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The Watson family was a strange bunch and John and Sherlock both were reluctant to come.
“Why are we doing this? I easily know everything about them just by looking at you.” Sherlock hissed quietly at John as they stepped out of the cab at the Watson household.
“I wish we didn’t have to,” John replies bitterly. “But they didn’t really give me another choice. Just… keep your mouth shut and this will go by quickly, okay?”
Sherlock is silent at that, simply looking up at the night sky with a helpless look, as if asking the stars to scoop him up and carry him far far away. John could relate.
Mrs. Watson swings open the door before they even reach the porch.
She grins and waves them frantically over.
“John! How are you? Don’t you love my aloe plants? I have become such a good gardener, I’ll have to tell you about it!” She rambles in an irritating high pitched voice, gesturing at the row of wilted little plants on the porch.
"Those are wilted." Sherlock says emotionlessly.
Mrs. Watson stops dead in her tracks. “What?”
Sherlock looks her in the eye. “You’re an awful gardener and all of those plants are wilted.” He replies cooly.
John’s hands fly up to his temples, attempting to rub the pre headache away.
Mrs. Watson frowns. “I should hardly think so, I know just about everything to know about gardening, John should know. The aloe plant is naturally brown like that and it always has been.”
Sherlock opens his mouth to reply, but John quickly grabs the back of Sherlock;s neck and steers him inside, simply nodding at his mother in hello and tugging the corners of his lips into a forced smile.
John guides Sherlock through the living room and into the kitchen where Harry has already started on her fifth glass of wine.
When she sees them she swallows the rest of the glass and slams it down.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” She says in sarcastic cheerfulness. “John brought a fag with him!”
They both follow their rule to be silent and sit down, scootching their chairs so that they are as close to each other and as far away from everyone else as possible.
Harry points a drunken shaky finger at Sherlock. “You… You look like you need a nice big slice of pie, sweetie.”
“You look like you need a glass of water.” Sherlock mumbles to himself.
John squeezes Sherlock’s hand briefly, as if to say ‘We can make it through this and when we’re done we can zip home and watch crap telly and cuddle and try to forget about this.’
~*~
Sherlock and John leave the Watson household with wine stained shirts and the echoes of loud arguments. They practically fight to get into the cab and yell their destination at the cabbie from the hysteria.
“Never again.” John says under his breath as he fixes his tie. “I can only hope your parents are better.”
Sherlock smiles, silently dabbing at a stain on John’s shirt.
“May I quote your sister, ‘Fuck you.’”
John laughs as he fixes a few displaced curls on Sherlock’s head, aroused unpleasantly by a bread roll that had flown across the table.
When they get home they change their stained clothing in exchange for something much comfier.
Sherlock is the first to collapse on the couch, quickly turning the television to some low quality sitcom. John comes trudging after him, flopping himself right on top of Sherlock. John snuggles his head into Sherlock’s chest and Sherlock drapes an arm lazily over him.
With John’s ear pressed gently against Sherlock’s chest he can hear the steady beat of Sherlock’s placid heart, and soon hears it so much that it grows fuzzy and normalizes, becoming just a regular part of John’s life.
Sherlock stretches out his long spidery fingers to leaf slowly through John’s short hair, absorbing the feeling of every layer being passed through his hands, memorizing the tension and thickness of every lock.
John’s eyelids droop to a close slowly, the rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest rocking his head gently up and down like the constant rise and fall of the summer waves, lulling John’s mind gently to settle thoughts and worries drifting about.
John’s peaceful figure is easy on Sherlock’s eyes and fills him with a sudden overwhelming feeling of thankfulness and affection.
He lays a tender kiss atop John’s head.
There were always poems about lovers, usually including things along the lines of ‘your eyes were flowers and your hands were a drift of smoke,’ but Sherlock never really agreed so much. John’s neck was not some marbeled pillar and his nose was certainly not any assortment of berry. He was just a lost and wounded man who had stumbled to Sherlock’s doorstep, both sharing the same need, two needs actually. Money, and though they didn’t know it at the time, love.