I had never really thought about intelligence all that much before meeting Sherlock and Mycroft.

I was intelligent enough to become a doctor, to survive a combat zone, to become a reasonably adult human being. But I didn't spend a lot of time separating my mind from my body.

Nothing like Sherlock of course.

I think he intimidates people on a few levels. It's not just the brains. It's his passion and intensity too. He denies that he feels, but the truth is that he feels more keenly than most people. Just as his brain works more.

Because of his hyper-awareness of other people's physical condition, body language, behavior, and heart beats per minute, he sees the slights and judgement that the rest of us are oblivious to. Even without her words, Donovan hurts Sherlock every single time they have an encounter.

He can feel the shift of eyes, the stiffening of posture, or the subtle distancing of themselves from him. He know full-well what all of that means too. Freak. Crazy. Addict. Other.

Genius.

Sherlock told me that first night that the frailty of genius was that it needed an audience. I listened but I didn't hear him.

I responded with a gruff, 'yeah'. But I still thought he was talking about the murderer. He certainly tried to make it seem that way.

But here I was, a complete stranger, accompanying him on a stake-out, having just accompanied him to a crime scene, almost entirely because he had asked. All he had to do was ask me to participate in his life instead of my own.

He said he liked company when he went out. Talking aloud helped him think. He said those things. And then he said genius liked an audience.

And I had signed up immediately.

Clearly, I thought, the life of a genius must be more exciting and fulfilling than an average Joe's. All the things they could do with their minds. The things they could understand and invent. The insights into humanity and science.

How thrilling.

But, as I said, I didn't hear him. Not correctly.

Genius needs an audience for the feedback. It needs an audience for the mirror. The audience gives encouragement and appreciation. The audience expresses their awe and amazement. The genius performs another feat of intelligence.

What he failed to mention to me then was what happened when the audience filed out of the theater, back to their mundane lives. What happens to the genius then? Without an audience.

The truth is that their lives can become just as pedestrian as anyone else's. And it's not the genius that goes mad. It's the boredom. The dull edges getting duller. The gray corners of life in between the flashes of bright white. That's where things fall apart.

Unless a genius such as Sherlock manages to find someone who can constantly brighten up the gray as well as tone down the stark white. The genius won't even miss the high of the flashes with the more steady center constantly feeding their ego with purpose and meaning.

That's where I came in to Sherlock's life and saved him from himself.

I followed Sherlock into our room and turned on the bedside lamp. He stood in the middle of the floor, halfway between the doorway and the bedside. Our little bedtime routine.

I came up behind him and reached up to slide his dressing gown over his broad shoulders and down his strong arms. I hung it on the back of the door for use tomorrow. As I did so, Sherlock turned to face me.

I returned to him and settled into his warm embrace, my cheek resting above his beating heart. My arms settled around his lower back, squeezing briefly before resting back into a holding posture. His arms wrapped around my shoulders.

It was something I had to get used to when we first began our physical intimacy, our height difference. It was different to tilt my head up to kiss instead of down or straight ahead. But Sherlock was so gentle a lover that I never felt uneasy or uncomfortable with it.

It was just another part of us. Like his greater intellect.

I had the greater amount of experience with emotional attachments. The greater amount of 'data,' Sherlock would say. So we complemented each other.

I could be calm when he was frantic. He could be rational when I was emotional.

Next, I brought my arms back around his sides to begin unbuttoning his shirt from the top down. I preferred this direction so that I could follow my hands with my mouth and mark him, day after day, as mine.

His head dropped back to expose that impossibly long neck. I paused a moment to look up past the sparse dusting of chest hair to the notch between his collar bones. Then up and over that pointed chin to the lips that were so acerbic and so sweet at the same time.

My Sherlock. Contradictions personified.

It was in these moments that he was truly himself. When he was quiet and tired. It wasn't often, but then it was more common now than it had ever been in his life before me. It was when Sherlock could stop trying to prove himself to everyone and just be-be with me-be us.

I slid the shirt off of his shoulders and arms the same way I had the dressing gown. But the shirt ended up in a heap on the floor. I was too eager at this point to keep moving over his skin and our routine to bother with taking care of his posh clothing. If he felt the need to complain, he kept it to himself. Night after night.

This routine was one of the first things I had instituted after our first rush of sexual exploration. I needed Sherlock to embrace routine as something other than boring and pointless. He needed something to look forward to that was repetitive.

He needed to not get tired of me either.

I would be his audience. I would stroke his ego, among other things. But he would defer to my care. It was a good compromise.

With his shirt dispatched, Sherlock backed up to the bed and sat down. I followed and knelt between his legs. My strong surgeon hands undid his belt and snaked it out of his belt loops. Doing so always reminded me of a case. A belt. A strangling. An unlikely perpetrator. Sherlock had known that there was a belt involved from the beginning just like he knew about the Pink lady's case.

I smiled to myself. The vagaries of the mind. The connections of thoughts and impressions was something I had pondered a lot during my last tour. Between influxes of wounded, I had a lot of down-time to chase my ideas around my own head. Right now, I wondered why I would equate a strangling with my slow lovemaking. It doesn't seem as if the belt connection itself would be enough.

"Hey," came a soft voice.

I looked up expectantly, realizing that I had stopped moving and simply held the belt in my hands.

"You're thinking too much," Sherlock informed me.

In another context, I would have snorted loudly and launched a handy rejoinder. But here in the quiet and semi-darkness, I just smiled more broadly.

Oh, wait.

"You're rubbing off on me, I guess," I said, waggling my eyebrows.

"Not yet, I'm not," he answered. "But keep going on my pants, and we'll see what comes up."

I laughed quietly, squeezing my eyes shut tight. "That was bad," I scolded him.

He chuckled too and carded a hand through my hair. "Best I could do," he said.

I sobered. Yes, he was tired. He was very tired if he was admitting to it impairing him and his wit.

I quickly popped open his button and fly, regaining my feet with a quick kiss to his lips. I pulled him to standing and slid trousers and pants down his thighs. Our eyes held each other tightly.

"I've got you," I assured him.