I worry about the things my brain does when I get bored.
I’m warning you right now, I don’t know what the fuck this is. Fluffy cannibalistic psychic Lovecraftian tentacle-shapeshift PWP smut? IT’S CUTE, GOD HELP ME. I’VE WRITTEN ADORABLE LOVECRAFT PORN.
The stars are bad tonight. It makes Sherlock jittery. He always insists it doesn’t bother him, but he’s not the one who has to put up with him being snappish and restless all over everybody.
It’s worse tonight than usual, which makes it a terrible night for a crime scene, but nobody got that memo out to the murderers.
They’ve been on site for five minutes, and already he’s got Lestrade’s team so on edge that John’s a little bit worried Donovan might finally figure out the trick to killing with her mind. He returns from a quick confab with Lestrade—playing courier pigeon for Sherlock—to find Sherlock hunched over the body’s thoracic cavity, reaching in for the heart.
John kicks him. ”Don’t you dare eat that!”
Sherlock pulls his hand back and glowers up at John. ”I wasn’t going to.”
Lies. John narrows his eyes. Sherlock makes a pinched, sarcastic little face back at him that proves nothing except that he’s a spoiled princess.
That’s another problem with a bad-star night. Sherlock gets snackish. Bored eating is a terrible habit he picked up from Mycroft. John can live with the moodiness, but coming up with places to put the hollowed-out skins does start to get tricky after a while.
It’s an interesting murder, though—highly ritualized, Sherlock says, and he would know—and after a few more minutes of stalking around the scene, John has just about decided Sherlock is entertained enough that it’s safe to relax.
That, of course, is when Anderson starts humming while he works.
It’s terrible. John has a musical ear—runs in his kind—and Anderson’s humming is off-key enough to set the dimensional walls grating against each other like badly seated tooth fillings. John has to remind himself that dissolving his head wouldn’t be neighbourly.
And then he glances back towards Sherlock. Who is looking decidedly blurry around the edges. ”Sherlock!”
It’s just a good thing they’re in a corner dark enough that to human eyes everything looks blurry. John pushes insistently against his shoulder in the direction of the door. Clearly it’s time to get Sherlock to someplace quiet where he can pull himself together. ”Come on, let’s get out of here before he lures in a byakhee looking for a mate.”
But by the time they’ve only gone a block, Sherlock is starting to look a bit…heavy, the fabric of space-time sagging beneath his density. Humans they pass eye him warily, picking up intuitively on his overabundance of realness. It’s a good thing they’re in London; in some places on this planet, reality might’ve crumpled out from under them by now.
"You’re not looking too hot," John tells him at the next street corner, and reaches out to brush a hand over the back of Sherlock’s neck. The tentacle that had been working loose of his silhouette sinks back into his form under John’s calming touch.
Sherlock doesn’t so much as acknowledge he’s spoken. John sighs and keeps trotting along at his side for another 40 yards or so, till Sherlock stops in the shadow of an alleyway and reaches a black-fingertipped hand out to John. ”Here.”
John peers into the mouth of the alley. ”Here?” He sighs when Sherlock waggles his fingers, and takes Sherlock’s hand to be led into the darkness. The black around his nails promptly fades back to flesh tone.
Of course Sherlock is right. He has a better grasp on the multi-dimensional geometry of space-time than John ever will. His kind are its masters, after all. John’s just a servitor race. He leads them at subtly off-kilter angles into the alley, and space unfolds spectacularly around them.
As the cramped dimensions of Earth blossom around them like an opening rose, John breathes easier for the first time in days. He picked this world as a hiding spot because it’s such a perfectly sheltered little cubby hole, but bloody hell it leaves him feeling claustrophobic. This little cul de sac Sherlock’s found for them may be nothing more than an enclosed courtyard, but at least John can see the real sky from here. He closes his eyes to enjoy the taste of the starlight.
He can feel Sherlock shifting next to him, unwinding, murmuring burbling liquid syllables to himself. He’s careful with them; their sounds only make the local reality shudder a little bit, softening into velvety moulded comfort around them. When John opens his eyes to look at him again, there’s little about Sherlock’s form a human would recognize anymore.
He reaches out to enfold John in his arms. John smiles up at him and raises a hand to his cheek. He’s so beautiful like this; all the deep iridescent colours of the ionized gasses filling the voids between stars, and eyes that blaze like Sirius.
"You need it?" John asks gently.
Sherlock nods, and twines more gleaming, interstellar limbs around him.
They knead across his skin, caress the old wound in his shoulder whose molecular structure he’s never been able to reshape properly, and tighten with intimate demand till John’s physical integrity begins to buckle deliciously beneath the pressure. He gasps in delight at the sting as the wriggling tips of Sherlock’s tendrils pierce his boundaries and push inside him.
John is a shapeshifter, born to a race that has no native form. He ripples with pleasure as Sherlock infiltrates him, his mass flowing and reshaping easily to accommodate. Sherlock is a rapture; he scintillates through John’s flesh, tiny gorgeous novae of sub-atomic collisions sparking wherever they come into contact till John can’t stay still through the sensation of it. He twists and writhes as Sherlock pours endlessly into him, flooding and blending into the shape of John’s body and mind until John feels through Sherlock’s flesh and knows through his mind.
John meets him with greedy, shameless need. Sherlock’s responding laugh crashes through them in a midnight black wave of sound and frothing joy.
John is so small, compared to Sherlock. Sherlock is immense, unspeakably immense, unspooling into shapes and colours, sounds and flavours and textures that John doesn’t even have words for. Through Sherlock, he can see so much more of the universe. It’s beautiful, dizzying, mind-bending, and he knows that by tomorrow the memory of it will fade to a dim echo of what he knows at this moment, but for now, Sherlock’s truth rips and shakes at him with a catastrophic, transcendent beauty.
Sherlock pauses when he’s penetrated John’s core, and simply breathes, the sensation of it reverberating in and around them. It feels so right to have him like this, like regaining a piece of himself he was missing. John is sentient, he has choice, but he can’t refute the fact that he was created for this, to serve Sherlock’s kind. Being able to have both—being able to choose to serve—the sweetness of it echoes through him.
Sherlock’s deeper-toned emotions ring through them both in counterpoint, his pleasure, possession, satisfaction. The tension that’s been riding him all night from the aggravating configurations of gravitational forces has all but melted away. Rooted deep into John’s core, he ripples the tendrils of himself through John’s soft shapeshifter’s essence and drinks from the soothing formlessness of it.
John shakes and sings with ecstasy. They might warp the local fabric of space-time around them. He doesn’t care.
A few blissful eternities later, time finally resumes when John feels Sherlock shift and begin to pull away. He comes back to himself bit by bit, their bodies and minds unwinding and separating from one another, and then they both shake themselves back into the containment of their human skins.
John stands in Sherlock’s arms for a little while longer, till Sherlock slides one hand down John’s arm to weave their fingers together and lead him back out of their private, starry little pocket.
“I told you the stars were bad tonight,” John says, leaning his head against Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Shut up.” But Sherlock slides an arm around John’s shoulders to keep him close.
“I told you they make you cranky,” John pushes, grinning.
“Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.”
Sherlock looks down at him with a little smile. “Mmmm, no.”
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