the solar system || johnlock ||

pluto

I didn't even get to say goodbye.

I didn't even–

Why?  I ask, my eyes pleading, pleading. Why?

I am looking backwards. I am spiraling, and I am falling backwards.

I want to let my body feel the dirt; crystallize my anatomy and preserve it beyond the reach of pettiness and other evils that John didn't have the chance to be subjected to.

Was he the lucky one, in the end?

I can hear distant screaming. My throat burns.

I've been worried all my life. I was the alien, the unknown quantity, the stone-cold planet, the outcast.

I believed he would keep me safe. He was armour I couldn't tell apart from the skin on my bones.

Why is it that the best people arrive so late, after so much suffering; why do these boons arrive after the sin?

Nothing will undo the past, and nothing will keep me from trying to be a person worthy of him. Worthy of him, of his inherent goodness, his precious attention.

So I let the first tear thud into the snow. A sound of silent melting as I begin to cry.

I always liked white roses. I want to burn the wreath that sits against the gravestone.

I remember his eyes. God, striking blue and blue and endless and irreplaceable. In bustling hallways. Across playgrounds and football fields. Through music room windows.

I remember his lips. How they quirked with dry humour; how they made me dissolve beneath their warm touch.

An accident, someone calls it. A tragic accident.

There was a boy, a bottle, and a truck. There was a beautiful, beautiful boy, a bottle, and a truck.

He was holding a rose in his hand as he fell, someone whispers. He was holding a letter, says another.

"Who's Sherlock?" A hushed, rhetorical question.

His heart was golden, pumping and alive; and he's gone and now I can feel it. I can feel the guilt seeping in. I haven't spoken to him since one night two weeks ago, and here he was with a letter, and a rose, and–

And my heart is leaden.

This heaviness belongs to gravity, and John was my core.

Someone tracks me down. A consoling hand presses a paper into my palms, gently laying a half-crushed rose above it. Like a carnation on a grave.

I don't open it; I press it against my face, I kiss it lightly, I inhale the last of his scent. My eyes burn. I don't care.

I am done trusting. I am done being this vulnerable shell of a person.

But in this infinity, at this point in the vast, complex time-space continuum, I clutch everything close to me. I am shaking, and crying, and maybe saying things. I cannot hear myself.

I only hear him.

"Sherlock," he'd said. "Do you have something you want to tell me?"

I wish I had.

And now, I lean in. I let it hurt. I should have told him how much I didn't deserve him, how I wasn't the one he should have saved this rose for.

I loved him with a fire that burned my exits entirely. And I always will. But.

There is no going back.

There is no more John.

There is only...

...beyond.

$∆L

the heaviness that i hold in my heart belongs
to gravity

the heaviness that i hold in my heart's

been crushing me