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“Mister Holmes!”
John was used to this. People tended to see Sherlock first: the relative height, the dramatic coat, the cheekbones, and the indefinable air of being something more than human rather drew the eye, never mind that it was John who had one arm thrown around Sherlock because his right ankle wouldn’t hold his weight. Not that John minded. He was perfectly happy to leave the business of securing a room for the night to someone else.
“Hello again, Hussein,” said Sherlock far too brightly. “You did say we could come back any time we wanted.”
“Yes, of course—but—I mean,” the young man behind the front desk faltered to a stuttering stop. “What happened to you?”
“We solved the case.” Sherlock still sounded too happy. John risked a sideways glance at him and saw he was wearing the slightly manic grin of a man who has been running on caffeine and adrenaline and knows both are about to run out. “The daughter’s boyfriend did it, the whole thing with the fried fish was an unfortunate misunderstanding—I’m sure you’ll read all about it in your local paper’s Twitter account in a couple of hours, sooner if the editor doesn’t stop for chips—and all of this means that we were not able to leave tonight as planned. As you can see John is worse for wear, and we would like our room back.” Sherlock paused, looking like he was going over a checklist somewhere in the depths of his mind palace, then found what he was looking for. “Please.”
“Oh no,” said Hussein, clearly distressed.
“I did say ‘please’,” said Sherlock. John didn’t even try to resist the urge to hide his face in his free hand. He’d been trying to work the word into Sherlock’s vocabulary over the past week and this wasn’t quite how he’d wanted to find out that he’d succeeded.
“Yes, only I can’t give you your room. I’d love to, but I can’t. Another couple checked in after you left and they made their reservation months ago—”
“It doesn’t have to be that room,” said John desperately. “Any room at all will be fine. Please,” he added.
“That’s the problem,” moaned Hussein, all but dancing on the spot. “There are no rooms for two people. We’re pretty much fully booked because of the folk music festival this weekend, and, um” —he finally took a good look at John—“shouldn’t you be sitting down?”
“I’d rather be lying down, thanks. Any other hotels in the area, then? B&B’s? Inns? Abandoned cottages?”
“Wait.” Sherlock’s tone became sharp. “No rooms for two people. What are the others?”
John nodded encouragingly. At this point, he was willing to help pay for a suite for a family of seven if it meant he’d be able to put his foot up, and fast.
“Well?” prompted Sherlock.
“Well...” Hussein hesitated. “I don’t know if you’ll like it—”
“We’ll like it.”
“It’s not ideal—”
“It’ll be fine.”
“There’s only one bed—”
“Does it look like that matters?”
“Oh.”
“You can’t say we weren’t warned.” John looked around the room. As promised, there was only one bed, twin sized and pushed into one corner so as to leave a sliver of carpet just wide enough for the door to swing open unimpeded. Apart from that, there wasn’t much else to take in: a tiny nightstand mostly occupied by a thin reading lamp, a diminutive armchair, a nook in the wall with shelves in it, and and another door that presumably led to the bathroom. “We’ve had worse. At least there’s a window.”
“You’ll take the bed, of course,” said Sherlock briskly as he helped John to it. It was hardly any distance at all.
“Don’t be silly. We sleep in the same bed at home.”
“You’re hurt. I don’t want to jostle you.”
“I’m not made of china.” John grimaced as he tried to get his shoe off. No, he was made of muscle and bone and tendons and sinew, which were fragile in an entirely different way, not to mention nerves that were currently firing off at the very least provocation. Not that he was about to admit it. “And where were you planning on spending the night? That chair?”
“There’s always the floor.”
“Is that why you asked for all those extra pillows and blankets? It’ll hurt more if I trip over you on my way to the loo.” John laughed warmly, equal parts exasperation and fondness. “I’ll be all right once I get this iced. Speaking of which, can you get some ice when you go get our bags?”
Sherlock did. He also brought back a first aid kit Hussein had found for them (John would use the elastic wrap in the morning) and, after they’d both showered and changed (separately, more’s the pity, but it wasn’t as though the shower could feasibly accommodate more than one person at a time), he helped arrange some pillows at the end of the bed for John to prop his foot up on.
“You’ll have to take the side by the wall,” said Sherlock as he set the flat cushion from the arm chair into place. “There. Will that do?”
“Yeah, that’s perfect, thanks. What was that again about the wall?”
Eye rolls and exasperated sighs really weren’t supposed to be endearing, but they were part and parcel of being in love with Sherlock Holmes. “You need to take that side of the bed, John: it’ll keep your injured ankle farther from me and I won’t have to crawl over you if I have to get up in the middle of the night. I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it.”
John wiggled his toes at him. The swelling had gone down marginally since the judicious application of about half a bucket of ice wrapped in a tea towel, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet; this brusque consideration of Sherlock’s was therefore heartachingly sweet. “That’s very altruistic of you.”
“Perhaps. It’s not too late for me to sleep in the Land Rover.”
“After what you deduced about the back seat?”
“Hm.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Now come to bed.”
It was a tight fit. There was no getting around that for all of John’s vaunted optimism, especially with the cushions at the end of the bed. Ordinarily, this could have been solved by cuddling or spooning or any of the myriad ways people could wrap themselves around each other in bed, but it wasn’t one of those nights.
“I refuse to complain,” John declared to the ceiling as Sherlock somehow fit himself sideways onto what remained of the mattress.
“You always complain.”
“Hey!”
Sherlock managed to turn to face John without falling over the edge. “You do. Not loudly, and certainly not enough for people to start thinking of you as a mean, shouty old man—”
“Old man?”
“—but you do have a way of letting them know when the world isn’t arranged according to your liking. The face you make when you taste sugar in your coffee comes to mind.”
“Says the man who tried to slip me drugged sugar at Baskerville!”
“See what I mean?”
“Yes, well.” John tried to scoot closer to the wall, a decidedly futile action unless it suddenly opened into Narnia. “I’m not going to complain about this. I think we gave Hussein a hard enough time, and if I even try to make a funny quip about how we were squashed into the bed like a pair of really intimate sardines, we’ll get made into one of those customers-are-horrible videos.”
Sherlock made a noise that indicated polite but distant interest. He sounded sleepy.
“You know, the ones where one person acts the part of customer service person and the customer by wearing different hats. They’d probably do you by popping up their jacket collar and have me as a dummy slung over your shoulder.”
“Ah. The ones you think are funny. I remember when you thought the peak of comedy was a cat falling off a shelf.”
“Things have come along a bit since then.”
The noise Sherlock made this time was disinterested and was interrupted by a yawn.
“I’ll stop yammering on.” John yawned himself and nudged Sherlock, but gently so as not to knock him off the mattress. “I love you, you know.”
“Of course.” Sherlock kissed him gently before rolling over onto his side to turn off the light. “Good night, John.”
And he was asleep in what seemed like a matter of seconds. Which was a good thing, John thought to himself in the cramped dark. All too often, it took Sherlock a long while to wind down after a case, especially if he’d been pushing himself for days, though the one they’d just wrapped up wasn’t a matter of a single complex case so much as the last in a series of small ones that Sherlock had taken on in the course of a week, leaping from one to the next like a man playing hopscotch on ice floes.
This one hadn’t even been a crime, not really. Or not yet. A family had failed to realize the exact (somewhat significant) value of an elderly relative’s collection of antiques, and the daughter’s boyfriend had tried to capitalize on this through a type of new-lamps-for-old scheme. He’d become a little too attentive, however, which had led to said elderly relative becoming convinced that he was trying to poison her. She’d called Sherlock in because her family couldn’t understand why she was being so paranoid about nice young Brian when all he wanted to do for her was swap out that horrible old cow creamer for a smart new milk jug from Marks & Spencer. Given that it was a surprisingly ugly cow creamer, John supposed it would have been a kind gesture if it hadn’t happened to also be a 19th century antique that could fetch upwards of a thousand pounds on the open market.
It was rather tame compared to the sort of case they usually saw, but John liked to think that Sherlock was a soft touch sometimes. Besides, there was a good deal of excitement towards the end, what with that explosive breakup when all was revealed, which had resulted in John having to dive to catch a Victorian era scent bottle before it shattered on the hardwood floor in all the commotion. That was what had done his ankle in, since he’d had to twist on his way down to avoid the spindly table with all the ceramic figurines that probably cost more than the sum total of the army pension he’d collected to date.
All the shouting and crashing about had led to the neighbors calling the police, and they’d arrived with the local paper’s editor hot on their heels. Sherlock said this was partly because he was very keen and a bit because he’d just been having a pint with one of the officers.
And...
He was still awake. Damn. What time was it anyway?
John pulled his phone out from under his pillow to check. 2:04AM. So it wasn’t as late as he’d thought it was but it still wasn’t great. He was tired and it wouldn’t be long before they had to start moving, but then he could always sleep on the train. And maybe in the car too, since he wouldn’t be driving. Though it had been a long time since he’d found sleep in any sort of moving vehicle satisfying.
He had the rest of the day to rest when they got back home at any rate, and there’d be a proper sized bed to look forward to, not to mention Sherlock’s frankly spectacular sheets. Honestly, it was no wonder he sometimes eschewed clothes in favor of those sheets. John knew for a fact that they were smoother against the skin than any shirt he owned, and, come to think of it, he’d been meaning to look for a replacement since Sherlock had, in a breakfast-related accident, singed the edge of the sheet he wore most often.
John had taken a picture of the tag and everything. He’d just never gotten around to looking it up, and now was as good a time as any. He was awake, he had his phone out, and he’d likely forget if he put it off for the daylight. And there was the photo—good thing that hadn’t been too long ago—and there was Google and...
Good lord. Nobody spent that much on bedclothes, surely?
John backed out of the website with unseemly haste, just in case they charged him for looking. Perhaps it could be a Christmas present. That was a long way off—he’d have to bookmark the page so he’d remember but, if he was to be completely honest with himself, he didn’t remember what half his bookmarks were for. Setting a reminder in his calendar was out of the question, not with Sherlock, not if he wanted it to be a surprise, and...
This wasn’t a problem for a strange hotel room in the wee small hours of the morning. He ought to sleep or at least lie there quietly, which would be more restful than flicking restlessly from app to app, not really taking anything in. He didn’t need to know tricks for frying eggs perfectly (he liked his with the burnt crispy bits around the edges) though they did need a new frying pan owing to a disastrous experiment of Sherlock’s and his own considerably worse attempt at cleaning it up.
Funny, that. Not too long ago, he would have gone to a shop, picked up a frying pan from the shelf, and not given the matter any more thought unless the handle fell off or something similarly dire. Now he was at least five click-throughs deep into frying pan reviews and had somehow ended up trapped watching ridiculous videos that no one with an ounce of sense should waste their time on. But then, he thought halfway through Make Any Frying Pan Non-Stick!, he’d never claimed to have much sense and he wasn’t about to acquire any at 3 in the morning.
“John.”
He froze guiltily, mid-scroll through the comments on Ultimate Frying Pan Hacks: Hack #5 Will Change Your Life!!! “Yes, Sherlock?”
“Put your phone away. It’s not helping you sleep, and I find the light distracting though I appreciate that you muted the videos.”
“Sorry.”
“You can look for frying pans in the morning.”
“It is morning,” said John, somewhat testily since Sherlock was one to talk about staying on your devices at all the hours God sent.
“You know what I mean. Or, better still, we can stop and buy a frying pan when we get back to London to save you from rotting your brain with YouTube click bait.”
“Hey!” In the light of his screen, John gazed blearily at the back of Sherlock’s head and the hump of his shoulder under the blanket. Where now was the caring and solicitous Sherlock from last evening? Then again, John had to concede that that Sherlock had not yet been trying to squeeze in a few hours sleep before dawn with a restless bedfellow. Besides, he was right. All the damn thing was doing was keeping him awake. “There. I’ve put it away now.”
“Good. And don’t pull it back out to check if you’ve set your alarm. I saw you do that before bed and I’ve set mine too.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“Good night, John. Do try to sleep.”
“Night, Sherlock.”
And he was out like a light again. For a minute John thought he might be shamming, but he began to make what he thought of as Sherlock’s sleeping noises. They weren’t snores: it was little breathy noises, with the occasional half syllable or murmured word thrown in to signify that that big brain of his was still working in there. John loved it. He’d grown accustomed to falling asleep with listening to those noises and one of the most adorable things he’d heard to date was Sherlock sleep-mumbling ‘sausages and mustard’ on a peaceful loop.
Sherlock soon shifted onto his back, bumping into John’s half of the bed, his curls brushing against John’s ear as he muttered something that may or may not have been ‘Galapagos’.
This was all right then. This was nice. John felt himself getting heavy and loose-limbed, and he just had time to congratulate himself on finally falling asleep when Sherlock’s sleeping noises were punctuated by a very real snore.
John started fully awake. Snoring only happened when Sherlock was well and truly tired. It was jarring, yes, but he could live with it. He wasn’t going to be an arsehole about it, not when Sherlock was obviously exhausted, but he did wish he would at least snore with some sort of rhythm.
The unpredictability was the worst of it. There would be three or four snores in quick succession, then blissful silence, then one long, drawn out, log-splitting monstrosity that the occupants of the next room must have heard through the wall, and it just went on from there. John tried to tune it out but it was next to impossible when God alone knew when the next one was coming and He certainly wasn’t about to share the timetable.
He had no way of telling how long he spent staring at the ceiling, dreading the moments of silence because there was no telling when they would meet their sudden and violent end. It felt like an eternity until John decided that there was no point in suffering. He gently, carefully eased Sherlock onto his side. Wonder of wonders, he managed to do it without sending Sherlock all the way over the edge of the bed.
There was a tense moment when Sherlock drew in a long, shuddery breath but what followed was a soft sigh, and he fell into deep, even breathing after that.
There.
That was better.
And now John had to pee.
He could hold it. Of course he could. And if he could only fall asleep now, he wouldn’t have to use the bathroom until morning. Or he could fall into one of those dreams where you use the toilet and your bladder isn’t terribly concerned about whether or not your actual body is still in bed. Damn, damn, damn.
This was ridiculous: he was a fully grown man who could go hours without a bathroom break if he had to. He’d just started to get comfortable and he was damned if he was going to get up for anything other than a soft apocalypse.
Outside, it began to rain. There must have been a drainpipe right by the window because the splash and gurgle of running water quickly became the most audible thing in the little room. It was pure torture.
No, no, this was even more ridiculous. John was a fully grown man with a medical degree who knew he wasn’t doing himself any favors by holding it. All he had to do was race to the bathroom and get it over with before the drowsiness wore off. He just needed to get up and—
Ah. That was the problem, wasn’t it? He hated to wake Sherlock (who had just sighed and murmured something that sounded a lot like ‘loop of Henle’) but there was no other way to get off the bed short of teleportation. The foot of the bed was clear, though. If he scooted downwards very, very slowly...
He knocked over the pile of cushions. His ankle screamed. John almost did too.
So that was out of the question. How badly did he have to go anyway?
Rain pattered against the windowpane.
Very badly, then.
Well. He was a fully grown man, and sometimes being an adult meant doing things you didn’t want to do, such as waking up the peacefully slumbering love of your life so you could perform necessary bodily functions. Or maybe the adult thing would be to tough it out? Either way, every second he wasted on this moral quandary was a second he came closer to simply shoving Sherlock to the floor on a mad dash to the bathroom because despite his best intentions, he would not be able to hold it forever. Waking him was going to be far kinder.
John tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Sherlock.”
“Proximal convoluted tubule.”
John tapped harder. “Sherlock, I need you to wake up. Or not. But I need you to move.”
“Nephron—mmm?” Sherlock’s head lifted off the pillow.
“I need to use the loo!” hissed John in a desperate whisper.
That worked. Whether or not he was actually awake was debatable, but Sherlock flip-flopped out from under the covers to stand aside, blinking blearily as John hobbled quick as he could to the bathroom. He still looked more than half asleep when John re-emerged, perched as he was on the edge of the bed with his head bowed and his knees on his elbows in an uncomfortable slouch.
“Sorry about that,” said John ruefully. He meant it too, but he was also very, very relieved.
Sherlock shrugged and lurched to his feet. He mumbled what sounded like, “Might as well,” before shuffling past John and into the bathroom himself.
So that kind of worked out then.
While he waited for him to come back, John re-positioned himself in the bed, making do with a slightly lower footrest because he couldn’t be bothered to go after all the scattered pillows. Settling in alone, he realized that this bed wasn’t much bigger than the one he’d had at his horrible old bedsit.
Good Lord, what a thought. Those had been bleak days: he’d barely been able to leave that bed, and it had been hard to think about getting to the next week much less the next decade. He’d never have been able to imagine Sherlock, or sharing a bed with Sherlock, or sharing this bed with Sherlock.
How long had it been since he’d left there—ten, eleven years? He really ought to know but he couldn’t count right now. The blog would have the exact dates.
And that was another funny thing, the blog. He wondered if Ella would still recommend blogging as a way to cope. Somehow it didn’t seem the done thing now. Would she suggest a YouTube vlog instead? Or, God forbid, Twitter? He doubted either would have helped his sanity. Might even have made things worse, actually, if he’d had to deal with YouTube comments...
“John. Hush.”
John looked up at Sherlock, who had returned and was looking considerably more awake. “I wasn’t saying anything.”
“You were thinking. Loudly.” He squeezed in next to John, lying on his side again to regard him closely. “Is everything all right?”
“Hm? Yes, I’m okay. We’ve had worse.”
“So you keep saying.”
“Oh, come on. What about that eighteen-hour stakeout in the Ford Fiesta?”
Sherlock snorted. “Eighteen hours and not a lavatory for miles. How did we end up in that car again?”
“It was the only one we could hire on short notice that wasn’t a moving van. Not that any other option would have come with a toilet.”
“And no car on earth would have made us follow the right sister through acres and acres of soggy countryside when the woman we actually wanted was on vacation in Peru. Yes, now I remember. That’s why I was trying to delete it.” Sherlock laughed softly then turned sober. “John. We really do need to sleep.”
“Do we really? I mean, what’s the point anymore? There can’t be much time left till dawn.”
“We do. And you know we do because it’s me saying it.” Sherlock put a hand on John’s chest, calming and reasonable, as he very rarely was.
“All right.” John laid his hand over Sherlock’s, twining their fingers together. “Good night. Again. And I love you.”
"I know."
This time it would work. Third time’s the charm, wasn’t it? John closed his eyes and held on to Sherlock’s hand and just tried to let himself breathe. The room was dark, and it was nice, actually, to listen to the rain outside when he was in a warm, ridiculously small bed next to Sherlock. He might not actually get to sleep but this was enough. It was...
Some semblance of sleep must have happened because the next thing John knew, he was waking up and the tiny room was drenched in morning sunlight. They must have both slept through their alarms but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He was caught in those blissful first few moments of consciousness when all you know is how comfortable it is to be lying exactly as you are (i.e., half wrapped around your partner who has encroached so much on your space that you literally have your back against the wall), and that you would sell your soul for five more minutes of sleep.
Or not sleep, thought John, inasmuch as he was capable of thought. What he wanted was five more minutes of precisely this—this glorious half-awake state where he was aware of Sherlock breathing in his arms (“Not the lark,” he mumbled), the weight of the blanket over them, the hotel pillow beneath their heads, and the sunlight against his closed eyes. Though maybe he could do with his leg not being caught between Sherlock’s pyjama-ed ones. If he moved his foot just a quarter of an inch...
It was his right foot. And therefore his right ankle.
There really was only one way to react to that.
“Fuck!”
“John?” Sherlock came all the way awake very fast, which would have been commendable if his first action hadn’t been tying to turn and find out what was wrong.
John got his ankle out of the way just in time, at the expense of jarring it somewhat. “No, I’m fine—Christ, ow!—I’m fine, it’s fine—”
“It doesn’t sound fine!” Sherlock flailed around again in a mad panic, trying to sit up and look at John.
“It’ll be fine if you stop thrashing around, you great bloody octopus! No, Sherlock, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—” Initially, John was apologizing for the unwarranted shouting, but it quickly turned into an apology for something else: Sherlock, in spite of John grasping for his shirt, fell, slowly and magnificently, off of the bed, taking most of the covers with him.
It was a fitting end to the night.
Much later, they were at the front desk again, trying to check out with almost as much urgency as they'd been trying to check in. Sherlock had needed to be disentangled from the sheets, and he had afterwards insisted that John should ice his ankle again before they left (in the interest of time, John's preferred strategy would have been to wrap it and let a couple of paracetamol do the rest of the work; Sherlock had grumbled about doctors making the worst patients).
Hussein was there, looking far too fresh for someone who had worked the late shift last night. He took Sherlock’s card and beamed at them. “I hope you slept well?”
John smiled thinly. “Like a baby.”
Technically it wasn’t a lie, not when you knew how infants actually slept. Hussein gave him the happy smile of a man who has no experience with small children, and John discreetly elbowed Sherlock in the ribs before he could shatter the illusion.
“Good, good,” said Hussein, handing Sherlock the receipt. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay for breakfast? I don’t think you’ve had our kedgeree yet—our chef only makes it on the weekends.”
“Tempting, but no, thank you.” Sherlock made the card and the receipt vanish into the depths of his coat, and produced the keys to the Land Rover as though performing a conjuring trick. “We really must be going.”
“Of course. Important business in London?” asked Hussein, in the tones of someone who has recently spent some time on the local paper’s Twitter account, Google, a certain blog and possibly one consulting detective’s website, and has thus formed certain Impressions overnight.
“Yes,” said Sherlock. John would have stopped him there, but he was in the middle of a huge yawn and could not belie it when Sherlock elaborated further: “Sleep.”