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Part 12 of You Go To My Head
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2020-07-04
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1/1
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With You In Spirit

Summary:

Dr Holmes doesn't like traveling without his husband.

This story is a part of the "You Go To My Head" AU series, and makes sense best when read after the preceding parts.

Notes:

Please note that some parts of this series can only be accessed as a registered user who has signed in.

This is my contribution to the 10 years of Sherlock celebrations. Thank you Elldotsee from putting things in motion.

[An index and guide to all my Sherlock stories]

Work Text:

There's no answer on John's first FaceTime attempt. Pursing his lips, he vacillates in the middle of the sitting room for a moment, phone in hand, and decides that Sherlock would probably prefer the webcam on his laptop, anyway. He goes to pour himself a whisky from one of Mycroft's birthday gift bottles — a very indulgent Wednesday morning post-call after-breakfast treat. Well, it's nearly lunchtime, but John had lounged around in bed after crashing into it after arriving home at around nine. He had burrowed under the covers until nearly eleven since there was no mad genius demanding he make breakfast, nor was there said mad genius' impatient cock nudging him because its owner was in the mood. For Sherlock, a bed is only to be used for sleeping as the last thing on the priority list. Most often, John is in the mood in the evenings when they prepare for bed, but it often takes a long time then for Sherlock to descend down to among the mortals from whatever he'd enthusiastically been doing all evening. Research, usually. And at six in the morning on a Sunday morning, John is partial to using the bed for its original purpose rather than indulging the whims of a husband who'd stayed up half the night doing God-knows-what, after which his brain had decided the next course of action would be barely two hours of dormancy following by horniness. Sherlock's mother has repeatedly confided in John about her son's odd and often nearly non-existent sleeping habits as a child, and it appears they are continuing into middle adulthood.

John settles into his usual armchair, perches the laptop on the armrest and places his whisky tumbler on the side table. Then, he tries to open another FaceTime video call again.

This time, it connects, and after a blurry moment, the screen settles into the sight of Sherlock in a spacious hotel room.

"Evening," John said. "Well, not over here, but––"

Sherlock doesn't smile — if anything, the edges of his mouth pinch straighter in irritation. "I can assure you I'm more viscerally aware of time zones right now than you are." He takes off his jacket, opens the top two buttons of his dress shirt.

John expects him to sit down in the front of the computer, but instead Sherlock disappears out of view. "Is that the Fairmont, then?" John asks, racking his brain to make sure he's remembered the hotel's name correctly.

A suit jacket lands on the bed but Sherlock is nowhere to be seen. "Yes, yes, the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, do keep up." He then re-appears and sits down on the bed to unlace his leather oxfords. "The first room they tried to foist on me had this eyesore of an art panel above the bed, dark red and messy and distracting. They changed me to one of the Gold rooms, instead, after I complained, but the second keycard wouldn't work."

John makes note that, instead of bold colours, the walls of this room are painted in a tasteful, dark blue paired with a greyish cerulean carpet with gold squares. It's understated opulence instead of modern, and John is not surprised Sherlock had approved of this room. It's calming, not energising.

"Flight went alright, at least?" He asks just as Sherlock gets off the bed and disappears from view again.

"No, it bloody well didn't." Sherlock's face pops into the screen again, peering into the webcam from above and looking as though he is photobombing the call instead of being the intended Canada participant. "We left Frankfurt five hours late, and then got rerouted to Ottawa because of bad weather and some other plane having an emergency because of said bad weather. They transported us here in coaches. Coaches, John! Old ones, and the driver's bizarre French accent was a nightmare to try to decipher. I suspect there was some Scottish Gaelic influence; the Montreal area has received quite a lot of immigrants from Britain and Nova Scotia."

If Sherlock — who speaks outstandingly fluent French just like Mycroft does — says someone is hard to understand, John is inclined to believe him. He suspects Sherlock has already written some strongly worded emails to the airline about this coach transfer even though it sounds as though there was little that could have been done to prevent such things. "So, you got into Montreal when…?"

"Five in the morning. And had to be at The Neuro at seven to lecture. I couldn't go through my slides in the coach, John, I just couldn't — motion sickness. And my caffeine intake schedule was fucked."

Sherlock never curses unless his nerves are in shreds. And, it's not the only sign that he's had a day which has stressed him to the very edge of his limits. He's awfully fidgety — jittery, even, constantly passing in front of the camera as he paces around holding various items from his luggage but not really putting them anywhere. His hair is a bit messy as though he's been too distracted to keep it in its usual perfect shape all day. He has dark shadows under his eyes and he's pale, his facial skin a bit puffy. John practically aches to be there in that hotel room with him, to make him stop making things worse by riling himself up and trying to organise his things when his executive function just isn't up to it for lack of rest and sustenance and caffeine.

Six months earlier, Sherlock had received an invitation to participate in two surgeries at one of Canada's premier neurosurgical units — The Montreal Neurological Institute & Hospital aka The Neuro, as the local professionals call it. The operations would provide training for local surgeons, and Sherlock would be able to lend his expertise to help two patients whose tumours were in particularly challenging locations within their skull. Neurosurgeons who can handle both their home turf and the sinusoid anatomy which tends to be the realm of ENT surgeons are rare, and John is aware that Sherlock is internationally known to be among the very best. He often gets invited to lecture and to give keynote speeches at conferences. Getting invited to participate in actual patient work is much rarer because it requires the whole process of getting licenced to practice in the receiving country. Thankfully, the mutual recognition of credentials process was somehow expedited, and Canada is a part of the commonwealth, which made some of the bureaucracy less incompatible than average between two countries.

When Sherlock travels for work, they often try to make a holiday out of it if it's to a distant location. This isn't just for fun — Sherlock has insisted that John's presence greatly helps with travel logistics since it allows him to focus on his work instead of things such as trying to find the right terminal. This time, however, their schedules had conflicted, with John required to run yearly staff reviews at the time of the scheduled surgeries, so he'd stayed in London.

John thinks his presence is most useful in helping with the consequences of jet lag on his husband's brain — such adjustments are very hard for Sherlock. Shifting from activities to resting is outstandingly challenging for him at all times, and jet lag makes it impossible and makes a raging mess of him at worst when he can neither function nor rest.

Judging by what John is seeing on screen, that state is approaching fast. "What was it like, then, once you got to the hospital?"

Sherlock's steps halt in the middle of the floor. He huffs and probably doesn't even realise his thumbs are frantically flicking his fingertips. John knows he stims in many kinds of situations, but mostly tries to conceal the more obvious forms even from him. The fact that he's not noticing what he's doing tells volumes about his state of mind.

"I was taken around the hospital to meet people," Sherlock announces with obvious disdain. "I only wanted to meet the surgeons I'll be working with but instead, they paraded me in front of a horde of unimportant people. Then, there was a lunch with some admin idiots who couldn't tell a scalpel from a butter knife. I was then asked to sit in on a research progress seminar which was mildly interesting; they are doing some pioneering work here on minimally invasive epilepsy surgery––"

Sherlock launches into a florid, lengthy and very frantic summary of that research, occasionally blinking hard as he gets frustrated when some obscure numerical detail is eluding him.

"Sherlock," John tries to intervene eventually when his husband starts arguing spiritedly with himself over whether it's the CA1 or the CA3 regions of the hippocampus where neuronal loss is detected in some obscure epilepsy type.

While Sherlock does this, he's re-re-re-organising his socks and putting them back into his suitcase, after which he starts taking them out again. Completely oblivious to the attempts to get his attention, his increasingly harder-to-follow explanation continues.

"Sherlock?" John tries again, to no avail.

The frantic research explanation — more of a lecture at this point — continues, and then suddenly segues into a rant about how the hotel receptionist's handwriting was so atrocious that he had read the WiFi password wrong which had been the cause of his not answering John's first attempt.

"Sherlock, sit down!" John finally commands in his best captain's voice, and Sherlock freezes on his tracks. He sits down — on the floor.

John can now only see the crown of his curls. "Tilt the screen," he tells Sherlock.

There's a slightly embarrassed "oh", and soon Sherlock's face comes back into view.

"Lots of people around today, then? And you were annoyed that you didn't get to review your material for the lecture?" John suggests. Sherlock is well capable of complaining about the minutiae of what irks him, but he has severe trouble connecting frustrating and frightening and other kinds of emotionally engaging experiences to words in a way that would explain why he's ranting or complaining about things or getting into a tizzy after a very trying day.

"Exactly." Sherlock sounds relieved.

"You're jet lagged."

"Yes, Captain Obvious."

"You're also oversocialised."

"That doesn't mean what you think it means."

"Probably not, but I'm sure you can deduce what I meant from context––" John sees his husband's mouth open and he knows what will happen next if he doesn't put in the work to keep this conversation on the tracks, "––and no, I do not want to hear the real definition right now." Sometimes being with Sherlock feels like being married to the child a lexicon had with a particularly toffee-nosed encyclopaedia, especially when Sherlock is spouting facts at him at one in the morning and they both have to leave for work at six bloody thirty a.m.

Sherlock's mouth is an angry line, but he stays silent. This could be the sprouting seed of a sulk, so John needs to regroup his verbal troops.

"What's the plan for the evening, then? Besides packing and unpacking your bag 56 times and pacing a canyon into the carpet?" He teases with a smile.

At first, Sherlock looks scandalised at the description, but then realises that John is right. "I need to go over my case notes, but I can't do that if my things are in the wrong place, and admittedly, I am having trouble putting them where they belong. There are no right places, anyway, because this isn't our bedroom."

"Then just leave it for a while and go have dinner?" John suggests. "Good food never fails to cheer people up."

"Did you see that on a Hallmark card?"

Jet lag tends to ruin Sherlock's appetite, but he'll get waspish if he tries to undertake long surgeries without enough sustenance. He can't give his best performance if he hasn't eaten, doesn't usually understand why, and takes it out on the team.

"Anything else you need to do to prepare for tomorrow?"

"Not really. I got to review all the imaging results and full patient records this afternoon before they finally let me leave for the hotel, the local surgeons have done all the consenting and prep, and I will meet the patient tomorrow morning before the surgery."

"Good. So…" John almost says that Sherlock can then relax for the rest of the evening, but that would only earn him a scoff. "Food. Water. Crap telly in French. Melatonin."

Sherlock's eyes go wide at that last mention. "I don't have it. They took it off me at Heathrow!"

John's brows knit together, and he takes a quick sip of the whisky. "What? Why? It's just melatonin!"

"The idiot customs officer confiscated it because it wasn't in a blister packet or its original bottle. I didn't want to bring the whole hundred tablet thing, so I put what I needed in a ziplock bag."

"A plastic bag with random unnamed tablets. You didn't consider what that might look like?"

"They tested it and I had to wait. Even though I told them I'm a licensed physician and that it was nothing but melatonin, they still insisted on putting it in the itemiser!"

"Yeah, well, they would, wouldn't they?" John can't help smiling a bit at how Sherlock really isn't grasping the problem here. "Even doctors could try to smuggle things."

"In their jacket pocket? While en route to a work assignment? Don't be preposterous, John."

"Wouldn't be the craziest stunt anyone's pulled at an airport." John enjoys watching the reality shows about customs and border control while Sherlock scoffs at such things. He doesn't sometimes understand how rules apply to him as well as everybody else. John's had to mediate several arguments between his partner and border control and airport security.

John digs his phone out from his pocket and does a quick search. "There's a pharmacy on the ground floor of the mall next to the hotel, and low-dose melatonin is prescription-free in Canada. You could go pick up a packet while going to dinner."

"Why would I go out to dinner?"

"Because you hate room service?" This is one dislike the logic of which John has yet to understand. For now, it's filed under 'Sherlock being very Sherlock'.

"Right, yes," Sherlock confirms distractedly. Suddenly, he yawns. "I shouldn't be tired. It's late morning in London."

"You should be tired because I doubt you slept on the plane, you're jet-lagged off your tits and you've had a rerouted flight plus a very a long day."

Sherlock blinks at him blearily. It's as though someone's suddenly knocked the stuffing out of him; his shoulders are hunched and gone is the manic, nervous energy of just minutes ago. From zero to turbo boost and vice versa is how John knows his brain works. Maybe getting to fume and scoff has done the trick.

"Food, Sherlock. Melatonin. Maybe a bath. Then sleep. And don't sit with your laptop half the night, the blue light keeps you awake."

"I've forwarded you several meta-analyses which contradict that claim when it comes to non-neurotypical brains. And have you any idea how badly hotel room bathtubs are cleaned on average?"

John can't help but chuckle. "You're sitting on the floor. I doubt that's any cleaner than a tub."

"Yes, but I have both my pants and my trousers between me and the carpet. And I won't be putting clothes I've worn on the plane on the clean sheets."

John rolls his eyes with a grin and downs the last of his two fingers. "Right. Sorry. That's rule 47356, should have remembered," he teases.

He gets one of Sherlock's death glares and another yawn. "I might need the melatonin tonight, even if I feel tired enough to sleep now. Blasted time difference means I could wake up after an hour. Ground floor of the mall, you said?"

"Yes. Next to the underground station entrance," John repeats unwearyingly.

"It's called metro in Montreal. It has rubber tires. Strange." Another yawn on the screen. "I'd better––"

"Go, before you fall asleep."

Sherlock climbs to his feet and readjusts the screen so he remains in view. "John, if I…"

"Yeah?"

"Can I call you again?"

"Sure, of course you can. I'll be home all day, doing nothing. Might even steal one of your fancy dressing gowns."

"You got a ketchup stain on the blue one the last time," Sherlock accuses indignantly while putting his jacket back on. It's yet another sign that he's frizzled and overstressed and exhausted that he doesn't button his shirt back up.

"And with sincere remorse, I had it very carefully dry-cleaned. Twice, I might add, since you insisted you could still see it after the first round."

"I might call you again," Sherlock reminds him, averting his gaze. "If I need to."

John smiles. "I'd be disappointed if you didn't," he offers.

This need for contact that Sherlock is referring to is not new. It's what John, when present, addresses by making him come to bed and holding him during their travels when he's too restless with the time difference and anticipation of the next day and his overactive brain. He can't do that now, but he can talk Sherlock out of a fit of frustrated anger directed at himself. He's got very challenging surgery to do tomorrow and being aware of how many hours remain for rest between now and when he picks up the scalpel might be enough to cause sleep to elude him. He keeps track of such things only when he's nervous; when he's relaxed, having fun and engaged in something that interests him, hours fly by and doesn't even recognise the need for food or rest.

He's impossible and John loves him impossibly much.

"I will call you," Sherlock decides, and closes the lid of the laptop without a goodbye. Social niceties such as properly ending a call are never important for him.

John lifts his bare feet onto Sherlock's armchair — something that would bring forth a scandalous glare if its owner were present. He decides to order in something to eat, and makes a mental note to keep his laptop open on the coffee table for when he gets another virtual visit from his husband.

Ten minutes later, he gets an iMessage: 'Shoe store between pharmacy and station entrance. How many times do I have to tell you to be specific when giving orienteering instructions? SH'

John laughs and types up a reply: 'I love you, too.'

The reply is: 'And the term oversocialisation refers to three closely related flaws in the constructivist sociology of knowledge: social overdetermination, sociological triumphalism, and unfounded relativism. SH'

Shaking his head and chuckling still, John replies, 'Yup. Still love you.'

 

 

— The End —

 

 

 

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