Fluffbruary - Day 15 - Vintage John
Prompt was drink. I took it literally - a short history of John's drinking life. And bonus points for the pic. for @fluffbruary
It's also here:https://archiveofourown.org/works/37152175
Vintage John
John had his first beer when he twelve. Stolen from his grandfather's fridge on a dare, he carried the bottle to school the next day, wrapped in an old jumper and buried in his backpack beneath his maths homework. Hiding behind the garden shed after school, he and Tommy Leith passed the bottle back and forth between them, laughing and belching loudly. They buried the empty bottle under a rock when they were done. John pocketed the cap for luck and carried it in his back pocket all through secondary school.
The first time he got drunk, he was sixteen and had a crush on a girl who barely knew his name. He'd just finished reading a Hemingway novel in which every character drank to forget the pain of unrequited love. All he could find at the back of the pantry was a half-empty bottle of peach schnapps and a dusty bottle of Celteg elderberry wine. He grabbed both bottles, tucked them beneath his flannel jacket, and headed to the woods behind the house. He was a quarter way through the bottle of elderberry wine when the trees began to blur. He liked the feeling of a world less solid than the one he was used to. He liked how the wine filled that part of him that had always felt hollow. He was three quarters the way through the bottle when he threw up all over the library's copy of "The Sun also Rises." It was dark when stumbled home, singing "Anarchy in the UK" before vomiting, one last time, in his father's boots.
By his third year at uni, he drank every weekend at local pubs, listening to cover bands and playing it cool. He learned to love the burn of scotch against his throat, the slow fire it fueled in his gut. He liked how the music sounded when it was filtered through a haze of cigarettes and whisky. The first time he kissed a man – in the alley behind the Pig and Whistle in the middle of February – he was drunk on Highland Black Whisky and the dangerous feeling of his hard-on pressed up against another man's cock.
Home from Afghanistan, he drank every day. One shot because he was thirsty, two because it had been a bad day, three because that's how many it took to blur the jagged edges of his life. Six and he didn’t care anymore that his job, his flat, his life was complete shite. He knew it was becoming a problem when Harry told him she was worried about his drinking.
It was Sherlock who introduced him to good wine. He taught him about Pinot Noir and Beaujolais and Cabernet, about balance and nose and finish. How to identify the parts that made up the whole, like the notes of a sonata. Sherlock showed him that good wine wasn't always expensive, and expensive wine wasn't always good. That Chardonnay tasted better after sex. That bad wine was worse than no wine.
Later, Sherlock taught him that drinking never cured a broken heart.
Four years later, when he and Sherlock were finally finding their way back to each other, John kept a bottle of Glenlivet under the sink in the kitchen. He called it scotch tape – they only seemed to drink it when they needed help putting together the broken pieces of their lives.
It was only years later, after they made the move from London to Sussex, that John discovered that Newcastle Brown Ale, sucked out of the hollow of Sherlock's neck, was the only drink he ever needed.
