Shelrock: my body when it is with your (NC-17)
Title: my body when it is with your
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Magic AU
Summary: Lupercalia: the season when the werewolf takes a mate. John is unhappy. Sherlock is intrigued.
A/N: Written for a
sherlockbbc_fic prompt regarding Werewolf!John, which is of course why I spend most of the story writing about Psychic!Sherlock. ::facepalm:: One little note on the dates--I'm afraid that there is no full moon on February 10th in either 2010 or 2011. This was very disappointing to me. (I worry about this sort of thing.) The title is from e. e. cummings, because I when I like a poem I never stop using it.
my body when it is with your
by Mad Maudlin
It wasn't exactly a secret; the whole of Abnormal London looked to the days after Imbolc with a mixture of tension and perverted black humor. John had circled the day on every calendar in the flat (lunar, Gregorian, and Great Wheel) and taken a week off work. Sherlock had no problem speculating out loud as to whether that expressed pessimism as to his desirability or optimism about his stamina.
"Don't," John said fiercely, without making eye contact. "Just stop it, Sherlock."
"There's no need to be coy, you know," Sherlock said, without looking up from his laptop (attempting to distinguish a possible embezzlement/blackmail case from simple industrial-grade stupidity). "Lupercalia is practically a bank holiday. Will you be spending it at Sarah’s, or have you made hotel arrangements?”
“I’m spending it here,” John said flatly.
Now Sherlock glanced up, and couldn’t resist a quick probe of John’s surface thoughts (tensionanger guiltdreadshame goddamnitsherlockoutofmyhead) before he spoke. “That will be incredibly unconducive to my work, you realize.”
“I’m spending it here,” John clarified, hands hovering over his own keyboard without typing, ”alone. Mrs. Hudson’s given me the keys to 221C.”
Now that had Sherlock’s attention: he considered the data. John’s relationship with Sarah was new, certainly, and somewhat strained by Sherlock’s habit of crashing their dates and/or getting them kidnapped individually or as a pair; but she was a powerful witch in her own right as well as a doctor, and had nothing to fear from John in any shape. Common knowledge--and common myths--about werewolf mating practices were often enough to end relationships, or prevent them from starting in the first place, but Sarah had to be better informed and had demonstrated no prior hesitation. And even if she had, for some reason, proven unamenable--perhaps the surgery couldn’t spare both of them?--well, you couldn’t swing a dead cat this time of year without finding single werewolves and the occasional fetishist interested in a Lupercalia tryst. John could be frustratingly conservative in other ways, but he’d never shown any particular aversion to casual sex as long as the appropriate precautions were taken.
Not that werewolves actually needed to mate--that was among the more widespread myths, because it was the most blindingly ignorant. Lack of sex had never proven fatal to anything that didn’t actively feed on it; a werewolf without a mate would certianly suffer certian mental and physical side-effects, but he would not die and he certainly wouldn’t rape the first humanoid to enter his line of sight (much to the disappointment of some of the aforementioned fetishists). John certainly could endure his mating cycle alone in the basement flat; the question was, why would he choose to?
“Stop it,” John said again.
“Stop what?” Sherlock asked, because all these thoughts had passed through his head in a matter of seconds.
John scowled at him. “It’s not what you think.”
“I haven’t even told you what I think,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Whatever it is, it’s not that,” John said firmly, and slammed the lid on his laptop.
Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “What if I think that you resent the loss of self-control you experience during the mating season, above and beyond what the lunar cycle subjects you to, and isolate yourself as a form of self-flagellation?”
John froze in place halfway to the stairs, shoulders rigid. “All right,” he said stiffly. “So it is what you think.”
Which was exactly how Sherlock realized it was not.
-\-\-\-
Lupercalia this year fell on February the tenth, a Wednesday. John spent the time growing increasingly grumpy and withdrawn in anticipation, the BBC spent it running absurd news reports about werewolf health and sexual assault statistics (without ever explicitly drawing a link between the two, but still, it was hardly subtle)--and Sherlock spent the time observing John.
Reading John’s mind was always a challenge, which was one of the reasons Sherlock had initially approved of him as a flatmate; for a non-reader he had an excellent sense of when someone was muddling in his thoughts, and had developed a habit of thinking about bagpipe music whenever he caught Sherlock trying. Sherlock also did not dare sneak into John’s room, because there was no point in provoking his territorial instincts any more than necessary. As John retreated there more and more frequently, it made data collection increasingly difficult, but Sherlock was nothing if not inventive.
He found two separate occasions to visit the surgery, for instance, once for a case and once when a particularly disgruntled former client managed to send him a poisoned letter. He probably should have gone to the A&E for the latter, except that involved long waits and tedious explanations, whereas he could always claim he needed to see John about personal matters and only then remove his gloves.
“Jesus Christ,” John blurted, reaching for his instrument tray. “Don’t tell me you brewed that in the kettle.”
“Mrs. Laffey was unimpressed with my revelations about her husband’s mistress,” Sherlock explained. “My only consolation is that she likely sent the same or worse to him.”
John set up ample amounts of cotton gauze and a bottle of some cleansing agent, and then put on no fewer than three pairs of latex gloves--the last took a bit of wriggling to get on. “Did you get this in the post? Because there’s laws against trafficking in this stuff.”
“As gratifying as it would be to drag the whole affair into the public eye, I can’t be bothered with court dates,” Sherlock said. “And the extra gloves really aren’t necessary.”
“Just trying to make this as...not unpleasant as I can,” John said. He moistened the first ball of cotton and held it up. “Ready?”
Sherlock nodded, and held his breath.
He might never know first-hand what it was like for John to change shapes, but he knew intimately how it felt to be betrayed by his own body. Hunger, sleep, libido--these he could conquer, though nicotine and will, at least long enough to solve a case. But he could not control his own riotous mind, in all its exquisite sensitivity; could not always remain detached from the thoughts and feelings that crowded into him from the outside. A terrified witness could make his own heart pound; a grieving one drag tears to his eyes; holding a murder weapon sometimes triggered phantom pain that sent him to his knees. He managed it: kept his hands gloved, kept his concentration focused. These days not even John’s nightmares of Afghanistan were enough to disturb Sherlock’s composure. Mostly.
It was harder when people were touching him, though. Skin to skin was worst, but latex was a flimsy barrier, even in triplicate. John cleaned the ugly purple blisters on Sherlock’s hands and fingers, and his thoughts seeped in without any effort from Sherlock. Mostly he was concentrating on his task--thoroughly wiping the poison away, noting where it had burned deeply enough to need bandaging, even listing off the bones and muscles of the human hand to keep his thoughts from wandering. Irritation seeped in around the edges, though--at Mrs. Laffey, at whoever had provided the poison, at Sherlock himself, because shouldn’t such a vaunted reader have picked up on the aura of malice before he even opened the bloody envelope?
“I did,” Sherlock protested. “I thought she was suing me.”
John winced, burning with guilt and anxiety. “Sorry,” he murmured out loud, while his mental monologue started over at abductor pollicis brevis.
He was just finishing up with the bandages when Sarah knocked once, and then stuck her head inside. “John? Everything okay in here?”
John let go of Sherlock’s hand a moment later, but not before Sherlock caught the sudden flood of emotion--and it wasn’t affection. It left him feeling that his own stomach was in anxious knots even after John turned around. “Yeah, fine--Sherlock just needed a couple of plasters.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at Sherlock with exasperation. “Don’t you have your own GP, Sherlock?”
“I was in the area,” he said mildly. “And the queues at the A&E are awful.”
“Hence why you come jump ours,” Sarah said dryly. She was wearing lipstick, a darker shade than usual, and the earring were new. Interesting. “Speaking of queues, if you’re all done with John...”
“He’s done,” John said firmly, and stripped off all his latex before passing Sherlock back his gloves; the traces of talcum powder on his fingers left white streaks on the black leather. “I’ll be ready in just a moment.”
“Great. Thanks.” Sarah flashed them both a perfunctory smile and slipped out the door.
In the interest of professionalism, Sherlock waited until she was gone to ask, “When did you break up with her?”
John’s head snapped up, and he glared. “Not now, Sherlock.”
“Because she’s obviously got a date tonight, and not with you,” Sherlock said. Then paused. “You did break up, didn’t you? She’s certainly not acting like a cheating lover.”
John didn’t answer; he hit the buzzer to send the next patient through, and his anger was enough to make the air vibrate. Sherlock, contrary to popular belief, could take a hint; this was one of the rare times he chose to follow one. He left, holding his hands very loosely clasped in front of him.
And when he got back to Baker Street, as soon as he’d properly disposed of the poisoned note, he set his gloves out on the table. The white smear of talcum powder was just barely visible. Tiny things, grains of talc, but they had been in direct contact with John’s skin, and if Sherlock hadn’t contaminated the impression on the cab ride back--
He very, very lightly brushed his fingers across the stain.
Oh.
That was interesting.
-\-\-\-
Of course, he had precious little time to confirm the impression--and they always needed confirmation, something objective and quantifiable to buttress slippery intuitions. On the seventh, John spent most of the day setting up 221C for his intended hermitage, taking down bedding, an electric kettle and a hot plate, some books--
“Need a hand?” Sherlock asked, hovering on the stairs.
“No,” John said firmly.
“It’s no trouble at all.”
John exhaled through his teeth, loudly. “I’m good, thanks.”
“I could--”
”No.”
Maybe it was just the territorial instinct at work; maybe having anyone else’s scent in the room, even faintly, would be an unnecessary extra irritant during a time when John’s temper was already bound to be on a hair trigger. But Sherlock was increasingly certain it was something else. Something more specific.
He found an excuse to visit Bart’s on the eighth, while John was at work, and followed a gaggle of Mike’s students on their rounds--not saying anything, just following them and smiling broadly. Given the way Sherlock dressed, the students all uniformly concluded that he was either an administrator or an escaped psychiatric patient, and either way their anxiety level skyrocketed. Mike enjoyed the torment far more than he ought to, and let it go on until lunchtime as long as Sherlock didn’t actively interrupt or follow them into any restricted areas. Afterwards they went for coffee.
“Are you experimenting on my students or just trying to get my attention?” he asked brightly, pushing Sherlock’s cup across the table.
“A bit of both,” Sherlock said. “Stress reactions are complicated. There’s always new data.”
Mike chuckled. “Come on, out with it. You must be bored if you’ve got time to puncture their little delusions of aptitude.”
Sherlock sipped his coffee, and slipped a finger into Mike’s mind--just a probe, nothing too deep. “Frightfully bored. John isn’t particularly good company at the moment.”
A much younger John, affectionrespectpity, sound of laughter. John in a strop before a full moon, sluggish and grumpy after. John laughing with a woman--cleavage recalled better than face. “I’ll bet,” Mike said. “Doesn’t work as fast as he used to, does he?”
“Not at all,” Sherlock said, pleased to confirm one deduction. “And he’s taking a week off for Lupercalia.”
Mike laughed again. John swaggering onto rounds, a line of hickeys visible on his throat. “A week? Dunno whether that says more about his stamina or his partner.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Sherlock said, sipping his coffee again.
“Who’d he snag this time?” Mike asked. “Last time we talked he mentioned he was seeing someone...”
“Broke it off recently,” Sherlock said. “Not entirely certain what his plans are now.”
Face, names, fragments of charts--speculation. Mike was perhaps the normalest man in London, but Bart’s did have an Abnormals ward and he had some contacts in the community. The fact that he’d consider trying to set John up with a mate on short notice was kind, if a bit naive; the fact that he was considering both men and women allowed Sherlock to tick off the last box in his list. “He’s probably not looking for anything right now, is he?” Mike said, thoughts shading to disappointment.
Sherlock shrugged, and managed to subtly hit a button on his phone through his pocket. “It is a bit recent.”
Mike sighed. “Yeah, John never was any good at moving on. Convinced himself he was in love with everyone he so much as snogged.”
Sherlock’s phone went off loudly, at the exact delay he’d programmed, and he cursed Mike for suddenly choosing now to be particularly interesting. “Sorry,” he said, and pretended to check a text while giving Mike’s memories a deeper sift. Sad John, drunk John, raving about this or that ex, fits of depression before he managed to move on to the next True Love...
“I have to go,” Sherlock said, pocketing his phone, and this time he wasn’t lying.
Mike took it good-naturedly. “Found a nice murder, have you? Enjoy yourself--and hey, if you need a hand with something while John’s off wanking himself blind--”
Sherlock missed the rest of that sentence. He nearly ran home.
The ninth was a bad day; John found some excuse to stay out of the flat until nearly nine o’clock, and Sherlock found himself caught in a vicious cycle of speculation and nicotine. Suddenly the entire situation seemed fraught with hidden pitfalls. It was ludicrous to theorize based on data more than a decade out of date--John was older now, more mature, less trusting--but even so, the mere possibility had introduced a wrinkle into Sherlock’s blissfully pure mental exercise. This suddenly went far beyond Lupercalia. This had consequences.
He was brooding on the subject when he felt the lightest mental intrusion. He tried to shut it out. I can sense your angst all the way from Whitehall, my dear, Mycroft said, nudging his way in.
You may be interested in a marvelous invention called a telephone, Sherlock sent back. He never had been able to keep Mycroft out for long.
Would you really like to have this conversation over something as public as an unsecured mobile connection?
I should not like to have this conversation at all.
Amusement--fondness--all the squidgy messy feelings that Sherlock couldn’t deal with oozed out of Mycroft’s mind like syrup. Ah, young love. It had to happen to you eventually.
Sherlock rolled over to face the back of the sofa. You know perfectly well that I don’t--we can’t.
I think you’d be surprised what is possible if you accept a certain level of...risk.
Risk to my sanity, you mean?
Really, Sherlock, since when have you ever been sane?
There was one thing guaranteed to make Mycroft go away. Sherlock snatched up his violin and quickly tightened the strings into tune. It’s an untenable situation. He may have the right idea after all.
You are half-correct, at least.
Sherlock fitted the violin under his chin. I thought you were proud that I’d made a friend.
I never thought I’d see the day when you settled for anything.
Just for that, the bastard was getting Brahms. Sherlock started to play, letting the music absorb his entire attention, until John and Mycroft and everything else fell away. There was only the bow and the strings and the pure clear notes, the rhythms and harmonies and progressions; it was the only time his mind ever approached anything resembling clear.
He segued from one piece to the next without pause, simply because he felt like it, and only paused when his arm started to twinge. The moment his attention drifted, the world rushed in, and he was suddenly, excruciatingly aware that John was standing behind him--had been for at least seven minutes.
“That was beautiful,” John said with nothing but honest admiration, before Sherlock could even turn around. Did Sherlock want to turn around?
“Thank you,” he said awkwardly. He wondered what would happen if he touched John’s thoughts now, if he’d hear violins or bagpipes or something else entirely.
John exhaled noisily, and carried on up the next flight of stairs to his bedroom. Squeaky boards and heavy footsteps said more about his subsequent movements than any preternatural gift: he puttered about for a bit, changed into pajamas, crossed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and then went straight to bed. Tomorrow was Lupercalia, the day the wolf took a mate.
Sherlock flexed his arm, and switched to Elgar.
-\-\-\-
February the tenth was gray and chill, and Sherlock dozed off on the sofa while the sky was still a dreary gunmetal color; when he woke up, John was gone. Not at the surgery, surely--he never worked before a moonrise--but simply out, gone, avoiding the flat. Sherlock found himself rather grateful for that. Not that he couldn’t have found John if he’d been determined (Mycroft wasn’t the only reader skilled enough to pick out a target from the sea of minds that was London) but without a solution he felt it wiser to avoid the question entirely. Perhaps he ought to let the mating season pass before he pursued the matter any further. March was always a bit dull, anyway.
Except that still meant he’d have a stroppy werewolf knocking about the flat for four weeks. Including the entire next week, when John meant to hole up in the basement and weather the worst of the season. Two floors away was certainly better than one, and Sherlock was certainly capable of shutting out the endless background babble of the world around him--would have gone entirely mad long ago if he weren’t--so in theory he shouldn’t have any trouble enduring the coming week. A week of knowing that some yards below him, John was in the grip of a biological imperative, hormones and neurotransmitters tied to sun and moon by subtle laws. That John was hard and wanting and desperate, alone in the single dusty bed, that he was going to touch himself and that while he did it, he wouldn’t be thinking about Sarah or any of his past nameless conquests.
That is, in theory.
In practice, Sherlock recognized that he was probably buggered.
There was no other recourse for it, he concluded, and he took a cab over to the surgery. He lingered outside, considering the best strategies for obtaining his goal without undue embarrassment or prolonged interaction, but unfortunately--perhaps because of the poison incident a week prior--he waited a shade too long; he was still weighing his options when Sarah propped the door open and asked, “Are you going to come in?”
“I was debating it,” Sherlock said.
“John isn’t in today,” she added.
“I know that.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and Sarah’s brows knit ever so slightly. Eventually she said, “I’ve got a lunch break in ten minutes. There’s a sandwich shop two streets over from here that does a good turkey and cheese.” Then she shut the door.
Sherlock spent several minutes loudly condemning women, witches and himself, and then, faced with the likely outcome of all possible alternatives, went and got her bloody sandwich.
Sarah’s office was much more messy than John’s, with decorations that followed a general theme of small porcelain cherubs and posters of kittens in watering cans. It also had an aura of magic about it that was strong enough to make Sherlock’s eyes itch. She had two mugs of tea ready when he appeared with the take-away bag, but Sherlock did not sit down or even unbutton his coat.
This would normally be the moment when he skimmed his interlocutor’s thoughts lightly, just enough to gauge their attitudes and current preoccupations; but Sarah was a witch, and to Sherlock her mind was like a pane of ice, cold and slippery and opaque. She took her sandwich and tutted at him. “I’m not going to turn you into a newt, you know.”
“As that would be illegal, the thought had never crossed my mind,” Sherlock said. “How was your date, by the way?”
“None of your business,” she said. “Now, is this about John or is this about you?”
“You presume those options are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive,” Sherlock shot back.
“I presume that he hasn’t told you anything about us, and so you’re being a snoop,” she said. “Incidentally, if this turns into you castigating me for hurting his feelings I’m going to have to reconsider the newt.”
Sherlock reflected back over the burst of feeling he’d sensed when Sarah walked in on them last week. Inconclusive data. “Are his feelings hurt?” he asked.
For some reason she smiled at him. “No. Not that I know of, anyway. No more so than mine.”
This answer irritated him with its lack of specificity, but he pushed it aside; he was getting bogged down here. “In any case, I did not come here about John. I came to see you.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow at him. “Ah. Is it related to your work, or is this another of your tricks for jumping my patient queue?”
“I am fairly certain John would not want me to explain this matter in public to the receptionist,” Sherlock said.
“You just said it wasn’t about John,” Sarah pointed out.
Evil-minded woman. Sherlock took a deep breath. “Has he explained to you how he intends to pass Lupercalia?”
Sarah stared at Sherlock for several minutes, but she was not completely stupid; it took longer than he’d expected, but she got it. “Ah,” she said, then. “Oh.” She set down her sandwich and studied him.
Sherlock locked eyes with her and raised his chin slightly. “A charm of veiling would be beneficial to both of us at the moment. I will, of course, compensate you at market rates.”
“First things first,” she said. “Have you ever used one of those before?”
“On several occasions,” he said. “They are at times a necessary evil.”
She nodded. “Any side effects?”
“None to speak of,” Sherlock said.
“And if I were to track down your NHS file, would I find out you’re lying?” she asked.
Sherlock scowled at her. “If it were not a last resort, Dr. Sawyer, I wouldn’t be sitting here six hours before moonrise.”
She rolled her eyes. “I guessed that one, actually. You must be desperate to want a veil for the whole month.”
“I would not be using it continuously, and not for the entire month,” he pointed out. He didn’t add that the migraines would be less of a distraction than John’s mind, when it was too shredded by need to keep Sherlock out. He would endure the dizziness, the cotton-wool feeling of having one of his integral senses blocked, if it removed the temptation to peek.
Sarah kept staring at him, though, and just when Sherlock’s patience was about to run out she asked, quietly, “I don’t suppose you’ve talked to John about this.”
“John has been avoiding--people,” Sherlock admitted. Me, he almost said, but that would be a bit too revealing.
She sighed. “Let me rephrase the question. You’ve never had a meaningful talk with him about anything of consequence ever, have you?”
Sherlock wondered if she had had meaningful talks with John, if that was how they’d negotiated the end of their relationship, how much she really knew. Her mind remained completely closed, and he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of scrabbling around at its margins like a rodent, but he did tell her, “If you say the word ‘feelings’ to me I will leave immediately.”
“Oh, Sherlock,” she said, in a strangely fond tone that he’d rarely heard before. She sipped her tea and sighed again. “All right. I’ll make you the charm. But I think you need to seriously think about what you’re doing.”
“I do little else,” Sherlock reminded her.
“You know what I mean,” she said firmly. “Try to understand why John’s point of view. And think very hard about what you want before you do something dire. He’s still my friend, you know, and for all intents and purposes this makes you my patient.”
A quarter hour later he was back on the way to Baker Street, with the charm in an envelope. The aura around it was palpable, almost malignant, he thought--it burned away any impression of gentler motives that Sarah might’ve left behind. But it would enforce the current state of equilibrium, such as it was. Provided, of course, that he used it.
Try to understand John’s point of view, Sarah had said, but she seemed to have forgotten that for Sherlock, that didn’t require conversation at all.
He hid the charm amongst the clutter of his own things and then climbed the second flight of stairs. John’s room had a lock on the door that he never used, probably because he recognized that Sherlock was both willing and able to pick it if the notion took him. Sherlock, in turn, had restrained himself--for the most part--from any acts of trespass, because werewolves were territorial by nature and John seemed happier and more functional with a tiny piece of London that was unmistakably his own.
Sherlock did not enter the room now, though that was a technicality--if John came up again before moonrise he would be able to scent Sherlock’s presence, would know he’d been standing on the very threshold of the door, honoring the territory boundaries in the letter rather than the spirit. He took off his gloves again, and reached into the still air of the room, which was very clean and almost impersonal--not many pictures, all the laundry tucked into the hamper, sort of thing. Air did not hold an impression for long, but walls and floors and furniture could speak at length, to a reader with the strength of will to drag it out of them.
Sherlock reached out, with his mind now rather than his hand, and took it all in.
johnjohnjohnsoftwarmsleepjohnwherearemytrousersjohnSHOTBLOODHOSTILESsleepnosleepnodreams
hottouchwantjohnsherlockcan’twon’tshouldn’tjohnhandsthighslipsmineneedwantlove
sarahguiltpainworrywonderneedneverenoughcan’twon’tjohnguiltlovesherlocktrustwithmylife
sherlocksherlockalwaysminecan’twon’tshouldn’talwayslovewantneedneveralwayscan’tdon’tlove
Sherlock surfaced, and realized three things: firstly, he had crashed to his knees in the doorway of the bedroom. Secondly, he was hard. Thirdly, John wasn’t mere infatuated; he was hopelessly, desperately in love.
Four things, perhaps, even if he couldn’t yet vocalize the last of them.
He stumbled down to his own bedroom, still in his coat and shoes, and collapsed onto the bed. The complex impression was still sloshing around in his head. John had been fantasizing about him, masturbating, and Sherlock could piece it together in his mind’s eye--John curled on his side, still half-dressed, fucking his fist and thinking about Sherlock and hating himself for it and doing it anyway. John dreamed of Sherlock, and woke up with a stain on his pajamas and guilt coiled in his belly. John had been telling himself for weeks that he wasn’t fixated on Sherlock, had been taking great pains to hide it, and Sherlock was a little impressed and a little disappointed that it had worked so well.
He slipped one hand inside his trousers, thinking about John thinking about him, building fantasies from fantasies. Of walking in at an opportune moment, at a revealing glance, some hazy steps in between and then John on top of him, surrounding him, the easy slide of lubrication versus the drag of bare skin--
Sherlock bit down hard on his lip. No. Not thinking about that. There was a reason these were called fantasies.
He came with John’s adoration still thick in his head, and for a moment simply lay limp, too overwrought to even clean up after himself. Eventually he stripped off his clothes and shoved them off the side of the bed, curling up under the duvet. A headache was starting to creep in from the corners, and he was far more exhausted than he had any right to be. He was willing to allow that he might have overextended himself with that trick, but at least he’d succinctly answered one of Sarah’s implied questions.
Think about what you want.
You’d be surprised what it possible if you accept a certain level of risk.
Sherlock dozed off thinking that he might, in fact, have answered both of them.
-\-\-\-
It was dark when he woke up, and John was home. Sherlock did not want to analyze too closely how quickly he had honed in on that fact, on the familiar mental presence currently occupying the basement flat. He checked the clock: indeed, well past moonrise. John would’ve come home and, seeing Sherlock’s coat absent and no light in the bedroom, assume the flat was empty. Would’ve found his bedroom door open and Sherlock’s scent hanging in the air, and when he scented the arousal--or perhaps he didn’t, or blamed it on the impression. Perhaps John had concluded that Sherlock read his room and then fled the flat in horror like a nineteenth-century maiden, or something along those lines.
He could’ve tried to probe John’s mind from upstairs, to gauge his reaction to this erroneous conclusion; but it was probably too risky. Better to have this conversation in person. In fact, if the moon was up, this might be the opportune time.
Sherlock dressed quickly, in the same clothes as earlier--the odors of sweat and sex could only bolster his case at this point. After a moment’s thought, he also collected the charm. John had locked the entrance to 221C, but it was easy enough to pick, and Sherlock stepped into the dim, chilly basement flat with his head held high.
The room with the fireplace had clearly been set up as a base camp: there was a folding table with John’s laptop and some of the books and things, as well as a mug half-full of cold tea. The kitchen was also empty of anything John hadn’t brought down himself--bread and pot noodles and a few small, sad-looking apples arranged neatly in the cupboards. The only other room in this flat was the bedroom, but Sherlock found that abandoned as well--the bed made to within an inch of its life as only a military man could do, and, unabashedly, a bottle of lubricant and a box of tissues stood on the table next to it. Sherlock ran a hand over the cold sheets, but there was no real impression, just the residue of John’s irritability from the day he’d brought them down. This was ridiculous. He could sense John in the flat--
A deep-throated growl stilled his hand on the sheets. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder, and saw only the dimmest outline of heavy, furred shoulders and the golden-green shimmer of a pair of eyes. “That’s hardly necessary,” he said.
John’s ears went back, and though he couldn’t speak in this shape he had learned to frame his thoughts in a way that Sherlock could easily read: Not supposed to be down here.
“I know that,” Sherlock said crossly. To be perverse, he sat on the bed. “But I strongly suspect that conversation is required here, and while this is hardly the optimum time, I doubt dawn will bring an improvement.”
John came fully into the room, letting a wedge of streetlight from the tiny window illuminate him. He really was an alarmingly large wolf, nearly four feet tall in the shoulders, and he completely blocked the doorway when he sat down. Sherlock hoped he wouldn’t need to utilize it. Talk about what?
Sherlock licked his lips, aware of the fraught path they were walking down and his own lack of direct experience. “I’ve revised my theory about your attitude towards Lupercalia.”
John’s hackles went up, and he shifted his weight, thinking an wary, wordless interrogative.
“You aren’t just worried about loss of self-control in a general sense. You’re worried about something in particular.” Sherlock forced himself to smile. “You’re worried that you might do or say something revealing in front of me, because you are rather ridiculously in love and seem to think that I am incapable of reciprocating.”
Aren’t you?
Sherlock clenched his teeth for a moment. “I think I ought to be insulted, John.”
Not what I meant. John heaved himself to his feet and started pacing the tiny bedroom, circling around one side of the bed and back; his emotions were all in a turmoil, making it hard to pick out what he meant to be words. I know you’re not really a sociopath, Sherlock, but you are a reader, and I can’t even touch you. I’ve watched you cry and puke and pass out because of someone else’s thoughts. I can’t do that to you, I can’t make you feel something you don’t want to.
“Oh, please,” Sherlock said. “I know my own mind, John, or I would’ve gone mad long before now.”
You can barely stand medical treatment, John shot back.
“Why do you think I keep coming to you?” Sherlock blurted, and then flushed, and then castigated himself for flushing. The entire purpose of this conversation was revelation; why should he be more self-conscious of this than the stain on his trousers? He shut his eyes briefly. “It’s...easier with you. Easier than anyone else has ever been.”
I know how to control myself. John didn’t feel entirely convinced by this.
“That’s not all of it,” Sherlock admitted. John’s ears went forward here, and for a moment his thoughts were an incoherent swirl of doubt and hope. Sherlock drew the envelope with the charm inside from his pocket, his final card. “And if you really need to be assured that I’m not a helpless thrall of your wild libido, I’ve obtained a veil charm that ought to remove any doubts.”
John’s second growl filled the whole room. You despise those things, he pointed out.
“I am also not a fan of condoms, but I do believe in safer sex.”
For a minute Sherlock did not know how to interpret John’s response to that; he flopped down on the floor with his head on his paws, giving off the strangest series of strangled little yips. His thoughts sparkled with a sudden burst of...mirth? Oh, god, his tail was wagging. Wagging.
“Are you laughing at me?” Sherlock asked, fighting down an answering smile.
John got hold of himself and slunk over to where Sherlock was seated. After a moment’s hesitation, he rested his head on Sherlock’s knee, though every muscle in his body was taut enough to pull back at a moment’s notice.
Sherlock had forgotten to put his gloves back on. He could feel John’s nervous anticipation without being consumed, could hold it aside and separate from himself. With a deep breath, he sank his fingers into the coarse ruff of fur around John’s neck, tangling them with the chain that held his tags.
It all flooded in, the guilt and longing and apprehension and misery, but above all want and love and a rising need. He had no frame of reference for these feelings, not with this depth and intensity, and for a moment he did lose his bearings, let himself be awash in it. He found himself again on the floor, with both arms around John’s neck and his face buried in the hard fur. John was whining gently, and shifting his feet around, and afraid. Sherlock, say something, he pleaded, or almost did, not with proper words but with naked anxiety.
But of course, Sherlock couldn’t--had spent so long convincing himself he didn’t want what he couldn’t have that he didn’t know how to verbalize the confused morass in his head. Not that John would likely believe it if he did, if he was so convinced that Sherlock was helpless against intrusions. There was another way to communicate it, though--John might not be a reader, but he wasn’t entirely deaf, and Sherlock might not be much of a sender but he might be able to manage this
He reached into John’s mind, felt John’s reflexive resistance and pushed past it. He couldn’t just dump a thought into John’s head and expect him to interpret it, but he could try to show, to make him feel--you see, this is me, and this is you, and we are separate but the same.
And he could sense the moment when John understood, when another high whine escaped his throat and pressed close against him. His relief was a relief to Sherlock as well, and helped him find his voice again. “I wish,” he said, “that I could kiss you right now.”
John responded by licking his ear.
“Eurgh! Not at all what I meant.” Sherlock pulled back long enough to wipe the sticky feeling away, and reluctantly let go of John entirely. He spent so much time shutting out the tiny minds of the idiots who usually surrounded him...it had never occurred to him that some feelings, from some people, could be as wonderful and addictive as cocaine. Probably ought not to share that thought with John, though...
John startled him by bounding up onto the bed at his side, though still with a comfortable space between them It’s ages still till moonset, he thought with bitter frustration.
“True,” Sherlock said. “And I can think of far more pleasant places to pass the time than this dreary little cave.”
John’s tail beat the bedsheets again. I’d race you, but it wouldn’t be fair when you’ve got just two legs and all.
“Two legs and opposible thumbs, I remind you.”
John yipped again, and took off for the stairs, claws clicking on the woodwork, but Sherlock was in hot pursuit, just to see him try to operate the doorknobs.
-\-\-\-
For one reason or another, John rarely spent the full moon at Baker Street; it was novel watching him try to navigate the furniture without knocking anything over, winding between chairs and bookshelves and shouldering aside the coffee table. He was growing restless with the approaching dawn, and no matter how many times he circled in front of the hearth he couldn’t manage to curl up for more than a few minutes.
Sherlock wasn’t in much better of a state, even if he hadn’t had John’s thoughts as a distraction. Perhaps it would’ve been easier if they could’ve fallen straight into bed together, without any time for second-guessing himself. Not that he was having second thoughts about John, exactly, but he was excruciatingly aware that his own data set in these matters was limited--the set of people he’d actually wanted in his life, who had also wanted him back, who he’d also been willing to risk contact with, was extremely small, and the few ensuing experiments had produced mixed results. Sherlock was not accustomed to this degree of self-doubt, and it was only worsened by the fact that he couldn’t predict with accuracy how John would behave once the moon went down. How his own body would react to the contact, in truth.
Uncertainty. Sherlock despised it.
John made another lumbering circuit of the room and then suddenly caught the hem of Sherlock’s coat in his teeth. He tugged once, gently. Upstairs.
“Now?” Sherlock asked. It had barely gone midnight.
John just growled a little, too agitated to elaborate his thoughts. Upstairs!
“Fine, fine...” Sherlock began to mount the steps to John’s bedroom; John crowded behind him, almost herding him up, like an oversized sheepdog.
Sherlock hesitated again at the door of the bedroom, but John bumped the back of his knees lightly, urging him over the threshold. Having Sherlock in what was indisputably his territory seemed to calm John a bit, and he prowled around the small room a few times before settling in front of the door. Sorry, he thought, clearly embarrassed by his own possessiveness.
“You’re forgiven,” Sherlock said. He looked at the bed, which was just as crisply made as the one downstairs. The impression he got off these sheets, however, was rather stronger. Fascinating as it was to know that John had wanked to the sound of Elgar the night before, it wasn’t particularly conducive to patiently awaiting the dawn.
Sherlock glanced at John, who was watching his every move with tense anticipation, eyes shining green-gold where they caught the low light. If only they’d been the same species at the moment....
Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it. Sherlock hung his coat on the back of the desk chair and kicked off his shoes, then stretched out on the bed. The physical smell of him combined with the deep psychic impression--of John, of love and want, of good, deep sleep--was oddly comforting. From the door, John thought in question marks without words.
“It’s fine,” Sherlock assured him. “I’m fine.” He wasn’t likely to get any sleep, of course--not in the least because of his earlier nap--but it was more comfortable that standing around for the next six or so hours.
After a little while, John climbed onto the narrow bed beside him, once again keeping a small, safe distance, giving Sherlock the option to touch or stay away. Sherlock gave him a scratch between the ears, both to reassure him and to steal another taste of his deep affection.
John flicked an ear but made no attempt to get away from the gesture, even as he protested mentally, Not a dog, Sherlock.
“Of course not. You’re far more interesting.”
John snorted at him.
-\-\-\-
Sherlock did eventually doze off again for a bit--his body occasionally played such tricks on him when he didn’t have a proper case. John was pacing almost constantly at that point, and the clicking of his claws on the floorboards proved strangely soothing.
But his eyes snapped open again when he realized that the room had gone silent. The windows were still dark, but the bedside clock said 6:13 AM--moonset or a little after. Sherlock could just make out a shape hunched in the shadows. “John?” he asked warily.
John rose on two human legs, pale skin nearly luminous where the streetlights happened to hit it. He was perfectly naked except for the tags around his neck--the ones that identified him as a werewolf regardless of the moon phase. He still wore the army-issue ones with the band of rubber around the rims to stop them jingling. Sherlock could see that he was already halfway to hard, barely had to touch his mind to sense the sharp angles of his thoughts, the possessive edges where want blurred into need And it was all focused on him, aligned to his presence like iron filings in a magnetic field.
Which made it all the more impressive when John said, raggedly, “Tell me if you need to stop.”
“Of course,” Sherlock said, and started unbuttoning his shirt. He had a strong suspicion that if he didn’t, it was going to end up a casualty.
“And don’t,” John said, taking one halting step across the room, “hesitate to stop me.”
Sock off, too. He was fairly certain socks were not sexy. Not that John was in any fit state to mind if Sherlock were wearing a wet suit. “Stop being an idiot and come here,” Sherlock said, and that seemed to be the end of all John’s self-control.
He took two steps and literally jumped him, jumped on top of him, and at that first touch it all exploded in Sherlock’s head: a continuous smear of want-love-need and the sensory overload of too-tight skin. He flailed for a moment, physically and mentally, almost getting lost again, before he found purchase in John’s shoulders and John’s flickering tags and the thrill of John’s teeth dragging across his lips. The pain-pleasure of it gave him an anchor, something to focus on, and that gave him the strength to pull himself closer and kiss John back properly.
He could do this, he thought triumphantly. Even his mind could be conquered by sheer force of will.
John was fully hard now, and rutting against Sherlock’s thigh while trying to unfasten his belt while kissing him. It wasn’t working very well. “You, you need,” he stammered into Sherlock’s lips. “Trousers. Condoms.”
Sherlock didn’t need to be a reader to correctly parse this, and in fact had been rooting around for the condoms as soon as the thought had surfaced in John’s mind. Telekinesis, he thought, would occasionally be a fabulous addition to his psychic repertoire. By the time he got the package open, John had managed to drag down Sherlock’s trousers and pants off, and simply pressed his face into the crease of his thigh, breathing deeply. Scenting him. The barest hint of moist air on his cock was not enough stimulation to concentrate on, not against the unnatural arousal pouring into him, and Sherlock thrust the condoms in John’s face, almost forgetting that he had to speak out loud. “You need to put these to use right now,” he said, and couldn’t even be embarrassed at how his voice quavered.
John obliged him by rolling the condom onto Sherlock’s prick with his mouth. That sent Sherlock crashing back into his own head, making undignified noises as he wondered where precisely that trick had come from. John sometimes seemed to be a bottomless well of surprises, each more astounding and alarming and magnificent than the last. An ever shifting-pattern that Sherlock couldn’t fully deduce. Would never want to deduce fully, not as long as he continued offering up those surprises, and certainly not as long as he kept doing whatever he was doing with his tongue.
He could sense that John was enjoying this, which was another surprise; that John reveled in the heat and friction and Sherlock’s ragged breathing. But his hands were still restless, stroking Sherlock’s thighs now, and now his hips, and now sliding down under and behind his balls, and now...
“No,” Sherlock gasped, and it was enough to make John go infuriatingly still and alarmed. “I mean, I’ve never, because that is what you were wondering, now don’t stop.”
But John seemed to take that as a cue to abandon his minstrations and climb up to kiss him again. His lips were red and raw and amazing, and he tasted faintly of latex, which was only appealing when Sherlock reminded himself of why. “Later,” John said between kisses, “later,” and he was thinking of fucking him, of bending him over and taking him, vivid technicolor fantasies that made Sherlock’s mouth fall open and his hips twitch up into empty air. John was still John, though, still enough of a doctor to worry about injury and preparation, still sentimental enough to want to be calm and coherent for him. Damn it.
“Promise,” Sherlock whimpered, pawing at John’s back again.
John pressed a line of little nipping kisses down Sherlock’s throat. “Later. Oh, god, later, I promise.”
Then they were both fumbling in the drawer again, for lubrication--nowhere near as big a bottle as the one downstairs, and Sherlock cursed himself for not bringing that one up when he’d had the chance. They both fumbled with it, spilling an embarrassing amount on the sheets. ”Sherlock,” John growled, temper flashing.
“I know what to do, it’s all there in your head,” Sherlock said, and pulled John’s mouth down to his for a moment. “Let me do this. I want to do it.”
John groaned, and suddenly threw his leg over Sherlock’s hips, straddling him. Sherlock squeezed his arse appreciatively before sliding a finger into the crack, just stroking back and forth and spreading the slick around. John’s impatience spiked again, irrational desperation, and he squirmed and growled, not even Sherlock’s name, just a long, aggressive consonant. He wanted it, wanted Sherlock’s fingers and hands and prick, wanted to be opened and penetrated and fucked and Sherlock couldn’t oblige fast enough, shoving in with just one finger all the way to the second knuckle.
It was glorious. It was too much. He could feel John tighten and flex around his finger, the heat of him and the slippery wetness, knew just where to stroke and twist to make him moan and writhe and rock backwards into his grip. It felt good, he felt how good it was, as immediately as if he was doing it to himself; his own thighs fell apart almost on reflex, spreading for a hand that wasn’t there, god, it was too much, too much and not enough.
“Sherlock,” John panted, concern edging into his pleasure. “Sherlock, say something.”
“I need you to kiss me,” Sherlock blurted, and he was no longer entirely sure that John was not a reader himself because he leaned forward and crushed their mouths together, teeth bumping and tongue sliding and this, yes, Sherlock could concentrate on this. He slid a second finger in alongside the first, and John bit down on his lip again, a little harder this time. Perfect.
John’s patience was already worn thin, though, and it wasn’t long before he pulled back and batted Sherlock’s fingers out of the way. In one fluid movement, he pushed Sherlock’s cock inside, sinking all the way down, and Sherlock found himself digging his fingers into John’s thighs in a way that was sure to leave marks because Christ, so much--
“Say anything,” John said, shifting his posture minutely.
Sherlock forced himself to take a deep breath. ”Move, damn it.”
John choked on a laugh and started to rock, infuriatingly brief movements that felt amazing but could definitely be better. “Thought I was the one in heat,” he sighed.
“Evil man,” Sherlock growled, and tried to get the leverage to thrust up into John, into the tight, slick warmth, to give him at least as much pleasure as he was getting out of this.
But John was the one in heat, and he started moving faster, lifting almost all the way off before grinding down in a sharp motion that made his tags bounce off his chest--no question who was fucking whom here, regardless of the actual positions. He was stroking himself, too, in perfect time, and Sherlock wanted to help with that, except his hands seemed to have lost all coordination. He was reduced to pawing at John’s hips and groaning, words piling up in his head that he knew he wasn’t ever going to be able able to say, like love and amazing and extraordinary.
In contrast, John’s brain-to-mouth filter seemed to have gone offline entirely, and he was babbling on about love and gorgeous and mine, too far gone for syntax, much less rationality. It was all spilling out of his mouth and his skin, no distinction between affection and desire, and as he chased his climax Sherlock was with him every step of the way.
They came at the same time--probably inevitable, under the circumstances--and for a split second Sherlock’s brain ground to a complete halt, the sort of complete and perfect silence that no combinations of drugs and magic had ever achieved for him. Almost as good as Mendelssohn, actually, except Mendelssohn wasn’t nearly as much fun.
Then John was sliding off of him, and feathering kisses on his face and neck, temporarily sated and thoroughly, stupidly in love; relieved and giddy and sore and exhilarated; thoughts tumbling one over another and pounding into Sherlock’s head faster than his frayed nerves could keep up with. “Stop,” he murmured, and squirmed away. “Stop, I need--”
John gasped a little ”Oh,” and rolled away, almost off the bed entirely; Sherlock caught just the edge of his sudden anxiety, and then they were out of contact, separate. Sherlock rolled to the edge of the mattress and took a deep breath, and another, steadying and centering himself. His head was his own again, and all he felt was his own physical lassitude and the incipient tightness in his abdominal muscles, the sticky mess on his stomach and the condom that was now slipping off. He flicked it away into a corner and wiped himself off with a sheet, pressed his trembling hands together and counted down his racing heartbeat.
“I’m sorry,” John said weakly somewhere behind him.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Sherlock said. The mattress shifted and squeaked. He rolled onto his back and found himself looking at John’s hunched shoulders where he was perched on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t do anything that I didn’t want.”
“You couldn’t help wanting it, though, could you?” John asked bitterly.
“That has more to do with your physical desirability than my mental sensitivity,” Sherlock said, just to see John’s ears flush pink. It was oddly endearing, and he wasn’t accustomed to being endeared to anything. “I simply wasn’t prepared for how...intense it would be.”
John’s back suddenly straightened with speed that should’ve been painful, and he said, “If this is where you tell me that I just took your virginity, I’m going to leave.”
“What? Christ, no, calm down.” He reached out and ran a knuckle along John’s spine, gently, catching the chaos of hope and guilt and anxiety...not so different from what Sherlock himself had been feeling earlier. He decided to clarify. “All my previous lovers were either some other variety of psychic, or witches. It was different.”
“Easier,” John offered, but Sherlock noted he was relaxing into that small point of contact between them. It was probably not ethical to use his own mating cycle against him, but Sherlock had never been concerned with ethics, and anyway he was doing it for the greater good..
“In some ways,” Sherlock admitted, because it was true. He withdrew his hand, only to push himself up and leaned close to John’s back--not touching, not quite, but close enough to feel the heat of his skin. “However, I am reliably informed that everything gets better with practice. And you do have a promise to keep.”
John twisted around, careful not to bump against Sherlock’s shoulder; his eyes were incredibly dilated even considering the darkness of the room. “You’re serious?”
“You know my sense of humor, John. You tell me.”
John sort of twitched, wavering in place, and it required no psychic ability to deduce that he was fighting the urge to lean in and kiss him. So Sherlock took the initiative, and let John push him into the mattress once again.
-\-\-\-
It was actually ten days before they crawled out of John’s bedroom for more than the amount of time it took to acquire or use the toilet. John, for his part, was developing a remarkable intuition about when and how to touch, when to push closer and when to keep his distance. Sherlock, for his part, suspected that he might never become erect again without outside aid, whether it be medicinal, mechanical or magical.
It was hardly easy, but it was getting easier, and the only thing that spoiled it in Sherlock’s mind was anticipating Mycroft’s overwhelming smugness the next time they communicated.
Eleven days into Lupercalia, they were--well, cuddling, with a thin blanket spread between them--and Lestrade called with a case. ”This thing was set up to look like a triple murder-suicide, but the position of the bodies is all wrong. Also, one of the kids is still alive, for the time being.”
“Conscious?” Sherlock asked, shrugging off John’s arm and the blanket so he could sit up.
”Even if she was, she’s got a tube in her throat. That’s why we need a reader.”
“I want to look at the crime scene first,” Sherlock insisted, and Lestrade grumbled, but eventually he gave up an address.
John watched the whole exchange drowsily, still sprawled on the bed, and Sherlock knew his hearing was sharp enough to have made out the full conversation. “Sounds messy,” he said, sitting up with a muffled grunt. “God, I hope we don’t have to chase anyone.”
“I’m sure the murderer will accommodate our infirmity,” Sherlock said, taking a few stiff steps in a futile attempt to stretch out his thighs. It occurred to him after a moment that John’s previous self-consciousness about the mating period had seemingly evaporated, and he tested this observation by saying, “If, of course, you’d prefer to stay home...”
“Not a chance,” John said firmly, stepped into a pair of pants from his bureau with only a bit of a wince. “I want you where I can see you.”
Sherlock smirked. “Not in the taxi, though; that tends to upset the drivers.” John chuckled at him fondly, and shooed him in the direction of his own clothes.
The case turned out to be worth his time and abilities: Lestrade hadn’t even noticed the obvious signs of a recent guest in the house, and the little girl was able to give Sherlock everything he needed without even waking up. A day and a half later they were able to hand over the killer for interrogation. (And only had to chase him a little bit.)
John put up with the odd smirk from the Yarders, hardly bothering to hide the love-bites peeping out of his collar; if anyone noticed that Sherlock was also walking with an abnormal gait, they didn’t deduce the obvious connection. Idiots. It was a refreshing return to his normal routine, but he also couldn’t miss the way John started to fidget at the twenty-four hour mark, like his skin was a bit too small for him. He hid it admirably well--really, when the man chose to exert it, his self-control was almost terrifying--but Sherlock could touch his thoughts from across the room and pick up the agitation, percolating hormones, inappropriate (but creative) fantasies related to everything from the cab to the filing cabinet in Lestrade’s office. It wasn’t nearly the monofocused tension of that first morning, but it was undeniable and fraying John’s nerves.
And so, while waiting for some last bit of paperwork to come through at the Yard, Sherlock reached out and caressed John’s knuckles. He didn’t remove his gloves for it, so the feeling was rather muted--more the electric spike of surprise than perverted thoughts about the staple removers. “Sherlock?” he asked warily, the why are you doing this? going entirely unspoken.
“You needed it,” Sherlock said simply, and sensed John relax to the unspoken admission: yes, he did. “And once we finish this last bit of tedium, we can go home and try the thing with the filing cabinet.”
”Sherlock--!” John sounded scandalized, but he was smiling, glancing around to see if anyone had overheard that little remark. Then he looked warily at Sherlock. “So you still want to--?”
“Of course,” he said peevishly. Why did John persist in questioning Sherlock’s motivation?
John’s smile at the affirmation was almost worth the irritation, however, his smile and the rush of affection and all the other squidgy emotions that were, perhaps, not so distasteful after all. So was Lestrade’s face when he came back around with the forms and saw Sherlock’s hand on John’s, however minimally. “Oh,” he said, because he’d worked with too many readers, and too long with Sherlock in particular, not to comprehend the significance of that. Well, that plus John’s hickeys. “I’ll, er, I’ll try to make this quick, then, shall I?”
“Please do,” Sherlock said, and kept his hands and thoughts to himself for the rest of the interview. For the first time he could remember, it was actually a challenge.
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Magic AU
Summary: Lupercalia: the season when the werewolf takes a mate. John is unhappy. Sherlock is intrigued.
A/N: Written for a
sherlockbbc_fic prompt regarding Werewolf!John, which is of course why I spend most of the story writing about Psychic!Sherlock. ::facepalm:: One little note on the dates--I'm afraid that there is no full moon on February 10th in either 2010 or 2011. This was very disappointing to me. (I worry about this sort of thing.) The title is from e. e. cummings, because I when I like a poem I never stop using it.
my body when it is with your
by Mad Maudlin
It wasn't exactly a secret; the whole of Abnormal London looked to the days after Imbolc with a mixture of tension and perverted black humor. John had circled the day on every calendar in the flat (lunar, Gregorian, and Great Wheel) and taken a week off work. Sherlock had no problem speculating out loud as to whether that expressed pessimism as to his desirability or optimism about his stamina.
"Don't," John said fiercely, without making eye contact. "Just stop it, Sherlock."
"There's no need to be coy, you know," Sherlock said, without looking up from his laptop (attempting to distinguish a possible embezzlement/blackmail case from simple industrial-grade stupidity). "Lupercalia is practically a bank holiday. Will you be spending it at Sarah’s, or have you made hotel arrangements?”
“I’m spending it here,” John said flatly.
Now Sherlock glanced up, and couldn’t resist a quick probe of John’s surface thoughts (tensionanger guiltdreadshame goddamnitsherlockoutofmyhead) before he spoke. “That will be incredibly unconducive to my work, you realize.”
“I’m spending it here,” John clarified, hands hovering over his own keyboard without typing, ”alone. Mrs. Hudson’s given me the keys to 221C.”
Now that had Sherlock’s attention: he considered the data. John’s relationship with Sarah was new, certainly, and somewhat strained by Sherlock’s habit of crashing their dates and/or getting them kidnapped individually or as a pair; but she was a powerful witch in her own right as well as a doctor, and had nothing to fear from John in any shape. Common knowledge--and common myths--about werewolf mating practices were often enough to end relationships, or prevent them from starting in the first place, but Sarah had to be better informed and had demonstrated no prior hesitation. And even if she had, for some reason, proven unamenable--perhaps the surgery couldn’t spare both of them?--well, you couldn’t swing a dead cat this time of year without finding single werewolves and the occasional fetishist interested in a Lupercalia tryst. John could be frustratingly conservative in other ways, but he’d never shown any particular aversion to casual sex as long as the appropriate precautions were taken.
Not that werewolves actually needed to mate--that was among the more widespread myths, because it was the most blindingly ignorant. Lack of sex had never proven fatal to anything that didn’t actively feed on it; a werewolf without a mate would certianly suffer certian mental and physical side-effects, but he would not die and he certainly wouldn’t rape the first humanoid to enter his line of sight (much to the disappointment of some of the aforementioned fetishists). John certainly could endure his mating cycle alone in the basement flat; the question was, why would he choose to?
“Stop it,” John said again.
“Stop what?” Sherlock asked, because all these thoughts had passed through his head in a matter of seconds.
John scowled at him. “It’s not what you think.”
“I haven’t even told you what I think,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Whatever it is, it’s not that,” John said firmly, and slammed the lid on his laptop.
Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “What if I think that you resent the loss of self-control you experience during the mating season, above and beyond what the lunar cycle subjects you to, and isolate yourself as a form of self-flagellation?”
John froze in place halfway to the stairs, shoulders rigid. “All right,” he said stiffly. “So it is what you think.”
Which was exactly how Sherlock realized it was not.
-\-\-\-
Lupercalia this year fell on February the tenth, a Wednesday. John spent the time growing increasingly grumpy and withdrawn in anticipation, the BBC spent it running absurd news reports about werewolf health and sexual assault statistics (without ever explicitly drawing a link between the two, but still, it was hardly subtle)--and Sherlock spent the time observing John.
Reading John’s mind was always a challenge, which was one of the reasons Sherlock had initially approved of him as a flatmate; for a non-reader he had an excellent sense of when someone was muddling in his thoughts, and had developed a habit of thinking about bagpipe music whenever he caught Sherlock trying. Sherlock also did not dare sneak into John’s room, because there was no point in provoking his territorial instincts any more than necessary. As John retreated there more and more frequently, it made data collection increasingly difficult, but Sherlock was nothing if not inventive.
He found two separate occasions to visit the surgery, for instance, once for a case and once when a particularly disgruntled former client managed to send him a poisoned letter. He probably should have gone to the A&E for the latter, except that involved long waits and tedious explanations, whereas he could always claim he needed to see John about personal matters and only then remove his gloves.
“Jesus Christ,” John blurted, reaching for his instrument tray. “Don’t tell me you brewed that in the kettle.”
“Mrs. Laffey was unimpressed with my revelations about her husband’s mistress,” Sherlock explained. “My only consolation is that she likely sent the same or worse to him.”
John set up ample amounts of cotton gauze and a bottle of some cleansing agent, and then put on no fewer than three pairs of latex gloves--the last took a bit of wriggling to get on. “Did you get this in the post? Because there’s laws against trafficking in this stuff.”
“As gratifying as it would be to drag the whole affair into the public eye, I can’t be bothered with court dates,” Sherlock said. “And the extra gloves really aren’t necessary.”
“Just trying to make this as...not unpleasant as I can,” John said. He moistened the first ball of cotton and held it up. “Ready?”
Sherlock nodded, and held his breath.
He might never know first-hand what it was like for John to change shapes, but he knew intimately how it felt to be betrayed by his own body. Hunger, sleep, libido--these he could conquer, though nicotine and will, at least long enough to solve a case. But he could not control his own riotous mind, in all its exquisite sensitivity; could not always remain detached from the thoughts and feelings that crowded into him from the outside. A terrified witness could make his own heart pound; a grieving one drag tears to his eyes; holding a murder weapon sometimes triggered phantom pain that sent him to his knees. He managed it: kept his hands gloved, kept his concentration focused. These days not even John’s nightmares of Afghanistan were enough to disturb Sherlock’s composure. Mostly.
It was harder when people were touching him, though. Skin to skin was worst, but latex was a flimsy barrier, even in triplicate. John cleaned the ugly purple blisters on Sherlock’s hands and fingers, and his thoughts seeped in without any effort from Sherlock. Mostly he was concentrating on his task--thoroughly wiping the poison away, noting where it had burned deeply enough to need bandaging, even listing off the bones and muscles of the human hand to keep his thoughts from wandering. Irritation seeped in around the edges, though--at Mrs. Laffey, at whoever had provided the poison, at Sherlock himself, because shouldn’t such a vaunted reader have picked up on the aura of malice before he even opened the bloody envelope?
“I did,” Sherlock protested. “I thought she was suing me.”
John winced, burning with guilt and anxiety. “Sorry,” he murmured out loud, while his mental monologue started over at abductor pollicis brevis.
He was just finishing up with the bandages when Sarah knocked once, and then stuck her head inside. “John? Everything okay in here?”
John let go of Sherlock’s hand a moment later, but not before Sherlock caught the sudden flood of emotion--and it wasn’t affection. It left him feeling that his own stomach was in anxious knots even after John turned around. “Yeah, fine--Sherlock just needed a couple of plasters.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at Sherlock with exasperation. “Don’t you have your own GP, Sherlock?”
“I was in the area,” he said mildly. “And the queues at the A&E are awful.”
“Hence why you come jump ours,” Sarah said dryly. She was wearing lipstick, a darker shade than usual, and the earring were new. Interesting. “Speaking of queues, if you’re all done with John...”
“He’s done,” John said firmly, and stripped off all his latex before passing Sherlock back his gloves; the traces of talcum powder on his fingers left white streaks on the black leather. “I’ll be ready in just a moment.”
“Great. Thanks.” Sarah flashed them both a perfunctory smile and slipped out the door.
In the interest of professionalism, Sherlock waited until she was gone to ask, “When did you break up with her?”
John’s head snapped up, and he glared. “Not now, Sherlock.”
“Because she’s obviously got a date tonight, and not with you,” Sherlock said. Then paused. “You did break up, didn’t you? She’s certainly not acting like a cheating lover.”
John didn’t answer; he hit the buzzer to send the next patient through, and his anger was enough to make the air vibrate. Sherlock, contrary to popular belief, could take a hint; this was one of the rare times he chose to follow one. He left, holding his hands very loosely clasped in front of him.
And when he got back to Baker Street, as soon as he’d properly disposed of the poisoned note, he set his gloves out on the table. The white smear of talcum powder was just barely visible. Tiny things, grains of talc, but they had been in direct contact with John’s skin, and if Sherlock hadn’t contaminated the impression on the cab ride back--
He very, very lightly brushed his fingers across the stain.
Oh.
That was interesting.
-\-\-\-
Of course, he had precious little time to confirm the impression--and they always needed confirmation, something objective and quantifiable to buttress slippery intuitions. On the seventh, John spent most of the day setting up 221C for his intended hermitage, taking down bedding, an electric kettle and a hot plate, some books--
“Need a hand?” Sherlock asked, hovering on the stairs.
“No,” John said firmly.
“It’s no trouble at all.”
John exhaled through his teeth, loudly. “I’m good, thanks.”
“I could--”
”No.”
Maybe it was just the territorial instinct at work; maybe having anyone else’s scent in the room, even faintly, would be an unnecessary extra irritant during a time when John’s temper was already bound to be on a hair trigger. But Sherlock was increasingly certain it was something else. Something more specific.
He found an excuse to visit Bart’s on the eighth, while John was at work, and followed a gaggle of Mike’s students on their rounds--not saying anything, just following them and smiling broadly. Given the way Sherlock dressed, the students all uniformly concluded that he was either an administrator or an escaped psychiatric patient, and either way their anxiety level skyrocketed. Mike enjoyed the torment far more than he ought to, and let it go on until lunchtime as long as Sherlock didn’t actively interrupt or follow them into any restricted areas. Afterwards they went for coffee.
“Are you experimenting on my students or just trying to get my attention?” he asked brightly, pushing Sherlock’s cup across the table.
“A bit of both,” Sherlock said. “Stress reactions are complicated. There’s always new data.”
Mike chuckled. “Come on, out with it. You must be bored if you’ve got time to puncture their little delusions of aptitude.”
Sherlock sipped his coffee, and slipped a finger into Mike’s mind--just a probe, nothing too deep. “Frightfully bored. John isn’t particularly good company at the moment.”
A much younger John, affectionrespectpity, sound of laughter. John in a strop before a full moon, sluggish and grumpy after. John laughing with a woman--cleavage recalled better than face. “I’ll bet,” Mike said. “Doesn’t work as fast as he used to, does he?”
“Not at all,” Sherlock said, pleased to confirm one deduction. “And he’s taking a week off for Lupercalia.”
Mike laughed again. John swaggering onto rounds, a line of hickeys visible on his throat. “A week? Dunno whether that says more about his stamina or his partner.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Sherlock said, sipping his coffee again.
“Who’d he snag this time?” Mike asked. “Last time we talked he mentioned he was seeing someone...”
“Broke it off recently,” Sherlock said. “Not entirely certain what his plans are now.”
Face, names, fragments of charts--speculation. Mike was perhaps the normalest man in London, but Bart’s did have an Abnormals ward and he had some contacts in the community. The fact that he’d consider trying to set John up with a mate on short notice was kind, if a bit naive; the fact that he was considering both men and women allowed Sherlock to tick off the last box in his list. “He’s probably not looking for anything right now, is he?” Mike said, thoughts shading to disappointment.
Sherlock shrugged, and managed to subtly hit a button on his phone through his pocket. “It is a bit recent.”
Mike sighed. “Yeah, John never was any good at moving on. Convinced himself he was in love with everyone he so much as snogged.”
Sherlock’s phone went off loudly, at the exact delay he’d programmed, and he cursed Mike for suddenly choosing now to be particularly interesting. “Sorry,” he said, and pretended to check a text while giving Mike’s memories a deeper sift. Sad John, drunk John, raving about this or that ex, fits of depression before he managed to move on to the next True Love...
“I have to go,” Sherlock said, pocketing his phone, and this time he wasn’t lying.
Mike took it good-naturedly. “Found a nice murder, have you? Enjoy yourself--and hey, if you need a hand with something while John’s off wanking himself blind--”
Sherlock missed the rest of that sentence. He nearly ran home.
The ninth was a bad day; John found some excuse to stay out of the flat until nearly nine o’clock, and Sherlock found himself caught in a vicious cycle of speculation and nicotine. Suddenly the entire situation seemed fraught with hidden pitfalls. It was ludicrous to theorize based on data more than a decade out of date--John was older now, more mature, less trusting--but even so, the mere possibility had introduced a wrinkle into Sherlock’s blissfully pure mental exercise. This suddenly went far beyond Lupercalia. This had consequences.
He was brooding on the subject when he felt the lightest mental intrusion. He tried to shut it out. I can sense your angst all the way from Whitehall, my dear, Mycroft said, nudging his way in.
You may be interested in a marvelous invention called a telephone, Sherlock sent back. He never had been able to keep Mycroft out for long.
Would you really like to have this conversation over something as public as an unsecured mobile connection?
I should not like to have this conversation at all.
Amusement--fondness--all the squidgy messy feelings that Sherlock couldn’t deal with oozed out of Mycroft’s mind like syrup. Ah, young love. It had to happen to you eventually.
Sherlock rolled over to face the back of the sofa. You know perfectly well that I don’t--we can’t.
I think you’d be surprised what is possible if you accept a certain level of...risk.
Risk to my sanity, you mean?
Really, Sherlock, since when have you ever been sane?
There was one thing guaranteed to make Mycroft go away. Sherlock snatched up his violin and quickly tightened the strings into tune. It’s an untenable situation. He may have the right idea after all.
You are half-correct, at least.
Sherlock fitted the violin under his chin. I thought you were proud that I’d made a friend.
I never thought I’d see the day when you settled for anything.
Just for that, the bastard was getting Brahms. Sherlock started to play, letting the music absorb his entire attention, until John and Mycroft and everything else fell away. There was only the bow and the strings and the pure clear notes, the rhythms and harmonies and progressions; it was the only time his mind ever approached anything resembling clear.
He segued from one piece to the next without pause, simply because he felt like it, and only paused when his arm started to twinge. The moment his attention drifted, the world rushed in, and he was suddenly, excruciatingly aware that John was standing behind him--had been for at least seven minutes.
“That was beautiful,” John said with nothing but honest admiration, before Sherlock could even turn around. Did Sherlock want to turn around?
“Thank you,” he said awkwardly. He wondered what would happen if he touched John’s thoughts now, if he’d hear violins or bagpipes or something else entirely.
John exhaled noisily, and carried on up the next flight of stairs to his bedroom. Squeaky boards and heavy footsteps said more about his subsequent movements than any preternatural gift: he puttered about for a bit, changed into pajamas, crossed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and then went straight to bed. Tomorrow was Lupercalia, the day the wolf took a mate.
Sherlock flexed his arm, and switched to Elgar.
-\-\-\-
February the tenth was gray and chill, and Sherlock dozed off on the sofa while the sky was still a dreary gunmetal color; when he woke up, John was gone. Not at the surgery, surely--he never worked before a moonrise--but simply out, gone, avoiding the flat. Sherlock found himself rather grateful for that. Not that he couldn’t have found John if he’d been determined (Mycroft wasn’t the only reader skilled enough to pick out a target from the sea of minds that was London) but without a solution he felt it wiser to avoid the question entirely. Perhaps he ought to let the mating season pass before he pursued the matter any further. March was always a bit dull, anyway.
Except that still meant he’d have a stroppy werewolf knocking about the flat for four weeks. Including the entire next week, when John meant to hole up in the basement and weather the worst of the season. Two floors away was certainly better than one, and Sherlock was certainly capable of shutting out the endless background babble of the world around him--would have gone entirely mad long ago if he weren’t--so in theory he shouldn’t have any trouble enduring the coming week. A week of knowing that some yards below him, John was in the grip of a biological imperative, hormones and neurotransmitters tied to sun and moon by subtle laws. That John was hard and wanting and desperate, alone in the single dusty bed, that he was going to touch himself and that while he did it, he wouldn’t be thinking about Sarah or any of his past nameless conquests.
That is, in theory.
In practice, Sherlock recognized that he was probably buggered.
There was no other recourse for it, he concluded, and he took a cab over to the surgery. He lingered outside, considering the best strategies for obtaining his goal without undue embarrassment or prolonged interaction, but unfortunately--perhaps because of the poison incident a week prior--he waited a shade too long; he was still weighing his options when Sarah propped the door open and asked, “Are you going to come in?”
“I was debating it,” Sherlock said.
“John isn’t in today,” she added.
“I know that.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and Sarah’s brows knit ever so slightly. Eventually she said, “I’ve got a lunch break in ten minutes. There’s a sandwich shop two streets over from here that does a good turkey and cheese.” Then she shut the door.
Sherlock spent several minutes loudly condemning women, witches and himself, and then, faced with the likely outcome of all possible alternatives, went and got her bloody sandwich.
Sarah’s office was much more messy than John’s, with decorations that followed a general theme of small porcelain cherubs and posters of kittens in watering cans. It also had an aura of magic about it that was strong enough to make Sherlock’s eyes itch. She had two mugs of tea ready when he appeared with the take-away bag, but Sherlock did not sit down or even unbutton his coat.
This would normally be the moment when he skimmed his interlocutor’s thoughts lightly, just enough to gauge their attitudes and current preoccupations; but Sarah was a witch, and to Sherlock her mind was like a pane of ice, cold and slippery and opaque. She took her sandwich and tutted at him. “I’m not going to turn you into a newt, you know.”
“As that would be illegal, the thought had never crossed my mind,” Sherlock said. “How was your date, by the way?”
“None of your business,” she said. “Now, is this about John or is this about you?”
“You presume those options are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive,” Sherlock shot back.
“I presume that he hasn’t told you anything about us, and so you’re being a snoop,” she said. “Incidentally, if this turns into you castigating me for hurting his feelings I’m going to have to reconsider the newt.”
Sherlock reflected back over the burst of feeling he’d sensed when Sarah walked in on them last week. Inconclusive data. “Are his feelings hurt?” he asked.
For some reason she smiled at him. “No. Not that I know of, anyway. No more so than mine.”
This answer irritated him with its lack of specificity, but he pushed it aside; he was getting bogged down here. “In any case, I did not come here about John. I came to see you.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow at him. “Ah. Is it related to your work, or is this another of your tricks for jumping my patient queue?”
“I am fairly certain John would not want me to explain this matter in public to the receptionist,” Sherlock said.
“You just said it wasn’t about John,” Sarah pointed out.
Evil-minded woman. Sherlock took a deep breath. “Has he explained to you how he intends to pass Lupercalia?”
Sarah stared at Sherlock for several minutes, but she was not completely stupid; it took longer than he’d expected, but she got it. “Ah,” she said, then. “Oh.” She set down her sandwich and studied him.
Sherlock locked eyes with her and raised his chin slightly. “A charm of veiling would be beneficial to both of us at the moment. I will, of course, compensate you at market rates.”
“First things first,” she said. “Have you ever used one of those before?”
“On several occasions,” he said. “They are at times a necessary evil.”
She nodded. “Any side effects?”
“None to speak of,” Sherlock said.
“And if I were to track down your NHS file, would I find out you’re lying?” she asked.
Sherlock scowled at her. “If it were not a last resort, Dr. Sawyer, I wouldn’t be sitting here six hours before moonrise.”
She rolled her eyes. “I guessed that one, actually. You must be desperate to want a veil for the whole month.”
“I would not be using it continuously, and not for the entire month,” he pointed out. He didn’t add that the migraines would be less of a distraction than John’s mind, when it was too shredded by need to keep Sherlock out. He would endure the dizziness, the cotton-wool feeling of having one of his integral senses blocked, if it removed the temptation to peek.
Sarah kept staring at him, though, and just when Sherlock’s patience was about to run out she asked, quietly, “I don’t suppose you’ve talked to John about this.”
“John has been avoiding--people,” Sherlock admitted. Me, he almost said, but that would be a bit too revealing.
She sighed. “Let me rephrase the question. You’ve never had a meaningful talk with him about anything of consequence ever, have you?”
Sherlock wondered if she had had meaningful talks with John, if that was how they’d negotiated the end of their relationship, how much she really knew. Her mind remained completely closed, and he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of scrabbling around at its margins like a rodent, but he did tell her, “If you say the word ‘feelings’ to me I will leave immediately.”
“Oh, Sherlock,” she said, in a strangely fond tone that he’d rarely heard before. She sipped her tea and sighed again. “All right. I’ll make you the charm. But I think you need to seriously think about what you’re doing.”
“I do little else,” Sherlock reminded her.
“You know what I mean,” she said firmly. “Try to understand why John’s point of view. And think very hard about what you want before you do something dire. He’s still my friend, you know, and for all intents and purposes this makes you my patient.”
A quarter hour later he was back on the way to Baker Street, with the charm in an envelope. The aura around it was palpable, almost malignant, he thought--it burned away any impression of gentler motives that Sarah might’ve left behind. But it would enforce the current state of equilibrium, such as it was. Provided, of course, that he used it.
Try to understand John’s point of view, Sarah had said, but she seemed to have forgotten that for Sherlock, that didn’t require conversation at all.
He hid the charm amongst the clutter of his own things and then climbed the second flight of stairs. John’s room had a lock on the door that he never used, probably because he recognized that Sherlock was both willing and able to pick it if the notion took him. Sherlock, in turn, had restrained himself--for the most part--from any acts of trespass, because werewolves were territorial by nature and John seemed happier and more functional with a tiny piece of London that was unmistakably his own.
Sherlock did not enter the room now, though that was a technicality--if John came up again before moonrise he would be able to scent Sherlock’s presence, would know he’d been standing on the very threshold of the door, honoring the territory boundaries in the letter rather than the spirit. He took off his gloves again, and reached into the still air of the room, which was very clean and almost impersonal--not many pictures, all the laundry tucked into the hamper, sort of thing. Air did not hold an impression for long, but walls and floors and furniture could speak at length, to a reader with the strength of will to drag it out of them.
Sherlock reached out, with his mind now rather than his hand, and took it all in.
johnjohnjohnsoftwarmsleepjohnwherearemytrousersjohnSHOTBLOODHOSTILESsleepnosleepnodreams
hottouchwantjohnsherlockcan’twon’tshouldn’tjohnhandsthighslipsmineneedwantlove
sarahguiltpainworrywonderneedneverenoughcan’twon’tjohnguiltlovesherlocktrustwithmylife
sherlocksherlockalwaysminecan’twon’tshouldn’talwayslovewantneedneveralwayscan’tdon’tlove
Sherlock surfaced, and realized three things: firstly, he had crashed to his knees in the doorway of the bedroom. Secondly, he was hard. Thirdly, John wasn’t mere infatuated; he was hopelessly, desperately in love.
Four things, perhaps, even if he couldn’t yet vocalize the last of them.
He stumbled down to his own bedroom, still in his coat and shoes, and collapsed onto the bed. The complex impression was still sloshing around in his head. John had been fantasizing about him, masturbating, and Sherlock could piece it together in his mind’s eye--John curled on his side, still half-dressed, fucking his fist and thinking about Sherlock and hating himself for it and doing it anyway. John dreamed of Sherlock, and woke up with a stain on his pajamas and guilt coiled in his belly. John had been telling himself for weeks that he wasn’t fixated on Sherlock, had been taking great pains to hide it, and Sherlock was a little impressed and a little disappointed that it had worked so well.
He slipped one hand inside his trousers, thinking about John thinking about him, building fantasies from fantasies. Of walking in at an opportune moment, at a revealing glance, some hazy steps in between and then John on top of him, surrounding him, the easy slide of lubrication versus the drag of bare skin--
Sherlock bit down hard on his lip. No. Not thinking about that. There was a reason these were called fantasies.
He came with John’s adoration still thick in his head, and for a moment simply lay limp, too overwrought to even clean up after himself. Eventually he stripped off his clothes and shoved them off the side of the bed, curling up under the duvet. A headache was starting to creep in from the corners, and he was far more exhausted than he had any right to be. He was willing to allow that he might have overextended himself with that trick, but at least he’d succinctly answered one of Sarah’s implied questions.
Think about what you want.
You’d be surprised what it possible if you accept a certain level of risk.
Sherlock dozed off thinking that he might, in fact, have answered both of them.
-\-\-\-
It was dark when he woke up, and John was home. Sherlock did not want to analyze too closely how quickly he had honed in on that fact, on the familiar mental presence currently occupying the basement flat. He checked the clock: indeed, well past moonrise. John would’ve come home and, seeing Sherlock’s coat absent and no light in the bedroom, assume the flat was empty. Would’ve found his bedroom door open and Sherlock’s scent hanging in the air, and when he scented the arousal--or perhaps he didn’t, or blamed it on the impression. Perhaps John had concluded that Sherlock read his room and then fled the flat in horror like a nineteenth-century maiden, or something along those lines.
He could’ve tried to probe John’s mind from upstairs, to gauge his reaction to this erroneous conclusion; but it was probably too risky. Better to have this conversation in person. In fact, if the moon was up, this might be the opportune time.
Sherlock dressed quickly, in the same clothes as earlier--the odors of sweat and sex could only bolster his case at this point. After a moment’s thought, he also collected the charm. John had locked the entrance to 221C, but it was easy enough to pick, and Sherlock stepped into the dim, chilly basement flat with his head held high.
The room with the fireplace had clearly been set up as a base camp: there was a folding table with John’s laptop and some of the books and things, as well as a mug half-full of cold tea. The kitchen was also empty of anything John hadn’t brought down himself--bread and pot noodles and a few small, sad-looking apples arranged neatly in the cupboards. The only other room in this flat was the bedroom, but Sherlock found that abandoned as well--the bed made to within an inch of its life as only a military man could do, and, unabashedly, a bottle of lubricant and a box of tissues stood on the table next to it. Sherlock ran a hand over the cold sheets, but there was no real impression, just the residue of John’s irritability from the day he’d brought them down. This was ridiculous. He could sense John in the flat--
A deep-throated growl stilled his hand on the sheets. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder, and saw only the dimmest outline of heavy, furred shoulders and the golden-green shimmer of a pair of eyes. “That’s hardly necessary,” he said.
John’s ears went back, and though he couldn’t speak in this shape he had learned to frame his thoughts in a way that Sherlock could easily read: Not supposed to be down here.
“I know that,” Sherlock said crossly. To be perverse, he sat on the bed. “But I strongly suspect that conversation is required here, and while this is hardly the optimum time, I doubt dawn will bring an improvement.”
John came fully into the room, letting a wedge of streetlight from the tiny window illuminate him. He really was an alarmingly large wolf, nearly four feet tall in the shoulders, and he completely blocked the doorway when he sat down. Sherlock hoped he wouldn’t need to utilize it. Talk about what?
Sherlock licked his lips, aware of the fraught path they were walking down and his own lack of direct experience. “I’ve revised my theory about your attitude towards Lupercalia.”
John’s hackles went up, and he shifted his weight, thinking an wary, wordless interrogative.
“You aren’t just worried about loss of self-control in a general sense. You’re worried about something in particular.” Sherlock forced himself to smile. “You’re worried that you might do or say something revealing in front of me, because you are rather ridiculously in love and seem to think that I am incapable of reciprocating.”
Aren’t you?
Sherlock clenched his teeth for a moment. “I think I ought to be insulted, John.”
Not what I meant. John heaved himself to his feet and started pacing the tiny bedroom, circling around one side of the bed and back; his emotions were all in a turmoil, making it hard to pick out what he meant to be words. I know you’re not really a sociopath, Sherlock, but you are a reader, and I can’t even touch you. I’ve watched you cry and puke and pass out because of someone else’s thoughts. I can’t do that to you, I can’t make you feel something you don’t want to.
“Oh, please,” Sherlock said. “I know my own mind, John, or I would’ve gone mad long before now.”
You can barely stand medical treatment, John shot back.
“Why do you think I keep coming to you?” Sherlock blurted, and then flushed, and then castigated himself for flushing. The entire purpose of this conversation was revelation; why should he be more self-conscious of this than the stain on his trousers? He shut his eyes briefly. “It’s...easier with you. Easier than anyone else has ever been.”
I know how to control myself. John didn’t feel entirely convinced by this.
“That’s not all of it,” Sherlock admitted. John’s ears went forward here, and for a moment his thoughts were an incoherent swirl of doubt and hope. Sherlock drew the envelope with the charm inside from his pocket, his final card. “And if you really need to be assured that I’m not a helpless thrall of your wild libido, I’ve obtained a veil charm that ought to remove any doubts.”
John’s second growl filled the whole room. You despise those things, he pointed out.
“I am also not a fan of condoms, but I do believe in safer sex.”
For a minute Sherlock did not know how to interpret John’s response to that; he flopped down on the floor with his head on his paws, giving off the strangest series of strangled little yips. His thoughts sparkled with a sudden burst of...mirth? Oh, god, his tail was wagging. Wagging.
“Are you laughing at me?” Sherlock asked, fighting down an answering smile.
John got hold of himself and slunk over to where Sherlock was seated. After a moment’s hesitation, he rested his head on Sherlock’s knee, though every muscle in his body was taut enough to pull back at a moment’s notice.
Sherlock had forgotten to put his gloves back on. He could feel John’s nervous anticipation without being consumed, could hold it aside and separate from himself. With a deep breath, he sank his fingers into the coarse ruff of fur around John’s neck, tangling them with the chain that held his tags.
It all flooded in, the guilt and longing and apprehension and misery, but above all want and love and a rising need. He had no frame of reference for these feelings, not with this depth and intensity, and for a moment he did lose his bearings, let himself be awash in it. He found himself again on the floor, with both arms around John’s neck and his face buried in the hard fur. John was whining gently, and shifting his feet around, and afraid. Sherlock, say something, he pleaded, or almost did, not with proper words but with naked anxiety.
But of course, Sherlock couldn’t--had spent so long convincing himself he didn’t want what he couldn’t have that he didn’t know how to verbalize the confused morass in his head. Not that John would likely believe it if he did, if he was so convinced that Sherlock was helpless against intrusions. There was another way to communicate it, though--John might not be a reader, but he wasn’t entirely deaf, and Sherlock might not be much of a sender but he might be able to manage this
He reached into John’s mind, felt John’s reflexive resistance and pushed past it. He couldn’t just dump a thought into John’s head and expect him to interpret it, but he could try to show, to make him feel--you see, this is me, and this is you, and we are separate but the same.
And he could sense the moment when John understood, when another high whine escaped his throat and pressed close against him. His relief was a relief to Sherlock as well, and helped him find his voice again. “I wish,” he said, “that I could kiss you right now.”
John responded by licking his ear.
“Eurgh! Not at all what I meant.” Sherlock pulled back long enough to wipe the sticky feeling away, and reluctantly let go of John entirely. He spent so much time shutting out the tiny minds of the idiots who usually surrounded him...it had never occurred to him that some feelings, from some people, could be as wonderful and addictive as cocaine. Probably ought not to share that thought with John, though...
John startled him by bounding up onto the bed at his side, though still with a comfortable space between them It’s ages still till moonset, he thought with bitter frustration.
“True,” Sherlock said. “And I can think of far more pleasant places to pass the time than this dreary little cave.”
John’s tail beat the bedsheets again. I’d race you, but it wouldn’t be fair when you’ve got just two legs and all.
“Two legs and opposible thumbs, I remind you.”
John yipped again, and took off for the stairs, claws clicking on the woodwork, but Sherlock was in hot pursuit, just to see him try to operate the doorknobs.
-\-\-\-
For one reason or another, John rarely spent the full moon at Baker Street; it was novel watching him try to navigate the furniture without knocking anything over, winding between chairs and bookshelves and shouldering aside the coffee table. He was growing restless with the approaching dawn, and no matter how many times he circled in front of the hearth he couldn’t manage to curl up for more than a few minutes.
Sherlock wasn’t in much better of a state, even if he hadn’t had John’s thoughts as a distraction. Perhaps it would’ve been easier if they could’ve fallen straight into bed together, without any time for second-guessing himself. Not that he was having second thoughts about John, exactly, but he was excruciatingly aware that his own data set in these matters was limited--the set of people he’d actually wanted in his life, who had also wanted him back, who he’d also been willing to risk contact with, was extremely small, and the few ensuing experiments had produced mixed results. Sherlock was not accustomed to this degree of self-doubt, and it was only worsened by the fact that he couldn’t predict with accuracy how John would behave once the moon went down. How his own body would react to the contact, in truth.
Uncertainty. Sherlock despised it.
John made another lumbering circuit of the room and then suddenly caught the hem of Sherlock’s coat in his teeth. He tugged once, gently. Upstairs.
“Now?” Sherlock asked. It had barely gone midnight.
John just growled a little, too agitated to elaborate his thoughts. Upstairs!
“Fine, fine...” Sherlock began to mount the steps to John’s bedroom; John crowded behind him, almost herding him up, like an oversized sheepdog.
Sherlock hesitated again at the door of the bedroom, but John bumped the back of his knees lightly, urging him over the threshold. Having Sherlock in what was indisputably his territory seemed to calm John a bit, and he prowled around the small room a few times before settling in front of the door. Sorry, he thought, clearly embarrassed by his own possessiveness.
“You’re forgiven,” Sherlock said. He looked at the bed, which was just as crisply made as the one downstairs. The impression he got off these sheets, however, was rather stronger. Fascinating as it was to know that John had wanked to the sound of Elgar the night before, it wasn’t particularly conducive to patiently awaiting the dawn.
Sherlock glanced at John, who was watching his every move with tense anticipation, eyes shining green-gold where they caught the low light. If only they’d been the same species at the moment....
Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it. Sherlock hung his coat on the back of the desk chair and kicked off his shoes, then stretched out on the bed. The physical smell of him combined with the deep psychic impression--of John, of love and want, of good, deep sleep--was oddly comforting. From the door, John thought in question marks without words.
“It’s fine,” Sherlock assured him. “I’m fine.” He wasn’t likely to get any sleep, of course--not in the least because of his earlier nap--but it was more comfortable that standing around for the next six or so hours.
After a little while, John climbed onto the narrow bed beside him, once again keeping a small, safe distance, giving Sherlock the option to touch or stay away. Sherlock gave him a scratch between the ears, both to reassure him and to steal another taste of his deep affection.
John flicked an ear but made no attempt to get away from the gesture, even as he protested mentally, Not a dog, Sherlock.
“Of course not. You’re far more interesting.”
John snorted at him.
-\-\-\-
Sherlock did eventually doze off again for a bit--his body occasionally played such tricks on him when he didn’t have a proper case. John was pacing almost constantly at that point, and the clicking of his claws on the floorboards proved strangely soothing.
But his eyes snapped open again when he realized that the room had gone silent. The windows were still dark, but the bedside clock said 6:13 AM--moonset or a little after. Sherlock could just make out a shape hunched in the shadows. “John?” he asked warily.
John rose on two human legs, pale skin nearly luminous where the streetlights happened to hit it. He was perfectly naked except for the tags around his neck--the ones that identified him as a werewolf regardless of the moon phase. He still wore the army-issue ones with the band of rubber around the rims to stop them jingling. Sherlock could see that he was already halfway to hard, barely had to touch his mind to sense the sharp angles of his thoughts, the possessive edges where want blurred into need And it was all focused on him, aligned to his presence like iron filings in a magnetic field.
Which made it all the more impressive when John said, raggedly, “Tell me if you need to stop.”
“Of course,” Sherlock said, and started unbuttoning his shirt. He had a strong suspicion that if he didn’t, it was going to end up a casualty.
“And don’t,” John said, taking one halting step across the room, “hesitate to stop me.”
Sock off, too. He was fairly certain socks were not sexy. Not that John was in any fit state to mind if Sherlock were wearing a wet suit. “Stop being an idiot and come here,” Sherlock said, and that seemed to be the end of all John’s self-control.
He took two steps and literally jumped him, jumped on top of him, and at that first touch it all exploded in Sherlock’s head: a continuous smear of want-love-need and the sensory overload of too-tight skin. He flailed for a moment, physically and mentally, almost getting lost again, before he found purchase in John’s shoulders and John’s flickering tags and the thrill of John’s teeth dragging across his lips. The pain-pleasure of it gave him an anchor, something to focus on, and that gave him the strength to pull himself closer and kiss John back properly.
He could do this, he thought triumphantly. Even his mind could be conquered by sheer force of will.
John was fully hard now, and rutting against Sherlock’s thigh while trying to unfasten his belt while kissing him. It wasn’t working very well. “You, you need,” he stammered into Sherlock’s lips. “Trousers. Condoms.”
Sherlock didn’t need to be a reader to correctly parse this, and in fact had been rooting around for the condoms as soon as the thought had surfaced in John’s mind. Telekinesis, he thought, would occasionally be a fabulous addition to his psychic repertoire. By the time he got the package open, John had managed to drag down Sherlock’s trousers and pants off, and simply pressed his face into the crease of his thigh, breathing deeply. Scenting him. The barest hint of moist air on his cock was not enough stimulation to concentrate on, not against the unnatural arousal pouring into him, and Sherlock thrust the condoms in John’s face, almost forgetting that he had to speak out loud. “You need to put these to use right now,” he said, and couldn’t even be embarrassed at how his voice quavered.
John obliged him by rolling the condom onto Sherlock’s prick with his mouth. That sent Sherlock crashing back into his own head, making undignified noises as he wondered where precisely that trick had come from. John sometimes seemed to be a bottomless well of surprises, each more astounding and alarming and magnificent than the last. An ever shifting-pattern that Sherlock couldn’t fully deduce. Would never want to deduce fully, not as long as he continued offering up those surprises, and certainly not as long as he kept doing whatever he was doing with his tongue.
He could sense that John was enjoying this, which was another surprise; that John reveled in the heat and friction and Sherlock’s ragged breathing. But his hands were still restless, stroking Sherlock’s thighs now, and now his hips, and now sliding down under and behind his balls, and now...
“No,” Sherlock gasped, and it was enough to make John go infuriatingly still and alarmed. “I mean, I’ve never, because that is what you were wondering, now don’t stop.”
But John seemed to take that as a cue to abandon his minstrations and climb up to kiss him again. His lips were red and raw and amazing, and he tasted faintly of latex, which was only appealing when Sherlock reminded himself of why. “Later,” John said between kisses, “later,” and he was thinking of fucking him, of bending him over and taking him, vivid technicolor fantasies that made Sherlock’s mouth fall open and his hips twitch up into empty air. John was still John, though, still enough of a doctor to worry about injury and preparation, still sentimental enough to want to be calm and coherent for him. Damn it.
“Promise,” Sherlock whimpered, pawing at John’s back again.
John pressed a line of little nipping kisses down Sherlock’s throat. “Later. Oh, god, later, I promise.”
Then they were both fumbling in the drawer again, for lubrication--nowhere near as big a bottle as the one downstairs, and Sherlock cursed himself for not bringing that one up when he’d had the chance. They both fumbled with it, spilling an embarrassing amount on the sheets. ”Sherlock,” John growled, temper flashing.
“I know what to do, it’s all there in your head,” Sherlock said, and pulled John’s mouth down to his for a moment. “Let me do this. I want to do it.”
John groaned, and suddenly threw his leg over Sherlock’s hips, straddling him. Sherlock squeezed his arse appreciatively before sliding a finger into the crack, just stroking back and forth and spreading the slick around. John’s impatience spiked again, irrational desperation, and he squirmed and growled, not even Sherlock’s name, just a long, aggressive consonant. He wanted it, wanted Sherlock’s fingers and hands and prick, wanted to be opened and penetrated and fucked and Sherlock couldn’t oblige fast enough, shoving in with just one finger all the way to the second knuckle.
It was glorious. It was too much. He could feel John tighten and flex around his finger, the heat of him and the slippery wetness, knew just where to stroke and twist to make him moan and writhe and rock backwards into his grip. It felt good, he felt how good it was, as immediately as if he was doing it to himself; his own thighs fell apart almost on reflex, spreading for a hand that wasn’t there, god, it was too much, too much and not enough.
“Sherlock,” John panted, concern edging into his pleasure. “Sherlock, say something.”
“I need you to kiss me,” Sherlock blurted, and he was no longer entirely sure that John was not a reader himself because he leaned forward and crushed their mouths together, teeth bumping and tongue sliding and this, yes, Sherlock could concentrate on this. He slid a second finger in alongside the first, and John bit down on his lip again, a little harder this time. Perfect.
John’s patience was already worn thin, though, and it wasn’t long before he pulled back and batted Sherlock’s fingers out of the way. In one fluid movement, he pushed Sherlock’s cock inside, sinking all the way down, and Sherlock found himself digging his fingers into John’s thighs in a way that was sure to leave marks because Christ, so much--
“Say anything,” John said, shifting his posture minutely.
Sherlock forced himself to take a deep breath. ”Move, damn it.”
John choked on a laugh and started to rock, infuriatingly brief movements that felt amazing but could definitely be better. “Thought I was the one in heat,” he sighed.
“Evil man,” Sherlock growled, and tried to get the leverage to thrust up into John, into the tight, slick warmth, to give him at least as much pleasure as he was getting out of this.
But John was the one in heat, and he started moving faster, lifting almost all the way off before grinding down in a sharp motion that made his tags bounce off his chest--no question who was fucking whom here, regardless of the actual positions. He was stroking himself, too, in perfect time, and Sherlock wanted to help with that, except his hands seemed to have lost all coordination. He was reduced to pawing at John’s hips and groaning, words piling up in his head that he knew he wasn’t ever going to be able able to say, like love and amazing and extraordinary.
In contrast, John’s brain-to-mouth filter seemed to have gone offline entirely, and he was babbling on about love and gorgeous and mine, too far gone for syntax, much less rationality. It was all spilling out of his mouth and his skin, no distinction between affection and desire, and as he chased his climax Sherlock was with him every step of the way.
They came at the same time--probably inevitable, under the circumstances--and for a split second Sherlock’s brain ground to a complete halt, the sort of complete and perfect silence that no combinations of drugs and magic had ever achieved for him. Almost as good as Mendelssohn, actually, except Mendelssohn wasn’t nearly as much fun.
Then John was sliding off of him, and feathering kisses on his face and neck, temporarily sated and thoroughly, stupidly in love; relieved and giddy and sore and exhilarated; thoughts tumbling one over another and pounding into Sherlock’s head faster than his frayed nerves could keep up with. “Stop,” he murmured, and squirmed away. “Stop, I need--”
John gasped a little ”Oh,” and rolled away, almost off the bed entirely; Sherlock caught just the edge of his sudden anxiety, and then they were out of contact, separate. Sherlock rolled to the edge of the mattress and took a deep breath, and another, steadying and centering himself. His head was his own again, and all he felt was his own physical lassitude and the incipient tightness in his abdominal muscles, the sticky mess on his stomach and the condom that was now slipping off. He flicked it away into a corner and wiped himself off with a sheet, pressed his trembling hands together and counted down his racing heartbeat.
“I’m sorry,” John said weakly somewhere behind him.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Sherlock said. The mattress shifted and squeaked. He rolled onto his back and found himself looking at John’s hunched shoulders where he was perched on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t do anything that I didn’t want.”
“You couldn’t help wanting it, though, could you?” John asked bitterly.
“That has more to do with your physical desirability than my mental sensitivity,” Sherlock said, just to see John’s ears flush pink. It was oddly endearing, and he wasn’t accustomed to being endeared to anything. “I simply wasn’t prepared for how...intense it would be.”
John’s back suddenly straightened with speed that should’ve been painful, and he said, “If this is where you tell me that I just took your virginity, I’m going to leave.”
“What? Christ, no, calm down.” He reached out and ran a knuckle along John’s spine, gently, catching the chaos of hope and guilt and anxiety...not so different from what Sherlock himself had been feeling earlier. He decided to clarify. “All my previous lovers were either some other variety of psychic, or witches. It was different.”
“Easier,” John offered, but Sherlock noted he was relaxing into that small point of contact between them. It was probably not ethical to use his own mating cycle against him, but Sherlock had never been concerned with ethics, and anyway he was doing it for the greater good..
“In some ways,” Sherlock admitted, because it was true. He withdrew his hand, only to push himself up and leaned close to John’s back--not touching, not quite, but close enough to feel the heat of his skin. “However, I am reliably informed that everything gets better with practice. And you do have a promise to keep.”
John twisted around, careful not to bump against Sherlock’s shoulder; his eyes were incredibly dilated even considering the darkness of the room. “You’re serious?”
“You know my sense of humor, John. You tell me.”
John sort of twitched, wavering in place, and it required no psychic ability to deduce that he was fighting the urge to lean in and kiss him. So Sherlock took the initiative, and let John push him into the mattress once again.
-\-\-\-
It was actually ten days before they crawled out of John’s bedroom for more than the amount of time it took to acquire or use the toilet. John, for his part, was developing a remarkable intuition about when and how to touch, when to push closer and when to keep his distance. Sherlock, for his part, suspected that he might never become erect again without outside aid, whether it be medicinal, mechanical or magical.
It was hardly easy, but it was getting easier, and the only thing that spoiled it in Sherlock’s mind was anticipating Mycroft’s overwhelming smugness the next time they communicated.
Eleven days into Lupercalia, they were--well, cuddling, with a thin blanket spread between them--and Lestrade called with a case. ”This thing was set up to look like a triple murder-suicide, but the position of the bodies is all wrong. Also, one of the kids is still alive, for the time being.”
“Conscious?” Sherlock asked, shrugging off John’s arm and the blanket so he could sit up.
”Even if she was, she’s got a tube in her throat. That’s why we need a reader.”
“I want to look at the crime scene first,” Sherlock insisted, and Lestrade grumbled, but eventually he gave up an address.
John watched the whole exchange drowsily, still sprawled on the bed, and Sherlock knew his hearing was sharp enough to have made out the full conversation. “Sounds messy,” he said, sitting up with a muffled grunt. “God, I hope we don’t have to chase anyone.”
“I’m sure the murderer will accommodate our infirmity,” Sherlock said, taking a few stiff steps in a futile attempt to stretch out his thighs. It occurred to him after a moment that John’s previous self-consciousness about the mating period had seemingly evaporated, and he tested this observation by saying, “If, of course, you’d prefer to stay home...”
“Not a chance,” John said firmly, stepped into a pair of pants from his bureau with only a bit of a wince. “I want you where I can see you.”
Sherlock smirked. “Not in the taxi, though; that tends to upset the drivers.” John chuckled at him fondly, and shooed him in the direction of his own clothes.
The case turned out to be worth his time and abilities: Lestrade hadn’t even noticed the obvious signs of a recent guest in the house, and the little girl was able to give Sherlock everything he needed without even waking up. A day and a half later they were able to hand over the killer for interrogation. (And only had to chase him a little bit.)
John put up with the odd smirk from the Yarders, hardly bothering to hide the love-bites peeping out of his collar; if anyone noticed that Sherlock was also walking with an abnormal gait, they didn’t deduce the obvious connection. Idiots. It was a refreshing return to his normal routine, but he also couldn’t miss the way John started to fidget at the twenty-four hour mark, like his skin was a bit too small for him. He hid it admirably well--really, when the man chose to exert it, his self-control was almost terrifying--but Sherlock could touch his thoughts from across the room and pick up the agitation, percolating hormones, inappropriate (but creative) fantasies related to everything from the cab to the filing cabinet in Lestrade’s office. It wasn’t nearly the monofocused tension of that first morning, but it was undeniable and fraying John’s nerves.
And so, while waiting for some last bit of paperwork to come through at the Yard, Sherlock reached out and caressed John’s knuckles. He didn’t remove his gloves for it, so the feeling was rather muted--more the electric spike of surprise than perverted thoughts about the staple removers. “Sherlock?” he asked warily, the why are you doing this? going entirely unspoken.
“You needed it,” Sherlock said simply, and sensed John relax to the unspoken admission: yes, he did. “And once we finish this last bit of tedium, we can go home and try the thing with the filing cabinet.”
”Sherlock--!” John sounded scandalized, but he was smiling, glancing around to see if anyone had overheard that little remark. Then he looked warily at Sherlock. “So you still want to--?”
“Of course,” he said peevishly. Why did John persist in questioning Sherlock’s motivation?
John’s smile at the affirmation was almost worth the irritation, however, his smile and the rush of affection and all the other squidgy emotions that were, perhaps, not so distasteful after all. So was Lestrade’s face when he came back around with the forms and saw Sherlock’s hand on John’s, however minimally. “Oh,” he said, because he’d worked with too many readers, and too long with Sherlock in particular, not to comprehend the significance of that. Well, that plus John’s hickeys. “I’ll, er, I’ll try to make this quick, then, shall I?”
“Please do,” Sherlock said, and kept his hands and thoughts to himself for the rest of the interview. For the first time he could remember, it was actually a challenge.