bbc sherlock/ Our lives on the line
Don’t the hours go shorter as the days go by
Sherlock seems to realise what time is only when he is on a case. When he is tracking down culprits minutes, even seconds, matter. He twirls around them, his mind speeding fast. When John looks at him as he observes a crime scene, as he effortlessly clicks all the pieces of the puzzle into place, he has no difficulty at all to admit that Sherlock is the most fascinating creature he has ever met.
John thinks about time, though. It’s one of the things that war taught to him. He wouldn’t exchange running through London with Sherlock for anything in the world, but sometimes while they’re on a case he is afraid, afraid that the time for the two of them could end.
We never get to stop and open our eyes.
One minute you're waiting for the sky to fall
Next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all.
It was after the pool. It was then that everything changed and shifted into place. During those never-ending minutes when he was waiting for Sherlock to fire the gun. He didn’t hesitate to put his life in the other’s man hands. In the end it was the more reasonable thing to do. Sherlock was the one who had made his life worth-living again and John found that he had no regrets in dying by Sherlock’s side. It felt right, it was exactly the place where he thought to belong. But something had squeezes the air of his lungs more than the fear for their lives. It was the fear of having lost the opportunity to tell Sherlock how much he really cared.
It was after the explosion, when they had survived plunging into the swimming pool. They had climbed out of the water, their lungs burning because of the chlorine and of the dust. John hand looked at Sherlock and Sherlock had looked at John. It was an instant. John reached out and traced the contours of a bruise on Sherlock’s right cheekbone. Sherlock’s beauty seemed almost blinding.
These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This fragrant skin, this hair like lace
Spirits open to a thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste
He had gone so close to losing him that John couldn’t even believe that they were still alive. The days following the explosion he had to make sure that Sherlock was really there, by his side, in their apartment.
At first there was causal brushes of hand against hand, of knee against knee while they were watching telly in the evening. Tentative touches of Sherlock’s hair and forehead pretending to check if he had a fever during the days of convalescence.
Sherlock didn’t like to be touch at the beginning. John could tell by the way his grey irises seemed harder and the way he always looked somewhere else, somewhere distant.
Then something changed in the pattern. It was Sherlock to reach out, maybe for the sake of experimenting or maybe because the incident had made the humanity hidden under the surface of his white skin throb. But well John wasn’t a man of question, he was more a man of sensations. He didn’t question Sherlock’s motives when the detective’s long and pale fingers started to trace unreadable patterns over his ribcage or around the edge of the scar on his shoulder.
“You can touch it…if you want.”
He had mumbled it away but Sherlock had nodded and then gently- oh so gently- had explored that spot of ruined, marred skin. His fingers had danced over John’s skin and at the show of John’s faith in his, of his adoration, Sherlock had slowly opened up too. He had let John touch him, take him. Even if it was strange and hard for him to let someone take control. John was grateful. In the white bless that being inside Sherlock was he realised that their spirits had touched and entwined.
When you're lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you're made to feel as if your love's a crime
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight
When you're lovers in a dangerous time
Knowing that himself and Sherlock are bonded so deeply makes John feel alive. Sometimes, though, it makes him feel as if their making a mistake, making themselves vulnerable.
But then when they stand side by side after a chase, after having solved the puzzle and Sherlock reaches out and presses his thin lips against John’s own, the doctor knows that what he has for Sherlock, what ignites his bones at the thought of having Sherlock in his life, makes him stronger. It makes them both stronger.