Chapter 8: Bullets
John comes down from his shower wearing nothing but pyjama bottoms and water, dripping from the little tongues of hair still plastered to the nape of his neck.
Sherlock sits up from the sofa like a hunting dog, biting back his smile when John catches sight of his expression and stops in his tracks in the doorway. He's visibly and quite wisely considering backing away slowly and then running for his life.
Recklessness wins the day. John enters the room. "What is it?"
"I've been wanting to see your bullet wound." Sherlock is vaguely aware that the ferocious greed in his voice is inappropriate to the situation. Most people would reserve that tone for phrases like 'I've been dreaming of kissing you' or 'I want to make you come.' Most people are pedestrian.
John is not pedestrian. He spreads his arms with a resigned grin. "Well, come on then."
Sherlock bounces to his feet to loom enthusiastically over his shorter flatmate. "Good man, John! You know how seldom I get to study physical trauma on living subjects? People are so prudish about their scars. It's ridiculous, you know, they're simply a biological phenomenon."
John shakes his head, amused. "Don't gloat, Sherlock, it's unseemly." It's easy enough to comply when Sherlock's got better things to occupy his attention. John doesn't protest the fingertips running over his skin. Engaging multiple senses always produces more complete information on a subject. Sadly, licking John would probably be over the line. He's half-tempted to try it, just to see what the other man would do, but the chances highly favor John shoving Sherlock off and storming from the room in irritation, with a somewhat distant second-place possibility of a punch to the face. More importantly, the odds of his ever letting Sherlock try this again would weigh in at 'vanishingly small.'
John eyes him suspiciously. "What's so funny?"
"I'm wondering if I could get away with licking you."
"Absolutely not." But it makes him laugh, which is why Sherlock told him.
His skin across the shoulders and chest is pale gold, a fading legacy of days gone shirtless under Afghanistan's sun. Scars stand out vividly against that gilded backdrop. Sherlock taps across a stippling of pallid marks around one bicep. "A youthful skirmish with barbed wire. Quite the young hooligan, John." Fading pink crescents at his wrists indicate recent restraint by means of zip-tie. No deduction needed; a matching set decorates Sherlock's own wrists. Swooping silvery threads across John's ribs speak of a fine knife or scalpel, applied at leisure with no attempt at resistance. Sherlock traces over the elegant curls, eyes careful on John's face. They're either marks of torture or an intense sexual encounter; not something he'd welcome inquiries into, either way, but then inquiries are hardly necessary. John's pupils betray the answer before he blinks and looks away.
They both pretend Sherlock saw nothing.
And there on his left shoulder is a tidy little thumbnail-sized oval, an asteroid impact in miniature just under his clavicle.
Sherlock circles it with a thumb by way of comparison. "You're lucky you still have your arm."
"I'm lucky I'm still alive." Their fingers tangle as John swipes at it, as if trying to wipe it off. Self-conscious after all, then. Sherlock can't blame him. He must have heard a hundred variations on the refrain of "Well, that doesn't look so bad." Idiots, all of them, leaping to erroneous conclusions without the least idea of either ballistics or anatomy. Sherlock splays one hand over the wound, estimating the temporary cavitation created by a bullet slamming into human flesh. It would have crushed a five to eight centimeter-wide path of nerves and blood vessels through his shoulder. The hydrostatic shockwave would have spread wider; damage to shoulder ligaments, probable fractures to the clavicle and the scapula. With three major nerves, the anterior tips of the lungs (contusions to lung tissue likely; he draws his fingers down to the top of John's left pectoral), and an artery only centimeters past its point of divergence from the aorta, John is right: it could easily have been fatal. Odds were wildly against his coming away with such minor permanent damage. Had he been anything but a surgeon, he could consider himself unscathed.
Sherlock peremptorily spins him, heedless of John's complaint, and halts him where he wants him with a hand on his other shoulder. "The exit wound."
It's larger and messier than the entrance wound, of course, an irregular, slightly raised five centimeter ellipse of pearlescent scar tissue at the inner edge of his shoulder. "Nicked the medial border of the scapula," Sherlock mutters, trailing his fingers along it. John shifts irritably under the touch—ticklish—but lets him get away with it. ".30 caliber, from the looks of it."
"You're cheating," John accuses, making an effort to come off unimpressed. "You know the chances were it was an AK-47."
Sherlock sniffs at him. "Full metal jacket," he says pointedly. "Fortunate for you they were compensating for the body armor." No fragmentation; the bullet had only just begun to yaw on exiting. If it'd been a soft-point round, it would've torn John apart from the inside.
John growls and twists under Sherlock's grip. Startled, Sherlock realizes he was digging his fingers into the muscle. He kneads the spot apologetically. "You were with a convoy. Were they targeting the vehicles, or did they know it was transporting medical personnel?"
John shrugs. "I never found out." A twitch of his shoulder expresses how he'd gotten distracted.
Sherlock continues mapping the route of the bullet and its devastation across John's skin, mesmerized and unsettled by the awareness of how close they came to never meeting at all. John stands quietly for him until he finishes.