A/N: The first birthday fic for my dear twinsie ongreenergrasses. Happy early birthday, darling!
If John Watson's body could speak, it would sound like an Algonquian elder. Its voice would be low and strong, and there would be stories within stories in the sound of it alone. There would be the patience that comes with age but also the strength and emotions of youth in each resonant vibration. A body is a reflection of the soul, after all, and John Watson is a soul left behind, a tiny fragment of a time of war and communion that has no place in the civilized world of sky scrapers and self-administered poisons.
Sherlock Holmes is drawn to that soul, that remnant of a darker, truer people. He reads the signs in John's body the way he reads ancient glyphs and Persian ciphers; his eyes narrow, his body moving into his thoughtful pose, as he studies the blue-eyed Native lying next to him.
There is still a light tan along John's body, as though his soul were seeping into his skin and holding fast to the little bit of sun that it so deeply craves. Eventually, though, the soldier will no longer wear the mark of the burning country where he lost his youth in a cruel exchange for age and wicked nightmares so constant and horrific that the man must hide himself away, must lock himself inside the cold, unforgiving bathroom where his shame is his and his alone. On the nights when his voice is raw from screaming orders and begging a god he doesn't believe exists to let the child live and return home as hero rather than a sacrifice, he falls to the floor and cries, too weak to stand and flee to that cold and twisted room. Those are the nights when his shoulder sears and his tattoos throb.
Back on the bed, the detective knows better than to go to the man on the floor, can see how the other man believes the pain to be a weakness. Doctor or not, he is still a soldier, is still a man with pride in his vitality. To be comforted like a child would only cut him deeper, so instead the man on the bed shuffles over so he lies in the spot where his Boswell was and ignores the scents of fear of desperation, pays no mind to the way another man's sweat lies across him. He dangles an arm over the edge and reaches out with warm fingertips, tracing the paths of scars and ink and muscle; though it is too dark to see, the soldier's body is a familiar place which he has memorized and needs no light to know.
They sit in agonizing silence, too afraid to break it, and when John can no longer hide the wet lines or disguise the heavy breaths, he listens closely as Sherlock sings him back to bed and wraps around him a dark and frightful body so warm and thin the soldier knows that he is home. He even mutters sleepy strains of a pale man who is so full of life, he fell in love with death.
