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The sunlight flickered through the slightly open curtain and landed on Sherlock’s face. He grumbled quietly under his breath before opening his eyes wide enough to squint. Sherlock could see John’s lazy smile in response to whatever he had been saying. They lay still on the brink of falling asleep until John moved his hands to link their fingers together and they shifted positions, bare skin rubbing against bare skin as their legs moved in search of a comfortable spot.
“I had a dream.” John’s voice was the barest of mumbles, drenched in sleep.
“Hmm?”
“The planets. You were on one and I was on another. But gravity intervened and we just… collided.” John didn’t say anything more than that and they fell back into silence. Breathing together, hearts and minds calm.
--
Inside John’s thoughts he could still see Sherlock, standing on a blood-red planet, his eyes shut and a shield – it was like a dome over the whole planet, not quite visible at first glance but enough to see when looking - to protect him from anything, even from good. John stood on white. The colour of surrender, but not for John himself. It was a message to the one person who didn’t want to see, a message to say that it was okay to let down defences and give in to sentiment. Mike was there as well and he was a diminutive man standing on a small rock who slipped past the defences of the detective’s planet as he had been for years, with ease and with little complications. Sherlock then opened his eyes. He saw the message, the rapid approach. He put down his defences without even knowing. Sherlock smiled and accepted John even though he knew, they both knew, they would destroy each other.
Gravity pulled them together and they followed one another, each only following the other. Watching each other’s faces as though the other’s face was the last thing each wanted to see before colliding.
There had been other planets trying to disrupt the event. A cold black planet where sat Moriarty, and a blue that angered the part of John’s mind in which Mary had once lived – the planet which had once almost knocked him off his own. He said all the wrong words – I love you Mary, Will you marry me Mary? – until he found Sherlock’s gravity steadying him again. He hadn’t realized how much he had relied on that gravity to be normal, to not be clouded with questioning of his own actions. He said the right words after the doubt cleared from his mind. I love you Sherlock. Mary, we need a divorce. Sherlock and John, detective and blogger, side by side and edging closer towards a collision that both hoped for.
--
The sun had risen a smidge higher by the time Sherlock spoke, his voice less sleep-groggy than John’s had been but still slower than the detective’s usual lightning speed.
“I dreamt of you too. It was the day we met.” There was a pause as they both cast their minds back through the cascade of memoriesto that first meeting.
“I didn’t talk when you came in which you know now is unusual. As I saw you by your soldier stance, your doctor speech and the utter sense of politeness for an old friend, I found myself speechless. I don’t know why, I didn’t know you. John Watson was a stranger. And I winked at him. I don’t know why and you know I don’t like knowing.” The silence of this pause was shorter, but intoxicatingly full of mutual adoration. “You made an impression and now I find that you’re always there. In my mind, telling me if it was good, or not good and now I would do anything to keep you there.”
The smaller blond man chuckled, inducing a confused smile from Sherlock in return.
“I was afraid that I would slow your brain down.”
“Never.”
“I knew that even the best could fall. Bart’s and Magnussen proved that you’ve sacrificed yourself to protect me. But I had myself fooled for a long time. I never thought that you would have fallen for me. Or me, for you.”
“That’s because you are an idiot. Even your dreams are smarter than you. Our collision, our love, it was inevitable.”
With that final word, their lips pushed together, chaste but loving. They had no desire to pushany further; it was enough to lie there touching. To reassure each other that, yes this is real. They are in their home, 221B Baker Street and not asleep a thousand miles apart, suffering.
“I was always with you, always. I suppose I just didn’t know it.” John whispered in a barely audible voice.
“And I with you.”
This time, when they kissed once more, when their hands grasped each other firmly, when each groaned the other’s name, when nothing but love spilled into the air between them, in both of their minds, the collision of their worlds was complete.
Now they stood together on a world that had been fractured many times but never broken. In the end, it was destiny to collide. Even if neither believed in that sort of thing.