Battle Wounds
He thinks of it as if the bullet that pierced his shoulder in Afghanistan bore the name of Sherlock Holmes and launched John spinning right into his solar system, and if Sherlock had understood metaphors, he'd known that he's the fixed point John revolves around. Funny that, how the most bizarre thing to ever happen to him came to be what's normal, the one thing he keeps returning to. He thinks of this as he sits on a plastic chair next to the detective in the hospital bed, with an aching head and shoulders after the longest night in John's life. No one can live as recklessly as Sherlock and notget shot, but still, the five minutes before the ambulance came were the longest five minutes he's ever experienced. He'd almost lost him again, but now Sherlock's heartbeats are beeping faintly but regularly on the monitor next to the bed. Lost him like after the fall.
And John, in his damned foolishness, had in Sherlock's absence fallen for Mary. She's everything Sherlock wasn't. Isn't. She's warm and soft and safe, dinner in front of the telly and work from 8-5. After meeting her, John doesn't dream about falling anymore, and his therapist says she's good for him. But then Sherlock returns to London and isn't dead. Never was. And with him comes chaos and turning everything upside down, just like he always did, until it feels like John can't possibly fit more information inside his head.
He looks so young lying in the bed, all inky hair, porcelain skin and cheekbones. But looking closer, you'll find the small signs of age, difficult to spot, yes, but they are there. John has aged too; his hair is tinged with grey and the crinkles around his eyes are deeper. They'll both have bullet wounds now. He whispers quietly to Sherlock, his voice hoarse from sleep deprivation, saying nothing important. He's already been cursing out too many desperate pleas in the ambulance. He can't say it, not even when he knows Sherlock can't hear him.
He touches Sherlock's hand gently. It feels almost like a violation; Sherlock doesn't invite to being touched. He's all motion and sharp angles under that bloody big coat he wears all year round. He always looks so cold, but the truth is he's warm, warmer than John (maybe it's all that mental energy producing heat as a waste product), and his touch sends sparks against John's skin. Now his hands are resting motionless and cold on the sheets, but when John puts two fingers against the blue net that are his veins, he can feel a faint pulse. He doesn't look at the track marks. Sherlock, you bastard.
John moves back to Baker Street after the revelation that his wife is an assassin, that she was the one to tear up Sherlock's chest cavity and burn his heart out. He should've known, should've known what she was. Nothing in John's life is ever what it seems to be, apparently. Except just… Sherlock Holmes. God knows what secrets he's still keeping from John, but he'd forgive them, he'd forgive all of them.
Baker Street is different. It doesn't feel like home anymore. Well, it isn't John's home anymore. Sherlock's different too. Less angular, more human. But he's never been a sentimental man, so they don't talk about everything that's happened; the fall, Mary, the baby, and when John's phone pings from an incoming message, Sherlock doesn't say anything. They solve small cases, watch bad telly, sometimes they fight and Sherlock sulks, but most of all, they don't talk. They've never been good at talking. These are silent months, hazy from Sherlock's cigarette smoke. John dreams about falling again, and of gunshots and of running. Sometimes it feels like he doesn't ever wake up.
For what feels like an entire lifetime he's been bursting at the seams to be able to say that he loves this impossible, irresistible paradox, but John is a soldier and trained to silently struggling on with his duty, and he would rather die than tell. That it started already at Angelo's restaurant, that he's been aching to touch him, have him, know him, since then. That Sherlock is a trigger and with every breath he takes he sets the gun off, piercing John's skin and blowing out his heart. It's so clear now, in retrospect. He knows now that he married the wrong person, he realised it at the wedding and he wishes he could forget the look in Sherlock's eyes before the waltz, and the way John had tried to laugh it off, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. (He shouldn't feel like this; after all he married someone else, because you chose her, and god, he hates it, but somehow he still loves what he thought she was, she is far too much like him and yet she isn't him at all). He's a soldier and he'll always be missing the warzone that is Sherlock, he needs it, desperately. To tell that when Sherlock was gone, there was nothing, really, and that he think they might both be broken but together they'd be at least less so. How do you tell someone this? It's not easy for him, these things.
He has to know. He notices everything, and John's feelings have been written in all he did, quietly trapped in silences and spaces. Sometimes, in small stolen moments, John could somewhere deep inside a tiny part of his heart hope that maybe, just maybe, and in those moments his own heartbeat were more intense and more terrifying than any explosion. But it's just wishful thinking, his mind playing tricks on him. Sherlock doesn't feel love that way. He manipulated Janine to get access to Magnussen's office, calling love a "human error". Yes, he is John's human error, and John can hardly bear thinking of how close he is, yet so untouchable.
And before John has even had time to catch his breath and try to start puzzling together the pieces in his head they're standing on tarmac, and an east wind is coming to sweep the man he loves away from him. Sherlock has shot a man on Christmas Day, just like John once killed a taxi driver to save Sherlock. They both know he is leaving for an inevitable death, and in their last moments together they have nothing to say, or nothing that can be said. John wishes he could meet Sherlock's gaze and say what he's wanted to say for so long, but he's falling apart and in his head, the words "it wasn't supposed to end like this" grind on. But John's a soldier, and when Sherlock looks at him after having said a joke that falls heavily as a coin pierced by a bullet to the ground, he doesn't break. Instead he laughs emptily. Don't do this to me, not again. Stop this.
He looks at Sherlock, steady grey blue eyes meeting muted blue shades melting into green. And at that moment he understands, and the realization hits him, not as a gunshot but rather as a strange sort of cold numbness spreading through his body, a morphine. As they shake hands they both know that it's too late.
Sherlock enters the airplane without looking back, and John stands next to his pregnant wife in her bright red coat, silently watching as it takes off and gets smaller and smaller until they can no longer see it below the clouds.
And then the plane turns around.