For agnesanutter

They had been sharing the Baker Street flat for a month when Sherlock finally challenged him. John was amazed it had taken him that long.

'I never see you naked,' he said, out of the blue.

'Don't pussy about, Sherlock. Just say what you think, never mind about holding back and considering my feelings!'

'Feelings have nothing to do with it. Why do you keep yourself covered all the time?'

'Not all of us like to prance about in nothing but a sheet. Some of us are actually quite private.'

'You're not private. You were in the army, so you are no stranger to being seen naked by other men. You are quite happy to show your body to your girlfriends. In fact, you appear to be desperate to get your kit off in front of them, so why not me?'

'Its not the same thing!'

'Why not?'

'Oh, Christ!' John pinched the bridge if his nose and tugged his dressing gown even more tightly than usual around his stocky body. 'Look, some of us have scars, alright? Some of us are a bit self-conscious about having genius detectives examine us as if we were lab specimens.'

Sherlock frowned, his head on one side. 'That's not the truth,' he pronounced.

'Its enough of the truth for the moment,' John snapped back. 'Now back off!'

It was not till the night of Moriarty's bomb, the night of the Pool Incident, as it came to be called on John's blog, that Sherlock finally found out the whole truth.

The entire business rattled him. Moriarty outwitting him like that, and taking John – in fact, the ease of his taking John away, of hurting him like that. It had all overwhelmed Sherlock in a way he had not expected. Suddenly assailed with feelings, he found himself unable to allow John out of his sight. Which was how he came to be hovering on the upstairs landing as John, back to his open bedroom door, pulled off his shirt to reveal the abrasions and bruises left by the man-handling of Moriarty's heavies, and the heavy bomb vest.

It was not the bruises that caught Sherlock's eye, nor even the older scar of the exit wound in the back of John's left shoulder.

Across the little doctor's shoulders, and down his back, cleverly shaped around his shoulder blades, was a delicate filigree of blue ink. It took Sherlock's eyes a moment to turn what he was receiving through his optic nerve into an image that made any sense.

John was tattooed.

As he circled his shoulders to try and ease the stiffness and pain left from the stress and battering he had received that night, the indigo lines resolved themselves into a finely rendered pair of wings.

Sherlock's gasp alerted John to his presence and he looked over his shoulder, his eyes weary.

'Had to look, didn't you,' he sighed.

Sherlock was helplessly drawn into the room, magnetised to the image laid across his friend's back, feathers seeming so real that when he reached out to touch, he expected the brush of actual quills against his fingertips. Instead there was only the velvet of John's skin, overlaid with the perspiration of pain.

John was standing in front of the bedroom mirror, and Sherlock's eyes rose up and met his gaze in the reflection.

'Why?' he breathed, unable to pull his fingers from the edge of John's scapula.

'I died on the operating table,' John said, and his eyes took on a deadness that Sherlock had never seen before. 'Twice. They brought me back, but my heart stopped. My system stopped. I was effectively dead. When I came back, I felt like I had earned my wings. Sometimes I wished I had died then. Before-'

He did not finish the sentence, and Sherlock immediately understood what he was not saying. Before I met you. Before you gave me a reason to keep living. Before you gave me my life back.

His fingers stroked idly over warm skin.

'I hope you never have to earn your wings that way,' John said, and the look in his eyes made something twist in Sherlock's chest. 'It was agony. Dying and coming back. I hope you don't have to go through that. Better to earn your wings outright.'

Three years later, after the heartbreak and the grief. After all the shouting and recriminations. After Sherlock had admitted he had been an idiot, even if he didn't regret it all for one minute. After John had punched his lights out on no less than three separate occasions. After all that, they went to a tattooists that Sherlock knew.

They sat in chairs side by side, shirts stripped, naked skin vulnerable and soft, leaning forward to receive out the visible manifestation of their shared story.

New wings.

John's shoulders were enhanced. Highlights added. Touches here and there to emphasise that his wings were white, fragile, doubly earned.

Sherlock's wings were black, the feathers broken. Broken, because John had insisted he was such a bad flyer, jumping off the roof like that, as if he hadn't meant to hit the ground. It was a bad joke, but it appealed to John's grief, and the edge of vindictiveness he still felt. And black, because Sherlock had told him what he had said to Moriarty in those last fateful minutes. Not on the side of the angels? No, John said, everybody knew that.

Only John's heart knew the truth.

So wings Sherlock was given, the wings he had earned, at such terrible cost, by coming back from the dead.

In years to come, those fading, feathering lines of ink entombed in flesh, under skin loosened by the progress of life, over muscles softened by Time, became a daily reminder, a glimpse for each of them of what they each had suffered to find one another.

End