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Beneath, there is black water. It is patient, its glassy surface impenetrable. It is still and quiet even against the sprawling landscape of a country amidst a revolution and so vastly, improbably dark that in the face of its greed even the shy blue glimmer of the moon on its surface is devoured. A ravenous creature born without sight or sound or life. There are no waves. There are no whitecaps lapping at the shoreline or disturbing restful calm. Beneath the illusory reflection, the surface tension pulls taut in anticipation for something unfathomable even to Sherlock. All of this, the moment before, is an aborted question of whether he will live to see the sun again as the fraying vignette of unconsciousness writhes into the faint edges of his peripheral.
What should be is oftentimes very different than what is. Those moments in where the abstract seeps into the corners of the named reality, where the night-things fester and mutate new limbs all the better to crawl with. When conspiracy opens its eye to become truth, where an innocent mourns upon his pyre of loss— when time itself slows to the pinprick of a second where those moments you once lived return for their final farewell.
Sherlock supposes that he knows better than anyone how deception can distort the mind; how those spindling, fragmented lines that sometimes weave fiction evolve to a higher, tangible horror.
Before him lies the unknown, be it perdition itself beyond the depths in a single glorious moment or the bone-seeping chill of the river. Sounds overlap one another until they melt into a ringing pool of voices and screams. Intent they are, on drowning out everything in the world but the sound of Sherlock’s own heartbeat pounding in his chest and sending the blood rushing through his skin. Everything but the desperation of his task, the realisation of what he’s done, the fragility of a man he should’ve never let leave 221b earlier that night. He’s captured within this one moment; a butterfly pinned on display or a smoldering ember at the fringes of a fire that’s long since gone out.
Futile, as again and again he’d have put himself here. Again and again, Sherlock would have fallen. Again and again, he’d stare into the blackness as it stared back into him because beyond it was a glimmer of light trapped so deeply it could no longer hope to free itself. Their world, entrenched in its own cruelty. William, trapped in a snare of chains he’d once forged himself. This failed to name itself valiant rescue, this was hardly a misguided attempt to rewrite a bitter ending. Sherlock had won— and he had lost— before arriving at the end beaten and bruised and a far, far different man than he’d been at the start. He’d once gazed alone at the sun and the stars before stooping to return once more to the darkness. He’d learned now that loneliness has never been a feeling so much as it has been an absence of one. Sherlock hadn’t even known it possessed a name until he’d been forced to confront the picture of a future without.
Feeling returns to his arms. Someone needs him who feels, like this, the very human thing that Sherlock now understood he would never and could never let go of. This is a free fall. This is a dead-end. It’s the question of what comes next when the road stretching ahead leads to nowhere.
The water waits patiently to meet him.
Long before he opens his eyes, long before he can comprehend that he’s cold and alone, Sherlock is awake.
Bathing all it graces, the hazy golden glow of early morning floods generously into the flat by way of the drawing window. Just as it shyly reaches out to him, Sherlock finally allows himself relief from his study to retire for bed.
His footsteps are muffled beneath him as he pads barefooted over the hardwood in the hallway and into the bedroom, the solitary sound drifting over the low hum of the furnace’s loyal attempts to heat a London flat in the early weeks of winter. Before long the chill will be an unavoidable symptom, for now, it is battered away into claiming only the stark planter-boxes on the terrace not yet revived by daylight’s grace. The bedroom itself is an elegant space in its simplicity. Extravagance is only spared for the windows; massive panes of crystal glass overlooking the near-frozen Thames abbreviated by deep mahogany shutters and concealed by flowing burgundy curtains gracefully skimming above the carpet. Their function isn’t so much as to subdue the morning sun as much as they are to tint the room itself in a warm, rosy hue.
Spanning the wall is a massive bookshelf, its worn but well-cared for titles inscribed with their authors and imparting the words of Descartes, Goethe, and Dumas. In the study is a wrapping shelf that easily puts this collection to rest, but the schools of classical philosophy and bound covers of the notes of Archimedes hadn’t ever much been ones to grasp Sherlock’s particular attentions. Neither is a vested interest in decor that functions solely for aesthetic’s sake such as the expensive coffee table spreads in the living area, or seasonal sheet sets of silken satin for when it’s cold and airy cotton for the warmer months. His eye was better trained for the appreciation of a thing's duality— its functioning usefulness and withstanding durability. The same, of course, applies to those living veins of knowledge Sherlock happens to consider worthwhile. Not an ounce of fat is spared for the impractical; not for his inability to learn but rather his desire for prioritising that which well better serve him.
He likewise finds difficulty in understanding the rationale behind always keeping a guest room prepared or why the pillows on the lounge should be regularly fluffed or even why there’s a spindling web of crystals over the light fixture rather when a simple tug-chain would do just as well. That is to say, minimalism itself is hardly an ideology of his— a fact easily testified by anyone with the pleasure of knowing him— it is more so the subtle luxury found even in the intricate moldings about the rooms trim, the painstaking care to every detail of design even down to the most stylistic decision better spoke to someone else.
This is a shared space, after all. A cohabitation. Where creature comforts are spilled into the frames on the walls and breathe their essence into the life of a home. Collecting and overlapping one over the other as the building strokes of watercolour flow across a canvas.
Sherlock had never thought he was the kind of person who could have something like this. In truth, he’d never even entertained the thought of wanting it. Escaping to independence from those skyward-reaching walls of the Holmes family home had been a lifelong desire for metamorphosis not easily swayed. Even when it became necessary, the idea of a roommate had been an unappealing one until it wasn’t.
Slinking past the bookshelf and closing the last few remaining steps to the bed, Sherlock carefully makes his return to his place beneath the covers. Where he’d been lying has long since gone cold without him. Insomnia cruelly gleamed no quietude in the night and for someone like Sherlock, whose head spun and spun with a constant stream of thoughts and questions there was no better time to listen to the roars of it all than when the world was silent.
Of course, lest it be forgotten, William was hardly better.
"Sherly…?" comes the mumbled lilt of someone trapped just beyond the veil of unconsciousness, William hardly bothering to move as Sherlock presses in against his back. As he settles in close enough to brush his lips to the nape of William’s neck, he lazily huffs the first chord of a chuckle when he’s granted a continuation: "I was starting to wonder if you’d be returning at all."
"‘M sorry," Sherlock whispers back. He lets his eyes slip shut for a blissful moment as a blurry rush of exhaustion washes over him. The ache between the blades of his shoulders slowly eases, the strain behind his eyes from scouring the too-small lines of a police report finally beginning to ebb away. Then, "I didn't expect you to even notice I was gone."
Perhaps in agreement, William makes a single soft sound before falling silent. Faint and far-away. As though he’s wandering again, easily lost beneath the costly toll a mind as his has. When Sherlock hooks an arm around him he says nothing still but allows himself to be tugged into Sherlock’s chest all the same. The tactile aspect of their relationship is best left to moments like these anyway, cotton-threaded comfort softening the oddest edges of their peculiarities until finally they mesh and join. Vast differences align into the rare instance where the world itself falls away from this room, this bed.
Slowly, the minutes pass by and the world falls further and just as Sherlock begins to suspect the conversation has run its course, William quietly supplies, "I had a dream."
"Yeah?" Sherlock answers in an easy enough mumble, "Anything interesting?"
Instead, William falls silent again for another long moment. Sherlock imagines the furrow in his brow, the two lines faithfully creasing his forehead as he ponders something. The corners of his mouth hooked with thin lines drawing them into the pouted frown Sherlock has witnessed a thousand times over. The easiest expression he wears with honesty, enraptured with his own thoughts and the branching splinters raised atop them like hackles. When he turns, twisting his head just enough to look Sherlock in the eye proper, his brow arches into a dry challenge.
"Only ever to the inquirer."
Sherlock scoffs a half-chuckle, leaning in to kiss a stretch of jawline as William settles back over again. "And if I promise to behave?"
"If you’d have woken me, there’d be nothing to tell at all." His voice tremors on the last bit of breath at his lips, Sherlock’s hand smoothing over the skin just beneath his naval. "I’d have been happy to keep you company."
"Always, you underestimate that task."
William’s shoulders shake in silent laughter and a smile of his own finds itself pulling at Sherlock’s lips, an answer to the one he can hear clear as a bell in the soft rasp of William’s unused voice. A light, pleasant delirium settles more soundly into his bones with every exhale, the almost sensual pull of exhaustion making his arm heavy around William’s waist. His dark lashes drop and flutter against the honey strands of William’s hair; the brown sugar cloy of maple syrup clinging to the strands, cinnamon and cardamon now a familiarity that Sherlock has come to associate explicitly with William alone.
William threads his fingers into Sherlock’s, splaying their interlaced hands over the smooth expanse of his stomach where the silken nightshirt he wears to bed has been rucked up. His hands are always cool to the touch, the picture of porcelain in every way they aren’t. Long and tapered, clean rounded nails in stark comparison to the picked beds of Sherlock’s own. How fitting that William’s hands, like him, are as precise and strong as the whiplash sort of way a stripped willow cord bends.
"I suppose I do." Murmured over the lull, whispered over the silence of the sanctuary the two of them are at home in as they wait for the world to lure them back into it.
Sherlock tightens his hold, nuzzling into the nape of William’s neck with a quiet sigh of his own. He’s lost like this. He’s lost but he’s also weighed, measured, and pinpointed in his exact coordinates on a map of a vast world that has zoomed in and occluded everything but this bedroom of red-tinted daylight and satin sheets. He’s himself and he isn’t because here Sherlock has with him someone who has reflected and changed him, for who Sherlock would trade a thousand restless nights for one solitary moment of the vision William paints.
"I was surprised," Sherlock admits in a mumble, his lips brushing once again over William’s skin before he can help himself. A chaste kiss, a self-indulgent one. Some marriage of the two. "Seeing you sleep so deeply in a bed instead of facedown in the bath. To tell the truth I thought it rather chivalrous to let you be."
Another laugh, another jerking movement of shaking shoulders as William’s laughter slips freely from him. "I see. In that case, I suppose I should rather thank you for your consideration."
"You can if you’d like." Sherlock scrapes his blunt nails lightly over the flex of William’s abdomen as it again contracts in laughter. There’s a grin tugging at his mouth so wide it threatens to ache, his earlier exhaustion slowly but surely slipping away now that William is here with his easy wit and his eagerness to lean back into Sherlock each and every time he ventures a step forward. "I could even help you think of a few ways to do just that if you have any trouble."
"How very predictable of you, Mr. Holmes."
"Right back to a last-name basis, are we? And here I thought you were grateful."
With lazy grace, William moves, arching back against Sherlock. The silky fabric of his bedclothes drags luxuriously across the covers and over Sherlock’s skin as he does, soft and suggestible. "Gratefulness loses its potency offered alongside reward; the last thing I’d want is to train you into a poor habit."
Sherlock snorts at that and abandons the guide of William’s hand at his stomach. He traces the dip and curve of each rib, stopping only to splay a large hand over William’s chest and ease him back into a snug fit at the curve of his lap. William goes easily, already picking at the buttons of his shirt and slowly stretching out from the curl of someone only recently woken.
Their legs tangle as Sherlock takes the opportunity to slot his thigh between William’s legs, the slow-burning sensation of impatience unfurling and stretching within his chest and just beneath his skin. He can’t place it, not really, those precise moments where intimacy becomes the thing he craves of William. It seems ever-present; insignificant and anything but, all-consuming want and the blind innocence just to exist at his side. Lights afloat in nocturnal darkness like a boat at sea. Sherlock wants whatever it is William will give him, allow him. He just needs the thread. He only needs the promise that William will continue to hold his end and never let it go.
"That can’t honestly be your philosophy," Sherlock says in a whisper against the shell of William’s ear. He pinches at William’s chest, finding and rolling his nipples between his thumb and forefinger. William makes another soft noise, his breathing beginning to pick up as he pushes back against Sherlock’s lap again, growing increasingly insistent. He grinds down against the thigh between his leg, reaching back to dig his fingers into the back of Sherlock’s thigh.
Sherlock gives an experimental roll of his hips, the will to deny himself what he wanted slipping through the fringes of his composure as William matched him step for step. A soft gasp slips from William’s lips, making it very clear to Sherlock that there wasn’t much more of this he could take without seeing William’s face.
"Ah, Sherlock…"
"I’ve got you," Sherlock murmurs.
He slowly turns William to his side, smiling at the slow, bleary expression of content warming his eyes. Blonde hair fans about him, the curve of his lashes and swell of his cheekbone casting perfect shadows across his face.
Sherlock leans forward, the shake in his breath acting as a cue for William to close his eyes and hold tight and he does. His pale lashes flicker against Sherlock’s cheeks and lets the kiss close at the bottom of his chin, the corner of his mouth, then closer still on the ridge separating his bottom lip from his skin. William takes that kiss, an amused smile twitching at his lips and not for the first time there’s an explanation that brightens the darker recess of Sherlock’s mind.
I am to you whatever it is that makes you feel the safest.
Their lips move and open, slow and lethargic like the sun leaking in and spilling across the room. William’s tongue slips into Sherlock’s mouth as easily as if it were a breath of fresh air. Sherlock gasps around it and fists his hand into William’s silky hair.
William shifts, a hand arriving at Sherlock’s shoulder to gently guide him back. Fluidly moves again, easing back onto him with a knee in between Sherlock’s thighs and his hands pushing down onto Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock goes down easily with a breathless flop and waits for William to crawl up the length of his body and set his arms into the blanket beside his head. William nips at his earlobe and mouths at his hairline; Sherlock groans. It’s too easy to hook his hands over the back of William’s thighs, squeezing at his skin just beneath that clinging fabric.
"How do I feel, Sherly?"
Sherlock groans at the way those words leave William’s lips. The way they singe his temple where the breath rushes out alongside him, the curve of William’s smile as he presses a chaste kiss to Sherlock’s forehead. He wraps his arms around William’s neck and pulls him down to meet his mouth, biting down on the beautiful curve of his jaw when William pulls away to lick at his ear.
"Perfect."
He lacks the born ability to create poetry with words as William can. He can’t thread them together into something that explains how his heart twists and swells into knots and shapes when William stops where he is to look back and offer his hand. His genius is far better suited for the way facts roll and tumble into one another in their eagerness to paint pictures before him. Though if he could, if Sherlock were the same kind of gossamer craftsman that William was, he would have said that William is his beacon at the shore. He’s the paddle and the ship out at sea that divides the messy continent of his reality from the ether of his headspace where the illusion of water is created from equal parts darkness and light.
William is the fantasy of shore beyond the fog and the mist, the thing stormbound sailors dream of when their voyages stretch so long they’re swallowing around the saliva in their mouths and dreaming of sand beneath their feet. William is hardly an anchor but Sherlock can be one of those for the both of them.
He keeps expecting to wake up one day and find William gone. He’ll return to bed and find it empty, he’ll step in for a kiss as William stands at the stove with the kettle in his hand and be greeted with a hand at his chest. William will pull away from him or stop or question Sherlock with that horrible dead gleam in his eye if Sherlock really, truly means it.
But William has yet to do such a thing and he certainly seems to possess the desire to leave now. He bears down onto Sherlock’s hips with his own, sparking heaven and hell and everything in between, all the flavours and sights and sounds of the earth. Sherlock finally paws that still infuriatingly present shirt open and gets at the soft skin beneath. He moans into the first section of flesh he can get his lips on and the shirt lasts all of ten seconds before it’s shoved down William’s shoulders and back.
William’s hands thread into his hair to cradle the back of his head, soft sighs slipping unapologetically from his lips. He’s warm and pliant, leaning into Sherlock as he chases the contact. Sherlock runs his hands up over his thighs, the curve of his backside, the dips at his lower back all before hooking his fingers into the loose waistband of those soft pajama bottoms.
"Sherlock," William says and Sherlock can hear the impending question in his voice. He slows, glancing up to see if there’s that familiar furrow between William’s brows, and finds it. Curiosity and thoughtfulness intermingling, the distance of waking still clouding the jewel tones of his normally attentive gaze. Philosophy is on his mind, surely, his imaginative nature often slipping into the theoretical politics of self-denial and asceticism; and, at the same time, the beautiful passion of the indulgent experience. He can’t help himself from wondering after the fantastic shapes of the shadows crouching in the corners of rooms, he can’t help himself from the enamor of asking questions any more than Sherlock ever could.
"You’d like to talk about your dream now, wouldn’t you?"
Faint, hardly-there, William smiles. "Perhaps." Meaning, given the preliminaries he has to ask are first satisfied. "Would it be too terribly inopportune?"
Sherlock rolls his eyes, the great exaggeration in his efforts making William’s smile grow a little wider. Inopportune as it was, Sherlock had already begun to wonder if they would return to this, though it appears it will be rather sooner than later. It’s always a gamble with William, of course, if he’ll ever address those things that make him worry at his lip. If he’ll bring it to the table weeks or months from now or if he’ll pad silently into Sherlock’s study and wrap his arms around him in desire of comfort.
"Of course not," He answers, truthfully. The right answer it seems, when a small bit of the misty, hesitant wariness in William’s eye recedes. Then, tilting his head, he asks Sherlock, "How often do you dream?"
"Rarely," Sherlock admits. "Though nothing I remember is hardly ever memorable enough to make it to breakfast."
William smiles at that, Sherlock can feel it at the crown of his head as it’s followed by a quiet hum. He understands, of course he does, just how hard it is to slip into that world of make-believe when the mind is instead intent on the worship of the senses. Delusion fancies itself at home in the abstract, living beyond the natural instincts and ordered principles.
He can’t help himself from venturing, an inflection of irony lilting the question. "Why? What did you dream about, Liam?"
Another smile curls over William’s lips, faint and slow as though it were the blooming of a flower. He pulls back to raise an eyebrow proper at Sherlock, coy and elusive. Intent on dragging every interaction into a spindling thread he refuses to ever cut. "You mean generally?"
Cheeky. "I mean," Sherlock reiterates, stressing the word this time around with that slow Eastern drawl, "go ahead and spit it out. Whatever it is you’re thinking about right now. Whatever it is you’re not saying."
William hums again. His fingers drag lazily through Sherlock’s hair, scratching against his scalp and threading through the length of the strands. Slow and measured and comforting. Sherlock leans into it all, letting his head fall against William’s collarbone and the fragile dip of his clavicle. He can hear the flutter of William’s heart, he can feel it against his cheek and count the seconds beneath each strong thud thud. It all makes William a little more real, a little more present, a little more like that beacon at shore and less like a kite whose line Sherlock has accidentally let slip through his fingers.
"I suppose…" William whispers, and that’s his warning. The prelude to whatever secret it was he was allowing only Sherlock to know. One of those carefully guarded treasures he kept locked away safe and sound beneath the floorboards of that place within his head. Sherlock often wonders if it’s the melancholy that leads William to always entertain such haunted thoughts. His desire to spiritualise the greater scheme of life beyond even rationalisation. "Well, it’s difficult to put into words."
William had never stopped struggling to share, this has yet to remain changes.
"Try," Sherlock urges, for he has never stopped wishing to know. He’s never fallen victim to the dread experience of a slow, twisting illness burrowing something misshapen and unnatural into his skull. He knows only too well, however, how very difficult it is sometimes to sludge through the murk and the mud. To lift veil after veil of dusky gauze from the fragile pupae of a thought trembling with its new flesh beneath the limitations of description. Distortions promising truth, shadows promising discovery.
"I’ve dreamt it before," he continues in that soft lilt of his, light and airy even as it curls around the sharp thorns of the things that are hurting him, "that must be why I remember it all so clearly."
Silently, Sherlock grounds himself. He looks up at William, to where William is staring at the coffered lines of the ceiling. His expression hasn’t changed, still lost in idle pleasure and hazy warmth but there’s a grimace tugging at the corner of his mouth that Sherlock has only ever seen when he’s venturing down a new fork in his thoughts.
It’s not an uncommon sentiment, this much Sherlock knows. How the mind takes things like anxieties and worries and twists them up into a personification so much more terrifying than the things could really ever hope to be. How William himself is someone who never pauses before picking up another stone to place on his shoulders, how he refuses to put them down or turn the other way from someone struggling under the weight of their own burdens. Once, he might have very well been quite soft. It is the kind of disposition a person loses while still very young. The belief that the Ego is a permanent, reliable thing could not be further from the truth. To Sherlock, it is almost certainly the Ego’s nature to exist in a complex multiform as reflected and shaped by the many faces and lives adopted into the kaleidoscope of ‘personality’.
Sherlock also knows, however, that this must be something that William has considered before. His own Achilles heel was created and bared by him alone. That there’s something there, carefully tucked into the nuances of the subconscious that speaks to something so much more than what it is. There must be something familiar about it; a sense of vu flickering along the line of dreamlike epiphany and delusion.
"Did it frighten you?"
His eyes find Sherlock’s. He is difficult to read and he readily uses this to his advantage. Lips curling into a smile, William shakes his head. "It didn’t."
Carefully, carefully, intent and earnest meld themselves into the drive to see this through. When he stretches out his hand for William to rest his check upon it Sherlock murmurs, low and sure, "Describe it to me."
Silence. William watches him. The warmth of his cheek seems so very far away from the distance clouding his eyes in memory. Then, "I’m alone. I’m falling, backwards through the air, as though I’ve leaped." Twin lines slowly begin to crease his forehead. Sherlock leans forward to smooth them. "I’m falling from the London Bridge, I think, because I can see it on fire above me. It all feels like an eternity, longer, even, for I know that I am going to die when I reach what is beneath me." Another pause as he delves back, peeling back the paper-thin layers until he can recall it. "My hands are outstretched in front of me, reaching out towards something I’m not able to see."
Sherlock listens. Huh. Vaguely he answers, "That sounds pretty frightening to me."
Was this a test of sorts? William’s reticence suggested something of a kind, but the way his gaze has flattened in on itself says another more macabre explanation. "It should be," He says softly. "Though if it were I am certain I wouldn’t find myself nearly as unsettled as I am. It’s precisely because I’m not frightened that makes the dream all the more memorable."
"Sure," Sherlock admits, "but even still, in a dream you can hardly expect to account for reason."
"And hope?"
"Hope?"
"I’m unafraid," he says again, "but… I am hopeful. It feels as though I’ve been waiting my entire life for whatever it may be."
What circles they’re making around themselves. Sherlock’s patience wanes not at the cause of William, but at the dream itself for its intrusion— invited discussion or not. "And? For what would that be, exactly?"
"Hm… Salvation, perhaps? For it all to be over?" William pauses, visibly mulling the question and his answer to it round and round. As his head begins ticking in a single slow nod, Sherlock kisses the corner of his mouth. William turns into it, happy to follow into Sherlock’s diversion. How easy it is to forget he can do this, that William will welcome him as he is even as William himself is so profoundly occupied with figuring out the answers to his question as he goes. Trialing endless nights to place words to them for the first time and tracing the lines of a coffered ceiling as a notion of death waits at his mind for a solution. Sherlock will wait endlessly for him to speak those dreams of his into existence is, in many ways, dico ergo sum. "It’s quite difficult to tell."
"You said ‘salvation’ first," Sherlock points out, letting William reach to help him with his own clothes. His concentration is working to remain unified, divided ever still between William— between his overwhelming presence, the astonishing sensation of his lips over Sherlocks, the dangerous dreaminess that makes it seem as though for all Sherlock tries William will never know the reality of his devotion for him. Sensuality tremors, obscured, though just hardly, in the way their hands reach for one another. How their eyes meet across a room full of a hundred others with none of the siren need they have for one another. It would feel like a codependence, this desire to be with and not without, but neither of their interest lies in the creature the two of them become when together. They will always separate, they will always draw back in eventuality with the longing following suit in a tide rush; designed by its nature to rebuild again and again atop of itself.
In imitation, their layers begin to vanish between them. Waxing captivation consuming without concern as William licks back into his mouth and caresses along the line of his thigh. Sherlock threads his hand into the hair at William’s nape, letting the sear of the moment scorch away any of the bitterness in the tale before they continue. He waits until he can look William in the eye, the low whisper of his voice catching on its own intensity. "As long as you want to be saved. The rest is irrelevant."
A hummingbird pause flits between them for a second, William frowning as he hovers in his memories to make the answers line up. "I wouldn’t—"
Impatience winning over his efforts to soothe diplomatically, Sherlock flips William down onto his back and discards the final pieces of clothing separating William’s bared form from his own. "Doubting me?" He challenges slyly, the skew of his smile crooked and warm all while making the effort to kiss every bit of skin available to him. The jut of William’s hip, the inside of his thigh, the base of his cock, half-hard despite the conversation at hand and swelling up towards his stomach.
"That…?" William struggles to ask, the pupils of his eyes blown wide against their saturnine ruby rings. How utterly romantic that everything he is and does can be beautiful beyond even the word itself, melancholia deepening the otherwise banality of a moment. To harken to this, William threads his fingers carefully back into the midnight of Sherlock’s hair, skillfully maneuvering himself backwards to lay his head on the pillows. Sherlock nestles back in over him comfortably, nearly swooning at the rush of exhilaration it gives him to hover over William like this, touching him, kissing him; it’s exhilarating, intoxicating.
"That everything else is irrelevant." He’s so certain William would have bestowed upon him a hard eye at the cheek, the picture of it already clear in his head had Sherlock not shied from scraping his teeth along the soft juncture of William’s thigh. Rather than a story, rather than a dreamy allusion to a place Sherlock couldn’t himself follow, he is instead rewarded for his efforts with a stifled moan and purpled tinctures blossoming in his wake as though he’d painted a long stroke of colour over William’s skin. The sight alone is cause for the heady rush of something so deeply married to love and lust and devotion that his actions have come to nearly feel like one of worship. Touched by it too, William’s thigh trembles against Sherlock’s cheek and then against his fingers as Sherlock spreads his legs further apart. "All you have to do— and all you’ll ever need to do is just wait for me."
William stares at him and Sherlock waits. Patient, precisely as William needs him to be. He can witness the conflict between confusion and understanding, of William’s acknowledgment towards what he knows Sherlock feels for him and where he simply cannot allow himself to comprehend the sheer scope and its depth. "And… what is it you would do once you’ve caught up?"
There is a moment that a sneaking suspicion begins to occur to Sherlock, one wherein William remembers a bit more of his dream than he’s letting on. He knows it very well could be the case. He also knows, however, that William’s withholding of just what he knows is very nearly always a scenario to conceal the horror of it all to himself. Never was there another who so readily sought out that which would hurt him and no other tried with so much of their ambition to keep it as a burden bared alone. Perhaps it bothers Sherlock all the more that William would omit pieces of a dream he’d had but the fact of the matter still remains.
A thoughtful sigh. "Well," Sherlock murmurs, straightening. He leans up to smooth a large hand over the curve of William’s cheek. Ruby eyes spark back at him, still dark in their obit, still beautiful. "I suppose I’d hardly be letting you go any time soon, after all you’d put me through to get to you."
William tilts his head. "Are you saying you’d jump off of a bridge for me?"
With a single, sudden bark of laughter, Sherlock cracks the seriousness William had begun to wear and earns, in turn, a warm peel of answering laughter. He cocks a grin, roguish debonair swinging into the curve of his brow and slant of his smile. "If you want to put it that way, sure. I won’t stop you."
"It’s just a dream, Sherly," William reminds him gently as the brightness dims. "Though it remains that your lack of self-preservation instincts pervades even in a hypothetical sense."
"That’s because it’d be something more like you-preservation I’d be trying for." Besides, he thinks, and Sherlock levels a look at him, wills William to bear witness his sincerity, for nothing of it to be lost in the pass of translation. "I would never let you go through anything like that alone."
A key slips into a lock somewhere, William’s entire face softening as he finally accepts the answer. "I suppose persistence is certainly one of your more prominent qualities. Along with a lack of mortal fear, doubt, and, above all, unluckiness"
"Hm. I better remember you describing that first one as ‘doggedness’ and thinking it was so clever."
Delighted laughter, then, "That would be more in how you dig up your bones. You find something of interest, no matter how deeply in the ground it’s buried, and refuse to simply leave it be."
"I can’t wait around for things like you do," Sherlock tries half-heartedly, not hiding his eagerness with the change of topic as William is wrapping his arms about his neck, his smile kissing at the line of Sherlock’s jaw and quickly sapping away the remainder of his strength to continue debating let alone further conversation. "…There’s hardly any fun in just drawing things out."
"I’m afraid I’m inclined to disagree," William murmurs, resorting to clandestine tactics with a wandering hand at Sherlock’s waist. "There are certainly benefits to prolonging the inevitable"
"You’re a cheat, Liam."
"I’ve never promised a soul to play fair—" Sherlock scowls, "—and besides, we do keep seeming to let ourselves get distracted…"
How very right he is. Happy to prove his point, too, with an ever-drifting direction to his hand and a smile at Sherlock’s neck he’s dying to savour for himself. "Let’s remedy that, shall we?"
He rolls off of William to reach for the drawer of the side table, rummaging around for the sleek bottle and finding it relatively quickly with a thankful explicative mumbled under his breath. Considering briefly whether he’d like to pass it over to William or prep him himself before going back to the drawer for a condom, his decision is made for him as William gently plucks the bottle from Sherlock’s fingers.
He rips open the packet and fits it over himself, a low, horrifyingly desperate noise spiriting out of his mouth before he can help it as he watches William’s head fall back against the pillow and a single slim finger work in and out of himself. This had precisely been the source of Sherlock’s earlier dilemma; to watch William wantonly prepare himself or do it himself for the feeling of William tightening around his fingers, hot and pliant.
The battle wins out in his head when a quiet noise suspiciously akin to a plea escapes from William, his eyes cracking open to find Sherlock’s.
He presses a finger inside of William and leans in to press kisses to his navel, tasting the smooth expanse of skin and leaving marks over where the umbilical dip swells down to the pubic bone. William shifts beneath his fingers, holding back the moans pressing behind his lips like expensive rewards he refuses to let Sherlock indulge in just yet. He presses another finger inside of him and crawls up William’s sides he can kiss him and draw those sounds out of his swollen mouth.
It works in every way as a charm does, William reciprocates eagerly with a hand slipping along Sherlock’s jaw and into his hair. His skin is cool against the fever Sherlock feels in his veins and is in sharp contrast to how hot he is around Sherlock’s fingers. He adds another for the appreciative moan William sings against his mouth, but he’s not yet undone by his pleasure. Sherlock quietly resolves to make that his mission, his past-time. Undoing this collected man so often caught in thoughts and concerns and the waking dreams that follow him over so complete and irreparably that William will no longer be able to play it all off afterward.
He’s more responsive now, the explicit carefulness Sherlock is demonstrating not entirely necessary against the regularity of their couplings but very much so for the specific sounds and expressions Sherlock can draw from William like this. His hips cant as Sherlock curls his fingers, a litany of encouragements pouring from his lips. He's especially beautiful like this; when he doesn’t bother with the pretenses of quieting himself or the little dishonesties about what it is he wants.
Sherlock tells him as such, never very good at keeping himself from heaping onto William all the things he should learn and know about himself. "You’re incredible."
A single ruby eye cracks open as William smiles at him, a pleased flush glowing over his cheeks and down his neck. Rose on porcelain, soft and muted. "You’re kind," he murmurs, and he reaches out for Sherlock then, to curl his hand at Sherlock’s nape and pull him in for a kiss. "Beautiful, too. So much so that it’s difficult to even breathe."
"Yeah?" Sherlock challenges, a disbelieving grin dripping with charm growing on his mouth. "Just how’s that work?"
"Because…" William trails, his nose bumping at Sherlock’s. His lashes are long enough to brush at Sherlock’s cheek, the faint freckling across his nose becoming endearingly obvious. "Because you’ll be there sometimes, staring at me like you can’t see anything else. You, you who can reflect back all the light in a room and try as I might, I can’t think of anything I possibly could’ve done to deserve that from you."
Sherlock kisses him again, hard enough to silence before moving to William’s jaw and the apple of his cheek and the place where the furrow creases his brow until finally, William smiles for him again. "Enough of that now," he chides, taking hold of William’s chin. "We’ll pretend you stopped at telling me I’m beautiful and in twenty minutes I’ll kiss you until you can’t even remember thinking anything after."
Dazedly, William nods. Just one of his slow, gentle smiles of gratitude lights every feature he has from the inside out.
"Right," Sherlock drawls, cheshire as ever all while committing every careful detail to memory. "Now, tell me that you’re ready."
Somewhere between coquettish and amused William answers him, "Am I?"
Happy to prove so, Sherlock grins and winds himself between William’s legs but before he can go any further, William shoves him off, roughly enough to effectively shock the breath out of Sherlock. He throws a leg around Sherlock’s hip with a smooth grace that sends Sherlock’s heart racing in his chest and straddles him, William’s slim hand taking hold of Sherlock to guide him inside slowly, blissfully.
His eyes flutter shut, twin rubies disappearing behind the golden fringe he wears on his eyelids and William’s head tips back as a high, quiet sound catches behind his bitten lip. Sherlock wants the arc of his throat between his teeth, he wants to feel the vibration of every moan and hitch in William’s breath, he wants to litter the perfection of it with bruising proof of his own desperation. William would let him, of course. That’s worth more than anything.
Sherlock hisses and settles for grabbing onto William’s hips and rolling up into him. William’s mouth falls open, a low throaty groan easing out of him like a line pulled from deep within his chest. He sounds like music, he always does, passion once more making him come alive into something animated and beautiful without the polite restraints holding him back. He’s tight like a vise, impossibly tight around Sherlock like a wet mouth greedily sucking and compressing.
"Look at me," Sherlock manages past the gruff in his chest, snapping his hips up into William and reveling in the shocked, erotic disruption of William’s choked exhale. He wants to see more of that, more proof that William is as anchored into this moment as he is with fire lapping over his skin and his heart thrumming against his ribs. "Liam."
William’s eyes snap open to meet his, clouded over and so full of fondness Sherlock needs to physically swallow down the answering and ridiculously soft sentiments that threaten to pour from him like a flood. William leans back to clutch at Sherlock’s thighs for support as he bounces, settling his weight more firmly over Sherlock as he eases himself back and forth, sliding up and down in an easy rhythm.
The way he moves, slow and languid, leaves Sherlock with no choice but to stare openly at the planes of William’s body; sharp angles and flat lines converging into art, smooth skin half pristine burgundy with the tinted sun and half ensconced in the soft-apricot glow of the sun slipping through the blinds. His face, the column of his neck, and the spot over his heart are trapped in a middle ground of dusky shadows. Sherlock can see where the points of light are reflected in his eyes, where the pout of his lips part around his soft gasps. Unable to help himself, Sherlock reaches up to trace the curves of those lips and William takes them eagerly into his mouth. His tongue is warm and wet, delving over the crooks of Sherlock’s long fingers and enveloping the digits in a slick velvet heat.
Sherlock sits up, spreading his legs a bit and binding his knees to better support William’s position. He spans the palm of his hand over the curve of William’s lower back and hips rollick beneath William’s, their movements finding synch effortlessly as their bodies collide and melt into one another. Sherlock kisses William, tasting how the moans dissolve on his tongue precisely the way he’d once imagined they would. He groans and, with a bit of reluctant hesitation, withdraws his fingers from William’s mouth to press his fist into the bed for the leverage he needs to push William down onto his back without gracelessly ejecting him from his lap.
"Oh," William gasps as he hits the soft covers, and Sherlock relishes the sinful way his Adam’s apple bobs around the cry. "Sherlock—"
Familiarity curls into that one word, a meaning that Sherlock can interpret so well alongside the heavy weight of his heart. He recognises the soft curl of fondness, the desperate yawn to find words for the moment and the feeling. Overwhelming is the only word for the sensation that hums through his blood, singing and shouting and threatening to pour out from his chest and past his lips.
"I know," Sherlock murmurs back, letting it flit into the curve where William’s jaw meets his throat. He seals it into place with an open-mouthed kiss and better situates himself between William’s thighs before pushing forward with a single-minded intensity. He thrusts into William and for all that he forgets to breathe, he doesn’t stop or slow until he finds himself walking the fringes of orgasm, increasingly frantic with it. William whispers his name again and again, growing louder and louder as though he can’t possibly stop. Sherlock touches him, closing his fingers firmly around the rosy length of his cock and William comes almost immediately; over Sherlock’s fingers and the flat expanse of his stomach as he writhes and clutches at Sherlock’s back and the blanket beneath him until he’s messily pulling it untucked from beneath the pillows.
Sherlock savours the look of William’s panting mouth, committing the glossy swell of it to memory, and buries his face into William’s neck as his own gratifying orgasm tears violently through him. He cries out into the small racing pulse point he’d kissed in answer and slowly deflates into jellied, boneless lethargy. His body twitches around the fluttering remnants of the high in his bloodstream as Sherlock waits for his breathing to even.
Sherlock watches the bright red slits of brightening daylight through the shutters and filtered through the ruddy maroon curtains. He closes his eyes, and William’s even breathing is wind passing through the trees. The settling heartbeat beneath his cheek is the lull of calm in the midst of a storm.
William runs his hands through Sherlock’s hair, his fingers catching gently at the mussed strands. "I must have loved you in a past life," he murmurs suddenly, and when Sherlock raises his head to look he finds William’s already staring back at him with that same soft look in his eyes. The one he slips into in the very early morning or very late night. The one he lets Sherlock see when they’re alone, tucked away from anything that could corrupt the sanctity of it. "Perhaps the one before that, too."
"Yeah?" Sherlock smiles. "How would you scientifically figure that?" He pulls out of William and fiddles with getting the condom off and tied so he can toss it into the trash can beneath the bedside table. William watches him, the same lazy interest scrawled across his expression before Sherlock’s laying back down, finding William’s shoulder with his cheek and nosing at a perfect collarbone.
"Unfortunately it’s a working hypothesis."
Snorting, Sherlock drags his eyes up to find William’s in suspended disbelief, physically and emotionally depleted. He cracks a smile; it stretches across his lips all on its own and grows into a laugh. He shakes his head and sinks back down into the curve of William’s neck, nipping lazily but intently at his throat. It buzzes under his teeth with William’s otherwise soundless amusement.
"I like to hear you talk like that way." He rummages through the catalogued collection of every striking endearment William’s ever said to him. "You said once you felt as though we’d met before. Another time you told me you’d nearly left everything for me."
Flushed at the reminder, William answers, "Those were hardly ever meant to be repeated."
"Why not? Who’s to say I don’t feel the exact same?"
"What a peculiarly romantic notion to hear you agreeing with, Sherlock Holmes."
"You’ve gotten into my head," Sherlock grins, "always convincing me to re-examine the things that I know. I’ve become an absurdist under your watch. Ruined for good."
"Life isn’t worth it without romanticisms," William says with a laugh. "Companionship and understanding, love and all the terrible, wonderful things that come with it. I can’t imagine trying to be happy in a world without it."
Sherlock angles his head just so but doesn’t have the strength to push up onto his elbows again, so he stays where he is. "Good thing you’ll never have to. I’ll chase you into whatever life I have to to find you."
William kisses the flat bone between his brow and cheekbone and then the crooked bridge of his nose. "You’ll catch me?"
"I won’t let you go," Sherlock mumbles against a cooling, sweat-slicked stretch of jawline. "I’ll refuse then and there and you’ll be stuck with me."
"Must I truly wait for our next life for that kind of devotion?"
"Ask me now, then. Find out for yourself."
A beat passes.
William murmurs mischievously, "It is Saturday."
Sherlock grins.
"Precisely my thinking."