Holmes missed some very large, very important things about John.
“What didn’t you know?” asks, not quite believing it.
“Everything, apparently.” Sherlock sighs.
“That must be a novel sensation for you,” John notes, surprised to find that Sherlock’s acknowledgement of deductive failure has effectively tamped down the worst of his anger and humiliation.
“It is,” Sherlock agrees. “It’s disconcerting. But a pleasant surprise. Better than Christmas, really.”
“Is it?”
“Of course.” Sherlock says quickly. “Of course it is John. You can’t honestly have imagined that I would be angry. You should have said something.”
“What did you think I was doing then? With you?” John asks. “If you didn’t know the truth.”
“Passing the time,” Sherlock says, exasperated. “Indulging yourself. Purging the adrenaline. You’re looking for Mrs. Watson, John. That’s what all the evidence suggested. And I am not Mrs. Watson.” He sounds bitter at the evidence, annoyed that it had lied to him. John has to grant him his deduction, however. At first, that’s what he thought he’d been doing too.
John puts the book on his bedside table and switches off the light. For a moment he’s not sure whether he wants to leap out of the bed or bury his head under the covers. A man can only take so much self-examination and embarrassment in a single day. He settles for lying down on his side, facing Sherlock, who immediately presses his palm against John’s neck, his finger cradling John’s ear, and presses his forehead against John’s.
“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says. He sounds sincere.
John sighs. “I should have known I’d have no privacy with you.” He had known it, really. He had always been aware that Sherlock’s finding and reading his awkward words had been inevitable. He wonders now if that had really been the point all along.
“I was concerned,” Sherlock says softly. “It seemed like evidence.”
The moment John first bought the notebook weeks before, he’d known on some level what he was going to do with it, and what would happen next. Creating tantalizing evidence is, after all, the very best way to get Sherlock’s attention. John has to admit to himself that he’d known that from the very start. He was a danger addict, just like Sherlock. He must have known, somehow, that this was the greatest rush he’d experience, the most danger he could put himself in, to fall in love with a sociopath and then expose his heart completely. It’s more terrifying than gunshots, or threats, or pain.
John takes a deep breath. He feels a familiar surge of adrenaline. “I suppose it was evidence.”
“You’ve always had your carte blanche, John. If you want it.”
John wraps an arm around Sherlock, feeling his sharp shoulder blades under the palm of his hand. “I think I do.”