*Rating will most likely change with later chapters. This is my first time doing Sherlock's perspective, and it's just as hard to write as I expected. If anything feels off, please point it out!
*Also, the next chapter will not be up until after my finals are over and done with, so it may take a while for this to update!
I hate hands.
I hate Molly's hands, how they flit and flutter in the air, how they toy with her hair, how she slathers them with synthetic creams – I can always smell them. At least they can efficiently dissemble a body.
I hate Mycroft's hands, how they're only good for pushing a button on an intercom or twirling his umbrella with purposeful flamboyance.
I hate Anderson's hands; incompetent, contaminating. And Sally's, with their disruptive, prying fingers. John's girlfriends', how they cling, cling to John, his arms, his hands.
John's hands. They are different; large, strong, always moving with purpose, always efficient. As quick to kill (for others. For me) as to cure. Sometimes they touch me; my shoulder, my arm, and once – thrillingly – the back of my neck. They always smell of medical-grade soap and tea; occasionally of gunpowder and metal. Mycroft told me that the left used to tremble. It's stopped since he met me. I stopped it.
I watch them now; he is sitting in his chair, cradling a well-worn book in his palms. Approximately every five pages he lifts his right-index finger to his thin lips, flattens his pink tongue over the tip, before turning to the next page. I watch him read 52 pages, lick his finger nine times, before he looks up, dark eyes clashing with mine. I don't look away and he blinks.
"What is it?"
"Your hands."
"What about them?"
"I like them."
He smiles at that, turns back to his book. "Well you can't have them." There is silence then, tiny smile still on John's lips. When he licks his finger eight pages later, I speak.
"May I examine them?"
He looks up again, stares for a moment before deftly slipping a marker between the pages and setting the book on the coffee table. He walks over and settles beside me on the couch, raising his hands palms-up, complying because this must just be another one of those strange things that his flatmate does. Maybe he thinks it's for a case.
And so John lets me do it; he lets me softly grip his left wrist and turn his palm towards me. I hold it up to my eyes and rake them over it, memorizing every ridge, every scar, every tiny feature. It's still faintly golden from his time in Afghanistan, lightly calloused from manual labor. His fingernails are meticulously clean, cut short so they don't tear holes in the latex gloves that have left his hands slightly dry. His lifeline is broken – Afghanistan killed him, left his life bare, dull, meaningless; and then he met me. All superstition, of course, one of the rare superfluous musings that enters my head when I am bored, and the only one that I won't delete. I bring each finger in turn to my eye, burning the whorls of his prints into my memory. He's missing two on his left hand – burned them off grabbing the muzzle of a hot gun.
I slide my palm around his hand – the skin on the back is so warm, a fragile barrier restraining his pumping blood. My other fingers drop onto his palm, trace the shattered line stretched across it, lingering on the break. I think – I could have imagined it – that his breath catches when I follow the same path with the edge of my nail. There is a ragged scar on his thumb that holds my attentions – it's old; difficult to determine the cause. When I brush over it for a fourth time John chuckles softly.
"Fishing hook. I was eleven. Tried to stitch it up myself."
I feel my lips curve upwards and I resume stroking his palm with my nails, and then it's unmistakable; his breath cuts off halfway through and he shivers lightly. But it's just a reaction to the sensation; not to me. I move them in a slow drag to his wrist. His heart is accelerated above its average, calm rate, but it's still well within the normal range. I'm pushing the boundary now; the limit on how long I can defend this as an experiment.
I probably shatter any experimental pretense when I yank his wrist up and press it to my mouth. I expect him to pull away. But John is so wonderfully unpredictable. He lets me stay, and I feel his pulse flutter faster against my lips. John's heart rate is normally fifty-five beats-per-minute. Right now it's at seventy, and when I part my lips and breathe against his blood-heated skin it spikes up to 90. His breath is catching audibly, beautifully, on every exhale. My own pulse rises as I slide my lips up onto his palm. He still doesn't pull away, not even when I flick out my tongue, catch salt and soap and the musk of his old book. I chase the taste over his life-line and up to his index finger, pressing my tongue into the bluntness of his nail; he groans softly and I feel it from my teeth to my toes. When I suck his finger down to the first knuckle, tongue swirling around to feel the shorts hairs sprouted there, his hand flies into my hair, curves to the back of my skull.
I slip off of that finger and take the middle two into my mouth, working my tongue in between them; this time his groan cracks, spikes an octave, elongates into a moan. I look up and he has his head pressed into the sofa, face red and filmed with sweat, breaths coming in short little bursts through his nostrils. I pull off once more and his fingers are slightly swollen. Gorgeous.
I bring his other hand up, because the right is always different from the left and I want to see if I can taste his saliva on the tip of the index finger. I stroke my thumb slowly over his - and then he lurches back into the far arm of the sofa, hands digging into the cushions, dark eyes blown wide as he stares at me in – is that disgust? Fear? The emotions flit over his features too quickly for me to pin down. My eyes follow him as he rises unsteadily and walks into the kitchen. I hear the tap turn on – it starts whistling, so he has the hot water running on its own. I can hear him scrubbing; the tap switches off and there's the sound of fabric dragging roughly over skin.
John stomps over to the door and yanks it open, tearing his coat off the hook on his way. I tilt my head back and look at him, and he freezes for a moment, eyes catching mine. Finally I can pin down his expression. Bewildered.
"I'm going out," he says with forced steadiness, and then the door slams shut and I'm left with the taste of soap on my tongue.