Nocturne in Tempo Rubato
part sevenThe hardest part about saying no was knowing Sherlock would forgive him for it. They had no qualifications, no stipulations, and very few expectations. They lived and worked together because it made them both happy; everything by choice and with implied consent in the invitation. Some things never needed to be asked and rarely needed to be spoken of. Honest truths could be observed without words to explain them--like the fact that Sherlock Holmes loved John Watson or that John, unconditionally, loved him too.
But love wasn't everything.
The suit Mrs. Hudson had picked out for him was very nice indeed. John couldn't imagine too many places he'd need it for, black tie events not often part of his work or social scope. The stiff white collared shirt with its ivory buttons looked very smart with the gold stitching and pale taupe pattern of the vest Sherlock had insisted on. He was glad for a proper tie and not a bow tie. The black jacket and trousers had all been tailored. John knew he shouldn't be surprised Sherlock had the perception to map out his measurements--he'd at least heard of him doing it once before--but the personal touch and attention to detail still made John's chest ache. He left the lot of it on their hangers, slipping them into his wardrobe with the protective plastic covering pulled back in place.
He made himself ignore the shower water running in the adjoining room and forget the minutes as they passed by; four, then eight, then fifteen. Close quarters meant he knew how long the average Sherlock shower took. He forced his mind not to imagine the tall, pale man melting under the scolding spray, forehead to the cold tile or crouched at the bottom of the tub where the water felt like rain. He made himself forget the absence of steam when at last the door was opened again. He stared at his computer instead, sitting cross legged on his bed, pretending to work and that these things didn't matter. He reread the same paragraph five times, comprehending less and less of what he himself had written. He gave up on it. He sat simply staring, thinking harder about the designs of the icons on his desktop then he had ever contemplated anything so benign before.
John wasn't surprised to find himself somewhat startled by the sounds of footsteps approaching his door. He shifted on the mattress, idle fingers finding random keys once again as he tried not to watch Sherlock peak inside to be absolutely certain he hadn't changed his mind. John hadn't. John hadn't even been using his mind since he'd found refuge in his room after Mrs. Hudson's far too tardy delivery interruption.
Sherlock cleared his throat, hovering awkwardly in the doorway. His shoes were shiny and his pants pressed to a perfect crease. "I don't think Scotland Yard had considered how lucky they were to be getting so hard a worker as you," he said. It was hard to tell if he was being passive aggressive or attempting to lighten the mood with a bit of praise. John glanced up at his simple smile and felt sure it must be the latter. The smile, though, for all its efforts, did very little to hide his deep disappointment.
Sherlock looked good, though not dissimilar from normal. Still a single button jacket, solid in black with black button. The shirt and tie were both black as well with nothing but the lighting and the tailor's fine skill to define the limits of his shadowy silhouette. The monochrome man looked a bit like his own shadow but for his eyes which never could settle on any one color themselves. Sherlock's less than elegant attire, most likely chosen for its simplicity and unassuming style, made every stunning facet of his face stand out above the trim, colorless body. He'd dressed himself in his own unique beauty and John bit his lip not to tell him.
Sherlock's long fingers traced the doorknob as he stood, watching John with his usual level of discernment. He raked the fingers of his other hand through his hair, the side part already falling closed over his forehead. "I'll be at the Royal Garden Hotel till seven," he said.
John nodded, not to be so rude as to ignore him. "I thought you weren't hungry." he said.
"I'm not."
John winced, teeth digging into his cheeks. "... Sherlock, I'm not coming."
"I know."
"So, don't... What, you're just going to wait all night for me to show up?"
Sherlock shrugged his shoulders, not in apprehension but with unconcerned acceptance. It wasn't uncertainty but a casual 'of course' in the way he tilted his head just so, startling eyes judging the ceiling before settling back in contest with John's.
"Sherlock, don't," the soldier warned. He bit the anger back, challenging Sherlock with a glare that would accept no grand performances. Suffering an actor with a flare for the dramatic was far outside his tolerance.
Sherlock seemed to know it as well. He breathed in deep, hands buried in his pockets as he leaned back against the door frame. "You can tell me you're not coming, John, but you can't tell me not to wait."
"You can't guilt me into coming and that is so low of you to try."
"I'm not trying to, John. Maybe if you tried listening more, you'd discern more than just what you hear." The detective did not scowl with his insult though the jab was well intended and received. The smile forgotten, his face seemed only capable of looking tired and worn. It made him look younger, not older as it did with most men John knew. Sherlock wore the sadness of a man nearly half his age under the reluctant acceptance of a man twice it. "I am going to wait," he said. "I will always wait. Because you can't come if I don't. That's how it works, isn't it? One of us has to stand still or we'll both be left to wander."
Sherlock's voice caught in John's throat like honey, muting him despite his efforts to swallow. He hesitated to speak though he had to say something, finally conceding to the anger. "I'm not lost, Sherlock."
"I never said you were. However, you know where to find me." Like a last hope, Sherlock gave one final smile before turning and walking out, his footsteps echoing down the stairs as he left 221B for the night.
John slammed the lid of his laptop shut then opened it so he could slam it shut again. There was a perverse pleasure in making the machine pay for the mess it had been a bystander to. He'd have thrown it if he'd had any confidence it would be alright afterward. He needed the computer as much as Mrs. Hudson's walls didn't need another hole in them.
He set the abused machine on the bedside table, leaving it closed with no real intention of working any longer into the night. He couldn't focus on work if he wanted to. All he could think of were the blue--no, green--no, grey--no, pale and every cool color eyes staring back at him with the best of intentions and worst of inclinations. And worst of all, the hardest pill to swallow, was that he had started it all; it was entirely John's fault. He'd been the first to bend, the one who took the nagging question 'What if?' and put it into action.
He'd kissed Sherlock.
With one, stupid, impulsive, regrettable action he had told his best friend that he had entertained the possibility of stretching that friendship into something more and had come away with the conclusion that it could be okay. It didn't matter that the kiss had been terrible, hardly a kiss at all except for the fact that it happened across their joined lips. John had presented a long denied possibility into the very heart of their relationship like a Semtex block waiting for a sniper's shot. It had really only been a matter of time. John had no doubt that Sherlock loved him as he had never loved another human being before. And Sherlock, never stumped by John, had only acted exactly as John feared he someday would.
They could have lived their whole lives in love and never had to question it or define it. They could have just had one of those odd relationships that defied all conventional understanding of what two people could be to each other. But John's kiss had broken that, said a chance existed to be defined and forgo the need for anything more than each other. John was not a celibate man, sex was part of his expectations from a healthy, romantic relationship, and he'd told Sherlock through teeth and flesh that he had been willing to accept him in that role.
Once a possibility, always a possibility. They were still the same two people and every moment since he'd come home had only fit into that perfect description of what they knew of their accord. The steps towards Sherlock's deduction were simple, elementary, as easy to follow as two plus two. Because for Sherlock it was that simple, just two constants reaching a logical conclusion. John's problem was full of variables, complex orders of operations, imaginary figures and spanned the length of a football field. Falling in love was so much easier than managing the repercussions.
He stood up from his bed, rubbing his face hard in the way that made his mother warn him of premature wrinkles. He didn't care about wrinkles. She'd also warned him his face would get stuck like that if he kept pulling faces and that certainly hadn't been true. With heavy limbs and a heavier heart he heaved himself to his feet, walking through the mess of a kitchen with muted agitation at the man who hadn't bothered to put his ears in a covered container. John half wished he could remember what exactly the experiment was for but could recall quite clearly the conversation about not leaving body parts out in the open. The conversation hadn't made it into the Mind Palace, then, apparently. John threw a towel over them to at least save Mrs. Hudson the sight were she to come up. Years in med school, the army, and the flat had more or less desensitized John himself. Bodies were evidence and they were clues and only sometimes were they allowed to be people. He didn't want to think about Mary somehow being a part of Sherlock's macabre collection of specimens. Even he would know better. Molly would never be so cruel at least.
He would have married her--Mary. Had she not died, even knowing how it all began and how it all ended, he would still have married her. He didn't long for that relationship as he felt sure he might and he rarely dreamed of her, but they had been happy and he liked who he was around her. She played into his fantasy of married life perfectly without being boring. It would have been short lived but it would have been okay. He did not wish things were different, though. Moran's decision had made all the tough choices for him and with a coward's appreciation he was glad to no longer be caught between the right-wrong choice and the wrong-right one.
The dishes needed doing. Someone had left the bread out after breakfast with the plastic bag untied. There was a stain against the grout lines--blood, perhaps, or jam--that needed a good scrubbing before Mrs. Hudson found out. John would rather have been sitting in a cab on the way to dinner, listening to reiterations on why the term 'elevator music' was never to be used to describe anything of value and debating whether to share a starter in order to make more room for dessert. Not if it was a date, though--as friends, with the public looking the other way, then and only then. If Sherlock's hand were to try to touch his, if with a pleased grin he tried to be kinder, tried to be ordinary under the scrutiny of all of London, John would have to pull away. The hand that had reached towards him before had at least done so in private. That sort of hurt did not belong on news stands.
John wasn't gay. None of the women who came before were shields for his masculinity, none of the loves he'd loved before were false in their pretenses. One love did not define his sexuality as a whole. But the world loved to pigeonhole and simplify and stereotype till reality was what they defined it as and nothing could defend the truth. There was nothing wrong with being gay, his own sister was gay, but there was something painfully wrong with being labeled something he wasn't.
John believed firmly in the fact that people didn't choose to be gay or straight--they were born that way. Biology and chemistry were scientific measures to which attraction could be studied in a way love never could be. If asexuals existed so did bisexuals surely as was the trend with one extreme advocating the other, every phobia needing its phelia. For every black and white there were surely shades of grey as hormones and brain function differed in each individual. Regardless of the many nuances, homosexuality was real with natural causes just like eye color and the sound of one's voice, undeserving of its stigma. It wasn't a choice to be gay, and so he could never be gay. Gay wasn't who one slept with, it was about attraction and arousal. Never in his own life did John ever feel any form of attraction to another man; not in his youth, not in his adolescence, not as an adult, not once in all his life did he ever have a doubt that he was attracted to women. John was a breast man with a more than fair appreciation for arse and legs. Stonking great big tits and a well groomed fanny were the subject of all his masturbatory fantasies and made up 10% of his hard drive. Sherlock was not a biological possibility, he was a choice, a conscious decision to go against his sexual identity. He never chose to love him but to become lovers was a far different story. The heart he loved was in a body he wanted without lust. That in itself was beautiful--beautiful and enough for friendship but not romance.
It wasn't impossible to conceive of--surely not for the mess he'd already made from it. There had been several girls in John's mature years he hadn't fancied at first but grew to be very fond of. Moles that were hideous could become cute and snout-like noses could be charming. Just being a woman had never been the only qualification for whether he was up for it. Being beautiful was a sure bet on a physical level but personality could forgive almost any 'flaw'. He'd never had a failure with any of the less-than-perfect women who had turned first impressions into regrettable shortsightedness. Attraction went much further than physical and though the thought of so much as kissing another man filled John with slight repulsion, the memory of kissing Sherlock made him wish he'd done it better.
Sherlock wasn't just a man. Sherlock had overtaken John's expectations for what his gender was capable of and become simply a benchmark for what humanity could be. Sherlock had in many ways transcended gender by being so otherworldly as to be nearly indescribable. Biologically there was only so much that could differentiate him from the rest of their species but the mind that called all the rest transport really and truly did make John's pulse race.
He leaned against the counter, eyes scanning a table that was a mess of books, files, notepads, microscopes, scalpels, test tubes, glass beakers and more that he'd either never known or could not recall the names of. This, the well-ordered chaos, was going to be the rest of his life whether he chose to kiss Sherlock again someday or not. He was a beautiful man; it would hardly be hardship. It also wasn't the sort of relationship you just walked away from or that went back to what is was if it all went to shit.
The kitchen could wait. John needed something to numb him so completely that he wouldn't have to think. He popped open the fridge and grabbed a beer, cracking open the top as he walked back to the room of memories to plop himself firmly in sight with the television. The cartoon channel offered bright colors, high pitched voices, and plenty of absurdities to make him forget he was a forty year old man going through a mid-life crisis. It served its purpose. He chuckled a few times. He was proud of himself for not getting shitfaced though it was more a short supply of beer than any measure of self control to be praised. In truth he spent over an hour sat there, mildly enjoying himself before Mrs. Hudson's hurried footfalls on the steps leading up to their flat made him pull himself out of the self-contained fog.
"John!" She hugged her dressing gown closed over her nighty, landline in her hand, face almost as white as the cotton surrounding her. "John, he's not answering his mobile!"
John stood up from the couch, face scrunched in confusion as he reached out to grasp her shoulder, trying to calm her as she trembled slightly. "Who, Sherlock? I'm here; what is it?"
She shook her head, a worried whimper escaping her lips. "It's the Royal Albert Hall! There's.. oh, there's been an explosion! It's all over the news and I've tried calling him--"
She kept on talking but John had stopped listening. He grabbed his mobile from the desk and phoned Sherlock, listening to the ring on his end while imagining the ring-tone he knew by heart ringing on the other. It went to voice-mail. He tried again as he wrestled his coat from the hooks, using his shoulder to manage the phone while his arms and hands slipped it on. Voice-mail. He cursed as he hung up, pausing only for a second in his glance at his mobile to notice he himself had missed a call, not from Sherlock but from the same strange number that had called him several times before. It didn't matter. Getting to the Royal Albert Hall was the only thing that mattered.
John grabbed Mrs. Hudson by the shoulders, steering her towards the sofa. "If he calls you, you tell him to call me straight away, okay? I'm going out to look for him. Soon as I've got him, I'll call you."
"Oh, John..." Her lip continued to quiver and he shook his head, finger raised in warning.
"No, none of that. He's fine. I'm just going to get him. Probably playing in the rubble looking for clues; you know, Sherlock. Just sit and keep trying to call him. Everything is going to be okay."
Mrs. Hudson nodded weakly as John tore out of the flat, flying down the stairs like a great wind.
Of all the nights for things to become entertaining.