When he was a boy, his father told him that everything was made of stars.
When he deleted the solar system, he did not delete this: that every atom was once stardust, every element born of that first bright cosmic revelation. Sometimes, when he was high, he would look at his hands and imagine them as galaxies. In the years that he’s been sober, he hasn’t thought of it much, the way pieces of him maybe belong somewhere else.
Until John Watson kisses him.
The first touch of their lips, and Sherlock’s entire being undergoes sublimation. He is not a body, not a self, but a vapor, all of him undone, his atoms breaking bonds with one another. He is melting into John. He will disappear; they will disappear.
John’s molecules rearrange themselves, make a space for him, and they breathe together, electrons swapping orbits, as explosive as that first moment of creation. Where they touch, they are hydrogen and oxygen and iron. They are light. Because John is brilliant, brilliant, he is all the stars in Sherlock’s universe.
And where their skin meets, Sherlock shines.