A few notes before we get started: first, though this has 10 chapters, it is a 5+1 (my first). The +1 is simply too large to be one chapter. Second, Mycroft deserves all the love. Unfortunately, he'll get none from this story, as he is not in it. Sorry, Mycroft. However, third, this story does feature John with Richard III beard. uwu And last, this is not only my first Shota Sherlock, but also my first Shota where both participants are human, and I can not stress enough that, if you are in a position like Sherlock's, do not start something like this (unless you're of age and then that's up to you and the other party) and, if you're in a position like John's, do not let it happen (same proviso). I'll condone the incestyness of real relationships as long as everyone is of age and informed because that's their business, but I do not condone relationships where one party is significantly under the age of consent. At all.

Shota Disclaimer: To me, as a young teen getting into my first fandom, and even now as an adult, there has always been a difference between 'Shota' (which I found/find acceptable) and 'Pedophilia' (which I found/find unacceptable and did/do not condone). This disclaimer is not the place to get into those differences, however, so I shall simply say that, no matter how you view the two terms and the differences between them, shota does contain sexual content between a pre-/pubescent boy and another person, one who is typically an adult, but can be a person of the same or lesser age; the term for the opposite genre (girl) is 'loli/ta'. If you personally know someone who has engaged in sexual activities with a child, whether you were the engager, the victim, or a bystander, please report them to a trusted authority immediately. No matter how shota/loli is written, no matter how informed the shota/loli's character consent is in-fic, real children are not capable of the same consent. That said, please enjoy this fictional work.

Special thanks to sexxica (AO3) who is an amazing person with amazing fics (especially her shota John: After School Special archiveofourown, works/1659848) and she beta'd the entire thing and is amazingly accommodating when I go in, play with things, and then come back looking to make sure it all still makes sense. Ily~

This story was also inspired a bit by a very telling section of 'Falling' (archiveofourown, works/520663). I can't stop reading that story, but I read "You can't tell Mummy", and this thing positively bloomed into what it is now. So thank fireofangels (AO3) for the gift(s) you are about to receive~

Chapter 1/10, originally posted 2014-12-25.

Despite being a military man whose adult life was built on routine, John still found, at times, some routines were difficult to fall into. This, thankfully, had not been one of them.

The young boy (no longer quite a child but just shy of puberty) that Mary and he had adopted was an almost frightfully intelligent, independent boy. When John had first expressed his wish to tuck Sherlock in at night, he had been equal parts surprised and relieved to find only acceptance. As the nights passed, he grew to realise that perhaps Sherlock looked forward to that time as much as John did, and the new spike in the pattern of their daily lives was, in its own way, a relief to fall into. As he smoothed the duvet over his boy's chest like he'd done every night the last two months, the door to his and his wife's room downstairs slammed shut.

"Is Mary mad at me, Daddy?" The soft voice, nearly ready to break and deepen, broke through his fugue and he glanced up into bright grey eyes.

"Of course not, sweetheart," he murmured as he leaned down to press a kiss to the pale forehead, Sherlock twitching away and giggling when John's beard tickled his nose. The laughter broke the normally cool, detached expression of the doll-like face and suffused John's heart with warmth. It still boggled his mind how perfect the boy looked, and often times his wanking fantasies would be overtaken by Sherlock's features, and his intelligence. Nor did it help that, of all the variations of 'father' for the son he'd adopted to call John, he had to choose the one with the most lewd connotations, especially when the only thing he called his adopted mother was 'Mary'. "Why do you ask?"

"She doesn't like my deductions."

John pursed his lips as the spike of heat in his blood cooled at the words, and he sat on the side of the bed, laying his hand over the smaller one hidden beneath the blankets. Sherlock's deductions were the most brilliant things he had ever heard, and the power of that brain never ceased to amaze him. But Mary had treated them like... a mutation. From the very first observation uttered, she had shied away from their adopted son's abilities.

"Mary's like most people, sweetheart," he finally said. "What you can see frightens them. It feels invasive because they don't understand how you see the world, how brilliant you are. " He paused and began to stroke through the dark curls, hoping it would help lessen the inevitable sting of his words. "I would love to say that will change as you get older, but it won't. People tend to not understand those who are different, and you are most certainly 'different'."

Sherlock was quiet in turn for a long moment, the look on his face like the one he got when he was organising new information in his Mind Index, as he once told John was how he kept his mind in order. "Good different, Daddy?"

The doctor's heart beat painfully in his chest as the years ahead of Sherlock stretched out before him. "For most people? No. You'll get called a lot of names, and-"

"Like 'freak'?" the child interrupted, and John felt a surge of anger at the tone of his voice and at the reminder of his wife calling their adopted son the same thing earlier that day. They had been at The Science Museum, and Sherlock had been deducing people to them. As soon as they let him off to explore without their 'glacial' place hindering him, Mary had whispered that word under her breath. John had almost left her.

"Yeah, like 'freak'," he said, smiling sadly.

"Am I a good different to you though?"

"Of course you are, sweetheart," he assured, ruffling the hair under his hand. Sherlock glared at him and knocked his hand away. John just chuckled and his smile lost its sad edge. "I love you, Sherlock," he said a bit more firmly, cupping the small cheek and keeping eye contact to make his point. 'More than you know,' John's mind whispered what he'd left unsaid.

"I love you too, Daddy," Sherlock replied, a hand emerging from under the covers to lay over John's. The same pulse as always went through him at the touch and he felt his smile go shaky before he pulled back as quickly as he could without making it seem like he was running away.

"Good. As long as we know that. Now, to sleep with you," he said sternly, standing up and walking to the door.

"Sleep well, Daddy," Sherlock said as John flicked the light switch down. There was something odd about his boy's voice, but he wanted to get away so badly that he didn't dare pause to examine it.

"You too, sweetheart," he replied before closing the door.

Downstairs, none of the lights had been left on for him, and he could only sigh at the passive-aggression of Mary's temper as he navigated the dark to their bedroom. Thankfully, it wasn't locked, and when he walked in, his wife was already asleep, an empty cup of tea on her side table. But her bottle of sleeping pills weren't next to it, so she wasn't that angry. Hopefully she had realised how wrong she had been, calling Sherlock what she had.

As John readied himself to bed, all he could remember was how happy Mary had been in the months prior to the finalisation. He hadn't met the boy they were going to adopt until the day of, he had been so busy getting everything ready for their new life: new house, moving their old one, insurance, schools, so many things that he had nearly lost count. But Mary had come home every day after she'd spent with their to-be son practically glowing- happier than he'd seen her since they'd gotten together. But the day of the finalisation, Sherlock had apparently dropped his mask because she'd started acting like she'd never seen him before. John could understand why; the child must have been passed up time and again after displaying what he could do, and when a new family showed interest in him, he was intelligent enough to hide his abilities until it was too late for them to turn back.

The doctor sighed as he slid naked into bed. His wife was as far away from his side as she could get, her back to him. But he knew she was asleep by the familiar, slow rise and fall of her ribs. He heaved another sigh and settled down, resolving to find a way tomorrow to get the two most important people in his life to get along better.

A hot mouth enveloping his cock pulled John slowly from sleep, soft kitten-licks to the glans and the gentle nips and kisses along his shaft a welcoming summons as the warmth of a body between his legs kept him drowsy in that realm of half-sleep/half-wakefulness. He groaned and flexed his hips, thrusting lazily into the soft heat.

"Another nightmare?" Mary murmured at his side, rolling into him and throwing a leg over his waist. John froze and his brain snapped awake as the mouth at his cock continued, the body between his legs he was only now realising was too small, too skinny, to be his wife's. It moved, straddling his leg and grinding a small, hard cock into the meat of his calf.

"Yeah," he finally managed to say, voice choked from the force of arousal suddenly pounding through every centimetre of his veins. "Nothing bad. Go back to sleep."

"Okay," she agreed in a low slur. The moments waiting for her to fall unconscious again as the mouth continued at his erection were the most heart-pounding ones he'd ever experienced, even more than ones invading Afghanistan had been filled with.

When her breathing had deepened and the push and pull of her breasts against his ribs slowed, he whispered her name, making sure she had passed back into true sleep. She didn't react, and he breathed a low, deep sigh, trying not to moan again.

"Sherlock..." he breathed. Finally, the soft tongue lapped at his by now likely-leaking slit one more time before pulling away.

"Yes, Daddy?" a voice whispered from below the sheets (that painfully soft, innocent voice), before that equally innocent tongue began its attentions again.

"What are you doing?" he choked out as as a slim, calloused finger pad pressed against his perineum, beginning to massage his prostate from the outside.

"Showing Daddy how much I love him," his boy whispered back, warm breath fanning across his glans and making his hips jerk. Mary's leg across his hip tightened as she nuzzled into his chest, the fuzz between her legs hitching for a moment into his hip, and he was struck with the sudden realisation that, while his wife was sleeping next to him, their adopted son was, for reasons he couldn't begin to grasp, giving him an award-winning blowjob beneath the sheets in the dead of night. Arousal was hot and heavy in his groin, and he realised the absolute risk and taboo of the situation was only urging his orgasm forward faster. Even with the threat of Mary waking from his actions, John couldn't stop his hips from flexing rhythmically into the enthusiastic heat.

"Why-" Without warning, his cock was swallowed down and he had to hastily throw a forearm across his mouth to prevent sound from escaping, to prevent himself from waking up his wife and alerting her to what was occurring.

He hadn't realised his orgasm was as close as it was, but with a hard press against his prostate from the outside and a ripple of the throat around him, he was coming, biting into the soft flesh of his arm and eyes squeezing shut as his release was swallowed down without pause. The hips against his leg rutted furiously before stopping dead, and the hot liquid spilling across his skin made his cock pulse again with lust and a secondary orgasm.

The unfamiliar, but far from unwelcome, prostate stimulation left him trembling as he came down from the glow, and soft lips suckling the head of his cock, lapping up every last drop of his release, kept him in a hazy state of unending pleasure. The body straddling his leg settled in more comfortably, a head covered in soft curls settling into the cradle of one pelvis and the wet heat settling over his cock like it had no plans to leave.

With a hand that shook, John reached down to thread his fingers through the soft strands, feeling so weak that he could barely grip to tug. But the body draped over his seemed to get the idea, and pulled reluctantly away. He gasped when the heat abandoned his cock, and the bed dipped along his side free side as the small body crawled up, following the pull of his hand. When Sherlock emerged a moment later, lips swollen and red in the moonlight, John had to bite his lip to keep from groaning as his cock twitched up into the sheet.

"Where did you learn how to do that, sweetheart?" ended up being the first whispered question out of his mouth. It wasn't what he had intended to say first, but once it had emerged, there was no way to take it back. And he wanted to know the answer anyway.

"I researched pornography on your laptop and practiced on cucumbers, Daddy," Sherlock replied as he draped himself over John's chest, nuzzling into the neat trim of the doctor's beard. Now he was surrounded by soft heat on both sides, his two loves keeping him warm and comfortable in his bed.

"And where did you get the idea to do that?" That was what he had intended to say first, but he'd somehow found it more important to assure himself that Sherlock hadn't done this before. Or rather, that it hadn't been done to Sherlock before.

"I wanted to show Daddy how much I love him," his beautiful boy said, now nuzzling into his neck as those long fingers danced over the ex-soldier's chest, stopping at the scar to explore.

"I love you too, sweetheart, but you don't have to show me like that," he tried to explain. Wanting, needing, it to be clear. The many boundaries this kind of relationship crossed were taboo for a reason. Besides, John could never force someone he loved into something they didn't want to do. The thought that Sherlock might think that this was what was required of him in order to keep his life here broke the doctor's heart. "That-"

"I want to show you like that!" the child exclaimed hotly, and then they both froze as Mary hummed and shifted. Despite his recent orgasm, once again, his cock pulsed at the thought of being caught with Sherlock wrapped naked around him. A moment later though, his wife settled again and they both took a deep breath.

"Okay," he whispered, smoothing his hand down the curve of a soft spine. "Whatever you want, Sherlock. It's all fine. It's whatever you want." His hand paused as spine turned into buttocks, but then Sherlock's hips pushed back, pressing the plush arse into his palm. He didn't moan when his fingers curled over and around soft skin, but it was a near thing.

"I told you, Daddy. I love you." There was that tone again, the same one from when John had tucked his boy in, but now he had the time and the will to analyse it. It was mischief. Mischief and smugness. It struck him suddenly that if Sherlock had been practicing, then he had been planning this for at least a few days, if not weeks. "You always looked at me like you loved me, but you never saw when I looked back at you the same way."

"Oh, Jesus, sweetheart," he breathed, his cock beginning to swell again. He had noticed those looks, but he hadn't associated them with meaning… well, this. He had known Sherlock had been an orphan for several years, never been adopted, considered, but never finalised, and he had believed the boy had just needed someone to trust, to latch on to. John had been more than happy to be that person, to be anything that Sherlock wanted or needed. He'd never anticipated, or even guessed, that Sherlock would want or need something like this. "You need to go back to bed, Sherlock," he finally forced himself to say.

"Okay, Daddy," his boy agreed, surprisingly quickly. But then he pushed up and pressed his mouth to John's in a kiss as slow and soft and loving as the blowjob he'd bestowed upon him minutes ago. When he finally broke away, the doctor was hard again, cock pulsing angrily beneath the sheets in a cry for attention. A small hand curled around the shaft, stroked once, and then pulled away as the body next to him slid out of the bed. "Goodnight, Daddy." He could almost see the smirk through the dark.

John couldn't reply though. He was too busy furiously moving his hand over his cock, just the mere memory of Sherlock's mouth working him, of Sherlock using his body to come to completion, had him spilling over his own hand in seconds. This orgasm flashed hot and furious through him, and when it was over, he felt frustratingly unsatisfied, knowing to his bones that his hand was a poor, poor substitute for that sweet mouth.

When he finally managed to pull his hand away, he wiped it lazily on his own stomach before relaxing into bed and his wife's embrace. Next to him, Mary slept on, completely unaware of the affair that had just begun or the fact that John had just gotten off twice within less than an hour, all because of the unexpectedly amorous attentions of the boy they'd adopted together.

When John finally fell back asleep, it was the best rest he'd gotten in years.

TBC

Reblog the thing (themadkatter13fanfiction tumblr, post/106127825163). :3 Tschüß~