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holmestice2015-12-06 09:00 pm
holmesticemods) wrote in holmestice2015-12-06 09:00 pm
Entry tags:
Fic for buttsnax: Tea at the End of the World
Title: Tea at the End of the World
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
buttsnax
Author:what_alchemy
Beta:jouissant
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1500
Warnings: Author chooses not to warn
Summary: Sherlock, John, and the K-Pg extinction event.
Sherlock was restive.
He had believed a good hunt would cure him of his agitation. In the cool of the night, steam rising from the fresh-spilled blood of his kill, each of his senses came over sharp and clear as if to torment him. He stood on a promontory overlooking the valley and felt as if he could hear them, see them, even smell them all — the little mammals who scurried about making small lives in the grass. Fucking and foraging and fighting. Growing fat and flavorful for the likes of him. But now, as he licked delicately at the blood dripping from his claws, his belly full and his pulse humming, he had to admit to himself a more insidious dissatisfaction. He had several conflicting desires he could not reconcile: he wished to gorge himself on meat even as his proventriculus threatened to burst, he wished to run until he reached the horizon even as his fool body with its fool touch-hunger demanded he return to his mate in their nest and strut about until he incited a rough coupling, he wished to sprout wings for his useless feathers and fly towards the distant flames interrupting the night.
In the hollows of his body, thick cramps ground and clanked together as if they were palpable things. He wanted to void his waste, but he found himself viciously plugged up. He screeched into the quiet and stomped his feet. In the valley below him, birds took to the sky in distress, and Sherlock hated them mightily.
A great and far-off fire flickered, growing larger as it drew nearer.
—
Sherlock was home by first light. He knew it was home by the sight of his mate’s lumbering silhouette shaking off the vestiges of sleep for an early morning graze. He alighted on the knobs and plates of John’s shoulders and began to preen himself. Beneath him, John protested, and the rumble of his voice sent thrills up Sherlock’s cloaca.
“Oi, you lazy bugger,” John said. “Do you really have to sit on me first thing in the morning?”
“You can call me lazy the night you shift your tail and do some proper work for your dinner.”
“Hmph.”
The sun on his feathers and the meal in his belly made Sherlock sluggish and wanton. He wished for John to smother him with his big body and deposit some sperm inside him, but John would be preoccupied with leaves this time of day, and Sherlock himself was still feeling off kilter from constipation. He settled for proximity with the knowledge that despite his complaints, John delighted in it as much as he did. John had long since given up his denials of their connection and had ceased to care what the neighbors thought of the union between an herbivore and a carnivore. It had taken him a long time, and there were times Sherlock wondered if his heart wouldn’t survive the ordeal, but in the end, John could no more resist Sherlock than Sherlock could resist prey that believed it could hide from him.
Idly, Sherlock wondered just what was in the small, hot, hairy little beastie he’d eaten the night before to tear him up so, but the worries receded as his heartbeat slowed and John’s particular moss-and-water scent surrounded him like an embrace. Sherlock dozed, buffeted about to and fro between the slats of John’s armor as he spent the morning getting his fill of greens. This, Sherlock thought in the hazy space between sleep and wakefulness, is the very meat of life.
—
The next night, Sherlock’s digestive system was no better, and he had taken to stalking about the camp John had made them, squawking and flapping his distress. The pressure in his gizzard had grown unbearable; he wondered if it were possible for the obstruction inside him to burst through his chest. Worse, he was hungry but could not bring himself to eat, even when John gathered up all his gall and crushed a scurrisome little thing beneath his foot especially for Sherlock.
“Please eat it, Sherlock,” John said, nudging the corpse toward him with his spiked tail. “You’ll feel better.”
“If I lick up one drop, I’ll explode! John!”
Sherlock paced around, shaking his head and clacking his claws together. He was emitting a low, keening growl almost constantly now. He wanted nothing more than to squat down low, head to the ground, and push until whatever torture he was enduring was over, but John’s eyes on him, those black holes of concern, caused him too much embarrassment to allow him to cower the way his body demanded.
He rent the air again with a shriek, and his body convulsed into the configuration it desired without his volition: head in the grass, claws anchored in the soil, tail up and quivering as something tore like a demon through his cloaca. The club of John’s tail swung anxiously side to side, and in the blindness of his pain, Sherlock felt John’s big knobby head press up against his body as if to comfort him. And damn him, it did — it did comfort him, but somehow the gesture’s success only made him angrier.
“Stop being useless and help me, John!” he bellowed, butting his snout against John’s head as if he could hurt him.
“We’re clear out of Ex-Lax, Sherlock,” John said, and Sherlock despised the soothing, indulgent tone he took when he said it.
“Then dig the poo out with your bare hands, you bastard!”
“Sherlock—”
“If you really loved me, you’d be elbow deep in my arse digging me free by now!”
“Look, you’re in pain, I don’t want to hurt you any more, all right?”
“Tedious!”
“One of my phalanges is bigger than your entire body, you prat!”
“I don’t care, oh, I don’t care, John, please!”
Another wave overtook him and smashed his face into the ground as it wracked his body. His cloaca felt as if it might turn inside out, and he wouldn’t survive that, he was sure. He was speaking, but of what he did not know, and John’s voice was equal gibberish in his ears. John’s big head was an anchor against which Sherlock could grind his pain.
Sherlock looked up to the stars. He strained, breath too tight even to scream, and in the distance, a great ball of flame seemed to glow brighter. He imagined he could taste ozone as the very fabric of the universe shifted to accommodate that flare of light.
The world was going to change.
Sherlock’s vision went white and he choked on his own breath when finally, finally his cloaca seized up and then released a rush of matter that threatened to tear him open as if he were a delicate mammal ripe for feasting upon. He lay heaving for air in the dirt, dimly aware of John rumbling behind him.
“Fantastic!” he heard John exclaim. “Brilliant!”
Sherlock lolled his head around enough to crack an eye in John’s direction. He was smiling, and wasn’t it perfectly ridiculous? That Sherlock should be so charmed by a rictus of square, leaf-grinding teeth with no use to him whatsoever. But there, in front of John’s grin, sat an impressive pile of eggs, creamy and freckled and slathered with mucous.
“I always miss something,” Sherlock murmured. He surrendered to the swallowing darkness, and behind his eyelids flashed flame and fear.
—
It was peaceful, this. Sherlock felt like a king on a throne, sitting atop his eggs with John curled around him. The steady rhythm of John’s breath soothed him, even as he deduced what was to come. When he looked into the sky, the inevitable was impossible not to see: the end of — not all things. The end of himself, of John, of everything he knew, certainly. But not all things. Not what was important.
“Our children will be powerful, John,” he said. “They will soar in flight and outlive us by millions of years. They will rule this hapless earth and look down upon it as they were born to do. They will be grace and beauty with no boundaries, pure and perfect in the hunt.”
John was staring at him, equal parts admiring and exasperated, Sherlock knew.
“Let me get you some tea,” he said, lumbering off into the leaves.
They would be trapped and hunted and driven out, Sherlock and John’s offspring. They would be hawks and eagles and budgies and canaries in equal measure. They would dip and dive and steal pet chihuahuas to a symphony of human screams, and they would dart in for sugar water and nectar as humans cooed around them. They would grow fat on farms only to be slaughtered. They would collect trinkets and shiny things and gather on electric lines to be shooed away. They would learn to sing and play tricks and undulate together in the sky like a living aurora. They would have their majesty wrested from them by those who would build cages.
But oh, they would fly.
End
Recipient:
buttsnaxAuthor:
what_alchemyBeta:
jouissantCharacters/Pairings: Sherlock/John
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1500
Warnings: Author chooses not to warn
Summary: Sherlock, John, and the K-Pg extinction event.
Sherlock was restive.
He had believed a good hunt would cure him of his agitation. In the cool of the night, steam rising from the fresh-spilled blood of his kill, each of his senses came over sharp and clear as if to torment him. He stood on a promontory overlooking the valley and felt as if he could hear them, see them, even smell them all — the little mammals who scurried about making small lives in the grass. Fucking and foraging and fighting. Growing fat and flavorful for the likes of him. But now, as he licked delicately at the blood dripping from his claws, his belly full and his pulse humming, he had to admit to himself a more insidious dissatisfaction. He had several conflicting desires he could not reconcile: he wished to gorge himself on meat even as his proventriculus threatened to burst, he wished to run until he reached the horizon even as his fool body with its fool touch-hunger demanded he return to his mate in their nest and strut about until he incited a rough coupling, he wished to sprout wings for his useless feathers and fly towards the distant flames interrupting the night.
In the hollows of his body, thick cramps ground and clanked together as if they were palpable things. He wanted to void his waste, but he found himself viciously plugged up. He screeched into the quiet and stomped his feet. In the valley below him, birds took to the sky in distress, and Sherlock hated them mightily.
A great and far-off fire flickered, growing larger as it drew nearer.
Sherlock was home by first light. He knew it was home by the sight of his mate’s lumbering silhouette shaking off the vestiges of sleep for an early morning graze. He alighted on the knobs and plates of John’s shoulders and began to preen himself. Beneath him, John protested, and the rumble of his voice sent thrills up Sherlock’s cloaca.
“Oi, you lazy bugger,” John said. “Do you really have to sit on me first thing in the morning?”
“You can call me lazy the night you shift your tail and do some proper work for your dinner.”
“Hmph.”
The sun on his feathers and the meal in his belly made Sherlock sluggish and wanton. He wished for John to smother him with his big body and deposit some sperm inside him, but John would be preoccupied with leaves this time of day, and Sherlock himself was still feeling off kilter from constipation. He settled for proximity with the knowledge that despite his complaints, John delighted in it as much as he did. John had long since given up his denials of their connection and had ceased to care what the neighbors thought of the union between an herbivore and a carnivore. It had taken him a long time, and there were times Sherlock wondered if his heart wouldn’t survive the ordeal, but in the end, John could no more resist Sherlock than Sherlock could resist prey that believed it could hide from him.
Idly, Sherlock wondered just what was in the small, hot, hairy little beastie he’d eaten the night before to tear him up so, but the worries receded as his heartbeat slowed and John’s particular moss-and-water scent surrounded him like an embrace. Sherlock dozed, buffeted about to and fro between the slats of John’s armor as he spent the morning getting his fill of greens. This, Sherlock thought in the hazy space between sleep and wakefulness, is the very meat of life.
The next night, Sherlock’s digestive system was no better, and he had taken to stalking about the camp John had made them, squawking and flapping his distress. The pressure in his gizzard had grown unbearable; he wondered if it were possible for the obstruction inside him to burst through his chest. Worse, he was hungry but could not bring himself to eat, even when John gathered up all his gall and crushed a scurrisome little thing beneath his foot especially for Sherlock.
“Please eat it, Sherlock,” John said, nudging the corpse toward him with his spiked tail. “You’ll feel better.”
“If I lick up one drop, I’ll explode! John!”
Sherlock paced around, shaking his head and clacking his claws together. He was emitting a low, keening growl almost constantly now. He wanted nothing more than to squat down low, head to the ground, and push until whatever torture he was enduring was over, but John’s eyes on him, those black holes of concern, caused him too much embarrassment to allow him to cower the way his body demanded.
He rent the air again with a shriek, and his body convulsed into the configuration it desired without his volition: head in the grass, claws anchored in the soil, tail up and quivering as something tore like a demon through his cloaca. The club of John’s tail swung anxiously side to side, and in the blindness of his pain, Sherlock felt John’s big knobby head press up against his body as if to comfort him. And damn him, it did — it did comfort him, but somehow the gesture’s success only made him angrier.
“Stop being useless and help me, John!” he bellowed, butting his snout against John’s head as if he could hurt him.
“We’re clear out of Ex-Lax, Sherlock,” John said, and Sherlock despised the soothing, indulgent tone he took when he said it.
“Then dig the poo out with your bare hands, you bastard!”
“Sherlock—”
“If you really loved me, you’d be elbow deep in my arse digging me free by now!”
“Look, you’re in pain, I don’t want to hurt you any more, all right?”
“Tedious!”
“One of my phalanges is bigger than your entire body, you prat!”
“I don’t care, oh, I don’t care, John, please!”
Another wave overtook him and smashed his face into the ground as it wracked his body. His cloaca felt as if it might turn inside out, and he wouldn’t survive that, he was sure. He was speaking, but of what he did not know, and John’s voice was equal gibberish in his ears. John’s big head was an anchor against which Sherlock could grind his pain.
Sherlock looked up to the stars. He strained, breath too tight even to scream, and in the distance, a great ball of flame seemed to glow brighter. He imagined he could taste ozone as the very fabric of the universe shifted to accommodate that flare of light.
The world was going to change.
Sherlock’s vision went white and he choked on his own breath when finally, finally his cloaca seized up and then released a rush of matter that threatened to tear him open as if he were a delicate mammal ripe for feasting upon. He lay heaving for air in the dirt, dimly aware of John rumbling behind him.
“Fantastic!” he heard John exclaim. “Brilliant!”
Sherlock lolled his head around enough to crack an eye in John’s direction. He was smiling, and wasn’t it perfectly ridiculous? That Sherlock should be so charmed by a rictus of square, leaf-grinding teeth with no use to him whatsoever. But there, in front of John’s grin, sat an impressive pile of eggs, creamy and freckled and slathered with mucous.
“I always miss something,” Sherlock murmured. He surrendered to the swallowing darkness, and behind his eyelids flashed flame and fear.
It was peaceful, this. Sherlock felt like a king on a throne, sitting atop his eggs with John curled around him. The steady rhythm of John’s breath soothed him, even as he deduced what was to come. When he looked into the sky, the inevitable was impossible not to see: the end of — not all things. The end of himself, of John, of everything he knew, certainly. But not all things. Not what was important.
“Our children will be powerful, John,” he said. “They will soar in flight and outlive us by millions of years. They will rule this hapless earth and look down upon it as they were born to do. They will be grace and beauty with no boundaries, pure and perfect in the hunt.”
John was staring at him, equal parts admiring and exasperated, Sherlock knew.
“Let me get you some tea,” he said, lumbering off into the leaves.
They would be trapped and hunted and driven out, Sherlock and John’s offspring. They would be hawks and eagles and budgies and canaries in equal measure. They would dip and dive and steal pet chihuahuas to a symphony of human screams, and they would dart in for sugar water and nectar as humans cooed around them. They would grow fat on farms only to be slaughtered. They would collect trinkets and shiny things and gather on electric lines to be shooed away. They would learn to sing and play tricks and undulate together in the sky like a living aurora. They would have their majesty wrested from them by those who would build cages.
But oh, they would fly.
End
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Gosh, as someone who has always loved biology and is in awe of the evolution and its huge time frames this story made me incredibly happy. So few words hold so much meaning.
I love how they were IC and had so many traits of their human counterparts. And that Sherlock deduced the oncoming catastrophy and was still content in doing what he did. And on top this last sentence. Your fic gave me all the feels and I'm dying to know who you are, MA! :D
Thanks for sharing this percious little tale with us! I loved it. <333
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I'm glad you liked it! It was definitely great fun to write. Thanks so much.
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I loved visualising Sherlock dozing on John's back between his plates as John grazed and John stomping on some scurrying thing when Sherlock couldn't hunt and didn't want to eat. Just an incredible transformation.
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A unique idea and a brave decision to write. Two dinosaurs founding a family at the edge of the apocalypse, that's so sweet and sad. But knowing thdy leave us a wonderful inheritance - birds - softens the heartbreak a bit. Fantastic, very imaginative fic! Thank you!
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I don't know how you went from "crack-y fic about a cranky dinosaur" to "epic love story at the brink of the apocalypse [oh and also Sherlock and John get to LIVE FOREVER through their offspring, who will be all the birds of the world]" in 1500 words, but I am very much in awe.
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Thanks so much! I'm so glad you liked it.
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A-ma-zing.
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Y'know, ever since buttsnax's sign-up went up, I was desperately curious to see the fill. It was absolutely worth the wait.
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Thank you!
The ending was brilliant. I love that their offspring represent various aircraft, the eagles obviously symbolizing the F-15 Strike Eagle, the hawks the BAE Systems plane of the same name, and "budgie" being a slang term for a helicopter. I'm still a bit perplexed as to what a 'canary' might be, but I'll think on it. Needless to say, your story left me impressed and even a little sweaty.
Thank you, author, for blessing me with the fruit of your linguistic cloaca. This story entered my life like the Chicxulub asteroid, and now all I want to do is die.
Re: Thank you!
Thank you :) I'm glad I was matched to you so I could poop this out myself.
Re: Thank you!
Re: Thank you!
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