Fic commission for hermioneinthetardisin221b!
A Soldier’s Luck – When John meets Sherlock just before deploying, he thinks he’ll never see him again. Turns out a soldier’s luck is greater than that.
teaser below the cut
John first met the dark haired omega that would change his life a few days before shipping out for Afghanistan. He was in a pub, enjoying the last of his time off, when he caught sight of an argument out of the corner of his eye. Something felt off, and never one to simply stand by, he stood and made his way over. The dark haired omega was talking to a mated pair, and the alpha looked ready to clock him. John managed to get between them. “What’s going on?”
“This wanker says I’m cheating on ’im,” growled the alpha, gesturing at his mate.
“But you are,” insisted the omega. “It’s obvious by your shoes.”
“By my shoes?” the alpha snorted
“Yes, you have mud on one side that’s from the opposite side of London from where you work and where you and your mate live.” He looked at the other omega. “He’d been taking a lot of long lunches, hasn’t he? Working late?”
He nodded, looking at his mate. “I already suspected.”
“Well, of course you did,” said the dark-haired one. “You simply asked me because you wanted to be sure. When it comes to cheating mates you should generally trust your instincts.”
“Now listen here,” the alpha shoved John out of the way and snatched the front of the omega’s shirt, tossing him up against the wall.
“Hey!” growled John, getting to his feet.
“Stay out of this, soldier,” snarled the other alpha, moving towards where the dark-haired one was struggling to his feet.
“As if.” John shoved him back, feeling strangely protective of the omega already.
i mean there are a THOUSAND different parallels to sherlock actually representing sholto (the uniform,“into battle”, always secluded, repressed emotions, john’s obsession with them both, unsociable, “neither of us were the first”, ex-commander) and later in the exact same episode which is supposed to be about some straight wedding the entire plot has completely given up on, sherlock himself realizes that sholto is suffering from a delayed-action stabbing which is later followed with a fuck ton of “we wouldn’t do that to john watson” re-establishing parallels between sherlock and sholto, RIGHT AFTER sherlock’s long-winded speech in which he declares that john is more interesting than the same work he claimed to be married to in a scene which coincidentally involved “girlfriends are not my area”, “no (i don’t have a boyfriend)” and john licking his lips, a confession he would not have previously admitted to until this one speech where sholto realizes he’s dying when it’s ***too late*** until john watson saves him, and there are more desperate attempts to demonstrate the parallels to sherlock’s inner monologue which at this point basically consists of “i just realized at the end of my speech the same way SHOLTO realized at the end of my speech that i am in love with john watson and it’s too late because he’s getting married and now i am dying inside and i need john watson to save me the same way he saved SHOLTO a man i have been paralleled to from the beginning” and you watch all of this in a plot supposedly revolving around john and mary’s wedding which you see 0.02% of besides the gay speech and the gay interactions and the gay dancing and the bisexual lighting and the gay music and the fake balloon baby
and still
“Sherlock faces his biggest challenge of all – delivering a best man’s speech on John’s wedding day! But all isn’t quite as it seems. Mortal danger stalks the reception – and someone might not make it to the happy couple’s first dance. Sherlock must thank the bridesmaids, solve the case and stop a killer!”
okay but…
is anyone else talking about how Mr. & Mrs. Holmes
were cosplaying their son and his blogger?
this is my oxygen.
john squeezes sherlock’s neck
then he squeezes it again, harder
and finally as he moves to sit back down, his hand lingers and drops slowly, still on sherlock’s shoulder
♡ ♡ ♡ ♡
Goodbye I’m going to cartwheel into the sun.
I love that this isn’t even additional commentary; it’s literally just describing exactly what happens and all of our hearts are exploding
John is not done hugging Sherlock. He’s supposed to be done, and Sherlock’s trying to move on with his speech, and there’s an audience to all this, but John is not done and can’t quite take his arm away. He doesn’t want to let go.
John tells Mary to stop him; he can feel it coming. He knows his desire to hug Sherlock is latent and might, if Sherlock goes far enough in his speech, spill over and he’ll do it, audience be damned, with the ecstatic delight he genuinely feels, and indeed that’s just what happens.
Neither of them make very much room for each other’s uncontrollable emotional outbursts. They’re like ships in the night that way.
When John tells Sherlock that he loves him, that Sherlock is his best friend, Sherlock practically loses his bloody mind. John reassures him in a heartfelt way, briefly, and then quickly changes the subject, even through Sherlock is completely and obviously too overcome to proceed. I always wondered why he did that.
John doesn’t appear especially uncomfortable at that point, as he does later after the wedding when Sherlock looks so heartbroken that John will dance with Mary from now on. We see John being uncomfortable with Sherlock’s feelings, and that best man request isn’t one of them. It looks instead as though he’s just misunderstood which feelings Sherlock is having. John instead reacts as if he thinks what’s overwhelmed Sherlock is primarily the necessity of the speech, not the reality of his place in John’s life and his heart. It’s not clear that he entirely understood that that was actually news to Sherlock, which might help explain why he didn’t leave any room for Sherlock have those feelings in the first place. He didn’t believe they were mutual at that point, did he!
Likewise, Sherlock seems utterly oblivious to John’s desire to hug him during his speech. John is genuinely overcome, so much so that he is willing to ignore the audience and just react with pure delight and affection. And that’s a big deal for someone as buttoned-down as John is. But Sherlock doesn’t react to John at all.
We know the wedding was a very difficult day for Sherlock, and during the speech he reverts to the rather shy and introverted person he sometimes is when he is deeply uncertain and out of his depth. It’s the same version of him we see when John tells him off for getting something wrong, when he listens quietly and does what John tells him to do rather than getting into a spectacular fight. Or when he’s drunk off his face and tries to make a joke. It’s his rawest self, the one that has no automatic defences. And that’s who he is when he’s giving his speech (until his speech becomes something else, naturally). That’s who he is when John hugs him, though it looks as if he can’t accept the hug, or even feel it happening, because he’s trying to do this difficult thing instead. He can’t make room for John’s feelings at that moment, because of the wedding, the speech, the loss he’s experiencing. So it happens, and then they move on, and it’s all unexamined. Until later, perhaps.
Desperately unspoken, indeed. There is a missing scene in series 3, and you can feel it. Maybe it was in the drunk tank, lost to the comfortable amnesia of alcohol. Maybe it’s at the hospital after Sherlock’s been shot. Or afterwards, when John knows that Mary isn’t what she seems. Maybe it didn’t happen, which would mean it’s still to come. The moment when they look at each other with the real weight of all those feelings and reactions, all understood and acknowledged, interrogated and confirmed, and actually have the space to hold them all.
tjlc:
John and Mycroft thinking Sherlock will take drugs after his love interest dies in ASiB
Sherlock actually taking drugs after John marries someone else
