Work Text:
“Ow,” said John, softly but with feeling.
To put it simply, everything hurt: generally, all over, in a way that reminded him he wasn’t twenty and fighting fit anymore, and specifically, in some places, to drive home the point with emphatic punctuation. The worst of it was the left side of his face.
He knew it looked a mess too. The swelling had gone down a bit since yesterday, but the area surrounding his eye was the deep, ugly purple of a day-old bruise. That was going to be there for a while, and after that he had the sickly greens and yellows to look forward to. Nice.
(“You should have seen the other bloke,” he’d told Lestrade the other night.
“I did. I put him in the back of the squad car: all of six-foot-five, built like a brick shithouse, and whimpering like a baby. What did you do to him?”
John, still high on the adrenaline and for whom the aches and pains were a problem of the distant future, had grinned at him. Lestrade, possibly worried for his sanity, had insisted on a visit to A & E.)
At least nothing was broken. He raised a hand, elbow and shoulder protesting all the way, and gingerly touched a spot just above his cheekbone. Pain blossomed beneath his fingertips. He didn’t know what else he’d been expecting.
“Ow,” he said again.
“Stop poking at it.” Sherlock’s voice was still blurred around the edges from the earliness of the hour, and it was coming from the region of the bedroom door.
John craned his neck to look at him. “I wasn’t poking at it. I was...examining it.”
“By poking at it.”
“I’m a doctor. I know how to poke things.” John considered Sherlock, wondering - not for the first time - how he could have gotten so lucky. He didn’t know what the best thing about his mornings had been before the sight of a just-woken-up Sherlock Holmes in his rumpled pyjamas and dressing gown became a regular occurrence, but whatever it was had faded into obscurity. The first sip of a cup of tea or some such mundane rot couldn’t have been anywhere near as glorious. “How are you feeling?”
Sherlock shrugged. He’d scraped his palm, skinned his knee, and torn his Spencer Hart trousers beyond any hope of repair, but none of that seemed to bother him as much as John’s black eye. “I’ll live. You, on the other hand - is it an ice pack or a warm compress on the second day?”
He held up both things. John noticed that a flannel was dangling from the pocket of his dressing gown.
“I’ll take the ice pack, thanks.” It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him not to bother, he’d be up in a second for a cup of tea, and maybe to fry up a couple of eggs, but realistically there was only so much he could do at the moment.
“Hush, you do this often enough for me,” said Sherlock, as ever reading John’s thoughts from the set of his mouth and the furrow of his eyebrows. He wrapped the ice pack in the flannel as he crossed the room, then settled on the bed next to John, gently maneuvering his head onto his lap and carefully, carefully putting the ice pack on his eye.
That felt nice.
John snuggled closer: Sherlock’s body warmth was a delightful counterpoint to the cold.
“Lestrade still wants to know what you did to St. Clair. He called earlier saying he confessed to everything and agreed to provide evidence that will almost certainly convict the couple who hired him, all provided that New Scotland Yard keeps you away from him. And Lestrade’s more than happy to comply if it keeps them from having to call you as a witness.” Sherlock carded the fingers of his free hand through John’s hair, absently, fondly. “He told me to remind you of last time, when you scared the jury more than the triple homicide suspect who was actually on trial.”
John ignored that. Sherlock was one to talk about behavior in court, and he’d already promised Lestrade to keep from glowering if he could help it. “St. Clair tried to hurt you, love. I couldn’t have that - just imagine what this shiner would have looked like on your pretty face. I was morally obligated to keep that from happening.”
“I’d prefer it if you kept your own pretty face away from where the fists are flying.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“You started it.”
“I can start more than that.”
Sherlock laughed, gamely letting John pull him down onto the bed. The ice pack slipped off to the side, quite forgotten.
John said ‘ow’ again much later, because the aches and pains didn’t miraculously disappear, but it was more out of habit than anything he actually minded.