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He is standing in the kitchen when it hits you. It's so very simple, but you've almost forgotten what it feels like.
He is standing in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and it's ordinary, horribly ordinary, and you find that you do not mind. It's appalling. You should be bored out of your mind. And yet, you're not. He's just making tea, for god's sake. Not even the good kind – bagged tea instead of loose leaf, you're a snob that way, and you both know it. How it sparked a revelation is beyond you (and not many things are ever beyond you, mind). Mycroft would tease you mercilessly if he knew.
John wouldn't. Not a lot, anyway. And it's ok if it's John.
So, he's standing in the kitchen and you're standing by the window and he doesn't know it yet but you just realised something very important. He doesn't know it yet, even though you make sure to tell him every day in some way or another, that you're the loop of a hourglass – if you seem to be running out of time, you just spin things around and start again. You're endless, when you're together. Where one ends the other starts. You balance each other out.
'John, the bagged tea is awful, and your hair looks like a grumpy hedgehog in the morning and I know you hate the way my breath smells after cigarettes, so I switched to menthols'. Those are the things that run through your mind, and it's so domestic that you would feel worried about the state of your intellect if you didn't feel like worrying was such an ugly preoccupation at the moment.
So, he's standing in the kitchen and you're standing by the window and you're standing in the light. You think of times when things weren't alright, times when you were a great actor, a performer, a Detective, but you were not a good man yet. You think of times when there were fracture lines running all through you, the two of you. Of the times when you didn't like yourself very much at all. Needle-times that drove your brother nearly to tears. Reckless times when you couldn't have cared less if you'd live to see the end of the month, because things were always the same. There were those times, and the times when he still carried ghosts in his eyes, and then times when you were the ghost in his whole body, in the way he walked, in the way he never talked like a person but more like a self-help book reciting what was asked of him, and then the times when you came back and watched him get married, felt your heart breaking, only to see him betrayed, and feel his heart break, because yours could only break once, but his hurt you so much more. You remember the darker times, and you are surprised to find them so far away and long ago. Because now he's in the kitchen making bad tea, and you're standing in the light, and you would never have guessed it, but this is where you were always meant to end up.
You smile, and he sees it, because the kettle clicked a few moments ago and he's already poured the water into his cup. He tilts his head in question, but you can't answer him, you're still amazed, so you smile, and he shrugs, leaves you to it, content because he knows it's something good. Knowing that you'll find a way to share it.
You think of the night before and the way he held your hand as you shook yourself apart under him, and you think of the way that same hand tightens into a frustrated fist less and less these days. You feel like playing the violin for him, for yourself, a celebration on an ordinary Tuesday because sometimes life is as much a cause for celebration as anything.
You're standing by the window, with John Watson in front of you, and it hits you like a runaway train, this colossal thought that is also a creeping feeling. It's been like this for a while now. You were just too busy to notice. That's alright. Your lives are still what they always were, only clearer, fuller. Better. Your eyes feel like crystals and he is the light breaking into colour through their prisms. You solve crimes for a living, as you always have, but where once the darkness followed you home, now, you are painting nebulas in your spare time, darling, on his canvas-skin, with your palette-heart. Or at least that's what it feels like. A cloud of burst glowing colour in the utter lack of light around you.
And it hits you. It's taken a while, but despite everything, after everything, you're doing ok.
You're doing ok.