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ifeelbetterTitle: You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ifeelbetter
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value.
Word Count: 2,248
Summary: Mycroft offers Sherlock a series of readings to help him prepare for falling in love with John.
Notes: Written for thesherlockbbc_fic kink_meme back in...November. The prompt was the last line of Joyce's Ulysses. The other texts referred to are Plato's Symposium, Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his love," Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Austen's Persuasion, and Tennyson's In Memoriam.
It was both comforting and the epitome of frustrating that Mycroft called five seconds--five seconds--after Sherlock stopped, a forkful of food frozen en route to his mouth, and realized why he was staring at John's chin. In those five seconds, Sherlock choked, knocked over John's beer, and stepped on a cat's tail.
"I can provide you with a list of readings that will assist you in your romantic endeavors," Mycroft said when Sherlock answered the phone. There was a pause in which Mycroft put a hand over his end of the phone and had a muffled (and brief) conversation with someone. "Ah," he said, returning to the conversation, "and I believe it is customary, at this juncture, to express some variation of 'Good on you, mate.'"
Sherlock always enjoyed the moments when Mycroft had to admit that he too was a couple hundred IQ points outside of the bounds of normalcy. He decided to count this moment as a minor victory despite the extenuating circumstances.
"I won't--" follow a course of directed readings on the subject of love he began to say but stopped when John's eyes rose from his plate of spaghetti and met his. "Get stuffed," he settled for instead. John's eyebrows rose.
"There is a variety of source material available to you that can inform any decisions you make regarding your associations with Doctor Watson. He will be well versed in the cultural norms and historical contexts--would you be comfortable deferring to his expertise?" Mycroft asked.
"I am very well versed in--"
"No, I'm afraid you're wrong there. You know the seedy underbelly of this business. I'm talking about the spires, the lofty ambitions, the pinnacles. Your experience will only bring you--and Doctor Watson--pain."
Sherlock squirmed. John was waiting, paused in chewing with one cheek fleshed out like a hamster, his fork waving towards the door as if to ask Is it important? Do we have to run off somewhere? And Sherlock knew how long it had been since his last meal, knew from the speed with which he had attacked the bread basket that he really was very hungry, and yet there he was, ready to run off and follow Sherlock anywhere he might lead.
No wonder he had been staring at his chin. The man was a marvel.
"Send me a list," he said into the phone. He could hear Mycroft smirk.
"There's a box waiting for you in your flat."
* * *
'Be ready to protect me, Agathon,' said Socrates, 'for I find that the love of this fellow has become no small burden.'
Sherlock had to read in places where John was unlikely to find him. He spent an afternoon with The Symposium in the Lestrade's dining room until Lestrade came home and kicked him out. He didn't bat an eye at Sherlock's reading material. He would have assumed that it pertained to a case or some obscure research that it would take Sherlock too long to explain and that he wouldn't care enough to listen to anyway. Sherlock was well aware that Lestrade frequently found him incomprehensible and found that he liked the detective more for the fact that it sometimes stopped him from asking questions that would have made Sherlock berate him for his stupidity.
Anyway, he must have acquired the necessary information from the text. Plato wanted him to think that Socrates's version of love transcended the rest and that a spiritual connection is more worthy than a physical one.
Sherlock thought Plato was bollocks and that a man in love ought to behave as Alcibiades did, committing to a siege of the fortress of the beloved in unending devotion.
He waited till John left the clinic for the afternoon and then he hid a big in his desk lamp. He was back in the flat before John--John never took a cab when Sherlock wasn't with him now that he didn't limp.
* * *
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with mee, and be my love.
Sherlock liked that one. It seemed the most direct. He tore the page out of the book--grinning as he did so, imagining Mycroft's expression--and tacked it to his wall. He pulled out a marker and drew directly into the wallpaper a series of logical steps, as derived from Marlowe's poem, that might convince John.
He stood back and considered the map when he was finished.
The only problem, of course, was that John already lived with him. The important part was to convince him to love him. Marlowe's tactic might be dependent on both results being unachieved at the moment of proposition.
He scribbled the map out in giant archs and flopped back onto his bed.
* * *
Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death,
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
Sherlock picked a pen out of the pocket of a businessman as he swayed closer to him (John was unlikely to find him if he stayed on the Underground) and circled the passage. He made a mental note to include an offer for physical pain in exchange for John's affections when he finally presented his case. He should probably also express a willingness to defy obvious fact (it is day, it isn't day) if John wills it so.
He licked his finger and turned the page.
* * *
"No, I believe you equal to every great exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as--if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my sex (and it is not a very great one, you need not envy it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."
Sherlock spent most of Persuasion frowning at the book. It was only that moment, when Anne (finally) expressed something clearly and directly, when an actual claim was enunciated that Sherlock began to understand why Mycroft had included it in the list.
Lesson learned. He would have to make a reference to his ability, despite the restrictions of his gender, to love John beyond his death. That and, he supposed, the fact that there was no tactic available in rhetoric to persuade him against his affections.
He had to put the reading aside at that point because Lestrade hadn't noticed that the body on the train tracks had been pushed. (The body was facing the wrong direction to have jumped.)
* * *
I hold it true, what'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Sherlock scowled. Patently untrue, obviously.
He scribbled, "Wrong!" in the margins.
* * *
I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
"What case is this for?" John asked, holding up Ulysses.
Sherlock froze for a split second as his mind raced, searching through potential uses for Ulysses in his usual line of work. Nothing believable sprang to mind.
"It's Mycroft's," he said. Diversion. That was the key.
"But why are you reading it?" John persisted. It was a bit absurd how he could sometimes be so dogged on a point, tangential or not. It often had him sniffing for bleach in the wrong house or deducing imaginary love affairs from a single blonde hair but, somehow, it made him right on point at that moment.
"He lent it me," Sherlock said. Another diversion. Hopefully John would bite this time.
"Yes but why?" John repeated in the tone he always used when he thought he was explaining some social cue of importance that Sherlock didn't understand (that Sherlock always understood he just didn't agree).
"To read it." Sherlock decided diversion wasn't working. Obstinacy was the obvious next best choice.
John rolled his eyes and flipped the book open. Sherlock noticed how he sped past the pages, familiarity in his fingertips. He barely had to note the pages as they flipped past until, suddenly, he stopped.
"There's nothing like this, right?" John said, mostly to himself. Sherlock watched him as he skimmed the pages. Something important in that one, then.
"It is unique," Sherlock said because he was trying to coax something out of John and John liked it when people said the obvious thing in a certain tone. But it was a bit inaccurate. "Though, Homer's Odyssey is quite similar in many of the particulars."
"Not similar, not quite," John said, still focused on the book. "There's no Molly Bloom in Homer."
Sherlock frowned. That seemed abnormally obvious even for John. He withheld comment and John looked up at him, just briefly, and smiled at something he saw on Sherlock's face.
"No, I didn't mean it like--Look, you should just listen," John said. "I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and," and John wasn't even looking at the page anymore, "yes I said yes I will Yes."
"There are several things I think you should know," Sherlock blurted out.
John closed the paperback with a small thump and waited expectantly.
"Firstly, I am willing to suffer physical pain on your behalf," Sherlock began. "Secondly, though I'm unsure about the applicability of it, I would willingly disavow obvious fact if it were necessary. Also on your behalf."
John didn't seem to be following. Sherlock sighed.
"There's also a series of so-called 'delights' that I could offer to entice you to live with me and be my love but I'm unsure about the efficacy of that tact considering the fact that you already live with me," he said, pulling the list out of his pocket.
John was still making his confused face.
"I also can guarantee that, despite my gender, I am capable of," and Sherlock looked at the list to make sure he got the wording correctly, "the privilege of loving longest when existence or hope is gone." He looked up at John. "That should suffice, right?"
"Are you--did you research love stories?" John asked slowly.
"Obviously, John. Do try to keep up."
"Did you--did you have a goal in mind?"
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "I would have thought that would be perfectly clear by this point."
"It's really not," John said, still so very slowly.
"I'm making my pitch. I'm giving you a sense of the scope of my offer," Sherlock said. Honestly. The space most people must have in their brains...
"...your offer."
"Yes, John, my offer. And now--since you seem to training wheels on this conversation--you respond. It's a simple 'yes' or 'no.'"
"You're offering to be the Anne to my Captain Wentworth," said John.
"And the Alcibiades to your Socrates because, frankly, Socrates was not half the intellect that his reputation makes him out to be," Sherlock said. "But I point blank refuse to participate in any Tennyson."
"Oh." John pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down heavily.
"I watched Casablanca as well but I still don't see the relevance," Sherlock said conversationally. "It seems far to contingent on circumstance to have much use value as a template."
"...you want templates."
"Well, yes, obviously." Sherlock was beginning to be concerned that John was focusing on all the wrong details.
"Can't we just--" John started to say. He stopped and looked down at his hands and Sherlock realized, just as suddenly as he had realized that he was watching his chin because he was in love with him, that he couldn't guess what John was thinking. It was like standing over a void and trying to glean meaning from its depths.
"Can't we just--" John repeated, now looking up at Sherlock, right into his eyes, "can't we do without the templates?"
"How else are we supposed to--" Sherlock started to say but John suddenly stood, shoving his chair back violently.
"You'll just be you and I'll just be me, alright?" he said, stepping closer to Sherlock.
"I'm hard to handle," Sherlock said.
"I know."
"I can't promise much if I'm just being me," Sherlock insisted. "I can't even promise to look you in the eyes."
"You're looking me in the eyes right now." John was right there, then, right in front of him and too close to be anything else, to be someone other than himself.
"And you don't know what you'll be either," Sherlock continued because his mind never did stop.
"Yeah," John said, "yes, I will," and there wasn't even that much distance left but he crossed it anyway. And it wasn't more than a breath between their lips and then there wasn't even that left anymore.
Author:
ifeelbetterDisclaimer: I own nothing of value.
Word Count: 2,248
Summary: Mycroft offers Sherlock a series of readings to help him prepare for falling in love with John.
Notes: Written for the
sherlockbbc_fic kink_meme back in...November. The prompt was the last line of Joyce's Ulysses. The other texts referred to are Plato's Symposium, Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his love," Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Austen's Persuasion, and Tennyson's In Memoriam. It was both comforting and the epitome of frustrating that Mycroft called five seconds--five seconds--after Sherlock stopped, a forkful of food frozen en route to his mouth, and realized why he was staring at John's chin. In those five seconds, Sherlock choked, knocked over John's beer, and stepped on a cat's tail.
"I can provide you with a list of readings that will assist you in your romantic endeavors," Mycroft said when Sherlock answered the phone. There was a pause in which Mycroft put a hand over his end of the phone and had a muffled (and brief) conversation with someone. "Ah," he said, returning to the conversation, "and I believe it is customary, at this juncture, to express some variation of 'Good on you, mate.'"
Sherlock always enjoyed the moments when Mycroft had to admit that he too was a couple hundred IQ points outside of the bounds of normalcy. He decided to count this moment as a minor victory despite the extenuating circumstances.
"I won't--" follow a course of directed readings on the subject of love he began to say but stopped when John's eyes rose from his plate of spaghetti and met his. "Get stuffed," he settled for instead. John's eyebrows rose.
"There is a variety of source material available to you that can inform any decisions you make regarding your associations with Doctor Watson. He will be well versed in the cultural norms and historical contexts--would you be comfortable deferring to his expertise?" Mycroft asked.
"I am very well versed in--"
"No, I'm afraid you're wrong there. You know the seedy underbelly of this business. I'm talking about the spires, the lofty ambitions, the pinnacles. Your experience will only bring you--and Doctor Watson--pain."
Sherlock squirmed. John was waiting, paused in chewing with one cheek fleshed out like a hamster, his fork waving towards the door as if to ask Is it important? Do we have to run off somewhere? And Sherlock knew how long it had been since his last meal, knew from the speed with which he had attacked the bread basket that he really was very hungry, and yet there he was, ready to run off and follow Sherlock anywhere he might lead.
No wonder he had been staring at his chin. The man was a marvel.
"Send me a list," he said into the phone. He could hear Mycroft smirk.
"There's a box waiting for you in your flat."
'Be ready to protect me, Agathon,' said Socrates, 'for I find that the love of this fellow has become no small burden.'
Sherlock had to read in places where John was unlikely to find him. He spent an afternoon with The Symposium in the Lestrade's dining room until Lestrade came home and kicked him out. He didn't bat an eye at Sherlock's reading material. He would have assumed that it pertained to a case or some obscure research that it would take Sherlock too long to explain and that he wouldn't care enough to listen to anyway. Sherlock was well aware that Lestrade frequently found him incomprehensible and found that he liked the detective more for the fact that it sometimes stopped him from asking questions that would have made Sherlock berate him for his stupidity.
Anyway, he must have acquired the necessary information from the text. Plato wanted him to think that Socrates's version of love transcended the rest and that a spiritual connection is more worthy than a physical one.
Sherlock thought Plato was bollocks and that a man in love ought to behave as Alcibiades did, committing to a siege of the fortress of the beloved in unending devotion.
He waited till John left the clinic for the afternoon and then he hid a big in his desk lamp. He was back in the flat before John--John never took a cab when Sherlock wasn't with him now that he didn't limp.
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with mee, and be my love.
Sherlock liked that one. It seemed the most direct. He tore the page out of the book--grinning as he did so, imagining Mycroft's expression--and tacked it to his wall. He pulled out a marker and drew directly into the wallpaper a series of logical steps, as derived from Marlowe's poem, that might convince John.
He stood back and considered the map when he was finished.
The only problem, of course, was that John already lived with him. The important part was to convince him to love him. Marlowe's tactic might be dependent on both results being unachieved at the moment of proposition.
He scribbled the map out in giant archs and flopped back onto his bed.
Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death,
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
Sherlock picked a pen out of the pocket of a businessman as he swayed closer to him (John was unlikely to find him if he stayed on the Underground) and circled the passage. He made a mental note to include an offer for physical pain in exchange for John's affections when he finally presented his case. He should probably also express a willingness to defy obvious fact (it is day, it isn't day) if John wills it so.
He licked his finger and turned the page.
"No, I believe you equal to every great exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as--if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my sex (and it is not a very great one, you need not envy it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."
Sherlock spent most of Persuasion frowning at the book. It was only that moment, when Anne (finally) expressed something clearly and directly, when an actual claim was enunciated that Sherlock began to understand why Mycroft had included it in the list.
Lesson learned. He would have to make a reference to his ability, despite the restrictions of his gender, to love John beyond his death. That and, he supposed, the fact that there was no tactic available in rhetoric to persuade him against his affections.
He had to put the reading aside at that point because Lestrade hadn't noticed that the body on the train tracks had been pushed. (The body was facing the wrong direction to have jumped.)
I hold it true, what'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Sherlock scowled. Patently untrue, obviously.
He scribbled, "Wrong!" in the margins.
I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
"What case is this for?" John asked, holding up Ulysses.
Sherlock froze for a split second as his mind raced, searching through potential uses for Ulysses in his usual line of work. Nothing believable sprang to mind.
"It's Mycroft's," he said. Diversion. That was the key.
"But why are you reading it?" John persisted. It was a bit absurd how he could sometimes be so dogged on a point, tangential or not. It often had him sniffing for bleach in the wrong house or deducing imaginary love affairs from a single blonde hair but, somehow, it made him right on point at that moment.
"He lent it me," Sherlock said. Another diversion. Hopefully John would bite this time.
"Yes but why?" John repeated in the tone he always used when he thought he was explaining some social cue of importance that Sherlock didn't understand (that Sherlock always understood he just didn't agree).
"To read it." Sherlock decided diversion wasn't working. Obstinacy was the obvious next best choice.
John rolled his eyes and flipped the book open. Sherlock noticed how he sped past the pages, familiarity in his fingertips. He barely had to note the pages as they flipped past until, suddenly, he stopped.
"There's nothing like this, right?" John said, mostly to himself. Sherlock watched him as he skimmed the pages. Something important in that one, then.
"It is unique," Sherlock said because he was trying to coax something out of John and John liked it when people said the obvious thing in a certain tone. But it was a bit inaccurate. "Though, Homer's Odyssey is quite similar in many of the particulars."
"Not similar, not quite," John said, still focused on the book. "There's no Molly Bloom in Homer."
Sherlock frowned. That seemed abnormally obvious even for John. He withheld comment and John looked up at him, just briefly, and smiled at something he saw on Sherlock's face.
"No, I didn't mean it like--Look, you should just listen," John said. "I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and," and John wasn't even looking at the page anymore, "yes I said yes I will Yes."
"There are several things I think you should know," Sherlock blurted out.
John closed the paperback with a small thump and waited expectantly.
"Firstly, I am willing to suffer physical pain on your behalf," Sherlock began. "Secondly, though I'm unsure about the applicability of it, I would willingly disavow obvious fact if it were necessary. Also on your behalf."
John didn't seem to be following. Sherlock sighed.
"There's also a series of so-called 'delights' that I could offer to entice you to live with me and be my love but I'm unsure about the efficacy of that tact considering the fact that you already live with me," he said, pulling the list out of his pocket.
John was still making his confused face.
"I also can guarantee that, despite my gender, I am capable of," and Sherlock looked at the list to make sure he got the wording correctly, "the privilege of loving longest when existence or hope is gone." He looked up at John. "That should suffice, right?"
"Are you--did you research love stories?" John asked slowly.
"Obviously, John. Do try to keep up."
"Did you--did you have a goal in mind?"
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "I would have thought that would be perfectly clear by this point."
"It's really not," John said, still so very slowly.
"I'm making my pitch. I'm giving you a sense of the scope of my offer," Sherlock said. Honestly. The space most people must have in their brains...
"...your offer."
"Yes, John, my offer. And now--since you seem to training wheels on this conversation--you respond. It's a simple 'yes' or 'no.'"
"You're offering to be the Anne to my Captain Wentworth," said John.
"And the Alcibiades to your Socrates because, frankly, Socrates was not half the intellect that his reputation makes him out to be," Sherlock said. "But I point blank refuse to participate in any Tennyson."
"Oh." John pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down heavily.
"I watched Casablanca as well but I still don't see the relevance," Sherlock said conversationally. "It seems far to contingent on circumstance to have much use value as a template."
"...you want templates."
"Well, yes, obviously." Sherlock was beginning to be concerned that John was focusing on all the wrong details.
"Can't we just--" John started to say. He stopped and looked down at his hands and Sherlock realized, just as suddenly as he had realized that he was watching his chin because he was in love with him, that he couldn't guess what John was thinking. It was like standing over a void and trying to glean meaning from its depths.
"Can't we just--" John repeated, now looking up at Sherlock, right into his eyes, "can't we do without the templates?"
"How else are we supposed to--" Sherlock started to say but John suddenly stood, shoving his chair back violently.
"You'll just be you and I'll just be me, alright?" he said, stepping closer to Sherlock.
"I'm hard to handle," Sherlock said.
"I know."
"I can't promise much if I'm just being me," Sherlock insisted. "I can't even promise to look you in the eyes."
"You're looking me in the eyes right now." John was right there, then, right in front of him and too close to be anything else, to be someone other than himself.
"And you don't know what you'll be either," Sherlock continued because his mind never did stop.
"Yeah," John said, "yes, I will," and there wasn't even that much distance left but he crossed it anyway. And it wasn't more than a breath between their lips and then there wasn't even that left anymore.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-07 05:35 am (UTC)salfjlsajfda I HAD TO STOP AND LAUGH AND LAUGH AND LAUGH. oh sherlock lakjdl
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Date: 2011-01-10 09:29 am (UTC)Beautiful line.
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Date: 2011-04-02 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 08:30 am (UTC)