a night sky with a redundancy of moons (tiny prompt ficlet)
@snorklepie gave me the words “fingernail clippings”. I, in turn, experimenteted with a mix of astronomy and epithelium..
***
New moons made out of keratin, contrasting against the dark bathroom tiles and turning the floor behind the sink into an distorted vision of the night sky.
A night sky with three moons.
And Sherlock may not know much about the solar system, but it’s clear that three moons is something of a redundancy.
John could have told him more. He did sometimes use to talk about those things, but Sherlock had never really listened to the words. He’d only paid attention to the voice that let them out into the darkness of the back of a cab or into the stale air of their - of Sherlock’s - bedroom.
(Would Sherlock have listened now, if John still told him about such things?)
John is a considerate lover. The new moons on the bathroom tiles was one telltale sign of that simple fact. The sight of the thin, thin slivers of new moons - of fingernail clippings that missed the sink John aimed for when he clipped them - used to fill Sherlock with a pooling sensation of something indulgent, liquid, expectant. Because John would always have freshly cut nails as not to tear, to hurt.
Turns out John needn’t have worried.
Neither of them needed sharp nails in order to tear something. Sometimes silence does the trick even more efficiently.
And they still move around each other (like the Earth around the sun, Sherlock thought idiosyncratically, because he still cared if John found him… ignorant), but they do it in a distanced way that makes the question of keratin against intestinal epithelium as redundant as three moons on a night sky.
The slivers of moons have grown wider as the silence had grown between them, until there was no longer any need for newly cut fingernails. As long as they were short enough to be hygienic when covered in latex in an exam room at the clinic, they wouldn’t be cut. No tiny, tiny clippings to be found in the early evenings, no foreshadowing of nights to be spent in sweaty, wrinkled sheets and limbs tangled.
And Sherlock knows it now.
Knows that he misses the days where he would see the redundant night sky on the tiles of their - of his - en suite ever so often.
It’s strange to miss something that was never anything but a redundant anomaly to begin with. But the abundance was never this loud.
(It’s never as loud as the lacking of.)