Fic: i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine) (2/3)
Title: i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine), Part II
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,740
Summary: All songs end. All hearts stop.
But damnit, not John’s.
(Part V of the Cardiophilia Sequence; Follows suddenly your heart showed me my way, the beat and beating heart, your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows), and echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)))
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My continued thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and beta-work, and for encouraging my emphases.
Previous: Part I
i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine), Part II
In the solitude, the privacy of his mind, he can almost admit it. Not in words, not specifically; not without caveats and implications and subtle, deniable assents to the individual components of the confessions, the admissions. But he can acknowledge it, however partially, however briefly: however hollow in his chest.
Sherlock Holmes fears silence.
There had never been silence, before. There had been quiet; times when his mind was violent and ruthless and hateful when it wished for him to suffer the void, but there was always something. His senses would rebel; there was always a buzz, a hum, sometimes a roar or a wail-there were always thoughts, always images and intimations and the call of a crime or a case or a quest or a high. Always, he could hear it, could perceive the vibration of it, maddening and ever-present, ceaseless even as it vacillated, his only companion, the only thing he’d ever need.
All had been well.
But then there had been a soldier, a doctor, a fighter and a healer and a mind that didn’t undulate wildly but took the world as it stood and built from the ground up, patient and competent and careful and sure; then there had been the cardiac muscle that pumped steady and full, committed to the moment after watching the void consume too much life, curtail too many songs and halt them before the coda was penned. Then there had been jam and antiseptics and steady hands and a scar traced, dug into tough skin; skin that was too soft to the touch, too desirable, too precious.
But then-but then, there was a heart: miraculous, impossible-that was strong enough, large enough, brave enough to beat for two, that could read the cues before they came and that leaped without a failsafe, a fallback, a floor; that taught him without his knowledge, outside his of awareness. There was a heart that quietly, patiently, damnably recalibrated his metronome and repositioned his centre of gravity and moulded the parts of himself be believed to be solid, unshakeable-that altered the smallest parts of him until without even realising, he’d been made new: the chords of him completed and a harmony coaxed forth, triumphant, keening and fledgling but filled with such promise, a voice that sang in the blood of him, a pulse that resonated, persistent, until his own heart surged in time.
And dear god, it was symphonic. It was brilliant and blinding and it soared, it seared around his veins-not just in them but through them, buoying them and raising them high, lifting them and allowing them to reach summits, to trace peaks he’d never known; speeding along the lilting tendrils, the hints of thoughts and observations, the first inklings of deduction and making them glide, making them thrill with new vigour, new life. The layers of being, of motive and meaning and progression and cause became simultaneously manifest: not teased back in succession but played out at once with a joyous abandon he’d never thought to look for, a playful sort of sheen to the Work that changed everything, that threw light at different angles and painted the world in new shades, lent tint and nuance to every speck and every clue, the most mundane of all minutiae would glitter, so long as it was cast in the proper luminance, so long as John brought forth the sun.
His John.
It was a revelation, really, loath as he is to admit it, deep as it shivers in him, crying in the cold. Before, Sherlock had never dreamt of pairing notes like that, of fusing keys and blending shades. He’d never thought of countering his double sharps with such subtle, complex naturals-naturals, but never flats, never boring, always fascinating and foolish, fresh and fevered and full, and it proved genius, proved wrenching and wild in a soul he’d never believed in until it burst to life and sang, until something in him shuddered warm and wanting from the brain to the bones of him, until no other word-not rational term-could fit the extent of it, the expanse: the way it felt and clung and moved.
He shudders, but it’s nothing: everything now is still.
He doesn’t remember, for certain, when the buzzing started to coalesce, when the random pitches harmonised into a whole. He can’t recall when the whir grew fraught with whispers, with murmurs and the sound of boiling water, of pouring tea, of footsteps racing and the loss of a limp, that particular pattern of steps. He doesn’t remember when the hum that was manic became pleasant and smooth, a bullet train rather than a melee, the processes streamlined and structured anew, and Sherlock had known that he was brilliant, known he was efficient and incomprehensibly clever and yet then there were crescendos and supernovae, discoveries and details that made the Chase seem new again, made the quiet murmurs of dull and common and repetition, repetition, repetition fade in the breeze because there was a weight at his side, in his hand: there was a presence-unlooked for and yet, somehow perfectly suited, carved to fit the holes Sherlock had never noticed, hadn’t seen-that shifted the balance moment by moment, breath by breath.
And then the beat. Oh Christ, the beat.
Sherlock knows, he knew from the very beginning that it was dangerous, that pulse-enticing, potentially lethal: he knew that it was everything, the very best, the truest, darkest, most desperate and concealed parts of the man who held it, against whose force it strained. Sherlock knew that if he let himself dwell upon it that he’d learn to know it, to question it and seek answers, to centre curiosity around its ebb and flow and then he’d crave it, and his cravings had never been benign-he’d need it, soon enough But in his mind he’d argued: it was easier to need the pulse than to need the man.
Than to admit that he needed the man.
But then there had been more. There’d been longing, alongside addiction. There’d been affection, alongside fascination. There’d been feeling, sentiment, the flutter of warmth that accompanied his intellectual occupation. There’d been his own hated-heart lit up, new and vibrant, brought to stinging surging swelling life, a life he’d never prepared for, never thought upon, never wondered how to grasp and control and abide.
He was lost almost immediately, stumbling, flailing, his eyes blurred with the windfall, his observations skewed, his mind confused and it was horrifying, maddening: he’d clawed for release to no avail, had clung to the spinning feeling in him, a hymn and a dirge because it was beautiful, because something deeper than cognition knew what he couldn’t, what his mind had been trained to ignore.
He’d been falling, he realises now, from the very start.
But then: a hand, a wrist, a splay of fingertips like feathers, like a sigh-then a stretch of skin to meet his eyes, to slide against the bridge of his nose, warm and throbbing; then lips and a tongue and then more: the taste of sweat and flesh, of heat and need, the scent of arousal and the timing, the arc, the journey from pounding to thrumming to pulsing to trilling, to singing and staying in Sherlock’s mind and his chest, to lilting along the cell walls of every piece of him, every component of his being like a swan song and a climax and a phoenix at rebirth, torn apart and set afire and then blinking, blinded, brought forth once more. It was failing to recognise himself from day to day inside the mirror, and yet, knowing the reflection in ways he never could before, seeing truth in the glass and the fog of his breath on the surface, in the flush of his skin and the daring pulse between his collarbones, visible when he thought too hard on it, when he dwelled on the whys he couldn’t handle instead of the weight he’d come to treasure: crushing even as it held him close. It was cursing his mind, his mind for the first time, the only time, unforgivable, because it was ill-equipped for all its space, its dexterity and skill: it is not sufficient to process and cherish and hold all of John, the whole of him, because John is greater, John exceeds it,:John exceeds all that Sherlock can imagine and recall and that is impossible and unthinkable and yet, and yet-
John exceeded. John was.
His cheeks are wet, Sherlock realises, and his chest seems heavy, leaden. By rights, it should hurt to breathe. By all logic, he should be able to feel the treasonous pump of his own heart, tangible for all the pressure built around it, a wall reforming itself but futile, transparent, all air and blood and already breached. He can hear it.
But there is no feeling.
Which simply affirms, merely serves to underscore the fact that he could feel, did feel, for all his denial and disdain: he had felt, and deeply, transformatively even, maybe, because the lack of it, the loss of it-the numbness is unconscionable, unbearable,
Again, words are inadequate, they do not fit, they’ve not been etched, never rolled off a tongue with care and passion and sentiment, never skipped, strong but soft and drenched with colour off a mouth whose taste Sherlock can’t quite recall anymore, can’t speak to even by comparison, can’t recapture adequately in his mind as Camellia sinensis and toothpaste, as curry and coriander and butterscotch, as sweetness and spice and freshness and life and all the little cravings that Sherlock never paid any mind to; that once satisfied, once overwhelmed and overflowed nearly overcame the others, the darker yearnings-could have satiated enough to grant submission, to calm the worst of his demons, the beasts.
He can’t.
Because there is no rhythm. There is no cadence. There is noise, and it is frantic, it is rising to a fever pitch, unforgiving and violent and ready to scream until the glass cracks through, until he fractures except he cannot, he is broken, and to shatter any more would be redundant, would be blood in shrivelled veins, a blow when there’s no pressure to ferry it to its target, no momentum to drive the last bullet clean through the core.
There is noise, but it means nothing. It does not echo. It cannot touch.
There is silence.
The ceiling is so very far away-the thought filters through the open space inside his skull, and he knows that the floor at his back isn’t moving, but everything seems untethered, leaving, fleeing, and he’s always falling, never firm. He plays with the crease, the fold of his morocco case, always hidden under the panels in his drawers, concealed by his sock index, obvious, never found. The leather is smooth, he knows that, but it’s no more than air, no more than fleeting contact: it means nothing, makes no impact, less than a vacuum and sullied, dead.
Seven percent. His perfect solution.
There are no solutions for this.
He remembers the overdose, remembers the burn in his veins and the way that he could feel his heartbeat in his cuticles, his kneecaps, the roots of his teeth: rattling and shivering in every strand of hair. He recalls the process of it: he’d needed to know the upper extreme, the limit-microgram by microgram until he was certain, until he knew what his body could withstand, its ne plus ultra in every sense. Bit by porous, needless-knowing bit.
Until breaking.
And oh, how it had burned. Fire and frenetic energy in his cells as they collapsed, as his neural pathways seared until simply brushing against his skull would have branded the coils, would have smote into the gyri and sulci like fingerprints, ouroboros on the skin. He remembers the convulsions of the one atrium before the other, vicious, at war: the heat, like John’s, a paltry imitation, a sorry excuse for a fix, but Sherlock wonders if maybe, just maybe he can fool himself. He wonders if maybe he can close his eyes and imagine, and maybe just the feeling will take him back only hours, only moments and he can pretend that there is rhythm again, superimpose some reason upon the world once more, a cure for the dullness and the way everything bleeds, all the edges washed away: for the way that observation now seems heavy, unwelcome-leaden, lacklustre, opaque.
He had felt then, in those moments, and he’d thought it was enough.
Except now he knows, now he knows and it isn’t. Now he knows new limits, quantities he never thought to measure, boundaries he never cared to push until they broke of their own accord, overfull, overwhelmed and throbbing, thrumming with a life he’d deemed tedious, and he’d been wrong.
He’d been wrong, fuck, he’d been wrong; but not to hate it, not to keep it at arm’s length. It deserved his caution, his disdain: it was vile and hateful and it burned brighter and harder and hotter, the hearts of stars and the fabric of time in a fist clenched hard at the centre, shaking, and if he squeezes his eyes shut tight enough, hard enough he can remember it, he can envision the flutter, the feeling of wild and limitless abandon, unrestrained potential and the free-fall that would follow, the bottomless, endless, perfect abomination of feeling, wrapped in surrender, encased in terror and weightlessness, simultaneous focus and infinity, and Sherlock, he, it, just-
He misses it. Jesus, he misses it.
A sob catches in his throat; he hears it, and it should sting, it should burn soundless in his ragged throat, but it doesn’t. The words are inadequate, but he knows the colloquialism, he can’t avoid the echoes of it in his mind, in the empty space where it used to sing against the ventricular walls, sparking underneath the endocardium: the innermost intimate chambers of the one palace he’d never peered inside before, one that was dark and unknown until someone braved it, someone cracked it open at the rusting hinges and gave light to the dusk.
Sherlock shivers at the memory, the way he shrank back, a coward. He was right to, he was right, but he wishes in the moment, now, that he’d been brave, that he’d met John sooner, more fully, that he’d given everything and let John’s courage come to him as everything else of John, of them had been held close-silent, steady, certain and horrifically undervalued for all that it was, all that it possessed and meant. He wishes he’d had faith and given John the cosmos that spun where his heart used to be, because Sherlock knows what this is called.
He knows, even if the word doesn’t fit, he can’t contain the depths, the lengths, the timbre and majesty and the tempo and the trill: the rhythm and the conscious thump, in pairs but then staggering, striving toward nearness and perfect symmetry: quadruplets drawn together every time that Sherlock pressed a hand and felt things that human skin was born too worn to touch. He knows the term, even if it can never hope to convey the sensation that overtook him every time he dropped his lips to John’s skin and imagined the barriers disintegrating, laved off and coating his tastebuds, immaculate, until Sherlock could savour blood, until he could time that treacherous, sumptuous, scared and sacred thump against his teeth; every time his mind affirmed what his mouth couldn’t say-and oh, what he’d give now to say it, all of it everything. What he wouldn’t give to affirm with every part of him that there is nothing sweeter in the world than the sound of that beat, nothing else that has ever grounded him or made him feel real, made him know he was safe, made him believe in better angels and missing pieces and a benevolent universe if only in passing, if only for the moments where John’s blood was his cantata, his siren song, his periodic table and his vision and his veins.
Love.
It is true, and it is everything but empty, yet he fears it above all things.
And it is alive. It is alive, and it’s bleeding, and it’s a torture more cruel than this world is meant to know because it should have left, it should be gone, it should have died with the heart it belonged inside, the heart that love learned to sing for, that it held to: the heart that should have stopped in twos and yet the stubborn half of it still in his chest is clanging, subvocal-a noise that doesn’t break the still, doesn’t stave off the silence but lends it a new fathomlessness, a new depth because the only heart that matters stopped still beneath his ear, the only heart that matters stole his breath and killed him cold, and all he can really make sense of is the senseless, all he can process is what he cannot accept and will not survive, not for long, and that is John, gone; John, gone.
John. Gone.
Forever.
He doesn’t remember, isn’t sure he had to think about lining the point of the needle to the push of a vein. It’s for the best.
The heat; he wonders if he’ll feel it. The heart, he wonders if it’ll surrender, give in.
His hand is trembling; his pulse limping, and he needs. He needs.
“Jesus.” Sherlock never heard the footfalls on the steps, nor the creak of the door; the word, though, the voice makes his fingers relax and leaves the syringe to clatter to the floor.
There are hands at his elbows, sliding up to hook at the axillae; he is unmoored, unhinged, and gravity is all the more hateful, all the more giddy to see it-Sherlock slumps, boneless, but there’s strength behind him, around him, pulling, keeping him afloat in the ocean of this endless, sneering, hushed-howling grief.
He doesn’t want to be saved.
“Up,” the voice commands, and he recognises it: strong jaw, silver hair.
“Come on,” Lestrade groans as he balances Sherlock, swears as Sherlock stumbles, unable to orient himself, his frame: cast out from all orbits and the universal laws-still and staggering.
“Careful.” Lestrade’s voice is close, the breath of him should be warm: it isn’t.
Vertigo hits him, unforgiving; it’s not dizziness so much as blackness, so much as an intensification of the numbness that his brain knows isn’t right. Lestrade turns him around and studies him, takes in the flat.
“Fuck,” he breathes, “look at you.” If Greg sees the drugs on the floor, he says nothing.
“Right,” Lestrade sighs, and Sherlock feels the weight of being and losing and an over-heavy heart bear down, clench teeth around his frame, dragging him low but Lestrade seems to see it, seems to anticipate the assault and holds him steady, lets him slump at the pivot points while his skeleton stays upright.
“Pull yourself together,” Greg tells him, orders-just a tad gruff. “We’re going to Barts.”
Sherlock, had he not been used up, bled dry: he may have questioned that. May have tried to process its unreason and deduce the purpose of the words. As it stands, he merely blinks, tries hard to swallow, longs for the hit scattered, lost like him on the floor.
“Now, Sherlock,” Lestrade urges, pulling Sherlock’s coat around him, threading his limp arms through the sleeves one by one and herding him, slowly, ankle-over-foot and uncoordinated, falling into the walls ever down, down, down until they reach the landing, the threshold.
Sherlock fears the outside, suddenly; fears whatever’s coming. He can’t make sense of why he needs to go to Barts, why he needs to leave or be or do; he doesn’t know what good he’ll serve when he’s empty and it’s quiet, so quiet, and he wants and he hates and he hurts so much that he can’t know it, can’t give it words or stay conscious with the ache because John’s gone, John’s gone and the world can’t possibly matter in light of that.
Sherlock doesn’t want to go to Bart’s to see his heart splayed out in the morgue.
But when the door slams behind them-as he staggers, half-dragged into Lestrade’s patrol car-he thinks, for a moment, that he can almost feel reverberations, like a stirring, like a whisper, like a caress inside his chest.
Please.
The salt-tracks on his cheeks is suddenly thick and stiff and cold, and his eyes sting against the air; he can feel, feel the trail of one more stray tear dip, let go from the precipice of his cheekbone and his breath hitches, desperate, acid in his chest and he’s too wasted now to help it, too weak to quash it.
Sherlock hopes.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 3,740
Summary: All songs end. All hearts stop.
But damnit, not John’s.
(Part V of the Cardiophilia Sequence; Follows suddenly your heart showed me my way, the beat and beating heart, your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows), and echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)))
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My continued thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and beta-work, and for encouraging my emphases.
Previous: Part I
i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine), Part II
In the solitude, the privacy of his mind, he can almost admit it. Not in words, not specifically; not without caveats and implications and subtle, deniable assents to the individual components of the confessions, the admissions. But he can acknowledge it, however partially, however briefly: however hollow in his chest.
Sherlock Holmes fears silence.
There had never been silence, before. There had been quiet; times when his mind was violent and ruthless and hateful when it wished for him to suffer the void, but there was always something. His senses would rebel; there was always a buzz, a hum, sometimes a roar or a wail-there were always thoughts, always images and intimations and the call of a crime or a case or a quest or a high. Always, he could hear it, could perceive the vibration of it, maddening and ever-present, ceaseless even as it vacillated, his only companion, the only thing he’d ever need.
All had been well.
But then there had been a soldier, a doctor, a fighter and a healer and a mind that didn’t undulate wildly but took the world as it stood and built from the ground up, patient and competent and careful and sure; then there had been the cardiac muscle that pumped steady and full, committed to the moment after watching the void consume too much life, curtail too many songs and halt them before the coda was penned. Then there had been jam and antiseptics and steady hands and a scar traced, dug into tough skin; skin that was too soft to the touch, too desirable, too precious.
But then-but then, there was a heart: miraculous, impossible-that was strong enough, large enough, brave enough to beat for two, that could read the cues before they came and that leaped without a failsafe, a fallback, a floor; that taught him without his knowledge, outside his of awareness. There was a heart that quietly, patiently, damnably recalibrated his metronome and repositioned his centre of gravity and moulded the parts of himself be believed to be solid, unshakeable-that altered the smallest parts of him until without even realising, he’d been made new: the chords of him completed and a harmony coaxed forth, triumphant, keening and fledgling but filled with such promise, a voice that sang in the blood of him, a pulse that resonated, persistent, until his own heart surged in time.
And dear god, it was symphonic. It was brilliant and blinding and it soared, it seared around his veins-not just in them but through them, buoying them and raising them high, lifting them and allowing them to reach summits, to trace peaks he’d never known; speeding along the lilting tendrils, the hints of thoughts and observations, the first inklings of deduction and making them glide, making them thrill with new vigour, new life. The layers of being, of motive and meaning and progression and cause became simultaneously manifest: not teased back in succession but played out at once with a joyous abandon he’d never thought to look for, a playful sort of sheen to the Work that changed everything, that threw light at different angles and painted the world in new shades, lent tint and nuance to every speck and every clue, the most mundane of all minutiae would glitter, so long as it was cast in the proper luminance, so long as John brought forth the sun.
His John.
It was a revelation, really, loath as he is to admit it, deep as it shivers in him, crying in the cold. Before, Sherlock had never dreamt of pairing notes like that, of fusing keys and blending shades. He’d never thought of countering his double sharps with such subtle, complex naturals-naturals, but never flats, never boring, always fascinating and foolish, fresh and fevered and full, and it proved genius, proved wrenching and wild in a soul he’d never believed in until it burst to life and sang, until something in him shuddered warm and wanting from the brain to the bones of him, until no other word-not rational term-could fit the extent of it, the expanse: the way it felt and clung and moved.
He shudders, but it’s nothing: everything now is still.
He doesn’t remember, for certain, when the buzzing started to coalesce, when the random pitches harmonised into a whole. He can’t recall when the whir grew fraught with whispers, with murmurs and the sound of boiling water, of pouring tea, of footsteps racing and the loss of a limp, that particular pattern of steps. He doesn’t remember when the hum that was manic became pleasant and smooth, a bullet train rather than a melee, the processes streamlined and structured anew, and Sherlock had known that he was brilliant, known he was efficient and incomprehensibly clever and yet then there were crescendos and supernovae, discoveries and details that made the Chase seem new again, made the quiet murmurs of dull and common and repetition, repetition, repetition fade in the breeze because there was a weight at his side, in his hand: there was a presence-unlooked for and yet, somehow perfectly suited, carved to fit the holes Sherlock had never noticed, hadn’t seen-that shifted the balance moment by moment, breath by breath.
And then the beat. Oh Christ, the beat.
Sherlock knows, he knew from the very beginning that it was dangerous, that pulse-enticing, potentially lethal: he knew that it was everything, the very best, the truest, darkest, most desperate and concealed parts of the man who held it, against whose force it strained. Sherlock knew that if he let himself dwell upon it that he’d learn to know it, to question it and seek answers, to centre curiosity around its ebb and flow and then he’d crave it, and his cravings had never been benign-he’d need it, soon enough But in his mind he’d argued: it was easier to need the pulse than to need the man.
Than to admit that he needed the man.
But then there had been more. There’d been longing, alongside addiction. There’d been affection, alongside fascination. There’d been feeling, sentiment, the flutter of warmth that accompanied his intellectual occupation. There’d been his own hated-heart lit up, new and vibrant, brought to stinging surging swelling life, a life he’d never prepared for, never thought upon, never wondered how to grasp and control and abide.
He was lost almost immediately, stumbling, flailing, his eyes blurred with the windfall, his observations skewed, his mind confused and it was horrifying, maddening: he’d clawed for release to no avail, had clung to the spinning feeling in him, a hymn and a dirge because it was beautiful, because something deeper than cognition knew what he couldn’t, what his mind had been trained to ignore.
He’d been falling, he realises now, from the very start.
But then: a hand, a wrist, a splay of fingertips like feathers, like a sigh-then a stretch of skin to meet his eyes, to slide against the bridge of his nose, warm and throbbing; then lips and a tongue and then more: the taste of sweat and flesh, of heat and need, the scent of arousal and the timing, the arc, the journey from pounding to thrumming to pulsing to trilling, to singing and staying in Sherlock’s mind and his chest, to lilting along the cell walls of every piece of him, every component of his being like a swan song and a climax and a phoenix at rebirth, torn apart and set afire and then blinking, blinded, brought forth once more. It was failing to recognise himself from day to day inside the mirror, and yet, knowing the reflection in ways he never could before, seeing truth in the glass and the fog of his breath on the surface, in the flush of his skin and the daring pulse between his collarbones, visible when he thought too hard on it, when he dwelled on the whys he couldn’t handle instead of the weight he’d come to treasure: crushing even as it held him close. It was cursing his mind, his mind for the first time, the only time, unforgivable, because it was ill-equipped for all its space, its dexterity and skill: it is not sufficient to process and cherish and hold all of John, the whole of him, because John is greater, John exceeds it,:John exceeds all that Sherlock can imagine and recall and that is impossible and unthinkable and yet, and yet-
John exceeded. John was.
His cheeks are wet, Sherlock realises, and his chest seems heavy, leaden. By rights, it should hurt to breathe. By all logic, he should be able to feel the treasonous pump of his own heart, tangible for all the pressure built around it, a wall reforming itself but futile, transparent, all air and blood and already breached. He can hear it.
But there is no feeling.
Which simply affirms, merely serves to underscore the fact that he could feel, did feel, for all his denial and disdain: he had felt, and deeply, transformatively even, maybe, because the lack of it, the loss of it-the numbness is unconscionable, unbearable,
Again, words are inadequate, they do not fit, they’ve not been etched, never rolled off a tongue with care and passion and sentiment, never skipped, strong but soft and drenched with colour off a mouth whose taste Sherlock can’t quite recall anymore, can’t speak to even by comparison, can’t recapture adequately in his mind as Camellia sinensis and toothpaste, as curry and coriander and butterscotch, as sweetness and spice and freshness and life and all the little cravings that Sherlock never paid any mind to; that once satisfied, once overwhelmed and overflowed nearly overcame the others, the darker yearnings-could have satiated enough to grant submission, to calm the worst of his demons, the beasts.
He can’t.
Because there is no rhythm. There is no cadence. There is noise, and it is frantic, it is rising to a fever pitch, unforgiving and violent and ready to scream until the glass cracks through, until he fractures except he cannot, he is broken, and to shatter any more would be redundant, would be blood in shrivelled veins, a blow when there’s no pressure to ferry it to its target, no momentum to drive the last bullet clean through the core.
There is noise, but it means nothing. It does not echo. It cannot touch.
There is silence.
The ceiling is so very far away-the thought filters through the open space inside his skull, and he knows that the floor at his back isn’t moving, but everything seems untethered, leaving, fleeing, and he’s always falling, never firm. He plays with the crease, the fold of his morocco case, always hidden under the panels in his drawers, concealed by his sock index, obvious, never found. The leather is smooth, he knows that, but it’s no more than air, no more than fleeting contact: it means nothing, makes no impact, less than a vacuum and sullied, dead.
Seven percent. His perfect solution.
There are no solutions for this.
He remembers the overdose, remembers the burn in his veins and the way that he could feel his heartbeat in his cuticles, his kneecaps, the roots of his teeth: rattling and shivering in every strand of hair. He recalls the process of it: he’d needed to know the upper extreme, the limit-microgram by microgram until he was certain, until he knew what his body could withstand, its ne plus ultra in every sense. Bit by porous, needless-knowing bit.
Until breaking.
And oh, how it had burned. Fire and frenetic energy in his cells as they collapsed, as his neural pathways seared until simply brushing against his skull would have branded the coils, would have smote into the gyri and sulci like fingerprints, ouroboros on the skin. He remembers the convulsions of the one atrium before the other, vicious, at war: the heat, like John’s, a paltry imitation, a sorry excuse for a fix, but Sherlock wonders if maybe, just maybe he can fool himself. He wonders if maybe he can close his eyes and imagine, and maybe just the feeling will take him back only hours, only moments and he can pretend that there is rhythm again, superimpose some reason upon the world once more, a cure for the dullness and the way everything bleeds, all the edges washed away: for the way that observation now seems heavy, unwelcome-leaden, lacklustre, opaque.
He had felt then, in those moments, and he’d thought it was enough.
Except now he knows, now he knows and it isn’t. Now he knows new limits, quantities he never thought to measure, boundaries he never cared to push until they broke of their own accord, overfull, overwhelmed and throbbing, thrumming with a life he’d deemed tedious, and he’d been wrong.
He’d been wrong, fuck, he’d been wrong; but not to hate it, not to keep it at arm’s length. It deserved his caution, his disdain: it was vile and hateful and it burned brighter and harder and hotter, the hearts of stars and the fabric of time in a fist clenched hard at the centre, shaking, and if he squeezes his eyes shut tight enough, hard enough he can remember it, he can envision the flutter, the feeling of wild and limitless abandon, unrestrained potential and the free-fall that would follow, the bottomless, endless, perfect abomination of feeling, wrapped in surrender, encased in terror and weightlessness, simultaneous focus and infinity, and Sherlock, he, it, just-
He misses it. Jesus, he misses it.
A sob catches in his throat; he hears it, and it should sting, it should burn soundless in his ragged throat, but it doesn’t. The words are inadequate, but he knows the colloquialism, he can’t avoid the echoes of it in his mind, in the empty space where it used to sing against the ventricular walls, sparking underneath the endocardium: the innermost intimate chambers of the one palace he’d never peered inside before, one that was dark and unknown until someone braved it, someone cracked it open at the rusting hinges and gave light to the dusk.
Sherlock shivers at the memory, the way he shrank back, a coward. He was right to, he was right, but he wishes in the moment, now, that he’d been brave, that he’d met John sooner, more fully, that he’d given everything and let John’s courage come to him as everything else of John, of them had been held close-silent, steady, certain and horrifically undervalued for all that it was, all that it possessed and meant. He wishes he’d had faith and given John the cosmos that spun where his heart used to be, because Sherlock knows what this is called.
He knows, even if the word doesn’t fit, he can’t contain the depths, the lengths, the timbre and majesty and the tempo and the trill: the rhythm and the conscious thump, in pairs but then staggering, striving toward nearness and perfect symmetry: quadruplets drawn together every time that Sherlock pressed a hand and felt things that human skin was born too worn to touch. He knows the term, even if it can never hope to convey the sensation that overtook him every time he dropped his lips to John’s skin and imagined the barriers disintegrating, laved off and coating his tastebuds, immaculate, until Sherlock could savour blood, until he could time that treacherous, sumptuous, scared and sacred thump against his teeth; every time his mind affirmed what his mouth couldn’t say-and oh, what he’d give now to say it, all of it everything. What he wouldn’t give to affirm with every part of him that there is nothing sweeter in the world than the sound of that beat, nothing else that has ever grounded him or made him feel real, made him know he was safe, made him believe in better angels and missing pieces and a benevolent universe if only in passing, if only for the moments where John’s blood was his cantata, his siren song, his periodic table and his vision and his veins.
Love.
It is true, and it is everything but empty, yet he fears it above all things.
And it is alive. It is alive, and it’s bleeding, and it’s a torture more cruel than this world is meant to know because it should have left, it should be gone, it should have died with the heart it belonged inside, the heart that love learned to sing for, that it held to: the heart that should have stopped in twos and yet the stubborn half of it still in his chest is clanging, subvocal-a noise that doesn’t break the still, doesn’t stave off the silence but lends it a new fathomlessness, a new depth because the only heart that matters stopped still beneath his ear, the only heart that matters stole his breath and killed him cold, and all he can really make sense of is the senseless, all he can process is what he cannot accept and will not survive, not for long, and that is John, gone; John, gone.
John. Gone.
Forever.
He doesn’t remember, isn’t sure he had to think about lining the point of the needle to the push of a vein. It’s for the best.
The heat; he wonders if he’ll feel it. The heart, he wonders if it’ll surrender, give in.
His hand is trembling; his pulse limping, and he needs. He needs.
“Jesus.” Sherlock never heard the footfalls on the steps, nor the creak of the door; the word, though, the voice makes his fingers relax and leaves the syringe to clatter to the floor.
There are hands at his elbows, sliding up to hook at the axillae; he is unmoored, unhinged, and gravity is all the more hateful, all the more giddy to see it-Sherlock slumps, boneless, but there’s strength behind him, around him, pulling, keeping him afloat in the ocean of this endless, sneering, hushed-howling grief.
He doesn’t want to be saved.
“Up,” the voice commands, and he recognises it: strong jaw, silver hair.
“Come on,” Lestrade groans as he balances Sherlock, swears as Sherlock stumbles, unable to orient himself, his frame: cast out from all orbits and the universal laws-still and staggering.
“Careful.” Lestrade’s voice is close, the breath of him should be warm: it isn’t.
Vertigo hits him, unforgiving; it’s not dizziness so much as blackness, so much as an intensification of the numbness that his brain knows isn’t right. Lestrade turns him around and studies him, takes in the flat.
“Fuck,” he breathes, “look at you.” If Greg sees the drugs on the floor, he says nothing.
“Right,” Lestrade sighs, and Sherlock feels the weight of being and losing and an over-heavy heart bear down, clench teeth around his frame, dragging him low but Lestrade seems to see it, seems to anticipate the assault and holds him steady, lets him slump at the pivot points while his skeleton stays upright.
“Pull yourself together,” Greg tells him, orders-just a tad gruff. “We’re going to Barts.”
Sherlock, had he not been used up, bled dry: he may have questioned that. May have tried to process its unreason and deduce the purpose of the words. As it stands, he merely blinks, tries hard to swallow, longs for the hit scattered, lost like him on the floor.
“Now, Sherlock,” Lestrade urges, pulling Sherlock’s coat around him, threading his limp arms through the sleeves one by one and herding him, slowly, ankle-over-foot and uncoordinated, falling into the walls ever down, down, down until they reach the landing, the threshold.
Sherlock fears the outside, suddenly; fears whatever’s coming. He can’t make sense of why he needs to go to Barts, why he needs to leave or be or do; he doesn’t know what good he’ll serve when he’s empty and it’s quiet, so quiet, and he wants and he hates and he hurts so much that he can’t know it, can’t give it words or stay conscious with the ache because John’s gone, John’s gone and the world can’t possibly matter in light of that.
Sherlock doesn’t want to go to Bart’s to see his heart splayed out in the morgue.
But when the door slams behind them-as he staggers, half-dragged into Lestrade’s patrol car-he thinks, for a moment, that he can almost feel reverberations, like a stirring, like a whisper, like a caress inside his chest.
Please.
The salt-tracks on his cheeks is suddenly thick and stiff and cold, and his eyes sting against the air; he can feel, feel the trail of one more stray tear dip, let go from the precipice of his cheekbone and his breath hitches, desperate, acid in his chest and he’s too wasted now to help it, too weak to quash it.
Sherlock hopes.