Fic: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled) (4/4)
Title: Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,253
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Previous: Part One // Part Two // Part Three
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part Four
Waking is a bit difficult.
Wait, no, scratch that: it’s a fucking ordeal, actually-his eyelids are heavy and his limbs weighed down like lead. He’s exhausted and hopelessly weak, his muscles overtaxed and his ligaments fraying when he tries and fails to move. He retreats from the challenge, ponders crawling back to the dark for a spell, but then he hears it, trailing in slow, subtle: that deep rumble that catches up in the squeeze of his heart, twists in the semilunar valves and vibrates, trills before systole, before it flushes through him and sears outward from the chest to the limbs, head to toe.
It’s faint, but he feels it, and he can’t pull back when it’s wrapping around him, gripping tight, refusing to give way.
I‘m sorry, it whispers, trembles; John, please, I, and then it fades off, but the burn’s still there, livid in John’s blood.
Forgive me, it comes again, and John exhales, feels his eyelashes fluttering, feels his throat scratch as he tries to lower his jaw, tries to open his mouth; as he makes the attempt to take in air between his lips and stretch his vocal cords against the haze of intravenous painkillers and quite possibly sedatives, if John’s properly recognising the cottony feeling in his head and behind his tongue.
“Forgive me, John,” and John’s close to the surface now, nearing the precipice. He can feel the weight of a hand in his, of rough fingers pressing, stroking ever-so-slightly against the veins of his wrist, tracing bone, and John feels something shiver at the centre of him, fault lines drawn from the clavicle across the sternum, all the way down.
His eyes open of their own accord: they have to see, have to place the final piece and make sense, make certain it wasn’t all a dream, a delusion; they need to make sure, of everything. He has to separate fact from fiction once and for all and breathe again like he’s meant to, like he relishes life rather than tolerates it, or worse: resents.
It takes a moment for him to focus, but then there’s the hair, the eyes-hooded, downturned and a bit red-rimmed, but the right colour; and the cheekbones, at just the right angle as they catch the lights, and the jaw that tightens, that shifts the orientation of that face in small ways that no one would notice, save John.
And then there’s the man, the whole of him, and Sherlock: he is warm; he’s soft and pliant where his hand wraps around John’s palm, and John forgot what the world looked like rightside-up before this moment, when everything shifts suddenly into its proper place and steals the air from John’s lungs, leaves him gasping for half-a-second that alerts Sherlock to his waking.
Sherlock’s own breath catches when he notices the change, when he registers John’s conscious presence-a bit belatedly, it takes him a moment; his whole demeanour is distracted, off-kilter-and he looks lost, so far adrift that John lets fear reign for a moment, terror at things he can’t name, that swim in that distant gaze.
“John,” Sherlock finally exhales, coming back, with John’s name breathy on his lips in a way that John’s never heard before and Sherlock deflates, every part of him unwinding until he slumps, the hand holding onto John clenching minutely while the free hand stutters in midair before it stills, drops, and Sherlock looks away.
“John” he tries once more, clears his throat and it comes out deeper, stronger, more recognisable but it’s a sham, like a boy putting on his father’s suit and trying to fool his friends. Sherlock’s eyes are shivering back and forth, trying too hard to narrow, hypothermic in their sockets as his fingers remain on John’s wrist, glued to the pulse-point.
John notices Sherlock blinking in time with his own pulse, resonant in John’s bones, in his marrow with the pressure of Sherlock’s fingers wrapped against the pump of his blood. He raises an eyebrow in askance.
“Just making sure,” Sherlock confesses-defensive, unsteady-but his grasp doesn’t waver, and that stirs something in John that he thought, that he’d feared might have truly died on that pavement, in that fall six months before.
John nods, inclines his head just a tad, pleased to note that the movement doesn’t cause him any disorientation as he curls his own fingers down toward the heel of Sherlock’s palm, stretching the pads of his fingertips to measure a twin beat beneath that soft, warm, pale wrist: Sherlock’s living flesh.
“Me too,” John says, his voice rough but firm, full to the brim with feeling, choked with it. He watches Sherlock, whose eyes slide closed for a long moment before they snap back open, reckless, desperate, aching as they fix on John, too wild to be seeing anything of consequence, too vivid a blue for John to stare into without the urge to flinch but he won’t, he can’t, there’s nothing for it: in the moment, in the now, that blue and the pulse racing, singing under his fingers-that blue and beat are all there is.
“How are you here?” Sherlock sounds a bit like the men John remembers from the battlefield, the ones who were dying, delusional from blood-loss; the ones who survived, but were too broken to believe.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t pick up a few tricks from you along the way?” John teases gently, wants to put warmth back into those eyes, wants to see them dance, wants to let the life in them erase all the nights John spent with that soulless gaze on the concrete staring up at him, relentless.
John wants, needs those lifeless eyes to be gone.
And John gets life, all right, but not the kind he craves. Sherlock eyes frown, fade, withdraw and his expression drops, and the blue turns bright, fluorescent, and John recognises a tremor when he sees it, when he feels it clasped to his arm like a lifeline, a prayer carved in skin, and Sherlock clings to him like the world’s ending; and John knows that feeling well, but he can’t quite comprehend where Sherlock might have crossed its path.
“No, I,” Sherlock tears out, the sound jagged like it left half of itself behind in the wrenching. “John,” and he trails off, can’t find his mooring, and John can’t bear it, so he clutches tighter to Sherlock’s hand, draws it closer-palm to palm- and threads their fingers together. Sherlock’s neck turns, head jerks, willing away something sinister and false in the ether before he focuses on John, gaze needy, asking, filled with longing and a childlike hope.
“What is it?” John urges him, gently, knows there’s something he’s missing, knows now that he needs the pieces if he’s going to make any more broken things into wholes.
Sherlock gropes, reaches for something behind him: in the pocket of his coat where it hangs askew on the chair he’s folded into, but he doesn’t break John’s gaze. He squeezes John fingertips when he eventually has to look away, mobile in hand, scrolling through menus before extending the device out to John, for him to see.
John’s eyes take a long moment to focus, and he tilts his chin to combat the glare, the strange polarisation of the screen before he sees images, characters that tell a story, that make some sense.
JW dead. No pulse, 10+ min.
John feels time slow precariously around him as he processes what the message says, what it means.
“The Network,” Sherlock forces out by way of explanation: gravelly, like it hurts. “They didn’t know why, didn’t know who they’d be contacting,” and John watches, a bit mesmerised, when Sherlock’s chest expands to accommodate the depth, the full extent of the breath he draws in and sighs out: long, heavy, brittle.
“One of the Irregulars followed you out to Royston. She saw,” Sherlock swallows, the muscles of his throat working hard, and John hadn’t noticed before just how gaunt Sherlock looked, how drawn his features had become: how thin.
“She said she felt,” and John feels his heart clench around the way Sherlock’s voice cracks, the way he blinks too fast, too desperate. John knows how that feels, and there’s something about seeing it, and feeling the echoes that haven’t died against the unrelenting grip of Sherlock’s hand on his own-there’s something about it that takes whatever core of anger, whatever edge of betrayal or comeuppance or requital that had been coating John’s need for this man, and his relief at finding him alive and in one piece; it takes those dark edges and burns them away in an instant.
“She said that you were gone,” Sherlock says it: small, confused, and sad in a way that John can’t quite makes sense of, like it’s too pure an expression of real, honest devastation for him to qualify it any further. It looks shaken, bereft, and Sherlock looks those things by extension, the whole of him, and that’s not right.
Sherlock Holmes isn’t meant to look that way.
“I had to make it convincing,” John makes the move to explain, to justify, and he tamps down the voice in his head that tells him he shouldn’t have to, because friends protect people, and love means sacrifice, and John will be damned if he can’t manage both, here and now: for this man, if for no other.
“You know how it is,” John tries, halfheartedly, perhaps ill-timed, to lighten the mood, even as that memory, that reality still weighs heavy on his heart. He tries, but it snaps something in Sherlock, sets him in motion, opens a floodgate and his lips are moving too fast for his words. He trips over them, uncharacteristically graceless, inarticulate, and his eyes look like they’re about to swallow the rest of him whole.
“They were, he was,” Sherlock stumbles, his breathing shallow. “They were going to kill you, all of you, you, and,” he sucks in a breath that steadies nothing, only takes up room with a sharp hiss. “You and Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and,” he’s breathless, more than John’s ever seen him-more than running across London and chasing criminals and fighting off smugglers and facing down death; Sherlock’s winded, utterly so. “It was my life or yours, and John, it wasn’t, I couldn’t,” and his hand is shaking in John’s, positively seizing, and John can’t take it, he can’t; “I-”
“Sherlock,” he says, with all the soft, exasperated, joyous affection that’s been bubbling in him since he saw Sherlock through that doorway, through that window, tied to a chair; he says it and lets the sentiment linger, soothing and warm between them as he gathers Sherlock’s other hand and folds then both within his grasp. “We’re not done with this,” he starts, serious but not grave; promising a tomorrow for them both, a day that waits for the two of them, together, where they’ll sort out the kinks and make sense of things again.
“We’re not done with talking about this, and what’s on and what isn’t when it comes to you putting me through the goddamned wringer, thinking you were dead, fearing I was going mad with believing that maybe, maybe you were out there.” John says it, holding on to Sherlock tighter with every word because it hurts, it stings to get this out but he needs to, they can’t go any further now without him saying just this much, just this bit, just the truth, because he, because that-
“Because that was hell.” And Sherlock’s eyes widen, he straightens, but John follows, leans in just enough to draw him back, to keep his hands between John’s where John can feel his heartbeat racing, a hummingbird beneath the skin and John’s not sure, but the thinks he could write a book around that rhythm, maybe build a life around that pulse.
“But we’re here now, and we’re safe,” John assures him, tracing the shapes of Sherlock’s fingernails with the pads of his thumb, stroking from the cuticles to the knuckles, down and back.
“And I’m not leaving you, do you understand?” John tells him. “We do this, whatever this is, whatever you’re after-we finish this together, or not at all.”
And there’s something immoveable, unshakeable in the way he says it that fills him with power, that strains the stitches in his back with the way it expands, the way it lifts him up and reaches out and settles in Sherlock’s eyes with a certain gravitas, a certitude that’s solid, that holds as Sherlock nods, slowly, considered: sure. It’s an understanding that John’s been waiting for, been aching for; that he didn’t realise would bring something in him to its knees the moment he saw it, the moment it was his.
John breathes out slow and closes his eyes for a spell, lets the dust settle; lifts his gaze inside the instant between feeling Sherlock’s right hand slip from their shared hold and the unexpected touch of that same palm to John’s cheek.
“You’re here,” Sherlock whispers, almost marvels. John smiles at him, and gives into the impulse, the unexamined urge to reach up and cover the hand that’s framing his face.
“And not a moment too soon, from the looks of things,” John tells him, the grin clear in his tone. “You shouldn’t have tried to leave me behind, you know.” He leans forward-a fault of gravity-but before he can correct it, Sherlock meets him halfway, hesitant for the lost half of a second before he rests his forehead lightly against John’s.
“I’m the brains of these operations, after all,” John breathes out, feels the heat condense and cool between their mouths and Sherlock doesn’t smile, not exactly, but he looks lighter, somehow; his lips form the shape that follows a long, contented sigh, and John thinks he’ll take that; thinks he’d take that any day.
“You’re alive, and you’re here,” Sherlock says again, voice still scarce, eyes closed.
“Repetition,” John chides him fondly. “That’s dull, isn’t it? Irritating?”
Sherlock’s lips quirk upward, and his breath is warm on John’s cheek when he answers: “Some things are worth saying twice.”
John smiles, and lets himself enjoy the stillness for a moment, lets himself revel in the breath of lungs that he’d feared were damned to dust beneath his feet. It’s a sensation, a revelation that John doesn’t think he deserves: it’s too bright, too aching and brilliant and painful and perfect, and he’s only a doctor, a soldier: he’s just a man who was too goddamned stubborn to accept a loss.
In an instant, unexpected, he’s overwhelmed by all of it, by everything, by the devastation and the resolve, the journey and the destination, by everything and nothing, and he can’t help the laughter that bursts from him, effervescent and badly-timed, but honest and full and grateful like nothing else in the cosmos, like nothing could ever dream of being outside of this one miracle that belonged to John Watson: that his and his alone at which to wonder.
“What?” Sherlock asks, and John glances up to see the question, the first buds of hurt in those eyes and it’s then that he reaches up himself and frames Sherlock’s cheek, lilts his fingertips across those fucking cheekbones and smiles all the wider.
“Nothing,” John shakes his head, truly overcome. “I only realised, I paid that coroner a boatload to keep things quiet, to keep anyone who came poking around well occupied,” he looks at Sherlock’s phone and breathes out one last chuckle, crime-scene giggles coming at him once again. “Lot of good that did.”
Sherlock sobers, and John knows he’s the cause, but he’s not sorry. He’s not sorry that he’s got this back, that he has this and there’s life again in a once-broken body: Sherlock’s, yes, but John’s as well. He won’t apologise for relishing that to the full, however it comes out, whenever it strikes.
He’ll never apologise for this.
“John,” Sherlock says, slowly, meeting John’s eyes and then glancing away, impossibly timid. He takes John’s hand from his cheek and gathers the other, both of John’s in his single palm and he holds them, reverent, before continuing on.
“John, if,” he licks his lips, and John watches the motion of his tongue, its retreat back behind his teeth. “If this is what you,” Sherlock shakes his head, meets John’s eyes and tears them away, stares at their hands together.
“These past months, if this,” Sherlock draws in breath again, halting and unsteady, and his next words, they’re pitched all wrong-keening, on the brink of something treacherous and deep: “then I’m-”
“Shh,” John cuts him off, catches his eyes and makes them stay, lets himself open to the storm in them, the storm in Sherlock, that is Sherlock Holmes and always was, for all that he wanted to hide it, for all that he tried to deny: the cyclone that’s all feeling and no restraint, the place where he’s splintered and can’t patch the break alone, and John holds, they hold and Sherlock settles, calms, and the lines in his palms press at wrong angles against John’s skin, and it’s alright, it’s fine.
It’s all fucking fine, and it always was, and John believed, goddamnit. John believed.
And they’re close. They’re so close, and it’s fine: it’s fine to feel Sherlock’s breath on his skin, to shiver when he exhales. It’s fine that John’s heart is pounding so fiercely that it moves him, shudders through him so as to bring them closer, tightening their orbit, strengthening the magnetic pull between them as they look and they breathe and they exist there, together, alive. It’s so fucking fine, it’s uncanny.
And it’ll be fine, John believes that more than anything else, when Sherlock’s lips meet his. When they connect and collide, when the world lights up in colour, they’ll be fine; more than fine, even; maybe.
Together, though, like this: they can’t possibly be anything less.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,253
Summary: John Watson is no one's weeping widow, and he knows that it's not impossible to cheat death. Spoilers for 2.03 - The Reichenbach Fall; Warnings for Suicidal Ideation.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title credit to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Author's Notes: This was a long time in coming, and it's only here now because of the talents of the incomparable sangueuk and the encouragement of weepingnaiad, togoboldly, na_shao, and savetomorrow.
Previous: Part One // Part Two // Part Three
Gone to Feed the Roses (Elegant and Curled)
Part Four
Waking is a bit difficult.
Wait, no, scratch that: it’s a fucking ordeal, actually-his eyelids are heavy and his limbs weighed down like lead. He’s exhausted and hopelessly weak, his muscles overtaxed and his ligaments fraying when he tries and fails to move. He retreats from the challenge, ponders crawling back to the dark for a spell, but then he hears it, trailing in slow, subtle: that deep rumble that catches up in the squeeze of his heart, twists in the semilunar valves and vibrates, trills before systole, before it flushes through him and sears outward from the chest to the limbs, head to toe.
It’s faint, but he feels it, and he can’t pull back when it’s wrapping around him, gripping tight, refusing to give way.
I‘m sorry, it whispers, trembles; John, please, I, and then it fades off, but the burn’s still there, livid in John’s blood.
Forgive me, it comes again, and John exhales, feels his eyelashes fluttering, feels his throat scratch as he tries to lower his jaw, tries to open his mouth; as he makes the attempt to take in air between his lips and stretch his vocal cords against the haze of intravenous painkillers and quite possibly sedatives, if John’s properly recognising the cottony feeling in his head and behind his tongue.
“Forgive me, John,” and John’s close to the surface now, nearing the precipice. He can feel the weight of a hand in his, of rough fingers pressing, stroking ever-so-slightly against the veins of his wrist, tracing bone, and John feels something shiver at the centre of him, fault lines drawn from the clavicle across the sternum, all the way down.
His eyes open of their own accord: they have to see, have to place the final piece and make sense, make certain it wasn’t all a dream, a delusion; they need to make sure, of everything. He has to separate fact from fiction once and for all and breathe again like he’s meant to, like he relishes life rather than tolerates it, or worse: resents.
It takes a moment for him to focus, but then there’s the hair, the eyes-hooded, downturned and a bit red-rimmed, but the right colour; and the cheekbones, at just the right angle as they catch the lights, and the jaw that tightens, that shifts the orientation of that face in small ways that no one would notice, save John.
And then there’s the man, the whole of him, and Sherlock: he is warm; he’s soft and pliant where his hand wraps around John’s palm, and John forgot what the world looked like rightside-up before this moment, when everything shifts suddenly into its proper place and steals the air from John’s lungs, leaves him gasping for half-a-second that alerts Sherlock to his waking.
Sherlock’s own breath catches when he notices the change, when he registers John’s conscious presence-a bit belatedly, it takes him a moment; his whole demeanour is distracted, off-kilter-and he looks lost, so far adrift that John lets fear reign for a moment, terror at things he can’t name, that swim in that distant gaze.
“John,” Sherlock finally exhales, coming back, with John’s name breathy on his lips in a way that John’s never heard before and Sherlock deflates, every part of him unwinding until he slumps, the hand holding onto John clenching minutely while the free hand stutters in midair before it stills, drops, and Sherlock looks away.
“John” he tries once more, clears his throat and it comes out deeper, stronger, more recognisable but it’s a sham, like a boy putting on his father’s suit and trying to fool his friends. Sherlock’s eyes are shivering back and forth, trying too hard to narrow, hypothermic in their sockets as his fingers remain on John’s wrist, glued to the pulse-point.
John notices Sherlock blinking in time with his own pulse, resonant in John’s bones, in his marrow with the pressure of Sherlock’s fingers wrapped against the pump of his blood. He raises an eyebrow in askance.
“Just making sure,” Sherlock confesses-defensive, unsteady-but his grasp doesn’t waver, and that stirs something in John that he thought, that he’d feared might have truly died on that pavement, in that fall six months before.
John nods, inclines his head just a tad, pleased to note that the movement doesn’t cause him any disorientation as he curls his own fingers down toward the heel of Sherlock’s palm, stretching the pads of his fingertips to measure a twin beat beneath that soft, warm, pale wrist: Sherlock’s living flesh.
“Me too,” John says, his voice rough but firm, full to the brim with feeling, choked with it. He watches Sherlock, whose eyes slide closed for a long moment before they snap back open, reckless, desperate, aching as they fix on John, too wild to be seeing anything of consequence, too vivid a blue for John to stare into without the urge to flinch but he won’t, he can’t, there’s nothing for it: in the moment, in the now, that blue and the pulse racing, singing under his fingers-that blue and beat are all there is.
“How are you here?” Sherlock sounds a bit like the men John remembers from the battlefield, the ones who were dying, delusional from blood-loss; the ones who survived, but were too broken to believe.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t pick up a few tricks from you along the way?” John teases gently, wants to put warmth back into those eyes, wants to see them dance, wants to let the life in them erase all the nights John spent with that soulless gaze on the concrete staring up at him, relentless.
John wants, needs those lifeless eyes to be gone.
And John gets life, all right, but not the kind he craves. Sherlock eyes frown, fade, withdraw and his expression drops, and the blue turns bright, fluorescent, and John recognises a tremor when he sees it, when he feels it clasped to his arm like a lifeline, a prayer carved in skin, and Sherlock clings to him like the world’s ending; and John knows that feeling well, but he can’t quite comprehend where Sherlock might have crossed its path.
“No, I,” Sherlock tears out, the sound jagged like it left half of itself behind in the wrenching. “John,” and he trails off, can’t find his mooring, and John can’t bear it, so he clutches tighter to Sherlock’s hand, draws it closer-palm to palm- and threads their fingers together. Sherlock’s neck turns, head jerks, willing away something sinister and false in the ether before he focuses on John, gaze needy, asking, filled with longing and a childlike hope.
“What is it?” John urges him, gently, knows there’s something he’s missing, knows now that he needs the pieces if he’s going to make any more broken things into wholes.
Sherlock gropes, reaches for something behind him: in the pocket of his coat where it hangs askew on the chair he’s folded into, but he doesn’t break John’s gaze. He squeezes John fingertips when he eventually has to look away, mobile in hand, scrolling through menus before extending the device out to John, for him to see.
John’s eyes take a long moment to focus, and he tilts his chin to combat the glare, the strange polarisation of the screen before he sees images, characters that tell a story, that make some sense.
JW dead. No pulse, 10+ min.
John feels time slow precariously around him as he processes what the message says, what it means.
“The Network,” Sherlock forces out by way of explanation: gravelly, like it hurts. “They didn’t know why, didn’t know who they’d be contacting,” and John watches, a bit mesmerised, when Sherlock’s chest expands to accommodate the depth, the full extent of the breath he draws in and sighs out: long, heavy, brittle.
“One of the Irregulars followed you out to Royston. She saw,” Sherlock swallows, the muscles of his throat working hard, and John hadn’t noticed before just how gaunt Sherlock looked, how drawn his features had become: how thin.
“She said she felt,” and John feels his heart clench around the way Sherlock’s voice cracks, the way he blinks too fast, too desperate. John knows how that feels, and there’s something about seeing it, and feeling the echoes that haven’t died against the unrelenting grip of Sherlock’s hand on his own-there’s something about it that takes whatever core of anger, whatever edge of betrayal or comeuppance or requital that had been coating John’s need for this man, and his relief at finding him alive and in one piece; it takes those dark edges and burns them away in an instant.
“She said that you were gone,” Sherlock says it: small, confused, and sad in a way that John can’t quite makes sense of, like it’s too pure an expression of real, honest devastation for him to qualify it any further. It looks shaken, bereft, and Sherlock looks those things by extension, the whole of him, and that’s not right.
Sherlock Holmes isn’t meant to look that way.
“I had to make it convincing,” John makes the move to explain, to justify, and he tamps down the voice in his head that tells him he shouldn’t have to, because friends protect people, and love means sacrifice, and John will be damned if he can’t manage both, here and now: for this man, if for no other.
“You know how it is,” John tries, halfheartedly, perhaps ill-timed, to lighten the mood, even as that memory, that reality still weighs heavy on his heart. He tries, but it snaps something in Sherlock, sets him in motion, opens a floodgate and his lips are moving too fast for his words. He trips over them, uncharacteristically graceless, inarticulate, and his eyes look like they’re about to swallow the rest of him whole.
“They were, he was,” Sherlock stumbles, his breathing shallow. “They were going to kill you, all of you, you, and,” he sucks in a breath that steadies nothing, only takes up room with a sharp hiss. “You and Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and,” he’s breathless, more than John’s ever seen him-more than running across London and chasing criminals and fighting off smugglers and facing down death; Sherlock’s winded, utterly so. “It was my life or yours, and John, it wasn’t, I couldn’t,” and his hand is shaking in John’s, positively seizing, and John can’t take it, he can’t; “I-”
“Sherlock,” he says, with all the soft, exasperated, joyous affection that’s been bubbling in him since he saw Sherlock through that doorway, through that window, tied to a chair; he says it and lets the sentiment linger, soothing and warm between them as he gathers Sherlock’s other hand and folds then both within his grasp. “We’re not done with this,” he starts, serious but not grave; promising a tomorrow for them both, a day that waits for the two of them, together, where they’ll sort out the kinks and make sense of things again.
“We’re not done with talking about this, and what’s on and what isn’t when it comes to you putting me through the goddamned wringer, thinking you were dead, fearing I was going mad with believing that maybe, maybe you were out there.” John says it, holding on to Sherlock tighter with every word because it hurts, it stings to get this out but he needs to, they can’t go any further now without him saying just this much, just this bit, just the truth, because he, because that-
“Because that was hell.” And Sherlock’s eyes widen, he straightens, but John follows, leans in just enough to draw him back, to keep his hands between John’s where John can feel his heartbeat racing, a hummingbird beneath the skin and John’s not sure, but the thinks he could write a book around that rhythm, maybe build a life around that pulse.
“But we’re here now, and we’re safe,” John assures him, tracing the shapes of Sherlock’s fingernails with the pads of his thumb, stroking from the cuticles to the knuckles, down and back.
“And I’m not leaving you, do you understand?” John tells him. “We do this, whatever this is, whatever you’re after-we finish this together, or not at all.”
And there’s something immoveable, unshakeable in the way he says it that fills him with power, that strains the stitches in his back with the way it expands, the way it lifts him up and reaches out and settles in Sherlock’s eyes with a certain gravitas, a certitude that’s solid, that holds as Sherlock nods, slowly, considered: sure. It’s an understanding that John’s been waiting for, been aching for; that he didn’t realise would bring something in him to its knees the moment he saw it, the moment it was his.
John breathes out slow and closes his eyes for a spell, lets the dust settle; lifts his gaze inside the instant between feeling Sherlock’s right hand slip from their shared hold and the unexpected touch of that same palm to John’s cheek.
“You’re here,” Sherlock whispers, almost marvels. John smiles at him, and gives into the impulse, the unexamined urge to reach up and cover the hand that’s framing his face.
“And not a moment too soon, from the looks of things,” John tells him, the grin clear in his tone. “You shouldn’t have tried to leave me behind, you know.” He leans forward-a fault of gravity-but before he can correct it, Sherlock meets him halfway, hesitant for the lost half of a second before he rests his forehead lightly against John’s.
“I’m the brains of these operations, after all,” John breathes out, feels the heat condense and cool between their mouths and Sherlock doesn’t smile, not exactly, but he looks lighter, somehow; his lips form the shape that follows a long, contented sigh, and John thinks he’ll take that; thinks he’d take that any day.
“You’re alive, and you’re here,” Sherlock says again, voice still scarce, eyes closed.
“Repetition,” John chides him fondly. “That’s dull, isn’t it? Irritating?”
Sherlock’s lips quirk upward, and his breath is warm on John’s cheek when he answers: “Some things are worth saying twice.”
John smiles, and lets himself enjoy the stillness for a moment, lets himself revel in the breath of lungs that he’d feared were damned to dust beneath his feet. It’s a sensation, a revelation that John doesn’t think he deserves: it’s too bright, too aching and brilliant and painful and perfect, and he’s only a doctor, a soldier: he’s just a man who was too goddamned stubborn to accept a loss.
In an instant, unexpected, he’s overwhelmed by all of it, by everything, by the devastation and the resolve, the journey and the destination, by everything and nothing, and he can’t help the laughter that bursts from him, effervescent and badly-timed, but honest and full and grateful like nothing else in the cosmos, like nothing could ever dream of being outside of this one miracle that belonged to John Watson: that his and his alone at which to wonder.
“What?” Sherlock asks, and John glances up to see the question, the first buds of hurt in those eyes and it’s then that he reaches up himself and frames Sherlock’s cheek, lilts his fingertips across those fucking cheekbones and smiles all the wider.
“Nothing,” John shakes his head, truly overcome. “I only realised, I paid that coroner a boatload to keep things quiet, to keep anyone who came poking around well occupied,” he looks at Sherlock’s phone and breathes out one last chuckle, crime-scene giggles coming at him once again. “Lot of good that did.”
Sherlock sobers, and John knows he’s the cause, but he’s not sorry. He’s not sorry that he’s got this back, that he has this and there’s life again in a once-broken body: Sherlock’s, yes, but John’s as well. He won’t apologise for relishing that to the full, however it comes out, whenever it strikes.
He’ll never apologise for this.
“John,” Sherlock says, slowly, meeting John’s eyes and then glancing away, impossibly timid. He takes John’s hand from his cheek and gathers the other, both of John’s in his single palm and he holds them, reverent, before continuing on.
“John, if,” he licks his lips, and John watches the motion of his tongue, its retreat back behind his teeth. “If this is what you,” Sherlock shakes his head, meets John’s eyes and tears them away, stares at their hands together.
“These past months, if this,” Sherlock draws in breath again, halting and unsteady, and his next words, they’re pitched all wrong-keening, on the brink of something treacherous and deep: “then I’m-”
“Shh,” John cuts him off, catches his eyes and makes them stay, lets himself open to the storm in them, the storm in Sherlock, that is Sherlock Holmes and always was, for all that he wanted to hide it, for all that he tried to deny: the cyclone that’s all feeling and no restraint, the place where he’s splintered and can’t patch the break alone, and John holds, they hold and Sherlock settles, calms, and the lines in his palms press at wrong angles against John’s skin, and it’s alright, it’s fine.
It’s all fucking fine, and it always was, and John believed, goddamnit. John believed.
And they’re close. They’re so close, and it’s fine: it’s fine to feel Sherlock’s breath on his skin, to shiver when he exhales. It’s fine that John’s heart is pounding so fiercely that it moves him, shudders through him so as to bring them closer, tightening their orbit, strengthening the magnetic pull between them as they look and they breathe and they exist there, together, alive. It’s so fucking fine, it’s uncanny.
And it’ll be fine, John believes that more than anything else, when Sherlock’s lips meet his. When they connect and collide, when the world lights up in colour, they’ll be fine; more than fine, even; maybe.
Together, though, like this: they can’t possibly be anything less.