I flirt with disaster, with disaster
Tonight, tonight
Don't you ever let me go
"You're dead. You're not – how are you here?" John whispered, stumbling backwards into a stranger he didn't acknowledge.
He was at a club in the West End. Pounding music overpowered the heartbeat in his chest, and the spinning neon lights blurred his blotchy vision. He was unsteady on his feet, stumbling even as he danced with strangers and caught fleeting snapshots of faces. The alcohol clouded his mind, dulling the ache in his limbs and the piercing, pounding, screeching in his chest.
Every time he did this it was like donning a pair of rose-tinted glasses which let him see differently. He would leave the grief at the door of the club and a different sort of numbness would rise up, and he would let it surround him, drown him. It was an ebbing and flowing high, and it let him escape himself and his demons for a night.
He crashed hard in the morning but he didn't want to stop, not for anything. He craved this even though it was all temporary. The taint of darkness, the sharp energy, the way it left his body humming and sticky with sweat.
It reminded him sometimes, but also made him forget. For whole moments this was the closest thing to feeling alive again.
But right now ... this was something new.
He was shaking, full-body shudders that had nothing to do with the two shots in his system. He swayed, rubbing his eyes with a forefinger and a thumb, taking deep breaths and trying to centre himself. When he looked up again, the apparition was still there. An apparition, an illusion, a delusion, because what else could it possibly be? It was still there, and it looked as blank and as imperious as before things had gone to hell with Moriarty.
John distantly noted that his clothes were different. Cutting, tight-fitting jeans that accentuated his legs, and a dark shirt that clung sinfully to his lean torso. The coloured strobe lights highlighted sections, portions, parts of the impossible man before him, and the gyrating bodies around them faded into a hazy mass of movement. John's blood was roaring in his ears.
He felt like he was sinking in quicksand as Sherlock stepped closer and grabbed the sleeve of one of his shaking arms, pulling him closer.
John tripped over his own feet, and then there was less than a metre between them, but also so much more and John felt like the weight of it all was piling up, pressing on his lungs.
He swallowed hard as the scent of the man he'd lost wrapped around him. He shut his eyes against the tumbling shelf of memories, of 221b, thrumming life, home. He gasped in essential air, eyes springing open only to find himself staring at a pale neck and an undone button at the collar revealing sharp collarbones.
"Sherlock," he whispered, "What …?"
The detective remained silent, his only response to pull John in closer, hands running slowly up his arms to his shoulders, then down his chest; slender, pale hands playing John's nerves like violin strings.
John shivered, the touch of the hands through his shirt seemed to make the temperature of the already hazy, sticky club atmosphere rise to near-suffocating. As Sherlock's hands drifted down to John's waist, shifting and tightening, he finally looked up to meet the eyes that loved to haunt his every moment, waking and sleeping.
He didn't know what he was expecting. Pity, nostalgia or arousal perhaps, but that wasn't what Sherlock's eyes held. This energetic, passionate and somehow present man's eyes were devoid of emotion, his face as blank as dried papier mâché.
John felt his blood flush cold, a swooping in his stomach. He broke their locked gazes, looking down to his left at blurs of heels and dress shoes and moving legs.
"You're not ... actually here, are you?" John asked.
Sherlock leaned closer and rumbled something that became jumbled on its way from John's ear to his brain. It didn't matter, it was still the same distant rolling thunder John remembered. He shivered at the cool breath brushing over his cheek.
John hadn't caught what Sherlock had said, but a warm feeling spread from his chest to his fingertips, to his cheeks. His skin was clammy.
The song began to crossfade into something with a heavier, core-shaking beat and a slow-grinding synthesiser. People around them changed with the music, their bodies re-energised, an instigated, controlled chaos. The air morphed into something darker, sinister and ...
Dangerous.
John looked at Sherlock's eyes once more and a taut thing inside him snapped. He didn't care. He just ... didn't care.
He remembered how he'd spent hours sitting in his armchair alone with his thoughts. He remembered how time was irrelevant when he was alone; hours passing in what he thought had only been minutes. He remembered being on fire but still so cold in the company of others.
He didn't care if this Sherlock was real or not, he was here. Here, for however short a time. John would bloody well make the most of it. The knotted, writhing constriction in his chest was easing. It still throbbed and screamed, but John didn't think that it would stop. Not for anything, not for a long time.
He took in sharp cheekbones and pale skin glowing in the darkness and flashing lights. These lights gave the man's dark hair a halo, tinting it blood red, water blue, warm brown. John watched empty grey eyes as they watched him, and were then cast into shadow as Sherlock lowered his head closer.
John glanced down at plush lips absent of blood, barely pink. His heart was pounding in his ears, adrenaline making his veins sing. He ran his tongue over his dry lips, trying to breathe steadily.
Drawing in air and gathering the dusty remains of his steely confidence, he gave a ghost of a smile.
"Want to dance?" John asked Sherlock.
And now I'm spinning in the glow of your neon light
Tonight
Tonight