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– ☠ – ☠ – ☠ –
An organ is an organ, and
A bee is just a bee;
Please just tell me darling, that
It’s so – that you love me.
– ☠ –
They fight that morning. Over something petty and stupid and small; John’s almost forgotten it by the time he’s on his second pass through Regent’s Park, but he can’t – can’t quite push Sherlock’s parting shout out of his brain. He’s shivering, probably looking ridiculous in his cotton-thin sleep pants and his thick February jacket and his work shoes.
It’s Valentine’s Day, there’s a liver dripping bile on his pancakes, and he’s fucking a sociopath.
It’s not quite rock bottom. So there’s that.
The air is very cool and very clear. Underneath, the midwinter slush has begun to fade, but there’s a sullen bite to the air that digs into his chest; absurdly, it reminds him of Sherlock. Frozen and spiteful, which sounds about right.
Such a stupid thing to fight over. Stupid, stupid, to let – let this, this dragging weight in his chest sink into his mind so that a mundane skirmish about food contamination turned into a fight about terrible frightening things like emotions and caring and – other things he should know better than to bring up on Sunday mornings. And such a stupid idea, to try to demand from Sherlock anything more than he could give.
When Sherlock gets angry, he goes straight for the kill. “Regret,” he’d said, “you’re regretting this,” and John hadn’t been able to stay in the flat, watching a human liver ooze brown and yellow on the kitchen countertops and the forks and the food any longer.
It had made him feel like a fussy wife, nagging to be appreciated, to have your effort taken seriously. Regretting. Never divorcing, because that’s not what fussy wives did, but always wishing that it were twenty years ago, when he smiled at you for coffee and didn’t fucking drop the liver in the mixing bowl. Which is even more ridiculous than it sounds, because Sherlock had been like this all along, and that’s the problem, really.
He’d made stupid, silly little heart pancakes because once Sherlock had told him that on his sixth birthday Mycroft had accidentally spilled sherry in the cake mix, and his mother had made him a cake with pancake mix instead, and he hadn’t even cared because Mycroft was back from Eton finally and don’t ever tell him this, but some of his conditioning experiments on me when I was very young were still in effect and I’d actually missed him. And because it was Valentine’s Day, and he’s pathetic, and he – what? Thought subliminal messaging would break Sherlock free from his sociopathy and teach him how to love?
Nearby a couple, concealed by a meticulously-groomed bush, begins to giggle. And abruptly, John feels very lonely.
Regret, Sherlock had said. Yeah. Regret. Because the things he wants he can’t do anything about except pine pathetically. Because he’s in too deep, because there’s no way out and the only way anywhere is forward. Because it was too late for him a thousand times over, it had been too late for him since basically the moment he’d opened the door of a flat he’d already started thinking of as his to see Angelo, and his cane.
Regret because it was always going to end up like this. No matter what choices he made or what happened on the way. Regret, because John Watson is in love with someone who doesn’t – who can’t – return the sentiment. (Because it’s a sentiment.)
It’s not that Sherlock doesn’t care about him – Sherlock’s proved that he does, with great gusto and drama. But it’s that he still, after six years and some change, still doesn’t quite get that John wants more from him than mad dashes around London and (really very nice) sex for afters. He wants – he just—
He wants to be important, he thinks dully, and it’s a strange but powerful distinction, between being important to Sherlock’s life, to his work and his happiness, and being important to Sherlock.
Look at me, he thinks scathingly, he doesn’t care about my feelings. The bitterness of it sinks into his ribs, down his spine until he stops walking because his ankles are too cold to move.
It’s just what he does, isn’t it? Put his faith in people. Fuse his breath to their deeds and his bones to their trust and his marrow to their goodness, and when they step out from his hold, they drag his whole skeleton out of him along with them.
And Sherlock – Sherlock was more than his breath and his bones a long time ago. Sherlock is the bloody, pulpy thing at the very heart of him. Sherlock is his muscles, pulled taut and loose at every moment, because John Watson is fucked in the head and every moment that forces him to remember that he is a calculation, not a lover, burns like toxin in his veins and makes him love the bloody bastard, impossibly, irresponsibly, more. Sherlock is his lungs.
And he wants to be – in return—
It’s not fair, he thinks, and it’s not, not to Sherlock, who never asked for John to love him with such desperation and probably wouldn’t have chosen it anyway. This – what they have – it’s good.
This is enough, he thinks. It is. He can live with this. It is enough.
– ☠ –
It’s strange, because John’s mobile, expressive face is still, and in the same moment, a cacophony of color: lights from the squad car leaping over the huge red welt that is starting to swell over his face. From just meters away, the lights of London play off the surface of the Thames; these lights are softer, mere flickers against a backdrop of red and blue and John’s terrible, terrifying paleness.
Like a scratched tape, his brain is a screaming mess of impulse; dizzily, he thinks that he can almost feel the neurons firing, too fast for even him, because he is groping for first aid in the case of concussion (concussion? or worse? possible skull fracture, intracranial hemorrhage, traumatic brain injury – second-impact syndrome – actress Madeleine Pieger who was found dead in her Paris apartment hours after refusing treatment for – John, crashing to the ground after Richardson struck him, so close to the waterline – don’t move him or is that for spinal injuries – what is your name what is the date who is the prime minister – John not being able to tell him his own name – John not being able to tell him Sherlock’s name – no don’t think about that don’t think about it don’t Sherlock don’t—
—Calm yourself! Mycroft shouts at him from his terrible dark office in the Diogenes—
—John, think of John, think of – John talking about patients left in comas after head injuries during the case with the rapist rugby player – John with his weakness for pseudo-news talk shows – John smiling at him, John kissing him, John, his voice raised in pleasure—
— or not, raised in anger, John, this morning, too angry to change out of his too-thin pajamas before storming out, John, who shouted when the liver turned out not to be up for the task of balancing on the tea tray after all and slipped into the pancake batter, John, who said terrible things about inequality and want and wanting more – John who regretted this – John who regretted him—
—Sherlock had never understood the grieving spouses and parents who wept in the morgue,”we’d just been fighting—”)
The harsh sound of flesh on metal behind him – Lestrade’s shoved Richardson into the door of his squad car, dragging his wrists back to place the handcuffs on him. The lights on John’s face suddenly intensify in hue.
Not just the squad cars anymore, Sherlock thinks in a daze. The ambulance is here. Which is – good, that’s good.
He’s been saying John’s name, he realizes. Over and over.
(—I’m sorry, John, I didn’t mean it – I don’t care, I don’t care if you regret this, if you never want to kiss me again, if you want to marry someone else and have the daughter you wanted so much – I don’t care, but please – subdural hematoma, 60 to 80% mortality rate – John who was in Afghanistan – John who has been hit hard enough to fall unconscious before—)
Paramedics. He looks at them blankly. A tug at his arms; Lestrade is pulling him up and back, criminal subdued and safely being read the riot act by Donovan.
“Let them work, Sherlock,” he’s saying, “You’ve done—”
(—“You can’t bloody well just walk this off, Sherlock!” John shouted. “It’s not like it is in the movies, where you wake up and you’re all fine – if you’re unconscious for even a few seconds that’s fucking dangerous, Sherlock, you need to take care—”)
On the stretcher, the forensics lights make his features harsh and white. Forensics light. Because this is a crime scene. Or is that in his head, too?
(—John, think of John, think of John—the last time he was unconscious someone tried to burn him alive – John I can’t – I can’t do this – not without you – please – please—)
– ☠ –
“Nigel Richardson,” Sherlock says.
Lestrade’s eyebrows go up. “The brother-in-law.”
“Congratulations, you’ve proven yourself at least capable of basic name recognition,” Sherlock snaps, and it’s a testament to how long the day has been that Lestrade pauses in twirling his pen at that. Sherlock’s always caustic, but this – is cruel, John thinks. He rubs his forehead. He is tired.
“Okay,” Lestrade says, “go on.”
Sherlock spins and begins to pace; the deductions are more dramatic when delivered in motion, John assumes. “That the motive must be personal is obvious – Ismat Richardson was murdered the day before Valentine’s Day, in the process of buying a gift for her husband, in such a brutal and conspicuous manner that the possibility of her being a random victim is ruled out entirely. Can’t be a serial killer, there’s no pattern. Can’t have gotten in the way of criminal activity, the killing was too ritualistic.”
Lestrade rolls his eyes. “Ritualistic? Didn’t exactly find any devil-worship around her body—”
“Ritualistic as in the multiple stab wounds and subsequent genital and facial mutilation,” Sherlock snaps. “Your options, given that Mrs. Richardson displayed exactly zero ties to a cult, organized crime, or a known psychopath, are serial killer or loved one.”
“No one would spend that much time chopping up a stranger if they could be caught at any moment,” John murmurs.
It’s the first thing he’s said about the case since Sherlock had made a scathing comment in the cab about how the last friend of Ismat’s that they’d interviewed, a kindly, if homely, nurse by the name of Maryam, was pathetically in love with her supervisor at work, who would never return her affections because he’d had his heart broken in his twenties by his first cousin. If he didn’t know better, John would almost think it was a deliberate dig, but subtle isn’t really Sherlock’s style.
Not to mention he displays such an utter horror of everyone sharing his genetic material on a frequent enough basis that John figures he’d never compare himself to a man in love with his cousin, even if only indirectly.
Sherlock falters visibly in his steps, but doesn’t turn, and doesn’t acknowledge that John has just spoken, either. Which is for the best, he thinks. Strange silences have settled between them all morning and afternoon; Lestrade’s definitely picked up on it, but he’s kind enough and perceptive enough to have also picked up on the fact that the last thing John wants him to do is mention it.
“Not the husband,” Sherlock says, his voice a sliver more inscrutable, “who was about to make a substantial monetary investment in their relationship by purchasing a non-refundable cruise across the Mediterranean – travel was her passion, not his. Not her parents, who disapproved of her marrying a non-Muslim but who, from the books on their coffee table and the numbers on their phone pad, have been coming to terms with it through self-help books and family therapy. Not her friends, who are universally ambivalent towards her – just bland enough to be boring, not enough to be worth killing. No lover – the gift she was purchasing for her husband was exactly medium-sized enough to suggest that she was too boring to have an affair.”
In spite of himself, John wants to smile. It’s easy to forget, sitting in Lestrade’s shoebox of an office, about pancakes and love and livers – to just sit back and relax into the rhythms of Sherlock’s mind. Everything else – this morning, their relationship, their history – stripped away, this is what he lives for: the electric thrum of Sherlock’s presence. In his bones, in his chest.
He can be okay with this. This is okay.
“Fine, fine,” Lestrade is saying, “but I don’t see how you got the brother-in-law—”
“No alibi, swollen hand that, despite what the Yard is content to believe, did not come from him helping a ‘mate’ move flats since it was clearly less than a day old and his wife attests to the fact that all during the day yesterday he was attempting to fuse with the sofa and no one moves furniture during the night, and freshly-bleached shoes.”
“I—” Lestrade is faltering, “okay, but there’s still no motive.”
“The disapproval of the marriage came from both directions,” Sherlock says. He’s by the window now, a melancholic outline against the bright fluorescence and low buzz of activity that is the Yard, even at eight at night. “Much more vehemently on Mr. Richards’s part than on that of the Wazeds, if the back copies of Candour hidden underneath the milk crates and the distinctive Combat 18 tattoo on his upper arm is any indication.”
Lestrade swears violently. “How did we miss that,” he snarls, and in two long strides is out of his desk chair and heading out towards the door, where Donovan and Markum are waiting for the word.
“There’s a meeting tonight, according to the notes on his counter,” Sherlock calls after him. “Under the Millennium Bridge in thirty minutes.”
John stands to follow. But Sherlock hasn’t moved, is still looking out the window. In the silence, all the tension comes flooding back. John moves closer anyway.
“Neo-Nazis,” he says. “That’s a new one.”
Sherlock is quiet, and something hard rattles around in John’s chest. Here, underneath the industrial track-lighting of Lestrade’s office, it seems – obscene, almost, to dredge up those quiet things that should be whispered in the dark, under covers and lit only by the streetlights of London three flights down from his window. Because John knows what’s about to happen.
“Sherlock—” he says. Low, not quite plaintive but edging into a plea.
A twitch ripples through Sherlock’s shoulders. “Are we discussing this, then, or will you storm out the door once I say something not directly relevant to the case?”
John doesn’t flinch back at the ice in Sherlock’s deep, taut, timbre. It’s a near thing, though. “Sherlock, can we just—?”
“Forget about it? No, I don’t think so, John, unless you want to do this again in two more weeks once you find – toenails in the oven, or blood in the shampoo bottle, or whatever I’ve done that week—”
“For fuck’s sake, Sherlock, it wasn’t about the liver—”
The noise Sherlock makes then is pure frustration. “Well, then why—?”
Before John can reply, Lestrade is in the doorway. “Listen, if you two are coming—”
But he breaks off, too, like the first breath of air in his office is so thick with disharmony that he can taste it. John sees the struggle in him, the tug between chewing them out for having a domestic while a murderer is sitting pretty not twenty minutes away and letting them work it out. But Lestrade has been with them for hours now; he’s felt the weight of John’s silence pressing in, Sherlock’s mania even brighter and less forgiving than usual. “Give us a minute,” John says.
“Richardson—”
“Give us a minute,” John says, and even as he does something dark and frightening lurches in the pit of his stomach. It’s not just a minute. It’s the rest of his life.
– ☠ –
But before that:
This is how sex with John goes: warm and shaky and so consuming that Sherlock thinks at times, through a haze of lust and distraction and something else, that he might splinter apart.
Try as he might to catalogue sex with John in the appropriate wing of his mind palace, when he opens the door to John’s bedroom, what greets him is less of a properly-ordered archive and more of a chaotic blur of perfectly-preserved images, of sounds that loop on endless repeat, of a swirl of taste and scent and touch and indelible, incredible awareness of every part of his body.
He keeps putting new locks on that door, but they keep breaking. Every so often, John will smile or lick his lips or run deft, steady fingers over a scalpel or a gun barrel or a severed head and the door will bang open and assault Sherlock with a cascade of sense memories he really shouldn’t be looking through at crime scenes if he wants Donovan to keep any semblance of tolerating him.
It’s slippery, edged over in thunder, in chocolate. In bed, on the sofa, against the door, in London’s back-alleys and rooftops, whenever Sherlock attempts to seize a record of the moment and file it away, untouched and perfect, his concentration seems to slip over the surface of the act. How, he wonders, is he meant to remember the pattern John traces on the skin of his back, his fingers rough and warm underneath his shirt, when he is too busy sinking into the curve of John’s lips on his own, on his jaw, on the hollows of his throat? How can he focus on the scratch of John’s fingers against his skin when he is so catastrophically distracted by the puffs of his breath against the waistband of his boxers?
Too much data. He just ends up shoving it all into the general “Sex with John” area and, when he has a moment to himself, quietly slipping in to that room in his mind palace and letting the disorder wash over him. The sensation of cooling saliva, from when John mouths a trail of kisses from ribcage to cock. The reassuring weight of John against his body, his movements slow and hypnotic, there must be an element of compulsion because Sherlock moves against him without a thought. Calluses rubbing against the ring of muscle around his hole, the rhythmic, inexorable motion of John’s finger (trigger finger, oh God) inside of him.
John’s lips, swollen and red, the faint croak in his voice when he comes. The focused, rippling motion of John’s body as he sinks down on Sherlock. The movement of John’s mouth when he leans down to swallow the whimpers Sherlock can’t help but let out. John’s hair as he rests on the pillow beside him, turned a brassy gold that it hasn’t been in fifteen years by the glare of the streetlamps outside.
It’s so unfair, that of all things this is the only one he can’t grasp, tuck away, wrestle into some semblance of order. There’s so much to look at, so much to have and to feel, and when it’s all over it looks a little bit as though a typhoon’s swept through the great hall of his mind palace and bullied its way through every room and ward until it settled itself to spin contentedly in the wing-and-a-half stuffed with various John-related miscellanea.
He wants to know everything about this, and instead he’s got to content himself to fumble through and sweep away the debris after a particularly intense orgasm. It’s all in there somewhere, he tries to content himself. Every noise, every flicker of flesh. It’s just all…unclassifiable. Like John.
The only thing he can’t say, he thinks one night, with John tucked up into his side and his fingers tracing the jagged white contours of his scar, is whether sex with John is over in what feels like an instant or if it stretches on ad infinitum, into forever – it’s both at once and neither. When John is in him, around him, time loses all meaning – his world narrows down to an out-of-sequence jumble of moments. John’s smile, pressed into the curve of his shoulder. John’s long, drawn-out groan when he is nearing the edge but not quite over it. John’s breaths against his skin – harsh and slow and soft and fragile and breathless and so saturated in peace that Sherlock sometimes thinks he could sleep.
It’s not sex with John that convinces Sherlock that this is love. But it certainly doesn’t hurt.
– ☠ –
“—I thought we’d worked past your habit of abandoning the situation at the first sign of hardship, but apparently not.”
“Right, because you’re so much bloody better, running around all over London and not even saying a word—”
“Why would you even agree to accompany me, then, since being on this case has been such a hardship for you?”
Sherlock is pale and distant, the only color in his face two bright spots of heat high on his cheekbones. Flush aside, he looks like a statue: immovable, untouchable, and still. Which is wrong. Sherlock is only still when he’s upset, John remembers, and the thought sends a sudden rush of fury through him. “Why do you need me to tell you when you can just deduce it, Sherlock?” John snaps.
Sherlock’s mouth twists. “Is that what your extensive relationship experience has taught you is the best way to approach a conflict, John? Avoidance and deflection?”
“You looked perfectly happy to do it this morning!”
“You didn’t contradict me,” Sherlock snarls. “Tell me, John, what is it you regret so much the thought of you drives it out of your home, hmm? Because I was perfectly clear about what I could and could not do for you at the start of this – this relationship—”
“Don’t, Sherlock,” John warns. He leans back against Lestrade’s desk, clenches down hard on the edge with his left hand.
“Is it the breasts? Is that it, John, are you so keen to get back to women you’ve started picking fights about experiments in the kitchen again? How utterly six years ago of you—”
“Don’t.”
“Or the looks you get, hmm, from clients and from your sister and from Donovan of all people, the ones that ask what are you doing, John, why are you throwing away your life chasing after a sociopath—”
“Don’t,” John says again.
(His hand is trembling.)
“Or is it actually about the experiments, is it the normality, then? John Watson, so terrified to think that suburbia and two dogs and children aren’t for him he can’t even see—”
And suddenly, almost against his will, John is shouting. “It’s not asking too much, is it?” he cries, but halfway through the rage breaks in his voice and gives way to something so raw and vulnerable John shies away at the thought of it. “Am I asking too much, Sherlock? Because Christ, I don’t need you to tell me you love me, but I just want to know that I’m fucking impor—”
He breaks off at Sherlock’s expression. He – he hadn’t meant to say that.
Stress, he thinks hazily. The stress of watching himself and Sherlock pull taut, magnetic repulsion, whatever quiet, fragile, wonderful thing had been between them threatening to buckle underneath the fucking stress. He hadn’t meant to say that.
“Forget it,” John says. His throat is suddenly tight and dry, like something’s lodged in it but his lungs haven’t figured out they’re not quite getting enough oxygen yet. “Forget I said anything. Delete it, everything – whatever you have to do.”
“John,” Sherlock says. There’s a strangeness to his voice now; that’s the voice Sherlock reserves, John thinks, for crime victims, just a shade softer than his usual tone.
“Don’t,” John says. He doesn’t think he can take it.
“John, I think—”
Whatever Sherlock thinks, John doesn’t get the opportunity to find out. Lestrade takes the moment to bang on the door and shout through the wood, “I can’t give you two any more time to sort out your domestic, you two! We need to leave now if we’re going to make this meeting!”
Right. Because there’s a woman who’s been murdered by a white supremacist, and they’ve got work to do. “Yeah,” John calls back, “we’re coming out.”
“John,” Sherlock says again, but John is already out the door.
– ☠ –
But before that:
Sherlock has an algorithm for calculating the likelihood that a client will proposition him. Attraction is nebulous, hard to track and even harder to predict (he hadn’t foreseen Janine, for example, but once he had peeled back the parts of her that were simply kind and gotten down to base chemical processes, he’d jumped at the opportunity she represented), but he does a fairly good job at noting and interpreting the outward signs.
So he shouldn’t be surprised when John kisses him, one Sunday in December. He is, but he shouldn’t be.
Because John has been looking at him with an indefinable warmth in his eyes (“bedroom eyes,” Janine had teased) of late, been placing hands on him in places that are safe, platonic (a shoulder, an elbow, between the shoulderblades) but still send a frisson of pure reaction through his body. Because John looks healthier, more whole. He looks like he is almost ready to smile again.
Because sometimes, John will look at him, and Sherlock will grow dizzy, because the only times he’d seen John look at him like that before was in his dreams, and two other times outside of them. Because John looks at him like he is a miracle. But this time Sherlock hasn’t cured his limp or returned from the dead. He’s just – been himself.
(But the look doesn’t go away.)
Sherlock doesn’t know what to do with this, this gaze that fixes him in place and heats him from the inside with something he hadn’t ever experienced before the hurricane of a man that is John Watson and the force of his love, so he tries to push it down, ignore. He thinks he fumbles it a few times, because sometimes when John looks at him Sherlock will lose the plot entirely and blurt out whatever moronic non sequitar has been hidden away in the dusty corners of his mind attic, and some of those times John shutters and goes quiet.
Whenever that happens, Sherlock is overcome with an equally unprecedented tidal wave of guilt. He makes tea and plays Tchaikovsky. He can’t help it; John Watson is terrifying, how is Sherlock meant to deal with the irrepressible force of that look?
And on one unseasonably warm Sunday in the first days of the last month, John asks him about his parents, and Christmas, and Sherlock says, sharply:
“We’ve hardly got standing plans or anything, John, you needn’t worry about keeping me from my family. Last year was – an aberration. Parental guilt over my injury and Mycroftian manipulation. Nothing of the sort will be happening anytime soon, I assure you.”
From the kitchen and over the faint whine of a newly-boiled kettle, John calls back, “You sure? They are your family, Sherlock.”
“All the more reason to avoid them,” Sherlock sniffs.
“So what’ll your parents do, then, with you and Mycroft still in London?”
“Just me, actually. Mycroft will probably be overseeing the new Egyptian elections. Again. Honestly, you’d think after the third time in a row he’d finally get it right.”
“One can hope,” John says dryly. Almost in spite of himself, Sherlock smiles.
“And my parents will do what they usually do, I suppose: book a cruise to Australia or somewhere else inhospitably warm at this time of year.”
From the kitchen, John emerges with two cups of tea. Sherlock takes his, takes a sip; perfect, which is par for the course. John does something to the tea to make it taste indisputably better than Sherlock can get it when he makes it himself. “Your parents? Really? Never took them for cruise people.”
Sherlock snorts. “You’re joking. Mummy thrives in her empty nest. Gives her more time to write scathing responses to the new millennium’s ‘great new minds in mathematics,’ even if she claims she’s never returning to academic work herself.”
“I can see that,” John smiles over his cup. “Is that what you’re going to do when you retire, then? Solve crimes long-distance from the Bahamas, or someplace?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, John, warm weather doesn’t suit me. In any case, I never imagined retiring.” He relaxes back into the sofa, the warmth of John and the tea beginning to work on him, soothe the tension out of him. “I never thought I’d make it to retiring age, anyway.”
John’s mouth flattens into a scowl. “Sherlock—”
He waves a lazy hand at him; “Oh, loosen up. That was before I had my own personal bodyguard to head off my more reckless attempts at self-endangerment.”
At that, John snorts, and relaxes a little; a tension still simmers at the base of his spine. “I try. God knows that probably makes me even madder than you.”
Sherlock feels his mouth curve into a smile. “I’ll figure retirement out when I get there, I suppose. I expect old age will only make me less tolerant of idiots and morons, so perhaps the countryside. Maybe with some beehives.”
“Beehives.”
“Bees are fascinating creatures, John. The ideal society. For the longest time in my adolescence, I wanted to be a beekeeper, you know.”
He gets up to put his violin away from where he’s had it out. He’s composing again. He’s done enough for today, though, and he doesn’t think he could manage a return to the focus necessary for composition if he tried, not right now, with contentment, warm and heavy, sinking into his limbs. One must be in a certain mood of creative dissatisfaction to produce art.
From the sofa, John says, “Right, well. I expect letters, you know, once you’re off mucking around with bees on a farm somewhere. If only to make sure you haven’t actually gone insane from boredom.”
“Don’t be absurd, John,” Sherlock says. “You’ll be typing up my observations, of course.”
There is a long pause.
“Will I,” John says – more like breathes, that’s a better word to describe how his voice rises like smoke into the air. He’s not on the sofa anymore.
“Sherlock,” he says, even softer. “Turn around.”
He doesn’t want to. This feels like a dream, strange and unreal, like reading fairy tales in his youth, wondering at the terrible things people could do to each other.
“Sherlock,” John says. He turns around.
John is so close Sherlock can see the light caught in his eyelashes.
You can’t look at me like that, Sherlock thinks desperately. And then he doesn’t think at all, because John is kissing him.
It’s just a dry press of lips at first, but then John moves, sliding Sherlock’s bottom lip between his teeth and oh yes, please do that again, and Sherlock is caught between a desire to seize John to his chest and curl over him and fossilize there and to just stand there, motionless, because if he makes a move then John might realize what he’s doing and pull away and Sherlock doesn’t think he would survive that right now.
But almost against his will (John has a habit of pulling things like that from him), his lips part, and then John’s tongue is in his mouth and the kiss turns slick and hot and John is much closer now and Sherlock realizes distantly through what seems like miles of molasses that apparently he reached out and pulled John to him after all, and it seems they’ve been kissing for only moments but his lungs are starting to burn and with a gasp he resurfaces.
John is smiling at him, lips spit-slick and wet and his hands are warm on Sherlock’s elbows, a distinct contrast to where Sherlock’s fingers are digging into his biceps. Is he dead? He feels dead. And he should know.
“Is this an experiment?” Sherlock asks, because he has to know.
John looks at him – only once, pulls back to stare him full in the face – and then he laughs, long and loud and so totally, utterly free of all the weight on his back and the losses on his shoulders, like in their place he is filled up with something so bright and devastating it has spilled over, it is leaking out of him, out of his eyes and his smile and his kisses. And it is the most beautiful sound.
– ☠ –
Nigel Richardson is a mean fucker; John had known that already, just from the way he talked about his brother and his murdered sister-in-law. The Nazi connection he’ll admit he missed, but even before Sherlock’s revelation at the Yard, John had been secretly hoping that he’d turn out to be the murderer after all, so that he’d have the pleasure of possibly knocking him a good one and calling it a necessary act in the course of justice.
As bad as he is, his friends are worse. Not for the first time, John wonders at the wisdom of making the arrest at a meeting of like-minded skinheads who may or may not have been in on the murder.
Somewhere behind him, Lestrade and the new recruit, Markum, are grappling with a large, tattooed man built like a cinderblock in, jarringly, a business suit. Sally’s already downed one of the men – skinny, weasel-like, looks a bit more like a 90’s punk rocker than a neo-Nazi – and has her taser planted in another’s back as an incentive for him to hold out his wrists quietly for arrest. Sherlock is – somewhere – and John can’t worry about that now, because Richardson’s decided that his record would really look better with a few counts of assault added onto the murder charge, and has pulled out a switchblade.
Switchblades John can handle, but Richardson’s no Billy Wiggins, and before John can get close enough to slam an elbow or a knee somewhere soft, he swings – wild and uncoordinated but you don’t exactly have to be good at knives to cause damage, you just have to be willing to use them. John ducks out of the way, but the blade catches on his sleeve and rips his jacket open. His only winter jacket.
“You’ll be paying for the replacement,” he informs Richardson, who doesn’t seem to appreciate that.
They’re under the bridge now, wading through cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. John wants his gun, but after a slight mishap during the whole Moriarty affair, he’d stopped bringing it to the Yard and they didn’t have time in between Lestrade’s office and crashing the white supremacists’ party—
Richardson swings again, high this time, and John ducks, feeling grateful, for once, for his height. “Look, mate,” he says in his reasonable voice, “you’re not getting out of here with the cops ‘round every corner.”
Richardson lets out a harsh scream of rage; John fancies foam dribbling from his mouth. He lunges, but Richardson takes a swipe at his arm and John pulls back quickly. Slashes when panicked. Right. Good to know.
John chances a glance behind him; they’re edging closer to the hard cement of the bridge, and past that, the Thames, swirling dark and forbidding. His crouches, gropes for something he can use as a weapon. “You don’t want to get yourself in any more trouble,” he tries, but before he can finish, the psycho rushes at him, free hand swinging in a wild fist. John ducks again, but this time he misses the knee that comes up to pound the breath out of him.
“Fuck,” he wheezes, and then smashes the empty beer bottle he’d picked up against the bastard’s knife-wielding hand.
It’s heavy glass, not the cheap kind they sell at convenience stores, and the fucker howls in pain, which is good. But he drops the knife and grabs at the front of John’s shirt. He might’ve miscalculated, he thinks.
Then his head smashes into the unyielding concrete of the bridge.
Fuck, he thinks, and then, Sherlock, and then he doesn’t think at all.
– ☠ –
But before that:
Afterwards – after the shooting and the screaming and the screaming, after the Yard has swept through to collect the bodies and take bewildered, bitter statements – Sherlock finds John sitting on the curb. He has a shock blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
Sherlock sits down next to him. He can’t think of what else to do, what to say, so instead he lines up their shoulders and says nothing.
“I don’t know why I have this,” John says blankly.
“You’re in shock,” Sherlock says, very gently.
“No, I—” He breaks off, looks down. At his hands, where two people’s blood is drying. Maybe he’s realized how ridiculous he sounds.
“You’re in shock,” Sherlock says firmly. John doesn’t protest.
They sit for a while. Sherlock watches the police mill around the crime scene – and it is a crime scene – but with strange, lost looks on their faces. Even the young ones, the new recruits, know who Moriarty is, though they can’t quite comprehend what’s happened here.
Sherlock sympathizes. John Watson, with powder burns on his fingers and blood on his shirt from where Mary pulled him down to whisper something in his ear. (He itches to know, but…he won’t ask. Not yet. Maybe not ever. With a start, he thinks he would be content with never knowing if not asking kept John from unhappiness.) John Watson, glassy-eyed but whose breath is steady at his side. John Watson, who has surprised him – once again.
He is glad it was Mary, and not John. He will never tell John this.
Beside him, John shudders. “What will I do now?” he asks, eyes still on the graffiti on the building opposite.
“Mourn,” Sherlock says. “And then get better.”
John laughs. It is a ragged, twisted sound, like razors caught in his chest and tumbling in his pharynx, and Sherlock thinks with a painful start that his laughter will sound like that for a long time. “It doesn’t get better, Sherlock. You get better at hiding it, and sometimes it stops mattering because someone comes back from the dead, but it doesn’t get better.”
Sherlock looks at John, and then away; he can’t think of what to say, can’t bear to look into eyes that seem as blue and as flat as the ocean, and as filled with grief, too. There is a strange, unsteady ache in his chest, between the third and fourth ribs. And the thought hits him like a concussion wave:
I would carve out my organs to make you happy.
He says, “You’ll move back in with me. And you’ll get better.”
John exhales a long, juddering sigh. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, okay.”
Sherlock doesn’t know then, of course. But he will.
– ☠ –
The thing about Sherlock is that he’s magnetic. That’s the only thing John’s got to describe him that even remotely makes sense; the inexorable pull Sherlock has on his surroundings, the way the architecture of the world seems to tilt ever-so-slightly in his direction. How every atom of every molecule of every cell in John’s body is in a state of hyperawareness, of Sherlock and his moods and his genius and his smiles.
The thing about Sherlock is that John understands the clients and the murderers and even Moriarty, how Sherlock’s attention is such a rare and precious thing that it’s easy to stake your fortune on it, build your life around it, build yourself around it until you and the reality of him are so bound up in your mind and your heart and your bones that for the rest of your life your pulse will quicken at the sound of the name Sherlock Holmes; and John’s put so much more than his mind and heart and bones into him.
Sherlock isn’t exactly easy to love, God knows. But the thing about Sherlock Holmes is that it’s so easy loving him.
And John remembers:
(—lazy morning kisses until their combined halitosis reaches critical mass and they break off in giggles and the disbelieving smile Sherlock lets play around the edges of his mouth when John tells him he’s fantastic, brilliant, incredible and the way he’s never really cruel unless you’ve done something to deserve it first and the movement of his fingers on the violin and the way he always seems so surprised when he comes and the way the most-checked site on his phone is John’s blog and the excitement and the mischief and even the bloody experiments and, and – and confessions, murmured into skin, under sheets, sometimes I still think about it, the drugs and she never even told me that my dog was sick and I love dancing, really, did I ever tell you that – and John, too, in return, he was bleeding out, what could I do but make it easier for him and I don’t know whether I would’ve forgiven her if it hadn’t been for the baby and don’t do that, don’t you do that again, don’t leave me, please, please, don’t leave—)
The thing about Sherlock is that being around him is like – like standing in a centrifuge. Like he spills over with so much light that everything around you becomes blinding with the reflection; he’s a floodlight, he’s the sun. He’s John’s lungs, his eyes, his heart. He’s everything, and he stops it all in its tracks, because that’s just what he does.
It’s amazing. And it’s enough.
John opens his eyes.
The back of his head is fucking throbbing.
He scrunches his eyes shut again immediately when the fluorescent lights overhead seem to flare like spikes driving into his skull. Almost against his will, he groans.
“Drink,” says Sherlock, and John obliging gulps down water from the glass held to his lips. Some of it sloshes over the side and runs down his chin, but the water feels so good on his parched tongue and tonsils that he doesn’t even care.
Sherlock removes the glass and, to John’s total shock, uses a napkin to wipe at his chin.
“Who’s the prime minister?” he asks.
John snorts. “Do you know who the prime minister is?”
He can’t see Sherlock, not with his eyes shut, but he can hear his scowl. It’s got a particular sound to it, like the sullenness of the air just after a lightning strike. “I could look it up,” Sherlock says with a hint of petulance.
“Stephen Fry,” John says, just to fuck with him.
“That sounds about right,” Sherlock says, after an uncertain pause. John can’t help it; he grins. He cracks his eyes open again, just testing, and then all the way when the lights overhead feel more like dull spoons in his eye sockets than ground glass.
“John,” Sherlock says. John turns his head obligingly, and immediately wants to clench his eyes shut again.
“Sherlock,” he sighs, “is that—”
On Sherlock’s lap is their black, embossed tea tray. On the tray is the liver, which has been joined by a human heart.
“I didn’t get a chance to explain,” Sherlock says.
“Look, Sherlock, no offense, but I’m not really in the mood to hear whatever mad experiment you’ve got planned for—”
“At the Yard,” Sherlock cuts in. “You didn’t let me explain.”
For the first time, John notices Sherlock’s eyes, rimmed with red and faintly puffy.
“Okay,” he says warily.
Sherlock sets the tray on the bedside table and leans forward, intent. “To be fair, I didn’t…didn’t fully understand what you were saying, at the time. What you thought.”
John doesn’t want to hear this. “Sherlock—”
“Listen,” Sherlock says, and it’s edged with not a hint of desperation. John shuts up. “Those two years I was – away – I spent some time in China. Human trafficking ring, the ringleader was – you don’t want to hear about that, it’s not important. But I spent a few months there.”
He looks down; his hands are in his lap, controlled and still…mostly. The pinky finger of his right hand is twitching very slightly.
“The Chinese have an…affectation, I suppose you might say. As a term of endearment, a person will sometimes call their significant other xingan. Xin for the heart, and gan for the liver. It means beloved, or conscience. But – it struck me.”
Sherlock looks up, and John – can’t breathe.
“Vital organs, things that you can’t live without,” Sherlock says, his voice low and sweetly vulnerable. On the table, the heart sags, purple and bulbous. “It seemed – appropriate.”
John – John is—
“You berk,” John says incredulously, “was this your idea of a Valentine’s Day gift?”
“I hardly thought you’d appreciate a card, or a stuffed bear, or any of the other trite conventions that have attached itself to an arbitrary date for purely commercial purposes.” There’s a hint of defensiveness in Sherlock’s tone, and John is filled up with so much helpless, defiant love for this total moron that he thinks he might pop the IV and float up to the ceiling. He’s grinning helplessly, so hard that it’s straining the brick of a goose egg at the back of his head. It’s as though all the weight that has sunk into his marrow has dissolved, imploded in on itself.
“You ruined my Valentine’s pancakes to get me actual vital organs,” he declares. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me. And also the most gruesome. If you don’t fucking kiss me right now, I will not be responsible for my actions.”
Sherlock smiles. John thinks his own vital organs will spurt wings and flutter right out of him.
“I love you, John,” Sherlock says. “Don’t do that again.”
John sits up just enough to grab him by the coat collar and drag him into a kiss. His head explodes with pain, but he ignores it; if he’s gotten this far in life without second impact syndrome, the concussion can bloody well wait until he kisses his git of a boyfriend. And he does, so long and so deeply that he thinks deliriously that maybe he is trying to fuse them together, to swap out their bones and their lungs and their fucking hearts and livers, too.
Vital organs. Christ. He lets him go with a tremendous gulp of air.
“Yeah,” he pants. “You too. Always you too, you wanker.”
“John,” Sherlock gasps.
“Happy fucking Valentine’s Day,” John says.
It is 12:14 in the morning of Monday, February 15th. But just this once, he thinks Sherlock will let it slide.
– ☠ –
And before that:
The weight of his coat is peculiar on his shoulders, after so long without it. Different, but good. Comfortably familiar, like, loathe as he is to admit it, Mycroft’s buzzing voice in his ear was, like coming home; like an embrace from an old friend.
He pauses outside The Landmark and takes a second to let the enormity of the moment wash over him.
Two years. Two years, and they had been long years, full of running and searching and the sort of tedious, mindless work of deconstruction that bored Sherlock stiff, but for the rare moment or two where a real mystery managed to catch his attention. Two years that grew progressively more exhausting, more tedious, as they dragged on (until he grew so careless he allowed himself to be caught and forced Mycroft into finishing the job).
Strange. He’d grown so used to having his… conductor, so to speak, by his side that deprived of him, the orchestra seemed ever-so-slightly off-beat.
That’s why he’s here, of course. It’s a complicated process, he is beginning to discover, recovering who you were. His hair has been cut, he has his coat, he has the city; but still he’s finding that he is not yet Sherlock Holmes. There are still pieces missing.
He turns, sets his shoulders. And just for a moment, he lets the frenetic flutters in the pit of his stomach rise, spread throughout his body, until he is taut with a strange mix of fear and elation.
Savor it, he thinks. This is a moment for celebration. He steps into the restaurant.
– ☠ –
I’ve true emotions, do not go!
It’s plain love, can’t you see?
An organ is an organ and
A bee is just a bee.
—“Organs and Bees,” Jonathan Howard
– ☠ – ☠ – ☠ –