BBCSH 'Wall' Part 3/6 [NC-17]
tigersilver
Notes:
For phoenixacid.
Work Text:
Very slight spoilers for second series, very slight angst. Much Sherlocking.
III.
John's a sporting man. He must be. There's a coil of rope ladder one day, suddenly, and clear signs that mortar's been chipped away. Or washed away—eroded. Some of the blocks are moved, there's cracks running though the smooth surface like grey mould through Morbier and Sherlock's not as comfortably situated as he used to be.
There's far more extraneous data in his head than he's accustomed to, in addition. He berates himself for his wild fancies now but simultaneously finds them necessary as breathing. Less boring than breathing. More distracting than other…historic distractions.
It's been months and months and there's also just been Moriarity and the pool. After the pool Sherlock was certain his wall within would fall, would collapse upon itself from the sheer weight of its own improbability. He wants to punch a gaping exit straight through it, but that's useless. Pointless. It's now been proved in his mind there is no wall, really. There's nothing left to separate him from the remainder of humanity but the scaffolding of his own arrogance and his own fear. And it is fear.
Fear he can taste, fear he can feel deep in the jarred bones, contusions, abrasions, mild concussion and miscellany thrown up by taking a sudden swim at high impact.
He has never more clearly experienced the overweening emotion of fear as he had when John wore his familiar old coat and it was crammed to the seams with the instruments of John's highly likely destruction. Fear is solid like the mass of a lead pipe to the stomach, fear is sharp as a blow to the head or a gout of chlorinated water pushed up one's nose. Fear explodes into shrapnel at the slightest tremor and Sherlock is in process of learning to tread very carefully indeed. Not that he's gadding about, what with the persistently broken leg.
If Sherlock believed in hubris, he'd find his shattered femur more darkly amusing than it is. His transport has failed him, and literally. He can't move to patch things up along the ramparts, shore up the ever-widening gaps and fissures in his wall. He can't, truly, do much of anything at all for a period of some eight to ten days, in and out of hospital. He can think, but then he always thinks.
Sherlock thinks that John Watson is above all a very kind man and an excellent doctor of practical medicine. Sherlock thinks John is the most patient of men in the world. Best of all, he allows Sherlock to keep mostly intact the plaything his wall has become. This though he's seen his own particular, especial, revealing lifeweb with his very own eyes; couldn't not, could he? Not when he's been called upon to deal with a slowly recuperating flatmate. So, he's definitely in full cognizance of the obvious fact of the matter, which is to say that Sherlock has John's stolen pants pinned above his head and thinks about John all the time. Has thought of John since Day One and shows no signs of ceasing. Is perhaps a bit unreasonable about it now.
What with the pool.
With every touch of John's hands on Sherlock, healing this and monitoring that, the John-web in his head deepens and thickens. It's a brilliant tangle of words, smells and images—and now touch, quite a lot of hand's-on touch—and Sherlock has become extraordinarily deft at running yarn against the black velvet background of his closed eyelids.
With every touch of John's hand on Sherlock the wall he owns wears away, becomes thinner and thinner. It waves and it ripples, it flaps like Sherlock's hands do when he's speaking of a moderately interesting case. It's morphed to a construction of lace or perhaps cotton webbing and John's aftershave twines its inevitable way through the many minute holes and gaps almost incidentally. His hands plunge through regularly, tearing great rends that don't hurt Sherlock proper in the slightest. He shoulders aside the wall as if it were nothing more than a sheer curtain and leans in his head companionably whenever he deems it needed for Sherlock's sake.
Sherlock has nothing to say against this. Not a sniping remark, not a single 'back-off' glance. If anything, he would wish John could go a little faster in his dismantling project, his invasion. There's an amazing amount of data on the other side and Sherlock desperately wishes to sink his teeth into it. Bite off and chew. Perhaps if he can his web of John Watson may show fewer blank bits and scribbled-out blots. He'd like that outcome to come about, very much.
But it'll have to wait. Sherlock's not yet strong enough to climb, not after falling such a great height into a shocking cold—not so soon removed from being pushed and shoved to his utter limit—being thrown under a lorry, as it were.
And… there's Moriarity.