Chapter Text
"I." John licks his bottom lip. "What."
"What?" Sherlock snaps. He crosses his arms over his chest. His face is thunderous. "Frankly, I'm having a very hard time seeing how it's anything to do with you."
John raises his palms. "It isn't, it isn't."
"Well, then."
"Yeah," John agrees, and settles back into his chair.
Sherlock pulls his laptop back onto his knees, then sighs, exasperated, and shoves it back onto the coffee table, flopping his legs out. Arms sprawled. His bare feet twitching.
"Still nothing," John observes.
"Well done, John," Sherlock mumbles, then sighs. Dark head lolling on his shoulder, turned to the side.
The rain is still rattling on the windows. Looks later than it is, when the weather gets like this. John shifts in his chair: he's not tired.
Sherlock is inhaling already when John asks, "All right, can I just—"
"The things you find to entertain yourself." Sherlock turns towards him, a bit, but doesn't lift his head.
"There isn't anything for us to use to entertain ourselves," John says. "Hence."
Sherlock scowls at him. John rolls his eyes and scowls back, and Sherlock barks out a laugh.
"So." John rubs his hands. "Can I, then?"
Sherlock waves a long hand. Doesn't sit up.
John nods, and asks, "How long?"
"Twenty years," Sherlock says. "Give or take a week or two."
John blinks. "Twenty years?"
"Yes," Sherlock says. "I told you, I've found that it makes quite a difference as to—"
"You mean since you last." John waves a hand. "With someone else, or—"
Sherlock frowns. "No. I told you, I choose not to, at all."
"At all," John echoes.
"Yes, at all," Sherlock repeats, "at all, including by myself, I find it distracting, it's not like wanking furiously on my own would somehow magically not take any time, and it's not like you appear to require external assistance, so this can't possibly be conceptually challenging, I don't—"
"It's not conceptually challenging, Christ." John laughs, rubs at his jaw. "It's just—Jesus, Sherlock, do you—er."
John stops. His face is burning, scalded scarlet, but he can't—
"What?" Sherlock says, and then, after a moment, pushes up to sitting. "What?"
"Do you... get, er." John laughs. "Christ, I can't believe I'm asking you this."
"Do I get hard," Sherlock says. Pale sharp eyes.
"Yeah," John says. Quieter: "Yeah."
Sherlock swallows. "Yes," he says, finally.
John nods. "But you don't..."
Sherlock's mouth twists, an odd angled printer's mark.
"You don't do anything about it," John says, finally.
"I don't masturbate to orgasm," Sherlock says, "no."
John shifts.
Sherlock is watching him. His forearms pale and lean, pressed to his knees; John is half-hard and sweating, sticky at his nape and the seams of his sleeves. He is absolutely certain that Sherlock can tell, that Sherlock may not have had an orgasm in twenty years but he unquestionably knows that for John it's been more like seventy-two hours, and John still feels like it's too long.
Sherlock isn't looking away.
After a moment, "You don't masturbate," John repeats, "to orgasm."
Sherlock leans back in his chair. "No," he says.
"I note," John says, with precision, "that you didn't say that you don't masturbate at all."
Sherlock steeples his hands.
"Sherlock," John says, voice twisting in his throat, feeling weirdly desperate—
"No," Sherlock murmurs. "I didn't say that."
John swallows. "How?" he asks.
"Carefully," Sherlock says, finally.
John laughs.