Fic: echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take) (1/1)
Title: echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,670
Summary: John’s heartbeat is the first and only symphony that Sherlock doesn’t quite feel worthy enough to know. (Part IV of the Cardiophilia Sequence; Follows suddenly your heart showed me my way, the beat and beating heart, and your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows))
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and beta-work and for knowing the rhythm well enough to predict the breaks.
echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)
“You’re enthralled, aren’t you?” John murmurs, dazed, and the tone of his voice something unknown, something that Sherlock, for all his vast holds and stores of knowledge, of reference on John specifically-on the way his tongue moves around vowels, the way that certain syllables elongate on his vocal cords, stretched. Sherlock wouldn’t have associated that pitch, that breathless, distant, drenched kind of sound with John had he not been there, had he not felt the word resonate, shivering through John’s chest, echoing around the pleural cavity and bouncing, uncoordinated and poorly held around John’s ribs. He wouldn’t have recognised the sound had it not been clear, resonant where it stood, spread, threaded through John’s torso and out to the world; pummelled by the heart that Sherlock’s fixed upon, pressed against, entrenched inside and caught within, dependent. Utterly. Entirely.
He wouldn’t have recognised John’s voice like this if he hadn’t felt the words slip in beside the beat that he’d know anywhere; that would know him and find him and claim him in turn, to the fathomless depths, to the end of his days.
Sherlock shivers with the promise of it, the potential; the way the forever is unknowable, yet he cannot help but reach.
“You’re fucking riveted,” John states the obvious, but Sherlock doesn’t mind it in the moment, doesn’t need to say anything, to chide John for his habit; Sherlock doesn’t think he has enough breath in his lungs to speak even if he’d wanted to, if he’d truly desired to move his lips and make a sound aside from the panting, the gasping as John runs fingers through his hair and lets Sherlock stay, lets him remain heavy at the centre of his chest. He gives Sherlock the gift of his bare torso and the beat of his heart against Sherlock’s cheek, tight against his ear like fire and wonder and the sky before a storm.
“I’m evidence, aren’t I?” John asks. “That’s all,” and the beat hits harder when he breathes in, and that’s normal, that’s normal, but it sounds different from before; slower and sluggish for the instants wrapped up in the inhale. Sherlock feels a clench in his own chest as he digs his fingernails into John’s side, needing him to know things he can’t say, can’t find words for because he never learned them, because they were never uttered, because Sherlock Holmes has never felt this way for anyone before, and there has never been a need in the past to articulate that which had yet to blossom, to soar.
“Just like a crime scene, that’s the look in your eyes,” John draws circles against Sherlock's scalp and tries to urge his chin up, tries to make eye contact to see if the look’s still there, the one he’s citing and judging and secretly lamenting-Sherlock can hear regret in John’s heartbeat, a subtle lag between contraction and release, the way the left ventricle and the right seem just a tad bit off, the valves lazy, disappointed, filled with something sorrowful; the atria lachrymose and Sherlock cannot look, cannot move, will not move because he’s listening, and he closes his eyes and breathes out and nods just a bit, nods in time to the steadily-accelerating beat that is everything, so simple.
He’d never imagined, not once, that everything, all of this-what it means and the possibilities that it holds, what it’s done and how it’s changed the very fabric of a universe that Sherlock thought he understood, thought he could pick apart piece by piece and observe. Except for this, except for intangibility and the sweet-soft ache that he cannot quantify, that he can’t look for on a scan or dissect beneath a lens but that lives in him more sure than silence and the residue of gunpowder from a pulsing-perfect shot; he’d never dreamt that this could ever be revealed as simple.
“Yes,” Sherlock whispers, gives shape and sound to a breath, but only just. “Yes,” and it’s repetition, repetition and it’s simple and it’s right, except no, not quite; there’s more, so much more and Sherlock feels filled with it, suddenly. Sherlock is overwhelmed by this like cocaine and the need for it and the loss of it, like a murder and the look of the culprit, the colour of blood on the hands of the guilty in shades the eyes can’t see but Sherlock can taste on the breeze: sweat and shame and delight, the sweet tang of violence and the detritus left behind.
It’s like that, and Sherlock’s speaking, staring at the place where John’s pulse starts to jump, a fledgling in the dark as Sherlock stares, begs it with his eyes dark and pupils full to bound, to beat, to show itself and give itself and to be, be, be.
“But it’s, it’s not just...” Sherlock trails off, and this is another thing that words weren’t made for, something novel and fundamental and flawless, like fire reducing him to ash and blood on the backs of his teeth. This is something he knows deeper than he knows anything, something that has etched into the panels, the very framework, the structure of the Palace in his mind and has lit it anew, has remade him, and it’s something words will never touch, no matter how deeply he knows it in his chest, his lungs, the veins that trace his red-ruined heart.
“It’s data,” he speaks finally; raw, rough, but honest, unbroken, true to the brim and unwarranted, undiluted, unhinged. “It’s the most crucial data,” and it is, by god, by the stars, by facts and figures and chemicals and the brain and the heart and the head and the soil and the sand, by words and all they’re not built to contain, by the colour of John’s blush and the bow of his lips and the shape of his chest and the pulse in his wrist: it is true and real and full and Sherlock cannot deny it, much as he wants to, needs to, will die if he doesn’t as sure as if he does.
“It’s you,” he tells John, a whisper. “It is vitality, it is the centre, the source.” He strokes the heat of John’s skin with an idle thumb and smiles soft when John shivers, when his pulse leaps in time with the shudder, with the raising of hairs on his skin.
“It’s,” and Sherlock pauses, swallows, and his own heart’s threatening to sync, to lilt about in time with John’s, and Sherlock’s never known that sort of parallel, so intense and present and near and unrelenting. He has never experienced connection quite like this: with John naked beneath him, with his groin pressed tight to John’s thigh and his ear to John’s pumping, wet-warm heart.
“You’re here, and you’re real and you’re gravity and nicotine and you are, this is,” Sherlock swallows again, but there’s something lodged now, something stronger than his throat and his will and his own thrumming heart; stronger, he thinks, than his ability to name, so he says the only thing left, the only thing: “John-”
“Shh,” John tells him, bends his neck to press lips to the crown of Sherlock’s head. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I don’t,” Sherlock starts, suddenly desperate, suddenly choking on that nameless entity obstructing his airways and John’s heart, John’s heart thrums louder, harder; “John, I can’t,” and Sherlock’s not strong enough, no, he’s not, and he’s drowning, except-
“There’s more than just that,” Sherlock tells him, losing himself in the relentless, ramming beat and exhaling, slow and sheer, because he’s not strong enough, but John-his John; John just might be.
“I know,” John exhales, soft and steady but his pulse is a different story, racing and rattling and out of control. Sherlock brings a hand to John’s chest to touch the trembling muscle where it rebels against the flesh; and yes, yes, he is riveted. “I know.”
Sherlock feels a momentary relief, is bolstered and saved in the affirmation, the confirmation that for all that Sherlock feels a part of John’s body, John’s presence, John’s living-surging self; for all that Sherlock fears the connection, the weakness, it is a strange sort of release that accompanies the knowledge that John is just as captured, just as caught inside the neurones, the cells under Sherlock’s skin. It’s a blessing, but it doesn’t last: Sherlock finds himself adrift, unanchored in the rushing crescendo of John’s racing pulse, its ever-growing force, his respiration and circulation and the feel of rising and falling on the waves with John’s chest and something’s missing, a piece silenced, and it sours in Sherlock’s stomach until he clutches, until he can’t help himself any longer.
“Keep talking,” Sherlock pleads, moans, demands as he gives shape to the syllables in broken, keening breaths, desperate trembles of his vocal cords because it’s a symphony, a masterpiece: the contraction, the cadence of John’s heart on systole-the percussion; the rush of his breath-woodwinds; the keen of his blood, the strings, the sharp bleed of the electrochemical stimulus that peaks as diastole wanes, like the brass. And then John, John’s voice and John’s words and the vibration, the tone and pitch of each vocalisation, each subvocal and supravocal sound that comes from John, that John creates, that resonates and takes form in Sherlock, because of Sherlock, undoing Sherlock from the foundations and holding, keeping him still when all logic would have him fall.
“Why?” John asks, struggling just a bit, exerted: not accusing, or rejecting, but curious, and the answer is clear.
Why? Because it’s poetry, it’s Tchaikovsky in the wrong key, the orchestra humming at odds with itself, and it is somehow-impossible; it is somehow every case and every murder, every saved life and borrowed breath and blessed triumph and vicious defeat. It is the answer and the question and it is John, and that is immutable, undeniable, unshakeable. It is the world and its vibrance, its terror in a breath and a beat and a pause, in the meniscus at the top of a flask and the tackiness clinging to his skin from a nicotine patch. It is imperfection in the tightness at his throat, the quirk of lips that borders, blasphemous, on sacrality.
This is the heart, this is the heart, and it was burned-a sacrifice, a penance-bruised and bloodied and made whole, reborn, and it is John’s and it is Sherlock’s and it’s blood and matter and shape and undulating, unrepentant feeling fused in sound and sensation, sentiment and consequence and calm, and Sherlock wants to live inside the notes, the rhythm and the rhyme. He never wants to see a day when they’re gone, when they’re no longer his and he’s no longer tangled inside them, known through and through.
“John,” he gasps, breathless and brimming with all that he can’t yet recognise and still knows all too well; gasps because he feels and he breathes but he suspects, for all of his brilliance, that he’ll never be able to say: “don’t stop.”
And John, John who is everything and yet, inconceivably, also so much less and more, and both are exceedingly, blindingly bright; John understands, and he doesn’t stop.
He doesn’t stop.
"It’s like being back in a war-zone, like my chest's on fire," John murmurs, breathes, barely gets out as his lungs heave, heavy, and Sherlock's tossed about with the force of his, lolled around at the neck. "When I’m with you, it’s a battleground, there’s no cover.”
Sherlock’s lips part when he hears it, when his begging is met, is fulfilled; John’s tone is airy, ephemeral; his mind is cloudy but his chest is open, clear: Sherlock can hear the syllables and the sluicing and the sharp hiss of air as John babbles, beats, breathes. There is a fire in Sherlock’s gut that flags before it feeds, surges and tightens between his thighs when the sounds processes and sings to him, when the words make sense from between John’s ribs, through the thickening air around them. The wet rim of Sherlock’s lips leaves traces on John’s skin, a mark above his beating heart, the curve of the right atrium, and it thrills, sparks something in Sherlock that is wholly transforming, that turns him into liquid and heat and robs solidity from his world for an instant: that defines him in fluttering uncertainty and a blissful rush that rivals the drugs; perhaps surpasses, maybe.
Yes.
“Like my heart's near the end of its run, like it's all about to implode at the middle and it's going to stop, like I'm going to stop.” John’s voice breaks as Sherlock shifts, rolls his hips only half-accidental, half spurred by need and the way his body, the very fibres of his being are growing in John’s direction, orienting to the light of him, the sun of him and learning to react to his presence, his proximity; John’s voice goes dim and his words bleed into some strange and wonderful hybrid of a keen and a moan that Sherlock burns into his hard drive and vows never to forget.
Sherlock stills, and loses something irreplaceable to the thud-and-rush of John’s heart waging war against his lungs, neither giving any ground; he loses, but he gains something else profound in the bloodshed and the bruising and the testament of life between them, beneath them, inside and within.Sherlock pants because he’s running, racing below the surface; he’s terrified and desperate and he needs, he needs-
“Like I'll fall and fail and go out from the knees, crash and burn and be gone, like I’ll just give way to the dust,” John picks back up, breathless, mindless, and his chest’s heaving with more than just his breath, now, tossing Sherlock around on a whim.
“When you're here, when I'm with you," John gasps and there's a frightening, fantastical gallop of his pulse, an arrhythmic double-beat that shudders and Sherlock peaks hard in meeting with the torrent, the crazed-chaotic pounding beneath his ear. He cries out and clutches John to him as he comes, violent and consumed with a need he doesn't comprehend but can't deny, and they’re close, they’re so close.
They’re close.
And the friction Sherlock creates between them, between his pulsing length and John’s hardness is unintentional but electric, remarkable in ways Sherlock could never have predicted, would never have supposed from the objective evidence alone-a logical impossibility, and yet it’s truer than Sherlock can process. It’s true, and it comes to its height between them as John follows him over the edge, strangled, and they both come down hard, crashed into the sand without a care for finding balance, or footing; just their hands in close proximity, the pulse in Sherlock’s thumb unforgiving where he brushes the centre of John’s palm, traces head-line and life-line and heart-line and fate-line in deliberate sequence, musing, useless, and he presses his head against John’s chest all the harder, until the sound of the beat is muffled for how he crushes the shell of his ear to the skin.
Sherlock, though, is far too shattered to mind it, to question the quality so long as the sound is still there, so long as it doesn’t leave, never leaves: so long as he can watch the little jump beneath the sweat-slick skin stretched taut across the pectoralis major-so long as he can gasp for air at just this angle, so that every exhale Sherlock expels drifts sharp across John’s chest, hardening the bud of his nipple and sending a complementary thrill through Sherlock’s bones at the revelation of it, the accomplishment, the success: he alone is the cause of this effect. He did that.
He thinks, perhaps, that he understands John’s wonder at crime scenes, at the process of deduction that is fundamental to Sherlock at his core; he finally comprehends it, because this moment, his breath and John’s body and the reactions and the heat: the moment snatches at his breath and clings and steals everything away, it steals him away, and it, he, just-
Amazing.
It’s amazing, John is amazing, whatever it is they embody as a unit, as a cohesive-compatible, reciprocal whole; it is incredible, uncanny, and Sherlock lets his lungs fill with the scent of it, with the musk of exertion, of humanness and salt and feeling, awkward and sweet all at once.
It’s the first time in months-eleven months and seven days, to be precise-that he doesn’t crave a cigarette when the silence starts to encroach, when the pressure in his chest builds to boiling.
And instead of resisting, which has proven fruitless now for far too long to justify persistence, for him to continue in pursuing a lead that yields nothing of worth; instead of denying the swell in him, Sherlock does the only logical thing, and changes tactics, alters his course of action.
Instead, Sherlock breathes in even deeper and in exhaling, he releases something of himself into the lingering ether, sinking boneless onto, into John’s torso and letting his neck slacken, his head list just a bit as his eyes slide closed, as he sighs out the last of the resistance in him for this moment and the next, perhaps even the moment following that as well as John threads his fingers through Sherlock’s wet, limp curls and exhales, too; joins Sherlock, holds him steady and follows him even as he leads, even as he sets the pace with the muscle at his core.
"It’s like gunfire, it’s proof of life at the very end. You're a battlefield, Sherlock," John finishes: belated, breathless, like he has something to give or to prove or to offer, and Sherlock will take it because he’s selfish, because he needs, because he thinks he might just try his damnedest to return these favours, these unfathomable gifts, and maybe-just maybe-he will one day succeed.
"You... you're like running into the fray without any cover, without relief. You're fucking brilliant, perfect, blinding danger,” John draws out an exhale, and Sherlock breathes it in like it’s all that there is as John mouths, whispers-spent: “and fuck all if I don’t want it, if I don’t need it like blood in my goddamned veins.”
John’s pulse ebbs, calms, but Sherlock’s doesn’t, can’t: he takes John’s hand now and clutches it to the centre of his own chest, not sure what he means by it but needing it, needing something there to keep it close, to keep that traitorous organ from loosing itself and going rogue, sprouting wings and leaving him, abandoning him just as he’s realised its worth, just as he’s recognised how essential it is to his survival. He needs something to hold it, something to keep it near, to need it wholly and without reserve.
And John, fucking brilliant, boundless, beautiful John; yet again, John sees what Sherlock can’t show and hears what he won’t say and he clutches, digs fingers into the skin, between the ribs until it aches, until Sherlock knows bruises will spread in the morning: John clutches like he wants to keep Sherlock’s heart where it is, like he needs it to stay between them, too, and Sherlock’s never known this, never felt this, whatever this is: Sherlock’s heart starts to slow when John holds it in place; holds it. Keeps it.
Eases it from the ledge.
Sherlock breathes, and there’s something unaccountably marvellous about knowing, unequivocally, that John is feeling it, that John’s guiding it from the outside; there is something inexpressible about his lungs obeying John’s touch, taking in the world anew at the contact of his palm on Sherlock’s skin. There’s something uncanny about the way his heart loosens, lightens, bathes in the feel and the sound, the soft and steady backbeat in John’s chest, at Sherlock’s ear-in the synchronic ways in which the drumming starts to join and sear and soothe, and Sherlock looks up, pivots his head at the point where he listens, where he seeks the bass of John’s pulse. He looks up and meets John’s eyes, and his blood stalls for an instant, his heart trips out of time with John’s heat for a beat before it’s caught and held by John: by John’s heartbeat and John’s hand that feels the stumbling, by John’s eyes on Sherlock’s when their gazes meet.
Sherlock thinks he’s never seen anything so startling, so unaccountably bare and full and yet certain. So sure.
John’s lips are on Sherlock’s before he can breathe, and Sherlock lets his head shift, leaves the sound abandoned just for now to tend to the taste of John, the slick warmth of his mouth.
John’s hand doesn’t leave Sherlock’s chest; his fingertips don’t stop clenching, just a little, in time with Sherlock’s pulse, and Sherlock thinks that probability is misleading, because this feels impossible. This feels almost perfect.
This feels real.
It has to be true.
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,670
Summary: John’s heartbeat is the first and only symphony that Sherlock doesn’t quite feel worthy enough to know. (Part IV of the Cardiophilia Sequence; Follows suddenly your heart showed me my way, the beat and beating heart, and your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows))
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and beta-work and for knowing the rhythm well enough to predict the breaks.
echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)
“You’re enthralled, aren’t you?” John murmurs, dazed, and the tone of his voice something unknown, something that Sherlock, for all his vast holds and stores of knowledge, of reference on John specifically-on the way his tongue moves around vowels, the way that certain syllables elongate on his vocal cords, stretched. Sherlock wouldn’t have associated that pitch, that breathless, distant, drenched kind of sound with John had he not been there, had he not felt the word resonate, shivering through John’s chest, echoing around the pleural cavity and bouncing, uncoordinated and poorly held around John’s ribs. He wouldn’t have recognised the sound had it not been clear, resonant where it stood, spread, threaded through John’s torso and out to the world; pummelled by the heart that Sherlock’s fixed upon, pressed against, entrenched inside and caught within, dependent. Utterly. Entirely.
He wouldn’t have recognised John’s voice like this if he hadn’t felt the words slip in beside the beat that he’d know anywhere; that would know him and find him and claim him in turn, to the fathomless depths, to the end of his days.
Sherlock shivers with the promise of it, the potential; the way the forever is unknowable, yet he cannot help but reach.
“You’re fucking riveted,” John states the obvious, but Sherlock doesn’t mind it in the moment, doesn’t need to say anything, to chide John for his habit; Sherlock doesn’t think he has enough breath in his lungs to speak even if he’d wanted to, if he’d truly desired to move his lips and make a sound aside from the panting, the gasping as John runs fingers through his hair and lets Sherlock stay, lets him remain heavy at the centre of his chest. He gives Sherlock the gift of his bare torso and the beat of his heart against Sherlock’s cheek, tight against his ear like fire and wonder and the sky before a storm.
“I’m evidence, aren’t I?” John asks. “That’s all,” and the beat hits harder when he breathes in, and that’s normal, that’s normal, but it sounds different from before; slower and sluggish for the instants wrapped up in the inhale. Sherlock feels a clench in his own chest as he digs his fingernails into John’s side, needing him to know things he can’t say, can’t find words for because he never learned them, because they were never uttered, because Sherlock Holmes has never felt this way for anyone before, and there has never been a need in the past to articulate that which had yet to blossom, to soar.
“Just like a crime scene, that’s the look in your eyes,” John draws circles against Sherlock's scalp and tries to urge his chin up, tries to make eye contact to see if the look’s still there, the one he’s citing and judging and secretly lamenting-Sherlock can hear regret in John’s heartbeat, a subtle lag between contraction and release, the way the left ventricle and the right seem just a tad bit off, the valves lazy, disappointed, filled with something sorrowful; the atria lachrymose and Sherlock cannot look, cannot move, will not move because he’s listening, and he closes his eyes and breathes out and nods just a bit, nods in time to the steadily-accelerating beat that is everything, so simple.
He’d never imagined, not once, that everything, all of this-what it means and the possibilities that it holds, what it’s done and how it’s changed the very fabric of a universe that Sherlock thought he understood, thought he could pick apart piece by piece and observe. Except for this, except for intangibility and the sweet-soft ache that he cannot quantify, that he can’t look for on a scan or dissect beneath a lens but that lives in him more sure than silence and the residue of gunpowder from a pulsing-perfect shot; he’d never dreamt that this could ever be revealed as simple.
“Yes,” Sherlock whispers, gives shape and sound to a breath, but only just. “Yes,” and it’s repetition, repetition and it’s simple and it’s right, except no, not quite; there’s more, so much more and Sherlock feels filled with it, suddenly. Sherlock is overwhelmed by this like cocaine and the need for it and the loss of it, like a murder and the look of the culprit, the colour of blood on the hands of the guilty in shades the eyes can’t see but Sherlock can taste on the breeze: sweat and shame and delight, the sweet tang of violence and the detritus left behind.
It’s like that, and Sherlock’s speaking, staring at the place where John’s pulse starts to jump, a fledgling in the dark as Sherlock stares, begs it with his eyes dark and pupils full to bound, to beat, to show itself and give itself and to be, be, be.
“But it’s, it’s not just...” Sherlock trails off, and this is another thing that words weren’t made for, something novel and fundamental and flawless, like fire reducing him to ash and blood on the backs of his teeth. This is something he knows deeper than he knows anything, something that has etched into the panels, the very framework, the structure of the Palace in his mind and has lit it anew, has remade him, and it’s something words will never touch, no matter how deeply he knows it in his chest, his lungs, the veins that trace his red-ruined heart.
“It’s data,” he speaks finally; raw, rough, but honest, unbroken, true to the brim and unwarranted, undiluted, unhinged. “It’s the most crucial data,” and it is, by god, by the stars, by facts and figures and chemicals and the brain and the heart and the head and the soil and the sand, by words and all they’re not built to contain, by the colour of John’s blush and the bow of his lips and the shape of his chest and the pulse in his wrist: it is true and real and full and Sherlock cannot deny it, much as he wants to, needs to, will die if he doesn’t as sure as if he does.
“It’s you,” he tells John, a whisper. “It is vitality, it is the centre, the source.” He strokes the heat of John’s skin with an idle thumb and smiles soft when John shivers, when his pulse leaps in time with the shudder, with the raising of hairs on his skin.
“It’s,” and Sherlock pauses, swallows, and his own heart’s threatening to sync, to lilt about in time with John’s, and Sherlock’s never known that sort of parallel, so intense and present and near and unrelenting. He has never experienced connection quite like this: with John naked beneath him, with his groin pressed tight to John’s thigh and his ear to John’s pumping, wet-warm heart.
“You’re here, and you’re real and you’re gravity and nicotine and you are, this is,” Sherlock swallows again, but there’s something lodged now, something stronger than his throat and his will and his own thrumming heart; stronger, he thinks, than his ability to name, so he says the only thing left, the only thing: “John-”
“Shh,” John tells him, bends his neck to press lips to the crown of Sherlock’s head. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I don’t,” Sherlock starts, suddenly desperate, suddenly choking on that nameless entity obstructing his airways and John’s heart, John’s heart thrums louder, harder; “John, I can’t,” and Sherlock’s not strong enough, no, he’s not, and he’s drowning, except-
“There’s more than just that,” Sherlock tells him, losing himself in the relentless, ramming beat and exhaling, slow and sheer, because he’s not strong enough, but John-his John; John just might be.
“I know,” John exhales, soft and steady but his pulse is a different story, racing and rattling and out of control. Sherlock brings a hand to John’s chest to touch the trembling muscle where it rebels against the flesh; and yes, yes, he is riveted. “I know.”
Sherlock feels a momentary relief, is bolstered and saved in the affirmation, the confirmation that for all that Sherlock feels a part of John’s body, John’s presence, John’s living-surging self; for all that Sherlock fears the connection, the weakness, it is a strange sort of release that accompanies the knowledge that John is just as captured, just as caught inside the neurones, the cells under Sherlock’s skin. It’s a blessing, but it doesn’t last: Sherlock finds himself adrift, unanchored in the rushing crescendo of John’s racing pulse, its ever-growing force, his respiration and circulation and the feel of rising and falling on the waves with John’s chest and something’s missing, a piece silenced, and it sours in Sherlock’s stomach until he clutches, until he can’t help himself any longer.
“Keep talking,” Sherlock pleads, moans, demands as he gives shape to the syllables in broken, keening breaths, desperate trembles of his vocal cords because it’s a symphony, a masterpiece: the contraction, the cadence of John’s heart on systole-the percussion; the rush of his breath-woodwinds; the keen of his blood, the strings, the sharp bleed of the electrochemical stimulus that peaks as diastole wanes, like the brass. And then John, John’s voice and John’s words and the vibration, the tone and pitch of each vocalisation, each subvocal and supravocal sound that comes from John, that John creates, that resonates and takes form in Sherlock, because of Sherlock, undoing Sherlock from the foundations and holding, keeping him still when all logic would have him fall.
“Why?” John asks, struggling just a bit, exerted: not accusing, or rejecting, but curious, and the answer is clear.
Why? Because it’s poetry, it’s Tchaikovsky in the wrong key, the orchestra humming at odds with itself, and it is somehow-impossible; it is somehow every case and every murder, every saved life and borrowed breath and blessed triumph and vicious defeat. It is the answer and the question and it is John, and that is immutable, undeniable, unshakeable. It is the world and its vibrance, its terror in a breath and a beat and a pause, in the meniscus at the top of a flask and the tackiness clinging to his skin from a nicotine patch. It is imperfection in the tightness at his throat, the quirk of lips that borders, blasphemous, on sacrality.
This is the heart, this is the heart, and it was burned-a sacrifice, a penance-bruised and bloodied and made whole, reborn, and it is John’s and it is Sherlock’s and it’s blood and matter and shape and undulating, unrepentant feeling fused in sound and sensation, sentiment and consequence and calm, and Sherlock wants to live inside the notes, the rhythm and the rhyme. He never wants to see a day when they’re gone, when they’re no longer his and he’s no longer tangled inside them, known through and through.
“John,” he gasps, breathless and brimming with all that he can’t yet recognise and still knows all too well; gasps because he feels and he breathes but he suspects, for all of his brilliance, that he’ll never be able to say: “don’t stop.”
And John, John who is everything and yet, inconceivably, also so much less and more, and both are exceedingly, blindingly bright; John understands, and he doesn’t stop.
He doesn’t stop.
"It’s like being back in a war-zone, like my chest's on fire," John murmurs, breathes, barely gets out as his lungs heave, heavy, and Sherlock's tossed about with the force of his, lolled around at the neck. "When I’m with you, it’s a battleground, there’s no cover.”
Sherlock’s lips part when he hears it, when his begging is met, is fulfilled; John’s tone is airy, ephemeral; his mind is cloudy but his chest is open, clear: Sherlock can hear the syllables and the sluicing and the sharp hiss of air as John babbles, beats, breathes. There is a fire in Sherlock’s gut that flags before it feeds, surges and tightens between his thighs when the sounds processes and sings to him, when the words make sense from between John’s ribs, through the thickening air around them. The wet rim of Sherlock’s lips leaves traces on John’s skin, a mark above his beating heart, the curve of the right atrium, and it thrills, sparks something in Sherlock that is wholly transforming, that turns him into liquid and heat and robs solidity from his world for an instant: that defines him in fluttering uncertainty and a blissful rush that rivals the drugs; perhaps surpasses, maybe.
Yes.
“Like my heart's near the end of its run, like it's all about to implode at the middle and it's going to stop, like I'm going to stop.” John’s voice breaks as Sherlock shifts, rolls his hips only half-accidental, half spurred by need and the way his body, the very fibres of his being are growing in John’s direction, orienting to the light of him, the sun of him and learning to react to his presence, his proximity; John’s voice goes dim and his words bleed into some strange and wonderful hybrid of a keen and a moan that Sherlock burns into his hard drive and vows never to forget.
Sherlock stills, and loses something irreplaceable to the thud-and-rush of John’s heart waging war against his lungs, neither giving any ground; he loses, but he gains something else profound in the bloodshed and the bruising and the testament of life between them, beneath them, inside and within.Sherlock pants because he’s running, racing below the surface; he’s terrified and desperate and he needs, he needs-
“Like I'll fall and fail and go out from the knees, crash and burn and be gone, like I’ll just give way to the dust,” John picks back up, breathless, mindless, and his chest’s heaving with more than just his breath, now, tossing Sherlock around on a whim.
“When you're here, when I'm with you," John gasps and there's a frightening, fantastical gallop of his pulse, an arrhythmic double-beat that shudders and Sherlock peaks hard in meeting with the torrent, the crazed-chaotic pounding beneath his ear. He cries out and clutches John to him as he comes, violent and consumed with a need he doesn't comprehend but can't deny, and they’re close, they’re so close.
They’re close.
And the friction Sherlock creates between them, between his pulsing length and John’s hardness is unintentional but electric, remarkable in ways Sherlock could never have predicted, would never have supposed from the objective evidence alone-a logical impossibility, and yet it’s truer than Sherlock can process. It’s true, and it comes to its height between them as John follows him over the edge, strangled, and they both come down hard, crashed into the sand without a care for finding balance, or footing; just their hands in close proximity, the pulse in Sherlock’s thumb unforgiving where he brushes the centre of John’s palm, traces head-line and life-line and heart-line and fate-line in deliberate sequence, musing, useless, and he presses his head against John’s chest all the harder, until the sound of the beat is muffled for how he crushes the shell of his ear to the skin.
Sherlock, though, is far too shattered to mind it, to question the quality so long as the sound is still there, so long as it doesn’t leave, never leaves: so long as he can watch the little jump beneath the sweat-slick skin stretched taut across the pectoralis major-so long as he can gasp for air at just this angle, so that every exhale Sherlock expels drifts sharp across John’s chest, hardening the bud of his nipple and sending a complementary thrill through Sherlock’s bones at the revelation of it, the accomplishment, the success: he alone is the cause of this effect. He did that.
He thinks, perhaps, that he understands John’s wonder at crime scenes, at the process of deduction that is fundamental to Sherlock at his core; he finally comprehends it, because this moment, his breath and John’s body and the reactions and the heat: the moment snatches at his breath and clings and steals everything away, it steals him away, and it, he, just-
Amazing.
It’s amazing, John is amazing, whatever it is they embody as a unit, as a cohesive-compatible, reciprocal whole; it is incredible, uncanny, and Sherlock lets his lungs fill with the scent of it, with the musk of exertion, of humanness and salt and feeling, awkward and sweet all at once.
It’s the first time in months-eleven months and seven days, to be precise-that he doesn’t crave a cigarette when the silence starts to encroach, when the pressure in his chest builds to boiling.
And instead of resisting, which has proven fruitless now for far too long to justify persistence, for him to continue in pursuing a lead that yields nothing of worth; instead of denying the swell in him, Sherlock does the only logical thing, and changes tactics, alters his course of action.
Instead, Sherlock breathes in even deeper and in exhaling, he releases something of himself into the lingering ether, sinking boneless onto, into John’s torso and letting his neck slacken, his head list just a bit as his eyes slide closed, as he sighs out the last of the resistance in him for this moment and the next, perhaps even the moment following that as well as John threads his fingers through Sherlock’s wet, limp curls and exhales, too; joins Sherlock, holds him steady and follows him even as he leads, even as he sets the pace with the muscle at his core.
"It’s like gunfire, it’s proof of life at the very end. You're a battlefield, Sherlock," John finishes: belated, breathless, like he has something to give or to prove or to offer, and Sherlock will take it because he’s selfish, because he needs, because he thinks he might just try his damnedest to return these favours, these unfathomable gifts, and maybe-just maybe-he will one day succeed.
"You... you're like running into the fray without any cover, without relief. You're fucking brilliant, perfect, blinding danger,” John draws out an exhale, and Sherlock breathes it in like it’s all that there is as John mouths, whispers-spent: “and fuck all if I don’t want it, if I don’t need it like blood in my goddamned veins.”
John’s pulse ebbs, calms, but Sherlock’s doesn’t, can’t: he takes John’s hand now and clutches it to the centre of his own chest, not sure what he means by it but needing it, needing something there to keep it close, to keep that traitorous organ from loosing itself and going rogue, sprouting wings and leaving him, abandoning him just as he’s realised its worth, just as he’s recognised how essential it is to his survival. He needs something to hold it, something to keep it near, to need it wholly and without reserve.
And John, fucking brilliant, boundless, beautiful John; yet again, John sees what Sherlock can’t show and hears what he won’t say and he clutches, digs fingers into the skin, between the ribs until it aches, until Sherlock knows bruises will spread in the morning: John clutches like he wants to keep Sherlock’s heart where it is, like he needs it to stay between them, too, and Sherlock’s never known this, never felt this, whatever this is: Sherlock’s heart starts to slow when John holds it in place; holds it. Keeps it.
Eases it from the ledge.
Sherlock breathes, and there’s something unaccountably marvellous about knowing, unequivocally, that John is feeling it, that John’s guiding it from the outside; there is something inexpressible about his lungs obeying John’s touch, taking in the world anew at the contact of his palm on Sherlock’s skin. There’s something uncanny about the way his heart loosens, lightens, bathes in the feel and the sound, the soft and steady backbeat in John’s chest, at Sherlock’s ear-in the synchronic ways in which the drumming starts to join and sear and soothe, and Sherlock looks up, pivots his head at the point where he listens, where he seeks the bass of John’s pulse. He looks up and meets John’s eyes, and his blood stalls for an instant, his heart trips out of time with John’s heat for a beat before it’s caught and held by John: by John’s heartbeat and John’s hand that feels the stumbling, by John’s eyes on Sherlock’s when their gazes meet.
Sherlock thinks he’s never seen anything so startling, so unaccountably bare and full and yet certain. So sure.
John’s lips are on Sherlock’s before he can breathe, and Sherlock lets his head shift, leaves the sound abandoned just for now to tend to the taste of John, the slick warmth of his mouth.
John’s hand doesn’t leave Sherlock’s chest; his fingertips don’t stop clenching, just a little, in time with Sherlock’s pulse, and Sherlock thinks that probability is misleading, because this feels impossible. This feels almost perfect.
This feels real.
It has to be true.