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It’s a dream, as it happens; the sort that should plague men younger than himself, but that’s how it goes, really. Nothing to be done.
John admits a certain degree of tactility on his own part after that night, after Sherlock emerges from the water unharmed, hale and whole and breathing with that heart beating. John doesn’t pretend that his hands don’t reach out, that his palm doesn’t settle, that his lips don’t linger on the skin wrapped around the arteries closest to the bone more often than before. Because they do.
He does.
And it is comforting. It’s intimate and captivating in a way he’d never supposed something so simple, so uneventful could be. He’d never fathomed that something that comprised so large a part of his professional life could be so different, so stimulating behind closed doors.
So it’s a dream, in the end, that proves that it is more.
It’s a war-drum, a bell-toll: it’s the end and the beginning and the way his own chest aches for the mallet of his heart against the sternum, bursting forth from the pericardium, uprooted, uplifted, straining to touch something unknown. John’s hot, hard, and there are fingers lilting over him, everywhere, and that rhythm, that song all around him, seeping into him: driving him, fuelling his blood and surrounding him with wordless promises and utter nonsense that makes the world turn true—John’s lost to it, building to something unthinkable, and it’s beautiful, it’s the start and the finish, relief and unmaking, and he wants it more than anything else in this moment, he reaches only to be evaded, and he reaches again—
He comes to, waking with a start, his chest heaving, the hard length of him heavy, straining, throbbing; tucked against his thigh. He blinks, confused—it was nothing more than his mind, the sensations at every nerve ending stolen away with the first hints of daylight, all but one thing: the rhythm, the perfect beat.
He blinks.
Sherlock’s still asleep beneath him, his heart a metronome at John’s ear, an anchor, a tether: a call back home in the darkness.
John bites his lip as he tries to calm himself, tries to steel himself against the rush of feeling and need that floods and takes hold, that is driven deeper, burrowed inextricable as Sherlock’s heart beats, beats, beats beneath him. Endless, thank God—unwavering.
John’s breathless, aching, and this, he realises with a strangled groan, might just prove horribly inconvenient.
___________________________________________
John’s already up the stairs at 221 when he realises he’s left his mobile at work. He curses under his breath as enters the flat and finds it empty; he’d been hoping to find Sherlock in his chair, sprawled across the sofa. He’d been hoping to find Sherlock and start evening the odds, start letting Sherlock return the favours of their early nights together, his own indulgences of Sherlock’s then-incomprehensible need to suck at John’s bounding pulse, to listen to John’s thrumming heart.
Yes, fine: so he’d been hoping to find Sherlock bored and prone and just a little huffy with the whole of existence for being so fucking dull so that he could coax the gorgeous bastard into letting John tongue his pulse as he came.
John grudgingly distracts himself—and his oddly-intractable libido—with a cup of tea that he sips at without much thought; opens the window, because the weather was gorgeous enough to merit a walk home, after all, and fresh air can only help, really.
He’s about to sit and finish his Earl Grey when the raucous sound of footsteps sprinting up the stairs outside stops him.
The door reverberates as it slams open, rattles in John’s ribs as Sherlock is revealed at the threshold, suspended: his eyes are wild, wide to the point where John can read all the vessels, the threads of red against the white from more than just the corners. His chest is heaving—he’s been running, sprinting, and he’s panting, John can hear the effort that each inhale takes, can see the pain of it, the punishment Sherlock’s lungs are extracting for the way they’ve been misused, pushed beyond their brinks and Sherlock’s whole being shakes with the effort to regain his breath as he takes John in, as he sees John and seems arrested beneath the tremors, the gasping, the absence of nicotine and the flood of adrenaline.
And for all the seizing-stillness that comes into play in this one man in these strung instants, for all the motion and the manic din, John’s pupils dilate, take in more than they’re meant and he hones in, watches the skin fold and stretch, give and retreat around pounding blood, around arterial pressure, around red and white and the world in two sounds and the rush of air, the in and out, the squelch and sift, the pump and release: lub-dub, they taught it, and yet no, not that. More like dyads, minor keys; more like ecstasy in pairs.
John can barely breathe himself when he starts to count the pulse across the distance like a tempo, like a conductor before the only orchestra in the universe, the only instruments worth playing: tongue and lips, valves and veins and the keen of that voice as Sherlock tries to speak and fails, the sounds caught against tight cords in his throat, the pummelling maestro of his bounding circulation: onetwothreefour, twotwothreefour, threetwothreefour—
Breathe.
“You didn’t answer your phone,” Sherlock’s voice, when it comes, is reedy, thin; his grasp on the doorframe is knuckle-white and frantic; John wouldn’t be surprised to find nail-marks in the chipping paint come daylight, but it’s a passing thought, because the measures aren’t slowing, and John wants to leap in and weave into that harmony as his own pulse begins to pound dangerously, deviantly at the dip of his clavicles, the resonant bass of it full with arousal and passion and the need to tame, to root Sherlock’s fluttering atria, frantic and fearful, eyes swallowed up in black for all the wrong reasons and John wants to suck on that neck and play that pulse above the barrel joint until he finds the right pitch but his legs won’t move, not yet.
Sherlock isn’t trembling any longer. His pulse is all the more visible. John swears he can feel the waves of it, the push of it in his own chest, against his own heart like a challenge or a pledge or a prayer, like gold and wine and lithium, like wonder and shame and a hand in his own.
His pulse is all the more visible, now, and John is transfixed.
“Forgot it in my lab coat,” John whispers, breathless, as if he’s the one who’d been running, and maybe he has been, in his own way, without knowing it. Maybe he’s been running toward this, head on, from the first: not fast enough, always a step behind, except then Sherlock paused, and it wasn’t a pursuit anymore but a meeting, a returning to the start, to the whole, to those Aristophanian wholes so that two pairs of legs shared pace, two sets of arms twined perfect, two lips met wondrous, and two hearts that had come into being with the sole purpose of syncing finally found their hymnal and sang it with joy, as one.
Unbounded.
John doesn’t realise his own hand’s come to rest upon his chest until his palm begins to count for him, measures the pumping at Sherlock’s neck, still distant but brought home, settling into John’s own chest as they dance on merging, close but not quite:
onetwothreefour, twotwothreefour, threetwothreefour
onetwothreefour,twotwothreefour,threetwothreefour
A gasp, the kind married to a sob. Sherlock’s whole frame shifts with it, his lungs still sour with him; he winces, but maybe not for the physical ache. John loses sight of the pulse for a moment, another, and there’s an emptiness that spreads like tar, like plague, and what John stood outside of before, this need; he lies mired in it, now, fed with it through the veins, his heart hungry for it when it empties, greedy with it as it fills.
“I thought,” Sherlock starts, and it’s heavy, leaden, soaked in dew or something more sinister, yes: more sinister, absolutely, John can tell when the only thing that shakes is Sherlock’s lower lip, just a bit, and the pupils are still wide and yet too bright for all the dark, and Sherlock’s chest is back to heaving but not for exertion, not that way and the pulse, the pulse is broader, if just slower; the pulse hits harder, the pressure fit to burst, and John can feel it squeeze in his own chest, feels it tremble through the pericardium and lance at the aorta without any regard to the wound left open to the salt of those tears before they fall.
So no—not the physical ache at all.
John’s limbs can’t hold the mounting resonance, can’t remain still for all the ruckus near the bones; within the space of a swallow, John’s across the room, and Sherlock’s hands are at John’s left temple, his right wrist: his favourite points, and Sherlock’s breathing hitches at the contact even before John ducks his chin to bring the protrusion of Sherlock’s carotid into the space between John’s lips, warm and wet and rough, like to like: chapped and stubble-burnt and red all around and oh. Oh: it’s like that blood, that beat knows instinctively that it has somewhere to go, now, has something willing into which to pour and fill and seep and give and disappear in safety and worship and all the splendour of undoing—it’s as if Sherlock’s heart knows it can beat its damnedest and John will cradle the excess for how it pounds, all that caged arterial pressure tight and tantalising against John’s teeth as the force ebbs after a measure, another: con brio, still, and yet sated, embraced warmly, and something in Sherlock releases, relaxes as John’s hands cup the back of his head, the curve of his hip.
“John,” Sherlock murmurs, gravelly, scraping the rough edges of his voice box for something suited to speech. John teases his incisors against the stretch of that skin with each beat, beat, beat, and yes, John wants—he licks, tastes salt and smoke and solace and he refuses to think about what he’s been missing, what he’s been overlooking in this the whole goddamn time.
Not now.
“John,” Sherlock tries again, and John shivers with the way his name feels in the pout of his lip, slow strings against the brass of those audacious palpitations, the flush of eyelashes shuddering as Sherlock leans back, allows access, doesn’t let go of John’s wrist at his waist, the curve of John’s forehead even as John works farther, deeper down Sherlock’s neck.
“What are you doing, John,” and it’s finally a sentence, but it’s not a question; there’s no inflection, no room for it, and John lets himself suck his way down the common carotid, lets himself tongue and lap and pull at the thin layers of skin between Sherlock’s clavicles, that perfect dip and he breathes it, nips it, traces it and Sherlock’s lost all steadiness again, whatever small sliver he’d managed to reclaim, his heartbeat flickering and shining, dimming and thrusting and John can’t stop his hands as they move to push Sherlock’s coat out of the way, as they undo one, two, three of the buttons of his shirt from the bottom up.
“It’s a rote sort of thing, you know?” John mouths into Sherlock’s sternum as he unbuttons the shirt to the collar, lets it hang open, debauched.
“Comes with the territory,” John follows the curve of Sherlock’s rib below the nipple, lets his exhale ghost over the sensitive skin and relishes the shiver that John can measure, that settles like bells in trickling formation, cascading around the percussive beat below his lips. John smiles, drags his mouth a little lower, traces the dark stains around those hard buds with the curl of his grin.
“Precordial examinations were my best area, back at Barts,” John comments idly as he presses a kiss at the intercostal space, dips his tongue into the divot of it. “Can’t even begin to think how many I’ve done, over the years.”
Sherlock gasps on the inhale as John makes his way to the apex, tries to see the pumping through the skin but can’t quite make it out for certain against the erratics of Sherlock’s lungs. No matter: he leans in and oh, yes, there it is, that wondrous kneading, that force of nature, yes. John holds his open lips to it for a long strand of seconds, just basking for a spell before he moves, half-kissing, half-sucking; laving and tonguing and tasting and worshipping that thunderous springing of life and ecstasy beneath the layers, under flesh and bone.
“Routine,” John exhales, shaky now, his own heart starting to shake him off balance for the need of it. “But then there was you, and I think the word ‘routine’ got tossed out the window after that.”
Sherlock trembles at the hips, and John is in love with that trembling, all the trembling in Sherlock’s body and all the heat in Sherlock’s soul, John is in love with every part of it, every atom, every tear and drop of blood.
John is so fucking in love with this man, he’s sure he could swallow a sun and never quite match the strength of it, this feeling, this ache.
John sinks slowly to his knees, feels vulnerable, and yet so very safe in the instant that Sherlock’s hands lace into his own, lowering himself to the floor in kind. Sherlock’s arms come around John, drawing him close and John gives in, his nose against the silken line of Sherlock’s open shirt, the slick sweat-heat of his skin, flushed red against him: his ear held tight to the deep gong of Sherlock’s heart beneath him, beside him, surrounding and sacred.
“There’s nothing clinical about it,” John confesses, childlike and marvelling and honest to a fault; he feels as he did in the beginning, when clues never fit and observation dwelt beyond his ken. “All the theory and the practice, all the diagnostics and the protocols, there’s nothing but you and god, Sherlock,” John moans as he presses in tighter, muffles the sound but intensifies the feeling. “It’s a goddamned marvel. It’s singing out a masterpiece, Jesus,” John shakes his head, and Sherlock’s pulse seems to almost seek his motion, cradles John from the inside as surely as out.
“Fuck, it’s,” and John trails off, overcome here and now with this, with him, with them, but they have grown something magnificent between them, and Sherlock’s palms gather John’s chin and coax his gaze, slow and sure. Sherlock stares at John and John can read the pulse at the neck again, beating not a tattoo but maybe a rhapsody, like hope and willingness and all the potential for wonder in world held tight, circulating wild.
“You understand?” Sherlock asks him, eyes fever-bright, his heart skipping rapidly, just this side of bursting with something unseen, as yet; something unknown and fucking full.
John knows, because his own heart is quaking, straining, nearly-rejoicing in kind.
“I think,” John whispers to Sherlock, to the blood bounding, to the organ contracting and making and keeping, he whispers; he prays: “I think I do, yeah.”
Sherlock’s mouth is on John’s before he can breathe, before his own heart knows he needs it, except he always needs it, always needs Sherlock close and the taste of him like shelter and water and air. John laments the sound of loss, the pull of it in his own skin when he draws back, makes his way down that body, opens Sherlock’s trousers and meets the already-straining length, guides Sherlock’s tip to his lips and holds his tongue over the glans, delicate, dragging the rough edge of his taste buds over the slit as Sherlock moans. The pads of his fingers skirt the inner thighs, move to tease at Sherlock’s length, the base, the skin drawn taunt beneath.
“Wait.”
John pulls away, his thumbs coming to press at the femoral pulse and oh, but it’s a gorgeous thing to feel his own racing heartbeat there, matched and echoed and wedded with Sherlock’s, heady and whole. John knows there’s a question in his own eyes, but in looking up at his partner there are so many answers in that gaze that John can’t find which fits; can’t decide how to interpret the fact that they all fit at once.
Sherlock’s eyes flicker, take in the whole of John from above him, at an incline: settle on their twins, eye to eye and John feels infinite in the moment when his gaze locks with Sherlock’s and holds, and he sees as Sherlock sees, observes the endlessness of a mind that processes him at its front, that holds him dear in ways John still can’t process or rationalise but he won’t question it, not if he can keep it.
Not so long as it stays.
And in an instant that makes no sense among all the world’s knowing, John understands why Sherlock’s stopped him, what he’s asking without it ever requiring a question, what’s he’s offering and needs John’s permission in order to give.
John shivers; his heart skips.
He raises up and captures Sherlock’s bottom lips like a thief, like a homecoming: what light tastes of after too much dark.
“Yes.”
Sherlock’s sigh; it tastes of wonder on his tongue, and John aches for this, for this man and this time and this presence, this perfection he never thought to ask for, never achieved anything worthy of calling this his.
But it is. God, but it is.
They move as if they’ve extended, embedded, permeated one another’s cells, as if a push from one begets a give from the other, in tandem, keeping time; a hand to a hip and a palm on a thigh, lifting as it raises, cradling as it surrenders control, as John slides into the place where Sherlock meets him. John’s mouth falls open as Sherlock reaches, teases, stretching, massaging and coaxing him wider with every three beats, now, a time signature new and untested, relentless, ready to encompass all the ecstatic unease of their pulses, the way they’ll flail even now, even after so much time just to touch, to be, to feel and enter, to see and breathe and sink and know with wet salt between them and the way their eyes never close, only stare and measure and keep time, so much time.
John’s ready. Sherlock knows.
The feel of him isn’t different as he breaches John, as he consumes him step by step: it’s not different, because Sherlock is everywhere and everything, in one way or another—it’s not different from any other time they’ve come together this way, except that it is. It is absolutely different, because when Sherlock is fully seated, when Sherlock remains still and pants heavy against John’s shoulder, his lips against John’s neck, his favourite taste of John’s heart save the source, curls damp and trailing against John’s skin: it’s different, because Sherlock is trembling, and his breaths match to the motion of his lips against John’s pulse, to the pump of his own restless blood where John can feel it, full and hot and taking John apart in moments and blinks where the length of him is sheathed, pulsing inside John like a second heart, like the half of him he’d never known to miss.
John frames Sherlock’s face, presses into the pulse at the jaw and oh, what he’s been missing.
Sherlock harmonises—a natural inclination, a need—as he thrusts at first in counterpoint to the resonant pulse, defiant and overwhelming and endless, and John gasps, moans, keens out Sherlock’s name like a curse to demons and angels as they fall. John’s lungs burn gorgeous when he sucks in air, his head lolling backward and he’s lost, he’s lost except he’s never been more settled, more found and kept and held and he never knew he could be this way, could feel air fill him wholly and still know it wasn’t enough, not without this body in his body, with this soul tied up inside his own.
He is so very found.
And then Sherlock pulls out to the very tip, and John whimpers without meaning to; Sherlock lingers and John’s heart is racing for the loss and the need, and Sherlock leans to kiss, to hold a mouth that wants to take and savour and preserve for all of time the song inside the arch of John’s aorta. John shakes with the tenderness of it, with the feel of Sherlock’s body on his body, his hardness pressed slick and unbearable against him, tempting to take him again and yet no, not yet, not when Sherlock’s chest is so close, not when John isn’t sure if he’s imaging the jump of Sherlock’s heart beneath the ribs for the way he stretches, sucks against John’s collarbone before he props himself up, considers John like a puzzle and a crime and the only blessing either one of them needs.
John means very much to whimper when Sherlock presses into him again, fast and full, and takes up moving, rocking into him with every second beat now—duple—and John’s heart beats harder, now, even if it can’t come faster, can’t bear to break the cadence. He moves into each thrust as he feels Sherlock’s climax building, feels the pounding of Sherlock’s pulse through the contact on the upstroke and the down, and aches through every inch of him, every molecule and atom for the way it all makes sense.
Sherlock’s hand between them, precise, conducting the final movement, the crescendo to the end: it takes all that John has to cry out for the sheer sensation of it, the way Sherlock strokes him in that same infinite rhythm: one-two-three-four, two-two-three-four, three-two-three-four, four—
John’s not sure they spill together, but fuck, it’s close enough.
___________________________________________
The floor, honestly, is cold, and hard, and should be uncomfortable, but their hearts calm in tandem, as with everything else, and John’s not sure he’ll ever quite get used to the way the crook of Sherlock’s neck feels like peace and still and home; to be honest, he’s not entirely sure he wants to.
“You were meant to meet me,” Sherlock murmurs into the crown of John’s head, his lips teasing the tousled strands of his hair.
“Hmm?” John shifts, looks up, but Sherlock turns his face to press his mouth to John’s forehead, to skirt his gaze and keep the pulse close: John knows him well enough to read the intentions as clear as anything spoken, anything shown.
“I texted you,” Sherlock tells John’s temporal pulse, his voice timid, tepid, vulnerable. John reaches for Sherlock’s hand and twines their fingers; Sherlock grips tight in return.
“I left a crime scene,” Sherlock continues, snippets of a tale told in the way he breathes steadily, but his heartbeat starts to climb, and John already aches for what isn’t said, for the wildness he’d seen in those eyes yet hadn’t understood before they’d come together, before they’d melded near the door and held.
“You weren’t at the surgery. I was,” Sherlock swallows, and John can see the shift of his Adam’s apple where it reveals the strengthening pulse at the neck, and John leans in, nuzzles at Sherlock’s jawline: affectionate, affirming.
Sherlock sighs, something in him forgoing tension to give when John turns to kiss Sherlock’s lips soft, slow before retreating, allowing Sherlock to bring him close again and rest his mouth at John’s temple once more.
“Traffic was dreadful,” Sherlock breathes, a tad uneven. “I couldn’t,” his head starts to shake, but halts in favour of keeping John where he is, maintaining the contact. “I ran...”
John squeezes Sherlock’s hand in his own, and Sherlock exhales a shaky laugh.
“I think I may have tipped the cabbie fifty quid,” he forces out, and John can’t help his small smile in return. “You’d have been pleased.”
When Sherlock says nothing more, it’s because he doesn’t need to.
When John eases Sherlock against him, brings him to curl into John’s chest and rest there, safe, made still and pliant and so very content against John’s rising-falling lungs, against the heart pillowed between and protected by the shell of an ear that listens with a love unfathomable—when John and Sherlock nestle close and make up for the cold of the floor with something better and brighter and endlessly warm, it’s because they both need it like air, like breathing.
When Sherlock exhales the world and breathes in John, it’s because John’s heart is steady, and that’s more than worth a world.