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There’s love that comes upon you sudden like, there’s love that grows, and then there’s love that consumes you until your heart wants to explode. And though he’ll deny it, John Watson understands this last kind of love best of all.
If you ask him, he’ll admit his chest fluttered the first time he saw the tall, lanky man with the careless curls, swelled when Sherlock deduced his whole life story in one swift exhale, and pounded against his ribcage all through their ridiculous dinner at Angelo’s.
He’ll tell you how much he wanted to kiss that ceaseless mouth, for days, months, years, spend the rest of his life with a man he’d just met, barely knows. And he’ll tell you how he waited for Sherlock to say, “yes” to make space between those lips for words of love, to leave an invitation at the errant corners of his crooked smiles.
In the end, it took a fall to do that and a crack across two hearts that was so wide, almost all the life worth living bled out.
He looks back now, they both do, from the tangle of arms and legs and wanting skin that binds them whole and kisses across the seam where the cracks have sealed. Yes, this kind of love, John Watson knows best of all.
