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Sometimes, Sherlock does it when he’s bored. John’s taken the gun away, and the violin’s all the way upstairs, and there’s no experiment to attend to. So Sherlock goes to the drawer and gets out packs of pens. Sometimes they’re elegant fountain pens and sometimes they’re kids’ felt tip pens and fineliners. Either way, he tips them all out of their packets, pulls up his dressing gown sleeve, and begins to draw carefully all over his own arm.
He also does it when he’s working, occasionally. John finds this slightly harder to understand, but Sherlock’s explanation, as far as John can understand it, is something along the lines of: his mind works better when it’s thinking on multiple tracks rather than trying to focus entirely on one, and drawing intricate swirls and spikes and bones and brains and dragons on his skin occupies the bits of his head that would otherwise be buzzing and whirring and distracting him from the task at hand.
It’s hardly the oddest thing Sherlock does, so John doesn’t say much about it. But he can’t help but notice that Sherlock’s drawings are surprisingly beautiful, though he chooses to keep that thought to himself. More beautiful than they would be on paper, actually, because Sherlock incorporates his freckles and scratches and scars into the pictures, and there’s something oddly delicate and fragile about the way the images hover on the surface of the flesh.
Occasionally John will covertly watch Sherlock drawing, strangely fascinated by the movements the tips of the pens make over his skin. Doesn’t it tickle? When he presses harder, to make a deeper, darker line, doesn’t it hurt?
It’s this watching and wondering, in the end, that is largely responsible for what happens.
John gets home from the surgery to find Sherlock sprawled on the sofa, shirtless, his entire left arm, stomach and chest covered in a bizarre mixture of pictures and what must be case notes. His right arm, meanwhile, has four nicotine patches stuck to it.
‘Difficult case?’ John says sympathetically, trying not to stare at Sherlock’s lean inky reclining body.
‘Very,’ Sherlock mutters. ‘And I’ve run out of space to draw on, and there’s – too many thoughts, and I –‘ he cuts himself off, his expression deeply frustrated.
‘Can’t you just draw on paper?’
‘Not the same.’
John nods. Then he hears himself say, in a casual, friendly tone of voice that belies his frantic thumping heartrate, ‘You could use me, if you like.’
Sherlock looks up sharply. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah.’ Before John can have second thoughts about this, he’s removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Where do you want me?’
Sherlock seems utterly thrown, which isn’t something John gets to cause often. He rather likes it. ‘Just – just here,’ Sherlock says, regaining some composure, and picking up a pillow to toss it to the ground. ‘You could kneel on that and I can draw on your back. If you really are sure.’
‘Yeah, ‘course,’ John says easily, even though he is now certain that this is a spectacularly terrible idea. He removes his shirt and kneels on the cushion with his back to Sherlock, as instructed.
He holds his breath. The pressure, when it comes, isn’t as uncomfortable as he was afraid it might be. Sherlock is using the fountain pens today, and he manages to press hard enough to avoid tickling without straying into pain. He is muttering as he does so, the names of suspects and places and bits of data. The drawing isn’t at the forefront of his mind; that’s really the whole point. It occurs to John that he would quite like this to happen when Sherlock is fully focused on him, studying his back and the way it interacts with the words and patterns. All of that scrutiny and intelligence and imagination trained on John.
This has got even more badly out of hand than John thought.
When it’s finally over, John gets up to go and make a cup of tea and, more importantly, remove his badly tented jeans from Sherlock’s sight before they're spotted, because you don’t have to be the world’s only consulting detective to deduce the meaning of that.
And perhaps the situation isn’t as awful as John had thought. Because as he glances back to smile at Sherlock on his way to the kitchen, he realises that Sherlock’s deeply flushed, and John has never once seen him blush at all before, and that his legs are crossed.
Well then. Perhaps John ought to try an experiment or two of his own.
*
‘What on earth is this?’ Sherlock asks, pointing at the pile of books on the floor.
‘You opened the Amazon packages,’ John observes.
‘They had my name on them,’ Sherlock says. ‘Why have you been ordering books for me?’
‘They’re a present,’ John says. He holds them up one by one. ‘Hamlet, that’s by William Shakespeare, and if you’ve deleted who he is I might actually cry. Then, this is the complete works of Keats. This one’s a modern poet called Don Paterson, I don’t know much about him, but he’s Scottish and Harry likes him. And this one’s Andrew Marvell.’
‘Presumably this is another attempt at expanding my cultural horizons,’ Sherlock drawls, casting a disdainful glance over the books that John’s now put down on the table.
‘Well, yeah,’ John says. ‘You need more in your life than crime scenes, and I’m never going to stop, so you might as well get used to it. Anyway, I thought this attempt might go down better.’
‘And why would you think that?’
John hesitates, shifts awkwardly. ‘Well – you like music. You love it, in fact. And poetry’s not altogether dissimilar, so…give it a try, OK?’
‘I’ve really got better things to be doing.’
‘Oi, these didn’t come that cheap, you know, even if they are second hand. So you’re going to sit down right now and read every last one of them.’ John pauses, then takes the plunge. ‘And after that we’re going to go to my room and lock the door and you’re going to tell me your favourite bits.’
John finds he really does like puzzling Sherlock; he doesn’t get to see a confused expression on the man’s face anywhere near often enough. ‘Why would we need to be in your room with the door locked for me to tell you my favourite quotations from books of poetry?’
John smiles. And hopes to god he’s read this right. ‘Because you aren’t going to tell me by speaking. You’re going to write them on me. Anywhere on me you like.’
Sherlock’s breath actually hitches, which is incredibly satisfying. He stares at John like John is some sort of magical creature from another dimension, then without another word scoops up the books, dumps them on the sofa, sits down next to them and picks up the one on top of the pile.
*
This time it lasts much longer, as John feels Sherlock’s narrow stylish handwriting forming across his shoulderblades, his arms, his spine. Sherlock is still drawing as well as writing, his usual morbid style, John should think, monsters and stars and tessellations. Probably equations too.
This time John’s entirely naked, and Sherlock doesn’t hesitate at all when he gets lower, is perfectly happy to let his pen glide over John’s thighs and ankles and arse, telling him to turn over in a low, breathy voice whenever he wants to switch which side he’s drawing on.
This time there’s nothing to stop John from moaning and rutting into the bed when the pen traces the dip in his back and the sensitive skin round the sides, and he comes with Sherlock pressing kisses into his hair while tracing a spiral across the side of John’s neck.
He turns his face up to look at Sherlock, half moving onto his side. ‘As I obviously can’t read what you’ve written,’ he says, ‘tell me what it all says. And I want to know where they all are, so touch them as you say them.’
Sherlock smiles at him, then draws a long finger across John’s collarbone. When he speaks, his voice is even deeper than usual, if only slightly. ‘Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,’ he says, ‘Disasters in the sun.’
‘Of course you would go straight for the fire and blood,’ John says. ‘Go on.’
Sherlock’s hand moves down, his finger circling around John’s nipples. ‘But long it could not be/Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,/Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/To muddy death.’
‘Sherlock!’ John protests.
Sherlock smirks. ‘You said my favourite bits, John. What were you expecting? It was never going to be love poetry, or odes to flowers in the spring.'
‘Well, no, but I didn’t expect to end up with Ophelia’s death written on my chest. Let’s try something other than Hamlet.’
‘Pity, I liked that one.’
‘Of course you did. Go on.’
‘The candlelight strange on our faces/like the tiny silent blazes/and coruscations of its wars,’ Sherlock says softly after a moment’s pause, and then instead of the touch of fingers John’s expecting, he feels Sherlock’s tongue lick a stripe across his hip.
‘Fuck, Sherlock,’ John murmurs.
Then Sherlock’s speaking fast, throwing out line after line, pausing only to tease John’s skin with his lips. ‘Our intimate dark, our skin-trade,/ that commerce so furious we often think/love’s something we share, but we’re always wrong.’ ‘Whatever our luck, by sunset, they’d fill the bay like burnt moths.’ ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.’ ‘With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain/With buds, and bells, and stars without a name.’ ‘Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.’
At some point during these lines Sherlock stops using his tongue to identify the locations of the words and begins, clearly pushed past the point of being able to hold off any longer, to rub his cock against John’s inked skin, following the lines with it and reciting all the while, his voice getting gradually deeper and less smooth, the words increasingly interrupted by tiny gasps and choked back moans. It’s only when he actually comes, semen spilling onto John’s back, that he stops being able to form the sentences and is reduced to swearing and John’s name. Which John doesn’t mind at all.
When he’s done, he collapses onto the bed next to John and looks at him fondly. ‘I can’t believe you let me do that.’
‘Well. It wasn’t exactly a wholly selfless act, was it?’
Sherlock grins and moves in closer. ‘You might change your mind once I tell you that you’ve got Hamlet’s speech about maggots all down the back of your right leg.’
‘I don’t remember any speech about –‘
‘A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots –‘
‘Oh God, shut up,’ John says, burying his head in Sherlock’s shoulder. ‘I should never have got myself into this.’
‘Does that mean it isn’t going to happen again?’
John laughs, and wraps his arm around Sherlock. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he says.