It starts out with the eye.
Sherlock knows how to sketch, can do it quickly, accurately. It's useful for him; he fills page after page of notebook paper with careful drawings of the experiments he's working, running up along the edges of his narrow handwriting and of the pasted in photographs of body parts in various stages of decomposition. It's not a hobby; it's a skill, a tool to be used, not something he does for fun.
And yet.
It's a Thursday morning, the shafts of light angling through the window of 221B cold and November bright. He's sitting at his desk, notebook pressed flat by the heel of his left hand, pencil held loosely in his right.
In front of him, there's a petri dish containing an eye, sliced carefully in half and propped up against the dish's rim so that the now sightless pupil stares blankly back at him. The iris is a hazel ring around it, the pupil itself a milky blue-white, larger than normal.
He does his best to draw as close to life as possible, wants to keep an accurate record before he begins his work upon it. He takes photographs too, of course, but he prefers his drawings where he can highlight the nuances that a camera can't catch.
Sherlock is so lost in the careful scratch of pencil against paper that he almost doesn't notice the muffled thump of John's footsteps on the stairs.
(Almost but not quite. He's attuned to John, knows that even if he were deaf and blind and in a crowded room, he'd know where John was in a heartbeat.)
He notices, but he chooses to ignore the grumbled good morning that John gives him on his way towards the kitchen.
Didn't sleep well, his brain supplies unbidden. Nightmare, most likely. Will be on edge for the better part of the morning.
Be gentle, it says.
From the kitchen, the refrigerator opens and closes and there is the sound of drawers slamming shut and silverware clanking. There's a crack and then a squelch as an egg falls to the floor and Sherlock can hear John cursing softly.
It shouldn't make him so happy. He has no idea why it does, but there's something about this morning that sits heavy and warm and dull gold in his chest.
A few minutes later, the smell of eggs and burnt toast gets stronger as John makes his way into the living room, two plates balanced carefully in his hands. He's humming softly but it stops abruptly when he reaches Sherlock.
"Sherlock," he says flatly, and there is something like steel in his voice and so Sherlock looks up. He's looking at the eye, which in turn is looking at Sherlock, who is looking at anywhere but John.
It's ridiculous, really, the little twist of guilt that sits sour in his stomach. He tries to arrange his features into something resembling innocence.
"Sherlock," John says again, and Sherlock wants to snap at him to get on with it, to get this pointless little squabble out of the way so that they can go on with life as normal. "That's an eye."
"Yes," he says in response, desperately battling the urge to roll his eyes.
John doesn't say a word, just sets the plates down on the desk and then plucks the petri dish up and whisks it into the part of the refrigerator that has been deemed Sherlock's.
(They had argued about this once, one of the first major arguments that they'd had. It had ended with John sectioning off a quarter of the refrigerator with masking tape and warning Sherlock that any experiments that managed to migrate past the taped off area would be tossed in the bin without a second thought.)
"One of these days," John announces cheerfully on his way back towards Sherlock. "I'm going to kill you. I really am."
Sherlock's not quite sure whether he's kidding or not, so he takes a long swig of tea to avoid answering. John sees this and rolls his eyes.
"Bloody child," he grumbles but there's the hint of a smile lurking behind the gruffness.
Without the eye to focus his attention on, Sherlock is fidgety. He rolls the pencil in his hand over and over and over again until the friction begins to burn. John sees this and frowns.
"You know, it wouldn't kill you to eat."
Sherlock waves him off. He's got a feeling in his gut that there'll be a case today, the first in ages. John says he's been absolutely horrid in the stretch between the last one, a right proper bastard he says with that guarded tone in his voice that means he's trying to prove (to Sherlock? to himself?) that he's not hurt.
I don't mean to be this way, Sherlock wants to tell him. Not at all, not at all.
He needs a case.
He practically aches for the mental stimulation, can feel the hunger for it vibrating hollowly in his rib cage. There's no point in eating, not when food will just slow him down later.
And so instead he flips to a new page in his notebook, taps the pencil against it contemplatively. The pencil covers the page in flecks and dashes, a snowfall of graphite.
He draws the plate of eggs in front of him in quick, messy lines. It takes under a minute.
Rubbish. Worthless. Dull.
He expands his scope after that to the contents of the desk: their laptops, tucked into the far corner, their mugs, side by side. Slightly more challenging but only a brief diversion.
John's no longer paying him any mind, his attention absorbed by the morning's paper. His face, normally placid, tightens almost involuntarily and Sherlock doesn't need to be able to see the headlines to know that he is reading about Afghanistan. It must be especially bad this morning, especially when combined with the nightmare the night before, and he can see in the way John's lips press together in a thin line that he is still covered, through and through, with blood and sand and desert heat.
Without even properly realizing what he's doing, he's started to draw John, broad strokes for the shape of his head and neck, small careful ones for the soft features of his face. He finds him in the tensed set of his shoulders, in the troubled slash of his mouth. For the first time in weeks, Sherlock finds that he's not bored.
Before he can finish, his phone chimes. He's tempted for a minute to ignore it but the curiosity, the burning need to know, wins out in the end, the way it always does.
Lestrade, of course. A teen boy found beheaded in an alley, two more killed the same day the week prior. Will he come?
Of course. It's not even a question.
He shuts his notebook, slips it under his laptop. John looks up from the paper, the worried lines smoothing out as he begins to realize what's going on.
"Case?" he says and there's hope in his voice. He needs this almost as much as Sherlock does, their destructive twin addictions.
Death and danger, mayhem and mystery. It'll kill them one day, and when it does, Sherlock hopes it takes him first.
It's selfish, he knows, purely and utterly selfish and it's one of his wishes that he'd never say out loud because John would frown at him in the way that signifies that he's deeply worried, but it's true: if one of them must die, he hopes that it's him so that he doesn't have to live in a world that lacks a John Watson.
The case eats up the rest of the day and they return to the flat close to midnight, sweat drying on their skin from a chase through an alleyway. The adrenaline of it all had worn off sometime during their post-case dinner and John barely lasts five minutes in front of the telly before he slides off into sleep, snoring softly. Sherlock tries his best to contain a fond smile and fails. There is a flutter of something in his stomach, nerves, tension, something all new and unfamiliar.
No good will come of this, he tells himself sternly and to shake it off, he reaches for his notebook, wanting to write down the details of the case while they're still fresh in mind. It had been worth abandoning breakfast for- a drug cartel that dispatched any of its defectors with beheading. The boys had all been runners for the cartel, mostly homeless youths or addicts themselves.
It had been simple but still satisfying, enough to keep the darkness away for a while, enough so that the gears and cogs in his mind can whir away in quiet contentment rather than acting as barbs intent of tearing him apart from the inside out.
He'd forgotten about the sketch of John, but there it is, nearly complete save for a few minor details. Sherlock stares down at it. Something about it seems too intimate, too personal and for a minute, he contemplates burning it.
He doesn't though but he also doesn't finish it, so there's that.
The train ride back from Dartmoor is quiet, with a faint lingering sense of tension that pervades the air in their compartment. John says he's not angry with him, not anymore, but his lips are still pressed tight together, his knuckles white from where his fingers dig into the leather of the seats. John might think that Sherlock is blind to this, to things like these, but he knows, can read John better than anyone else.
John scrubs at his face, muffling a yawn with his hand, and Sherlock watches the tendons in his arm and wrist shift and move under the skin. It's fascinating, it really is, and he wants to know more- where the small white scar around the base of his thumb came from, what the pale, pale skin on the underside of John's wrist tastes like. He wants to open John up from the inside out and study him until he understands John better than he understands anything else.
John catches him watching him. He scowls.
"What are you looking at?" His voice is trying its best to sound gruff but there's half of a laugh waiting underneath and Sherlock knows he's been forgiven.
"Nothing," he says, turning so that his gaze is directed at the window. "Nothing."
John looks at him, narrows his eyes, and then turns back to his phone. Sherlock sits in silence for another few minutes, bored and anxious and fidgety, and then fumbles around in his pockets, tugs out their contents and spills them out onto the seat next to him: pocket knife, pen, three inches worth of twine, a crumpled postage stamp, a handful of screws, two pills of indeterminate origin and a pocket notebook. John raises his eyebrows when he sees everything, but keeps fiddling with his phone.
Sherlock takes the pen and the notebook, pinches the latter open between his fingers and rolls the pen over speculatively in his hand.
He doesn't even need to think about it; almost unconsciously, he begins to outline a familiar shape. The round face, beginning to grow lined with age and stress (and he knows at least a few of those wrinkles are because of him) the thin stretch of his lips, the straight line of his nose. He knows John better than anything, anyone, better than he knows himself. He's a puzzle waiting to be solved and also the simplest thing Sherlock could imagine.
It's beautiful, really, the closest thing to poetry that he's ever known.
Sherlock bites his lip as he draws. He doesn't know why he's so focused on the drawing; he's the only one who will ever see it and he'll most likely burn it when he gets back to 221B, but he goes carefully, slowly.
When John's not looking, he sneaks tiny glances at him. There is a patch of gray hair near his forehead and he wonders how it would feel underneath his fingers- course and rough, he imagines.
There is the blue of John's eyes, and Sherlock wants to capture the color somehow, paint every wall of the flat that particular shade, catalog it, name it.
Did you know, he wants to tell John. In ancient Egypt, lapis lazuli was one of the most highly prized minerals for its vibrant blue color? They'd make into amulets. John would maybe smile at this, would ask Sherlock why this was relevant. Sherlock would never dare to tell him that he'd take the watery blue gray of John's eyes over lapis lazuli any day.
He wonders how John would react, can practically see it in his head: surprise, worry, sadness played out neatly across the theater of his face. He'd give that concerned smile and even though neither of them would acknowledge it, they would both know that it would be only a matter of time until John left. "Better for the both of us," he would say gently as he stood in the doorway of 221B for one final time. And Sherlock would try to convince himself that this was true, but it wouldn't be, not for him.
I'd be nothing, did you know that? he wants to tell John. Nothing, nothing without you, just a brain intent on cannibalizing itself.
It isn't fair. He was doing fine before all of this but then there was John and he cannot imagine going to back to how things were before.
You did this to me, he wants to tell John. Look at me. I'm a mess, thanks to you.
He stays silent until the train reaches London.
Once, just once (and he knows that John would kill him if he knew), he finds himself making his way up the stairs that lead to John's room.
It was the dark underbelly of the night; when the flat was silent save for the occasional noise from a passing car and the rustle of sheets as Sherlock lay in bed, attempting to sleep.
Just as he thinks he's about to finally slip off, there's a sharp creak of mattress springs from upstairs. He stiffens.
He knows this routine by heart, this weekly occurrence that leaves John stiff and guarded come morning: soon there will be a muffled shout and then silence (what happens then Sherlock doesn't know, can never know because this is a part that John will never let him see). Then John will pace his room the way he always does, trace a careful perimeter as if he's back in the desert, the floorboards creaking underneath his feet, the sound of his breathing measured, deliberate.
It frustrates Sherlock, though he'd never tell John. Look, he wants to say. Look. I healed your leg for you. You're here, with me, and it's brilliant isn't, I give you crime scenes and danger and every piece of me that I can bear to offer so why isn't it enough? Why won't it stop?
He balls his fists in his sheets, waits another minute or two.
Before he knows what he's doing, he's making his way upstairs. John's door is shut tight and he twists the doorknob carefully, slowly. He opens the door and stands in the threshold, not daring to enter.
John's still in the grips of the dream, face contorted and twisted into something monstrous and unfamiliar. This isn't his John; it's a stranger wearing his skin.
Unexpectedly, John's body snaps towards him and for a minute it's this stranger, this notJohn staring at him with eyes filled with a raw, animal panic. Then it clears and it's John once more, the outlines of his face muzzy with sleep and confusion, a bit of fear still lurking around the corners of his eyes.
"Sherlock?" he slurs, his voice bleary.
This was a mistake. He knows that now.
Sherlock says nothing, just shuts the door gently and makes his way back to his room, almost tripping over the bottom step. He sits in his bed and reaches for his notebook with shaking hands.
The sketch is sloppy at best- his hands tremble, his mind rattles. He does it quickly in pencil while his breath comes in shuddery gasps.
Why are you shaken? a part of his brain demands. This shouldn't affect you.
But it does, it does and he hates himself for it.
When the sketch is done, he stares at it for a moment.
John is an indistinct cloud of lines, face caught in the blurred zone between terror and waking. It is John and it is not. It is England and Afghanistan, order and chaos, a cup of tea with two sugars and the contents of a syringe.
It hurts to look at, like staring at the sun for too long.
His hands scrabble through the drawers of his bedside table until they close around a lighter. It takes three frantic clicks to get it to light. When it does, he pinches the sketch between his fingers and watches it burn, watches the smoke curl up in delicate tendrils and the paper crumble away into gray ash.
There is nothing more terrifying than this, this state of not knowing.
He does not sleep for three days.
After he's been away from Baker Street for six months, after his hair's been cut short and dyed a gingery color that he hates and after he's already forgotten how many steps there are up to 221B, Sherlock finds himself bored out of his mind in a dingy hotel room in Budapest.
The fluorescent lights flicker every ten seconds (he's counted) and from a block of apartment across the street, Hungarian music blares from a tinny speaker (he hears the lyrics, translates them to English, then to French and Russian and Mandarin and Latin and back to Hungarian and it's not enough not enough not enough). Three floors down, there is a man, his head lying in a pool of his own blood, sticky and congealing. Some of it is underneath Sherlock's fingernails.
The maid won't find the body until morning and by that time Sherlock will be on a plane bound for Damascus. His brain is tearing itself apart.
His mind flickers briefly to the small amount of cocaine that he has tucked away into his bag. He's only used a few times since leaving London, but the temptation is strong, strong, strong and he is the weakest man to ever breathe.
Sherlock rustles around in his bag for the vial, praying that he's got a clean needle, and his hand closes around something else- slim, bound in leather. His notebook.
He takes it out, flips through its pages: old experiments, diagrammed neatly in his spidery handwriting, notes on cases, John and John and John.
There's a stub of a pencil in his pocket and he rolls it between his fingers. Better than using, he supposes.
Where are you? he thinks as he draws. Did you leave Baker Street or could you not bear to? Have you met someone? Do you remember me? Could you ever forgive me? Would you ever understand?
He wants to know if he'll ever get a chance to ask.
When he finishes the drawing, he looks down at it speculatively. It's John but it isn't, not quite. There's something off about the set of his lips or maybe it's the lines around his eyes. Sherlock frowns and turns to a blank page, starts again.
This time it's something different but there's still something not quite right about the way that John has been drawn. He growls, low and deep in his throat.
He tries again and again, furiously scribbling, biting his lip in concentration, ignoring it when it begins to bleed. He doesn't stop until the graphite of the pencil snaps suddenly and he looks down at what he's done.
Page after page of a man who he doesn't know, not anymore.
He is beginning to forget John, forget the way that his face changes when he's happy or angry or frightened. He is he is he is and the thought of it makes him scrub at his face until the skin begins to burn with friction, makes him want to scratch and claw at the walls until his fingers are ragged, bleeding stumps. It constricts his chest and throat tight until he can't breathe and he's drowning he's drowning he's drowning.
Sherlock tears as many pages as he can manage out of the notebook, crumpling them up and tossing them across the room. He wipes roughly at his lip, the backs of his fingers coming away stained a wet crimson, and runs his hand through his hair, tearing at it a bit. He is ragged and raw and alone alone alone and the thought of it is the blackest thing he's ever known.
In the end, he uses anyways and the rush when the drug hits his bloodstream is the sweetest feeling there's ever been.
Three week after he returns, three weeks after John nearly breaks his nose with a well placed punch and then storms out of the flat in silence, three weeks after John had come back and squeezed Sherlock's shoulder just once, eyes filled with a clash of joy and resentment and disbelief, the power goes out.
He doesn't notice at first, not until John comes in through the front door. His gait's different, carrying something heavy- grocery bags? He's not sure.
"Why the hell are you just sitting in the dark like this?" John asks, his voice sounding tired, annoyed. Sherlock can't help but smile at it anyways (he's home he's home he's home). There's the sound of John flicking the light switch on and off then a sigh as he sets whatever he's carrying (grocery bags- Sherlock's sure of it now) on the ground. "Shit. The power's out. We should go find some candles or something."
Sherlock makes no attempt to move and John sighs.
"No rush," he grumbles from the other room but it's affectionate and for the first time in one year, six months and three weeks, Sherlock thinks that they might just be alright.
There is the sound of drawers and cabinets opening and closing all throughout the flat and John's voice floats in through a doorway.
"You'd think that with all the damn clutter in this flat we'd at least have some bloody candles." There's more to the end of the sentence but John's moved into another room and his voice grows muffled, and then drops away entirely.
There's a long stretch of silence for a while and Sherlock basks in it, breathes in the smell of must and tea and chemicals and John that is 221B. He knows he hasn't been entirely forgiven, doesn't think he ever will be, but he's home and that's all that matters.
Just when he's been gone for an unduly long amount of time, John comes back in, arms filled with candles of various shapes and sizes and lengths. He sets them up across the living room.
When he goes to place a fat purple candle that has congealed wax pooling at the top on the coffee table, Sherlock can see something tucked into his pocket and he realizes what took John so long.
"Where'd you get that?" he asks as John strikes a match. The tiny flicker of flame throws light onto his features, highlights just how much the past eighteen months have aged him.
"You left it in the silverware drawer, of all places. I was just returning it."
Sherlock's heart thuds almost painfully in his chest. There's no way that John, clever, perceptive John who can read Sherlock like an open book no matter how he tries to guard himself, can see those drawings and not know the truth.
If he demands to have it back, John will be suspicious and he's already unhappy enough with Sherlock. Better to wait, to be gentle. He watches John move around the living room, lighting candles, flooding the room with warmth and light.
When he's done, John sits in his chair, tugs the notebook out of his pocket. Sherlock can't help but bristle slightly.
"So these are what, your experiments?" he says, flipping through the pages. "I never knew you could draw. I mean, granted, a severed foot is hardly the same as a still life of wax fruits but-" He stops mid-sentence, breath hitching slightly, and Sherlock knows.
He can imagine how it'll go. John's lips will press together in that line that indicates that Sherlock's done something wrong, his brows pulling together. He'll be gentle about it; he always is. But his leaving is inevitable and Sherlock braces himself for it, tries to brick up his heart with stone and ice in these last few peaceful seconds.
He lets himself look up at John, just for a moment, but instead of the worried look he was expecting, his face is soft, surprised.
"Oh," John says quietly. "Oh."
John stands, drops the sketchbook into Sherlock's lap and leaves the room. For a brief, sickening moment, Sherlock thinks he's about to leave, but instead he returns a moment later with a pencil, his expression almost shy.
He hands him the pencil and then: "Would you?" so soft that Sherlock barely hears it. He dips his head in a nod, trying to ignore the way that his throat has gone dry.
"I…yes. Yes, of course."
John sits back down in his chair and Sherlock flips through the pages of his sketchbook, wincing a bit when he sees the drawings from that hellish night in Budapest. There are four jagged lines of torn paper from where he had ripped the drawings out and then one final blank page.
John sees this and smiles.
"I'll have to buy you a new sketchbook then, won't I?" His voice is warm.
"Only if you want to." Sherlock's just begun to sketch the rough outline of John's upper body.
"Of course I do," John says. "Of course."
John is made bright and golden by candlelight. Most of the time his gaze is fixed just above Sherlock's head but sometimes Sherlock catches him sneaking quick glances at his hand as it sketches and smooths across the page and something like hope quickens in his chest. He takes his time on this, makes it as close to perfect as he can get. It's his declaration, of sorts.
He looks up for a moment as he begins to start on his face. His eyes suddenly lock on John's and John knows, he has to know, there's no way that it's not all scrawled across Sherlock's face. They sit staring at each other for a long moment.
Don't do this if you're not sure, he wants to say. Don't do this if you're not sure because this is all there is for me. It starts with you and it ends with you and if you do this and leave, I think it might just be the end for me.
Please be sure, he wants to say.
John crosses the room in three quick strides and for a moment it's just them, just John's breath on his face as he leans over Sherlock.
"I missed you," Sherlock whispers and he screws his eyes shut tight. Please be sure please be sure please be sure.
"I know," John says. His hand is on the back of Sherlock's neck now, rubbing slow circles with his thumb. The tiny hairs there stand up on end. "I know."
And then John's lips are pressed to his and for a moment, everything drains out of Sherlock's mind but the feeling of it all. His lips are warm and chapped and soft and Sherlock wants to laugh at how ridiculous it all is, how inevitable.
It was always going to end like this wasn't it? he wants to say. You and me, like this, lips to lips and skin to skin? I don't think we could've avoided it if we tried.
John's tongue is in his mouth, his fingers carding through Sherlock's hair and Sherlock can't breathe and if this is what drowning feels like, he'd die a thousand times over.
He slides a hand under the fabric of John's shirt and John shivers under his touch, makes a soft noise that Sherlock wants to hear every day for the rest of his life. He can't contain the laugh that bubbles up against John's lips and suddenly John is pulling back and laughing too, laughing as he pulls his shirt up over his head and laughing as he unbuttons Sherlock's and it's brilliant, it really is.
Sherlock takes a moment to breathe him in, traces with his eyes John's chest. The tops of his shoulder are powdered with freckles and the scar stretches across and down to his chest, a puckered white mass of gnarled tissue. The candles flicker golden on John's skin and Sherlock is transfixed as he presses a kiss to John's unmarred shoulder.
I want to draw you like this, he wants to say. Like this, bare and bright and vulnerable. I want to catalog you, to know every inch of you, do a scientific study of you. I want you to never leave, not ever and I want you to call me brilliant and laugh with me at crime scenes and force me to eat. I want you to be mine and I want to be yours. I want you I want you I want you.
He doesn't say any of this, but he will one day. He doesn't even have to, not really. John already knows.
John's still laughing when he twines his fingers with Sherlock and pulls him up and out of his chair and out of the living room and he's still laughing when he kisses him again and again and again.
Later, they lie tangled together in John's bed, half asleep, sweat drying on their skin. It's dark- the power's still out and all of the candles are still in the living room, but neither of them particularly mind.
"Would you ever…possibly…" John's voice trails off into a question as he absently rubs nonsense symbols into Sherlock's back.
"Hmph?" Sherlock had been focused on all the work that's waiting to be done now that he's back in London. He'll need to call Lestrade first thing in the morning; at the absolute least, he can wheedle a few cold case files out of him.
"Would you ever think of finishing that drawing? Of me?" John's voice is soft and hesitant and Sherlock can't help but grin a little into the crook of John's neck.
"Of course," he says. "Anything. Of course."
You don't have to ask, he wants to say. You know I'd do anything for you, anything anything anything. You're better than a body in a locked room or cocaine or any piece of me that you could imagine. You're like candlelight.
But he's already slipping towards sleep but it's alright because the world is soft and slow and golden.
And for once, everything is quiet.