Work Text:
It wasn’t like the commenters on their blog were ever remarkably perceptive . Sherlock had once gotten into a row with John when a reader had thoroughly berated him for his lack of pop culture knowledge and he had demanded they turn off comments altogether. “I fail to see why I should have to know this tacky little musical act, these… Spice Girls …if they aren’t relevant to the case at all!” Sherlock had protested, to which John could only respond with indignation, “Sherlock…are you aware that no one on Earth would call the Spice Girls ‘tacky’?”
That conversation had ended with Sherlock roundly insulting John for his crude interests in the shallow realm of pop music and John declaring he would not speak to Sherlock again for the next two days.
This top comment on their latest blog, however, prodded at Sherlock’s curiosity in a way that transcended irritation or resentment. For once, he was looking at something new, something that even carried a twinge of intrigue.
He ran his eyes briefly over the name of the embedded link—“Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: a Collection”—and clicked without further hesitation. What about us could there possibly be a collection of? Sherlock wondered, expecting to click away 10 seconds later after discovering nothing more than yet another disappointing contribution from their dim-witted online fans.
***
“Tea?”
“Hm?”
A mop of hair bounced up from behind a computer screen as Sherlock jerked to attention, looking to all the world like a child startled from sleep—except, instead of sleeping, he had been peering at the computer so closely for the past hour that his breath had left a misty imprint upon the screen.
He looked…sheepish?
“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” John commented from the kitchen, noting with amusement the odd tinge of red beginning to suffuse the edges of Sherlock’s ears, “staring at the screen that close, it’ll give you a migraine.”
“No, it won’t,” came the retort as Sherlock, suddenly irritable, got to his feet and snapped the computer shut in one swift movement.
“Okay, it won’t, then,” John resigned.
Then, “Sherlock?”
Upon standing up, Sherlock had appeared to lose track of whatever it was he was supposed to do and remained rooted to the spot with a rigid, intense expression. He was making some momentous deduction, overcoming some extraordinary mental barrier, John mused with wonder—was he about to let loose a flood of insults about John’s latest blog? Burst forth with an epiphany regarding some case from months ago? Combust on the spot (from the way his eyes were practically vibrating in their sockets, not an unlikely possibility)?
After what seemed like an almost absurd amount of time, Sherlock strode over to where John leaned against the kitchen table and swept his mug from his outstretched hand.
Normally, he would take a sip of his tea, let out an unremarkable grumble about the temperature or the sweetness level or the saturation of flavor, and stalk off to the couch or the corner of the living room to mumble endlessly to himself. He would leave John to his own fussing about, his scoldings and his futile protests of “By the way, today was your day to take out the rubbish!,” and the evening would continue in its own uneventfully eventful way.
Instead, Sherlock cupped his tea in his hands and stood firmly before John, silent and apparently waiting for something to happen.
Or waiting to ask for something to happen.
“Yes, Sherlock?” John dutifully prodded, knowing there was an outrageous request of some sort just barely teetering on the edge of Sherlock’s tongue.
“I want you to pat my head, John.”
“Sorry?”
“Specifically, I want you to run your fingers
through
my hair, not just on top of it, and make it quick. I must get back to my research.”
John blinked once. Twice.
Then his mind—having already been so irreversibly accustomed to Sherlock’s antics—relented immediately with: oh hell, he’s asked for worse .
He sighed. “Well, at least you haven’t drugged me to do this.”
He reached out his free hand and pushed it into Sherlock’s curls, slowly dragging it through in a long arc from the top of his forehead to the nape of his neck. His hair was surprisingly soft for how unruly it looked, and it parted easily at John’s touch; he could almost lose himself in the serene feeling of it, so at odds with the rest of Sherlock’s sharp personality.
By the time his hand dropped back to his side, it was with a start that he realized that Sherlock’s eyes had fluttered shut at some point during it all, and the lines that had creased his brow earlier had miraculously smoothed out.
“Sher—”
“Incredible,” came Sherlock’s sudden conclusion as his eyes shot open and he assumed his unmistakable expression of discovery. “Their predictions were every bit as correct, if not more so; I must document this immediately.”
He scuttled away to the laptop he had slammed shut earlier, began furiously switching tabs and hammering away at the keyboard, and rendered himself completely oblivious to the dumbstruck gaze of John standing a couple meters away.
John, with his free hand still lying awkwardly at his side, could come to only two possible conclusions in that instant: 1. Sherlock had taken up another experiment in which John was, once again, the begrudging test subject; or 2. he had encountered an online claim so outrageous he had decided to replicate it purely out of spite.
Or it could very well be both. Why couldn’t it be both?
John sighed. “If this is some practical joke, Sherlock, I can’t say I’m amused.”
Sherlock tilted his head up and shot John a glare of rebuke, although the severity was undercut somewhat by the faintly dazed look still in the process of disappearing from his face. “Don’t be ridiculous, John; if I had merely wanted your amusement I would have tried for something far more mundane.”
With a huff, he returned to his work—whatever it was he was cataloguing so determinedly on his computer—and left John trudging off to his room with an incredulous shake of the head.
“Night, Sherlock.”
“Hm.”
After John’s footsteps gradually disappeared upstairs, Sherlock’s fingers tentatively flew up to his head and tried as best as they could to replicate what John had done earlier—a hand lazily running through his hair from front to back, the warmth of his palm seemingly curling all the way down his back—but the rush of something he felt earlier remained frustratingly distant.
He glanced back at his computer in resignation, at the curious “collection” staring back up at him, and engrossed himself once more in his research.
***
It had been raining incessantly for almost a solid week now, and Sherlock was already well past the brink of insanity after the endless stifling days spent indoors. No clients had come in since the start of the week, and Lestrade was currently on vacation to, what, New Zealand?
How utterly dull, Sherlock thought to himself with a slight wrinkle of the nose; New Zealand had the fourth-lowest crime rate in the world, and the likelihood of getting a case from Lestrade now was close to none. Oh, his suffering was beyond compare.
He must have accidentally been thinking aloud for quite a while, since John had begun nervously inching away from Sherlock on the sofa a couple minutes ago. “Sherlock,” he ventured, eyeing the loaded gun Sherlock was dangling carelessly from the tips of his fingers, “might want to put down— that— first…”
Sherlock glanced disinterestedly at the lethal weapon he was currently holding like a rag doll.
“Oh, this?” he sighed and cast it halfway across the room, sending it skidding off the carpet and onto the floor. John visibly winced at the clatter when the gun collided with a table leg and came to a precarious stop.
“Much better,” John exhaled, returning back to his morning paper with a slightly queasy look.
Upon letting his gaze settle for a moment on his unsuspecting flatmate sitting beside him, however, Sherlock’s expression briefly took on an air of mischief.
Actually, there was something he could do. Research-related.
A plan materialized itself in Sherlock’s head.
Sherlock abruptly dissolved into a full-body stretch, yawning and extending his limbs in such an exaggerated manner that he was able to shift marginally closer to John without arousing his suspicion. Close enough that their knees barely brushed against each others’, close enough to hear his steady breathing, close enough to count the number of lines on his forehead from his concentration on the daily paper’s crossword.
Close enough to casually lean his entire body against his.
Which he did.
John immediately stiffened as he felt Sherlock collapse entirely upon his shoulder—an understandable reaction, really, with the full weight of a 39-year-old male far taller than himself pressing him into the side of the sofa.
“Sherlock, what the hell,” John practically squawked, evidently fighting to breathe against the body that had suddenly deposited itself onto him.
Sherlock flatly ignored any protests that flew his way. Instead, he trailed his unbothered gaze over to the paper and across the crossword, scanning every part of the puzzle into his brain in a matter of seconds. “7 down: Haydn; 9 down: Sclerosis; 14 across: Tuvalu, not Tahiti —really, John, do you know your geography at all?”
“You bastard—”
As John’s indignation slowly began to override his initial surprise at their current state of—what, cuddling?—Sherlock took the opportunity to nestle himself further into John’s side. The contact felt so…strong, so right, so firm and safe, he thought absently. He fancied he could let himself just fall asleep right there, folded into John’s body like a hand in a glove.
Just like they said. Comfortable…very comfortable indeed.
He realized, once again belatedly, that he had voiced the last thought aloud.
“Comfortable for whom , exactly?” John grumbled, wriggling slightly to allow himself a little more space to breathe. For a brief moment Sherlock thought John was going to shrug him off entirely, that his weight upon him had driven him beyond irritation.
After a few seconds of rearranging himself in a slightly less cramped position, however, John’s movements seemed to settle and he remained—to Sherlock’s delight—in the same spot on the sofa.
John let out a muted sigh, as if resigned to his fate as Sherlock’s new cushion. He straightened out the paper in his hands and resumed his tedious battle with the puzzle before him. “What did you say again—7 down, Handel?”
Sherlock let out a short laugh into John’s shoulder, more out of pleasure at John’s continued presence than out of amusement at his stupidity. “ Handel , the father of the sonata form? Please, both composers would be rolling over in their respective graves.”
***
John jerked awake as if a fire had suddenly been lit underneath his eyelids, gasping and trying desperately to reorient himself. The room around him was confusingly bright, and it took John a couple more seconds to jump to the next hazy conclusions—that it was Sherlock’s pyjama-clad figure that stood tall in the doorway, that it was his hand lying on top of the light switch, that he was entirely responsible for having so rudely interrupted John’s slumber.
“Sherlock, what are you— what did I say about knocking? And for goodness’ sake, turn that damn light off.”
Sherlock obliged, flipping shut the overhead lights and granting John only a moment of reprieve before sauntering over to him and promptly turning on the bedside lamp. John groaned and rolled away from the offending light.
“Okay, spit it out. What do you want?” John finally managed, the sternness in his voice heavily masked by the weight of sleep.
“Can’t sleep,” Sherlock replied shortly, dropping himself to sit on John’s bed. Without waiting for a response or even the faintest sign of permission, he swung his legs up and burrowed underneath the covers.
“Oi—” John began in protest, but lost the remaining words in his throat as he felt the new body in his bed shift himself to move right beside him. He felt Sherlock reach out his arms to hug him closer, felt him bury his head into the crook of his neck, felt his chest momentarily swell against him as he inhaled deeply…
…then, at last, felt him release the breath with an almost contented hum.
Panic rattled through John’s heart and hammered against his ribcage. Rarely had Sherlock truly attempted to initiate physical contact of an affectionate nature, let alone any to this outrageous extent—but come to think of it, hadn’t there been a lot more of this happening between them recently? Sherlock’s entire body was practically cradling his own, not to mention his arms looped around his chest and his head he still had pressed into his neck, and it took John a heroic effort to finally venture, “Is everything…alright, Sherlock?”
Sherlock, clearly displeased at the note of worry in John’s voice, mumbled something incoherent against John’s skin. His breath tickled.
No, no, this was absurd. He needed a better answer, even though he wasn’t quite sure himself if anything could adequately explain the situation at hand.
John abruptly turned himself to fully face Sherlock, disentangling the hands around his chest in the process. “Sherlock, what’s the matter? Talk to me,” he practically demanded, eyes searching Sherlock’s face for an explanation that his words alone might not provide.
Sherlock only looked blankly back at him, feigning innocence despite their current state of shameless physical intimacy that he had clearly initiated himself. “Couldn’t sleep, told you already,” was his bored reply, but before he could go back to inhaling John’s clothing for some unfathomable reason, John grabbed Sherlock’s head and forced him to meet his eyes.
“No, not good enough.”
After heaving a dramatic sigh, Sherlock reluctantly resumed speaking. “I wanted to find— I wanted to deduce for myself— well, they said you’d smell— warm . While sleeping.”
John stared at him with a look of complete bafflement Sherlock was already quite familiar with. “Who are ‘ they,’ Sherlock?” he continued prodding.
Sherlock audibly grumbled his unwillingness to continue. “The commenters on your latest blog, John, they appear to have come up with quite an interesting catalogue of ideas, most of which appeared utterly absurd upon first read but ended up mysteriously correct, and of course the aforementioned absurdity inevitably meant I had to see for myself if they indeed predicted the right reactions and sensations, so I decided it would come to no harm to test their claims upon you as soon as you were readily available.” He exhaled as if having finally released something burdensome from within his chest and closed his eyes tiredly. “Now, John, if you would please release my face from your grasp—you have not cut your nails in weeks and they are positively rending my skin at the present moment.”
John released his hands, but not his disbelieving gaze, from Sherlock’s head. “So you mean, all this time—”
“Yes, all this time, John. An experiment.”
A pause. John finally tore his eyes away from Sherlock’s face, almost as if he was…
“Disappointed?” Sherlock grinned at him, mischief flickering back over his features. John only let out a snort of offense, but to Sherlock’s surprise, he did not even make an effort to move or turn his body away.
“In your dreams,” John mumbled unconvincingly.
In the sleepy silence that ensued, Sherlock slowly wrapped his arms once more around John, lowered his head to the exposed dip of his collarbone, and resumed drawing in deep breaths of his scent—toasty and mellow, like a cat that had been soaking up the sun all afternoon.
“So…am I?”
Sherlock looked up quizzically; their faces were so close his entire field of vision was taken up by John and John only. “Are you—?”
“Warm. Am I warm?” John clarified after quickly clearing his throat and looking away. Sherlock could not quite make out exact colors in the dim light cast by the bedside lamp, but he imagined John’s face was beginning to turn rather pink right about now.
Sherlock smiled to himself and pushed his head in a little closer. “Quite warm, yes.”
***
Sherlock awoke next morning feeling as if he had reemerged from the womb: fresh, content, and more well-rested than he’d ever been in the past 39 years of his life. Yawning, he hugged the body in his arms closer to himself—
—until he realized the body was not John, but John’s jumper wrapped around a body-sized pillow.
He wrinkled his nose in consternation and patted the empty spot next to him; judging from the residual warmth, John must have left the bed no more than 5 minutes ago.
Incredibly, inexplicably, Sherlock actually felt a wrench of disappointment at the mere thought of John waking up before him and worming his way out of his embrace.
The bed suddenly felt a lot less comfortable than it did last night.
As if having arrived at some obvious and dramatic conclusion, Sherlock immediately sat upright and flung off the covers. Not even bothering to change out of his blue dressing gown or, at the very least, put on any extra layers underneath, he stood up from the bed and promptly shuffled out of John’s room.
There was no time to waste. If he was to complete his research, it was now or never.
He entered the living room to see John’s back turned towards him. He was staring absentmindedly out the window at the morning bustle of London, taking slow and distracted sips from the mug of tea in his hand.
“Bit early for brooding, don’t you think?” came Sherlock’s unimpressed voice from the doorway.
John’s entire body startled in response, his tea sloshing dangerously close to the verge of splashing out. When he finally turned around, Sherlock could see almost a record number of worry lines written all over his face.
John took a step forward and gingerly set his cup of tea down on the table. “I, uh—”
Sherlock’s gaze immediately flickered past the open computer beside John’s cup and thought to himself with mild amusement, Maybe he’s been doing some research of his own .
John, meanwhile, seemed completely overwhelmed with a sort of crippling uncertainty. It was endearing, almost, to see his simple little mind begin processing new ideas at its own plodding pace.
Oh , thought Sherlock as he discerned the very familiar look now blossoming over John’s face. He’s about to do something stupid.
As if on cue, John suddenly came to life from where he was once standing motionlessly a few seconds ago. A couple brisk strides across the living room brought him within arm’s reach of Sherlock, and there he stopped, hands crossed over his chest, head tilted up to meet his eyes with an unexpectedly intense gaze.
“There’s one left. In the collection.”
As predicted , Sherlock mused to himself. A ghost of a smile toyed at the edges of his lips.
But before he could open his mouth to contribute a smart little retort, John reached out and grabbed his face between both hands to kiss that stupid, stupid trace of a smile off his face.
Sherlock’s hands immediately flew forward in an attempt to hang on to absolutely anything. They landed on John’s head and fisted into his hair as John kissed him, kept kissing him, pressed him into the wall behind him and caged him in with his arms.
It was with a vague sort of panic that Sherlock realized his mind had gone amazingly dumb. He only knew that John’s lips were nice, and they tasted of earl grey tea, and that he was never really fond of earl grey tea but he thought he could drink it from John’s lips for the rest of his life.
This was not in any of Sherlock’s predictions: not this level of desperation in John’s mouth moving against his, and definitely not how long this would last. He thought they might have been kissing for minutes, hours now, with the way his head was steadily beginning to cloud over with a strangely woozy feeling.
Only when they finally pulled apart did Sherlock realize just how much he missed air in his lungs.
“Sherlock?” came a very recognizable voice of concern that pierced the fog in his head.
Sherlock drew in a couple of deep, ragged breaths, staring at the face of the man who had, quite literally, just kissed him into oblivion.
When he spoke again, he surprised even himself with the uncharacteristically hoarse edge to his voice.
“They were right. I did forget how to breathe.”