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“Doctor,” he calls him. It is soft and low, and as close to sweetness as Sherlock Holmes can surely manage. It hints loosely at seduction and the good doctor can’t be sure that wasn’t actively attempted. “You could-“
“No,” his Watson cuts him short. That train hardly, he thinks, bears completing. To his credit, he can endure a great deal on the part of his companion, but the years have substantially diminished his tolerance for blatant self-destructive stupidity. He almost says as much. He looks at his friend, pressing his lips into a hard line. The look is torn somewhere between concern and condescension. He may as well have said it.
“You would hardly be feeding an addiction,” Holmes presses, but his friend will have none of it. He seats himself at the end of the settee, shaking his head resolutely before burying his face in the palm of one hand.
“No,” he says again. No, and again, and again as though the word could cloud the air until the question lingering there were swallowed whole. No, and on until it dissolves into silence.
Sherlock Holmes all but throws himself into the opposite end of the settee, casting himself across it with a backwards kind of glide, tossing distance between them with ferocity, as though he hopes it will sting. He curls in upon himself, arms folded over his chest and legs drawn in as close as he can manage without pulling them onto the furniture. His face is twisted into an ugly pout.
Watson could almost laugh, glancing sidelong at his friend. He looks for all the world a child denied some treat or plaything. For all of it though, with hair mussed and scarlet robe splayed beneath him, he is, in his own utterly Sherlock-ian way, the strangest kind of lovely. He is all cool red, like chilled wine or old blood, lit by the fading embers of a fire that should have been allowed to die hours ago.
“You are cruel,” Holmes mutters pointedly, his voice splicing several moments’ of static.
A sigh. John Watson could share with him no small knowledge of cruelty. The doctor in him reminds him that old wounds are not meant to be reopened, and so he bites his tongue and repays the compliment. Melodramatic madman.
The ensuing silence turns tense quickly and it is Holmes who breaks it once again.
“You could hardly stop me, you know,” he says, and it’s almost flippant. Hardly has it left his mouth when the doctor issues his reply.
“And what of my trust, Holmes?”
And that’s it, isn’t it. There’s the reason they’ve bothered with this argument at all. Because it’s not as though Holmes hasn’t sworn to break this habit before, and it’s not as though that’s stopped him even once. Really it isn’t as though he believe his dearest friend’s trust to be so fragile that he could ever wholly break it. But it’s not as though it doesn’t hurt every time he tramples over it.
Holmes leans in, if only the slightest bit, and every facet of him seems to soften. “Now, my dear man,” he says, slowly, steady. “That is hardly fair.”
And maybe he’s right. Maybe it is too much to impose such blatantly human standards on him.
A tentative silence settles itself on the air. The tension between them has eased, but it’s still palpable. Holmes can feel his next words clawing at the back of his throat, choking on them until the moment is right. They breathe. He speaks.
“It would, perhaps, be some relief to you to,” he pauses, takes a measured breath. ”Have control over this... It would surely take a step towards insuring my… safety.”
John Watson buries his face in his hands once again, his breath coming in a series of sighs. Sherlock Holmes always knows what to say, damn him. Watson could argue that he has been in control from the moment he was given leave to lock away the needle at the heart of this argument. He doesn’t though, and Holmes in turn does not remind him that no lock has ever kept Sherlock Holmes from having what he wants.
He knows how he’s going to reply long before he does, but draws the intervening moment out as long as he can hope to.
“Half,” he breathes at last into his palm, and at least that much of him hopes his friend won’t even hear it.
“Three quarters,” comes the immediate reply.
“Half,” he says again, ripe with severity.
“Two thirds.”
“One third.”
And all too quickly Holmes returns with “Half sounds precisely the correct dosage.”
So that is that. Urged on by a Holmesian grin that tries too hard not to be smug, Watson rises and ambles off into his own room. The little morocco case is held tightly in his hand when he returns to find his friend sat straight upon the settee. His legs are stretched long in front of him and his left arm is extended, shirt sleeve already hitched high around his arm. A leather band, probably hidden in his pocket the whole time, Watson realizes, is drawn loosely up around his bicep. His face is a mask of contentment.
John Watson’s handling of the hypodermic needle is a perfect display of absolute medical precision, much as his handling of Sherlock Holmes becomes from the moment he agrees to this wretched favour. He kneels before his friend who is drawing tight the leather around his arm before the syringe has even been filled. Half. The measurement is precise. Not a drop more than it has to be, and he would count on Holmes to notice any less.
With a steady hand he grips his companion about the back of the forearm, firm enough, if tentative. Bent on bringing further damage, and yet so fearful and abhorrent of the destruction edging nearer.
Briefly, he examines the skin. An archipelago of scars mapped out below the crook of an elbow. A blue-green vein pressed taut against flesh whose pallor hints at violet. Here, ever so lightly, he rests the needle’s head. Now, slowly, a mounting pressure drives it home. The thinnest red, red ring laces around the shaft, as skin breaks beneath it. The vein has been tapped.
There is a moment between the initial puncture and the ultimate release. A moment of stillness. I am here. Of awareness. I am holding a needle. It is intimate. Inside of you. And unnerving. Inside of you. And impossible. Inside of you.
It is unlike anything. And all at once, it is gone.
It comes on all together like a wave, and it comes on slowly building like a storm. It’s a rush and it feels like falling and like floating. It’s cold but, but it flares in his veins. How it is feels like Heaven when the leather is released, the blood flowing free and full of fire. Heaven- Thinks Sherlock Holmes- and if Hell is waiting, let it wait.
He seems scarcely aware of his friend, moving now about the room as a ball of poorly muted anxieties. It is not before he has returned to his side that Holmes stirs again. His eyes flutter open, bright and grey, pupils blasted wide. A smile spreads across his face, and for all it’s sincerity Watson feels an uneasiness roused in him. His hands are trembling.
He reaches for his friend.
He fixes his finger behind Holmes’ elbow. There is, he notes, the faintest trace of blood left lingering in the wake of the needle. Feather-light, he runs a finger over the mark. Tentative and gentle, like the drug has made him fragile, Watson leans forward. His lips are drawn so close to the minute wound. And suddenly they’re lingering in another in-between. A still, silent moment of breath and flesh, of touch and time-unmoving. One fleeting fraction of a second sees lips meeting skin.
It is a prayer for absolution.
And then he’s gone again, sat straight at the other end of the settee with a mumble of there you are now, old boy, that trips all over itself. His eyes trace lines across the floor for some short time until inevitably they are drawn back to his companion, tracing up the line of a leg and following torso until finally fixing again on his face. He finds those brilliant eyes have seized upon him.
“Thank you.”
It seems very sudden, though it’s utterly sincere and when he closes his mouth around the end of the words, it almost immediately forms a smile once more. It tugs at the corners of his lips as though he can hardly help it. It ebbs across his features, slowly painting absolute contentment across them. Then he laughs. A giggling, bubbling laughter that starts off so small, and builds until it seems to absolutely overflow. And it is golden.
Between short bursts of laughter he sighs, and still they watch each other as the minutes fall away around them. In time, his helpless giggling fades away from him with the ease of falling asleep so that neither really notices when the silence has returned in full.
With a languid motion like moving underwater, Holmes extends his arm so perfectly slowly the air hardly stirs, and lays a tender touch to the side of his friend’s face. His fingers ghost over the curve of a jaw-line, until two fingers come to rest at a temple, and a thumb is lingering on a cheekbone. Watson leans into the touch. There is something so perfectly precious about this, something warm that weaves it’s way around them.
For one inordinately poetic moment, John Watson thinks he understands the feeling of taking a straight shot of happiness from someone else’s hands. He isn’t actually sure if Holmes has said his name or not, but he’s roused from a line of thinking and comes back to earth to find an expectant gaze fixed on him. He blinks once in response, smiles almost sheepishly.
Sherlock Holmes implores his attention.
Shall I tell you where you spent the morning?
There is no answer and there needn’t be. He simply begins, as he is wont to do, drawing lines around the little things— Chalk dust. Splatter pattern. Do you remember saying... —until he has crafted a perfect picture of time spent without him.
And so now it happens, and for the thousandth time, that somewhere amidst the ever insuperable awe, John Watson feels himself falling— sudden as a storm, and steady as a rising tide— into Sherlock Holmes. And so slips from mind the drug, the question of whether they really believe this is the breaking of a habit, falling to a quiet Baker Street evening and the glow of a fragile happiness.