Title: The Lightning Strike
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Rating: K+
Pairings/Characters: Sherlock/John. If you narrow your eyes a fraction.
Warnings: n/a
Wordcount: part 1: 826, total: 3107 (according to my count)
Summary: A sort of triptych based on each part of "The Lightning Strike" by Snow Patrol. (Youtube: watch?v=2Q3KFwHhW-0) Because I'm massively uncreative, and music serves as a substitute. It's like the Thames is flooding, but we won't drown if we hold on.
Beta: avianautumnus
Disclaimer: *insert the usual here*
Crossposted to Livejournal: fire-chan9490 (dot) livejournal (dot) com (slash) 43647 (dot) html
Only a moment, and it all changes, the shift so indescribable, even his own mind fails to identify, categorise it. Suddenly, everything is bright and brilliant and there is insanity and adrenaline within him the likes of which he's never felt before, and god, he doesn't want it to end.
He stares at John, and John stares back with a mad, fractured grin. The danger is there, highlighted in every line in his face, the glare of the lightning that traces his perfect-not-perfect silhouette against the storming black sky –
Sherlock looks, and the shock that thrums through him has nothing to do with the thunder that sounds so loudly he can feel his heart skip from the bass of it and everything to do with the man before him. His mouth is dry, empty despite the rivulets of water that run down his face. No words rise to his lips, none, but a thousand rise to the forefront of his ceaselessly churning mind: ephemeral, dangerous, visceral, human, normal, unusual, ordinary, extraordinary, broken, whole, damaged, shattered, dynamic, on and on and on.
He doesn't want this to stop, tries to catch the instant as it starts to slip because it's so new, so strange to him. He is not bored, not one bit. He can take on the world, raise the wrath of a hundred million sleeping snakes and come out of it alive, alive. It's terrifying and wonderful and different.
.
Cracking the cases like raw eggs and separating yolk from white, truth from false leads: easy, easy, easy. Long white fingers that grasped and untangled the scarlet threads from the colourless skein, eyes blindfolded by smothering normalcy. Alone in brilliance, burning everything around him, he was so sick of it. Sick of watching the sheep in uniform addle their little mundane brains trying to keep up, sick of trying to rein in his fires so that this narrow, stupid world (that flies around the bloody sun, damn it) can accommodate him.
And then there was John. John, who is so frighteningly typical on the surface, but who kills without hesitation, without tremors in his left hand.
John, with the calm, friendly face, so surprised and grateful when his cane was presented to him at the end of their first (intoxicating) run. John, with the calm, friendly face, so surprised and disappointed when he heard about the cocaine and the morphine (This guy? A junkie?).
Just as high on adrenaline as Sherlock is, just as dangerous, if not more. Still slate-grey-blue eyes that bore with a constant strength and curiosity, not like his own that slice and dissect like surgeons' knives with a butcher's efficiency. It's nearly comforting, at least as comforting as monotonous sameness and not-threats can be. The constant strength is not enough to reach him.
Except that it is.
And it almost doesn't bother him, except it does, except it doesn't.
But it was such a slight not-disturbance at the time that he chose to delete it.
.
"Sherlock?" John shakes his head, attempting to shake the water from his face. Sherlock says nothing, the image of John Watson dazzled by silver white lightning still imprinted on the backs of his retinas. "Sherlock, we're going to lose them." The mad grin is beginning to dissipate, exchanged for a slight uncertainty as Sherlock fails to move.
The rain pours down in humming sheets, and the moment is starting to fade already, the sheer normalcy of the world pressing in like large clumsy hands against the fragile bubble of the second. For once in his life, he does not want to keep running, just wants to stand there, and let it wash over him in waves like ecstasy. He knows he can't.
Deliberately, he closes his eyes, still observing that frozen dynamic image, still feeling John's presence in his veins like the electricity that had cut through the night and divided his life into ignorant and aware. John has been with him for some time, yes. He has killed for Sherlock, and the gunshot still echoes there in the beat of the rain. He had been too shocked, too caught up in the case to really think, to really feel, but now he saves this awareness, every detail, the shhhhhh of tires on wet asphalt, even the ugly London street smell, like carefully folding away something precious and storing it in the attic.
"Sherlock, are you all right?" He opens his eyes, and the bubble collapses in on itself. Evanescent, quite possibly never there. John does not look dangerous or brilliant; he looks wet and bedraggled and slightly ticked at his lack of response, but then there it is, glowing in the attic of Sherlock's mind and sparkling behind those constant slate-grey-blue eyes.
He grins, a mad grin to replace the one that has left John's face. "I am on fire," he declares in exhilaration, and they are running into the night again.
A/N: I haven't written fic in ages. If anything blatantly sucks, please. Forgive me.
