Raw
part nineJohn got a bottle of homemade gooseberry wine for Christmas in the Secret Santa at work. The tall brunette in administration was kind enough to offer him a warning about the bottle's contents, having been the recipient two years before of the customary gift. The story started with a night in with the girls and ended in a brief explanation of why, if one looked closely enough, they could still see a pair of purple knickers stuck at the top of a tree in Queens Park. The recipient from the year prior, a 2nd year teacher, admitted to never having uncorked his. John hadn't initially been all that impressed by the gift, appreciative but hardly enthusiastic, but leaving the party with the bottle in hand, he felt perhaps Santa was quite good at these things. John had gotten a potentially volatile bottle of mysteriously potent fermented adventure juice. It sat on a rack over the Christmas holiday as a special New Year treat to ring in the future and toast to the past. He rather liked the idea of getting completely smashed. Christmas had been easier than he'd expected but still hard all the same. His first without her; the inaugural of many more to come. Best not to think of it that way. The holidays marked new beginnings as much as they did the loss. His first toast of the New Year would be to Mary and the joy of memories they'd made. His second, unarguably, would be to Sherlock with no real need to elaborate as to why.
Most days he thought about Mary maybe once or twice. Some days not at all. Christmas had been rich with unwanted reflection, though. It seemed every call and card over the holidays had felt it necessary to bring up her death and his coping of it. They'd known the Christmas past that it would be the last one, that the New Year would herald darker times eventually and somewhere in the following twelve months something would give and she would go. She lasted four. It had made the whole celebration between one year and the next a hard point to celebrate when all it meant was one number that could be pre-filled on a death certificate without too much worry of inaccuracy. Bitterness as much as heartache made him generally avoid lingering too long on her absence. But though it made his chest ache more than normal to be forced into memories and fond contemplations, it still wasn't pain. He liked that. It was hard not to smile knowing it was that much easier to enjoy the good rather than avoid it all for the sorrow of it being a thing of the past. One of the few promises Mary had asked of him was to smile when he thought of her rather than frown. It was the kind of thing one agreed to without any real thought or any intention outside of placating and pleasing. John liked that he could do it, though. One thing to check off the short list that started with 'Give Analise my ring when she's old enough' and ended in 'Don't be alone.' He wasn't alone, would never be alone with their daughter to raise, but he knew what she meant. She'd been very vocal on her want for him to find love again, had even suggested divorce near the end if it would help him move past future feelings of being unfaithful. There had always been something soul shattering about listening to a hopeless woman worry about her hopes for him but even that made him smile slightly now, thinking of the way her nose had wrinkled when he scowled with the return of such black topics of conversation.
She had been one of the few people on earth he could consider a best friend. He didn't want this New Years to be the first date on a short countdown to the anniversary of her death. So instead he rented every zombie film in the shop, even some he hadn't heard of before, and settled in for a movie marathon in honor of the undead and everlasting.
Sherlock hadn't watched any decent zombie movies due to their inaccurate depictions of decaying matter and scientific implausibility which was only slightly less appalling than his previous lack of Bond knowledge. John let Sherlock pick their film order from the more than decent selection while he made cottage pie for dinner--though a grotesque serving of spaghetti had been a pausing thought. Analise was in bed by nine giving them more than enough time to put the baby gate up at the top of the stairs and pull the television into the open. They left the lights of the Christmas tree on and turned out the rest, the parti-colored twinklings a comfortable backdrop for screams and blood and horror. John made sure the volume wasn't going to carry the sounds too far up the stairs then hurried back towards his spot with bottle and wine glasses to share.
Sherlock, bundled in a red jumper John had bought him for Christmas, sat in the far corner of the sofa with their night's entertainment stacked in a short tower on the table before him while the DVD menu waited for John to press play. John took the other corner, a few short blankets shared between them against the brisk cold of the season. There was frost on the window and a dusting of snow on the sill. John set the film in motion then proceeded to pop the cork off the wine and pour two glasses full of the homemade drink which he rather hoped was as strong as it smelled.
"This one has fast zombies," he said, setting Sherlock's stemmed glass in front of him. "Little more on the action side of things."
Sherlock seemed unimpressed, swirling and smelling at the deep amber liquid with eyebrows raised in question--not of John but of the glass's contents. "If we're going to be entertaining the idea of the living dead, may as well start with the most improbable and work our way down in ridiculousness."
"No one said you have to believe in zombies to be entertained by them." John was the first to take a tentative sip and found it proved the brunette in administration quite right, the moisture practically sucked from his mouth while his lips nearly set to pucker at the tart tang of the fruit. It most certainly was a strong wine with a heavy bouquet. A little bit at a time, he thought, and put his glass back down while his pallet recovered.
Sherlock put his down as well. "Just how drunk are you planning to get tonight?" he asked, his face still lengthened from his own first try.
John chuckled, play-punching his arm as the film really started so as to keep him focused and on track. With a roll of his eyes and a crossing his arms over his red-knit chest, Sherlock fell into suitable silence for the first of their stories to be told.
They were both quite buzzed when they started exchanging medical facts on both live and dead tissue when the heroes on screen were engaged in scenes of high carnage. They were on their third glasses and second film when they really began to critique both the zombie line of attack and the human defensive strategies. They were both pissed when the third film was over and were too busy making their own zombie plan to bother with putting in the next one.
"We're dead until Analise is at least six," Sherlock said, leaning heavily on the opposite arm of the sofa, his long legs encroaching on John's lap as he stretched languidly over the three seated cushions like a liquid poured in a bath.
John shook his head. "You keep saying that. That's just ridiculous!"
"Hardly! Whoever carries her will be overburdened and she's not strong enough to run on her own at speeds which will permit safe escape." Sherlock pushed at John's thighs with his heel, John wrapping his hands around his feet to make him stop. He'd already managed to mostly squish him against the corner with his slowly spreading tactics of sofa acquisition. Sherlock continued to kneed his toes against him with or without the full range of motion to his soles. "If it's against slow zombies I can understand your point but the true raising of the dead is far less likely than a mutated virus or some genetically altered bacterial strain that can overwrite the basics of humanity and create the mutant 'Infected'."
John rolled his eyes at the absurdity of it. "So we don't run. Fighting is always an option. We bunker down here and defend ourselves until either help comes or we win. If we got Mycroft to get me set with a stockpile of ammunition for the Browning, then we're pretty much set. We can live off your honey for as long as we need to which is actually the ideal food stuff for just this kind of thing because it doesn't require refrigeration should the zombies take out the power grid."
"That's your big plan? Stay here, shoot everything and eat honey?" Sherlock shook his head, arms folding higher on his chest with indignity. "Why don't we just get a tank, then, so we can drive over their corpses and blow up hoards with a single round?"
"No one is going to give us a tank."
"I could get us a tank."
"Doesn't matter, you wouldn't have a clue how to drive one."
"Doesn't take away the fact that we would have a huge armored vehicle at our disposal to deposit Analise into should its only use be as a last-resort bunker." Sherlock kicked at him again with his sulk before letting his head roll back towards the window where dead vines hung without their leafy greenery. "Or, of course, I could try to genetically modify bees to recognize me as their Queen and thus attack in my defense."
John scoffed and threw his arms up. "You know, I thought you were taking this seriously," he cried, disproportionately annoyed at the sudden inanity. Genetically modified bees in a zombie plan? They'd be the only meal on the block that came with a comedy act.
Sherlock scowled, pointing across the sofa at John with a flurry of graceless gestures. "You have a gun," he said. "I have a garden and several governments that owe me favors. I'm trying to take advantage of all my resources."
"By gene--No. Oh, no, see, this is how it all starts!" John turned in his seat, letting Sherlock's feet go as his mind burst with his new thoughts, the most ingenious thoughts he'd ever had if anyone cared to ask him. "It's because of you! Your mutant bees sting some poor sod and you end up responsible for the zombie outbreak in the first place!"
Sherlock sat up slightly, his face scowling with a curious quirk to his left brow. "So you're saying this is all my fault now?"
"Could be."
"... So then I'd be able to command the zombies as though they were my mutant bees?"
John's brain nearly exploded. "Oh. My god," he said, sitting back with a flounce. He raised his hand in a soldier's salute. "Long live the Queen!" he cheered and hardly halfway through the words found himself face down in his own knees laughing while Sherlock echoed the sound in further recline. His ribs hurt and his face felt numb. All he could picture was Sherlock in his silly yellow hat, standing upon a useless tank surrounded by a zombie hoard all humming to the same tune as the honey bees. He gasped and choked on his own chuckle, coughing into his fist as he fought to find a way to speak over the roll of amusement that had claimed him. "Sherlock, I don't think I have ever heard of a zombie plan that begins with starting the zombie uprising so as to have dominion over the attacking hoard!"
"The best defense is a strong offense," the scientist remind him.
John nodded, sighing noisily as the laughter refused to die. "And what do we do with this new army?" he asked.
Sherlock shrugged, lips pursed in a long look of consideration. "I guess that really depends on how bored we get."
John fell over laughing once more, quite sure he might vomit if they continued on much longer. Sherlock's face was red with drink and merriment and John could only imagine what his own face looked like. It felt hot against his hands as he wiped tears from his eyes with the heel of his palm. He hadn't laughed this much in ages.
The menu for the DVD continued to roll through its short loop of sounds and music as they failed to select any additional viewings since the credits had rolled away and sent them back to the main hub. John looked down at the watch on his wrist to see how much more time they had before the New Year only to find three black numbers displaying themselves where there were supposed to be four. "Jesus, it's past one! We missed it," he said, floored as to how they'd managed to overshoot it but with a mostly empty wine glass sitting on the table in front of him as reminder.
Sherlock sighed as he continued to melt over the arm of the sofa. "Well, I haven't accidentally written the wrong date in the past hour. No harm done."
"We're supposed to toast, though," John reminded him, tipping the bottle's remnants into his own glass and finding not but a drop remaining. Sherlock waved his hand over the top of his own all the same to stop him.
"John, if I have one more sip of that gooseberry wine, I might slip into a coma."
"I told myself I'd toast."
Sherlock sighed, boneless. "We can have toast for breakfast," he promised as though it were a helpful compromise.
John scowled at Sherlock's rather failed attempt at further humor and nudged him. "Sherlock. Raise your glass at the very least," he asked.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and groaned with the effort but managed to get himself seated upright, fumbling fingers finding his empty glass and holding it aloft to the light of the television.
John smiled with a nod, the amber drop remaining in his own glass as he raised it in a wavering salute. "Here's to Mary," he said, clearing his throat when his voice threatened to break over far less silly words. "To the best wife a man could hope for and the kindest friend anyone could ever need. You are missed but never forgotten." He found Sherlock's glass and clinked against it, letting the last bit of wine slide down to his tongue while Sherlock mimed and placed his back on the table. John shook his head and nudged his knee against his thigh. "And! And to Sherlock."
Sherlock sat up a little straighter, his head half cocked in curiosity though his glass remained set on the table.
John raised his own all the same. "To my best friend for whom there are no words. Just.. immense gratitude, respect and... everything amazing in the world. May Britain never see the likes of your Zombee hoard," he said with a crooked smirk, and, lacking in further wine to share or a glass to knock against, he leaned in and pressed his lips to his in a quick and fleeting kiss. Sherlock's eyes were glassy and red from the wine but keen enough to follow him with their stare as he pulled away and sat straight. John smiled, no regret in his drunken state in the least for his first kiss of the New Year to be the same as his last of the old. "Happy New Year, Sherlock."
Sherlock nodded, hardly even blinking. "Happy New Year, John."
John gave his thigh a pat and forced himself to stand, grabbing the empty glasses and a bottle to take to the kitchen. He walked three steps before falling into Sherlock's customary chair with a cackle, nearly dropping everything as he hugged them to his chest shaking with laughter. "Jesus, we are pissed," he howled, looking over at Sherlock who smirked at him but who's heavy eyes were drooping shut as he stretched out fully on the otherwise vacant sofa, settling comfortably in. John snorted. "Going to stay right there?"
"Mm," Sherlock hummed in the affirmative. "Suggest you do the same. You'll break your neck on the stairs and the baby gate is childproof."
And thus, effectively, drunk proof. John chuckled briefly and sighed, putting the glassware on the floor for safe keeping as he slouched down, feet on the table, embraced in the well-worn leather of a chair that was as much Sherlock as his coat and scarf. John looked across at him with a smile as he seemed to be already asleep with his eyes shut and cheeks rosy. John tried to press his foot to his leg to get his attention but missed and prodded the cushion instead. "Sherlock," he called, not bothering with a whisper.
"Sleeping."
"Liar." John tried to tap his leg again but settled for letting it rest against his calf, the proximity to Sherlock a comfort as the DVD menu colored him in red. John tapped him with his toes. "Sherlock, if I asked you out on a date, not now but... you know. If I did. When I do. Sherlock, will you please say yes?"
Sherlock hummed as though thinking it over, rolling his leg against his touch, flesh to fabric but still connected all the same. "If it sounds like it'll be an agreeable evening," he said at last, his eyes still shut with sleep weighing on them.
John nodded, letting his head rest on the low back of the chair where his slouch kept him perfectly perched. "Okay. That's fair. Just, um... I want to give it a chance if you'll let me."
"I never asked for gold from a pauper. In your own time, John."
John wasn't sure exactly what he meant by that, but the close had sounded like a yes.
Sherlock rolled over on his side with his head pulled back in the sort of posture only the drunk and cats found comfortable. "Go to sleep," he ordered, mouth held slack as he breathed in deep and let it go with one long last sigh.
John gave a committal grunt and fumbled with his heel on the table, giving the remote a good, percussive kick to leave the room finally covered in darkness with the exception of the twinkling starlight of the evergreen.