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Wind filled with sleet batters against the windows of 221b Baker Street, sticking there a while before dripping down the glass in icy rivulets. It’s a miserable February afternoon and Sherlock lies on the sofa, drifting in a haze of morphine. The little lacquered box that contains his vials and his needles is tucked back into the hollow of the sofa cushion, where Mycroft and John have yet to find it. He needs to replenish his stock – his morphine vials are getting sparse, used too often and in too high a dosage. The dose singing in his veins now is large, making him drowsy, slow of thought and loose-limbed. It’s not nearly large enough, but any more and he’d run the risk of drifting off. He’d run the risk of still being noticeably high when John returned.
Sherlock sighs in frustration, rubbing his hands over his eyes. John is, irritatingly, the crux of the matter. It is February the fourteenth, Valentine’s day, and even the pleasant glow of morphine can’t counteract the black cloud stealing over Sherlock. Valentine’s Day – a pagan fertility festival hijacked first by Christianity and then by chocolatiers and florists around the world. A day when the idiots of the world profess their affections with conventionally approved symbols and tokens, and the unattached of the world were once again reminded of their second-class status. A day when any other fool might confess their unrequited love for their straight, ex-military flatmate.
Sherlock sits up in annoyance, looking longingly at the sofa cushion that conceals his stash. The dose is wearing thin and he’s coming down, or else his mind would never have suggested something so foolish. He wants to shoot up again; he fights the urge, and settles back on the sofa. He indulges himself, just for a fleeting moment, in another way – he imagines kissing John. His lips part slightly as he pictures John’s tongue sliding past his teeth, feels a familiar hand cupping the back of his head. He would kiss John thoroughly, he decides, press into him until their bodies molded to fit one another, kiss, touch and lick until John ran through his very veins, through his beating heart.
(As if he’s not there already.)
John is worse than any drug could ever be.
When Sherlock turned to chemicals, it was to free his mind of the shackles of boredom and everyday life. Finding new ways to make his brain sparkle and vibrate became almost a hobby, plunging down one consciousness-bending alley after another. Anything not to be bored any more. It was almost the death of him, but Sherlock has always valued his life lightly and especially then, when there were new ways to make reality twist, to escape for a little while from the screaming dullness of his existence.
It was just too good to let go. It still is, thinks Sherlock, aware of the slight difference in the consistencies of the sofa cushions that indicate that there is a hiding place in one of them. It's so easy to give in, to float away in the embrace of an opiate, and soften the edges of the world; or fire up his mind and give the dull Earth back its shimmer with cocaine. The consequences were far too abstract, far too distant to weigh at all on his mind, suddenly so free and clear. Death, damage, illness - it was of no consequence. Sherlock was the problem child of a grand old family - in times past, he would have been sent to sea, or locked in a monastery. Since neither of these alternatives were socially acceptable, Holmes pere had given Sherlock the best education money could buy, and the back of his hand. He was footloose and unattached, and there was no one to worry, no one to care. If it hadn't been for Mycroft, Sherlock would have been left to wither himself to an early, messy grave. It took an abduction from Mycroft to wean him off and a threat from Lestrade to keep him clean, and in the end it was the work that saved Sherlock's life, not a late-arriving sense of self-preservation.
He's relapsed before, spent long, bored days under the influence of one narcotic or another, whiling away the time until he could work again. He took care that Lestrade never found him at his worst, lest he refuse to allow Sherlock onto a crime scene; the risk was a small one, considering how much the Detective relied on his services. He took more care around Mycroft, knowing how much his older brother liked to dangle the Damoclean sword of rehab over his head. It was always manageable, or so he liked to tell himself.
He was clean (for a given value of clean; once every couple of months hardly counts, does it?) when he met John. Dependent on nothing but his work; afraid of nothing but the long blank tedium between cases. It was a better way to be, better than hooked on some chemical, locked in the tolerance-increased dosage-overdose spiral. At last, his mind was free of its reliance on any but its natural chemicals, at the height of its powers and magnificent. Loathe as he was to admit that perhaps Mycroft had been right, the drugs were of no use to him - not as a Consulting Detective. And in his ascendancy, he'd met John Watson, a shortish, unassuming man who was the first person since he was a teenager that Sherlock had inwardly admitted to liking.
He was also the first person since his twenties that Sherlock had wanted physically. He'd seen that straight away, as John leaned into his cane and in that pleasant quiet voice, offered him his phone. Something dusty and forgotten had flickered in him, and made him think "hmm." And from there...well. They had sprinted around London, and Sherlock had deigned to allow John along, treating him like a live-in PA, and it had worked. What if he had moaned John's name into his pillow, gasped it in the shower, panting from the ministrations of his own hand? It was a release, nothing more. It was just a simple way to prevent his physiological symptoms from overtaking his mind, and it had worked, aside from a notable incident in which he'd got lost in imagining being tied to his headboard and taken from behind. Lestrade had been so suspicious he'd ordered a drug squad to descend on 221b (again). Had Sherlock not been so angry, that might have served as his first warning. But he went on, and on, keeping a distance from John in his waking hours and letting his considerable imagination run wild in the night, and imagined that he could sustain this, until death or an argument about body parts in a fridge parted them. (I can give it up anytime I want.) Then Moriarty had taken John to be his fifth pip, strapped Semtex to him and told Sherlock to choose; his career or his best friend. And that was when Sherlock had realised what trouble he was in. Because he could live with the prospect of death, of disease and wasting or a violent and bloody confrontation, but watching that little laser sight flicker over John's forehead was more than he could take. The vista of a life without John Watson opened before him, and he felt a cold and sickening fear shudder through him. If Moriarty's man pulled the trigger, Sherlock would come to an end, whether or not the resulting blast killed him. Life in the world, for all of its clues and mysteries and delightful puzzles, would not be enough anymore.
And so after the pool, after John and Sherlock had resumed something that felt like normality again, the detective found himself facing up to a number of new and alarming truths. He had, without knowing it, become entirely addicted to John. Little by little, he'd let him in, as surely as though he'd loaded John into a syringe and injected him, and now Sherlock needs him just to survive. He is sure that other people use the same metaphor for love and lust and devotion, and Sherlock can't deny that those things were part of the swirling knot of feelings that he kept just below his sternum. But there is also the stark knowledge that if John is ever taken away, Sherlock will not live. It's a physical thing, not an emotional one. John Watson's presence is like air and water: necessary.
John is so much worse than even the heroin. Drugs can only get into his bloodstream; John is in his bones.
And how he wants to reach out, to take more than just the crumbs that have fallen his way. Sherlock knows he shouldn't still fantasize about John. It's dangerous, now he wants John so very much. Each imagined kiss batters at his resolve, crumbles the will stopping him from bringing any of them from his mind into reality, for all that his dreams are but shadows of what the real thing would feel like. Because that would be Not Good; John is not gay. John does not want him, not the way Sherlock does. Any move Sherlock makes to move their relationship from not entirely platonic would send John away, in pity or disgust. These, at last, are consequences too hard to bear. All the fear that should have struck him the first time he took up his syringe arrives now, fifteen years late and all the more powerful. Sherlock can never have what he desires most, for in taking it, he would lose John, and then he would die.
But then, he thinks wryly, I have never been overly afraid of death.
Sherlock thinks, in a moment of bitterness, that perhaps it would have been easier to have died of an overdose in his youth. He realises, casting his mind back over the years, that he has Mycroft to thank for John. He would never have lived long enough to meet John had he not been forcibly checked into a secure rehab facility. He is in the middle of debating whether to admit this to Mycroft when the door downstairs opens and closes, and there is a very familiar tread on the stairs.
“It is bloody freezing out there,” huffs John as he walks in, bringing the scent of snow. He casts a look at Sherlock, still spread out on the sofa. There is a small drift on his shoulders, and Sherlock belatedly realises that at some point as he was lost in his reverie, the sleet had turned to snow and it had begin to settle on the windowsills and the horizontal planes of John Watson. “I see you haven’t moved,” says John, half-amused.
“And I see you have no plans for St. Valentine’s.”
"Yeah, well, it's a stupid festival," says John, shrugging out of his coat. There are still snowflakes dusting his hair, and Sherlock wants more than anything to get up and brush them away. Any other idiot would. Sherlock stays on the sofa.
"Says the man who bought a dozen roses, two bottles of champagne and half a kilo of chocolates last year." Sherlock's voice is a disinterested drawl. It's perfectly convincing; he's had so much practice.
"Yeah, well, last year I was still trying to get into Sarah’s pants," John's voice echoes wryly out of the kitchen. "This year, thankfully, I don't have to try so hard."
"And instead you're spending it in the flat with your male flatmate. Surely people will talk." Sherlock can't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice; he suspects no amount of practice will quite manage that.
"Yeah, well, if they think I should but someone I hardly know an overpriced dinner at a crowded restaurant, then they're entirely missing the point."
"And that point is?"
"One of the great mysteries of life."
"John," Sherlock rolls his eyes, opening his mouth to tell John to stop being so damn elliptical and just answer the question, when John carries on talking, and his answer sends a chill through Sherlock, and stills him.
“Love, I mean.”
Sherlock frowns and turns to look at John, eyebrows creasing, watching as John settles down into his chair, cheeks still red and pinched from the cold outside. He senses that the question is rhetorical, self-evident, but he doesn’t understand. How can love be a secret? How is love a mystery? A collection of neurochemical associations and physiological responses borne of a mating instinct, that’s all (you’re fooling no one.) John looks away from the snow and to Sherlock, realising that for once he is the one with all the cards in the conversation, and continues.
“Well…you can’t ever understand love from the outside. Unless you’re the loved or the lover, unless you’ve felt that…that need for someone else, the feeling that you’re one part of a whole that’s only complete when it’s the two of you…well, it’s a mystery. Nothing but pretty words. But once you know….”
John’s eyes are startlingly blue in the lamplight. They are distant and soft, tracing the snow swirling in the deepening dusk, eyes drifting gently downwards with the flakes. Sherlock takes him all in, the warm steady hands, the five o’clock shadow, the faint scent, the jumper (much thicker than usual because the heating system is excellent but this is still an Edwardian building and the snow chill seeps in through the sash windows). He can’t reconcile them, all these little ordinary things that add up into his extraordinary John; the sides of the equation don’t match. Sherlock lies there, imagining pressing himself into John, molding them together until there is no room for anything else. He imagines drying up, falling apart into the smallest he could be, just dry dust motes winnowing on the wind, surrounding John, settling in his hair, on his skin, in his lungs, being part of him. John catches his eye after a moment, and there is such an expression on his honest face that Sherlock thinks for a panicked moment that he’s spoken his thoughts aloud. But instead John clears his throat and gets up to make tea, stuttering a little as he asks Sherlock if he wants some.
Sherlock stares out at the window in turn, watching the hypnotic fall of the snow. He wonders if every cell of his body is really physically straining towards the kitchen, or whether it just feels that way. He wonders if there is any drug strong enough to purge love from a heart, and whether he would take it if there was. Sherlock presses his hands together, trying to clear his mind, and wonders how much more of this he can take.