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John, standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbed viciously at an inoffensive plate and tried to blame his foul mood on the moon – the moon and Sherlock Holmes. It wasn't like both of them hadn't given him reasons to be angry.
In terms of the former, moondark had been especially difficult this month, bad enough John had had to cancel his shifts at the clinic. As a result, the current full moon was giving John extra-violent emotional jags and mood swings. And as for the latter, Sherlock recently seemed hell-bent on wrecking both his health and John's nerves by starving and sleep-depriving himself into an early grave – if that wasn't a bad joke when applied to a vampire.
John made himself inhale and exhale evenly as he rinsed the plate under the tap and placed it in the drying rack, next to the second plate that had been meant for Sherlock. But the lamb vindaloo that normally got Sherlock to eat when all else failed had proven ineffective, even dished from its carryout box onto a plate (the equivalent of five-star dining at chez Baker Street) and waved temptingly under Sherlock's nose.
Still, John thought, trying to find a positive, didn't go to waste. His appetite was spiking as it always did this time of month, and when Sherlock had refused to eat (going so far as to give John a testy warning hiss), John had given up and consumed the lot himself. A full belly helped him feel better . . . for about fifteen minutes. But now that the washing up was done, he was getting annoyed again.
Annoyed, and, underneath that, worried. Sherlock wasn't a normal sort of bloke, five minutes in his company would disabuse anyone of that idea. John was willing to roll with it: the ego, the terrifyingly accurate deductions, the world-class sulks, the former drug habit, the vampirism, the experiments, the sarcasm – it was all worth being in close company with a true, unique genius.
This brutal, pointless self-destruction, however . . .
Padding on silent, bare feet (it was a Sunday with nowhere to go, so his attire had never progressed beyond the old-t-shirt-and-track-suit-bottoms stage), John crossed the kitchen floor, pausing at the threshold of the sitting room. Sherlock was where John had left him, sitting in "his" chair, arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees like a sulky child – a child who hadn't moved, eaten, or drunk for days. He hadn't slept either, which was less pressing for vampires – except John knew for a fact Sherlock was close on a month and a half without rest; three to four weeks was the safe maximum. He had to be approaching the point of total collapse. But there he sat, glaring at a point of empty air two feet in front of his face as if it were riveting.
Lestrade was worried, too. He'd been by twice in the past week, waving cases under Sherlock's nose in much the way John had offered lamb vindaloo, but to no avail. Nothing was interesting enough, bizarre enough, to rate more than a dismissal as "boring," assuming it got a response at all.
John growled under his breath: a deep, rib-shaking rumble. The urge to shout, curse, scream, or howl was rising in him, along with the itch beneath his skin that urged him to change, to hunt and run with the rising tide of the moon. He'd been able to offset that need, for the most part, since his return to London, but this month he might have to take to the rooftops and back alleys to work the excess energy out of his system. Maybe do a little hunting to take the edge off. It wasn't like the rat and pigeon populations couldn't absorb the damage. They bore the brunt of most lycanthrope and vampire activity in the city, as John knew well, though it wasn't something the general populace was aware of; they enjoyed the dearth of vermin in complete obliviousness, little guessing it was a side effect of the relatively dense population of supernatural predators living secretly in London.
Except hunting meant abandoning Sherlock in a vulnerable state, and John found his desire to stay close to his stricken flatmate stronger than the urge to shapechange. And when one got down to it, that protective urge was the real root of John's bad mood, because it told him things about his emotional attachment to a certain consulting detective that he frankly did not want to contemplate.
---
John had always been a lone wolf, after his brief (but intense) experimentation with werewolf subculture at uni. He'd longed for a place to belong, but instead he'd found at best snippy social cliques and at worst violent gangs, all calling themselves “packs,” based on outdated (and, as John learned in a single afternoon spent in the library, inaccurate) theories about wolf pack structure. The experience had solidified John's personal belief that werewolves were, for the most part, human beings with a thin veneer of wolfiness over the top, playing dress-up with fur and fangs. After all, if they'd been responding to genuine wolf instincts, wouldn't they naturally array themselves in proper wolf fashion, rather than following the dictates of misguided human research?
John hadn't had the patience to last long around the anal-retentive social stratification and petty alpha/beta/omega status squabbles the other werewolves seemed so fond of – not to mention their obsession with all things “natural” and the resultant atmosphere of homophobia, none of which had gone over well with a bisexual man whose sister was a lesbian, thank you very much. He'd chosen to go his own way, and proven strong (and scary) enough to fend off any packs that felt a need to harass loners.
The military had been different – there it had been all the shapeshifters of every stripe (literally, in the case of the tigers) banding together as an informal brother- and sister-hood of pariahs, united by their service and purpose. That fellowship had been exceptionally good, but it had vanished with John's medical discharge – not because his former friends had abandoned him so much as it had been a logistical parting of the ways, after which he was unlikely to ever see his military “packmates” again on a regular basis.
He'd been resigned to running lone for the rest of his life (however long it might be), when he'd met Sherlock.
---
John, leaning against the open doorway, arms and ankles crossed, contemplated his difficult flatmate. (Vampire, the enemy) part of his blood advised, while the other half whispered, (pack, he's pack, the truest pack, the best), and he couldn't lie to himself any further.
In natural wolf behavior, the core of every wolf pack was a mated pair, joined for life, along with whatever offspring they might produce: a couple, a family unit. And John was finding he might have more wolf nature in him than he'd previously thought, because the longing for pairing, for partnership, in every sense of the word, was becoming an overwhelming urge.
It was something that had been growing for a while, he realized in hindsight. His last fragile hope in another direction,-- his attempted relationship with Sarah – had crashed and burned two weeks ago, just before moondark, when she'd finally sat him down and given him The Talk: how she was fond of him as a friend but she was tired of feeling like a third wheel, and so on and so forth (also, she didn't like being pulled into one of Sherlock's adventures on a regular basis when all she really wanted was a quiet night in). John had to admit he couldn't blame her; when he thought about it afterwards, he'd reached the wince-worthy conclusion that he'd miss having Sarah's flat as a place to sleep after an argument with Sherlock more than he'd miss Sarah's company – that and being able to say defensively, "I've got a girlfriend!"
Losing the last mental barrier against his feelings for Sherlock had made John's past moondark a brutal three days. It was normally a time to wrestle with one's inner demons, even in the best of situations; confronting his now-undeniable, impossible longing for Sherlock had been agonizing. Particularly when all of his instincts had urged him to seek Sherlock's company for solace – a disastrous choice, since John was certain his compromised mental and emotional state would be obvious to Sherlock's keen powers of observation. And Sherlock was unlikely to be pleased by what he saw.
So John had locked himself away in his bedroom, only venturing forth for necessities when his senses of hearing and smell told him Sherlock was gone from the flat. He'd barely slept, and the fact that Sherlock picked those three days to play his violin almost non-stop whenever he was home – edgy, harsh, atonal tunes, rather than his usual mix of classical music – hadn't helped.
Come to that, Sherlock's current jag of self-destructive sulking had begun right about then, when John was least in a state to deal with it. Everything always goes to hell at once, dammit.
John reached up and scrubbed one hand over his face, hard, trying to erase his thoughts. He'd never had occasion to regret his bisexuality, no matter how much grief he'd got for it – until now. Why couldn't he look at Sherlock and just see . . . a mate? Just a best, if slightly mad, friend. Not a mate. Particularly not Mr. “Not My Department,” probably-asexual Sherlock Holmes. If John was going to be blindsided by a wolfish pair-bonding instinct, it would have been helpful if the object of his attraction were capable of responding in kind. Not that what he wanted was purely sexual, oh, no, but sex was definitely a part of it.
Not to mention all the more mundane, normal-human worries about losing one of the best friendships he'd ever had if he made the wrong move, and so on and so forth.
John sighed in resignation. Buggered by both sides of my nature at once. Joy. Tired of pondering the unresolvable, he pushed away from the wall and padded across to Sherlock.
"Sherlock," he said, forcing his tone to be calm and neutral. "I was thinking of making tea. Would you like some?"
"No." An actual word. More response than John had been getting lately, that was something.
"Sherlock, you need to eat and drink. Water, food, blood, anything, it's been days." Greatly daring, telling himself it was normal care and nothing more, John rested a gentle hand on Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock, like John, was barefoot and dressed in sleeping clothes, for all he hadn't slept: a T-shirt and pyjama pants. He hadn't even bothered with a dressing gown for days. His skin was cold though the thin fabric of his shirt, well below even vampire-normal.
The response was immediate. “Don't touch me!” Sherlock hissed, flinching away from John and turning to bare needle-sharp fangs in warning, though his eyes remained clear and blue-grey rather than vampire-black.
The threat broke John's fragile control. "Fuck it all, Sherlock, you're going to shut down if you keep starving yourself. That or go mad." Revenants – vampires so blood-starved they went insane – were rare, but had been documented in the medical literature. In pure frustration, without thinking, John shaped his left forefinger into a razor-claw and drew it lightly across his right wrist – not deeply enough to cut veins, arteries or tendons, but enough to rupture the fragile capillaries and draw a bit of blood to the surface. He thrust his bloody arm under Sherlock's nose. "Take a whiff of that, if you don't believe me."
Sherlock's eyes went black in an instant and he lunged for John's wrist. John, ready for him, responded by cuffing Sherlock across the face with a claws-out slap: not too hard, but enough to rock even a vampire back in his chair.
Sherlock blinked at John in shock, eyes human-pale again, as he raised one hand to the four shallow, parallel scratch marks barring his right cheek. They began, very slowly, to ooze dark blood (too slow, too dark, he's dehydrated, the bastard). "You hit me," Sherlock said, as if it was incomprehensible.
"Damn right I hit you."
"But you offered!"
"I was making a point!"
Sherlock blinked, blank-faced, and John started off on one (of the many) rants he'd been building up to.
"You're this close -” John held up thumb and forefinger, a millimeter apart, “- to turning revenant and attacking someone in the street! If you think your friendship with Lestrade – or your relationship to Mycroft –is going to save you from the repercussions of that, you're even further off your rocker than usual."
"I wouldn't attack 'anyone in the street,'" Sherlock shouted back, all pretense at being a controlled thinking machine completely gone. "I'm not interested in drinking from random idiots going about their boring little lives!"
"You will be if you get hungry enough! What the hell's got into you, anyway? You were managing fine, I thought!" Sherlock had previously been making use of London's rats and pigeons for his sanguinary needs, as John's nose had informed him over the months – to John's sneaking, guilty relief. It wasn't like someone with Sherlock's looks and presence wouldn't be able to find plenty of willing human donors, if that was what he fancied. But Sherlock didn't seem inclined in that direction, any more than he sought most forms of human contact.
Sherlock's lips peeled back from his teeth in a vicious snarl, and he pushed out of his chair. "That was before," he gritted out. He tried to loom over his shorter flatmate, but John wasn't impressed.
"Before what? I swear, you aren't making any sense, not even for you."
Sherlock vented an inarticulate growl of frustration that was most un-vampiric, and turned on his heel, no doubt intending to stalk dramatically from the room. John was having none of it.
"Oh, no," John said reaching out to grab Sherlock's arm, "you aren't going anywhere!" His intent was to spin Sherlock around to face him, but Sherlock moved with incredible speed, twisting free and lunging at John with eyes black and fangs bared. John, reacting more on reflex than anything else, responded with another heavy slap, and Sherlock rocked back again, more scratches trailing across his face.
Sherlock hissed then, in full threat – the deep, open-mouthed, overheating-boiler hiss of an angry and dangerous vampire.
John replied with bared teeth and a defiant wolf growl. "Right, then," he rumbled, voice a good half-octave deeper than usual. He preferred to bluff and posture his way through encounters with other supernaturals in civilian life, but he was familiar with the rough-and-tumble side of things, from minor squabbles right up to life-and death battles. At the moment a little violence seemed like just the thing.
Sherlock sprang, and everything happened very quickly after that.
Sherlock was capable of moving with incredible, blurring speed and had a vampire's gift of fooling the senses, not to mention inhuman strength.
John, untransformed, was stronger, tougher, and faster than a normal human but no match for Sherlock. However, he was a military-trained shapeshifter in complete control of his body and its reactions, which meant his speed and strength weren't locked into human defaults – and vampiric mind-tricks don't affect the sense of smell, which werewolves have in spades.
Sherlock started well, catching John's wrist and attempting an arm lock – which only works when one's opponent's joints and bones are going to stay the same shape. John's arm and shoulder went fluid, changing leverage, breaking the lock . . . and resolidified into a temporary and unnatural (but powerful) configuration that let John throw Sherlock halfway across the room.
A quick shoulder roll and Sherlock was on his feet again; John took the brief respite to strip off his lazy-Sunday clothing. He was damned if he was going to fully change shape for this fight – he would deal with Sherlock in (mostly) human form or not at all – but he wasn't above taking his body beyond its normal limits, and for that he needed flexibility.
Sherlock launched himself again. John dodged and struck, shredding Sherlock's thin T-shirt and scoring fresh lines along pale skin, only to be tackled amidships by a wickedly fast recovery. Sherlock bit ferociously at the vein in John's arm until he disjointed his elbow and pulled free, spattering blood everywhere. Not a serious wound – the vein hadn't been pierced – but messy and irritating.
"Are you enjoying this?" Sherlock breathed as they circled one another on the sitting room carpet. "Mocking me? Teasing me? Is that what you want?"
"What, to slap you around a little?" John rumbled back. "Damn straight it is." He lunged, aiming low, and cut Sherlock's legs out from under him.
Sherlock, catlike, righted himself midair and landed on his feet. He pounced as soon as his toes touched the floor, light as a bouncing balloon, and landed on John's back like a ton of bricks, knocking him to the floor.
"Do you think I don't know?," he hissed in John's ear, the words dripping venom.
John's stomach went cold with horror (he knows, oh, God, he knows, he's Sherlock, of course he knows), but that didn't stop him from twisting like rubber beneath Sherlock's weight, righting himself and planting his feet against Sherlock's chest so he could use the full strength of his legs to push Sherlock away, none too gently. Sherlock thwacked into the nearest wall, hard enough to leave a noticeable dent. That gave him a moment's pause as he rubbed the back of his head and glared at John.
"Know what?" John asked, unable to stop himself. He was back on his feet and rolling his shoulders to reset them properly. The left one twinged a bit, but he hardly felt it through the adrenaline.
"I can hear your heartbeat. I've been listening. I know."
Wait, what, heartbeat? A vague memory from Afghanistan, a vampire – John couldn't even remember her name now – saying something about heartbeats, about how they telegraphed more than the enemy's position, sometimes . . .
"Ever since moondark," Sherlock continued, beginning to circle again. "You've been wanting . . . and then you go waving blood in my face." He hissed in frustration.
John cringed inwardly, but kept his defensive posture, tracking Sherlock's movements. He bared his teeth, feeling a tell-tale flush warm his cheeks and ears at the same time. He couldn't help remembering, in vivid detail, all the things he'd imagined and desired in the private (he'd thought) darkness of his room, and it was only a particularly bloody-minded sense of defiance that kept him from dropping dead of embarrassment on the spot. How much can he hear?
"You were listening? Christ, don't I get any privacy around here?" John shot back, aiming for outrage but afraid he was projecting waves of guilt instead.
"I tried not to, but you were so fucking loud I couldn't help it!" Sherlock replied, and while his flatmate might be too blood-starved to flush, John had the strangest feeling Sherlock might otherwise have been blushing, too, which was distinctly out of character. Also, John couldn't remember ever hearing Sherlock use the word fuck before. John began to get the faintest inkling there might be two very different conversations happening at the same time – but he was too angry and mortified to follow up on the thought.
"More like your ego wouldn't let you stop!" John shouted back, barely aware of what he was saying. "I'm sure you were loving every minute of it . . ."
Sherlock lunged again, and the struggle continued, ever-shifting advantages cancelling each other out in quick succession, until Sherlock managed to get a vicious grip from behind on John's head, wrenching it aside to expose jugular and carotid at once. John's body convulsed in reflex, throwing Sherlock forward over his head. Sherlock landed flat on his back on the floor, wind temporarily knocked from his lungs.
John followed up his advantage by landing on Sherlock and pinning him, both of Sherlock's wrists captured in one of John's clawed hands and forced up over Sherlock's head, John's weight pressed full-length on top of Sherlock. Sherlock struggled to free himself, turning into one long, lean expanse of wiry, writhing muscle, and John's moon-enhanced instincts took an immediate, sharp turn in a very different direction.
The two of them froze simultaneously, with John's rock-hard erection digging into Sherlock's hip, their faces inches apart. Sherlock's eyes, back to their normal, human color, went wide and his mouth formed an almost perfect "o" of shock.
"Oh!" he said, as if the heavens had parted to emit the blinding light of revelation. "You weren't thinking about Sarah!"
John, derailed from his incipient death by embarrassment, said in genuine confusion, "What the hell? Sarah? How'd she get into this?"
"She dumped you. You took it badly. You spent all of moondark in your room, pining. For her, I thought. I was wrong. I always miss something. Always!" Sherlock punctuated the last word by dropping his head back onto the carpet with an annoyed thunk.
"I don't under . . . erk!!" John's protest was cut short when Sherlock rolled his hips slightly to the side, revealing a state of arousal matching John's.
John was so shocked he threw himself back and away from Sherlock as if he'd been burnt, landing flat on his arse a few feet away. Breathing heavily, he stared at Sherlock and tried to regain his violently scattered thoughts.
Sherlock, freed from John's body weight, rolled into a spring-loaded crouch, balancing with a controlled grace at odds with the ragged, blood-smeared state of his clothing and wild rat's-nest of dark hair. He watched John with wary intensity, uncertain.
John swallowed, and shifted his weight, moving slowly and non-threateningly as he got his feet under him and stood up. "Sarah dumped me because she said I was already too involved with you to need a girlfriend. I spent moondark realizing she was right."
Sherlock exhaled and, moving with equal care, rose to his feet, assuming a more normal and relaxed posture. "I thought you weren't gay."
"Bisexual isn't gay!" John snapped, an old button being pushed, then forced himself to relax when Sherlock tensed. Dead calm, he responded, "I thought you were married to your work."
"That's what I wanted!" Sherlock said, looking very wild, very confused and desperately harried. One long hand reached up and threaded through Sherlock's rumpled curls, digging in. John had seen his flatmate play out all sorts of emotions for the benefit of suspects and witnesses, but this was different – he was seeing the shell crack at last, Sherlock actually expressing what he felt. “And it was working. Then you came along. Now I . . .” Sherlock dropped his hand and exhaled. "I can't hear any heart but yours. I can't feed if it isn't you. I want . . ." He stopped, at a loss for words.
That was how it worked for vampires, sometimes, John knew: they would fixate on a particular person, and either hunt them down and drain them dry, or attempt to take them as a human servant, locked for eternity in a tight circle of symbiosis: sex, blood, lifespans - everything. It was very much the way wolves (and, apparently, werewolves) might mate for life, forming the tight, committed core of a pack.
John licked his lips, feeling his world shifting madly, rules and expectations that had seemed set in stone gone into flux, taking on new, strange configurations. Sherlock, standing in front of him, pale, battered, unguarded, at a loss, all because he wanted . . .
Essentially what John wanted.
"So let me get see if I've got this right," John said. "We're here, beating the shit out of each other in our sitting room, because we're attracted to each other but neither one of us wants to admit it, and we both think the other person isn't interested?"
Sherlock blinked. John's eyes met his, and they tuned to the peculiar wavelength that was, and had always been, just theirs.
John's lips twitched, and so did Sherlock's. John was the first to give in, the moonlight bubbling through his veins transforming to mirth. "God," he said, through his giggles, "we're pathetic!"
They both broke into wild, relieved laughter. "Hopeless," Sherlock admitted, gasping. He grinned at John . . . and then the smile wiped itself from his lips, replaced with a mildly surprised expression as his knees folded and he started to collapse.
"Sherlock!" All his laughter gone in a second, John darted forward and managed to catch Sherlock – rather messily, since he ended up mostly cushioning Sherlock's impact with his own body. They both ended up on the floor, John cradling Sherlock in an awkward embrace.
On the edge already and then all that exertion – no wonder he dropped, John thought. "Sherlock. Sherlock!" He was ready to bolt for his cell phone and dial 999 when Sherlock's eyes blinked open.
John breathed a sigh of relief. "I told you you were about to fall over, you wanker," he said.
Sherlock frowned. "I didn't intend to do that," he said.
He sounded so put out by his body's betrayal, it started John going on the giggles again, and without thinking he pulled Sherlock into a half-sitting hug.
After a pause, Sherlock hugged back. It was weird, to be embracing the very person he'd thought was untouchable for so long, but John wasn't about to complain because it was also perfect. He buried his face in Sherlock's shoulder and breathed deeply, drowning in the autumn-and-iron scent, letting it fill his senses and seep all the way into his animal brain. It made him want to hold Sherlock closer, to rub skin with skin, to . . .
Sherlock's tongue traced a cool wet line along the side of John's neck and John gasped.
"John," Sherlock rumbled, his voice sounding huge in its proximity to John's ear. "I need to feed."
"Yeah, you do," John sighed. "Best get to it." He raised his chin and turned his head to one side, exposing his throat in invitation. He wasn't enthralled by the idea of having his blood sucked, but if he wanted a . . . relationship with a vampire, it was bound to go with the territory.
Sherlock pulled away, frowning. "Are you sure this time?"
John couldn't help smiling. "Yes, I promise it's not an excuse to start smacking you around again, tempting as that might be."
Sherlock responded with a half-smile, then, going serious, said, "It will be easier if you let me . . . in."
The wording might be vague, but the underlying play of supernatural forces was not: John could feel Sherlock's will pressing against him, seeking to take control of his mind. It was how vampires hypnotized their human victims, but John, being supernatural himself, wasn't susceptible unless he chose to be. It was a huge leap of trust and faith; once he was under Sherlock's spell, he'd be unable to defend himself. Still, it was an easy decision; he'd already made it long ago, he realized, in a mad dash across London's rooftops after a certain cab.
"Okay," he said, simply, letting himself relax.
Sherlock's eyes changed, midnight black seeping in to obscure whites and irises, becoming pools of purest darkness, endless as the void between the stars. All John had to do was drop into the abyss, and let Sherlock's will take him.
It was like succumbing to a rush of adrenaline or the exhilaration of sexual arousal, but without the urgency – there was no stress, no fear, no past, no future, just floating joy and Sherlock. When glass-sharp fangs pierced the tender skin of John's neck he cried out, but in pleasure rather than pain. His heart pounded, blood thundering through his veins and running out in a hot, wild rush, everything that he was freely offered and, gloriously, taken. He could turn himself inside out, let his life be drained away, and wrapped in the glamour of Sherlock's magic he'd be glad of it. God, no wonder vampires are so dangerous, he thought, but it was an almost meaningless realization; the glamour was strong and he trusted Sherlock, so he let himself drift, weightless and timeless.
He couldn't say how long it was before he regained normal consciousness in Sherlock's arms. Long, slow tongue-strokes alternated with gentle suction at a dully-aching spot on his neck.
"Almost done," Sherlock murmured in John's ear, sounding weirdly matter-of-fact. "I'm just clearing the last of the anticoagulent."
John blinked at the ceiling with blurry vision and gluey eyelids, confused, until his brain kicked into gear and he shifted half out of Sherlock's embrace, head reeling from blood loss.
Sherlock looked better than he had in days, with a pink tint at the peaks of his sharp cheekbones and his full lips dark and lush. He smirked, raised a knowing eyebrow and said, "If I'd known you'd go under that easily, I'd have tried this days ago."
"I'd have smacked you down just as hard," John said, blinking and getting his bearings. With every beat of his heart his vision cleared a fraction more, his lycanthrope's constitution recovering swiftly.
"Yes, you would have," Sherlock agreed, more pleased than peeved. "Your tenacity is one of your more useful features."
John snorted, "Your sweet nothings need some work," he said.
Sherlock smiled in response, as John had expected. He looked so uncharacteristically warm, so open, that John's immediate response was to kiss him.
Sherlock's lips were just as soft in reality as in John's imagination, and the first brush woke John's barely-banked, moon-fueled desires with a vengeance. He cupped one hand against the back of Sherlock's head and leaned into the kiss harder, using his tongue to explore Sherlock's mouth (and catching a surprisingly arousing hint of his own blood in the process). With a reflexive growl of pleasure he pulled Sherlock into a tighter embrace, overcome with the abrupt urge to take/touch/claim/mark/devour . . .
. . . And then Sherlock struggled in John's arms and pulled away, freeing himself. It took one glance at his flatmate's frowning, uncertain expression to shatter John's rising arousal, full moon or not.
With a crushing weight of disappointment in his belly, John disentangled his limbs from Sherlock's. Surely he hadn't been imagining the reciprocal arousal of Sherlock's body rubbing against his, earlier, a part of his brain wailed in dismay. He ignored it. More fool me, not his area, just like he said. Blood, yes – sex, no. Moving clumsily, John pushed himself up off the floor and to his feet, trying to ignore the wobbliness from blood loss and thwarted desire.
"Right," he said. "Well, then. I guess I'd better . . ." he started to turn away from Sherlock with no clear direction in mind, when a hand on his arm caught and held him. Soft lips pressed against the back of his neck, and John's body was covered in a wave of tingling gooseflesh.
"Oh God. Sherlock," John said, closing his eyes and clenching his fists. "You don't have to. I get it, not your area . . ."
"Shut up," Sherlock responded. His hand slipped down John's arm and fondled his hip. John's body arched in response, and he groaned.
"I don't want you doing anything you don't want," John said, "I really don't, and now is not the time to be provoking me, please . . ."
"Provoking?" Sherlock rumbled in John's ear with a voice like audible sex, leaning forward and wrapping his arms around his flatmate. "I thought I was seducing." As he pressed against John, an unmistakable firmness made itself known, nudging the small of John's back – not John's imagination earlier, after all. If Sherlock had had reservations before, they seemed to be gone now. "I'm not asexual, if that's what you're thinking. Or uninterested. I'm just very, very . . . selective." He punctuated the last word with a light nibble at John's ear and a huff of warm, animal breath that all but emptied John's brain of rational thought.
"I . . . you . . . fuck!" John managed, incoherently, as the last of his resistance washed away in a rising tide of lust. His body went fluid and turned faster and smoother than ordinary human muscle and bone could ever hope to, rotating within Sherlock's embrace so that his mouth was locked against Sherlock's and his arms were wrapped around his flatmate's narrow ribs, and every instinct was screaming, take, mate, yours, now!
Sherlock made a surprised little mmmph! noise when John's lips closed over his, but then he was kissing back, enthusiastically if sloppily. Not a lot of experience, John guessed. I'll fix that, John thought with fierce joy, and pushed Sherlock against the nearest a convenient wall, close to the spot where he'd thrown Sherlock during the fight.
There followed a brief round of sincere, clumsy grabbing, rubbing and thrusting, during which John used momentary flickers of razor sharp claws and teeth to strip away the last remaining shreds of Sherlock's T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, leaving nothing but the luscious bare skin his instincts desired. He was already hard again, and blessed the full moon for its restorative properties. His body was very, very clear about what it wanted, but John was aware enough to know that the necessary time-out to secure lube and other necessities (not to mention proper preparation) was simply not going to happen. He flipped Sherlock around to face the wall all the same; there were alternatives.
Sherlock, for once, didn't resist – only braced his hands against the wall and moaned encouragingly when John nipped at the skin of his back and shoulder. The actuality of a submissive – for the moment – Sherlock was enough to trip all of John's instincts into overdrive. He took full advantage of Sherlock's cooperation to position his flatmate with legs together, giving John the angle he wanted. He gripped Sherlock's hips hard, and, making use of the copious natural lubrication his system was producing, along with a hasty palmful of spit, thrust hard between his flatmate's closed thighs, achieving penetration enough to sate his driving need.
Sherlock gasped, startled, then moaned in complete abandon as one of John's hands shifted from his hip to his erection, stroking in time with John's deep, rolling thrusts.
It was over quickly; Sherlock shuddered as if all his bones were being rattled together by some giant hand and then came, hard, in John's hand. John pumped him through to the end before switching back to a two-handed grip on Sherlock's hips as he ground to his own release. At the very last moment, the urge to climax met and blended with the full moon's desire to change shape; John rode both waves with the skill of experience, channeling most of the force into his orgasm while releasing his grip on Sherlock's hips just in time to slam his transformed, clawed hands into the wall, digging deep furrows in the plaster as he rode out his pleasure.
Spent, he slumped against Sherlock's sweaty (Sweaty? Sherlock never sweats, does he . . .?) bare back, and, soon after that, realized friction and their mutual body weight was pretty much the only thing keeping them upright.
"Sherlock?" John asked, wrapping one arm around Sherlock's chest for support and hoping he somehow hadn't managed to break his flatmate.
"Mnh, sleepy," Sherlock murmured, limbs uncharacteristically flaccid.
John understood: Sherlock starting out on the edge of exhaustion, getting a fast meal of fresh blood + a hard orgasm = sudden crash.
"Hold, urgh!, on!" John said, horsing his now limp and awkward flatmate around until they could collapse in a mutual, mostly-controlled fall to the carpet.
"That was . . . not what I expected," Sherlock rumbled. His eyes were closed, his voice was so faint John hardly would have heard it if he hadn't been holding Sherlock so closely.
"Er. Sorry," John said, mostly by spinal reflex. He hadn't exactly been very considerate, in retrospect, manhandling Sherlock the way he had. "I hope it wasn't. Um."
"No," Sherlock breathed, "it was good, it –" And then he was gone. John, alarmed, checked for breath and pulse; confirming that both were there, however slow and faint (a beat about every thirty seconds, a flow of breath so shallow as to be almost nonexistent – normal for a sleeping vampire), he collapsed next to Sherlock in relief. Just asleep, finally, the idiot. Then he yawned, huge and gaping, and, before he really knew what had hit him, fell asleep himself.
–
John awoke with a sense of disorientation, spooned aggressively up against an unfamiliar, rather unyielding body. A long body, since John's face was pressed up against the other person's backbone, somewhere below the shoulder blades, and there was a strong scent of dry leaves and ashes . . .
Oh. Not a dream.
Memory kicked into gear, and John woozily levered up on one elbow to confirm that, yes, he'd been curled against a very naked, very asleep Sherlock, in the wreckage of their sitting room. That much was clearly visible in the thin, early morning sunlight filtering through the blinds. Also, John was very thirsty and his bladder was full.
The last two things were easiest to deal with, so John creaked to his feet – sore in every joint and fiber of his body – and wobbled to the loo. He felt like he was ninety years old, all the lactic acid burn from his orgy of targeted shapechanging hitting him at once, but he kept moving by force of will. When he got there, he relieved himself, cleaned up a bit, drank a tall glass of cool water, and then squinted at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He looked as if he'd been in a fight with a freight train: purple-green bruises everywhere, and his neck didn't quite want to straighten out, probably thanks to that final wrench Sherlock had given it before they'd worked things out.
And had they ever worked things out. John smiled at his own reflection. Half his neck was one huge, blooming bruise, with two vivid fang-marks positioned over the major blood vessels.
Most fun I ever had getting something that looked that bad, he thought with good cheer, and pushed away from the sink. His cock felt like it had been worked over with sandpaper, the result of an insufficient lubrication-to-friction coefficient, spit and pre-come notwithstanding, but John couldn't begin to care. He tottered back to the sitting room, taking stock of the damages as he went.
Lots of furniture overturned, though most of it didn't look broken, except for the one wobbly chair, which had finally fallen apart, and a few cups and saucers – no great loss there. Papers and random clutter were scattered haphazardly. By instinctive self-preservation or sheer good luck they'd managed not to slam into the glass bookshelves or sliding doors, but even so blood was smeared everywhere in small drips and streaks, with a few larger splotches here and there.
There was a considerable dent in one wall, and nearby some exceptional claw gouges, along with more blood and other-bodily-fluid stains. The claws had been a bit of self-indulgence that John almost, but not quite regretted; if they were going to wreck the place, might as well do it properly. Still, he had a bad feeling the wallpaper was going to be hard to match. A broken cup had splashed milky tea over some of the blood for a double stain in the carpet – the very devil to get out, no doubt. Overall, though, the flat wasn't in as bad a shape as John might have expected.
In the midst of it all, half-curled on his side, lay Sherlock. His pale skin was crisscrossed with dark claw marks and spattered with bruises, though they were already fading, and he was so still and quiet he seemed like another person altogether. John realized he'd never seen his flatmate vulnerable before; Sherlock had never slept where John could see, but here he was, out in the open, defenseless. He looked disconcertingly young (he'd only been in his twenties when he'd been turned, Lestrade had said) and painfully alone.
A fierce wave of protectiveness swept over John, an instinct deeper than the marrow of his bones and old as the moon's phases. Well, he won't be alone any more. Not as long as I'm around. Then he yawned, two weeks of poor sleep since moondark catching up to him again. He'd be hungry later, from the blood (and other) loss, but for now yesterday's double helping of vindaloo was seeing him through; he was just sleepy.
He decided against trying to wrestle Sherlock's unconscious body into a bed, a Herculean task given Sherlock's height and John's exhaustion, and the sofa was too narrow for both of them at once. The floor would be fine. He snagged a couple of pillows – the Union Jack for himself, a sofa cushion for Sherlock – before spooning up against Sherlock's sleeping body again. It had been several hours already; Sherlock would be waking up well before sundown, and thus before Mrs. Hudson would likely be stirring. They could clean the worst of the mess before she decided to pull a "not your housekeeper" visit. He had faith. After all, Sherlock was an expert with bloodstains, surely he knew how to get rid of them.
As for the rest of it – their partnership and friendship, Sherlock's work and everything surrounding it – things would change, but perhaps not much, or not in a bad direction. John was awash in happy, hazy, post-coital faith. He buried his face against Sherlock's back and inhaled his packmate's autumnal scent, blended with musk and sweat – the perfect mix of death and sex. Even better, there was an echo of John's own scent beginning to breathe out of Sherlock's pores, legacy of John's blood working its way through Sherlock's veins. (Mine. Yours. Ours.)
John smiled against Sherlock's now-warm skin and let himself fall into a deep, healing sleep, expecting, for the first time in a very long while, that the future would sort itself out for the best.