The next prompt from my celebratory drabble promptfest! (As you can see, they’re not always exactly drabbles.) If you missed it before and want me to write you something, drop a prompt in my ask box.
Prompt #3 (from consultingdepressive):
Sherlock/John. Darkness. Middle of the night. Love.
This is a gorgeous prompt, CD. Just wanna let you know. I’ve wanted somebody to write a story like this for ages…and it looks like ‘somebody’ is me. ^_^
I don’t feel like I did full service to this prompt, to be honest, but this is a draft I can work with. I think this one will stew for a while, and maybe eventually become something more.
Fiat Nox
Late at night, with the blinds drawn to shut out all but a trickle of the city’s light, they navigate each other by feel.
Sherlock’s often told John that eyes can lie. They play tricks, distract the mind. Without the light to divert and deceive, touch is more honest. In the quiet dark of Sherlock’s room, under each other’s hands and tongues and cheeks and toes, their bodies are full of mysteries the light blinds them to.
Without sight, every touch flares with explosive intensity, John’s skin grabbing hungrily for sensation, for the faintest contact to help him construct his world. Without sight, there’s nothing for him except cool rumpled sheets and pillows that smell like sandalwood and male sweat, and soft coils of curly hair and acre upon acre upon acre of another man’s body against his own. Like this, John’s hands can differentiate every inch of Sherlock by texture: the nap of his lightly fuzzed outer thighs over the hard swell of muscle; the velvet grain of his inner thighs so soft it dimples under his fingertips; the warm silk of his hip stretched taut and fine over the hard blade of pelvis. John brushes kisses over them all, intent on memorizing every texture.
Sherlock’s fingers combing through his hair have never been so intimate—so <i>encompassing.</i> The short strands crackle under his strokes, a sensation that’s almost a sound. John has never noticed the massaging caress of finger pads against his scalp in such detail, or the slow release of muscles he’s never even felt before releasing under them, draining tension from his neck and shoulders like the spray from a shower. Those fingers trail down to dip into the swirls of his ear, down to spread in a web over his neck, digging blunt and hard and strong into his flesh.
They learn and teach each other at the same time, showing off the treasures they unearth from each other. John maps the way the lower edge of Sherlock’s ribs rise and subside with his breaths like a volcanic island in the ocean, and discovers that behind his knee lies virgin territory, so sensitive and untouched that Sherlock’s tracing fingers coax brand new sounds out of him. Together they explore the contrast between Sherlock’s lush, all-encompassing lips and John’s thin, gripping, mobile ones, and find out what their mouths blended together taste like.
In the blind quiet, their bodies make up their own private universe. The dark makes them creators. Skin can’t reach beyond itself; they live in oblivion until touch brings them forth from it, sculpting each other out of nothing with a nip to Sherlock’s nose and breath over the crook of John’s elbow. Skin has no way to see horizons, either, so in the dark their bodies may as well be endless. It’s almost enough. Hands and feet and cocks and thighs slide and twine in infinite swathes of heated, damp skin till they lose track of what belongs to whom and finally, <i>finally</i> they can blend together into a single being.