From the first moment he opens the gas canister, he is struck with the smell, the poignant and nearly nauseating smell. He swallows and overturns the can, dousing the room in the overwhelming stench. Curtains, drawers, carpet. He watches the stain spread across the bed sheets, sinking deep into the mattress.
He heard somewhere that gas stains never came out of fabric. It won't matter.
If there's no more sheet, there's no more stain. A crude solution, to be sure. But, nonetheless.
A solution.
Sherlock finishes the room and moves into the next one, watching the liquid seep into the floorboard, seek out every corner, and drip down the walls.
It feels strange to be surrounded by a flammable womb, a cocoon of gasoline. What will he emerge as? Does he want to emerge at all?
He leaves the can open and tips it, lets it flow on his way down the stairs, leaving a darkened trail.
At the foot of the steps, he hears Joan in the kitchen, splashing.
(He may have had to convince her, cajole her, fall to his knees and beg. "We need to do this," he had said and she had sighed, like he was a petulant puppy, and kissed him and he knew that was a yes.)
He waits for her in the foyer.
"Done," she says when she arrives.
"Done," he agrees, gesturing upward.
He pulls out his pack of cigarettes. He lights one and shakes out his math. The first inhale is beautiful, deep and laden with relief. Nicotine. A disease that will kill him happily.
"You are so fucking sexy when you smoke," Joan says beside him. He remembers when she had tried to convince him to quit. When she would sit beside him, satiating his need for chemical. And here they are now: prepared to let everything go while she complimented him. There is something perverse about being here and not taking advantage of the moment.
He takes another drag and lowers his mouth to hers. She's already starting to inhale. Without looking up from her darkened eyes, he flicks the cigarette at the trail of gasoline.
He hears more than sees the flame catch on, a distant murmur as it races up the stairs. While he feels the fire greedily suck the air out of the room, Joan greedily sucks the smoke from his lips. She is warm and welcome. Sherlock has to remind himself she is not fire. She is wet. If he plunges into her, he will not be charred- he will drown.
The heat glows at his back and Joan tastes like the faintest trace of gasoline. (When he had gone to the gas station, asked for a pack of smoke while he paid for the gasoline, the cashier had smiled at him and asked if he was planning something sinister. Her lipstick had been too bright for her job and he had told her he'd tell her but then he'd have to kill her and she had laughed. Oh, they always laugh. There is nothing else to do.)
Tendrils of orange are racing through the room and she is trying to pull his shirt up. He takes a step back and does it for her, in a single move pulling it off and throwing it at the growing fire. Incinerated.
Purified.
She takes off her underwear under her dress and he grabs it from her hands, aiming again for the fire. She snatches it back.
"I'm gonna need that," she tells him, sly and practical.
He laments for a moment the loss of his shirt, but then her lips come down hard on his. So hard that he feels the jarring impact of her teeth before her tongue slides into his mouth. Hungry.
From upstairs, there's a cracking, a roaring. The second floor is burning. Sherlock thinks of the bed sheets, the gasoline stain. Gone. He thinks also, of all the religions, the ones that burn their dead and the ones that make you walk through fire and the ones that tell you to burn away your sin. They may not be wrong, not just yet.
His spine is against the wall and he can see both Joan and the contorting mass of light behind her. He needs more time to figure out whether it's frightening or beautiful. Joan is whispering into his mouth, her fingers working open his zipper. She is soft, velveteen like flower petals, she feels malleable. But he knows that she is anything but; that if he tries, she would rip him apart and never look back.
Sherlock waits until she pulls down his jeans and turns her to the wall, his back to the heat. The flames are a presence behind him. A tug, almost an embrace, the fire gently calling. Cocaine could never do this. Cocaine was flying from the tops of buildings into traffic; this fire was falling from the building and watching himself hit the pavement. But it's still familiar; painfully familiar. There is smoke in the air, mixing in with their oxygen until Sherlock feels short of breath already.
"You kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire," he manages to say, more of a garbled whisper than an actual coherent sentence.
And yet Joan murmurs in return, "A fire inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service."
And violins swell in Sherlock's heart.
She has sweat on her body already as she pushes off onto him, long legs wrapping around. His knees buckle as her full weight shifts into him and he into her, her legs hanging inches off the ground.
With his first thrust, Joan throws back her head to expose her neck. He bites and she gasps as if touched by ice, the smoke-tainted breath catching in her throat and turning into a cough. He feels that action: spasms from her diaphragm to her entire body, down to his cock, a tightening of muscles around him. He feels like a live wire, shocked and coursing with voltage.
She clears her throat and nods and he begins moving his hips again. The roar behind him turns into a shrieking. Their home screeching for help, screeching obscenities mixed with pleas of desperation, screeching because it cannot talk. Wood splintering, electronics sparking, paint peeling, scorching the very soul.
He wants to tell her, this is what you do to me. This is what I want to do to you.
It feels like there are thousands of bugs running up his bare back, fire flies and dragon flies and the bees he had been sure to evacuate before going about this task. It is either that or the ghosts of the house who are trying to escape. Collateral damage in his quest to find Heaven.
Joan is lightly moaning, making high breathy noises with a rasping somewhere in her throat. The sound of a foreign creature. The heat is getting more intense now. His eyes sting and he blinks rapidly, tears forming. Through the film of liquid, he watches her blur in and out of focus with every movement, the sheen of sweat on her skin, hair sticking to the dampness on her face. Faster, faster, focusing, fading, faster.
Her nails dig into his back and he thinks, we might die in here.
He comes with a guttural noise and sinks an inch lower under her weight and the pressure of the flame behind him.
"I'm not done yet," she gasps.
He can barely see, the orange flickering blending with all the smoke and pricking at his eyes. Everything is a shadow, scornful, scolding. He balances her between the wall and himself and frees one hand. He feels his way down his own chest to where he is going inside Joan, feels her swollen clit.
Nerve endings, happy endings. Idly burning away.
Kissing up the tendons of her neck, he brushes over it lightly, then with more insistence until Joan's back arches and her lips tremble. With a throaty "Fuck, Sherlock," she comes, clenching around him.
(He can remember the first time she had come by his hand, surrounded by silk sheets and soft pillows, and she had writhed upon the bed and he had thought that this was something he wanted to do to her every day. He thinks to himself: that might have been the first day I wanted to ignite the bones of this apartment, just to see what she would do and how she would come while it happened.)
He takes a moment to catch his breath before letting Joan down. Their entangled mess of limbs becomes, again, two separate bodies. She goes to pick up the crumpled mess her underwear is.
Sherlock briefly misses his cigarette, flicked into the gasoline, even though his throat is parched. The flames are higher now, indistinguishable from anything else that remained of their home. He notices with a mild glance that the fire has consummated everything there was and is spreading into the foyer, a desert attacking the oasis. The soles of his boots feel warm. He knows without lifting a foot that the bottoms will have melted into the floorboards.
He turns to go, but Joan is standing still, head bowed in futile avoidance from the smoke and staring into the mesmerizing flame with an oblivious expression.
"Fire cleanses," he reminds her.
She swipes two fingers at the wall and holds them out to him: dark soot, endless black skies.
"Fire destroys," she informs him.
He takes her fingers into his mouth, the bitter taste somehow reassuring. Carbon, he remembers, phosphorous, nitrous, potassium. Incomplete combustion. This is what didn't burn and turn to smoke, this is what will remain of them. It is ink, spilling the story of their life onto the walls.
Under it lingers Joan's own aroma. He savors the sensation of the ridges of her fingerprints on his tongue. They shine in the dim burning when he lets them go, his saliva coating her fingers. She is beautiful here, he decides, and frightening with destruction around her. Chaotic energy.
Kali, the goddess who upon defeating her enemies began to dance- a dance that would have destroyed the world had Shiva not lain in her path. Will he lay in her way? Could he sacrifice himself? He wants to find out.
But the roof is going to come down any second, collapse because whatever supported it is turning into ash. He has to realize that they have unleashed a beast they cannot control and there is a faint whining of a siren outside of humans who think they can control it. They are wrong, of course, but even goddesses aren't immortal.
It is her hair that persuades him in the end. He loves her hair. He doesn't want it to get burned. "We have to go," he says gently, tugging at her arm.
She takes a deep breath and turns the doorknob halfway. "Ready?" she asks, and Sherlock knows what she's talking about: the oxygen that's going to feed the fire the moment the door opens, whatever's waiting outside, that they have nothing left because he wanted to burn all of it. He nods.
The blast of cool air from outside immediately turns into suffocating heat the second the flame senses it. Joan and Sherlock run outside, laughing. The chill hits his bare back and the tips of Joan's bangs are singed but- oh- it's the sight he has yearned to see. This doorway with everything they are burning inside while they stand outside. Spectators.
There is a wan light from the rising sun, very pale and very shy, nothing like the whirlwind inside, and Sherlock thinks it is perfect for the moment. It is morning at last and his salvation is beside him.
Her hand in his is warmer than any open flame.