‘John put the notebook down’ to ‘lethargy over him’ in Cross-Wired. This is an excuse to make you talk more about the characterisation in this wonderfully twisty fic.
Cross Wired. Man, what the hell was going on in my head when I wrote Cross Wired? 😉
This is a hard one actually. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, trying to figure out what to say about it. I guess that first, I should let you in on the dirty secret: I haven’t reread the entirety of Cross Wired since I posted it. Not because it disturbs me (I’m pretty comfy with the creepy corners of my brain, and this nowhere near as deep as the hole goes), but because I never felt that I entirely got it right, and I’m afraid to read it and be proven right.
More below the cut. TW: rape, and a Sherlock/John relationship of dubious sanity.
The issue is John. I nailed Sherlock; totally happy with him. But John…the structure of the story being what it was, it was really hard getting his sections to fuse into a convincing narrative for him, and I don’t think I ever quite got down to the bone on what I was trying to do with him in this story.
So, we start in John’s POV. Obviously I started with the John <3 Danger; Sherlock = Danger; QED: John <3 Sherlock angle here. Sherlock is self-evidently dangerous, and so is his lifestyle, but John is discovering in this notebook that Sherlock’s waaaaaay more potentially dangerous to him on a very personal level than he ever suspected.
The gap I’m not sure I jumped convincingly is, why does this turn him on instead of quite sensibly send him running?
John put the notebook down on the sitting room table, closed his eyes and breathed. Hard.
I want his mind.
Bound, gagged, blindfolded. God, it would be so exposed. Eyes, ears, mouth—as senses, they were contained. They could be directed, shut off. Skin was everywhere. He could be touched anywhere, in any way, and he couldn’t… Stop thinking about it.
Sherlock owning him. He’d never even imagined someone getting inside him that way. It made him queasy, but at least the nausea was a sane response to this. He wrapped his arms around his middle, wishing desperately that he could force that unwelcome roil of lust into submission.
Captivity, pain, control, torture—that threat-adrenaline rush was still fucking with his arousal response, but amid all that, the thought of Sherlock’s attention was frying his brain. Having his whole world hanging on a single touch, his body betraying him to let Sherlock seep into his mind… Stop thinking about it.
I want his mind. John squirmed, and tried not to wonder what having Sherlock in his mind would be like.
He flipped the page.
John’s thinking about the fantasy he just read (bondage, sensory deprivation, mental conditioning). It’s turning him on, not because he likes the idea of being controlled (John isn’t a submissive in this story, more on that assertion later), but because he likes the danger of it. The idea of being accessible to someone else, body and mind, that things could happen to him, good or bad, and all he’d be able to do is endure it…
That’s the answer, but I’m not sure I got to it in the story. John only feels completely alive when his limits are being tested. He wants to push the envelope, risk death, find out how far is too far. Having lived at the full extent of his potential, he yearns to get back to that place. That’s the adrenaline high.
Yeah, John is an addict, just as much as Sherlock is.
The funny thing is, if this were any other person John knew, he’d probably still tell them to GTFO you crazy stalker, but since it’s Sherlock, who has in the past actually endangered himself in order to keep John from dying…well, that earns him the benefit of the doubt. And y’know? Getting worked over by a man who he can be pretty sure wouldn’t finish him off…that thought gets John’s motor running.
In the final analysis, the fact that it’s Sherlock is what does it for John. Because he trusts Sherlock implicitly, but he also knows better than to think he can ever predict the man. With Sherlock, he can simultaneously exist in that space where he’s constantly waiting for the knife to fall and confident that it never will.
And then Sherlock’s next fantasy.
I want his fear. I want his will. I want to take them, lap them up from his skin as he sweats them away. He won’t understand at first. He’ll shove me away, confused and annoyed, assuming I’m playing games. Only I won’t go. I’ll pull him into a clinch and watch for the realization that turns his face to stone. Feel his body snap taut when he understands what’s happening to him. Then it will be all fists, knees, elbows, limbs twisting with deadly intent. He’ll snarl with rage as I grapple him, trying furiously to drive me off. He feels so good: rough, purposeful, painful, holding him is like riding an angry tiger. He knows how to fight. He’s dangerous, he could hurt me if I let him. But I’m trained as well, and taller, stronger, heavier, with better reach and the advantage of momentum, and I’m already between his thighs before he can fully bring himself to bear. Control his hips and I control his leverage. My hands clamp crushingly on his wrists and I force him down, back, his body running hot, fierce and unyielding beneath mine.
You know, I’ve gotten a lot of comments on the weirdness of Sherlock’s writing style, which pleases me greatly because that was deliberate. I figured Sherlock’s not great at writing, um, prose. ^_^ He’s very articulate, a master of grammar and vocabulary, and I’m sure he’s a very precise technical writer, but I think creative writing baffles and annoys him. So the fantasies he writes are inconsistent in tone, wobbling between soundly technical and…rather sensationalist.
In fact, Sherlock’s tone is a clue to his approach to each fantasy. The stronger his voice, the firmer his grasp on it. This one is one of his strongest. He’s confident of it because it’s very contained and he’s had a lot of reference on how rapes play out.
He’s still heaving under me. I let his struggles work for me while I tear his clothes away, baring him in swatches. I want him to feel me mastering him. He will give me nothing. I’ll take anything I want. I want everything.
I want those first faltering motions, when he’s still fighting but he can’t quite keep up with me. I watch panic pool beneath fury in the creases of his face as it dawns that this isn’t luck. I’ve outlasted and outfought him, and this will be the outcome, every time. I tie his wrists tight with his own belt and watch the defeat settle like lethargy over him.
He’s very specific about John’s reactions here (whereas with some of the others, his speculations are somewhat nebulous and fantastical) because he feels secure in his ability to predict John’s responses in this scenario. I don’t know if it had this effect on anyone else, but to me the specificity and confidence in Sherlock’s voice here made it one of the most disturbing—one of the most grounded and plausible.
And let’s just throw the rest of this bit on here, to round it out.
He’ll try reasoning with me first. When that doesn’t work, he’ll thrash and shout. Finally, he’ll beg; he’ll hate that the most, but it will be just as deliciously futile as the rest. He gets his answer when I force his hips up for access, his spine torquing him in my grip. That hopeless will shimmers like heat waves across his skin, and I’ll savour it, right up until his pained shout when I force my way in to quench it.
John, surrender is your only option. You’ll let me have you, because you’re well aware of the damage I’ll do if you don’t.
But it’s not when you fear, is it? No, that moment will be when I kiss you as I come. Because I love you like this, overpowered, broken to my will.
Sherlock in this story is…well, I didn’t conceive him as a sociopath, though I’d have to be stupid not to be able to see it (and a couple of readers have argued fairly convincingly that he is). But he does care about John here. He’s definitely got a massive case of obsessive love (I actually don’t necessarily think Sherlock’s a drug addict, but boy howdy does he ever have an obsessive personality), and I can only describe him as pathologically possessive, but as much as he wants these fantasies (and he really does, these are not the innocent ‘sometimes our brains run away with us’ kind), he does not want to violate or destroy John to get them (which, you know, makes them tricky, given the subject matter). And he very much doesn’t want John dead. That would defeat the very idea of having a John to love and wreck up.
They’re not looking for the same thing out of this, even once they do establish a relationship. Sherlock wants to possess John; John wants Sherlock to push him, test him, threaten him, give him something to fight against. The agreement they come to is a weird one: ”You don’t need my consent, but don’t assume that means I’ll go along with it.” It’s almost a ‘survival of the fittest’ thing. That, incidentally, is why this story isn’t labeled BDSM, because this isn’t about establishing a safe, controlled environment to explore dynamics of power and pain. What they hash out is pretty much the exact opposite. Sherlock can try to take whatever he wants, and John will do his best to kick the crap out of him if he doesn’t like it (not a submissive, like I said).
So yeah. Mostly what I know is that both of these boys are pretty messed up in the head, that this is not a safe, sane, consensual, or enviable relationship, and probably somebody who’s not me could give you a better analysis than I can.
Rather ironic that I asked Gins about Immortal Beloved, because I think we might’ve been writing fairly similar versions of these two.
PrettyArbitrary: Writing meme stolen from roane