Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Mariana’s flat is extremely cosy. 

Now, John is fully aware that ‘cosy’ is often used as an acceptable term for ‘small’, because it’s the exact remark that Sherlock had made after seeing her place furnished for the first time. He’d then followed it up with, “Nothing wrong with that, of course,” immediately robbing it of any subtlety that he may have initially managed. 

The thing is that it genuinely is cosy. If there’s one thing that Mariana has lots of, it’s blankets; if there’s another thing she has lots of, it’s pillows. Subsequently, her tiny living space-slash-kitchenette is one of the softest, warmest, and yes, cosiest places John has ever had the pleasure of occupying.

Their tri-weekly-ish tea date is going approximately the same as ever: John finished his tea about fifteen minutes ago—a tragic side effect of being raised by Carol Watson is that he inherited her pain tolerance and penchant to finish hot drinks while they still had the ability to scald—and Mariana is still chipping away at hers. Mariana’s feet are up on the sofa, and one of John’s feet is tucked under his bad thigh, big toe feeling out the scar tissue for the thousandth time. Most importantly, they’re gossipping about an assortment of their exes. 

Pretty standard fare for a Thursday, all things being equal.

“Yeah…” Mariana takes a sip of her tea. “The first boyfriend wasn’t great. Maybe the inability to date when I was younger made me a less… ah… good judge of character? I kind of just got to university and attached myself to the first guy who showed interest.”

“Mhm, yeah. Classic.”

“Broke up with him after like, three months?” Mariana laughs. “Not after some truly terrible sex, though. I mean, like… awful.”

“Did he not—”

“He didn’t even know the clitoris existed, John. It was… it was. Yeah, wow.”

John snorts. “This is where I get to feel superior.”

“What, because you’re a guy?”

“No, Mariana, because I know where the clitoris is and I’m not a selfish arse.”

“Huh,” Mariana gulps down her final dregs of tea and sets her mug on the floor. “Could’ve fooled me.” At John’s protesting noise, she relents. “Kidding! Like, TMI? But also I’m glad to hear it.”

“Thanking you.” John attempts a bow from where he’s already sat half folded in on himself.

Mariana tilts her head back so far that it’s almost dangling out into the office. 

“Hm,” she says.

“Hm?” John replies. 

“Hmm…” 

“Okay, not sure what's going on now. You good?”

“Just thinking.” Mariana laughs undervoice, a breathy thing. “My first time with a woman was just—so different.”

“Oh?” It’s not the first time Mariana has mentioned liking women, but John gets his ally head on regardless. Now, as the token cishet guy living with two queer people, John likes to think that he gets on well—and to be fair, he’s always had a lot of gay friends. 

It feels nice to be trusted with a part of someone that isn’t always treated kindly. John’s heart always aches a little bit about it, even at passing mentions. 

“Yeah, like… I dunno, when I realised and when I managed to shake off all the weird anxiety and fear surrounding it all, and I actually just—got out of my head, hooked up with a woman—it was so different but, so the same?” Mariana doesn’t lift her head up, doesn’t meet his eyes. “It just suddenly felt like I was included. Like I was cared about.”

“Mhm.”

“And it made sex with guys better afterwards.”

“Wh–really?”

“I dunno!” Mariana laughs. “I think I felt more like I knew myself, and just generally happier to like, be assertive. Like, yeah, I’m here, I’m involved, I’m gonna tell you what to do.”

“Well, good for you.” John smiles despite himself. 

“It was nice. It is nice.”

John nods, even though Mariana still isn’t looking at him. He’s getting drowsy. Mariana’s blankets must be getting to him. 

“Getting to that point was…” Mariana shifts onto her side, kicking one of her legs over John’s lap in the process. 

“How…” John’s lips purse. Is there a right way to ask about this? Does it matter? “When did you—”

“I was, what, twenty-three?” Mariana grabs a pillow from behind her back and hugs it tightly. “I just, I always had friends that I talked to about this stuff and they were always so, like, cool. I don’t know. I just started thinking about it one day.”

John nods again. It feels like the right thing to do.

“And when I thought about it, it was like all this stuff— all this stuff from when I was younger, and from then, right then in my life—kind of fit together.” Mariana sighs. “Then it was just a lot of talking and reading and psyching myself up to figure out if the epiphany was just. I don’t know. Me making something up to feel better about being twenty-three.”

“Well, I can tell you that I did not do anything like that at twenty-three, so,” John says uselessly. He feels like the room is colder all of a sudden. His chest hurts. Mariana carries on.

“I know, right! It’s so funny how much your brain will fight against itself with things like this.”

“I had no idea,” John says. He’s not sure why it sounds so hollow. 

“But yeah, I just—eventually managed to pin myself down and just sleep with a woman. Honestly, even then I almost thought my way out of it,” she laughs, humourless. “But it felt right. And I felt more like me.” She finally turns back to John, peeking over the edge of the pillow clutched to her chest. “Sooooo… yeah.”

“Wow.”

“Maybe a bit much for…” she checks her phone, “two thirty, oh my God I need to get back to work.” 

The pillow is abandoned to the floor and Mariana’s leg is pulled out of John’s lap. John, for his part, feels weirdly—frozen to the spot. He’s barely sure he’s breathing. 

“Hey. Hey.” Mariana’s fingers snap impatiently right next to his ear. “Up, up, vamos. Work.”

He physically shakes himself out of his bizarre stupor. “Ah! Work! Yes!”

“Yes, work. Off my sofa, you probably have editing of some kind to get on with.” The hand that was just clicking in his ear is offered to pull him to his feet. John gladly accepts. 

“Okay, okay!” He lets himself get pulled and, frankly, bodily shoved out of Mariana’s home with minimal complaint. “See you later.” 

“Dinner, right? Seven?”

John grimaces. “Let’s go with eight, I need to make sure Sherlock is in the land of the living before I start cooking in case he has last minute input.”

Mariana snorts, ungainly. “Classic.”

“Ah, we love him really.” His stomach turns over. “Well, see you, then.”

“See you see you bye!” The door is slammed in John’s face. The landing outside is quiet. The sounds of Baker Street drift through the front door and wall, gently muffled. John still feels cold. 

Instead of assessing whatever the fuck just happened, he turns to start up the stairs to 221b. He’s got editing to do, after all. 

When the cold, dense, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach doesn’t go away by the early evening, John starts thinking about it. 

He thinks about it when Sherlock haphazardly makes his way into John’s room after what can’t have been more than four hours of sleep; he thinks about it while he and Sherlock bicker over the evening menu. He thinks about it as he pushes Sherlock into the living room, thinks about it while he’s grabbing shopping bags from under the sink, thinks about it all the way to the shops (alone) and thinks about it as he stands in the vegetable aisle.

It is something very difficult to place. The first coherent thought that rises from the painful cavity in his stomach that is it is: did he ever enjoy having sex?

The answer is obvious: yes. John nods, satisfied with his findings, and picks up a lettuce. 

It does not go away. 

As he slowly makes his way down his shopping list—a list that’s getting long enough to come dangerously close to a Big Shop—he approaches the question from a different angle. Did he feel comfortable having sex? Did he feel present?

The weird thing is that he knows, knows, that the answer is yes. He knows there’s no contradiction, nothing hiding in the cracks on this answer; he’s always tried to be conscientious, and almost every woman he’s slept with has been appreciative of that in a way that’s made him feel warm, recognised in some way. Proud of himself. He felt like he was there because he had to be there, be in that moment, because he’s always been the one giving, receiving the trust of another and taking that vulnerability in his hands.

It tugs insistently at one of his lungs, and John’s breath catches. Okay. 

He felt comfortable. He felt present. He felt in control. 

He’s not sure why it isn’t going away.

John’s basket is just about as full as it can possibly be, and he gets a few dirty looks from the other shoppers in the self-checkout queue. He does his best to ignore them and is largely successful. The beeping and rustling and mid-level chatter around him is—comforting. 

A self-checkout clears for him. John sets down his shopping, gets out his shopping bags and starts packing. 

It’s… does he want to not have to be so present? That doesn’t make sense. John’s heard genuine horror stories from many a female friend about guys who didn’t care about anything but themselves, and has long since resolved to be unfailingly aware when putting parts of himself literally inside another person. The maths isn’t complex. 

Nothing is particularly helped, John muses, by the spectre of his more significant exes hanging over the thought experiment. Carrie, in particular, had left him for—well. He tries not to think about it now. He tries not to think about it ever, honestly. 

The shadow of exes past, looming as it is, throws a particular point into sharp relief: John knows (hopes?) that he’s received a huge amount of vulnerability, but he’s struggling to remember when he felt particularly vulnerable during sex. 

It lightens slightly. 

Okay, John thinks, now we’re getting somewhere. 

So, he ‘hasn’t been vulnerable’ and some deep part of himself is expressing its displeasure at that fact. He’s not really sure how to actually appease that part of himself, given that he hasn’t slept with anyone since 2022—anyway, how would he achieve that even if given the opportunity? It’s not like he didn’t have close relationships with his exes. Does he want to get—

John’s stomach inverts itself. The wave of arousal that hits him isn’t unlike being whacked in the solar plexus with a bag of wet cement. He has to bite down hard on his tongue so he doesn’t simply double over in the middle of the Aldi self-checkout area. 

Well! The silver lining is that he’s only got a single cabbage left to scan and bag. The dark cloud is just—everything else about what’s happening to him today!

John leaves Aldi with significantly more shopping than he meant to get, a slightly weirder feeling pit in his stomach, and the faintest whisper of an erection. Not really standard fare for a Thursday anymore.

It gets heavier again. John doesn’t really want to think about it anymore, though. The weight of the shopping bags in his hands is a nice distraction from the fact that it is starting to resolve itself into a shape that looks slightly too much like shame. 

“Are you alright, Watson?”

Ten fifty-seven in the evening. Mariana left for bed about ten minutes ago. John is doing the washing up, because of course he is, he always does the washing up—

“Watson,” Sherlock repeats, “are you alright?”

“Sure,” John replies.

“You really don’t seem to be,” Sherlock says, a healthy amount of doubt colouring his tone. 

“And what makes you say that?” John scrubs harder at a—well, it could be a bit of solidified food or a scratch, won’t know if it’ll come off until he’s tried—on one of the plates. 

“Well, you’ve been talking less than normal, and picking at the skin around your nails incessantly. You keep putting your hand to your sternum, as—”

“Alright,” John says with slightly more force than necessary, “I’m feeling a bit off today, but it’s really nothing to worry about.”

Catastrophically turned on in Aldi at the thought of getting fucked, but it’s nothing to worry about, sure, says a small and snide voice in his head. Not for the first time, John wishes he could perform a partial lobotomy on himself. 

“A bit off,” Sherlock says.

“Yeah.” John turns back to the washing up. He’s almost done, and then he can go to bed and sleep and put this whole thing behind him—

“Humour me,” Sherlock says, “what in particular are you feeling ‘off’ about today?”

Now, a list of things that John can’t say goes something like this:

• My stomach hurts
• I feel like something’s really wrong with me,
• Like, really genuinely wrong,
• I can’t stop thinking about it
• I want someone to sleep with me, and not the other way around,
• I want—

“Just a bit of a headache,” John says. “Nothing to worry about.”

“But I am worried,” Sherlock replies, and he looks concerned, not just in his eyes, not just in the set of his mouth; every line of his body is angled in towards John. John feels pinned down, a fly in Sherlock’s ever-present web. Sherlock’s hand moves slowly, giving John plenty of time to move, to avoid him.

John doesn’t move. Why would he? His chest seizes violently as Sherlock’s hand settles lightly over his own where it’s resting on the counter, and John ignores the feelings and Sherlock’s face and the electric tinge in the space between them.

“Tell me,” Sherlock says, unerring. 

“I’m fine,” John lies. He fights every cell in his body to not give into the animal reflex to flee. With the light behind him, Sherlock’s eyes are shadowy and dark and—

Sherlock lets John’s hand go. John laughs at nothing, scratches the back of his neck, and says, “I might head in for the night.”

“Okay.” Sherlock’s posture is unreadable now. John isn’t sure whether he’s done something wrong or if Sherlock is just being Sherlock. 

“Okay!” John claps his hands together, flinching at the loudness of the noise in their tiny kitchen. He laughs at nothing again. “Night, then.”

“Goodnight, John,” Sherlock replies, stepping to the side to allow John an easier path to the corridor. John’s stomach lurches at Sherlock’s use of his first name—yet another weird thing to mark down in a day full of bizarre shit. 

John surrenders to the animal part of himself and escapes down the corridor to his room. Right before he closes his door, though, he turns back towards Sherlock. 

“Night,” he says again, and then shuts the door behind him. 

It’s lunchtime on Saturday; time for coffee with Mariana, again. Unrelatedly, John is just about ready to crawl out of his skin.

It, the feeling, the whatever, hasn’t gone away. He woke up with an insistent voice in the back of his head, telling him to think about it, and try as he might, he can’t shove the voice back wherever it came from. 

John knows Sherlock has noticed, as well, and that just makes it worse—Sherlock treating him like a Ming vase is making it a lot less easy of a problem for John to ignore. 

John has this idea, though—this idea that Mariana put it into his head, and maybe she can get rid of it again. 

He walks slowly down the stairs. He collects his thoughts. By John’s reckoning, he can start the conversation a few ways.

Hi, Mariana, I think I’m losing my mind.

“Nope,” John says out loud.

Do you think sexual experimentation is normal for people in their thirties?

John grimaces. “No, not that.”

What was it like for you? What was it like for him? Did it hurt?

John stops, a metre and a half short of the door.

“What?” he says. “It’s not—”

“Not what?” Mariana asks, swinging the door open all the way, a mug of what smells like coffee already in her hand.

“Isn’t that too much caffeine for the afternoon?”

“Nah,” Mariana says breezily. “Just the right amount, I think.” She takes a loud sip. “So, what’s not what?”

“Nothing!” John almost makes a face at how forced his tone is. Mariana raises an eyebrow.

“Oooookay,” she says. “Sure.” She presses her back against her front door, giving John plenty of room to enter. 

John makes his way through the office and into the kitchen, trying to adjust his posture to give off the air of someone who is having a very normal few days. Confidence, he thinks, carefree… carefreeness? Is that a word?

“Is carefreeness a word?” John asks Mariana as she enters the kitchen behind him.

“Uh,” Mariana frowns. “Not sure. I don’t think so?”

“Wait, let me—“ John pulls out his phone and types the word—maybe-word—into Google. “Aha, yes! It is a word, get in.”

“And you’re so happy about this because…”

“No—no reason.” John starts making himself a cup of tea, very deliberately relaxing his shoulders.

“Huh.”

The kettle is rumbling slightly. Mariana’s kettle is electric, and has a label wrapped around the cord; the plug situation in her kitchen is woeful. John’s not sure why she even owns half the appliances that are attached to the nest of cables next to the wall—who on earth needs an air fryer and a rice cooker?

“I can feel you judging the cables, John,” Mariana says from the sofa, a note of warning in her tone.

“I’m always judging the cables, Mari,” John shoots back.

“Well, stop.”

“Stopping right away,” John mutters. 

The kettle is rumbling more insistently now, the water jumping and bubbling visibly through the slender plastic window on the side. 

John says, “How’ve you been?”

Mariana says, “Good!”

The kettle must almost be done. John drums his fingers against the countertop.

“Mariana,” he says. Stops. Thinks.

Mariana puts down her coffee. 

“John?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he hedges. Mariana raises her eyebrows expectantly. The kettle reaches boiling point and clicks off. “I’ve been thinking about—what you said. On Thursday.”

“What… part of it?” Mariana’s fully at attention now, both feet planted on the floor, leaning in. 

“The part about—uh,” John looks away, at the kettle. He should really start brewing his tea. “The, the part about.” He knows the words. He does.

He reaches for the kettle instead, pours the water into his mug.

“Exes?” Mariana says apprehensively. John breathes out a sigh of relief; this, at least, gives him an in.

“Kind of? About, um. The way you felt about… sex, after you figured yourself out.” He waves a hand vaguely in her direction, silently begging her to understand.

“Okay. Uh… okay.” She pauses. “What?”

John sighs. “It’s just been bothering me.”

“What has?” 

“Just—I don’t know! I don’t know, Mariana!” John doesn’t know why, but he’s almost shouting, a rising tide of distress constricting his airway.

“Hey,” Mariana snaps, “stop.”

John takes a deep breath. He looks up at the ceiling. 

“Sorry,” he says.

“Thank you.” Mariana is frowning, hands clasped in her lap. “John, I need you to try and figure out what’s going on, or—”

“I don’t have—I don’t know what it is.” His voice is shaking. “I don’t know what’s going on with me.”

“Was it… do you… was it about being assertive?” She clicks her tongue, considering. “No offence, but I can’t see you having a problem with that.”

“No, it was, it was about being—” He makes a noise of irritation. “God, what is wrong with me?”

“Thursday, thursday,” Mariana mutters, “what even—” She snaps her fingers. “Wait, Sherlock said you were being weird.”

“Oh, brilliant.”

“Have you been feeling, like, bad? He said you said you had a headache, but—”

“Why do you two talk about me?”

“Well,” Mariana says, frustratingly reasonable, “we talk about him.”

“Ugh, whatever.” John takes a mutinous sip of his tea. The burning on his tongue helps ground him. “Yeah, I’ve just felt kind of—off. Weird.”

“Thursday…” Mariana says again, and then says, “oh.”

John’s shoulders lock up, apprehension flooding his torso. 

“Oh,” Mariana mumbles. She looks like someone’s slapped her across the face. “John, are you—” An unfocused panic is in her eyes now. She seems unsure. It makes John feel a little braver. 

“Ask me,” he says, bracing himself. 

“Do you think,” Mariana says, picking her way carefully around the words, “you’re—that you might be attracted to—to men?”

It’s not even close to the question John thought he’d be answering. He’s genuinely, truly, utterly dumbfounded. 

“Uh,” he says.

“Just—think about it.” Mariana’s determined, now. 

So John thinks about it. He thinks about it, that dense knot of shame sitting uncomfortably in his stomach. He thinks about feeling adrift in his late teens, his early twenties, his late twenties, now. 

He has no idea what kind of face he’s making, but it prompts Mariana to say, “You know, it’s never too late.”

His breath catches. He thinks about sick jealousy and formless longing and how his heart hurt when friends talked about the moment they knew. 

He wonders when he gave up. 

John sets his tea on the counter gently, and then lets himself—well, collapse, really. His legs fold under him and he sits down hard on the floor, back against Mari’s kitchen cabinets. He pushes the left leg of his trousers up and feels for the scar tissue. 

“John,” Mariana says. John didn’t see her drop down from where she was sitting; she’s on the floor now, her back against the sofa. She’s got a brave face on, but she looks hurt. She looks grief-stricken. 

“I—” John says. Stops. Thinks. Thinks. Shuts his eyes. 

“John,” Mariana repeats. 

“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s fine.”

“It’s okay if you’re not fine,” she replies. 

“Okay,” he says. It rings like a bell, hollow. Mariana laughs. 

“Okay,” she whispers. 

John’s head falls forward onto his knees where they’re curled up in front of him. He feels unhinged, frenetic energy suffusing his entire body. 

Do you think you might be attracted to men, Mariana had said. It’s such a stupidly obvious answer that he kind of wants to kick himself. 

“Does this mean I don’t get to be the token cis-het man anymore?” His voice is unsteady. 

Mariana laughs again. “If you’re—if you’re not—no, I don’t think you do.”

“It feels bad.”

“To be—”

“Not to have known.” The truth of the words almost closes his throat and asphyxiates him. How, how did he not ever once think—

“Sometimes, there’s no escaping those feelings.” Mariana is quiet, pensive. John looks up. “Just try not to let them…” She’s doing that thing she does, sweeping her eyes from left to right to left, trying to find the right word in English. “Become you. You’re more than what you lost by not knowing.”

“Okay.” John exhales tightly. “Mari, I don’t think I’m fine.”

“I know,” she says. “I get it. I really—I do.”

Her hand finds its way to his ankle, fingers lacing around his where they’re feeling their way over damaged flesh. She lets their joined hands fall to the floor and squeezes gently. She doesn’t let go.

The next few hours swim uncertainly in John’s memory. He talks to Mariana, she talks back, they keep their fingers interlaced and she kindly doesn’t mention the tremor in John’s voice. 

Eventually she gets back to work, and so does he; he sits down in front of his laptop and tries to think about editing, and adventures, and Spotify analytics. He spends a full three-quarters of an hour looking for the right music to go over a certain snippet—the frustration of trying to track it down is absolutely worth the distraction. 

At half-past-six exactly, Sherlock knocks on the door of John’s room. The door is open, as it usually is, so John’s not sure why Sherlock’s being so cautious. It puts him on edge.

“Hello,” Sherlock says. 

“Hi?” John replies. Sherlock has a plaster on one of his long, elegant fingers. The plaster has Winnie the Pooh on it. It makes John smile despite himself.

“Oh.” Sherlock cocks his head. “Feeling better?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Sherlock takes a few steps into the room, sits down on John’s bed. “How is… editing.” The question is so stilted and reluctant that John smiles again, and then starts laughing. 

“Sherlock, you don’t have to pretend to care about audio editing,” he manages around his laughter, “I’m fine.”

“I’m not pretending!” Sherlock sounds indignant, even though he’s clearly lying. He gets up off the bed and leans over the back of John’s chair, his chin brushing John’s shoulder. “That looks like very good audio. Yes. Quite.”

John laughs harder. 

“Alright, fine,” Sherlock relents. He stays leaning over the back of John’s chair, fingers drumming restlessly along the back. John swallows; his throat is feeling rough and dry all of a sudden. Has he been drinking enough water?

“Well, mate, I’m sorry to have worried you.” God, Sherlock was worrying about him. Sherlock had confided in Mariana that John was acting strangely, and it was all because of a sexuality crisis. The remaining fragments of the ball of shame in John’s stomach tighten. 

“No worries, Watson,” Sherlock says breezily. “I think I’ve figured out—”

“What?” John asks, suddenly extremely tense. 

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

“Sherlock, that’s obviously what I’m going to do if you say that.”

“Well, don’t!” Sherlock is clearly trying not to smile, but John can see the twitch at the corner of his mouth in his peripheral vision. 

“Being bullied in my own home. Amazing.” John swallows again, a few things slotting together in his head all of a sudden. He buries them down deep, because a Sherlock-related sexuality crisis is the absolute last thing he needs. Especially while the man is literally in his room. 

Sherlock finally pushes away from John’s chair, sitting back down on the bed. John spins around to face him. Sherlock is staring at the ceiling, a pensive look on his face; John immediately unburies a number of feelings by studying the angle of Sherlock’s left cheekbone. 

“There’s a crack in the paint on your ceiling,” Sherlock notes dispassionately. 

“Yeah,” John says. “It’s been there since we moved in.”

“Yes, but it’s gotten slightly wider.”

“No it—wait, has it actually?” John cranes his neck upwards and sees no perceivable change in the crack’s length or width. 

“Yes, there’s a point near the end where some of the paint has flaked off. Nothing to worry about, of course; I expect it’s from vibrations through the walls.”

“Sure,” John says, still trying to figure out what the hell Sherlock is actually talking about. 

“Lovely,” Sherlock says. He flops backwards onto the bed, long arms spread as wide as they can go, reaching for something. 

“Did you want anything in particular, or…”

“Just to see you.” It’s delivered the same way as anything Sherlock ever says, with maybe a stronger undercurrent of warmth that somehow feels undeserved. For no reason he can discern, John suddenly and desperately wants to throw himself out of their front window. 

“Oh.” John’s voice cracks as he says it—his voice cracks on a single syllable. The desire to escape out a window intensifies. “Cool!”

Sherlock snorts a laugh, ungainly in a way that he rarely is outside of their flat. “How eloquent.”

“Yeah, yeah,” John turns back to his laptop, flushed. “Yuck it up, you big smug prick. I’ve got more editing to do.”

“Alright.” Sherlock makes no attempt to sit up, or roll off the bed, or leave John’s room in any way. 

John tries to ignore him, he does, and he gets a good amount of work done—he manages to prune a good amount of useless audio. He saves a few clips to his personal folder as well; one of Mariana singing, another of Mariana and Sherlock arguing about toothpaste, and a final clip of Sherlock listing the breed of every dog he sees in Hyde Park. John really, really hopes that Sherlock isn’t watching him work.

At seven o’clock, Sherlock sighs and rolls onto his side. At seven-fifteen, he curls up into a ball. John keeps working and tries not to think about the master detective lying on his bed.

At quarter-to-eight, John realises that Sherlock has fallen asleep. 

At quarter-to-eight, John starts thinking about everything—his whole life, honestly—and he can’t find it in him to stop himself. 

The first thought is of being twenty-four, young and in an unfamiliar place and stitching people together, saving limbs and failing to save limbs and failing to save lives. He thinks about one of the lieutenants, a guy named Rafi—he was only slightly taller than John, and had a kind of irrepressible energy to him, even in the most dire circumstances. John remembers having liked his smile a lot, maybe more so than would be considered normal; it didn’t matter, because Rafi got punctured through the lung and the thigh by a few nasty pieces of shrapnel and barely escaped going home in a body bag.

John hasn’t heard from him since. He wonders how Rafi is sometimes. He remembers that his hands weren’t shaking as he sutured the leg wound, though the shrapnel had missed Rafi’s femoral artery by a hair’s breadth. 

Sherlock shifts in his sleep, mumbles something incoherent, and sighs. 

“So much for consistent breathing patterns,” John mumbles. He’s smiling, though. It scares him. 

Andrew—Andy—in year seven; he’d been much taller than all of the other boys, and John was nauseatingly jealous in a way that he can physically feel even now. Andy had been kind, and smart, and had once found John crying behind the lockers after he twisted his ankle during P.E. He hadn’t told anyone, and John had found a box of plasters on his backpack the next day. He never thanked him.

When he was five, during a game of tag, he held the hand of a boy whose name he can no longer remember—what he does remember is thinking that the boy’s hands weren’t so different from a girl’s. He thinks he might have blushed. 

The other boys had laughed at them, John remembers. 

Sherlock stirs again. His fingers twitch. John completely gives up on working and spins around; it feels wrong to stare at Sherlock, so he stares at the crack in the paint on the ceiling instead. 

It feels a little bit like a funeral, this remembering and remembering and thinking and knowing. Mariana said it’s normal, but the loss still strips away John’s internal organs and replaces them with lead. Knowing, not having known. Feeling things and not thinking, never thinking, never letting the feelings condense and run down into his conscious mind.

It had been grief in Mariana’s eyes, just hours ago. It’s a grief that he feels now. The ceiling looks the same as it had when John moved in.

Sherlock makes an unhappy noise in his throat and rolls onto his other side. John’s almost one hundred percent certain that he’s still asleep. 

John looks at Sherlock’s sleeping face. He doesn’t know how to fully parse his emotions on the sight in front of him, in no small part due to reluctance. He feels like he’s walking along some treacherous mountain path, and any misstep could send him plummeting down—somewhere. A big inky black unknown somewhere. 

Sherlock is going to wake up at some point, and John doesn’t know if he can be in the room when he does. It’s something-past-eight. John stands, stretches, and heads to the kitchen. There’s nothing that a cup of tea can’t fix.

One week passes slowly, and the next passes quickly. Every moment that John isn’t occupied is a moment his mind forces him to spend unpicking every relationship he’s ever had; this problem is easily solved by drowning himself in work.

“You’re worse than Sherlock at the moment,” Mariana jokes at one point. She’s smiling, but her eyebrows are furrowed. 

“Ah, don’t worry about it.” John brushes her off easily, but—

Gunfire. Smoke. Sand and trees and that’s not right, that’s definitely not—he’s running, he’s running and it doesn’t matter that the forest is sinking into the sand because there are bullets clipping his hands and face with every step. 

The bomb goes off. John falls, assesses, looks down at his leg; it’s mangled. It’s ruined. He reaches down and pulls a fragment of the Russian kid’s ribcage out of the wound. It doesn’t hurt. He can see a tooth in there too, shining dully against the mess of burns and dead flesh. His hands start sinking into the sand before something wrenches them out. John thinks he’s making some kind of noise, because his throat hurts, but he can’t hear anything above the ringing in his ears, and the gunfire, and—

“John,” someone says distantly, and then the rest of the words are lost in the dull roar. The voice sounds familiar. John tries to move towards it, but his limbs keep sinking and his body feels heavy and useless and there’s the pain, radiating from his leg right the way up to his jaw, the base of his skull. 

“… here, I’m here,” says the voice, and suddenly John’s eyes hurt. He flinches away instinctively, head falling back onto a pillow, and the disorientation freezes him in place. 

“Bollocks,” says the voice, “you weren’t supposed to—”

John tries to say, Where am I, but what comes out instead is an unsteady breath, and then some kind of high pitched whimper. There’s a thud as someone kneels down in front of him, hands fluttering around John’s face, not quite touching, never touching. 

“Sherl,” John manages to slur out. “Sherlock, what’s…”

“Night terror, I think,” Sherlock replies, almost businesslike. “I couldn’t see what was happening properly, so I turned on the light, but your eyes were open.” He huffs a breath out through his nose. “A thoughtless error on my part. You must have reacted to the stimulus.”

“Oh.” John’s just about managed to focus his eyes on Sherlock’s face at this point, limbs still feeling gluey and numb. 

“My apologies for waking you—I did—I don’t—hm.” Sherlock’s lips are pressed tightly together, his face crumpled. He’s upset. “You remember, I assume.”

John desperately needs a glass of water. The cortisol is slowly receding, leaving him feeling exhausted and sick. Though his tongue feels like cotton in his mouth, John manages to say, “I remember.”

One of Sherlock’s hands finally alights on John’s shoulder. The pressure is nice. John’s eyes droop slightly against it. 

“I think you should try to stay awake for a while, John,” Sherlock says. John grimaces. “It’s in your best interest.”

Now that his head is swimming very slightly less, John rolls over onto his back and stares at the crack in the ceiling, fortifying himself. When he sits up, Sherlock hands him a glass of water from—somewhere, who cares where—and John gulps it down greedily, not caring about the water running down his face and onto the duvet. 

Sherlock is silent, simply observing. John’s skin feels raw with it. 

“I don’t think it was a night terror,” John says.

“Your eyes were open,” Sherlock replies. 

“Sure, but—” John shakes his head, the pain of it grounding him somewhat. “Even if you wake up, remembering night terrors isn’t normal.”

“Sometimes things are abnormal,” Sherlock says, tone entirely level. 

John snorts. “You’re telling me.”

“You were screaming,” Sherlock says, a barely perceptible edge of discomfort creeping into his voice. John’s not sure when he got so good at reading his flatmate—maybe sometime around Sherlock attempting to kill a man on John’s behalf. It’s not clear. 

“Sorry,” John says. 

Sherlock makes a displeased noise. “There is no use in apologising for things outside of your control, Watson.”

“Sure.”

“It’s bothering me.” The crumpled frown is back on Sherlock’s face. “There’s no upcoming anniversary that I can remember, and yet your sleep has been more interrupted than it has in months.”

“It’s—”

“And no amount of work, or, frankly, overwork has helped you sleep any better—”

“Sherlock.” John’s tone is oddly firm and steady, even to his own ears. “It’s not—an anniversary, it’s—”

“And it has affected you this strongly?” Sherlock twists his torso around to face John more fully. The hand that had been on John’s shoulder is now clicking rhythmically, held close to Sherlock’s heart. 

John takes a deep breath, the room and the situation not quite feeling real. 

“I was—I talked to Mariana, and—” Sherlock hasn’t blinked; John can’t help but feel unnerved. “We were—well, she said, and I think she’s right, that. Um.” Sherlock’s eyes narrow minutely. “I might be—attracted to men.” He’s leaning on Mariana’s phrasing, the clinicality of it barely touching the complicated, knotted mess in his stomach. 

Several expressions burst over Sherlock’s face like firecrackers, surprise and confusion and focus. For some reason he ends up settling on disbelief. 

“You didn’t know?” Sherlock says. It’s damning. John grits his teeth.

“No.”

“Not that there’s—ah.” The hand near Sherlock’s heart has picked up its pace, the clicking almost sounding like raindrops on a tile roof. “That’s… okay, I’m just—surprised.”

“You and me both,” John says, feeling more drained than he has all week. 

“It’s not a bad thing, to not realise.” Sherlock sounds harried, distressed at the idea that he may have caused offence, for once in his life. “It’s just unexpected.”

“You said, the other day…” John’s voice falters. “You said you’d figured it out.” 

Sherlock’s expression goes guarded. “Yes.”

“What did you—?”

Sherlock shakes his head firmly. 

“John, I think it’s important that you focus on this—realisation, at the moment.” His tone invites no argument. “You’re still processing.”

“Isn’t that my choice to make?” John doesn’t know why he’s so frustrated, but it bursts out of him now, an unwanted, unneeded guest. “I’m not gonna, I dunno, die. Nothing about this is life-altering, or—”

“You know that’s not true.” It’s a deduction in the guise of reassurance; not a particularly difficult deduction, mind. John can hear his voice shaking just as clearly as Sherlock can. 

“Well—”

“Thank you,” Sherlock says, “for telling me.”

It pulls John up short, the short-lived frustration evaporating in the face of Sherlock’s genuine thanks. He’s not sure how to respond, so he doesn’t. 

“I think you’ll be okay to go back to sleep now,” Sherlock says after two minutes of silence have passed. He stands to leave, and John can’t, he can’t—

He catches Sherlock’s wrist as he passes. 

“I’m going to be okay,” he says, determined. Sherlock smiles; it’s brilliant, though it’s fleeting and half in shadow.

“I’m sure you are, Watson. But you should sleep now.”

Sherlock leaves quietly, switching the light off as he passes it and closing the door behind him. John’s room feels very empty. He lies back down and tries not to think—he does anyway. He wonders when it’ll end.

He falls asleep still wondering.

John can’t stop looking at the nape of Sherlock’s neck.

It’s a sensory thing, apparently—the way Sherlock likes to keep his hair off the back of his neck, regardless of length. The length, naturally, varies wildly depending on whether it’s bothering Sherlock or not (and sometimes depending on whether he remembers to book a haircut). 

He had a haircut a few weeks ago, though. The hair on the back of his head is short, neat, not yet showing the natural wave that it usually takes on when longer. The nape of his neck is exposed. John can’t stop looking. It’s weird. 

There’s been other things, too. A guy he saw on the street, his crooked nose and upright posture. Some other bloke in the park playing frisbee, the way his shoulders shifted as he moved. The stupid little smirk Sherlock wore when self-satisfied. The almost bird-like tapering of Sherlock’s wrists and ankles, the strength in Sherlock’s hands. 

Dear lord, Sherlock’s hands. 

It makes him a little itchy, all the things he’s noticing about other men, the specific movements and stretches of skin, the shifting of tendons. John’s a doctor, for crying out loud; he’s cut people open and sewn them back together, he’s seen how almost half the muscles in the human body look with the skin sliced away. 

He can’t explain what’s happening to him. Or, actually, he absolutely can; he just doesn’t want to. 

Another uncomfortable thing: more than half of the things he’s been noticing, that his chest and stomach and body have been reacting to, have been things about Sherlock. John’s not sure how to feel about that.

One night, when he’s had a beer or two, Mariana’s words settled gently at the bottom of his thoracic cavity, John thinks about touching the nape of Sherlock’s neck, the line of his spine. He thinks about thumbing over the bumps of vertebrae, kissing the point where the skin disappears under his collar. 

He’s on the sofa. Sherlock’s face is turned towards the TV, the line of his neck on full display, vulnerable in a deep, animal kind of way. John’s stomach flips over, every nerve in his fingertips feeling exposed, live with tiny electric impulses. He feels just as vulnerable in the moment, watching the light of the TV play over Sherlock’s face. 

It feels like a small unfolding, the corner of a label coming away from a surface. John realises that he really, truly, desperately wants Sherlock Holmes—and not just a shallow want, something that can be satisfied in an hour, or a day, or any span of time at all. Once John looks at it head on, it’s a yawning chasm, dizzying, terrifying, just a tiny step off of that mountain path.

He swallows roughly. He turns his eyes back to the movie they’re watching. He doesn’t think about it again that evening.

He does think about it three nights later, alone in his room at some point between midnight and morning. He thinks about it until his breath starts catching weirdly in his chest, until his pulse picks up and flutters in the side of his throat, until his stomach is aching heavily and he’s—

Wow. Okay. 

The reality of the feelings, all the things he’s been noticing, all the thoughts and imagined touches—the reality that slams into him when he connects all of that with the words ‘attraction’ and ‘arousal’ is so shocking, so sudden that it almost turns him right back off again. 

Almost. His erection is still insistent against his stomach, every breath that shudders into his lungs making the relentless physicality of it harder to ignore. 

The sound of the sheets rustling is almost deafening against the relative silence of the room. John tries to move his hand as slowly and quietly as possible, his heart now attempting to exit his body through his oesophagus. Despite the fact that he’s alone, John, come on, despite the fact that he’s done this before and is thirty-five years old, heat prickles across his face and chest. 

His hand slips under the waistband of his underwear. The first touch makes him gasp, and then hiss, and then squeeze his eyes shut hard. Every feeling is too much, too big, too bright against the insides of his eyelids; John tries to get his hand situated as efficiently as he can, biting back unfamiliar noises and keeping his hips still only by the grace of God. 

“Fuck,” he bites out. The hand that isn’t around his dick is shaking where it rests against his ribcage. He feels slightly dizzy. 

John knows that he is well and truly fucked when a wheezy little sound punches out of his chest the second he moves his hand upwards; he kicks his left leg out of the sheets and plants his foot on the mattress, pulls his right hand out of his underwear and rests it on his thigh. He’s audibly panting, and he’s barely even done anything.

Okay. Okay. Clearly he needs to adjust his expectations for himself for this particular experience. 

He gives himself a minute or so to calm down, so he feels less like he’s going to have a heart attack or come in twenty seconds; when he feels ready, he wrestles his underwear off with uncoordinated limbs. Even after cooling off, he still feels ready to blow as soon as he touches himself again, so it’s better to avoid sticky underwear if possible—

He’s stalling. John takes a fortifying breath, plants his left foot again, and reaches down. 

It’s no less intense; the sensation still crackling down his spine like—like—

“Shit,” he grits out without any involvement from his conscious brain. 

He starts moving slowly, heat and cold sweeping across his torso like weather fronts, head tilted as far back as it’ll go. It feels like his dick has a direct line to every other nerve in his body. It feels like someone has doused him in petrol and is standing over him with a lit match. It feels better than all of those things, better than metaphors; it feels good, uncomplicatedly and intensely good, good enough that he wants to cry or scream. 

“God,” he says instead, “God, I need—I—”

He’s never spoken before while jerking off; he’s never really made any noise at all. Faced with the unexpected catastrophe that is his larynx disconnecting entirely from his parietal lobes, John does the sensible thing and shoves his hand in his mouth. Biting down on the knuckle at the base of his thumb doesn’t exactly ground him all the way, but it at least shuts him up. 

At least, John thinks, hand still moving steadily, seemingly every muscle tense, at least now, Sherlock won’t hear me. 

His hips kick up with more power than John even knew he had—he’s literally fucked people with less desperation than this. Without the freedom to speak, a needy whine tears out of his throat. 

Don’t think about Sherlock, his last fleeting shred of self-preservation warns, urgent. 

The other part of John’s brain—realistically, ninety eight percent—dedicates itself to recalling high-definition memories of Sherlock’s neck, his hands, his flighty way of moving, his stupid stupid stupid little smirk—

It doesn’t last long after that. The last coherent thought that John has is: yes, please, please. 

He comes on his stomach, the base of his thumb clenched between his teeth, feet scrabbling against the bed. He feels lightheaded. He feels sticky. 

A few seconds pass. The room is still, the flat is still, the world is still. John’s heart is still hammering, sweat cooling all over his body. 

Shrilly, a siren pierces the night from outside on Baker Street. 

John’s cold. He starts shivering. He realises how guilty he feels, how dirty—the feelings start trying to paper themselves over the experience with an almost impressive speed. John sits up, touches the cum that’s now drying in the hair on his stomach. He doesn’t want to feel ashamed. 

Sometimes, Mariana’s words echo in his head again, there’s no escaping those feelings. Just—try not to let them… become you. 

John thinks of himself just a few minutes ago, thinks about his brain and mouth disconnecting, thinks about how good it felt. He remembers the chasm that had opened in his chest when he realised he wanted Sherlock. He remembers thinking please. 

A final word flits around the edge of John’s brain, eventually settling down with ‘attraction’, ‘arousal’, ‘need’, ‘want’; the word ‘love’, and all of the associated baggage, roosts among its siblings. John feels very, very short of breath. 

Okay. He can handle this. 

The cum on his stomach is still slightly tacky. John says out loud, “I am bisexual.”

Nothing happens. It’s a nothing that is more empty than any nothing to come before or after—a complete absence of any significance, and a presence of everything else. John thinks he hears a group of drunk students passing under the living room window, loudly chatting shit. His room remains dark and quiet. There’s still cum on his stomach. 

John exhales slowly, and stands to wash himself up.