Chapter Text
“Come through.” Lestrade beckoned John and Sherlock through the door into the squat room. It was clear that an effort had been made to make it look nice, though John noted, somewhat morosely, that it had failed. It was difficult to make a barracks look homely, he recalled from his time in service, and although not a barracks, this base clearly suffered from the same problem. It went disused for months at a time, Lestrade had explained to them, and had since the Cold War. It was only used now for increasingly infrequent threats from the North Sea, or, like in this case, when Scotland Yard co-opted it to save money in a smuggling case. Sherlock wasn’t normally interested by smugglers – mercenary crime, he called it – but this gang had proven particularly ingenious in evading capture, and so he had been roped into decoding their ciphers to find their next landing point. Lestrade had asked them to stay at the base, deciphering messages that they could intercept via the base’s aerial; John suspected that this didn’t actually require their presence in Scotland, and guessed that Lestrade was being pressured by Mycroft after John had come across a small baggie of cocaine in Sherlock’s possession the previous week. Although the flat would be just as they’d left it when they returned, John knew Mycroft would have combed every inch of it while they were away. He suspected that Sherlock knew this too, but he wasn’t complaining, so John wasn’t going to bring it up.
Being honest with himself, he thought Sherlock was clean anyway. Sherlock had insisted it was just for an experiment, and John believed him; the warning signs that John had grown so good at picking up on weren’t there, the slightly dilated pupils, the mania, the hyperfocus that could send him for days without sleep. He was never in danger of overdose, but there were times when he fuelled himself on microdoses of class A substances – only a doctor would pick up on it, but that’s exactly what John was. So he had felt obliged to text Mycroft all the same, and within half an hour the invite to Scotland had appeared. John had to hand it to Mycroft – when it came to Sherlock, he left nothing to chance.
The evening in the base passed uneventfully; John and Lestrade normally went for pints of a Friday anyway, so it wasn’t much different to their regular weekends. Sherlock was always invited to these sessions but begged off with a variety of excuses; tonight, he zoned in and out of the conversation indiscriminately, sometimes picking up on a train of thought that fascinated him and other times seeming to be a million miles away. His foot tapped back and forth with a restless energy that John knew came from being away from Baker Street; intrepid as he was, he was always slightly uncomfortable in new surroundings, and John watched his eyes flicker as he took in every facet of the base around them. Lestrade clearly noticed this as well and took pity on Sherlock, trying to draw him into the conversation.
“So how did you crack it, Sherlock? The cipher?”
“Simple.”
Lestrade sighed; John marvelled at his patience to have worked with Sherlock for so many years and have never cracked.
“It’s not so simple to me – tell me.”
“It’s an algorithmic cipher; you connect the letter to its numeric place in the alphabet, put it through a function, and then change the number you have back into a letter. The key is the function – if you don’t have it, it’s nearly impossible to crack.”
“But you did.”
“Yes.”
John snorted at the smirk dancing on Sherlock’s lips. He was enjoying taunting Lestrade, if nothing else.
“Right – and how did you do that?”
“A mixture of methods – frequency analysis, geographical and psychological research for keywords, and then trial and error for the algorithm itself –“
“Trial and error? The great Sherlock Holmes uses trial and error?”
The smirk immediately disappeared from Sherlock’s face. “Yes, well. More trial, less error. Unlike when Scotland Yard attempt it.”
Lestrade laughed good-naturedly – he was a little tipsy on the beers that he and John had been drinking, which John knew improved his mood. “Touché.”
“Right.” John got to his feet. It was late, and he wanted to end the evening before the sparkle of Sherlock’s acerbic comments wore off. “To bed with me.”
“Right – now – a fair warning, there’s only one bed for you boys,” Lestrade said as he stood up, stretching. “But the sofa here is a great sofa bed, I slept on it when we were up here the last time we were trying to catch this lot, slept like a log. And the bed in there is a double – a big double, god knows why, a small base like this, but it’s not uncomfortable.”
John was used to all sorts of less-than-ideal sleeping arrangements from the army, so this really didn’t bother him, but Sherlock’s reply to Lestrade was slightly tetchy. “And you’re in the single – why?”
“I’m a snorer,” Lestrade laughed. “You won’t catch a wink with me around. Even across the corridor might be too loud – I hope you’re not light sleepers.”
John hadn’t been able to sleep for a long time since Afghanistan, but since moving into Baker Street he had found his sleep had cycled back to normal. He still had interrupted nights, normally the nights he spent away from home. He looked around the base regretfully, noting that its military style probably meant he would struggle tonight, but there was nothing to be done.
“Thanks Greg – try not to wake us,” he laughed, as he and Sherlock went towards the room. Lestrade had been right – the bed was large, too large for the room, taking up nearly all of it. John snorted; someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get a bed like this in the base. Still, it would serve him well – it looked like a good quality mattress, better than the sort he knew you normally found in these places, so whatever the reasoning of the original proprietor, John thanked him or her.
John briefly went to the bathroom, a tiny, rectangular little room just small enough for him to brush his teeth and change into pyjamas. When he came back, Sherlock was pyjamaed, standing at the door.
“I’ll go to the sofa.”
“Sherlock.” John appreciated Sherlock’s politeness - it was a characteristic that was increasing at a snail’s pace – but it was definitely a bad idea in this situation. “You sleep terribly. You’ll never sleep.”
“Lestrade said it was fine.”
“Lestrade can sleep through anything. You’re a terrible sleeper.”
“I’m not.”
“Sherlock.”
Sherlock bit his lip, and John knew he had won – Sherlock, who frequently woke John up with his midnight ramblings around the flat, couldn’t argue this one.
“Well – I don’t want to make you go to the sofa –“
John sighed, exasperated. “It’s a big bed – you won’t even know I’m there. Get in.”
Sherlock nodded quietly, and rolled onto the far edge of the bed. John noticed that he curled as close to the edge as he could, as though he were trying to take up as little space as possible. His hunched shoulders peeked out from under his neckline; John could see the tension written on them. He sighed and lay down, respectfully close to his own edge in the hope that it would make Sherlock more comfortable. He switched out the light.
“Goodnight.”
Sherlock didn’t respond. John sighed and rolled over.
It normally took John about twenty minutes to get to sleep now that his nightmares had gone, and he reckoned he was certainly at the pleasant haze of the eighteen minute mark when a gravelly voice penetrated his consciousness.
“You’re not asleep.”
“Well now I’m not, Sherlock, no.”
He rolled over so that he was facing Sherlock’s back; Sherlock didn’t seem to have moved since they had first gone to bed. He lay there for a moment, waiting for Sherlock to reply. He had finally accepted that that was it for the evening conversation when Sherlock broke in again.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, mate. Get some sleep, yeah?”
“I just didn’t want you to be uncomfortable because you were sharing a bed with, uh –“
John heard a gulp, the dust of the rarely used bed sheets catching in Sherlock’s throat.
“- with, uh, me.”
John sighed. “It’s fine,” he said, and he meant it. “I was in the army, Sherlock – we bunked up all sorts of ways – not like that, you know what I mean. Sharing an incredibly comfortable mattress with my flatmate is hardly the biggest problem in my life.”
Sherlock’s shoulder muscles remained tense, almost as though he was clenching himself to the edge of the bed.
“Don’t stress, Sherlock – this is no different to sharing a bed with anyone else – you still steal the sheets, for one thing.” It was true; Sherlock’s knuckles had tightened around the eiderdown in their tension and had spent the last twenty minutes slowly pulling it over to his side of the bed. For the first time in the conversation, Sherlock let out a low chuckle and released his clenched fists; John was pleased to see some of the tension flow out of his shoulders as well.
“See, there we go – I bet everyone you bunk up with asks for the sheets back.”
John had been attempting to inject a little more humour, to get Sherlock relaxed enough to sleep – when he was wound up like this, John knew that he could stay awake for hours, and John really didn’t relish the thought of Sherlock waking up Lestrade at two in the morning by shooting the wall, as he had done John last Tuesday. Yet instead of lightening the situation, John saw immediately that his comment had done the opposite – if anything, Sherlock’s muscles tautened more than before, and John suddenly realised his misstep.
“Sorry – not that – you don’t have to have – I didn’t mean to assume.” John tripped over his words as he tried to make up for his mistake; normally reasonably tactful, he never seemed to know how to tread when it came to Sherlock’s emotional life. “If you’ve not… shared a bed… with anyone before – that’s okay. You know that’s okay. I was just making a joke. A bad one.”
Sherlock didn’t respond, but his shoulders loosened a tiny bit, and John breathed a sigh of relief. No shooting the walls of the base tonight then. Lestrade could thank him in the morning.
They lay there in silence for a few moments more. Then, just as John was about to close his eyes again and roll over, Sherlock’s voice came quietly through the darkness.
“For what it’s worth, I have.”
John lay in silence, unsure of how to respond, but feeling that he should. This was the most that Sherlock had ever confided in him about his emotional life after two years of knowing him. In the end, he simply mustered an “oh, right.”
He was already kicking himself for the poverty of his response when he heard Sherlock snort from the other side of the bed. John couldn’t help but laugh himself; Sherlock laughing at John’s emotional ineptitude was not something that happened very often. Somehow, it eased his awkwardness, and he found himself asking:
“Did she tell you you stole the sheets too?”
The words were met with a second of silence, and John’s stomach plummeted far more than the occasion warranted; he had a horrible feeling that he had again made a misstep. The beat of silence that elapsed before Sherlock responded seemed to echo around John’s brain for far longer, until finally he heard:
“Yes – he told me I stole the sheets.”
The emphasis was faint but it was unmistakeable. Something fluttered in John’s stomach when Sherlock said those words, a feeling that he couldn’t quite place. Again, he found himself covering his tracks.
“Right – yeah – he. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t know.”
No – he hadn’t known. Yet somehow John had felt that he should; he had been living with Sherlock for the last two years, after all, and there had never been a hint of any of this. He swallowed nervously, noting the dryness in his mouth as he fumbled for what to say. He had never considered himself homophobic, but he was somehow clumsy around sexuality in a way that other people weren’t; although he would never say it aloud, he blamed himself for the way he and Harry had drifted apart when they had been so close as kids. He had never been able to find the right words for what he wanted to say.
Finally – to relieve the tension more than anything else, to show Sherlock that it was fine, it was all fine – he just asked:
“What was his name?”
“Victor Trevor.”
John noted with surprise the warmth that had crept into Sherlock’s voice, a warmth he’d never heard there before. His stomach twisted slightly to hear it. He had never felt further from his flatmate; before tonight, Sherlock had seemed somehow eternal, a constant presence in the Baker Street kitchen or in the taxi cabs of London, merging effortlessly with the landscape of John’s new life. It seemed strange, but John had never properly considered Sherlock’s life before him, though he knew bits from conversations with Mycroft, and it had never bothered him before. But somehow, in the light of that one name, a gulf seemed to open up in the bed between them that pushed Sherlock ever further away.
I don’t have friends. I’ve just got one.
That was what Sherlock had said to him, and John reflected perhaps that was what was bothering him. Since John had moved into Baker Street, Sherlock’s name had become coupled with his, everywhere they went. Sherlock-and-John. John-and-Sherlock. There were plenty of other John-ands, of course – far too many, really, than John would like. John-and-Sarah. John-and-Janine. John-and-Cassandra. But Sherlock had only had one.
John was surprised to be shaken from his reverie by the gentle sound of Sherlock’s breath as it moved into a regular rhythm, deep cycles of in and out marked by the curvature of his back. John tugged the rapidly disappearing sheet back over himself. He had thought Sherlock would never sleep, but here was he, lying awake. He smiled wryly to himself and rolled over, but it would be a long time before sleep claimed him.