Chapter Text
It was supposed to have been a simple case: infiltrate the hideout, retrieve the murder weapon, and return his findings to the police. Cut and dried. And everything had been going according to plan, but, well…
What is it they say about the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men?
Another gunshot rang out. The echo rattled off the rain-slick buildings and mixed with the racket of shouts and sprinting footfalls that stamped along the empty cobblestone streets. Despite the break in the storms, the clouds rolled in thick blankets across the sky. The moon peeked out once, a thin, sharp crescent, before it was obscured once again. Between the dark and the noise, it was near impossible to tell where the shooters were even firing from. Well, near impossible for anyone but Sherlock Holmes.
Based on the distinct voices of at least five individuals, the way sound carried in the damp air, the layout of this part of Cordona, the build of their pursuers and the individual length of their strides, Sherlock could easily determine that—
“They’re closing in on us from up ahead, Sherry!” Jon shouted back to him. “We’ve got to find another way!”
The pair skidded to a halt, veritable sitting ducks in the north end of the Scaladio district.
“Right,” Sherlock said, then grabbed Jon’s wrist. “This way.”
They darted left through an alleyway. It was a close fit, hardly more than a gap between buildings, but it spit them out at the entrance of a large cemetery. Sherlock braced himself as he shouldered into the gate at full tilt. It banged open at a volume that made him wince, but he didn’t let himself slow. Jon was a steady presence in his periphery, easily keeping pace as Sherlock zigged and zagged through the maze of dark paths until he deemed they’d gone far enough and dragged them into a crouch behind a pair of crumbling tombstones. For a few brief moments, the only sounds disturbing the misty quiet were their hurried gasps for breath.
Jon recovered first, his eyes catching the spare light of the lamppost overhead. They glowed bright and catlike as his gaze darted around. “Looks like you led us right into a metaphor,” he whispered.
Sherlock laughed, still breathless, and whispered back, “I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘allegory,’ Jon, but you’d be wrong either way.” He jerked his head toward the entrance to the cemetery, where he could just make out their pursuers running straight past and back down the street where they’d come, meeting up with those that had been tailing them from behind with shouts of confusion.
Jon huffed a quiet laugh. “Well, I guess a man admits when he was wrong.” He settled back against the tombstone and let his legs splay out in a relaxed stretch. He grinned sideways at Sherlock, then nodded his head toward the gleaming knife in Sherlock’s hand. “And you managed to hang on to it!”
“You really think I’d send us into the lion’s maw only to lose the murder weapon?” Sherlock said, the accusation brimming with amusement. He sat as well, delicately lowering himself to the ground, and grimaced at the way the wet grass soaked through his trousers.
Jon knocked his shoulder playfully, then leaned closer to the knife. “Looks like they wiped the thing clean.” He sniffed the air. “Still smells like blood though. You think that’ll be enough for the police?”
“I doubt it, but as you can see here” — Sherlock pointed to an irregularity on the blade — “this curve matches the oddities in the wound we found on the victim. Surely that alone will put any further doubt to rest.”
“Hah!” Jon said, his grin beaming bright even in the low lamplight. “Another successful case! How should we celebrate?”
Sherlock grinned, preparing to say something about counting chickens, when Jon slapped a hand over his mouth. Sherlock couldn’t help the surprised noise that escaped his lips, muffled into Jon’s calloused palm. Jon lifted a finger to his lips, giving Sherlock a warning look that burned through the darkness for several beats before he dropped his hand from Sherlock’s face. Sherlock watched as Jon’s slouched form twisted around, silent and preternaturally quick, so he could peek over the gravestone at his back. Sherlock heard the footfalls only a moment later.
“They must’a come in here,” a grizzled voice shouted. “We’ll go this way. The rest o’ you, keep looking over there.”
“Shit,” Jon hissed as he ducked back down. Sherlock’s stomach dropped. The group split off, and a set of footfalls were now headed directly toward them. “We need to find a way out of here.”
“Right,” Sherlock said, keeping his voice low. He tucked the knife into his pocket and reached for his pistol. “Perhaps a distraction?”
The streetlamp exploded in fantastic fashion, sending sparks and shattered glass raining down on the shouting men. Sherlock and Jon bolted, not a moment spared to admire Sherlock’s marksmanship. That lamp had been one of the few light sources, but Sherlock couldn’t let that slow him. They needed to make it back to the gate. Sherlock trusted his memory when it came to retracing his steps, and he trusted Jon’s senses to make up for any lack in his navigation. But the shouts weren’t gaining on them, the distraction having paid off in spades. The gate was in sight, still open and swinging lightly in the growing breeze. They were almost there—
“Sherlock!”
Oddly, it was the pitch of Jon’s voice, alien in its animal panic, that startled Sherlock more than the crack of the stray bullet firing. Maybe that said something about how often he got himself into situations like this since his return to Cordona, but for all his reckless drive, he’d never been shot before. He found himself surprised at the unexpected way the pain slammed into him all at once, an explosion from shoulder to hip that threw into the ground with all the force of colliding with a brick wall. He groaned into the dirt, dimly aware that his gun had flown out of his hand.
Gritting his teeth, he forced his hand down his side to check for a wound, for blood, for any indication of how easily he’d be walking away from this. What he felt, instead, was a limb that didn’t belong to him. An arm, muscled and solid, wrapped tightly around his waist, pinning him to the earth and nearly squeezing the breath out of him.
“Jon?” Sherlock gasped, wincing at the stiffness in his neck as he tried to turn back to look at him.
Jon grunted, the noise coming from somewhere between Sherlock’s shoulder blades. Then Sherlock felt the arm release him, felt Jon’s weight roll off of him, and suddenly he could breathe again. Wasting no time, he patted his hands all over his front and the parts of his back where he could reach. A dull bruising pain was present, yes, but his hands came away clean. The sudden relief made him giddy, and it took all his self-control not to laugh. He moved to Jon’s side, pushing him up by the shoulders.
“Come on now, Jon, we must keep moving.” And sure enough, he heard more distant yelling as their pursuers regrouped.
Jon winced at the movement and clutched at his side. “You’re gonna have to give me a moment, Sherry,” he said. He looked up at Sherlock with a grin that would’ve been wry if not for the way a grimace of pain twisted it. Sherlock’s brain worked fast enough that he knew what he’d see before his eyes even managed to track down the side of Jon’s body. Jon’s chest was heaving with aborted breaths. His hand gripped over his ribs, doing nothing to staunch the frighteningly quick spread of blood through the fabric of his shirt. It looked black in the low light, Sherlock thought, like the ocean at midnight, when he’d catch glimpses through the curtains in his cabin quarters on those sick and sleepless nights alone during the sail to Cordona. Sherlock shook out of the trance and tightened his hold on Jon’s shoulders.
Jon rolled away from Sherlock’s grip, putting more of his weight on his uninjured side, and inexplicably managed to wink up at Sherlock. “S’alright, Sherry,” he said wetly, wearing a proper grin now, one that Sherlock was dismayed to see tinted with blood. He’d been hit in the lung. “I’m sure I’ve had worse.”
Sherlock swallowed, then took a single, steadying breath. There was no time to waste. He moved behind Jon, reached under his shoulders, and dragged him in the opposite direction of their exit, further off the path. A mausoleum loomed behind them, tucked against the fence surrounding the property, and while the heavy lock hanging from the door would bar their entry, the massive neighboring tree that butted up against the stone would provide enough of a cover for Sherlock to think. The same darkness that proved fortuitous in hiding any blood trail from view also made the short trek rife with slips and near falls as Sherlock hauled Jon as delicately as he could over the damp grass.
Jon stifled a pained grunt as Sherlock arranged them in the hiding spot, Jon’s back against Sherlock’s chest and Sherlock leaning back against the tree, their legs pressed together as flat against the wall of the mausoleum as they could get, barely able to stretch out fully before the bars of the fence blocked their feet. Sherlock kept his arms wrapped around Jon’s middle to prevent him from slumping sideways and back out onto the lawn. He allowed himself one peek at Jon’s side, the distant, dull glow of another streetlamp beyond the fence providing just enough light to confirm his suspicion; there was a small, trickle of blood just above the dip in Jon’s waist, an obvious entry wound for the bullet that was meant for Sherlock but tore straight through Jon.
A small blessing that it had exited at least, but the damage it had caused...
Sherlock pushed his hand firmly over the mess of Jon’s chest. Jon gasped and tensed, but Sherlock didn’t let up, not even when the quantity of blood slicking out from between his fingers and the feel of Jon’s torn flesh made his head swim and his stomach turn.
When they were children, Sherlock had always marveled at the way cuts and bruises cleared from Jon’s skin within minutes, sometimes seconds. He’d accessed them both equally, all their scraped knees, rolled ankles, and whatever dozen other injuries that befell them as young and careless adventurers, even after Jon had asked him to stop lining the margins of his notebook with his findings, insisting he wasn’t one of Sherlock’s experiments. The notes hadn’t mattered though, for no quantitative measuring, nor even the finest prose Sherlock was capable of penning would have been enough to describe the awe he felt when he watched, from scarcely an inch away, as a papercut on Jon’s finger stitched itself neatly back together right before his eyes. But that had been a papercut, and Sherlock would be a fool to think a bullet wound would compare.
“There, there,” Sherlock said, swallowing the ill feeling crawling up his throat. He forced his voice to steady. “I’ve got you.”
Jon huffed a laugh, the sound bitten off by pain but still good-natured as always, and it made Sherlock’s own chest ache with fondness. A fondness that was quickly buried by anger.
“Why did you do that?” he hissed in Jon’s ear.
“You’re the detective, Sherry,” Jon said, his head rolling back until it settled on Sherlock’s shoulder. This close, his grin looking pleased and almost reverent, but Sherlock attributed that to Jon’s slipping consciousness. “Why do you think?”
Then Sherlock saw the way his gaze went unfocused, he gave him a desperate shake. “I suppose you were hoping to spare me this ghastly injury,” he said when Jon gasped back into wakefulness. “At the expense of yourself. A foolish, impulsive thing to do.”
“We both know I heal faster than you do.”
“Normally, yes, but this is clearly more extensive than your body is used to.” Jon’s head lolled, eyelids drooping, and Sherlock adjusted his grip to keep him upright. “Jon, you’re losing too much blood.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Just need t’ sleep it off is all.”
Sherlock looked left and right, his mind whirring trying to come up with a reasonable plan of escape. Despite Jon’s cavalier speech, Sherlock didn’t foresee him walking himself out of the graveyard anytime soon. Sherlock himself wouldn’t be able to carry him quickly enough to escape notice, and even with panic renewing his vigor, the iron fence stretched too high to throw Jon bodily over.
No, they’d need something else. Something out of the box. Something risky.
Something Jon was sure not to like.
The one sleeve of his jacket was already rolled up, so it took no time for Sherlock to shove his bare forearm under Jon’s nose.
“Oi, mate!” Jon sputtered, feebly pushing at Sherlock’s arm. “What are you doing?”
“You’ll heal faster if you have human blood.”
“I’ll… what?” Sherlock shushed him, but Jon continued, “No. Absolutely not.” He winced in pain, and when Sherlock thinned his lips knowingly, he tried again, his voice taking a desperate edge as he sloppily shoved Sherlock’s arm away. “M’fine, Sherry, really!”
Sherlock’s jaw clenched and he forced a sigh through his teeth. He spared one glance up to the tangle of branches above him, but the tree offered no more guidance than the gloomy sky it shaded them from. The decision was his alone. With one hand, he reached into his pocket for the weapon they’d pilfered, released Jon’s wound with the other, and after only the briefest anatomical calculation for where the least permanent damage would be done, he pressed the blade near the crux of his now-free arm, and dragged it straight through his skin.
The pain was instantly sobering, and the fear and frustration in his gut clarified into the sharp awareness of what he was asking Jon to do. Sherlock shoved the feeling down, and clung tighter.
“Come on,” he said, voice tremorring with the struggle to keep calm, to keep quiet. “Quickly now.”
“Sherry…” Jon’s voice came out a reedy whine, pitiable and pleading, as he weakly turned his head away, and the guilt Sherlock was trying to ignore lanced straight through his conscience. He nearly released him, but the ice cold dread of losing Jon like this, bloodied and dying in his arms, galvanized him. He would rather spend the rest of his life apologizing than spend another day of it without Jon.
He leaned forward, the cropped hair at the side of Jon’s head scratching against his cheek, his lips brushing against Jon’s ear as he whispered a desperate plea of his own. “Please, Jon.”
Jon let out a choked sob, and Sherlock held him tighter, willing him to relent and silently begging for forgiveness in equal measure.
The sting of cool night air against the wound was quickly overwhelmed by the softness of Jon’s dry lips pressing over his skin. Next came a suction so gentle that it almost tickled, until the last vestiges of Jon’s reluctance must have evaporated, and he pressed his mouth to Sherlock’s forearm in earnest. Sherlock could feel the flat edge of Jon’s teeth pressing into his skin, and Sherlock’s body must have reacted to the precursor to a new threat. His face flushed, his breathing quickened behind his clenched teeth, and his heart hammered away, pumping a primal fear straight to the center of his brain, one that ignored where they were or when they were or why they were even hiding in the first place and simply screamed, Run, run, RUN!
Suffice it to say, the sudden calmness that followed was… astonishing, like the sun finally soothing over lands long battered by rain, like a balm that quieted his worries, smoothed down the frayed ends of his nerves, until his mind went blissfully silent and his existence narrowed to every singular point of contact between Jon’s mouth and his own skin. Then Jon’s tongue pressed down, licking over the wound in one broad, messy stroke, and Sherlock’s eyes rolled so far back that his head followed suit, thumping against the tree behind him. His mouth fell open to let out a ragged exhale, and when Jon licked him again, the noise became a whine.
Jon was off him in an instant, twisting fully around until he was out of Sherlock’s lap and crouched facing him instead. Their gazes met, and Jon’s expression flitted from confusion to fear before pinching with worry. Whatever it was that concerned him, Sherlock couldn’t possibly imagine because everything was suddenly so very, perfectly fine. Jon’s eyes flashed bright beneath his knitted brow when they caught the lamplight, effusing them with gold so bright and alive that it made Sherlock’s breath catch. His own eyelids felt heavy now as he stared with wonder at his friend’s face. Jon was truly radiant.
“Sherry?” Jon panted, and Sherlock caught sight of his canines hanging longer and sharper than they did normally, something Sherlock hadn’t seen since he was a child. They were slicked pink from spit and blood. Sherlock’s blood. The thought sent him dizzying. Jon grabbed either side of his face and forced their eyes to meet again. “Did I hurt you?”
“Quite the opposite, Jon,” Sherlock said, his voice airy and light. “I feel… absolutely marvelous.” If Jon looked convinced, Sherlock wouldn’t know, his eyes already trailing down Jon’s front. His shirt and waistcoat were torn open, framing the space just below his breast with gore-soaked fabric. But the skin beneath was smooth and whole, and when Sherlock brushed his fingertips over it, the mended muscle quivered gently underneath. Sherlock giggled breathlessly at the sight. He’d been right.
Jon snatched his hand away, brow furrowing. “Sherlock, what’s wrong?”
“Must be the, ah, blood loss making me a bit woozy. Nothing to worry about.” Not a lie in its entirety. In truth, Sherlock felt he’d been affected by a great deal more than that, possibly some yet unknown power of Jon’s. He’d have to remember to investigate this claim… somehow. Perhaps later when his threads of thought stopped evaporating the moment his mind tried to follow them. Sherlock reached out and touched Jon’s cheek, brushing his thumb under one of those blazing eyes. The warmth of him spread like fire under Sherlock’s skin. “You are truly remarkable, Jonathan.”
Jon’s cheeks flushed hotter. “I… Sherlock.”
A twig snapped nearby, startling Sherlock’s hand away. They both froze. Sherlock’s eyes went wide at the gathering sound of footsteps, only a few yards behind them on the path that led out, but Jon gave a minute shake of his head, warning Sherlock into silence. He was gripping Sherlocks bleeding arm so tightly over the wound that a staticy numbness began to prick at the tips of Sherlock’s fingers, but he didn’t dare breathe, didn’t dare move, not until they heard a shout alerting the others of an unproductive search, followed by a command to head back to the hideout. And even after that, they waited another long stretch to make sure they were well and truly safe.
It was Jon that moved first, slumping fully to his knees in the grass with an exhausted sigh before glaring down at Sherlock. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said, lifting Sherlock’s injured arm and shaking it as if in demonstration. Sherlock’s hand flopped limply back and forth with the movement, which only served to make him laugh again, which in turn made Jon glower more. Sherlock marveled at the look of him, at the colors he could see swimming not just in Jon’s eyes but everywhere: the redness of his cheeks, the copper gleam of his hair, the bright flash that glanced off the ivory curve of his teeth. It was like the night had released its hold on the colors, allowing everything to glow with a strangely beautiful luminescence.
“Oh, Jon, you can’t be mad. I did exactly what you did.”
“Something foolish and impulsive?” Jon snapped.
“I saved your life.”
“But you weren’t meant to... not like that.”
“If there had been another, better way,” Sherlock said, smiling and serene, “I would have done it. But seeing as there wasn’t…”
“You didn’t even know it would work!”
“Ah, yes, but I do now, don’t I?” He reached out again to touch the place where the bullet wound had been. “Your body chemistry is absolutely incredible.”
“And you are absolutely infuriating,” Jon said, slapping his hand away again.
Sherlock beamed at him. “But you love me all the same.”
“I…” Jon started, but whatever he was about to say got stuck as a choked little noise in the back of his throat. His mouth snapped shut and he looked away with a huff. And what another marvelously novel thing to see: Jon — his Jon — for once at a loss for words.
A renewed fondness surged through him, leaving him heated and restless and bolder than he’d ever felt. Returning his hand to Jon’s cheek, he turned Jon’s face back toward himself, leaned up, and pressed a slow, chaste kiss to Jon’s lips.
It only lasted a moment, but when he pulled away, Jon surged forward, pressing his mouth into Sherlock’s, and Sherlock, who, to be fair, had never kissed anyone before and therefore had no prior experience to compare to, thought this development was absolutely wonderful. Jon’s lips parted, and Sherlock followed his lead, opening his own mouth and meeting Jon’s eagerness with his own delighted enthusiasm. Then came a bright prick of pain at Sherlock’s bottom lip where one of Jon’s sharp teeth must’ve caught the fragile skin. Sherlock felt a trickle down his chin, and the scent of new blood must’ve hit Jon’s nose, if the warm, pleased sighed he breathed into Sherlock’s mouth was any indication. His heart juddered in his chest, his pulse throbbed in his arm, and when Jon’s tongue chased the blood trail from the tip of Sherlock’s chin back up to his lips, he let out a pleased noise of his own, a tremulous cry that Jon swallowed down easily. The bulk of Jon’s body crowded over him, chased him until there was nowhere left for him to go, until Sherlock was shoved so hard against the tree at his back that he could feel each individual jut of bark pressing deep into his skin. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. He’d stay here forever. This was all he wanted. This was all he needed.
Appropriate then, that it was nothing short of a force of nature — a peal of thunder so loud that it rattled Sherlock’s teeth in his skull down to the bones in his ankles — that startled them apart.
They sat like that for a beat, the silence settling heavy between them, until Jon cleared his throat.
“We, uh…” he said. He averted his gaze and cleared his throat again. “We should head back, I think.”
Jon pulled Sherlock up as if he weighed nothing at all, the easy show of strength almost comical next to Sherlock’s unsteady, wobbling limbs. His brain was still fogged with heady warmth and an urge for closeness that had him folding into Jon’s side until his head was tucked happily against Jon’s shoulder. He let out a contented sigh. Jon froze, briefly, then pressed one hand against Sherlock’s wound, a firm yet gentle pressure, while the other looped around his waist to steady him, and with the distant rumble of thunder hurrying them along, the pair made their way back to Stonewood Manor.