Fic post: Sherlock: Insomnia
Aug. 30th, 2010 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gayalondiel_bakFandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Title: Insomnia
Character/Pairing: Sherlock/John
Episode: After "A Study in Pink"
Length: 2329 words
Rating: NC-17 (yes, really).
Spoilers: Mild for "A Study in Pink"
Warnings: Do I need to warn you that it's slash? Nothing scary. First time.
Disclaimer: The Holmes characters fall in the public domain: This version falls under the creative control of Messers Moffatt and Gatiss, and the BBC. No ownership is implied or inferred. This is done for love only.
Summary: John Watson has trouble sleeping. Sherlock thinks he can help, but can he?
AN: This is scary. Scary because it's my first fic for a new fandom, and scary because I never write anything beyond PG or PG-13 if you squint, so this is a bit of a departure. I cannot express how helpful the support of my wonderful beta![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rabidsamfan has been - without your reaction to this, and your help, there is no way this would have got as far as this. Thank you as ever.
Insomnia
John Watson did not sleep well.
In Afghanistan, sleep had not been a problem, but something that claimed you when it could and got ignored otherwise. He learned to sleep anywhere, at any time, for the quick cycle of watches left little time for rest and recuperation before he returned to his duties. There was an art that the soldier learnt of resting whenever possible, be it five minutes sitting or standing somewhere relatively safe, or collapsing onto the nearest bunk in exhaustion after a long hard day of patrols, threats and attacks, watch keeping and emergency surgery on soldiers too wounded to wait for evacuation. It was the norm to have turned in, off-duty, to be woken again to the cries of injured men within an hour, to get up and work purely on adrenaline, and then collapse, knowing that he only had a short while before he was on duty again. It was the sporadic, dark sleep of an exhausted man, and in Afghanistan there was no time or space for dreaming.
_______________________________________________________
When he returned to London, John barely slept at all. He paced his room at all hours of the night, made endless cups of tea and read his way through what seemed like more books than he had ever previously read, to keep his mind from straying to places he did not want it to go. The internet was his constant companion and he spent many hours tripping from site to site, scouring Wikipedia for useless information on anything and everything, making tangential leaps between articles until he had thirty tabs open and had forgotten why at least half of them had interested him.
On good days he read articles of interest and corrected the entries on medical conditions. On days when he had a therapy appointment coming up he looked up what the collective internet consciousness thought someone recovering from PTSD should say and think and do, so that he was prepared for the oncoming battle with his therapist. On bad nights he just clicked from link to link, looking for and failing to find something - anything - to distract him from thoughts that were at once relentlessly absorbing and far too much for him to handle. Every night he succumbed, eventually, and then his dreams were a mass of images and sounds and pain, red and black and hot sharp white, and he woke with a shout, drenched in sweat.
He invariably told his therapist that he was sleeping just fine, thank you, and she always nodded and made a note on her pad to the effect that she didn’t believe him.
_______________________________________________
When he first spent the night at Baker Street John thought that sleep would come naturally, so exhausted was he from chasing Sherlock around London. The mental and physical effort which the day’s events had taken were overwhelming and it seemed the most sensible thing to borrow some bedding from Mrs Hudson and sort out his belongings later. John and Sherlock stayed up late into the night, giddy with the adrenalin of the day. When John finally limped up the stairs, too tired to consider if his limp was psychosomatic or not, he fully expected to fall into the deep sleep that only exhaustion brings.
He dreamt of guns, of soldiers and blood and sand, of comrades dressed in pink, of roadside bombs, faceless people taking pills, and an old man laughing until John could bear it no longer and pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand, only to find Sherlock was stood before him, looking startled as the blood spread across his chest.
He woke with a shout and prayed that Sherlock had not heard. He thought he heard a foot on the stair, but he lay still until the long silence convinced him that there was no-one there to hear the drumming of his heart.
_________________________________________________
After that sleep was much as it had been before, broken and uneasy, except that now he had more people to hide it from. Mycroft had told him that he missed the war, and maybe that was true, but there were some things that no man could tolerate without anguish and pain, and these were the things he saw in his dreams, not the rush of excitement that came with the call to action. John took to lying awake in bed listening to his flatmate moving around the living room at impossible hours, working and experimenting and every now and again playing the violin until Mrs Hudson stormed upstairs to demand why he was making such an unholy racket at three in the bloody morning. Too many evenings he left his laptop in the living room and was cut off, for it would seem too conspicuous to take it with him, and so he lay in bed staring at the ceiling and visualising Sherlock pacing backwards and forwards across the floor. He strained to hear him muttering and if he closed his eyes he could see an image of Sherlock’s face, his eyes sparking and lips moving as he thought out loud, and when he opened his eyes he wondered why he should think of such a thing.
On nights that he did take his laptop to his room John worked on his blog, writing up case notes and checking the occasional comment that was left there by faceless internet users. If there was a case in hand he would return to plumbing the depths of the internet, trying to learn a little about the many and varied subjects so that he would not be hopelessly useless to Sherlock.
Whether he drifted off listening to the sounds of wakefulness from the living room, or slumped back onto the pillow with his laptop still glowing atop the covers, his dreams were still the same: soldiers and guns, brilliant colour and stark black and white: but they were now dominated by a dark-haired man in a long coat whom John pursued but could not reach. In the mornings he wondered briefly at the meaning of his dreams, but they faded as dreams do and the distractions of the day prevented him from questioning why his focus, waking and sleeping, now seemed to be on Sherlock Holmes.
____________________________________________________
It had been many weeks since John had had anything approximating a decent night’s sleep, when one night the sound on the stair became a definite footstep that was followed by more, and then a soft knock sounded on the door. John looked up in time to see Sherlock slipping in and pushing the door closed behind him.
“You’re not asleep,” he observed.
“No,” said John, at a loss as to what else to say. He sat up straighter and Sherlock moved to the foot of the bed and sat so that he was facing John.
“You never sleep well,” he stated.
“No,” repeated John. It crossed his mind to ask how Sherlock knew, but he was already far beyond asking for explanations. Sherlock invariably knew, whatever the question.
“I wondered if I could help,” Sherlock continued, with a tiny quirk of his eyebrows. A movement distracted John, and he observed that Sherlock was tapping a single finger against the bed frame, as if he were nervous.
“Oh?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
Sherlock hesitated for a second, then very slowly and deliberately he leaned forwards and pressed a kiss firmly on John’s lips. Somewhere in John’s mind the strangeness of this registered, but before he could react Sherlock had drawn back and was sitting watching him. John thought for a moment, of the changes he had already made in his life for this man, the way he had started moulding himself to fit Sherlock’s needs. He thought of how he lay awake listening to him, how he dreamt about him, without ever knowing why. And just as Sherlock seemed about to move and his eyes flickered away, it was John who leaned in and pressed his lips to Sherlock’s in reply.
The kiss was gentle at first, almost hesitant in its tenderness. Moments later, when he seemed more certain that John was not about to pull away, Sherlock slipped a hand to the centre of his back and pressed, bringing them closer and deepening the kiss. Somehow John’s arms found their way around Sherlock and clung to him with a need that he had not known he was harbouring, and then Sherlock had him in a tight grip and was guiding him down to the bed, their legs a fumbling tangle around the duvet, Sherlock’s full weight pressing down on John with comfort and want and need.
John sighed a little into the kiss and Sherlock took advantage of the moment, slipping his tongue between John’s lips and pulling them into a more passionate embrace. They explored one another slowly as they kissed, still hesitant at first as though some sudden movement must shatter the spell they were under. John reached up and wound his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, and Sherlock ran his hands over John’s face, neck, shoulders, toying with the buttons of his pyjama shirt; and then they returned to clinging to one another.
Their kisses became greedy, and to his surprise, had he any emotional space left with which to be surprised, it was John who made the next move. He reached up to the neck of Sherlock’s dressing gown, slipping it down over slender shoulders and tugging at the shirt underneath until the effort finally forced them to break their kiss. Sherlock pulled free of the garments and set hurriedly about freeing John from his shirt.
John could not help but gasp as cold air touched his skin, followed immediately by warm flesh. Sherlock leaned over him again, at once both gentle and demanding, and somewhere in John’s mind it registered for the last time that this should feel far more wrong than it did. Sherlock was moving now, pressing kisses to his neck, shoulders, chest, working his way down to the waistband of his trousers. Deftly he made short work of peeling the material down over John’s legs, palming his hardness in passing and making John writhe in pleasure at the touch.
John was vaguely aware that Sherlock was in complete control of the encounter, but that did not seem so wrong to him as he watched Sherlock divest himself of trousers and underwear. Sherlock paused then to run his gaze up and down John’s body with a greedy look in his eye, and John took the opportunity, although he had never thought he wanted to, to admire the lithe form leaning over him, pale skin flushed in patches and shining slightly in the half light. Sherlock turned his head, caught John looking and threw him a wicked, almost feral grin. Then he was on him again, covering John’s naked body with his own. His hands grasped at John’s shoulders, hips, buttocks as he pressed down on him, and it was all John could do to cling tightly to Sherlock as he drove his hips up in response. They kissed and bit at one another’s lips, wild and passionate, and their bodies moved together as if they could by rhythm and desire and clinging and sweat and heat become a single being. Sherlock slipped a hand between their bodies and caught their erections together in his grasp. He did not bother to tease but matched their rhythm at once, squeezing and pulling in the sweetest of movements until John came in fits of ecstasy coupled with a lingering sense of surprise. Sherlock released him but continued to massage his own length until at last he climaxed with a shudder and a gasp, biting down on John’s shoulder. For a long time neither man moved.
Eventually Sherlock slipped his weight from John’s body and rolled over, sprawling out on the bed beside him, all limbs and sweaty curls of dark hair. Somehow between them they managed to tug the duvet out from beneath them and they lay side by side, tangled amid the bedding.
It was not until John awoke to see Sherlock slipping out of the door, dressed but turning his head to give John a wink, that he realised it was morning, and he had slept and passed the most restful night he had known in months.
_____________________________________________
The next day both men were the model of politeness, as far as their personalities could accommodate it - John was kind and even courteous, and Sherlock was less like himself than usual, making an effort in between bouts of energy and frustration with his cases to take an interest in things John was interested in, and even going so far as to make the tea more than once. Nothing was said about their night-time rendezvous, and John did not know what to expect or even what to hope for. So he went to bed as usual, and if he did make extra effort in brushing his teeth and choosing clean pyjamas, there was no-one else there to know it. For a long time he lay alert to every sound, listening to Sherlock moving around the living room. He pretended to himself, for there was on-one else to convince, that he was not listening for footsteps on the stairs - and when the steps did not come, he pretended even harder that he was not disappointed.
Eventually he slept, and his dreams were all of white and black, yellow flashes and pools of red, of soldiers and bodies and a tall slender man, and when he woke in the early hours of the morning with a start, cold sweat drenching his sheets, there was no-one there to comfort him. Breathing hard, he thought he heard a foot on the stairs to his room: but then it turned and resumed pacing in the living room, and John was again alone in the dark.
Title: Insomnia
Character/Pairing: Sherlock/John
Episode: After "A Study in Pink"
Length: 2329 words
Rating: NC-17 (yes, really).
Spoilers: Mild for "A Study in Pink"
Warnings: Do I need to warn you that it's slash? Nothing scary. First time.
Disclaimer: The Holmes characters fall in the public domain: This version falls under the creative control of Messers Moffatt and Gatiss, and the BBC. No ownership is implied or inferred. This is done for love only.
Summary: John Watson has trouble sleeping. Sherlock thinks he can help, but can he?
AN: This is scary. Scary because it's my first fic for a new fandom, and scary because I never write anything beyond PG or PG-13 if you squint, so this is a bit of a departure. I cannot express how helpful the support of my wonderful beta
rabidsamfan has been - without your reaction to this, and your help, there is no way this would have got as far as this. Thank you as ever.Insomnia
John Watson did not sleep well.
In Afghanistan, sleep had not been a problem, but something that claimed you when it could and got ignored otherwise. He learned to sleep anywhere, at any time, for the quick cycle of watches left little time for rest and recuperation before he returned to his duties. There was an art that the soldier learnt of resting whenever possible, be it five minutes sitting or standing somewhere relatively safe, or collapsing onto the nearest bunk in exhaustion after a long hard day of patrols, threats and attacks, watch keeping and emergency surgery on soldiers too wounded to wait for evacuation. It was the norm to have turned in, off-duty, to be woken again to the cries of injured men within an hour, to get up and work purely on adrenaline, and then collapse, knowing that he only had a short while before he was on duty again. It was the sporadic, dark sleep of an exhausted man, and in Afghanistan there was no time or space for dreaming.
_______________________________________________________
When he returned to London, John barely slept at all. He paced his room at all hours of the night, made endless cups of tea and read his way through what seemed like more books than he had ever previously read, to keep his mind from straying to places he did not want it to go. The internet was his constant companion and he spent many hours tripping from site to site, scouring Wikipedia for useless information on anything and everything, making tangential leaps between articles until he had thirty tabs open and had forgotten why at least half of them had interested him.
On good days he read articles of interest and corrected the entries on medical conditions. On days when he had a therapy appointment coming up he looked up what the collective internet consciousness thought someone recovering from PTSD should say and think and do, so that he was prepared for the oncoming battle with his therapist. On bad nights he just clicked from link to link, looking for and failing to find something - anything - to distract him from thoughts that were at once relentlessly absorbing and far too much for him to handle. Every night he succumbed, eventually, and then his dreams were a mass of images and sounds and pain, red and black and hot sharp white, and he woke with a shout, drenched in sweat.
He invariably told his therapist that he was sleeping just fine, thank you, and she always nodded and made a note on her pad to the effect that she didn’t believe him.
_______________________________________________
When he first spent the night at Baker Street John thought that sleep would come naturally, so exhausted was he from chasing Sherlock around London. The mental and physical effort which the day’s events had taken were overwhelming and it seemed the most sensible thing to borrow some bedding from Mrs Hudson and sort out his belongings later. John and Sherlock stayed up late into the night, giddy with the adrenalin of the day. When John finally limped up the stairs, too tired to consider if his limp was psychosomatic or not, he fully expected to fall into the deep sleep that only exhaustion brings.
He dreamt of guns, of soldiers and blood and sand, of comrades dressed in pink, of roadside bombs, faceless people taking pills, and an old man laughing until John could bear it no longer and pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand, only to find Sherlock was stood before him, looking startled as the blood spread across his chest.
He woke with a shout and prayed that Sherlock had not heard. He thought he heard a foot on the stair, but he lay still until the long silence convinced him that there was no-one there to hear the drumming of his heart.
_________________________________________________
After that sleep was much as it had been before, broken and uneasy, except that now he had more people to hide it from. Mycroft had told him that he missed the war, and maybe that was true, but there were some things that no man could tolerate without anguish and pain, and these were the things he saw in his dreams, not the rush of excitement that came with the call to action. John took to lying awake in bed listening to his flatmate moving around the living room at impossible hours, working and experimenting and every now and again playing the violin until Mrs Hudson stormed upstairs to demand why he was making such an unholy racket at three in the bloody morning. Too many evenings he left his laptop in the living room and was cut off, for it would seem too conspicuous to take it with him, and so he lay in bed staring at the ceiling and visualising Sherlock pacing backwards and forwards across the floor. He strained to hear him muttering and if he closed his eyes he could see an image of Sherlock’s face, his eyes sparking and lips moving as he thought out loud, and when he opened his eyes he wondered why he should think of such a thing.
On nights that he did take his laptop to his room John worked on his blog, writing up case notes and checking the occasional comment that was left there by faceless internet users. If there was a case in hand he would return to plumbing the depths of the internet, trying to learn a little about the many and varied subjects so that he would not be hopelessly useless to Sherlock.
Whether he drifted off listening to the sounds of wakefulness from the living room, or slumped back onto the pillow with his laptop still glowing atop the covers, his dreams were still the same: soldiers and guns, brilliant colour and stark black and white: but they were now dominated by a dark-haired man in a long coat whom John pursued but could not reach. In the mornings he wondered briefly at the meaning of his dreams, but they faded as dreams do and the distractions of the day prevented him from questioning why his focus, waking and sleeping, now seemed to be on Sherlock Holmes.
____________________________________________________
It had been many weeks since John had had anything approximating a decent night’s sleep, when one night the sound on the stair became a definite footstep that was followed by more, and then a soft knock sounded on the door. John looked up in time to see Sherlock slipping in and pushing the door closed behind him.
“You’re not asleep,” he observed.
“No,” said John, at a loss as to what else to say. He sat up straighter and Sherlock moved to the foot of the bed and sat so that he was facing John.
“You never sleep well,” he stated.
“No,” repeated John. It crossed his mind to ask how Sherlock knew, but he was already far beyond asking for explanations. Sherlock invariably knew, whatever the question.
“I wondered if I could help,” Sherlock continued, with a tiny quirk of his eyebrows. A movement distracted John, and he observed that Sherlock was tapping a single finger against the bed frame, as if he were nervous.
“Oh?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
Sherlock hesitated for a second, then very slowly and deliberately he leaned forwards and pressed a kiss firmly on John’s lips. Somewhere in John’s mind the strangeness of this registered, but before he could react Sherlock had drawn back and was sitting watching him. John thought for a moment, of the changes he had already made in his life for this man, the way he had started moulding himself to fit Sherlock’s needs. He thought of how he lay awake listening to him, how he dreamt about him, without ever knowing why. And just as Sherlock seemed about to move and his eyes flickered away, it was John who leaned in and pressed his lips to Sherlock’s in reply.
The kiss was gentle at first, almost hesitant in its tenderness. Moments later, when he seemed more certain that John was not about to pull away, Sherlock slipped a hand to the centre of his back and pressed, bringing them closer and deepening the kiss. Somehow John’s arms found their way around Sherlock and clung to him with a need that he had not known he was harbouring, and then Sherlock had him in a tight grip and was guiding him down to the bed, their legs a fumbling tangle around the duvet, Sherlock’s full weight pressing down on John with comfort and want and need.
John sighed a little into the kiss and Sherlock took advantage of the moment, slipping his tongue between John’s lips and pulling them into a more passionate embrace. They explored one another slowly as they kissed, still hesitant at first as though some sudden movement must shatter the spell they were under. John reached up and wound his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, and Sherlock ran his hands over John’s face, neck, shoulders, toying with the buttons of his pyjama shirt; and then they returned to clinging to one another.
Their kisses became greedy, and to his surprise, had he any emotional space left with which to be surprised, it was John who made the next move. He reached up to the neck of Sherlock’s dressing gown, slipping it down over slender shoulders and tugging at the shirt underneath until the effort finally forced them to break their kiss. Sherlock pulled free of the garments and set hurriedly about freeing John from his shirt.
John could not help but gasp as cold air touched his skin, followed immediately by warm flesh. Sherlock leaned over him again, at once both gentle and demanding, and somewhere in John’s mind it registered for the last time that this should feel far more wrong than it did. Sherlock was moving now, pressing kisses to his neck, shoulders, chest, working his way down to the waistband of his trousers. Deftly he made short work of peeling the material down over John’s legs, palming his hardness in passing and making John writhe in pleasure at the touch.
John was vaguely aware that Sherlock was in complete control of the encounter, but that did not seem so wrong to him as he watched Sherlock divest himself of trousers and underwear. Sherlock paused then to run his gaze up and down John’s body with a greedy look in his eye, and John took the opportunity, although he had never thought he wanted to, to admire the lithe form leaning over him, pale skin flushed in patches and shining slightly in the half light. Sherlock turned his head, caught John looking and threw him a wicked, almost feral grin. Then he was on him again, covering John’s naked body with his own. His hands grasped at John’s shoulders, hips, buttocks as he pressed down on him, and it was all John could do to cling tightly to Sherlock as he drove his hips up in response. They kissed and bit at one another’s lips, wild and passionate, and their bodies moved together as if they could by rhythm and desire and clinging and sweat and heat become a single being. Sherlock slipped a hand between their bodies and caught their erections together in his grasp. He did not bother to tease but matched their rhythm at once, squeezing and pulling in the sweetest of movements until John came in fits of ecstasy coupled with a lingering sense of surprise. Sherlock released him but continued to massage his own length until at last he climaxed with a shudder and a gasp, biting down on John’s shoulder. For a long time neither man moved.
Eventually Sherlock slipped his weight from John’s body and rolled over, sprawling out on the bed beside him, all limbs and sweaty curls of dark hair. Somehow between them they managed to tug the duvet out from beneath them and they lay side by side, tangled amid the bedding.
It was not until John awoke to see Sherlock slipping out of the door, dressed but turning his head to give John a wink, that he realised it was morning, and he had slept and passed the most restful night he had known in months.
_____________________________________________
The next day both men were the model of politeness, as far as their personalities could accommodate it - John was kind and even courteous, and Sherlock was less like himself than usual, making an effort in between bouts of energy and frustration with his cases to take an interest in things John was interested in, and even going so far as to make the tea more than once. Nothing was said about their night-time rendezvous, and John did not know what to expect or even what to hope for. So he went to bed as usual, and if he did make extra effort in brushing his teeth and choosing clean pyjamas, there was no-one else there to know it. For a long time he lay alert to every sound, listening to Sherlock moving around the living room. He pretended to himself, for there was on-one else to convince, that he was not listening for footsteps on the stairs - and when the steps did not come, he pretended even harder that he was not disappointed.
Eventually he slept, and his dreams were all of white and black, yellow flashes and pools of red, of soldiers and bodies and a tall slender man, and when he woke in the early hours of the morning with a start, cold sweat drenching his sheets, there was no-one there to comfort him. Breathing hard, he thought he heard a foot on the stairs to his room: but then it turned and resumed pacing in the living room, and John was again alone in the dark.
