The pulsing music in the club seems to be syncing with his heartbeat. It's a quick pace. He can feel the bass thumping through his chest, vibrating his bones. Obviously it's unlikely that his physical pulse has truly been commandeered by the auditory one. Yet he cannot banish the feeling that the music controls the pulse of his blood, that his heart pumps to the beat. He is drunk enough that instead of being vaguely nauseated, as he normally would under such strenuous visual and auditory input, he gyrates to the music, feeling liberated, feeling as he never did in similar situations at uni. The heady combination of alcohol and John's company has Sherlock feeling as light as air.

He knows he looks good. Hasn't he always known? How could he dismiss the sidelong glances, the yearning looks, or the glares of jealousy that followed him wherever he went? It is obvious. The dark-haired man at the bar is watching with a predatory look in his eye, his grin wolfish. The redhead two dancers over sends Sherlock smoldering looks, tries to get Sherlock's attention. A tall blonde man to Sherlock's left has been constitutionally unable to keep his gaze from Sherlock's plush arse for at least ten minutes now.

Sherlock observes them, but he does not see them. He sees John. He sees John is smiling. It is with horror that he perceives the hot pang of pain in his chest as he realizes that he wishes it were John gazing up smolderingly at him through fluttering lashes. John doesn't seem to notice the flash of dismay that seems so painfully obvious to Sherlock, and pantomimes drinking. Sherlock nods in assent and follows John to the bar, fighting the impulse to grab his hand. Sherlock wraps his long fingers around a glass of something cold with a lime in it, attempting to call himself back to reality, attempting to assure that he's still being fun for John, for he knows that that is what a stag party is meant to be. Fun.

He's fairly far gone at this point. But so is John, if the rosy tint of his cheeks is anything to go by. John fidgets with his glass as though he wants to put his hand elsewhere. Sherlock will pull himself together, he thinks, as John excuses himself to use the loo. He will be fun. He will be careless. He will stop pining and give John the stag night he deserves. Sherlock swills at his drink. It's never enough. Alcohol never has the obliterating potency that it should. He drinks more of it, wishing for cocaine and berating himself for that tiny, pathetic wish.

It is through this fog of pining and self-pity that the suave young naval officer cuts with a swagger.

Ah. Yes. Good. He's fit. He's blonde. He's bold. A distraction. An excellent one. He buys Sherlock another drink (Sherlock hadn't even realized that his was already nearly gone). He stands close to Sherlock, puts his mouth close to Sherlock's ear and his hand on Sherlock's thigh. He is equal parts hard and soft. He has a reckless glint in his eye. On leave. In search of casual sex, obviously. His hand is tracing abstract patterns on the fine cloth of Sherlock's fine suit. Sherlock is willing to imagine, willing to put that godawful palace of memories and fantasies to good use, willing to shut down the center of facts that threaten to make this distraction disastrous. If he squints his eyes just so, the stocky sailor is not too dissimilar from John. His voice has a similar cadence, a paradox of clipped and lilting. The sailor even surprises a laugh out of Sherlock once or twice.

Sherlock begins flirting in earnest. He does not often use his deductive prowess for seductive ends. It seems to be going quite well. What's one more manipulation in Sherlock's history? The sailor is warily impressed, tipsy, turned on, and most pressingly running a hand up Sherlock's back, making him almost jump off his barstool in surprise. He hasn't been touched like this in quite some time. As he recalls, he didn't much enjoy it last time. But now the feeling is exciting. He can almost forget that the sailor is not John. Sherlock drops his voice to a low velvet purr, milks every word for all its worth, rumbles suggestions into the sailor's ear. He bloody well knows he is tantalizing. Most skilled manipulators are. He has never done this to John. It would be wrong to woo him that way, to win his lust by cheap tricks and sleight of hand and sickly saccharine coquetry.

"What's this?" John's voice is currently comprised of more clipped than lilting. He turns a hard, gimlet eye on the sailor, whose name Sherlock has already forgotten, having immediately substituted a certain common one-syllable English name.

John's eyes are as steely as flint. "What are you doing?" It's uncertain whether he is asking Sherlock or the unfortunate sailor, who, trained in reading bad weather, feels trouble in the taut electric charge of John's stance and the dark cut of his brow.

The sailor puts his hands up. "Sorry, mate. Didn't know he was taken." At this Sherlock's brows raise incredulously. Taken?

John growls as the sailor leaves and knocks back a drink, slamming the glass down when he's finished. "Well?" he says, his voice laced with something dangerous, a hard edge. God, but Sherlock loves him like this. "What exactly did you think you were doing?"

Sherlock blinks, considers. Sips his new drink. He can't recall when he switched to hard liquor. "Flirting," he says neutrally. "Having fun."

John bristles. "That was fun for you," he says. He takes Sherlock's drink from him and drains that as well. "You were flirting." His voice is flat with disbelief.

Sherlock looks sharply at him. "I'm supposed to flirt, aren't I? I'm supposed to have fun and carry on. It's a stag night." If a little bitterness creeps into his voice, he does not notice enough to censor himself. He is well on his way to plastered. John is right behind him.

The wild club beat segues into Depeche Mode crooning darkly about love and want and drugs over a steady stream of soft, insidious synths.

"Were you going to kiss him?" asks John. "Hmm?" He's on a roll now. "Let him push you up against the bar, put his hands in your hair? Pull it? Oh yes, I bet you like that. I bet you like to have your hair pulled. Hard, too. Were you going to follow him back to his flat, let him fuck you insensate later?" John stops suddenly. He looks sick. He feels sick, and he suspects it's not the alcohol.

"So you're policing my sex life, now?" asks Sherlock, hot with anger, the words spilling out of him like a kettle of hot water bubbling over. "I wasn't aware you cared whom I fuck." He practically spits at the injustice of it all.

John stares angrily for a long pregnant moment, listening to the singer confessing desperately:

"I stop and I stare too much, Afraid that I care too much, And I hardly dare to touch, For fear that the spell may be broken. When I need a drug in me, And it brings out the thug in me, Feel something tugging me, Then I want the real thing not tokens…"

The words are simple, too simple to be terribly good lyrics, but the parallels are too complete to bear. John crushes his body and his mouth against the stiffness of his confused body, against the hot, open 'O' of Sherlock's surprised mouth,. At first the pressure is bruising, a possessive bite of a kiss. The grip of John's left hand on Sherlock's arm is painful, and the grasp of his other hand tangled in the curls at the nape of Sherlock's neck stings. But as Sherlock's mouth and body soften under John's firm ministrations, John too softens, licks gently at Sherlock's swollen lower lip, sweeps his clever tongue along the tender flesh just within, eliciting a soft moan from Sherlock, who is fairly certain his core temperature has never skyrocketed so high so fast.

When John finally pulls away to come up for air, he can't help but notice the delicate blush suffusing Sherlock's pale cheeks, the unbelievably suggestive tousle of his dark curls, the darkness of his blown pupils, and the unbearably beautiful way his soft, reddened lips have parted slightly like the petals of a just-blooming flower. These are the things that make him groan internally with desire. But it is the complex cocktail of utter bewilderment, of cautious, strained hope, of awed and afraid and rosy and slightly wild sexuality untamed and unexplored on Sherlock's face, that makes John's heart ache painfully in his chest. He puts a tender hand on Sherlock's cheek and marvels as Sherlock presses into it instinctually, like a cat seeking affection. "I didn't know," John breathes, amazed. "How could I not have known?" John's hand slides back to Sherlock's nape.

"Sherlock," John says quietly. On John's lips the name is a quiet eulogy, a reverent prayer, a hushed confession, an ashamed appeal, and lastly and most importantly, an elegy. A tragedy of immense proportions. A lament sweet, bitter, and plaintive.

Sherlock stands by his side as Best Man as John marries the next day. He chokes a little on his speech. So does John. He puts the sweet sadness of lament into every note of the waltz he wrote for the newlywed's first dance. No one seems to notice that the piece is as tragic as it is beautiful.

In the end, watching the couples dancing, seeing yet not seeing their happy faces, Sherlock muses that happy endings are not his lot in life, never have been. It would have been the exception of a lifetime for this to be any different.

But still he hopes desperately for a divorce, or for a horrible accident, or for an unpreventable murder to befall the newlywed bride. He prays for these dubious miracles and laughs shakily at what he has become.

He chants silently, "Alone is what I have. Alone protects me." And when the party becomes too much to bear, he is gone, knowing that he will not be missed.