Fic: suddenly your heart showed me my way (1/1)
Title: suddenly your heart showed me my way
Rating: R
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 7,003
Summary: In which Sherlock develops a fixation with John’s pulse, and discovers his own esoteric heart in the process. (Part I of the Cardiophilia Sequence)
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Pablo Neruda.
Author's Notes: My continuous thanks to togoboldly who is such a stellar friend and human being that he deigns to Britpick for me on the side, and to savetomorrow, na_shao, and weepingnaiad for encouraging this notion, and looking over the bits and pieces as they came together.
suddenly your heart showed me my way
The first data he collects is gathered and processed with utter disregard for the standard experimental model; his Cambridge tutors, he knows, would be appalled.
The instance in question takes place in the preface to their unfolding story: that extended encounter proceeding from the first that leads into everything else, the breathing space between reaching and grabbing and holding and texting and sending that should be boring by definition, yet proves anything but. It's a matter of moments, the brush of fingers, of flesh, of tendon straining about bone as a subtle drag of phalanges ensues, friction between dry palms: mundane, but Sherlock can't help himself. It is evidence. He is predisposed to collect it by his very nature, his own categorical imperative.
The contact itself is brief, may very well be anomalous with regard to its content and thus requires further investigation from the very start, but it's poignant, and Sherlock cannot quantify the desire to trust it-uncharacteristic, alarming-but his senses insist, so trust it he does.
His senses never fail him.
The rhythm he detects is a steady, measured march: military, rote and ready, a tap-tap-tap at the wrist, precise. Just three quick beats caught out, spontaneous, abrupt across a scant 1.697 seconds of actual contact, just over 106 beats per minute-elevated, not yet alarming. There’s something tight about the cadence, he notes as a secondary, perhaps a tertiary consideration: the coordination of contraction and release suggests a riotous amalgamation of exertion-the limp, he suspects; the walking and the climbing and the rushing for the gun that Sherlock can see outlined beneath his jumper-and excitement, the sort of adrenaline that energizes, rather than cows.
Sherlock closes his eyes and opens his mouth, and feels the impossible thud of those same three beats, over and over in his temples, beneath the heels of his palms where he holds his hands, steeples his fingers above his own sternum-and he's forgotten what he wanted to send, the content of the text he'd meant to dictate, had aimed to instruct John to compose. The backups of said message in his hard drive are suddenly hazy, corrupt, and he only knows one thing in that instant between lockup and reboot: he requires more data, and so he needs John Watson to stay.
He proposes Angelo's, then, a plan forming and a chase tugging at the comers of his lips, the whole idea composed to the cadence of three stray beats: strong, andantino, mezzo forte, utterly common and wildly unempirical and yet strangely, curiously, confusingly-undeniably fascinating.
His tutors at Cambridge were entirely useless, anyway.
________________________________
The metaphorical significance of the human heart is not lost on Sherlock, but he has vehemently eschewed it’s validity since before he can rightfully recall.
There’s a symmetry about the geometric shape that shares the name that is potentially pleasant, in theory, but Sherlock has only ever been able to process it as two separate halves, sharp lines drawn down with a lethal point seeking a mark, a rapier searching a victim to skewer. He remembers, as a child, tracing only the sharp peak, watching blood drop from the tip in his imaginings, and relishing the smooth pump of that same crimson colour through a buried network of veins, metres coiled within to take it up and lead it through-channels designed to give over the red as subject, as slave to the whims of the organ that looked nothing like the figure, nothing like those curved globes tapering down to join at the cusp.
Earlier, even-farther back-Sherlock remembers dissecting things, animals, dead vermin; he remembers his mother’s distaste but her unwillingness to discourage his curiosity. He remembers a specific interest in the construction, the anatomy, the function of the heart. He remembers disbelieving the capacity of that pumping, awkward sac for sustaining life in so much as the smallest shrew, let alone a human being. But Mother had insisted it was so, had drawn one of his hands to her chest, leading the other to bury in the soft coat of her beloved Abyssinian, to feel the flutter beneath both sets of ribs at once: the cadences utterly different, but the motion, the character of the thump beneath his palms much the same.
His mother had then moved his hand from her chest to his, cupping his palm to his own thrumming heart, more like the cat’s than hers, fast and frantic, a butterfly’s wings, and Sherlock doesn’t quite like to recall that realisation, that moment of revelation at the so young an age. He doesn’t like to dwell on the way his mother’s affection had rushed warm in his chest cavity along with that small muscle’s dance; the way her voice had told him, soft and sure and distant but deep, that should his mind ever fail him, ever drive him to such doubt again-should it ever convince him to deduce that no odd conglomeration of chambers and tubes could possibly drive the most trivial and vital forms of life alike, not ever; should his mind wander astray, his heart would always lead him true.
He’s spent most of the intervening years-more than three decades, now-ignoring the cadence that drives his own function, the motor running his Transport. He succeeds, until he meets a man whose heart is visible, always, and hidden, perpetually; until he brushes up against that pulse at the wrist and can’t delete it, and more troubling, has no desire to. Wilfully won’t void the rhythm he finds himself walking to, descending the stairs in time with, rosining his bow to the tune of and breathing, breathing at counterpoint to, once for every third cycle of the sound.
He doesn’t like remembering that day, her touch, his tiny pulse, the feline heart, a mother’s careful guidance, soft-sweet-nonsense words. He doesn’t like the unfounded, unbearable sense of wavering, of uncertainty that he still associates with the heavy rush of his own pulse, now and again, all because of those things, that time, that place.
The uncertainty that both stings and titillates-impossible-now, with John. And again.
And again.
He also remembers the long technicolor battering of cocaine in his veins, the quiet bombardment of the very best highs; he remembers the shaking, torturous crash of the lows: the darker days near the end of his struggle, the middle of the first relapse, the start of his last hurrah with white-his gorgeous solution to the problems only he could see, only he could understand to be insolvable. He remembers being wildly enamoured of his own beating, bulging, boorish heart in the space between the prick of the needle and the impact of the crash, remembers holding his palm to his chest and laughing, maniacal, when the drugs hit him wrong, flooded his system askew-when colours weren’t brightened but left to bleed out, when shapes were distorted and his mind wasn’t sharped, but wrung to a pulp.
So of course, the general inclination, the tendency toward fascination: that in itself isn’t new. The susceptibility to obsession, objectively, isn’t entirely out of character. Moreover, the intense preoccupation with those ventricles and atria, with the septum down the centre like that long, forbidding line of vertical symmetry and the pumping pumping pumping via the subendocardial branches: even that is far from uncharted territory.
But just as the touch of his Mother’s heartbeat, the kitten, and his youthful palm skirting the pulsation at his own sternum shook him, stirred him-keeps him from a state of equilibrium to this day when he delves too deeply into the sensations they evoke-his unflagging zeal for three useless, pointless, meaningless taps of John’s blood-so far from its source in passing, unmeant-is by its very nature unseemly, a distraction. To be fixated entirely on an aspect of a living, breathing composition of cells and blood and breath, to care at all for something that could possibly-improbably-but could feasibly manifest as care in him, in return: this, this is unheard of. Unprecedented. Unacceptable.
But he feels, truly; he experiences sentiment at times, in moments that are quickly inching closer to the norm than the exception-instances in which he is steeped so deeply with emotion that he reels with it, cannot reach conclusions for the fog over his vision, can’t pick up the whispering of subtle, clandestine clues for the buzz in his mind and the thump in his ears.
And these days-these days that have occurred in the portion of his existence that can be characterised only by the presence, the influence of John Hamish Watson; these days, those moments of feeling are visceral and cloying, overwhelming and complete: they clench in the chest, put pressure on the heart and vibrate, thrum poetic and obscene in threes, in a triad of motion and meaning and sheer vibrant life that is beyond Sherlock-a secret he holds at his core but can’t unravel.
Yet he can delineate the effects, the evidence for it: the presence and the clenching and the pressure. He can hear the echo about his eardrums, can feel it tight and dry when he swallows, throbbing violent at the temples and the jaw and in the neck. He can taste it like sweetness and bile all together in the back of his throat, on the far papillae; can see the advent of kutis ansterina on his bare arms and the otherworldly expansion of his arterial walls, of the culpable muscle itself at the left of his chest, like a creature-some being with its own will, outside of Sherlock’s own control entirely; a parasite living beneath his skin and overtaking him, transmogrifying him from the core of his being, bit by bit until he is unrecognisable, until he is someone else entirely. The sensory cues are all there, as much as Sherlock wishes they were absent: he feels, ceaselessly, and it may very well kill him before the end.
But the fact remains, as painful, as horrific and illogical as it is and had always been: the fact remains that he cannot deny his senses.
They’ve never lied before.
________________________________
Sherlock despises few things in the world more than wilful ignorance, than intentional hypocrisy and deliberate contradiction. Simply put, it’s all a form of self-induced stupidity, and he refuses to abide it.
Sherlock knows sentiment, and yet he denies it. Because it unsettles him, and yet he has renounced such fear. Fear stems from the unknown, Sherlock knows this.
And knowing; knowing is Sherlock’s calling, his forte, his undeniable vocational domain of expertise.
All he requires is data.
When John hands Sherlock his tea in the morning-on the mornings when John’s feeling particularly lenient, or indulgent, or concerned for Sherlock’s hydration or his mental state; when John actually brings it to him on the sofa or in his chair-Sherlock’s usually cultivated an air of distraction, or tenuous, dangerous boredom, so thick and inscrutable that John doesn’t think twice about Sherlock’s lingering fingers once he’s got a grip on the cup itself. He doesn’t so much as suspect, wouldn’t go so far as to fathom that Sherlock’s fingertips are tracing the blue veins that ring the radial pulse, that trail like breadcrumbs, a line of evidence direct to the source, the key, the artery, carrying erythrocytes and leukocytes and albumin, couriering life and vitality and reason and rightness and-
He shakes his head each time, each and every time as his mind begins to turn unbearably soft, wandering in uncharted and inadmissible directions as it floods with dopamine and serotonin, with glutamate and more norepinephrine than he thinks he’s equipped to withstand. Every time he exhales-careful, controlled-and lets go, the pads of his fingers tapping shallow, inconspicuous into the lukewarm china of his cup, keeping time with the beats he knew, the beats he touched, the same recurrent surge pressed soft into the winding lines of his fingerprints, singular and sure. He shakes his head and returns to his cuppa, and thinks quite pointedly about all of the things in the universe that are not John Watson or his pulse, or Sherlock’s own traitorous heart making it ever so difficult to swallow his tea.
Then there’s the run-in with the Tong, and so much data: there’s John examination of the bruising at Sherlock’s neck, evidence of his strangulation at the hands of Zhi Zhu (John’s fingertips, the pads of his thumbs: they are veritable wealths of information, the way he feels, strokes, presses, palpates; the way his fingers tap, pulse unintentional, unconscious against the throat-the way they brush at Sherlock’s own pulse, there, and send it racing for reasons untenable, uncertain: the way John’s heart loses tension and rapidity when he rules out a fractured larynx-one-fifteen-tracheal deviation-one-oh-two-and hyoid fracture-ninety-three-in turn, and Sherlock barely dares to hypothesise as to what those changes might mean, hardly bothers to conjecture, because there is not enough data to responsibly extrapolate; yet he experiences the desire to wonder nonetheless, to wonder with his thrumming heart and that is troubling).
There’s John’s pulse steeped in guilt, for Soo-Lin and for putting Sarah in danger (visible at the throat, both times: one-nineteen and one-oh-eight respectively, controls for physical exertion impossible to adjust for with accuracy, though supplemented with brief physical contact at the clavicle, a supportive clap of the hand in passing-the beat is loose, languid, quick but inefficient, not powerful, drained, fitting; sentiment).
There’s John’s heart and its rhythms with a gun to his head (made prominent given the angle at which he holds his neck against the promise of a bullet to his brain, and Sherlock’s body, traitorous wretch that it is, no wonder he’s seen fit to ignore it: his own body is rebelling, demanding more air than it is prudent to take in, at speeds he can’t afford if he is to save them, if he is to manage to free John, free his date, finish the job-his lungs are tight against his wildly-pounding heart and he’s slightly dazed with it, for an instant before he reasserts control, mind over matter, master over transport, and watches John’s neck trembling with breath and the beat of blood, of a muscle working hard to meet demands, one-thirty-one and fluctuating, hard to tell precisely at such distance, in such light).
More frequently, though-more recurrently, it happens when they’re running: when they’ve stopping their running, he can see the ebb and flow, the impossible cycle of endless tides pressing, encroaching on John, pushing at the shore of him, the banks of his skin at the neck, eroding the boundaries between flesh and blood. He can see John’s chest heaving wildly and his mouth open, gasping but quirked upward at the corners, thrilled as his eyes shine, his pupils widening in the dark, open and vulnerable and gleaming, almost pulsing in time with the waves at his throat: imagined, probably, but Sherlock’s just as enamoured with it, just as taken in and grasped and held.
And John’s rather fit, to be sure, and his heart can handle the effort, has handled it, has handled worse, more, has had greater feats demanded of it-survived Afghanistan, in fact. John’s heart is as healthy as John is, as unbroken as John’s resolve, and yet Sherlock feels something oddly unsettling at watching the blood bristle, barreling like a freight train through arteries under the flesh; feels something disconcerting and tight in his own chest at the thought of how that pivotal organ contracts, how the precarious electrical impulses cause it to contort under his ribs at such an incredible pace, with such immense intensity, such velocity. There’s something Sherlock doesn’t approve of, can’t rest comfortably with in that riotous, raging beat at the neck, even as it settles, recedes.
There’s something simultaneously frightening and worthy of reverence, there, and Sherlock Holmes has never known fear, has never found an entity worthy of worship or respect before in his life.
Sherlock Holmes is out of his depth, and such a state of being is relatively unprecedented.
It’s unprecedented, and he is understandably wary. So he watches. Carefully.
He watches carefully, pointedly, harnesses his attention and his cognisance and his observation, musters all the pieces of his consciousness to that thrumming, that steadfast and powerful rhythm like a caged bird at the throat, those frantic wing-beats transfixing, almost elegant as Sherlock’s eyes refuse to focus on anything else; one-seventy-three and holding, no, slowly decreasing, pounding, moving the skin with such force, coupled with the waves of his laughter-joyous, never waning, like he’s always just this side of amazed that this is his life, that they’re doing what they do; that he made it back from the war in the first place, that they’ve survived to see another sunrise or maybe some of both or all and more, Sherlock cannot be sure. He wants to be sure.
He wants to know what that muscle sounds like, suddenly; notes the timbre of his own as inconsequential unless it matches, can be used to deduce the pitch of John’s powerful, unwavering, unyielding laid-bare heart.
Laid-bare, and yet there’s so much Sherlock can’t, doesn’t see, so much that he needs to know.
Two minutes after they’ve stopped, and John’s pulse is down to one-seventeen, steadily dropping, returning to its normal, reliable diligence, keeping John alive and well and present and real and whole.
Two minutes after they’ve stopped, and Sherlock’s still gasping.
It’s not for the exertion.
He’s having trouble, again, with the swallowing of his own saliva, with the tedious task of taking in air. His chest is suddenly sore, quite uncomfortable.
Sherlock knows these things. Sherlock has the data to support these claims.
The conclusions, though; the conclusions are shaky at best, indefensible.
Further observation is required.
________________________________
It’s dark in the flat, after, when they return. Alive. Whole.
It is dark, and Sherlock is sitting in his chair, fingers steepled in mid-air before him-the contact, the opposing force of both hands wed together in space is meant to steady, to still: it fails. He shakes.
I will burn you. He hears it, not an echo, but the voice itself, as strong as it was and then amplified, shouted to overcome the thrill of Sherlock’s strung-out pulse, more frantic and unwieldy than he’s ever known it: Semtex and John’s skin lit up with stray-laser wavelengths of red managing feats that cocaine and the promise of nigh-certain death had never quite achieved.
I will burn the heart out of you.
Repetition is pointless, pedestrian. Dull. Sherlock knows this, and he knows his new opponent-clever psychopath, brilliant mastermind, the antithesis that proves the very idea of his own self possible; Sherlock knows his nemesis.
Repetition is meaningless and trivial, the mark of an inferior mind: Sherlock knows this.
Clarification, however, can be enlightening. Can be crucial.
As it happens, though, there’s a battering ram at the centre of him, suddenly; an enemy force that’s trying to crack his sternum and putting up a good job of it, all things considered-and it’s making it unbearably difficult to think too long, or too deeply on the events of the evening, the board that’s been set and the gambit that’s opened the Game. Instead his hand gravitates to his chest, beyond his conscious control, and he can feel it-the thrashing-and it’s not quite a battering ram, it can’t be, because the physics is impossible: any pendulous apparatus delivering such force upon impact could not complete its cycle of motion so swiftly, would have to yield to unforgiving momentum before it could lay siege again. The pummelling in his chest cavity is something more vicious, more precise and unremitting. It’s friction and fierceness and it’s oh-so-very-fast, but it’s not until John walks into the room, makes eye contact with Sherlock and frowns, asks with clear and honest concern whether Sherlock is okay, that Sherlock realises how fast, precisely; how very out of control it’s all become.
John asks if he’s alright, or else, this is what Sherlock assumes he asks, because above the heavy impact of the sound that stirs him from the centre of his chest out to his limbs, up to his skull and down to the soles of his feet: above that, there is static, and then there is the dim hum of a voice that Sherlock always hears, always detects on some level; has done from the moment it rebounded from boundaries of the lab, a certain pitch that caught, that resonated with something deep-seated and already primed within Sherlock’s mind; a complement to the whir of his neural processing, his thoughts in motion.
Sherlock assumes that John asks the question once, because when John states his name, sharp and seeking response, reciprocation, it’s in a certain tone that Sherlock recognises as combining both exasperation and mild concern and hearing it, allowing it to sweep him away from his own mind: it erupts in an inferno through Sherlock’s chest as his eyes snap open and widen, finding John standing over him, now: steady. Sane.
“Sherlock.”
He files away the soft pulsation in John’s neck-one-oh-two; accounting for the snipers and the explosives and the necessity of repetition-accordingly before he focuses, blinks and processes John’s voice.
“Are you alright?”
Repetition. Dull.
Clarification. Crucial.
You. The self. The circulation. The him. The heart. The whole. The heart in him and the him in his heart and which him, which heart, inside or out and which sat where and which thrums faster and stronger, which takes on significance and suffuses, soaks it up until the meaning and the muscle and the meter and the man are indistinguishable, until the evidence is so alike that no lines can be drawn?
Repetition. Clarification. Emphasis. Intent.
John, who had been twice-marked for death just that evening alone, looming and steady and asking. Twice.
Ah.
The pieces are beginning to coalesce.
And for the first time in his life, Sherlock almost wishes they’d remained disparate, disconnected; he almost yearns for ambiguity, for the mysteries that remain unsolved.
(Upon watching the pulse in John’s neck, Sherlock’s heart calms at the intake, the presentation of proof: the soft balm of John’s pumping blood slows Sherlock’s in turn by a whole seventeen beats to the minute.
As John’s pulse disappears, too soft to be seen, Sherlock’s surges, tight and tense, back up by thirty BPM.)
Almost.
________________________________
Once the data is amassed, it’s difficult to avoid the obvious implications. He runs through several logical conclusions before he siphons them off into the realm of impossibility-physiological disorders, imprecise measurements, mental instability, inaccurate observations, uncontrollable anxiety, cardiac defects-until he has no choice but to confront what remains, and his shame, he balks immediately upon the revelation of its nature, its consequences: what it means.
Deliberate contradiction. Intentional hypocrisy. Wilful ignorance. All the things he isn’t and cannot stand for are creeping into his psyche, are melding to his bones and holding, demanding-desperately-that he reconsider, that he turn a blind eye and walk away before a conclusion can be reached, before it’s too late to delete the evidence and its extensive ramifications because improbable; improbable simply cannot be borne.
Not this time.
Because there is a case. There is a case, there is the Work, and he cannot process it, cannot parse it and see the threads where they begin to intertwine. He cannot focus or suppose, he cannot clarify or correct, he cannot see or smell or taste or touch or know because it’s all excitatory chemicals with no inhibitors, no GABA to calm him or bring him down, and he’s abuzz, he’s trembling, he’s breathless and he’s twitching. It’s worse than boredom, and it’s bigger than doubt; it’s the thing he’s been accused of, falsely, before this moment, and he’s knows that all such prior accusations were false because this is new and unprecedented, this is vivid and unsustainable. This is a quiver in his chest and lead dropped cold at the abdomen, resonating out until everything freezes, so swift that it sears.
This is his blood boiling and moving too quick. This is muscular hypertrophy and dire effects. This is his heart on fire in more than just his chest.
“I don’t know myself, John,” he declares, without feeling, straight and clear and John just blinks, frowns-doesn’t know what to say, but isn’t quite bewildered. Sherlock knows the expression well, is on its receiving end often, and damn it all to the innermost circles of whatever hell awaits, but all he wants, all he really wants is to rush at John and touch him, taste him, to capture his lips or stroke his neck, to place a palm upon his sternum and measure everything, every subtle telling hitch of the heart-pattern, the beat-schema, the typology of the cadence that corresponds to that familiar look, and this is why it has to stop. This is why.
He swallows, and holds the heat at his centre close, fools himself into believing that it’s made of rage and hate, lets the falsified feeling spill unforgiving from his tongue, for all that his pulse is rebelling, for all that it numbs him with the flames.
“My control, my ability to predict my own reactions and capacities, my own faculties and margins of error,” he sucks in a breath that gets battered around as it runs through his chest. “You’ve corrupted the files, John! You’ve encrypted the very baseline recordings that I’ve kept locked away for reference and for the life of me I cannot access them. I cannot break the seal, I cannot analyse the data and it is destroying me, John.” He runs trembling hands through his hair and turns to catch John’s figure, his seated frame out the corner of his eye but he can’t look, not truly; he can’t, and when he hears John’s sharp inhale and the click of his mouth moving, opening, the crack of saliva on his tongue, he dives forth, heads him off.
“My senses are as keen as ever, and yet they’re misaligned, everything is skewed, shifted, the apex and the centre and the point of balance and focus, it’s all wrong now, it’s all of it tilted off and,” Sherlock bites his tongue for a moment, an ill-advised experiment: tries to trap his ransacking, railing heart between his teeth and pierce it, stop it, kill it dead but for naught-something tight and keening gathers in his throat beneath the pressure and nearly makes itself known, dangerously close to a sob when he opens his mouth and finishes, breathless and bent.
“And it’s your fault,” he inclines his head, angles the lids of his eyes just so, so that John will know beyond a doubt what Sherlock is trying to say, so that John will have a certainty that eludes even Sherlock himself. “It is absolutely your fault. You are to blame for this travesty, this monstrosity, you are the reason I have become,” and the crack he’s swallowed once is too determined to be silenced twice; his own will too strained to tamp it down again as his voice falters, breaks: “this.”
He takes deep, gulping breaths as quietly as he can, trembles, and spits with the most acidic vitriol he possesses, turning out the burn in hopes of saving his insides, the heart of him from complete destruction but it doesn’t help, just deepens the ache. “I am a disgrace, I am a feeble, useless, distracted abomination, you have poisoned me, ruined me, reduced me to nothing more than a pitiful excuse for a detective, for a mind, a-”
Sherlock’s phone rings-and it so rarely rings with a proper call that the sound of it stops everything, cuts a knife through the moment that has settled, still and stifling between John near the window and Sherlock cast within the shadowplay of late-afternoon. Sherlock’s chest heaves, his lungs working double because his heart’s too eager to be seen and heard and known, to express its displeasure and the unconscionable way it’s wanting, willing, threatening to split down its seams and break in two, and Sherlock won’t have that, Sherlock can’t have that and the ringing is gone when John meets his eye and Sherlock can’t have that either, so he turns away, looks for his mobile just as John rises to grab for it, to check the screen just as the chime for a text plays, shrill.
“Lestrade,” John announces, neutral but clipped, and that wretched heart in Sherlock’s chest trembles on at the sound, at the buried depths that shiver in time with that voice. “Suspect’s naffing about in Greenwich, he’ll meet you there.”
Sherlock lingers, dwells upon the you. The self. The singular. The heart of him takes note and thumps, feral and futile and fierce to the point where he has to plant his feet, has to hold firm against its virulent barrage as bile rises in his throat and he wonders, frantic-diminished-whether the singular self has a heart worth noting, whether the beat he’s braced against is even real when it stands all alone. The heart. The whole.
But he feels it. It is undeniably, unrepentantly real.
“Shall we?” John’s voice filters, always heard; Sherlock pauses, and the hammering stills in kind, if only for a moment. John is standing two steps down, jacket zipped, his body visible at the angle of departure from only the mid-thigh up and he looks at Sherlock, not warmly but determined-prepared. Awaiting.
Sherlock breathes again, and alights the stairs.
________________________________
The protocol is rudimentary, predictable. The address that accompanied the text leads them to a dilapidated warehouse where Lestrade is already waiting. He tells Sherlock to wait until they have secured the perimeter. Sherlock doesn’t bother refusing before he’s gone through the door.
As for the tension that may or may not exist between himself and John after the words exchanged-more delivered, really, for there was no dialogue, no repartee on John’s behalf: well, John’s at his heels, jumps a bit so that he’s properly at Sherlock’s side, gripping his firearm as he enters the silence that stretches from wall to wall inside: as he always does, as Sherlock has observed time and again. Thus, Sherlock’s willing to let it all slip from his mind for the moment, allows himself to attribute the thrumming buzz of his blood now to the Chase, and the Chase alone.
They split, left to right, coordinated without words as they weave through the partitions-the remains of a distribution line long-abandoned and unused-and Sherlock’s pulse gives an odd little flutter that he cannot understand at the way they communicate, at the way John’s still here, at the way it feels right despite everything, anything else.
Sherlock moves quickly, lightly, darts and judges sounds, shadows, applies his own well-tuned sense of placement and space to take the correct turns and detect any signs of life apart from his own. He is playing the Game, now; he is reimmersing himself in the world that he knows and holds dear, and it is liberating, it is beautiful and safe and he has found nothing, observed no sign of the perpetrator he is after just yet, but it’s coming, it must be, he sees everything, he hears everything, he knows-
There’s a gunshot-it sounds like a Sig, but the reverberation, the cavernous ceilings and empty space around them distorts it, and Sherlock cannot be certain, can’t parse out the waves as they hit and rebound, the angles of their motion and deflection: and frankly, John’s not the only one who carries that piece, even if he could pin it down.
And to be truthful, to extend the facts to their reasonable conclusions-even if he could pin it down, it wouldn’t matter. Where there was everything before, there is now only the one thing, the one pulse: his own, and the sinking feeling at knowing that John’s is beyond his reach. possibly forever.
Possibly. Probable. Impossibly.
No.
Sherlock’s heart is suddenly pumping at three, no, rapidly approaching four inefficient beats per second-less like individual beats, now, and more like a tremor, like John’s tremor that’s cured and gone but, if it hadn’t been, if it persisted still and if trite metaphors and sentimental imagery truly could manifest themselves in the flesh, then perhaps the shivering muscle beneath Sherlock’s breast is currently being held inside that hand, balanced precarious in that shaking palm to be squeezed, delicate and frantic and harsh so that the fingernails sink into the warm wet red of its shape. If the worst of all the things that Sherlock’s made a point to scorn somehow came to be real and true, then it would be a verifiable fact that it’s his heart that’s trembling, terrified, held in the cosmic balance of John’s grasp and Sherlock is gasping, failing, and he’ll hit the ground and burst the very minute John’s hold gives way, lets go, flees this world and leaves Sherlock to bleed, the heart flailing for endless moments after the life is lost, is gone.
The heart, he thinks, hears it echo through the ether, in his ears and off the high ceilings and through the water of a pool as he drowns, cannot breathe as he burns from the lungs out and he runs runs runs-the heart of him; the heart was always the key to it all, from the very moment it ceased belonging to him alone, stopped claiming just his own chest as its home.
It is only later that he is able to recognise that the flood of catecholamines, that the so-called fight-or-flight response will have robbed him of everything aside from the capacity to run; will have made it utterly impossible for him see anything outside of the tunnel, the narrowing of his vision to what is directly in front of him, to what is immediate and not peripheral: he’ll realise that at such a pace, his heart could not have been fuelling anything more than the bare essentials of survival. He couldn’t have perceived anything, really, nothing close enough to matter above one-hundred and seventy-five beats to the minute: near-sighted vision would have been lost entirely, no precision-his complex cognitive function, his fine motor skills: all of it compromised; no depth, just surface. Just the barest impressions, nothing of substance.
Not like this.
He’ll see these things, later; he will note these confounds in retrospect but he will not dwell on them. He will not dwell because the survival his heart vibrates, hums and claws at in those moments centres solely on the wellbeing of one man, just one, and that man is not peripheral, he isn’t anything except essential, and he comes out of nowhere, emerges from the black edges of Sherlock’s world and grants it colour again, balances and gives everything shape, direction-he emerges from the darkness and expands Sherlock’s world.
And it’s only then that Sherlock understands that he could not observe, could not make deductions, could do nothing, nothing but rush, nothing but navigate this pointless, pathetic world blindly, useless, fumbling until he collides, hits a wall that’s firm but yielding, that reaches up for him in a way that walls simply can’t, and he blinks once, twice, and he swallows, and his own pulse tries its damnedest to choke him. Tries.
Can’t.
But tries
And Sherlock’s heart doesn’t slow, not at first; he blinks hard and tries to catch his breath as his hands come up, miss their target as John, John steadies Sherlock, grasping his shoulders and keeping him rooted and real and still, saving him from coming apart entirely. Sherlock’s jaw’s dropped down, low, and he’s sucking in air, so much air and yet none of it’s making a difference, none of it’s doing its job and Sherlock’s lightheaded, dizzy in a way that even the drugs, even the lack of the drugs couldn’t match. His chest burns and his fingers clutch and grasp and need and he has no control, not any, as he slumps, falls: drops.
The momentum he expects, though-it’s curtailed, it stops short. He goes down, forward, and there’s a shuffling noise before he’s grabbed beneath the arms, leaned at an uncomfortable angle, a partial, perfect slant against John’s heaving chest, with John’s strong hand on the back of his neck, the cool of the gun he’s still holding like a shock against his skin; and then another hand, the second hand at his cheek-gentle and whole. Whole like John, the John he’s pressed against, pushing relentless, crushing into the wall behind, and Sherlock can’t, he can’t, he-
He finishes the fall, stops fighting, stops pretending that this isn’t him, that he’s not this person who is leaning, falling, broken and yet complete; that he’s not at his very core a being that feels, now as he never has before, for John Watson as no one else deserves-Sherlock stops fighting and buries his face in John’s chest, lets go, and balances the bridge of his nose, the crest of his brow at the suprasternal notch and allows himself the necessary surrender, the melting and melding of his very being into John’s racing pulse just above the heart, so close to the muscle itself as it sings, sings.
Christ almighty, but it sings and Sherlock is tired. He’s exhausted. He is weak and ruined and relieved in every way, every bone and ligament, and every bead of blood in his body relaxes in the same instant because it can be, it can continue to be because John’s hand is on his cheek and Sherlock’s shaking, or maybe it’s John, but they’re so close and Sherlock sighs into the coarse caress of John’s heartbeat against him, against the shape of his skull and his sweat-slick skin as he breathes in air that smells like John, that tastes of John and Sherlock feels weightless, empty, and somehow ineffably full.
Because there is a beat, and John is stroking the line of his cheekbone with a thumb that pulses into his skin at yet another place, another point of contact. Because John is whispering, murmuring nonsense: mindless, thoughtless nonsense that comes from another place entirely, somewhere that resonates, that touches the same octave and hits the same notes as the heart Sherlock’s tucked into, and Sherlock’s own pulse ebbs, recedes to align with John’s, to intertwine and craft a frantic, impromptu cacophony that maybe, maybe could grow into a symphony someday, this day-one day, maybe.
And Sherlock: he is this man. He is held inside this man. He exists in time with this man. The future, without this man; a world without John Watson is inexplicably, unexpectedly, undeniably impossible.
And however improbable the implications of that fact prove to be, perhaps; perhaps if he stops trying to deny them, stops trying to deny logic itself, his sacred Rule-
Perhaps if he stops trying to fight it, they could-together-create a masterpiece.
Rating: R
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 7,003
Summary: In which Sherlock develops a fixation with John’s pulse, and discovers his own esoteric heart in the process. (Part I of the Cardiophilia Sequence)
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Pablo Neruda.
Author's Notes: My continuous thanks to togoboldly who is such a stellar friend and human being that he deigns to Britpick for me on the side, and to savetomorrow, na_shao, and weepingnaiad for encouraging this notion, and looking over the bits and pieces as they came together.
suddenly your heart showed me my way
The first data he collects is gathered and processed with utter disregard for the standard experimental model; his Cambridge tutors, he knows, would be appalled.
The instance in question takes place in the preface to their unfolding story: that extended encounter proceeding from the first that leads into everything else, the breathing space between reaching and grabbing and holding and texting and sending that should be boring by definition, yet proves anything but. It's a matter of moments, the brush of fingers, of flesh, of tendon straining about bone as a subtle drag of phalanges ensues, friction between dry palms: mundane, but Sherlock can't help himself. It is evidence. He is predisposed to collect it by his very nature, his own categorical imperative.
The contact itself is brief, may very well be anomalous with regard to its content and thus requires further investigation from the very start, but it's poignant, and Sherlock cannot quantify the desire to trust it-uncharacteristic, alarming-but his senses insist, so trust it he does.
His senses never fail him.
The rhythm he detects is a steady, measured march: military, rote and ready, a tap-tap-tap at the wrist, precise. Just three quick beats caught out, spontaneous, abrupt across a scant 1.697 seconds of actual contact, just over 106 beats per minute-elevated, not yet alarming. There’s something tight about the cadence, he notes as a secondary, perhaps a tertiary consideration: the coordination of contraction and release suggests a riotous amalgamation of exertion-the limp, he suspects; the walking and the climbing and the rushing for the gun that Sherlock can see outlined beneath his jumper-and excitement, the sort of adrenaline that energizes, rather than cows.
Sherlock closes his eyes and opens his mouth, and feels the impossible thud of those same three beats, over and over in his temples, beneath the heels of his palms where he holds his hands, steeples his fingers above his own sternum-and he's forgotten what he wanted to send, the content of the text he'd meant to dictate, had aimed to instruct John to compose. The backups of said message in his hard drive are suddenly hazy, corrupt, and he only knows one thing in that instant between lockup and reboot: he requires more data, and so he needs John Watson to stay.
He proposes Angelo's, then, a plan forming and a chase tugging at the comers of his lips, the whole idea composed to the cadence of three stray beats: strong, andantino, mezzo forte, utterly common and wildly unempirical and yet strangely, curiously, confusingly-undeniably fascinating.
His tutors at Cambridge were entirely useless, anyway.
________________________________
The metaphorical significance of the human heart is not lost on Sherlock, but he has vehemently eschewed it’s validity since before he can rightfully recall.
There’s a symmetry about the geometric shape that shares the name that is potentially pleasant, in theory, but Sherlock has only ever been able to process it as two separate halves, sharp lines drawn down with a lethal point seeking a mark, a rapier searching a victim to skewer. He remembers, as a child, tracing only the sharp peak, watching blood drop from the tip in his imaginings, and relishing the smooth pump of that same crimson colour through a buried network of veins, metres coiled within to take it up and lead it through-channels designed to give over the red as subject, as slave to the whims of the organ that looked nothing like the figure, nothing like those curved globes tapering down to join at the cusp.
Earlier, even-farther back-Sherlock remembers dissecting things, animals, dead vermin; he remembers his mother’s distaste but her unwillingness to discourage his curiosity. He remembers a specific interest in the construction, the anatomy, the function of the heart. He remembers disbelieving the capacity of that pumping, awkward sac for sustaining life in so much as the smallest shrew, let alone a human being. But Mother had insisted it was so, had drawn one of his hands to her chest, leading the other to bury in the soft coat of her beloved Abyssinian, to feel the flutter beneath both sets of ribs at once: the cadences utterly different, but the motion, the character of the thump beneath his palms much the same.
His mother had then moved his hand from her chest to his, cupping his palm to his own thrumming heart, more like the cat’s than hers, fast and frantic, a butterfly’s wings, and Sherlock doesn’t quite like to recall that realisation, that moment of revelation at the so young an age. He doesn’t like to dwell on the way his mother’s affection had rushed warm in his chest cavity along with that small muscle’s dance; the way her voice had told him, soft and sure and distant but deep, that should his mind ever fail him, ever drive him to such doubt again-should it ever convince him to deduce that no odd conglomeration of chambers and tubes could possibly drive the most trivial and vital forms of life alike, not ever; should his mind wander astray, his heart would always lead him true.
He’s spent most of the intervening years-more than three decades, now-ignoring the cadence that drives his own function, the motor running his Transport. He succeeds, until he meets a man whose heart is visible, always, and hidden, perpetually; until he brushes up against that pulse at the wrist and can’t delete it, and more troubling, has no desire to. Wilfully won’t void the rhythm he finds himself walking to, descending the stairs in time with, rosining his bow to the tune of and breathing, breathing at counterpoint to, once for every third cycle of the sound.
He doesn’t like remembering that day, her touch, his tiny pulse, the feline heart, a mother’s careful guidance, soft-sweet-nonsense words. He doesn’t like the unfounded, unbearable sense of wavering, of uncertainty that he still associates with the heavy rush of his own pulse, now and again, all because of those things, that time, that place.
The uncertainty that both stings and titillates-impossible-now, with John. And again.
And again.
He also remembers the long technicolor battering of cocaine in his veins, the quiet bombardment of the very best highs; he remembers the shaking, torturous crash of the lows: the darker days near the end of his struggle, the middle of the first relapse, the start of his last hurrah with white-his gorgeous solution to the problems only he could see, only he could understand to be insolvable. He remembers being wildly enamoured of his own beating, bulging, boorish heart in the space between the prick of the needle and the impact of the crash, remembers holding his palm to his chest and laughing, maniacal, when the drugs hit him wrong, flooded his system askew-when colours weren’t brightened but left to bleed out, when shapes were distorted and his mind wasn’t sharped, but wrung to a pulp.
So of course, the general inclination, the tendency toward fascination: that in itself isn’t new. The susceptibility to obsession, objectively, isn’t entirely out of character. Moreover, the intense preoccupation with those ventricles and atria, with the septum down the centre like that long, forbidding line of vertical symmetry and the pumping pumping pumping via the subendocardial branches: even that is far from uncharted territory.
But just as the touch of his Mother’s heartbeat, the kitten, and his youthful palm skirting the pulsation at his own sternum shook him, stirred him-keeps him from a state of equilibrium to this day when he delves too deeply into the sensations they evoke-his unflagging zeal for three useless, pointless, meaningless taps of John’s blood-so far from its source in passing, unmeant-is by its very nature unseemly, a distraction. To be fixated entirely on an aspect of a living, breathing composition of cells and blood and breath, to care at all for something that could possibly-improbably-but could feasibly manifest as care in him, in return: this, this is unheard of. Unprecedented. Unacceptable.
But he feels, truly; he experiences sentiment at times, in moments that are quickly inching closer to the norm than the exception-instances in which he is steeped so deeply with emotion that he reels with it, cannot reach conclusions for the fog over his vision, can’t pick up the whispering of subtle, clandestine clues for the buzz in his mind and the thump in his ears.
And these days-these days that have occurred in the portion of his existence that can be characterised only by the presence, the influence of John Hamish Watson; these days, those moments of feeling are visceral and cloying, overwhelming and complete: they clench in the chest, put pressure on the heart and vibrate, thrum poetic and obscene in threes, in a triad of motion and meaning and sheer vibrant life that is beyond Sherlock-a secret he holds at his core but can’t unravel.
Yet he can delineate the effects, the evidence for it: the presence and the clenching and the pressure. He can hear the echo about his eardrums, can feel it tight and dry when he swallows, throbbing violent at the temples and the jaw and in the neck. He can taste it like sweetness and bile all together in the back of his throat, on the far papillae; can see the advent of kutis ansterina on his bare arms and the otherworldly expansion of his arterial walls, of the culpable muscle itself at the left of his chest, like a creature-some being with its own will, outside of Sherlock’s own control entirely; a parasite living beneath his skin and overtaking him, transmogrifying him from the core of his being, bit by bit until he is unrecognisable, until he is someone else entirely. The sensory cues are all there, as much as Sherlock wishes they were absent: he feels, ceaselessly, and it may very well kill him before the end.
But the fact remains, as painful, as horrific and illogical as it is and had always been: the fact remains that he cannot deny his senses.
They’ve never lied before.
________________________________
Sherlock despises few things in the world more than wilful ignorance, than intentional hypocrisy and deliberate contradiction. Simply put, it’s all a form of self-induced stupidity, and he refuses to abide it.
Sherlock knows sentiment, and yet he denies it. Because it unsettles him, and yet he has renounced such fear. Fear stems from the unknown, Sherlock knows this.
And knowing; knowing is Sherlock’s calling, his forte, his undeniable vocational domain of expertise.
All he requires is data.
When John hands Sherlock his tea in the morning-on the mornings when John’s feeling particularly lenient, or indulgent, or concerned for Sherlock’s hydration or his mental state; when John actually brings it to him on the sofa or in his chair-Sherlock’s usually cultivated an air of distraction, or tenuous, dangerous boredom, so thick and inscrutable that John doesn’t think twice about Sherlock’s lingering fingers once he’s got a grip on the cup itself. He doesn’t so much as suspect, wouldn’t go so far as to fathom that Sherlock’s fingertips are tracing the blue veins that ring the radial pulse, that trail like breadcrumbs, a line of evidence direct to the source, the key, the artery, carrying erythrocytes and leukocytes and albumin, couriering life and vitality and reason and rightness and-
He shakes his head each time, each and every time as his mind begins to turn unbearably soft, wandering in uncharted and inadmissible directions as it floods with dopamine and serotonin, with glutamate and more norepinephrine than he thinks he’s equipped to withstand. Every time he exhales-careful, controlled-and lets go, the pads of his fingers tapping shallow, inconspicuous into the lukewarm china of his cup, keeping time with the beats he knew, the beats he touched, the same recurrent surge pressed soft into the winding lines of his fingerprints, singular and sure. He shakes his head and returns to his cuppa, and thinks quite pointedly about all of the things in the universe that are not John Watson or his pulse, or Sherlock’s own traitorous heart making it ever so difficult to swallow his tea.
Then there’s the run-in with the Tong, and so much data: there’s John examination of the bruising at Sherlock’s neck, evidence of his strangulation at the hands of Zhi Zhu (John’s fingertips, the pads of his thumbs: they are veritable wealths of information, the way he feels, strokes, presses, palpates; the way his fingers tap, pulse unintentional, unconscious against the throat-the way they brush at Sherlock’s own pulse, there, and send it racing for reasons untenable, uncertain: the way John’s heart loses tension and rapidity when he rules out a fractured larynx-one-fifteen-tracheal deviation-one-oh-two-and hyoid fracture-ninety-three-in turn, and Sherlock barely dares to hypothesise as to what those changes might mean, hardly bothers to conjecture, because there is not enough data to responsibly extrapolate; yet he experiences the desire to wonder nonetheless, to wonder with his thrumming heart and that is troubling).
There’s John’s pulse steeped in guilt, for Soo-Lin and for putting Sarah in danger (visible at the throat, both times: one-nineteen and one-oh-eight respectively, controls for physical exertion impossible to adjust for with accuracy, though supplemented with brief physical contact at the clavicle, a supportive clap of the hand in passing-the beat is loose, languid, quick but inefficient, not powerful, drained, fitting; sentiment).
There’s John’s heart and its rhythms with a gun to his head (made prominent given the angle at which he holds his neck against the promise of a bullet to his brain, and Sherlock’s body, traitorous wretch that it is, no wonder he’s seen fit to ignore it: his own body is rebelling, demanding more air than it is prudent to take in, at speeds he can’t afford if he is to save them, if he is to manage to free John, free his date, finish the job-his lungs are tight against his wildly-pounding heart and he’s slightly dazed with it, for an instant before he reasserts control, mind over matter, master over transport, and watches John’s neck trembling with breath and the beat of blood, of a muscle working hard to meet demands, one-thirty-one and fluctuating, hard to tell precisely at such distance, in such light).
More frequently, though-more recurrently, it happens when they’re running: when they’ve stopping their running, he can see the ebb and flow, the impossible cycle of endless tides pressing, encroaching on John, pushing at the shore of him, the banks of his skin at the neck, eroding the boundaries between flesh and blood. He can see John’s chest heaving wildly and his mouth open, gasping but quirked upward at the corners, thrilled as his eyes shine, his pupils widening in the dark, open and vulnerable and gleaming, almost pulsing in time with the waves at his throat: imagined, probably, but Sherlock’s just as enamoured with it, just as taken in and grasped and held.
And John’s rather fit, to be sure, and his heart can handle the effort, has handled it, has handled worse, more, has had greater feats demanded of it-survived Afghanistan, in fact. John’s heart is as healthy as John is, as unbroken as John’s resolve, and yet Sherlock feels something oddly unsettling at watching the blood bristle, barreling like a freight train through arteries under the flesh; feels something disconcerting and tight in his own chest at the thought of how that pivotal organ contracts, how the precarious electrical impulses cause it to contort under his ribs at such an incredible pace, with such immense intensity, such velocity. There’s something Sherlock doesn’t approve of, can’t rest comfortably with in that riotous, raging beat at the neck, even as it settles, recedes.
There’s something simultaneously frightening and worthy of reverence, there, and Sherlock Holmes has never known fear, has never found an entity worthy of worship or respect before in his life.
Sherlock Holmes is out of his depth, and such a state of being is relatively unprecedented.
It’s unprecedented, and he is understandably wary. So he watches. Carefully.
He watches carefully, pointedly, harnesses his attention and his cognisance and his observation, musters all the pieces of his consciousness to that thrumming, that steadfast and powerful rhythm like a caged bird at the throat, those frantic wing-beats transfixing, almost elegant as Sherlock’s eyes refuse to focus on anything else; one-seventy-three and holding, no, slowly decreasing, pounding, moving the skin with such force, coupled with the waves of his laughter-joyous, never waning, like he’s always just this side of amazed that this is his life, that they’re doing what they do; that he made it back from the war in the first place, that they’ve survived to see another sunrise or maybe some of both or all and more, Sherlock cannot be sure. He wants to be sure.
He wants to know what that muscle sounds like, suddenly; notes the timbre of his own as inconsequential unless it matches, can be used to deduce the pitch of John’s powerful, unwavering, unyielding laid-bare heart.
Laid-bare, and yet there’s so much Sherlock can’t, doesn’t see, so much that he needs to know.
Two minutes after they’ve stopped, and John’s pulse is down to one-seventeen, steadily dropping, returning to its normal, reliable diligence, keeping John alive and well and present and real and whole.
Two minutes after they’ve stopped, and Sherlock’s still gasping.
It’s not for the exertion.
He’s having trouble, again, with the swallowing of his own saliva, with the tedious task of taking in air. His chest is suddenly sore, quite uncomfortable.
Sherlock knows these things. Sherlock has the data to support these claims.
The conclusions, though; the conclusions are shaky at best, indefensible.
Further observation is required.
________________________________
It’s dark in the flat, after, when they return. Alive. Whole.
It is dark, and Sherlock is sitting in his chair, fingers steepled in mid-air before him-the contact, the opposing force of both hands wed together in space is meant to steady, to still: it fails. He shakes.
I will burn you. He hears it, not an echo, but the voice itself, as strong as it was and then amplified, shouted to overcome the thrill of Sherlock’s strung-out pulse, more frantic and unwieldy than he’s ever known it: Semtex and John’s skin lit up with stray-laser wavelengths of red managing feats that cocaine and the promise of nigh-certain death had never quite achieved.
I will burn the heart out of you.
Repetition is pointless, pedestrian. Dull. Sherlock knows this, and he knows his new opponent-clever psychopath, brilliant mastermind, the antithesis that proves the very idea of his own self possible; Sherlock knows his nemesis.
Repetition is meaningless and trivial, the mark of an inferior mind: Sherlock knows this.
Clarification, however, can be enlightening. Can be crucial.
As it happens, though, there’s a battering ram at the centre of him, suddenly; an enemy force that’s trying to crack his sternum and putting up a good job of it, all things considered-and it’s making it unbearably difficult to think too long, or too deeply on the events of the evening, the board that’s been set and the gambit that’s opened the Game. Instead his hand gravitates to his chest, beyond his conscious control, and he can feel it-the thrashing-and it’s not quite a battering ram, it can’t be, because the physics is impossible: any pendulous apparatus delivering such force upon impact could not complete its cycle of motion so swiftly, would have to yield to unforgiving momentum before it could lay siege again. The pummelling in his chest cavity is something more vicious, more precise and unremitting. It’s friction and fierceness and it’s oh-so-very-fast, but it’s not until John walks into the room, makes eye contact with Sherlock and frowns, asks with clear and honest concern whether Sherlock is okay, that Sherlock realises how fast, precisely; how very out of control it’s all become.
John asks if he’s alright, or else, this is what Sherlock assumes he asks, because above the heavy impact of the sound that stirs him from the centre of his chest out to his limbs, up to his skull and down to the soles of his feet: above that, there is static, and then there is the dim hum of a voice that Sherlock always hears, always detects on some level; has done from the moment it rebounded from boundaries of the lab, a certain pitch that caught, that resonated with something deep-seated and already primed within Sherlock’s mind; a complement to the whir of his neural processing, his thoughts in motion.
Sherlock assumes that John asks the question once, because when John states his name, sharp and seeking response, reciprocation, it’s in a certain tone that Sherlock recognises as combining both exasperation and mild concern and hearing it, allowing it to sweep him away from his own mind: it erupts in an inferno through Sherlock’s chest as his eyes snap open and widen, finding John standing over him, now: steady. Sane.
“Sherlock.”
He files away the soft pulsation in John’s neck-one-oh-two; accounting for the snipers and the explosives and the necessity of repetition-accordingly before he focuses, blinks and processes John’s voice.
“Are you alright?”
Repetition. Dull.
Clarification. Crucial.
You. The self. The circulation. The him. The heart. The whole. The heart in him and the him in his heart and which him, which heart, inside or out and which sat where and which thrums faster and stronger, which takes on significance and suffuses, soaks it up until the meaning and the muscle and the meter and the man are indistinguishable, until the evidence is so alike that no lines can be drawn?
Repetition. Clarification. Emphasis. Intent.
John, who had been twice-marked for death just that evening alone, looming and steady and asking. Twice.
Ah.
The pieces are beginning to coalesce.
And for the first time in his life, Sherlock almost wishes they’d remained disparate, disconnected; he almost yearns for ambiguity, for the mysteries that remain unsolved.
(Upon watching the pulse in John’s neck, Sherlock’s heart calms at the intake, the presentation of proof: the soft balm of John’s pumping blood slows Sherlock’s in turn by a whole seventeen beats to the minute.
As John’s pulse disappears, too soft to be seen, Sherlock’s surges, tight and tense, back up by thirty BPM.)
Almost.
________________________________
Once the data is amassed, it’s difficult to avoid the obvious implications. He runs through several logical conclusions before he siphons them off into the realm of impossibility-physiological disorders, imprecise measurements, mental instability, inaccurate observations, uncontrollable anxiety, cardiac defects-until he has no choice but to confront what remains, and his shame, he balks immediately upon the revelation of its nature, its consequences: what it means.
Deliberate contradiction. Intentional hypocrisy. Wilful ignorance. All the things he isn’t and cannot stand for are creeping into his psyche, are melding to his bones and holding, demanding-desperately-that he reconsider, that he turn a blind eye and walk away before a conclusion can be reached, before it’s too late to delete the evidence and its extensive ramifications because improbable; improbable simply cannot be borne.
Not this time.
Because there is a case. There is a case, there is the Work, and he cannot process it, cannot parse it and see the threads where they begin to intertwine. He cannot focus or suppose, he cannot clarify or correct, he cannot see or smell or taste or touch or know because it’s all excitatory chemicals with no inhibitors, no GABA to calm him or bring him down, and he’s abuzz, he’s trembling, he’s breathless and he’s twitching. It’s worse than boredom, and it’s bigger than doubt; it’s the thing he’s been accused of, falsely, before this moment, and he’s knows that all such prior accusations were false because this is new and unprecedented, this is vivid and unsustainable. This is a quiver in his chest and lead dropped cold at the abdomen, resonating out until everything freezes, so swift that it sears.
This is his blood boiling and moving too quick. This is muscular hypertrophy and dire effects. This is his heart on fire in more than just his chest.
“I don’t know myself, John,” he declares, without feeling, straight and clear and John just blinks, frowns-doesn’t know what to say, but isn’t quite bewildered. Sherlock knows the expression well, is on its receiving end often, and damn it all to the innermost circles of whatever hell awaits, but all he wants, all he really wants is to rush at John and touch him, taste him, to capture his lips or stroke his neck, to place a palm upon his sternum and measure everything, every subtle telling hitch of the heart-pattern, the beat-schema, the typology of the cadence that corresponds to that familiar look, and this is why it has to stop. This is why.
He swallows, and holds the heat at his centre close, fools himself into believing that it’s made of rage and hate, lets the falsified feeling spill unforgiving from his tongue, for all that his pulse is rebelling, for all that it numbs him with the flames.
“My control, my ability to predict my own reactions and capacities, my own faculties and margins of error,” he sucks in a breath that gets battered around as it runs through his chest. “You’ve corrupted the files, John! You’ve encrypted the very baseline recordings that I’ve kept locked away for reference and for the life of me I cannot access them. I cannot break the seal, I cannot analyse the data and it is destroying me, John.” He runs trembling hands through his hair and turns to catch John’s figure, his seated frame out the corner of his eye but he can’t look, not truly; he can’t, and when he hears John’s sharp inhale and the click of his mouth moving, opening, the crack of saliva on his tongue, he dives forth, heads him off.
“My senses are as keen as ever, and yet they’re misaligned, everything is skewed, shifted, the apex and the centre and the point of balance and focus, it’s all wrong now, it’s all of it tilted off and,” Sherlock bites his tongue for a moment, an ill-advised experiment: tries to trap his ransacking, railing heart between his teeth and pierce it, stop it, kill it dead but for naught-something tight and keening gathers in his throat beneath the pressure and nearly makes itself known, dangerously close to a sob when he opens his mouth and finishes, breathless and bent.
“And it’s your fault,” he inclines his head, angles the lids of his eyes just so, so that John will know beyond a doubt what Sherlock is trying to say, so that John will have a certainty that eludes even Sherlock himself. “It is absolutely your fault. You are to blame for this travesty, this monstrosity, you are the reason I have become,” and the crack he’s swallowed once is too determined to be silenced twice; his own will too strained to tamp it down again as his voice falters, breaks: “this.”
He takes deep, gulping breaths as quietly as he can, trembles, and spits with the most acidic vitriol he possesses, turning out the burn in hopes of saving his insides, the heart of him from complete destruction but it doesn’t help, just deepens the ache. “I am a disgrace, I am a feeble, useless, distracted abomination, you have poisoned me, ruined me, reduced me to nothing more than a pitiful excuse for a detective, for a mind, a-”
Sherlock’s phone rings-and it so rarely rings with a proper call that the sound of it stops everything, cuts a knife through the moment that has settled, still and stifling between John near the window and Sherlock cast within the shadowplay of late-afternoon. Sherlock’s chest heaves, his lungs working double because his heart’s too eager to be seen and heard and known, to express its displeasure and the unconscionable way it’s wanting, willing, threatening to split down its seams and break in two, and Sherlock won’t have that, Sherlock can’t have that and the ringing is gone when John meets his eye and Sherlock can’t have that either, so he turns away, looks for his mobile just as John rises to grab for it, to check the screen just as the chime for a text plays, shrill.
“Lestrade,” John announces, neutral but clipped, and that wretched heart in Sherlock’s chest trembles on at the sound, at the buried depths that shiver in time with that voice. “Suspect’s naffing about in Greenwich, he’ll meet you there.”
Sherlock lingers, dwells upon the you. The self. The singular. The heart of him takes note and thumps, feral and futile and fierce to the point where he has to plant his feet, has to hold firm against its virulent barrage as bile rises in his throat and he wonders, frantic-diminished-whether the singular self has a heart worth noting, whether the beat he’s braced against is even real when it stands all alone. The heart. The whole.
But he feels it. It is undeniably, unrepentantly real.
“Shall we?” John’s voice filters, always heard; Sherlock pauses, and the hammering stills in kind, if only for a moment. John is standing two steps down, jacket zipped, his body visible at the angle of departure from only the mid-thigh up and he looks at Sherlock, not warmly but determined-prepared. Awaiting.
Sherlock breathes again, and alights the stairs.
________________________________
The protocol is rudimentary, predictable. The address that accompanied the text leads them to a dilapidated warehouse where Lestrade is already waiting. He tells Sherlock to wait until they have secured the perimeter. Sherlock doesn’t bother refusing before he’s gone through the door.
As for the tension that may or may not exist between himself and John after the words exchanged-more delivered, really, for there was no dialogue, no repartee on John’s behalf: well, John’s at his heels, jumps a bit so that he’s properly at Sherlock’s side, gripping his firearm as he enters the silence that stretches from wall to wall inside: as he always does, as Sherlock has observed time and again. Thus, Sherlock’s willing to let it all slip from his mind for the moment, allows himself to attribute the thrumming buzz of his blood now to the Chase, and the Chase alone.
They split, left to right, coordinated without words as they weave through the partitions-the remains of a distribution line long-abandoned and unused-and Sherlock’s pulse gives an odd little flutter that he cannot understand at the way they communicate, at the way John’s still here, at the way it feels right despite everything, anything else.
Sherlock moves quickly, lightly, darts and judges sounds, shadows, applies his own well-tuned sense of placement and space to take the correct turns and detect any signs of life apart from his own. He is playing the Game, now; he is reimmersing himself in the world that he knows and holds dear, and it is liberating, it is beautiful and safe and he has found nothing, observed no sign of the perpetrator he is after just yet, but it’s coming, it must be, he sees everything, he hears everything, he knows-
There’s a gunshot-it sounds like a Sig, but the reverberation, the cavernous ceilings and empty space around them distorts it, and Sherlock cannot be certain, can’t parse out the waves as they hit and rebound, the angles of their motion and deflection: and frankly, John’s not the only one who carries that piece, even if he could pin it down.
And to be truthful, to extend the facts to their reasonable conclusions-even if he could pin it down, it wouldn’t matter. Where there was everything before, there is now only the one thing, the one pulse: his own, and the sinking feeling at knowing that John’s is beyond his reach. possibly forever.
Possibly. Probable. Impossibly.
No.
Sherlock’s heart is suddenly pumping at three, no, rapidly approaching four inefficient beats per second-less like individual beats, now, and more like a tremor, like John’s tremor that’s cured and gone but, if it hadn’t been, if it persisted still and if trite metaphors and sentimental imagery truly could manifest themselves in the flesh, then perhaps the shivering muscle beneath Sherlock’s breast is currently being held inside that hand, balanced precarious in that shaking palm to be squeezed, delicate and frantic and harsh so that the fingernails sink into the warm wet red of its shape. If the worst of all the things that Sherlock’s made a point to scorn somehow came to be real and true, then it would be a verifiable fact that it’s his heart that’s trembling, terrified, held in the cosmic balance of John’s grasp and Sherlock is gasping, failing, and he’ll hit the ground and burst the very minute John’s hold gives way, lets go, flees this world and leaves Sherlock to bleed, the heart flailing for endless moments after the life is lost, is gone.
The heart, he thinks, hears it echo through the ether, in his ears and off the high ceilings and through the water of a pool as he drowns, cannot breathe as he burns from the lungs out and he runs runs runs-the heart of him; the heart was always the key to it all, from the very moment it ceased belonging to him alone, stopped claiming just his own chest as its home.
It is only later that he is able to recognise that the flood of catecholamines, that the so-called fight-or-flight response will have robbed him of everything aside from the capacity to run; will have made it utterly impossible for him see anything outside of the tunnel, the narrowing of his vision to what is directly in front of him, to what is immediate and not peripheral: he’ll realise that at such a pace, his heart could not have been fuelling anything more than the bare essentials of survival. He couldn’t have perceived anything, really, nothing close enough to matter above one-hundred and seventy-five beats to the minute: near-sighted vision would have been lost entirely, no precision-his complex cognitive function, his fine motor skills: all of it compromised; no depth, just surface. Just the barest impressions, nothing of substance.
Not like this.
He’ll see these things, later; he will note these confounds in retrospect but he will not dwell on them. He will not dwell because the survival his heart vibrates, hums and claws at in those moments centres solely on the wellbeing of one man, just one, and that man is not peripheral, he isn’t anything except essential, and he comes out of nowhere, emerges from the black edges of Sherlock’s world and grants it colour again, balances and gives everything shape, direction-he emerges from the darkness and expands Sherlock’s world.
And it’s only then that Sherlock understands that he could not observe, could not make deductions, could do nothing, nothing but rush, nothing but navigate this pointless, pathetic world blindly, useless, fumbling until he collides, hits a wall that’s firm but yielding, that reaches up for him in a way that walls simply can’t, and he blinks once, twice, and he swallows, and his own pulse tries its damnedest to choke him. Tries.
Can’t.
But tries
And Sherlock’s heart doesn’t slow, not at first; he blinks hard and tries to catch his breath as his hands come up, miss their target as John, John steadies Sherlock, grasping his shoulders and keeping him rooted and real and still, saving him from coming apart entirely. Sherlock’s jaw’s dropped down, low, and he’s sucking in air, so much air and yet none of it’s making a difference, none of it’s doing its job and Sherlock’s lightheaded, dizzy in a way that even the drugs, even the lack of the drugs couldn’t match. His chest burns and his fingers clutch and grasp and need and he has no control, not any, as he slumps, falls: drops.
The momentum he expects, though-it’s curtailed, it stops short. He goes down, forward, and there’s a shuffling noise before he’s grabbed beneath the arms, leaned at an uncomfortable angle, a partial, perfect slant against John’s heaving chest, with John’s strong hand on the back of his neck, the cool of the gun he’s still holding like a shock against his skin; and then another hand, the second hand at his cheek-gentle and whole. Whole like John, the John he’s pressed against, pushing relentless, crushing into the wall behind, and Sherlock can’t, he can’t, he-
He finishes the fall, stops fighting, stops pretending that this isn’t him, that he’s not this person who is leaning, falling, broken and yet complete; that he’s not at his very core a being that feels, now as he never has before, for John Watson as no one else deserves-Sherlock stops fighting and buries his face in John’s chest, lets go, and balances the bridge of his nose, the crest of his brow at the suprasternal notch and allows himself the necessary surrender, the melting and melding of his very being into John’s racing pulse just above the heart, so close to the muscle itself as it sings, sings.
Christ almighty, but it sings and Sherlock is tired. He’s exhausted. He is weak and ruined and relieved in every way, every bone and ligament, and every bead of blood in his body relaxes in the same instant because it can be, it can continue to be because John’s hand is on his cheek and Sherlock’s shaking, or maybe it’s John, but they’re so close and Sherlock sighs into the coarse caress of John’s heartbeat against him, against the shape of his skull and his sweat-slick skin as he breathes in air that smells like John, that tastes of John and Sherlock feels weightless, empty, and somehow ineffably full.
Because there is a beat, and John is stroking the line of his cheekbone with a thumb that pulses into his skin at yet another place, another point of contact. Because John is whispering, murmuring nonsense: mindless, thoughtless nonsense that comes from another place entirely, somewhere that resonates, that touches the same octave and hits the same notes as the heart Sherlock’s tucked into, and Sherlock’s own pulse ebbs, recedes to align with John’s, to intertwine and craft a frantic, impromptu cacophony that maybe, maybe could grow into a symphony someday, this day-one day, maybe.
And Sherlock: he is this man. He is held inside this man. He exists in time with this man. The future, without this man; a world without John Watson is inexplicably, unexpectedly, undeniably impossible.
And however improbable the implications of that fact prove to be, perhaps; perhaps if he stops trying to deny them, stops trying to deny logic itself, his sacred Rule-
Perhaps if he stops trying to fight it, they could-together-create a masterpiece.