”Hold on, little girl”...?
Oct. 16th, 2010 12:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
r_scribblesOn a bit of a Sherlock Fic Roll.
Part 3 of 'It's Complicated', ye story of Victor Bastard Trevor.
Three
-x-
‘Nothing happened,’ Sherlock told John. ‘Nothing that’s any of your concern, anyhow.’
‘But…’
‘It’s in the past,’ Sherlock snapped, quietly. ‘It’s irrelevant. So let’s stop concentrating on that and pay a little more attention to the task ahead of us, shall we?’
John sighed. ‘Right. Right…’
‘I’ve been talking to you for far too long,’ noted Sherlock under his breath. ‘I’m supposed to be delighted to see these people again.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Back into the fray. I’m off to mingle.’
‘Good luck,’ John told him.
But Sherlock was already gone.
-x-
After half an hour of chatter, John became suddenly aware that everything in his earpiece had gone very quiet. He tried tapping the device, but nothing happened. He darted off into the toilets to try taking it out and inspecting it. Just before he removed the earpiece, though, he found he was able to hear quieter, more subtle sounds thanks to the relative peace of the Gents’.
There was the rustle of leaves in the wind. Sherlock, it seemed, had gone outside. Then came a familiar suck-and-sigh, and John rolled his eyes in irritation.
He was having a crafty fag. After dragging John all this way and making him work a room of strangers all night, and after sending him out at all hours for Nicorette patches over the months they’d been living together. John knew he’d been having the occasional ciggie on the sly, he just knew it.
Well. He wasn’t in the mood for putting up with it tonight. He strode out of the toilets and through the function room. He quickly spotted Sherlock through a window, sitting next to the shrubbery in the gardens at the back. Sherlock was indeed halfway through a cigarette, staring blankly off into the dark garden. John was just about to locate a door so that he could fling the offending cigarette into the ornamental Koi pond when something directly in front of Sherlock that John couldn’t see caught his friend’s attention.
‘All right?’ muttered a voice over John’s earpiece. He recognised that voice straight away. Victor Trevor.
‘Evening,’ relied Sherlock in a similarly muted tone.
Victor kept his distance as he lit up a cigarette of his own.
‘Bad habits,’ added Victor, stiltedly. ‘Difficult to break.’
‘I’m supposed to be quitting,’ Sherlock replied.
‘So should I,’ said Victor. ‘It’s very bad for us.’ They locked gazes for a moment, and John was struck by how sad Sherlock’s expression looked, bathed in the light from the doorway beyond.
Victor snorted a little laugh, breaking the spell. ‘Might stunt our growth.’ He indicated to his own large frame, with a second gesture that seemed to reference Sherlock’s height.
There was an awkward pause, and the solemn stillness fell over the two men in the garden again. There was something there – some atmosphere, some sort of charge between them, and John didn’t like it one bit.
Because he understood, now. He’d worked it out. Bullying, name calling, violence, even… Sherlock shrugged things like that off every day. Victor hadn’t bullied him – what had happened between them had been something that John was almost certain that Sherlock simply didn’t have it in him to cope with.
They’d been lovers.
Victor took a step towards Sherlock, as though reading John’s thoughts somehow and taking it upon himself to prove his theory. ‘Look at you,’ said Victor, softly.
Sherlock’s reaction was as though his seat had suddenly had an electric current passed through it. He sprang to his feet, throwing the remains of his cigarette to the ground.
‘Sherlock.’ With the same quiet tone, Victor put a burly hand around Sherlock’s arm, forcing him to a stop. ‘I know he’s just your flatmate, you know.’
Without another word, Sherlock shrugged out of the other man’s grasp and walked back inside.
John frowned to himself, thinking. Then he searched his pockets, found a biro, scribbled a note on a napkin and handed it to the DJ of the little Hired Disco thumping ‘Tiger Feet’ out in the corner of the Function Room. Then he went to look for Sherlock and ended up bumping into him in the doorway.
‘You all right, Mate?’
Sherlock barely looked at John at all, making a show of scanning the room.
‘I take it you got all of that exchange, too. I did notice you at the window, even if Victor didn’t.’
‘He was your boyfriend,’ John told Sherlock, quietly, ‘wasn’t he?’
Sherlock finally met eyes with John, and gave him a brief, cold, joyless smile.
‘Wrong again. He was a boy, he was my friend. There was no romantic relationship there.’
‘Doesn’t mean you weren’t crazy about each other.’ John paused, watching Sherlock’s frown. ‘I’m not the idiot you like to say I am, Sherlock. I’m a man of the world. I know what it means when people look at each other the way the pair of you just did out there.’
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ Sherlock insisted. He made another glance around the room; this time, it seemed, to ensure that nobody was close enough to hear their voices over the sound of the disco. ‘He never loved me. I was very young. Fifteen. Young enough not to have yet conditioned myself out of the unbearable hormonal weakness of sexual yearning.’
‘So, you did…’
‘Yes, John. I’ll print you out a little certificate when we get home – “John Watson worked something out about the enigma that is Sherlock Holmes’ sexual history”. Happy now?’
Sherlock tried to push past him.
‘It wasn’t just an unrequited little crush though, was it?’ John asked. ‘You mentioned a falling-out in your teens. Something happened. I know something happened. I can see it in your face.’
Sherlock turned back to John. ‘Fine.’ He lowered his voice to a conspirital tone. ‘I kissed him. We were both high as kites, we’d had a wonderful evening laughing and singing Gilbert & Sullivan at the tops of our voices, and I wanted it to end perfectly, so I kissed him. And imagine my joy when he kissed back. And, as one thing led to another, I was hardly going to stop him, was I? I was hardly going to remind him that we were supposed to be best friends, or that he had a girlfriend. I was young and naïve and I thought I was winning him over. But I wasn’t.’ Sherlock gave John another unhappy, tight smile. ‘As turned out, I was an Experiment.’
‘Oh, mate,’ sighed John. ‘Jesus. My getting dumped by Michelle Harrison in front of the whole Student’s Union Bar suddenly doesn’t seem so bad any more.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Mind you, that’s not the whole story though, is it?’
Sherlock just frowned at him.
‘I mean,’ continued John, ‘you are aware that he fancies the pants off you, aren’t you?’
Sherlock stared at him for a second, then shook his head with a snort. ‘Don’t try to make me feel better by feeding me nonsense.’
‘You can’t possibly think that’s nonsense,’ replied John with an incredulous smile. ‘Were you asleep when he came on to you in the garden just now?’
‘He did not…’
‘Please. You know I saw and heard it all. There was more repressed yearning there than the whole Merchant Ivory back catalogue.’
Sherlock gave John a withering look. ‘You also overheard Victor’s conversation with Rupert…’
‘Where Victor insisted you were Gay and single?’ asked John. ‘That your Mum had made up our relationship and I was embarrassed even to seen here with you? Yes, I did. Seemed like wishful thinking on his part to me.’
‘No it isn’t.’ retorted Sherlock. ‘You can’t call it wishful thinking when it’s all true.’
The song that the DJ was playing had started to come to an end. With a gesture that was part friendly-pat-on-the-back and part parental-nudge, John made to usher Sherlock back into the function room.
‘It’s not all true,’ John replied. ‘I’m not embarrassed.’
Another withering look.
‘All right,’ he admitted, ‘I’m a little bit embarrassed, but that’s down to the situation. Not because of you. Jesus – who’d be embarrassed to be seen with you?’
Sherlock’s expression didn’t alter.
The song was fading out. John grabbed Sherlock and practically mandhandled him into the function room. ‘All right. I’ll prove it. About me and about Victor Bloody Trevor.’
‘What on Earth are you doing, you strange little man?’
John held up a finger for Sherlock to wait and listen. Tiger Feet faded out completely…
…and The Macarena came on. An odd mix of confusion and contempt, with more than a smattering of wariness etched itself over Sherlock’s face. John sighed and pinched at the bridge of his nose.
‘If this were a movie, that would have worked.’
‘What would have worked?’
John gave the DJ a wave and a pointed glare. The DJ blinked, ‘mouthed ‘oh, yeah’ and cut the Macarena off suddenly, leaving a grand total of no people sighing in disappointment. Sherlock, either tiring of the distraction or unappreciative of the sudden focus on John and he, being the only two people on the dancefloor as the music scratched into silence, tried to make a hasty exit, but barely took a step away from John when Victor Trevor walked back in, stopping in the doorway, watching Sherlock, and whether intentionally or not, blocking his escape.
‘And we’ve got a special request here,’ announced the DJ. ‘”For the most incredible man I ever met”, from “The Famous Doctor Watson”.’
John wasn’t sure how many old ladies sighed ‘Aaahhhhh’ at that announcement. Sherlock could have told him. It was at least half a dozen.
‘What?’ asked Sherlock through gritted teeth, freezing his lips so that no one could read them.
John took his hands. ‘Trust me,’ he muttered as quietly as possible. ‘This worked a treat with Karen Baker at the 6th Form disco.’
‘What?’ reiterated Sherlock.
‘Just… trust me?’
‘Always.’
‘Then shut up and dance.’
After a moment’s fumbling to find the right record, the DJ finally started the song. John pulled Sherlock to him as convincingly as he could and began the awkward swaying that he’d stuck with for many a Slow Dance over the years. Sherlock pulled a face at the first line of the song.
‘”Hold on, little girl”?’ he echoed, indignantly.
John gave a little shrug, wincing apologetically. ‘It was perfect at the 6th Form Dance. Couldn’t think of any other song to use tonight off the top of my head. The chorus should fit, though.’
‘If this is all to convince the party that we are the couple that my mother says we are…’
‘It’s not about your mother. It’s about you. I’m not embarrassed, Sherlock. Look at me, not being embarrassed to be seen like this with you. If anything, it’s flattering. Bloke like me? With a bloke like you? I mean…’
John trailed off. There was that look on Sherlock’s face again – the look from the restaurant, just after they’d moved in together, when they’d had that little misunderstanding.
‘Listen, John. I know I said that Victor was my adolescent self’s version of you, and that my feelings for him evolved into something other than those of friendship, but please don’t think that I meant… because these days… I mean, ever since then…’
‘I know, I know. Even if I was – which I’m not – I know. Married to your work, although that clearly isn’t the whole story regarding that, bearing in mind you were taken advantage of and had your heart broken when you were still just a kid…’
‘I wasn’t taken advantage of. I threw myself at him.’
‘You were 15.’
‘That’s old enough.’
‘Law says otherwise. What was he – 18…?’
’19.’
John just shook his head.
‘So, did it “work” with Karen Baker?’ asked Sherlock, after a moment.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you “the next to be with her”?’
John laughed a little and shook his head, again. ‘No. I was just a good mate. I was “good mates” with a lot of girls back then.
‘Your tone implies that that was an unsatisfactory situation for you,’ Sherlock noted. ‘Don’t you think that maybe… it’s better to be a “good mate”? That maybe that’s more special than…’
It was Sherlock’s turn to trail off.
‘I do,’ John replied. ‘Now. Not so much when I was 17, though. Still, she did appreciate that look on her ex boyfriend’s face at this routine.’ He cast a sly side glance at the door. ‘Speaking of which…’
Victor Trevor was watching them intently, but clearly didn’t find the scene as enchanting as all the cooing old ladies did. His face was a picture of bitter envy.
‘See?’ asked John.
Sherlock’s gaze darted to the window opposite the door – he could see Victor’s expression perfectly well in the reflection… and more beside, it seemed.
‘I do see,’ replied Sherlock. ‘John, you’re a genius.’
‘No,’ muttered John, embedding that rare compliment as firmly into his long term memory as he possibly could. ‘Not like… I mean… really?’
‘Not really,’ said Sherlock, jerking his head faintly towards the “kids table”, ‘but the effect is much the same as it had been if you’d been clever enough to have planned it this way.’
John looked at Cynthia and Rupert as surreptitiously as he could. Cynthia and Rupert weren’t watching them dance. Rupert was watching Cynthia concern while Cynthia was watching Victor, watching them. And Victor really wasn’t watching Sherlock and John’s dance particularly subtly.
‘Cynthia knew, back then. She wasn’t stupid – she worked it out.’ Sherlock added in a low tone. ‘Just because she’s having an affair doesn’t mean she’s automatically going to be happy for her husband to show feelings for somebody else, let alone another man, and in public, too. How humiliating.’
‘Cynthia gets upset, storms off,’ John murmured, playing out the scene in his head, ‘Rupert hurries after her, possibly spends a while “comforting” her, seeing as how Victor’s so distracted by you, and we grab his laptop in the confusion…?’
‘He’ll probably sling it to the bar staff to keep it safe if he’s in a hurry,’ added Sherlock. ‘They’ve seen us chatting cheerfully with the Trevors all night, buying them rounds – if I say Rupert’s asked me to grab his laptop back for him, they’re likely to believe I’m just running an errand for a good mate.’
The song was starting to come to an end.
‘We’ve only got a few more bars to make her leave,’ said John.
‘Desperate times,’ muttered Sherlock, closing his eyes and tilting his head down a little.
It was the sort of kiss John used to give his mum when he was little – closed mouthed but not in the slightest bit awkward, devoid of sex but full of fondness. John closed his eyes into it too for a moment, opening them again when he heard the scrape of two chairs. Cynthia hurried out of the function room, followed closely by Rupert, after he had given his laptop to a barmaid to keep hold of. They both pushed right past Victor, still standing less than a foot from the door. He didn’t so much as notice. He was still watching Sherlock the way John had seen Harry watch people drink wine back when she’d tried to go on the wagon.
Various old ladies broke into applause at the end of the song.
Sherlock stayed pressed close to John, for appearance’s sake in part, but also so that he could murmur ‘Victor’s attention will be on me. You get the laptop, I’ll meet you upstairs’ into John’s ear.
It was as easy to get the laptop off the bar staff as Sherlock had suggested. John hurried upstairs with it, aware that they had little time in which to copy all of its files onto a replica laptop so that the original could be sent to recover whatever emails and documents Rupert Trevor had thought he’d erased. He noticed as he walked as speedily as he could without drawing attention to himself out of the function room that neither Sherlock nor Victor were anywhere to be seen. Well. Good, John supposed. Victor was the only one still about who would notice that the laptop John had picked up wasn’t his. Sherlock had probably drawn him off somewhere. And, for pity’s sake, Sherlock faced more troublesome people every day than some paunchy toff that he’d had a crush on once as a kid. John was certain that he could take care of himself.
-x-
‘I can take care of myself, you know.’
Sherlock was still standing by the car door, sullenly lighting up yet another cigarette.
‘Clearly,’ Mycroft called back to him, ‘that couldn’t be further from the truth.’ He went back to rooting through the boot of their mother’s Land Rover. Thankfully, she still had her art equipment in the car from going landscape painting on Good Friday.
‘Going to paint a picture?’ Sherlock asked.
Mycroft finally found what he was looking for and held it aloft. ‘White spirit.’ He started walking back towards the smashed Mercedes. ‘You’ve written off my car, Sherlock. I can explain a silly boy deciding that he can drive the thing like a grown up and ploughing it into a sycamore tree easily enough. Blood on the back seat’s a little harder to explain to the insurance people. You said you didn’t want the police to become involved. I’m making sure that they don’t.’
Mycroft held the white spirit and rag out for Sherlock. Sherlock pointedly ignored it. Refused to so much as look at the back seat.
‘Fine,’ sighed Mycroft. He opened the back door of the Mercedes and started carefully spot-cleaning the blood off himself.
Sherlock just smoked and looked off into the distance, as though Mycroft’s activity was boring him to tears. Perhaps it was.
‘So, you’re Gay,’ said Mycroft as he cleaned. ‘I have to admit, I’d have preferred a more traditional Coming Out Party.’
Sherlock shook his head, his eyes still focused on the treeline. ‘Not Homosexual. Nothing as simple as that.’ He took another drag. ‘I think I might have been a Victorsexual, but I’m starting to accept that that might be up for revision.’
There was another silence. Still, Mycroft cleaned.
‘I know you crashed the car on purpose, you know,’ added Mycroft. ‘You made it all the way to the Trevors’, then all the way out to wherever it was that this happened to you, then drove him home, then got yourself a few hundred yards from your own home with only a couple of scrapes to the paintwork and then went headlong into a tree? Unlikely.’
Sherlock shrugged. ‘Mea culpa. I was angry. I wanted to break something. And you’re right – I knew you’d come running looking for your precious car. I fancied the attention.’
‘You could have killed yourself, you know that?’
‘Yes. I know.’
Mycroft stopped, and looked up at his brother. ‘Sherlock? Is that what you were trying to do?’
Sherlock managed a thin, bitter smile. ‘Not sure. Pretty half hearted attempt if it was.’
Mycroft wanted to shake his brother again – shake out of him whatever wretched seed that had been planted in his mind that his life could possibly be worth giving up if it couldn’t be with Victor Bloody Trevor of all people. Better yet, he wanted to shake Victor Trevor. He wanted to do a lot worse than shake Victor Trevor. Instead, he set his face resolutely, the way their father always used to do when a matter was not up for debate.
‘You’re not going to see Victor any more.’
‘Don’t worry,’ snorted his brother. ‘Victor made the same sentiment very clear to me.’
‘I’m not talking about what’s in Victor’s interests! I’m talking about what’s best for you. No matter what Victor says – no matter if he calls you, says he’s changed his mind, says he’s leaving Cynthia, you’re not to see him.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because you’d clearly do anything for him,’ Mycroft replied. ‘And, that is clearly a very dangerous position for you to find yourself in.’
‘You’re being over dramatic again,’ grumbled Sherlock.
“Over dramatic”. From a boy who’d just celebrated the loss of his virginity by slamming his car into a tree.
‘Answer me honestly,’ said Mycroft. ‘If he got back in touch with you again, told you he wanted to relive last night – recklessly hurt and degrade you again for whatever reasons it was the he had a few hours ago, and leave you in an even worse state than you’re in right now - you’d let him. Wouldn’t you?’
-x-
40 seconds. 50. 60. How long would John need? He’d probably got the laptop by now, give him time to get out of the function room and safely up to their bedroom without being spotted.
Victor was still following him. The odd shadow falling past him from behind, not the sound of footsteps so much as that prickly sensation in the back of one’s neck that one got when being watched and followed with intent.
70 seconds. 80. Enough time for John, surely.
He’d come to the billiards room. A dead end, and empty with the lights switched off, at that. Victor was still behind him. Fine. He’d just pretend he’d been looking for the stairs up to the bedrooms and had got lost, politely but firmly walk past him and that would be the end of it.
He stopped, just inside the darkened room. His hand fell down and his fingers brushed against the sofa.
Leather.
Tactile memories. Leather. Victor’s hands. They were rougher in those days, he’d started moisturising them since.
His palms were clammy. Again! This was intolerable. Something would have to be done about it.
He turned, and there was Victor in the doorway, mere centimetres away from him. Blocking the exit, again. Now, was that subconscious or consciously deliberate?
‘Hello again, Sherlock.’
-x-
NB the song that John gets the DJ to play is 'To Be With You' by Mr Big.
Part 3 of 'It's Complicated', ye story of Victor Bastard Trevor.
Three
-x-
‘Nothing happened,’ Sherlock told John. ‘Nothing that’s any of your concern, anyhow.’
‘But…’
‘It’s in the past,’ Sherlock snapped, quietly. ‘It’s irrelevant. So let’s stop concentrating on that and pay a little more attention to the task ahead of us, shall we?’
John sighed. ‘Right. Right…’
‘I’ve been talking to you for far too long,’ noted Sherlock under his breath. ‘I’m supposed to be delighted to see these people again.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Back into the fray. I’m off to mingle.’
‘Good luck,’ John told him.
But Sherlock was already gone.
-x-
After half an hour of chatter, John became suddenly aware that everything in his earpiece had gone very quiet. He tried tapping the device, but nothing happened. He darted off into the toilets to try taking it out and inspecting it. Just before he removed the earpiece, though, he found he was able to hear quieter, more subtle sounds thanks to the relative peace of the Gents’.
There was the rustle of leaves in the wind. Sherlock, it seemed, had gone outside. Then came a familiar suck-and-sigh, and John rolled his eyes in irritation.
He was having a crafty fag. After dragging John all this way and making him work a room of strangers all night, and after sending him out at all hours for Nicorette patches over the months they’d been living together. John knew he’d been having the occasional ciggie on the sly, he just knew it.
Well. He wasn’t in the mood for putting up with it tonight. He strode out of the toilets and through the function room. He quickly spotted Sherlock through a window, sitting next to the shrubbery in the gardens at the back. Sherlock was indeed halfway through a cigarette, staring blankly off into the dark garden. John was just about to locate a door so that he could fling the offending cigarette into the ornamental Koi pond when something directly in front of Sherlock that John couldn’t see caught his friend’s attention.
‘All right?’ muttered a voice over John’s earpiece. He recognised that voice straight away. Victor Trevor.
‘Evening,’ relied Sherlock in a similarly muted tone.
Victor kept his distance as he lit up a cigarette of his own.
‘Bad habits,’ added Victor, stiltedly. ‘Difficult to break.’
‘I’m supposed to be quitting,’ Sherlock replied.
‘So should I,’ said Victor. ‘It’s very bad for us.’ They locked gazes for a moment, and John was struck by how sad Sherlock’s expression looked, bathed in the light from the doorway beyond.
Victor snorted a little laugh, breaking the spell. ‘Might stunt our growth.’ He indicated to his own large frame, with a second gesture that seemed to reference Sherlock’s height.
There was an awkward pause, and the solemn stillness fell over the two men in the garden again. There was something there – some atmosphere, some sort of charge between them, and John didn’t like it one bit.
Because he understood, now. He’d worked it out. Bullying, name calling, violence, even… Sherlock shrugged things like that off every day. Victor hadn’t bullied him – what had happened between them had been something that John was almost certain that Sherlock simply didn’t have it in him to cope with.
They’d been lovers.
Victor took a step towards Sherlock, as though reading John’s thoughts somehow and taking it upon himself to prove his theory. ‘Look at you,’ said Victor, softly.
Sherlock’s reaction was as though his seat had suddenly had an electric current passed through it. He sprang to his feet, throwing the remains of his cigarette to the ground.
‘Sherlock.’ With the same quiet tone, Victor put a burly hand around Sherlock’s arm, forcing him to a stop. ‘I know he’s just your flatmate, you know.’
Without another word, Sherlock shrugged out of the other man’s grasp and walked back inside.
John frowned to himself, thinking. Then he searched his pockets, found a biro, scribbled a note on a napkin and handed it to the DJ of the little Hired Disco thumping ‘Tiger Feet’ out in the corner of the Function Room. Then he went to look for Sherlock and ended up bumping into him in the doorway.
‘You all right, Mate?’
Sherlock barely looked at John at all, making a show of scanning the room.
‘I take it you got all of that exchange, too. I did notice you at the window, even if Victor didn’t.’
‘He was your boyfriend,’ John told Sherlock, quietly, ‘wasn’t he?’
Sherlock finally met eyes with John, and gave him a brief, cold, joyless smile.
‘Wrong again. He was a boy, he was my friend. There was no romantic relationship there.’
‘Doesn’t mean you weren’t crazy about each other.’ John paused, watching Sherlock’s frown. ‘I’m not the idiot you like to say I am, Sherlock. I’m a man of the world. I know what it means when people look at each other the way the pair of you just did out there.’
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ Sherlock insisted. He made another glance around the room; this time, it seemed, to ensure that nobody was close enough to hear their voices over the sound of the disco. ‘He never loved me. I was very young. Fifteen. Young enough not to have yet conditioned myself out of the unbearable hormonal weakness of sexual yearning.’
‘So, you did…’
‘Yes, John. I’ll print you out a little certificate when we get home – “John Watson worked something out about the enigma that is Sherlock Holmes’ sexual history”. Happy now?’
Sherlock tried to push past him.
‘It wasn’t just an unrequited little crush though, was it?’ John asked. ‘You mentioned a falling-out in your teens. Something happened. I know something happened. I can see it in your face.’
Sherlock turned back to John. ‘Fine.’ He lowered his voice to a conspirital tone. ‘I kissed him. We were both high as kites, we’d had a wonderful evening laughing and singing Gilbert & Sullivan at the tops of our voices, and I wanted it to end perfectly, so I kissed him. And imagine my joy when he kissed back. And, as one thing led to another, I was hardly going to stop him, was I? I was hardly going to remind him that we were supposed to be best friends, or that he had a girlfriend. I was young and naïve and I thought I was winning him over. But I wasn’t.’ Sherlock gave John another unhappy, tight smile. ‘As turned out, I was an Experiment.’
‘Oh, mate,’ sighed John. ‘Jesus. My getting dumped by Michelle Harrison in front of the whole Student’s Union Bar suddenly doesn’t seem so bad any more.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Mind you, that’s not the whole story though, is it?’
Sherlock just frowned at him.
‘I mean,’ continued John, ‘you are aware that he fancies the pants off you, aren’t you?’
Sherlock stared at him for a second, then shook his head with a snort. ‘Don’t try to make me feel better by feeding me nonsense.’
‘You can’t possibly think that’s nonsense,’ replied John with an incredulous smile. ‘Were you asleep when he came on to you in the garden just now?’
‘He did not…’
‘Please. You know I saw and heard it all. There was more repressed yearning there than the whole Merchant Ivory back catalogue.’
Sherlock gave John a withering look. ‘You also overheard Victor’s conversation with Rupert…’
‘Where Victor insisted you were Gay and single?’ asked John. ‘That your Mum had made up our relationship and I was embarrassed even to seen here with you? Yes, I did. Seemed like wishful thinking on his part to me.’
‘No it isn’t.’ retorted Sherlock. ‘You can’t call it wishful thinking when it’s all true.’
The song that the DJ was playing had started to come to an end. With a gesture that was part friendly-pat-on-the-back and part parental-nudge, John made to usher Sherlock back into the function room.
‘It’s not all true,’ John replied. ‘I’m not embarrassed.’
Another withering look.
‘All right,’ he admitted, ‘I’m a little bit embarrassed, but that’s down to the situation. Not because of you. Jesus – who’d be embarrassed to be seen with you?’
Sherlock’s expression didn’t alter.
The song was fading out. John grabbed Sherlock and practically mandhandled him into the function room. ‘All right. I’ll prove it. About me and about Victor Bloody Trevor.’
‘What on Earth are you doing, you strange little man?’
John held up a finger for Sherlock to wait and listen. Tiger Feet faded out completely…
…and The Macarena came on. An odd mix of confusion and contempt, with more than a smattering of wariness etched itself over Sherlock’s face. John sighed and pinched at the bridge of his nose.
‘If this were a movie, that would have worked.’
‘What would have worked?’
John gave the DJ a wave and a pointed glare. The DJ blinked, ‘mouthed ‘oh, yeah’ and cut the Macarena off suddenly, leaving a grand total of no people sighing in disappointment. Sherlock, either tiring of the distraction or unappreciative of the sudden focus on John and he, being the only two people on the dancefloor as the music scratched into silence, tried to make a hasty exit, but barely took a step away from John when Victor Trevor walked back in, stopping in the doorway, watching Sherlock, and whether intentionally or not, blocking his escape.
‘And we’ve got a special request here,’ announced the DJ. ‘”For the most incredible man I ever met”, from “The Famous Doctor Watson”.’
John wasn’t sure how many old ladies sighed ‘Aaahhhhh’ at that announcement. Sherlock could have told him. It was at least half a dozen.
‘What?’ asked Sherlock through gritted teeth, freezing his lips so that no one could read them.
John took his hands. ‘Trust me,’ he muttered as quietly as possible. ‘This worked a treat with Karen Baker at the 6th Form disco.’
‘What?’ reiterated Sherlock.
‘Just… trust me?’
‘Always.’
‘Then shut up and dance.’
After a moment’s fumbling to find the right record, the DJ finally started the song. John pulled Sherlock to him as convincingly as he could and began the awkward swaying that he’d stuck with for many a Slow Dance over the years. Sherlock pulled a face at the first line of the song.
‘”Hold on, little girl”?’ he echoed, indignantly.
John gave a little shrug, wincing apologetically. ‘It was perfect at the 6th Form Dance. Couldn’t think of any other song to use tonight off the top of my head. The chorus should fit, though.’
‘If this is all to convince the party that we are the couple that my mother says we are…’
‘It’s not about your mother. It’s about you. I’m not embarrassed, Sherlock. Look at me, not being embarrassed to be seen like this with you. If anything, it’s flattering. Bloke like me? With a bloke like you? I mean…’
John trailed off. There was that look on Sherlock’s face again – the look from the restaurant, just after they’d moved in together, when they’d had that little misunderstanding.
‘Listen, John. I know I said that Victor was my adolescent self’s version of you, and that my feelings for him evolved into something other than those of friendship, but please don’t think that I meant… because these days… I mean, ever since then…’
‘I know, I know. Even if I was – which I’m not – I know. Married to your work, although that clearly isn’t the whole story regarding that, bearing in mind you were taken advantage of and had your heart broken when you were still just a kid…’
‘I wasn’t taken advantage of. I threw myself at him.’
‘You were 15.’
‘That’s old enough.’
‘Law says otherwise. What was he – 18…?’
’19.’
John just shook his head.
‘So, did it “work” with Karen Baker?’ asked Sherlock, after a moment.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you “the next to be with her”?’
John laughed a little and shook his head, again. ‘No. I was just a good mate. I was “good mates” with a lot of girls back then.
‘Your tone implies that that was an unsatisfactory situation for you,’ Sherlock noted. ‘Don’t you think that maybe… it’s better to be a “good mate”? That maybe that’s more special than…’
It was Sherlock’s turn to trail off.
‘I do,’ John replied. ‘Now. Not so much when I was 17, though. Still, she did appreciate that look on her ex boyfriend’s face at this routine.’ He cast a sly side glance at the door. ‘Speaking of which…’
Victor Trevor was watching them intently, but clearly didn’t find the scene as enchanting as all the cooing old ladies did. His face was a picture of bitter envy.
‘See?’ asked John.
Sherlock’s gaze darted to the window opposite the door – he could see Victor’s expression perfectly well in the reflection… and more beside, it seemed.
‘I do see,’ replied Sherlock. ‘John, you’re a genius.’
‘No,’ muttered John, embedding that rare compliment as firmly into his long term memory as he possibly could. ‘Not like… I mean… really?’
‘Not really,’ said Sherlock, jerking his head faintly towards the “kids table”, ‘but the effect is much the same as it had been if you’d been clever enough to have planned it this way.’
John looked at Cynthia and Rupert as surreptitiously as he could. Cynthia and Rupert weren’t watching them dance. Rupert was watching Cynthia concern while Cynthia was watching Victor, watching them. And Victor really wasn’t watching Sherlock and John’s dance particularly subtly.
‘Cynthia knew, back then. She wasn’t stupid – she worked it out.’ Sherlock added in a low tone. ‘Just because she’s having an affair doesn’t mean she’s automatically going to be happy for her husband to show feelings for somebody else, let alone another man, and in public, too. How humiliating.’
‘Cynthia gets upset, storms off,’ John murmured, playing out the scene in his head, ‘Rupert hurries after her, possibly spends a while “comforting” her, seeing as how Victor’s so distracted by you, and we grab his laptop in the confusion…?’
‘He’ll probably sling it to the bar staff to keep it safe if he’s in a hurry,’ added Sherlock. ‘They’ve seen us chatting cheerfully with the Trevors all night, buying them rounds – if I say Rupert’s asked me to grab his laptop back for him, they’re likely to believe I’m just running an errand for a good mate.’
The song was starting to come to an end.
‘We’ve only got a few more bars to make her leave,’ said John.
‘Desperate times,’ muttered Sherlock, closing his eyes and tilting his head down a little.
It was the sort of kiss John used to give his mum when he was little – closed mouthed but not in the slightest bit awkward, devoid of sex but full of fondness. John closed his eyes into it too for a moment, opening them again when he heard the scrape of two chairs. Cynthia hurried out of the function room, followed closely by Rupert, after he had given his laptop to a barmaid to keep hold of. They both pushed right past Victor, still standing less than a foot from the door. He didn’t so much as notice. He was still watching Sherlock the way John had seen Harry watch people drink wine back when she’d tried to go on the wagon.
Various old ladies broke into applause at the end of the song.
Sherlock stayed pressed close to John, for appearance’s sake in part, but also so that he could murmur ‘Victor’s attention will be on me. You get the laptop, I’ll meet you upstairs’ into John’s ear.
It was as easy to get the laptop off the bar staff as Sherlock had suggested. John hurried upstairs with it, aware that they had little time in which to copy all of its files onto a replica laptop so that the original could be sent to recover whatever emails and documents Rupert Trevor had thought he’d erased. He noticed as he walked as speedily as he could without drawing attention to himself out of the function room that neither Sherlock nor Victor were anywhere to be seen. Well. Good, John supposed. Victor was the only one still about who would notice that the laptop John had picked up wasn’t his. Sherlock had probably drawn him off somewhere. And, for pity’s sake, Sherlock faced more troublesome people every day than some paunchy toff that he’d had a crush on once as a kid. John was certain that he could take care of himself.
-x-
‘I can take care of myself, you know.’
Sherlock was still standing by the car door, sullenly lighting up yet another cigarette.
‘Clearly,’ Mycroft called back to him, ‘that couldn’t be further from the truth.’ He went back to rooting through the boot of their mother’s Land Rover. Thankfully, she still had her art equipment in the car from going landscape painting on Good Friday.
‘Going to paint a picture?’ Sherlock asked.
Mycroft finally found what he was looking for and held it aloft. ‘White spirit.’ He started walking back towards the smashed Mercedes. ‘You’ve written off my car, Sherlock. I can explain a silly boy deciding that he can drive the thing like a grown up and ploughing it into a sycamore tree easily enough. Blood on the back seat’s a little harder to explain to the insurance people. You said you didn’t want the police to become involved. I’m making sure that they don’t.’
Mycroft held the white spirit and rag out for Sherlock. Sherlock pointedly ignored it. Refused to so much as look at the back seat.
‘Fine,’ sighed Mycroft. He opened the back door of the Mercedes and started carefully spot-cleaning the blood off himself.
Sherlock just smoked and looked off into the distance, as though Mycroft’s activity was boring him to tears. Perhaps it was.
‘So, you’re Gay,’ said Mycroft as he cleaned. ‘I have to admit, I’d have preferred a more traditional Coming Out Party.’
Sherlock shook his head, his eyes still focused on the treeline. ‘Not Homosexual. Nothing as simple as that.’ He took another drag. ‘I think I might have been a Victorsexual, but I’m starting to accept that that might be up for revision.’
There was another silence. Still, Mycroft cleaned.
‘I know you crashed the car on purpose, you know,’ added Mycroft. ‘You made it all the way to the Trevors’, then all the way out to wherever it was that this happened to you, then drove him home, then got yourself a few hundred yards from your own home with only a couple of scrapes to the paintwork and then went headlong into a tree? Unlikely.’
Sherlock shrugged. ‘Mea culpa. I was angry. I wanted to break something. And you’re right – I knew you’d come running looking for your precious car. I fancied the attention.’
‘You could have killed yourself, you know that?’
‘Yes. I know.’
Mycroft stopped, and looked up at his brother. ‘Sherlock? Is that what you were trying to do?’
Sherlock managed a thin, bitter smile. ‘Not sure. Pretty half hearted attempt if it was.’
Mycroft wanted to shake his brother again – shake out of him whatever wretched seed that had been planted in his mind that his life could possibly be worth giving up if it couldn’t be with Victor Bloody Trevor of all people. Better yet, he wanted to shake Victor Trevor. He wanted to do a lot worse than shake Victor Trevor. Instead, he set his face resolutely, the way their father always used to do when a matter was not up for debate.
‘You’re not going to see Victor any more.’
‘Don’t worry,’ snorted his brother. ‘Victor made the same sentiment very clear to me.’
‘I’m not talking about what’s in Victor’s interests! I’m talking about what’s best for you. No matter what Victor says – no matter if he calls you, says he’s changed his mind, says he’s leaving Cynthia, you’re not to see him.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because you’d clearly do anything for him,’ Mycroft replied. ‘And, that is clearly a very dangerous position for you to find yourself in.’
‘You’re being over dramatic again,’ grumbled Sherlock.
“Over dramatic”. From a boy who’d just celebrated the loss of his virginity by slamming his car into a tree.
‘Answer me honestly,’ said Mycroft. ‘If he got back in touch with you again, told you he wanted to relive last night – recklessly hurt and degrade you again for whatever reasons it was the he had a few hours ago, and leave you in an even worse state than you’re in right now - you’d let him. Wouldn’t you?’
-x-
40 seconds. 50. 60. How long would John need? He’d probably got the laptop by now, give him time to get out of the function room and safely up to their bedroom without being spotted.
Victor was still following him. The odd shadow falling past him from behind, not the sound of footsteps so much as that prickly sensation in the back of one’s neck that one got when being watched and followed with intent.
70 seconds. 80. Enough time for John, surely.
He’d come to the billiards room. A dead end, and empty with the lights switched off, at that. Victor was still behind him. Fine. He’d just pretend he’d been looking for the stairs up to the bedrooms and had got lost, politely but firmly walk past him and that would be the end of it.
He stopped, just inside the darkened room. His hand fell down and his fingers brushed against the sofa.
Leather.
Tactile memories. Leather. Victor’s hands. They were rougher in those days, he’d started moisturising them since.
His palms were clammy. Again! This was intolerable. Something would have to be done about it.
He turned, and there was Victor in the doorway, mere centimetres away from him. Blocking the exit, again. Now, was that subconscious or consciously deliberate?
‘Hello again, Sherlock.’
-x-
NB the song that John gets the DJ to play is 'To Be With You' by Mr Big.
