Maintaining a Personal Life

Chapter Three

Sherlock should have been using his time to re-evaluate the details of his current case, now that one suspect had been eliminated. There was, after all, a grieving sister waiting impatiently for the justice that the police seemed unlikely to deliver on the low-priority murder of a common whore.

Instead, Sherlock spent the morning staring at his laptop screen blankly while he was actually deep in contemplation on the matter of John Watson. John didn't seem the least bit conflicted or embarrassed about his most recent conquest as he went about making breakfast. He smiled eighty percent more than he usually did after a night of sexual recreation, and was still faintly humming under his breath while he fried up an enormous portion of eggs.

For all his protestations about not being homosexual, John acted as though there was nothing at all unusual about what obviously occurred last night. And from the way John was walking, what had occurred was in fact very obvious. If John was willing to be penetrated by a perfect stranger during a casual sexual encounter initiated at a pub, then Sherlock's suspicions concerning John's experience were clearly confirmed: this was not John's first sexual encounter with a man, and quite likely not even his second. It was possible that he started as far back as university, but it most definitely happened at least once in Afghanistan. Sholto was a viable candidate—'ex commanding officer', indeed.

There were certain conversations and interactions with John that Sherlock revisited periodically in his mind when searching for clarity, and that very first night at Angelo's was one of them. Sherlock had really only allowed John a minimal amount of his focus at the time, which had been a mistake. He'd known from the start that John was fascinating, but hadn't yet realized that he was important.

Sherlock rarely second-guessed his deductions, but he did occasionally wonder if he'd misread the flicker of interest John had shown in him that night. It had seemed obvious at the time, but in hindsight it was entirely possible that John had only been awkwardly trying to deduce Sherlock's sexuality with all the delicacy of a ham-fisted toddler. All of the facts from that night on seemed to support the latter interpretation: John doggedly denied any attempt from others to pair them together, and very intentionally pursued only women (and so many women).

But now there was a completely new dataset to analyse. John had brought a man home, had intercourse with him in his own bed, and seemed completely satisfied with the results. More satisfied, in fact, than he had been in a long time. The data also strongly suggested the possibility that John Watson had a type. From the correlations between the man this morning and (possibly) Sholto, said type was perhaps moderately close to Sherlock himself in stature and physique, if nothing else: tall, lean, somewhat imposing in demeanour.

The implications shattered Sherlock's concentration completely.

There was a room in Sherlock's mind where he'd carefully tucked away his more complicated feelings for John. By now this room was filled to bursting with years of material: the catalogue of every single variation of John's smile and what precisely called each one forth; the way perusing said catalogue made Sherlock's chest constrict with a peculiar tightness; an album of every instance where John had ever told Sherlock he was brilliant or amazing, which didn't happen as often as it used to but never failed to make Sherlock swell with pride; a memory of John leaning up against a wall with his chest still heaving from a spike of adrenaline after chasing down a suspect, which had made Sherlock's own pulse begin to race for reasons unrelated to the chase; a different memory of John shortly after Mary had left for good—John standing in the empty sitting room of their former house surrounded by boxes, with his hands balled up at his sides in frustration and a desolate frown carved deeply into his features, and the way it made Sherlock want to cover John's hands with his own and press his mouth against that frown just to see if he could make it curve up at the edges.

The door to this room stayed locked and bolted shut, even though it stubbornly insisted on creaking open anyway every now and then. John Watson was off limits for a great deal of reasons, and just because another one of those reasons may have resolved itself didn't mean it was any less ill-advised. Sherlock needed John at his side, in whatever capacity would lend itself to keeping him there the longest. Without John every victory was hollow— even solving cases was no longer satisfying when John was removed from the equation.

Clearly even if pursuing John romantically was a viable option, it simply wasn't worth the risk.