Work Text:
As Sherlock reached Baker Street tube, it began to rain. Only a few minutes later it was raining so hard it ricocheted off the pavement, and something that may have been an aeroplane or may have been some distant thunder rumbled about the city rooftops.
As he crossed Marylebone Road, he caught sight of a cab. Turned the hailing motion into flipping up his coat collar. He would walk, in this mid-July thunderstorm.
A walk of shame – he supposed that was the appropriate colloquialism for this. A stumbling-out into an early London morning, still covered in evidence of the night before (he had just snatched the shirt from the floor, and it was only as he crossed Portman Square that he realised there were several somewhat suspect stains around the collar). Although, as he understood it, a walk of shame was taken away from the site of the previous night’s…activities, and towards your own home. In his case, they were one and the same place, and his early morning walk was towards New Scotland Yard.
He crossed Oxford Street, the rain easing from heaven-splitting to merely heavy. Spared a look down to Marble Arch, the old site of Tyburn Cross, and thought, as he always did, that the view would have been much improved if they’d left the old gallows there – call it a tangible deterrent. He was soaked to the bone, everywhere that was not covered by his coat. Rivulets ran down his hair, sneaking under the (marked) shirt collar. His feet were sore, rubbed by wet socks and slippery shoes. He had not anticipated the sudden change in weather. Otherwise, he might have brought a spare pair of socks. He walked on, feeling the pain in his feet and a similar one on his neck where his damp scarf chafed over the love-bite on his collarbone.
Sherlock bit his lip. If he concentrated, he could feel each love-bite from his throat to his thighs rubbing against his clothing and he was on Constitution Hill, almost at Buckingham Palace, and now was not the time to be having inappropriate thoughts. Now was not the time to think of teeth on the tender skin on his stomach, or of calloused hands gripping his hips or any one of the filthy loving words dropped into his ears by lips that had not yet been kissed enough.
Suddenly Sherlock was very glad of the cold rain.
He needed not to think about the last twelve hours. Correction – he needed very much to think about the last twelve hours, but he must not think about it at this particular moment (dodging someone on a pink Vespa as he crossed Deanery Street). That was a seriously intense mental discussion he needed to have, logical foundations for his reasoning that needed to be uprooted and laid anew. And this was not the time; he had work to do, promises to keep, hence why he was soaked to the skin at just gone eight in the morning, instead of curled up in his own bed with someone else’s warm breath on his shoulder.
Sherlock stopped, under a café awning on White Horse Street and looked back the way he came. There was an expanse of skin, tanned at the wrists and neck and pale across the chest and legs and puckered in scars at the thighs and shoulder, warm and soft beneath his covers. There was feathery pale hair, scruffy on his pillow. Two very blue eyes were undoubtedly still closed in sleep, and they would wake to an empty bed. Instead of being there to watch how John woke up in the morning, Sherlock was more than a mile from home in the rain because he’d made a promise to Lestrade that he’d help with closing the case this morning. He had left a note on his pillow. He could have just called Lestrade. He could have switched his phone off and watched John’s lashes flutter as he dreamed, all the while planning their long years together. There was a very long moment of silence and Sherlock considered running the entire way home in an effort to be back in bed and mostly dry by the time John woke up.
Instead, he turned and continued walking down the street, on towards Green Park and as he wandered between the green boughs drooping with rain he realised he was smiling. Uncontrollably so, in fact. Because quite apart from the worry over how long this would last, or consternation that he had failed to recognise the signs of this coming on, the large majority of his brain was taken up with imagining the previous night in all of its glory, every touch of lips and tongue, every disbelieving laugh that it had taken them half a decade and a ransom case to realise what had surely been evident from the very moment they met. Something warm and vital uncurled in him, spreading across his skin and rooting beneath his heart. He couldn’t tell whether he was drowning or soaring in the air (he would be surrounded by fluid and at an abnormal altitude either way, so perhaps it didn’t matter).
(He vowed never to be ashamed of this, walk of shame or no. Never.)
So he carried on, walking south towards the river and Scotland Yard, where he would arrive in a little over twenty minutes, drenched and dishevelled and happy enough that he would have Lestrade surreptitiously checking him for signs of drug abuse for the next three weeks. But on that one rainy morning, no one could put a dent in Sherlock Holmes. And later when the rain had cleared and the sky was high and clean and almost completely blue, Sherlock walked in sunlight reflected from fallen rain, back through his city to lips that would smile when they saw him and a future that stretched out as bright and as clear as the sun after a storm.