Chapter Text
You’re thirty-three when you meet him for the first time.
Thirty-four when a bullet almost takes him away.
Thirty-five when you wait inside a bar in the salt crusted breeze wafting off the Mediterranean just outside the open window to your left.
It’s a bar not unlike the one you first met in, candles flickering on tables, leather gleaming, spirits winking. You perch on the edge of a bar stool in a deep blue velvet suit and take a sip of John’s whiskey neat which he abandoned only moments before. You swallow, tasting smoke and charcoal and salt and something antiseptic, like cherry drops or iodine on the back of your tongue. You set it aside and watch him as he leans in close to his friend Bill (Belinda) Murray who he served with in Afghanistan, his hand on her shoulder, listening intently over the two men playing Spanish guitars in the corner. Her face, round, British but with obvious Italian roots, with olive skin and long black hair, is animated as she talks, and your John, well, he listens as if it is the only thing he cares about in all the world.
You imagine what they must be saying to each other. A long time has passed since John was discharged from the army after the injury he sustained during a fire fight in April of last year. It seems pure serendipity to find Bill here, vacationing with her family while on leave from her third tour of duty as a combat surgeon in the RAMC. She was John’s closest friend overseas and you know that they haven’t spoken since John was carried off in a chopper towards Helmand all those months ago. They had embraced that afternoon on the beach, her running towards him, shouting his name, brown ankles slick with seafoam, sugar white sand glinting on her calves, body wrapped in a sage green sarong. You had watched John’s face pinch in such a look of pained pleasure as he held her that you had instinctively stepped back, reluctant to intrude, letting John beckon you forward when he was ready.
What will he tell her?
About the months he spent hobbling around London with his cane and his gun tucked like a promise in the bottom drawer of his desk?
Will he tell her how he avoided you, never answering your letters, your calls? How he told you to forget about him? Of the nightmares and the tremor and the phantom pain in his leg and the way he felt himself useless, untethered?
Or about that day in Bart’s with Stamford your unwitting ally, giving you one last chance. And over the months that followed, you wooing him with thrill and danger and trust and reminding him reminding him reminding him who he was? Will he tell her about the morning in July when he came down the stairs at Baker Street and kissed you, so so softly, hello?
How do you explain to someone how the soul, the heart, the body mends, one painful stitch at a time?
Does he notice? you wonder as Bill joins you for post-dinner cocktails, her and John laughing and telling war stories. Does he see the pile of medical journals on his nightstand and the Google searches for locums hiring GPs and the twice weekly date at the racquetball club with Stamford? Does he see the way he sleeps through more nights than not? The way his scar has faded from a blast sight to a web of spider silk?
It’s a miracle happening in increments. So gradual you almost miss it until one day you’re on the other side of it, looking back and marvelling at how far you’ve come.
“You were quiet tonight,” John remarks when you’re back in your hotel room. He sets the keycard down on the dresser and leans against it, facing you. You sit on the bed, toe off your shoes, and shrug. You reach for him.
John’s mouth tugs up a little, his eyes on yours.
“What’d you think of old Bill?”
His thighs are warm as they settle across your lap, his weight sinking down into you, arms looped around your neck. He smells so good, so familiar, it makes your throat ache; you bury your face in him.
“What? No observations?” He prompts a minute later, teasing. “No deductions? Go on, then, I know you want to.”
It’s not as if you hadn’t gathered any. And it’s not as if seeing how at ease John was with her didn’t make you run hot with jealousy. Any normal day and you would have stripped all the paint from her walls. But then you think again of how happy John was, and how relaxed, and how, in a desert miles and miles away, she had saved his life, and so, “She’s a good friend,” you say into his skin instead.
He sighs, a breath you didn’t know he was holding, having expected something vicious perhaps, or your particular brand of unsparing honesty at the very least, but you’ve managed to surprise him, you can tell, as his hands begin to move again over your back. “She is.”
He has only himself to thank for that small kindness. There has always been a thorn inside you. Of sadness, of difficulty, of shame. Pricking, pricking. Until him you had been nothing but bramble and briar, but among the thicket there is now the odd bloom or two.
“I don’t think we’ve talked about how much I like this new suit,” he says, voice low and rough, brushing his mouth across yours, your stubble scratching at his lips. Blood colours them, the skin pinking up, but he only presses closer; he doesn’t mind your prickly bits, which is the point after all. “You look splendid in it,” he murmurs, hands stroking down your arms, feeling the soft nap of the velvet against his palms.
“John,” you breathe, feeling suffused with heat and want. His tongue slips into your mouth and you moan at the hint of whiskey still burning on his tongue.
“Take it off,” he whispers in your ear a moment later, scrambling off your lap and reaching for his belt. He turns, walking around to the other side of the bed, as you stand, a bit wobbly, on weak knees.
You watch each other undress from across the crisp expanse of the freshly made up bed.
Blue eyes ravishing you, worshipping you, touching you all over with their ardent, hungry light.
Behind him the white muslin curtains stir at the window and the scent of orange blossoms is carried in on the tide of the breeze. Outside the trees sway gently in the courtyard with crimson bougainvillea dripping over its stone walls and beyond them the moonstruck silver caps of the waves crest and break on the shore.
You meet in the centre of the bed, kneeling, naked. The hair on his legs sparks against yours and sends shivers crackling down your spine. He curls his hand into your hair and brings you down to his mouth and the deep wet stroke of his tongue.
“Turn around,” he says, long, kiss-drunk minutes later, and you shiver at the dark husky rasp of his voice, shuffling up the bed to wrap your hands around the headboard. Your skin stings in the raw air, alive with anticipation. You feel him shift at your side, knelt close, silky cock tucked against your hip. You hear the snap of the lube bottle and the way John’s breath is coming fast and hard against your right shoulder blade.
“I need to—“ broken off, breathless. A quiet moan, his teeth on the nape of your neck. His left hand on your belly, steadying. “Christ. I need—“
“Yeah,” you say, hanging you head between your shoulders and bowing your back.
“I want—“
“Yes. Anything. John. Please.”
The sound you make when his fingers slip between your arse cheeks is a deep animal purr. It shudders up and out of you as his slick fingertips rub over you, rumbling in your chest, burring in your throat.
“God, Sherlock.”
You moan again, louder this time. His hand slides up your chest to rest against your sternum, right over the hammer of your heart. You turn your head and meet his mouth. He kisses you through it, the breach and the burn, until he is settled inside you, touching the hectic beat of your blood from the inside.
It doesn’t take long to prepare you. You feel a current arcing between you, a desperate urgency to be joined. Is he thinking, as you are, of how you might have met a year ago if he hadn’t…
How you would have met in the bar downstairs, how your eyes would have met with that same shocking sizzle? There is no way you could have waited, could have sat through drinks and small talk. You would have grabbed his hand and pulled him into the corridor and kissed him up against the mosaic wall. How you would have stumbled down the street, weaving through the crowds on the boulevard out for dinner in the fragrant springtime air, to your hotel room? To this bed?
It had been building between you for months.
You can feel it now, that same frantic energy filling you up to overflowing. You don’t want it soft. You don’t want it gentle. You want him to take you.
“Now, John.” He groans and kisses you and kisses you and then, drawing back, moves to kneel behind you. His knees nudging yours wider as he slicks himself, positions himself, and with a hand on your shoulder, encourages you to sit.
The sound he makes when he enters you is worth the initial pain of your body accommodating the thick girth of his cock. He goes slow, lets you adjust and you bite your lip to keep from gasping. He guides you, up and down, his fingers wetting the rim of you, fondling the swollen edge of where you are stretched out around him, until your body eases, taking him deeper and deeper on each pass.
His breath is wet and warm against your spine as he rests his forehead there for a moment, panting, his hands curled around your hips, holding you still. Your thighs are spread to either side of his, your cock bobbing out in front of you, red and hard and shiny at the tip.
You squirm in his lap, restless, swivelling your hips with him buried so deeply inside you, searching for that spot that promises relief.
John’s hands smooth down the insides of your thighs, urging them even wider, before he thrusts slowly up. Your knuckles go pale around the headboard as the sensation cuts brightly through you. This type of light, the type you create between you when you’re together like this, it’s the vivid hot pulse of the sun at mid-day. It’s the type of light that shines purely white, but which feels red inside you, like being engulfed by flame.
He works you on his cock with abandon. You can tell he’s lost to it just as you are. You lean back, let go your hold, set your knees deeper into the mattress and let him fuck up into you. Let him fill you with the thick throbbing length of his big beautiful cock.
He wraps his hand around you, swiping his thumb over the sensitive head, and you cry out. Pleasure coils deep in your navel, radiating out down your thighs. The heat of his fist and the tight slick clutch of his hand and the way he’s pushing into you, his fat velvety crown hitting your prostate over and over, it takes one stroke, two, and then you’re spilling over his fingers, painting the headboard in your come, the walls ringing with your shout.
You fall forward, into the pillows, senseless to all but the cadence of your blood pounding in your ears, as John thrusts into you from behind. You feel him take your cheeks in his hands and part them so that he can watch himself.
“Oh, God, oh, fuck, Sherlock!” You feel him begin to spurt inside you and you tighten yourself around him, milking him and milking him, until, shaking, he collapses on top of you, spent.
After you clean up he curves himself into your body, tucks all of himself into all of your honeycomb cells, safe, and you lie together in the sweet air listening to the waves crashing on the shore.
“I wouldn’t have made it through this year without you,” John says, quiet, but sure, a little while later.
“You would have,” you say, nuzzling your nose behind his ear, your throat tight tight tight.
John shakes his head, voice hoarse. “I was so alone—”
“You—“
“—and I owe you so much. Thank you for saving my life, Sherlock.”
He’s holding your hand curled right over his heart.
You were thirty-three when you met him for the first time.
On a perfectly ordinary Thursday evening in a perfectly ordinary pub.
You were thirty-three with track marks on your arm and weighing whether or not to give yourself a second chance at living.
And in walked a man who looked at you, just looked at you, and wanted you.
Wanted you.
Thorns and all.
You could say then, that he saved your life too.
You’re thirty-five when you whisper, “I love you,” for the first time into the soft silvering vee of hair tapering at the nape of his neck. All of the big sentimental silly cliche feelings you’ve been denying redacted no longer.
He wriggles closer and squeezes your hand. “Mm,” he hums, as if this is old news to him, which, perhaps, it is. You still feel it settle warmly in your chest, the light inside you glowing whiskey gold and radiant when he says, a moment later, “I love you too.”