Work Text:
“I need you to do some maintenance."
John wipes his dripping clean mug with a tea towel and looks up at Sherlock looming in his personal space. "What did you break this time?"
"Nothing. You know what I've been doing all day, you know that perfectly well. But two of the ribs on my left side have become weak after repeated stress. I've ordered replacements. I need you to fix it."
"Right now? It’s a bit late." Half ten, which John considers nearly bedtime after so many years of early mornings in the army. Not that he ever really got a full night’s sleep in the army.
"Are you objecting?"
"No, of course not. It's my job, isn't it?" He’s almost glad for the chance to do some maintenance. Sherlock looks a lot less human when you can see the metal inside the skin. It's a good reminder. John sets the mug and the tea towel down on the worktop and gestures Sherlock into the lounge. "Come on. Show me which ribs it is."
Sherlock holds up a pair of new steel ribs, one in each hand. He leads the way into the lounge, transferring one of the ribs to his left hand in order to unbutton his shirt with his right. John finds himself watching the shifting of Sherlock’s shoulder muscles under his shirt, and distracts himself by going to the desk and digging his tri-wing screwdriver out of one of the drawers. He should really be hiding it better. Sherlock sets the ribs down on the table by John’s chair and turns off the telly before he shrugs his shirt down his arms and off. Sherlock is totally unselfconscious, which of course makes perfect sense, but John still finds it refreshing. After Afghanistan London had seemed so buttoned up.
Outside the sky is dark, and the cool white glow of streetlights filters in, mixing with the lamps scattered here and there and warming the flat. The light makes Sherlock's synthetic skin look more eerily real than ever. John's eyes rove across Sherlock's face, his naked torso, his arms, the more delicate skin at his elbows. The now-familiar excitement of having a robot this new to work with curls in his belly. God, Sherlock's amazing. He's so much smarter than any other robot John’s ever seen, even at the LSR before the regulations tightened up so much they started to stifle all of John’s hopes for his future career. And so well-designed.
John slides his driver into his trouser pocket and watches as Sherlock takes a scalpel and a foil-wrapped disposable blade out of his own pocket. His fingers--God, he has incredible fingers--are deft as they unwrap the blade and fit it into the handle of the scalpel. He drops the wrapper on the floor (slob, John thinks rather fondly) and offers the tool handle-first to John. John shakes himself and pushes away from the desk, stepping across the room to take the scalpel.
"Cut on the diagonal; it re-fuses better that way," Sherlock says.
“I know, Sherlock. We’ve done this before. A lot.”
“It's been a while.”
"Yeah, it has." John has missed this, in some ill-defined way.
Sherlock lifts his right arm so the skin pulls tighter across his chest and makes his ribs stand out and gestures with the other hand, pressing two fingertips to his bottom two ribs. “These. The floating ribs or costae fluitantes, in a human ribcage. You’ll need to detach them at the spine.”
“Yeah, I have looked at the schematics, thanks. If I make the cut in the back can I just tug ‘em out?”
“Yes.” Sherlock turns at the waist first, and then moves his feet, putting his back and right side in John’s view. He looks over his shoulder at John.
John takes a deep breath and presses his lips together tightly. He reaches out to touch Sherlock's skin, running his finger up the part of his spine where the ribs connect, pressing slightly to make sure he’s in the right place. John traces the rectangle he is going to follow with the knife, the square of skin curving around the side of Sherlock's body that John is going to cut open on three sides and fold down.
John sets the tip of the scalpel to the bottom left corner of that rectangle, and pauses a moment. Sherlock’s skin is warm and dry, softer than you’d expect from an artificial material. Familiar, surprisingly so.
John braces himself with his right hand on Sherlock’s hip. "Hold still," John murmurs, though Sherlock isn't moving.
The knife slides in. The initial resistance--just like real skin--is broken, and the scalpel moves upwards precisely and smoothly. John turns the corner less perfectly than he would have liked, and narrows his concentration to take the next corner more delicately.
He folds the flap of skin down. Revealed is an elegant mess of metal parts, moving in perfect, repetitive tiny ways, wires connecting like veins and disappearing beneath the unopened skin. On top of all this are Sherlock’s ribs, almost identical to the ones still sitting on the table but clearly older and more worn.
John steps back and sets down the scalpel. Sherlock looks like an écorché, a body with its skin cut away to show the internal organs. A thoroughly modern écorché, made not for medical study but for action and thought, for the joy of pure untarnished technology. John is captivated by the sight, by the subtle movement of the parts revealed, the edges of the skin, Sherlock's perfect torso and equally perfect internal mechanisms.
Sherlock lets John stare for a long time, longer than John would have expected--time wasted, inefficiency, hurry up before dust gets inside. "John," Sherlock says finally.
"Sorry," John mutters, shaking himself. He pulls his tri-wing screwdriver out of his trouser pocket and presses his thumb to the fingerprint lock. It clicks, and the smallest of the three screwdriver heads snaps out of the handle. He unscrews the little strips of metal that attach the ribs to Sherlock’s spine, handing the screws to Sherlock to hold.
John takes the bottom rib carefully between fingers and thumb and pulls at it. It resists, but after a minute it pulls out. The second rib takes more tugging. John turns his right palm sideways, bracing it more firmly against Sherlock’s side, fingers curling around. Finally the rib budges and John extracts it carefully, the arc of metal snaking out from the inside of Sherlock’s body. He looks at the place where his hand meets Sherlock’s skin and freezes, unable to look away.
John had thought, when he started to notice his attraction to Sherlock, that it was a product of how human Sherlock is, that it was only happening because Sherlock is an attractive man and John spends far too much time with him, that it only hits John when he forgets that Sherlock is a robot. But here John is with Sherlock’s wiring on display and his steel ribs in John’s hand, and John is looking at his hand on Sherlock’s hip and wanting to tug him backward, bury his face in Sherlock’s back.
John has done what he never thought he’d do, broken one of the most important rules. He wants a robot in all the wrong ways. Not just because this robot is so easily mistaken for human, but because John knows he’s a robot. Because he's Sherlock.