"Kiss me."
The words come to John through a stupor of alcohol and exhaustion, taking longer than usual to reach his brain and cycle back out into some kind of sense. At first he thinks he's heard wrong. There's no way in hell Sherlock could have just said that. It's a nauseating mistake on his part. Sherlock doesn't want John to kiss him. He doesn't want anyone to kiss him. He doesn't feel things that way. John is being foolish and wistful, that's all. Nothing unusual there. He's wanted these exact words from this exact mouth for five years too long, but it's all in his head, he thinks, putting his whiskey down on the side table with a strange tremor of despair. Sherlock cannot possibly want this (him).
He hears it again. Louder, a wildly desperate thing itching to climb out of Sherlock's throat and sit naked in the space between them.
"Kiss me."
If two words have ever in his life sounded more bruised, more beleaguered, more beaten, John can't recall them. He turns his aching neck to the right so he can look at Sherlock properly, framed as he is by thin light from the overhead bulb, and see him standing there in his big stupid coat with a gun in one hand (John's breath swoops from his lungs at once), and a bouquet of flowers in the other. The flowers are not at all attractive. They're limp and look like they've been scavenged from a garbage skip.
John fixes his eyes on the gun instead. It's beautiful to him, someone who still finds tremendous appeal in efficient, elegant weaponry. Sherlock's fingers are clenched around it, tight and trembling, which makes John feel a soft kind of terror. Nothing makes sense. Not Sherlock's request, not the gun, not the damn maggot-riddled carnations, none of it. The next thing Sherlock says makes even less sense.
"Moriarty is dead. So is your wife."
John stares at him for a full beat. Then he clenches and unclenches his left fist and says, choking on emotion, "Fuck."
"Yes," Sherlock agrees and comes all the way inside, shutting the door behind him and toeing off his Oxfords as though he hasn't just demanded John kiss him, then tell him the greatest criminal mastermind of all time is dead, along with John's assassin soon-to-have-been ex-wife.
It's like some ridiculous joke. Like the train carriage and the bomb and a minute and eighty-nine seconds to live, but infinitely worse. John waits for Sherlock to break into laughter and murmur, "Totally had you," but he doesn't. He just lays the gun on the side table and the bouquet in John's lap, and says he's sorry.
"For what?" asks John as a hot buzzing flares in his ear canal.
"For killing her. Them."
"You killed them?"
Sherlock looks at his chair for a moment as though he wants to sit, but opts to remain standing. "Yes."
John's tongue is thick and heavy in his mouth, horribly like something dead. His blood-alcohol ratio is clearly off the rails, and between that and the past two sleepless nights, he feels grotesque. This is not the time for such shocking news, but it seems he doesn't have a choice. He looks at the flower petals strewn across his upper thighs and swallows. "Tell me what's going on, now, or I swear to God, Sherlock..."
Sherlock nods unflinchingly. He takes off his coat, thoughtlessly tossing it to the floor where it lands on John's second-best slippers from sight.
"The whole story," John prods, gritting his teeth.
"Right," says Sherlock. "The whole story." He inhales shakily, but rather than getting to point, says, "I would have called, but everything happened so quickly that by the time I'd have spoken to you I'd be nothing more than carnage in the rubble."
John flicks a maggot from his right knee. "I don't understand."
"Moriarty had planted a bomb directly under the statue of Anteros."
"In Piccadilly Circus?" John asks, incredulous. His head is on fire.
"Precisely. Mycroft let me know there'd been a tip-off about a bomb there, but he couldn't confirm who was responsible. I correctly deduced that it was Moriarty, and went to see if I could defuse it myself, as well as how much time was left, if any. I then suffered through an exceedingly tedious phone call from Moriarty himself. He was teasing me about the detonator code being in his mobile, saying that we were all going die in eight seconds, and then one of Mycroft's men got a visual on a man of Moriarty's height near the statue and told me to take the shot."
Sherlock goes quiet then, seemingly lost in thought, and John, unwilling to oblige his reverie, nudges his arm and tells him to continue.
"I was about to take the shot, when suddenly, there was Mary, standing right beside Jim, talking to him. He—he called her Sabrina, told her she was fucking it all up."
"Sabrina Moran," John cuts in hollowly. "Moriarty's right-hand woman. Shit."
"I'm sorry, John," Sherlock says for the second time. "I'll apologise properly in a moment, but you asked me to tell you what happened so—"
"No, no, go on."
Moriarty dodged the first bullet, so I took aim again, but Mary—Sabrina—caught that one in the chest and dropped like a stone. Dead immediately, I presume."
"And the third shot?"
"Direct hit. He never had time to finish typing the code."
"Christ," John breathes. Two maggots are crawling up his jumper and a loose petal has landed on his sock.
"Should be on the news right about now," Sherlock says with something like nonchalance, though he looks as though he will keel over at any moment.
"How are you here and not being mauled by the press?"
"Mycroft, mostly. He got me out, gave me a ride home."
"You—I mean—this is—I can't believe it." John does not need any more whiskey, but he picks up his glass and downs the rest anyway, because fuck. He offers to get some for Sherlock too, but he declines with a delicate shake of his head.
"I'm—I'd rather not say what I'm about to under the influence of anything but adrenaline," he says, so quietly John nearly misses it.
It feels like the contents of his stomach have spilled into his abdominal cavity. His heart begins to race. "What do you mean?"
"I was going to tell you this on the tarmac months ago, but somehow it didn't seem appropriate considering I didn't think I'd ever see you again, so I'm going to say it now." Sherlock rocks forward and back on his sock-clad heels a few times, looking remarkably like a small child, a strange flush blooming on his cheeks. John struggles to his feet, placing the flowers none too gently on the piece of upholstery he's just vacated, because suddenly he doesn't want to hear whatever Sherlock is going to say sitting down. Little black dots swim across his field of vision, combining with the dizzy roar of blood thumping in his ears.
Sherlock stares at the rug, clears his throat, and speaks. "I am in love with you."
John makes a sound; half-whimper, half-grunt, and his eyelids fall closed of their own volition. He slams his right fist down on the arm of his chair, clenching the fabric.
Moriarty is dead and Mary—or A.G.R.A. or Sabrina Moran or whatever the hell her name is—is dead too and Sherlock is in love with him. It's without question the most staggering five minutes of his life, and he's had his fair bloody share of shocks.
Sherlock moves forward as though to console him, but decides against it in the end. They stare at each other while every barrier, boundary, and limit they have ever constructed between them collapses around their feet. John is going to pass out. His heart is pounding too fast and the black dots are getting thicker with each passing second. He puts his free hand to his forehead and feels a patina of perspiration there. This is…there are no words big enough—severe enough—to accurately describe it. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
In a deeply primal region of his brain, a great wail of celebration is going off, shrieking and clanging like a piece of industrial machinery. He's longed for this desperately, but this isn't how he imagined it happening. In his brief, quickly discarded fantasies, he and Sherlock had been sitting someplace nice, preferably with low lighting and a bottle of fine wine between them, not like this; John drunk as hell on a Wednesday night and Sherlock high off adrenaline, with a rubbish-scavenged bouquet of chartreuse carnations—no fucking symbolism there—dumped on his lap. Kind of a mood killer, that. So is the news of his wife's recent death.
Sherlock, you really aren't getting the hang of this, are you, John thinks, and drops back into his chair, flowers and all. He puts his head in his hands and exhales heavily. Sherlock is talking again, but John cannot look at him.
"I realise this is terribly unwanted news, but I can't bury it any longer. The whole game with Moriarty…it might have begun when we were just boys with the Carl Powers case, but as soon as you got involved, he saw how I cared for you and set out to destroy me through you. Every seemingly random interaction in your life since I jumped off St Barts was orchestrated by him, John. That includes you meeting Mary. She was assigned to you so I would return from my work and find you preoccupied, so I wouldn't feel necessary, so I would see for myself that you were unavailable and that my feelings, however intense, were hopelessly unrequited."
"Sher—"
Sherlock holds up a hand. "Please, I'm not finished. John, he—he meant what he said at the pool. He meant to burn my heart out and he has, despite my greatest efforts otherwise. He knew you were my weak spot from the very start. So did Magnussen, which is why he put you in that bonfire. It wasn't for leverage. It was to ruin me."
Something about this strikes John as remarkably unfair, as though he is some sort of pawn in the flurry of action, something to be bargained over, something to pluck at the hero's heartstrings just enough to distract him from saving the world. He lifts his face, rubbing at his chin with the heel of his hand, and remembers something. "He said I was your damsel in distress."
Sherlock snorts. "He meant it quite in the metaphorical sense, I assure you. You've never been helpless, John. You're endlessly resourceful and much stronger than I could ever hope to be. You've never needed me."
"I'd have died in that fire if it wasn't for y—"
"If not me, Mary would have pulled you out. And if not her, someone else. I'm quite replaceable."
John huffs through his nose, glaring at Sherlock with all the wrath and unrequited desire he's bottled up for so long. He agrees that he isn't some helpless damsel in the throes of Moriarty's game, but he does need Sherlock. Incredibly. "You arsehole. Why are you always so hell-bent on making it seem like I don't need you? Of course I bloody need you, and not just to drag my unconscious body out of bonfires or shoot criminals in the knee when they try to strangle me, but because you're my best friend, the best and bravest and wisest human being I've ever known. Because you revive me. Because you heal me."
Sherlock blinks several times in rapid succession, much like when John asked him to be best man. His tongue skates briefly along his lower lip.
"Has this not been clear to you?" John presses, growing angrier by the second. "Can you not see, you supposed genius, the evidence in front of your eyes? Because at this point it must be neon and strutting around in the nude!"
"What ev—"
"Your incessant self-deprecation when it comes to me is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. You're blinding yourself to the truth and—"
"What truth?" Sherlock demands as John pushes himself out of his chair for the second time, gathering a terrifying sort of momentum.
"—and you—you come in here with this ridiculous—" John snatches up the bouquet and thrusts it in Sherlock's whitening face— "clump of maggoty flowers and present them to me. For what? A gift of apology? A romantic fucking gesture? What, Sherlock, what? No, don't answer. That's a rhetorical sodding question, because you don't know what the hell you're doing, do you? You think you can just come in here after killing my wife and Moriarty and beg me to kiss you and then tell me this. And then, and then, have the utter audacity to tell me I don't need you. Well, you know what? Fuck you. You don't know anything. If only you'd learned to stop feeling sorry for yourself and open your eyes for half a second maybe w—"
"Open my eyes to what, John?" Sherlock fairly bellows, wrenching his suit jacket off and throwing it to the floor beside his coat with immense vitriol.
"To the fact that I am in love with you right back, you titanic moron." John's chest is heaving with emotion and the feeling of vertigo has only increased. "And have been for years."
Sherlock's face goes completely, alarmingly blank.
John nods in acknowledgment, smiling grimly. "Didn't see that coming, did you? What an epic clusterfuck we've gotten ourselves into, you and I. Should have said something ages ago and perhaps we could have avoided all this."
For what must only be several seconds but feels more like several eons, Sherlock stares at him as though he is simultaneously the most extraordinary and most wretched creature he's ever encountered. "But you—but Mary!" He bursts out at last, looking furiously indignant. "You married her, you love her!"
"I thought I did, but that was before she killed you."
"She didn't kill me, I'm standing right here."
"You were dead, Sherlock, and by some miracle your heart restarted, but's that totally beside the point, becau—"
"It wasn't by some miracle."
"Excuse me?"
Sherlock swallows and rubs a hand over his face, taking a tentative step closer. "When my body was going into shock, when I knew I was dying, I went to my Mind Palace. Moriarty was there, where I'd left him, stark raving mad, and he said something—something important."
"What?"
"He said—he said I was letting you down, that you were definitely in danger."
John inhales sharply, absorbing this. "You mean…?"
"It was you. You brought me back."
"God," says John. "God. Sherlock, I'm—I didn't know. " He goes on, considerably more gently, "Everyone had basically given up hope of your survival. Any love I had for Mary vanished as soon as I found out she was responsible. You tried to give it a positive spin for my sake, but I knew it was bullshit. It wasn't surgery, it was murder. And yes, I married her and I did love her once, but I thought you were dead, I thought I needed to move on. If I'd known you weren't really dead I swear to God I would have waited for you, but I didn't. You never told me."
"I couldn't," Sherlock breaks in weakly. "That would have spoiled everything."
"No, it wouldn't," John snaps, still tremendously sore over this specific chain of events. "But let's not get into that. We have enough to sort through as it is, and I'm not feeling particularly charitable at the moment." A billion and one questions swarm hotly through his head, but one is burning the brightest: "Why, if you thought your feelings were 'hopelessly unrequited,' did you come in here and tell me to kiss you?"
Sherlock digs his teeth into his bottom lip, two spots of colour appearing high on his cheeks. "Because I had to come back to you after two years of hell and see you with someone else at the very same moment I realised I was in love with you, because I was forced to swallow my feelings at that awful church, burning and burning, standing behind you while you kissed the bride on your wedding day, because I would kill for you and die for you and resurrect myself for you, and I have, because you don't understand the effect you've had on me, John, because my want for you could fuel a rocket, and then some." He pauses. "Because I needed you terribly."
And then it seems all consideration for logic and rationality has fled John's mind because he is saying, "You can have me," and he's putting his hands on either side of Sherlock's face and pressing his mouth to Sherlock's mouth, and kissing him like the world is going to end.
This isn't how John pictured it, either. His late-night fantasies never involved an achy, whiskey-tasting, moist-eyed first snog in the middle of 221B, but here they are, and as they clutch each other tighter, tripping over Mrs Hudson's tea tray in their haste, it's safe to say he doesn't give a damn.
...
And that is how John comes to be standing in St Bart's morgue at three o'clock in the morning with Sherlock's warm hand wrapped around his own clammy one while Molly peels the sheet back from the corpse that was his wife.
He knows it's her the instant he sees her hair; bleached blonde and falling over her forehead as it always did when she didn't bother with gel. A pang of something sweeps through him, a howling mixture of loss, regret, and fury. He exhales roughly and Sherlock squeezes his hand twice. Alright?
John squeezes back, but it lacks resolve. The surrealism of everything keeps hitting him like a punch to the abdomen. Now that the effects of alcohol have worn off, he feels heavy and grim and awful. The situation is so bizarre—Molly's eyes keep darting between the place where Sherlock's hand is entwined with his own, and Mary on the autopsy table—it almost feels as if he should make a joke out of it to ease the incredible tension, but he refrains on the grounds that he will be the world's biggest dick if he does so.
"John," says Molly suddenly, sounding apprehensive, "I—I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, but the baby i—"
"I know," John cuts in, another wave of anger and remorse flaring in his gut.
"Wh—what d'you mean?"
He experiences a dark sense of irony that even Molly is able to tell he hasn't been having sex with Mary—and thus hasn't seen her undressed—even though he's been living with her since Christmas.
"It's fake, I know. She told me."
Sherlock twists around to look at him, eyes wide with dismay. "She told you the baby isn't real?"
"Yeah." John snorts, humorless.
"When?!"
"Earlier tonight, actually. Probably so she could go and destroy London with a clean conscience. That's why I came over, but you weren't there. God, I'm stupid," he murmurs, inhaling sharply when Sherlock clenches his hand around John's own, vice-like.
"You're not. You're not stupid. Don't ever call yourself that again."
"But I should have known; I'm a bloody doctor, for fuck's sake."
"It's not your job to be suspicious of the woman you married or expect she might have faked a pregnancy."
"I—"
"You will never convince me of this being anyone's fault but hers, John," Sherlock says, with an expression of such piercing rage it causes a curious hotness in the back of John's throat. "And I am so, so sorry."
"As am I," Molly says with a tremble in her voice. "I can't imagine how you must be feeling."
There isn't a word for how John is feeling. The sensation writhing in his gut absolutely defies the limits of the English language. He is no longer going to be a father, and although this is a highly unexpected shock, the worst thing is that he feels relieved over it and not devastated as he ought to.
It reminds him of the miscarriage his mum had when he and Harry were nine years old; the way she broke the news while standing at the kitchen sink with her forearms damp to the elbows and specked with pearlescent suds and the remains of that night's supper, the look of sheer anguish on her face as she turned the faucet to scalding and let the water pour hotly over her skin, the tears she blinked away, the tears she couldn't. He should be feeling that too, the kind of sorrow that melts your insides and leaves wind whistling through the cavities where your organs once were, but he doesn't.
Perhaps this is because he's also reeling over Sherlock's admission of love, is violently aware of the places Sherlock has just kissed him, glowing like a second sun. He's hung-over, both physically and metaphysically, and feels more intensely tuned in to the great beauty and horror of life than he has ever has.
John has loved a lot of people—he thinks of rolling end over end down scorching dunes with James Sholto the afternoon they finally decided to stop fucking around and put their mouths on each other's bodies; thinks of the girls before that, the ones with long hair and eyes that narrowed bluely when they laughed; thinks of everyone after Sherlock burst into his life, the women he chose because they reminded John of him—but he has never loved anyone as fully or fluorescently as the man beside him, holding him to Earth. John is a helplessly poetic soul, and feels that if he hadn't found Sherlock when he did, he would have found him later. Anytime, anywhere. In a fucking monsoon on a planet in another universe, in the heart of an apocalypse. Their deep inevitability is shaking through him with the force of a tectonic shift, muddling any residual sorrow over the sudden loss of his never-real-to-begin-with wife and child.
He puts a hand on Sherlock's cheekbone (his stomach rolls with pleasure at the fact that he is allowed to do this now, to touch Sherlock in this way), and Sherlock's eyes crinkle very slightly at the corners, solemn and infinitely tender. This cannot be the same human being who once contaminated John's Thai curry with bull semen and left acid burns in the bathroom sink, but it is. Remarkable.
"John—do you—do you need a moment with her?" Sherlock is careful not to address Mary—Sabrina, John reminds himself bitterly—by name. "Alone?"
"Er, yeah. I suppose." He feels horribly out-of-body, in the room but not. Sherlock moves back and Molly tugs the sheet awkwardly up to the corpse's chin, as though John won't be able to bear seeing her flat belly, a painfully obvious reminder of the feigned pregnancy.
"We'll just be…" Sherlock nods toward the door and he and Molly disappear into the hall, walking a respectful distance away.
"Well," John says, exhaling through his teeth. He moves toward the autopsy table with an abstract sense of dread and clenches his left fist as a wave of nausea sweeps through him. This is it, the final moment with the woman he'd made his wife. He should say something reverent, something remorseful, but the first thing that comes to mind is, "You cold fucker. Not so nice being on the other end of the gun, is it?"
Mary/Sabrina is greyish and perfectly unresponsive. Insolent, John thinks, even in death. He inhales and reaches out to flick her hair from her closed lids. "I'm sorry for you," he murmurs with surprising decorum. "It didn't need to be like this."
As much as John detests her for lying to him so profoundly, nearly murdering his dearest friend, and working for Jim-fucking-Moriarty, he knows the dead woman in front of him was once someone's little girl, a child who probably slept with stuffed toys at night and jumped rope with other kids. It wasn't entirely her fault for ending up here; circumstances have certainly dictated much of it. If her parents are still living, they will never know their daughter is dead, lying prone in the white glare of hospital lights while her husband stands over her, numb.
John rests his palm briefly on her exposed clavicle, feeling the pulseless flesh with a final throb of grief. Then he steps back, takes a greedy swallow of the coffee Sherlock forgot to take with him, pulls the sheet all the way over his wife's face, and leaves her like that, marble-cold body to match a marble-cold heart.
...
Rain is coming down with violence as they step out of the cab, Sherlock's hand on John's ulnar process, thumbing his pulse. They're both exhausted to the point of surrealism and limited motor-control—everything seems incandescent and full and strange as they stagger into the dim silence beyond the threshold and up the seventeen stairs to their flat, mute.
Sherlock stops as soon as they close the door behind them and looks at John. His fingers are still moving over the skin of John's wrist and a faint crease has appeared between his brows, the one John's wanted to kiss smooth for years (oh, he's in deep, isn't he?).
"What?" he asks, barely more than a susurrus of breath. Sherlock is so close John can see the light from the kitchen overhead caught in his sooty lashes.
"I don't know." Pause. "It's just—you look like the last spurt of a volcano before it goes dormant and the whiteness of light shed from newborn stars and th—"
"Don't start waxing poetic," John interrupts, shaken. "That's my job. Now, come on, you git. You need patching up." The unspoken darling-love-beautiful-angel-Sherlock take up space in his lungs, beg to be voiced, but he grits his teeth instead and exhales hard, taking Sherlock's elbow and leading him gracelessly through the dark before they collapse right where they are.
"I don't need patching up," Sherlock protests, flicking on the bathroom switch and giving John the world's weakest scowl.
"You've got a superb bruise on your collarbone and three cuts on your hands, and that's just what I can see. Who knows what's under your clothes." Shit, that sounds more suggestive than John intended. It has a similar effect on Sherlock, whose cheeks flush a dull rose. "You know the drill. Sit."
Sherlock lowers himself to the closed lid of the toilet seat, unable to hide a wince in doing so.
"Rib out of place?" John asks, lifting an eyebrow.
"It would seem so."
"I'll work on it once we get some gauze and antiseptic for these." He sweeps his fingers gently along the split skin of Sherlock's hand, hissing in sympathy when Sherlock twitches in discomfort. John turns around to pull the first aid kit from the medicine cabinet, startling when Sherlock curls an arm around his waist and rests his forehead against John's lower back.
"I'm sorry," Sherlock grits out, muffled by wool. "I'm sorry she's dead."
John swallows and opens the kit with a click. "I'm not."
The realization escapes him with relative ease.
Sherlock freezes somewhat, his forearm digging into John's belly. "She was—she was your wife."
John plucks a tube of topical ointment from between a pair of tweezers and a bottle of aloe vera gel. "We've been over this, Sherlock. I hadn't loved her for a very long time. Yeah, maybe it should or could have ended differently, but—" He revolves within the semicircle of Sherlock's arm to face him, looking down into that perceptive face with a burst of affection so fierce it is almost indecent. "—But I really can't imagine another way out. She did nothing but use me to target you, and all while working with Moriarty. She was narcissistic and uncaring and manipulative. Her loss will not destroy me, know that. You have to know that." He cups the back of Sherlock's skull, palming the calciferous plates beneath his curls. "The death of Mary, Sabrina, or who-the-fuck-ever, was a bit like having a cancerous tumour removed. Not a pleasant procedure, but endlessly healthier in the long run." He bites his lip. "Honestly, I owe you one."
Sherlock wraps his other arm around John's middle and presses his cheek to John's abdomen, inhaling shakily. "Shut up, John. You don't owe me a damn thing."
"Christ, yes, I do."
Sherlock looks up at him, bemused. "You saved my life."
"It's rather mutual," John says softly, bending at last to kiss Sherlock's puckered brow. "Now, you have to stop distracting me," he admonishes, straightening and squeezing an ample amount of antiseptic gel from the bottle. He extricates himself from Sherlock's grip and begins tending to the visible wounds, grunting with displeasure when Sherlock unbuttons his shirt to reveal four more angry scrapes along his torso. "For Gods sakes, be more careful the next time you assassinate the world's greatest criminal mastermind."
"I'll try," Sherlock replies, meek, and it's absurd how sentimental John feels, how molten. There's a distinctly first-date giddiness vibrating through them, despite it being nearly four o'clock in the morning with a pair of frayed adrenal systems and bone-deep fatigue. Sherlock sucks in a breath when John's thumb brushes (quite accidentally) over his left nipple, and they meet eyes for a split-second, breathless.
"John."
"Yes?"
"Your bed or mine?"
This is so unexpected that John laughs, clear and open and free, for the moment, of all the weight upon his shoulders. "You're in a bloody hurry."
"No! No, not—not like that." Sherlock is blushing, really blushing, and laughing too, a bit. It's like watching a baby sparrow take flight for the first time, soft and sweet, gut-punching in its virginity. But he looks vaguely affronted by the suggestion, enough that John's heart sags in his chest. Oh. Sherlock doesn't want…that.
It's fine, though, he tells himself. He'll love Sherlock if they never touch each other again, even in the most innocent sense, but the idea of not being able to explore Sherlock's physical topography pains him more than he's willing to admit.
"I see," he says easily, and snips a length of gauze from the roll. "So, just sleeping, then."
Sherlock draws back, staring at him with something like astonishment. "Don't be daft. Of course I want more. I want to…decode you, decipher you, learn you. Just not now. You deserve me when I'm not like this."
Christ. This sends tingling heat into John's chest and groin both, so he reluctantly closes off that avenue of thought lest his current state become any more conspicuous. "And where does kissing fall in this model?" he inquires, securing the gauze with a strip of medical tape. The pads of his fingers linger over Sherlock's swiftly accelerating heartbeat.
"Acceptable," Sherlock mumbles—more like breathes, a far better way to describe the manner with which his voice rises like smoke into the air—and he must stop giving John that look immediately (the one that makes him feel like he's swallowed a fucking comet and died and come to life several times over) because John is leaning down with the helpless inevitability of metal fillings to a magnet or moths to a great light, and kissing Sherlock Holmes for the second time in history.
Sherlock's fingers dig into his biceps as John brushes their chapped lips together, his tongue coming to meet John's, cautiously, meticulously; so completely in character John could weep if his head weren't spinning off his neck with euphoria, wonder.
This is less urgent than the first time, allowing them to express much more of their long-suppressed feelings for one another. The pain of so many things unspoken is beginning to dissolve, John can feel it. The ache is fading and giving way instead to something terrifyingly, brilliantly, bright.
It's the story of a kiss that's gone through hell to happen, that struggled to life years earlier in the light-shot darkness of London's streets, that bloomed over take-away Chinese and scalding tea, that fluttered wistfully between them that night, the night with the handcuffs and the fear and the thrill and the take my hand, that waited in bitter stillness for two years, dusty with neglect, that has seen murder and rage and joy and want, and is finally, finally streaming out of them, victorious.
It is worship. It is revival.
Sherlock makes a sound into John's mouth and gets to his feet, clumsy, moving them back through the open doorway and along the hall into his bedroom, where John's scapulae meet roughly with the wall.
"Sher…" He pants, wrapping his arms around Sherlock's upper back as firmly as he possibly can and throwing himself into the kiss the way he does everything; glowing with base, animalistic desire. If John could deviate into a separate universe that consists solely of him and Sherlock and the slick warmth of their mouths, he would do so in a heartbeat. There is nothing but this.
"John. John John John." Sherlock has a way of bending his name to express things which are unspeakable, too profound for the confines of language. It's terribly affecting.
"God, god, oh," John heaves out, and finally, because his lungs are beginning to ache and strain, they part.
Sherlock is very pink and very close.
"God," John repeats, bracketing Sherlock's face with his palms.
"John," Sherlock corrects, and John's heart rearranges itself completely.
They stand, each gripping and grasping at the other, two life-lines entwined, anchored only by anticipation and intention.
"Did we decide on a bed?" John whispers against Sherlock's lower lip before pulling back to look up into his eyes.
"Mine," Sherlock responds instantly, half-speaking, half-trying to kiss John again.
"Wait. Wait. Ask me again."
Sherlock blinks at him, confusion furrowing in the bridge of his nose. "Ask you what?"
"What you said when you first came home, earlier tonight."
Sherlock presses his forehead to John's and sighs. "Ah. That. John…kiss me."
"It would be my deepest pleasure." John presses a rosy, lingering kiss to Sherlock's mouth, pulling back as Sherlock responds with vigor. He grabs a fistful of Sherlock's half-buttoned shirt in one hand and walks backward, leading them into the bedroom, then closes the door with a solid click, not once looking back.
A colossal thanks to Marie (known on AO3 as CWB), my beautiful beta-reader and pillar of support, who helped me shape this into something solid and bright. I am grateful beyond words.