Who, if I cried out would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:

I would be consumed in that over whelming existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying.

You smiled at me today. Not the vague, strategic, curve of the lips that you use to bend a witness, or Molly, or an unfamiliar member of the force. A true smile. Full of joy and triumph and the giddying high of the hunt.

Radiant. Glowing. Beautiful.

And I wanted to kiss you, my love. Badly I wanted to kiss you.

But would I survive that Sherlock? Would I live through you turning your head away in shock. Stumbling for the words to kindly (for you were ever kind to me, in your own way. In your own, distinct, understanding of the word…) but surely crush my heart?

Or worse, would I live through your lips returning my spontaneous caress?

For, I cannot lie; there are days when the simplicity of your tolerating my company and not loving me seems to threaten my very existence. Could my body (nothing but flesh and blood and bone after all) bear the intensity of even the possibility that your heart stirs for me as mine does for you?

Long, long ago I lost track of whether it was the danger of the chase (the dance of the crimson sniper sight across my chest) or the danger of your love (your fingers, cold with what I could almost believe was fear, tearing the deadly vest from my body) that stilled the incessant trembling of my hands.

And I am so very afraid, my love, that this, the purest emotion that I have ever felt, the greatest beauty that I have ever nurtured, might crumble under the light of your acceptance. What then Sherlock? If it was all smoke and mirrors. Not love, but lust and vanity that sped the frantic beating of my heart. What would be left of me then?

So I grin back (like the idiot that I am) laugh, clap you on the shoulder and save my poetic prose for the hours when sleeplessness blurs my sight and the ache in my chest becomes too much to bear un-channeled.

All so that I might cling, helplessly, to the exquisite fear that you do, or don't, feel for me what I so desperately believe I feel for you.

I own nothing, Sherlock and John belong to the BBC, the poetry at the beginning is the first stanza of Rainer Maria Rilke's fantastic poem The First Elegy (look it up and read the rest of it. Seriously, it's beautiful!)

If you review will love you forever!