'Watson!'
Time slowed. I could hear the tick of my watch in my pocket, the scratch of a rat running through the alley. A breeze washed over me, a jolt rushed through me, and from somewhere only a foot or two away and yet miles off, Holmes was shouting my name, reaching for me – but I was already falling.
How odd, I thought, watching his eyes widen, watching his hands spread, how very afraid he looks. It's only a counterfeiter. It's only a little knife. Isn't it?
'Watson!'
Yes, I recognised that look of utter terror. I had seen it many times before in my own mirror as I thought of him, tugging uselessly on the knot under my breastbone, the one that would lead me to him no matter where we each two were. To see it now on his face, to see my own desperation and sorrow and need reflected back at me, was the most wretched thing I could ever have imagined. I'm all right Sherlock, I wanted to say, but I could find neither the breath nor the words to speak.
'Watson! – John!'
And then: I hit the ground, hard. I'd forgotten it was coming. I just had time to look up and think, distantly, that I could see the stars tonight, and then everything went black.
He was there when I woke.
The pain was there too, as well as the tell-tale nausea of morphine. I gasped against it, but a cool hand slipped into mine, steadying me. 'You are at Baker Street,' he said, low and even. 'And your injuries were not severe, thank God, but do not strain them now, when I have worked so hard to keep them clean.'
I laughed; my throat was dry and dusty, and my shoulder flared into searing pain where the blade had met my flesh. Not severe though, he'd said. I trusted him.
'You foolish man,' Holmes went on, and here his voice strained into anger. 'To just – let him stab you like that. You stupid, foolish man. Stop laughing, you'll hurt yourself.'
He lifted a cup of lukewarm tea to my mouth, insistent. It was too sweet – his own cup, then – but I drank greedily of it anyway, watching him. He was disheveled, his hair wild. His hand, where it was caught in mine, was trembling.
And the look on his face: my breath caught, but I knew that look. I knew that concern, that tenderness, that heartache and devotion and need.
It was an impossible thing, an unbelievable thing, but the more I watched him, fussing over me, the more certain of it I became.
I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next day, but eventually I became aware again, and it was not Holmes' gentle touch nor soft voice that tugged me toward the surface.
It was Mary.
I stiffened in the bed when I recognised her, feeling distinctly caught out – in Holmes' own bed! – before my wound made itself known again and I forced myself to relax. 'John,' she whispered, a little tearfully. 'John, there you are. I'm so glad to see you wake.'
'What time is it?' I asked, but she shushed me almost immediately, nodding to the other side of the bed, where Holmes was curled up in a chair and fast asleep.
'He's only just dropped off,' she explained, still whispering, 'and I fear he looks nearly as bad as you do. It's half-nine, if you must know. Do you think you could manage some broth?'
I nodded, not taking my eyes off Holmes' contorted frame, his exhausted face. Mary checked my wound and cleaned my face of sweat, and finally I looked back at her. 'You don't have to,' I murmured.
She shook her head. 'If you're to convalesce here, I must take care of you when I can,' she declared quietly. 'Now let me put this pillow behind you – here comes Mrs Hudson with the broth.'
Holmes was sitting by the fire when I emerged from my room. Shadows played upon his thin face, making him look gaunt, and exhausted, and somehow fragile, sitting alone there, in the dark. The longing I had grown so used to suddenly seemed unbearable, and now I knew that he felt that ache, too.
I took a deep breath, and risked everything. 'You care for me.'
Holmes did not look up. He did not move, yet something about him seemed to crumple, to cave. 'Of course,' he murmured, staring into the blaze. 'We are very close friends, aren't we?'
'That's not what I meant,' I said, as softly as I could. Holmes stiffened in his chair. 'I mean something deeper. Something you have tried to deny.'
The fire crackled and popped into the silence. 'I've no idea what you mean,' he said finally.
Slowly, carefully, I went to him, placed my hand upon his arm, knelt beside him so I might see his face. 'Holmes. Look at me.' There were, to my infinite surprise, tear tracks on his cheeks. I dared to reach up, to take his face in my hands. To brush his tears away. 'I care for you that way too.'
He stared and stared, but just when I gathered the courage to lean in, he drew himself back.
'I am not wrong about this, Holmes, and I cannot live this way.' I paced the floor at Baker Street, distraught; he looked unfairly calm, standing at the window with his violin, staring out into the night. I'd interrupted him in the middle of a song, burst into argument before he could stop, and now the strains of a melancholy tune were companion to my distress.
'And yet we must do nothing.'
'Nothing? Holmes, I love – '
The bow fell from the strings with a screech. 'No, don't say it,' he said, finally turning to me. His eyes were rimmed with red, the bags underneath drawn deep. I ached to look at him. 'You mustn't. I won't make an adulterer of you, John Watson, and I'm criminal enough already without your sin on my hands.'
I wanted to kiss that sin into his very skin. I wanted to throttle his sin out of him and into myself. 'Do you think me innocent of those same crimes?' I hissed, enraged. 'Do you think I spoke without knowing the consequences of these things I have tried so hard to deny? That I did not choose to accept them?'
'You may accept them,' Holmes said quietly, 'but I will not.' And before I could respond, he turned away and, once more, lifted his bow.
Perhaps a man in my position should have run. Perhaps I should've turned my back to 221 Baker Street, never again to darken its door; perhaps I should have taken the grace Holmes offered me and gone home to lose myself in the sanctified love of my virtuous wife. Perhaps I, having spent so many years with Holmes putting criminals in the docks already, should have taken every chance to avoid ending up there myself.
I did not.
I had seen the naked emotion in Holmes' eyes, and I could not.
Holmes, for his part, seemed insistent on behaving as though nothing had changed. He still took my visits, accepted and even asked for my assistance, returned my messages and passed his regards on to Mary, though the last did become more pointed as the days drifted by.
But he wasn't unaffected. He stopped stealing my biscuits or packing my pipe, and when next he appeared out of some dark alley after scuffling with some fiend, blood dripping from his brow, he dodged me entirely and instead he'd staunch the bleeding with a handkerchief, refusing to let me see.
Yet he did not turn me away. He didn't ask that I not come.
And his eyes followed me whenever I had to leave, with a familiar pain writ upon his brow.
For weeks we wandered around each other in this daze, knowing and pretending otherwise, recognising in each other the things we had each tried to hide in ourselves. But it was a façade, and facades, inevitably, must collapse.
I knew it first. We'd been running, first chasing, then escaping – our feet flew on the wet streets of London, step in step, stride in stride – and by the time we clattered up the stairs inside Baker Street, breathless and surging with adrenalin, I knew.
I closed the door behind us. Holmes stood silhouetted by the fire, his hands hanging uselessly by his side as he watched me. 'I cannot,' he said, apropos of nothing. 'I refuse.'
I only looked at him.
'I will not,' Holmes said then. His voice betrayed his determined declaration.
'I don't mean to force you,' I said softly. 'I don't ask for what you resolve not to give. But I think you already know that you will, just as I know that I will.' I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, feeling myself shake as my courage strengthened. 'We can't go on like this, Holmes. Every second I'm with you, we move inexorably closer. But I will not go, and you will not send me away. You know whatever resolve we had has already been broken.'
'We agreed,' Holmes repeated uselessly, even as he took a step closer to me. 'We agreed.'
I was shaking; I could feel it in my hands, in my knees, in the insides of my elbows. I was going to touch him. He was walking toward me, stumbling almost – as though he were trying to resist, and couldn't. The sight made my breath short, made my cheeks hot. 'We didn't,' I countered, huffing a nervous laugh as my hands clenched around themselves, restraining myself. 'I've always – ' My voice faded against the words I had for so long prevented myself from saying, and I had to try again. 'I have always wanted you.'
'You were the one who left,' he said, breathless, and suddenly he was there, standing in front of me in pale, trembling, uncertain glory. 'You set the limitation yourself.'
'I thought I was protecting you,' I said. He was so close I could smell the lingering scent of his tobacco, could see the barest suggestion of a day's worth of whiskers on his jaw.
Holmes' eyes were sharp under his brow, and something like joy seemed to rise in them even as I watched, fiery and fierce. 'I don't need protection from you,' he said, and then his mouth was on mine, and I was consumed in the blaze.
Together we drowned in firelight.
In all my imaginings, I could never have imagined this: the graze of hands, of mouths, of teeth, the stretch of Holmes' neck and the gasp of his voice, the beat of his heart and the flush of his blood. The unveiling of a thin chest, a dusting of hair, a peak of a nipple. The shape of his mouth, breathless and bewildered – the heat of his tongue, seeking and searching.
He clutched at me, arched into me, his every façade crumbling around my feet like so much discarded linen, and I could have wept for the beauty of it.
We fumbled at each other, coming undone at every new sensation, every brush of skin against undiscovered skin, pushing and pulling each other closer. The dying fire gilded over every plane and curve of Holmes' flesh, and I ran my tongue along each rise and fall, eager to taste him. The first touch of our pricks together was a revelation; the first thrust of our hips together was an epiphany.
I found his eyes with mine, desperate that he know, that he see, that he understand, and then he said my name against my mouth, a prayer and a benediction both, and together we thrust, together we surged – and together, we fell, into complete, devastating bliss.
Holmes and I had just settled into a relaxed, comfortably smug silence, when the bell rang downstairs. Our eyes met from across the sitting room as tension whipped through us, the risk of our shared secret suddenly heightened under the eye of a client.
It was even worse than that, however: it was Tobias Gregson of Scotland Yard.
I clenched my hands to hide their trembling and stood, making my excuses, but Holmes stopped me with a touch to my shoulder that I felt all the way down to my spine. 'We shall do it together, Watson,' he said, falsely jovial, 'or I shall not do it at all.'
He'd stood with his back to the good inspector so that I might see the truth in his eyes, I realised. They pleaded with me to stay – to not make him face this fear alone.
But Gregson did not notice anything amiss. He sat on our sofa and recounted his story, looking back and forth between us, watching us, and did not notice.
Cautiously, my disquiet eased into relief, and when Gregson finally left, Holmes gathered me to him and kissed me soundly. 'I thought we were done for,' I confessed.
He laughed. 'Gregson isn't a bad detective,' he said, 'but perhaps it is just as well that he's not any better.'
We burst into the flat, panting with the victorious giddiness of a crime solved and a murderer caught swelling in our chests. We had chased our man throughout the streets and alleys of London, driving him into the path we'd laid and finally into all the ready teeth of Scotland Yard. It had been fierce, and frenzied, and brilliant.
I shut the door behind us, vibrating with energy, and when I turned back to the room, Holmes was there.
For a moment I could only stare, struck still and silent by the intensity of his gaze as lust flashed up my spine. His cheeks were flushed with exhilaration; his eyes were shining with need.
It was only three steps to him.
We crashed together, ripping the collars from each other's necks and the buttons from each other's waistcoats in our rush. Holmes pushed at my jacket, my trousers, shoving me back against the door; I dragged him with me, steadying us as we rocked together. He groaned and shoved some more, seeking skin, and I bared it for him, bared myself to him, sinking into the heat of his mouth.
'John,' he whispered, with that mouth, that reverential, devoted, needy mouth, and I tipped back my head and let him shatter me with it, with every lick and suck and bite.