Archive of Our Own

Lestrade held the door for John when they walked out of the restaurant, full of Thai food and beer.

"Good, right?" Lestrade said.

"Very good. Thanks. And not that spicy, yeah? I told you."

Lestrade's shoulder twitched in that way he had when he wanted to put his arm around John but couldn't decide if it would be worth the stares. John stepped closer and slid his arm around Lestrade's waist, under his jacket. Lestrade dropped his head briefly to press his cheek to John's temple.

It was so comfortable. Lestrade's body was warm against his side. Lestrade's arm settled over his shoulders, a heavy, anchoring weight.

"So. Six months," John said. It was still blowing his mind a bit every time he remembered it.

"Six months."

"Not your longest relationship. How long were you with-- No, wait, never mind. Not tonight. Rewind. I didn't say that."

Lestrade was smiling at him. "All right. Cupcake?"

"Excuse me?"

Lestrade pointed. "Cupcake shop. Do you want one?"

"Oh! All right."

The inside of the shop was brightly lit almost to the point of pain, and the walls were pink and white striped. John hung back, blinking in the glare, and watched Lestrade chat with the woman behind the counter on the merits of various flavor combinations as if it really and truly mattered to him whether lavender-mint icing belonged on a vanilla or chocolate base.

It did matter to him, John knew. Lots of things mattered to Lestrade. Proper dates and flowers and romance and birthday celebrations and Valentine's Day. Lestrade waded in mud looking for dismembered body parts, forgot his stab vest while chasing violent criminals, and then came home and told the boys stories, loaned out his biscuit cutters to that boy on Anthea's security team and really cared about cupcakes.

John wasn't sure he'd ever been able to manage that much caring. Even before he'd acquired a sort of invisible riot shield between him and the rest of the world.

It was amazing. Lestrade was amazing. John was continually astonished by the sweetness in him. The hardness had been easy to see from the first, and that was what had drawn John in, what he'd recognized: here was someone else who wouldn't break. He hadn't expected the rest, hadn't know it was possible to combine the two at all.

"What do you think?" Lestrade said. The debate was now apparently between one with pink icing (peppermint?) and one with chocolate, so that was an easy choice.

"Chocolate."

"Right, and one of those," Lestrade told the woman.

She did something behind the counter and then handed over a box that had to contain at least six of them.

"You're going to make yourself ill," John said automatically. He did try to remember that Lestrade's eating and sleeping habits weren't actually any of his business and that Lestrade was an adult and presumably entirely capable of looking after himself.

Sometimes, though, he thought Lestrade liked it. That maybe it was part of the whole domestic, romantic package that Lestrade seemed to feel was a real and viable way to live. So Lestrade ate absurd things and slept at ridiculous hours, and John fussed, but tried not to fuss too much.

He didn't want to end up like Bryan, after all. Forbidding Lestrade to ride his bike through the magical powers of emotional blackmail. There was some line there John needed not to cross, and some days it felt like a very fine line indeed, gossamer thin and easily snapped.

Lestrade laughed and pulled him close and kissed his cheek. "Yes, mum. Don't worry, I'm going to have help eating them."

They held hands on the way back to Lestrade's flat. Lestrade carried the cupcakes cradled to his chest. John looked around at the lit windows and traffic and paid attention to the feel of Lestrade's palm shifting against his. He wondered, yet again, how this had become his life.

He wasn't domestic. He wasn't especially romantic. He wasn't a doctor anymore, not really. He wasn't a soldier. His life had come to be defined by the things he wasn't, come to revolve around Lestrade and Mycroft and Sherlock, packed lunches and cleaning and listening to stories from the real world when everyone got home.

Sometimes he felt he ought to hate it, but he didn't. It felt like a waystation between his life before and the world normal people lived in and took for granted.

At the flat, they watched Hot Fuzz and ate the cakes. Or, at least, they watched the beginning of Hot Fuzz. By the time Nicholas Angel was asleep in his hotel room, Lestrade was licking caramel icing off John's finger, and John was a bit distracted.

It was the first time in his life he'd been able to count on regular sex, too. It never, ever got old.

John tugged his hair until Lestrade detached from his finger and licked across John's lips instead. Lestrade was a slow kisser. Even his hellos and goodbyes lingered. He could kiss John in the kitchen halfway through making a sandwich, and it would last so long John sometimes felt time must've stopped altogether. If he were Lestrade, he'd probably have been able to say that out loud at some point. As it was, not a chance.

"God, you're beautiful," Lestrade said, and didn't give John enough time to tell him how clearly absurd that was. He got another of those time-stopping kisses instead, Lestrade's tongue sliding against his, faint taste of chocolate, more and more of Lestrade's weight on him until he was stretched out full length on the sofa with Lestrade on top of him.

"Just like the first time," John said, and Lestrade let out a breath of laughter against his lips.

"Does that mean we should go to bed?"

"Dunno, it has nostalgia value..."

"We should definitely go to bed. The things I want to do to you need more elbow room."

"You don't have some sort of kinky elbow fetish, do you?"

"Oh, yeah, baby, your hot, sexy elbows..." Lestrade caught his arm and licked his elbow until John was laughing helplessly.

"Get off, you elbow pervert!"

Lestrade grinned and rolled to his feet. "Come on. I even changed the sheets so they're not all dusty."

You ought to move in when your lease is up. You're never here anyway. John bit his tongue on that, as he had been for a couple of months now. Offers like that were ultimatums, even if you didn't mean them to be. He'd have to be the one to say it, eventually. Lestrade wasn't about to invite himself to move in. He just had to pick the right time.

He let Lestrade take his hand and tow him into the bedroom, where the bed was made up, covers folded back to reveal clean white sheets. Lestrade stripped down like he was getting ready for bed: clothes draped over a chair, shoes stuck underneath it, ready to pull on again if he got a call in the middle of the night. He sat, naked, on the edge of the bed and bounced gently.

"Well?" Lestrade said.

John took off his shoes and socks, but stopped there. He knelt between Lestrade's legs.

Lestrade raised both eyebrows at him. "You look like a man with a plan."

"Mm," John said, and scooted forward on his knees to rub his cheek along the shaft of Lestrade's cock. It was hardening already, and he liked the feel of it on his skin, under his lips as he mouthed at the base and licked up to the head.

Lestrade let out a shaky breath and smoothed his hands over John's head like he was setting a crown in place. He never pulled John's hair, unlike basically every other man whose cock John had sucked over the years. Someday, John was going to make him to lose it, and toward that end, he was practicing. There had been a lot of blowjobs recently, and he'd been getting as much of Lestrade into his mouth and down his throat as he could take. It wasn't much, as yet, without gagging, but it was a work in progress. He had time.

And it wasn't as if Lestrade didn't enjoy it. When John had his lips around him and teased the head with his tongue, hard and slow, Lestrade lay back on the bed like he couldn't hold himself up anymore. He clutched his fresh sheets and breathed in long gasps and said John's name like a prayer. It was beautiful.

But not quite the end result John was looking for tonight. He pulled off and kissed Lestrade's thighs until Lestrade was looking up at him, flushed, hairline faintly damp with sweat.

"Roll over," John told him.

Lestrade shifted around to lie on his stomach, stretched out diagonally on the bed. He watched over his shoulder while John removed the rest of his clothes and dropped them in a heap on the floor.

"That's not very tidy, soldier."

"Not a soldier," John said. It still hurt to say, but he thought it might be getting the tiniest bit easier with repetition. He smiled. "I can drop my clothes where I like. I might even stop making the bed in the morning."

"Yeah, the day after the apocalypse maybe. You can take the boy out of the Army, but--"

"Shut up," John said, laughing. "I haven't had any Army in me for at least a year, just copper, thanks very much."

"Didn't know they made dildos out of that."

John sat on the edge of the bed and pinched his backside, still laughing. Ridiculous man. "Shut up, I said! We're going to have very serious sex now. With no copper dildos."

"How about silver or gold?"

"You've only got the hot pink one."

"I told you, it was the only color it came in!"

John spread himself over Lestrade's back and kissed his neck until he stopped grumbling. He thought, occasionally, that Lestrade might have a point about his supposed innocence. He'd never owned sex toys of any sort, for one, though he'd used a few of his girlfriends'.

Mostly, he'd just had a lot of perfectly normal sex with, when he thought about it, probably a higher than standard number of people. More people, he was pretty sure, than Lestrade. They hadn't ever talked numbers though, and he wasn't about to bring it up.

He spread his hands out over Lestrade's back and walked his fingers over little scars and imperfections, over ridges of muscle and planes and juts of bone.

"What're you doing?" Lestrade said, muffled by pillow.

"Relaxing you."

"Really don't need it."

John ignored him and reached for the nightstand drawer, which contained, among other things, massage oil and lube. The oil smelled of lavender, with a faint undertone of chocolate. It reminded John of the cupcakes.

He smoothed oil over Lestrade's back, and Lestrade groaned when he dug his thumbs in.

"John, Jesus, I'm s'posed to be..."

John knew the end of that sentence. "It's your anniversary too, idiot. I get to do nice things for you as well. And I know you like this.

"I do. I really do." Lestrade subsided onto the bed, face buried in the pillows.

John liked it too, maybe more than Lestrade did. He liked learning Lestrade's body, where he held his tension and where his skin was the most sensitive and the more unusual places John could touch him to make him shiver and get hard. More than all that, he liked the ability to melt Lestrade into a man-shaped puddle on the bed, liked turning his muscles to water and making him moan John's name.

He moaned it even louder when John got two fingers inside him. John lay along his side and fingered him until Lestrade was grinding his hips down against the bed.

"Come on, come on," Lestrade muttered. His breath was rough, and his hands were squeezing into the pillows, white-knuckled.

"Soon," John told him, though in truth he didn't want to move on from this, even hard as he was. They didn't often get the chance to take their time. Minutes ticked past audibly, measured by the thick second hand on Lestrade's alarm clock.

"John, will you get in me!" Lestrade said, finally. "Now, before I come all over the bed?"

John bit his lip so he wouldn't laugh and shifted to kneel between his legs at last. He pulled Lestrade's hips up and back, waited for Lestrade to get his knees under him, and slid in easily. He shut his eyes and stayed still, smoothing his hands over the oiled skin of Lestrade's back and down his thighs.

It was going to be over too soon once he started moving. He couldn't string it out any longer. He bent his head to fit his cheek and lips against the curve of Lestrade's neck. Lestrade's body squeezed tight around John's cock. John groaned and bit down gently at the join of his neck and shoulder.

"Fuck, harder," Lestrade said.

John pressed his teeth harder against smooth skin and drew his cock out of the tight heat of Lestrade's body a few agonizing inches before he slammed back in. He felt a shudder pass through Lestrade and reached for his cock. It was hard and hot, slick at the tip. It slid easily through his fist as he stroked it once, and then again.

Lestrade's breath hitched and he jerked his hips forward into John's tight grip again and then back, shoving himself onto John's cock. Lestrade's arms were braced against the bed, locked straight, muscles pulled taut across his shoulders.

They rocked together. Lestrade's knees slipped against the sheets. Their breath came louder. John could hear his blood in his ears, louder as he got closer. He twisted his hand around Lestrade's cock, and Lestrade came with a shout and a gush of wet heat over John's fingers.

Lestrade slid down until he lay flat on the bed. He reached back and dug his fingers hard into John's hip. "Don't stop, come on. Hard."

John squeezed his eyes shut and fucked him hard. He focused on Lestrade's grip, the faintly dusty smell of the room, the sweat gathering at the back of his neck, but it was no good. He came within five strokes. Spreading warmth and lassitude pulled him down until he lay stretched over Lestrade's back. His hips jerked a few more times of their own accord, and he felt the answering squeeze from Lestrade's body each time until he slipped free.

If Lestrade were any of the other blokes John had ever slept with, at this point he would say: Get off, you're heavy, and then go and have a shower. But this was Lestrade, and he craned his neck round to kiss John softly and then wriggled out from under him to fetch a damp cloth.

John rolled onto his back and stretched himself out. They'd argued about this, early on. John had felt he ought to haul his arse out of bed and do the fetching some of the time. Well, half of the time. It was only fair. It had taken a lot of shouting, over the course of several weeks, before John had got it into his head that it wasn't something Lestrade did out of an expectation that John would ever reciprocate. He did it because he wanted to, because he liked - his words - taking care of John.

That was another thing John felt he shouldn't like and yet did, along with Lestrade's frankly absurd desire to protect him (and/or his so-called innocence). It all gave him a sort of guilty, stomach-twisting pleasure. He didn't need protection, certainly didn't deserve it, but he liked it all the same.

Lestrade returned and lay down next to him. He kissed John while he cleaned him up, slow as ever. The towel was warm and wet and faintly rough. Lestrade wanted to do this for him, god only knew why. And under the slow simmer of embarrassment, John wanted him to as well.

"John? All right?"

"Hm? Yeah. Fine." He tugged Lestrade closer and slid an arm over his waist. "Really good, actually."

"Can't sleep," Lestrade said, and followed it up with a yawn. "Gotta get home."

"I'll wake you up. Don't worry."

"Sure?"

"Mmhmm. Sleep."

Lestrade settled down with his head on John's chest, and John settled down to watch the clock.