John was thrumming with the quiet simmer of both anticipation of what was to come and being completely content to stay where he was,doing what he was, for the rest of his days.

He realized at some point, that Sherlock's previous skirmishes with desire, sexuality, and the practical applications of the biology he seemed to keep bound up were all in vaults. John was, perhaps, for all intents and purposes, giving Sherlock something that was perhaps new to him. Not that he hadn't been giving it a solid try before, but stumbling across that thought, he found himself moving differently, lighter. John felt carbonated, as if his very being was fizzing.

One of John's hands found its way into Sherlock's dressing gown, now untied and open, petting and scraping his blunt nails across Sherlock's pectoral with a barely there pressure. Sherlock arched into John's touch, and John grinned against his mouth.

"Yes?" he checked, barely moving scant millimeters from Sherlock's lip. Sherlock fluttered his hands at the back of John's shoulder, as if to tap out a tempo for him as he nullified the space John had made. John toyed with his lips, nuzzled into the side of his face, palmed again across Sherlock' chest, this time reaching and dragging his nail against a nipple.

"Ah!" Sherlock said. He and John had been sitting beside each other up until that point, but Sherlock moved into John's space gradually, slanting forwards until John was almost horizontal, and Sherlock followed suit. One of John's legs ended up planted on the floor beside the sofa to give Sherlock room to situate himself between John's legs.

John murmured his approval of this new situation, and his prick did the same, poking Sherlock gently in the abdomen, restrained only by John's trousers and Sherlock's cotton pajama bottoms. Sherlock let out a low laugh, and John got the impression that a large, stringed instrument was sitting on his chest, feeling it reverberate throughout his entire body.

Sherlock pushed himself up, bracing himself with one hand to the right of John's head as the other gave a friendly how-do-you-do squeeze to John' cock. John huffed out a laugh, hips snapping up against his will. John felt, a bit, like he was eighteen again, unhurried and amused.

"It is nice," Sherlock mused, looking puzzled, "to participate without the estrus."

"It is very nice," John agreed, and knew he would feel emotionally exhausted if he really thought about what Sherlock was saying: half-mystified that being touched could be gratifying when our from the influence of biology. "Could be nicer," he grinned.

Sherlock blushed from his chest to his ears. "If you are implying that you would be amenable to some version of intercourse, I must respectfully decline."

"Woah, Sherlock, you don't have to respectfully do anything," John said, the heady, pleasant fog cultivated by Sherlock's close proximity and skin contact starting to dry up as if touched by the sun. He started to sit up, and Sherlock had to sit up properly to let him. "We're done if you want to be."

Sherlock looked down, briefly, and John should have hit himself. "I forgot," he said, dumbly.

Sherlock waved a hand vaguely. "It's just a little irritated."

"Did you use the cream I brought you?"

Sherlock looked guilty, and John immediately got up, adjusting himself shamelessly as he moved. "Stay right there," he instructed. "I'm going to get it."

When he came back, Sherlock was sitting on the couch primly, posture meticulous and both feet on the ground. His hair, which had been carelessly mussed a few minutes ago, had made it into some semblance of order. John was holding the cold tube in his hands, and Sherlock reached for it.

"You want it?" he asked, angling it by the cap toward Sherlock. "Or should I?"

Sherlock, who had probably just been finger combing his hair for maximum effect and had catalogued every facial nuance of which he was capable, ranking them on the axis of percentage of time they help me get what I want, looked like he didn't know what to do with his face. Finally, he leaned back. "You're the medical professional."

"That was smooth," John grinned. "Want to pop out of your digs?"

Sherlock lifted himself enough to pull his cotton trousers down and drop them in a puddle in front of his feet. John was immediately aware of the fact that Sherlock wasn't wearing any pants. His mouth went dry. "I'll just – shall I?"

"Yes," Sherlock agreed. "That would be the point of the interaction."

John crouched before Sherlock, reverently, and poured some lotion from one hand to the other, cupping it in his hands for a moment before touching Sherlock, intimately, chastely, with a steady hand. The flesh of his cock didn't look as abused as it had immediately after, but John was careful with it, soft and small in his hands as he rubbed the fluffy cream all over, and then behind to move one gentle hand to his bum, only daring to brush his fingers soothingly over the red skin of his cleft.

Sherlock looked embarrassed, and relieved, before excusing himself upstairs to his room without so much as a look back.

"Sherlock, there's an email here. Maybe interesting."

"Probably not," Sherlock drawled. He seemed to have recovered from his unexpected heat. He looked remarkably well rested for a man who had retired to his room and then promptly got to work making excessive amounts of noise for eight hours. He had been typing at length for some time, pausing only to make hold an old key to the light or run his fingers across the teeth of another. "I'm finishing a comprehensive examination of the keys of the eighteen hundreds to the current models."

"There's a zoo manager who suspects one of his underlings of using a dead polar bear cub as a drug mule."

Sherlock sneered convincingly, but his attention to the keys faltered.

"I'll just tell him you're not interested."

Sherlock put his coat on.

On the train out to the country, Sherlock found them a carriage and sprawled himself across more seats than one person needed. "I have revisited my assessment of the Donovan-Anderson affair."

"That was … quite a non sequitur," John said, "but I'll bite."

"Oh," Sherlock said, flapping his hand as if to wave away John's pedantic quibble, "I was thinking about sex. It transitioned perfectly in my head."

"You were…" John trailed off, heat sparking behind his eyes.

"Anyway. Two weeks after I accused them of having an affair, Donovan came in to work mid-week with evidence of pet dander consistent with what Anderson typically has clinging to his trousers, but Anderson had recycled both his trousers and his shirt from the previous day."

"So they stayed at her place?" John asked, content to be Sherlock's yes, tell me more arrow for Sherlock's flow of information. He was half convinced it was the main reason Sherlock kept him around.

"No, Anderson and the cat are cohabitating too regularly for that. Donovan stayed at Anderson's while he was unavoidably detained."

"Huh," John said. "Well that's interesting."

"It hadn't occurred to me until this recent turn of events."

John blinked at him. "You're saying you never met anyone who was queer?"

Sherlock appropriated more chairs, like an amoeba. "It's not about sexual preference. I solve crimes. I frequently run into jealously over infidelity as motive. Rarely do I run into happily adulterous relationships."

John let out a huff of laughter at Sherlock's formal phrasing. And then, after a minute: "So, thinking about sex," he ventured with a grin.

Sherlock pretended to be deeply engrossed in his paper.

They spent three days in the countryside. They performed an autopsy of an Okapi, to see if there were any similarities. They went on a long, wet stakeout. Sherlock put on his best disguise yet. Not only did the case require him to impersonate a member of the Wildlife Preservation Society, but for some inexplicable reason, he deemed it necessary to assume the identity of a female member of the WPS, as he went door-to-door warning citizens of an escaped lion. People don't like answering questions. They like contradicting you.

He'd also informed one woman that he husband had lost his job some time ago and didn't know how to tell her. To John's visceral surprise, she's insisted they stay and have a coffeecake with her, thanking him for his kindness.

John was chuffed as hell to tell Sherlock he made quite an attractive lady in uniform, and did not hesitate to snap a photo of Sherlock and the newly discovered – and still breathing! – young polar bear. Who appeared to be a new household pet, not a pocket for cocaine.

"Dull," Sherlock said, reading John's blog about the ordeal over his shoulder, but he was smiling. The zoo manager had given them a lifetime pass to the park, and John was already working out a way to get Sherlock to behave on a crime-free day.

"That's the life we lead," John sighed. "Polar bears and murders. If only the criminals would do something really public spirited and invent a conspiracy for you."

"There's always my birthday," Sherlock suggested.

Sherlock seemed to have retreated into himself since they'd arrived at home, shied away from their fledgling relationship. John wasn't about to pry, but he'd made sure to leave his hand in the middle seat between them on the cab, in touching distance if Sherlock had the urge to touch.

"Someone paid a hefty fee to get a zookeeper to heavily sedate a polar bear, declare him dead, pay off the driver that was to transport him to the autopsy center and the autopsy technician, and planted drugs in both places to make it look like a smuggling operation while he absconded with the cub." John summarized. "Which he was fishing with in his private creek when we arrived."

Sherlock let out a put upon sigh. "They can't all be tens."

Something occurred to John, the lack of a scent he'd been getting acclimatized to over the past four days. "You're back on your suppressants."

"The default state of things."

"You were off –"

"During an anomaly heat, because it was already happening. The cause and effect were not reversed."

"Of course, but, I'd thought."

A glass shattered. It took John a sixteenth note to realize Sherlock had thrown it. "You have my attention," John said calmly.

Sherlock looked down at the floor in surprise. "That just… happened."

"Not particularly appropriate," John said. "But go on."

"I need you to put aside the preoccupation with my heat if we are to continue to engage in acts of sexual congress."

"I told you I don't care, Sherlock."

"And yet, you keep asking about it. Thinking about it."

"Your health, Sherlock. That's what I'm worried about."

Sherlock closed his eyes. "I almost wish you'd let Mycroft explain."

John pushed himself to his feet. "Stop this, Sherlock. Your case is over, you can get a good night's sleep. We can talk about it –"

"Never. We'll talk about it never if we wait until I'm well rested or well fed or not having a panic attack." Sherlock said, hands flexing at his sides. There are shards of glass from just in front of him to almost the stairs down to the front door.

"Alright," John said.

"Mycroft didn't come home when I presented. He was … well, he has always said he was unavoidably detained, but I have long suspected he was in rut."

John's brain had already arrived at the moral of the story by this point. Mycroft hadn't made it home for his first heat. John's stomach rolled at the thought. Harry had been on a Uni tour at the time in Paris with her sixth form group. One of the chaperones had made the five hour trip back to London with her. She still ribbed him about it sometimes, but there would have been no other conclusion. If she's been in America, she could have bumped someone off a full flight to get to him.

Sherlock soldiered on, pulling at the sleeves of his own dressing gown. "We've never recovered. We used to be very close."

John felt a sharp pang in his ribcage. "I couldn't forgive Harry, if she hadn't made it home." He knows it down to his toes.

Sherlock lifted a single shoulder. "I think I have. The tension is just too thick. It makes both of us too irritable to interact properly, even with my suppressants. There was virtually no change when he was on them as well, besides the side effects, so he discontinued taking them after Uni. It's why we see each other so rarely. He stalks me to compensate. He feels like, on an instinctual level, he's my alpha."

John wanted to ask about the side effects, but he didn't want to be rude. Sherlock was dying to tell him about them, he could tell by the smirk, he was just waiting for John to ask. Sherlock loved it when John was rude, nosy, or otherwise a bit not good.

Finally, Sherlock let out a disappointed huff. "His hairline, John. Honestly, do your eyes have any purpose?"

John's eyebrows jumped. "That's from…"

"Yes, obviously." Sherlock said, fluffing his own hair with both hands, as if to say you couldn''t possibly think it ran in my genes. The motion was unbearably arousing, Sherlock standing in the middle of a kitchen littered with broken glass and ruffling his own hair like a casual demi-god of destruction. John licked his lips before he could stop himself.

"I'll just get that, shall I?"

Sherlock looked at him dolefully, stood painfully still while John crouched to get all of the shards away from him, swept into a glittering pile of jagged rubbish.

When he was done, and had had a minute to reel over Mycroft didn't make it home for Sherlock to have his first heat, Mycroft missed that chemical change from familial to foreign and his brain would never sort out the difference, Mycroft missed his chance of adhering to the Westermark effect, Mycroft and Sherlock react to each other sexually without having to make any sort of eye contact while he sorts that out.

"Thank you for telling me," John said, calm as always in the eye of the storm, as if Sherlock's just read him the headline, or passed along a message.

Sherlock scowled. "I just wanted you to know. Nothing will change unless one of us bonds, and it is unlikely on both fronts. I need you to put all thought of my continued use of suppressants out of mind."

John made a gesture with his left hand from the side of his face that people typically associated with blowing one's brains out, but he felt like Sherlock would appreciate it for what it was.

"Having understood that," Sherlock said, like a business proposal. "I would like to continue the progression of our friendship into something sexual."

"I'm glad we're on the same page."

It is only after things emphatically do not change that John questioned what he'd expected.

Sherlock effectively appropriated his body for his own use when they weren't even friends yet; calling him back to send texts for him and treating him like he might as well be Sherlock's hat – there to frame Sherlock's cheekbones and not much else.

John has always been in charge of sustenance, shopping, tedious things like paying bills and hoovering. On further examination of his expectations, John came to at least one conclusion, and that they would be adding "help Sherlock achieve orgasm" to that list.

In the morning after their first case since Sherlock said the words "continue the progression of our friendship into something sexual"out of his own mouth, Sherlock stood with the small of his back against the counter, barefoot, legs crossed near the floor. He looked well rested, flushed with victory, and endearingly sleep-rumpled. John found himself staring at the place where his pajama trousers rode up over the nub of his ankle like some sort of Victorian gentleman with a collar buttoned to his chin.

Sherlock went on blithely slathering his toast with an obscene layer of marmite, and John had a very distinct thought: I have to kiss Sherlock before he puts that in his mouth.

John Watson, being a man of action, took two long steps to plant himself in front of Sherlock and pinched his toast by the corner. "May I?" he asked, already pulling it from Sherlock's hands and setting it down on the counter.

"By all means," Sherlock said, when the toast was well out of his hand. John held his face in both hands, briefly, looking at Sherlock to make sure his intentions were clear, and Sherlock's pupils dilated noticeably. John reeled him in, close, and angled his face, hesitating with only millimeters between them.

"John?" Sherlock breathed, the word coming out in a ticklish puff of breath.

"Yes?" John grinned.

Sherlock didn't answer. He might have mumbled something like, for God's sake, John! as he crashed into John, sending him staggering back into the other side of the kitchen, effectively pinning him against the fridge. John felt frissons of heat radiating from where Sherlock put his hands—one cupping the nape of his neck and the other against his side, and oh hell, he hadn't put down his butter knife; there was going to be marmite ground into his favorite top when he regained enough good sense to care. Sherlock dove into his mouth with the energy of the starving, as if he was making a grid of his mouth, and there was the clatter of his butter knife against the kitchen floor. John hardly noticed because he was a bit preoccupied with the fact that he was pinned by his hips against the cold front of the fridge.

Sherlock came up for air, only briefly, before applying his mouth, clever and movile and warm, to John's neck, down his chest, dropping warm kissed through his tee shirt, to his trousers. Sherlock's cool fingers worked at the button for them. "I never got to return the favor," Sherlock said, nuzzling into John's crotch with his face, and John's fingers gave a tingle at the redirected blood.

"Please," John gasped, and Sherlock sucked him into his mouth unceremoniously, his omega prick fitting all the way to the hilt in Sherlock's mouth, with room for his tongue to swish around his underside with Sherlock's mouth tight like a smile around the base of him. He came with both hands in Sherlock's hair and his name in his mouth, feeling weak at the knees and dizzy.

"Well." he said, when the aftershocks had passed. "That was unexpected."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at him. "You made the first move. How was that unexpected?"

"I wasn't sure if you…? You hadn't…"

"You've been very vocal about your general preference being for omega females. The last time we engaged in amorous behaviors, you were ovulating."

"Tracking my ovulation schedules?" John said. He hoped his eyebrow conveyed the fact that he found it unamusing.

"It's not hard to calculate halfway between heats. It's hardly astrophysics. And I didn't have to invade your privacy to find out – you told me about the last heat." Sherlock sounded petulant.

"Very true," John said, amenable in the wash of chemicals he was feeling for his ridiculous flatmate in the buttery light of recent orgasm, and, more honestly, all the time. "How does that all stack together?"

"Many articles compulsion towards affection during ovulation. After I expressed a desire to continue, you failed to stand closer than necessary, attempt to occupy my bed, or spend any more time staring than usual. So I thought maybe that was to blame."

John let out a laugh. "Sherlock, you berk! I was trying to be a gentleman. I'm the one who's libido has never been a question of debate. And, you know, I did go out on a limb and let you know that I am you know, stupidly emotionally invested here."

"This is tedious." Sherlock narrowed his eyes at John. "Let me be clear: I am also … extremely fond of you, which is not something I am in the habit of feeling. Now, may I please have a blow job?"

John's face burst into a smile, premature lines changing into something joyous. "You don't have to ask me twice," John said, grabbing him by the wrist. Extremely fond, John's brain repeated to him in a sing-song voice, like the kind of pop song that made him feel old.Extremely fond, extremely fond.

By the time he had Sherlock on his back, one flat palm putting a dull pressure against his seam, but not quite in, mouth planted firmly over Sherlock, his hips squirming in gleeful anticipation, his thoughts were still on loop.

"What!" Sherlock demanded, the first time he'd pulled off with a smack to grin at Sherlock, canines set against his bottom lip in an attempt to contain it.

"Extremely fond," John said, shaking his head fondly, and sank back down.

"You know what I meant," Sherlock huffed.

"Yes," he agreed, enunciated as best one can with a mouth full of someone else. He most emphatically did. Something inside of him was soft and sighing, and he traced the letters on Sherlock's bare, warm hip as he went along, until Sherlock came apart at the seams, like a spilled bowl of sugar. "I do."