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Sherlock has never hated everything more in his life.
The entire flat is humming – buzzing, really, shimmering with heat waves and the micocosm of everything that has ever been alive in moisture and why hasn’t everyone died of malaria yet? He wants to break apart the silence, the sound, but his clothes stuck fast to his skin and he’d been forced to peel them off in sloughs, like ripping tactile decaying flesh from his skin in minute little folds. When he closes his eyes he can feel each little eddy of hydrogenated air kissing up and down his calves, his arms, buzzing incessantly and pricking against the backs of his eyelids. Laws of physics be damned.
“Sherlock?”
Surprising. How had he missed the door?
“Sherlo-oooh god, you’re naked.”
John, startled; societal norms dictate offensiveness of the naked form, but also not particularly offended. Like fingers in the icebox; upset out of British-ness, not John-ness. Perhaps even pleased about the lack of clothing? Nothing he hasn’t seen before, in any case. Turns out kissing had done very little to change their relationship besides offering another form of distraction between cases. John seems to enjoy sex much more than Sherlock of course, but on an objective level the process is fascinating. And, yes, admittedly enjoyable. Certainly more fun than he remembered it. He wonders if laughter is a typical part of sex, but then again John tends to make him laugh much more than previously recorded. Sherlock cannot remember a time in his life when he’s laughed as much as he does with John. John is a Good thing in his life, Sherlock knows, like the way certain acids can cut through every layer of ectodermal tissue on contact or how Luis Garavito maimed and killed a proven one hundred and thirty eight victims with a possible body count breaching four hundred, comprised predominantly of children. These are facts in his life, important and at the forefront, proven with painstaking evidence.
“Sherlock,” soft, the way John would approach a wounded animal, “love, you’re scaring me.”
Sherlock frowns. He hasn’t done anything terrible yet. “Everything’s… buzzing.”
John hesitates. “Okay.” The bed dips under his weight. “Do you want to tell me why you’re lying naked in bed at four in the afternoon looking like you’ve been crucified?”
Syntax, John. Sherlock sighs and opens one eye to glare at John. “I just told you.” Not listening, as usual. John never hears him when they have these conversations. It makes everything hateful. John’s eyes are an interesting blue in this light, dark, like puddles and twilight. Sherlock reaches out slowly to brush a thumb over his brow, and John leans into the touch. His lips quirk up on one side.
“You’re naked and… like this, because everything is buzzing?”
“John.” How he hates repetition.
“Okay, okay.” Defeat, bemused, thinks Sherlock is being ridiculous. These are the moments when John fails him. “No, hey, don’t get upset.” He turns his head to press a kiss to Sherlock’s palm, one hand coming to close around his wrist. Sentiment. What is it about John’s eyes that inspire so much empathy? He resembles a large, expressive dog. Puppy dog eyes, that’s what they call them, isn’t it? Sherlock has never had much faith in idioms. He closes his eyes again.
“So you don’t want to talk about it, but everything is buzzing. And you’re naked.” Obvious, John. “Um. Do you want me to join you?”
“I don’t want sex, John.”
“No, Jesus, I just mean…” A soft huff of breath. “Right, okay.”
John releases his wrist, and Sherlock lets his hand drop back to the sheets. Every point of contact with the fabric makes his head spin dizzy, and he pushes himself deep into the sound of the traffic outside, forcing himself to visualize the street. Sharp click; high heels, practised walk, professional. Slow rumble, high exhaust, impatient at the light; mid-life crisis vehicle idling at the crosswalk, in a hurry to get nowhere in particular. The world is painted in bright hues of neon, and Sherlock can’t stand a single inch-
“Oh.”
Sherlock opens his eyes.
John is standing over him with a kind expression and a soft smile, and why didn’t he think of this before? The shock of cold slipping over his forehead and down the line of his neck makes him shiver, and he opens his mouth to breathe deep. The air is so thick it could choke him.
“You never refill the bloody ice tray,” John is saying fondly, “so this’ll have to do. Either that or I can get us some ice cream. I think Mrs. Hudson has some if you’ve done something to ours. Is the ice cream fine to eat?”
Sherlock opens his mouth only to find no sound coming out; he cannot find the words. John sits on the edge of the bed and smooths the hair from his forehead. After a moment, he leans in and kisses Sherlock’s nose.
“I never know what to do with you when you’re like this,” he mutters. “Before, I may have just left you to it, but now I’m allowed to worry about you. Obligated, even.”
Ah, yes; caretaker, doctor. Typical, sentiment, John. “You took care of me before we were involved in a physical relationship.” He feels the need to point this out, because John’s behaviour has really changed very little besides the kissing and the sex. Not that Sherlock is adverse to either of these things, but it bears mentioning.
“That’s because I always worry about you, git.” Affectionate, albeit frustrated. Does not understand Sherlock’s mind, moods, behaviour. Makes John nervous. Tedious. “Shove over.”
“If you’re attempting to lower my core body temperature, this is not the way to do it.”
Sherlock moves over. John strips off his shirt and trousers with military efficiency and climbs onto the bed with him, tucking up against his side. He presses his cheek to Sherlock’s shoulder and continues to smooth the wet flannel over his chest and down his abdomen. He pulls Sherlock’s leg between his ankles.
“I love you.” John says this into his skin, tone tilted up at the end like a half-question, as if to ask if Sherlock is aware of this fact, hidden deep in the muscle and bone. Affection is a funny thing, the way the chemistry of the body can trick someone into obsession, the way that John has become something necessary in his life like breathing and nourishment; potentially ignored, but ultimately essential. John will bandage him up and break him down when he’s built up walls around himself and press kisses into his skin when he is overstimulated and shivering because that is what John Watson’s love is. He is a doctor, and a healer, and sometimes he is a soldier, and he is always and forever Sherlock’s. He is Sherlock’s assistant at crime scenes and his best friend on outings and his lover when Sherlock is willing. John is almost always willing, sex or analysis or otherwise. This is something that Sherlock does not understand. Sherlock does not love John like affection; Sherlock loves John like possession, like marking every inch of his body with teeth and nail, like pressing his mouth into the crevices of his skin until he is begging, until his voice breaks. John is a requirement, an assumption, a fact, like the logical conclusion to Sherlock’s equation. Quod erat demonstrandum; and thus, after Sherlock, there is John. John is the answer to all things.
“Q.E.D., John.”
John huffs out a laugh. “Is this the part where I disappear?”
“What?”
“God, literary reference, never mind.” John smiles into his skin. “So if it’s already been demonstrated I guess I don’t have to say it anymore.”
Sherlock frowns. “Unacceptable. Flawed logic.”
“Alright,” John says reasonably. “Explain it to me, then.”
Sherlock tilts his head to press a kiss to John’s temple. “Demonstration of affection does not signify love, it signifies affection. Furthermore, I’d already stated that you used to take care of me before we were involved.”
“I have it on good authority that we’ve always been involved.”
“That’s because people are idiots.”
“Are they?”
Sherlock opens his eyes to consider John’s serious tone. His nose is mashed into Sherlock’s skin, but the one eye visible is solemn in its contemplation of Sherlock’s profile. Sherlock presses another kiss to his brow.
“If you were mine beforehand I would have never let you go out with all those boring women.”
“But you didn’t,” John points out. “You were always poking your nose into my dates and calling me out on cases and getting everybody kidnapped.”
“That was Sarah! She didn’t even mind. And it was once.”
“Once is enough.”
Sherlock sighs and drops his head back into the pillow. “If this is the part where you tell me you were hopelessly in love with me all along I am going to do something terribly drastic because that means we wasted a really quite unacceptable amount of time not kissing and rowing about the shopping instead.”
“Says the man who jumped off of a building for me.” Teasing; affectionate, good that they can joke about this, now. “You can love someone and not be in love with them.”
“I was most certainly in love with you when I jumped off of the roof of St. Bart’s.”
Silence. John has stopped moving, and Sherlock opens his eyes to turn and observe. John is staring at him incredulously, head raised slightly to see better. His mouth is open slightly.
“Sherlock, that was over four years ago.”
Obvious, John. “Well, that’s not to say that I was aware of it at the time, but certainly by that point you had already become the sole point of focus in my life. Moriarty knew I was in love with you since the day we first met him; he said as much at the pool. So, obviously, I was already in love with you by the time I jumped off of the roof at St. Bar-mmf.”
Sherlock will never stop being delighted with how John tastes, because each time is different. He was afraid, for a time, that he would get bored with John, but each encounter returns gloriously varying results. John is the most interesting lifelong experiment Sherlock has ever encountered, his control for every single other variable that has come into play. Today John tastes of the stale instant coffee that he gets between patients and a bit of mustard likely left over from lunch. These small things will be gone in a moment, lost between the tangle of tongues and that soft sound that John makes when Sherlock reaches into his mouth and coaxes his tongue out to suck and nibble at. He swings a leg over to straddle Sherlock’s thighs.
“You,” John gasps out between kisses, “are ridiculous.”
Sherlock ignores this in favour of pressing his fingers into John’s skin hard enough to bruise, biting at his lips and trailing his mouth up along the edge of his jaw. “Mm.” He nibbles at a bit of John’s ear. “I’m still not particularly in the mood for sex.”
John groans and tangles his fingers into Sherlock’s hair. Frustrated, wants to touch. Sherlock is not opposed to this. “I can’t believe you,” he complains. “You can’t just say things like that.”
Sherlock bites down harder, this time against John’s carotid. The sound he elicits is pornographic. “I do believe I am entirely within my rights to decline your sexual advances, Doctor Watson, physical relationship or otherwise.”
John stiffens for a moment before collapsing in a fit of laughter. His weight drops onto Sherlock’s body with a surprisingly pleasant thump, and Sherlock wraps his arms around his waist and drags his fingers up his spine while John giggles. The sounds he makes are absolutely delightful, Sherlock decides, and he will never get tired of hearing them.
“Oh god,” John mutters into his neck. “I meant about us. Before. That thing you said before.”
“About being in love with you?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s a fact.”
John lets out a snort. “Oh my god.” Sherlock ignores this. “So when did you realise you were in love with me, then?”
“Presumably we reached the same conclusion at approximately the same time.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Sherlock huffs softly and drags his fingers across John’s skin, tracing the spine and the nape of the neck to card into his hair. John is warm, slightly sticky from the metro gauntlet and the heat of wearing a doctor’s coat in this sort of weather. Sherlock entertains the idea of licking the sweat from his skin before deciding against it; John is already sexually frustrated, and Sherlock is too lethargic to be interested in sex. It’s entirely too hot for it.
“I thought about you endlessly, while I was gone. Moriarty said he would burn the heart out of me, and regardless of what I thought of his analyses regarding our relationship I knew that he was referring to my affection for you, my one weakness.” John snorts at this; amused by Sherlock’s presumed arrogance. Not factually untrue. John has always been his weakness. “I told myself that I was just concerned for your welfare. And yet when I came back to you, years later, there was something… different. I couldn’t leave it alone. I realised you were attracted to me, and here we are.”
John makes a soft sound, burying his face further into Sherlock’s skin and muttering something indecipherable.
“Hm?”
“That’s still not really a bloody answer,” John grumbles, and Sherlock frowns. This is not what John had said originally. Whatever it was had fewer vowels.
“Why not?”
John shakes his head and pushes up, separating their sticky skin and rolling off to the side slightly. Bizarrely, despite the heat, Sherlock misses his warmth. He turns onto his side to regard him more clearly, and John stares back at him with a reproachful expression. After a moment he reaches out to trace the line of Sherlock’s brow, cresting along his cheekbones and trailing down to his mouth. His pupils are noticeably dilated, and Sherlock relishes this. It is always good to be reminded that he is wanted.
“I love you,” John says eventually, and Sherlock blinks at him.
“I know.” Why is John repeating himself instead of answering his question?
John laughs and kisses him softly. “Good. Chasing after you whilst you run amuck and nearly get yourself killed all the time. I love you more than you know.” He sighs against Sherlock’s mouth, hand tightening in his curls. “I wish you would take better care of yourself. Sometimes you frighten me.”
“I know,” Sherlock says again, guilt curling in his gut. “I don’t do it on purpose, John. It’s just that sometimes the work-”
“If you die, there won’t be anybody to do the work,” John laughs, pressing kisses to his cheekbones, his brow. “And I mean like this, when you let your mind twist you up into knots and you work yourself into these states. I love you, jesus, I love every inch of you, and-” He breaks off with a small, frustrated noise; the doctor, helpless in the presence of a patient he cannot cure. Sherlock curls a hand around his nape.
“I will always come back to you,” he promises, and then, “I love you, too.”
John curls around him, body slick with sweat, heart pounding enough to betray his anxiousness. Sherlock pulls him down and arranges them front to back, John cocooned in his arms, flush against each other. John’s heartbeat taps a rhythm against the outer skin of his pectorals. Heart to heart, his mouth against John’s ear, he whispers it again. John is everything; his skin and bones, his beating heart, his greying hair, all of it imperative to Sherlock’s existence, more necessary than breath.
“You are everything,” Sherlock tells him again, one palm flat against John’s stomach. He slides his hand up to cover John’s heart.