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“Going out?” John said.
Sherlock knotted his scarf around his neck and pulled on his coat. “Obviously.”
“Mm,” John said, taking a slow sip of tea. “See you later, then.”
Sherlock tilted his head. “You’re not wondering where I’m going?”
John blew gently on the surface of his tea before answering, “Nope.”
Sherlock arched an eyebrow. “All right.” He turned on his heel and swept imperiously out of 221B. John leaned back in his chair and chuckled to himself as Sherlock thudded down the stairs. Five, four, three, two -
“John!”
There it was.
“John, the door’s blocked. With snow! We’re entirely snowed in!”
“That’s very observant of you,” John said, setting his tea down and smiling smugly as Sherlock stormed back into the flat.
“Did you know it was snowing?” he said, looking mutinous.
“Uh, yes,” John said. “Because I’ve got a window. It’s the storm of the century, they’re saying. London hasn’t seen this much snow in living memory, so on and so forth. It’s been all over the news for days.” He turned his laptop around to show Sherlock the front page of the BBC - All London Schools Closed, Stay Inside Begs Mayor, Parliament Takes a Holiday. “I mentioned it last night before I went to stock up at Tesco. Multiple times. You didn’t hear a single word, did you?”
“No,” Sherlock said, hanging his scarf up on his hook. “How am I supposed to investigate Lestrade’s one-armed jewel thief when I can’t even get out the front door?”
“First of all,” John said, “he’s definitely got two arms, and second of all, Lestrade called last night to tell you not to come by today, said the force is in a state of emergency.”
“Why didn’t I talk to him?” Sherlock said, frowning.
“You handed me your phone and told me you were busy analyzing the dust from under Mycroft’s sofa,” John said, setting his tea down and going to turn on the kettle once more.
“Well, I was,” Sherlock said crossly. He sat down in his armchair and steepled his fingers under his chin, staring intently at the tip of his shoe. John flicked on the kettle and rolled his eyes. He took out another cup and set to making a pile of sandwiches.
“John!”
John jumped and nearly knocked the spoon out of the sugar bowl. “What, Sherlock.”
“Is Mrs. Hudson in?”
“She’s on holiday in Barcelona,” John replied, considering putting relish on Sherlock’s sandwiches just to spite him. “Where it’s probably sunny and nobody’s stuck at home with an insufferable flatmate.”
“So,” Sherlock said. He appeared suddenly on the threshold of the kitchen. “Just us, then. Snowed in.”
“Possibly for days, yes,” John said. He stared down at the marmite, ignoring the heat of Sherlock’s gaze on the back of his neck. “Don’t worry, I’ve got enough food. Not that you care. You’d go for a week on last year’s saltines.”
“I wouldn’t,” Sherlock said. “Well. Probably not.”
There was a long, drawn-out silence, during which Sherlock continued to stare and John continued to ignore him. The kettle whistled. John poured two cups of tea and dropped a spoonful of sugar in his, half a spoonful in Sherlock’s, the picky bastard, and thought about putting on a pair of woolen socks; the heat in the flat was fine, but the floors were always freezing, like little blades of ice pricking at the bottom of his -
“Are you going to kiss me again?”
“Christ,” John muttered, thumping his forehead against the cupboard. “Now, really? We’re doing this now.”
“Well, we’re snowed in with no one else to talk to and nothing else to do. I’ve deduced everything I possibly can from your silence on the topic. Aren’t you the one always encouraging communication between flatmates?” John could tell Sherlock was teasing him, mostly, with just a razor sharp edge of - curiosity? Repulsion? Sheer terror? - beneath.
He turned around to face Sherlock. He was still hovering - looming, really, the lanky arsehole - in the doorway, hands clasped behind his back and face a purposeful blank. John tried not to squirm; he knew that Sherlock was deducing every blink, every breath.
“Look,” he said, because that was an articulate way to start explaining to your best mate why you’d grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and kissed him in the hallway three nights earlier. Indeed, look was surely a great starting point as you tried to muddle through telling him why, as you arrived home, both of you still buzzing with the adrenaline of a successful pursuit, breath hot in the cold winter air, you realized there would never be a better moment than this, even though you could hear Mrs. Hudson watching Top Gear playing through the wall, even though you hadn’t cleaned your teeth since that morning, even though he’d never really implied in your many years of acquaintance that he’d like you - or anyone else, for that matter - to push him up against the wall and kiss him. This was going so well already, John thought. “That was a mistake.”
Sherlock didn’t even blink.
“I just - I got carried away a bit, I think,” John said. “You know, the case. And - well, it’s been a while since - well, since Mary, and I just - “
“Ah,” Sherlock said. His features slackened into a look of practiced boredom. “Sexual desperation. Nearest target. Understood.”
“What - no, that’s not - “
“I said understood,” Sherlock snapped. “Is the tea ready?”
“I - yes, of course,” John said, gesturing at Sherlock’s cup. “Sherlock, that wasn’t what I meant.”
“No, you’ve been very clear,” Sherlock said. “It’s already forgotten.”
John clenched his fists. Punching Sherlock would probably be only slightly less productive than this conversation. Still. Tempting. “Are you going to let me finish my sentence?”
“I should think probably not,” Sherlock said, gathering his tea and taking a sandwich off the top of the pile. He sat down at the table and picked up a slide - at random, it seemed to John - and placed it beneath the objective lens.
“Sherlock,” John said. “Can you - can you just give me a moment to explain?”
Sherlock zoomed in on the slide.
“Did you - “
“Yes, I’m listening,” Sherlock said. He switched the slide out for another. “In fact, I’m a captive audience.”
John sighed. “Okay. Fine. Right.” He took a too-large gulp of tea for fortitude. “I wasn’t trying to say that I didn’t mean to kiss you. Or that I would have kissed anyone. I wouldn’t - I wouldn’t have kissed anyone but you, just then. I wouldn’t kiss anyone else now, either,” he said in a rush. “Not that I’ll have a chance because I’m going to die right here in the kitchen, clearly.”
Sherlock twisted the eyepiece of the microscope. John considered throwing it out the window.
“So,” he said. “I was the intended target of your pent-up sexual aggression. Very well. Flatmates are highly convenient sexual partners. Proximity is a leading factor in most marriages. And murders.”
“‘Course it is,” John said. “The thing is - it’s - well, you and I, it’s complicated, Sherlock, isn’t it? We’re - we’re not normal, are we - “
“Yes, I’m familiar with my deficiencies when it comes to normal,” Sherlock said, sounding bored.
“I meant us,” John said, slapping the worktop with a bit more force than he’d intended. “Both of us, Sherlock, you and I.”
There was a long silence. Sherlock’s back was stiff, his shoulders taut under his shirt. John wanted to touch them, knead the tension away, and then he wanted to run and burst out into the street and wade through the deep snow until the heat of his mortification had melted away.
“I agree,” Sherlock said. “You’re not normal either.”
John knocked the back of his head against the cupboard this time. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m impossible?” Suddenly Sherlock was on his feet, the stool pushed away, the microscope and sandwich forgotten on the table. “I’m not the one who kissed you and then shut myself in my room and went to sleep without a wank because I thought you were listening in - “
“Oi, I knew it,” John said.
“ - and then acted like it hadn’t even happened the next day,” Sherlock continued. “And I am very aware that I am unversed in the inane subtleties of courtship - “
“Courtship,” John said faintly. “Oh, my God.”
“ - but it is inordinately frustrating that you refuse to simply be upfront about anything,” Sherlock said. “So if you want normal, John, you’d be best served directing your attentions elsewhere.”
“I meant us, you stubborn arse,” John snapped. “We’re not normal - together. Or - not together, as it were. Look, most people, they meet, they go on a date, they kiss - they don’t have a snog with their flatmate in the hallway after chasing down a kidnapper. There is no normal for us, d’you see what I’m saying? I’m - ” John blew out a heavy breath. “I’m just as bloody confused as you are, all right?”
Sherlock’s gaze was assessing, intrusive, and John met it stubbornly, hating that he could still do this after all these years. What could Sherlock deduce from the dilation of his pupils, the bite marks on his lips, the crease of his jumper? He wondered what Sherlock had seen three nights ago, when John had clung to his coat like a drowning man, kissed him like a teenager in the parlor at his parent’s house, fast and hard and out of breath, no technique at all, just contact. He’d wanted things he’d only allowed himself to want in half-remembered dreams, absent-minded fantasies that fired through his synapses when he saw Sherlock in the right light; he’d wanted to push Sherlock up against the wall, to scratch his hands down Sherlock’s back, to fall to his knees at Sherlock’s feet.
He cleared his throat and broke Sherlock’s gaze. He could read Sherlock more often than Sherlock knew, but he was at a loss. He wanted to be scoffed at, ignored, humiliated; he could handle that. What he couldn’t handle was hurt, or frightened, or, worst of all, gone.
“So,” Sherlock said slowly. “You admit you’re not normal, either.”
That startled a laugh out of John. “Definitely not.”
Sherlock advanced on him. “And you don’t expect me to be either.”
“Be a bit useless, wouldn’t it?” John said. “I’m not a total idiot.”
“Debatable,” Sherlock said, resting his hands on the worktop on either side of John, effectively trapping him. John swallowed, trying not to let his body get ahead of his brain at Sherlock’s nearness as Sherlock glowered down at him, curious and irritated and something else, a look that John couldn’t quite place.
“Sherlock,” he said, the cupboard pressing into his back. “Look, if you’d rather, we could just pretend none of this ever happened.”
“I wouldn’t rather,” Sherlock said, and John couldn’t tell if he was reaching up or if Sherlock was leaning down but in just moments this wouldn’t be an accidental, adrenaline-fueled first kiss in the hallway, this would be something that was happening on purpose, eyes wide open, this would be -
“Is this a bad time?”
John reared back so fast that he slammed the back of his head into the cupboard, his heart thumping somewhere in his throat as he peered around Sherlock to see Mycroft Holmes standing in the doorway.
“No, it’s perfect,” Sherlock snapped, not taking his eyes off John. “Your timing is impeccable. Please, sit down for tea.”
“How did you even get here, Mycroft?” John said. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. “The roads are all closed, presumably on your orders. Helicopter, was it?”
Sherlock snorted, and Mycroft raised an eyebrow.
“Wait,” John said, “You didn’t really - “
“At any rate,” Mycroft said smoothly. “I’ve only popped in on Mummy’s orders. She was concerned you’d starve to death buried in a half meter of snow.”
“I went to the Tesco before everything sold out, we’re fine,” John said. “Don’t you have to get back to running the government while Parliament’s out having a snow day?”
“My, how impatient you are to be alone,” Mycroft said smarmily. “And here I was thinking it hadn’t yet gotten to the point of base physicality.“
“Oh, my God,” John said.
“I will turn you into mincemeat, Mycroft,” Sherlock said from between clenched teeth.
“Stay warm, boys,” Mycroft singsonged on his way down the stairs.
The door to the flat shut firmly behind him. John squinted, listening carefully for rotors, but couldn’t hear a thing over the wind.
“Well,” John said after a long silence in which his body slowly remembered that Sherlock was pressed up against it. “Suppose I should have expected that. What’s a deeply personal moment without Mycroft bloody Holmes showing up in the middle?”
The corner of Sherlock’s mouth twitched.
“Don’t you dare laugh,” John said, then Sherlock snorted, before John knew it he was laughing himself, and then Sherlock was too, his shoulders shaking, and John dropped his face into his hands and leaned his forehead against Sherlock’s chest, trying not to panic.
“This could go extremely poorly,” Sherlock said, his voice rumbling through his ribcage.
“I’m not actually sure it could go worse than it already has,” John said, leaning back and grinning up at Sherlock.
“You’ll never be rid of me now, you realize.”
“Could I have been rid of you before? News to me,” John said, and then they were kissing, warm in Baker Street as London was buried in a bright white blanket of snow.
*
“Mycroft didn’t actually come in a helicopter, did he?”
“If you ever mention my brother again while we’re in bed, I shall throw you out the window.”
“Right-o.”