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John’s patient — Leonard Agarwal, better known to his compatriots as Fuckin’ L — was staring at him. John was meant to give him a tetanus jab and inspect a few bites and sores he had, but Leonard’s unblinking eyes bored into him the entire time John was reading his chart and asking health questions.
“If you’d just— yeah.” John gestured at Leonard’s oversized coat. Without wavering in his surveillance, Leonard shrugged the coat off, and his big woolly jumper, and his thin woolly jumper, and his cardigan, and his flannel shirt, and his long-sleeved cotton t-shirt, until he was down to just the one soiled undershirt. “Ta,” John said, and he slid his chair up next to him. He used a rag and some anti-bacterial soap to wash the accumulated dirt of rough living off Leonard’s deltoid before finally giving it a once-over with a sterilising wipe. Leonard kept staring, which was even worse at such close range. “Bit of a pinch,” John said, and dispensed the jab to no apparent reaction from Leonard. He put the used needle in the hazardous waste bin, then clapped his hands and turned back around to face Leonard with a polite smile. He met Leonard’s gaze, a sharp, clear brown. “How about those sores, Mr. Agarwal?”
“Fuckin’ ’ell,” Leonard rumbled at him in a broad East End accent. “Mr. Agarwal is my father.” He cracked a tiny grin full of poorly-kept teeth, and John felt his own smile soften into a more genuine one.
“Fuckin’ L, then,” he said. “What ails you today?”
Leonard lifted his shirt and pointed at various sores, all without ever taking his eyes off John’s face.
“Some on my back and my legs and my arms too,” he said.
John considered himself a steady sort, not prone to “the willies” as his grandfather might once have called them, but there was something unsettling in being the sole focus of any one person’s attentions for an extended period of time. Even Sherlock, a year and a half gone and now and nothing but a yawn in the hollow of John’s belly, would eventually tire of sussing him out and avert his eyes to something else. John wasn’t sure he’d ever been so visually scrutinised in his life.
His patients here at the shelter were always more likely to refuse any eye contact at all. That suited John fine. He’d shied from connection and intimacy since Sherlock had gone. There was something raw and broken in him that surely someone would see and recoil from if they got too close.
And then there was Leonard Agarwal.
Even when John was up close and cleaning his wounds, Leonard stared. It should have been funny — Leonard should have gone cross-eyed at the proximity, or he should have had to lean back or do something else to maintain it that would render this whole thing ridiculous, but instead he was still and even as a windless night, and the hairs at the back of John’s neck prickled.
John cleared his throat.
“These look like spider bites, Mr…ah, L,” he said. “Probably you’ve got a nest feasting on you in your sleep. Thankfully they don’t look infected and the variety of spider seems benign, but I’m afraid you might have to hang your hat somewhere else from now on.”
“Got a prime bit of real estate though, Dr. Watson,” Leonard said with a crooked little smile. “Very enviable, and everyone knows it’s ol’ Fuckin’ L’s, so I don’t get no poachers. You understand.”
John forced himself not to sigh. He did understand, after so long serving his sentence in day shelters and listening to his patients tell their stories. His official capacity was as a volunteer doctor — Mycroft couldn’t get rid of the charge of aggravated assault against the superintendent altogether, but he was able to lower the sentencing and have John placed at two locations where his community service put his professional skills to use and where he was needed. More needed, he thought bitterly, than where he actually worked at the clinic, diagnosing sniffles and old age. At the shelters, one for men and one for women and children, he was a doctor to those who truly needed it, but he liked to think that after a fashion, for some of them, he was also a kind of mate. He talked to them. He laughed with them. And he had heard a lot about the more desirable places to lay one’s head if one were homeless in London.
“Then you’ll just have to find the nest and blast it with something arachnocidal, I suppose,” he said. “Easier said than done.”
John got up to rummage through his cabinet full of samples, and he came up with a handful of miniature tubes of bacitrin ointment. He could feel the weight of Leonard’s gaze on him, even with his back turned. He took a fraction of a second to steel himself before turning back around with a smile and placed the tubes in Leonard’s open palm.
“Dab a little bit of this on each bite,” he said.
“Right,” said Leonard.
“Anything else?” John said.
Leonard shook his head but kept staring. John gave him a polite not-smile — lips flat, eyes uncrinkled — the kind of look most people interpreted as a cue to take their leave. Leonard only cocked his head and drew his brows together as if searching for something in John’s face.
“Are you sure there’s nothing else I can help you with?” John thought he kept the impatience from his voice admirably.
“Sorry, mate,” Leonard said. He blinked — finally — and sat back in his chair. He made no move to gather the clothes he’d chucked. Maybe it was better that way — he could get them washed here for a bit of change. “Just — he was a force, yeah? And I wanted to see what a force like him saw in you. You’re nice, I think. But if you’ll forgive me, Himself didn’t seem to have any particular need for niceness.”
John went cold all over.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Sherlock ’olmes,” Leonard said. “He were an all right bloke. Used to pass me a bullseye sometimes in exchange for a bit of, ah, surveillance, yeah? Like he didn’t know what that could get a punter like me. I liked him.” This last sentence was delivered with a helpless shrug, as if the simple declaration of having enjoyed someone’s company required justification or apology. Probably Leonard Agarwal had discovered somewhere along the line that any soft feelings for the likes of Sherlock Holmes had necessitated as much in certain circles. But not here, alone in an examination room with John Watson.
John swallowed with some difficulty.
“I did too, Fuckin’ L,” he said.
—
Sweet Beezy looked, as always, smug. Even holding out her split knuckles for John to wrap, face mottled with bruises, a satisfied curl took residence in the corners of her mouth.
“Someday you’re going to come in here with a broken rib and you won’t be getting any sympathy from me,” John said.
Sweet Beezy flexed her hand in his grip and snorted.
“If there were one thing of which the great Doctor Watson were incapable, it would be withholding sympathy,” she said. She manfully cleared her throat and shifted in her seat when John tightened his wrap job abruptly. “’sides,” she went on, “who says I need your sympathy? All’s I need is your steady hand.”
Sweet Beezy was, like John, a veteran — an explosives specialist. She was, like John, frequently underestimated due to her diminutive size, but, like John, she had earned her place in the army with competence and ferocity. And, unlike John, she had not had Mike Stamford and luck on her side when her pension proved inadequate to the task of supporting her. She bunked with some of the other vets in a park, she drank too much, and she earned a little cash in underground fights. The whispers that rose up around her whenever she was at the women’s day shelter spoke of an undefeated streak, and John believed it. It was in the quiet air of triumph about her, and the fact that she didn’t boast. Winners, John had often found, did not have to boast.
Silence swelled between them as John took care of her hand. John found himself wanting to fill it, but with what? Sweet Beezy was not a damsel in distress, and she wasn’t his friend. He could not say, “I know what it is to find all your purpose gone.” He could not say, “I know what it is to be a weapon you want to turn on yourself.” He could not save her from the elements, from the fights, from herself. And he could not stop seeing his own reflection in the hard lines of her face.
In the end, it was she who broke the silence.
“You all right there, Doc?”
“Hmm? Oh yes, of course.” He smiled at her, and he knew it was brittle. Her brown eyes seemed warm even as her gaze cut through him. He dropped his own to her wrapped hand. He turned it over gently, inspecting his handiwork.
“Only I knew this bloke,” she said, too casually. “He’d come down the matches once in a while. Sometimes just to watch, often to play. Posh, you know the type. Public school, boxing lessons, enjoying his time slumming it a bit too much. A pretty sure bet, too.”
John pursed his mouth and frowned when he looked back up into her face. She was looking off about the vicinity of his right ear.
“You remind me of him, is all,” she said.
“I remind you of a posh git stupid enough to get into the seedy world of illegal underground fights?”
Sweet Breezy met his eyes again and cracked a wide, crooked grin full of almost-even teeth that made John think of her as beautiful for the first time.
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Does he look like me or something?”
“Not a bit.” She was still grinning, and somehow it had taken on a wistful quality that unnerved him. “Only the pair of you have the same look in your eye sometimes.”
John snorted. “And just what look is that?”
“Like you’re missing something you never expect to find, but you have just enough hope left to be disappointed.”
John had no retort or comment. Or if he did, they dried up on his suddenly nonfunctional tongue, got caught behind suddenly clamped teeth, tangled up in suddenly immobile lips.
“And if that bloke were here,” she said, gentle in a way he’d never seen before, “I’d tell him I’d missed him in the piss and shit of the underground, and hoped he was all right, and then I’d offer to buy him a drink.”
John cleared his throat and stood with a wooden smile. He broke eye contact and went to fiddle with something — anything — on the counter.
“This is an NHS shelter, Ms. Beezy,” he said. “There will be no drinks.”
He heard her scoff, and then she rose from her chair and moved toward the door. Before she slipped out of it, she said, “You take good care of us, Doctor Watson. You ought to look into a bit of the same for yourself.”
Then she was gone, and John sank into the chair he’d vacated, remembering as if from a foggy dream the one or two times Sherlock had come home with swollen knuckles, purpling eye orbits.
—
On a cloudy afternoon in early autumn, John was walking home from his clinic job when a prickle at his neck told him there were eyes on him. He settled into a stillness he was trained for, squared his shoulders, raised his chin, and walked with purpose. He decided to go back to Baker Street in a roundabout manner, and just about at Regent’s Park, his rather inept tail revealed himself.
“Really, Marko?” John said when he rumbled the lad out from between some bins. Marko was red-eyed and racked with tremors, young and slight under John’s hand. John had seen him in and out of the men’s day shelter, sometimes flying high and getting kicked out, sometimes hollow-eyed and sober shivering on a sofa, always a bit squirrely, avoiding John even as he peeked at him from his peripheral vision.
“S-s-sorry, Doctor Watson, sorry, sorry,” he said, over and over. His eyes streamed tears without the expected accompaniment of actual weeping. John sighed. Marko had probably been thinking soft Doctor Watson was an easy mark, but John couldn’t find it in him to be angry. He was just weary.
“You should detox somewhere safe, Marko.” Even as he said it, John knew it was futile and naive, even cruel. He might as well have spat, why don’t you just get a job? There were day shelters and night shelters, abut none would accept Marko in his current state, none were equipped to ease anyone through withdrawal, and none were designed to house someone around the clock. Marko needed rehab, or at least 24-hour housing, and with waitlists being what they were he wasn’t going to get it. He was going to be a kid on the streets, hurting until his next hit, needing without wanting. John should have known better, but it was too late to bite back careless words. “Look mate,” he said, gentling his tone. “How about I get you a hot meal and then we can find you a place to bunk for the night, yeah?”
“I got it handled, Doctor Watson, no worries, no worries,” Marko said. He shivered all over and hugged himself through it, but favoured John with a tremulous smile. “You good?” he asked.
John almost laughed. “What? Am I good? Marko, what—” His breath was squeezed out of him when Marko crashed into him and the whole weird thing turned out to be an embrace. He gasped the first sounds of Marko’s name until Marko let up, still grinning. It made him look like a little boy, and at the sight of it, John’s chest hurt in a way that couldn’t be explained by an overly enthusiastic hug. John smiled back at him, squeezing once at his biceps before stepping back and breaking contact.
“’m glad, Doctor Watson,” Marko said. “Just wanted to be sure, like. Got reports to make ’n all. And sorry about knocking you over that time!”
“Reports? Knocking me— Marko!”
But Marko had scurried away, and now the chill of a London autumn trickled down John’s spine and made him shiver. He clenched his hands into fists for warmth and punched them into his pockets with more force than necessary.
When was John knocked over? He racked his brain for any incident in which he was jostled by anyone at the men’s shelter and he came up blank. All he could think of was the time someone nudged him while he was making tea, but he got a mumbled apology from the culprit, an older gent who went by some kind of animal name. Wombat? Jaguar? Something like that.
Not Marko.
London in autumn was monochrome in the oncoming dusk, grey washing into grey whether he cast his gaze toward the street or the park or the sky. The air had just taken on the edge of a chill. John usually liked autumn, but as he hunched his shoulders inward and tucked his cold nose into his collar, he was struck by a sense of melancholy. He picked up his pace; his feet knew the way home.
There was no skull on the mantle, no body parts in the fridge.
—
Sometimes, it was John’s job to watch his shelter patients take their meds.
Fiona was what some of the staff called a “lifer.” She was in her forties, and when she was on her medication she was fastidious in her hygiene and could often be found doing chores around the shelter. A bit of cleaning, or helping out during meal time. She was friendly and compassionate, helpful and reliable. It got her some privileges, like being allowed to stay longer than most of the clients here.
When she was off her medication, she’d bugger off for months at a time, and no amount of asking around would reveal her whereabouts. She had just returned from one such walkabout, looking gaunt and cowed as she entered John’s office. He handed her a little cup full of her antipsychotics, gave her a smile instead of a lecture, and waited for her to take them obediently like she always did. Instead, she inspected them like a parole officer sniffing for a violation.
“Fiona?” John said. “Is there something wrong?”
According to her chart, she had returned yesterday, and the doctor on duty wrote that she had resumed her course of medication. She looked it, freshly showered in clean clothes, gaze focused and clear.
He watched her press her lips together before looking up at John with green eyes that might once have been bright.
“Will these hurt a baby?” she asked, timid, and John’s military calm flared to life.
“Let me consult my book, all right?”
She ventured a smile at him and nodded. John rifled through the bottom drawer of the desk for a reference book. As he flipped through the pages, he thought about how strange it was that she should confide in him and not yesterday’s doctor, who was a woman. Her chart indicated no pregnancy or resistance to taking the pills — maybe she’d only just found out?
He found the relevant pages. There were no contraindications for pregnancy, and he told her they were safe. She smiled and tipped the pills back as John returned the desk reference to its place in the bottom drawer. When she was done, she raised her eyebrows and levelled a polite smile at him, as if asking permission to leave.
“Hold on,” John said. “Just — do you want to discuss your options? I’m—” a doctor, here for you, totally unbiased all seemed both obvious and inadequate. John shut his mouth and swallowed around the thwarted end of that sentence.
Fiona tilted her head and gave him a tired smile.
“I know what my options are, Doctor Watson,” she said. “And I’ll keep them in mind. But for now, I’m…erring on the safe side.”
“All right,” John said. “But if you have questions, or need to talk, I’m available of course. If you’d rather speak to a woman, there’s Doctor Toomey, you saw her yesterday, or if you don’t fancy her I can refer you to a friend of—”
She laughed. “Having the same parts as me doesn’t necessarily make a doctor more appealing,” she said. “There’s a reason you get people queuing up outside your door on the days you’re here, Doctor Watson.” Her smile was somehow amused and fond all at once, as if John were desperately young.
“Come now, the other doctors can’t be all that bad,” he said.
“No,” Fiona said. “But they’re not our Doctor Watson.”
John was not given to fits of emotion, but a lump rose up in his throat and he could not dislodge it.
“I— why?” Becoming a doctor was one of the things John was proudest of accomplishing in the course of his life and it always would be, but he couldn’t say he’d ever been the recipient of such a high compliment, even when he was saving lives in the RAMC. He imagined this was what being knocked on your arse with a feather felt like.
Fiona’s eyes shuttered as she peered into his face, calculating. The tip of her tongue darted out to wet chapped lips, and in her lap her hands twisted against each other. She took a breath.
“Because we’re all in the business of taking care of Sherlock Holmes. That makes you one of us.” She stood. “Thank you, Doctor Watson. For everything.”
When she left, John didn’t call in the next patient for a long while. He sat in his chair and his left hand trembled as he remembered: the flash of dull green eyes as his fingers were pried from Sherlock’s wrist. His vision swimming from the collision with a cyclist. His own mouth forming the words he’s my friend, he’s my friend. Being kept away.
By a very convenient mob.
—
Sherlock Holmes returned to John Watson on a dreary Wednesday evening.
The shelter was just about to close when a stooped elderly man John had never seen before came in, and the atmosphere in the shelter shifted. He was given a wide berth even as the stragglers were visibly happy to see him. John straightened and crossed his arms, mouth thinning. It was a good disguise — you had to give him that, John thought. He wore a patchy, convincing beard and artful make-up complete with smears of dirt, and John didn’t know if that was a wig or if he’d committed to the cause enough to grow his hair long and dye it a tarnished silver. But you didn’t live two years with a man, didn’t watch him like your own personal miracle, didn’t sleep beside him and forge a staggering intimacy without knowing the particular lines and planes of his body, even when he was hiding it from you. And for all that John had come to expect and to anticipate — to dread — this day, somehow he was not ready. Somehow his stomach went cold and wobbly at the sight of Sherlock Holmes before him, whole and gazing at him with blazing eyes.
When a member of the shelter staff told the newcomer, “actually, we’re closed, you might try a night shelter this time of day,” John interrupted her.
“It’s fine, Kirsty,” he said. “I’ll just give him his meds and then I’ll lock up.”
Kirsty pursed her lips and John favoured her with his most benign “trust me, I’m a doctor,” smile.
“If you’re sure,” Kirsty said slowly.
“Come on people, places to be, yeah?” Fuckin’ L piped up gleefully, ushering people out. John turned his back and led his new charge towards the office, nodding at staff along the way, uttering platitudes like no, no, you go on, it’s no trouble at all, yeah, see you Saturday, mate, ta.
They got into the office and John heard the lock engage with a heavy clunk. And then, somehow, he was paralysed, unable to turn around and face this spectre, this manifestation of all of his doomed hopes. His breath shuddered out of him and his hands clenched at his sides. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“John,” Sherlock said, and his voice, his voice was so low and rumbling and dear, it was such a visceral thing to feel vibrating in his gut again, John, like a benediction, like an endearment, like time had folded to give him this skipping heartbeat again, John.
His body moved without his brain’s volition and in the space of a breath, John had Sherlock pinned to the wall, long grey hair suddenly on the floor, bits of his false beard torn off and joining it.
“Everyone, Sherlock! Everyone knew but me! All your homeless friends and who else? Mycroft? Lestrade? Mrs. Hudson? The shopgirl at Speedy’s? Why not me? Sherlock, why not me, you fuck!”
Sherlock’s Adam’s apple bobbed once, and his hands closed around John’s wrists, skimmed up John’s arms until he held John by the shoulders as if the two of them were mirror images, and he squeezed John gently there. That, somehow, was the last straw that had John’s lungs quaking.
“I wanted to,” Sherlock was saying, along with John’s name, over and over.
John kissed him then, the collision of two bodies like the worst kind of accident, like John could consume this man whose absence had consumed him. And, damn him, Sherlock kissed back with all the ease and ferocity of their past partnership, as if two years had not passed barren and shadowed without him. Sherlock’s big hands came round the back of John’s head to hold him in place while he plundered John’s mouth. It was so familiar, gestures they’d engaged in on countless occasions; John felt cleaved in two by time.
John whimpered into Sherlock’s mouth before yanking away and dragging Sherlock to the examination table. He shoved Sherlock over the edge of it and tugged down his ill-fitting trousers — threadbare and stained in deference to his disguise, but freshly laundered — until Sherlock’s arse was bared to him, gooseflesh rising in the cool of the room. John laid his hands on the full swell of Sherlock’s cheeks, undiminished by whatever hard living he’d been up to, and the touch sent a zing of electricity up John’s spine. Sherlock groaned, and John saw him clutch at the paper sheet lining the table even as he pushed his arse into John’s palms. His bollocks were full and flushed beneath him.
“God, yes,” Sherlock said, breath muffled by paper.
“Fuck,” John said. His erection had surged to full-mast in record time, and it strained now against his trousers. When he released it, it slapped hot and wet against the flesh of Sherlock’s arse, and all that earned him was a pained moan and wriggle.
“Do it, John,” Sherlock said.
“I’m so angry at you,” John said, rocking the length of his cock in the humid space between Sherlock’s cheeks.
“Berate me later,” Sherlock groaned. “I’ve waited so long, John, for God’s sake.”
“You’ve waited so long?” There was a resounding clap, and a livid pink mark rose up on the white expanse of Sherlock’s left arse cheek. He gasped and pressed his arse back, spread his legs. John heard Sherlock’s cock bob over the edge of the examination table with a dull thud against the side. “You? How do you think I’ve felt, all this time, thinking you’d, that you were—”
“So bloody hit me again!”
“You’d like that wouldn’t you, you great shit.” John obliged anyway, and Sherlock pushed back into the contact, both cheeks blazing, cock leaving smears of pre-come all over the sides of the examination table. “Don’t think I’ve forgiven you.”
“Oh, never, never, John.”
“Shut up,” John snarled. He knelt before Sherlock’s arse and prised his cheeks apart roughly. His hole was damp and winking amid the sparse smattering of hair, and John almost growled to see its funny little wrinkles again. He licked a stripe up over the whole of Sherlock’s perineum, from the base of his sac to his tailbone, and Sherlock thrashed against him and gasped for more. “I said shut up, Sherlock.” He gripped Sherlock’s arse hard, uncaring of future bruises, and held him open again for a thorough application of his tongue.
There was some shifting above him, and then the groaning from the examination table was muffled. Sherlock pushed back into his face, but John only hummed in satisfaction and sucked harder at the rim of Sherlock’s arsehole. Sherlock was musky, and the scent of him made John dizzy with memory and arousal. John flickered the tip of his tongue around the outside before giving him a full lave and finally pressing inward. Sherlock’s thighs strained on either side of John’s head, and he felt the fingers of Sherlock’s free hand wind into his hair to hold him steady whilst Sherlock screwed himself backward onto John’s tongue.
John let go of one arse cheek to take his own cock in hand. He moaned at the contact and lashed at Sherlock’s hole with sloppy swipes of his tongue. The muscle loosened by increments until Sherlock’s hole was grasping for more, and John took that as his cue to stagger back to his feet and kick his trousers away. When Sherlock shoved a hand beneath himself to squeeze around his cock, John slapped it away.
“You’ll come on my cock or not at all,” he said, and then without warning he slid his middle finger up Sherlock’s spit-slick arse as far as it would go. Sherlock shouted around the knuckles in his mouth and arched for more. “Fucking gagging for it, you are,” John murmured. He twisted another finger in and rocked them in and out to loosen Sherlock up further. Sherlock snapped his hips hard and writhed before him, moaning around his own hand as if John’s fingers were the finest imaginable balm to his pains. Inside, Sherlock was a hot, smooth grip, tight enough to make John pause. And he couldn’t help it — he had to ask. “Who’s been inside you, hm? Who’s fucked this tight arse since you’ve been gone? Tell me.”
“No one!” Sherlock said around wet fingers. “Just you, John — just you, oh God.” John hooked both fingers hard at Sherlock’s prostate and savoured the baritone wail that elicited, vibrating up through John’s guts and gripping him by the spine like an incipient orgasm.
John extracted himself and slammed through the drawers looking for a tube of KY. When he found it and turned back around, he caught sight of Sherlock’s face, smashed against the cushioned, be-papered slab and riotous with colour. His eyes were green and dazed, and sweat and saliva had made his face shiny, had made what remained of his false beard start to slip off haphazardly. It would have been funny — John would have laughed — but Sherlock saw John’s aching cock and blinked sluggishly, opening his lush mouth as if he wanted nothing more but to swallow him to the root.
John’s bollocks throbbed with the want of it, but he swallowed it back and said in his best Captain Watson voice, “You’ll make it up to me later,” and Sherlock’s filthiest grin stole slow across his face. He buried his face back in the mess he’d made of the examination table, and John moved back behind him. He stroked at the downy cheeks of his arse and pushed up the shirt Sherlock was wearing to expose the lithe lines of Sherlock’s back, the familiar constellation of moles. He wanted to kiss each one, to murmur his devotion at them, but he was not that man anymore, and his heart clenched against his mouth’s desire.
He shook his head as if clearing cobwebs and stepped back to slather his prick with lube. With a cursory dollop on Sherlock’s needy hole, he lined his cock up and pushed slowly inside, moaning at the sight of Sherlock’s anus giving way to John’s girth. Sherlock grunted low and dark and the sound of it buzzed at John’s guts again. Sherlock’s body enveloped him in a tight, slick, muscular heat that made John’s vision dapple with cascading stars.
“Fuck,” John hissed as he bottomed out. Sherlock’s back arched, and his arsehole, pink and stretched and glistening, clenched hard around the base of John’s cock. John swept his hands up and then down Sherlock’s back before gripping him by the swells of his arse and easing himself out only to slam back inside. Sherlock shouted, and with that, John set a punishing rhythm that had Sherlock hitching out ecstatic gasps and bellows when his breath cooperated enough for it.
John wasn’t going to last. Distantly, it irked him — distantly, he wondered if they would ever come back from this, rutting like beasts but hiding from each other, holding fast to secrets and resentments. But, not so distantly, the plushness of Sherlock’s arse against John’s hips made John’s blood rush faster through his veins, and the steady slap of his balls against Sherlock’s provided a maddening counterpoint, and the corded muscles of Sherlock’s thighs against his own proved too sharply sweet, too good to stave off. John began to drill into him with shallower thrusts, just the first few inches of his cock hammering in and out, battering, he knew, Sherlock’s prostate. Just as John’s eyelids began to slide shut of their own accord, Sherlock seized up and went rigid, going choked and silent in orgasm, and John felt the splatter of Sherlock’s come against his own legs. John gave a single shout that bounced between the clinical walls of his office as he pushed all the way inside Sherlock’s spasming arse and drained himself as deeply into Sherlock’s body as he could manage. He shook and pushed until he was spent, and he slumped against Sherlock’s back.
They lay like that for long moments, breathing in tandem, until John’s vision cleared and he gained back full use of his legs. He gingerly eased out of Sherlock’s arse, and when he extracted himself, come slid out of Sherlock’s hole along after him.
“Fuck,” he said, and swiped at it with his thumb. Sherlock issued a weak whimper, but otherwise gave no indication of moving any time soon. More come dribbled out and John felt a hopeful spark in his bollocks at the sight of it, but his lads were more optimistic than he could be. He licked some away, and when more seeped out, he rubbed it into Sherlock’s perineum, and then pushed some back inside with two fingers.
“God, John,” Sherlock said, tipping his arse back into the penetration.
“Getting fucked not enough for you?”
“It’s been a long time,” Sherlock said, voice snide. John’s heart plummeted into his stomach. He pulled his fingers out and yanked his trousers up and went to wash his hands in the sink. He rinsed his mouth and stuck his head under the tap.
“John?” Sherlock’s voice, more cautious than John had ever known it, came from above and behind. He was looming, and he was being careful, of all things, and who was this man with John’s dead lover’s face?
“What the fuck have you done, Sherlock?” John said into the sink, nauseated. “Where the fuck were you? Why?”
“I had to, John.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“John, please.”
A shiver racked John’s spine and his eyes slid shut. He felt Sherlock reach around him to turn the tap off, and then his hands were on his shoulders, gentle, turning him around.
Solemnly, warily, like a stranded space alien who had never done such a thing before, Sherlock said, “I’m going to hug you, John.”
John felt an hysterical giggle threaten to bubble up from his gullet. A giggle or maybe a sob, it was a mystery, because soon he was being held tight against Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock smelled like laundry instead of himself, instead of how John knew Sherlock smelled when they lived together and chased criminals together and lounged about generally being men with various smells about their persons together. Even though it was foreign and familiar at once, even though it wrenched at his innards to be pulled in so many opposing directions like this, John allowed his body the indulgence of doing what it longed to, and he put his arms around Sherlock Holmes. He bunched the Oxfam shirt up in his hands and held on.
End