i.
The plane hits earth. Shakes you up, you and your pounding heart, the breathless beast squeezing out the only name that ever mattered: John, John, John, John. The pilot directs you to the exit and you stand for a moment breathing air that smells of thunder, England, and revival. There is cold light in front of you. You blink and breathe and try to stop trembling. Your jaw jitters as though you've been walking in a blizzard. The skin beneath your collar is slick with sweat. He always did this to you. You pull your gloves on, leather on flesh. You are going to need them. With a tight swallow, you move. Glide down the set of retractable stairs and walk toward the trio on the tarmac. John is very very very nauseatingly beautiful, you think, sweeping toward him as if in a dream. You are too tired to stop yourself from letting such a thing cross your mind. All you can do focus on is his face; the red of his mouth, the crinkles embedded in his skin, the dying indigo of his eyes. Hideous, sentimental bullshit. He's a fucking poem and cannot breathe for the beauty of it, your ribs are squeezing in on themselves.
If only the plane had taken you away. If only the East Wind would come and knock you off your feet so you would not have to stand here as John's shoulders lift and fall, as he says, so softly you almost miss it:
"Sherlock?"
ii.
You take a cab back to Baker Street. Mycroft and Mary go in another one, but John insists on going with you. His cheeks are aflame and he can't stop looking at you. And saying fuck. He does this at least thirteen times before you lay a palm over his ulnar process and he shuts the hell up. "I know," you say, "I know, I know," and you do. You are dizzy with relief, with the mystical power of the second chance. A second chance at what, you don't know. But anything's better than screaming through the stratosphere in an airplane taking you away from the man you realised too late is probably the love of your life. You can't say any of this, you think, and it stings. It feels like forcing a shot glass of cyanide down your throat. Maybe, if you stay quiet, if you keep playing the part of someone who is firmly not in love with John Watson, you will survive this. Maybe you will do better than survive. You imagine yourself taking John and kissing him, hard, rough, warm, as you've imagined two billion times before, thrusting into your palm, drowning in bed sheets and white, white vertigo. You have never been kissed like that, but somehow you know that's how it ought to be done, so you turn your poor throbbing head to the left and drink him in, the man who keeps saving your life, and you want to press your hand against his cheek and thank him until the blood runs from your tongue.
Look what he's done to you. Look what you've become. You were always so good at keeping your fissures sealed, but John's broken you open, loosened your soul, and taken it for his own. You don't blame him, you just try to tend to the cuts and gashes. You stay alive. You wait. The wait is hard as fuck, harder than overdose or withdrawal, harder than faking your death, harder than stepping into that restaurant and having a nuclear bomb detonate in your belly at the sight of John and a women who tries to kill you later. Harder than all of that.
"This is fucking crazy," says John. Stares at you. Flushed, and breathless, and stunned.
"Isn't it always," you mutter, both of you laughing because yes, it always fucking is. That's the two of you, the core of what you are. Guns and riddles and euphoria ricocheting everywhere, you and your battle hearts, the war neither of you could walk away from; the ways you cannot seem to stop blowing yourselves up. You were made for this.
When you reach 221, the paparazzi are already there, flashbulbs flying. "Get the hell out of the way," John growls, grabbing your wrist and pulling you toward the door. Mrs Hudson is there, puffy and damp, hugging you with vigor of the bone-snapping sort.
"Thank God," she gasps before asking why, and you say, completely truthfully for the first time in your life, that you do not know.
When Mary and Mycroft arrive thirty seconds later, Mary's face is pinched above the rosy burn of her coat.
She watches John watch you.
iii.
Jim is dead, after all. The whole did you miss me catastrophe was down to a couple of shithead hackers with too much time on their hands. And Janine, who shows up at your flat thirty-six hours later and tries to murder you.
The gun feels inappropriately nice against the curve of your skull. The metal doesn't bite, as it has in the past.
"Good boy, Sherl,'" says Janine, a purring lioness. You hate her. "My brother was right about you."
And then it all makes sense.
You close your eyes, you breathe out, but suddenly Janine is on the floor and John is standing over her with grim light in his eyes and a book in his hand, Poisons from A to Z. You try to get to your feet but you wobble and fall on your arse and that makes you laugh so hard you almost vomit. John kneels and touches your shoulder. "I should have figured that one out," he says, sounding disgusted.
"No, not your job. You-you have a baby, and-"
"It's not real," John says flatly.
You don't understand, but a curious buzzing flares in your head. "What?"
"Mary faked the sonogram. I just found out. Came here to tell you and found this instead." He looks at Janine, unresponsive on the carpet when he says this and looks as if he wants to grind her limbs into a fine pulp between his teeth.
"You're not going to be a father?"
"No." John pulls you to your feet, doesn't look you in the face. He does not seem happy, but he does not seem unhappy, either. You're both lightheaded and shell-shocked, but it's like coming home, falling back into a surreal trauma so powerful it verges on ecstasy.
You call Mycroft. He answers with a sigh.
iv.
And then there's the fallout. John and Mary, screaming at each other-no, that's wrong. John screaming, Mary standing; cold, unaffected, ugly with apathy. She wanted to kill you. She still does, you think, and touch the rumpled skin above your sternum. A reminder, a remainder.
There are many star-pricked nights of John staggering into your flat, smelling of beer and conflict and fatigue beyond expression. Sometimes he's wearing his wedding band. Sometimes he isn't. You pour him water. You lead him to the sofa. You sit next to him. Your heart beats, beats. You wait. He falls asleep quickly most nights. His face goes slack and his eyes twitch beneath his lids, and you battle the urge to press your lips against them, to stroke the shell of his ear, to kiss the crease between his brows. You are so in love with him you think you are going to die, atoms on exploding atoms, a rocket on the launch pad tearing itself apart. And he doesn't know. He doesn't know any of it. Sometimes you think he might be a bit in love with you, too, but who could fall in love with a man like you? You are so pathetically inadequate. You're a computer, a mind, and no one will ever want you for more than that. No one will ever lay their hands on you, or kiss you the way you would kiss him, or hold you because they are desperately, helplessly mad for you. No one will ever want you. But you can want, right? It's not in the rules, but the rules are wrong, and you can whatever you fucking please. If John can't observe, can't see the myriad of ways you desire him, then fuck him.
Fuck him.
v.
It's evening.
John comes by wearing his oatmeal jumper, tender-mouthed and quiet. The two of you plant yourselves side by side on the sofa, the distance between you yawning, infinite. "I can't do it anymore," he tells you."
Your heart skitters. You burn beneath the weight of your longing while something deep and dangerous shifts behind your ribs, spreads its wings.
"She loathes me. Hates that I keep coming to you." John is looking at the fire. You are looking at him. Oxygen shivers in your throat.
"I'm sorry," you say, because you are. You can't bear to see him like this, dull and dimmed, not when you know of his brilliance. You should tell him to stop coming, that it's for his own good, but you can't bring yourself to do such a thing. You'd rather not participate in your own heart's demise.
"I'm not." Now he looks at you, strangely determined. Strangely lovely. Saliva runs into your mouth.
"Aren't you?" Your hands won't stop fucking trembling.
"No."
And here it is, here's where you lean into him, put your mouth on his, and kiss him, kiss him, kiss him.
You don't.
John sits back. He takes an overlarge sip of tea and grimaces as he swallows. He isn't looking at you anymore. You should tell him. The wedding, the speech, into battle, best and bravest and kindest, it's always you, you keep me right, look how you care about John Watson. You should tell him you're in love. Human error.
"John-" You cut yourself off.
He stares at you, just this side of starry-eyed, but that's not new. He's always looked at you this way. "Yes?"
"It's nothing," you lie, and another little piece of you plummets to its death.
vi.
You smoke the days away. You play the hell out of your violin. It's funny, how you can be in the worst pain of your life and still be so neon, so alive. You're a phoenix, surging up from the rubble with a lament of incandescent human suffering. You think of John. You drag your uncut nails across your chest, across the wound his wife put there. You bite your lip. You wait.
vii.
"Mary can go fuck herself," John declares, rubbing the back of his neck, and looks like a volcano. His ring finger is gloriously bare. You stare at it, unable to stop the torrent of hot relief from shimmering in your gut. He drops his bags to the floor and it's the best sound you've ever heard. It's ridiculous, isn't it, to keep hoping? To believe John will ever feel for you what you feel for him. You do it because you'll break if you don't. You know it's futile, but what else, after all this, is there for you to do?
viii.
You're walking along the Thames when it happens. John starts laughing, and he can't stop, he can't stop even when moisture has gathered at the corners of his eyes and his face is bright red and the shattering brightness of it has long since carved itself into your brain. "Yes," he says, sputtering and helpless, "Yes, I-yes," and he turns and he kisses you.
Light, of the blinding sort.
Then you gasp, and you groan, and you kiss him the fuck back. There's always something.