[fic] be mine, johnlock, Valentine's Day
title: be mine
part: 1/1
Rating: G
Summary: John spends yet another Valentine's Day alone. Somehow he manages. A fic/art collab with venvephe.
Notes: A few days fashionably late, and a fluff and angst fic?! This is new for me. Not dark at all!
be mine
When John arrived at the clinic that morning, there was a picture of a sexy banana on his desk. There was no other way to describe it: she was a banana dolled up for a night on the town. Her eyelids were painted a lurid blue, her lashes luxuriously long and thick with mascara, and her mouth, a perfect cupid’s bow, was pressed into a scarlet red pout.
“Valentine, I find you very a-peeling!” said the speech bubble.
There were a handful of other cards on his desk, each one undoubtedly featuring a terrible pun and perhaps a distressingly oversexualised inanimate object. Someone - probably Sarah - had also gifted him with an oversized Hershey’s kiss.
Was it Valentine’s Day already? It seemed like it had been just Christmas two days ago. Time was a strange concept. Days flowed into each other, months rolled on and on. The next time he looked up, it would be August.
But it was just yesterday, wasn’t it, when he had stood outside St. Bart’s and looked up into a hopeless sky? It was just last night when he had watched the blood pool on the pavement. Just a minute ago it had been January. He’d been on his knees on frozen ground in front of a grave. It had been his birthday. The smooth, black marble had reflected John’s face back at him and he looked at his own face and the name Sherlock Holmes and in that small space their existences overlapped, one over the other, blending together.
Just a minute ago it had been January.
Now it was February again.
The clinic had been attacked by an overzealous Bobby, the receptionist, who had splattered red and pink hearts on every available surface. Streamers and the red silhouettes of winged naked toddlers dangled from the ceiling. Upon entering the office, one would be greeted with the sight of a giant disembodied baby head pouting coyly, with wings that apparently sprouted from behind its ears.
“Give blood!” an anthropomorphic heart suggested happily. “Spread love!”
If you had asked John his thoughts on Valentine’s Day three years ago he would have parroted the same old trite rhetoric people spouted to sound like individuals. It was an overcommercialised holiday fuelled by consumerism, fed by the greeting card industry; a simple plot to trick people into buying flowers and chocolate in the dead of winter. He remembered it, for his own sake, when he had a girlfriend, and forgot about it, for his own sake, when he didn’t.
As the common question went, why designate only one day for love out of 365? Why not love on the other 364? Why not love every day?
It was stupid, was what John-from-three-years-ago would have said.
Perhaps it was still stupid. Perhaps it was overcommercialised, with its trappings of silly cards and chocolates and flowers. But he knew this truth as well: 364 days out of a year people take love for granted. 364 days out of a year people love silently, people love quietly, they love in secret. The love is implied, the love is unspoken, it settles in the heart, it hums in the background, it makes up the fascia that connect the muscles and makes up the cells that make up the fascia. It is the silent, inner processes of the body and the mind, the involuntary systems that are necessary for life. And so people walked around, carrying it carelessly, wordlessly inside, never paying it any mind, never knowing the worth or weight of it, until, one day, it was gone.
A couple came into the clinic with their baby-with-a-fever, bickering. They bickered in front of the giant cupid head and they bickered in front of a wall covered with glittery red hearts. “I can’t believe you didn’t think to make reservations on Valentine’s day!” hissed the wife.
“I can’t believe you didn’t remind me!” came the righteous retort.
John wanted to shake them. He wanted to shake them until they rattled together. “Appreciate each other, goddamnit!” he wanted to demand.
He did not, of course, because he was not a crazy person. Not quite. Not yet.
The day was still young.
He wrote them a script for paracetamol and sent them on their way.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” the wife said, as she put on her coat.
One of the cards on his desk featured an adorable owl. There was no other word for it: it was round and fluffy, with large eyes “Owl be your valentine if you’ll be mine!”
“Dear Dr John,” the card read inside. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” The dot over the i was a heart. ‘Dear Dr John’ was written with particular flourish, curl on the D’s and a swoop on the n.
It did not take a master detective to know that Denise, the nurse practitioner, quite fancied him. She had placed two cupcakes on his desk, one with pink frosting, one with white, both adorned with those awful conversation hearts that tasted like chalk and disintegrated cement blocks.
“U R 2 cute,” read one.
“Be mine,” read the other.
If his life were a romantic comedy, she would be somewhere gathering up the courage to confess her feelings for him today. There would be some hilarious mishaps along the way. John would have returned her feelings, in secret, but some unforeseen obstacle prevented him from confessing. Perhaps an ex was still in the picture. Perhaps there was some emotional baggage from the past. The audience would root for their happy ending.
And John would realise, that he had thought himself alone all this time, when actually she had been there, watching and admiring, supporting from afar. He would realise that he need not be lonely nor sad because there was someone waiting for him, waiting to fill that person-shaped hole in his heart. It would be like fate.
At the end of the day she would approach him, she’d look up at him and smile, she’d say something cute, and John would laugh. Or maybe they would bump into each other in the hall, each of them carrying a pile of documents, and send all the papers flying. He would bend down to pick them up, so would she. Maybe their hands would touch, maybe their eyes would meet. Maybe she would blush and tuck a lock of dark hair behind her ear. Maybe he would do it for her.
And he would say, “Have dinner with me.”
But John did not believe in fate, and his life was not a romantic comedy.
Last year, Valentine’s Day had not been spent alone. There had been Maura, whom he’d met two weeks prior. “Call me Mo,” she’d said, laughing as she pulled him into a dance, at a pub that was not meant for dancing. He’d called her Maura. When she kissed him he could taste the sickly-sweet linger of alcohol on her tongue.
They had dated, the way that young people do, and the way that people were meant to do, and the way that John had thought he’d forgotten how to do. They went to dinner and they went to dancing. People smiled at them when they walked through Regent’s Park, holding hands. It seemed like everybody in his small little social sphere breathed a collective sigh of relief when he was dating somebody. ‘John is doing okay,’ maybe they said, to themselves and to each other.
For a while there, when things had been bad, when his limp had been pronounced, John had found himself at the receiving end of a great many date offers, none of which he had chosen for himself. Lestrade wanted to know if he’d like to come around the Yard sometime, and meet the new detective. Harry suggested her friend Lorelei, an artist who would ‘understand his pain.’ Mrs Hudson invited him for tea with Mrs Johnson’s single daughter, and when that seemed to have no appeal, how about Mrs Bertrand’s lovely young son? He was, after all, a dentist.
And then John had come home one night to find a white binder on his kitchen table full of the glossy dossiers of available young women, aged 27-35, complete with photos, profiles, and thorough background checks. They were organised by the percentage of their likely compatibility, based upon their personalities, hobbies, and political views. It was probably a bad sign, he thought, if the British government had decided to serve as his own personal dating service. He must have been in truly dire straits.
So he went out. He found girlfriends. Some lasted longer than others. Sometimes he talked about Sherlock, more often he didn’t. And he smiled for a while, and his friends smiled for a while, and it was all bearable, for a while.
He and Maura had celebrated Valentine’s Day in the traditional manner, with a candlelit dinner at a small but nice restaurant. They sat by the window, where he and Sherlock had first watched for the suicide-inducing serial killer. He considered telling her the story, but found himself feeling unexpectedly selfish that night. They shared a modest bottle of Cabernet, vintage 2003. Afterwards, they went back to her place, as they usually did. She didn’t know where John lived.
He had brought her a dozen red roses, and later he kissed her by a roaring fire. She’d worn a red dress, and he could smell the perfume in her hair. He told her that she was beautiful, she said how much she wanted him. It was all terribly romantic.
“I’ll call you,” she said, in the morning, a gentle hand on his cheek. She had been looking at him with soft grey eyes warm and blurry with sleep.
She didn’t call. John tried very hard to care.
He couldn’t.
One of the cards was completely blank. A rush job delivery; a forgotten message. It came in a red envelope with a smudge of chocolate in the corner, although there were no chocolates to be found. There was a picture of a heart on the cover, and nothing inside.
John laughed. It was very clever, in the same way that a knife is clever when it slides itself right between the ribs.
It is possible, medically, to die of a broken heart. The condition is known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or, more romantically, Broken Heart Syndrome. There is a sudden temporary weakening of the myocardium, a bulging of the left ventricular apex, often triggered by emotional stress.
In layman’s terms, the heart muscle weakens, the heart changes shape.
It can lead to lethal ventricular arrhythmias, ventricular rupture, or acute heart failure.
In other words, the electrical activity of the heart is disrupted, the heart bursts, the heart fails and the lungs fill up with fluid.
The heart breaks.
No one understands the true etiology behind Broken Heart Syndrome, although several mechanisms have been proposed.
The fact that it is possible to die of a broken heart does not surprise John. He has always been a logical, medical man.
The fact that one can feel like this and continue to live, now, that is surprising.
“It’s the first day,” he kindly told the recovering addict, a young man with bleached hair and the tremors of withdrawal, “that is the hardest part.”
“Just get past these first two weeks,” John said, “and you’ll be fine.”
He was, of course, lying.
It was all the hardest part.
The clinic closed at 6. Sometimes John stayed after to take care of the remaining patients. “Go ahead, take off early,” he told Sarah, at five o’clock.
“John, are you sure...?”
“Of course,” he replied. “It’s not like I have an impatient boyfriend waiting for me with reservations at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the biggest date night of the year.”
Sarah giggled and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, love, you’re the best.”
“I know,” John said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Denise lingered, after Sarah had left. She rearranged the papers and did the filing and saw a patient or two.
“So...” she said, at 5:45. She toyed with the bell of her stethoscope. “Do you have any plans tonight?”
“Ah...yeah, actually,” John said, offering her a smile. “Surprising, huh? You?”
“Oh! Yeah, me too.”
It was easier. It was easier to hug her at the end of the night, easier to brush his lips lightly against her cheek instead of her lips. He wished her a happy Valentine’s Day, and she returned it, winking, saying, “good luck on your date.” He laughed a small laugh, and told her that he’d wish her the same, only that any man that had her should already consider himself lucky.
Then they parted ways, wrapped in the dignity and comfort of their shared lies.
The light was on in 221A when John got home. Mrs Hudson had a new beau; a professor of Literature whom John was fairly sure wasn’t a serial killer. Sherlock would have liked him, John thought, but probably not as much as Sherlock would have liked him if he had had a penchant for sadism and murder.
Inside his own flat, he heated up some Chinese takeaway and cracked opened a bottle of Bass Ale. He turned on the telly to a rerun of EastEnders, not really watching but not needing the silence.
This night alone was no different than any other night he had spent alone, really. It was no different than the nights that he would spend alone, in the future.
He dozed off on the couch, dreaming of scattered things. He dreamt of milkweed pods that burst open, fluffy seeds turning into parachutes and a pool full of wriggling fish, all strapped with bombs. In his dream, water turned red. That was a common occurrence.
On the telly there was a documentary about the lives of whales and those who hunted them.
A sudden, impatient knocking on the door awakened him. He stirred and pulled himself to his feet, groggy, head heavy with the disorienting swoon of combined alcohol and exhaustion. His leg ached but he’d forgotten where he’d put down the cane.
Slowly he made his way over to the door. The impatient rapping came again. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” John grumbled. Who could it possibly be? Mrs Hudson would have simply come in if it had been urgent. Lestrade would have no reason to seek him out so desperately; the days of having an impossible case and looking for Sherlock were long gone. Harry. It was possibly Harry, drunk and maudlin, or fresh from another breakup, desperate. She was the only one left who would try and intrude upon him at this hour of night, who showed complete and blatant disregard for his comfort and his convenience.
It was refreshing.
He opened the door and almost lost his balance. It felt like he’d lost his balance, like the world had crumpled like stiff paper beneath his feet. The room spun into madness. He couldn’t breathe.
Sherlock Holmes stood before him. Standing, corporeal. Not dead.
John fell forward, he must have still been dreaming; he staggered and the ground seemed to lurch underneath him as if he were on a ship in a storm. He had been through a storm; he’d come out on the other side of it, sodden and seasick. That was this feeling right now, a distinct seasickness, nausea and dizziness and a general distrust of his surroundings swirling around him.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Instead: a sound, something strangled, choked in his own throat with the size of it.
He reached out, both hands grasping, needing to feel the solidness of Sherlock, needing to know that he was here, he was real, or maybe John was still just dreaming. If he was dreaming he didn’t want to see the end of it. If he was dreaming then he’d down a bottle of Valium and dream forever.
Could his tired mind replicate, then, the solidity of Sherlock’s wool Belstaff coat beneath his hands, and the warmth and the solidity of the body beneath that? He’d held onto it enough, to replicate it from memory alone. Could his dreams reconstruct the tired look on Sherlock’s face, the dark smudges beneath his eyes? He’d seen Sherlock forego sleep for days on end, working on a case, until he either fell asleep where he stood from exhaustion or John muscled him onto a soft surface. From memory, he could so easily recall that odd pale hue of his blue-grey-sometimes-green-aquamarine eyes, he could recreate that crease in his brow, could sketch every eyelash.
“John...” said Sherlock, “I...” and trailed off, and John shuddered and closed his eyes. The sound of his name in that voice, that familiar, deep voice, it was like coming home. Like he had been the one gone all this time, and now he was finally back again, at journey’s end.
But his mind could recreate that sound, too. How often had he turned, in those first few months, thinking that he’d heard Sherlock calling for him, only to find no one there?
There was only one thing he could do, only one thing that could not be replicated: the new experience, the thing that he’d never done before and therefore had no memory to draw from.
He grabbed Sherlock by the scarf, fingers curling in the soft blue material. This scarf, he remembered the feel of this scarf. He moved before knowing. What happened next he could no more stop than his next inhale of breath, he could no more predict than the changing of the winds.
He pulled Sherlock down towards him, as his whole body, his whole being, leaned up, and then he kissed Sherlock, solidly upon the mouth.
It was not a kiss like any kiss he’d shared before; it seemed to surge through him, from the pit of his stomach, straight through the core of his body, starting and ending at the meeting of mouth to mouth, body to body, the two of them a complete circuit of electrical charge. Sherlock’s mouth, pressed to his, was dry and chapped and very decidedly male. It made no difference; it made all the difference.
John had never kissed another man before. But even this, this was not the kiss that he’d given to his dates, not the type of kiss between boyfriend and girlfriend, not even the type of a kiss between lovers. No person in their right mind would recommend this kind of a kiss to anyone; it was the kiss of desperation, of ultimate loneliness, of heartbreak, the kiss of mourning, of loss and of being lost and of being found again.
It was a kiss of madness, surely, John had gone mad to be kissing Sherlock like this. He felt like he had, with the clamouring in his brain and the clamouring in his chest, hand fisted in Sherlock’s scarf, mouths sealed together. And he felt like he’d go mad if he didn’t, if he didn’t press their bodies together like he was trying to fuse them together from pressure alone, as if he’d die of frost if he couldn’t warm himself with Sherlock’s body, living, warm, alive, metabolising, processing body - glorious!
John may not have believed in fate, but Fate had, somehow, believed in John Watson.
Sherlock had opened his mouth in shock, or perhaps to breathe, and instinct made John slip his tongue in. It would be stupid, stupid not to, not to try to slip in as close as possible, to steal this intimacy that he’d never had, to check that his tongue was wet with human saliva, to make sure he was breathing, to check his temperature and make sure he was all right.
His mouth was hot and it was not perfect. He had the slightly sour tobacco-tinged breath of someone who has been smoking far too many cigarettes. There were some other flavours there, too, that he could have deduced but John could not. Instead John focused on the heat of it, on its unyielding shape, on the pressure of it, the reality of it. It was not sugar; it was not spice, but it was Sherlock and it was all very human and all very alive, and just so.
Oh God, he was kissing Sherlock. The realisation hit him like an arrow through the heart. He pulled back quickly, mortified. His own cheeks had to be flushed, his lips wet and pressure-reddened. His heart was still seizing and clenching in his chest.
“Okay,” John said, out of breath. “You’re real, and I’m not crazy.”
Sherlock stared at him, open-mouthed and silent. It was comical, really, to see Sherlock so astonished, his own thoroughly-kissed mouth reddened. John took a moment to revel in his own accomplishment: he had found a way to stun Sherlock Holmes into absolute silence.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” John chided, “Come in, already! Good God, you’re thin. When was the last time you had anything decent to eat? Never mind, don’t answer that.”
Sherlock stood in the doorway, gone completely still. He looked especially pale, and he may have been slightly hyperventilating.
Oh God, thought John, he’d probably broken him.
He took Sherlock by the arm and half-helped, half-dragged him over to the couch. He forced him to sit down, lest he have an apoplectic attack standing up.
“I’m going to get you a blanket,” John told him, “And then, when you can talk, we’re going to talk about all the ways I’m going to kill you.”
He should have been furious, really, and he was, and he wanted to hit something, and he wanted to cry, and he wanted to laugh. He wanted to do all three at once. Instead, he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. He opened a can of soup and poured it out, to heat it up on the stove. And then he went into the other room, to rummage for a blanket for a probably-broken Sherlock.
“John?” came Sherlock’s voice, suddenly. He had rediscovered the ability to talk, at least.
“Yes?”
“There were chocolates, but I...they’ve suffered irreversible damage. In transit.”
John returned to the living room, where Sherlock sat on the couch, with his coat still on, looking shaken, staring desolately at some badly-crushed chocolates spread out over the table. John put the blanket around Sherlock’s shoulders. His hands lingered just a moment, just long enough to feel the solidness of Sherlock’s scapulae. If he trembled a bit, Sherlock did not call attention to it, and if he felt Sherlock tremble a bit, he did not notice it.
John looked at the chocolates, some of them oozing out of their red foil wrappers, some of them nearly completely melted. The sight of them made his vision go blurry and wet. He picked one up and unwrapped it carefully; it still smudged stickily all over his fingers. He was such a mess.
He put it the chocolate into his mouth. It was warm and soft from Sherlock’s body heat, and the caramel filling stuck to his teeth. He swallowed, and then swallowed again although the candy was gone. He blinked rapidly.
Sherlock - alive, breathing, Sherlock -was looking up at him, awaiting his judgment.
“Still good,” John decided.
Sherlock smiled.
♥
part: 1/1
Rating: G
Summary: John spends yet another Valentine's Day alone. Somehow he manages. A fic/art collab with venvephe.
Notes: A few days fashionably late, and a fluff and angst fic?! This is new for me. Not dark at all!
be mine
When John arrived at the clinic that morning, there was a picture of a sexy banana on his desk. There was no other way to describe it: she was a banana dolled up for a night on the town. Her eyelids were painted a lurid blue, her lashes luxuriously long and thick with mascara, and her mouth, a perfect cupid’s bow, was pressed into a scarlet red pout.
“Valentine, I find you very a-peeling!” said the speech bubble.
There were a handful of other cards on his desk, each one undoubtedly featuring a terrible pun and perhaps a distressingly oversexualised inanimate object. Someone - probably Sarah - had also gifted him with an oversized Hershey’s kiss.
Was it Valentine’s Day already? It seemed like it had been just Christmas two days ago. Time was a strange concept. Days flowed into each other, months rolled on and on. The next time he looked up, it would be August.
But it was just yesterday, wasn’t it, when he had stood outside St. Bart’s and looked up into a hopeless sky? It was just last night when he had watched the blood pool on the pavement. Just a minute ago it had been January. He’d been on his knees on frozen ground in front of a grave. It had been his birthday. The smooth, black marble had reflected John’s face back at him and he looked at his own face and the name Sherlock Holmes and in that small space their existences overlapped, one over the other, blending together.
Just a minute ago it had been January.
Now it was February again.
The clinic had been attacked by an overzealous Bobby, the receptionist, who had splattered red and pink hearts on every available surface. Streamers and the red silhouettes of winged naked toddlers dangled from the ceiling. Upon entering the office, one would be greeted with the sight of a giant disembodied baby head pouting coyly, with wings that apparently sprouted from behind its ears.
“Give blood!” an anthropomorphic heart suggested happily. “Spread love!”
If you had asked John his thoughts on Valentine’s Day three years ago he would have parroted the same old trite rhetoric people spouted to sound like individuals. It was an overcommercialised holiday fuelled by consumerism, fed by the greeting card industry; a simple plot to trick people into buying flowers and chocolate in the dead of winter. He remembered it, for his own sake, when he had a girlfriend, and forgot about it, for his own sake, when he didn’t.
As the common question went, why designate only one day for love out of 365? Why not love on the other 364? Why not love every day?
It was stupid, was what John-from-three-years-ago would have said.
Perhaps it was still stupid. Perhaps it was overcommercialised, with its trappings of silly cards and chocolates and flowers. But he knew this truth as well: 364 days out of a year people take love for granted. 364 days out of a year people love silently, people love quietly, they love in secret. The love is implied, the love is unspoken, it settles in the heart, it hums in the background, it makes up the fascia that connect the muscles and makes up the cells that make up the fascia. It is the silent, inner processes of the body and the mind, the involuntary systems that are necessary for life. And so people walked around, carrying it carelessly, wordlessly inside, never paying it any mind, never knowing the worth or weight of it, until, one day, it was gone.
A couple came into the clinic with their baby-with-a-fever, bickering. They bickered in front of the giant cupid head and they bickered in front of a wall covered with glittery red hearts. “I can’t believe you didn’t think to make reservations on Valentine’s day!” hissed the wife.
“I can’t believe you didn’t remind me!” came the righteous retort.
John wanted to shake them. He wanted to shake them until they rattled together. “Appreciate each other, goddamnit!” he wanted to demand.
He did not, of course, because he was not a crazy person. Not quite. Not yet.
The day was still young.
He wrote them a script for paracetamol and sent them on their way.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” the wife said, as she put on her coat.
One of the cards on his desk featured an adorable owl. There was no other word for it: it was round and fluffy, with large eyes “Owl be your valentine if you’ll be mine!”
“Dear Dr John,” the card read inside. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” The dot over the i was a heart. ‘Dear Dr John’ was written with particular flourish, curl on the D’s and a swoop on the n.
It did not take a master detective to know that Denise, the nurse practitioner, quite fancied him. She had placed two cupcakes on his desk, one with pink frosting, one with white, both adorned with those awful conversation hearts that tasted like chalk and disintegrated cement blocks.
“U R 2 cute,” read one.
“Be mine,” read the other.
If his life were a romantic comedy, she would be somewhere gathering up the courage to confess her feelings for him today. There would be some hilarious mishaps along the way. John would have returned her feelings, in secret, but some unforeseen obstacle prevented him from confessing. Perhaps an ex was still in the picture. Perhaps there was some emotional baggage from the past. The audience would root for their happy ending.
And John would realise, that he had thought himself alone all this time, when actually she had been there, watching and admiring, supporting from afar. He would realise that he need not be lonely nor sad because there was someone waiting for him, waiting to fill that person-shaped hole in his heart. It would be like fate.
At the end of the day she would approach him, she’d look up at him and smile, she’d say something cute, and John would laugh. Or maybe they would bump into each other in the hall, each of them carrying a pile of documents, and send all the papers flying. He would bend down to pick them up, so would she. Maybe their hands would touch, maybe their eyes would meet. Maybe she would blush and tuck a lock of dark hair behind her ear. Maybe he would do it for her.
And he would say, “Have dinner with me.”
But John did not believe in fate, and his life was not a romantic comedy.
Last year, Valentine’s Day had not been spent alone. There had been Maura, whom he’d met two weeks prior. “Call me Mo,” she’d said, laughing as she pulled him into a dance, at a pub that was not meant for dancing. He’d called her Maura. When she kissed him he could taste the sickly-sweet linger of alcohol on her tongue.
They had dated, the way that young people do, and the way that people were meant to do, and the way that John had thought he’d forgotten how to do. They went to dinner and they went to dancing. People smiled at them when they walked through Regent’s Park, holding hands. It seemed like everybody in his small little social sphere breathed a collective sigh of relief when he was dating somebody. ‘John is doing okay,’ maybe they said, to themselves and to each other.
For a while there, when things had been bad, when his limp had been pronounced, John had found himself at the receiving end of a great many date offers, none of which he had chosen for himself. Lestrade wanted to know if he’d like to come around the Yard sometime, and meet the new detective. Harry suggested her friend Lorelei, an artist who would ‘understand his pain.’ Mrs Hudson invited him for tea with Mrs Johnson’s single daughter, and when that seemed to have no appeal, how about Mrs Bertrand’s lovely young son? He was, after all, a dentist.
And then John had come home one night to find a white binder on his kitchen table full of the glossy dossiers of available young women, aged 27-35, complete with photos, profiles, and thorough background checks. They were organised by the percentage of their likely compatibility, based upon their personalities, hobbies, and political views. It was probably a bad sign, he thought, if the British government had decided to serve as his own personal dating service. He must have been in truly dire straits.
So he went out. He found girlfriends. Some lasted longer than others. Sometimes he talked about Sherlock, more often he didn’t. And he smiled for a while, and his friends smiled for a while, and it was all bearable, for a while.
He and Maura had celebrated Valentine’s Day in the traditional manner, with a candlelit dinner at a small but nice restaurant. They sat by the window, where he and Sherlock had first watched for the suicide-inducing serial killer. He considered telling her the story, but found himself feeling unexpectedly selfish that night. They shared a modest bottle of Cabernet, vintage 2003. Afterwards, they went back to her place, as they usually did. She didn’t know where John lived.
He had brought her a dozen red roses, and later he kissed her by a roaring fire. She’d worn a red dress, and he could smell the perfume in her hair. He told her that she was beautiful, she said how much she wanted him. It was all terribly romantic.
“I’ll call you,” she said, in the morning, a gentle hand on his cheek. She had been looking at him with soft grey eyes warm and blurry with sleep.
She didn’t call. John tried very hard to care.
He couldn’t.
One of the cards was completely blank. A rush job delivery; a forgotten message. It came in a red envelope with a smudge of chocolate in the corner, although there were no chocolates to be found. There was a picture of a heart on the cover, and nothing inside.
John laughed. It was very clever, in the same way that a knife is clever when it slides itself right between the ribs.
It is possible, medically, to die of a broken heart. The condition is known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or, more romantically, Broken Heart Syndrome. There is a sudden temporary weakening of the myocardium, a bulging of the left ventricular apex, often triggered by emotional stress.
In layman’s terms, the heart muscle weakens, the heart changes shape.
It can lead to lethal ventricular arrhythmias, ventricular rupture, or acute heart failure.
In other words, the electrical activity of the heart is disrupted, the heart bursts, the heart fails and the lungs fill up with fluid.
The heart breaks.
No one understands the true etiology behind Broken Heart Syndrome, although several mechanisms have been proposed.
The fact that it is possible to die of a broken heart does not surprise John. He has always been a logical, medical man.
The fact that one can feel like this and continue to live, now, that is surprising.
“It’s the first day,” he kindly told the recovering addict, a young man with bleached hair and the tremors of withdrawal, “that is the hardest part.”
“Just get past these first two weeks,” John said, “and you’ll be fine.”
He was, of course, lying.
It was all the hardest part.
The clinic closed at 6. Sometimes John stayed after to take care of the remaining patients. “Go ahead, take off early,” he told Sarah, at five o’clock.
“John, are you sure...?”
“Of course,” he replied. “It’s not like I have an impatient boyfriend waiting for me with reservations at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the biggest date night of the year.”
Sarah giggled and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, love, you’re the best.”
“I know,” John said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Denise lingered, after Sarah had left. She rearranged the papers and did the filing and saw a patient or two.
“So...” she said, at 5:45. She toyed with the bell of her stethoscope. “Do you have any plans tonight?”
“Ah...yeah, actually,” John said, offering her a smile. “Surprising, huh? You?”
“Oh! Yeah, me too.”
It was easier. It was easier to hug her at the end of the night, easier to brush his lips lightly against her cheek instead of her lips. He wished her a happy Valentine’s Day, and she returned it, winking, saying, “good luck on your date.” He laughed a small laugh, and told her that he’d wish her the same, only that any man that had her should already consider himself lucky.
Then they parted ways, wrapped in the dignity and comfort of their shared lies.
The light was on in 221A when John got home. Mrs Hudson had a new beau; a professor of Literature whom John was fairly sure wasn’t a serial killer. Sherlock would have liked him, John thought, but probably not as much as Sherlock would have liked him if he had had a penchant for sadism and murder.
Inside his own flat, he heated up some Chinese takeaway and cracked opened a bottle of Bass Ale. He turned on the telly to a rerun of EastEnders, not really watching but not needing the silence.
This night alone was no different than any other night he had spent alone, really. It was no different than the nights that he would spend alone, in the future.
He dozed off on the couch, dreaming of scattered things. He dreamt of milkweed pods that burst open, fluffy seeds turning into parachutes and a pool full of wriggling fish, all strapped with bombs. In his dream, water turned red. That was a common occurrence.
On the telly there was a documentary about the lives of whales and those who hunted them.
A sudden, impatient knocking on the door awakened him. He stirred and pulled himself to his feet, groggy, head heavy with the disorienting swoon of combined alcohol and exhaustion. His leg ached but he’d forgotten where he’d put down the cane.
Slowly he made his way over to the door. The impatient rapping came again. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” John grumbled. Who could it possibly be? Mrs Hudson would have simply come in if it had been urgent. Lestrade would have no reason to seek him out so desperately; the days of having an impossible case and looking for Sherlock were long gone. Harry. It was possibly Harry, drunk and maudlin, or fresh from another breakup, desperate. She was the only one left who would try and intrude upon him at this hour of night, who showed complete and blatant disregard for his comfort and his convenience.
It was refreshing.
He opened the door and almost lost his balance. It felt like he’d lost his balance, like the world had crumpled like stiff paper beneath his feet. The room spun into madness. He couldn’t breathe.
Sherlock Holmes stood before him. Standing, corporeal. Not dead.
John fell forward, he must have still been dreaming; he staggered and the ground seemed to lurch underneath him as if he were on a ship in a storm. He had been through a storm; he’d come out on the other side of it, sodden and seasick. That was this feeling right now, a distinct seasickness, nausea and dizziness and a general distrust of his surroundings swirling around him.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Instead: a sound, something strangled, choked in his own throat with the size of it.
He reached out, both hands grasping, needing to feel the solidness of Sherlock, needing to know that he was here, he was real, or maybe John was still just dreaming. If he was dreaming he didn’t want to see the end of it. If he was dreaming then he’d down a bottle of Valium and dream forever.
Could his tired mind replicate, then, the solidity of Sherlock’s wool Belstaff coat beneath his hands, and the warmth and the solidity of the body beneath that? He’d held onto it enough, to replicate it from memory alone. Could his dreams reconstruct the tired look on Sherlock’s face, the dark smudges beneath his eyes? He’d seen Sherlock forego sleep for days on end, working on a case, until he either fell asleep where he stood from exhaustion or John muscled him onto a soft surface. From memory, he could so easily recall that odd pale hue of his blue-grey-sometimes-green-aquamarine eyes, he could recreate that crease in his brow, could sketch every eyelash.
“John...” said Sherlock, “I...” and trailed off, and John shuddered and closed his eyes. The sound of his name in that voice, that familiar, deep voice, it was like coming home. Like he had been the one gone all this time, and now he was finally back again, at journey’s end.
But his mind could recreate that sound, too. How often had he turned, in those first few months, thinking that he’d heard Sherlock calling for him, only to find no one there?
There was only one thing he could do, only one thing that could not be replicated: the new experience, the thing that he’d never done before and therefore had no memory to draw from.
He grabbed Sherlock by the scarf, fingers curling in the soft blue material. This scarf, he remembered the feel of this scarf. He moved before knowing. What happened next he could no more stop than his next inhale of breath, he could no more predict than the changing of the winds.
He pulled Sherlock down towards him, as his whole body, his whole being, leaned up, and then he kissed Sherlock, solidly upon the mouth.
It was not a kiss like any kiss he’d shared before; it seemed to surge through him, from the pit of his stomach, straight through the core of his body, starting and ending at the meeting of mouth to mouth, body to body, the two of them a complete circuit of electrical charge. Sherlock’s mouth, pressed to his, was dry and chapped and very decidedly male. It made no difference; it made all the difference.
John had never kissed another man before. But even this, this was not the kiss that he’d given to his dates, not the type of kiss between boyfriend and girlfriend, not even the type of a kiss between lovers. No person in their right mind would recommend this kind of a kiss to anyone; it was the kiss of desperation, of ultimate loneliness, of heartbreak, the kiss of mourning, of loss and of being lost and of being found again.
It was a kiss of madness, surely, John had gone mad to be kissing Sherlock like this. He felt like he had, with the clamouring in his brain and the clamouring in his chest, hand fisted in Sherlock’s scarf, mouths sealed together. And he felt like he’d go mad if he didn’t, if he didn’t press their bodies together like he was trying to fuse them together from pressure alone, as if he’d die of frost if he couldn’t warm himself with Sherlock’s body, living, warm, alive, metabolising, processing body - glorious!
John may not have believed in fate, but Fate had, somehow, believed in John Watson.
Sherlock had opened his mouth in shock, or perhaps to breathe, and instinct made John slip his tongue in. It would be stupid, stupid not to, not to try to slip in as close as possible, to steal this intimacy that he’d never had, to check that his tongue was wet with human saliva, to make sure he was breathing, to check his temperature and make sure he was all right.
His mouth was hot and it was not perfect. He had the slightly sour tobacco-tinged breath of someone who has been smoking far too many cigarettes. There were some other flavours there, too, that he could have deduced but John could not. Instead John focused on the heat of it, on its unyielding shape, on the pressure of it, the reality of it. It was not sugar; it was not spice, but it was Sherlock and it was all very human and all very alive, and just so.
Oh God, he was kissing Sherlock. The realisation hit him like an arrow through the heart. He pulled back quickly, mortified. His own cheeks had to be flushed, his lips wet and pressure-reddened. His heart was still seizing and clenching in his chest.
“Okay,” John said, out of breath. “You’re real, and I’m not crazy.”
Sherlock stared at him, open-mouthed and silent. It was comical, really, to see Sherlock so astonished, his own thoroughly-kissed mouth reddened. John took a moment to revel in his own accomplishment: he had found a way to stun Sherlock Holmes into absolute silence.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” John chided, “Come in, already! Good God, you’re thin. When was the last time you had anything decent to eat? Never mind, don’t answer that.”
Sherlock stood in the doorway, gone completely still. He looked especially pale, and he may have been slightly hyperventilating.
Oh God, thought John, he’d probably broken him.
He took Sherlock by the arm and half-helped, half-dragged him over to the couch. He forced him to sit down, lest he have an apoplectic attack standing up.
“I’m going to get you a blanket,” John told him, “And then, when you can talk, we’re going to talk about all the ways I’m going to kill you.”
He should have been furious, really, and he was, and he wanted to hit something, and he wanted to cry, and he wanted to laugh. He wanted to do all three at once. Instead, he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. He opened a can of soup and poured it out, to heat it up on the stove. And then he went into the other room, to rummage for a blanket for a probably-broken Sherlock.
“John?” came Sherlock’s voice, suddenly. He had rediscovered the ability to talk, at least.
“Yes?”
“There were chocolates, but I...they’ve suffered irreversible damage. In transit.”
John returned to the living room, where Sherlock sat on the couch, with his coat still on, looking shaken, staring desolately at some badly-crushed chocolates spread out over the table. John put the blanket around Sherlock’s shoulders. His hands lingered just a moment, just long enough to feel the solidness of Sherlock’s scapulae. If he trembled a bit, Sherlock did not call attention to it, and if he felt Sherlock tremble a bit, he did not notice it.
John looked at the chocolates, some of them oozing out of their red foil wrappers, some of them nearly completely melted. The sight of them made his vision go blurry and wet. He picked one up and unwrapped it carefully; it still smudged stickily all over his fingers. He was such a mess.
He put it the chocolate into his mouth. It was warm and soft from Sherlock’s body heat, and the caramel filling stuck to his teeth. He swallowed, and then swallowed again although the candy was gone. He blinked rapidly.
Sherlock - alive, breathing, Sherlock -was looking up at him, awaiting his judgment.
“Still good,” John decided.
Sherlock smiled.
♥