Author's Note: I'm new. Go easy on me. Just for the record, this is not how I actually expect the reunion to go. Also, I realize that 'spasmed' is not a word. I don't own these characters. Thanks, team.
When John Watson was invalided home from Afghanistan, he forgot how to breathe. It had nothing—and everything—to do with his injury. He'd startle himself at odd moments with his inability to draw a full breath, and at night, his dreams could knock the wind right out of him. He thought little about it though—the limp and the tremor got the attention—because each time he concentrated, he found his lungs in proper working order. But somehow, that didn't help him lose the feeling that he was running out of air.
Until Sherlock.
That first night—the night they chased the cab—John's lungs had stretched with the effort of running. And when they'd stood panting in the hallway, he'd let out a breathy giggle, and that was that. The trouble with his lungs was simply erased from his mind, and though he marveled at the cure for the psychosomatic limp, it never occurred to him that Sherlock's mad magic trick had freed John's breath as well.
Now, there was always air. There was air in his lungs to yell Sherlock's name in the moments before he shot the cabbie. Air to run through London streets and rail yards. Air to speak, and cajole, and praise, and scold. Air—even when his chest was weighed down with explosives and the words were not his.
Certainly, there had been that breathless moment at the pool where he'd gone light-headed from relief and suppressed fear, but even then it had been different. The air was still within reach.
In fact, without fail, the air was always within reach: questions, fights, fits of laughter, compliments, reprimands, sighs, groans. But it didn't matter that he used so much. John Watson had all the air in the world.
Until the pavement.
And after.
Until the quiet.
John relearned, then, that quiet can burn. Stillness can ache. That the wrongness of displacement is heavier than oxygen, and it will fill your lungs from the bottom up until there simply is not enough room to accommodate all the air you once claimed.
It made it hard to breathe.
Eventually, the world turned its voracious eyes in some other direction, leaving John to the business of soldiering onward. John Watson was not a coward, so he worked his lungs. He pushed back against empty, adapted to breathless. He moved on, repositioned, made changes, and all the while he kept himself breathing.
He got better at it, of course he did, until he could almost tell himself that it wasn't so different. That it didn't matter that he only used the top half of his lungs. He had enough air, certainly. So what did it matter if it was no longer a limitless supply?
For three years, John Watson kept breathing.
Until the morning when he ran out of breath entirely.
Far from Bart's hospital, far, far from Baker Street, near his new lodgings, John yanked a man out of harm's way, looked into the man's face, and stopped breathing.
Because it turned out he'd been wrong about a lot of things.
The ensuing bottleneck of emotion cut off what little of his chest was still open to pedaling oxygen, and for the first time in his life, John just stopped.
"John." There was so much riding on that voice that his mind locked into a skid. Pain slicked across his skin, and his vision began to tunnel away.
The detective's eyes flickered.
"John?" he said again, becoming concerned.
John's chest spasmed once, twice, but otherwise he was at a complete halt. The taller man's eyes went wide.
"John, take a breath," he ordered.
John heard but did not quite comprehend. The burning quiet had gotten into his chest, and there wasn't room inside him for anything else.
"Watson! Take a breath!"
But John was locked down, filled out with half-formed emotion and pain. The world was going gray.
Fisting his hands in John's jacket, the detective towed him around and slammed him backwards into the nearest wall, compressing his chest.
"Breathe."
The impact forced everything—everything—out of John's lungs. The air from the depths, the air that had been trapped in his chest since that day on the pavement, rushed up his throat in the form of a sound. It was barely audible but entirely uncensored. It was the dregs of the words he'd spoken—He's my friend, please!—the last echo of his plea, the heavy displacement, and so much horrid silence. And it burned.
The detective absorbed the sound like a blow, but he did not retreat.
"Breathe," he insisted, quieter now.
John did. He drew the air in deep and let it hit bottom, then slid it noisily back out between his lips. Deep breaths. Like the night at the pool.
The detective hadn't released his grip on John's coat, so he felt the moment when John's breath settled into its familiar rhythm—when John settled back into himself. John blinked slowly, let out another breath, raised his eyes.
There.
John's face was hard, eyes harder—angry, yes angry, and demanding, and bracing, and believing.
This time it was with a tone of recognition: "John."
"Sherlock."