Chapter Text
John can’t believe how long it takes him to get caught. Not stealing his few pints a week from work—he’s been doing that so long, half his life, that it hardly seems wrong anymore. They pay me in blood, he’d wink at his family. Not dinner with his rugby mates, bowls and straws and a newly slaughtered deer opened and dressed on the sideboard so it doesn’t lose its freshness on the way to the table. In Scotland, okay, but in London? He opens the blood bags he’d bought on the bar and doesn’t ask questions. Not even the girls who mistake the nips for love bites, who like that he doesn’t mind their periods, or the pros he visits once or twice, or, as time goes on and even worse after Sherlock dies, the pale recovering addicts who like to be hurt. No matter that he spends all his life atoning for these violations. Sherlock would not have guessed.
He can’t believe how long it takes him to get caught with Sherlock’s blood.
The thing is, Sherlock gets hurt. A lot. He never understood it before, the obsession with a single person's blood, until a month after the pool incident Sherlock cuts his hand on a broken beaker and covers the table in blood. John stitches him up and makes him sit in the bathroom for ten minutes while John cleans up, makes things safe. Three weeks later Sherlock gets stabbed, and before washing the towels he’s bled into, John stops to suck them like a hungry child. A couple of meals like that and John is sitting on the floor of the bathroom with increasing regularity, trembling and licking Sherlock's straight razor.
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After Sherlock’s return, John knows there won’t be any more girlfriends. No one has ever hurt him the way Sherlock does. He really likes to do it—he isn’t putting it on for John. It excites Sherlock to pull John off during a blow job and hit him. He genuinely loves seeing fear in John’s face. One epic night, he decides to punish John for every sexual act he’s performed with anyone else. John can see Sherlock’s never had so much fun, and at the end he feels bizarrely clean, and loved, and when Sherlock tells him how well he did, John understands what he can do to help himself. Just after the next case, he clears his throat and clenches and unclenches his fists and says to Sherlock, “Punish me again tonight.”
“Hmm,” says Sherlock, not looking up from his experiment. “If you want that again, it wasn’t much of a punishment.”
“I do want it,” says John. “But not—I need it.”
“Oh,” says Sherlock, eyes on him. “You did something I don’t know about. Interesting. “
John is silent; surprisingly, so is Sherlock, who the next night punishes him with relish without asking him once what he’s done. It’s simple and brutal, as punishments go—he makes John wank first to some fairly horrifying and possibly illegal images, stuffs his wet underwear in his mouth, beats him a bit for making a mess, blindfolds him, and then—John seriously cannot remember consenting in advance to what Sherlock does next. He should have known once he saw the blindfold, since Sherlock usually likes to look into his eyes during scenes. Afterwards he feels like he’s been to church, a thing that has actually been off-limits for decades. But Sherlock’s torture chamber has become his sanctuary.
Which is what makes his real perversion, his one genuinely irredeemable pleasure, the last thing on earth he would ever bring there.