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Sherlock only started collecting John’s ways of breathing after he’d heard him take that breath.
His own lungs had still been burning with the air expanding them against the water’s defiance, when in perverse irony John’s lungs had started drowning. Sherlock had tried everything he knew, which was no small arsenal, but John simply wasn’t breathing. Horror had started to close over the frantic edges of Sherlock’s mind, threatening to suffocate it. Then survival had kicked in—in the shape of good old denial—and savage incredulity shoved off the panic: John couldn’t die. Of course John couldn’t die!
Yet he was doing a very good job of trying. And something in Sherlock suggested he might as well join him. Frankly, the prospect of having to move, and talk, and work, and do all this living lark without John around hadn’t seemed like much at that moment. Hadn’t seemed like enough.
Sherlock had heard screeching tires and overlapping voices; someone’s hands had removed his useless dripping lump of a form away from John. The hands had touched him with calm expedience. He hadn’t objected them one bit. He had looked at the people handling the still figure on the ground and gratitude and hope had blossomed around his head like laurels to be bestowed on John’s rescuers. Please, please, please, save him. Save me.
But John still wasn’t breathing. Sherlock had seen the abyss opening before him, the cesspit filled with guilt, loss and emptiness, with grief beyond anything he’d ever imagined himself capable of—
—and he’d heard John taking a desperate breath, one that instantly turned into coughs and splutters and a glorious mess of other disgusting sounds. Sherlock’s senses had undergone a sudden decline and he’d found himself unable to hear beyond his immediate surroundings. He’d rushed closer to make sure—He still doesn’t remember much about what happened next. He remembers someone in uniform turning to address him, only to say hurriedly, “Hey, hey, okay—let’s get you settled somewhere, feet up, hmm? I need some help here!” He remembers scowling at his own brain for the persistent darkness in the picture. And there were too many sounds in his ears, he only needed one! Unfortunately, it happened to be the weakest sound.
They’d got to the hospital and finally people had left them alone for a few moments. Sherlock had drawn on his deepest reserves of willpower to muster a look of haughty dismissal at the suggestion he have a rest. Of course he’d have a rest—he was constantly on the verge of blacking out, and he wasn’t an idiot! He just needed to make sure John was still with him and that things weren’t about to change in that respect. People constantly found ways to berate Sherlock when he failed to display emotions. Why were they equally frustrating when he was throwing a gala performance in front of their very eyes? There was no pleasing them.
***
This was four months ago and he is nowhere near getting bored of John breathing. Sherlock’s found a fantastic selection of samples, actually; he should have known John would be deceptively ordinary in that aspect, too.
There is the calm breathing and its in-laws: the breathing to stay calm, different from the breathing to calm down. There are the innumerable kinds of breathing associated with movement. Factors, such as speed, weather, general health, adrenaline, steepness, type of surface, type of shoes, etc., have made it impossible for Sherlock to catalogue properly but he is satisfied just to enjoy the program. (And if Sherlock made John run back to the shop that time, when he had pick-pocketed John’s debit card and said John left it in the machine, it was only because there was an ideal headwind. Sherlock had taken a shortcut to wait for John at the shop entrance and was rewarded with the sight of John’s mussed hair and the sound of a brand new sample for the collection: the whizzing breathing with a rasp. Then he’d heard the familiar classics: vexed breathing and breathing in restraint of smacking Sherlock.)
There is the contented puff of air at the moment John sinks into his armchair with a cup of tea, after he’s exerted himself in some way. (Sherlock is still debating the merits of creating a separate sub-category for the sigh, which comes under the same conditions, but only after a successfully completed blog-post.) There are the five types of breathing corresponding to the five stages of sleep. There is John’s breathing when he’s just woken up from a nightmare. There are John’s amused huffs of air— huffs of affection?— when Sherlock tries to clean after himself or (on one occasion only, so more data is needed) to cook. There is John’s Doctor’s Mode breathing: confident, even, and a tad shallow when John is concentrating. (There is the lick of the lips then as well— a very regular occurrence, that one. But even Sherlock had to yield to the necessity of rounding up one study before taking up a new one.)
There are sharp inhalations in shock and surprise, angry guzzling of air and wistful sighs (different from the nostalgic sighs, of which Sherlock has distinguished at least three varieties: childhood, university, military service); there are warning exhalations directed at Sherlock (unique) or at other people (generic), two kinds of snoring, and three kinds of laughing (but Sherlock suspects this would be a longer study). Sniffing: when ill, when it’s cold, just before a sneeze. Sneezing, panting, gasping, yawning… Sherlock hasn’t heard sobbing yet, but as much as it would go a long way towards gratifying his insane need for completion, Sherlock can wait for that one.
And then there are the sounds John made last night.
***
He can’t say it was all completely accidental. Sherlock did go to the bathroom door, while John was having a shower, in order to listen to him. He found the door open by the breadth of a finger, courtesy of a draft or some very gracious Goddess of Experiments. Sherlock had felt buoyant— this was his chance! While he had excellent hearing, it was extremely hard to listen to someone’s breathing through a closed door and with the noise of running water to boot. He’d done that a few times, only to gather some very unreliable data. Part of Sherlock still berated himself for tampering with the results by letting his imagination run loose. Without any conscious request on Sherlock’s part, his fancy had taken advantage of the fact that his eyes were closed in concentration and had presented him with visual suggestions of what John must look like showering. Sherlock had been startled— even more so to discover that a few minutes had already passed with this show running through his head. So he’d taken to keeping his eyes wide open and staring at the small scratches and uneven licks of paint on the frame of the bathroom door.
Now, in the form of an open door, a golden opportunity to fill in the blanks had presented itself. Maybe John was a very quiet whistler? Or he hummed? Or breathed in water and choked? Sherlock had to know.
He started listening in silence, his body absolutely still. Everything was going as it had gone the previous few times: Sherlock heard very satisfactory evidence to support a few of his hypotheses. Such as how John’s breath hitched when the flow of hot water first hit him. Or how he sounded when he twisted to reach his back with soapy hands, lungs shifting in his ribcage. Sherlock felt so smug with the confirmation of his little theories that at first he didn’t register the change in the pattern of sound. But soon he noted the unusual quiet. He stood there, ear physically prickling; then he started frowning. This was different. With nothing to go on but the sound of water splashing over John’s rooted body, Sherlock was at a loss. What was John doing in there? Why was he so immobile? If Sherlock could hear his breathing properly, he would know more or less everything there was to know. But he couldn’t. Water was all.
Was John unwell? Sherlock felt apprehension. But just then his ear caught the first sound. Maybe there had been others before and he’d missed them, his focus elsewhere. But this one he heard clearly. Something between a moan and a hiss. Just the one, then the returning quiet. Now, however, as Sherlock’s concentration came back in a snap, he noticed something else too—the change in the way the water fell. It was somehow more…rhythmic. Sherlock closed his eyes; all help was needed to figure this out. The flow, the pattern of splashes…Was John stretching a muscle in there? Pulling the joints of his fingers or of his wrists? Sherlock quickly scanned his memory for any evidence of back pain or soreness and found nothing. John’s breathing would be different in that case, anyway.
Was John distressed in any way? Was he just standing despondently under the water? He looked fine downstairs, sitting on the sofa and watching TV while Sherlock read. In fact, John had been so relaxed that Sherlock had allowed himself a small liberty: He'd slithered his cold feet inch by inch across the sofa to rest them against John’s thigh, revelling at the anticipated warmth. John had let them stay there for a couple of minutes before getting up to have a shower. But he didn’t leave with any aggravated remarks.
Was he meditating in there? Sherlock’s mind desperately extended to improbable explanations, but nothing could be lightly dismissed—John was still highly paradoxical, with his propensity for producing actions and reactions contrary to his very mundane, plain side.
The second sound floated to Sherlock in a manner that could only be described as…stifled. So. A change of routine. Silence. Change of water pattern from random to rhythmic. A sound between a moan and a hiss. And now a similar sound, but stifled. The only conclusion was that John didn’t want to be heard. Why would he want to be secretive in the—
Oh. Oh.
The surface of the door, into which Sherlock’s forehead and cheekbone were pressing, began rapidly cooling under his skin. His eyes snapped open, but not in time—the mental image, conjured up again of its own volition, refused to fade away. Sherlock stood there, glued to the spot, mind suddenly empty but for the sound of water, falling into understood patterns with exquisite mathematical precision. Apart from it the world had gone so very quiet, and Sherlock listened like he’d never listened before. Slowly the rhythm of the drops started changing again, together with John’s breathing—with Sherlock’s breathing in tow. There was an indefinite stretch of suspended time, in which the whiff of John’s shower gel, the sounds and the freefall of images all mingled somewhere deep in Sherlock’s belly. Then he heard a gasp—a thing of beauty to pin on the invisible wall with the best samples of John’s sounds—before John’s exhalations caressed Sherlock’s ear, dangerously slipping inside and down, down: irregular, skittish, and torn, like a piece of chiffon, by one single bitten moan.
Sherlock was unable to stay for the conclusion. Undoubtedly there’d have been the smoothing of John’s breath to listen to, or perhaps a sigh of contentment—the type Sherlock was never going to hear in their living room. But there were things that stood above experiment or study, and folding at the face of a belated sense of privacy was one of them. Or at least, that was partly Sherlock’s reason to leave.
Sherlock knows he should have been worried about himself there and then, if for nothing more than the ominous fact that he’d accepted a social norm as his motive; that a social norm was the only thing he understood well at that moment.