Title: Petite Mort
Author: Elliott Silver
Summary: Sherlock knows why John has done it, but it is a kindness that cuts him to the heart, even the one people don't think he has. If he hasn't (and perhaps he doesn't), then John's must be enough for both of them.
Rating: M – only for safety. There is no sex and nothing adamantly explicit, but just in case.
Author's Note: This story is based on the BBC series, as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short story, "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" (for the famous quote from that piece – relevant to this story – please see my profile). The work here is a study of the show's consequences (following the Reichenbach fall) combined with the Garrideb aftermath. It is a series of alternating POVs between John and Sherlock, each section denoted below.
/-/-/-/-/
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
It's been seven months since Sherlock died, four months since the consulting detective miraculously reappeared, and a month and nine days since John Watson was shot.
It's not the first time (Afghanistan saw to that), and working with Sherlock, John doubts it will be his last.
It was the case of the three Garridebs. Sherlock had moved, but not quickly enough, and when the suspect shot at them, the bullet went through his shoulder cleanly. John knows the routine of this already, the debriding, the suturing, the dressing. It hasn't taken much to recover – from this wound, anyway, this real injury – some stitches, a few shots, a bit of antibiotics. In the end, it's no different in the city than in the field, and the itch of his skin healing is unbearable as ever.
But things have been different since then – Sherlock's been different. He's gotten quieter, not quite so bursting at the seams. On the outside he's as much of an arrogant git as ever, but there are times when John looks over and finds Sherlock looking back at him. Not as if he's worried that John will affect a limp again or go all PTSD on him, but something else entirely, something that might blow their world off its fragile and newly restored axis, something that might shatter it completely.
Cases have come and gone, but Sherlock only plays his violin, long mournful sonatas that draw the soul from him.
John walks up now, and Sherlock is playing. He doesn't stop as he comes in, but the sound changes somehow. It hollows and vibrates towards a blasting crescendo, and then abruptly – stops.
Sherlock turns to him, the violin falling to his chest. It covers his heart like a shield, and the streetlight flares in his blue eyes.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock Holmes remembers dying.
He remembers the fall and the pavement. He knows why he did it – and all those reasons are still logical, and more so they are still right – but when he sees the look on John's face from across the street every single one of them becomes invalid.
Moriarty echoes in his head, and he knows all too well now (as if he didn't before) that it's not the fall but the landing that really matters.
As John comes towards him, he realizes this landing is far harder than he ever thought.
"You bloody fucking bastard," John breathes as he comes to him. "How could you – how? how?"
"I deserve that," Sherlock tells him, but John's anger is volatile, compressed by his grief, and it leaves Sherlock breathless.
"You deserve this too," John says and hits him. This time he doesn't try to miss his nose or his teeth. He just aims, and it hurts, the living solidness of him that comes crashing into his flesh.
He wants to say that he did it for John, but the words don't come. He feels the rawness of them, the burn of it. He feels the scrape and chew of his bloody cheek, the crumble and the dizziness, but what he really feels is John's furiously pounding heart as the doctor pins him into place.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
"You almost died," Sherlock says.
"So did you," he replies.
There's a hiss of breath and Sherlock throws the violin. John catches it somehow before it smashes against the wall. It's not a Strad but it's a Cremini and deserves better. The bow snaps against the damask wallpaper.
This violence is vibrant and vigilant, it seethes and blooms like a volcano. It's everything Sherlock has kept so carefully down since that day he was shot. John is used to Sherlock's anger, but he understands that this – this – is something new.
"I still see your blood on my hands," Sherlock says.
John realizes that he is shaking as he speaks.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
John came back to 221B as if he never left, and Mrs. Hudson resurrected boxes of his things she couldn't bear to give away. He took cases, John blogged about it, and Lestrade was generally satisfied even if Donovan was not. Her face moves like prunes when she sees them, but she says nothing.
Things seem almost normal again, as if they ever were.
He takes the Garrideb case without really thinking about it. It's simple, and he figures it out quickly. They wait for the counterfeiter in the dark, and it's only when they flush the suspect, when he confronts him, that the bastard raises a gun, that he shoots.
Sherlock knows the sound clearly, the echo and thud of a bullet leaving the chamber. He's studied the effects of such projectiles for years. And yet when it happens in front of him, to someone he –
Despite the sheer clarity of his mind, those moments are still a blur to him. He remembers the way John's body bent back and into itself, the way his face contorted and his body sagged to the floor. He remembers the way John held his hand as Lestrade called for help, the way he closed his eyes as if he might never open them again. Sherlock remembers John's shirt was blue, and that it turned red, even as he sunk his hands into John's flesh, pushing into him as if he could keep the blood from coming out.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
He's a doctor, he knows intimately the limits of trauma a body can withstand. But he's always been shocked by it, by the stubborn resilience of human physiology to sustain, to recover from even the worst wounds.
And yet sometimes even the smallest injuries, the littlest deaths, are the most devastating.
Sherlock comes to him now; he presses the shoulder where John was shot. The tenderness is like snow, and the bandage ruffles under the long tips of his fingers.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
John is the only person he would ever beg mercy from – once, if necessary. Twice, without being asked.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock moves like sound, the kind that can break glass without even being audible. He plays his body as gracefully as he plays the violin, long strokes of his legs, willing chords of his arms, glissando, legato, pizzicato, staccato, vibrato, that beautiful rub of Sherlock's fingers against the ebony fingerboard, the way the tips of his fingers are rough from the strings, gut wound with threads of wire, the way his nails are sticky with rosin.
John holds his breath as Sherlock comes towards him, and then lets it out very slowly.
They've been through a lot lately. Irene, Moriarty. Death, shots. Perhaps this is the price they must pay now, the cost of this extraordinary and impossible resurrection.
Perhaps this is, as for Marlowe, the reckoning.
They have not (perhaps cannot) come away unscathed.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
He could give many reasons for this, reel off a list so long it would hurt. Each one a precise and accurate accusation, a feeble and collapsing defense. It's been a long time. It's hot outside. It's boring without a case. I don't like being called the Virgin. I need to hear your heart beat. I wonder what you want. I hate not knowing.
Everything that happens to him is in his mind, but sometimes he wants his body to follow suit.
He's restless as a storm. But he knows barometric change has nothing to do with it, and everything to do with John's fading pulse, the threadbare way his skin now bears the mark of Sherlock's errors.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
Have they got boundaries, he and Sherlock? John wonders. He would say no because Sherlock invades everything that surrounds him (crime scenes, toilets, funerals, beds), draws it to him like a black hole, an exploding star, a supernova of gravity that he sucks into that swirling maelstrom mind of his.
Sherlock Holmes invades. It is direct and almost unappealing. It's the same way he flaunts his nudity, the way he goes to Buckingham Palace without pants, the way he steps out of the shower and traipses through their rooms without adornment.
And yet there is something about the lines of Sherlock's collarbone, his clavicle, the fluted hollows of his throat, the way that water pools there after he showers, the way that John sometimes can't look away. It is the way his ribs are whole, not broken, the way they move when he breathes – god, yes, that blessed way he still breathes.
John feels old somehow, like the veteran that he is. Sherlock is young, he doesn't understand the way that time leaves its marks in crowsfeet and tummylines, in the graying hairs on his head, the silver of his stubble and his chest and even lower. John's body has been etched by so many marks of war, that there isn't a space free of life's graffiti.
But Sherlock isn't like that.
No, Sherlock has a body that's blank, that's waiting to be written on. John could dust the entirety of it from elbows to thighs, from chin to navel, and find no tracks of previous lovers there, no marks of explorers who have come before him to map their presence on the pale cartography of his skin and bones.
Irene knew this too well, that Sherlock Holmes is a tabula rasa of the flesh.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
He comes towards John and rests his forehead against his. It's innocent (isn't it), the way the crowns of their heads roll slightly against one another, the graceful curves of their bones (at least his is graceful, John's is more sturdy, utilitarian) nodding together.
John's face swims nearly out of focus, or rather, comes so closely into focus that the sharp proximity makes him dizzy. He sees the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the sprouting hairs of his eyebrows, the patch near his left ear where he doesn't shave as closely, where the new injury has made it hard for him to reach. He would shave there if John asked, he would take the lather and razor to his skin, but he likes knowing that there's a part of him that is rougher than the rest.
His cheek closes the distance and John's stubble, the very bristle and root of him, the consistent and ever-living part, rubs him.
He reaches out and rests his hand on John's broad and giving shoulder.
Then he pulls him towards him, hands grasping the collar so a stitch pops and rips.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock swings on momentum, the lushness of it, and meets his unresisting mouth. He crushes himself against it, the chapped and roughness of his lips. There's a stilted moment as he freezes, as time stutters, but then – he breathes. John steadies them as Sherlock slides against him and the contours of their lips fit.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
John moves suddenly, so suddenly it seems like a shadow and perhaps that's how you avoid bullets when the Taliban is shooting at you in Afghanistan. Perhaps you have to get good at it like that, at controlling your body until it suits your whims, until it obeys. He remembers the first time he saw John, the clutching limp of him, and knows he's gotten better at getting what he wants, which is why he isn't surprised – ok, maybe a little surprised – at this flurry of skin and teeth and tongue coming at him.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
John remembers too well when Sherlock was gone, when all he asked for was his safe return. Now he wonders, was he asking for this? And if he wasn't, why not?
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock pushes John back, puts all his weight on him and lets him feel it. He doesn't stop, and when John kisses him again, Sherlock tastes everything he had been going to say and didn't.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock moves against him, and John opens his mouth deeper. He lets Sherlock taste the bitterness of whisky, salt and peat, on his breath. He seeks out the coolness of Sherlock's mint-and-wash tongue.
What would it be like to sink into Sherlock's body, as deeply as he does his mind? That lithe and elastic expanse of ligaments and flesh, strung together as delicately as the wing of a butterfly. What would it be like to feel the fibers of his skeleton, the bend of him, the way his bones move beneath his skin? What would it be like to become part of that movement, even the motor of it? What would it be like to feel Sherlock moving above him, the heft and bulk of his own muscle holding together the fineness of their bodies, coming together even as they fall apart?
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock pulls at John's shirt, untucks it. John's skin is warm, and his fingers slide up his ribs, counting them as he goes until he reaches the muscle of his heart. John is moving against him now, and he feels the rub of them, this way they want nothing but mercy – and perhaps, not even that.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
Sherlock Holmes wants to see the battlefield of his body, see the damage he has caused to it, and perhaps he has every right to. He could give into this, into them, and it would not be rash, nor spurious.
But John knows they can't – he can't. He can't explain that if he does this, if he lets go, that nothing will be the same again. Things will change, in extraordinary and unexpected ways. And he knows that Sherlock doesn't understand this – can't – because he thinks with his head, not his heart.
Love is not the strongest of emotions – in fact, it's the vicious one – but loyalty is.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
John pushes him back, somehow gently.
"This isn't who I am," John reminds him. "This isn't who we are."
John sets the distance, the balance, back between them. It settles easily, as if it hadn't ever been broken, and he realizes only John could do that, could do something so perfectly even he couldn't tell where one began and the other left off, not even in all those possibilities spinning through his head.
John rises and Sherlock feels the rip of them, and then just as clearly, the seamless reordering of their lives.
He knows why John has done it, but it is a kindness that cuts him to the heart, even the one people don't think he has.
If he hasn't (and perhaps he doesn't), then John's must be enough for both of them.
/-/-/-/-/ John /-/-/-/-/
John understands what has brought them to this, and he doesn't regret it – not a bit. But he won't – can't – give in to it either, as much as (shockingly) he might want to right now. This, this jeopardizes everything they believe in. Imagine the ruin of their world, this world they keep piecing together between Sherlock's intellect and his dogged sidekickery. What would it be to live without Sherlock Holmes? John can't think of that, and he knows he can't risk it by having him now only to lose him later.
Sherlock had said on that first case, the study in pink, that he was married to his work – no girlfriend, no boyfriend, no extraneous emotional attachment. It would only muddy his thoughts, that brilliant and precise way he does work. But they work together too, in intricate and not always perfect but complementary ways. Perhaps they are a couple as everyone seems to think, perhaps they are married to each other, but in more committed and delicate ways than any license or physical act could be.
Will he look at Sherlock differently now? Perhaps; there's no denying that. Will he look over at him under streetlight, in the lab, at a crime scene, and remember how he tastes, this stringent and bracing quality of him, the way the skin over his ribs moves as he breathes?
Will Sherlock look back at him the same way?
John doesn't know that, but he does know this – this terrible, difficult, insane choice, this brutal but petite mort – is all that keeps them together. It's what enables them to go on, to have these looks if they want them (as if they will need to remember), when really all they need is each other, alone and without clutter or confusion – even of love, perhaps because of it.
/-/-/-/-/ Sherlock /-/-/-/-/
"Is this love?" Sherlock asks.
John lets go of his hand slowly, his fingers trailing over the back of Sherlock's wrist, and somehow this little death rocks them back onto the axis of the world.
"Yes," John answers, and Sherlock knows it is, it must be or perhaps it can be nothing else, because he walks away.
/-/-/-/-/
.