I’m scared,” Sherlock said abruptly, then fell silent. John hugged him more tightly and nestled his nose against the back of Sherlock’s ear.
“Tell me,” he urged.
“What if you die,” Sherlock said flatly, his question falling into a statement.
“Of course I will die,” John said, not exactly in a light tone, but with something other than sorrow in his voice.
“What if you leave,” Sherlock said, in the same flat tone. “If you leave, John—” his chest heaved abruptly, causing John to pull him even more deeply into his embrace.
…”I will never leave you,” John said, “and you know that this is a promise that I can make, with all of my heart, and at the same time, it is a promise that I cannot keep.”
…”I cannot keep the promise,” John said softly, “because that kind of thing is out of my hands. And –” he took a deep breath, not knowing how to finish what he had started. You must say this, he thought. You must tell Sherlock this, because for all his brilliance and all his knowledge, he does not know this very simple human truth. And that is why he searches for it so desperately, among the dead. He thinks he’ll find it there, but he’s wrong. Death is what gives meaning to life, but it isn’t in death that we find that meaning: it’s here, in these fleeting, gorgeous moments, in the suppositionless now, where we forge our lives. And life is always, always lived in the shadow of death.
“This is the price we pay,” John began again. “This is the price we pay, for living and for loving and for finding each other.”
“I don’t want this then,” Sherlock said, and his voice was wretched, so sad that John could barely stand to hear it. “I don’t want this. It hurts, John. Knowing I am going to lose you.” He sniffed against the wall, his body still shaking with the sobs.
“Yes, Sherlock. It hurts… It hurts, Sherlock. …It hurts, and yet…You still want this, you still want me.”
“Yes,” he blurted, “and that’s what is so painful. How can I want you so badly? How do people live with this kind of pain?”
John laughed, his face moving into a smile, reassuring Sherlock with the everydayness of his expression.
“You know what happens to the worst of us,” John reminded him. “Murder and mayhem and all the rest.” He took a deep breath, then looked down reverently at Sherlock’s penis. “But others—the majority of us—take what we can get. We love now, because we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. All we know is that it will be over, someday. And we want to love before it is all gone.”
—
excerpts from Pax americana by emmadelosnardos
