I wrote this about three years ago for br0-harry and his amazing kiss animation. Sharing with you all in memoriam.
He’s dreaming. He must be dreaming.
John opens his mouth to speak, but he can’t. He won’t. Not yet. Of the hallucinations that plague his waking eyes, Sherlock. Sherlock as John once remembered him annuls the fear of losing his shit. He fights to sustain the phantasm with the desperation of a drowning man, willing Sherlock to linger because no blood, no broken pieces, all there was and will be no more.
It’s decimating. How John envisions him so clearly. A merger of yesterdays, resonating eternal between his ears. Penetrating his frontal lobe in sync with the beating on his heart. The past colligates with the present and he knows he’s off the deep end. There are no words. No real words.
Real. This can’t be real, he thinks.
But he wants. His body, his soul aches with the whole of it.
Sherlock smiles. Soft. Small. Evocative.
Christ, he can’t help himself.
John understands the heart cannot feel pain. Not technically. Angina pectoris, a lack of blood, a lack of oxygen. Generally due to obstruction or spasms of the coronary arteries. Sentiment, Sherlock would say. Pointless.
John hesitates. Please, God, don't let him disappear. He’s never prayed for anything so earnestly in his life. Not even when he was dying in the desert in Afghanistan.
The turning point. The realization. The fourth movement of a symphony. Allegro, maybe? Hell if he knows. Sherlock would. He would know. John makes a mental note to ask him later and the very idea of later is quite possibly the most beautiful, precious, invaluable notion John has ever known.
His hands. Validating that which can’t be true, but is. It is tue. Sherlock, drinking him in, legitimate tenderness and honest affirmation. For the first time since John unwittingly/willingly devoted his life to his flatmate, his friend, he sees in Sherlock his consummate loyalty—his love—mirrored back at him. And suddenly, it was worth it. All of it. The agony. The despair. The months of despondency.
Sherlock’s eyes are unguarded. John catches a glimpse of his great heart as well as his great brain. It damn near undoes him.
He kisses Sherlock’s lips with all the reverence he can muster. Warm. Chaste. He revels in the tentative breath shared between the two of them. A promise. A pledge. Short and sweet and more alluringly provocative than he could have imagined, fever dreams of passion incomparable to the titillation of naked affection. Their bodies thrum with the implications.
John can feel Sherlock’s pulse. A delicate lure beneath his fingertips. He justly believes he will protect him and his carotid artery forever.
Sherlock looks at John not unlike he surveys a crime scene. He says nothing. And it means everything.