#br0-harry

Can you help? Help if you can.

Kidneys… we have two. But most of us can get by just fine with one.

I donated one of mine in 2017 and I’ve felt no different. I have a slightly numb patch of skin on my right hip that led to a comical situation around my former boss poking me to get my attention as I stood at the photocopier and me absolutely not noticing her doing it, but other than that, nothing.

As to why…

I have nothing but sympathy for sufferers of kidney disease, but I don’t know any.

I didn’t do it for them.

My beloved husband died of cancer in 2015 and there was nothing I could do.

And I would have done anything. Given anything. Changed places with him in a heartbeat. But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t save my husband.

He looks male, although he wasn’t born that way. It’s a strong face. Square jaw, high, Slavic cheekbones giving warning that English is not his first language; although he speaks it very well, only occasionally slipping in words that should be, but strangely aren’t. Like ‘discomfortable’. He’s had a discomfortable life.

He is tall for a trans guy. And blessed with broad shoulders, although he still tends to hunch them after years of trying to hide the hated breasts he bound so tightly he could barely breathe. Getting rid of them was the best day of his life, once testosterone had lowered his voice and given him the muscles he’d had to work so hard for before. You’ve never seen someone so happy with a surgical drain still in place.

His biggest fear is of failing to ‘pass’ as male. That someone will notice his chest is a little narrow, his hips a little wide, and decide that they know more about him from that one judgemental glance than he knows from having lived inside his own head all his life. People can be stupidly cruel. As if it’s a crime to try to make your outside match your inside. As if being transgender is something anyone would choose.

His eyes are blue, and so beautiful it’s an effort to never use the word to him. ‘Gorgeous’ is safe. ‘Handsome’ is better, but you can’t have ‘handsome’ eyes, can you? His eyes are beautiful.

He’s dreaming. He must be dreaming.

John opens his mouth to speak, but he can’t. He won’t. Not yet. Of the hallucinations that plague his waking eyes, Sherlock. Sherlock as John once remembered him annuls the fear of losing his shit. He fights to sustain the phantasm with the desperation of a drowning man, willing Sherlock to linger because no blood, no broken pieces, all there was and will be no more.

It’s decimating. How John envisions him so clearly. A merger of yesterdays, resonating eternal between his ears. Penetrating his frontal lobe in sync with the beating on his heart. The past colligates with the present and he knows he’s off the deep end. There are no words. No real words.

Real. This can’t be real, he thinks.

But he wants. His body, his soul aches with the whole of it.

Sherlock smiles. Soft. Small. Evocative.

Christ, he can’t help himself.

John understands the heart cannot feel pain. Not technically. Angina pectoris, a lack of blood, a lack of oxygen. Generally due to obstruction or spasms of the coronary arteries. Sentiment, Sherlock would say. Pointless.

Bastard.

John hesitates. Please, God, don't let him disappear. He’s never prayed for anything so earnestly in his life. Not even when he was dying in the desert in Afghanistan.

A touch. A caress.

The turning point. The realization. The fourth movement of a symphony. Allegro, maybe? Hell if he knows. Sherlock would. He would know. John makes a mental note to ask him later and the very idea of later is quite possibly the most beautiful, precious, invaluable notion John has ever known.

His hands. Validating that which can’t be true, but is. It is tue. Sherlock, drinking him in, legitimate tenderness and honest affirmation. For the first time since John unwittingly/willingly devoted his life to his flatmate, his friend, he sees in Sherlock his consummate loyalty—his love—mirrored back at him. And suddenly, it was worth it. All of it. The agony. The despair. The months of despondency.

Sherlock’s eyes are unguarded. John catches a glimpse of his great heart as well as his great brain. It damn near undoes him.

He kisses Sherlock’s lips with all the reverence he can muster. Warm. Chaste. He revels in the tentative breath shared between the two of them. A promise. A pledge. Short and sweet and more alluringly provocative than he could have imagined, fever dreams of passion incomparable to the titillation of naked affection. Their bodies thrum with the implications.

John can feel Sherlock’s pulse. A delicate lure beneath his fingertips. He justly believes he will protect him and his carotid artery forever.

Easily, without a shred of debate, br0-harry’s work led me to Sherlock and the incredible things it’s given me.

To me, as a queer human who never thought I’d see anything like my life experiences, anything even remotely resembling the queer romantic arc, anything that thought to treat us with soft, soft romances, baby steps, trepidation, just like anyone else. I never thought I’d see, in my lifetime, a show, and its byproducts, that normalized that. That normalized me .

Br0-harry brought that hope to light and to life for me in a way that transcended the show itself. I owe so much of my experience in this fandom to his works.