Work Text:
The hateful thing in Sherlock’s belly coiled, spitting venom, wrapped about his heart and tightened, stopping up his throat and choking back the words he wanted to say, the words that had waited for so very long.
But no fool was his John, the good doctor, the gentle soldier, who caught the serpent’s tail and tamed it with his tongue, chased it across the small space between them as he took Sherlock’s face between his hands, fingers trailing over flushing skin and kissed him.
Their first kiss.
And John, his John, he sucked the venom from those words, licked the poison from Sherlock’s lips and breathed something sweeter into the both of them, until they parted, dazed with the wonder of what they had done.
The serpent stilled. Uncoiled. The heart rolled free, cracking open like a stone and Sherlock felt something else begin to bloom in his chest, cooing softly as it beckoned, “Oh my lovely fool, kiss him again.”
So Sherlock did. Forty sweet long years and a summer’s worth of kissing, until the dark Sussex loam claimed them for its own, John first, Sherlock a season later, not a shared grave but side by each, close enough for bones to touch, for the great heart and the glorious mind to tumble into stories, into dreams and into legend.
