Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Am I pretty? This?”

“You are very pretty, John.” Sherlock said and got surprised by the sincerity his answer conveyed, and the ease with which it had slipped from him. His gaze fell down to his glass of whiskey, half-full… or was it half-empty?

“Good, am I-” the doctor stopped dead, frowning as he understood. He pointed a falsely accusing finger towards his friend, mouth twisting into a smile, “Are we still playing the game?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if Madonna is pretty.”

“Sherlock…” John burst into laughter, and Sherlock’s eyes sparkled, “you just spoiled the game!”

“Sorry,” he smiled, and he only half meant it.

John got closer to him, hand on his knee just like seconds ago. Sherlock couldn’t help but notice how unusual this gesture was between them - normally always religiously keeping a conventional polite British gap between them, preventing any inopportune physical contact - and how it was the second time it happened this evening. Despite the alcohol in his system, he realised that he felt exposed. It wasn’t a feeling he was used to - him usually being the (annoying) one exposing others without pity - and he realised that he wasn’t too keen on it. But in front of John, he didn’t mind so much. He didn’t feel threatened, he only wanted to explore the feeling a bit more, indulge the exposure, testing his vulnerability, as he knew that if there was one man in the world with whom he could let go it was, and would ever only be John Watson. Soft eyes met his, and the man took a flirty amused tone: “Thank you,” he marked a pause, words broken up by the alcohol, “you’re not so bad yourself.”

“You’re drunk,” the detective clang to the last bit of rationality his mind could grab onto. John got even closer, provocatively took the whiskey from his grip and drank it down in one.

“Elementary, my dear Sherlock!” He chuckled as if he only understood the joke, eyes stuck into his partner-in-crime(-solving)’s. He leaned across his friend, trying to put down the glass to the floor, right next to the armchair feet, out of their reach. But in doing so without taking into account his greatly overestimated drunken capacities, John found himself grasping onto Sherlock’s arm to keep balance and preventing his face from kissing the floor hello. Three occurrences of direct physical contact in less than five minutes was definitely odd, the detective thought. A number of times surprisingly high, especially for John Hamish Watson and his not usually too keen on physical contact nature. Sherlock wondered why he hadn’t put the glass on the coffee table - overly simply next to his armchair - and wondered when he was actually going to remove his hand from his arm because it was starting to grow abnormally hot through the sleeve of his suit. Except that when he got up, his friend not only didn’t withdraw his hand, but also let himself fall onto the detective, and on a whim started to laboriously climb his way up his lap, like a bloody cat, but - more importantly and above all - unlike everything remotely expected of John Watson. Sherlock froze. He had never felt more self-conscious than at this very moment, and John’s hands gripping his thighs for support didn’t help in the slightest. The doctor settled comfortably over him, loosely, letting a little huff of content as he let his legs swing over the armchair. Sherlock was too confused to be petrified.

“Are you the type of drunk that is… cuddly, to say the least?”

What kind of stupid question is that, the answer is literally sat on your lap.

“Apparently,” he slipped an arm around Sherlock’s shoulders for balance - and also because he wanted to - “‘s not very British of me, I know… I guess I just fancied some-”, and suddenly, he seemed to sober up for a few seconds and was so sincerely concerned when he asked, “Do you mind?”

John Watson was soft. And oh, how Sherlock would never get tired of it. People rarely tend to be soft on him, rather pissed off - legitimately. He didn’t need people to be soft on him, but he’d got to admit that it was rather refreshing.

“No. It’s fine.”

He remembered why he didn’t like to drink. If nicotine - or else - helped him think faster and clearer, it wasn’t in any way the case concerning alcohol, not strong enough to distract him from the horrendously boring world, but insidious enough to mess with his train of thoughts. His mind palace was flooded with ethanol: words, concepts and ideas floated at the surface, all mixed up, out of their assigned places, navigating before his eyes in a chaotic ballet, like they had a mind of their own.

All of that was way too far from his usual neat, tidy mind world. And he did not like it.

He observed John.

Madonna.

Thin paper. Cheap tape. Sloping handwriting. Note must have been written in a hurry. Tape is from a classic everyday supermarket, middle class. Author must have been in a domestic environment, possibly stressed or drunk.

The handwriting appeared so strangely familiar before his eyes, and the way letters were traced tickled something in his brain. He flew over all of the cards, letters, notebooks and other memos stocked into the different drawers of his mind palace, and tried to remember if he ever wrote a blog about all the different editions of blue pens available in supermarkets through the years, and how the shades of blue used in manufacture evolved through time. And eventually he put the finger on it, cracking the case!

Right. That was his own handwriting. From approximately fifteen minutes ago.

How embarrassing.

He focused back on John, retracing all the things he already knew about him, like a reassuring familiar path, a mantra.

Grey hair. Dim light. Lashes.

Wrinkles. Tired eyes. Expressive. Kind. Warm.

Lips.

Kiss?

He shook his head. That was new.

A hand tickled his temple, ever so softly. “Is this alright?”

He hummed. And Watson slowly deepened the touch, brushing his hair from his fingertips, then playing with his curls. It was soothing and the detective felt his eyelids becoming heavier and heavier. He leaned his head back, seeking the softness of the chair, and maybe a bit more pressure from his friend’s touch.

John’s large hand was on his skull, massaging with care the back of his head. He could tell the man was a doctor, the stimulus was so pleasant, hitting all the right spots, giving his brain a shot of relaxation. In spite of how purely physical the sensation was, his mind palace slowly felt clearer and quieter. He sighed in relaxation without even noticing, and the sentence escaped:

“That’s good.”

He hated being drunk. So physical, and emotional. And to make matters worse in front of John, unable to control his parasite thoughts. This was definitely very humiliating.

“Yeah?” John snorted, gently mocking this very unsherlockian outburst.

“Shut it.” He shot his best threatening stare at his friend, but his eyes got themselves caught by John’s. A soft, kind, welcoming blue, complete opposite to his piercing electric blue orbs that would make any sensible soul scared of being absorbed.

Unlike the ones he liked to call ‘ordinary people’, Sherlock had nothing against eye contact; it often came in handy, being quite revealing of a person. Watson, however, was one of those ‘ordinary people’ and usually struggled with these kinds of things, but presently was drunk as a lord, so he could handle a bit of eye contact, for this one time, with this one person.

He got impossibly closer, absolutely unscared of being absorbed, or simply being careless, “How are your eyes even real?”

Their foreheads were touching, John leaning into the touch, eyes to eyes. Sherlock took care of adding mental notes on the way each of his lashes was drawn upon his friend’s eyes. He could always put this in the new ‘John’s room’ that seemed to have imposed as a room of choice in his mind palace.

John’s grip tightened into his hair and that’s when he saw it.

Dilated pupils.

He couldn’t check John’s pulse, not now. Well, as a matter of fact he could, technically, but he was pretty sure that the doctor wouldn’t be so happy about it, being - rightfully so - fed up with Sherlock reading him like an open book. But he could check his own. He grabbed his own wrist in urgency, arm around the older one, pushing him closer to his chest, and took his own pulse.

John huffed, eyes anchored to him. “How’s the heart?”

“Too fast.”

John’s drunk smile got from one of his ears to the other. “Lemme do, I’m a doctor.”

Sherlock frowned in confusion, and a hand gently cradled his jaw, tilting his head up until he found John's eyes again. The latter softly pushed a curl out of the way and approached slowly, ever so slowly - leaving plenty of time for his friend to withdraw - his forehead to press a reassuring kiss on it. A shiver went down Sherlock’s spine and he couldn’t help but notice how illogical his body was acting, but for once, decided to keep the thought to himself. Instead, he looked - marvelled and observant - at John going back to stroking his cheek, prepping his next attack. In an agonising slowness, he peppered one, then two, then three kisses, each closer to the detective’s mouth than the precedent.

Sherlock, immobile, took note of his blood pulsing into his lips. It made absolutely no sense according to the elementary rules of vital functions, but he was stuck too deep into this armchair, too deep into these arms, to be upset about it.

John straightened up a little, as though this moment was more serious than the rest of it. He cupped Sherlock’s face not only with one hand this time but with both of them - and it helped the detective get anchored to reality, maintaining his head on his shoulders and not letting it fly away as he had the firm impression it was going to. John stopped impossibly close to his face and Sherlock thought that he was going to die of apprehension.

He was the most impassive man in all London - or at least he thought - resolving on a daily basis the most sordid cases, confronting the most deranged minds, going through any ordeal unbothered.

But John Watson would be the one getting Sherlock Holmes shaking.

“May I?”

His mind palace collapsed, everything suddenly getting out of control. He gazed at John, and no matter where he placed his eyes:

Kiss?

Kiss?

Kiss

Kiss.

He didn’t shake the thought away this time. For curiosity's sake, he convinced himself. For an experiment, he tried to shout into his head. Because I want it, was the answer.

“‘suppose so.”

Do better, Holmes.

John gave him a faint, drunken smile, and Sherlock caught himself admiring how suitable it was on him. There wasn’t much space in between their lips to close, but John applied to the task with such tenderness that it made Sherlock doubt whether a single person could even be capable of this. Sherlock hadn’t particularly thought he would sincerely kiss someone one day, but he thought that if he did, it would be like in the few novels he remembered having read; everything would stop: as well as time, his brain would also have gone shut. But no, he’d gotten everything wrong: John’s kissing contained so much to decipher, so much to feed his brain with burgeoning thoughts. His kiss held the friendship they had, the respect and admiration he cultivated towards him, the jokes - the lame ones, and the not-yet-made ones -, the daily bickering, the warming smell of all the cups of tea they had shared, and endless love.

Drowning everything else was endless love.

The kiss was wet, bitter from the alcohol, but it was right, it felt right. John’s mouth, in its tenderness, revealed a gnawing hunger. A hunger for Sherlock, for his lips, for the entirety of his being, a radiating hunger of becoming one. All of this through the most delicate of kisses.

Sherlock was always game for a good paradox.

He tried to accumulate, welcome and treat all of the new information that would be able to illustrate some of the theoretical stuff he had read about - putting some sensations away in a dusty folder labelled ‘kiss’ buried deep into his mind - but a minuscule movement of John’s lips against his made a fuse blew up in his brain. He tried to unravel the thread of his thoughts but a jolt of alcohol drowned everything once again, sweeping all away with a want to taste his friend more. And at this particular moment, the weight of John on him, the light pressure of his hands, holding his face with the sweetest firmness, and his breathing - so loud and meaningful - all of this pushed Sherlock through the edge.

Tentatively, he returned the kiss, as if he had any clue about the way to proceed. He just went for it, pressing dumbly his lips back, and surprisingly it seemed to work if he was to believe John grinning intently against him. The feeling of hard teeth amongst the softness of their mouth mingling was new and intriguing, Sherlock thought, but not disgusting. All the more it meant that John was glad, and that was the best he could hope for.

Saying that the doctor was glad was a cute euphemism - he could focus on nothing else than savouring the moment, savouring Sherlock like he had craved so strongly. Yet, instead of asking for more, he gently pulled back and blinked, satisfied, but not replete.

The warm feeling leaving his mouth disappointed the detective, letting nothing but a slightly damp feeling on his lips. The both of them slowly caught their breath back, mouths parted.

And the hunger was there again, but what Sherlock had taken at first for a carnal hunger was in fact a hunger for merging. John thought that if he didn’t hug Sherlock right now and here he might die. He simply needed to hold him tight, so tight, as tight as humanly possible. He’d needed it for quite a certain time. He nestled into his neck to squeeze his friend as intently as he could, and Sherlock cradled him in a protective embrace, honestly rather surprised at himself for doing so. Hugging was to him a notion less well known than homicide or drug doing, not even to mention cuddling: nothing but a soppy concept for uncompleted people with gaps to fill.

But John Watson had gaps to fill, and if he could be of any help to it, be assured that Sherlock Holmes was ready to do anything within his capacities. Luckily, and in pure coincidence whatsoever, cuddling felt good, and with Watson even felt… fulfilling.

“Bloody doctor,” his voice was the usual deep tone, only sounding a bit raspy for a connoisseur like John, “you did do a really bad job with my heart rate, I must say.”

A short silence punctuated the statement, shattering into pieces to the sudden giddy laughters from the both of them. It was a freeing laughter: it felt so good, it felt so light to just let go. For a few seconds, the quiet room was filled with the sound of loud giggles. And each time one of them tried to calm down, a simple glance made them both start again, just like little kids.

Eventually they managed to calm down, and in a mumbling voice John commented in Sherlock’s neck, warm air tickling the sensitive area, nose buried just below his ear: “I know, but ‘t’was worth it, wasn’t it?”

The consulting detective didn’t respond. His everyday life already consisted mostly of stating impossibly obvious things. He could take a break just for now.

John seemed to understand, anyway.

Sherlock took note about the increased levels of serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin running all the way from his brain to his heart, back and forth, and in this moment he understood just a tiny bit more what was all the fuss about ‘love’.

The doctor huffed into his neck, warm air sending chills to every inch of skin ever known to Sherlock.

“No but seriously, you don’t know if Madonna is pretty?”

“Haven’t got a clue.”