Okay but imagine this
Sherlock Holmes is an excellent boxer, but you’d never know by looking at him.
Sherlock, ‘immaculate, posh, put-together’ Holmes is a vision of perfection in all forms; things like extreme physical exertion, dirty underground fighting rings, bloody knuckles, a bruised lip and blackened eye aren’t things that John would ever think to associate with him. He might even believe Sherlock’s never been in a real fight in his life.
Nobody suspects it because he gives them no reason to. Because Sherlock Holmes is an excellent fighter.
He leaves at night, he’d always left at night, long after John had already gone to sleep; he never bothers getting a cab, he prefers the walk on these occasions, with London’s bitter cold biting at his already heightened senses.Â
It’s not every night he goes; just the nights he needs to, when a case is particularly frustrating or when there’s just no case at all. The tug on his spine, the way his skin crawls with need for something, anything.
It doesn’t always alleviate the boredom completely, but it helps.
He’ll arrive, and it’s always the same thing; he folds his coat and his scarf and sets them aside before descending a dingy staircase, where voices echo and grunts get louder with every step. There would have been a time that men would have side-eyed him, smirking at the easy win that stalks by, smacking their buddies on the chest and pointing his direction with a hunger in their eyes, but Sherlock ignores them all and is affected by none of it.
It only takes one night for their opinion to change.
He fights like he does everything else, the way he always has; precise, unyielding, and a little on the side of unpredictable. He grins in such a way that makes the others fight like petulant children and he gets off on every moment of it. The way his fist feels when it has smashed against someone’s face, and he names each bone as they shatter. The way it feels when their blood begins to seep into the cracks of his knuckles and the burn in his chest and the sweat that makes his curls stick to the back of his neck; it’s all a different sort of high than what he’s used to, but it’s enough when he needs it to be.
He dodges nearly everything, narrowly avoiding the onslaughts of jabs, uppercuts, hooks. He learns how to take a punch in just the right spot that can easily be covered up, but never the face. When they do land, he breathes out heavily, and that’s all he allows himself.
He hasn’t left with a real scratch since he was fresh out of uni, when he’d show up more times high than he could count. It’s perfect, and so is he.
Until John meets Mary Morstan.
And she’s pretty and blond and everywhere he goes and John talks about her too much. It shouldn’t be distracting to him, but it is. John doesn’t sleep at Baker Street anymore, but somewhere that is unfamiliar to Sherlock and he often finds himself talking to the air that doesn’t answer back.
The worst part is that Sherlock thinks he should like her. And he thinks John knows it.
He becomes more irritable; the nights spent out become longer and more frequent because the tug on his spine and the crawling of his skin becomes too much to take. He’ll think she has nothing to do with it, but his throws become sloppier and his hits lands in all the wrong places. He’ll fight the same man he’s fought a hundred times before and something’s different, something’s off, and he’s suddenly unbalanced and slow on his feet. Sometimes he blinks into the crowd standing around them, turns his head and wipes away the sweat on his brow and he sees her face in every shirtless, tattooed man there, smiling her pretty smile and tilting her head to the side like she’s watching him. Their jeers become louder than he’s ever remembered them being and the one in his head becomes like a megaphone saying, The thing about Mary is that she has completely turned my life around. And one night he’s hit with a straight punch to the jaw and it goes downhill from there. He takes punch after punch, can’t get up straight, can’t hit back, like his opponent is keeping him down, hell bent on not letting him back up. That night he goes home with a blackened eye, a bruised lip and knuckles so raw they burn when he runs them under the water in the sink, watching the blood slip down the drain and he tells himself that tomorrow night will be different. [Inspired by this image!]
