It’s on a whim; he walks straight past the florist on the commute home every other day, doesn’t he? Only today the gaudy Easter arrangements and strands of faerie lights are something like a siren song, and he stops in front of the shop and bites his lip and stares at the window, and something in him says that this is a thing he ought to do.
He never bought his girlfriends flowers. They wilt and die, after all, and there’s all that awkward scrambling for water and a vase to put them in. Always seemed a sad waste of ten quid. Wine was a far more sound investment for an evening.
Sherlock won’t expect flowers, though, and there’s something about that that makes the idea infinitely more appealing. There’s no generic flowers-chocolates-wine-jewelry progression with Sherlock. There are instead ‘here, I saw this book on people who’ve been killed by their exotic pets and thought you’d enjoy it’ gifts and ‘here’s a Lucky Cat because I love making you laugh’ gifts, and he thinks flowers might be just the thing for a ‘here, I think you’re lovely and wanted you to have something lovely’ gift. It might even be a surprise, and it’s not often John gets the pleasure of surprising the World’s Most Observant Man.
He goes inside and stands there awkwardly, tries to browse casually and feels more awkward still. Eventually the shop-keep takes pity on him and strolls over and gives what sounds like a prepared sales pitch for straight blokes. Which is fair enough, John thinks, but he still appreciates how the man’s demeanor loosens up considerably when he tells him he’s looking for something for his partner, emphasis on the not-a-wife-or-girlfriend.
He leaves the shop with a recommendation for a pub he ought to check out, several enthusiastic well-wishes for his and Sherlock’s relationship, and a dramatic bundle of irises wrapped up in soft green paper.
They’re tall, and curly, and vibrantly purple. They make him smile.
He jogs up the stairs back at 221b to the bellow of Sherlock’s voice telling him he’s late, and that he shouldn’t have bothered stopping for bread on the way home because Mrs. Hudson already brought some.
John wears a small, knowing smirk that grows into a grin that grows into a wide, joyful smile at the sight of Sherlock’s furrowed brow and sudden, surprised silence. This is good; this is very good.
John clears his throat and ducks his head slightly, holding out the flowers and watching Sherlock as he stands there quietly in his pajamas. John thinks he can feel his face go red. He tells Sherlock the flowers are for him. He tells him he saw them and thought of him. He tells him lots of things, talks about the supportive shop-keep, makes a few awkward jokes, realizes he’s rambling nervously, and shuts up after a minute.
Sherlock takes the flowers.
He stares at them, blinks a few more times, then shifts into John’s space and leans down and gathers him into a hug with his free arm, dropping his face into the space between John’s neck and his jacket collar. There are muffled words spoken into his skin, something like ‘thank you, they’re beautiful’ and ‘no-one’s ever.’ John brings his arms around Sherlock’s waist and breathes into the curls at the nape of his neck. They smell dusty and warm, like an unwashed day spent in the flat.
He feels suddenly nauseous with how much he loves him. He does. He’d buy him flowers every damn day if it would make him happy, fill the flat with them; sod his pollen allergy.
He watches a few minutes later as Sherlock clatters through his lab supplies and rifles through the kitchen cupboards before finally holding up an enormous beaker with a triumphant flourish and filling the thing carefully with water and irises and the little packet of plant food that came with them, and John thinks the awkward scrambling for a vase didn’t turn out to be that bad after all.
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood Rating: G Warnings: None Apply Pairing: Thirteen/Jack Harkness (platonic) Words: 1792 Status: Complete
I had a lot of feelings after seeing Rosa yesterday. I’ve also been having not great feelings about myself and a lot of other stuff going on. This is me trying to write my way through them. And no I’m not officially back to writing fan fic. Hope you like it.
The snow was falling again, heavier and larger now, and up in the trees the ravens complained to each other about the state of it. Greg rifled in his coat for his emergency stash, then shook out a cigarette and his lighter.
“One more, please,” said Mycroft.
Greg peered at him. “Really?”
“It’s been a disconcerting day.”
As far as Greg was concerned, the only Dickensian thing likely was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come manifesting in the fireplace and ushering them all to hell.
Fandom: Sherlock Pairing: Mycroft Holmes/Gregory Lestrade Rating: Explicit Wordcount: about 17k [COMPLETE] Tags: Love, Romance, Desire, Affection, Emotions, Intimacy, Holidays, Christmas, One Shot, ACD Canon References, Banter, Snark, Companionable Snark, Original Character(s), Alcohol use, holiday ghost story
🎄👻🎄 It’s here! If you enjoy this story, I would love it if you’d help boost its signal to catch all those who have boarded the Mystrade ship over the last few years. Tumblr, Twitter, Slack, or whatever else, it’s all appreciated. Please, please help me spread the gift of Spooky Holiday Mystrade. Thanks. <3 🎄👻🎄
Some mornings, now, Sherlock leaves his hair
ungelled, silky and loose, to savor the way John runs a careless hand
over it, passing by. He’ll let his stubble remain until he gets a chance
to rub his face roughly in John’s neck and hear his surprised giggle.
After a shower, he stands in front of the mirror and smooths his hands
over his naked belly, feeling the softening, and smiles, because John
cooks for them every night, magnificent food, and it’s good; it’s more
than good. They’re home.
Meanwhile something’s happening to John
as he settles into the fact of Sherlock-and-John: he’s becoming clearer
around the edges, visible, vivid. His jeans hold him closer and his
shirts get brighter; jewel tones that set off the silver of his sculpted
hair. He steps out with wildly patterned socks peeking above his
sensible shoes. Sherlock never mentions the layers of John’s
self-protection coming off; but he looks his fill.
One night
they’re reading together in the quiet of the living room when Rosie
peeks her head in; on her way out to meet friends. Sherlock reminds her
to take her pocketknife, and not to take drinks from people she doesn’t
know, and John asks her to text him in two hours and tell him how it’s
going. She smiles her reassurances, Yes, of course, yes, I will; asks
Sherlock if he likes her nail polish (teal with a subtle sparkle) and he
says he does. It goes nicely with her top. She leaves. It’s quiet.
“I liked her polish too,” John says. “I wish she’d ask me what I think of her outfits.”
“She knows which of us has taste.“
“Hey!”
“All
right, your taste is fine. But no one would expect you to have a
passionate opinion on nail polish, John.” Sherlock’s tone is indulgent.
“What if I do?” John’s blushing, but his chin rises bravely.
Sherlock gives him a good long stare and then starts to smile. “John. Do you?”
John’s
blush deepens. “I used to sneak into Harry’s room and try hers on when I
was six, seven years old.” He sighs. “Not stupid enough to leave it on
more than five minutes. If mum had caught me there’d have been hell to
pay.”
“Your mother,” says Sherlock, clearly, “was an idiot. And
Rosie has an excellent array of nail colors in the catchall next to the
sink.”
Rosie comes home at half ten to find her dads in the
kitchen, spiking their mugs of hot cocoa with the Christmas liquor, with
the third Star Wars movie on pause in the sitting room. Sherlock’s
nails are a deep, rich red, and John’s are a shimmery, starry blue, and
they’re both mussed and blushy enough that she says promptly, “Hi dads.
Bye dads,” grabs a tin of biscuits and heads straight upstairs. She
knows very well when to get out of their way.
Downstairs, the Star Wars theme song starts up, and almost covers the sound of their laughter.
My brain is too fried to write properly, so instead I’m just daydreaming this: John Watson is asked to The Diogenes one evening while Sherlock is out. He’s surprised to actually be asked by Mycroft, rather than just kidnapped in a limo. He’s even more surprised when he gets there, and finds Mycroft is accompanied by Greg Lestrade.
John takes a seat at Mycroft’s desk, fearing the worst. He’s never seen Greg in a jumper and jeans before, nor Sherlock’s brother looking so unsettled.
The two of them awkwardly explain that they’re about to go public with something, and they’d like John’s support in managing Sherlock.
John – concerned – asks what it is.
With Greg’s hand on his shoulder, Mycroft explains that they’ve entered the committed stages of a personal relationship. They’d rather have continued to keep it private from Sherlock, but he’ll realise soon anyway. It seems better for someone to gently inform him now than to let him deduce it on his own.
A shocked John agrees to do what he can.
In the end, he just has to tell Sherlock point blank. Hinting it gently doesn’t trigger any reaction, nor does subtly fishing for a hypothetical opinion.
Sherlock scoffs, and remarks that Lestrade’s romantic judgement hasn’t improved at all since the divorce – but that’s the worst of it.
When John phones Mycroft to tell him the reaction, he hears Mycroft exhale with shaky relief.
Over the next few months, he sees more and more human hints filtering into Mycroft’s behaviour. It’s like Greg is rounding off all his edges. One Friday night John bumps into them both at the supermarket. It’s the most surreal experience in the world, and oddly touching, seeing them both there with a basket in the bread aisle. Greg is coaxing Mycroft fondly into almond croissants for breakfast in the morning. “I’ll bring you them in bed,” he says, and John can’t quite forget the thought of Mycroft Holmes having breakfast in bed – sitting there in his pyjamas, eating almond croissants. Orange juice and a folded newspaper.
He can’t stop thinking about some other things, too.
Not in a creepy way, he tells himself – he just can’t get his head around it.
Two weeks later in the pub, he buys Greg an extra couple of pints and dares to ask the question. Greg is tipsy enough to grin at him, bright-eyed, and answer.
“Yeah. ‘Course we do.”
“What – what’s that like, though? Sex with… a Holmes.”
Greg visibly fishes around in his head for an answer he can give. It takes him a while. “He… pays attention to everything,” he says. “He learns. It’s like being studied. Like I’m fascinating. It’s… really good.”
It takes John a while to get to sleep that night. He’s not sure why.
He realises the next morning when Sherlock brings him a cup of tea – just the right shade of coppery light brown, in his old regimental mug, with one of his favourite oat biscuits positioned perfectly so he can pick it up and dunk it.
Sherlock doesn’t say a word. He never does.
He just puts the tea down, like he does every morning, and goes off upstairs to get dressed.
Perfect. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fic (I don’t think Colors counts) where Mycroft and Greg being together gives John a hankering for something similar. I like it!
The rabbits are serving tea and glowing a merry shade of a blue. The man
at the fireplace is changing appearance with every breath. And he knows
exactly where to kiss John to get him hot and bothered. Dreams are truly wonderful things.
Aesthetic : Sherlock stretching on the bed, naked, barely awake and his hair ruffled, and John watching him, leaning against the doorway, two cups of tea in hands and not quite believing he’s this gorgeous man’s husband
John stops in the threshold of their bedroom and leans against the door jamb, two mugs of tea in his hands, and takes in the scene before him. The simple room is filled with evidence of lazy morning lie-ins and cosy late nights, testament to the two of them lounging with books and newspapers, crossword puzzles, and back copies of the Scientific Beekeeping Journal. There are stacks of books on the bare, wide-plank floor, an antique dresser against one wall, and loosely folded jumpers in an open chest at the bottom of the wrought iron bed.
The room is bright with diffuse, early morning light, and two sunbeams fall diagonally across the bed and the man still sleeping in it. There’s a bee outside now, one solitary bee, bumping gently against the leaded glass windows above the bed. The bee knows, he thinks. The bee knows where Sherlock is, and he wants in. The bee probably has a message that only Sherlock will be able to decipher, something about honey saturation levels or feuding nurse bees.
Sherlock lies on his stomach, asleep, unaware of his little bee messenger. The sheets are twisted around his splayed thighs, his curved bottom half-exposed. His arms are flung out to the sides, and he’s managed to burrow his face in both his and John’s pillows. Sherlock’s hair is spread over the linens in every which direction, curls of silver and sable and all the shades between sticking out in an unruly mess. He wears it longer now, and even after all these years, John can never stop touching it. The hair at the nape of Sherlock’s neck is still just as dark as when they first met, and John likes to burrow his nose there and imprint Sherlock’s scent in his memory. As if he could ever erase it.
He pads across the chilly floorboards now and sets the mugs down on the nightstand on Sherlock’s side of the bed, which isn’t really Sherlock’s side because Sherlock always takes up most of their bed, leaving John the sparse spaces that are left, usually curled around the taller man’s back or half underneath his star-fished form. God, this man, and all that he consumes.
It’s on a whim; he walks straight past the florist on the commute home every other day, doesn’t he? Only today the gaudy Easter arrangements and strands of faerie lights are something like a siren song, and he stops in front of the shop and bites his lip and stares at the window, and something in him says that this is a thing he ought to do.
He never bought his girlfriends flowers. They wilt and die, after all, and there’s all that awkward scrambling for water and a vase to put them in. Always seemed a sad waste of ten quid. Wine was a far more sound investment for an evening.
Sherlock won’t expect flowers, though, and there’s something about that that makes the idea infinitely more appealing. There’s no generic flowers-chocolates-wine-jewelry progression with Sherlock. There are instead ‘here, I saw this book on people who’ve been killed by their exotic pets and thought you’d enjoy it’ gifts and ‘here’s a Lucky Cat because I love making you laugh’ gifts, and he thinks flowers might be just the thing for a ‘here, I think you’re lovely and wanted you to have something lovely’ gift. It might even be a surprise, and it’s not often John gets the pleasure of surprising the World’s Most Observant Man.
He goes inside and stands there awkwardly, tries to browse casually and feels more awkward still. Eventually the shop-keep takes pity on him and strolls over and gives what sounds like a prepared sales pitch for straight blokes. Which is fair enough, John thinks, but he still appreciates how the man’s demeanor loosens up considerably when he tells him he’s looking for something for his partner, emphasis on the not-a-wife-or-girlfriend.
He leaves the shop with a recommendation for a pub he ought to check out, several enthusiastic well-wishes for his and Sherlock’s relationship, and a dramatic bundle of irises wrapped up in soft green paper.
They’re tall, and curly, and vibrantly purple. They make him smile.
He jogs up the stairs back at 221b to the bellow of Sherlock’s voice telling him he’s late, and that he shouldn’t have bothered stopping for bread on the way home because Mrs. Hudson already brought some.
John wears a small, knowing smirk that grows into a grin that grows into a wide, joyful smile at the sight of Sherlock’s furrowed brow and sudden, surprised silence. This is good; this is very good.
John clears his throat and ducks his head slightly, holding out the flowers and watching Sherlock as he stands there quietly in his pajamas. John thinks he can feel his face go red. He tells Sherlock the flowers are for him. He tells him he saw them and thought of him. He tells him lots of things, talks about the supportive shop-keep, makes a few awkward jokes, realizes he’s rambling nervously, and shuts up after a minute.
Sherlock takes the flowers.
He stares at them, blinks a few more times, then shifts into John’s space and leans down and gathers him into a hug with his free arm, dropping his face into the space between John’s neck and his jacket collar. There are muffled words spoken into his skin, something like ‘thank you, they’re beautiful’ and ‘no-one’s ever.’ John brings his arms around Sherlock’s waist and breathes into the curls at the nape of his neck. They smell dusty and warm, like an unwashed day spent in the flat.
He feels suddenly nauseous with how much he loves him. He does. He’d buy him flowers every damn day if it would make him happy, fill the flat with them; sod his pollen allergy.
He watches a few minutes later as Sherlock clatters through his lab supplies and rifles through the kitchen cupboards before finally holding up an enormous beaker with a triumphant flourish and filling the thing carefully with water and irises and the little packet of plant food that came with them, and John thinks the awkward scrambling for a vase didn’t turn out to be that bad after all.
Greg should have known something was amiss when he saw light shining through the windows of his flat, but he was so knackered after 15 hours on the job that it didn’t even occur to him to be suspicious.
Shouldering open the door, he nearly dropped his keys on the mat from the shock of finding Mycroft Holmes leaning casually against the kitchen counter in his impeccably pressed suit, umbrella tucked neatly under his arm.
“Welcome home, Gregory.”
“Jesus, Myc – nearly gave me a heart attack! How – how did you get in?”
Shaking his head, Greg staggered over the threshold. “Never mind, don’t answer that,” he said, and he just caught the shadow of a smug smile playing at the edges of the other man’s lips.
Rather than reply, Mycroft beckoned Greg into the sitting room-cum-dining area where – would surprises never cease? – a crisp white table cloth had been draped precisely over Greg’s secondhand table. Candles flickered merrily, illuminating a bottle of merlot already breathing next to two ready wine glasses and place settings made up for two. Something, though, wasn’t quite right…
“Are those… did you get chips?”
Sure enough, stacked high on the gleaming china plates were mounds of the greasiest chips Greg had ever seen and – more wonderous still – two healthy portions of deep fried cod, steam still issuing from the crisp, golden batter.
“Well, this is… unexpected,” Greg sputtered, turning around to regard Mycroft with wide-eyed wonder.
“I happened to hear that you’d had a particularly trying day,” Mycroft replied, leaning his umbrella against the wall and crossing the room. “I knew you would be too tired to stop for your usual post-case fare, so I thought I would bring it to you.”
Greg felt an unexpected lump in his throat as he regarded the peculiar, brilliant, terrifying man who had become so dear to him these last five months.
“But you hate pub food,” Greg said, stepping closer to Mycroft and staring deeply into his pale blue eyes.
“Yes,” Mycroft murmured, his eyebrows raising slightly, “but I know what you like.”
“Oh yes,” Greg said, his voice a bit rough as he pulled Mycroft’s face down to his, “yes, you do.”
The Doctor raked his hands through his messier-than-usual hair.
“Why do I always let you talk me into this?” he groaned, casting a scathing look at the handsome man perched on the stool to his right.
At least, it was meant to be scathing: from the wide, toothy grin that he received in return, however, it seemed to have quite failed to do anything but amuse.
“Oh, come on, Doctor,” Jack replied gallantly, “I hardly dragged you here.”
“You called me up and said it was an emergency,” the Doctor accused.
“Yada yada, false pretenses, but you can’t pretend you haven’t been having a good time,”
Jack winked suggestively. “I had no idea you were such an… energetic dancer.”
The Doctor felt his cheeks burn pink.
“Besides,” Jack continued, “it was an emergency. You’ve been flying around by yourself for far too long. There’s only so long a man can keep up a pity party that intense before he drives himself batty. So really, I did you a favor.”
The Doctor was about to retort that Jack’s “favors” were rarely selfless when the bartender loomed up over them from the opposite side of the gleaming metal bar.
“Compliments of the lifeform at table three,” he grunted, sliding a thin, transluscent flute of purple liquer at the Doctor with one of his pale tentacles.
Jack clapped the Doctor heartily on the back, nearly making him spill the drink down his front.
“Look’ee there, old man,” he hooted, “I always knew you were a charmer!”
The Doctor considered flashing a rude hand sign he’d picked up from Rose’s mates at the chip shop, but he reconsidered when his eyes fell on the smiling Bolian at table three. Lifting his glass, the Doctor toasted silently and took an appreciative sip, closing his eyes to savor the flavor redolent of caramel and stardust.
“Don’t look now, Doc,” Jack whispered, “but I think your friend is coming this way.”
Sure enough, the blue-skinned creature was sauntering their way. Without a word, she (the low-cut, gold dress left no question that it was, in fact, a she) had plucked the Doctor from his barstool and spun him out onto the dance floor.
Despite having numerous helpless looks cast his way accompanied by silently-mouthed pleas for assistance, Jack leaned back against the bar and contented himself to watch his friend put through his paces to the sounds of a Silurian celestial funk band.
