Sherlock stepped back, as if to walk away, but then... he clicked the heel of his foot to the ground as he walked around John, inspecting him indiscreetly, hands held behind his back.

"What are you doing," John breathed, as Sherlock looked him up and down, a faint smile on his cupid-bow lips.

"Mm," he hummed. "I don't take you for an idiot." Sherlock stopped behind John, whose hands where turning blotchy - he was squeezing too hard, and it was starting to hurt his palms.

"Wow," John said, airily, "I'm so incredibly glad that the great Sherlock Holmes doesn't think I'm an idiot," but his tone was unhinged and unconvincing, hanging onto the last shred of composure he had. John felt like he was under attack. Sherlock was looking at him - no, he was opening up John's head with a scalpel and staring at his brain - what if he saw everything?

What if...

Sherlock cut off John's thoughts with a snap of his fingers, and then he began talking in way that was so fast and deliberate and shocking - nothing like the short-tempered speech he usually sported. This was stark and staccato and unbearably... unf.

"I don't think you're an idiot, Doctor Watson," he started, and John wanted to tell him that he could stop calling him Doctor Watson, because whenever he said that John felt overheated and self-conscious and old, but he couldn't get a damn word in edgewise.

"I think that you're in denial," Sherlock pressed on, "I think that you're afraid that you're going to grow old in this place without truly growing old at all, without experiencing life to the extent most would want to. You hate this apple pie life with your picket white fence, and the fact that your future has been practically planned out, minute by minute. You need adventure but you know not where from. When I look at you, I see a man who washes his ring daily but puts it on the wrong finger - you really want to make your marriage work, but you don't know how - and you love your fiancée, but you don't really like her - at least not to the extent you would like to believe-"

"What the hell has my fiancée got to do with this?" John spun around indignantly, and found himself inches away from Sherlock's face.

"Patience, Doctor Watson-"

"It's John, you bastard, and why are you bringing up my fiancée?"

"Because she's fucking boring, John."

John's nostrils flared. "What?"

"I said, she's fucking boring. Dull, tedious, wearisome - how many more synonyms do you need?"

"Who-" John was really angry, now. If he could be personified into an animal, he would look like a boar, haggard and steaming with a restrained anger. John was boiling over, and Holmes was turning up the stove, higher, higher, higher-

"Who do you bloody think you are, pretending you're the goddamned Prince of Persia, rattling off my fate to me in some spout of words that you're probably too young to even know the meaning of? Talking about - about my wife, like she's just some form of idle gossip!" John was seeing red, he was so angry, and his heart was beating hard and fast and his fingers were twitching, too. He could fucking punch this sod; "You don't know a thing about me! I walk into this room and you think you have the right to tear my fucking life apart? Huh? Sir, you look like you stepped out of puberty yesterday, like you haven't seen a bit of pain in your life, and you're telling me about the state of my marriage? Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Who the hell do I think I am?" Sherlock yelled. "The better question; who the hell do you think I am?"

"I don't know!"

"You're afraid."

"I'm not afraid, Sherlock. I'm five seconds away from punching you in the face."

"Punch me, then."

"What?"

"Punch me, John, I'm not going to repeat myself," Sherlock spat, drawing back his fists.

"No!"

"Do it!"

"No-"

Sherlock's fist struck John's face, and John felt a lightning bolt of pain before he keeled back into the wall. For a moment, he was dizzy with disoriented shock, the jarring feeling lighting up the receptors in his skin, and then he was touching his nose to check for blood - he was bleeding - and Sherlock was right there, yelling, "Look sharp, John, don't be so bloody daft, come on, hit me!"

"Hit me!"

John didn't hit Sherlock Holmes. Oh, no.

He forced him with full body contact to the other side of the music room, slamming the back of Sherlock's head into the wall. He yelled in pain, gritting his teeth as he struggled, but John had no intent of stopping. John heard things crashing to the ground as he drew back his fist-

The punch came so hard that John had to bite his lip in order to not cry out. Underneath him, Sherlock doubled over, making gargled pleads, but John kept going. He pushed his leg under Sherlock's, making him fall to the ground. Sherlock latched onto the collar of John's shirt as he collapsed, dragging John down on top of him, and their noses and foreheads bumped painfully together with an audible noise. John was breathing so fucking hard, the entirety of his body feeling like it was burning up - like he was not only in the warzone, not only leaving craters, but tearing through Sherlock's skin and diving into the pool of uranium that Sherlock was composed of.

John was heaving breaths, eyes alight with a burn that made him feel alive, his hands on Sherlock's chest and his mouth open and his heart convulsing like a epileptic drum. Sherlock was staring at John's lips, which were glossed with blood, and in those moments that John was gasping for air, John finally felt Sherlock's hands on his bare waist, where his shirt had ridden up.

He felt his fingertips, each individual one, pressing into his bare flesh. Sherlock's thumbs making radioactive holes in John's skin.

John closed his eyes and swore.

"This," Sherlock panted. "This is what you want." Sherlock slid one hand from John's waist to place his fingertips to his neck, where his pulse was hammering with blood. Sherlock's fingers were lighting up fireworks into John's skin, and he was acutely aware of his soul being ripped violently from his body, oh, God, please.

"Do you feel that, John? That... is your pulse," Sherlock gasped, brushing his thumb very deliberately across John's Adam's apple, "and it's telling me that you want this. You want this so badly, and you know it, and even as you lay here, you cannot bring yourself to admit that you crave this feeling. She is never going to make you feel like this, John - Claire cannot do this. Not to you."

Sherlock was grinning, moving his fingertips from John's hips to the concrete underneath him, sitting up underneath John, who was staring, entranced, at Sherlock's pomegranate pink lips. His eyes just kept darting between Sherlock's eyes and his lips - resisting the urge to move. Their noses were centimeters from touching. It seemed too insane to be true. This entire night was a fucking catastrophe, and John didn't want to hear these - these words, and he hated Sherlock for it and he didn't want to be here, with blood crusting his nose and his pulse pumping liters and liters of red, hot, rushing blood, everywhere, oh God, he was everywhere-

John began to laugh.

If someone had looked at the both of them, John's hands on Sherlock's chest, completely alone as night fell, laughing... they would have thought that they had known each other for much longer than a week.

But they were strangers. The question still hung in the air, like an ominous cloud, and John prayed that Sherlock wouldn't stop his laughter (deep, rumbling, mellow) to bring it up again, like a bad memory. He didn't want to face things. He didn't want to move. He was infected with Sherlock's radiation. He was gone. John was no longer John, anymore. John was plain, and he liked simple things - no, this... this John...

This John swam through lava and crawled through warzones. This John confronted people and told them what they didn't want to hear; this John yelled and he was dangerous and he took baths in radioactive materials. This John didn't want to get married. This John didn't want to conform to his parents, or society, or anything. This John was here, right now, this John was alive, and he was pressed up against Sherlock Holmes, feeling his heavy breaths and his heaving chest, and his knee, pressing into John's groin. This John was relishing the taste of metal flecking his tongue like crimson water. This John was completely alive.

"John..." Sherlock said his name warily. "The question still remains."

"What question?"

Sherlock smiled, and murmured, "Who do you think I am?"

A/N: i just deleted all the update chapters

tomorrow, guys