Title: Learning to Let Go

Word Count: 1555 Words

Rating/Warning: M - For slashy kissing, and some images of violence towards the beginning

Summary: Returning from a hard case is never easy, but John knows just the thing that could help himself, and Sherlock. Starts pre-slash and ends on a slashy kiss. Not connected to another JohnLock series.

Sherlock was troubled. John could tell by the way he walked, but it was also in the way he stared out at the world as though there was nothing. A vast nothingness. Well, not nothingness exactly, more lost in thoughts, dark thoughts that ran around his mind.

They were on their way home from a case, a very sad and disturbing case that would shake up even the most hardened of men and women, Sherlock included as he classed himself as hardened on a good day. A young child prodigy and her mother were just killed or murdered, they were slaughtered by the one person that should have been trying to protect them, the husband and father. He didn't shoot them or snap their necks, something that would have been easy enough in some ways, cleaner. No, he brought them to the brink of starvation and tortured them for at least a week.

What was even sadder was the fact that if the girl hadn't have been a child prodigy they may not have even found them. The young girl was scheduled for some very big meetings and when she hadn't arrived, people had started to get very worried and raised it with the police who went to Sherlock straight away. Unfortunately they arrived too late, maybe the man had heard the sirens, because he slit their throats leaving them to bleed out while he shot himself in the head. Their blood was still seeping across the floor when they opened the door of the basement.

John had a theory-he always did when it related to Sherlock-and knew that Sherlock probably saw a little of himself in the girl, and thought of the waste of talent in the world. Sherlock kept a brisk pace and John had to jog every few steps to keep up with the detectives long strides. They were long strides of frustration, John could see that.

They were walking at John's instigation that the walk would give them time to try to get what they'd seen out of their minds, even just a little bit, and it was better than them being cooped up inside, especially with Sherlock in the black mood that he was in. There was a black cloud following them though, figuratively and literally, and it was heavy and eager to rain them out from what John could see.

Sure enough after a few more steps after noticing the swollen clouds, not even ten of them, John felt the first drop before millions followed the same path.

John stood for a few moments rooted to the spot and let the drops soothe and cleanse him, so much so that he didn't notice Sherlock had stopped a few paces down the road. Turning his face skyward, John stretched his arms t their fullest length and allowed the rain to pelt his face and soak through his clothes, he literally felt the tension melt away until he laughed and opened his mouth to taste the rain.

John felt exhilarated. He wanted to run, to allow his blood to pump hard in his veins and his heart to thud hard within his chest. He wanted to jump into the nearest forming puddle, so he did. He ran and jumped causing a small splash, but feeling as he did when he was ten years old in a thunderstorm.

Sherlock watched on in horror at first. It was a reaction that didn't last more than a few seconds, the horror stemming from a mostly rational adult running around like a child. Really, what did John think he was doing anyway? Then horror moved to fascination, that was the emotion he felt brewing in himself, like he was watching an experiment, only far more riveting.

Sherlock was fascinated about the bright eyes John now had, not bright with the passion that seemed to spark without any really meaning. This was unlike any exhilaration that he'd ever witnessed on John before.

Sherlock wanted it. Wanted to taste this emotion, feel the exhilaration. Hell, Sherlock wanted to jump in puddles and not be upset about the fine shoes he was soaking through but focus on the tactile sensation that damp socks gave his toes so he could file it away in his mind palace in the room he was starting to use to link things to John.

John looked younger, Sherlock noted, he looked freer and much like he had never been in a war, or shot. He looked as though he believed love could still happen, which Sherlock had witnessed John bury deep down. Like the things that went bump in the night were only to make sure you could get closer to the one that you loved. Sherlock knew that John would be good at that kind of comforting, and indulged in a moment of allowing the image to form in his mind of John comforting him over something and seeing where that could lead.

So lost in his own thought, Sherlock didn't notice that John had long since ceased marveling at the rain and was marveling at the super-sleuth directly and unabashedly instead. Sherlock looked amazed that a grown man could find so much pleasure in something so small as being caught in the rain. Maybe he didn't understand that it was a cleansing rain of sorts, without all the dramatics of beliefs. John watched him smile though his eyes were glazed and wondered what could have drawn his attention so much in that mind of his. John wanted the attention, wanted to bathe in it. So he tried something small and simple, like moving into Sherlock's field of vision, and waited.

Sherlock's cheeks flushed ever-so-slightly at his thoughts, but it was enough given his porcelain skin, and he had to focus for a moment before he spoke. "Finished? Good, let's be going home then."

John watched Sherlock stride away and follows quietly for a while until he had to ask what was on the tip of his tongue, "Don't you like the rain?"

"It gets rid of almost all evidence, of course not," he walked a few steps before he felt compelled to be very, very honest and he stopped, "I have never noticed anyone enjoy it. Not like you just did. It...seems to free you. You look..."

"Right. Okay..."

"I...John, I want to learn how to do that. How to be free like that. Not to be like it always...but I want to understand it. Feel it. What it does to me." Sherlock shifted from foot to foot at the admission, but stayed silent as he waited for what felt like the longest seconds of his life.

John stepped closer to Sherlock and looked up with a wild smile that Sherlock was sure he'd never seen before, "Okay, we start here!"

John grabbed Sherlock's hand and all but dragged him as he ran down the road, jumping into puddles and darting around the few people in the street with their large umbrella's. John began by guiding Sherlock, but soon enough Sherlock was meeting him step for step and looking more alive than he did when they were running for a case.

"Let go, Sherlock!" John laughed as he shot a look to Sherlock, "The trick is to just let it all go!"

John didn't have to say, "Let go of all the baggage and images," it was implied.

Sherlock felt a grin breaking through on his face as he listened to John's instructions and took them into his heart. He allowed his feet to guide him over concrete and into puddles, leaping cats and dodging more people, running... He never let go of John's hand though, just of thinking, for minutes as he ran at John's side, as he felt.

Their hearts pounded in their ears, and their limbs grew tired in their pursuit of freedom from thinking, but they didn't stop. Not when John sung them around corners and down alleys. Not until Sherlock swung them around one corner and brought John crashing into his waiting arms, with both of them breathing hard.

Sherlock stepped forward into John, closer than simply chest to chest, more in each others space than they would normally be unless they were on a case acting as two parts of the same whole, one heart and one mind.

Maybe it was for that reason that John tilted his head up to Sherlock as he leaned down to brush his lips against John's, in a moment where neither of them were really thinking, just feeling.

One light peck, two, and then a gentle opening of lips as they smiled into each other for their first kiss, and John quickly darted his tongue in for a taste before drawing back and looking up at Sherlock with a quirked brow.

"What?" John shrugged up at Sherlock but kept a hold of his hand. Sherlock quirked a smile at the corner of his cupid's bow lips tempted to swoop in for another kiss. "Nothing, I'm just taking your advice. I'm learning to let go."

John smiled at the thought of Sherlock learning something that was a challenge to so many, and brought his pale fingers to his lips and kissed them gently before tugging on his hand to get them home.

The End

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