Sherlock: Comfort(able)

[tartancravat.livejournal.com]

Title: Comfort(able)
Fandoms: Sherlock BBC
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: R
Word count: 2,000
Disclaimer: I don’t own these characters or make money off them.
Warnings: semi-explicit sex, alcohol-induced accident
Notes: Beta by miss_sabre.
Summary: Hugs aren’t Sherlock’s area of expertise, but he’s okay with comfort.


-

John has had a horrible day. Sherlock kept him up late last night running back and forth across London, so he hasn’t slept more than two hours. It’s flu season, and the surgery has been packed all day with people for whom John can do nothing but advise rest and fluids. The commute is worse than usual, and as he’s turning onto Baker Street Harry rings, already into the drunk-dialling portion of her evening. John doesn’t remember that they’re out of everything but tea and stale cornflakes until he’s in the front door.

He trudges up the stairs, mentally preparing himself for whatever awful mess Sherlock has made, hoping he won’t snap when he sees it. He goes straight into the kitchen, hoping at least that Sherlock hasn’t boiled any bodily fluids in the kettle again.

No such luck, it seems. The electric kettle is just boiling. “Sherlock!” John barks.

“What?” Sherlock is sitting at the living room table, sifting through papers.

“Please tell me the kettle’s not a biohazard again.”

Sherlock looks mildly offended. “It’s just water.”

“What, really?”

“Yes, really. You want tea, make your tea.”

John digs out a tea bag, slightly dazed. “Thanks,” he says finally, staring at the bloom of colour as the hot water hits the tea bag.

-

Sherlock doesn’t understand why John’s so bothered by this case. From his point of view, it’s the perfect case. The police are stumped, the motive is unusual, the criminal unexpected, the method interesting. In short, it’s everything Sherlock could have wished for.

John feels sick every time he thinks about the victim and her family--the horrible, bloody, messy death the killer had clearly enjoyed, and the hollow, shocked looks of her large and happy family. The people who die aren’t usually so happy.

Sherlock doesn’t understand why this case is different, why happiness makes it worse.

He sees John’s face, though, when they step outside.

“Lunch?” Sherlock suggests.

John looks down at his feet, makes a face, and shakes his head. “Not hungry.”

“Too bad. I want lunch. You needn’t eat.” He sets off down the road, towards a busy street where they’d passed several restaurants earlier. John, swallowing around the uncomfortable tightness in his throat, follows.

“You’re hungry?” John asks. “Really?”

“I eat,” Sherlock says defensively.

“I know you eat. You had a piece of toast two hours ago.”

“Yes, I remember.”

Sherlock turns right and right again, in through the door of a Thai restaurant. John follows, still thinking about the lead feeling in his stomach.

They take off their coats and sit down, and there’s a menu in front of John. He picks it up, because that’s what you do with menus, and he looks at it, because it’s in his hands. He remembers he’s been meaning to try Kai Phat Khing, and by the time he looks up from the menu to see Sherlock looking at him his stomach is beginning to rumble with hunger.

John almost asks. He can’t imagine his reaction wasn’t well-considered in advance. Sherlock always knows what he’s doing. The waitress arrives at their table before John gets a chance to point this out, though, and when Sherlock only orders a side of egg rolls John knows for sure.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, as he steals one of the egg rolls.

-

Sometimes Sherlock does things for John that don’t make sense in any other context. The language of actions between them is incomprehensible to anyone else. Even John isn’t fluent. For example, John doesn’t understand at first why Sherlock pushes him down to the sofa after he gets home from an unusually rough session with his therapist. He begins to understand when Sherlock kneels on the floor and, with single-minded focus, starts untucking John’s shirt. It all becomes clear by the time Sherlock unbuttons his trousers.

In any other world this would be ill-timed, in poor taste, unexpected, and unwanted. In 221B Baker Street it makes sense. John knows what Sherlock is saying, and it’s fine. Hugs aren’t Sherlock’s area of expertise, but he’s okay with comfort. He knows what he’s doing and how John will see it.

John isn’t hard, but Sherlock folds aside his pants and pulls his cock out anyway, smoothing his palm around the weight. He presses his nose to the inside of John’s knee and slides upwards until his hair brushes against John’s skin and John shivers. “All right?” Sherlock asks, lips right where John can feel them moving.

John laughs a little. “This? Yeah. Everything else? Not really.”

Sherlock’s mouth is warm and wet, and no matter how bad his day has been John always responds. One of Sherlock’s hands flattens against John’s stomach, holding his shirttails out of the way.

They don’t do this often. They don’t have sex, not really. Just sometimes, one of them will need something, one of them will have something to say that can’t be said any other way, because in all honesty they are both a little fucked up.

It’s okay.

John breathes through his mouth and looks down at Sherlock, who doesn’t look up, just curls his tongue and wraps his free arm around the small of John’s back.

It doesn’t take very long. Sherlock swallows, delivers a last soft lick, and pulls away. John tilts his head back, looking at the ceiling.

“This isn’t what I would’ve expected,” he says.

Sherlock knows what he means.

-

Sometimes John doesn’t understand Sherlock’s actions at all. Sometimes John gets so caught up in what’s happening that he misses it, misses the meaning, misses what Sherlock’s saying when he makes John sit in the kitchen chair and shows him a lumpy green thing on a slide, or hands him the mug of tea Sherlock made an hour ago and never drank.

He’s been getting fewer and fewer hours at the surgery, and he’s worried about money. He’s underslept; he’s been having nightmares, worse than usual. Last night he woke with his eyes full of tears, not knowing what he’d been dreaming about, except that in the dream the nameless soldier on a stretcher had Sherlock’s eyes. In the morning the corners of his own eyes were gritty with salt, and John realised he forgot to go shopping once again; Sherlock had used the last tea bag.

John does the shopping, but he does it grumpy and forgets to buy eggs, and the chip and pin machine is being finicky again. In the afternoon he goes to the surgery for a couple of hours, but when he leaves Sarah tells him they won’t need him again until next week, and he thinks back to the £3.05 biscuits he bought for Sherlock this morning and how he probably shouldn’t really have spared that money, when Sherlock will probably just forget to eat them or use them in an experiment or something.

When John walks into the living room, feeling two inches shorter than usual and exhausted, Sherlock is standing by the window talking on the phone. He says, “Not interested,” to whoever’s on the other end, and hangs up. As soon as John sits down in his armchair Sherlock slips his phone into his pocket, and whirls around to look at John.

“People are so boring!” Sherlock exclaims.

“Yep,” John says, staring blankly into space.

John sits and watches as Sherlock’s eyes sharpen and he looks at John properly for the first time. “Bad day?” he asks finally, watching as John’s left hand clenches and unclenches against his leg.

“Sort of,” John says.

Sherlock frowns, and then passes by John into the kitchen. John hears him speaking quietly, and then he swans back into the living room and steps around John’s chair, grinning.

“Got a case,” Sherlock announces. Wasn’t he just complaining people were too boring to provide any cases? “Faked suicide.”

“Great,” John says dully, wondering when that became his automatic response to the announcement that someone somewhere is dead.

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” Sherlock says, his grin slipping.

“No, I don’t suppose I do.”

“Well, come on, then,” Sherlock says briskly, putting on his coat and checking his phone again, bouncing impatiently on his toes. “Crime scene. You’ll have to determine the cause of death.”

“No.”

“What?” Sherlock freezes, and turns back toward John.

“I said no,” John tells his knees.

“You never say no.”

Oh God. That’s probably not a good precedent.

“I’m saying no now,” John snaps. “Get Anderson to do the cause of death for you.”

“Anderson won’t work with me.”

“He doesn’t need to bloody work with you. It’s his job to determine cause of death, whether you’re damn well there or not.”

Sherlock’s mouth snaps closed, and he hovers for a moment in the doorway. “I don’t like to make assumptions based on Anderson’s opinion. I don’t trust him.” And for once, John doesn’t hear the implied meaning in Sherlock’s words, the meaning in his actions. I don’t trust Anderson. I trust you.

“Too bloody bad,” John says, throat tight around the words, frustration and anger making his skin feel too small.

“John, I--it might be dangerous?” He says it like an offer, but John doesn’t hear the offer.

“You can handle it. I’m staying here.”

“Oh. All right.”

John never does realise what Sherlock is trying to do. Sherlock solves the boringly simple case alone.

-

Sherlock is rarely indecisive. He knows what do to do and how to do it, and he thinks so fast the pause he takes to think about it is incalculably small.

Except when it comes to John.

John gets the news on a Tuesday morning just as he’s leaving for work. He stands on the landing outside the living room, his coat half on, listening to a stranger’s voice on the phone telling him that Harry’s in hospital, she isn’t stable yet, she was drunk, she fell down the stairs.

Sherlock hears the tone in John’s voice when he makes some kind of acknowledgement, incomprehensible even to himself, and hangs up the phone. Sherlock is out of his chair in an instant, and he stands in the doorway and pauses, too long, as John sinks down on the top step and holds on to the railing.

Sherlock doesn’t know what happened, though he can deduce that it’s about Harry, that it’s bad--bad enough that John didn’t ask for medical details, though it’s likely to be a medical emergency given Harry’s habits. Sherlock hovers for a moment, suddenly over-conscious of his body as though he’s supposed to be doing something with it and hasn’t figured out what. John’s face is buried in his knee, but if he were to look up he would see the uncertainty around Sherlock’s mouth and the worry in his eyes.

Sherlock’s usual methods have failed before, and he knows they won’t work this time.

Finally, Sherlock steps across the landing and sits down on the stair next to John, and tentatively places a hand palm flat on John’s back, between his shoulder blades. John tilts sideways and lifts his head from his knee to immediately press it into the hollow between Sherlock’s shoulder and his chest. He isn’t crying, but perhaps only because he is too overwhelmed to cry, because crying will neither fix his problems nor give him the kind of release he needs.

Uncomfortable in this new position, Sherlock slides his hand along John’s back and around his shoulder, curling his fingers loosely in John’s shirtsleeve. He hums, almost like a cat, deep in his chest so that John can feel it and not have to listen.

After several minutes John breathes a heavy sigh, gets up, brushes a bit of his jumper fuzz off Sherlock’s shirt, and goes into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

Harry will be fine. They will all be fine.