Fic: i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you) (1/2)
Title: i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you), Part I
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 2,299
Summary: Love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.
Sherlock is terrified. And John, well-John should probably have seen this coming.
(Part VI 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), echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take), and i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My ongoing and most sincere thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and for probably having more confidence in my style than I can properly rationalize. Credit to Amy Lowell for the title.
i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you), Part I
Sherlock doesn’t sleep, he can’t; it’s not surprising, really. His patterns of existence have been fundamentally altered; his Circadian rhythms are no longer his own.
He doesn’t eat. Before, he could manage just enough, the absolute minimum required to maintain his transport; now, he feels nauseated constantly, his heart in his throat, choking-in his gut for the pull of gravity, the plummeting despair, worn away by acid and the wrench of some eternal ache, some whisper from the depths that promises impossible, ineffable: untenable truths.
And it’s a puzzle, a problem, a dilemma that by rights he should solve, could have once, but not here, not now. He can’t analyse it too closely; he cannot think on it, can’t dwell on it because it heralds devastation, holds inside it a heartbreak of an order, a magnitude that no mortal man could be expected to survive.
And if he’s learned anything, if he’s found a truth he can no longer deny in this, it’s that he is human, he is finite, and for all the unexpected depth of a muscle, of a metaphor inside his chest he is dying, nonetheless: he is frail, he is weak for the feeling and the uncoordinated flailing of every beat beneath him, within him, around him-necessary, and too distant now to know.
He wants, needs to yield and embrace that percussive sign, that echoing contraction of fibres and cells and blood where it burgeons and blossoms and rises to the surface to greet him like a calling or a prayer; he needs to know that planets spin and organs pump and blood flows; he needs.
But he doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve the salve; the warmth. Not now.
Not after... not after-
He blinks, and stares out over the fog, over the water that he knows, that he can recite the composition of on any given morning, its alkalinity, its microbial content; he can feel it on his skin if he merely breathes deep enough to close the distance and make it near, intimate-a coolness, a resonating slip that never lingers, only flows, and Sherlock knows that that’s what awaits him, rightfully, knows that it's all he can possess, all that can encompass his confines and cover his voids: the opposite, the wretched, the frozen, not John, not John-
He hugs himself tight against a chill that was made for him, that’s fitted to the weft of his skeleton alone; he shivers.
How had it progressed so far? However had this feeling, this attachment, this ever-wretched sentiment: how on earth did it manage to pierce so deep?
How had it embedded so that every sluggish, faltering spasm of wet, wasted flesh merely strikes harder, yearns larger, longer-flays and strangles and yet clings, holds the whole of it ever more dear, sympathetic; devoted to the demon that bleeds it dry; some half-hearted Stockholm Syndrome that sings, wrenches with each breath except it patches the puncture marks, keeps his lungs inflated from the first-and this is agony, he realises; this is what it feels like to live through dying, to take all the limbs for the sake of a heart that can’t pump, can’t beat into nothing, a catch twenty-two and a mirror-masque and a benediction promising Hell alone.
Not his area, he’d said it once. Not his area, and if only he’d know just how much, how far beyond his purview this stretched, this reached: how deep against the shallow streams it flooded and filled, how much it sought to decimate and sculpt him anew, and fuck, but how was it possible, where did it come from? Did the Earth; do the Heavenly Bodies feel like this?
Is the deeper reason, the honest truth as to why they never touch, is it more than the force of gravity, more than geodesics and the risk of incineration-what little life remains within this universe, is the sum of it only just the ashes, just the husks left once the lover’s been burned, inside out or outside in and is there even a difference, does it matter at all when already he is splayed wide: the open wound of his organs, the weeping core of him gaping, open to the world, to oxygen and sodium and light in all the dark except no, he’s turned from his Sun, he’s wandered too far and it’s cold, and he hurts, and is it worse, really, to burn than to freeze-
He gasps, his lungs stretching, creaking for the way he forces them to choke down air, a breeze that’s dry and damp together, a paradox, like living and dying and the eye of some radiant hurricane in the heavens come to tear him asunder.
If only.
He gasps, and he wills his fingers to still as he lights the cigarette and pretends, for an instant, that he is Before, and that illumination, that the conduction of light is a scientific inevitability, that it means nothing-that it doesn’t squeeze against his ribs, each bone in a fist of its own, fracturing miraculous, almost relieved at the promise of a respite, of a breaking point that means they’ll not have to hold against the fray any longer.
Won’t have to fight a battle no one ever hoped to win.
Sherlock’s heart races as he inhales, takes an uneven, unpracticed drag and fights the irritation, the rebellion of his lungs because this is foreign, this is Before just like every other simple, wretched, wanting thing he knows and is, but the nicotine had only ever calmed him, then. It had only ever made him feel light and slow, sharpened things for the way they stalled.
Now, though, the drumbeat is deafening in his ears. Now, he can’t see straight for the thickness of every breath, every harsh suck of air balanced wrong, apportioned senselessly, needlessly, because Sherlock doesn’t need air, Sherlock doesn’t need space or light or matter or form, what he needs is a single conglomeration, one unique amalgam of molecules in perfect synchrony, one living breathing being wrapped in sun-kissed skin and thick wool and a mouth that fits his own like the torn halves of newsprint, delicate and precise in the empty space, the fringe where a word is lost but a new story knits together. He needs eyes so blue he has to blink twice. He needs a touch so warm it sends him reeling.
He needs a heart so strong and steady, so willing to pound and press and hold; he needs a beat so bold and brilliant that he doesn’t recognise the world, cannot pick apart himself without its presence, without the way it conducts his very respiration, the pithy pump of every millilitre of blood in his body; the way it strokes and saves his very soul.
He drops his cigarette into the Thames, accidental; his wrists are shaking too goddamned hard to hold.
His wrists are shaking, and the drumbeat in his own ears, now, is taunting him; his fingertips sing with the need to touch, his lips and tongue with a heart’s-ache to savour and the heel of his boot is scraping, digging at the pavement in the dark as he goes to turn, intrinsic, thoughtless, driven by the depths in him he’d never plumbed and now cannot escape, and it’s John, it’s always been John: John is the heart and sees the heart and holds the heart and dwells in the heart and Sherlock needs, he needs, he-
But then he hears it, feels it: phantom limbs and the world crashing around him. Then he knows it right beside him, as if it never left: the trashing and the slowing, the stumbling and the fall. He has never known pain like that, fear like that, and for all that he requires data, for all that he needs to know he’d have happily died an ignorant man to never have known what John Watson’s heart felt like as it stopped.
He trembles, chokes as his own heart jumps back to being, except his heart has long been lost, cradled in another chest and then it ceased, then it died, and if it started against by some miracle, some impossible prayer, then he, himself, stayed greying, riddled with decay.
Ah. So this is what kills a man. It makes sense. It all makes so much sense.
He feels ill.
Sherlock’s eyes slide closed, wet beneath the lashes, just at the space where the shadows are growing, cast wide below the socket, periorbital bruises in the dark and his heart is still thrumming because it does now, always; it shivers, fibrillates without any sense of time or restraint, desperately yearning, dying, to wear itself down, to wear itself out, to bid farewell to the promise of mourning and its lingering chill where it touches the scapulae, brushes the back of his neck.
He breathes out, long, a sigh and a wish, all leftover smoke and condensation on the air as the muscle at his centre pummels, pushes hard at awkward, anxious intervals: the first pass of air from his lips, the twist of his wrist, the clench of his teeth down on the tip of his tongue and the first bead of blood between the spaces in his teeth; the flex of his fingertips as he shudders, swallows a sob because there is a distance he has to maintain to survive, and yet the distance is what’s killing him sooner, rather than later. The distance is what’s stringing him out like a junkie, like he used to be, and draining him more thoroughly than he’d believed he could be bled.
And that, perhaps, is the reality of it. That’s the horror he let himself in for when his fingers felt that pulse by chance, and his mind turned luminous, his chest went warm.
Because love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.
Love is his heart in a vice and wrapped up in feathers, pierced with the daggers and lodged deep as Excalibur yet kissed, caressed gentle and true and Sherlock hurts for it, he hurts because love is perpetual dying, love is the end of beginnings; love is immortality unbidden, a repudiation of death, and love is sickness in the marrow of him, deep in his bones and oh, oh-his chest is too light, too small to contain all of this; his heart too full and swollen from its wounds, all at once.
He needs John. He needs all that John is, all that John means. He needs John in order to stop the slow descent, the gripping reaper at his back.
But John’s face still has that pallor, when Sherlock looks at it. John’s chest doesn’t rise and fall, when Sherlock watches. John’s eyes are wide and glassy, lifeless, even as he stares at Sherlock with all the care, the concern, the affection Sherlock wants to feel, needs to absorb and believe in, now that he knows what it is, where it fits and how it corresponds with the hollow where John’s heart slides and stays and stands unfailing against his own, where they meld and mesh and hold.
John’s pulse, should Sherlock feel for it now-he cannot imagine it as anything but stillness and cold, cannot bear to remember how it was before it stopped, before Sherlock stopped and the poles of the planet shifted places and Sherlock’s equilibrium was shattered, rendered folly.
And for all that he craves it, requires it, needs it to function like oxygen in the lungs and the blood and brain, he is not equipped to shoulder the risk.
He is not equipped.
Logic tells him that John is real. Reason tells him that even as he is, even as he’s always been, the human body has its limits and he’s testing them. He will not last long, not like this, not on this ledge, unbalanced, unmoored. All he needs is to reach, to feel it, to remember the rhythm and reclaim the beat in John as his only complement, his conductor and his strings, his rosin and bow and the blink of his eyes as he measures time in his bones. All he needs to do is touch and John will pull him back to safety, to solid ground: will pull him close and Sherlock will fall into heat and a heart he knows, he loves, that stopped and restarted because Sherlock was clever, even if he wasn’t enough to keep it pumping, present, here.
Logic tells him many things. And yet his own heart raps out a tattoo unending, unrelenting, wild and unsustainable and his chest hurts now, aches always.
Sherlock needs John. Sherlock doesn’t have a death wish.
But he cannot touch the man who holds him, who commands the whole of him, and find nothing; he cannot brush against flesh and find the life there to be no more than an illusion. He can’t.
Not again.
He stays on the bridge until sunrise; until John’s left the flat for the day.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Word Count: 2,299
Summary: Love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.
Sherlock is terrified. And John, well-John should probably have seen this coming.
(Part VI 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), echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take), and i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author's Notes: My ongoing and most sincere thanks to speak_me_fair for the Britpicking and for probably having more confidence in my style than I can properly rationalize. Credit to Amy Lowell for the title.
i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you), Part I
Sherlock doesn’t sleep, he can’t; it’s not surprising, really. His patterns of existence have been fundamentally altered; his Circadian rhythms are no longer his own.
He doesn’t eat. Before, he could manage just enough, the absolute minimum required to maintain his transport; now, he feels nauseated constantly, his heart in his throat, choking-in his gut for the pull of gravity, the plummeting despair, worn away by acid and the wrench of some eternal ache, some whisper from the depths that promises impossible, ineffable: untenable truths.
And it’s a puzzle, a problem, a dilemma that by rights he should solve, could have once, but not here, not now. He can’t analyse it too closely; he cannot think on it, can’t dwell on it because it heralds devastation, holds inside it a heartbreak of an order, a magnitude that no mortal man could be expected to survive.
And if he’s learned anything, if he’s found a truth he can no longer deny in this, it’s that he is human, he is finite, and for all the unexpected depth of a muscle, of a metaphor inside his chest he is dying, nonetheless: he is frail, he is weak for the feeling and the uncoordinated flailing of every beat beneath him, within him, around him-necessary, and too distant now to know.
He wants, needs to yield and embrace that percussive sign, that echoing contraction of fibres and cells and blood where it burgeons and blossoms and rises to the surface to greet him like a calling or a prayer; he needs to know that planets spin and organs pump and blood flows; he needs.
But he doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve the salve; the warmth. Not now.
Not after... not after-
He blinks, and stares out over the fog, over the water that he knows, that he can recite the composition of on any given morning, its alkalinity, its microbial content; he can feel it on his skin if he merely breathes deep enough to close the distance and make it near, intimate-a coolness, a resonating slip that never lingers, only flows, and Sherlock knows that that’s what awaits him, rightfully, knows that it's all he can possess, all that can encompass his confines and cover his voids: the opposite, the wretched, the frozen, not John, not John-
He hugs himself tight against a chill that was made for him, that’s fitted to the weft of his skeleton alone; he shivers.
How had it progressed so far? However had this feeling, this attachment, this ever-wretched sentiment: how on earth did it manage to pierce so deep?
How had it embedded so that every sluggish, faltering spasm of wet, wasted flesh merely strikes harder, yearns larger, longer-flays and strangles and yet clings, holds the whole of it ever more dear, sympathetic; devoted to the demon that bleeds it dry; some half-hearted Stockholm Syndrome that sings, wrenches with each breath except it patches the puncture marks, keeps his lungs inflated from the first-and this is agony, he realises; this is what it feels like to live through dying, to take all the limbs for the sake of a heart that can’t pump, can’t beat into nothing, a catch twenty-two and a mirror-masque and a benediction promising Hell alone.
Not his area, he’d said it once. Not his area, and if only he’d know just how much, how far beyond his purview this stretched, this reached: how deep against the shallow streams it flooded and filled, how much it sought to decimate and sculpt him anew, and fuck, but how was it possible, where did it come from? Did the Earth; do the Heavenly Bodies feel like this?
Is the deeper reason, the honest truth as to why they never touch, is it more than the force of gravity, more than geodesics and the risk of incineration-what little life remains within this universe, is the sum of it only just the ashes, just the husks left once the lover’s been burned, inside out or outside in and is there even a difference, does it matter at all when already he is splayed wide: the open wound of his organs, the weeping core of him gaping, open to the world, to oxygen and sodium and light in all the dark except no, he’s turned from his Sun, he’s wandered too far and it’s cold, and he hurts, and is it worse, really, to burn than to freeze-
He gasps, his lungs stretching, creaking for the way he forces them to choke down air, a breeze that’s dry and damp together, a paradox, like living and dying and the eye of some radiant hurricane in the heavens come to tear him asunder.
If only.
He gasps, and he wills his fingers to still as he lights the cigarette and pretends, for an instant, that he is Before, and that illumination, that the conduction of light is a scientific inevitability, that it means nothing-that it doesn’t squeeze against his ribs, each bone in a fist of its own, fracturing miraculous, almost relieved at the promise of a respite, of a breaking point that means they’ll not have to hold against the fray any longer.
Won’t have to fight a battle no one ever hoped to win.
Sherlock’s heart races as he inhales, takes an uneven, unpracticed drag and fights the irritation, the rebellion of his lungs because this is foreign, this is Before just like every other simple, wretched, wanting thing he knows and is, but the nicotine had only ever calmed him, then. It had only ever made him feel light and slow, sharpened things for the way they stalled.
Now, though, the drumbeat is deafening in his ears. Now, he can’t see straight for the thickness of every breath, every harsh suck of air balanced wrong, apportioned senselessly, needlessly, because Sherlock doesn’t need air, Sherlock doesn’t need space or light or matter or form, what he needs is a single conglomeration, one unique amalgam of molecules in perfect synchrony, one living breathing being wrapped in sun-kissed skin and thick wool and a mouth that fits his own like the torn halves of newsprint, delicate and precise in the empty space, the fringe where a word is lost but a new story knits together. He needs eyes so blue he has to blink twice. He needs a touch so warm it sends him reeling.
He needs a heart so strong and steady, so willing to pound and press and hold; he needs a beat so bold and brilliant that he doesn’t recognise the world, cannot pick apart himself without its presence, without the way it conducts his very respiration, the pithy pump of every millilitre of blood in his body; the way it strokes and saves his very soul.
He drops his cigarette into the Thames, accidental; his wrists are shaking too goddamned hard to hold.
His wrists are shaking, and the drumbeat in his own ears, now, is taunting him; his fingertips sing with the need to touch, his lips and tongue with a heart’s-ache to savour and the heel of his boot is scraping, digging at the pavement in the dark as he goes to turn, intrinsic, thoughtless, driven by the depths in him he’d never plumbed and now cannot escape, and it’s John, it’s always been John: John is the heart and sees the heart and holds the heart and dwells in the heart and Sherlock needs, he needs, he-
But then he hears it, feels it: phantom limbs and the world crashing around him. Then he knows it right beside him, as if it never left: the trashing and the slowing, the stumbling and the fall. He has never known pain like that, fear like that, and for all that he requires data, for all that he needs to know he’d have happily died an ignorant man to never have known what John Watson’s heart felt like as it stopped.
He trembles, chokes as his own heart jumps back to being, except his heart has long been lost, cradled in another chest and then it ceased, then it died, and if it started against by some miracle, some impossible prayer, then he, himself, stayed greying, riddled with decay.
Ah. So this is what kills a man. It makes sense. It all makes so much sense.
He feels ill.
Sherlock’s eyes slide closed, wet beneath the lashes, just at the space where the shadows are growing, cast wide below the socket, periorbital bruises in the dark and his heart is still thrumming because it does now, always; it shivers, fibrillates without any sense of time or restraint, desperately yearning, dying, to wear itself down, to wear itself out, to bid farewell to the promise of mourning and its lingering chill where it touches the scapulae, brushes the back of his neck.
He breathes out, long, a sigh and a wish, all leftover smoke and condensation on the air as the muscle at his centre pummels, pushes hard at awkward, anxious intervals: the first pass of air from his lips, the twist of his wrist, the clench of his teeth down on the tip of his tongue and the first bead of blood between the spaces in his teeth; the flex of his fingertips as he shudders, swallows a sob because there is a distance he has to maintain to survive, and yet the distance is what’s killing him sooner, rather than later. The distance is what’s stringing him out like a junkie, like he used to be, and draining him more thoroughly than he’d believed he could be bled.
And that, perhaps, is the reality of it. That’s the horror he let himself in for when his fingers felt that pulse by chance, and his mind turned luminous, his chest went warm.
Because love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.
Love is his heart in a vice and wrapped up in feathers, pierced with the daggers and lodged deep as Excalibur yet kissed, caressed gentle and true and Sherlock hurts for it, he hurts because love is perpetual dying, love is the end of beginnings; love is immortality unbidden, a repudiation of death, and love is sickness in the marrow of him, deep in his bones and oh, oh-his chest is too light, too small to contain all of this; his heart too full and swollen from its wounds, all at once.
He needs John. He needs all that John is, all that John means. He needs John in order to stop the slow descent, the gripping reaper at his back.
But John’s face still has that pallor, when Sherlock looks at it. John’s chest doesn’t rise and fall, when Sherlock watches. John’s eyes are wide and glassy, lifeless, even as he stares at Sherlock with all the care, the concern, the affection Sherlock wants to feel, needs to absorb and believe in, now that he knows what it is, where it fits and how it corresponds with the hollow where John’s heart slides and stays and stands unfailing against his own, where they meld and mesh and hold.
John’s pulse, should Sherlock feel for it now-he cannot imagine it as anything but stillness and cold, cannot bear to remember how it was before it stopped, before Sherlock stopped and the poles of the planet shifted places and Sherlock’s equilibrium was shattered, rendered folly.
And for all that he craves it, requires it, needs it to function like oxygen in the lungs and the blood and brain, he is not equipped to shoulder the risk.
He is not equipped.
Logic tells him that John is real. Reason tells him that even as he is, even as he’s always been, the human body has its limits and he’s testing them. He will not last long, not like this, not on this ledge, unbalanced, unmoored. All he needs is to reach, to feel it, to remember the rhythm and reclaim the beat in John as his only complement, his conductor and his strings, his rosin and bow and the blink of his eyes as he measures time in his bones. All he needs to do is touch and John will pull him back to safety, to solid ground: will pull him close and Sherlock will fall into heat and a heart he knows, he loves, that stopped and restarted because Sherlock was clever, even if he wasn’t enough to keep it pumping, present, here.
Logic tells him many things. And yet his own heart raps out a tattoo unending, unrelenting, wild and unsustainable and his chest hurts now, aches always.
Sherlock needs John. Sherlock doesn’t have a death wish.
But he cannot touch the man who holds him, who commands the whole of him, and find nothing; he cannot brush against flesh and find the life there to be no more than an illusion. He can’t.
Not again.
He stays on the bridge until sunrise; until John’s left the flat for the day.