
The Paradox Series

Copyright © 2012 by wordstrings

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Posted at Archive of Our Own: <http://archiveofourown.org/>

First Posted November 2012: <https://archiveofourown.org/series/28906>

Smashwords Edition: This edition may be distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and provided the book remain in its complete original form.

Design by thewaysinwhich

Copyright © 2016 by thewaysinwhich

Cover image from _Un Chien Andalou_ (directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, 1928)

ISBN: 9781370311248

Table of Contents

An Act of Charity

The Paradox Suite

The Death and Resurrection of the English Language

Entirely Covered in Your Invisible Name

Wider than a Mile

New Days to Throw Your Chains Away

A Thousand Threads of What-Might-Have-Beens

The Dying of The Bees

Postscripts

About the Author

References and Related Works
An Act of Charity

In which what's in Sherlock's head is never going to get any better, and John is nearly thrown out of his flat.

Sherlock is thinking.

It's a sordid little problem about a missing husband who doesn't wish to be found, an appeal made via his website, not even worth the price of a patch. Not worth the kilobytes sent  _The Science of Deduction,_  really. So he stares at the rather gritty ceiling, making other deductions. The musty-smelling damask pillow is tucked at the perfect angle behind his dark head, balanced like a Swiss watch, not an angle to waste by getting up. His phone is across the room, after all, and his client won't be enjoying his news. His client, with her modernist "nite" spelling, and the mad, utterly mad, completely insane desperation involved in signing business correspondence "xoxo." She's unbalanced enough already. Let his client be happy for twenty or so more minutes. Or let her be worried to death, rather, for a bit longer, before the house burns to the ground. It can't hurt, might even be an act of charity.

_No, it isn't_ , Sherlock thinks, viciously unsentimental about himself as usual. It might be possible, if the practice were cultivated, to grow sentimental about others. Plenty of people do that, and even a sociopath might manage it. But one cannot grow sentimental about oneself, not when one is simply being too lazy to get up.

And it's rather interesting here. Shocking amounts of detail to sift through. For instance, there is a stain just above him in the cracked plaster of the old flat, barely visible. A spray of champagne, by the distribution. It could be nothing else. Twenty years old at least, by the looks of it. And by the miniature tracks, scratches, and scrapes in the flooring, all the little traces men and women leave without knowing they're dropping bread crumbs through a forest, not to mention the carpet indentations, all of them telling Sherlock precisely where the furniture was twenty years before, when the bottle was opened... yes, it was a post-wedding toast.

Either that or an anniversary party. He can't be entirely certain, can he, not with the limited data at hand.

With his fingertips just touching, and his eyes closed just so, it's difficult not to let the long-ago wedding toast bleed into the present-day extramarital affair. He's seeing patterns in everything, even in unrelated things, has never been able to help that, really, and suddenly wants chemicals other than nicotine rather badly. He's entirely sober just now, he didn't even have coffee this morning. Though John did, with a splash of cream and only half a teaspoon of sugar, which means that John drinks his coffee black as a habit, but is drinking it now with just as much cream and sugar as he can stand simply because he's alive and in London where one can indulge in cream and sugar. He'll stop that within a week, Sherlock thinks, and then Sherlock will tell him why.

"You've taken your coffee black this morning."

"Ah. So I have. Never fear, your brother hasn't replaced me with a cyborg just yet, you're quite safe."

_"No,  _you're  _quite safe. Or I mean, you're not entirely safe, which is much more interesting. You're continually in the presence of dangerous things."_

"What, things like you, you mean?"

"Yes, precisely. And so you're taking your coffee black. It makes you feel quite at home."

"It?"

"Me."

No, he won't say that, Sherlock thinks.

"Yes, precisely. And so you're taking your coffee black. It makes you feel quite at home."

"It?"

"Surely you've noticed that the man shooting at us last night drove you to the very peak of good health."

Something too much of this, for the moment. He thinks enough of John Watson accidentally without dwelling on the poor man deliberately.

Drawing in a long breath through his nose, Sherlock decides to brave an experiment. He is in perfect health. He is awake, aware, quire keen. His mind is, just at the moment, entirely free of artificial stimulus. _So let us,_  Sherlock determines,  _embark upon a little test. The only important test, really. The one for all the marbles._

The first such test in five years, and a terrifying one to contemplate attempting. But it's a diagnostic that needs gritting one's teeth and doing periodically, and he has life rather firmly by the bollocks just now, so it might even be successful for the first time.

The question to be tested is a very simple one.

Is it better now than it used to be?

He stops thinking, deliberately. He tries to focus on nothing. The void. The calm, sure, inner peace of self. It must be in there, it's just been hidden all this time. But now he's older, in his early thirties, and has a career, and is sober for once. He has finally caught up with himself. Just for an instant,  _let there be nothing,_  he thinks.

And there was nothing.

For exactly three seconds, there was nothing at all.

God had it entirely backwards, didn't he, all the things in the world, all the useless, petty, undusted, uncared-for, forgotten, overlooked things in the world, it's an utter sham isn't it, the way there are so many individual things with their individual smells and textures, and half of them warped and cracked, and green and teal being so different and there being a thousand varieties of blue at the minimum, I ask you do we need it all, and God probably doesn't exist anyway, but if He did, that would be a joke, wouldn't it, leaving someone alone here who can see all of it at once and knows that pink tastes different from vermillion in a certain way, that girl by the underground staircase earlier for instance with her aquamarine boots which matched not a thing about the rest of her and meant she desperately wants to be looked at, and she must certainly have been an executive in the music industry, and yes, her boyfriend had just moved out, because of the aquamarine boots and the concealer under her eyes and her wearing a scent that didn't suit her a bit but was nevertheless a new one, just longing for a new smell about her, never fear, one of her friends will tell her by this afternoon that jasmine makes her smell like a fucking funeral, but how can one oblige, how can one look at her, how can anyone be seen at all, what with so many bloody things filling the world and not a chance of erasing any of them at the rate these millions upon millions upon billions of worthless ant-people make new ones, and them all too stupid for any of the new things to be any good, or at all fundamentally different really, why, we ought to burn it all down, it really all deserves so ripely to be incinerated, we should find a match and soak it all in gasoline and–

Sherlock comes out of it with a start and a tiny gasp.

And it isn't any better than it used to be.

There's a knot in his flat stomach like a hard fist. He's shaking ever so slightly, and that's ridiculous. Hateful. So he tells himself at once that he knew it wouldn't be any better, but it's the duty of a man to face up to facts and determine the worst of it, and that's why he's trembling just now beneath his pale outer shell. Because it was very bad indeed, and he stared at it, and he could have drowned in there. And if Sherlock were capable of being sentimental about himself, it might have worked, too.

_That wasn't it at all,  _he thinks savagely. _It was the hope that did it. You hoped it was gone, that you could go blank like all the others. Hope got you into this mess._

He moves his fingertips up to his eyelids. He's going to pull himself out of it, he's going to love the singularity of the things in the world. He will find a particular, and he will see its details, and he will ride them like a California surfer does a wave. They're going to lead him to a deduction from memory. That is what he  _does,_  and no one uses an umbrella to saw timber or a light bulb to change a spare tire or a tomato to scrub the flat's kitchen floor.

No one uses the freak as the poster child for peace of mind.

Freaks are for conclusions, he concludes.

Take John's jumper, for example. That oatmeal sort of coloured one. Harry gave it to him before he went to Afghanistan. That much is obvious—his trousers are good but not brand name, his shoes completely dull, that black jacket with the leather bits is rather finer, but he got that for himself from a good secondhand store when he returned to London, it's last season's and almost new but previously belonged to a man who smoked Parliaments. John doesn't smoke Parliaments and he hasn't any money, so he bought a barely used coat for much less, but the fashion taste is completely off from the jumper, which was much more expensive when new, but came out of storage just before a strain of mould found it, you can smell as much. So: it's from before the War, isn't precisely his taste, was expensive, and fits him perfectly. No girlfriend in her right senses would buy him such a thing, not if she fancied him and wasn't stone blind, he'd look so much better in blue cashmere or a v-neck in dove grey, it's warm and comforting and sisterly, a garment you wear to be warm, not to look attractive. Not that he doesn't, but in principle. And without the colour oatmeal and scent of Parliaments, which are both completely irrelevant to you, you'd never have worked that out, would you?

There are footsteps coming up the stairs, he realizes.

Sherlock wonders, as the door opens and John comes in, what exactly about this fellow makes him want to crush him against a wall. There is a reason for everything. There is a reason that, having just nearly sent yourself into a ludicrous psychic fit, he reflects, that you were spinning logic out of a jumper to come out of it. Probably it had nothing to do with being John's jumper specifically.

Jumpers are warm and secure, and just because he's a sociopath doesn't mean that the entire human perception of comfort is lost on him, symbolically speaking.

"Hullo," John says. "Anything astir, then?"

"Send a text for me, will you?"

John sighs. He is sighing because that is the best way to hide a smile in Sherlock's company. John is a military man. He is thus strong and capable and self-determined, but there is a pleasure he takes in being given orders. He derives a very soulful, cheerful satisfaction from being told, for instance, "Pat him down for weapons, John, we don't have all day, do we?" And in a smaller sense, while being outwardly annoyed, he enjoys being Sherlock's personal secretary. _Not  _when Sherlock is polite about it, because of course he tested this theory as soon as it occurred to him, but  _only_ when Sherlock barks out orders.

It fascinates Sherlock like nothing else does. And like absolutely everything about John does.

"Suppose I simply bring you your mobile, and you send the text yourself? I think you'd make a pretty good job of it."

John is sitting by Sherlock's shoeless, stockingless feet by this time, having shoved them out of the way back into the other dreadfully mismatched pillows. There is no way in hell, as pleasing as it would be, that Sherlock is now going to send him to the mantelpiece where his skull has been restored, to find Sherlock's mobile.

"God, how tedious. I haven't the time for you to walk across the room and back. Use yours. Here's the number, I've set it down. Write this exactly: 'Husband's disappearance traced to pair of international tickets to Bermuda coupled with illness of assistant meant to tell you he was called away to conference.' Oh, and if you like, add 'Condolences.'"

"If  _I  _like?"

"Well, they wouldn't be from me."

"I think you suppose I have a blackberry. This is a mobile phone."

"Get on with it, I'll say it again if you like."

But John is growing used to this ritual, and doesn't need the message repeated. He enters it, he sends it, and then he looks at Sherlock as if that had all just been a very elaborate and strange way of shaking hands. And it was, in a sense.

"What's the matter?" John asks then, the bags beneath his eyes changing shape sympathetically. "What were you thinking when I came in? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Sherlock scoffs, a queerly airy sound for all its depth. "Backwards, John, backwards. Always backwards. Get it right. You mean I  _look like_  a ghost. _You_  are the one  _seeing_  the ghost."

That's fair, so John cocks his head and drawls out a longish, "Right. Well, you are a bit pale."

"I live in London and have never invaded... well, anything, really. Of course I'm pale."

"Never invaded anything? In your entire life? That I call hard to believe."

"Do you?"

"Well, you ought to try it. Sometime. I mean, invigorating– pshhh. It's the ultimate."

John is teasing him again. But Sherlock closes his eyes even so, because he can picture himself invading something this very instant, can see himself walking right into Dr. John Watson's mind and on every separate cell—no, every neuron, then later cell by cell, and then atom by atom, skipping the molecules because that would be redundant—writing his own name on John's brain. He would be able to muse upon nothing but Sherlock. All the time. And when all is said and done, Sherlock thinks, am I not the most interesting thing he could possibly be preoccupied with? Am I not unique? Am I not burning so much more brightly than the others that it's like being tied to a stake with fiery faggots at my feet even to wake up in the morning? Could John ever, if he looked, find a finer obsession? It wouldn't hurt him, might even be an act of charity.

_No. It would not. Be. Charitable,_  Sherlock thinks with positively bestial fury at himself.

"Right. You're going to... tell me about it, then?" John wonders in that wandering, direct, impossible to chart way of his.

And suddenly Sherlock knows exactly what to do. It all clicks in his head. This was a problem, and he hadn't even realized it—a five-patch problem, maybe, but that's over now, he's solved it, and he sits up very quick, pulling his legs out from behind John and setting his feet on the floor. They ought to vacuum, he thinks. _Cat, dirt, crisp crumb, dried beer_ –

"You have to get out of here," Sherlock says very seriously.

"I..." John trails off. "Did an arch-enemy make an appointment with you?"

"No, of course not, you bloody idiot," and Sherlock doesn't even care how this sounds, even though John was patently joking, he never cares how this sounds. It's only the truth. He leans closer. "Leave now. Right now."

"No," John says, annoyed.

Ah.

So there is something he won't obey out of hand.

"But you have to," Sherlock says, more persuasive this time.

"Why?"

And what to say to that... it's a profound question.

Well, why not tell the truth? Yes, that would be better, would it not? It would avoid all the ugly intricacies of lying, and lying is a thing invented to spare the feelings of oneself and others, and Sherlock certainly never spares his own feelings, let alone those of bloody  _others,_  and so the truth. Yes, that would be better. Cruelty is quicker than kindness. More efficient.

"I'm not like you," Sherlock says softly, with the floating half-smile on his face.

John clears his throat. "Um, no. You're not like anyone. But you don't seem contagious."

And it's just that, really.

_What if I  _am  _contagious?_

"Fine. No, fine. I'll– God,  _why_  must I– I'm not like you. These things I order you to do... there are others. Which I... I think about things. I'd like to say them to you. I won't, though."

John doesn't gasp, not even close. He doesn't even move. But it's a quick little breath. Not a normal one. He doesn't leave, however. The stupid bloody-minded man slides closer, of all things, so close that Sherlock can see the pale eyelashes on his lower lid, generally lost in shadow. He loves them the way a man would love a tender, helpless, lovely thing.

"You're not making any..." John clears his throat, tries again. "I did say to you. Weeks ago. Well. It's... all fine."

"It isn't," Sherlock whispers despairingly.

Because he has a list. A neat mental list of fine things and not-fine things. A very, very abbreviated version of the first list, things which are undoubtedly fine:

Kiss me. Now.

Take that jumper off, it looks dreadful, and anyway later I'll use it for a pillow.

Tell me about every lover you've ever had. I want to make them each smaller in your memory.

Press your mouth over every inch of my skin. It's rather sensitive, but I've barrels of self-control.

Get on your knees.

Tell me about the last time you got on your knees, it wasn't in the Army, it was in London. I know these things.

Say my name, but breathless, very breathless, with your fists twisting the sheets of my bed. Say Sherlock. Say it again. At least I know you've never said that name in that way before now.

Ask me whether I've ever made a scientific study of the effects of sex on the human body. Ask me if I ever repeated the experiment once I found out about sodomy.

Never leave me. Not even when I ask you to.

But there is another list. And Sherlock knows that nothing on that list is "fine." It's all dreadful, in fact. He's never wanted to spare anyone anything in his life, and this is a new sensation, this feeling of  _kindness,_  perhaps even of  _empathy,_  it's what's ripping him apart, and he's constructed in such a way that he feels each and every seam. But he wants achingly to spare John this second list. The not-fine list. It's ugly, but he dwells on it, can't help but linger there, and it's such a struggle to know which are the edgier parts of the first list and which are the more forgivable aspects of the second one. The one he wants John to leave him over.

Tell me you'll never love anyone other than me, now you've met me.

Let me take you to a train station I know in Liverpool. It runs below ground, and we'll stand on the tracks with the train coming at us, and at the last second, we'll violently tear ourselves away from each other and throw our bodies against the opposing walls and it'll pass us by, we'll be unharmed. I promise. I've done it before.

Watch me put a gun to my head with only one bullet in the six chambers and pull the trigger. I'll probably be fine, and I'll see your face when I'm all right, that sweet harried sagging beautiful face of yours, witnessing me remain alive. It'll look like you love me. Even if you don't just yet.

Since I never want to forget you, take this knife and draw a long shallow gash down my inner thigh. I don't mind that it'll hurt. I swear. I'd prefer to have it.

"It isn't all fine," Sherlock says. "And I don't want you to see I'm right. You have to leave."

"Okay," John answers, getting a bit lost and blinking and one-must-remain-calm, "you want to tell me... things you don't actually want to tell me. That's. Not making sense, is it?"

"That's it exactly."

"Because it isn't all fine, you claim."

"Well, at least you aren't deaf as well as stupid."

"I think, being as stupid a man as I am, you ought to explain further."

"You have no idea," Sherlock whispers.

He shakes his head. His lips are parched. How does one explain something when one cannot breathe? It's too much to ask of a fellow. Even of a high-functioning sociopath. Sherlock slaps his hand—once, very hard, but not hard enough to alarm John—to his forehead. It helps a bit.

"I get so confused," he murmurs. "You can't know what it's like. Facts all in a row before you, and never knowing what's right. Every single day. Have you any  _idea_ , in this world of yours, how  _impossible_  it can be to do the right thing? Do you know what it's like when everything is so very vivid and so very fucking detailed that you suddenly find that it all turns grey? I want to be... I want you. Near me. Not like my work, I can't ruin my work, I want you... possessed. Yes. And everything I touch gets dissected and thrown away after it's used. Do you suppose I want that happening to you? So get the hell out of my flat."

John thinks about this. He is surprised, to be sure. He looks away. His tongue nervously touches his lips. He begins to speak, stops. Sherlock catalogues every moment, saves them for when John will not be there. Which will happen in about five seconds.

"I can tell you," John says, casually. He shrugs off his coat.

"What?"

"I can tell you. I'm very good at right from wrong. It's a specialty. Ask me something."

This is a very bad idea. You're not fit for him. You'll encase him in plastic and keep him in the cellar. God knows what you'll do. Don't do that, please don't do that, you already love him and you've known him a month. Make him leave.

You're one of a kind, though. Doesn't he deserve one of a kind? Doesn't he merit a unique specimen? You would never hurt him, and this might even be an act of charity.

_It isn't,_  Sherlock thinks as he drowns.

"There is a champagne stain from a wedding celebration on the ceiling, and everyone either leaves each other or ultimately dies," he observes.

"That's all true. And. I'm not sure whether it isn't the most utter rot I've ever heard."

"You take your coffee black, not with cream and sugar."

"How in bloody hell–"

"I'll wreck you, you know."

"You're going to do what the entire Afghan army couldn't manage? I... congratulations. You're a marvel."

"Do you  _know_  you say these things out loud?"

"I know every word," John answers, reaching for the back of Sherlock's neck with a very steady hand.

"Oh, God. To hell with the both of us. Kiss me," he says, desperate.

And John does.

And that's fine, really. It's better than fine. It's a loving, wet, warm tongue against his own, sure of itself and already panting, and it's fine.

It's fine.

It's fine it's fine it's fine God it's fine it's better than fine it's almost like not being alone, being with him. It's so very close. So near it's only a hair's breadth to not being alone anymore. He's so boring, incredibly dull really, and then he does or says—it's fine. He's not like everyone else either. Your brain is leagues above theirs, and so is his heart. That makes him the antithesis of dull. He's unique, only not the way you are. What on earth produced a character like that? Don't hurt him, always ask him first, so that it's fine. Try to be like him. Less grey. More colour. Their sort, not yours.

Sherlock will just have to try harder. And anyway, he has John now to tell him right from wrong. Doesn't he?

It seems that I do. It seems most definitely that I do.

What a tremendous advantage that will be.
The Paradox Suite

Being with Sherlock is a series of shocks, but John is game for it anyhow.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. He has learned to be. Has to be.

He is a good man, and he went to war.

He is a doctor, and dying is what people  _do._

So he copes with opposites quite handily—better than most, with more grace. Most contradictions cause him no more than a couple of slow blinks, an inner shrug, and a tired smile. Then he goes about his business, and the paradox, whatever it was, is allowed to live in peace without John Watson insisting it account for itself in any way. This is why it occurs to him two weeks after being ordered out of his own flat as if there were a ticking bomb in it, and then discovering that bomb's self-identified name was Sherlock Holmes, and then being kissed as if the sky were falling by the world's tallest, palest, most alarming and beautiful madman, that he ought not be so very surprised by anomaly at this point in his life. It ought to be the case that the most unsurprising thing about sleeping with Sherlock Holmes is that it's all so surprising.

It's a job, though, not being startled. By nearly everything about it.

"I– what? What is it?"

Sherlock is staring again, this time at the back of John's neck, which is currently slick with sweat that's beading thicker by the second as John valiantly tries to endure the sort of scrutiny normally reserved for severed heads, murder scenes, flogged corpses, and other inanimate objects which were once alive and are now somehow gruesomely  _not alive_. The fact that he can't see the expression doesn't mean it's not there. They're flush against each other, just moments afterward in fact, not even fully apart, and John can feel ash-grey eyes boring holes through his spine. At times, John wonders if Sherlock remembers that he's still an  _animate_  object for the time being, capable of being rendered uncomfortable. His flatmate removes the hand from his hip and puts two elongated fingers very softly against his spine. And then, inevitably, it all becomes so much more shocking than it could be.

"I didn't know you'd played football as a child."

"Oh."

It takes John a few seconds to decide what he wants to know first.

"Um. Important, is that?"

"You never told me."

And of course, John  _had  _played football as a child, for two years, when he was ages twelve and thirteen. But how that information could be gleaned from the back of his neck remains a mystery.

"Should have disclosed it sooner, eh? Two years at being a crap goalie is the deal breaker?"

"No, it's lovely."

And  _there_  is the kicker, the lurking shock to the system waiting to pounce. Moonlight-coloured, mad-eyed scrutiny is to be expected. It was always a central tenet of living here, in fact, and at times it was even helpful. John can't spend nearly so much time rigourously examining  _himself_ , his  _dreams,_  his ridiculous  _leg_ , when someone else is already doing it for him. That would have made his own pathologies seem far too important. John isn't a vain man. And now that he seems to have placed himself entirely at the disposal of London's only consulting detective, he could hardly expect the chillingly thorough study to  _lessen_. That would have been completely out of character for his friend, and anyway John supposes he might actually have missed it. So deductions and scrutinies are all very much in their usual line, necessary, no matter how... exposed they might make him feel at times.

_No, it's lovely_  in a hushed baritone, on the other hand, is borderline earth-shattering. He means it, too. John knows he does. Sherlock never says anything he doesn't want to say.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. But some are easier dealt with than others.

For instance, it is just after a frankly harrowing case during which he and Sherlock were very nearly done to death by way of the sort of poison gas soldiers wake up screaming about, and their hair still smells slightly of burning lye, though they've washed it at least three times apiece, and binned their clothing, and scrubbed each other's skin pink, Sherlock's pinker than John has ever seen it, and now they are naked in John's bed and Sherlock is on top of him, raised on his elbows, grinning the genuine but blinding grin of the utterly cracked.

"Fantastic day, wasn't it? I don't know that I can remember a better."

And no, it wasn't fantastic. Not really. Not exactly. Not what with the three dead transvestites, and the being locked in a makeshift gas chamber, and Lestrade's looking so horrified even for a hardened policeman. Not when the terror of taking a single breath more was considered, and accurately recalled—the cold sweat and the steadily growing panic making John's every limb perfectly calm and still. He's not sure why that happens to him, actually. And it isn't precisely pleasant, turning into a survival machine. It takes him hours feel startled by anything afterward. To feel human and not this detached breathing apparatus. But then again, the day had after all been spent with Sherlock, and lord knows it hadn't been dull.

"By your standards, yes."

"What, you'd have preferred it spent at the cinema, falling comatose?"

"No, just. I like a bit more steadily-come-by-breathing in a day, myself. Less of the holding your breath till you're about to pass out moments, crouched against the crack in a door. Fewer of those."

Sherlock just widens the smile, which should not actually be possible. No one's lips are like that, John thinks. They're minor miracles.

"Glad to see you're chuffed, though." John slowly smiles back. And he finds that he means it.

"Breathing," breathes Sherlock, "is boring."

And he places a white hand over John's neck. He presses, just a little, just so much that the air flow is restricted. Audible. He does this so meticulously that John wonders for a moment whether he is in fact about to be murdered. That wouldn't make sense, though, because Sherlock has had his fair share of chaos and destruction for the day. Being locked in a tiny room with poison pumping into it ought to hold him for... oh, ten hours at least. Maybe even through dinner the next night. And then Sherlock reaches between their legs and grips the two of them at once in his other hand, lifting his hips to the side a bit so his slender weight is balanced, settling back down, and now John still can't quite breathe but that doesn't matter any longer. Sherlock is steadily pulling, and he's tightened his grip on both his throat and their cocks, and John supposes that of all the ways to die in the world, this one isn't bad.

_No, god no,_  he thinks, and then,  _does he want me to fight it?_

But Sherlock makes a sound like a contented little sigh, and squeezes all ten of his fingers, and his curls fall towards John's face, and  _no._

No one save for John trusts him entirely. So this time, he wants him still.

Now Sherlock's lips are against John's, and yet he isn't kissing him. He's instead feeling with his mouth how John isn't breathing freely, the way he's sucking air through in little trickles, and that is probably the mirror opposite of a kiss when you think rationally about it, thinks John. An anti-kiss, one which shouldn't turn him on, but he's seeing adoring star-bursts behind his lids anyway. Sherlock's own breath is warm, unimpeded. Caressing John's lips as he grapples with the lack of oxygen. Things are going as pale as Sherlock's skin was four hours ago, as white-noise-but-sharply-brilliant as his thoughts, and then black as his hair, and it's  _glorious,_  it's  _perfect_ , it should  _never stop_ , this being  _mastered by him,_  this sensation of his entire life being held _  in someone's palm._ And not just anyone's palm, either.

It feels so very safe to be this dangerous—when he abandons control entirely, nothing can ever be John's fault.

It's getting worse and getting better by the instant. His blood pounds through his ears and his face and his groin, not enough room and too much pressure and far too quick. John thinks he might actually black out for a moment, but just as he falls, Sherlock gives him a breath from the detective's own lungs. As if it's mouth to mouth underwater. As if they're both drowning.

_We probably are, to be fair,_  thinks John, clutching the sheets into his fists because he can't help himself.

When it's over seconds later, it's more like death than it ought to be. And also exactly like being raised from the dead in a blaze of glory. None of that was the shocking bit, though. Not in the slightest. Sherlock is, after all, entirely insane.

The surprise comes afterwards again, on this occasion. Sherlock cleans them up, and John gets his breath back, and when Sherlock climbs back into bed like some stunning new creature fresh off the Nature channel, all limbs and joints and gorgeous angles, he fits his palm over John's face and kisses either one of his eyelids. Before flopping dramatically over with his back to John's chest, turning out the light, and deliberately curling John's arm round his torso with their fingers laced together.

"People aren't like this," John says affectionately into Sherlock's downy hair.

"Aren't they?" Bored. A pause. "Wait, like what?" No longer bored: intrigued.

"People who choke you without asking don't generally use your arm as a heat source."

"It's not a heat source," comes a muffled and mildly petulant voice. "I want you  _closer._ "

John obliges. Sherlock adjusts a leg so they fit even tighter. John is baffled. Paradoxes are fine by him, have been for years now. But he can't seem to help being continually surprised.

"I meant that generally people stay far away from chaps who want to choke them."

"Do they?"

"Yes. On principle."

Sherlock just pulls the tip of one of John's fingers between his lips, the tiniest, most chaste caress conceivable.

"I don't see what the one has to do with the other."

John thinks about this, breathing in and out through hair which still bespeaks traces of chemical warfare. He loves it. Can't help but love it.

More possibly he loves  _him_ , rather, John corrects himself.

"You really don't, do you?"

"Shut up," says his friend contentedly, running his fingers gentle and slow round John's pulse point.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. But this has all gone quite far enough.

Sherlock found him in a skip under a piece of corrugated metal, drugged half into a coma, filthy and unmoving and whitewashed of complexion. Already looking more than three days dead. It had only been two days, though, when Sherlock dove into the right metal bin. And six hours after Donovan had elsewhere shot the kidnapper, as it happened, an act which seemed to John when he awakened to have exploded Sherlock's entire sense of self.

Donovan wasn't gloating, through. Not that he could remember. He'd glimpsed her from the wheeled cot, and she'd seemed very quiet about everything. Smiled at him. Rolled her eyes at Sherlock's back. John had tried to return it. He wondered if he'd been successful.

It was all so confusing. He had been in there for so long, and been so dehydrated, and so fucking  _high_ , that staying awake in the blackness had seemed the only viable medical self-treatment. And he'd done it, though it had been worse than miserable. What with the duct tape over his mouth, and the cold, and the blade-like aches cutting through the numbness. He'd done it, but it had been a near thing. So they had gone at once to hospital, or so John gathers, because now they're already leaving hospital, and Sherlock won't let the nurse anywhere near the wheelchair. As if it's an aeroplane he's piloting, and everyone else on earth a hijacker. John is beginning to find the idea of his  _belonging  _to Sherlock slightly unsettling. Endearing, yes, of course. But Sherlock just snapped at a perfectly pleasant nurse as if she might be a badly disguised vampire, and that raises John's hackles. People ought to like nurses. They work hard, and get snapped at for their trouble by worried spouses. Friends. Colleagues. Sociopaths.

_Perhaps all of the above_ , he thinks as Sherlock wheels him twenty feet out of their way so as not to encounter a single kerb.

They arrive home. John still feels slightly queasy, can't help it for the life of him, and so he directs his feet towards the sofa and Sherlock obliges, letting himself be steered by the man half in his arms.

That is in itself highly unnerving.

John Watson collapses, breathing heavily from the stairs. Having sex with Sherlock is currently the very last thing on John's mind. His mind is on his body, because it bloody well  _aches_ , and on his back, which was severely bruised when he was tossed into the skip, and on his life, which seems to have taken a turn for the suicidal. Sherlock is indispensable to John, and John knows it. That isn't a question any longer. But he is beginning to think of himself as a minor accessory in the pantheon of Sherlock's wild opera, the sort of character who lives and dies and is mourned for four measures if at all. It isn't that he wants to leave. It's that he thinks he'll probably be snatched away sometime soon. Which would be a shame, really, as he and Sherlock get on like a very successful bit of arson.

"I don't know what I would have done," says a very deep voice.

John's eyes open. Sherlock seems to have sat on the carpet beside the sofa and has rested his impossible-to-tame head on John's stomach.

He doesn't seem to be breathing very well. In fact, he looks almost exactly like he did when he was lying through his teeth to that young waiter taking a smoke break behind the posh curry restaurant last week, when Sherlock was shamming that his cat had just died and that he desperately needed to borrow the man's mobile. There had been actual tears, coldly brushed off minutes later, which always unnerved John. There are this time too, or perhaps there are about to be. Except that this doesn't seem to be about a cat. Or about a mobile. It appears to John to be much, much worse. Perhaps because this time he isn't shamming?

John instinctively brushes his hand into his friend's hair. But Sherlock doesn't curve up into it like he generally does. He shudders.

Surprise number one.

"How dare he touch you. Drug you, shut you up in the dark. How dare he steal from me. I would have drowned that son of a bitch like a bag of kittens," he says fiercely.

Unsurprising.

"That is, supposing I'd lived through it, but I don't think I would. I don't think people can  _feel  _like that and survive it. I only had a bit of it, you were alive, but you aren't supposed to  _leave_   _me_. You aren't meant to leave me, ever, and you did. It wasn't your fault. But I couldn't stand it."

Surprise number two.

"It's all over, can't you see that? We could dance round it forever, but the point is that you're like– like some kind of bloody  _pacemaker,_  and if anyone so much as  _looks_  at you in future, I will  _hurt them._ "

Unsurprising.

"Bit not good," John whispers, carding his fingers through masses of hair.

"No?"

"No."

"What would be better?"

Surprise number three. John wonders if he's the insane one just now, or if Sherlock is. One or the other of them has completely lost touch with their special version of reality.

"Dunno. How about you love me?"

The head resting on his torso shakes back and forth emphatically.

"Right. Okay. Why not?"

"Because that isn't  _new  _information."

"Well," John coughs, letting that go. "Fine, then. I love  _you_. How's that?"

Sherlock's mouth twists like John's just struck him across those unnaturally fine cheekbones, and he wrenches his face into John's thin cotton shirt. For a while, longer than John would ever have expected, he seems simply to be using it as a tool against hyperventilation. But then he is kissing John's belly through the fabric. Not long after that—but before the shirt is rucked up and John's fly is down and his slim stomach is wet with saliva and there are hands on his thighs and none of that is very surprising but what went before was—sea monsters and dragons flying over London and straw spun to gold and flying cars.

_Oh, Christ_ , John thinks when he slips into Sherlock's mouth, not having been the least bit interested in any such thing seconds before.

Surprising.

No. He rethinks the matter.

Not surprising in the least.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes. As a general thing. But they can grow to be very exhausting.

When Sherlock is bored, people tend to suffer for it. Mrs. Hudson suffers when she brings up a generous slice of bread pudding for the pair of them and is asked why on earth she can't bring something  _useful_ , like a fresh  _corpse,_  or else leave him in peace. Lestrade suffers, because his mobile lights up with the word WRONG! when he's doing the crossword in the morning, and it's unsettling to think that Sherlock can read his mind. John suffers for two reasons. First, he suffers because the kitchen becomes filled with unnerving experimentation of the highly toxic variety, and it becomes very dangerous to make a cuppa with everything smelling equally of formaldehyde. And second, it's a hard thing to watch, Sherlock being bored, because he knows it genuinely scrapes his skin raw. And John Watson is a sympathetic person.

Tonight, though, he found thirty-two human teeth with their long roots still attached sitting in the bathroom cup he likes to use when brushing his teeth before bed. Beginning to smell.

"What in  _hell,_  Sherlock?" he demands.

"I need to watch how fast they discolour," his friend... boyfriend... plague of his life, rather, that's closer to the truth of it... replies from where he's twisted into the shape of a capital R somehow, on the sofa, with his fingers tented up by his lips. He's wearing the blue robe, and has been for three days now, changing his thin t-shirt every morning after he showers and shaves and not doing a damn thing else.

"Why for Christ's sake do  _I_  need to watch them discolour along  _with you_?"

"No, I'll stay in tonight, I think. Bring back some miso soup, though."

John grinds his own—mercifully not yet the subject of scientific research—teeth. And suddenly some sake and tempura seems to be a very good idea indeed. He gets his coat and stalks out.

"Wear a muffler, it's freezing," he hears from above him.

So he grabs one of Sherlock's, the thick blue one, and he remembers to slam the door.

The sake and the tempura are satisfying distractions, and because he sits at the bar, he chats with a neighbour from further down Baker Street who sells custom home theatre equipment. It feels strange, talking with someone about the merits of Bose speakers. Worse than strange—unnatural. But very nice, too, like visiting a foreign country where the natives are friendly and want to teach you the language. John hums and nods and listens to a long discussion of wireless speakers and flat-screen telly, and is offered a substantial discount. He demurs.

"Maybe your boyfriend might like a better way to unwind of an evening?"

"My boyfriend's idea of recreation isn't... quite normal, actually," John observes.

"More of an outdoors type of bloke?"

If by "outdoors," you mean "elbow-deep in fresh gore," yep. That's just his bag.

"He's not much a one for telly. Not a lot on that holds his interest."

"Well, the BBC is crap anyhow, innit?" his neighbour agrees in a friendly way. "Here's my card, if you change your mind."

John pays, and forgets the miso soup. He's halfway up the stairs when he recalls it, and it annoys him. It annoys him so much that he is very prepared to be stroppy with the man who probably hasn't moved from the sofa, who thinks "miso soup" is the proper response to "why the teeth?" He opens the door.

Sherlock has moved, actually, and is now slumped in his wide-armed chair with his legs crossed under him. He looks miserable. He looks, in fact, as if he's being tortured. The man looks so hurt by the normalcy of day-to-day life that for a few seconds John wonders if it's worth it, never being enough of a distraction. John shuts the door, and locks it, and wonders when he's going to be accused of forgetting the soup as he takes off his coat. It's cold in here, so he leaves the muffler on for now.

Sherlock doesn't say anything about soup. Doesn't remember, probably. He's staring at their blank television screen. Lifeless.

_The last thing we need is a three thousand quid sound system,_  thinks John. _The very last thing. On earth. We'll sooner need an elephant, or a racecar. Or a solid gold statue of Napoleon._

John goes to the bookshelf and pulls down  _Master and Commander._ He turns up the light a bit. He sits in front of Sherlock's chair, with a pillow at his back and his knees drawn up, with a second pillow for the book in his lap. He's not going to start a crime spree for this man, but he's not going to stand by and watch him disintegrate either. He'll be nearby, at the very least. Right here. In front of this sodding chair. With some poor bastard's teeth filling his cup in the bathroom. God help him.

It's a good book, as it happens. John begins to forget there's a suffering genius behind him, except when he brushes his knee turning a page. Then Sherlock readjusts his legs, pulling them in so he's jackknifed, with his arm curled under his head on the arm of the chair, his feet tucked into the other arm. It should not be physically possible for a man this tall to accomplish this particular move. But Sherlock is perennially doing impossible things. Like fitting his entire body into small spaces. His breath is now very close against the back of John's neck.

"Fancy a shag?"

John fights the urge to laugh. Fights it hard.

"Um. No, thanks. Not really in the mood."

"Have I been ignoring you?"

"Yep."

"Ah."

Long minutes pass. John begins to wonder whether playing hard to get was the right card. Sherlock is bored, this he knows. Sherlock loves chasing things. Sherlock has become aware once again that John exists. Isn't it better to drag it out? Have two pleasant hours instead of one? Give Sherlock the chance to form strategies, to plan, to  _think  _a little? But now he's quiet. His absolutely beautiful nose is nearly touching his own muffler, still wrapped round John's neck. John begins to worry. It isn't that he doesn't want the sex, far from it. But he wanted to give the man who can't bear to live a normal life a little room to maneuver. To  _scheme._

"Not very determined, are you?"

"Hmm?"

Sherlock never wastes time saying "what," or god forbid "I beg your pardon," when a velvety humming sound will suffice.

"About the sex."

"What about it?"

"Not very determined, I said."

"Oh, sorry, wasn't thinking about that any longer. Distracted."

"By what?"

"Your hair isn't blond."

John puts the book face down on the floor. He turns, not sure he heard right.

"Sorry?"

"Your hair isn't blond. But I like it. That's wrong, but I don't know why, can't think why this is different, it bothers me when I can't think of a colour. There are too many colours, everywhere, like an infection. It's awful."

John blinks. "Is it?"

_"Yes._ It's like..." Sherlock ponders. His eyes are very pale. "There are thousands of sorts of microwaves, and I know all of them. It's very much like that."

John turns more fully round so that Sherlock is right in front of him, folded into the chair seat. He doesn't usually see Sherlock from this angle: sideways, with their faces almost level, John's a little higher. He's gorgeous like this, John realizes, which is nothing if not unsurprising. John leans one forearm on the edge of the chair seat.

"Microwaves."

"That's what I  _said,_  yes. Microwaves. I know all the sorts, it might come in handy, has done before, because everyone in the world has one, and who can tell? But I hate that there are so many. It's not... elegant. It's messy. It takes up space on my hard drive."

John absorbs this.

"And my hair is. Just like that. Like microwaves."

"No no no no no no  _no,_  your hair  _isn't  _like the microwaves, so many  _colours_  all the time is like the microwaves."

Rubbing a hand over his face, John allows himself to smile. He doesn't understand a word of this conversation, and if he smiles about it, he's not going to feel quite so dense. He doesn't like feeling dense. Even when Sherlock is calling him an idiot, it doesn't usually provoke that reaction, but failing to follow a conversation certainly does. So he smiles a little, taking a breath.

"You aren't dense, or not any denser than all the rest, you're just not letting me finish. Your hair isn't blond and it isn't brown. I can't work it out, I don't have a word for it, and that should bother me, but I've been thinking for ten minutes, and it doesn't bother me. So I forgot about the sex, thinking about your hair. It was helping."

John swallows, and touches Sherlock's hair. His hair is black. Very black. Blue-black, as a matter of fact. Inky.

"Right."

"Understand now?"

"So, you're telling me, you sometimes don't like to differentiate between so many similar things. Like colours and microwaves. So when my hair should have bothered you but it didn't, you started thinking so hard about hair that you. Um. Jumped tracks and forgot about sex. My hair colour being as fascinating to you as..."

"As the sex with you is. Yes, that's it."

"Sherlock, does that mean that sex with me is... boring?"

Sherlock scowls darkly, adjusting the lapel of his thin robe in a huff.

"Now,  _that_  is dense."

Something begins to glow in John's chest. It's a fluttery glow, warm and yet skittering, like leaves before a pane of glass blocking the sunlight.

"Does it mean my hair is... riveting?"

"There we are. Thought you'd catch up eventually."

It has become impossible not to kiss Sherlock. And the kissing Sherlock is, of course, sublime. Surprising in every way, when it ought to be rote by this point. His lips are always full and soft, but his mouth always opens when John least expects it to, and he never will get used to the taste of him, no matter how many times he tries to identify it on the slide of his tongue. And there are about to be a thousand shocks in store when the sex begins, John thinks when he pulls the robe off his friend's shoulders and Sherlock laughs at his haste.

But none of them more shocking than to think that John's hair colour is as arresting as making love. That means something profound, John thinks before he can't think anymore. That means something... quite heavenly. A paradox a little bit like love itself.

"Dishwater," he says much later, to Sherlock's neck.

"Hmm?"

"That's what mum called it, anyway. The colour of my hair. Dishwater."

"Dishwater," says Sherlock.

As if he's saying,  _spectacular._

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes.

To a point.

"Fuck," he gasped seconds ago at the ceiling. Feeling as if he was splitting apart, in a transcendent fashion. With his knees over Sherlock's sharp shoulder blades and his fingers bruising the man's ivory neck.

Now Sherlock is up and away and already texting someone. John heard it buzz too, but had been sufficiently mind-blown to have forgotten. Not Sherlock, of course. Three seconds after they've both finished, and his fingers are flying. His face, with all its unexpected curves and lovely not-curves, is ardent. His trousers are at half-mast, and his face is flushed, and he's yet to bother with tidying himself up, but not so distracted that he can't manage to text... who?

Who in  _bloody hell_?

"Mycroft," Sherlock answers without being asked.

John wonders if he's capable of rising and finds anger a powerful motivator. He rises. Finds a pair of used boxers half-under the bed. Wipes himself off. Continues to work on the same project. Glaring at the carpet.

"Life and death, you know, question of world security. Tiresome, really. Why can't he be bothered to solve things  _himself_? Lazy old cat, can't even bother to be moved from behind his desk usually, no wonder he can never get fit, doing nothing but sitting in chairs asking me questions."

John gets himself clean to the point that he thinks he might be able to sling a towel around his hips and make it to the shower without Mrs Hudson screaming should she happen to be... anywhere in the vicinity. It is her house, after all. And John is a gentleman. Even if, at the moment, he does feel just a bit like a paid call girl. Still, he is a gentleman.

_Unlike that sod on his mobile,_  he thinks darkly. _Don't know quite why I feel the need to tolerate human decomposition in our fridge._

"I mean to say, he does it purposefully, pretends there are lives at stake at awkward moments for me. Maybe there are, but not yours, and I don't care about the others."

John pauses in the doorway, a white towel clutched round his waist.

"Bit not good," he says over his shoulder.

Merely as a test.

But his heart is racing. Which is...

... _entirely to be expected. You love him, but you aren't yet quite certain of anything. You'd shoot a man in cold blood to protect him, but you don't always like him, at times want to throttle him yourself. You'd let him kill you, but you don't like being treated like an escort, and that's where you draw the line. He might love you, but it might never cross his mind to mention it. He'd probably die for you, but half the time you're completely invisible to him. You'd die for his sake in a heartbeat, but he has to be bothered to notice that's true. So what's it to be?_

"Why 'not good'? I love you," comes the annoyed response. "You can't expect me to feel the same way about it, about you as I do  _them_. It isn't logical."

John almost drops the towel, only keeps it up because it occurs to him that dropping it would be an absurd, almost cartoonish reaction. Something out of classic American Warner Bros. Still, that was not what he'd expected. That was...

Shocking.

More than shocking. Life-changing.

He can still hear it echoing in his ears. Along with the continued clicking of tiny keys under his lover's thumb. Which is...

Unsurprising.

"Don't just stand there, I need you dressed in three minutes," Sherlock announces, hitting SEND and shrugging his button-up back on.

So John heads for the shower and lets the warm water fall over him.

Thinking what an odd life it will be, what a continually surprising one, to be loved by a walking paradox.

But he's comfortable with paradoxes. And in any case, he's beginning to suspect that he might be just a bit of one himself.
The Death and Resurrection of the English Language

Wherein the English language dies, Sherlock mourns it, and John revives a dead tongue.

Sherlock Holmes has recently grown aware that the problem must be one of language.

He and John Watson clearly speak different versions of English. Must do. It's the only logical explanation.

When Sherlock explores this hypothesis in retrospect, it becomes still more clear to him that a linguistic barrier must be the answer. He will test it just as soon as he can come up with an effective rubric. It accounts for so very many instances when John went shocked and blinking, cutting his sentences into little one-word clips, when what Sherlock had been saying should undoubtedly be normal by anyone's standards. There is a difference between saying to someone, "May I please tattoo my name with this x-acto and this pot of ink somewhere on your back, anywhere you like really, to prove that I own you," and saying to someone...

Well, the entire conversation about condoms, for example. That was the day after the kissing. The day after Sherlock had ordered John out of their flat.

The kissing had stayed kissing for half an hour, which to Sherlock—who was documenting every shift and nuance—wasn't surprising in the least, but he sees how possibly it could have been. He could stay in that in-between land for hours if allowed, just tasting, marveling that his tongue is inside someone's mouth, and that they don't object. It feels like a benevolent invasion, now that he thinks it over, and John was right: invading is really the ultimate when it comes to a blood rush, a surge of adrenaline the likes of which he's constantly seeking. He had liked it tremendously with previous boyfriends, and with John it's like being allowed inside his actual head, he is so very  _present_ , which is miraculous. So it had stayed kissing for what might have been thought rather a long period. Then there was a strangled noise from John, who pulled him off the sofa onto their floor, and it was rather more than kissing, and technically  _could_  have involved a condom or two, if they were being careful, but Sherlock can't recall ever giving head with johnnies entering the picture, though it would certainly be interesting and he's game to try provided it's for an experiment and not the usual practice.

The next day, John had been smiling stupidly at everything.

No, not stupidly, as a matter of fact. John isn't much stupider than most people, and rather better than some. Just absently. Non-specific smiling. It didn't bother Sherlock, though lack of specificity generally does. He'd rather liked it. It was something new about John to catalog, and Sherlock likes nothing better than cataloging things about Dr. John Watson. Like the very recent fact that John sleeps curled on his side like a little boy, turning onto his back if any sand-swept and brilliantly toxic gunfire visions disturb him. Sherlock knew that he ought to be fonder of John for smiling stupidly all the late morning than he was fond of him for rolling onto his back when he dreamt about deserts. But he wasn't. He still isn't. He hoards them both equally, the way he does every other specific.

That afternoon John sat at the kitchen table, which was covered in questionable items and dusty papers but with a little space cleared for tea, sipping PG Tips, making out a list for the corner store. Sherlock could see it from where he sat with his laptop resting on a box of frozen sheep embryos as they thawed. He hadn't yet told John about the sheep embryos, but they were of absolute necessity to him, and anyway it was more fun letting John find things himself. The list for the trip down to the Tesco read, in the most endearingly  _medical_  handwriting Sherlock could ever recall seeing:

_Milk_  
 _Eggs_  
 _Kleenex_  
 _Paper towels_

Then John started tapping his biro on the table with an amused, delighted lift to his mouth.

"Suppose I'd better put condoms on this list, eh?"

Sherlock coolly finished typing his sentence. It was an email to a client in Wales. But she hadn't included the right information, so he was demanding to know what breed of dog her accountant owned, large or small, because people—ordinary people—think about things like their dogs when they are buying new flats with embezzled funds.

"Don't bother."

John's eyebrows went a bit... well, crushed was too strong a word. His face is so very wonderfully  _rumpled_ , however. So not crushed, but certainly  _deflated._

"No, I'll have whatever sorts of sex you like, looking forward to it, but you needn't bother buying condoms. Waste of money."

John leaned forward with his elbows on the table, almost upsetting his tea, looking very trained-medical-professional all of a sudden.

"They are  _not  _a waste of money."

Sherlock smirks, ducking his chin slightly. "Well, I'm not very likely to get you pregnant, am I, with or without a johnny? Let's think this through a bit better. I'm a freak, yes, but I do possess a very typical male reproductive system, that I can promise you. I'm not  _biologically_  freakish. The reverse being equally true, or so I assume, I can't see why you'd want to mess with the things, it would be a complete waste of time, and anyway they're–"

It occurred at this moment to Sherlock that they were speaking at cross-purposes, just a bit. Because Sherlock had been very airily joking in tone, but the doctor—instead of seeming more and more understanding, nodding or perhaps smiling again like he was before—was actually looking more and more exasperated, his eyebrows darkening, so they'd somewhere lost track of one another, and therefore–

_"Oh,"_  said Sherlock, all in a rush, as he does when he's discovered the key to something. "Is  _that  _what you thought? No, it's fine, it's entirely fine. I promise, I can even show you the paperwork, I'm clean as a whistle, I had to have every lab test possible done six months ago when a corpse in the morgue exploded, and I haven't been with anyone since then."

And that statement really  _ought_  to have solved the problem.

Sherlock thinks more carefully on the subject. Yes, that all ought to have been fine. It's a language issue, has to be.

Because John in fact had winced, very charmingly, and then opened one eye as if looking at Sherlock was very much like staring into the sun, and then passed his tongue over his lips, and then stuck the end of the biro in his mouth.

"Okay," said John.

Pausing, apparently, not knowing quite where to start.

"Sherlock," said John.

Sherlock waited. He typed another sentence.

"Did the corpse explode due to any particular– no,  _no,_  strike that, Sherlock, never tell me why the corpse exploded. All right? Not even if I ask about it. Don't tell me, ever, not for as long as I know you. Got it?"

_For the rest of your life, then. Check._ Nodding, Sherlock tried to count the number of separate expressions John had just passed through. _Nine_ , he thought. _No, ten, counting the blinking.  _He'd never seen a human face so expressive, so  _clear._ It made his heart swell, every time he watched it, the ease with which John Watson could be spread open and  _read._ He wanted to pin him down like a butterfly on a card and simply watch, for months. For years. Forever.

_Bad idea,_  he thought.

"So," said John.

Obviously as puzzled as was humanly possible. But that made no sense.

Running through what he'd just said for discrepancies, logical errors, fallacies, paradoxes, blind ends, Sherlock finally identified the conundrum and wondered why he was being so slow this morning. Did being with John make him slower than usual?

"Oh, of course. Yes, well, obviously with  _previous  _partners, I did use condoms. Not that there were so very many. Five, but yes, I see why that confused you, and anyway there were condoms before, always, and then the–"

"Exploding corpse," John said with his eyes tight shut.

"Correct, and then nil, and now you. So there isn't a problem, it's fine."

At this point, well satisfied, Sherlock had gone back to typing. He had skipped saying  _And I always used fresh needles, every single time._ He was very proud of himself for that omission, it was the sort of thing which could slip out all too easily and ruin everything. People don't like knowing about his drugs, though he can't fathom why. His drugs have nothing to do with  _their_  health, after all. _Their  _health remains quite unaffected by them. There had been that particularly horrid cock-up when Lestrade had found him without much of a pulse, and from the way the idiot had reacted, you'd think it had been  _his  _heart that–

"Sherlock," said John, sounding as if this entire conversation was steadily weakening his system.

"Hmm?"

"And what about  _me_?"

"Mmm, yes. There you are."

"No,  _what_  about  _me_?"

"Well, what about  _you_?"

"I could... have something. For the sake of argument."

"Oh, but that's different. If you have something, I want it too."

And this is what Sherlock is still struggling to comprehend, why that statement in particular, which was really a harmless fact, dangerous only to Sherlock even in theoretical potential and never to other people, why should  _this_  offhand remark cause John's elbow to finally hit the tea mug and send it onto the kitchen floor with a  _smash._ It wasn't a potentially unwelcome declaration of undying possession, and it wasn't even approaching what he wanted to say that morning, which was  _You must swear on your life never to leave me and never to stop looking at me the way you looked at me this morning, like I'm some sort of extraterrestrial miracle, because if I have to go back to the way it was yesterday, without having you, I will get a very long, very sharp, very, very Japanese knife, and I will–_ no, he hadn't said that. Nothing of the kind. Only  _I want it too._ Which ought to be fine.

John looked down at the broken tea mug and thought about getting a rag, but he didn't. Instead, he stood up, and came round to Sherlock's side of the table. He set himself up between Sherlock's knees, leaning against the table and what he didn't know were thawing sheep embryos, looking very, very serious.

"You want it too."

"Good, you were listening."

"So for the sake of argument, if I had syphilis, you'd enjoy sharing it."

"That's only a matter of a round of penicillin."

"Okay. Right-o, sorry, forgot you were a genius for a moment, my fault. If for the sake of argument I was riddled with AIDS, you'd want yourself a helping of it?"

"You aren't, but for the sake of argument, yes."

"Sherlock, that's  _insane,_ " his friend John said in a slightly pleading voice. _"Why?"_

"It's not insane, it's practical. We'd have a better shot at living the same amount of time."

John's mouth went rather numb-looking. His eyes did that fluttering thing again, ending up with one shut tighter than the other, and from closer up Sherlock could see the place on John's neck where he'd bitten him the day before, and of course Sherlock only wanted to live as long as this man. Of course. He needed this fellow and no other, this particular ex-Army doctor with the very unfashionable jumpers, the one who smelled a bit like Chai tea at the crook of his elbow. If he fell into the Thames or got trapped in a house fire or fell off a bloody bridge, Sherlock would go too. Sherlock had now counted thirteen separate new expressions on John's face in the last six seconds, and he loved all of them, and he hated John's hand for covering up two and a half of them, but then he didn't hate John's hand the way he hated other things. Not a bit, actually, he simply wanted to  _move_  John's hand so it no longer impeded his view, and if John Watson had caught malaria, or dysentery, or cholera somewhere, Sherlock would want it too. John probably didn't want Sherlock to make it all quite this obvious, though, he thought. It was probably similar to item number thirteen on Sherlock's  _Not Fine_  list.

13. (dependent upon whether or not we have the same blood types) We could go to hospital and get ourselves hooked up to a transfusion machine, and exchange all the blood in my system for all the blood in your system and vice versa. Preferably on the anniversary of something significant, and we had better be awake the whole time. Then I will have all of your blood and you'll have all of mine, and it'll be lovely.

That really would be lovely, Sherlock thought, but best not to inquire.

"Why isn't that okay?" Sherlock asked instead, growing anxious. "Hell, John, you don't have HIV, I'd have seen the meds, deduced it from countless signs by now. Why isn't that fine? Are you–"

"I'm completely clean, the Army does loads of tests, and I haven't been with anyone either."

_It's too much,_  Sherlock had thought. _I'm too much. I thought I would be, too. I can't let it out like this, he'll leave and everything will go much, much too bright again and I'll lose my mind. Or he'll try to leave and I'll do something cracked like finding a John-sized glass case with a lock to it. What would a normal human being say? What would Lestrade say?_

"Fine, get the condoms, it'll be safer," Sherlock said.

John coughed. "We're both clean, we don't need them. That's established. You do realize that you've just required our relationship to be completely exclusive, by the way."

Things went a bit white after that. John hadn't meant anything by it, of course, was only being thorough and sweetly dogmatic, in fact, but everything went white all the same. And that was worse than too many colours. Sherlock shuddered ever so slightly, adjusting. Like an explosion, like a fucking supernova, he had been presented with a second problem of language. Because it hadn't once occurred to Sherlock that it could be anything  _but_  completely exclusive. And by the cast of John's mouth, he suspected that it showed.

"Oh, Jesus," John had said softly. "I'm... so sorry. Of course I don't want, but I didn't know that you–"

_"I'm off,"_  Sherlock had managed to say, diving out of the chair.

"No, stop. Sherlock, come back here. I'm an idiot. I never–"

"I know you are, everyone is."

"Well, I ought to know a bit better than them."

"The, um, the post must have come by now, I'll–"

"Sherlock, wait–"

"Just popping out for a bit of air, won't be a moment–"

"Listen to–"

"The, I need patches, and you're out of brown sugar, I'll just be–"

"Sherlock,  _stop moving this instant._ "

Sherlock hadn't meant to stop at all, but John grabbed him by one long arm, half in and half out of his coat, and had whirled him against the door, and had kissed him like he was giving mouth to mouth resuscitation. It felt like that, as a matter of fact. Like Sherlock had been dying, floating off into a horrible white cloud, and then all at once he was coming back. His coat was falling off one shoulder and the forearm trying to grab at more of John Watson was impeded by it, but everything was still getting better. The white cloud was receding. John's hair was very soft, and his shoulders very solid, and everything very small, and very determined for all that he was so small, and now that Sherlock could breathe again, he didn't have the first idea what to say.

John stopped kissing him and looked up at his face. He really was remarkably tiny for being such an enormous presence.

"You get to have all of me, provided you don't blow up any more corpses. Deal?"

_How did he know  _I  _blew it up?_

Sherlock nodded desperately. That was a very fair deal, remarkably fair, and anyway if he didn't get all of John, he would kill whoever got pieces of John, so really this was better for both of them. "Yes, yes, I can—yes. Everything?"

"Right."

"Because I do mean  _absolutely_  everything."

"I, yes. Thought as much, actually. What you see is what you get."

"What about the–"

"Stop talking about condoms," John had ordered before kissing him again. "Start talking about the sorts of sex you'd like to have this very instant."

_Language,_  Sherlock had thought as his coat fell to the floor. And then,  _I am going to have to solve this scientifically._

Not all that long afterward, Sherlock has composed a series of test questions. These are subdivided into three groups, each group containing ten individual tests. There is a control group, naturally, of things which are so normal that Sherlock has in fact heard other people saying them, composed of utterly banal queries. Questions along the lines of "Do you prefer whole milk, or skimmed?" The secondary set of inquiries he's written down are similar in form, content, and intention to those on the  _Fine_  list. And the final ten are based firmly within the scope of the  _Not Fine_  list.

This time it is a Monday morning, and John is curled in a chair reading the international section of the newspaper and frowning every time he encounters the words  _WMD, reasonable doubt,_  or  _former U. S. President George W. Bush_. The series of unconscious frowns makes him look older than he is in fact. But Sherlock is absurdly compelled by how aged John seems to be at times, how very calm and weathered he is. Like a harrowed saint or a silent poet or an American cowboy. Sherlock's heart flutters ever so slightly when John frowns even harder and rubs at his pale eyebrows with the heel of his hand, knowing in an instant that John just read the words  _timetable for withdrawal._ It could not possibly please Sherlock any more, knowing this about John.

He also, as of five o'clock this morning when John was still sleeping, looked through John's army paperwork. Their blood types match, both of them A–. They will likely never go to hospital and switch it all, but it's so unspeakably nice to think that they  _could._

Sherlock tents his fingers. The air this morning is auspicious. Time to start the experiment, and with the control group.

"Do you prefer whole milk, or skimmed?"

John looks up from his newspaper, reaches out for a sip of his tea. "Sorry?"

"Do you prefer whole milk, or skimmed?"

"What have you done?"

Sherlock is reclining in his favorite non-posture on the sofa, feeling very happy and boneless. They solved a fantastic case yesterday, assassinations and gang warfare and cover-ups and one pretty cracking car chase while someone was holding a knife to his throat and John was driving, and he's thus remarkably relaxed. But now he's also a bit muddled, and so drops his head to the side to glance at John, his hands losing their architectural pose.

"What do you mean, what have I done?"

"You heard me. Confess. There is milk in the fridge, and I happen to know it's whole milk, because I bought it. I bought it because you never buy milk. Buying milk for you would be like. Well. Probably like most people feel about being pursued by timber wolves. I also bought it because I prefer whole milk. In my black tea, or cereal, but not in my coffee, and never in green tea, of course, goes without saying. You know I bought it, you saw me put it in the fridge. You never miss a trick. Therefore you know that I prefer whole milk. And so I say again. What have you done."

Sherlock brushes a hand through his hair. He hasn't done a thing to the milk, of course. But admitting that would taint the results of the... already rather bollocksed study.

"Is the milk radioactive? Riddled with botulism? Replaced with glue? What have you done to it?"

John won't look up from his tea and paper when he repeats this question, and that is... that is just so bloody  _beautiful._ Blinking, Sherlock finds that he can only smile. He has just been outplayed. Expertly outplayed, and it feels  _wonderful_ , it really might as well be Christmas, except that Christmas comes once a year and outplaying Sherlock comes perhaps once every three to four years after Mycroft is discounted, the smug bastard _._ Sherlock feels like laughing, feels it creeping up from his ribs to his lips. So very few people ever  _dare_  to challenge him, possibly fearing that he might tie them up for days and have his way with them. With John, that danger is obviously... rendered a moot point. Sherlock can tie John up and have his way with him for days anytime he wants, he's beginning to quietly, rapturously, tremblingly suspect, so outplaying the detective is not risky. It's  _fun._

_Meanwhile,  _thinks Sherlock,  _that was a spectacular failure of the English language._

"Bull semen," Sherlock lies, grinning lazily. "It's an experiment."

"You complete  _prat_ ," this earns him. "Since when?"

"Don't fuss so. Only an hour ago."

"Oh. Right. Lucky thing for you I felt like jasmine this morning."

_How does one conduct an experiment in which one's control group is destined to fail comprehensively?_  Sherlock wonders. _Bugger._

Keep calm and carry on, then.

Sherlock waits for a minute and a half exactly before striking again. Culled from Group Two, he asks mildly, "I'm going to need to borrow you in a moment. I want to see whether I can bring you off solely by fucking you. Do you mind?"

"Nearly through here, news is all dreadful, anyway. Don't know why I read the stuff."

That provokes a fit of deep, quiet chuckles that soon renders the detective sprawled even less symmetrically upon the furniture. He can't recall a madder conversation. There has probably never been one. This man is brilliant, this oh-so-normal-looking doctor fellow, this man is like talking to a slot machine. No matter what Sherlock tries, he gets a response he never predicted, in fact the only thing he can safely say at this point is that the experiment in identifying the linguistic geography of their particular communication barrier is a staggering failure and that he does not give a flying toss about it. Sherlock pulls his knees into his chest and grins as wide as he can, wrapping his arms around them, curled into a giddy ball. This man is like no one else in the history of human speech. And  _god_ , Sherlock hasn't been bored in  _days_  now.

One more for good measure? Then cap this off as a total waste of scientific inquiry?

"When I met you at Bart's that afternoon, I wanted to open up your skull and see inside."

John looks up, smiles back at him. "That's more or less what it felt like, yep. So no regrets there. Well done, you."

Sherlock can't be bothered to keep balanced on the sofa any longer, and so he slides off of it, laughing like a five-year-old.

"You know what, though?" John adds. "Sherlock. Christ, what's gotten into you? Sherlock, you know what I remember thinking?"

"What?" Sherlock asks, calming a little. He very much wants to know.

"I thought it ought to bother me more."

"Well, at least you were right about that much."

Nearly in tears, Sherlock tries very hard to get a hold of himself. His hand is over his breast as if he's trying to keep the laughter in. It really can't be dignified, laughing this hard. But John Watson is clearly insane, and that is hilarious. It's also a marvelous thing to have found out—that Sherlock might be a high-functioning sociopath, but his flatmate John Watson is mad as a hatter.

"Hey, you can giggle," John says fondly, snapping the paper edge. "It isn't as if it's a crime scene."

_Wrong,_  thinks Sherlock.

And then collapses laughing all over again.

The next day someone throws a poisonous gas bomb at New Scotland Yard. Three people are injured and no one is killed, which makes John happy, and also pleases Sherlock aesthetically, though he doesn't show it much. Murder is interesting, death is always interesting, but bombing is simply messy. It's embarrassing, really, what criminals are willing to do these days, how low they will sink. Sherlock once read of a killer who murdered a former colleague with an ice pick to the spine, so that the evidence would melt away, and Sherlock wanted to shake that man's hand. Before arresting him, of course.

Finding the bomber requires nine hours before they can corner him, in a very nice upper-story flat near St. James's, holed up with an enormous knife and a pair of grenades. The Yard isn't there yet, of course. A spectacular fight ensues, after which the following things can be said of a previously very fine flat indeed:

A grenade went off in the dining room. Pieces of mahogany and blue china and ivory-coloured wall are everywhere. There is another grenade, its pin still intact, which rolled under the red striped sofa in the next room.

An enormous glass table is quite broken, shattered really, and there is an unconscious bomber in the middle of it.

Sherlock smells like a grenade went off very near to him, and he is covered in plaster dust, but otherwise intact.

John is very nearly intact, but a piece of glass from the table is stuck into his shoulder, right through his thin coat, and he is now in the act of pulling it out again. Not even wincing very much.

"There are moments," breathes Sherlock, "when it's all I can do not to  _eat you._ "

Then he pauses. For the next 1.46 seconds, Sherlock's mind is occupied with:

Fuck.

It must be the adrenaline, idiot, god you're such an idiot, there are currently twenty-six items on the Not Fine list, and there you go and blurt out number twenty-one in the middle of a crime scene, it's the way his hands move when he's fighting, isn't it, all quiet elbows and god when he holds that gun it's like the thing is part of his arm, it's brilliant, he's brilliant, the stillness he gets, it's magical, it looks like he's sitting on a mountaintop having a cup of tea, and just what about number twenty-one did you imagine he wanted to hear, and now you'll never be able to see that stillness he gets ever again, you won't, who in his right mind is going to trail about after a man who vaguely wants to have bits of him for supper, only the bits he won't miss, because you'd run out otherwise, but the point is that normal people want to do things like go out for dim sum and then a film and god it's so very very hateful, hateful, all of that, and how busily they're all going so many places and all the places themselves so dull, deadly dull, and none of them like John look at that, how still and peaceful and not-busy he is, how small and how silent deep within himself and he'll never understand what happens when you try to go silent but maybe if he stayed long enough, you might learn a bit of the knack of it but now he won't, of course, because you've decided it's a good idea to tell him you suppose him edible, you fucking idiot, idiot, idiot.

"Oh,  _god_ , yes," John mutters, throwing the piece of glass to the carpeting and crushing his mouth against Sherlock's.

Sherlock thinks his own mouth was probably open before John even reached it, but he can't be certain, because he was still coming off the edge of nearly a second and a half of raw panic. The lack of accurate recall only disturbs him for a moment, however. He's fisting his hands in John's coat, everything teeth and tongues and heat and  _yes_ , and John needs to be  _closer_ , and Jesus the doctor tastes the way pastry shops smell but without the sugar, just warm and good and alive, and what with the grip he has on John's jacket, there isn't any space between them, but there's far too much space between them, and then he can't twist the black fabric any longer because this coat needs to come  _off._

He steps away. It feels like an amputation.

"Don't, stop—no,  _why_  are you stopping?"

Tearing John's coat off takes 2.35 seconds, and it's too long.

"You look like a fucking crime scene," Sherlock breathes.

Stopping with the coat is a bad idea. He rips the black button-down John's wearing off his shoulders and reveals the trickle of blood and the little cut like a mouth on top of his shoulder.

Very much like a mouth. Only redder.

_Fuck it,_  Sherlock thinks, and dips his head.

"You look like a crime scene too," John gasps.

The detective smiles, blood on his lips and everything absolutely  _stunning_. Apparently having a gash laved with Sherlock's tongue is not the deal breaker. Or so it seems, because one hand is on Sherlock's slim waist and the other is kneading fiercely into his hair.

"I love crime scenes," Sherlock interrupts mouthing at John's injury to say. It seems very important that John understand. "John, I  _love them._ "

"I think I— _god_ —might love crime scenes myself. What exactly are you–"

"Saliva is a natural antiseptic."

"I, yes. Right. That's true, actually," John hisses.

"You taste  _brilliant._ Oh, you taste like thunderstorms and bread with salted butter and copper coins."

"You can taste thunderstorms?"

"Haven't you ever smelled a thunderstorm?"

"You mean electricity?"

"Yes, but–"

"With  _bread_?"

"Shut up, shut up, like  _this._ "

This time when Sherlock's tongue slides into John's mouth, John starts sinking to the floor, which is really an  _excellent_  idea, in Sherlock's opinion. An utterly cracking idea, and so is the fact that Sherlock has lost his coat and the thundercloud-coloured shirt is now being pulled from his shoulders, and the way John's blood tastes with John's saliva involved reminds Sherlock of an eight hundred quid bottle of white Burgundy Mycroft once gave him after he'd refused a knighthood for the second time. There are minerals, and bits of apple, and lingering acid, and some sort of butter, he can't decide whether Irish or French. If Sherlock can think of a scientific way of bottling it, he is going to try it out. He gets John's belt open.

"This is a bad idea," John says, already shoving a hand into Sherlock's trousers and shivering at the growling sound Sherlock makes against his lips.

Sherlock grins, just about as wide as he can without interrupting the kissing. Kissing John, he is more convinced every time, is almost better than the sex. He feels just as inside John kissing him as he does when he's actually inside John.

"Of course it's a bad idea, that's why we're doing it."

"Oh, right. Well spotted."

"That man  _is_  quite unconscious?"

"An hour at least," John reports.

"Thanks for the compliment, John, but given the circumstances, I might not be up for  _quite  _that impressive a–"

"Sherlock. Take. Off. Your clothes."

Sherlock laughs, and it's mad. All of this is mad. But in the mad world they seem to have created, Sherlock isn't a freak at all. He's quite normal here. And it's breathtaking.

There's vaseline in his coat pocket and it's only lip balm, but that's just manufacturers being modest about how very many uses their product has. And now they're past the talk of condoms, it turns out that John is exactly the same about sex as he is everything else: clean and bright and open and warm and not overly fastidious. Which is good, because Sherlock is finding himself unable to waste any valuable time here. Normally he will experiment with foreplay until John looks ready to either shake to pieces or to slap him, but this is different. He can taste John's blood on his tongue, and he needs to be  _closer._ All he ever feels when he sees John is  _closer_ , but this time is so otherworldly and anyway John doesn't want him to wait, by the looks of him, all flushed and his straw-coloured hair a mess and his eyes glowing within the tender little crows' feet.

He pushes home, and both of them gasp, and then John winces.

"Did–"

"No, you're brilliant,  _god you're good_ , I think there's a piece of shrapnel under my back."

"Do you want me to–"

"It's fine."

"I can–"

"If you don't move, I am going to bloody well  _scream_."

So he does move, and not hesitantly either. Just as even and as pure and as deep as he can, and Sherlock is a musician, so he's quite good at this part. He's hoping for five minutes, but when two have gone by and he sets his mouth over the tiny slash in John's shoulder again, and just ever so kindly presses his tongue into the cut, and John makes that  _sound_  again, the one like he's  _dying_ , and so unabashedly  _thrilled  _about it...

His eyes fly open because he can't help but watch this unfold, can't help but need to prove it to himself. In general, just now, he'd be completely riveted by the scar tissue on John's left shoulder. It looks like a map of something Sherlock is still trying to identify properly, only after an earthquake has cracked it apart, but painted into his skin out of minor chords and clear petri dish culture, and it's astonishing that it all happened so perfectly. That John was shot, and so is in England. Sherlock probably shouldn't be quite so happy about the bullet wound business as he is, and he knows that part is best left unsaid. Sometimes, it's a struggle. Not just now, however, not under the circumstances of glass shards and the tiny slash which isn't bleeding any longer.

Not with a brand  _new  _scar to think about.

Sherlock's mouth is still open over that beautiful wound when John  _does  _scream. And because there might be neighbours he clamps his hand over John's lips, dragging his own teeth over unhurt skin as he shudders and thinking that if he had told himself six months ago about this night, before meeting John, he would never have been able to believe a single word.

He can't quite believe it even now, as it's ending.

They think about dressing and getting up, calling the Yard. But they don't. Not quite yet. Sherlock is sprawled half atop John feeling like if he moves, it'll be tantamount to peeling off his own eyelids, and John isn't objecting so far. He'll object all too soon, but Sherlock had retained enough sense to slide the two of them off the shrapnel, which was a piece of coffee urn, and so they're relatively comfortable, with Sherlock's curls mashing up against John's neck.

"So you're a vampire," John says fondly. "Suspected as much."

Sherlock is absolutely appalled.

_"Wrong,"_  he says emphatically, vehemently, tracing John's ribs with his fingertips.

"Hey, I was only taking the piss. With, you know, the–"

"Vampires want to turn normal people into people like them. I don't  _ever_  want you to be like me, I want you to stay just  _exactly  _as you are, do you hear me, not a  _bit_  like me, because that would be the absolute worst nightmare I can imagine. You being like me."

_Language,_  thinks Sherlock. _What a mess language is. Nothing like sex. At least if he can't understand me, he'll never... understand me. That's something._

John thinks about this statement, smoothing Sherlock's hair down over and over again. It's nice, like being petted. Like Sherlock is a cat, which is lovely, as cats are wonderful and far superior to vampires. John seems to like his hair.

"You're right. I was, um. Mistaken. Well, you can't blame me for being fooled, look at you."

"Oh, let me guess," Sherlock drawls nastily, utterly disgusted, "I'm  _tall_ , I'm  _raven haired,  _I'm  _pale_ –"

"No, that has nothing to do with it. Dimples."

"What?"

"Vampires have the best dimples. Simple fact. Everyone knows it."

Sherlock lifts his head to look up at John. "Are you out of your mind?"

"Smile at me. The one where you're shamming at being regular and you want someone to let you in their flat or hand you their mobile or lend you a tenner."

Sherlock smiles. The dazzling one.

"Yep, god yes. There they are. That was where I made my mistake, you see, was with the dimples. Christ, those are well done."

The oddest sensation takes place on Sherlock's face, which he thinks consists of the false smile slipping off because an actual smile is approaching. This, to his knowledge, is completely unprecedented. His face has no idea how to accomplish such a weird switching of tracks, though it's happening without his permission. And for at least a passing moment, he knows that he looks like he belongs in an asylum. It's a split second after John starts laughing helplessly that the transformation finishes, and there is a real smile on Sherlock's face instead of the Normal People Smile. John kisses his hairline. Still laughing.

"How horrid. You're making fun of me," Sherlock observes, settling his head back down.

"Has that ever happened to you before? Sham smiling and then smiling?"

"Shut up."

"I've never seen a human face  _do_  that before."

"Shut  _up._ "

"It was like watching two people behind one set of eyes, you're barking mad, you know that, don't you? You're wired wrong."

"You like me, though."

"Do I?"

"Of course you do. I'm a marvel."

"God, I do," John says, breathing hard and grinning into Sherlock's hair. "I bloody well  _do._ You're amazing."

Not so very long after, Sherlock finds John in a skip.

Sitting in hospital, waiting by John's bed in a bad plastic chair to be told they can go home, Sherlock thinks over the past several days. He needs to fit events and feelings and thought processes into their proper slots, make better sense of what took place. Run a diagnostic on his hard drive. If he doesn't, very likely his brain is going to vibrate clean out of his head with the stress of it all.

For instance, he is a man capable of withstanding a great many things that normal people find intolerable. Sleeplessness and hunger, for instance, he rather likes. They sharpen his mind, and the empty stomach is like an anchor, reminding him to keep pure and focused and clear headed. He didn't sleep for the two days he was looking for John, and he didn't eat either. Those weren't hardships. But nevertheless those two days were the worst of his life, and that was in spite of having a  _problem,_  and an  _exciting  _problem no less, a  _case to work on_. With John missing, everything went back to the way it was before John was around. No one to stand next to him while all the details of the world howled in his face, and no one to distract him from the howling of the world inside his head either.

And if Sherlock had been subjected to a single day more of it, he might have crawled out of his own skin.

That all makes perfect sense. To be expected, really, he supposes. He wants John, needs John, cannot tolerate the world without John. It's entirely selfish, and that's quite in character. Fine.

But what in  _hell_  was the other feeling, the sensation of knowing John was hurting, it was like a constant shrieking in his own ears, for completely  _unselfish_  reasons. Almost  _charitable  _ones. At least, he imagines that this is what charity might feel like, to a freak. Even when he is being ruthless with himself, as he always is.

And neither was it a useful discovery to learn that when you are in sympathy with the victim, when you are imagining what  _might_  be happening to that person, you are less effective. Less quick, less brilliant, less aware. It made him guilty to the point of nausea as it was happening, and then he had been in a completely different part of London when Donovan shot the bastard he was mulling over torturing to death. She was in Spitalfields. And he was in Norwood, following the lead which ultimately led him to the skip.

He's not going to get quite as much trouble out of Donovan in future, Sherlock thinks. Because when he'd finally found John in the skip, and he tried to wake him up, Donovan looked at him very hard until suddenly she wouldn't look at him anymore at all, and told all the other police to fuck off and do something useful while staring right at Anderson. That was... unexpected. And Lestrade would probably have been more surprised by that if he hadn't been on the phone with 999. But he missed it. He also missed the exchange between Sherlock and Donovan just as the ambulance was pulling up.

"It should have been me," Sherlock said cuttingly.

"Yeah, maybe," she admitted, her voice weirdly gentle. "But it wouldn't have been self-defense if it was you, now would it. And hey... at least I didn't let John down. I'd thought you'd like that bit."

Sherlock walked away. She might have added, under her breath, "Nor let you down, come to it." But as he didn't care, it didn't occur to him to find out for certain.

In hospital, in A&E and now in a ward, John looks all wrong. His colours are lost under bad florescent lighting. His colours are already muted enough without help. Now he looks like a silent film, and Sherlock hates it. And he's greyer anyhow, because of the drugs, and how long he'd been trapped in a bloody waste bin, and he looks far smaller than he actually is in a hospital bed, Sherlock really just can't be expected to stand how small he looks and how tired, just a double set of bags under his eyes and his skin pale as paper under the slight desert tan. John is clean now, and he's fine, he won't suffer any ultimate effects from this ordeal, but Sherlock is convinced that they're probably ruined anyhow. He feels ruined. He feels worse than that.

After waiting what seems months, and Sherlock cannot tolerate waiting, they arrive home. It's all rather a muddle.

He's hoping they end up twined in bed like a figure eight within minutes. Not doing a thing, just resting, just breathing, which perhaps isn't as boring as he supposed. But John can't walk very well yet, he's simply too tired, and so he falls onto the sofa instead of going to either of their bedrooms.

Sherlock looks down at him, horrified.

His colours are  _still  _all wrong. Sherlock can't quite understand John's colours anyway, but these aren't right. It's as if they never left A&E, as if they'll both carry the stain of bad lighting around with them forever, as if bad lighting can infect you. _Maybe it can,_  Sherlock thinks. And there was a song playing as they left the ward earlier which carried on into the lift, an instrumental version of one of those very orchestral Beatles themes, and it's running round and round in Sherlock's head like a police siren. Sherlock thinks, wincing,  _smash it_.

He tries.

It's still there, though. At the edge of his consciousness. And he knows the lyrics, so they're playing too. Sherlock has never before loathed being able to think along two tracks at once, but he does now. The fact that he very much likes the song, when he wants it gone, adds insult to injury. Sherlock takes his coat and muffler off, leaves them thrown over a chair, turns back to the sofa and its occupant.

When John moves even the slightest bit, he flinches, and that is so very  _wrong_ , Sherlock thinks. Is there nothing warm in the world?

The warmest thing he can think of on earth he's discovered thus far is John's belly when he's wearing a jumper, and he's wearing one now, so Sherlock slumps to his knees by the sofa and puts his head on it. It's just as warm as it ought to be, too. At least John knows how to do things properly, at least John is a constant, at least John can be a fucking fixed point in this wretched circus, and John's the one hurt, and that's possibly the saddest thing Sherlock has ever thought about.

_When people actually cry, in real life, is it voluntary like standing, or involuntary like heartbeats, or a combination like blinking or breathing?_  Sherlock wonders. Because he's forgetting how to breathe for some reason.

"I don't know what I would have done," he says softly.

John's eyes blink open. He focuses down his torso, looking at Sherlock. The breathing is only getting harder. John shouldn't be the only warm thing Sherlock can hold onto right now, John should be free to recover without Sherlock taking things from him, John should not be a walking  _charity_ , it's not right that his stomach is the only warm thing in the world and Sherlock can't bear to move off of it. John pushes his fingers very sweetly into Sherlock's hair, and he shudders. They're bottomless, the pair of them, except that John is always giving and Sherlock will never get enough. He can see himself as a marvel with some pride, and see himself as a freak without hurting too terribly, but he's not used to being the villain. It's repulsive. He's repulsive. And that bloody song is still humming along the edges of his thoughts. It's all infuriating. This is only happening because of that utter  _bastard_ , everything was fine before.

"How dare he touch you. Drug you, shut you up in the dark. How dare he steal from me. I would have drowned that son of a bitch like a bag of kittens."

John just listens, his fingers in Sherlock's hair.

"That is, supposing I'd lived through it, but I don't think I would. I don't think people can  _feel_  like that and survive it. I only had a bit of it, you were alive, but you aren't supposed to  _leave me._ You aren't meant to leave me, ever, and you did. It wasn't your fault. But I couldn't stand it."

He still can't stand it, and he can't even stand to remember it. When did breathing grow this difficult? Is this what crying is like?

If so, crying is  _awful._

"It's all over, can't you see that? We could dance round it forever, but the point is that you're like– like some kind of bloody  _pacemaker_ , and if anyone so much as  _looks_  at you in future, I will  _hurt them._ "

John smiles ever so slightly. "Bit not good."

"No?"

"No."

There is nothing good inside Sherlock, he realizes. Nothing. Because that came from the bottom of his heart, and even still it's wrong somehow. He meant every word of it like a gift. And it's still bloody wrong. And that song is still playing. Then it occurs to him that this is what John is for. It might not be fair that he's the one with the warm stomach who can tell when things are good, but he did promise to explain about the good continuum on a case by case basis.

"What would be better?" he asks.

Because he has no idea.

John looks as judicious as he can, under the circumstances. He rubs his thumb a little into the skin at the line of Sherlock's hair. "Dunno. How about you love me?"

Oh, god, wrong.

Sherlock shakes his head very hard against the wool with his throat clenching against nothing and his heart hammering and his brain flying in seven thousand different directions. That song. That song is still playing. It won't stop playing.

Smash the song.

He tries.

It does smash, and now it's fragmented into both itself and other interwoven parts of the album. Pieces of it are playing non-continuously. It's all out of order. He'd prefer to be electrocuted just now than hear another word of it, and he's been electrocuted before. Twice.

"Right," says John on a bit of a sigh. "Okay. Why not?"

"Because that isn't  _new  _information," he says miserably.

That isn't it, not exactly, it's only a piece of it, but he doesn't want to say the whole reason. The whole reason is quite long. And he has no idea what's fine anymore. Nothing that's coming out of his mouth appears to mean what he thinks it does.

"Well," John says, clearing his throat a bit as if he's reached a decision. "Fine, then. I love  _you._ How's that?"

It's absolutely  _devastating._

Sherlock flinches like he's been slapped, and yes, this is probably what crying is like. It turns out to be  _involuntary_ , which is scientifically interesting, and legitimately new information. He decides that if his entire face is buried in John's belly, that might keep him from passing out, so he does just that, while he thinks:

_Why in hell would you ever suggest I say that to you  _(yellow lorry slow) _, and now of all times, I couldn't say it, I just couldn't, not exactly because I would have been repeating old information, though surely you must know how I feel by now if you don't have the tiniest little mind in all of England_  (I never give you my number) _, not really because of that, but because you're meant to say those particular words when you're happy, aren't you  _(soon we'll be away from here) _, when something happens that's wonderful, that's when you should say it, when you're flying  _(one two three four five six seven) _, and I know I never quite bothered even then  _(and in the middle of the celebrations, I break down) _, but fucking Donovan has been of more use to you in the last week than I have_  (boy, you're gonna carry that weight) _, I've been next to worthless, and anyway if I love you, particularly if I tell you about it today of all days  _(all the money's gone, nowhere to go) _, then you'll be getting thrown into skips for the rest of your life  _(any jobber got the sack) _, why say something like that on a day this horrifying, not a thing about today is worth marking in that fashion, you idiot  _(and in the middle of negotiations, you break down) _, why are you such an idiot, and how can you love me when you're the one with the warmth and I'm the one sucking it out of you like a leech, and anyway I already told you I love crime scenes  _(I only give you my situation) _, I love crime scenes, John, remember when I said that  _(and in the middle of investigations, I break down) _, on that perfectly wonderful day  _(carry that weight a long time) _, on that day I could never have imagined even if I tried, and I'm a genius with the imagination of a god, John, and you still were something I never expected, and I still never expect you  _(once there was a way to get back homeward) _, and you were a crime scene, remember  _(you never give me your money) _, don't you recall how you were a crime scene and I tasted you and you were perfect, and didn't you bloody well hear a word I said?  _(all good children go to heaven) _Didn't you hear me?_

_Language,_  thinks Sherlock, in the very depths of exhaustion. _Sod the entire English language. Get it out, get it out._

Sherlock wants very badly to say something to John, in light of recent announcements. But it's devastating to learn that language is entirely useless. The very idea of having words in his mouth disgusts him, and he feels emptier than anyone with this wicked a maelstrom inside him should do, and so, Sherlock thinks as he tugs up John's jumper and gets a mouthful of soft skin, John is going to have to be  _closer._ Otherwise something terrible will happen.

He'd have stopped there if John had objected _._ But he'd only arched towards him marginally, as if he weren't thinking about it, and so that's all right. Everything's all right now, he'll get these blasted trousers open and have John in his mouth and never have to worry about the rest of it ever again. At least this is something he  _knows_  to be fine, and he doesn't want anything back from it either. Just John here, alive, and something real on his tongue other than words.

Something good.

And it's just as wonderful as he thinks it will be. But only for a moment, because orgasms are like death. So of course, John's are no different. They happen sudden, and swift, and one at a time.

After, he goes into the bathroom and looks in the mirror for ten minutes, trying to recall what it felt like to be him four days ago. He can't.

Sherlock comes out again and changes the sheets on his bed, because high time that happened and now the pair of them have been gone for so long, they're a dusty business. He can't think where his spare set might be, and can't be bothered either, so he gets John's out of the cupboard at the top of the stairs. He wonders if they'll fit his bed. They do. When he's finished, he goes back to the sofa and slides one wiry arm under John's shoulders and the other under his knees.

"You're calling it a night," he announces quietly.

John is completely unconscious again, and he so receives no reply. Marvelous. He carries him into the bedroom where the coverlet is already pulled down.

He gets them undressed and settled to his liking, and then he crawls into bed himself and switches the light off. He lies on his back perfectly still, with his fingertips tented up by his lips in the dark. The song is gone. It went away when John finished, with his hand wildly mussing Sherlock's hair. The surface level, the top layer of Sherlock's brain, is quiet again. Underneath it's another matter, he knows, but he's not about to delve any deeper tonight. He'll steeple his fingertips and live forever in this upper story, with John next to him and the sheets all smelling of army doctor.

"Sherlock."

"Hmm?" he says.

"I don't know how I got here," the sleepy, affectionate voice continues. "And I know I'm short. But if you ever pick me up again, I'll bloody well kill you."

Sherlock smiles into the dark. A real smile, and one nobody will ever see, he's happy to know. There are generally between nineteen and thirty items on the Not Fine list at any given instant. But the last one never changes. At times, it is number twenty-three, or at times, like now, it is number twenty-seven. But it's always the final one, and the one he's most convinced he should never ever say:

27. If I were dying already, really dying, of disease or poison or a gunshot wound, or an explosion, and there were seconds left, and nothing anyone could do, I'd want you to kill me. It would be the best end to any life of all time. I'd want you to be the only thing amazing enough to end me, and I'd want to give it to you.

Mulling over dying isn't a bit sad to Sherlock, and he knows that's where he goes wrong with most people. Being dead would be so peaceful, he supposes, and anyway it happens to everyone. It's what people do. The rest of it, the interim between being born and being quiet—that's the part he pictures when people say  _hell._

"You're too far away over there," John adds.

Sherlock sighs, and untents his fingers, and moves over.

Sherlock holds a small eulogy for the English language the next day. He celebrates the life and death of English by saying to John, "Good morning," which he never says on principle because he thinks it's asinine, because you can't tell yet, can you? John looks at him like he's an asylum inmate, and that's fine. He's simply not going to be bothered about it anymore.

He goes on with the work he also loves, the saving grace he first married. John feels better, so he comes too. He sees all of it right beside Sherlock, the murders and the robberies and the loves and revenges and the thick smear of greed over the world. They try to stop people doing harm.

It's an endless task.

It's something to do.

So there are cases, and they are wonderful.

There is John, and he is wonderful.

There are the times between cases, and they are not wonderful.

But John is still there even when the cases aren't, so that's something.

English being dead to him, Sherlock doesn't even feel guilty that when he finally does mention to John that he loves him, he throws it on the floor between them like the end of a spent fag. He drawls it out in his most arch, bored, disdainful manner because John is nagging him about humanism again, and it's infuriating. He's so irritated that John wants him  _feel_  about strangers, about victims, which makes no  _sense._ He  _feels_  about one person already, and that's quite enough to be going on with. He doesn't  _want  _to feel like this about strangers, it would be excruciating. So he says the word  _love_  in the identical tone he uses when he says the word  _idiot,_  and he knows it. He doesn't care. John goes quiet and thoughtful, so maybe that was a mistake, but Sherlock doesn't mind the angle his head cocks to a bit, because John has a little cleft in his chin, and now Sherlock can see it better. John deserves this, anyway. For wanting to hear something that monumental on the Last of the Skip Days, all but the title of which has been erased from the hard drive.

They keep at it. The gruesome cases, and the three-a.m. biryanis, and the kitchen experiments, and the hungry sex.

_I never needed English in the first place,_  Sherlock thinks triumphantly.

Then there is a stretch of six entire days of being  _bored._

Nothing is happening, nothing that happened before counts, nothing will ever happen again. All the colours are gone,  _all of them_ , the whiteness is back, and the whiteness is worse, the whiteness will finally kill him one of these days, Sherlock imagines. He can't see a thing like this. He can't see the eggplant colour of his favourite shirt, whether a curry's going to be any good, how many times a pedestrian's garment has been washed, whether something is pink or actually salmon, he can't see his violin patina and he can't see John's hair. Losing the colour  _dishwater_  is the final straw, as it happens. At last, in a desperate bid for action, something to shake the white off and wake him up again, because he's sinking into the lower levels where the howling din lives and he knows it, Sherlock types on  _The Science of Deduction_  website:

If any of you pathetic lot out there who like to send me threatening revenge notes are actually possessed of a pair of bollocks, now is a good time, as I haven't anything on.

The next three days are bloody marvelous.

Sherlock is nearly poisoned twice, once when John is present, and he throws John's ravioli away for good measure. He is shot at three times, and on each occasion, John shoots back. They catch everyone who dares to come after them, catch them with elegance and ruthless efficiency, and Sherlock is glowing like a Christmas tree. A car tries to run him down, but he rolls over the boot and John shoots the tire. Once an actual, honest-to-god poisoned dart lands in an advert for a punk concert pasted to the wall Sherlock is leaning against, which leads to a spectacular chase down the Embankment into the docks.

When things settle a bit, John grows suspicious. On a Friday night in their flat just as the sun is beginning to sink.

"Hard to believe that many people wanted to kill you just now, and you claim none of it was connected," he points out.

Sherlock is barely listening. The whiteness is gone and he is managing splendidly. He is writing an article, in fact, about the psychology of guessing people's account passwords. The wisdom of posting it is debatable, but at least he's included a guideline for making them indecipherable and still memorable. John has his own computer in his lap over on the sofa, likewise typing away.

"Sherlock?"

Sherlock registers he's being spoken to.

"You can't really find it surprising that people want to kill me, can you?" he smirks.

"Not that part," John owns. "The dry spells and sudden floods part."

"Maybe it had something to do with forces I can't understand. Phases of the moon," Sherlock says innocently. Typing  _dates of birth of admired historical figures, when mixed with vivid images, can be random and yet memorable enough to–_

"You could understand the moon's phases if you bothered, and no, I don't think all those chaps trying to kill you were werewolves."

Ten minutes later, John slams Sherlock's laptop closed.

It's so unprecedented that he can't make a sound. There John stands, right up against his crossed legs where he sits in his chair, holding his own laptop open in Sherlock's face. It's  _The Science of Deduction_ , of course. And the challenge he offered. John is so angry that he looks calm, as he does when he's holding a gun. How angry is that, precisely? Sherlock tries to calculate it for a moment. But he's prevented.

"What in bloody fuck do you think you're about?" John growls at him.

"Don't," Sherlock warns sharply. "I needed it, needed to move, to be able to  _think._ "

"In order to be able to think, you invited a gang of paroled criminals to engage in open war, the field of battle being Westminster? Are you off your fucking  _head_ , Sherlock?"

"Don't get a strop on, I never meant to–"

"Of course you never meant it to go badly, never meant any harm by it, never spared a thought at all, really. I can't even... right. So that's what life is to you, then. That's what it's worth. It's just a chess piece to you, isn't it? My life, everyone else's, I know they're separate categories, but they're still just little bits of wood for you to play with, you completely arse about face  _bastard._ Me, a scrap of wood worth retaining for the time being, and everyone else all pawns. Then there's your life, and that's just the queen, I suppose, still a game piece, god knows you don't give a damn about it the way normal people do. So here I go round and round with you in these matches—what am I, a knight? Bishop? Tell me sometime. And then. What, Sherlock? I'm meant to read a notice like this without being a bit gutted? It's utterly sick, the sheer number of things you didn't think about before posting this. Did it ever occur to you that your little open season on Sherlock Holmes announcement might end with you dead?"

Sherlock closes his eyes. He can't answer that one, it'll be taken wrong, because yes—that occurred to him.

"My god. You're a fucking lunatic," John breathes.

"And you're a complete idiot," Sherlock snarls back. "You  _know  _I'm like this, you just never bothered to think I might  _always  _be like this. But I will be."

"Is it all to prove you're clever? Is that all it is? Fine, you're the cleverest sodding man alive, are you happy? I'll write it in the blog. All right? Are you through now? Is it about being clever?"

"Sometimes," he whispers.

"Is it about being brave?"

"No."

"It's about risk, then, and also about being clever."

"It's about being  _bored._ "

"And the rest of the world can go hang."

"Something like that. No. I'd not have wanted that, no one was hurt."

"No one was hurt by  _accident._ "

"If you truly think that, you're as stupid as all the rest of them," Sherlock snaps. " _Are_  you as stupid as the rest of them? Because you've been giving me the impression that you're ever so slightly above the common herd. Exactly five people weren't hurt, and it wasn't an accident, none of it was an accident."

John touches his tongue to his lower lip, still staggeringly furious. It's like watching _National Geographic_ , Sherlock thinks, when something very small and furry and soft suddenly seems made of teeth.

"Right. This is going to go on, then. This sort of thing."

"Probably."

"Sherlock, do you want me to get killed by some nutter you sent to gaol ten years ago when you were at uni?"

"I'd die first."

"Do you want to die?"

"Not at the moment."

John takes a deep breath at this.

"Sherlock," he says, "why can't you just be content without mayhem for as long as six  _days_? Do you want me to have to  _watch_  you die?"

_Now that,  _thinks Sherlock,  _would be very interesting._

"If I were dying, I'd want you there, but not the way you mean it," Sherlock says. "Don't keep at me like this any longer, it's useless, you'll never understand it, English doesn't work. This is horrible."

"What's horrible is knowing that you'd prefer I stay angry than to waste the smallest particle of energy explaining yourself."

"It won't make any sense to you."

" _You  _won't be  _bothered._ "

"You won't understand."

"And my not understanding is worse than you getting yourself murdered?"

_"Yes,"_  Sherlock snaps on his way out the door and down the stairs.

He walks for a very long time. Or at least, it feels that way. He's forgotten his coat, but it's a mild enough evening when all is considered, everything getting warmer by the day, and anyway he doesn't feel the cold the way normal people do. Doesn't feel a thing the way normal people do. He walks north, over the York Bridge and into Regent's Park. There are beginning to be buds on the trees high above him, and the roses no longer look like sad little shrubs. He skirts the edge of the boating lake full of grey birds and greyer statues. Sherlock keeps going. He finds a bench under a massive weeping willow, or maybe it finds him, as he wasn't looking for anything in particular. He sits down, wondering whether this communicating business could possibly be any more tiring. An old woman twenty yards away is feeding popcorn to pigeons, and Sherlock wonders if that's a good idea for the birds. Possibly not.

It's relatively quiet in his head at the moment, but that's temporary. So he thinks over what he should bring back to John by way of apology for being who he is. It's something useful to do.

He's rejected flowers, take-out, a new mobile that isn't John's sister's, and the sort of jumper that makes John look like a veteran with a stunningly beautiful scar on his left shoulder under the fall of wool, and not a pastry lump, when John sits down next to him. Slides under his arm a bit, really. Clearly Sherlock was followed. He thinks back. Yes, from the moment he crossed Baker Street, actually, he simply didn't allow it to register because John is not a threat.

"All right?" says John.

Sherlock can't quite answer. Even though it's merely a figure of speech.

"I went the wrong way about that," John amends.

Sherlock swallows, shifts his grip on the park bench. It's true, but he's probably not meant to agree.

"You can agree with me, you know. I'm not that devious."

Sherlock nods very subtly. John's right. He isn't.

"The thing is, I wasn't asking you the right question, and I'd like to mend that. So. You're ready?"

"For your one proper question?"

"Right."

"Oh, get it over with," Sherlock moans dramatically.

"What's it like in your brain, when it gets so bad that you pull these stunts? What's going on in there?"

Shaking his head, Sherlock feels a bitter smile lifting one corner of his mouth. "You don't want to know that."

John folds his hands together. He's not wearing a coat either, and he snugs a bit closer under Sherlock's arm. His hair isn't blond and it isn't brown, and it's lovely. John has type A– blood. John sleeps curled up like a cat before the sands blow through his mind. John smells like every warm thing in the world Sherlock has ever yet encountered, every good thing, but mostly of spiced tea, especially at pulse points. John is indispensable. John is too curious for his own good.

"Try me," John suggests.

"Not to mince words, but what you're proposing frightens me half to death."

"You're not frightened of anything."

"No? You're very unobservant for a doctor, and the best of them are none too observant as it is. It won't work, I tell you. You don't speak my language."

"All right. If I can tell you what frightens you, will you try?"

"I'll take that bet," Sherlock says viciously. "I'll even tell you what you're about to say, save you the trouble, you think I'm frightened because once I've explained and you understand, you'll be afraid of me and you'll leave. Wrong."

"Right. Only an idiot would think that. I think that if you  _try  _to explain it, for the first time in your life, and to me, and it doesn't work, you'll be devastated."

Sherlock turns his head, tilts his face down to look at John. John's eyes aren't blue, and they aren't green, and they aren't hazel. His brow is furrowed just now, and he's five foot seven, and the dip in the flesh just under his nose tastes more like  _him  _than almost anywhere else, and Sherlock finds all of this terrifying at the moment. Because John is right.

"Go on," John says quietly. "I'm very understanding. It's a talent of mine, like right and wrong. I'm sorry I raked you over coals backwards like that, and not more sensibly, but you're an impossibility. I want to strangle you sometimes. You're a walking paradox. Help me understand. You're a genius, so I know you can do it."

Sherlock's mouth parts slightly.

"Don't look like that, Sherlock, take your time about it. Okay? Just. Breathe a bit, then tell me."

So Sherlock thinks over ways to say it, watching the old woman poison the pigeons with corn. It doesn't seem likely to go well, but he might as well enter the fray with a battle plan.

Microwaves infuriate me.

When all the colours go away, it's just white, and then I can't see your hair.

Everything in the world except you would do well by being burnt to a crisp.

I'm incredible, and if I'm not being incredible constantly, I'm merely a sociopath who likes to think about dying.

It's like Chinese water torture.

It's like reading a map in Serbian when all you know is English.

It's a constant battle.

I get so tired sometimes, and I never show it, because it's not the sort of tired you feel in that sense, the never knowing what's right.

Then he understands a way he might say it. It has nothing to do with microwaves, and everything to do with John Watson.

"You won't like what I'm about to do to you, but I need to... hurt you slightly if you're going to understand it," Sherlock sighs. "I never intended even to try this, I'd given it up, but you want me to, yes? You're sure?"

John doesn't even blink. "Absolutely sure. Do your worst."

"You're certifiably mad, you know that, don't you?" Sherlock asks coolly, resting his hand to the side of John's head, his elbow on the back of the bench rail. "You're wired wrong."

"I've seen worse."

"Fine, then—and I'm here the whole time, right here, stop me if it's too much." Sherlock wants to close his eyes, but he doesn't. He'll keep them trained on John, make certain that John is all right, that he is listening. "Picture a firefight in Afghanistan. You're in the middle of it, John, just bullets flying and tanks being hit with mortar shells and people screaming. Dark sounds, terrible sounds. A score of people are screaming—some are angry, and some are frightened, and some are dying. Some are wounded, some are killing. Some adults, some women, some children, all in pain, and you can't understand a word, it's all in Dari and Pashto. They're right in your ears, all screaming for different reasons. There are explosions surrounding you to the point that you can't tell where one ends and another begins, and the heat is excruciating, and your ears are ringing, would be shrieking if the screaming stopped. But the screaming doesn't stop, and the firefight only crawls closer, and you can't move. You're trapped, in the middle of it. Can you picture it? Are you picturing it,  _really  _picturing it?"

"Yes," John says softly, his eyes wide and his hand steady.

"So you go into your head, don't you? Deep down, where it's quiet? You're there now, aren't you, just from my describing it?"

John nods. It makes his hair brush into Sherlock's fingertips. Sherlock does shut his eyelids now, and for a simple enough reason. He can't keep them open any longer.

"What if what was inside your head was worse than what was outside?"

His eyes are closed because he can't see what John looks like, failing to understand this. He can't. It  _will  _decimate him when John can't comprehend what he's saying, the minute John says  _Have you tried lithium?_  Sherlock will have a very strong desire to spread his arms and fall off the top of the Eye. So he doesn't look. He feels John's face with his fingertips. So far, it's still. Very still. So far, he's rapt. For the moment.

"What if it were never quiet anywhere? And then, what if you weren't _  you_ at all—what if you were clever, really clever, the cleverest person you can imagine, and you felt all of it straight through to the bone, and you couldn't stop being clever or go quiet, what if you had to stay where the screaming was for all time?"

"I'd go insane," John says.

"Well, that's what it feels like."

"All the time?"

"No. But sometimes. When I'm bored. Perhaps... _bored_ might not be the proper term. Then, I mean."

Another quiet falls. Sherlock can hardly bear to breathe any longer.

"For god's sake, look at me, you mad wanker," John requests.

Sherlock opens his eyes. John doesn't look a bit confused, as it happens. He's not smiling, as he does when he's puzzled and ashamed of it. He's not frowning either, as he does when he's puzzled by something more serious and isn't bothering to be ashamed. He looks just the way he does when he understands something perfectly. His thin brows up and his lips quite even and all of him so quiet and so calm.

"You've been a comprehensive prick, and as a result I've been rather beastly," John remarks. "I don't. Just. If you can't  _tell_  me something, then can't you at least tell me that you can't tell me? And then I'll fish it out somehow?"

Sherlock thinks it over. He's so relieved that this seems to have worked, he can feel his skin tingling. As if it had been wrapped too tight a moment ago, and now it fits him.

"I think I can manage that."

"And then," John continues, "when you feel this way, might we first try... alternatives to your usual death wish?"

"What sort?"

"Dunno. Firing range."

"Dull."

"Science?"

"Doesn't always suffice."

"Annoying your brother."

"Not bad."

"Flying lessons."

"Whatever for?"

"Sex, then."

"How am I meant to want to have sex with you when I can't even  _see  _you? I can't see a thing when it gets like that, even you're a blank. That's what I was trying to get back."

"Pretty visual, your libido, isn't it?"

"I'm a man. I'm not  _biologically  _freakish. Do pay attention."

"Fuck it, then," John says with a shrug. "We'll risk our lives, prove we're clever. Suited us down to the ground so far."

The woman feeding the pigeons and likely ruining their diets glances in their direction just as Sherlock leans down and kisses John like he's some kind of poison antidote. He's never kissed anyone in a public park, so far as he can recall. Not because he'd have objected, but possibly because  _they  _might have done. Seb certainly would have, what with the upper-class homosexual-so-long-as-it-suits-me attitude, and the aspirations-to-a-trophy-wife secrecy. That disgusted Sherlock, but not quite so much as it hurt his feelings. And he does have them. Feelings, that is. Sherlock is legendary, he's a walking marvel, people should want to kiss him in public parks. They should  _initiate  _that sort of thing. He'd have forgiven Seb for being bisexual, but he can't quite pardon him for being a hypocrite. So he's not opposed to trying it out, no,  _god no,_  it's fine,  _very very fine_ , he's never minded the notion of sending his tongue between someone's teeth on a green knoll not far from the boating lake. And it's what John would call fine as well, to be sure, and thank god for that.

But what's truly miraculous just now is that John has apparently resurrected an entire dead language. Sherlock doesn't stop kissing him, his mouth is too warm, but he does smile over John's lips. Then something even happier drifts to the surface, and he breathes out half of a silent laugh.

"What on earth are you giggling over this time?" John demands, one hand on Sherlock's thigh and one at the back of his white neck.

"Nothing. You're a very good doctor. Very, very good, better than you realize. Stop interrogating me, we're kissing now."

"I'm not a bit interrogating you, and anyway. We're only scrapping this way out of sheer affection. If you get yourself murdered, I'll  _kill you._ Yes? Watch me."

"Perfect," Sherlock gasps. "God, that's perfect, and you don't even know why. You're perfect. Do shut up. I've never gotten off with anyone in Regent's Park before."

So they kiss until they decide they're through. It takes rather a long time on Sherlock's end. The sun is very nearly down, and bobbies are about to be eying them suspiciously. It's all quite decadent, and public, and altogether thrilling.

But John doesn't seem to mind in the slightest.

It's exactly one fortnight later when Sherlock makes a severe miscalculation.

John is with the Yard on the ground floor of the dry goods warehouse. He's with D.I. Geoff Lestrade, of whom Sherlock is frankly rather fond these days, and with Anderson, the horrid prat, and with Donovan, at whom Sherlock now winks. She never winks back, hasn't once done, she rolls her eyes at him. But he can tell that she means well by it. And she smiles when he isn't looking, he can see her in car mirrors, though he suspects that she knows he can see her in car mirrors. So that's something, and she didn't let John down, after all, did she? All of those people—along with most of the criminals in question—remain below. Sherlock, several dozen steps ahead of everyone, is on the first floor. He's cornered the man they are truly after, the leader of the band of filth. He's nabbed a very elusive criminal indeed. One with shining gold teeth and a name like a spat curse. _Kratides._ And then something very exciting, very interesting, and very unlucky happens.

The man called Kratides, guilty of running a sex slavery ring on the banks of the Thames, has a machete somehow. He uses it.

It slices through the top of Sherlock's thigh like it's sweeping through grass. And Sherlock falls.

Just like grass does.

He thinks,  _I saw hay being cut once, in the countryside, and it looked like I just did. Not so red, though. And anyhow, even apart from the red, straw doesn't create puddles this way._

Everything fades a bit then.

The concrete is improbably cold. Sherlock tries to shout out for help, but realizes that he's not very good at it, not having had any practice. He never calls for help. Never. He'd supposed it beneath him all this time. So making his voice work when the pain is cutting through his body and his eyes are hid behind a curtain of sparks proves difficult. Sherlock wonders what the term  _bleeding out  _means to a doctor, and next wonders if that's what he's doing. It's very difficult to make enough sound when the top of your thigh or perhaps the bottom of your pelvis is slashed open, but if he's bleeding out, John would want to know theoretically. Being a medical man.

He really ought to try shouting again. Seeing as all this cutting business might have to do with his femoral artery. He does try, but finds it impossible by this time.

His phone is on his uninjured side, though. Perfect. Even though he's shaking, fast losing the strength in his fingers, he gets it out. The right message. Everything important, that is. Everything he wants known about who he's turned into in the past few months.

_First floor, being murdered._  
 _You were the best part of it._ –SH

Sherlock awakens in hospital.

Many different things hurt him, he realizes. They hurt severely. And that's through a great deal of painkiller.

His leg, for starters. That feels very badly damaged. His head. His head is second. Maybe even vying for first. His head is full of spider's silk.

Sunday morning yellow lorry any jobber magic feeling.

That's not right. He tries again.

One sweet dream once there was a way came true today to get back homeward.

Lord, no. That's all bollocksed.

Nothing is firing properly. And when he moves...

Oh.

Sherlock looks down and sees a hospital gown. And a massive pack of gauzy bandaging around his upper thigh.

Why is that there?

No one else is in this hospital room. It's small, true, but still oddly empty. It's also a very dull beige. He'd ask Mycroft if the gift of privacy was his doing, as usual, but of course he hasn't the slightest idea where his mobile has got to. That's an equally uncomfortable sensation, like having his mouth taped shut. There's one window, with blinds drawn. A standing curtain alongside the bed, but he can see the door anyhow. Private rooms are expensive. Mycroft, then. Sherlock is glad he made that deduction. Otherwise he might as well be the last person on earth, for all this eerie silence.

His throat is parched nearly closed. That's wrong too, because he has an IV drip attached to his arm. When he sees it, and sees what sorts of bags are hanging there, he realizes two things. First, he is very lucky to be alive. Second, he lost a very great deal of blood and now is being subjected to a transfusion. Obviously, that's why his salivary glands are lagging. Needles piercing his arm are an all too familiar sensation, but he doesn't dwell on that part. He can't. That's a terrible loop, a level of hell.

Too late now, though. The detective stares at the metal in his forearm anyhow. He shivers.

Sherlock fights not to feel as if this is all  _disgusting._ He can bear to be immobilized, but not by means of his own weakness. He can bear to be hurt, but this is different. He can't even  _move._ And of course he can bear to be treated in hospital, that has happened more times than he can reasonably number. ( _Fifteen times now,_  Sherlock corrects himself. Ruthless as ever.) But it's revolting to suppose that bits of him now had belonged to another person entirely, that what's beneath his skin is alien, it sends his head skipping like a rock over a flat pond, it's  _repulsive._

When the door pushes open, Sherlock forces his pale eyes open a bit wider.

The first thing he notices is that John seems to be talking. The bags beneath his eyes have doubled up again, and he's paler than normal, but he's very calm, and obviously taking some care to explain what's happened, and it's unfortunate really that Sherlock seems to have lost English again, as they were growing so adept at it. John's brow furrows. He's so patently tired that even the cleft in his chin looks cut deeper. He's wearing scrubs for trousers and a white cotton t-shirt. He reaches for Sherlock's wrist and sets his fingers over the pulse point, checking his watch at the same time.

The second thing Sherlock notices is that John has a little piece of white cotton taped to his left arm.

It can't be.

Maybe it can.

It's too good for the likes of him. It's an actual, honest to god dream come true.

"Right. There we are," John says, and it's the first thing Sherlock manages to register properly. "Your pulse is much stronger. Thank Christ."

Sherlock glances back at the transfusion bag and then at John's arm again.

"There was a terrible accident on the M4," John explains. "Jackknifed petrol truck on the motorway. Dreadful business, nothing to do with us, of course. They'd run through all the A negative, though."

Raising an eyebrow, Sherlock asks a question.

"Three pints, actually, but they gave me back enough of the plasma to– have you any idea how big an idiot you are? Can you actually speak yet? Good. Shut up. You lost– I thought you were. Jesus, Sherlock, that was the worst thing you could have possibly done to me... and a  _machete_? What next, a fucking  _broadsword_? And  _alone_? You couldn't wait two buggering minutes for– and that  _text message._ Screaming never did occur to you? I swear to Christ, for a genius, you are the biggest moron ever born. I'm through with this. Really. Just. I'm done. You'll walk without any trouble, we think, you're very lucky and had a fine surgeon, I know him slightly, but– Sherlock, sorry, why in bloody hell are you smiling like an entire psych ward at me? I haven't the patience."

"Sorry," Sherlock whispers. "It's just such a wonderful day. It's Christmas, it's just... better than anything."

John's kindly face is beginning to resemble a much-folded piece of scrap paper, and it's the most stunning thing Sherlock has ever seen. The doctor sighs, and tries to work this out. It's a struggle, though, and he's in a bit of a strop again, and Sherlock doesn't blame him for not understanding. Sherlock can't stop smiling either, however. It's all too utterly lovely. Suddenly, just as John's beginning to glare in profound and sheepish annoyance, John glances along Sherlock's line of sight and finds his own arm.

"You're... my god."

One corner of Sherlock's lips quirks up still higher.

"Happy about the blood transfusion?"

Sherlock nods. This is  _spectacular_. How did he end up here? He never expected it to go this well, his life, the way all the pieces fit together now.

John rubs his hands over his face and sits on the bedside further from the machete gash. He reaches for a water glass and Sherlock obligingly sips from it. Sherlock suspects he's probably smiling all the while, because John looks like he wants to shake him, but that can't be helped.

"Let me get this right. You nearly died. You sent me a text whilst you were almost-dying, so– Almost a sweet text, really. Very nearly touching. Not quite, but– No, never mind. Anyway, I've proof of it. Concrete proof. And now I gave you blood, and you're a kid at the seashore."

Shrugging, Sherlock grins again. "Take some of mine."

"What?"

"You can have some of mine back."

"Sherlock, that is precisely the opposite of the  _point._ "

"I don't mind. John, I don't. It's a present."

John tucks away a piece of black hair which he clearly found to be impeding his view of Sherlock's expression. "Let me explain this to you. My blood, which I spent time and effort producing, is in my veins. And yours. _Your_  blood, on the other hand, is largely to be found on the first floor of a warehouse. Which is  _your fault._ Spilled all over the concrete, you see. You absolutely incorrigible  _tosser._ Wasted blood everywhere. Scared me half to death."

"I know. I'm sorry, take some of mine back."

John blinks, fighting not to smile himself. "You're completely high, aren't you?"

Pondering the question, Sherlock cannot find this accusation to be true. It takes more drugs than this to get him completely high. But if he says something ridiculous or  _Not Fine_ , as he suspects he's already doing, maybe being high would be a good excuse.

"Yes, but that doesn't matter, I've thought it over for ages and this is perfect. I'll give you some."

"No."

"Just a little."

"I don't want a unit of morphine-laced vampire blood, thanks all the same."

"I'm  _not  _a vampire," Sherlock says before he realizes John is joking, his lips still quivering with the barely suppressed smile. "All right, fine, I'm a vampire, I'll just... regenerate it, won't I? I can't be killed like this. So take a bit."

"You need your blood."

"Just a syringe full. Take it. Can't you understand, it's such a  _wonderful_  day," Sherlock laughs.

"You," John says very carefully and fondly, his thinner lips against Sherlock's wide ones, "are hereby officially declared clinically insane by a medical professional. And stop giggling, it's a hospital ward."

Sherlock does stop, but only because John is kissing him. The idea that John is kissing Sherlock and he has John's blood at the same time is downright magical. Nothing will ever be better than this, he expects, objectively speaking it's too much to hope for. Nothing possibly could top having John's blood while John's kissing him. But John is very unpredictable, after all, and they lead dangerous lives. Maybe one day something will surpass even this moment. Sherlock had never expected the rest of it, so it's reasonable to assume he'll never see the next incredible thing coming either.

How  _marvelous._

"Just a tiny little injection. Say you'll think about it."

"I'll think about it when you aren't high as a kite." John is kissing his eyelids now, and it's all so peaceful. Everything quiet for once, and everything warm. "Even though it would be of no medical value whatever. Is this you being romantic?"

"It's a reasonable hypothesis," Sherlock agrees.

"Right. Should have seen that one coming. You being romantic is... quite terrifying."

"You react well to stress. You're reacting well now."

"Thank you. Anything else you'd like to tell me while you're hopped up on opium derivatives?"

"There was a song that wouldn't stop, and I tried smashing it, but then you made it go away."

John blinks, tucks the sheet in more neatly. "You're welcome."

"English was broken, but you fixed it."

"That's impossible. And nonsense. Impossible nonsense, but—not surprisingly—I think I know what you mean."

"You'll want my blood later, you'll see." Sherlock's eyes are fluttering shut again. He's very happy and very, very tired. "You'll want a bit of it, anyway. I'm amazing. Just look at me."

"Yes, well. You are admittedly amazing. And very beautiful under most circumstances. But you look like a crime scene currently. In fact."

_That's all to the good, though. You love crime scenes,_  thinks Sherlock.

He's no longer worried about whether or not this might be wishful thinking, either. John Watson has a scar on his shoulder that's a map of something, and one day Sherlock Holmes will work out what it is. John Watson looks ten years younger when he smiles. John Watson can shoot a gun like it grew out the end of his arm. John Watson knows when things are good, and he's the one gave him the blood in the first place, so it must be fine, everything's fine. It's almost as if someone understands him. And better than that, it's exactly as if someone is finally  _trying._ _If John Watson were a bit bigger,_  Sherlock thinks hazily,  _then he'd be proportionately more good and more warm as well, that's simply science, and then no one overseas would ever have shot at him because they'd have seen what he was at a distance, and they couldn't have done it. Thank god he is so small. And they missed it. Or he might never have come to London._

"You love crime scenes," Sherlock smiles, feeling fingers brush his face as he drifts off again.

"God, yes," he hears last of all. "I bloody well  _do,_  don't I?"
Entirely Covered in Your Invisible Name

Sherlock solves crimes, loses himself, comes back again, and all the while John prays that he never comes to his senses.

John is reasonably sure that one of these days, Sherlock is going to come to his senses.

Oh, he won't be any saner, that goes without saying—but eventually, John will cease to be the center of this maddening, bizarre, frantically gorgeous lunatic's universe. He doesn't like to think about it. But it seems inevitable.

Not that John is in any way insecure about his own charms. He may not be a genius, but he's very smart, made it through uni and frankly harrowing advanced physical chemistry and then the Army's special training, and he can do the Friday crosswords. He may not be handsome, but he's affable and doesn't ever think himself ugly. He's short, but he can kill a man from very, very far away. He certainly isn't fashionable, but he's neat and he's clean. His temper can be thin, granted, but he listens very well indeed and he's masterful at understanding the people he's listening to. He's scarred, but he's also brave. So that's something.

But none of that really explains Sherlock. Nor what seems to be best termed Sherlock's... obsession.

The point really comes home to him on Thursday afternoon at around five o'clock, in a gay bar in the East End, in pursuit of a suspect.

Sherlock Holmes, John has realized, is  _never_  going to stop alarming him. Never. He keeps coming up with new ways of doing it, and then pretending that whatever he did just then wasn't a bit outside normal parameters. For instance, just now he is shamming at being gay. He's leaning on the bar with one angular wrist, having undone an extra button on his white-on-white striped designer shirt, brushing the hair from the back of his neck and touching his collar every so often with his impossible fingers, flirting with an archaeologist who knows where his neighbour keeps her spare set of flat keys. Sherlock wants the flat keys. The archaeologist wants Sherlock.

John wants another drink. And to quit getting wildly possessive urges that make him feel like a fourth former.

The archaeologist is tall, with close-cropped blond hair and very blue eyes, and his clothes are effortlessly rumpled, and he's clearly very muscular underneath them. No one in the bar is ogling the archaeologist, however. They are ogling Sherlock, who just took a shot of vodka and then licked his lips and then drew the back of one finger over his lower one. The miraculous one, the one that's both round and squared-off at once. Then Sherlock smiles, and nips the same lip with one upper tooth for exactly half a second. John wonders if it would make any difference to the archaeologist to know that Sherlock isn't a bit like that, that he's better and madder and darker and stiller and sharper, or if the archaeologist would take him to bed anyway. He'd bet a fiver the chap wouldn't give a damn. Just  _look_  at Sherlock. Christ.

In this light, the man's cheekbones are mathematically absurd. They ought to be feminine, first of all. And second, they ought to be harsh. They're neither.

Jesus Christ.

Now Sherlock has turned round with both elbows on the bar and is leaning back so prettily and so sensually—no, strike that, _sexually_ —that every man in the place with a clear view is probably at half-mast. Too much of his alabaster chest is visible. He's made his eyes glow silver somehow, as if he owns some sort of inner backup generator. John has never seen him lounge with his pelvis so far forward, and that isn't even the worst of it. He's batting his eyelashes. His  _eyelashes._ No one on earth has ever been gayer, and Sherlock isn't even– _is_  Sherlock gay?

_I'm losing my mind,_  John thinks. _He was inside me eight hours ago._

Sherlock puts his hand on the blond man's forearm, gripping it, and the other man's palm slides very naturally over Sherlock's waist. John looks away because if he doesn't, he'll ruin Sherlock's performance. Possibly by getting into a serious ruck. Sherlock would never let him live that down, and after all there are much worse things happening in this very bar at this very moment. So long as he's not looking, he can wait out the blind rage. Must do, because he doesn't want to make things awkward for Sherlock by murdering a stranger in a gay pub. It would make for an embarrassing time with Lestrade.

John knows the instant Sherlock learns where the flat keys are, because he thanks the archaeologist for the shot, winks at him, and dives for the rear door. Walking normally now, like an elegant bullet train screaming out of a station. John follows. They end up in an alley just back of the kitchens, everything smelling of fry oil. A ginger cat stares at them from within a little cardboard box and growls.

"You're not even gay, are you?" John marvels.

"Hmm?" Sherlock is texting. Of course he is. His fingers are moving at lightning speed, his eyes riveted. John reaches out, does up his shirt to the usual standard. He feels instantly better.

"Queer. _Are_  you gay?"

"Not exactly," his boyfriend owns. "Dreadful nuisance this, there's a front desk with an attendant, only one lift, staircase entrance in the foyer, we'd be seen trying to get to her spare set. I'm going to have to get in through the window."

"It's eleven flights up."

"Yes."

"Sherlock."

"A window-washing service."

"Sorry?"

"Who I'm texting, a window-washing service, he owes me a favour, I got his brother out of gaol six months–"

"No, no,  _no,_  Sherlock, back up a bit. When you say you're not  _exactly  _gay–"

"Neither are you," Sherlock points out mildly.

"So, you... right, then. You do sleep with women."

"Not once."

Sherlock sends his text. He stops, slides the phone in his jacket pocket, and stares at John. He crosses his arms, narrows his eyes a bit, focused and yet completely neutral. Trying to work out just what on earth has John in a strop this time.

"You've never shagged a woman, but you're not exactly gay."

"Right. Not exactly gay. Same as you."

"Nope, sorry, I've shagged plenty of women, on three continents in fact, and am simply bisexual."

"Asia, Europe, North America," Sherlock deduces placidly. "I never slept with any women, but that might be by accident, I haven't the data, I might have done. Who can say? I hardly fancied anyone enough to bother, and all of them were men."

"Yes, but you weren't– I mean to say, you... hang it."

Sherlock thinks this over.

"You want to tell me that I wasn't attracted to them because of their direct biology. Only who they were. That's true. Take Charles, for instance, I didn't sleep with him merely because he's a  _man_."

"Right. Yes, right, that  _is  _what I mean. Sorry, Charles?"

"The bloke I was chatting up just now, Charles. I didn't have sex with him because of his gender, exactly. I liked him."

This effectively sends the conversation veering along another track. Now John is actually angry. Before, he was just angry in principle and in theory. But now... now it's in earnest and in fact.

"That fellow you were just shamming gay over, flirting with, you've... you've... that's your ex."

"One of them. Why?"

If it were any man other than Sherlock—literally any man in the world—John would have punched him right in the jaw. Instead, John turns deliberately around, so as not to see Sherlock cocking an eyebrow at him. He looks at the brick wall, grimy with dirt and spray paint, right before his nose. After a minute's contemplation, he drops his head into the building.

"Hey, hey, easy," Sherlock says, sounding more annoyed than alarmed. "I never–"

"Thought I might be troubled by it," John says to the bricks, vaguely disgusted and more than a little put out. "That bit—though you're a genius—never occurred to you. That I might object."

"But why on earth  _should  _you? I need keys. Needed keys, we'll go another way about it now. Window washers."

John pounds his head into the wall just once. It doesn't hurt, but it's going to arrest Sherlock's attention. John himself isn't dramatic. But he does speak Sherlock's version of English and his version of body language and his version of silence. And those languages are very dramatic indeed. It works, very quickly. Sherlock grips John by both his shoulders, fisting his hands into John's dark plaid shirt, and turns him round. John's back hits red brick, and that's something. A very small victory, but a triumph nevertheless.

"Stop doing that," Sherlock says ominously.

"Okay. Did it cross your mind I might not like you throwing yourself at an... an ex?"

Sherlock makes the scoffing sound which means John is being dense. "But he's just a bit of data."

" _A bit of–_ you're off your head, completely. He's very, very, very fit, Sherlock."

"Dull."

"And well spoken."

"Boring."

"Sherlock, he goes round the world for a bloody living!"

"Charles could go round the mulberry bush for all I care, he's still tedious."

"Your nursery rhyme references are always disturbing, I want you to know."

Breathing a little quicker, swiftly growing worried, Sherlock seems to absorb this critique. But judging from the line between those eyebrows, just below where his black hair sweeps down to one side, he still hasn't caught on yet.

"Look, here we are," John offers, "I'd my tonsils out when I was a lad. Before that, I loved strawberry ice cream. Couldn't get enough of the stuff. But then my throat was sore. I had it... well, every day, Mum felt sorry for me, so there you are. She let me have bits of it whenever I couldn't eat much else. At first, it was grand. But then, everything changed. I got sick of it. Never wanted to see it again. Wretched business, strawberry ice cream, but it's my own fault I don't care for it, I was the one gorged on the stuff. So you see, you'll grow tired of this. One day. Being with a..." John clears his throat loudly. "It's not that I'm not good now, but you're. Overdoing it. I think. You'll wear me out. For yourself, I mean to say, because I'm fine, never felt better, but you– you'll lose this sort of. Keen interest you... have. Sherlock, what, I... what's wrong?"

"You've had your tonsils out?"

Sherlock sounds heartbroken. Devastated, as if John just confessed he'd also shagged Charles the Archaeologist, and ten minutes ago.

"Why didn't you  _tell_  me?" Sherlock pleads.

"No," John says flatly. "No, no, no, no. No, you lunatic. You will not change the subject. You were shamming  _gay  _for that man. Right in front of me. He touched you."

"What else don't you have? Other than tonsils, I thought you had tonsils. Tell me."

"He was one of the tidiest blokes I've ever seen."

"He was an  _experiment._ "

"Oh my god," John breathes, horrified. "What sort?"

"The normal sort! Everyone else gets to have experiments!" Sherlock explodes with all the petulance of a three-year-old child. "It's completely unfair! Everyone else,  _everyone_ , John, sleeps with people as an experiment, in order to determine whether or not those two people fit. It's normal to have experiments, try people on for size and see if you like them, you can't pretend I'm different just because– and oh, no, I'm  _sorry,  _don't let me  _forget,_  some people also shag other people simply because they want to, and don't give a damn about anyone else's feelings. But that's fine, it's all fine, everything's fine, just so long as Sherlock Holmes confines himself either to tender endearments or else a wank every few weeks, just because my feelings aren't like... because I'm... Piss off."

"Did you sham gay for him the whole time?" John snaps. "Or were you... you? The way you are. Come on. How long can you go, playing at–"

"As much as two weeks, and  _yes_ , I was–"

"So that was why you had to sham it again, keep your bloody story straight, I can't  _believe_ –"

"Everyone shams at things! Why does this make you angry?" Sherlock asks desperately. "This is insane, it can't matter. It  _can't._ "

"Why can't it, then?"

"Because the point is logically moot, as I'm never having it off with anyone else ever again. I'm not _  straight_, I'm not  _gay_ , I'm  _with you._ How do I get it through that skull of yours? I'm... John-sexual. Oh, bloody hell, you're  _mine,  _you said I could have you, you  _did._ You promised."

"I did, right," John recalls. "Christ. That's mad, isn't it? Property of Sherlock Holmes."

That phrase provokes a little growl, as if it's just about the best thing Sherlock has ever heard. The part that John doesn't understand precisely is  _why_  this is so, why the detective should be completely preoccupied by him. But it's difficult to think very clearly about it when it feels as if Sherlock Holmes is going to insert himself inside your ribcage simply by kissing you. His tongue is everywhere, and his hands are both on John's throat now, with his thumbs pressing into the spaces around his larynx, and his fingers pushing in the softer flesh under his jaw, and John wonders idly whether Sherlock is about to prefer a dead taxidermied John to a live breathing John. Because it's not impossible. But then he recalls something and he starts to laugh.

"You can't  _taste  _that I don't have tonsils," he points out fondly.

"Idiot. Of course I can."

"You really can't, though."

"I can try."

Sherlock does try. For at least two more minutes, equally using his fingers. It's breathtaking, and comprehensive, and all-consuming. Yes,  _consuming_. That would be the right word for this particular round of snogging in a public alley. Then John hears a little chime, and the phone in Sherlock's jacket vibrates against both of their chests.

It's in Sherlock's hand half a second later. His dark hair is even more mussed than usual, and now his lips are flushing slightly. Sherlock is texting, so John gets to stare while he gets his breath back a little. _This is not like the strawberry ice cream,  _John thinks,  _the staring at Sherlock Holmes. It's not. It's more like a heroin habit, or breathing in and out. What a bloody mess I've gotten myself into._

John thinks of Charles the Archaeologist and feels rather smug.

"Yes!" Sherlock exclaims. One of his fists flies into the air in boyish triumph. "Yes, yes, yes. Brilliant. I am brilliant."

"You are," John agrees.

"We're going to wash a window on the eleventh floor."

"Lead on, then."

After the window washing, and the break-in, and the stealing of a laptop, and the daring escape out the window again with the evidence for Lestrade, and the hacking into protected financial records, they are ready to return home, and none the worse for wear. John likes that for a change, they get themselves into enough scrapes. But today went really well, what with the initial deductions and then Sherlock getting to be a window washer, which he liked, and John can't help but be in a good mood anyway now. He's had an idea.

"You need to eat something," he reminds Sherlock. "There's good Cantonese near here. That manager woman whose sister you cleared of smuggling charges?"

Sherlock makes an indulgent humming sound and links his hand into John's elbow.

"After dinner," John says slowly, "I wonder if you might do me a favour."

One of Sherlock's eyebrows quirks up.

"Can you sham gay at home?"

He frowns.

"With the blue robe on?" John adds.

"If you mean, am I capable of acting like a nancy in our flat, yes of course, but–"

"With the blue robe on and nothing else. It's an experiment," John says seductively.

"Oh. _Oh,_ " he breathes, getting the picture a bit better. He thinks it over, smiling softly. "Won't you be angry?"

"No," John promises, "not for an experiment."

"Right, then. Yes, if you want. But I'm not certain you'll like it."

"Did Charles like it?"

"Yes. I'm very good at it."

"Did you like it too?"

"Yes. Before I got bored and had to go back to being me. It was the  _me  _that was the problem."

"Well, it's just an experiment. But so long as  _you're_  enjoying it too, I'll like it."

"If you say so," Sherlock shrugs, setting off. "You're going to have to top, though, sorry, nothing to be done about it, I can't keep it going otherwise, it's too much for me, dreadful things happen. I'm not hungry, but if you want Cantonese, it's this way."

It takes a moment for John's feet to work well enough to follow after. But he's very good at recovering.

Later, it's a wrench to decide whether to take Sherlock—who certainly seems to be enjoying this particular experiment, and actually thumbed a bit of jam onto John's jaw so as to lick it off again in their tiled kitchen—to bed, so as to make slow, delicious love to him; or else to throw him against the wallpaper and wipe the sweet little smirk from his face. But Sherlock is much too tall for that, though John is fast losing his patience. He's hard enough to see stars, as a matter of fact, and he has more than ample evidence that his friend isn't keen to wait much longer either. After all, Sherlock was the one who clambered onto the only clean part of their kitchen table with his long legs gently swinging and his knob just visible, smiling whimsically with his head cocked, and now he's wrapped both legs around John's naked waist while John kisses him senseless. _Yes, as happy as either of the first options are_ , John thinks as he traces Sherlock's pectorals with his nails,  _best to go with instincts._ And quickly. Sherlock has his head bent down and is moaning softly into John's mouth, and it's glorious, but John still has a crick in his neck.

"Don't you want me yet? I'm good, I promise I'll be so good. You're making me dizzy," croons the baritone, about an eighth above his normal speaking voice.

Of course this Sherlock has a supremely healthy ego too, it occurs to John. Whoever this Sherlock is. And wherever he came from.

" _I'm  _making  _you_  dizzy?" John laughs, his hands drifting around inside the sheet of blue fabric, skimming porcelain skin.

"God, of course you are. I've never felt like this, I want to tell you everything."

"I... really? What sorts of things?"

"When I touch myself, I picture you. That you're in me, and it's so good I can't even breathe."

That does it. Really, that bloody well does it. John's self-control is not boundless, and so he pulls Sherlock off the kitchen table. At first blush, it seems best just to turn him round and bend him over, but their kitchen table is nothing if not dangerously unsanitary. So John swiftly maneuvers his friend flat on his stomach on their much-abused Thinking Sofa and slides the blue silken robe to one side very slowly and climbs up on his knees, hands very steady and breath very quick.

"You  _are_  enjoying this, aren't you?" he murmurs against the detective's ivory ear.

"Silly little darling." It's isn't Sherlock's voice at all, it's much softer, but there he really is in the wink John receives from the upward-tilted side of his face. It's one of the oddest things John has ever seen, but somehow it makes him all the harder. As if that were possible.

John mouths at the detective's spine, his heartbeat gone all ragged. "Do you have any idea how  _beautiful  _you are?"

_The real him_ , John thinks,  _would say 'yes, I am well aware of the fact.' The bloody prick._

"I wish you'd show me, please show me, please, I can't wait any longer," begs the other Sherlock, shivering as John's already slick fingers trail past his spine and down.

John thinks, as he sinks his fingers in and Sherlock gasps like a born tart, that Charles the Archaeologist—whatever Sherlock subjected him to—is a very, very, very stupid git.

If not for military training, it would be over the moment it begins. But John grits his teeth and thinks about safety manuals and cold clinic examination rooms and how to perform gallbladder surgery and waits out the most dangerous part. When he safely can, he buries his face in the white shoulder blades with the silk falling off of them and sighs gratefully.

"God, love, I  _said_  please," coaxes the trembling, sublime not-quite-Sherlock underneath him.

"Say it again, then," John growls out.

Sherlock, of course, does him one better. Naturally. He  _is  _a genius, even if at the moment he's pretending to be a society slag.

"Please fuck me, I want you to so much, don't you want to? _Please._ "

"God, you're a bloody health hazard," John groans, twitching his hips hard. "You're a menace. There ought to be a medical caution on you,  _signs_ , some sort of warning device, you're  _incredible_."

His friend grins, eyes shut, and it's the real one. Not the Normal People Smile and not the recently discovered Flirty Gay Smile. Apparently the bizarre savant is very touched at being called a health hazard, because this is just Sherlock, being darkly delighted with himself. So John doesn't feel a bit guilty when he thrusts it right off his face again, as Sherlock's hands scrabble for a hold on the sofa cushions and his eyelids flutter madly.

John loses himself in the world that is Sherlock very quickly after that. He's made love to men before in plenty of ways, but he wasn't in love with them. He's rodgered a man this tall once, but that fellow didn't make sounds like a baby tiger cub purring. He's been in love before, but never obsessed. And he had better take it while he can get it, he thinks with something close to despair as he reaches the edge and Sherlock suddenly shudders face first into the sofa completely untouched. Because this man is a miracle and John is ordinary.

And one of these days, Sherlock will come to his senses.

Sherlock is very still now. He looks asleep, but he isn't. Carefully, his heart pounding, John pulls away and slips behind him on the sofa. It's a bit of a mess, but he can't be bothered to care. He pulls his friend round so his head is in John's neck and John can smell all the dark secrets in his hair. He wraps the blue robe over both of them and then wraps his arms tight around Sherlock's slim back.

"Tell me I'm beautiful again," comes a lazy voice in his ear.

"Hey, quit that," John whispers, tightening his grip.

"Why?"

"I want  _you_  back. This was an experiment. I'm with a genius vampire consulting detective who fancies himself a sociopath. Come back."

Sherlock pauses. "But I wasn't shamming."

John winces, then smiles. It is his real voice, of course, just gone soft and mellow from a rare stint at submissive sex.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, including crime scenes. You're... the only thing worth looking at. You are dangerously lovely. And incredibly vain."

Sherlock sighs contentedly and snuggles closer. John suddenly misses him terribly, misses the too-bright wild creature without manners whose idea of Eden is covered in blood. What has he done to him? What if he never returns? What if this was all a terrible mistake, and now John is stuck with a charming and otherworldly queer instead of an infuriating John-sexual tosser with a brain like a razor blade?

"Say something for me back. Something very  _Sherlock_ ," he requests, fighting hard not to be frightened.

Sherlock drags a fingertip along John's pelvis. "You haven't any appendicitis scars, so as far as I can deduce, all you're missing are tonsils. But I do need to know if my conclusions are accurate. It's imperative."

John's breath slides out of him in relief. "Just the tonsils. Is that important for when you finally have me for a fry-up?"

"Mmm. No. Something else."

John laughs. Sherlock is back, and he's wonderful. He's better like this, John concludes. That was a very successful experiment, as experiments go, but people can't help who they love, can they?

"When you said dreadful things happen, what did you do to Charles the Archaeologist?" he asks with his lips against Sherlock's forehead.

"I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"It's... not fine."

"Sorry?"

"There are a pair of lists," Sherlock explains, still sounding in a complete and utter haze. John wonders if this is what it's always like afterward for him, or if the fact it was John this time had something to do with it, because he's talking like he's been sedated. "Fine and Not Fine. I didn't call them that before I met you, but there were always... categories of items. I only fancied him, it was different, so the lists were very short. Three items apiece."

This isn't making much sense. "You don't fancy me?"

"No," he says, smiling. "That's not quite the proper English."

"So there are lists. I think you've hinted at this. Right. I can manage, I'm game."

"No, you can't."

"Shall I fear for my life in earnest, then? What did you do?"

"I told you. I got bored. I was me."

"But it's  _you_  that I–"

"There was a very valuable long piece of petrified wood he'd unearthed somewhere, a totem of some kind, quite smooth, maybe an ancient fertility idol, I don't know, I've deleted it, but he loved the thing, and it was ridiculous, he bragged more about finding it when he was in pubs than he did about finding  _me_. Hundreds and hundreds of years old, though, and apparently very valuable to scholars, not to mention in the fiscal sense, so he objected when he discovered I'd used it on him the night before."

John is laughing so hard that the man in his arms suddenly seems rather heavy. And Sherlock is quite compact, but not generally  _heavy._ John's chest is shaking, however, and that makes him seem denser than he is.

"You rodgered someone with a priceless antique because he gave it more compliments than you?"

"I told you. Not. Fine. Try to keep up."

It might not be fine, but it's very funny nevertheless. John's breathing calms. He chuckles again, once, and then kisses his friend's hair.

"How many items are on my lists? Fine and Not Fine?"

"Thirty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively."

"Bloody hell," John says, shocked.

"Forget I said that," Sherlock requests drunkenly. He's really very far from his usual self at the moment. "Delete it."

John thinks about telling Sherlock he's not capable of "deleting" things from his brain, but is suddenly very sleepy. And that's not really what he wants to tell Sherlock, anyway. It's not what's in his mind, what haunts him whenever he wakes up to see grey eyes peering at him as if he's a fresh corpse. It's not what truly matters to him in this moment.

"Don't ever come to your senses," he whispers to Sherlock, who is now asleep. "Stay like this for me. For as long as you can."

The next morning, Sherlock hasn't come to his senses. But neither has he fully returned to being the complete prick John rather adores, which is troubling. Sherlock actually makes the tea, for instance. Which is interesting, as John wasn't certain Sherlock knew how tea was produced, and there is a pot of English Breakfast on their little dining table. John begins to worry again.

He worries still more when Sherlock kisses his knuckles after John hands him his mobile. It isn't that Sherlock fails to be affectionate generally. On the contrary, and sometimes he's shockingly sweet, really. But his version of affection oftenest involves things like finishing a crust of toast simply because John already ate most of it, or lightly writing his own name on John's skin with his fingernail when he thinks John is asleep (John appreciates that one much more than any reasonable human being should, he knows), or using up all the hot water specifically so that John has to bathe in water Sherlock has already used supposing he fancies a soak. That's one of Sherlock's favourite tricks. The Recycled Bath Water Gambit, John calls it to himself. He ought to pitch a fit every time it happens. He doesn't, though, to his own continual surprise. Just like he doesn't own up to being awakened every time his friend decides he needs to trace SHERLOCK HOLMES into his skin in the middle of the night.

John wonders after an hour or two of this newly sane treatment whether he ought to press a bit of hard-won advantage and bin some human remains he found in the veg drawer. But then they get a call from Lestrade and Sherlock whirls into his coat like a hurricane and John forgets to fret about it any longer.

When they arrive at the crime scene, John realizes that today is going to be extraordinarily trying.

On some days, John thinks, Anderson is a wanker. On other days, Anderson is an unbearable bully. And on others, days like today, Anderson is a vicious-minded twat who is about to make John lose his temper despite his own best efforts.

John quite likes most of the Yard. They're trained professionals, like he is. Sherlock seems distantly to appreciate that John likes them, for John's affability makes it that little bit easier for Sherlock to get things he wants and have things his way, both of which are very high on the detective's list of essentials. For instance, on one occasion when Sherlock had just told a fresh-faced D. I. called Hopkins that he had the retentive memory of a goldfish who'd been dropped on the floor, John was able to obtain D. I. Hopkins' crime scene photos anyhow. As for the more familiar faces, they're just that, and sometimes a bit more. Sally Donovan once stood with John waiting for Lestrade on a frigid street corner whistling in harmony to The Kinks. Sherlock had arrived first and sighed tragically, but that's the sort of thing he does when John expresses the desire to see a film, for instance, so John let it pass.

And of course, D. I. Geoff Lestrade is a very decent man. John knows such things upon first meeting people. Lestrade is really quite lovely, in fact. Even apart from his pleasantly imprecise, husky voice, and his incredible stores of patience, Lestrade seems generally to want what's best for Sherlock, and not just for the case. It goes a very long way towards endearing him to John, that. Lestrade's hope that Sherlock Holmes succeeds along with the Yard.

Then there's Anderson.

The team of police and the pair of Not-Amateurs are staring hard at a body which has been hung from a chandelier in a very seedy hotel. Anderson has concluded, and John along with the unholy sod, that the man was drowned before being strung up. His neck features abrasions, certainly, but superficial ones—and he wouldn't have water in his lungs from a stay in a shite hotel room. John knows that Sherlock could probably have worked this all out for himself, but Sherlock always defers to medical experts because he isn't a doctor. Sherlock respects expertise.

Sherlock does not respect Anderson, and the feeling is mutual.

"Obviously, it was the victim who originally engaged the room," Sherlock says to no one at all, except perhaps John. And Lestrade is allowed to eavesdrop, of course, theoretically.

"How d'you figure?" Lestrade wonders, nodding for the techs to cut the body down. "We don't have an ID on him, no wallet, and reception says the room was booked by a John Smith, of all the tossers you hate to come across at a crime scene."

"From the shoes in the closet. Parisian, just like the ones he's wearing, and identical size. I'm sure you'll find his prints everywhere."

"And you're supposing the murderer just... returned him home and made us a little diorama? That's mad."

"No, it only seems so, there must be a reason for the drowning before stringing up. God it's fantastic, I've never seen anything of the kind."

"Will you listen to him?" Anderson sneers softly to a departing medical tech. "A kid at the bloody circus. No decency at all. If it was his own mother, he'd offer to do the autopsy himself. Probably load up on pictures of her guts for the family album."

Sherlock hears him, but Sherlock stopped speaking to Anderson eleven days ago when Anderson called him a twisted fuck, and Sherlock asked Anderson whether he knew his wife was shagging her psychiatrist. And relations are still steadily deteriorating. John, meanwhile, knows that Anderson could not be more wrong. Sherlock is nothing if not violently tetchy on the subject of his mother. And that is why Sherlock isn't responding, he knows. Sherlock is not a safe man, but he's a very cautious one, and John can't think of any way for Anderson to find himself dead in an alleyway faster than to keep on the subject of the Holmes matron.

"She must be a head case herself, come to think of it," Anderson continues. "If the freak's mother isn't mental, institutionalized mental, I'll buy the whole force a pint."

Instead of taking the bait, Sherlock dives down to the corpse with a needle he stole from god only knows what technician and stabs it into the dead man's lung, extracting a sample of the fluid.

"God, he's genuinely mentally ill," Anderson mocks. He glances at John. "Must be heaven to live with. Does he demand tissue samples in lieu of rent money? A pound of flesh? You've left that part off the blog, I suppose."

This is a bit too close to home for John's liking, which he admits to himself when he later reflects on the afternoon. Anderson shouldn't be able to wind him up, he knows. Anderson is an idiot. But Sherlock is... not usual. The needle in Sherlock's hand comes out of the body rather more viciously than it went in, which isn't simple to accomplish. But Sherlock still doesn't say anything. He doesn't even look at Anderson. John crosses his arms, sympathetically enraged, telling himself to wait five bloody minutes and it'll all be over.

"Hey, easy on the remains if you don't mind, Sherlock," Lestrade huffs when he turns back and notices what his favorite oracle is doing. "We  _can_  do lab work and text it to you, you know."

"Can you?" Sherlock muses, not caring in the slightest.

"Bet your life."

"Not today, thanks."

Carefully pressing a drop from the syringe onto his disposable glove, Sherlock brings the moisture to his nose.

"Thames water, though I'll have to confirm it," he says happily.

"Jesus, it's like a pederast outside a primary school," Anderson scoffs to John. "How can you bear it? We might as well be watching him have a wank."

"For the record, I enjoy watching him have a wank just as much," John snaps, finally losing the reins.

The heads of four med techs swivel. Lestrade covers what looked like the start of a highly satisfied smile with a cough into his sleeve. Sherlock remains entirely still, and in the back of his mind John wonders why. But he's still too furious to bother asking.

Anderson, meanwhile, seems to realize that he's the one making the scene.

"Right," he says nastily. "Well, I had the wrong end, then. No offense." He holds out his hand.

"I'm not shaking hands with you."

"But," Anderson stammers. "Oh, come off it, I was only taking the piss. Why not?"

"Because Sherlock doesn't like having his things touched," John growls, exiting the room as fast as he can.

Out in the farther distant hall, everything is quiet and too gaudily patterned. It's better here. In the hall, he can't hear the med techs. In the hall, he can't see Sherlock's reaction to this little drama, which is likely enough to be no reaction at all. It's difficult for Sherlock to notice anything, really  _notice  _it, when his mind is on a case. John's leg twinges, the imaginary ailment, and he drives a fist into it. He wants to punch the evil smirk off Anderson's face, wants to bloody him for the childish, cruel taunting that shouldn't matter either to him or to Sherlock. John's not ashamed of what he said, but he's aware he can't see Anderson twice today without embarrassing himself, without actually losing his temper. He was hurting Sherlock deliberately, and John knows Sherlock can be hurt far more easily than anyone thinks. John will stay in the hall, therefore, and hope Sherlock remembers to fetch him. But he can't clap eyes on Anderson again. The man was begging for a broken jaw.

Sherlock appears five minutes later, sweeping down the hallway. He's expressionless. It could mean anything. John passes a tongue over his lower lip, tentative.

"This way," Sherlock says, brushing past him.

They don't exit the building by another route, as John supposes they mean to do. Sherlock stops abruptly, examining several doors. They all look the same to John. Then Sherlock pulls a Swiss army knife from his pocket and kneels in front of one.

"You're breaking in?" John asks. He doesn't get an answer, because the answer is too obvious. "Is this... part of the case? What, you've. You've found something?"

"It's nothing to do with the case. Quiet for a moment."

And it only takes a moment. When Sherlock has the door open, he pushes John through it before following himself. Then he wheels about with the DO NOT DISTURB card and pops it on the outer handle, locking it with a loud  _click_. Sherlock turns back round and takes three paces towards John, one hand tucking into his hip appraisingly. The difference between Sherlock two seconds ago and Sherlock now cannot be underestimated. His eyes seem to be magnifying everything before them a billion times, and his lips are parted, and his blood is throbbing in his slender neck.

In fact, he's already gone practically supernova, which is perhaps a bad sign.

_There he is,_  John thinks.

Sherlock is back. And he's so beautiful. John can't be bothered to come up with poetry about it other than  _beautiful_. He might write a blog, but he isn't the sort of man to carry on about dove-white skin and ludicrously brilliant eyes and the ever so slight tilt to Sherlock's torso which all combine to make Sherlock the completely unpredictable thing John nevertheless relies upon for an anchor. He doesn't compare him in his head to a summer's day, because Sherlock isn't the least bit temperate. He doesn't compare him to anything. He can't. He's a plain man, and Sherlock is incomparable.

"You're well and truly obsessed with me, aren't you?" Sherlock asks.

For a moment, John is taken aback. He expected any number of things, but never to be mocked. Not for loyalty. Sherlock doesn't understand empathy very well, but he does understand loyalty. For a moment, John is not merely taken aback. He is badly hurt.

"What?"

"You heard me." Sherlock advances. He'll pounce any moment, and then John won't even be able to pretend his will is his own. "You're obsessed. 'Sherlock doesn't like having his things touched?' If that isn't proof, I don't know what is."

Sherlock isn't mocking him, John realizes next.

He quoting facts. Rather breathily.

And just after that, John makes three simultaneous discoveries.

First, this is a game, because this is what Sherlock looks like when a game is on. Maybe it's even a marvelous game, a game where truth masquerades as foreplay. The sort of game only Sherlock could come up with, because only Sherlock refuses to say tender things unless the moon is bloody blue or the sky has turned into one giant rainbow. Second, this is a game two can play. Third, this is a game Sherlock wants him to join.

So of course, nerves thrilling, John does.

"Must have been watching me pretty closely all this time to notice such a thing," John answers calmly. "In fact, is there ever a time when you're  _not_  watching me? You watch me in your sodding  _sleep._ One might think you fairly preoccupied yourself, mate."

Smirking, Sherlock reaches out with two hands and tugs John into his body by the shirt collar. John begins to breathe a bit harder. Everything gets a bit harder. God,  _everything._ And not just a bit. Did they  _make  _Sherlock Holmes out of pure sex drive? His friend's thigh nudges just a bit further in, and John presses his palms against his waist.

"You  _worship_  me," Sherlock whispers half an inch from John's lips.

"Uh, hey, I'm not the one hung up on tonsils here."

"I'm all you think about. Admit it."

"If you could take your eyes off me for a fucking second, I'd say you have a point."

"I'm your hero. I'm John Watson's bloody heroic ideal."

"Beg pardon, but you didn't even believe in heroes before you met me. I proved to you they exist."

"I  _own_  you."

"Bit like owning a scuba tank underwater, though, isn't it?"

"I've never seen someone so besotted in all my life."

"Brilliant. Because neither have I."

This kiss is nothing like the night previous. Oh, no. This kiss is like being in the path of a Molotov cocktail. The detective's lips are already burning. He's already dropped the collar ends and twisted his fists into John's shirt at the back. There is already a trickle of something like fuel oil running down John's spine. His skin is already burning. Their hips are already pressing together meaningfully. _I should have expected to get laid for insulting Anderson,_  John thinks, and then,  _Did he kiss everyone like this, or only me?_  and then,  _His heart is racing, I can feel it in his throat. This is too dangerous already and it hasn't even started yet._

_Good,_  John thinks next, taking Sherlock's tongue a bit deeper.

Sherlock pulls away, looking down. The expression would be impossible to relate to anyone who has never seen a wolf staring down another wolf in complete snowy silence. John saw that once, on some educational program, or he wouldn't have recognized it.

"You'd let me do anything I liked to you," Sherlock observes. "You  _want  _me to do anything I like to you."

"Haven't we sorted that yet? Anyhow. The things you'd like to do to me are the things I want from you."

"You don't know that."

"I do."

"You can't know that, it's impossible."

"Wrong."

"How so?"

"If you think I've never seen your face when I come, your status as a genius is hereby revoked."

It doesn't take very long after that for clothing to be flying about as if John is sharing a room with a small hurricane, which isn't far from the truth. It doesn't take very long for Sherlock's madly shelf-like cheekbones to flush slightly, and his grip on John's hair to tighten to just short of pain as he does his utmost by way of kissing to live deep inside his mouth, which also isn't really a metaphor. It's all fast, and it's all frenetic, and it's all furious, and it's all fine. It's wonderful. It's the only thing John has ever experienced which makes him feel truly better than himself. John likes John just fine, but John needs more than that. On occasion fighting the Taliban, he knew that being shot at was a nobler cause than the hundreds of other causes his old friends and acquaintances and people-he-liked and people-he-didn't-like were pursuing. Saving the lives of brave soldiers was better than trying to get rich, or trying to get a promotion, or trying to get laid, or trying to own a house.

But trying to live in the tidal flood of Sherlock Holmes is better still, John thinks by the time he's on his knees on the unfashionable carpet and Sherlock is behind him, still impossibly tall even though he's also kneeling, taking him at the identical moment he pushes several of his perfectly lovely fingers into John's throat.

John wonders, as he struggles to breathe, why he only wants more and deeper of both.

"You adore me," the lips at his ear tell him. The fingers slide out of his mouth just enough for him to talk, and no further. "You'd die for me. You tried once."

"And you spent the next hour hyperventilating," John gasps. "It was slightly pathetic. You need me. Admit it. You  _need_  me."

"You told me to run."

"And you called me a pacemaker."

Either this satisfies Sherlock, or fucking John's throat with his fingers while he fucks him in earnest suddenly takes precedence. It ought to be over quickly, when one considers how it started, but it isn't over quickly. John supposes that's because Sherlock is being a genius and making it last. And by the end of it John supposes, with Sherlock's arm around his waist and half a white hand down his throat, that if Sherlock ever comes to his senses, it will probably be the death of him.

_If Sherlock isn't the death of me anyway,_  John thinks when the hand wrapped round his pelvis reaches lower, and he is unwound.

After, they actually make use of the bed. Sherlock's arm is slung low over John's back, and John lies with his head on his friend's chest, listening to a very strange heart beating as if it's perfectly normal. That's comforting, somehow.

"You love me," John says, better than half convinced of it.

"You love me too," the madman beneath him says smugly.

"So you solved the case?"

"Why do you say so?"

"Well, if you hadn't, then..." John is confused. "Sherlock, you did solve it just now, didn't you?"

"No," Sherlock yawns. "But I will. His name is Blessington, the dead man, I'll sort it within six hours, this is actually a cold case."

"No, but. Stop. Wait. You took a break in the middle of a case to have sex with me?"

John cranes his neck up in Sherlock's direction, and Sherlock gives him a lazy smile that makes John feel like a bona fide genius. He isn't one, he knows. But sometimes Sherlock glows so brightly that John begins to feel like a sort of prism. A conductor of light. It's light years beyond being alone, and it's a hundred times better than living through a firefight. John is a superconductor. John is a battery. John is the world's most willing magnifying lens.

"Was it worth it?" he asks.

"Idiot," Sherlock sighs.

Sherlock solves the Blessington case six hours after they leave the stolen hotel room. And the following week, Sherlock disappears for two entire days.

First of all, before he disappeared, let it be said that Sherlock was bored. And that is always dangerous. At the beginning, he toyed about with the formatting of _The Science of Deduction._ Then he marshaled his resources and actually organized some case files. That was on Wednesday.

By Friday, John thought that Sherlock might possibly be losing his mind.

For three hours, Sherlock was playing the saddest Bach that a violin had ever produced, and John stayed around, because it might have worried him but it was also rather beautiful. But then Sherlock started to play something else. It was a floating tone and then a drop, as if someone were falling over a waterfall. Over and over and over again. Just that steady, sad sound and then the descent over a cliff side. After twenty minutes, it was maddening, and after an hour it was completely intolerable. So John left the flat and went to the pub for a pint, letting Sherlock have his mad noises and his aching minor chords.

That had been an hour ago, so John concludes that Baker Street is probably safe for human ears once more. But when he gets back, Sherlock is nowhere to be found.

At first, John refuses to worry about it. Perhaps Sherlock was called to the Yard, though it's unlikely he'd go without texting John with instructions to follow after. Perhaps he went for a walk. Perhaps his equally mad brother arrived to annoy him and Sherlock fled. Perhaps, and this would be a miracle, he went to the corner shop because they're out of eggs.

Pulling out his phone, John texts:

_where've you got to?_ –JW

And he waits for an answer, very decidedly not worrying.

John is able to follow his own injunction not to worry about a grown and frankly deadly man for five hours before texting Lestrade.

_is Sherlock running amok with you?_ –JW

His phone chirps about thirty seconds later, even though by this time it's almost midnight.

Not seen him in days. Problem?

Thinking it over, John decides to ask Mrs. Hudson first. He ducks out their front door and hastens down the stairs. It might not be a grand idea to knock Mrs. Hudson up at this hour, but she's suffered worse and maybe Sherlock is just having a cuppa with her. They've clearly known each other for years, after all.

Mrs. Hudson opens the door in a slightly fuzzy dressing gown, looking slightly fuzzy about the eyes and hair. The herbal soothers, John thinks, have made an appearance tonight. She smiles readily at John.

"Everything all right, dear? There's a man on the telly claiming he can communicate with the ghosts of dead pets. Stuff and nonsense probably, but it makes the people so happy. Is there anything in it, do you think?"

"I couldn't say, but it's probably a scam. Mrs. Hudson, have you seen Sherlock?"

Her lips purse. "Well, no, I haven't, dear. Are the pair of you in a tiff again?"

"I, um. Didn't think so. No. Not that he bothered to share with me."

"Good. He's a sweet boy, Sherlock, but the temper on him... you're really an angel, you know. Did you try his mobile?"

"Yep. Texted him."

"Oh, my. Do you want to come in? I've a fresh kettle on, and we could puzzle it out together."

John follows Mrs. Hudson into her cozy set of rooms, with its friendly portraits on the walls, and the lingering smell of the lavender she freshens her linens with. He takes a seat at her kitchen table, half-listening to the man on the telly in the parlour, who is talking with a deceased cat. There's a cup of Darjeeling in front of him seconds later.

"Just this once," Mrs. Hudson says sweetly regarding the tea, like she always does. "Now, let's find that man of yours. Where could he be? We'll think of it, between us."

But they don't. And Mrs. Hudson, as worried as she is, retires at three. John leaves the set of flats to pace electrically lit Baker Street, trying to ignore the fiercely protective ache in his chest. Sherlock is unmistakably tall, and as he rounds every corner John expects to see him sweeping along, having gotten the cracked idea of documenting every individual brick on their block, or reading all the graffiti he can find so as to take his mind off doing nothing, or maybe chatting up the homeless on the subject of unsolved crimes. Sherlock could really be doing anything, because Sherlock is insane. But John doesn't see him. It's a mild night, and it ought to be pleasant to walk through Westminster, but none of the tailored suit jackets are quite slim and expensive and form-fitting enough, and none of the strides quite sufficiently catlike, and none of the bobbing heads unruly and black in quite the right way.

Sherlock is nowhere to be found. So John keeps walking.

_you're frightening me. where_  
 _are you, you cow?_ –JW

At dawn, when his legs are tired and his eyes watery with fatigue, John buys a coffee.

_didn't mean to call you a_  
 _cow. say something, you_  
 _complete sod._ –JW

John manages to wait until he returns to the flat to contact Mycroft, which is for several reasons. First, however mad Sherlock is, Mycroft is madder. Second, when he discovers that John contacted Mycroft, Sherlock will throw a wobbly the likes of which hasn't been witnessed since Ancient Rome. There will be flouncing, and scoffing, and gravity-defying acts of plutonium-grade petulance on the settee, and the wild tugging of dressing gown lapels, and acrobatic thrashing ending with his face in a pillow, the sort of sulk which could peel their wallpaper. But after a sleepless night and ten additional texts between himself and an increasingly anxious Lestrade, John caves and texts The Brother.

_haven't seen Sherlock since_  
 _7 last night. any ideas?_ –JW

John waits for exactly ten seconds.

_On my way._ –MH

Mycroft Holmes is in their flat twelve minutes later. He doesn't knock. Mycroft never knocks, and when he opens their door, somehow John never hears him. Mycroft just materializes out of thin air with the aid of his magic umbrella. As unnerving as Sherlock is, his brother wins hands down, every time, no question. He's like something out of Harry Potter, appearing and disappearing as he does, and the umbrella is probably a disguised wand. John is sitting at the table with his fist against his chin, admitting to himself that he's now gone over from being Very Worried to being Worried Half to Death. It doesn't help that Mycroft's smirk is so noticeably dampened.

"Ah, John," Mycroft says in that approximately-pleasant-but-not-actually-warm way of his, without bothering to look at John. He's examining their flat, in fact. _Good,_  John thinks. If anyone can find Sherlock Holmes, it's Mycroft Holmes. "Glad to see you've reduced your clinic schedule, Sherlock does so like a captive audience for his little victories."

John doesn't bother asking how Mycroft knew that. "It's been over twelve hours. I can't– has he done this before?"

"Disappeared?" Mycroft turns back to John, pulling his index finger and thumb across his lips delicately. "Well. Depending upon what  _this_  turns out to be, perhaps yes. I would not rule it out just yet. And then again, perhaps no."

"Sod it all, are we to worry that he might have been kidnapped by vigilantes? Attacked by thugs? Spirited away?"

"Oh, I  _always  _worry about those things, Doctor," Mycroft sighs, smiling sadly. "It is my natural state, as I have mentioned to you. Pity, because it isn't entirely comfortable. When last you saw Sherlock, he was in a state of existential ennui, I take it."

"You—what, deduced that?"

"The state of your Union Jack pillow really could not be more telling. And he hasn't put his violin bow back in the case."

Mycroft's phone buzzes mildly. He pulls it out of his grey suit jacket's inner pocket. The Holmes brothers couldn't be better dressed if they were paid for it, John thinks. Mycroft reads the message, frowning.

"Sherlock did not exit your flat by conventional means."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, John. It's really nothing to–"

"Is there a camera trained on our front door?"

"Don't limit your imagination so, John, it's uncharacteristic of you. Neither did Sherlock exit through the back or via the roof. Puzzling. You  _have  _searched the flat itself, I suppose?"

"Of course I did. Every room, twice. Not the cupboard, but Sherlock wouldn't  _fit_  in the cupboard."

Mycroft smiles indulgently at John's snappish tone. "An admirable display of logic, and one which doubtless saved you immense time. Nevertheless, I am going to take the liberty of very thoroughly searching your flat again, including this cupboard you speak of. Follow me if you like, but I won't be a moment."

John texts Lestrade again rather than following Mycroft. When Mycroft returns, he sits opposite John and crosses his legs elegantly. He checks the time on his wristwatch, which he does very frequently. He frowns.

"Useful, was that?" John wants to know.

"Sherlock is not here."

"I know he's not. That's the problem. What, you thought he'd be under the bed, having a bloody picnic?"

"John, when it comes to my brother, I think that you will agree that one is always rewarded for ruling nothing out prematurely. So. Sherlock was not entirely well, but your domestic accord hadn't yet been threatened, he did not actively desire to worry you, he'd no intention of being gone for longer than an hour or two, he was not coerced into departing, he left by one of three means possible without being detected by surveillance, and now he is missing."

"You know all that from our flat?"

Mycroft's mouth ticks up, but it's the most resigned smile imaginable. It's not a smile at all, really. It's an imitation of one. His phone goes off again, and he raises it to his ear.

"Yes? I see. Very well, thank you." Mycroft returns the phone to his pocket.

"Anything helpful?"

"On the contrary. He's turned off his mobile."

"Sherlock never turns off his mobile. Ever."

"I am aware of the fact."

"You know him pretty well, don't you," John remarks. "Despite his sort of. Well. His–"

"Healthy antagonism? Yes."

"So are we worried about him?"

"We are worried about him," Mycroft agrees. "Constantly."

Mycroft gets into a very expensive black car twenty minutes later, assuring John that he will do all he can. John doesn't know what to make of this, but he assumes that it means the entire British Government is now looking for Sherlock, and that's pretty satisfying. John, meanwhile, heads to the Yard. Lestrade readily informs him that Sherlock's name and description have been circulated throughout the force, and everyone is keeping a watchful eye out.

"Didn't much need the description bit, did we?" Sally Donovan says dryly. "Every last plod in London would know Sherlock Holmes with their eyes closed. Just from the sudden smell of disdain."

"I'm not in the mood for Sherlock jokes. Quit dossing and get out there and find him," John growls. "He could be in serious trouble."

Donovan's face twists sympathetically. She likes John, as much as Sherlock drives her round the twist. "Yeah, but if he's in serious trouble, he's  _giving_  serious trouble. Don't worry."

But John does worry. He's so worried he can hardly remember to eat, and sleeping is out of the question obviously, everything apart from looking for Sherlock is out of the question. He goes to every restaurant he can remember ever frequenting with Sherlock, asks the proprietors if they've seen him, and is disappointed at every turn. He goes back to the flat to check, but Sherlock isn't there. Hours pass searching in what John hopes is a systematic fashion, but he can't be sure because Sherlock isn't present to ask. John stops for another coffee, and it burns in his empty stomach. He pays a homeless woman fifty quid to find Sherlock and tells her there's a five hundred quid reward. Sherlock has the money, even if John doesn't.

John texts Mycroft at five the next morning after not sleeping all night, busy appealing to readers of both his and Sherlock's websites.

_anything?_ –JW

He receives the following reply:

_Neither good news nor_  
 _bad. Which worries me._ –MH

John winces. He enters Sherlock's number, hoping against hope it's been turned on again.

_you can't do this to me. I_  
 _need to know where you_  
 _are. are you all right? can_  
 _you tell me what's happened?_  
 _please. get me a message,_  
 _use the genius for something_  
 _useful, for god's sake._ –JW

John is sitting in Sherlock's chair thinking furiously  _there hasn't been a ransom note, there hasn't been a ransom note_  when he finally falls asleep. It's a decision his body makes, and not his mind. He awakens at around four in the afternoon when his mobile vibrates. Startling, furious at himself for losing consciousness even though he wasn't really accomplishing anything anyhow, he whips it out of his pocket.

_I got lost._ –SH

It's the single most terrifying three words John has ever seen.

In a near panic now, John replies.

_where are you? what_  
 _does it look like? are_  
 _you hurt? alone?_ –JW

Pacing, John stares at the mobile in his hand, hardly blinking. He doesn't stop looking at it for the seven minutes it takes for Sherlock to respond to him.

_Small room, smells of_  
 _mould. Off the map._  
 _Alone._ –SH

"Fuck!" John snaps, throwing himself back into the armchair.

Then he starts thinking.

Mould. Sherlock did not leave the flat by conventional means. Sherlock did not intend to be gone more than a few hours. Sherlock never meant to worry him.

Mould.

Catapulting out of his chair, John gets the spare key set Mrs. Hudson gave him for emergencies out of the drawer and races down the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding in his throat.

John unlocks the door of 221C, calling  _Sherlock_  repeatedly, no longer caring how desperate he sounds. And he sounds bloody awful. The flat reeks of emptiness, hints of damp and decay clinging to the edges, and it's a dreadful place, really, John thinks, this dungeon where they found the pair of trainers. It's terrible here. The only noise in the wet stillness is the racket John's making trying to locate his friend. John stumbles into the main room.

And there Sherlock is, propped against a mould stain in the wall, sitting on the dank carpeting with one knee a bit akimbo and both his legs out.

He doesn't look right. He's a haggard mess, actually, pale and thin-skinned as tissue paper. All his strings are cut. His eyes have gone almost transparent. When they drift up to John, they squint slightly. Maybe they register John rushing towards him, John landing with each knee astride Sherlock's legs, John's hands on his face, frantically touching him. But John literally can't tell, because Sherlock is frowning as if something is very wrong.

"All right, what's happened to you?" John demands. "Are you hurt,  _where  _are you hurt?"

Sherlock doesn't say anything.

John remembers the text.

"Sherlock, it's me. It's John. What's happened to you? What did you mean,  _lost_?"

Sherlock's lips tighten worriedly. "Why have you painted yourself clear?"

_Jesus Christ_ , John thinks.

His heart is hammering and his brain is very still and his hands are solid as skyscraper foundations.

"I haven't," he says slowly. "That's not even– it's impossible. Can't you see me?"

"You don't look like yourself," Sherlock whispers. He temples his fingers in front of his lips. He has to tuck them up between John's forearms to do it.

"It's John."

"I know it's John, I can see your name."

"You what?"

Shaking his head, Sherlock sighs miserably. "It happens at crime scenes sometimes, in my head. White words. I don't mind at crime scenes, it helps me shut out the other colours and focus, but you're– I don't need that with you. Why did you change, why do you look like that? All white and lowercase,  _j-o-h-n._ "

John doesn't know if Sherlock could dream up a way of scaring him senseless more quickly even if he'd tried. And just when John was beginning to think he knew what the inside of Sherlock's head looked like, too. His fingers slide from the detective's face down to the pulse in his neck. It's racing nervously, but quite steady. His pupils, though. His pupils are too small for the light in this room.

What in bloody fuck.

"You've no idea where you are, do you?" John asks. "Or how long you've been here. It's been  _days,_  Sherlock. Where are you right now?"

"Shut up," Sherlock says, wincing. "I can't understand you, you're talking in maths."

"Maths?"

"You're buzzing like a fridge. Please stop. It's like a detuned radio."

That rings a bell, but John can't think why for a moment. He knows that English frustrates the hell out of his friend, that Sherlock believes at times that words are hardly worth speaking if no one understands you after you've said them. But the exact phrasing of this is... peculiar. Familiar. For some reason, it reminds him of the music Sherlock was playing when he disappeared. A sad keening note and then a sharp dying fall. Over and over and over and over again. When he thinks of the pattern, other sounds creep back into John's memory. A high, chiming, distorted, electric sort of noise and a man with a sweet, sad voice. A man saying that for a minute, he'd lost himself. Lost himself. _I got lost._ Bloody  _hell._

"Sherlock," John says, well and truly panicking by now, "those are Radiohead lyrics."

"Fifty-nine hours."

"What?"

"In my head. It's been playing for fifty-nine hours now, I can't make it stop."

Sherlock has both his shirtsleeves rolled. That's hardly unusual, but the left one was rolled higher and then just barely tugged back. John grabs his elbow and tears his sleeve up. There's a dried pinprick of blood on his forearm. It isn't the first, either, but John knew that already.

"What the fuck did you take?" he snaps.

"I don't know exactly."

"You don't  _know_? You've gone completely mental, and you don't  _know_?"

Sherlock's palm searches for something behind his back. It comes back with a disposable hypodermic syringe and John's own blood goes even colder. "I think this may have something to do with it."

"Right. I'm calling 999."

"No," Sherlock gasps, his left hand shooting out and stopping John from pulling out his mobile. "Please, it's going away, I think. I sent the text, didn't I? I texted you, I remembered you, you're a doctor, you– you're my doctor. There, yes, it says right under your name. _Doctor._ Don't take me to hospital, Mycroft will have a fit."

"I don't give a flying toss if your brother has a fit, you deserve it, he's already having a fit, what in the name of  _fuck_  did you take? This isn't cocaine, look at your pupils, your– is this morphine?"

"No. I didn't want... but. There was... no."

John forces himself to breathe very calmly. He wants to shake the answer out of the lunatic in front of him, but that isn't going to work. So he tries another tack.

"What was it like in your head?" he asks quietly. "Then you'll remember what you tried to do to stop it."

Long black eyelashes flutter shut as the detective drops the syringe again. He rubs both hands over his face. It's obvious to John that he hasn't slept all this time, and that could be half of it. But John is leaving nothing to chance. "Yes. Yes, that's. Yes. Well, there was..."

"'Karma Police' playing for almost sixty hours now," John says patiently, marveling at what his life has turned into.

"And the colours were gone, all of them. I wanted them back, because I couldn't see my violin, and your eyes were blank, it was horrible. But I know when it's white, the white isn't there really, it's just in my head, so... and it hurt, very badly. All of it hurt. I don't know that it's ever hurt like that before. Only a few times, anyway. So I mixed up something to fix it, it was chemistry. Science."

"It was nothing of the sort, you wholesale fucking idiot." John closes his eyes, forces himself to be stiller. "So. Radiohead, colours, head pain... what was for the head pain?"

Sherlock squints. "Intravenous oxycodone."

"I'm going to kill you," John snaps. "I'm really going to bloody well kill you. The song will stop playing then, you know, once I've stove your head in, you utter _  bastard_. What else?"

"The song was just an illusion, so... oh, yes. Haloperidol. And. I wanted the colours back, so. Yes, I remember, I spiked it with a trace amount of LSD."

It doesn't occur to John to ask Sherlock how he got hold of the pharmacy, just like it doesn't occur to him to wonder how Sherlock broke into the flat. He knows Sherlock's opinions on Bart's security measures and on Mrs. Hudson's door locks. So the drugs aren't puzzling. He'd a hospital at his disposal and he's a chemist. Besides, John hasn't room in his mind to wonder  _how._ The doctor part of John's brain is now fully at war with the bloke part of John's brain, which is also scrapping with the sympathetic part of John's brain. The first bit wants Sherlock hydrated and unconscious as quick as humanly possible, because an asleep Sherlock will probably rid his system of the drug cocktail faster and with fewer opportunities for complete madness. The last bit aches for him, because even when he was in hospital with a gash wound in his upper thigh and needed John's blood to stay alive, he didn't look this... _lost._ And the middle bit wants to slap him right in the face for what he's done, how  _dare_  he do such a thing, how could he?

"You took an intravenous combination of modified heroin and a strong antipsychotic, and you mixed in a  _hallucinogen_?"

"It didn't work."

"You're fucking well right it didn't work. Have you had any water all this time?"

"Twice, from the taps. God, I can see everything you're saying," Sherlock whispers. "Tick-tick-tick-ticker-ticker-tape in a row. How did you get to this place, how did you find me? It's not on the map, it's somewhere else. How did you know what song was playing?"

"Everyone knows that song. We're going home," John says. "Get up. Come with me."

"How do I know if you're real?"

John closes his eyes and counts to ten before answering, because he really is going to kill this man. For what he's done to himself, to his beautiful mind, for what it does to John to see him like this. He's so angry he can hardly breathe.

"Ask the white letters."

Sherlock cocks his head and stares at John. He really can't get any thinner, John thinks. Not ever any thinner than this. This is the limit to how thin he is going to allow Sherlock Holmes to get. If Sherlock gets to own him, then the reverse should be true, and John is putting his foot down. Sherlock makes the Thin White Duke look plump just now.

"They say you're really here."

John holds a hand out, pointedly. And then Sherlock is up and they are leaving. Sherlock is too thin, he's too cold, he's a tower of strength drained completely empty. It could make a grown man cry, this sort of waste, this level of senselessness. Why should a priceless work of art dash itself against the concrete purposefully? The whole story is a tragedy. It could break John's heart if he let it.

But he isn't going to.

When Sherlock sees their flat, it's as if they just crossed a desert and not merely a few yards of hall and a staircase. So relieved he can barely stand. John deposits him on his bed, which has for some time been their bed despite the posters of serial killers all over the walls, and goes into the hall to send a twin pair of texts.

_he's back._ –JW

Mycroft's response takes five seconds:

_Will call off special forces,_  
 _in that case. Do try not to_  
 _lose him again for a few_  
 _months, we're considerably_  
 _over budget. He's well?_ –MH

After texting Mycroft in the affirmative, Lestrade's response to the same message arrives.

_Tell him to fuck himself. I'm_  
 _shattered, haven't slept in–_  
 _he's all right, is he?_

John says yes. But he can't be sure yet, so he hastens back into Sherlock's room with some water.

Sherlock has crept into the grey cotton Ennui Uniform with the round-necked t-shirt and is lying on his back staring miserably at the ceiling. Not looking as if he plans to be sleeping anytime soon.

"Drink this," John says.

He does. Then he simply goes back to blinking. He tents his fingers up by his chin and then freezes once more, perfectly still and incredibly awake.

"You need to go to sleep," John says helplessly.

"I'll never fall asleep again," Sherlock whispers. "It's finally caught up with me. Like a worm in my brain. Sleep? Sleep is for normal people. I wish to god I could sleep, hell, are you out of your mind? It's never going to happen. I've given all I can, and it's not enough. It's not enough."

John makes two decisions simultaneously. First, Sherlock is off the Thom Yorke, and for good, though John doesn't know quite how he's going to police progressive pop music. Second, supposing you have tried fighting fire with water, and with foam, and with explosives, and the fire is still raging, the only thing left to do is to fight fire with fire. Pursing his lips, John goes to his medical kit and gets a fresh syringe. He probably will qualify as a madman himself after this, he's well aware of it, but Sherlock is tapping his index fingers together in time with  _This is what you get when you mess with us._

"We're performing a surgical extraction," John says.

Sherlock's eyebrows tilt when he registers this.

"Why? How?"

"Because you're past the help of drugs, and I am a doctor. Can you  _move  _the song?"

Frowning, Sherlock rolls onto his side, bringing his knees up towards his ribs. He turns his face into the pillow, nuzzling it like an exhausted cat. "I don't know. I think so."

"Then put it in your arm."

John sinks the hollow needle into Sherlock's arm, the bad arm, the left arm, the arm he avoids looking at habitually, and extracts about one fluid ounce of blood. Oddly, as he performs the most insane medical procedure that the mind of man has ever conceived, he doesn't feel he's doing any sort of disservice to actual medical science. Medical science is about making people well. John is about making people well too, as it happens. Talismans are valuable. Placebos are documented aids to recovery. Washing hands seemed like superstition once. Chemotherapy is like magic. Art can fix minds. Herbs can do good. Sherlock is mad.

And there really isn't anything less invasive that remains to be tried, is there?

When the blood is out, Sherlock stares at it, fascinated. His eyes are turning pearly and have stopped blinking. John doesn't even have to ask what he's thinking now, which is both a miracle and a curse, probably. Sherlock can still hear it playing in the hypodermic, from inside the transparent song prison.

Before he can tell himself that it's the act of an asylum inmate, John presses the needle into his own arm and plunges the tiny dose of fresh blood in. He waits a moment, then pours a little antiseptic onto a cotton ball to clean the two punctures.

"I've turned it off," he says as he lies down next to the only man who has ever made him feel like a savior of anything.

Sherlock is only asleep for four hours before John wakes in the near-darkness to find that he's being watched. It's almost fully night again, and Sherlock seems very pale. But he's always pale, and the edge of his mouth twitches in an almost-smile when he sees John's eyes open.

"You're back," John says drowsily. He's on top of the coverlet and so is Sherlock, and John is still wearing jeans, apparently. He feels run over by an Underground train.

Sherlock nods.

"I'm going to kill you," John adds with finality. "Oxycodone? I'm going to kill you dead."

"Don't do it nicely, then," he whispers. "I'd rather be awake."

"Fuck off, Sherlock, this actually isn't about what  _you_  want, for once in your life."

"I know."

"You're  _sick,_  you realize, to say that to me."

"I know."

"You'd deserve it, though, you'd bloody well deserve the worst I could give you."

"I  _know._ "

They are silent for ten minutes, listening to the clock. Sherlock never takes his eyes off John, and somehow that helps John to reach his decision. It isn't going to be pleasant, and it isn't exactly fair. Hell, it's dubiously moral and John knows it. But this can never happen again. Never. And slowly, as Sherlock's eyes never never blink and never never leave John's face, John retreats into the quiet part of his head, from where he can manage to attempt this feat. Miracles aren't really his forte, but he did recently kill an invisible song. He props up on his elbows and rolls his body into Sherlock's, up flush against him, ready and able to do something impossibly courageous now that he's reached the conclusion that he has no choice. John never thought of himself as a miracle worker, not even once, but he can _  attempt_ the impossible nevertheless. He's a trained professional at that sort of thing... tilting at windmills. After all, Afghanistan never went well for any young British soldier in any story that John can recall.

Sherlock's eyes are still on John. They're burning.

_But the worst o' your foes is the sun over'ead:_  
 _You must wear your 'elmet for all that is said:_  
 _If 'e finds you uncovered, 'e'll knock you down dead,_  
 _And you'll die like a fool of a soldier._

Fool, fool, fool of a soldier...

"Listen to me," John says from above his friend's beautiful, otherworldly face. The face John can all too easily imagine still and lifeless and carved of wax.

Sherlock nods once more. So John curls his fists into either side of Sherlock's hair.

_For beauty won't help if your rations is cold,_  
 _Nor love ain't enough for a soldier._

'Nough, 'nough, 'nough for a soldier...

"I have never told Harry that if she took another drink, I'd go away. I wouldn't ever do that. And I'd not do that to you either. But. I promise you this much. If you... take yourself off again. Disappear. If you try to  _hide  _from me the drugs you're doing, if you go away, if you hole up somewhere secret and I'm left wondering if you're alive... no. No. Whether it's 221C, or the south of France, or a massage parlour in Hong Kong... it's over."

"You'll kill me? This again?"

"No, I'll  _leave you._ Leave you flat. Alone. I'll do it too, I. I'll rip my own heart out and leave it here, but I'll do it. You've said I was wired wrong. I can do. I  _can._ I'll leave you, and it'll kill me, probably. But you won't get to see any of it happen."

Sherlock is shocked.

John has wondered what it would look like from time to time, but now he knows, he doesn't like it. It looks shattering, like he's just viciously reversed the detective's gravity.

"I'll find you," Sherlock says fiercely. "I can find you anywhere."

"Not necessarily."

Suddenly John—who thought all this time that his military training was up to snuff—is underneath Sherlock with his hands pinned violently above him against the bed, Sherlock holding his thighs in place with his knees. The grip Sherlock has on his wrists is extraordinarily careful, brooks absolutely no argument, and in fact makes a very clear point: John isn't going away. Ever. John doesn't bother trying to get out of this hold, because he knows he can't. It would only fuel whatever Sherlock is doing, which is what needs to be defused as quickly as possible.

So John lies very still, watching the man above him act like who he genuinely is. He ought to be terrified, and the tragedy is that he's  _fascinated._

"Just what is it like in that tiny little mind of yours?" Sherlock asks, in the first truly dangerous tone John has ever heard him use when they're alone together. "Is it nice, having such a childish imagination? Being able to ignore any inconvenient fact you like, is that  _lovely,_  John, is it  _comfortable_? I wonder, you see, because you appear to think that I can be bullied, which is a patently  _stupid_ mistake. You aren't leaving me. Do you know what would happen if you did? You would try to hide where you were headed and proceed to make a series of completely juvenile blunders, idiotic mistakes really, because you are ordinary, and then I would hunt you down and take you back, because I am not ordinary, I am  _incredible._ And I  _own you._ Don't you ever fucking think for a moment that you could just vanish into the ether and leave no trace of yourself, you haven't the means."

_When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck,_  
 _Don't look nor take 'eed at the man that is struck,_  
 _Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck_  
 _And march to your front like a soldier._

"I can and I do," John says.

"Shut up, it's  _impossible_."

"Not if I call your brother."

"You  _won't  _call my brother."

"If you hide away again for a drugs binge, I will, watch me."

Sherlock is breathing so hard he's practically hyperventilating, and his eyes have gone utterly feral, like the eyes of a rabid cat.

"I could kill you now, and you'll never get the chance," he points out evenly.

_If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white_ ,  
 _Remember it's ruin to run from a fight._

"You could," John agrees. "You could probably have killed me any number of times. But you aren't going to kill me, Sherlock. You're going to allow yourself to be bullied just this once, because it's by me, and you aren't going to kill me, you're never going to kill me."

"Why not?"

He sounds desperate. As if he actually needs to know, which John thinks is altogether heartbreaking.

"You know why already," John says gently.

"Tell me."

He's pleading now. This question has clearly crossed his mind. And John wonders how horrible that must be, knowing yourself to be light years above ordinary and a maverick law unto yourself, on the day you realize you might hurt the people you least want to. John thinks it must be the worst feeling in the world, as if your cancer were contagious or as if you emitted toxic radiation. He thinks about how  _careful_  Sherlock always is, how  _precise,_  how very  _thoughtful_ , and he loves him for it.

"You could tell me, if you thought about it hard enough."

"I can't. You don't know what it's like."

"I don't need to know what it's like to know you won't kill me. If you killed me, you'd never get to see what I was about to do next."

"Oh, thank you," gasps Sherlock. John wonders if a person can be wound so tightly that when they release some of it, they disintegrate, because that seems to be what his friend is doing as he lets goes of John's wrists and descends into a broken marble heap on top of him. "I knew you'd tell me why. That was. I never meant to... I can't think sometimes, I'm sorry, I–"

"Sherlock, shut up," John orders.

_When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,_  
 _And the women come out to cut up what remains,_  
 _Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains_  
 _An' go to your Gawd like a soldier._

He holds the pair of them very still. It's easy to do, because Sherlock is limp as a rag doll now, just curled into him lifelessly, and because John's hands have never been steadier. John vaguely recalls that the business of surviving probably shouldn't happen in their bedroom, but he can't care now. He picked this. He decided that this was who he'd see through the tempests, and he didn't leave the Army because he turned tail, he left because they no longer had any use for him. And this is the same. He'll be useful to Sherlock, and that's the way it is. No point needlessly philosophizing over it.

Maybe it's crazy, but crazy doesn't matter because John knows when something is good. And Sherlock is worth every second of it.

"I won't disappear anymore," Sherlock whispers. "I just– I didn't want you to see."

John feels the white-hot glow of triumph over adversity flooding his chest. If John had conquered Asia, he wouldn't feel any different than he feels hearing this statement made by the still shivering chap in his arms. Compelling Sherlock Holmes to do as he's told is probably more difficult, anyway. John runs his fingers up and down his friend's back, as if he'd expected to win all along. It's an amazing sensation, this. Sherlock Holmes can do anything, and John Watson can tame Sherlock Holmes. That makes John feel like a king. Provided Sherlock never comes to his senses, this is actually going to  _work._

"What if I don't mean to disappear, though? What if it's an accident, you can't leave me if it's an accident, can you? What if I get lost again?"

"If you get lost, I will find you." John knows he can do it, knows this to be true. "There is nowhere you could go I wouldn't go after you. I swear to Christ there isn't."

"What if it's in my head?"

"I'll go in your head."

"How can you be sure?"

"I love you. I'll figure it out."

"Don't say that now," his friend snaps.

John moves his head to look down, but Sherlock's face is far from visible. "Bloody hell, Sherlock, is there a  _better_  time to say–"

"Stop it, stop it. Say something nice to me if you must, say anything, just not that, today doesn't deserve it, I'm deleting today except the important parts. Say something else."

John pauses. "You're a fucking crime scene," he says with tears in his eyes.

"Right," Sherlock says on a long exhale. "Right. And we love crime scenes."

_This man will be very hard to live with_ , John thinks. He already is, after all. He is like living with a piranha when you're already bleeding. John is never going to have any privacy, not even inside his throat where there aren't any tonsils, and now his boyfriend has gone mad enough that they've switched blood, so there really isn't much left, John thinks. But it's better than nothing ever happening to John again. So much better, in fact, that he feels as if he never made any conscious choice at all. John mulls over Sherlock's version of English, wonders what else he would enjoy hearing as much as being called a crime scene.

"You're also a health hazard."

"True." Sherlock goes very tense all of a sudden. "But I wouldn't have killed you. I wouldn't, ever. I'm sorry. I was only bullying you, I promise."

"That's a lie, isn't it?"

Sherlock thinks it over. "No. It isn't. I don't believe it is."

That's one of the nicest things John has ever heard. And that is insane. John smiles in the dark where no one can see him.

"You do realize, Sherlock, that 'if you leave me, I'll kill you' threats are–"

"More than a bit not good, the exact textbook definition of Not Good."

"And you also realize that we're skipping that part entirely in future."

"I do realize, of course I do, but you frightened me. I shouldn't have done it, but I couldn't seem to stop myself. You're probably angry. I know you're angry, are you angry, but I'll make you like me again. I'm wonderful at making you like me, I'll make it up to you, I'll do something amazing."

"Yep, you probably will."

"I can do anything. What would you like first?"

"I'd like you to go back to sleep," John murmurs. "And try not to do anything cracked while you're unconscious."

For several more hours, they do sleep. When John awakens for the second time, at around five in the morning, it's because he can feel R-L-O-C-K being written in gentle fingernail on the back of his neck. It occurs to John, as the H-O-L portion commences just below it, that if Sherlock did this in cursive instead of defiant capitals, perhaps it wouldn't wake John at all. He considers telling his friend this. Sherlock won't mind a little constructive criticism, and that way John can sleep. For about five minutes, as Sherlock traces the letters over, John thinks about the best way to phrase his suggestion.

John doesn't say anything, though. Just the way he doesn't ever mention seeing through the ludicrously transparent Recycled Bath Water Gambit. He simply drifts off towards sleep again, a man with an invisible name being tattooed on the back of his neck. In a drowsy corner of his mind, he knows it is joining the invisible SHERLOCK HOLMES on his forearm, and on his calf, and on his collarbone, and on his pelvis, and on his thigh, and on his hip, and on his left shoulder, and on the other side of his left shoulder, and just above his left shoulder, and on his back where the bullet exited his left shoulder. Sherlock hasn't ever repeated locations for his imaginary body artwork to date, unless he managed to do it without waking John and John doesn't realize it.

_One day,_  John thinks in Sherlock's general direction,  _I'll be entirely covered in your invisible name._

It's a goal, anyway. It's something to aim for.

The following Tuesday, Sherlock solves a case involving poisoned stationery, a Russian smuggling ring, a love triangle, and a golden pince-nez. He is glowing like a Harrod's window. No one on earth has ever burned brighter than this, John is absolutely certain of it. Sherlock is a magical creature, and he wraps his arms around John's waist in the middle of the street and he spins him in a wild circle. Under normal circumstances, John would object to being picked up like a tyke and swung round and round where all the motorists in the nearby roundabout can plainly see him, but as usual he forgets to object. This time, however, when Sherlock reaches the pavement and sets him down, he finally finds the nerve to tell Sherlock what's truly on his mind.

"How long will you be like this?" he asks before he can stop himself.

"Like what?"

John shrugs, his skin prickling with discomfort. "Like you are. Obsessed with me—looking at me like that, I just. When you're looking at me like that... hang it. It scares me witless, really. That you'll stop, and I won't... that you'll stop one of these days. That's all. I want to  _do this,_  to be– I want to be there to help you. For as long as I can. I just want to  _be there._ With you. How long am I likely to have as your, um. Preoccupation?"

Sherlock's eyes narrow. "Do you really think about that?"

"Every day, more or less," John admits.

The ludicrously brilliant smile creeps steadily onto Sherlock's face. "John, I was three years old when I first grew obsessed with the sound of the violin, and I solved my first crime when I was seven. Have I thrown either of those things over?"

"Well... no. But–"

"It isn't  _my_  fault I didn't meet you until that day at Bart's, is it?"

"Of course not, but–"

"You are such an  _idiot_ ," Sherlock says lovingly.

It takes another five or six seconds before John realizes he is smiling back at his friend. And maybe he is an idiot. He tries to imagine a Sherlock Holmes who doesn't love the violin and doesn't solve crimes. He can't. When he tries to imagine a Sherlock Holmes who doesn't care whether or not John has tonsils, he finds to his utter delight that he can't manage to do that either. Sherlock is out of his mind, and John-sexual, and the rarest, brightest thing on earth.

"I'm an idiot," John agrees. "But you don't much care, do you?"

"Of course not," Sherlock beams at him. "Practically everyone is."

"Well," John clears his throat. "Anything on that list of yours you're keen to try?"

"Which?"

"Either. I'll veto it if it's too insane."

Sherlock thinks this over with his dark head cocked. He is very, very pleased with the offer. John wonders just which options he is currently rejecting in favour of which other options and finds he isn't even put off by the certain fact that half of them are probably  _awful._

"May I take all your fingerprints and examine them through my microscope?"

"Yep. Really, that's all?"

"Then will you ink them again and leave a set on my skin? Out of sight, I promise."

"Wouldn't you prefer to ink yours and leave them on me?"

"Yes," Sherlock admits, "but possibly that's going too far."

"No, it's all right. It's disturbingly nice. But Sherlock... I can tell you're toning it down. Fingerprints are fine. What about something else? Something from your other list? Tell me."

His friend seems hesitant to oblige. As if perhaps John will run screaming away if he delves with any honesty into The Other List. But eventually, Sherlock puts a hand on his lean hip and takes the plunge.

"May I taste your eyes?"

John doesn't wear contact lenses, as his eyesight is very good, so he thinks it over. The concept is more uncomfortable than it is distasteful in and of itself. Will he be able to keep them open? But then he recalls all those days overseas when grit and sand blasted into his corneas, and how meticulous he had to be with wet cloths, and after all Sherlock's tongue is very delicate and very soft and wet and warm. When it isn't acting like a conquering army.

"Why not," says John amiably. "It won't be the maddest thing I've ever done. I invaded Afghanistan, after all."
Wider than a Mile

Sherlock may know what it's like to be beautiful, but John knows what it's like to be good.

It is well past midnight, and Sherlock has stopped being Sherlock for the time being, in favour of being a conduit. The light through the sitting room windows is charcoal-stained and warmly metallic. Cold city air with a thousand smells imbedded in every molecule seeps past the cracks. But Sherlock doesn't notice the details, for once. Can't notice any of it. He is standing, slim and pale and draped in blue, on the low table before their sofa, and his hand has gone missing. He doesn't recall when he lost the appendage, but it must be close to an hour now. Currently, it's merely a mechanism with which to hold a violin bow.

No, not a mechanism. Sherlock's eyes flutter open and then shut again. Or if a mechanism, his wires are veins and his gears are sinews and his casing is cream-coloured skin.

There are times, Sherlock knows, when he is amazing. When he is a supercomputer, when he is a bloodhound, when he is a marauder and the prize in his sights is an Army doctor with a sweet, gentle face and a deadly trigger finger. And there are other times when Sherlock is a torment, to himself as much as to anyone else. But just now, as happens every few months when he is lucky and the world around him allows it, he isn't Sherlock Holmes at all.

As for the Strad in his hands, it is throbbing and humming and pulsing like a living thing. The violin shies away from him, all a-tremble, and then presses back into his touch as if doubly ashamed of itself. Its patina is flushed and its strings quiver delicately. He strokes the bow over them with tremendous care, they're so sensitive by this time, oversensitive, it's been five hours since he started playing, they're far too sensitive for Chopin by now and Mendelssohn would arch his fiddle's back in a gasp and break its spine, and so he croons tender phrases over the heated strands. Ancient English songs. Lullabies. Songs about cold winters and about lost loves.

Moon River, wider than a mile...

Sherlock's eyes flick open again.

John is standing there now, and Sherlock hadn't noticed him enter. He's in front of the table, which means his head is roughly at the level of Sherlock's hips. The doctor's dishwater hair is sleep-mussed on one side and his arms are crossed over his striped jumper, which he's thrown on top of the undershirt and flannels. Sherlock deduces that it's freezing in here but can't be bothered to docket any more facts other than that John is smiling with one side of his mouth. John's eyes are so dark in the glancing electric glow from the window that Sherlock can't see the blue, but he knows it's there.

The detective isn't a detective anymore, and that happens so very rarely, so he keeps playing. He plays for all the times he's too much, and for the times he's not enough. He plays for London. He plays for the things he can't remember are beautiful, and the things he's forgotten are ugly.

He plays for the person who lets Sherlock under his skin despite all medical good sense, and John watches. Unmoving. Sherlock can see the lines in his face better in the near-dark. That doesn't make sense, but nothing about John Watson makes the slightest bit of sense at all. He plays for the delighted furrows John's smiles make and the haggard semicircles Afghanistan and Sherlock dig under his eyes. They're all the same to him. They're all John, so he plays for them.

He plays for a long time.

The notes slide to a stop.

"Hello, Huckleberry Friend," says Sherlock.

"And hello, Heartbreaker," says John.

Sherlock lets gravity pull the bow towards the floor, but keeps the Strad perched on his shoulder. It's emitting lovely soft little pants of blissful exhaustion. It would be cruel to put it down.

"It's mad to be jealous of a violin," John whispers. Fondly. Sadly, Sherlock thinks.

"I don't mind," he says truthfully.

John just watches him.

"You're right," Sherlock adds, by way of being helpful. "I'm not coming down."

John hesitates for one more moment and then steps up onto the narrow table. Sherlock swept all the papers and books onto the ground, so there's room, if not much.

"Why do you look so sad?" Sherlock questions. "I thought you liked when I play."

"I do." John runs his fingers over Sherlock's lapel as if he really wants to touch the violin but would get an outburst of claws and teeth if he tried. He's right about that, Sherlock thinks. John can touch it under normal circumstances, but not just now. Not when Sherlock's hand is gone. "I only... you won't understand."

Sherlock cocks his head.

"You're already beautiful," John says. "You can't know what it's like to wonder what... what that's like. To be beautiful."

Considering whether he thinks of himself as beautiful, abstractly, Sherlock comes to find that he does. Most of the time. At the moment, he's not even himself, and so the question is much more objective. Who is Sherlock Holmes, and is he beautiful? Well, yes. He's the sort of person people will still reference long after his death, beyond the grave, decades and decades in the future, because he's one of a kind.

"I wonder what it's like to be good," he offers instead.

A breath escapes John's lungs just before Sherlock kisses him. His friend's lips are pliant with sleep and affection and melancholy and all the gracefulness written on every strand of his DNA. Sherlock still has a fiddle on his shoulder, but his right hand tugs John's hips closer, closed fingers with a bow in them pressing into the doctor's lower back.

There his hand is again. It's on John.

Sherlock isn't a conduit anymore.

He doesn't care.

The kiss changes. Sherlock has come back to earth like the gentle fall of a weightless comet, and of course John notices. John pulls away and looks up at him, his fingers brushing over Sherlock's jaw once, twice, three times.

"I ruined it, didn't I? I'm sorry."

"It's always ruined sooner or later."

"How often has it happened?"

"Dozens of times. Forty-three. It'll be back."

John nods. Sherlock shivers, and discovers that the only reason he knows it's cold in the room is that John is warm. And then he realizes that John loves him, and John was kissing him just now, and nevertheless John is looking sadder by far than he has in weeks. He's blinking hard at Sherlock's collarbone, trying miserably not to show it and failing.

"I wish I knew why you look like that," Sherlock says. "Don't look like that. I haven't done anything terrible, and there's such a lot of world to see. We'll see it tomorrow."

"Right," John whispers. "And you love me."

"And you love me."

"Off to see the world, then. We'll see it tomorrow."

"Of course we will."

"You aren't coming to bed, are you?"

"No."

"Right. Goodnight, in that case. Tell your violin I'm sorry for interrupting."

John goes back into the bedroom.

Sherlock goes to the window. Letting the violin slide from his shoulder, he looks out at London. There are stars, he knows, but they're snuffed out by light and pollution. He wishes they were visible tonight even if he can't understand them. Tomorrow he'll see too much of the world, more than likely, but just now is so quiet. It's better than quiet, in fact, for it's somewhere in between all the rest of it. Like a dream state or a vision. He is drifting through the silence on a little raft of half-remembered sound.
New Days to Throw Your Chains Away

When Sherlock decides that he needs to be higher functioning, he simultaneously finds the perfect tutor.

John is lying on a green camouflage-print blanket in the middle of a wide desert with his dark, dark, dark blue eyes closed. Sherlock is next to him on his back, staring up at an unmarked sky, expecting explosions the colour of thick blood and silver sweat to begin at any instant, but nothing is happening. All is quiet. Perhaps they aren't in Afghanistan after all. Perhaps the War is nowhere near them, or they're here at another time, though Sherlock is too cynical to suppose peace ever lasts for long in Afghanistan. If not one War, then Another. Perhaps they're somewhere else, in Egypt or in Kenya, but Sherlock has never seen a desert for himself in his life and so is going to have to find out from John. Hesitant of breaking the vast, enormous silence, Sherlock rolls on his side to see if his friend can provide him any sort of non-verbal clue as to where they have landed themselves.

But John doesn't look right.

John's blood has gone blue.

Sherlock tries to think what that means, where the phrase 'blue blood' actually came from, because he's quite keen at etymology and maybe it would help John, whose skin is going grey from the tiny rivers of blood flowing beneath it. He's much keener at etymology than at formal medicine, anyhow. 'Blue blood'... it meant originally blood uncontaminated by Moorish descent, but the sense has changed from fair-skinned to something different. Blue blood is so delicate as to be thin, he supposes. Thin, pure blood, anemic blood. But how is that medically relevant? He thinks it has something to do with oxygen, whether the blood has or hasn't any, but he can't recall which is best. Surely red would be better, wouldn't it, as that's the hue John's generally is?

John opens his eyes. Even the minuscule veins within the whites are a severe cobalt.

Oh.

Sherlock, recalling exactly what just happened between them, is suddenly absolutely bloody terrified.

John is talking now.

"I'll leave you," he's saying. "Leave you flat. Alone. I'll do it too, I. I'll rip my own heart out and leave it here, but I'll do it."

"John," Sherlock whispers, "you've got the wrong blood."

In general, John is a wonderful listener, but he isn't listening now. He's just opening his pale, thin lips to continue as if Sherlock hadn't spoken, cold and distant and utterly calculated, a carefully balanced and heartless machine, really, an imitation of a real person, reminding Sherlock dreadfully of Sherlock Holmes. The blue within him makes him look dead. Maybe he is dead, though. That's entirely possible, as Sherlock has been carefully poisoning his blood all his life long and now it's crawling about inside the only entirely good man he'd ever met who could still manage to tolerate him. Maybe the blood–

"You've said I was wired wrong. I can do."

"Wait, I–

"I can." He's hideously proud of the fact.

"No. No, no, no, no. This isn't you speaking. It's not your words, not your blood, it's mine, this isn't you talking, you're never–"

Cruel, he meant to say. John is never cruel. Not even when he's killing things.

"I'll leave you, and it'll kill me, probably."

"Give it back, give it back!" Scrabbling closer, Sherlock grabs at John's shoulders, looking for an opening, any opening, somewhere to get the bad blood out. John is wearing a dark blue cotton shirt and a pair of old jeans and Sherlock paws wildly but efficiently at his sleeve until his arm is visible. A puncture mark is there, but already closed. Just a speck of dried blood and no entrance. Sealed-off. Useless.

"But you won't get to see any of it happen," John concludes.

It can't be possible, it certainly shouldn't be, but John is actually smirking Sherlock's smirk right in Sherlock's face. The sight is almost enough to make him gag. It's the worst expression on the least appropriate human being imaginable.

"I'll find you," Sherlock says, meaning only reassurance. "I can find you anywhere."

"Not necessarily," John drawls in a voice much deeper and more clipped, and yes, admittedly, why mince words on the subject, more public-school and ancient-money than his usual.

"Why are you me?" Sherlock begs him. "I never meant to, I swear to Christ I didn't. I'm not a vampire. Stop being cruel. You aren't cruel, I am, and generally by accident. Stop it. You can't leave me like this, speak to me like this. You can't go where I can't find you, it's impossible."

"Not if I call your brother."

"You won't call my brother."

"If you hide away again for a drugs binge, I will, watch me."

Sherlock runs his palm over the doctor's face and finds it deathly cold. Too cold to be dead and too cold to be lying under the white-hot sun in the middle of a bloody desert. When his fingers brush past John's lips, John tilts one side of his smile upward mockingly.

His chest moves. He's laughing.

"You'd never laugh at me, stop this, I need the blood back," Sherlock gasps frantically. "I only wanted a piece of me to go with you day in and day out, when you aren't actually anywhere nearby– oh, god, please stop laughing."

"Why should I? You're being an idiot. Would you stop laughing in my place?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you ought to know. If you can't teach me how to act, to help me now I'm you to grow better at it, then who can? It feels marvelous, by the way. Being you. It's like being some kind of deity. I can see everything so much more clearly. It would be perfect, if not for the screaming. All that screaming underneath, it's terribly distracting, isn't it? You should have warned me in more explicit terms, you know, about the screaming. Before your blood went in my veins."

"I don't want you to hear that, ever. Say you can't hear it."

"It's your own fault that I can, isn't it?"

"I'm not a vampire," Sherlock recites raggedly, closing his eyes.

"Wouldn't you like to think so. I wonder, are there any villages nearby?"

"Why?"

"I was only puzzling over who else might want your blood. Everyone, more than likely. You're wonderful. You're absolutely incredible, of course they want some."

"They don't."

"But how else are they to hear the screaming?"

"Stop it. This isn't you, it's–"

Sherlock's eyes open again. John is grinning widely now. Grinning the madcap, moonshine, maniacal grin of the moderately high-functioning sociopath.

"Aren't we amazing?" John asks happily. "I think we're possibly the best and wisest men I've ever known. I'm going to make everyone on earth just exactly like us."

There is a knife in Sherlock's hand now. He didn't pick it up, has no idea how it got there, but it's heavy and curved and Arab-looking, and also—he knows without testing it—very, very sharp.

"I could kill you now, and you'll never get the chance," Sherlock whispers.

"You aren't going to kill me, Sherlock." John laughs delightedly. "You're never going to kill me."

"Why not?"

"Because we can't be killed." John's voice goes almost tender, as his frigid, dead fingers drag their way down Sherlock's throat. "We're above all that, you know. Soon everyone in the world will hear the screaming, and we'll never be alone ever again."

The cut Sherlock makes in John's belly slices long and deep, as if he's gutting a fish, and the dark blood gushes out thick as oil on his hands, and he doesn't mean to kill John, never, but if he can only get his own blood out, then maybe everything will be all right again, and John is still laughing as the thick blue blood pulses with his heartbeats, spilling onto the blanket and beyond that, underneath, into the sand, and the whole world is turning blue now, just sluggish liquid seeping slow and rich into the pearly grains–

"Sherlock."

– but maybe without the bad blood he can get John back, it isn't hopeless, yes, the less blood the better in order to recover the real John, the one who falls asleep in cabs with his head on Sherlock's coat and who doesn't put any sugar in his coffee, and there are John's guts, he's up to his elbows in them now but they're so cold despite the bad blood seeping away into the dunes, it's the texture of eels in an icy river–

"Hey. Sherlock."

– and why is he still so cold but suddenly now so pink and pale and red and terrified, where did all that hurt in his eyes come from, why is John whimpering in fright before he opens his mouth wide to scream, what in the name of holy god has Sherlock done this–

"Sherlock!"

When he snaps awake, his fists are full of sheets and he's panting into the dark as if he'd just run across miles of knee-deep dunes. There's blood on him, his own sapphire blood that won't turn red, blood  _everywhere,_  and that's disgusting, blood is crimson and belongs in crime scenes and morgues and test tubes where it's wonderful, but there is wrong-coloured blood all over this bloody t-shirt and this bloody bed and this–

"Sherlock, my god, what's– look, you're awake. Here, look, Sherlock. Look at me. It's all right."

The light next to the bedside flicks on.

There is the coverlet half kicked off, and that is normal. There are the crates and crates of case files and news clippings he isn't sure why he holds on to now that they're all archived online, and that's normal. There is his robe in a heap on the floor. Normal. There are the countless posters of everyone from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer, and that's perfectly normal, although not "normal" per se, he's aware of the fact. There is cold sweat all over him, trickling down the front of his t-shirt between his lean pectorals, and that isn't normal at all, but at least it isn't blood.

There is John. He's wide-eyed and by now entirely awake, his dark blond hair all mussed and his breathing slightly quickened, up on his knees, one hand on Sherlock's thigh and the other gripping the side of his dark head where the curls are scattered helter-skelter. He's alive, and he has a far more weathered face than anyone his age ought, and he looks absolutely beautiful, the way perfectly clean and warm wrinkled laundry all in a pile looks so beautiful it hurts sometimes.

"What on  _earth_ ," John sighs, slowly pulling his hands away as he turns to glance at the clock. When he looks back, his brow is inquisitive.

Sherlock closes his eyes and swallows, hard. He shakes his head.

"Listen, come here, you needn't–"

Sherlock is now rubbing his fingers back and forth through his hair as fast as he possibly can, as if that will erase what's within the skull. It's worked in the past on occasion, when something is too recent to delete.

"Sherlock."

It isn't working now.

"Sherlock Holmes. Tearing your hair out won't help."

"How do you know?" he snaps viciously.

"Because punching the wall of my old flat didn't help either."

"Didn't it?"

"Um. Well, sorry to say. No. It only bruised my hand."

"Nothing will help, then."

"Nothing? On the face of the earth?"

"Correct."

"You're... sure about that, are you?"

"You have a point. Nothing legal."

"I see. That's. Okay, fine. Well, if nothing save for illegal things will help, then you might as well waste your time calming down over here with me rather than over there frightening me half to death."

There's logic in that, in the fact that if it doesn't matter either way he might as well be agreeable, and Sherlock is grateful for logic just now. He drops his hands and gradually slides over where John clearly wants him, with his head tucked into his friend's neck. John smells much more  _John_  this way, with Sherlock's nose so near his ear and the edge of his collarbone. John smells like the colour orange, pumpkin orange, but never like oranges or like pumpkins. Sherlock realizes this would make little sense to anyone save him, but after all, no one save him will ever hear it. Opening his eyes a crack, he watches John's carotid pulsing a gentle beat.

He watches ravenously. Forcing his brain to do something other than replay John bleeding out blue slick in the middle of a desert, he translates the pulse into an imaginary heart monitor screen simply as an exercise in calm:

And it's red blood, after all. The right blood.

Only tainted the smallest bit by Sherlock's.

He shudders before he can stop himself. It was all meant to be so  _perfect._ It  _was_  perfect eight days ago, before he lost his mind and then lost his way and then spectacularly lost his temper and then possibly his soul, he can't be sure after all if he ever had one, very likely not, but anyhow he feels altogether soulless at the moment. He didn't this morning, but this morning he hadn't seen the dream.

"What happened?" John murmurs into the top of his head.

"Don't ask me," he breathes, reaching out and tracing a rib with his fingertips.

"Are you telling me that you can't tell me?"

"Yes."

"Sherlock." John sounds very grave. "The other night, when–"

"Stop."

John waits, then decides to soldier on. Sherlock can tell when he's doing just exactly that in his head: soldier on. It smells of canvas and metal dog tags.

"You never told me what you were thinking when I–" he continues softly. "I only– it could have been anything, in that head of yours, you were already so drained after all, and just now, when you were dreaming, you said–"

"Just don't. Please, for me."

"But maybe you. Can't remember, or... I don't know. Don't want to."

Sherlock can remember every instant of what was going on in his head when John said he was going to leave him, go somewhere Sherlock could never find, even if under hypothetical future circumstances. Every instant of inner monologue right up to the very real words, "I could kill you now." Sherlock replays it for himself, checking. He deleted a great many things from that day, but not what he was thinking before he did something any fucking slack-jawed moron knows Isn't a Bit Fine and is in fact the Embodied Caricature of All Things Not Good in Relationships. He kept it for a very specific reason: lacking a predictable moral compass is highly uncomfortable depending upon circumstances, granted, and feeling wicked is mildly irritating for howsoever long it lasts before he can quash it. But that's all bearable because it's  _de rigueur_  by now.

Feeling stupid, on the other hand, is like being tortured. And he feels stupid. And he could have Ruined Everything.

The point isn't that he thinks about pretty ways to die, it's that he doesn't kill himself. The point isn't that he wants to take every one of Jim Moriarty's senses away from him before he murders the bastard, but that he doesn't mention it. The point isn't that he'd like very much to know what John's exposed heart looks like, aortas and ventricles and hot thumping fleshy muscle. It's that he generally isn't stupid enough to  _say such a thing out loud._

The thought process took about 2.5 seconds, give or take a tenth, and went exactly in this manner:

_John is walking down a road and there are yellow cornfields and I've never set foot there it's entirely new and he's alone  _tell him  _John is underwater in a pool but he's broke the surface and is smiling at his wife who has auburn hair just the same as their two children in the distance age eight and age ten and they all three think he's a tiny king  _you have to tell him _  John is playing footie in September in Manchester with mates I've never seen before I don't know their names there are dry leaves on the ground I don't know any of their names not a single one _make him stop this  _John is flying on a plane and looking down at white clouds which look solid below and then he turns back and touches the hand grasping his arm and it's attached to a remarkably fit dark-eyed businessman who loves him as best as he's capable but has affairs with vacuous club boys when he's out of town away from John who doesn't know a thing about it  _say something _John is in a field hospital in Brazil making other people well, strangers, people I've never seen, none of them, he's touching them and I'll never know them at all and I can't learn what he's done or who he's saved or how it hurt him  _SAY SOMETHING _  John is kissing a tanned rugger in Brighton who writes shyte poetry John smiles at only because he's John and John would smile at a sack of coal if you'd lugged it far enough for him after all he's an idiot and the air smells of salt and weeds and the scent seeps into John's hair and changes it _SAY ANYTHING, STOP THIS  _John is dying of advanced liver cancer in Newcastle at age fifty hooked up to a thousand tubes and no one is there to crawl into his cot with him with a matched pair of quietly deadly white pills and–_

And that was when he had opened his mouth, more's the pity.

"I remember." Sherlock's voice is nothing like it should be, he notes, all gravelly and confined.

Then he goes quiet again. John thinks for a moment, moving the hand snaking underneath his friend's torso, freeing its range of motion a bit. He brushes the fingertips lightly up and down the damp patch along Sherlock's spine.

"Where were you, then, just now? You weren't in London."

"Deserts," Sherlock murmurs. "I was dreaming of deserts. I dreamt of deserts and you were there and everything was my fault."

"The War was your fault?"

"Much worse things were my fault."

"I don't suppose I can think of any worse things."

Sherlock looks up, wondering if he's gone somehow astray. Maybe there shouldn't be worse things than the War, at least not out loud. That might be offensive. John doesn't sound angry, however, nor mocking, nor impatient. His eyebrows are creasing and he pulls Sherlock a bit closer, ghosts a thumb over the seam between his lips.

"I know  _you_  can, though," John concludes with something like pained admiration. "You've a rare talent for the supremely fucked, you realize. You're like the Stephen Hawking of Fuckery. You ought to have a university chair."

It's tempting to smile back at him and Sherlock as a rule quite likes John's bizarre not-compliments. This is a particularly good one. This one will make the archives, and deserves a thankful expression. But it would look like the Normal People Smile, and John can tell the difference. He bites gently at the thumb instead and settles back down.

"Why should a vampire dream of deserts?" Sherlock wonders as he tries to grapple with the notion of falling asleep again.

"You're not a vampire." John sounds more than concerned now. He sounds alarmed. His arms tighten their grip almost imperceptibly. Almost. But not to Sherlock.

"Irrelevant. The point is, I've never been to one. A desert. Why should my subconscious have done?"

"Maybe my blood is playing with your REM cycles."

It's a joke, that's obvious, but in Sherlock's current state of half-awake non-logical thought, it's also highly plausible. John yawns and reaches up to switch the light off.

"Any new dreamscapes that are actually yours I need worry about?" he asks.

Sherlock winces, but at least John can't see him any longer. His night vision is excellent, almost as good as Sherlock's, but it takes at least three minutes to engage fully. It takes Sherlock one minute twenty-six seconds.

"I don't think so. I've deleted those a long time ago."

"Grand. We'll both forever and always dream of deserts, then," John says dryly, "until one of us wakes up."

Sherlock, as a master of forgetting about things, decides to forget about it.

It isn't doing either of them any good, he tells himself. Living in a state of perpetual guilt would be a ridiculous waste of a brilliant life and a soaring career, and anyway he's marvelous enough in most ways that—provided he never does something so  _stupid, stupid, childishly, laughably, tragically stupid_  again—they'll be fine. It's lovely that Sherlock has John's blood, it's in him in the shower and in the middle of thoroughfares and when he's telling himself not to bury Anderson somewhere no one will ever find the git. And the lovelier Sherlock can manage to be, in theory, the better his blood will be for John, even if it possibly contained trace amounts of oxy, anti-psych meds, and acid. That was an accident. John's timing is usually perfect, and in a purely selfish short-term sense it was in this case too. In a purely selfish long-term sense, however, Sherlock could do without feeling he's contaminated someone divine, thank you very much.

So he promptly stops. John deserves better. John deserves the best of everything, and he is damn well going to get it. Sherlock, therefore, sets about the task of being amazing. He's very good at it. And it's wonderfully distracting, incidentally.

It works like a minor miracle, this deciding that for John's sake he's going to be a minor miracle again, and within the month, for no reason whatsoever Sherlock can fathom, John lets him taste his eyeballs. As it happens, they taste less salty than the rest of him, and less like tea from Mumbai, sweeter than that, more like—oddly enough—his saliva. John Watson's eyeballs taste like a delicacy invented for Sherlock Holmes.

"No," John says, laughing.

"Why not?"

"First off: complete and utter lack of motivation. Try not to be offended."

John isn't wearing a stitch of clothing and neither is Sherlock, who is lying on his stomach with his ankles crossed like an adolescent girl, watching John laugh at him. Literally no one else laughs at him, and it requires acclimatization. Sitting cross-legged on his quilt with sheets draped over his wiry legs, John is giving him plenty of practice. It's probably getting dark outside, and people in London are probably doing all the mad, ordinary, peculiar, boring things they do, and some of it is probably illegal, and Sherlock will probably have to unravel their tangled-up webs for them come morning. Life is beautiful. He doesn't know quite why, but that doesn't mean he can't appreciate it.

"We've had sex already, it was rather brilliant, it's Saturday, you're not hungry, I've nothing on, you're not  _busy_ ," Sherlock says with the hint of future pouting.

John just laughs again, running his fingers over his eyebrows.

"See, that's not logic. Not a logical argument. Your premise is fallacious. By that logic, every time I've nothing on, I'd be licking your eyes. When in fact I'd prefer... ha. Almost anything else."

"It's  _interesting._ "

"I'll take your word for it, thanks."

"Next you'll tell me you want to get dressed and have a coffee and see a show on the West End."

"Yep, well the day I say that, you can officially declare my self-preservation instincts deceased."

"So you want to do something else, something that isn't boring?"

"Maybe."

"You promise it isn't boring?"

"Not boring."

"Tell me."

"Fine. Your first kiss. Off you go."

Sherlock picks at a thread in the quilt pattern and thinks it over. Provided it's reciprocal, since his every waking leisure moment is now and forever dedicated to memorizing John Watson, it won't be a complete waste of time. And John usually covers up so quickly, but it's warm in his room and he's letting Sherlock stare at the scar for as long as he likes, and Sherlock knows enough about John to comprehend by means of inductive reasoning that his continued nudity is both deliberate and generous.

"Victor, in the chapel of all places. I was sixteen. We were at boarding school together. I made friends with his dog because I wanted him to notice me."

John nods, amused. "He noticed you before that, I guarantee it. But your scheme was sound. And how did that experiment go? The kissing?"

"Perfectly. He didn't run." Sherlock smirks wolfishly.

"Always promising."

"It is. You?"

"Jane Whitcomb, both aged thirteen, in her basement, experiment went pretty much identically to yours with the lack of running. In fact, I think in retrospect she lured me down there. We'd no notion of what we were doing, kept confusing snogging with mashing faces together. Dreadful. You'd have been appalled. First time having sex?"

"Victor," Sherlock reports, worrying at the thread. "Two weeks later, his room. Though I'm not sure what sense you mean. Doesn't matter, anyhow. Proper shag also Victor, six months after that, my room after I'd rigged my lock properly."

"Oh." John is surprised. Then seems to realize he shouldn't be. "And you were–"

"Please. I was always me except with Charles. I'd wanted to feel normal, and I didn't think he'd like me any other way. A fortnight of feeling normal was enough of a lark. Anyway, everyone already knew me at school, didn't they?"

"Then what went wrong with Victor?"

"Nothing," Sherlock reflects. "He was... he was very nice. It was a successful experiment with repeated positive outcomes. I fancied him, he put up with me, we figured out the sex part soon enough, as he's bright and I'm very bright indeed. He ended up reading theology at Oxford, I think. Odd. I haven't thought about Victor Trevor in years. He smells of expensive dish soap. I liked that. He could read Anglo-Saxon. I liked that too."

"He broke it off when he went to uni?"

"Neither of us broke it off."

"Well, I happen to know you aren't still seeing each other."

"Trevor senior broke it off. Not everyone thinks it's all fine, you know."

John's mouth twists down. Then he nods, suddenly grave. Sherlock starts deducing automatically as John's brows darken further in thought. _Fellow soldier—dalliance discovered—private altercation—hazing?—not hazing, superior officer—minor incident—never reported—conflict not physical—some bigoted backwater bloke picking a fight John wouldn't give him._

Sherlock smirks at nothing as John's eyes refocus.

"I'm sorry," John says. "That shouldn't have happened to you."

"Of course it should, don't be ridiculous."

"But. That's. Sherlock, that's a terrible situation to have found yourself in, and as for Victor–"

"Oh, forget about Victor. I certainly had. He's fine. I suppose he's fine, anyway, and I'm glad it happened."

John just blinks, wearing a frustrated smile which demands further explanation.

"If I'd stayed with Victor, I'd probably not have left him, and then I'd not have needed to go halves on the rent with anyone new, already having a guaranteed financial partner with sexual benefits built into the package not to mention knowing each other's foibles intimately, stability and comfort and all that nonsense, which means I'd not have whinged to Stamford about needing a suitable flatmate, and then he'd never have thought about it when you complained of London prices being too dear. So. I'm delighted Trevor senior is a bigoted old cow."

"Sherlock," John attempts, "you can't just. Writing people off that way really isn't on."

"I don't see why."

This is starting to go badly, Sherlock realizes. But the one thing he cannot do is start lying in the middle. It's difficult enough to track where he's gone astray with the truth without switching directions and overcompensating. John had once told Sherlock that it was a Bit Not Good of Sherlock to mention that at least Moriarty had killed the Old Woman in a fit of panic rather than the Young Boy, it being far less wasteful, and shifting tacks in the middle to admit that the Old Woman probably knew a great deal more and was thus intellectually more valuable to society by virtue of accrued wisdom than the Young Boy had... not solved anything. Had not helped in any way, as a matter of fact.

"You don't see why you could spare him a bit of sympathy?"

"Correct. It isn't a commodity I have in excess."

"That's an understatement."

"Just a moment, whose side are you on?"

"Victor's, I'm beginning to think. We have common interests. Poor bastard probably loved you."

"'Probably' doesn't enter into it, as he claimed he did and I can tell when he's lying. Who cares?"

" _He_  does, even if he's the only one, you complete–" John bites his lip, stopping himself continuing.

Sherlock frowns, achingly frustrated with English. English is workable these days, certainly not dead, but it's like paddling a canoe with a soup spoon at times. It's not on to praise one's exes, that he knows, because he'd once told John that Sebastien has a brain for numbers and complex finance like a perfectly tuned Stradivarius and John was quiet for over two hours because he realized Sherlock had first admired Seb's brain, and John's brain is very bright but also quite ordinary and neither of them bother to pretend otherwise. It's not on to ignore them either, or they wouldn't be having this conversation. It's not on to pretend they were all ghastly, John knows that Sherlock's sex drive outside of the Object of Admiration is both practically nil and theoretically nonexistent, and also that Sherlock is exquisitely particular.

_What  _is  _on, exactly?_

"How did you feel when it happened?" John questions doggedly. "Not now. Not re-contextualized. How did you feel then?"

Sherlock thinks it over.

"I was annoyed."

John rubs his hands up and down his face. It looks like despair, but thankfully Sherlock knows it isn't.

"Annoyed," he repeats.

"I was  _spectacularly_  annoyed?" Sherlock cheerily offers instead, liking the sound of it.

"But now you've found someone else, you're keen on daft old bastards who cruelly thwart their sons' love lives. Glad to have encountered them."

"I'm glad you got shot, too, come to that."

"Sherlock–"

"I am," he insists, aware that it's dangerous and also aware that John is still fundamentally not-getting-it and drastic measures must be taken.

But John looks furious now, so the drastic measures clearly require immediate re-drafting.

"That sort of pain and suffering are just a means to an end that you've found suits you, is that it?" he demands. "Christ, Sherlock. Is this some sort of principle? Any sort of pain and suffering is fine so long as it leads to your being better off in the long run?"

"Stop playing stupid."

"Stop acting a heartless prick, then."

"I can easily manufacture sentiment, but I frankly won't be arsed to do so simply for your amusement," Sherlock snaps. "It's useless. If meeting you means losing Victor, goodbye Victor, the prat didn't shrug off the Trevor family fortune for me, did he? _Did_  he? If my brother offered  _you  _twenty thousand quid and a future career as a court justice, would you leave me over it? I simply cannot imagine why you want me to make a spectacle over him, as you are generally quite unnerved when I cry on command, don't think I can't see you squinting at me when I do. Is that what you want? Tears?"

"No, I never said–"

"As to your being shot, you're alive. And different now than you were before, of course you are, and  _yes_  I'm glad of it, I can't stand to think of you any other way than the way you are, the way you decided to be, picturing you unmarked and  _ordinary_ ,  _boring_ , having chosen a desk job at a sodding insurance company rather than walking open-eyed into a War, thinking about that is  _awful._ Because you're  _not  _normal. You can't be predicted. You can only be guessed at. It's beautiful, I swear to god you're being deliberately ignorant, and your leg hurts less and less these days anyhow, and that scar is the most fucking fantastic piece of permanent physical evidence that I've ever seen, it's  _art_ , it's a  _Rembrandt,_  it's bloody  _Chopin written in  fibrous tissue and inelastic collagen_, is what that scar is, you're a fool not to see it but I shouldn't be surprised, and anyway I'd likely be dead if you hadn't ever learned to shoot a man with a handgun through a window at twenty meters."

John's lips fall open. It's extremely gratifying.

"So, fine," Sherlock shrugs. "Act like an idiot. Wish I were dead. See if I care. Go on. You don't regret enlisting, you're glad of it, glad you were brave-and-useful, Queen-and-country and every quaint notion you've ever confessed to, you probably still send the New Yorkers you fought with notes at Christmas, so it's ridiculous to regret being shot. Hypocritical, even. And worse than useless to mind that I'm glad of the fact. I'm over here. Not hurting you a bit. Just being glad of things. Glad and harmless. See? I'm not even touching you. I'm... twenty-six inches distant. If you don't want to be glad of anything, or watch me being glad, then go away."

Sometimes it seems to Sherlock as if  _enough_  English will inevitably get his point across. It's a question of volume. But that was a marathon even for him. He stops, studying its effects. John is... John is still over there, being John. He's staggered. Mostly blinking, every so often a twitch of one thin lip. His square face is flushing a fair amount, tending towards rose tones, and Sherlock is determinedly  _watching_  and  _glad of it_. John's tongue will appear at literally any moment. Ah, there it is. Brilliant.

"Sherlock, what are you doing?"

"Filing away exactly what you look like when stunned. And glad of the opportunity, still glad, John, and keen to keep at it, the glad, stop trying to  _spoil everything._ It's annoying."

John shuts his mouth with a small  _click._ Sherlock waits. He doesn't have to wait long before John crawls down the bed and lies on his stomach facing him, both propped up on elbows and Sherlock somehow still taller. Well, not  _somehow_. His upper arms are exactly–

"Is this you being optimistic?" John asks very close to Sherlock's lips.

That's more like it, he muses. John's breath still smells faintly of the way Sherlock's skin tastes, and that is fantastic. That is goodness of December the 25th proportions. Sherlock tilts his head, bringing their lips still closer and surreptitiously sniffing. He's seen cats purr when they smell open food tins. He doesn't ever have to wonder what that feels like.

"Possibly. I haven't considered."

"You being optimistic is–"

"I won't stop being glad, you can't make me."

"Bloody hell, you've gone full Pollyanna on me. If Pollyanna was a mentally deranged, gore-obsessed three-year-old."

Sherlock grins before he can stop himself. But that's all right. Grinning and glad go together quite well, as he understands the principle. And he likes that his hair is beginning to brush against John's forehead. It's like touching him without the sensation of being touched.

"Sherlock, your moral relativism is highly dangerous and dubiously logical."

"I know," he whispers. "That's what you're here for."

"Am I?" John smiles. "What else am I here for?"

"Primarily for kissing."

"I thought I was for splitting the rent. And making points for you in front of Lestrade."

"No, you're for kissing."

"Not for buying milk?"

"For kissing."

"I distinctly recall–"

There's a surge forward, just the smallest of brief magnetic tugs from either one of them, Sherlock honestly can't be sure which, and then soft wide lips are dragging over soft thin lips, and the glad disappears _._ It's frightening, how bottomless this is, Sherlock acknowledges when John's tongue meets his with a muffled wordless sound meaning  _yes_  from one or the other of them, because Sherlock knows himself to be brakeless when he isn't ruthlessly focused, and John isn't cautious where his Sherlock addiction is concerned. He doesn't seem to find high levels of Sherlock Holmes in any way toxic to the system. He's careful  _with_  Sherlock, and takes care  _of_  Sherlock, and cares  _for_  Sherlock, and cares for himself quite carefully as well, but he doesn't take care how  _much_  Sherlock he's inhaling at any given moment. The current moment being a fine example, because Sherlock just rolled John decisively onto his back and is kissing him as if kissing and fucking are identical. Which they are, he owns, aesthetically at any rate, if only to him.

John isn't ever going to tell him  _enough_ , so Sherlock stops, just to look down and see John, ordinary and preternatural John, not-stopping-him.

"Why is being happy with me different from being happy with Victor Trevor?" John questions at last, breathless and bemused and possibly—finally—a bit flattered.

"I'm not  _happy_  with you."

"You aren't?"

_No, not precisely,_  Sherlock thinks. _It's that so many things used to not matter, and now all of them do, and I can't make the mattering stop. Any sort of death used to be a nice thing to think about, for instance. And now you matter, so you'd have to be there too._

"Happiness is irrelevant," he concludes. "You are the  _sole requirement._ It's not the same."

It's also not nearly so comfortable, or safe, or pleasant. But luckily I don't much like comfort or safety or pleasantries.

"Well, then," John says as he pushes his face up towards Sherlock's lips for more, "here's to sharp-eyed terrorists and homophobic patriarchs."

Over an hour later, still in the bed, John looks thoughtful again. John's head is in Sherlock's lap and his knees are pulled up towards his chest, just resting in silence with his cheek against Sherlock's thigh. They do this sometimes when Sherlock's brain is quiet enough, marathon lie-ins to make up for the usual mania. Sometimes sex doesn't even enter into it, though it has twice this time, and if Sherlock wanted to he could sink his fingers into where he's loved John and stay like that until the room goes dark. John lets him. But why does he look so thoughtful? He's very often thoughtful, he's wonderfully thoughtful even if he isn't a genius, and Sherlock can sometimes follow what he's thinking. Not now, though, which is another thing about John that is riveting. So Sherlock settles for considering the fact that the length between John's nose and his very thin, fully horizontally oriented, perfectly curving upper lip  _(what is that type of ornamented punctuational brackets called? the one like his lips? gullwings?)_  is identical to the length between the first knuckle of Sherlock's ring finger and the tip. That doesn't mean anything in particular but is very satisfying nonetheless.

"What?" Sherlock asks.

"Nothing. It would be awful, though, I s'pose. It would be horrible."

"What would?"

"I was just wondering what it would be like to love you if you didn't care one way or the other about it."

"John, don't be  _disgusting_ ," Sherlock requests, shivering as if he's just been told the most harrowing ghost story known to man.

Things fall apart the following week.

It's to do with a case this time, which surprises Sherlock. John is confusing and being in a relationship with him still more so, but Sherlock is very good with cases, understands them like he understands nothing else. They track the ringleader of a narcotics operation to a nasty little flat in Norwood, where his plan is to set his own house afire and be found dead, all to start a new life for himself under the assumed name of Jack Cornelius, to whom he has been wiring staggering amounts of money. This would all be merely an amusing little crime if not for the fact that Oldacre—his actual name is Jack Oldacre—has procured some human remains in order to make his disappearing act effective. They're smelling up the kitchen at present.

Now his wrist has been broken in the scuffle and Sherlock has tied him to a chair, and any minute Lestrade will arrive, he's been texted, but in the meanwhile Sherlock would very much like to know where Oldacre came by a half-decomposed middle-aged male corpse. It's interesting. John is in the other room, rifling through the papers which could tie Oldacre to Cornelius.

"Did you exhume it from a graveyard somehow?" Sherlock wants to know. "It's been subjected to mortuary chemicals."

"Not going to tell you, am I?"

Oldacre has a face like a mean little pug, and something about him makes Sherlock's skin crawl. He's stupid and selfish and cringing and gloating all at once, and the aesthetics of that are appalling.

"Did you pay someone else to get it for you?"

_Dear Jim,_  Sherlock thinks,  _please fix it so I can vanish with my money._ A shivery feeling runs down his spine. He's right about this, he can feel it in his bones. He knows the mark of the artist, the brushstrokes, the same way he would know a piece by Bach for a piece by Bach even if he'd never heard it before, though he's heard Bach's entire canon at one time or another. _Dear Jim, I need a corpse, it doesn't have to be fresh and I'll pay anything you like._

A flicker crosses Oldacre's face.

"Tell me," Sherlock whispers.

"Why in hell should I?"

"Because I'll hurt you if you don't."

"You wouldn't dare," he sneers, but his eyes are frightened.

Without really thinking about it, Sherlock reaches for his broken wrist and he bends it backwards. It isn't about the pain, pain is actually rather boring. But he wants an answer and he doesn't like this man who mocks him at the same moment he flinches away, he's a terrible little man, and Jim Moriarty needs to be murdered, that has to happen one of these days, and so Sherlock wrenches the broken wrist as hard as he can. Jack Oldacre screams.

"You paid someone to bring it here, didn't you?"

Oldacre, panting, eyes tearing with hurt and fright, says nothing.

So Sherlock does it again.

Oldacre shrieks once more, and this is getting inelegant and tedious. Then John appears in the doorway.

"Sherlock, what the  _fuck_  is going on?"

"Unfortunate circumstances," Sherlock sighs.

John has papers in his hands, and his eyes are oddly bright. He's fast paling, and that's wrong. He shouldn't be, they're both perfectly safe. Suddenly looking absolutely defeated, he drops the papers to the floor.

"What's the matter?" Sherlock asks, startled.

John shakes his head violently, jerkily. "Did you just ask an Afghan War veteran what the matter is when you're busily torturing a suspect?"

And when put like that, it's much more easily understood. A door opens somewhere behind John, and that'll be the Yard, and so John goes off to greet them. The next ten or so minutes are a blur because Lestrade examines the long-dead corpse, and Sherlock speaks with him, and Lestrade hauls Oldacre off to a waiting police car, and before Sherlock quite knows what has happened, John has disappeared. He's nowhere in the flat, nor in the street.

Sherlock pulls out his mobile.

_You're angry. Are you_  
 _angry? It was about M,_  
 _I needed to know about_  
 _M._ –SH

Walking down the street with his coat open and his scarf hanging loose, the ends of both flapping behind him, Sherlock stares down at the phone in his hand. It's agonizingly silent. Sherlock crosses a road without looking and narrowly misses being run over flat by a Mercedes.

_M covered you in semtex_  
 _and I will do anything to_  
 _get to him. Any. Thing._  
 _But not that thing again if_  
 _it makes you angry.  Where  
are you?_ –SH

Nothing. Sherlock slides the phone into his pocket and then pulls it out again. People are staring at him because he's a very tall man walking very quickly, but none of the people staring are John, they're ordinary Norwood people with shopping bags and dogs on leashes and coffees in their hands. A cab back to Baker Street. Sherlock needs a cab. Sherlock needs to know what John looks like right now, whether the colour has come back into his face, whether he's limping again. He feels underwater in a straightjacket.

What if John isn't at Baker Street when he gets there? What if John is at his sister's? What if John was bashed on the head and wrapped in semtex again? What if John was crossing the street and was angry and didn't see a car coming and was run down by a Mercedes himself? These things happen. What if John never comes–

"Fuck," Sherlock hisses, tapping furiously at the phone again.

_You can be alive and_  
 _in a strop at me so long  
as you're alive and don't_  
 _leave. Please._ –SH

After a cab ride memorable only for the fact it was so horrifying that Sherlock was forced to recite the entire lyrical contents of _The White Album_ to himself in order to stop his brain from rattling out of his head, he pulls out his keys and goes up his seventeen steps two at a time. When he sees the sitting room with its familiar clutter and the table where he reads the newspaper while John eats toast for breakfast and John isn't there, his heart clenches painfully.

Footsteps, though. There are John footsteps on the stairs.

Sherlock races out of the room and meets him halfway, ludicrously taller because he's on the step above. When he pulls John into him, John's head only reaches the level of his stomach.

"That was just about the worst thing you could do to me," Sherlock announces, clutching him hard round the shoulders.

"Well. Likewise." John's voice is muffled and very tired.

"I didn't mean to."

"Didn't mean to wrench a chap's broken wrist  _twice_?"

"No, make you angry. I didn't mean to make you angry."

"You do grasp why I'm livid at you?"

"Yes."

"And why this is a severe problem?"

"Yes. But it didn't occur to me."

John cranes his neck up, looking weary and miserable. Sherlock can't stand that expression, it looks the way John looked just before Sherlock had said, "You're a doctor," and invited him to the pink lady's crime scene. It looks like John before Sherlock and that's awful.

"So what are we going to do about it?" he asks.

The only answer that occurs to Sherlock seems like an admirable one, perfectly suited to the talents of The Good Man and The High-Functioning Sociopath.

"We're going to make me higher functioning," Sherlock concludes. "We'll begin in an hour or two. You're hungry."

They decide to start with the Seven Deadly Sins, because John is good but not religious and Sherlock respects the classics as a general principle. They look them up on Wikipedia and then write them out on a piece of paper. Unbuttoning his cuffs as he does when he's working on a problem, Sherlock rolls up pale blue sleeves.

"Well, two of these are going to have to be chucked out from the start," Sherlock muses.

There's take-away curry on the table and John tears off a little piece of naan, chewing pensively. "Bit not good."

"But it's perfectly clear they aren't workable."

"Which?"

"I'm not going to stop lusting after you, for one."

John in a jumper three sizes too big for him, looking edible. John with a gash on his mouth from a fistfight and I kissed it, kissed it until my lips were red. John reading at the end of the bed like a lovely little cat. John fingering the dog tags he keeps in his dresser drawer. John taking a bath after I've already used the water. John's cock in my mouth, deep down in my mouth, so far I can't breathe properly. John's fist in my hair in the hallway.

John's laptop is sitting next to the biryani, and he scrolls down the Wikipedia entry with an amused expression. "Lust... excessive love of others, love of man before God. Do you love me more than God?"

"If God exists, yes."

"I think that's blasphemy, which isn't a deadly sin and should be, but somehow I don't seem to mind. Which other?"

"Pride. It's logical to be proud of oneself if one has valuable attributes. I don't see the point of false modesty."

"You don't see the point of  _any_  modesty."

"That's because I'm so brilliant."

John laughs, explodes really, covering his mouth and nearly choking on a milky sip of chai from a paper cup. Then he looks apologetic, shaking his head. "Only you. Only you would find the sin of hubris essential for everyday life. Right, we're clearly not going to extract the pride from you, that would be like extracting your entire skeletal system. But the rest of these–"

"Come to think of it, depending on the circumstances, wrath is also out."

John puts his head in his hands, mock despair clouding his face. "Sherlock, that's three of seven you're chucking. That's a horrible percentage."

"If I saw Jim Moriarty, I would do terrible things to him, and then he would eventually be dead, and I'd have killed him," Sherlock says clearly. "I wish I had the power to bring people back from the dead, so I could kill him more. When I think about that green coat with the fur, I want to kill him by choking him to death with my hands, but when I think about public pools, I want to stab him in the heart and twist it, and when I think about snipers, I want to give him arsenic and watch him writhe. You don't have to like that, but it's true, and it's seemingly  _wrath._ Wrath in the cause of good."

John reaches out and takes Sherlock's hand, brushing his lips over it before getting up to put the leftovers in the fridge with the dead bat and the three fresh pairs of human ears. "That sort of wrath I can only encourage. I'd like to kill him myself, the twisted fuck."

John goes to the fridge with the containers.

"Sherlock."

"Mm?"

"Ears."

"No, thank you."

"Six of them, Sherlock."

"There's another problem."

"Yes, that's precisely what I'm saying. There is a problem. Ears."

"No, there's a problem with gluttony."

John comes back, looking amused and exasperated. He grips Sherlock by the shoulders, reading the computer screen over the top of his curls. Sherlock's head nuzzles back into his collarbone automatically.

"There is no problem with gluttony."

"Yes, there is. I want to know  _everything_  that could be important to crime-solving, and I think it feels like gluttony."

"That's just obsession."

"Fine. I also want to see what you are under your skin and I want to memorize your genetic code and I want to wear you like a coat and I want to live inside your chest."

"That's a bit gluttonous," John owns breathlessly. His mouth descends into Sherlock's hair and his hands start moving, just lightly stroking his shoulders. "You're going to actually find a way to veto every one of these, aren't you? That is amazing. Just. Completely amazing, your morals are amazing. This project is not going well. The Making You Higher Functioning Project. How are you going to veto sloth?"

Last Wednesday, when we didn't get out of bed all the day long, I made you come with only my fingers inside you while we were face to face and kissing, just taking you slowly apart with my hand while your breath was in my mouth, and it was the best Wednesday of all the many Wednesdays, and that part alone took well over an hour, and when you finished my lips were on yours and I've never done anything so wonderful in all my life.

"Last Wednesday," says Sherlock. "It was good."

"Jesus Christ, last Wednesday. I get aroused just thinking about last Wednesday."

"You should think about last Wednesday more often, then."

"Sloth is out. Right. Next?"

John's hands are roaming down Sherlock's chest now, flicking buttons open with dexterous doctor hands, with his entire face buried in his friend's hair. Sherlock decides to make short work of the remaining items.

"Greed makes no sense for us," he says on a hitched breath. "Greed and love are the same, I think. I want every last bit of you, and sometimes when other people shake your hand, I want to hurt them."

"So not good. So very, very not good."

It's getting much more difficult to concentrate now, as John's hand slides into the parted shirt and traces lazy circles on Sherlock's chest. And it isn't as if John is the only one in the room who likes to think about Last Wednesday. Last Wednesday should be celebrated with a yearly anniversary and a parade and floats and possibly colourful balloons.

"I wouldn't hurt them, I promise. I know better than that."

"We're left with envy. If you can make that workable, I'll be so gobsmacked that I will creatively reward you."

"Envy is easy," gasps Sherlock when John's nail scrapes over his nipple. "I was playing my violin and you saw me and you said it was mad to be jealous of a violin and you looked so sad and it was envy, I think, but it can't have been wrong because you're good. You're always good."

"And we have a winner," John announces just before pulling Sherlock's head back by the hair and kissing him hard on the mouth. Sherlock rides the wave of feeling kissing always gives him and then closes his hand over the arm still snaking down his chest, pulling John out from behind the chair and straight into his lap. John on Sherlock's lap is very good indeed, as they're nearly the same height that way, and John shoves his shirt open and pushes it down his arms. "I'm still angry, you know," John says, biting Sherlock's fleshy lower lip. "Torture is not on, Sherlock Holmes. Whether it's to do with Moriarty or not, whether you're the William Shakespeare of Atrociously Skewed Morals or not."

"I thought I was the Stephen Hawking of Fuckery."

"You've earned a new title." John is undoing his belt now, his hands on the leather and his mouth on Sherlock's collarbone, and Sherlock wraps his long fingers gently around John's neck.

"We can make me higher functioning. We can try something else. I don't want to hurt you."

"I know we can make you higher functioning. I have another plan. One that falls more in line with your natural interests, and will help me understand your brain."

It's good that John has a plan, very good indeed, but Sherlock loses the thread of the conversation when John's hand slips under the band of his pants. As tempted as he was just now to move them to the bedroom or at least over to the sofa, it's very difficult to think clearly when John is tossing you off with his legs straddling your thighs, dragging his fingers repeatedly through your hair. As a matter of fact, it's twenty minutes later when Sherlock recalls that John had a proposal. John, who is naked now, and still in his lap, because some things are too nice to stop doing.

"How am I learning how to be good without the concept of absolute sins?"

"Case by case basis," John answers matter-of-factly.

"What sort of cases? Mine?"

"In one sense, very much yours. We're going to have a look at those lists."

Sherlock freezes. Alarm bells are clanging loud and sharp in his brain. They are very strident, painfully strident.

"Come off it," John says. "It can't be that bad."

Nothing sensible can be said in response to this, Sherlock concludes with a shudder.

"Hey, listen, if you say no, then I won't force you. Won't insist that you trust me, though I'd like you to. But this is... it's dead serious, Sherlock. I can love you every day just as I have done, I hope for the rest of our lives, but forgetting that torture is expedient in your head is just... it's impossible. I can forgive you that, forgive you what happened after you got lost, but forgetting about it is another matter. I'm sorry, but I can't delete things from my brain. I don't need you to be sinless, starting with the seven deadly sins was obviously a wash, but I need you to try to do better. I can't even think about Norwood without–"

"You ought to have run," Sherlock says brokenly. Meaning months ago, when he was on his sofa thinking about champagne stains on the ceiling and all the terrible things that could happen to John if John let Sherlock love him.

" _You_  ought to have run," John says. Meaning months ago, when he was wreathed in explosives and didn't care so long as Sherlock survived it.

"We're neither of us good at running, I suppose."

"No."

"I'm not a safe person. Do you really want to see that in stark detail?"

"I'd do a great deal more than that if it means I get to keep you."

_Easy for you to say,_  Sherlock thinks. _I haven't been the death of you just yet._

"I don't think I can show you," Sherlock says. "I'm sorry. I just can't."

That night, John is restless. He tosses and he turns until finally Sherlock falls asleep and can't feel him wriggling about any longer. And the moment he slips into unconsciousness, he is back in the desert, this time with a normal-coloured John.

John is sitting at a tea table in the middle of a valley surrounded by sand dunes, pouring out two cups of what seems to be red blood. The blood flows easily, so it's very fresh. He is smiling a bit shyly, cocking his head as he does when he's flirting. The china pattern is Mrs. Hudson's, though Sherlock has no idea why John has transported her china to Afghanistan. And that's where they are, he's sure of it. Afghanistan.

"One lump or two?" John asks.

In a bowl are little pieces of bone and teeth. John drops one into the blood in his own cup and then looks at Sherlock expectantly.

"Whose blood is that?" Sherlock asks.

"Ours," says John. "It's all the same now, you remember."

"Why are we drinking it?"

"We are washing your sins away with holy communion. It's the only way to save your soul. You lost it, you know. This is how to get it back."

Sherlock approaches the table. As he does, he sees that John is lifting the cup to his lips, and that John is not well. There are gashes on him, deep ones, and it's John's teeth that are sugar lumps, and John's bones that are clicking in the shallow little bowl.

"Don't. Don't, don't, put it all back. I'm not a vampire," Sherlock pleads.

"No, you're a sinner. And so someone has to die for you. Someone perfectly, entirely good."

John slumps out of his chair into the sand. Lifeless, with teeth and blood and bits of bone missing. Sherlock, helpless to do anything else, starts to scream.

This time when Sherlock awakens, John is on top of him, his entire body pressing into his chest and his hands on Sherlock's face in the darkness. One of them is gasping desperately, very likely Sherlock, and either sweat is streaming into his eyes, or his eyes have teared up dreadfully. His heart is racing again, and all of it is smothering and spinning and freefalling and awful.

"It's all right, it's all right. I'm right here. My god. Sherlock, what's got into you? What in hell were you dreaming of?"

"Jesus Christ," Sherlock pants.

"You don't  _have_  to tell me, I suppose, but–"

"Fine, you win, I'll show you the lists, both lists. Fine. Just don't die."

A hand smoothes over his brow in the pitch-dark. It's very steady. Very warm. A bit calloused, on the trigger finger.

"I won't," John murmurs. "I won't. And thank you. But don't let me bully you in your sleep like that, Sherlock. It's not a pretty thing to watch."

It's terrifying, this proposal. It's worse than when Sherlock saw the yellow graffiti that meant John had been kidnapped, and worse than the second morphine overdose when Mycroft walked into A&E. But he'd do a great deal more than write out the Fine and Not Fine Lists if it means he gets to keep John.

Sherlock determines several ground rules about this exercise, purely for self-defense, the first and primary of which is that it'll be done on a chalkboard. It's not the potential for denial, exactly, but it allows for... efficiency, perhaps. If John goes white and blinking at an item, Sherlock had damn well better be able to erase it quickly enough for them both to forget about it and move forward.

They need a chalkboard and some chalk, therefore, which means that the next Monday, when they don't have a case and John insists that they set in if they're going to do it at all, Sherlock finds his Bart's keys and gets them in after hours. The two men walk down a darkened corridor towards the morgue, not speaking, watching the fluorescent lights flicker. Both are completely silent. It's difficult for Sherlock to even consider forming a sentence just now. He and English aren't always the best of friends, and this feels like picking a nasty fight with his native language deliberately. When they reach an unmarked door which he knows hides both a chalkboard and nothing in particular else of interest, he pulls a sliver of metal from his pocket and picks the lock. John is about to follow him inside when Sherlock's hand lands flat against John's chest.

"I should finish it first and then you can come in," he observes.

"Yeah, all right," John agrees after a little thought. "Of course. Good lord, Sherlock, stop looking like a guest at your own execution."

"That's the point, really," growls Sherlock just before he shuts the door. "I wouldn't  _mind_  being– oh, to hell with it."

Fifteen minutes later, his hands covered in pale yellow silt, Sherlock throws open the door. He's long ago shed his coat and is wearing a very nicely tailored white shirt, wondering absently if he's gotten chalk dust on it. Wondering if chalk powder is on his shirt is much better than wondering whether John's head is about to explode.

"Fair warning," he sighs. "It's all true."

They step into the room and John walks up to the chalkboard as if it's got the meaning of life printed on it. He leans back on a desk. He tucks his hands over his sleeves, crossing his forearms.

"Holy buggerfucking hell," he says.

His eyebrows swoop down towards his perfectly straight nose. Taking a bit more time, John reads all of both lists. There used to be one extra item on each of them, but they've now covered Looking at John's Fingerprints and Leaving Them on Sherlock, as well as—remarkably—Tasting John's Eyes. So currently there are thirty-six and twenty-seven dashes with thoughts scribbled after them.

Sherlock watches John.

John reads.

Shifting his weight, John clears his throat.

His blue eyes are tracking back and forth. They have flecks of other colours in them and are very dark. They look brown under bad lighting. His dishwater hair is greenish in the glow of the overhead illumination.

John is still reading.

But John has already read that part.

"Jesus Christ," John says.

He goes back to reading.

Sherlock listens to the light fixture drone at them. It's almost unbearable.

"Okay," says John, exactly three and a half minutes later.

Sherlock waits. Something sensible is going to emerge from his boyfriend any minute, it simply must, or Sherlock is in a very great deal of trouble. Or he will be, because he will slap him across the face.

_No, I won't_ , he thinks,  _that only works in films._

Now John's fingers are heading upwards to brush over his lips. The fingers stay there. Covering the lips.

What does that mean?

There's no other explanation: John is now re-reading. No one takes this long over simple declarative sentences.

And Sherlock has excellent handwriting.

So that isn't the problem.

Lyrics to a song drift dizzily into Sherlock's head:

_drown, drown_  
 _sailors run aground_  
 _in a sea change nothing is safe_

"Right," John remarks.

He goes back to reading. He crosses his legs at the ankle, still leaning on the desk.

_strange waves_  
 _push us every way_  
 _in a stolen boat we'll float away_

Yes, this feels exactly like that song, Sherlock decides.

in a turnstile backwards we fly

John emits a low whistle.

"I'm in the same fucking room!" Sherlock bursts out at last.

"Okay, yes, yes, yes, sorry, that was. I'm sorry. Yes. Ha. You're right there, very present, you're next to me in fact. Hello."

"Hello," growls Sherlock.

"Hello."

" _Hello._ That isn't the proper response to make when two people have already said–"

"Sorry! I am sorry. Good, there you are next to me, here we are, right. Yes. Together. Now."

Sherlock waits.

"Now," John says again.

"Right, I'm off," Sherlock decides.

"Wait! Stop, please. You took me a bit by surprise, is all. A bit. Well, quite a bit. _Quite_  a bit. Don't scrunch your eyebrows like that, calm down. You love me."

"Yes."

"That's not your usual response to–"

"I'm not entirely certain of the premise of my typical reply any–"

"Of  _course_  I still–"

" _Don't  _say it! Today is ghastly. Say it and I'll–"

"This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. And out of your mind."

"Yes, I am, you can see it writ large in chalk just there, so keep your heartfelt endearments to–"

"You're such a  _child._ Stop fucking censoring me, I can't–"

"Goodnight, then."

As he's retreating, John grabs Sherlock's arm, brooking no argument, his strong fingers closing around a slender wrist. Once he has it, he unbuttons the French silk cuff and yanks it backwards. White arm is revealed, a good expanse of bared flesh, and Sherlock is one hundred percent certain that this has to do with drugs, and that is not going to help the onset of panicked nausea in any way. He's going to lose all sense of himself in another moment, a white cloud will descend, and the blank will eat him. Then John starts writing something on the blue veins of Sherlock's upper wrist. It takes Sherlock a moment to realize that's what he's doing: writing.

O-H-N W-A-T-S-O-N

He stops, looks at Sherlock pointedly. But it's difficult to form a response under these circumstances. Sherlock's heart has turned into something crystalline in the shape of a geodesic dome, electrically lit and giving off napalm and laser beams. He can't be certain of the device's precise structure or function, but that is exactly what it looks like, at any rate. He can feel it in his chest.

"You. You knew about that," he says stupidly.

John quirks a smile and licks the end of his index finger.

Y-E-S Y-O-U C-R-A-Z-E-D T-W-A-T

"For how–"

"Ages."

John reaches up towards Sherlock's forehead. The middle of his forehead.

M-I-N-E

Silence reigns for about five seconds.

"You've made your point. I don't think you need to say it now," Sherlock mentions hoarsely. "The... other thing. Because this was. Good."

John sighs. "You say it, then."

"Fine. You love me. Fine."

They look at the lists a while longer, both rather awed by the turn of events.

"I think this is what having a heart attack feels like," Sherlock whispers.

John fusses him into a chair at this, and Sherlock can't be sure it's not a brilliant idea. Perhaps it's the best idea John's ever had. God knows that when he'd just torn that semtex vest off John, he'd have appreciated a moment to reflect at his leisure. And Now feels almost as dangerous as Then. Sherlock looks up at John, who wanted to do this in the first place, because after all he's no brain surgeon, is he, no he isn't, John is a normal surgeon and an idiot. Sherlock is only wanting a little guidance. Something has to happen next or his tongue will melt down his throat. Just because it's against the principles of science doesn't mean it could never–

"I need to understand this, but... not in order. Okay?"

Sherlock nods once, closes his eyes.

"So. Item ten on the Fine List. Explain."

Sherlock glances up.

10. Get divorced from John.

"That one is very simple," he says, pleasantly surprised. "They claim that getting married is a highly intimate spiritual experience, which frankly I think is a lot of outmoded superstition, but then at any rate there's a honeymoon, which is something. But I don't think of you that way. Like a... a person to wash the dishes or to bring in the clinic checks or to qualify for benefits. You're more like... you're like breathing. So we could try it, but then we should go back to the way we were before, as in the way we are now."

John pauses before speaking, cocking his head. "Your notion of marriage is... outmoded."

"Not according to the data I've gathered."

"Your data is bollocksed. So you want a wedding night, but you don't want to wash my socks."

"You could equally say I don't want you to wash my socks."

"Sherlock, you've already done our laundry. To my deep shock. Several times."

"It smelled of you the whole time. I liked it. And I could make infer–"

"Right," John sighs, rubbing his face. "Wonderful, you do my laundry so as to read my personal history in the stains. That is... so very, very typical. Christ have mercy. The Helpful Launderer Ploy."

Sherlock can hear the capital letters but isn't certain why they're necessary.

"I still don't grasp why divorce is Fine," John adds.

"But why shouldn't it be? Of course it's fine, millions of people do it. It's like buying a new car."

"Bloody hell. Move divorce to the Not Fine List."

"But–"

"Now."

Sherlock gets the eraser and chalk and does as he's told. It feels rather nice. Domestic, maybe.

"Next," John announces, "would be item five on the Not Fine List."

5. Tell John you love him on the perfect day.

"Why is that  _not_  Fine?" John wants to know. "It ought to be splendid."

"Ah. That may in fact have something to do with the exact nature of the perfect day."

John ruminates for a while. Then his eyes widen. Then they narrow. Then he whips his head to look at Sherlock.

"Do we... do we die on the perfect day?"

"Possibly."

"Both of us?"

"It's not outside the realm of–"

"Is it graphic? And we're both somehow involved in the actual– strike that, no. Never mind. Sherlock, here's what you're going to do for me. Right. Take the Perfect Day, whatever it is, and put it next to whatever you did to make a corpse in the morgue explode. Don't tell me. Ever. Never even hint at the truth. Take the truth and just. Put it somewhere and blockade it."

On the perfect day, I am dying, and as I am dying, John takes a knife and he finishes what someone else started, and as I am bleeding to death, he turns the blade round and–

"Sherlock, are you on the same page as me here?"

"Yes."

"Did you blow up a corpse in Bart's morgue?"

"I can't tell you that."

"What is the Perfect Day like?"

"I have no idea."

They move on through several more items, arguing but never severely. Sherlock starts to get the feeling that John is saving something up for the end, as he's being very efficient about all of this. They're never going to stand on train tracks and then nearly die before leaping towards the walls, according to John. They're never going to watch Sherlock playing at Russian Roulette. They're never going to make John stop loving Harry simply because he needs to love only Sherlock, and Sherlock finds himself resigned to the notion. He knew it wasn't Fine, after all. John will never put a cigarette burn on his hip bone where only Sherlock can see it, because Sherlock loves John and he also rather adores cigarettes, but that doesn't make it Fine. They're never going to switch non-essential organs, which wouldn't have worked all that well anyway since John doesn't have tonsils, which ruins the symmetry, but they aren't even going to switch appendixes even though they have the same blood type and technically the same blood, because John seems to think it cosmetic surgery and also that cosmetic surgery is frivolous.

John starts giggling.

"What?" says Sherlock.

"Item fifteen on the Not Fine List. I love it. It's not happening, even though I'm sure you could scheme it all out easily, but I love it."

15. Arrange somehow for John to shoot Anderson in his useless, pathetic face. Preferably at the Natural History Museum, because Anderson once had to put a lizard skeleton in an evidence bag and he looked ill, and dinosaur skeletons are like lizards but much bigger, and thus proportionally Anderson probably loathes dinosaurs still more, and I therefore would like a dinosaur to be the last thing the prat ever sees.

"Thank you," says Sherlock. "I like it too."

"Okay. So. I can arrange for you to have a full-body X-ray of me, which takes item eight off the Not Fine List and onto the Fine one. Go ahead and move it."

"You would do that?"

"Why not."

Glowing, Sherlock erases item eight and tacks it onto the Fine List.

"Shockingly, item six on the Fine list is one of the most arousing things I've ever heard. I have no idea why. Why is... nope. Not a clue. But you ought to have proposed that a long time ago, I've been not looking at it purposefully so as to stop myself dragging you off for a shag. It's brilliant and so simple. No notion why I like it so much, maybe because I'm a doctor after all, but still. That is happening. And I have an instant read thermometer, of course, and I'll let you decide where to put it."

Still at the board, Sherlock flashes John a grin and underlines

6. Determine John's exact core temperature when relaxed, when aroused, and when experiencing orgasm.

"Also, I understand your point, but after a great deal of thought, item thirty-two needs to move to Not Fine."

"But I trust you. I told you that."

"Without a safeword, forget about it."

"No safeword, that's the  _entire_   _point of the enterprise._ "

"Safeword or nothing."

"No safeword, you're missing the objective here, it's that I would go as far as you would take it. No safeword."

"Then forget about it."

Frowning, Sherlock moves item thirty-two. He returns to his chair and sits down again, next to where John is leaning against the desk.

"Here's my general diagnosis," John says carefully. "You are mental. You're off the tracks, completely wholesale insane, a right nutter."

"A freak."

"No, you're not a freak. You're a head case. You're the Mozart of Lunacy. But this is... very telling, in the sense of morals. It's enormously helpful to me. You seem to understand the concept that the items which might permanently damage yourself or others are socially unacceptable, and thus ones you shouldn't propose. Where it starts to go south is the fact that so many things you think about are either self-harming, other-people-harming, or me-harming. They're entirely amoral, as it happens. But I'm starting to think now that isn't precisely the point."

"What is the point, then?" Sherlock sighs.

"It's that you  _don't_  say them. Or do them. I've wanted to die before too, but I didn't go through with it either. That's the point. So... yes. That's good. And seeing what's in your head like this, it's probably all irrelevant anyhow. I don't believe you're... curable, Sherlock. I believe you're the way you are."

John goes quiet. Sherlock watches him staring at the lists and feels an ache in his chest that's more painful than the pain in his head when the colours fade and songs won't go away. If he were another person, John wouldn't worry so. John wouldn't wind up at the bottom of skips or strapped with explosive vests. If he were another person, John could have a little peace, and Sherlock reveres peace because he scarcely ever gets any. Sherlock leans his head against John's hipbone, defeated. It's all too tiring, too impossible, and John is right—becoming someone else isn't an option. How lovely it would be if it were. John has every part of him, and Sherlock is rare and marvelous, but having a pet viper would probably be comparable.

_go to sleep_  
 _we're so tired now_  
 _altogether in a snake pit of souls_

"How you love me, though," John says quietly. "Look at that. Christ, how you love me. The way you love me, it should be illegal."

"It probably  _is_  illegal."

John turns around and slides his palms down his friend's back. That is good, having a faceful of John's warm jumper, because the room has gone cold and the song is still playing. Everywhere without John is cold now, and it always will be, and so Sherlock will always be trying to warm himself at John's fire. That's one of the saddest things Sherlock can think of. The song drones beautifully onward.

_new days  
to throw your chains away_  
 _to try to hang your hopes on the wind_

Sherlock and John embark on a case.

And something goes wrong.

There are stick figure pictures of dancing men being left everywhere. Written on Elsie Cubitt's mailbox, on her front door, on the billboard across from her house. They terrify her, and her new husband wants to know why that is. So he emails Sherlock Holmes at _The Science of Deduction_ , and Sherlock sets to work being amazing.

Sherlock studies every message meticulously. Three are emails of scanned pictures, which the husband found in Elsie's inbox. They are long. Two he copied after seeing them on the postal box and the wall. They are short. One he took a picture of with his iPhone, because it was done in chalk on the pavement before their condo. The longer they are, the better. It's a simple enough substitution cipher, but Sherlock needs as many words as possible in order to figure out the sense of them.

Biting his lip, Sherlock texts his client.

_Any fresh material?_ –SH

Twenty minutes later, he gets an email.

Mr. Holmes,

Found this only this morning, done in spray paint on the garden wall. Attached a photo. Not very long, I fear. Any progress on your end?

Hilton Cubitt

Impatient and disinclined to waste time responding when he's so close, Sherlock swiftly clicks open the attachment. He is sitting at the kitchen table with all his chemical apparatus shoved to one side and a notepad and pen before him when he finally cracks the final message.

ELSIE, SEE -OU IN HELL

_"Oh,"_  he says.

"What?" says John, from the sofa.

Sherlock is already in his coat, wrapping his scarf, racing for the door, and John is behind him, following, he'll always follow. Downstairs, Sherlock whirls out the door and into the street, arm in the air and his eyes peeled for a cab. With his other hand, his right hand, he's rapidly texting:

_Get her somewhere safe._  
 _Go home. Now. And tell  
her to ring the police._ –SH

"What are we doing?" John asks when the cab pulls away. One of his shoes is untied. He reaches down to lace it.

"Stopping a murder."

"Love it," says John.

Only they don't.

The house is surrounded by policemen and by yellow crime scene tape. There's a zipped body bag and D. I. Dimmock standing next to it. Techs are hastening about, recording things on sheets. Everyone is pinched and grave-looking, the way normal people are when something awful happens. So something awful has happened.

The awful thing, it turns out, is that Hilton Cubitt rushed home in response to Sherlock's text and now has a bullet through his brain. Mrs. Cubitt decided that matching her husband was the best way to respond and put a pistol in her mouth. But she is alive. Alive, brain damaged perhaps, in hospital. Sherlock, absorbing all of this information, goes very white. And John, watching Sherlock, grows worried. But that can't always be helped, can it?

"It's an awful bloody business," Dimmock concludes. "Poor bugger. And the wife—that stunt I  _cannot_  understand."

"It's easy to understand if you're not a complete moron," Sherlock says frigidly. "She loved him. She loved him, and he was dead. She loved him, and he was dead, and you can't bring people back. So she went too, or she tried. I'd have done the same."

Dimmock gapes at him. John just looks at the ground in a pained sort of way.

It takes Sherlock an hour to get his hands on the killer, but he doesn't care about the killer. He writes a false note and then hands the big ugly brute over to Dimmock with a minimum of fuss. Then Sherlock wanders into the back area, into the little garden that the Cubitts shared. All the while he is thinking, and the song comes back, and so many things hurt that he can't tell where he stops and the hurting begins. There was a device in the Middle Ages like a barrel full of knives, and that is where Sherlock is right now. Nothing is right and it comes from inside of him, so there's no escape, he will never outrun himself and the hurting will simply continue.

_cold bones_  
 _tied together by_  
 _black ropes we pulled from a swing_

_What if that had been John  _little one _I'd have done the same thing wouldn't I  _just a little way _  I'd have said to ring him and to ring the police and I'd have rushed back and he'd still be dead, or I'd be dead, it doesn't matter because they're the same thing, and John is so small _little one _  it isn't fair small things and warm things can be crushed so easily _just a little way _  and I'd have done the same as her, I would have. I'd have died._

"Sherlock, don't do this to yourself," John says quietly.

Sherlock turns. The garden is frosted-over and the plants are all dead and John is probably freezing, as he left the flat without his coat. The fine dishwater hairs on the back of his neck are pricking up, as a matter of fact. Everything here is grey and muted and the colours of dust and straw and mice and winter things, and John fits in here, he blends into the palette.

"You can leave me," Sherlock says.

John's jaw drops.

"I. I can  _what_?"

"If I can't keep Elsie Cubitt or her husband safe, I can't be expected to manage it with anyone else, can I, and you don't care for failures, I certainly don't either, but anyway you look worried now and that's my fault and if you didn't love me, it wouldn't hurt you. You didn't run then, but you can run now."

John walks up to Sherlock. The cold winter sun makes his blue eyes very deep and very dark, the way the ocean is dark and can never be known, only guessed at, the way John is inside. He's going to say goodbye to Sherlock now, and that will hurt like bleach on his skin until he is dead, which will be thankfully soon. But at least he can tell himself that he committed a single act in his life that wasn't based in selfishness. That once, if only once, an act of charity came from Sherlock Holmes. That would make a nice epitaph. John is very close now, and Sherlock starts to think about how much he loves his eyelashes, that pale dusting of delicate hair along the lids. It would make a very nice epitaph, actually. _Here lies Sherlock Holmes, who once committed an Act of Charity_. John is right in front of him now, practically touching.

"I don't believe it. Say that again."

"You didn't run then, but you can run now."

"The first part."

"You can leave me?"

"Bloody hell," John whispers. He's unbuttoning Sherlock's coat. Why? That makes no sense, and it's cold out here, and John isn't ever cruel. "Amazing. Literally amazing."

"What is?"

"The kindest, most loving thing you've ever said to me is that I can leave you. That is amazing. Better than... I can't. Just better. I don't think we need to worry about your morals any longer. You're sorted. And thank you."

"So," Sherlock says, swallowing. "Goodbye. Be very good to yourself, and keep warm. I'd like to kiss you first, but then I might change my mind. So don't kiss me."

"Oh my god," says John.

Then he is quiet, his lips pursed. He stands looking at Sherlock, feet a little apart on the dead grass. The lines under his eyes are dark today, and they make his small face look still smaller. He's so small, such a little one really, and bigger than the whole wide world. He reaches for Sherlock's hand and turns it palm up in his own. He sets his fingertip right along the creased V of his lifeline.

J-O-H-N

"There isn't room for the rest of it," he adds.

Sherlock wonders if crying, which is involuntary, is supposed to be triggered by wonderful things happening. Because that makes absolutely no buggering sense, but he can't breathe and his eyes feel glassy. John is smiling at him as if he is very stupid, and that is magical, feeling stupid has never felt so utterly spectacular.

"Why have you unbuttoned my coat?" he questions in a wrecked voice.

"Because I'm freezing my bollocks off," John answers, stepping neatly inside the wool.

John is so small that Sherlock finds he can do up the top button and thus keep the coat shut around the pair of them. John's head rests on his chest and Sherlock puts his arms around him and wonders when he'll next dream of deserts.

He doesn't care, so long as John is there to wake him up.

Three days later, they are walking past a pet store in Westminster when an advert catches Sherlock's eye, taped to the display window where terrier puppies are sleeping and biting each other. It is for a microchip that goes beneath the skin, perfectly painless after insertion, and detectable with the right scanner. The price is reasonable. Any information can be put on the chip: name of pet, address, phone number, name of owner. Any information at all, really. Sherlock feels lightheaded. The world slows down, his hands are weightless, his shoes have disappeared,  _this is fucking brilliant._ He doesn't realize he's stopped in his tracks until an impatient huff from John brings him back to himself.

"Jesus Christ,  _no_ ," John says, sounding horrified. "No. Just– no."

"But–"

"Piss off, Sherlock."

"But we both–"

"Not fine."

"Even if–"

"Unbelievable," John says to the heavens, shaking his head in despair. "Fucking unbelievable. You are a marvel."

"I'm your marvel, though," Sherlock points out mildly. "I'm in your system. I'm under your skin already. Why–"

"You are the Edgar Allan Poe of Love," John sniffs, walking away.

It's one of the nicest things Sherlock Holmes has ever heard. He files away the name of the shop and the address in his head, just in case, turning to follow John. John is unpredictable, and can't ever be known, and so it's not impossible. They have the same blood, after all. John's perfect blood is in Sherlock and Sherlock's mad blood is in John, and so everything is possible under the proper circumstances.

Nothing on earth is impossible save for John Watson's impossible self.
A Thousand Threads of What-Might-Have-Beens

John finally does leave, and Sherlock is entirely unsurprised by it. And he clearly has two options: either get him back, or die trying.

When John does finally leave, Sherlock is the last one to be surprised by it. But so much leading up to the event had been Good by their eccentric standards, even Immeasurably Good, that the timing does seem wrong. Well, mildly wrong. As wrong as any trivial detail can feel when one's bones have been removed, for example, or one's blood drained out of one's veins. As wrong as  _bad timing_  can feel next to:

John isn't here.

And Sherlock clearly has two options to choose from: either get him back, or die trying.

Sherlock had imagined a number of ways Christmas that year might go. There are generally gifts in these visions—outrageously expensive close-fitting jumpers made of cashmere, and a better watch, and a laptop that didn't freeze every time its anti-virus software self-updated. Things that would make John smile. The making John smile being the point, and not the gifts, though the new jumpers would be a blessing. After the extravagances, purchased with a credit card stolen from Mycroft, there would possibly be food, as John likes food though Sherlock usually couldn't care less about it, ordered from the pretty French place on Marylebone Road, and after the delivery and the obligatory dinner and the not-answering-Mycroft's-call, there would be between three and five hours of sex. Sherlock had enjoyed anticipating Christmas even more than usual as a result of these schemes, and he'd planned the day out between cases with every intention of following through. But then John gets a virulent flu for Christmas instead and all of Sherlock's plans are derailed entirely.

He first becomes aware that something is amiss when John arrives home much later than usual after a shift at the clinic, two days before the holiday. It's pouring outside, silvery streaks glistening in their windows, the lights beyond refracting red and gold and white and orange and green, as lovely in its own way as any sort of artificial decor. It's mesmerizing. Sherlock has been watching the drops scattering the colours for endless minutes, on his back on the settee, his legs tucked up and his fingertips touching and his head on the Union Jack pillow. Mrs. Hudson is playing the radio downstairs, and a song which ought to be played in a French cafe, sung by a man with a voice like coal smoke, is drifting up the staircase through the crack under their door. When it opens with a bang and he hears John cursing under his breath and shaking his umbrella, Sherlock turns from the light show to glance at the entrance to their sitting room.

_Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,_  the man rasps.

John's hair is damp despite the umbrella, and he's toeing off wet leather shoes. He looks harried, rather ragged around the edges. The tremor in his hand is barely evident when he brushes his hair back from his sweetly lined brow. Odd.

"What are you up to, then?" John sighs.

"Watching," Sherlock says.

"Watching a wall?"

"Watching the rain."

John's keys hit the tabletop, and he rubs his hand over his face.

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn.

"Anything new on hand?" John drops the post dispiritedly. It's bills and adverts, Sherlock deduces. He hadn't bothered to check.

"Commonplace little murder in Lambeth. I solved it by text. It was the landlord, he was the one with the shellfish allergy."

"Right. I don't understand a word you say sometimes."

"I know."

John walks over to the sofa as Sherlock unwinds himself a bit, sliding further in with his spine to the cushions. When John stretches out next to him exhaustedly, his back to Sherlock's front, Sherlock presses his face into soft not-brown-and-not-blond hair which currently smells of chamomile and winter and the dazzling rain display just beyond the windows. John is shivering.

_Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove,  _the man growls gently from below stairs. Sherlock interrupts the accompanying violin solo he has been mentally writing for the past three minutes whilst also listening to his friend and also listening to the words sung by the man who sounds like coal smoke. John doesn't feel normal.

"Are you all right?"

"Honestly, I don't know what you see in this holiday," John grumbles.

That isn't like him, so Sherlock frowns, propping himself up on one elbow so he can see better. "Why not?"

"You do love Christmas, yes? I've heard you say so."

"I do."

"And why?"

"It's difficult to explain," Sherlock counters. "It's none of the typical reasons—not because of Christmas dinners, certainly, nor the sentimental Victorian idea of God-bless-us-every-one. It's a mood. A sort of  _process._ "

"What sort?"

"I couldn't possibly make it clear to you."

"Very flattering."

"What's wrong?"

"I was just kept at the clinic for two hours longer than I should have been because a sweet, dotty old bat I treated last week couldn't be arsed to finish out her prescription antibiotics and developed pneumonia in her right lung, and then when I finally escaped—she'll be fine, I think, god I hope so—I went to Harrod's to try to find  _something_  for the world's only independent consulting detective, who is unnaturally gorgeous and claims not to want anything on the planet. The ponce."

"But I don't." Sherlock smiles.

"You're very unhelpful. Anyhow, it was all crowds of people, jostling at each other, and picking through thousands of things they didn't need in the slightest, and it was all just– it was far too much. The things, and the people, and after such a shite day. I wanted to rip all the holly down. It was too bright and too loud and too many and not enough, and I know I'm just tired, but. I dunno. It was like being inside a washing machine with the brights going. All tumbling and garish and meaningless. And I could tell everyone felt just as I did—none of them were enjoying the spectacle either. They all looked a mess. Oversensitized and miserable. I couldn't wait for it to be over, for Christmas morning, when everything would be quiet again, and– what? Sherlock?"

Sherlock's breathing has stilled.

John turns over onto his back, setting a hand on his friend's side, touching his ribs through the tailored grey shirt, dark blue eyes looking up into eerily pale ones. "Hey." He tugs at the fabric gently. "Tell me."

"That's why," Sherlock says, dumbfounded.

"What's why?"

It is the exact definition of the reason he loves Christmas. For most of the year, Sherlock Holmes is the only one of his kind, an alien life form in a way, a man with a brain which makes him his own island nation with a population of one. Every Christmas, however, there are visitors to his kingdom. Other people begin to flinch when they see stack after stack of similarly useless detritus, and complete strangers start snarling due to simple overexposure to humanity, and painfully catchy music that sticks like treacle in your ears, and hyperbright products that will be purchased and then thrown in the bin six months later. Far too much is required, and everyone is striving, and it's all quite entirely useless, and they know it. The city dwellers who generally float along obliviously with the help of their tiny little minds and their plodding, pedestrian senses are nervous wrecks. They get wound tighter and tighter as the season progresses, all across London, and, because Sherlock more or less is London, he can feel them coiling like springs, waiting for the moment when everything is too much, too fast, too relentless, and they either jump in the Thames to die like the lemmings they've just realized they are, or else... Or else they live.

And Christmas morning arrives, and it's over. All the scurrying. Everything is quiet and there is nothing more to be done, the effort is over with one way or the other, too late to change anything, and so it's a bit like dying even if they survive it. It's final, like a funeral.

It's wonderful.

"It's just so horrible beforehand, and then... then it's calm," Sherlock says lamely.

John begins to smile his not-quite-getting-the-whole-picture-here smile, but then it slows. He rubs at Sherlock's skin beneath the shirt, understanding relaxing the cast of his eyebrows. They settle back into a sympathetic quirk, the one Sherlock has been trying to reproduce when interrogating witnesses and thus far spectacularly failing at.

"You feel that way all the time, don't you? Every day. Almost overwhelmed."

Sherlock nods.

"And once a year, it all gets amplified."

He nods again, touching the buttons on John's shirtfront.

"And Christmas morning, it's..."

"Over."

Smiling a real smile this time, John tucks his head into the space between Sherlock's upper arm, his bent forearm, his propped head, and his shoulder. "Microwaves. Beforehand, it's like the microwaves. That's settled, then, I'm buying you a new microwave for Christmas. There are still stains from the ink you boiled in ours."

"What a marvel you are," Sherlock murmurs.

John Watson, thinks Sherlock as he runs his hand down John's back, is an honest to god miracle. John is boundlessly warm and infinitely perfect and perpetually intriguing and now can apparently read minds. This is fascinating news.

"I'm sorry your world is turned up to eleven, even if it makes you amazing. Is that the only reason you like Christmas? The mad rush and then the silence?"

"I also like fairy lights, but I don't know why. You're still shivering," Sherlock says, concerned. He can feel John's trembling in the circle of his arm. The doctor's torso is alive with tiny spasms.

"It's nothing. Just– it was cold outside."

It isn't nothing.

Within two hours, John's head is over the toilet and his face is pale as death and the shaking is about ten times worse. Or at least, Sherlock assumes that remains the case, because John locked the bathroom door half an hour ago. Sherlock's ear meets the wood for the fifth time as he grits his teeth against being excluded from something happening to John he's never witnessed previously. And something that's hurting him, to boot. It's absolutely maddening. He could  _claw_  his way through this door. He could positively  _chew_  his way inside.

"Any better?" he calls quietly.

"Sherlock. You're not helping," comes a weak voice from beyond the barrier.

That is decided, then. He will help. If that will gain him entrance, he will help tremendously.

Sherlock goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He also pours a glass of cold water and drags the thickest blanket they own off John's armchair. When the tea is finished, he finds the dusty brandy bottle and pours a little measure in, recalling something of the sort happening when he was sixteen and virulently ill over Bonfire Night when he'd have much preferred to be watching explosions. He changes out of his dress shirt and trousers and ties his blue robe over grey cotton, fetching John's flannels and a t-shirt in the meanwhile. John's small stash of medical supplies are in the kitchen, so he finds an anti-nausea agent and paracetamol and a bottle of flu medicine and puts them on a tea tray with the spiked tea and the water and a packet of very bland biscuits. Thinking twice about the tea tray, he removes the items and washes it quickly, as it last hosted the remains of a spinal column. Armed with a blanket, pillow, sleep clothes, provisions, and a Swiss Army knife, Sherlock picks the bathroom door lock in record time.

"Bloody  _hell,_  Sherlock," John moans.

He's slumped against the wall a little distance away from the toilet, grey and wrecked. It's entirely arresting, this new John, the John whose blood is now filled with some sort of virus, and Sherlock feels precisely the way he did during the summer on that day they were out in the blinding sun all afternoon and John's skin was flushed pink along the tops of his ears, the time he laughed about it when Sherlock pointed it out. New things about John are sacred. They are to be revered and savoured and placed on clear glass slides in Sherlock's hard drive forever and ever and for all time, amen.

Apparently when John is very ill, the whites of his eyes grow red. Sherlock gleefully ticks off another box.

"What  _is  _all of that?" John asks miserably.

Carefully, as if he's dealing with a wild animal, Sherlock sits with his back to the corner between wall and bathtub and sets the tea tray and bedding down. He holds out the biscuit package.

John shakes his head, wincing.

Sherlock tries the water glass. Sighing audibly, John reaches for it.

Water first, then. A new box goes  _tick_  in Sherlock's head. He passes the glass to John and John sips carefully. John then lowers his hands, staring down at his lap with a defeated expression.

"I hate this," he whispers.

Sherlock cocks his head inquisitively.

"I think it's just flu, but I. Well. You know what happened, probably. After I was shot. I nearly died."

Nodding, Sherlock holds out the teacup. With a rueful twist to his mouth, John takes it and sips.

"You aren't meant to break in when I'm throwing up everything I've ever ingested, you berk," John points out after he swallows the spiked tea.

"Why not?"

"Because I said so."

"Not good enough."

"It's the principle of the thing. You could give a man a little privacy if you liked."

"No," Sherlock says, deeply annoyed.

"I fucking  _deserve_  privacy, Sherlock."

"But I don't understand the point of it."

"Well, what if I don't want you to see me like this, perfect, elegant _you,_ seeing me all twisted and weak and broken and fucked-up and _helpless_?" John snaps savagely.

On the word  _helpless,_  he sends the teacup flying cruelly into the bathtub. It hits the porcelain and shatters in a spectacular explosion of china. It's the most brilliant thing Sherlock has ever seen. Now the tub is spattered with brandy and hot chamomile, and there are little pieces of disfigured pink blossoms everywhere, sharp enough to draw blood. Shrapnel from a distant war zone brought vividly home and painted with cabbage roses, scattered all around their drain. John winces, hard, and then covers his face with one shaking hand.

Get your bloody hand out of my way, you're completely ruining my line of sight.

"I'm such a mess," John says hoarsely through his fingers. "I hate being this way. I hate  _me  _this way _._ "

"I don't." And god, Sherlock doesn't. "But don't hurt anymore. I brought Boots night liquid and anti-nausea tablets from your kit."

The hand slides off his face again. John looks at Sherlock with a resigned and embarrassed and exasperated expression, as if he half wants to punch Sherlock and half wants to sink through the floor.

"You really can't be enjoying this," John observes. "I could spare you the discomfort."

"If you tell me to leave now, I will do," Sherlock offers. "I will. But I don't want to be spared. Do you think I like listening at doors, wondering how miserable you are? Does that seem like something I would enjoy,  _guessing_  at your condition? Where I'm concerned, do  _guesswork_  and  _John  _make a happy pair in your brain?"

John thinks it over.

"May I have a biscuit, please," he murmurs.

Tearing the packet open, Sherlock passes one along. John chews it experimentally, then winces again and drops the remainder in the bin.

Sherlock lifts the pair of flannel trousers and the soft cotton shirt experimentally.

"Right, hand them over."

"No. Come here."

John scowls.

"Problem?"

"Sherlock, I'll only get you sick."

All it takes is the raising of one very eloquent eyebrow to convey to John that the previous remark was either very stupid, or else failed to take into account anything he has ever learned about Sherlock Holmes.

Finally,  _at last, at last, at last,_  something in John softens visibly. He rolls his eyes heavenward and then crawls within easy reach. Being exquisitely careful, Sherlock reaches out and begins unbuttoning his shirt. When it's open, he slips it over John's arms, pulls his undershirt up and off, and continues, with John's occasional shaky assistance, until he has John nearly dressed for bed, tugging the flannels up his lean hips and pulling the drawstring to tie the knot. Dressing and undressing John is always a pleasure, but this time there is something to it beyond the revealing what's veiled, something deeper than the heady rush he always gets when a previously covered patch of John's skin is exposed. It feels almost worshipful doing this, like draping a Buddha or a saint. It's breathtaking.

If Sherlock could undress John to his bones, painlessly peel off the skin and then dress him back up in his own soft flesh again, that would be wonderful. More than wonderful. But it would hardly feel any more sacred than this does.

"You'd better go to bed," John says, watching Sherlock's fingers move. "I live here for the moment."

"Then I live here too."

"This is ridiculous, I'm perfectly capable of–"

"No."

Sliding the tea tray away a bit, Sherlock rises to a crouch and spreads the blanket over the floor. It's soft and thick and quilted, and he puts the pillow against the wall, lying back with his head sinking into goose feathers. John looks down at him as if Sherlock is a creature never before seen with human eyes, as if he'd encountered a unicorn sleeping in the middle of the forest.

"This is the part where you come here," Sherlock observes.

John's lids slide wearily over his eyes, and he grips the edge of the bathtub in frustration. "God in heaven, I– listen, Sherlock, you remember when I used to limp around like a mongrel run down by a truck? I was ashamed of it. Angry. I didn't... I didn't want to meet anyone who knew me, didn't want them to see how damaged I was. Running into Mike Stamford was horrifying. I'm a fucking doctor, I  _knew_  the leg pain was imaginary, I saw the tests and the scans myself."

"You're not limping an imaginary limp. You've a case of very real flu."

"Yes, and right now I feel as wrecked as I did when there was a hole in my shoulder and the nurses were being extra kind to me despite the fact I was screaming bloody murder at them, because the fever was rising and they all thought I was going to die. That was awful. Knowing. That they were coddling me, that they... And you're not just  _someone._ And you don't just  _know me._ "

"Correct. And so?"

"I don't want an audience."

Sherlock, despite knowing that John is simply being honest, can't help feeling outraged.

"Wrong. _Wrong_. I am not an  _audience_. Of all the mindless– you love me, and so I am going to sleep here with you on this floor, and bring you water and more tea in a new teacup and whatever else you like, for as long as this lasts. I cannot be  _coddling_  you, as I am emotionally and intellectually incapable of coddling anyone. I don't think you are twisted or weak or broken or fucked-up or helpless. But you are  _mine_ , in case you had momentarily forgotten." He's listening intently, but nevertheless John doesn't say anything. "Do you want it to be for me? Fine, that's fine. It would be better for me," Sherlock requests in desperation. "Please come here."

John absorbs this. His mouth twists, hesitant, and he swallows something bitter down. Sherlock would greatly prefer to have swallowed it himself and saved John the suffering, but some things aren't workable no matter how badly you want them, no matter how thoroughly your blood is mixed up in each other's veins.

When John does crawl onto Sherlock's lean chest, he's shivering badly again. Sherlock takes John's head and guides it down, pulls him tenderly into a cocoon of long arms and longer legs and slim musician's fingers brushing through his hair. He wraps his friend up in his limbs as if Sherlock is a coat, and then sets his lips where they can rest against John's hot brow while his nose is buried at the edge of his hairline. He kisses John's sweat-damp forehead once, but that isn't the point really, and John shouldn't get the wrong idea, that his friend needs more contact, as Sherlock doesn't want anything save for  _this._ The closeness and the too-sweet heartache and the fact that now he can feel the tremors in his own body beneath John's, which is a much more accurate measure than simply watching, or listening through a sodding  _door_. Sherlock wonders whether he'll catch the virus too perhaps, whether it would be at all helpful to take some of the minuscule invaders away from John and fight them himself.

There was once a song written by someone else who liked to think about dying, about wishing to eat someone's cancer, and Sherlock lets it play in his head. Slow and dark and dissonant and helpless and sad.

"The way you love me boggles my tiny little mind," John confesses to Sherlock's breastbone.

They both know that John's body is tiny, and his mind isn't. So Sherlock smiles like a caress against John's skin.

The next three days ought to be excruciatingly dull, but they aren't. They're riveting.

While John is asleep, Sherlock solves two cases via the web, rather cleverly. But by the end of John's illness, he won't even be bothered to recall them. John with flu, as it turns out, is a source of endlessly mesmerizing information.

The first night mainly consists of kipping on the lav floor, alternating between kneeling with his hands warm and steady on John's shoulders as he coughs helplessly over the toilet, or wrapped around John's shaking form, or going for water, or sweeping the teacup shards out of the bathtub when John says they would give him nightmares if he did manage to drop off. By morning, John is in bed, but still feverish, saying strange things as he half-sleeps and half-dreams, syllables that Sherlock's vast brain records religiously. In Sherlock's experience, John never speaks during his nightmares, though half-strangled sounds emerge at times, just before he turns onto his back. But now his lips are soft, pliant, ready with hazily whispered words.

Marasta.

Wadrega.

Zeh mutaasif yum.

John takes tea when awake that afternoon, and manages a few more biscuits. But by nightfall, the fever has worsened, though he's now perfectly alert and awake and still a combination of annoyed and miserable and awestruck.

"Thirty-eight point eight," Sherlock reports gravely when the thermometer slips from John's mouth. "Should I take you to hospital?"

"God, no, not for simple influenza," John sighs. "They're stacked three deep as is, this time of year, and me a grown man. I'll be fine."

You can't die of this. There's only one like you in the universe, I know it. And somehow you're mine. The thought of a doctor tending to you instead of me doing it is like a slap in the face, but I'd endure that no matter how awful, him or her touching you, I'd let them, I really would, for your sake. I'd not hurt them after, either. I'd promise.

"Are you  _certain_?" Sherlock demands.

"I'm sure you'll come up with a much more interesting way for us to die, one of these days," John returns dryly. Silently, Sherlock wholly agrees with him.

Throughout the course of the next two nights, Sherlock does things he hadn't ever imagined doing. Things he'd never done previous. He'd never before listened to the language spoken in the land of his own new dreamscapes, the tongue of deserts and beige camouflage and blood spurting from bullet wounds. He can't stop dreaming of deserts, and now the whispers have a voice. Before this incident—and it's now much more than an incident in Sherlock's mind—John had always been endlessly affectionate and yet completely in control of himself. Deadly, in fact. A force to be reckoned with. John loses his mind during sex because he wants to, not because he can't help it. Now he's completely vulnerable, just a shivering little pile of bones. To his own shock, that makes Sherlock feel unspeakably kind. As if, now that John is actually at his mercy, mercy is the only thing he wants to provide.

No, not mercy. Mercy implies a crime. Just what John deserves.

And Sherlock keeps on providing, he himself as shocked as John by the deeds which pour forth. He'd not before stayed awake all night just to keep a steady hand on a sick man's breastbone and occasionally his brow. He'd not ever held a mug of soup for someone while pretending that chap could probably manage it on his own when both men know it's an outrageous lie. Although Sherlock has often cleaned dead flesh so as to get a better look at it, he'd never once fetched a cool bowl of water, and several towels and cloths, and then set to  _making  _a fever recede, by hand, on frantically shivering skin. John's epidermis fights him all the while, the flushed skin raising hackles at the contact and John himself half gritting his teeth and half relaxing in intuitive relief.

"It doesn't matter now, you know," John says in a dry whisper at the end of one such session.

"What doesn't?" The man in his arms has never felt smaller, and Sherlock's mouth is against John's temple, which is burning like a ransacked city.

"How it ends. You're the only thing I'll ever want anymore."

John doesn't mean to say it, and that makes it true.

What Sherlock admits to himself (he's ruthless) and John doesn't suppose (he isn't) is that all of this business is just about the headiest power trip Sherlock Holmes has ever been on. It's the bipolar opposite of charity. Sherlock feels like a god even more than is usual, and a god without a small, steady being to clear his throat and correct his own thinking from time to time. When he examines it ruthlessly (as is his habit), Sherlock adores being literally  _everything  _to his friend, and seemingly without any price tag involved in the selfish privilege. After all, John seems gradually to be mending, and Sherlock couldn't  _invent  _a virus which could have given him a better series of small, infinitely precious gifts. He loathes the suffering involved in John's ordeal and gladly would endure it himself if such were possible. But since it isn't...

It's all more or less spectacular.

After a total of three days, John looks exhausted but is smiling inexplicably from the bed. Sherlock, bearing tea on another rainy evening, assumes there is something to smile about and awaits news from the doorway.

"I'm sick to death of this room," John says. "Let's move to the sofa."

Finally, the worst of it is past, Sherlock supposes. He can't help but be glad, despite the tender confessions and the muttered Pashto and the fact that he'd practically held John in the palm of his hand. Soon, John won't be miserable, and warmth spreads through Sherlock's chest at the thought of it.

They go into the sitting room and settle themselves along the sofa and turn on the telly, just for ambient noise to help John sleep. _North by Northwest_  is playing, and Cary Grant is preoccupied with elegantly dodging bullets and climbing cliff sides.

"He's dangerously good looking in this film," John muses.

Sherlock looks, considering. If he were capable of being attracted to anyone else now there is John, and if he were capable of being attracted to aesthetics when removed from the real person, just  _appearance_  without knowledge of intellect or character, then yes, he sees John's point, as his few attractions have always been confined exclusively to homosexual encounters, though he's incapable of interpreting the current visual data flow sexually. John isn't incapable, though. John is normal. And bisexual.

"Stop scowling, Sherlock. He died about fifteen years ago. Must have been over eighty years old by then."

_Good,_  thinks Sherlock, well satisfied.

Then it occurs to him, in an idle way, that he'll never be that old. For one thing, he's a person very, very apt to do dangerous—borderline deadly—things. But for another, by the time he grows old, he won't be beautiful any longer himself, and that's the reason John stays, apart from his being amazing. It certainly isn't because Sherlock is generally all that comforting or comfortable. No, he's a beautiful specimen, one of a kind and all, and a wonder at that, but without being beautiful, there wouldn't be much reason for John to tolerate the rest of it. John is very patient, but it wouldn't be the same.

Then Sherlock starts wondering whether anyone else thinks about this, if this is normal, needing to stay beautiful or the world would careen off like a bowling pin, and winces to himself. It can't possibly be a profitable line of thought, he supposes as he falls asleep at last.

The next day, they awaken on the sofa and the telly is still softly glowing. John sits up with his back to Sherlock's pelvis, smoothing a hand over Sherlock's face. He looks normal. Not feverish at all. Just  _John._ Weary and tireless and gentle and deadly and grave and funny and boyish and weathered.

"Good morning, crime scene," he says to Sherlock with a disbelieving smile.

"I missed you," Sherlock returns sleepily.

John bends down and touches his cheerful slope of a nose to Sherlock's elegant one.

"We also missed Christmas," he notes apologetically. "But I'll make it up somehow."

"No need. I'd not have wished it different."

Pausing, John blinks. "I... god help us. Sherlock, you were amazing. Are amazing. I am amazed." John smiles in a slightly abashed manner. "Still, no need to pretend that was a picnic."

"No. It was much better."

John's head tilts. He frowns, and his lips purse in thought. It occurs to the still very sleep-addled Sherlock that he had better shut up. He's well in just now, John seems quite pleased with him, what with all the unexpected care-taking, but John's face has clouded. He's not angry, but he's puzzling something over.

"Um. You liked the last few days, did you now?" he inquires.

Sherlock thinks very quickly. He did, and he also didn't, not in the least. But there's a right and a wrong way to say that.

_What is the proper way?_  "There isn't anything about you I don't want," he says. "Even when you're miserable and half-delirious. It was something new about you, so I wanted it."

And that's the truth. It's one of the truest things he's ever said. But John doesn't answer. He bites his lower lip, in fact, and–

"Thinking about you in pain is nauseating," Sherlock hastens to add. "Thinking about you in pain without me, all alone, is– it's not bearable."

And that's also the truth. One of the other truest things he's ever said. It dissipates the growing maelstrom in John's already storm-coloured eyes, and John tilts his head and leans back in for a kiss, one that's thankful and trusting and oh so very, very warm.

_The truth is a useful tool on occasion,_  Sherlock thinks as his breath is stolen away from him.

The next day, there is a case, and John manages to get himself locked in a fish freezer. Sherlock rescues him by expertly picking a padlock, and when John walks out, his eyebrows are more or less frosted-over. Sally Donovan puts him in a shock blanket and scolds him for tagging along after the likes of Sherlock Holmes, the tosser, but she's smiling in relief while she says it. So Sherlock doesn't mind as much. The day after that, Sherlock involves himself with a crime ring that's been passing along forged American paper currency made in South Korea, which earns him a gun to his head and a nasty bruise on his left arm from where the crowbar glancingly landed, and John clucks over the dark contusion in what seems to be irritation while the three men are led off in handcuffs. After that, there is a case involving an insurance scandal and high finance, which takes up far more of Sherlock's time than he'd like, but ends with a spectacular showdown on the rooftop of a skyscraper, so that's something.

All in all, Sherlock doesn't have any time to think about his birthday until it is upon him. January the 6th.

John is leaving for the clinic that morning, but he makes them both tea beforehand and puts Sherlock's next to where his hands are typing away on his laptop, explaining to someone in Georgia (the country, not the American state) that he absolutely requires the make of bicycle tire before he can get any further.

"I'm through at seven-thirty. Meet me at Bart's at eight?"

"Hmm?"

Sherlock looks up, fingers pausing.

"You have another case," John explains, winking.

Sherlock frowns in disbelief.

"Fine. There's a brilliant corpse I need you to look at."

"How brilliant?"

"So brilliant that Molly saved it for your birthday. She emailed me about it."

This is puzzling. But Sherlock enjoys puzzles. Tremendously.

"Why would Molly email you about a corpse?"

"Why would you email Molly asking specifically for a victim of leprosy last Tuesday?" John counters on his way out the door. "And why don't I mind? People do eccentric things."

Sherlock arrives at Bart's morgue at ten to eight, his breath frosting in the chilled air outside the stately structure. He follows his usual route and finds Molly sitting before a computer screen having a cup of coffee, wearing her lab coat and a new shade of mauve lipstick, entering the data from a post-mortem. He glances over the information, reading it in two and a half seconds. Boring.

"Hullo," she says cheerily. "God, it's awful."

"What?" Sherlock inquires.

"You. Poor little thing. Having to work on your birthday. John said it was a case, very secret and hush-hush and all. Told me to tell you he's in Room 114. Already working on it. Hope it won't take you long. Do the pair of you fancy a birthday pint after? My treat, of course, there's a very nice–"

But Sherlock is already out the door by this time. Heading swift and sure for room 114, which is a normal, small, dull room for private medical examinations. It's for tapping people on their kneecaps and taking their blood pressure. He cannot imagine what John could possibly be doing there. If he'd truly found Sherlock a leprous corpse, he'd have kept it in the morgue. John is keen on sanitation. Very keen. No one in in the hallway, and Sherlock's shoes echo against the floor. There. Room 114. The light within is turned on. Reaching out, Sherlock twists the door handle.

When Sherlock enters the spare, square chamber, he at once stops in his tracks. Shocked into stillness.

John is sitting on an examination table, wearing blue scrubs that make his eyes bluer, barefooted, his head covered with an interconnected net of white electrodes. The little nodules are resting against his scalp over his downy hair, and against the upper part of his brow. There are perhaps three dozen of them, and they are all attached at the base of his skull to a slightly wider cord, which runs loosely down from the padded table and over to another table and plugs into a small box which resembles a cheap beige radio. Sherlock knows without being told that the box is a portable recording device meant to store medical readings. And he can also see that the box itself is plugged into a small computer monitor which is currently blank. But apart from that, his brain has stopped working entirely. His friend is smiling, equal parts confidence, good humour, and amused nerves, beneath the tiny discs of white plastic.

"Happy birthday," he says. "Lock the door somehow, won't you?"

Sherlock closes the door and props a folded metal chair back under the handle. He goes back to staring.

"Is something wrong?" he asks at length, as it's the best he can come up with.

"God, I hope not. Come here, you, we haven't got all night. Only about... I should say thirty minutes, in fact, before things start to look spotty to Molly."

As Sherlock walks to the examination table, John reaches over to the box he's wired to and flicks a switch. Lines appear on the monitor, a series of elegant waves as lovely and even as a summer's ocean. They're moving. John claps his hands lightly as if he's beginning something, firing a gun at the start of a race.

Sherlock discovers that his diaphragm is paralyzed seconds later, when he realizes what exactly this  _is._

"You probably know this is all about voltage. Do you? Of course you do. The synchronized activity over the neuron network plays out onscreen as oscillations. Currently, I'm anxious you're going to find all this utterly crackers, so you should be seeing that my beta bands are emitting low amplitude waves. Just there, at twelve to thirty Hertz. Right. What else. Well, currently, my synaptic activity is quite firmly within parameters. From what I can tell. I decided to use an average reference montage rather than–"

"I wanted to open up your skull and see inside."

John stops. He glances at Sherlock and then back at the screen, the bluish white glow with the squiggly lines running along it horizontally.

"You did," he concedes, "but that sounded rather a lot of bother. On my end, anyway."

"I wanted to read your thoughts."

"Thank Christ  _that's  _never going to happen."

"I wanted to map every fold of your brain."

"Yep. So I gathered."

Sherlock is speechless.

John's lips push forward. "Do you still, then? Or have I the wrong end, and you've– hang it all, you think this is lunacy, don't you? Listen, it isn't as if you wanted anything for Christmas, so I wasn't about to go through that rigmarole again a week later. Finding you some... some  _thing._ You don't consider food recreational, so taking you to dinner is out. And it isn't as if I can just hand you a birthday voucher for a blow job or something, our sex life is brilliant, I'm not exactly a slouch and I can barely keep up with you. You're like the Bobby Fischer of sex. Are you even  _listening_  to me?"

"That's your brain," Sherlock whispers hoarsely, still staring at the lines. "What you're thinking. This is an electroencephalogram."

If Sherlock wanted to rip his eyes off the stately progression of various neural frequencies, he would be physically incapable. It isn't that they're elegant and organic and mathematical and gorgeous and pure and human and divine. Though they are. It isn't that they're the closest scientific approximation to John's thoughts he's likely ever going to view. Though they're that, as well. It isn't even that he can see clear as day all the aggregated individual interactions and permutations between the billions of neurons living inside the skull of the man he loves so much that it hurts to look at him occasionally. That's true too, but that isn't what strikes Sherlock right through his core either. It's that John said that he deserves privacy, and privacy means keeping some things hidden, and John has just invited Sherlock  _inside his head._  The detective feels as if he's just crested the top of a roller coaster.

He is falling either:

1) in circles like a felled predator

2) to pieces

3) in on himself

4) through the dull grey floor

_5) apart_  or perhaps

6) in love

though that seems rather redundant at this juncture.

"Tell me I'm permitted to touch you this very instant," Sherlock commands, "or something genuinely terrible is going to happen."

John just grins at him. It feathers the crow's feet around his dark eyes in ways that currently give Sherlock what feels like actual arrhythmia. Then John glances down at an object resting on the table to his right. It's a testament to his complete loss of logical faculty that Sherlock missed a small tube of lubricant in plain sight.

"Idiot. If you couldn't touch me, what would be the point?"

It takes two strides to reach the exam table, and four more to grip John by the legs and swing him entirely round so his back is to the monitor and Sherlock has reached the opposite side, looking over John's shoulder. He has a clear view of the screen and John doesn't, but presumably this is being recorded for posterity. And if not, Sherlock is going to fucking well devour every instant of it in great bloody dripping greedy handfuls.

Keeping his eyes up, he fastens his lips to the side of John's neck just above his carotid artery. The pulse leaps a little, which is sublime but also normal.

A line on the screen quivers, which is  _heartrending._

"Glad you're finally on my page here. I was hoping you'd see what you could do about my theta bands," John breathes.

"I presume they indicate arousal in the adult brain."

Not stopping what his teeth are doing to the sinews of John's neck, Sherlock reaches behind himself and tugs his arms out of his jacket, throwing expensive fabric mindlessly on the floor. Then he brings his hands up, one to the other side of John's neck and one to his upper thigh, caressing the muscle beneath the soft cloth of the scrubs. When he sucks a mark onto John's throat, the man under him shivers at the same time he half-laughs.

At the same time a digital black line throbs.

Sherlock's eyes flutter shut without his permission. Furious, he wrenches them open again.

"If you actually were a vampire, which you aren't, now would be a good time, don't you think?" John asks teasingly.

John is playing with fire in the worst way, though he hasn't the slightest idea that's the case. Sherlock could take a scalpel and cut him open just to taste the blood at the moment, the blood that's mostly John's but also a bit Sherlock's. Sherlock could bite off his earlobe and swallow it down. He could fetch a rib separator so as to crawl into John's torso. He doesn't need to, though, staring straight into John's skull. And the most violent options don't seem at all conducive to his goal of witnessing what John's theta bands do when he's screaming the word  _Sherlock._ So instead, he slides his hands up under the soft blue shirt and then drags his fingernails down his friend's chest. John shudders pleasantly again, electrical readings fluctuating, and then reaches for Sherlock's belt buckle.

"Don't touch me."

"But–"

"Leave off."

"I thought– what's wrong?"

"Let me have this, please, oh please let me have this," Sherlock begs breathlessly, his eyes darting to John's. "Let me know your mind."

"God yes, but don't you–"

"I can't watch if I'm distracted. I can't–"

"Hush," John murmurs. "Anything you want. Well, within– you know. Let's both emerge intact. But Sherlock, god,  _anything._ "

"Then say  _anything_  again."

Sherlock is focusing his full attention on the monitor screen now, and when John smiles and repeats the word  _anything,_  meaning what he says for the third time, a slightly differently pitched little series of spikes appear.

That is too good for any English words to qualify, and requires immediate further escalation, and so Sherlock sets his full mouth over John's thin one, begging immediate entry, tasting his breath and his lips and his heart and no that's wrong anatomically where did that come from his teeth yes that's right and his tongue and  _how in the name of god did I ever find this man_. Out of the corner of his eye, he can still see the readout, it's well in his periphery, and—though it's a job not to close his eyes when kissing John Watson—the increase in wavelength of one data stream is enough to send wild sparks careening down his spinal column. He's so lightheaded for a moment that he does allow his lids to fall, just as John's have fallen, already breathless and panting and god can John be enjoying this too, can John Watson actually be mad enough to be aroused that Sherlock is  _in his fucking head?_

Wrenching himself away momentarily, Sherlock tugs at the drawstring on the scrubs. John lifts himself up and then they and his pants are gone, joining Sherlock's suit jacket on the ground. Something about that is wonderful, but not as good as kissing, and so Sherlock returns to that activity with a hungry growl.

"What do you want?" John gasps when Sherlock is wedged between his knees and neither of them are getting nearly sufficient levels of oxygen.

"Everything." The soft laughter bubbles up from nowhere, from both of them at once, mingling with the kissing neither knows how to stop. "I told you. Absolutely everything."

"Right you are. That was... day two. I didn't fully grasp it at the time."

"You don't fully grasp it  _now._ And it's Day Three Hundred and Seven."

"Stop giggling, you can't giggle, it's a hospital. Sherlock. _Sherlock._ "

Sherlock's eyes widen. "Say my name again. Now."

John complies, but lower, darker,  _more_. The results are conclusive. John saying  _Sherlock_  while Sherlock watches his brainwaves flutter with wanting is better than John saying  _Sherlock  _in their bed, against the wall, at a crime scene, after a blood transfusion, in any other situation he can recall.

"Do you want to see it too?" Sherlock questions with his lips over the perfect cleft in John's chin, realizing that John is missing his own data stream. It's the only completely altruistic query John is going to get out of this encounter.

"What? The reading? I don't care about the reading, there's something much more interesting in here." John swings his legs back up and lies down on his side facing Sherlock, propped on one elbow so as not to damage sensitive medical equipment, his lips flushed and one knee up, cocking an eyebrow.

Sherlock knows the unspoken suggestion  _fuck me somehow_  when he sees it and considers it his privilege to comply.

And the strangest part of all is what's so natural about doing something so entirely mad. Later, when he remembers it, Sherlock doesn't think exclusively about the delicate pulsing waves that flowed past his vision whenever his eyes shifted upward, the dips and valleys of John's thoughts, the poetry of neurons spiking, the undertow of John's anxieties and his memories and his sadness, the mountain ranges of electrogalvanic passion, the music of his brain's energy mapped and laid out for the scientist like a human sacrifice. Granted, that waterfall of data was giving him what felt like a sustained intellectual orgasm, but that isn't all. It isn't all, and that shocks Sherlock, shakes him down to his bones. When he remembers, he remembers that his hand stroking John created one pattern, of course he does. And that his mouth on John created another. But then his thoughts fly to the taut muscles of John belly quivering as his lips skimmed them. The same as they always do. To what good clean sweat in the crease of John's thigh always tastes like. To John saying  _please  _and then  _fuck  _and then  _like that, oh like that, god yes._ All of which is normal. To the happy, uncalculated, almost self-deprecating huff of breath he gives when Sherlock's fingers first curl up inside of him, and how after that sound, John's eyelashes always flicker like moths, and how during what they still call Last Wednesday they hadn't hijacked any expensive medical equipment but it was still perfect anyhow, that taking John apart is both the means and the end and the goal and the journey, no matter if his cranium is transparent or not.

John means to finish quietly, undone by Sherlock's two hands and with his head thrown back. Sherlock can tell. But it doesn't go quite the way John wants it to. The quiet.

After, John sits up, breathing hard. He reaches for a cloth on the nearby table and wipes it over his stomach, tentatively smiling. Sherlock is leaning heavily with both hands on the exam table's edge, unmoving, his lips parted, still riveted by the readout. When John's hand brushes over his friend's perfectly flat and respectable trouser flies, Sherlock's eyes wince shut.

"Hey." John's voice is worried. "You're not even... maybe this wasn't the sort of thing you meant by–"

"Shut up, please," Sherlock hisses. He closes his mouth again.

He didn't mean to say that, even softened with a  _please._

But it is all much too much at the moment.

It is all much too much for several very long moments, in fact.

He can hear John sliding down, can hear him disengaging the gelled-on electrodes with professional medical efficiency. Next he can hear the click of the machine shutting off, and John re-dressing in his scrubs, and John setting Sherlock's rumpled suit jacket to his immediate left, and finally John easing his hands over Sherlock's on the padded surface from across the table.

If he opens his eyes, Sherlock thinks from within a painful haze of downward-spiraling delirious sensory overload, it will be the death of him.

Gradually, Sherlock becomes aware in the darkness that John has unbuttoned one of his shirt cuffs and rolled up his right sleeve. His small, deft index finger touches Sherlock's inner arm, sure but light. Unobtrusive.

T-H-A-T W-A-S A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

Quirking his lips, Sherlock feels himself blushing. Blushing is undignified. But clearly can't be helped.

He doesn't move, though, can't stomach the notion yet. After another very long silence, John's fingertip begins writing again.

D-I-D I B-R-E-A-K Y-O-U-R B-R-A-I-N?

Sherlock shakes his head, smiling a little wider.

W-H-A-T A-R-E Y-O-U T-H-I-N-K-I-N-G O-F?

Exhaling slowly, Sherlock captures John's hand in both of his and settles down on his elbows, leaning over with eyes still shut. It's growing better now. He'd supposed from the instant his eyes first closed that coming down from a sustained mental plateau of that height would give him irreparable psychic bends, and he has absolutely no doubt that he was right. Nothing like this has ever happened before, but he does know his own mind. That it was all rather touch and go for a moment. He knows his own heart too, the one that isn't meant to be there, and he thinks to himself that he will never repay his friend for this, that the balance is irretrievably lost, that all his life, he will now be working to adequately thank a man for having given him something he didn't even know that he wanted. And if he'd wanted it in the first place, Sherlock knows he'd probably not ever have mentioned it. Turning John's hand over, he touches his friend's palm.

Y-O-U

When Sherlock eyes open a moment later, they are already looking into John's. As if they can see him in the pitch black. As if they'd been looking at each other all along.

Sherlock and John arrive home at nine thirty, Sherlock carrying a wrapped birthday gift from Molly. She had been her usual fluttery, buoyant, askew self despite being turned down over a trip to the pub, good-naturedly still fretting over Sherlock for having to work on his birthday and smiling at John because John removed the single greatest source of unresolved stress from her life several months ago by sleeping with Sherlock. Molly had held the present out, with her arm straight and her hair in her eye, looking like a cat who'd swallowed a canary.

"I think it's right up your street, Sherlock," she'd said.

Sherlock, by now capable of rudimentary English, had taken the gift and thanked her politely because he hadn't yet gotten any further towards recalling how people behave, let alone how  _he_ behaves specifically. He was going on instinct.

"You're nice like this," John teased him as he hailed a taxi. "You've got manners and everything. How long will it last, d'you think?"

Sherlock glares. But he takes John's hand, and he keeps it for the entire ride home.

Sitting at their Food and Experiments table, staring at the cup of tea John just passed to him, Sherlock begins to feel almost normal. Or if not normal,  _as usual_. He looks up at where John, still in scrubs, is writing his clinic schedule on their calendar. John the Doctor. John, who can speak in dead tongues. John, who once gave him blood, and whose thoughts resemble brightly sparking little live wires.

"I don't know what to say," Sherlock says.

"Neither do I, at the moment. And I'm a bit distracted. Maybe because you kept your clothes on, who knows, I've been thinking that you are so beautiful as to be a biological impossibility." Turning, John smiles easily. "Go on, then. What did Molly give you? Looks like a book."

The thin paper tears off easily and Sherlock turns the volume over to read the title.

_"Perfume,"_  he reports. " _The Story of a Murderer,_  by Patrick–"

"Bloody  _hell._ "

The book is whisked from Sherlock's hands before he has time to blink by a suddenly very active ex-military doctor. John puts the table back between them at once.

"Just a moment," Sherlock objects irritably.

John is holding the book firmly and just a little behind him, as if its contents were visible with the spine closed. His eyebrows are raised, as they are when he's putting his foot down, but Sherlock hasn't the slightest notion of why.

"Right, you're not reading this," John declares, walking to the sink cupboard and binning the gift.

"That was  _mine_ ," Sherlock snaps.

"Now it's rubbish. But it was a nice gesture."

"What in the name of actual bloody hell–"

"Sherlock, you don't give a damn about perfume, do you?"

"In the context of a crime scene I do. And it said  _murderer._ "

John's hands slide to his face, and he rubs them up and down. "Yes. It... did. Look. You're not reading that. You don't give a damn about fiction either, anyhow."

"Explain why you are stealing my property and then binning it before my eyes."

Blowing out a breath between his lips, John walks over to Sherlock and perches with legs spread in his lap. His skin is warm under the scrubs, the compact musculature of his thighs pressing up into Sherlock's groin, and it isn't the slightest bit inelegant for all its simplicity, the way they fit together. They fit like Sherlock crafted John out of clay and then breathed life into him.

"That isn't going to work," Sherlock says, petulant almost in spite of himself.

"Yes, it is."

" _Tell_  me–"

"Which bits first?" John nips at his neck softly. "The part about how you're amazing, or the part about how goddamn beautiful you are, or the part about how I can't stop thinking about either one of them? You are  _driving._ _Me._ To  _distraction._ Hottest sex in ages, and I didn't even  _see_  you properly. We're sorting that."

"But why did you bin–"

"Because you adore me, you infuriating work of art."

"Yes, but–"

"It's safer. Trust me. And if you think you are going to make it through your entire birthday without a shag, you are dreaming. Stop thinking about literature. Your knowledge of literature is nil, anyway."

John is nibbling at his ear. "Not that I mind this, precisely," Sherlock sighs, "but frankly I'm a bit–"

"Knackered," John agrees. "Dazed. Blissed out. Slow on the uptake. High. Thick. Adorable."

"Shut up. I meant–"

"I know what you meant. I can take care of it. I haven't wanted to fuck you this much since that night you wore the tuxedo when we were tailing the fence trying to sell that stolen Greuze."

That does the trick.

And really, he should do this more often, he thinks. It's lovely to be undressed and gently pushed into bed when it's by John, and it's lovely to be moved to your side with your knees pulled up a bit and a soft pillow under your head, and it's lovely to know that's because John is half a foot shorter, and having the upper curve of your shoulder and your arm and the back of your neck kissed while John is moving slowly behind you is lovely too. The first time, after the fight over Charles, Sherlock had imagined his spine was unraveling, just untwisting like a tightly braided cord being pulled apart all the way up into his brain, and had been ever so slightly frightened of it despite the jolts like tiny hits of heroin over and over again. Because no matter how much of a top Seb may have been, and how badly Sherlock had wanted to remain agreeable for once in his life, that had never happened before. With Seb, or with any of the others. But with John, things fray all to pieces at their edges. He'd never conceived of anything like it. But now he's better used to it, John's hand on his hip and in his hair, can feel his mind unspooling without supposing John is untethering it entirely and plans to let it go like a bunch of balloons over the Thames. And John is saying  _beautiful_  when Sherlock shudders at last,  _so fucking beautiful_ , and so it's fine, being unspun like a jumper with a hole in it. Everything is fine.

"You," John says twenty minutes later, having showered briefly and returned to bed smelling of soap, "are a very clever boy. Here it's  _your  _birthday and  _I'm  _having the time of my life."

Sherlock tucks his face further in against John's neck. One of his ankles is crossed over John's, and he rubs them together lazily.

"My knowledge of literature is not nil," he drawls stubbornly, pouting. "And I still want to know why I can't be trusted to  _read_. How am I to  _improve  _literature knowledge when you won't even let me have books? Why did you chuck it out?"

"Professor Hawking, just what department do you chair at university?"

Sherlock scowls. It's more determined and masterful than laughing, he supposes. But it doesn't hold up for very long. It's a fragile scowl, brittle, and it breaks into a wry half-grin before he can manage to salvage it.

The following week, Sherlock receives a very strange appeal from Lestrade.

When he and John arrive at the house, Lestrade hands over a number of photographs. The atmosphere inside the parlour they stand in is oppressive—thick and a bit musty. It's clean, though, and nicely decorated, all stripes and quiet blues, and Anderson is dusting for prints on the upright piano. Sherlock imagines his head exploding like a pumpkin dropped from a building and then moves on to the evidence.

"My god," John breathes.

There are several pictures of a pair of men. Both look wild-eyed, their faces contorted in freakish pain, shrieking something at the camera. They're crime scene photos, snapped without regard for aesthetics, looking like something from a horror film. One of the men is being given an injection by an emergency medical tech. The other is laughing in the most horrifying way possible.

"That would be George and Owen Tregennis," Lestrade explains. "Daft as a sack of jackals. As of yesterday morning, when they were found in this room. Not previously given to fits. I've seen them an hour back, they're even more charming in person."

"They remind me of someone," Anderson mutters pointedly.

Ignoring him, Sherlock moves on to the next still. It's a woman, previously very pretty, clearly the sister of the other pair by the evidence of her chin, her face both demented and blasted with terror. She's sitting in a chair with her hands fixed to a card table with a number of beer bottles resting on it, and her is mouth gaping open, eyes looking glassy and demon-possessed. Very dead. Dead how Sherlock can't tell, but she looks... frightened to death.

"Pretty, isn't it," Lestrade agrees dryly.

"Fascinating," breathes Sherlock.

"Disgusting," gripes Anderson.

"Your knack at marital fidelity, or whatever drug these people took?" John asks sweetly.

Sherlock flashes John a glance and quirks a smile at him.

They learn as much as they can from the official police. Brenda had a fiance, for instance, a celebrity doctor John has heard of who does AIDS and other virus-related work in Africa. He's in town at the moment, but has a very valid alibi, as he was giving a lecture on bush meat before a crowd of fifty people. He is about to return to his studies in the jungle. The trio have another brother who was absent from the proceedings but dropped by earlier in the evening, and discovered the bodies when he returned the following day to fetch an umbrella he'd left behind. He appears to be in shock, according to Lestrade, and his name is Morty. Morty is of the opinion that his siblings got their hands on some sort of illicit drug cocktail, a badly laced batch of meth or LSD, and took it while partying the previous evening, not knowing its potential effects. Sherlock, looking around and sniffing, isn't so sure. Neither is John.

"These could have been accidental deaths," John says judiciously. "But lord, what a way to go. It's a dreadful business. And if they all took the same dosage, why was the girl the only one killed? She's not so very different in weight. Are there toxicology reports yet, Lestrade?"

"Not as such. No track marks, though, and no trace of anything left lying about either. Pipes, syringes, what have you. We took blood from the two men, but nothing's come of it yet. Sherlock, why are you staring at the fireplace? Christmas is over."

Sherlock is staring at the fireplace because according to the photos, Brenda had been seated closest to it. And Sherlock's nose is very sharp indeed. And something in this room is a Bit Not Good. He points.

Lestrade and Sherlock stare down at the grate. Most of the ash looks normal, but there's a very fine powdering of queer grey powder on one of the fire irons.

"Well spotted, you. Could mean something. Oi, Anderson, take as many samples as you can from this fireplace. Whether these deaths were accidental or not, how the drug was delivered might give us some answers."

"You think it was airborne," John muses as they hail a cab outside, directing the driver to New Scotland Yard while Lestrade follows in a police car. "Whatever poison that was."

"I think it was _  new,_" Sherlock whispers.

"Well, hallelujah, then– that's a 'new' I could have done without, thanks awfully."

Morty Tregennis turns out to be a landscaper, a weedy, sweating fellow with mean eyes and a red nose. His siblings were lushes, he claims—beloved, but experimental drug freaks. Who knows what they could have dug up to snort off of mirrors this time. Or cooked up out of night liquid? He's heard rumours of such things. But he is heartbroken, and poor dear Brenda, and are George and Owen feeling any better yet?

"Not likely to," Lestrade says gruffly.

"It's all too horrible," Morty says tearfully. "It was awful to see. I couldn't stand it, and when they arrived after I called nine nine nine, they all turned white as a sheet."

Sherlock tries not to smirk at this news, that the atmosphere in the room had previously been still more oppressive, and fails. John catches his eyes but says nothing. After promising Lestrade that Sherlock will keep him informed this time, for once, god help us, Sherlock and John leave the Yard.

But by that time, even so early in the proceedings, not everyone is quite so well-informed as they could be.

For instance, Lestrade doesn't know that Sherlock collected a quarter-ounce of dust from the bottom of the fireplace at the blighted Tregennis house when they weren't looking. When Sherlock had asked Lestrade to check the bathroom for pills the siblings could have powdered.

Neither does Anderson, the twit. He'd had his back turned very,  _very  _pointedly whilst alone with The Freak.

John doesn't either. He'd been going through the kitchen supplies, looking for evidence of the Tregennis family having ever cooked up their own special mixtures. He doesn't know when they leave the stifling residence, and he doesn't know when they exit the Yard, and he doesn't know when they go home, and he doesn't know when he pays for the cab fare because Sherlock never has any cash on him, grumbling about just how many favours Sherlock expects per day on average, though Sherlock points out that John likes doing him favours, and he doesn't know when he pops down to the corner shop for a sandwich and a bag of crisps. John, after all, grows hungry frequently.

And then Sherlock is alone in his flat. He takes out the dust he'd scraped into an evidence bag and he looks at it.

Sets it on the kitchen table.

Gets a glass slide out of his chemistry kit.

There will always be a moment of choice in these situations, Sherlock knows. It is never simply  _involuntary._ Just because he feels compelled to do it doesn't mean his feelings rule his brain. They don't. As he had watched his own hand rising to his lips with the cabbie's poison pill, granted, he had thought himself in the right regarding his choice. Safe. But that hadn't meant the notion of dying was any less thrilling than usual. Going to see Jim Moriarty alone was tragically stupid in retrospect, but nevertheless it was his own decision and he cannot pretend not to have loved the risk of it.

Sherlock is too ruthless for that.

So when the spent powder (it's spent, isn't it?) is there on the glass slide (like no drug he's ever seen before, like a new species, like a miracle), and he is trying to think how to identify it in their kitchen (analytical method must be chosen carefully when dealing with such a small sample) and not at Bart's (too great a chance for interruption, this is delicate work), Sherlock knows perfectly well that burning the stuff would be dangerous.

Unhealthy, potentially.

But not deadly. Surely not?

It's the question mark he loves like almost nothing else.

So he flicks a lighter on and holds it under the slide.

At first, nothing happens.

Then a violent smell like hashish laced with mortuary chemicals assaults his nostrils, and he gasps, choking. Feels the bile rise up in the back of his throat.

Bad idea.

Sherlock makes it to the sink and shoves the slide under the tap just as the front door opens. It's John, probably. Yes, it's John, because John is saying something, and now dropping the bag he was carrying, and now John is racing to the windows and throwing them open, and now he's shoving Sherlock into the bedroom, onto the bed, not being gentle, closing the door behind them to block away whatever-is-infecting-the-sitting-room, and–

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Sherlock flinches, shoving his palms over his ears. There is a horrible hissing screeching high-pitched whining static just above the screaming now. And a lingering sense of dread. He's used to the shrieks of his mind, has always heard them and will always hear them, and maybe he's immune to the true horror of this drug, since what's in his mind anyhow isn't exactly a stroll through the Park. He isn't seeing visions, and the darkness inside him isn't worse than normal. It doesn't make him want to scream the way the others had in the photographs. To hide away from the terror of it. But his heart is hammering and his lungs are dragging in trickles of air against a closing throat and John is straddling him on the bed, his knees spread, shouting something with his dark blue eyes raging. He tears Sherlock's hands away from his head.

"–swear to Christ on my life, if you weren't such a fucking sick bastard. Sherlock. _Answer me,_  damn you. That was the poison, you found it, the poison from–"

"I think I'm dying," Sherlock realizes.

And the moment he realizes that for a fact... it's fine.

Everything is fine.

It could have been so much worse than this. This is the right way.

John is here. So it's fine.

It's such a relief, as a matter of fact, that it's all over. John is here, he won't die alone, will have spent every last second with his friend. He doesn't deserve it, but he's getting it. His dying wish. More or less.

Really, it's an honest to god dream come true.

"No." John clenches his fists in Sherlock's shirt. "No. You are not. Sherlock, breathe a little slower. Calm down. You're going to be fine, just–"

But he isn't. Sherlock isn't not-breathing-right because it's an interesting trick and breathing is boring. It's because he can't help it. And his heart...

_his  _heart...

" _No._ No, you are not fucking doing this to me, Sherlock Holmes."

Sherlock's eyes squeeze shut. The pain is excruciating. Deserved, he thinks, because his friend sounds anguished. He's never heard anyone sound like that. John is saying his name again, just over and over, frantic,  _Sherlock,_  and it's like he's praying for something. It's wonderful. Sherlock ought to say goodbye. Now is clearly the time for it. And John shouldn't look this frightened. Why does he look so? Everything is fine, after all. It's as it should be. What would he most like to say to John, if he didn't have time to explain it, wanted it to be correct from the beginning, needed English to work the way it's meant to for the very last time?

"If you hadn't been in the world," Sherlock says, "it wouldn't have been worth visiting here at all."

John screams something in return, but Sherlock can't hear it.

He thinks it's still his name.

What a perfect way to begin the greatest adventure of all.

Sherlock falls into a dream just before he dies.

Or he lands himself in a strange limbo, possibly, as he passes on. He can't be quite certain which.

Someone in his mind is singing a song he once heard in an independent record store, and—with his agonizingly perfect recall—he can remember every word of it as he slips down beneath the lip of the world, even though he'd been busy half-throttling a blackmailer in the jazz section during the first and only time that he'd listened to it play.

To escape you must've been brave

It was a frightening case

Where somebody chased you to the same place where your eyes closed

It is night in the Afghan desert. Before Sherlock stands John, looking delighted to see him. His shoulders are thrown back easily, quite free of care, and he's illuminated by the bright grey glow of the countless stars overhead.

Say hello to the monster in your home

Who roams around when he thinks that he's alone

The light is otherwordly, shocking. There isn't any moon, but the stars are beyond Sherlock's imagining, and that is saying a great deal—they're staggering in number and almost blinding in intensity against an ebony backdrop, sharp as glass and twice as painful, for they burn coldly. Sherlock knows without asking that he's in the Maiwand District, in the shifting sands north of Kandahar, and that the night sky really looks like this there—stars gone dangerous and cutting, as deadly in their way as some of the men who live under them. Sherlock has always loved starlight, but this is different, almost too much. The constellations he's always appreciated without knowing why now prick at his pupils.

"You're here," John says happily. In the starlight, he looks like a black and white photograph.

"I always come here now," Sherlock answers.

"No, this is different. This time you're staying. I'm so glad."

Grinning, John crosses his arms. He looks happier than Sherlock can ever recall seeing him, and it suddenly occurs to the detective that there isn't any scarring beneath the black and white striped jumper and the casual jeans. John is completely unscathed. Flawless. Quite entirely wrong. Sherlock's skin prickles uncomfortably. The question may not be where they are, but rather when.

"You haven't been hurt yet," Sherlock says, confused. "This is you before deployment. But this is Afghanistan, I know it must be. Your blood makes me dream of it."

"Close," John concedes. "Not far off. Good enough for horseshoes, anyhow. We're somewhere else. You'll love it here, Sherlock—I was tired of waiting, you know. I mean to say. I'd have waited forever, but this is much better. Good lad."

Sherlock makes a full circle, looking around them. Only desert, as far as the eye can see. Endless desert, not even any mountains at the edges, and that can't be right, and the sky is too close and too bright, and John too happy, and everything piercingly cold.

No one can hear you scream, _  John says kindly._

No, that's the song.

"Listen to it here, Sherlock," John instructs. "Not the song, love. Not back there. The world. Where we are. Just listen a moment. Listen."

Sherlock cocks his head, and... and he doesn't hear anything any longer. No song, and no ambient buzzing, and no drone of far-off machines. No animals. No whispers of wind. He can't even hear John breathing. He can't hear his own pulse. Why can't he hear what ought to be ringing in his ears, since his nerves feel so highly strung at the moment? Where is the pressure, the relentless beat?

Sherlock puts his fingers over his own wrist and finds his heart has stopped.

That explains that, then.

John smiles, open and wistful. "Isn't it just what you've always wanted?"

Actually, it's exactly that.

It's glorious.

It's everything the end of the world is supposed to be.

And Sherlock appreciates it, the silence and the stars and John. But something is wrong.

"There's something I forgot," Sherlock announces. "Somewhere else."

"An object? A person?"

"No. A reckoning," Sherlock says slowly. "A balance."

John frowns for the first time. Sherlock wonders how he knows John is unmarked below his clothing, but he's dead certain of it, that John's skin is smooth as the day he was born, and the knowledge eats at him even as the silence fills his chest with cool, watery peace and his eyes grow used to the piercing stars.

"Everyone leaves imbalances," John objects. "Everyone. You're staying here with me. You don't need anything else. Do you?"

"What are we to live on?" Sherlock inquires carefully. As a test.

"We'll live on starlight and crime scenes," John says with infinite affection. "Same as we always have."

That sounds right.

Doesn't it?

We two live on starlight and crime scenes.

Yes. It fits.

They always have done.

Say goodnight to the contents of your room

Trim the lights for the spinning of the moon

In your bed, it's a shoulder for your head or a helicopter pad

"Stop listening to yourself," John says patiently. "You don't even like it, listening to yourself. You never have."

"I've missed something," Sherlock insists. "It was something important. It had to do with you."

"But I'm right here. And perfectly sorted, thanks."

Sucking in a breath, Sherlock closes his eyes. Breathing hurts of a sudden, he finds, hurts as badly as anything he's ever felt in his pain-ridden life. It's too cold here. John doesn't seem affected, but it's ungodly cold, the sort of frigid atmosphere that scalds the lungs.

"Sherlock, for god's sake. Come on."

"I told you to stop listening to that," the quiet, scarless John reminds him.

Do you see in the corner of your eye that I'm standing by your side?

Nothing is making any sense. That's infuriating. Sherlock grits his teeth, hard, his airless lungs aching. "I never meant to–"

"Just breathe for me. Just once. Please."

"I'm trying to reward you, and this is how you act?" John asks sadly.

"I'm sorry. I like it here. And here you are as well, with me, but I don't think I can stay. It had something to do with a hospital. You gave me what I'd always wanted, what I hadn't realized I could ever have."

"That does sound like me."

"Yes. And I haven't repaid you yet. Whatever it was."

**You say I never leave**   **But I've been everywhere**

Sherlock doubles over, feeling as if his ears are bleeding and he's breathing in burning petrol. Something in his breast aches, something like a bulbous bag over-full of liquid and about to explode within the confines of his torso. Nothing ought to hurt this much. Especially not here. This is hell, probably, he supposes. An eternity of it will be very unpleasant. Something is crushing his chest cavity like a snail shell underfoot. His collarbone is bending and his ribs cracking and breathing sulphur would likely be pref–

"Don't. Don't,  _don't_. Breathe, damn you. Please breathe."

"Goodbye," the John who has never been pierced by bullets says, waving. "I wanted to keep you, very badly. I'm so alone here."

Falling to his knees in the sand, a half-strangled scream escapes Sherlock's lips. His body is being twisted in half and he doesn't want to leave John alone, not in the cold under merciless stars, he'd never do such a thing, abandoning–

" _No._ Come back. Oh, god, love, please don't. Don't leave me here alone."

You're not blind

"You're killing me," Sherlock gasps in agony.

"You can't leave me this way."

There's not a star in the sky

"I'll wait for you," John says. "I'll always be here. It's like dying, though. Every day. A piece at a time."

It's like dying.

Dying—

DYING—

"Sherlock–"

The light is like an explosion.

It rips through him like a detonation, like dreams of chlorine and a soft Irish accent and a searing red dot on John's skull.

"Oh, thank you. That's it. Yes. _Yes._ Easy, now. Easy. I've got you, I've got you. Stop thrashing."

Sherlock hadn't realized he was thrashing at all. But he goes limp obligingly. That sounds like John. The ringing is still in his ears, but further away. And Sherlock's pulse is back:

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~

And nothing has ever hurt this much.

Ever.

Not even before he Got Lost.

There are nails in his chest, he's sure of it. Driven through the skin.

Someone is whimpering a little, just a soft moan, and Sherlock suspects it's him. It certainly isn't his friend. Who is speaking.

"Shh. It's fine now. Easy there. You're fine."

Sherlock can't be expected to judge time very accurately just at the moment, but he suspects that nearly ten minutes go by as he gets his breath back. All the while, his head expands and contracts like a bellows. His lungs burn. His blood pumping feels like being punched in the breastbone repeatedly. He's still lying back on the bed and now John is stretched out beside him, just whispering soft phrases, his fingers firmly tucked into the pulse in Sherlock's throat. Not moving. Just feeling the rhythm. As if it might stop again. It strikes Sherlock that John's hand isn't trembling. It's very warm and steady, like John's heart.

After enough time passes, Sherlock struggles to a sitting position. John readily follows him.

Blinking, the sleuth breathes in. That was very fast, very deadly, and very disorienting.

But he's getting himself back again, and when he hadn't thought it possible.

"Better now?" John asks gravely.

Sherlock nods.

"Not dying any longer?"

He shakes his head.

"Right."

The slap is completely unexpected, the efficient, sharp, driving, open-palmed blow of a man who knows what he's doing when it comes to his hands. Sherlock's head twists as the side of his face begins to burn.

Interesting.

But then, John is nothing if not unpredictable.

"How  _dare_  you," John growls through his teeth.

Rubbing at the side of his face, Sherlock wonders where to start. This is not going to be... pleasant. In fact, the slap, as it was fascinating, will probably prove to have been the highlight.

"It might have been an unjustifiable experiment," he admits rather shakily, thinking it a good start. "But I needed to know–"

"No," John snaps. "You did not 'need to know' what it felt like. You did not 'need to know' what  _I  _look like, finding you've gone suicidal with crime scene evidence. We did not 'need' this."

"I didn't imagine the effect would be so sudden," Sherlock says. It's entirely true. "Or so severe."

They fall quiet for a while.

"It also didn't have the effect on me it had on the others," Sherlock observes at length. "It didn't drive me mad, for one."

"It would be fucking superfluous, the driving you mad," John snarls. "Testing an airborne poison by  _burning_  it? You're already mad. There's wild experiments, and then there's. You ought to be  _sectioned._ "

"God, if I could only die that way, though," Sherlock says to himself, shutting his eyes and remembering. "Later."

"You'd like that, would you." John's voice has gone strange. Blank and grainy-sounding. "Leaving me that way, in a completely nightmare scenario. You can be... just... so cruel, it's shocking. Have you any idea what it's  _like_ , having a man like you are in love with you?"

"No," Sherlock realizes.

"You wanted to leave. I saw it. You wanted to die. Why did you come back, then?"

Sherlock opens his eyes. John is crying.

Crying for the first time that Sherlock has ever seen. It's strange and otherworldly and marvelous, this new expression of John's, because soldiers don't cry and John has never even hinted at being capable of such an act. Sherlock fights as best he can not to look utterly enthralled, but it's a losing battle. Three seconds in, and he's soaring, over the moon with new data. John's face isn't screwing up in pain the way normal people do when they are forced into tears, it stays relaxed instead, though he blinks more readily than usual and his mouth looks softer, less like a steady little straight, tender line. John crying is like no other fascinating thing Sherlock has ever seen. It's a piece that he didn't even know he was missing, a facet so mysterious that it went unlooked-for all this while, like turning a page and suddenly finding it three-dimensional. It feels a bit like fractals and considerably more like the colour violet, but really like nothing Sherlock has ever imagined.

And why did I come back, after all?

It would have been such a lovely way to die. Just falling away like that, a drifting snowflake or the ash from a Marlboro cigarette, listening to John say the only name he ought to be able to remember by now. John's voice the last sound he ever heard. And then the screaming would have stopped. Sherlock doesn't believe in Heaven, but he believes that much with all his heart, and it's like believing in Heaven from the perspective of a person whose world is inverted, he supposes. When he dies, everything will be blank and quiet. It will be a reward.

"I think because I owed you a favour," Sherlock says hesitantly.

It doesn't sound right and John puts his hand over his mouth, shaking his head. He makes a muffled noise that might have been a curse. The tears don't stop, and Sherlock thanks him silently for that, because how often is this going to happen? Obviously not often, and he'll try to avoid causing this reaction in future, because people leave people who make them cry too frequently. Everyone knows that. It's a basic principle. For the moment, though, it's like watching a star go supernova in real time. John's eyebrows, in particular, are doing splendid new things. And if he only makes John cry once, that ought to be acceptable by normal standards.

But soon enough, an all too familiar panic strikes Sherlock. He knows he's staring and suddenly needs very badly to comprehend why John seems horrified.

"If you want to stop crying now, you can. It's spectacular, but I won't be angry, I've already memorized it," Sherlock says in a rush of breath.

And god, his head aches, but he loves John so. Pressing forward on the bed, he puts his mouth over John's eye, and John is going to know that it's half kiss and half an excuse to taste what salt water produced by John is like, but John is also going to know that at heart, those two motives are identical. He has to know that by now. If he doesn't, then his sense of context is thoroughly buggered. Sherlock's lips part just barely over John's very soft and fragile-seeming eyelashes.

And it's  _stunning._

They currently taste vaguely of oysters and sweet grass, the moisture thicker than water, thinner than sweat.

That is  _incredible._

Sherlock can't help it, and a gust of happy breath escapes his not-quite-open mouth. "Oh, god, John, you're perfect, you're... no. That's not what I mean. I mean... don't cry. Am I meant to tell you not to? I probably am."

John makes the sound he produces whenever Sherlock is tenderly choking off his air supply, his hands exploring the landscape of the back of Sherlock's dress shirt.

"The only reason you came back is because you owed me a bloody  _favour_? Like paying for petrol or doing the washing up?"

"Yes. I owe you for the... It was good."

"You lived because you owe me. I think you've finally done it. That is. It's too much, Sherlock."

_Too much_  is not a phrase with which Sherlock Holmes is at all comfortable. But he's very familiar with it, whether it's Christmas or any other time of the year.

Too much.

Too much _______

cocaine.

sound.

colours.

Anderson.

light.

knowledge.

greed.

detritus.

humanity.

melody.

chatter.

space.

sky.

at once.

meaning.

inanity.

morphine.

life.

small talk.

emptiness.

air.

idiocy.

smiling.

sensation.

ugliness.

silence.

insincerity.

data.

loveliness.

pain.

time.

Sherlock.

Bloody hell.

Too much Sherlock, he means, John means the exact same thing I do.

"Listen, I'm glad I did, though, honestly," Sherlock says in reeling desperation. "Otherwise I'd not have got to see you cry."

John's head tilts back as he laughs. It's not a balanced laugh, nor is it in any way a happy one. It's overwrought and sounds painful and means Sherlock has it quite wrong. The tears were beautiful, but he doesn't like that sound out of John, it's violent and messy and more despair-laden than crying somehow. John pushes his middle torso away, firmly, simply  _not wanting him near any longer_ , and Sherlock has him fiercely by the jumper with both hands an instant later.

Unfortunately. But that's what happens,  _that's the sort of thing that happens,  _Sherlock thinks as the world turns universally beige in the space of about two seconds, when you don't know what's meant to happen next.

"Hell, John, just tell me what to say," Sherlock begs. "I don't want you to be unhappy. Look, the poison is still in my system, so I'm literally a crime scene. You love crime scenes."

"Sherlock, stop talking," John gasps. "I hate you more every second. I love you and I hate you, and I can say that today, can't I, because you almost got away from us? This whole fucking sideshow you loathe so much. I can't. I just... please stop. Stop telling me to think of poison in your veins as an attraction, that you like to see me cry. I love you, and I think you're breaking my heart."

"But that's backwards. I love you, and I'm not even meant to have a heart."

It's wrong again. John launches himself off the bed at this confession, tearing himself from Sherlock's grip. He's pacing, quick little spurts back and forth on his short legs, furiously drying his face with his jumper sleeve. Finally he comes to a brief stop in front of the wall and sends his fist flying at it. It's not hard enough to make a hole, but it's hard enough to damage the fingers, and John flinches in pain, and Sherlock stares, feeling much more like he's drowning now than he did twenty minutes ago.

"So this is the way you really like it," John concludes, his back striking the wallpaper. His legs seem exhausted suddenly, as the did that day at the public pool, and that's wrong, violently  _wrong,  _wrong enough to freeze Sherlock's breath in his throat. "Fuck all the rest of it, crime scenes and electroencephalography. You like being officially dead for twenty seconds or so while I do CPR and mouth-to-mouth on you, and then coming back because you feel vaguely obligated, and then watching me break. That's. That's a laugh a minute for you, a day worth making declarations on."

Wait a moment.

Sherlock is normally an unspeakably fast processor, but that was...

Oh.

I...

Yes. I see.

Not Fine List

5. The Perfect Day.

Tell John you love him on the perfect day.

But I didn't say I loved you because today was so sublime. I can't be entirely happy, you looking like that, weak in the knees like there's semtex hanging off you. I could never be happy when you're propped against the wall like a broomstick, that would be impossible. I said it because I thought you wanted to hear it.

And because it's true.

Meanwhile, Sherlock's tongue is glued fast to the roof of his mouth.

"I can take a lot of things," John whispers. "But if this is truly your perfect day. Then. Well."

John folds his arms over his chest. He stops talking. He closes his eyes, delicate lashes drifting down towards deeply scored pain-and-suffering lines. He stands perfectly still against the wall like an abandoned dust mop, and just exactly that colour too, and Sherlock can see his entire life crumbling, both of their lives, a thousand futures of cases and take-away and murders and sex and misunderstandings and jokes and obsession and quiet smiles and mingled blood gone in the blink of an eye. A thousand threads of what-might-have-beens, all burning.

"Just because I want to die in your arms doesn't mean I'm sorry I didn't," Sherlock says when he can talk again. "And I can't say the things you want to hear without knowing what they are. You're too far away over there, come back. It's not what you think."

"It's exactly what I think, Sherlock– if you could rewind today, do it all differently, you wouldn't want to, would you?"

"No, but that's because–"

"Because you are so selfish and so cracked that you'd rather break my heart than never have seen what it looked like. You can't leave well enough alone, can you, you and your sodding  _science,_  you'd rather catalog this along with everything else than spare me the _... fuck."_

Sherlock once used dry ice in order to preserve an extremely delicate tissue sample, so of course he knows what dry ice feels like, the cold searing into his skin, because naturally he experimented. But this is a bit more like a much rarer chemical compound he spilled on his wrist once, a frozen burning throbbing underneath the scalding panicky thought of  _NO._

"That isn't true and you know it," Sherlock snaps, rising.

"Then tell me you'd prefer that none of this ever happened. Go on. Jesus. You can't, can you?"

"I can't because every time you save my life, my life means something to  _you,_  specifically. None of this is news to you, by the way." The sandy fear in his gut is sharpening his voice into still worse dagger points than usual. "I hate when you pretend you're stupid. You aren't this stupid, John. You  _know me._ You've read me like a book."

"I once read a book about Afghanistan, too. And then I saw it for myself."

They don't say much of anything after that.

John pushes himself off the wall and rubs his hand over his head. He's not looking at Sherlock, and Sherlock desperately wants to be looked at just at the moment, he's good at non-verbal communication and anything he could possibly say right now would only make it worse supposing he is in fact the human personification of Afghanistan. Speech would be shooting a revolver into the bottom of a sinking lifeboat. Meanwhile, John walks to the bureau and slides his wallet in his pocket, checks his jeans for his phone. He stands still for another moment and then straightens his shoulders, which means he's  _soldiering on_ , which makes sound sense if Sherlock is a desert where people shoot at him, and then his tongue touches his lower lip. He's about to say something. He doesn't want to say it, though, whatever it is. And thus, whatever he's about to say is too terrifying to contemplate.

It has to be stopped.

"If you're going out, you've forgot your keys," Sherlock whispers.

He only means to forestall what John says next.

But John doesn't say anything. He doesn't even look back when he leaves.

It isn't a bit the way Sherlock had thought it would be, being without John, he discovers on the first day.

He'd thought, for one, that it would last about eight hours at maximum before he was dead. He'd supposed that a trip to Bart's pharmacy or a quick dip into a knife shop would solve the problem. But just when he needs it most, he can barely stomach the idea. If he dies, then he doesn't get to have John again,  _ever._ And anyhow, he doesn't deserve something so nice as dying, not after what he did. He still owes John. The asymmetry is still there, even if John isn't around to be kind to, which scrapes steadily at his skin.

The eight hours when he wasn't dying consisted of the following activities:

1. Staring at his silent phone, waiting.

2. Typing out  _This will be the death of me_  and then erasing it. Because John probably knows that.

3. Typing out  _I only said I loved you because I love you and not because of today at all and if I can't say I love you when I do love you then I'll say something else that means I love you if you'd rather I not say I love you I do understand that and happy to oblige even if you're being a feeble-minded little–_ and then erasing it.

4. Absently noticing that his heart seems to be working better as the poison goes away.

5. Not texting Mycroft. (This one is harder just now than it ought to be, and growing ever more difficult.)

6. Activating by means of a red necktie hung in his sitting room window Certain Longstanding Worst-Case Scenario Precautions.

7. Downloading the e-book and then reading  _Perfume: Story of a Murderer._ When he finishes, he is so enraged that he wasn't allowed to read it previously that he can hardly see straight.

8. Typing out  _I can find you anywhere and I will do, and then I will take you back and keep you here forever, because this is where you belong and I own you, every cell of you is MINE  _and then erasing it. Because John can leave if he likes. Sherlock told him so.

The next morning, he has barely moved, only sat in his chair as the dawn rose with creeping cold fingers on the back of his neck. Clouds are obscuring the sun, but he can sense the light. It's cooler than the day before, tangy pollution hovering in the air like powdered grit.

_And that's it,_  he thinks.  _What it's like. That's eight hours without John._

If eight hours were ever more utterly useless, he can't remember them or even imagine them possible.

Sherlock takes a shower, turning the taps so the water is as hot as he can stand, pinkening his skin and then reddening it, leaning with his hands against the tiles. He stays like that for ten minutes, until he looks like a boiled lobster and is so dizzy from heat and steam that a bit, just a bit, a nearly imperceptible degree, really, of the cold in the pit of his stomach recedes. Scalding water isn't John's belly, but it'll do until he boils his epidermis off. Getting out, he scrubs his hair dry and opens the door of the bathroom, standing in a quiet, empty flat. He looks down the hall one way, then the other.

That's nothing like he'd imagined either.

Sherlock had also supposed that being without John would grow exponentially more difficult every second, spiraling in a complex and ruthless geometric progression until his own heart simply clenched in on itself and died, or he forgot to breathe, or his brain stem melted. It isn't like that either. It's horrible, but it's the same horrible second after lonely second. A droplet from his elbow falls to the ground and splashes.

He waits.

Another falls.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

For the first time in his life, Sherlock wishes with every fibre of his being that there were more sounds. Construction outside in Baker Street, Mrs. Hudson hoovering downstairs, a horrible earworm of a cleverly penned song drilling into his skull right through the bone. Anything would be better than this  _absence_.

_What's viciously catching?_  he wonders in quiet despair. _What's hideously, cruelly insinuating?_

I have stood here before, inside the pouring rain

With the world turning circles, running 'round my brain

It doesn't work. The evilly pernicious tune just drifts away again, melting, a snowflake in August.

It's so fucking  _quiet._

This is nothing like Maiwand by night, nothing like anything he's ever experienced. There aren't enough sounds, and Sherlock can feel his own tongue in his mouth just now, people aren't meant to be able to feel that, to really  _register  _it. The tongue which possibly isn't ever going to speak to John again, or share a piece of toast with him, or caress the back of his ear.

Drip.

Drip.

He quickly brushes the towel over his shoulders, sickened at the thought of one single further tiny  _drip_  in the stillness, one more whisper that doesn't come from John. If Sherlock were a man who could be anything less than ruthless with himself, he might have thought that at least it couldn't get any worse. But he knows better than that, because it won't get better either.

_Same becomes the definition of worse, sooner rather than later,_  he thinks grimly, going into his bedroom.

The sheets are still mussed. Of course they are. Crawling into the wrinkled cotton, Sherlock feels the beginnings of a wretched headache beginning to pulse in his upper neck.

How long do sheets smell of a person before they stop? If I avoid sleeping here, if I sleep upstairs and then only allow myself to live here for an hour a night, say, will that make it last? Will it stay, then, if I don't smell it all at once, the vague skin and cinnamon and sand and salt and cream smell John has, since smell consists of particles?

Sherlock's phone buzzes and his heart starts hammering as he reaches for it. But it's only Melissa Wiggins, who is homeless and very keen. The red tie worked, then.

Grapevine traced him as far as Wandsworth, home of Harriet Watson. Stopped en route for toiletries. CCTV #34622 for surveillance.

Toiletries.

_Toiletries._ Toothbrush toothpaste shaving cream razor soap floss aftershave deodorant lotion.

Sherlock sticks his knuckles in his mouth to prevent an undignified whimper of pain, but it's a near thing.

Melissa is a paranoid schizophrenic who nonetheless is very observant. She threw herself in the Thames once, claiming that she'd wanted a swim, but Sherlock knows exactly what she really wanted. She'd told him the water was so cold that it felt warm, like a hot slick over her skin, as if she was being tarred and feathered for witchcraft. Sherlock likes Melissa Wiggins, but she's mad as a hatter. He knows the type intimately. Melissa thinks too much and never gets any quiet and believes radio waves are blindingly visible. Melissa doesn't have anyone to speak with who understands her. That's because not one person in fifty thousand understands madness without being wholesale insane.

John does, of course.

_I'm going to die,  _Sherlock taps out on his mobile, adding his initials.

_Get used to it,_  she replies a few seconds later.

Sherlock gets out of bed and dresses quickly, half-buttoning a white collared shirt. He pads barefooted into the kitchen where he left his laptop and pulls it open, enters the password, clicks the shortcut to  _The Science of Deduction_ , and accesses his email account, sitting at the Food and Experiments table.

_Dear Jim,_  he begins to type.

He pauses. But it's a better way to die than most, now that John won't be there to watch. And this way, Jim Moriarty will die too. In agony. On fire. With his skin melting off. And aware of a certain... poignant irony in the technique Sherlock plans to use. And so he continues typing, being very efficient. Sherlock is about to make an appointment someplace where covering himself in semtex won't cause anyone save for he and Jim Moriarty any fiery harm when Mycroft Holmes walks into his flat, takes one look at Sherlock, and then closes the laptop. Sherlock's face whips upward with a snarl on his lips.

"Oh, come now," Mycroft chides, propping his umbrella in the corner. "You didn't suppose you were the only one in the universe to adopt... well, Certain Longstanding Worst-Case Scenario Precautions, did you?"

"Don't you have a prime rib for two or an entire roast chicken or maybe a pound of foie gras to be eating somewhere?" Sherlock seethes.

Mycroft pulls a chair up far too close to Sherlock and sits, adjusting his trouser leg. He looks both comfortable and put-upon. Sherlock doesn't know how he manages it, but can date the expression to when Mycroft started civil service.

"Inelegant. You ought to have picked just one, it's far pithier. You were about to contact James Moriarty."

"Sod off."

"No."

"I wasn't."

"You were."

"Don't bully me."

"I haven't the slightest intention of doing so. But you were arranging a rendezvous."

"What difference does it make?"

"Sherlock," Mycroft says sternly, "count the number of brothers I possess. You'll find it won't take you long. I shall wait for you to reach a figure and give me a report."

_Smug, self-righteous bastard,_  Sherlock thinks, and holds his tongue.

Mycroft glances around their flat, absorbing the flow of data. It would be bad enough to have a brother who  _is  _the British Government when war is so horribly wasteful and boring, bad enough to have a brother as unflappable and infuriating and fucking  _nosy_  as Mycroft, bad enough to have a brother who's seen him at his worst, helpless and strung-out and half-dead and still high, bad enough that it's more than likely that Mycroft loves him even though Mycroft doesn't  _want  _to care about anyone, bad enough that Mycroft always wins. But Mycroft is also measurably smarter than Sherlock. And to Sherlock, that is simply  _unfair._

"Well," Mycroft says, conversationally. "This is unfortunate."

"That's not the word I would use," Sherlock grates out.

"Regardless of your penchant for dramatic hyperbole, it remains factually 'unfortunate.' What are your plans?"

"I haven't any."

"That is patently not the case."

"I'll die somehow or other, Mycroft. Watch me."

Mycroft narrows his eyes at Sherlock, and Sherlock is suddenly aware that he just sounded about ten years old. Not "like a ten-year-old," but like himself at ten years old, when nothing seemed to be right in the universe and the colours surrounding him felt like sandpaper and his future life already looked far too long. His ears start to burn.

"You're right—it wasn't the most elegant of solutions then, either, though it did impress me with a certain dramatic flair," Mycroft supplies.

"It's the only one I can think of," Sherlock whispers, burying his head in his arms on the table. Defeated. Again. And so  _soon_ , too.

"You can survive without being  _happy_ , you know. Look at me."

"It's not about being happy," Sherlock confesses despairingly without looking up. Talking to Mycroft is easier without having to look at his pudgy, self-satisfied face. "I'm not happy with him at all. We're hardly ever just  _happy._ Sometimes it's wonderful and sometimes it's awful, but it's not that I'm happy. I'm  _me  _with him. Like myself. Who I am. Not... censored or filtered or even translated. Just me. And he..."

"He loves it," Mycroft finishes.

Sherlock looks up. He slumps back in his chair, because fore or aft, good posture is simply not happening right now. Shockingly, Mycroft doesn't look like an overstuffed shirt with a smile painted on at the moment. He looks sad, and tired, and a bit overwhelmed. His phone begins to ring, and he pulls it from his suit jacket, not looking at the caller before switching it off. The phone disappears once more.

"That's why I like him," Mycroft offers quietly.

In a small series of half-noted images, fragments of sneers really, Sherlock recalls that Mycroft loathed Charles the Archaeologist, without ever having met the man, although you could never be certain with Mycroft. He'd always wondered why, and this seems to be the reason. It hadn't been Charles's fault Sherlock had fooled him, but the fact remained that Charles had wanted a normal person, an open and loving and sensual and affectionate  _normal_  boyfriend. And Sherlock is not normal.

And apparently, Mycroft prefers Sherlock to live that way. Abnormally. It's news to Sherlock.

"If you need him that badly, dying seems rather a profoundly roundabout way of getting him back, don't you think?" Mycroft asks, with some of the usual condescension creeping back into his tone.

A silence falls in which the lack of words mean that Mycroft is right. Sherlock follows the line of thought  _getting John back..._

"Not that way," Mycroft says sternly.

"Get the fuck out of my head," Sherlock snaps, decidedly  _not_  thinking about chloroform or Rohypnol or simple tranquilizers.

"Fine." Standing up, his brother places a hand on Sherlock's shoulder. To Sherlock's vast bewilderment, he doesn't shrug it off. "You are possessed of boundless ingenuity and equally infinite enthusiasm. Disturbing enthusiasm, in fact. Find a way. I'll be in touch."

"Whether I like it or not," Sherlock mutters.

Halfway to the door, Mycroft calls back, "Not that way either."

Wincing, Sherlock erases images of an unmarked van and a masked man with an AK-47 from his consciousness, stops feeling the scratch of wool against his face. It takes three and a half minutes, but he manages it. Because the difference between him and Jim Moriarty goes beyond simply how they feel and what they think and how they get their kicks. It's in knowing that a particular prize is worth more if garnered by some means than by others. Sherlock understands this principle. He doubts that Jim does. One day, that may be an advantage.

Sherlock pulls out his mobile and glares daggers into the screen.

_I should be thanking you._ –S

Seconds later, his phone chirps.

_If you ever do, my response_   _will_  
 _be "You're welcome."_ –M

Between watching little glimpses of John on the CCTV feed he hacked into and trying not to think about ether and its properties, Sherlock makes a shocking discovery: it turns out that what you do when you've been left is remarkably like what you've always done. You don't eat and you don't sleep much and you smoke cigarettes you shouldn't and you respond to Lestrade when he texts you because if you don't, you'll never think of a way to make it up to John because the silence will have completely smothered your mind.

He's sure that this decision,  _continue the case_ , is the right one. On the third consecutive night of hell, while trying to ignore Mrs. Hudson's worried tap-tap-tapping and yoo-hooing and  _all-right-dear?_ -ing at the door, he found one of John's hairs on his pillow. It took two hours to scour the flat for more, and Sherlock, who has eyes like a nocturnal predator, is reasonably sure he got them all despite how pale and fine they are. There are forty-seven of them, and they are in a plastic evidence bag. At the time, it seemed a worthy project. But he can see how it also might be construed as rather melancholy. It could also be construed as melancholy that he sleeps with them, and with the hard disc with the electroencephalogram recorded on it.

He's cradling them both on his chest as he lies on the Thinking Couch when his phone goes. Reading the text, he realizes that you don't sharpen your imagination or stiffen your resolve by spending time with hair follicles. You  _move._ You take off the t-shirt and find a pressed pair of trousers and respond to Lestrade.

Besides, the text says:

_Morty Tregennis is dead. Same_  
 _symptoms. Will you come?_ –L

When Sherlock spies Lestrade at the crime scene, which so happens to be the identical house where they started all this ghastly business, Lestrade's lips tense as Sherlock approaches.

"Where's your boyfriend, then?" he asks, his eyes on his phone. "Sorry. Your forensics colleague. I'm getting to like him, he has a sharp eye. And he's nicer than you."

It's difficult to answer this question, so Sherlock doesn't.

Gradually, Lestrade lowers the phone.

"Christ," he says.

Suddenly knowing everything. How did  _that_  happen?

Sherlock swallows.

"Out with it," says Lestrade.

"First I need to know–"

"Somebody dragged Morty Tregennis in here equipped with a respirator for sinus problems. He was found dead. Same drug. Off his apple. Toxicology can't trace it for shit. No prints on anything—not the mask, not the house, nothing. Sod all that. Have you tried flowers?"

"Hmm?" says Sherlock, desperately trying to ignore his ally of the official police.

Lestrade crosses his arms, determined. It occurs to Sherlock that DI Lestrade appears to be suffering from some degree of mental anxiety, and that the same mental anxiety might possibly have to do with whether or not Sherlock is happy. This is news more shocking than even Mycroft's revelation. Lestrade wants crimes solved and Sherlock likes solving them. Is a genius at solving them. That is how things work. Lestrade knows Sherlock is a drug addict and sometimes treats him like one, but only because Sherlock takes advantage of Lestrade in every other conceivable way, and it's the only ammunition Lestrade knows will make Sherlock stop and listen. But this is not a drugs bust. Lestrade's hair glints silver in a shaft of winter sun from the window. Coughing impatiently, he lifts his brows. He does this when Sherlock is being purposefully dense or deaf, Sherlock recognizes for the first time.

"Flowers," says Lestrade. "Those colourful bits at the ends of stems. Often in a vase."

"No," says Sherlock.

"Hang on, John likes cinema. I doubt you ever take him, though. Tried that?"

"No, but it's rather more–"

"Then what else does John like? You've at least made a list or something for emergencies, yes?"

Wincing, Sherlock decides not to tell Lestrade anything whatsoever to do with  _lists._

"Well, if you haven't been paying attention–"

"John likes my violin and he likes The Kinks, but not when I play them, he says it sounds as if I don't like the songs. He likes wearing things that make him look like a civilian, more or less a schoolteacher, because it doesn't remind him of the Army, because he wants to look as if he isn't deadly, isn't a threat if he wants to be. He likes books. Fiction. Tremendously. He likes cooking, but only when we've finished a case the night before. He likes treating minor illnesses much less than he likes saving lives, whether it's in combat or a case of adult chicken pox. He likes his coffee black, but he still puts little dashes of sugar and milk in because he  _can_ , and it feels indulgent. He likes dogs, but he also likes cats, but not hairless cats. He likes Angelo's fresh pasta, particularly the black spaghettini, but not Angelo's gnocchi, he's always very polite about it, but I can tell he thinks it's mealy. It _  is _mealy. He likes when I make tea, god only knows why, he makes perfectly good tea himself. He likes chocolate with mint in it. He likes Carey Grant. I think. He likes crime scenes. No, he  _loves_ –"

Sherlock stops, because his voice has gone off like milk left on the counter. Lestrade, meanwhile, is staring him down as if he's suddenly become a shifty witness. Which is very uncomfortable.

"It's worse than I thought," says Lestrade, "and I thought it was pretty damn bad."

"What was?" Sherlock demands.

"You've gone round the twist," he answers sympathetically. "Look, the point is, I don't really know what John likes. Not the way you do. But knowing _  you_... have you tried anything yet?"

Clenching his jaw, Sherlock shakes his head once.

"There. Set that to rights, and you'll be well sorted. The other point is, the name is Greg."

"What?" Sherlock questions, entirely derailed.

"Greg Lestrade. If you ever want to have a conversation that's not to do with a crime scene. I think when you're around that expert medical consultant of yours, you're a... you're better. Better than alone."

Sherlock only gapes, trying to look less tall when he generally likes being the center of all attention.

"You've solved my crime, yes?" Lestrade asks, almost rolling his eyes but visibly stopping himself.

Yes, Sherlock has, he indicates with his head.

"Bugger. Nothing less than I expected. And you know, I think I might have solved it myself this time. However. You can skip the big reveal if you need to go see John. Supposing no one is about to flee the country imminently. Go see your fellow right this instant and we'll keep it between ourselves you chose John Watson over collaring a murderer."

But Sherlock shakes his head, playing out possible scenarios in his mind. This criminal... yes, this criminal is  _important._ This criminal is worth speaking to. Sherlock needs to know just how this specific criminal feels about all these proceedings. And so he is going to have a professional chat first, and then...

then.

Lestrade is walking away, towards the door and his waiting police car, having also made up his mind.

Sherlock thinks about saying  _Goodbye, Greg._ It's tempting for a moment.

He doesn't do it.

But he's alive and well, after all. He has plenty of time.

"I loved Brenda," Leon Sterndale confesses, broken.

Of course Morty killed his sister, and drove his brothers mad. For whatever reason. There had never been a trace of drug culture about the three of them, and Sherlock can spot drug culture. He can also spot trends. And likelihoods. And liars. So can Lestrade. Everything he had seen at that crime scene announced  _not a stranger. Someone you love. The way hearts are generally broken._ And just as obviously, Brenda's fiancé, currently in the country to drum up funding at an awards dinner, killed Morty with the same drug. Sherlock checked Sterndale's flight information by pretending to be a VIP flying standby at the last moment. Sterndale had skipped his first-class flight back to his research. After chatting with his personal secretary, Sherlock learned that it was for "unavoidable personal reasons."

But now Sterndale is telling his own story, in a voice like a crypt talking.

"It's simple as that," Sterndale continues. They are standing outside his temporary flat in Pall Mall. It's ridiculously posh here, and Sherlock can feel his own brother staring down the back of his neck. Not that that isn't generally happening. "She was an angel. If you'd seen her, had ever met her, you'd have known what I mean. Everyone loved her. She didn't belong here at all. She was too good for this fucking world. But she was mine, has always been mine, she was the one person who's ever loved me, and I needed her like air. We were going to get married when I came back, and her studies were finished, and..."

Flexing his fingers, Sherlock glances away. He isn't entirely comfortable with watching grown men sob. Particularly when he knows how they feel. And they are standing outside a dwelling place on a public street because Sherlock hadn't any warrant and Sterndale, now he knows what's at stake and what Sherlock has already deduced and feels the weight of his own madness, is too hysterical to move them inside.

"I do AIDS research in the bush, but I'm also a student of ritual African medicines," Sterndale says, pulling himself together with a violent effort. "Her bastard of a brother has been in my lab. This root, when powdered... it's called the devil's foot. _Radix pedis diaboli._ Absolutely foul stuff. I never imagined, though—Brenda and Morty never got on—he owed her money. A very great deal of money. But there was something wrong with Morty, anyhow. I only wish I'd seen it sooner. When I realized what he'd done, I put his face into a respirator of the stuff with my gun against his head. He died within two minutes. Christ, how he died. It was wonderful. You think I'm insane, don't you?"

Sherlock shakes his head. Not in the slightest.

"Maybe if you'd ever loved someone like that," Sterndale finishes hoarsely, "you'd have done the same. But I don't care if you understand or not. Nothing terrible can happen to me ever again. Without Brenda... I'd just as soon be dead myself. Go ahead and arrest me for murder. I don't care. It doesn't matter now."

"You're right," Sherlock says slowly. "It doesn't matter now."

He begins to walk away, his dark coat spreading in the chill wind.  
"Where are you going?" Sterndale asks, mystified in spite of his grief. "Don't you mean to turn me over to the police?"

"Dull," Sherlock sighs.

"Dull?"

"You heard me. I'm sorry, I can't be bothered at the moment. Lestrade is going to get you anyhow, supposing he wants to, he saw what I saw. But I'm in a hurry. If you could get Brenda back, what wouldn't you do?"

"Nothing," the bereaved man murmurs, utterly bemused. "I'd do anything. I'd look death right in the face if it meant seeing her again. I'd walk through hell."

"Well, wish me luck," Sherlock says over his shoulder. "That's where I'm going."

The cab arrives in Wandsworth in late afternoon. The streets are quiet, and the paint on the row houses has apparently darkened all into greys, even though Sherlock knows they don't really look like that. He takes the 47 hair follicles in the plastic evidence bag and a note and he tacks them both with a flat-headed pin to Harry Watson's front door. The fine dishwater hairs are nearly invisible against the dark wood, as if John himself is fading out of reality without Sherlock being there to observe him. The note reads:

_This is the last of you apart from skin cells, which are too small for the naked eye. I can't think_   _of anything more precious to me than these, and I will give them back to you, they're yours after all, in exchange for one conversation. Think what you like of me, but you know what I think of  you. There are forty-seven hairs here, and they inspired me to add an item to the Fine List, which_  _is to count yours, the live ones, because if God can do it, then so can I. I'd rather cut my arm off  than leave these tacked to a door, so since you know that to be literally true, and I think you likely don't want my arm, please talk to me._

If you do want my arm, though, let me know,

Sherlock Holmes

When he walks away from the door, it feels like the last of everything. He doesn't care where he's going, so he bumps with highly uncharacteristic clumsiness into a housewife out doing the shopping, and she huffs at him with a glare settling over her tired, narrow features. She has three children and they're staying with her mother while she buys the groceries. Sherlock knows this is true, but isn't sure quite why. Oh. It's because of the run in her stocking and the fact that her keys are jingling in her open coat pocket and not her purse. He keeps going, crossing a street. There's a shop with great rounds of cheese in the window, a shop with light fixtures whitely glowing, a shop packed to overflowing with chrome-accented electrical appliances, and an office blanketed with photographs of empty flats waiting to be filled to bursting with the blenders and the standing lamps and the cheddar.

So many things in the world so many things god so very many many things, and none of them any better than any of the other things, if you put it all in a pile and doused it with petrol and lit a match it would all be so much cleaner, it would be an amazing feat to do that and so John would say it was amazing, I'd been amazing to burn it down, and he'd smile but try not to look too pleased, glowing but then glancing sideways in under two seconds, it's always under two seconds, like he doesn't want me to see it, but he does, he does, he always does, and the fire would be warm and John's mouth would be warm and it would sort everything, saving the world by means of arson.

Too bad it's never going to happen.

Sherlock's phone chimes.

He freezes. He's under an unlit street lamp and he suddenly whirls, his coat flowing around his legs, leaning against the metal and breathing quick and soft through his lips as he pulls the mobile from his pocket.

_well spotted, my not_   _wanting your arm._  
 _I'll_   _meet you at the park,_   _on that bench you like._  
 _where you told me about_   _the screaming._  
 _no  severing limbs in the_  _meanwhile._ –JW

Sherlock reaches out with his left hand and traces the letters on the flat mobile screen, reading the message over again.

It's dizzying.

Getting to Regent's Park is partly a blur of frenzied anticipation and partly an exercise in severest self-control, as John clearly was at Harry's front door when he texted Sherlock, and the street names of the route John is following are slamming one after another through his mind like a series of physical blows. _Ballantine Street, Dighton Road, Birdhurst Road._ Sherlock's consciousness has been entirely hijacked by something resembling a Google map. It would be faster to run to John, to sprint back, so much faster, to see John emerge from round a street corner looking for a taxi to take him to Westminster and then to enfold him in his arms and possibly swallow him whole, whether he likes it or not, to chew him up and just bloody ingest him and never never never be without him again.

Bad idea.

When Sherlock arrives at the Park, he assumes it's looking largely green and brown and beige, though he can't be sure just now. But he can see it's rather deserted due to the time of day, right before people leave work or begin to think about what to make for supper. The shadows are growing longer, and Sherlock's is very long indeed, very thin, except where his coat spreads like a fan as he walks. Finding the proper bench all too quickly, Sherlock sits.

He stands.

A man passes by holding the hand of a small child. The child is whinging about the fickle nature of squirrels, one of which he had wanted to pet when it came close.

Sherlock sits again. He's on his feet ten seconds later, pacing. Pacing is the right approach, as it happens. He circles the bench, changing direction often, striding a few lanky paces one direction and then another.

Sherlock Holmes reaches what seems a profound conclusion. If this discussion doesn't work, he will never open his mouth again. English will be dead to him, an enemy loathed more thoroughly than Jim Moriarty. He will never speak it more as long as he lives, preferring muteness to a tool that couldn't get John back. Maybe he will cut out his own tongue, as that would be interesting. But maybe instead he will let it sit there in his mouth, useless now, kept only due to the fact that it at one time or another explored every single secret inch of John. In any event, it won't be making strings of words any longer, not in English, nor any other dialect, not after having lost–

John.

As he turns towards the water, there John is. Short and limping a little and wearing his black coat un-zippered, with the same striped jumper underneath, his soft, dull hair being ruffled by the wind.

Sherlock stops pacing, primarily because he's forgot how to move his legs.

John limps up to him.

"Hello, Heartbreaker," he says with a wry expression.

He looks terrible. In all honesty, Sherlock can't look much better, probably looks worse, in fact, but it hurts to see John this haggard again. His quick, secretive, sideways smile is nowhere in evidence, and he's looking at Sherlock as if the sight physically excoriates him. It's all Sherlock can do not to flinch. In fact, he's breathing wrong already, hard and quick like he's drowning, no, he's actually drowning, that was wrong, why was that wrong, he should have known better, the way his head was buzzing, it's all pools and semtex and whiteness and static and shrieking and–

"Hey," John says. "Sherlock, what's– no, I'm an idiot, what the fuck am I saying? Sherlock, it's okay. Did you– my god, what have you been about all this time, starving yourself to– what the  _fuck_  am I saying? Sherlock, you need to bloody well sit down before you fall down."

Sherlock sits, though it feels more like falling. The park bench is rough and the trees are spinning. Just when he begins to marvel at himself for behaving like something out of bad telly, he recalls that he did in fact last eat before John left. Four days ago.

That was foolish. He's probably not very well hydrated either.

When the space between them closes and John's jumper touches his nose inside the gap in his coat, Sherlock could fall apart on a cellular level. He buries his face in warmth, and there are hands in his hair, and thank god his hair is clean from the scalding showers. John likes his hair, and hair ought to be very clean.

"I'd berate you for the hunger strike, I'd beat the shite out of you over it, in fact, but you didn't tell me about it, which means you simply forgot food exists, because you are the genius population's biggest moron," comes the most perfectly kind and sad voice on earth. "I'd have talked to you before, you know, without the... hairs. But the hairs were very... generous. Um. I appreciated them. Though I've lots."

Sherlock takes two fistfuls of the jumper inside the coat and simply  _holds on._

"What is it going to take, stopping you hyperventilating? You are always doing this at awkward times. That time we came home after the skip, I thought your lungs were going to explode. At least you aren't rubbing a gun against your cranium, that was more than a little disturbing. God almighty. I'm not going anywhere. All right? Sherlock, just. Come on, love, I'll be damned if I'm letting you pass out on my shoes. Look at me."

"I can't. I needed to say something. No looking yet."

What he's doing in the meanwhile, however, is  _smelling._

1. Harry's detergent brand, generic lavender. Disgusting. Disregard that at once, it isn't John.

2. Cloves.

3. Dry earth.

4. Wool.

5. Darjeeling.

6. Caramel.

7. Burnt umber.

8. The idea of Last Wednesdays.

Long seconds pass. The world rights itself a bit. As dignified as he can, Sherlock stands. It must be at least moderately graceful, because John's hands slip smoothly away as Sherlock rises and turns, cocking a hand over his hip and his coat and his charcoal suit jacket, pretending he wasn't just drowning in the middle of a London public park. Briefly, he shoves his long fingers into his dark hair and cards them out again.

"I don't know how to say it," he informs John. "The... I tried writing a formula, you see. About us. It was accurate in almost every particular, and very elegant. But your algebra is quite pedestrian."

John blinks, absorbing the frank assessment of his maths skills. "Okay." He looks to be fighting a smile for an instant, but the mirth at once disappears. "Well, I..."

"And the map didn't work either. I couldn't get the geography of it precisely right. As I said, I thought about just giving you my arm, as a metaphor, but–"

"English, Sherlock." John already sounds exasperated. "English. Take a stab at English and I'll try to fix it if it gets bollocksed."

Fine.

The detective takes a deep, slow breath.

Not a bit fine.

Fuck it, step into the firing squad, it isn't as if anything else will work either.

"I needed you to know that I'm sorry I'm like this." Sherlock's heart is thrumming like a hummingbird's under the pale skin, all the beats running together so it's a near-constant clenching. "Tasting your tears is like tasting your blood, but I shouldn't have let you see that, that I was fascinated and happy of the chance. I do want you to be there when I die, but on the other hand you don't want to watch me die, and I understand that, I really do. And whenever I almost die, you want me to live and you somehow accomplish it, and that makes my life more valuable, every time, but I shouldn't have been honest, I ought to have said I wished the poisoning hadn't happened. I've been thinking for days over what I could possibly give you to make it all up, but if I'd actually stolen the Crown Jewels, you'd have objected. I don't think... no, you'd not have liked that."

John shakes his head, catching his lower lip in his teeth. Good. The Crown Jewels would have been a feat, but also a mistake.

Carry on.

"So I just wanted to tell you the truth." Sherlock waves an arm, helpless. "I want you home. I don't know how to make you, but I don't exactly want to  _make_  you, though I also  _do,_  but really it's more that if I knew what a normal person would say to convince you, the right thing to tell you, then of course I would say that, the proper combination, even if it was cheating."

"I'm not a normal person, Sherlock," John says softly. "I don't think anyone is. Why don't you try what  _you  _would say to get me home?"

Sherlock clenches and unclenches his fists twice. It's a hopeless request, but so very like John to think that asking the insanely impossible might just be a step in the right direction. It's going to fail, though. And Sherlock had thought he deserved a hint or two. At least it'll be decided, however. Ten minutes at most and he'll be tongueless, but apparently that can't be helped.

"Please come home," Sherlock requests. "That's all I can think of. It isn't very good, but then neither am I. I can't promise to be safe nor not to hurt you, but I can promise to be amazing, and beautiful—that is, for the time being, until I get too old, and then I'll have to think of something else. You can leave me when I'm not beautiful any longer, I'll quite understand, but that'll be at least ten years thrown away if you leave now. For the moment, I'm still beautiful, and yours. And that's... that isn't as much as I once thought it was. Me. But I'm all I have. It's too quiet without you, and it's freezing in that flat, and even when I was alone, I wasn't alone like this. I know it's selfish to want you back, but I can't help it. At least you could own something beautiful, if only for the time being."

"You'll always be beautiful, you daft bastard." John isn't breathing right either. "Beautiful like white tigers, and really expensive guns."

"Beautiful like things you think will hurt you." Sherlock nods in quiet despair. "I will again, probably. And you can't take it, I see that now, and that's–"

"No! It was never... oh, Christ. It was never about that. Not being able to take it."

"Why else would you have left me?"

" _Left_  you?" John exclaims. His lips dart forward, pushed together, as they do when he's vexed about something. "Sherlock, I went to my  _sister's_. Without my bags or my clothes or. I never. God in heaven. Don't tell me that  _you_  of all people didn't know where I was, it's impossible."

"Of course I did, I had you tracked by the homeless network."

"And I was easy to find, yes?"

"Childishly so."

"Well, and what did you make of that?"

Sherlock gapes at him, because he'd not made anything of it.

"After I'd picked up the bare necessaries, I never set foot in a shop, either. You knew that? You were watching?"

"Of course I was."

"And you didn't make any deductions? Not a single inference?"

" _What  _inference?"

"That I needed some air," John murmurs, looking dazed. "A lot of air. A very great whopping deal of air. There isn't enough sodding air on the planet for the amount I needed. I nearly derailed the entire ecosystem. But I... are you serious? You thought I was going to live out the remainder of my adult life with a knit jumper, a mobile, and three pairs of new-bought pants to my name? Are you out of your–"

John cuts himself off, putting a hand over his thin mouth.

The entire world is reeling. Sherlock can't understand why the other people in the Park aren't staggering about, the ground is so uncertain.

"You left your keys!" he snaps. "You left without saying goodbye. You left me standing there. You  _left_."

John winces, hard. "God, I did. I know. I was punishing you, I think. Punishing myself too, for. I don't know. Not being enough. Enough of a friend that you... enough to keep you here. But god knows how that drug was messing with your internal chemistry, and you did come back, and I should never have... I'm ashamed of myself, really."

"Why? You know you can leave. I've told you."

"No, not for leaving, not if I'd really been leaving because I knew I couldn't take you anymore. That would have been fine. It isn't as if you were being tactful, you're never that, and you were being... Well. Unguarded, I suppose, worse than usual. Still. I never thought we couldn't survive it. But I thought you'd come after me a hell of a lot sooner. Sherlock, I went to  _Harry's.  _Not– not Abu Dhabi, for fuck's sake. At first I was too hurt and furious to think at all, but later I supposed you'd pop round by morning, demanding I follow you to some godforsaken bloodbath or other. I can't believe you managed to resist, in all honesty, with me kipping on my drunk sister's sofa, but then again. Christ. You shock me stupid six and seven times in the week. Why didn't you burst through her door with a case and a cracked expression?"

"I could have. Morty Tregennis was murdered horribly. It was wonderful. But I don't understand this." Sherlock's head is beginning to pound again.

"I almost lost you. I was half off my head already, Sherlock. Then you... you gutted me pretty thoroughly, and I s'pose I wanted to punish you. It was wrong of me, now I look at it, but that's what it was."

"Because I was being unguarded," Sherlock says slowly. "But you've already seen the very worst of–you've already seen twenty-six on the chalkboard, for example, though there are perhaps others equally as bad now."

Not Fine List

26. Carve a massive scar in John's right shoulder to match the absolutely brilliant one on his left, so that the majority of his scarring belongs to me, and slowly, and he had better watch me do it.

"What?" John looks alarmed. "There are new ones?"

There are, of course, since the Incident of the Flu. They're slightly out of order of importance these days, as twenty-seven is still John mercy-killing Sherlock, but he can't be bothered to re-number everything perpetually, can he?

28. Arrange for John to ingest nothing whatsoever save what I feed to him, forever, so that the production of all his new cells might be entirely my doing.

29. Induce another serious fever, this one more prolonged, and thereby learn absolutely everything about John's subconscious.

30. If only one of John's kidneys failed, then I could–

"Stick to the point," Sherlock snaps. "How was what happened any worse than–"

John throws his hands in the air. "Because you seemed to think it was all right to tell me you returned from the brink of death so as to pay me back a fiver for cab fare. As if you were in a snit over an accounting balance. It wasn't nice."

"A  _fiver_?" Sherlock cries. "It was because of... of the  _hospital._ You didn't have to do that, to do something mad just because I'm mad, I never imagined a life where I even wanted such things from a person before I met you, let alone a life where anyone would dream of  _tolerating_  them, let alone  _coming up with new ones unasked_. It was something I didn't even know I wanted and you gave it to me just because you're good, and it was a miracle, you're a miracle. An  _electroencephalogram_? You did that because I'm insane, it was tailored for me, and you... you understand. So yes, I wanted to give you something like that. Something... it was an act of charity, John. I wanted to return it in kind."

This ought to be working, but John is turning green.

"What have I done  _now_?" Sherlock demands.

"I am an idiot," John whispers. "Officially. But for the record, you giving me a spectacular orgasm does not fall under the category 'selfless favours John has done Sherlock,' or 'John's acts of pure altruism,' you barking mad git."

"I can't talk anymore, talking isn't any good when  _I'm  _not," Sherlock says miserably, fear seeping like acid through the soles of his shoes. "I knew it wouldn't be. If you come home, we don't even have to– I could try to let you alone, John. It's a nice flat. You  _said  _it was very nice indeed. The rent is low. I just need to hear you walking over the kitchen floor occasionally, that would be enough. You don't have to blog about me, or help me, or sleep with me, or make two cups when you make tea. Just don't leave me. I'll be very quiet if you like, even when I'm doing experiments. You'd never have to touch me again, or kiss me, just  _be there_. Will that make you come home?"

"No, it _  fucking well will not_ make me come home," John gasps, reaching out with two hands and dragging Sherlock's mouth down to his.

A tongue is a very interesting organ.

_A tongue is_  light flashes through the slits of Sherlock's eyelids when John's arms both fly around his neck  _ostensibly an organ used for taste  _the top of John's spine rests under the detective's right hand, and his left arm is wrapped round John's compact waist beneath his black coat, pulling like he's never letting go, because he isn't  _and yet when it's used for touch, it's such a sensitive apparatus, tasting and touching at once, that's an otherworldly thing, it's shocking really, it isn't as if you can taste with your fingertips_  John makes a sound like he's starving for something and Sherlock can only hope John is getting whatever he wants, because he's already on his tiptoes and Sherlock is very, very busy just now  _and it's a small miracle every time, tasting him and touching him at once, the wet and slide and sweetness and breath and salt of it, and to think that the same organ is meant to be used for something so utterly wretched as English_  neither man can breathe very well, but breathing has always been highly overrated and not to be bothered with when half-bodily lifting a lovely little doctor whose arms were just round your neck and whose grip is now shifting to your breastbone and to your hair _  and to think that something so mad and so perfect just happened to me and I was never going to use it again, not to kiss anyone, not to say another word for the rest of my life, and now this._

A tongue is a very interesting organ indeed.

John touches Sherlock's lower lip with his fingertips, breathing hard. "How do you do that?

"What?"

"Incredible."

"Which part?"

"Every part. Just when I think I've got you sorted. Every time. Fuck you, Sherlock Holmes," John laughs, still kissing him though now his fingers are in the way slightly.

"Well. If you'd like."

"God,  _yes,_  you're so good, you're–"

"I'm not, though. You've got us mixed."

"I _  try_ to be good," John says, letting his forehead touch Sherlock's when the taller man ducks. "But I fail sometimes. I don't mean to, but I'm human. I'm only human, Sherlock. We both try. You try, too."

"It doesn't look the same when I fail. Things explode."

"Well. You're a bit beyond human." John tangles his fingers in the curls at his friend's nape. "So you have a different excuse altogether."

"What are we to live on?" Sherlock demands, forcing his voice to remain even although it's just now strenuously objecting. "How are we to live like this?"

"We'll live on starlight and crime scenes," John breathes. "Just as we've always done."

That sounds right. Even though it doesn't make a bit of sense. They will always live on starlight and crime scenes, Sherlock thinks, at the edge of the map, where other, saner people fear to tread. Something about the phrase strikes him as familiar, but not for any specific reason—it's the way the five hundredth crime scene looks familiar, when the fifth was still foreign. He's been here before, somehow. And John is speaking his language. How John learned it Sherlock doesn't know, because he never taught it to him. John is like Babelfish,  _English to Sherlock_ , without ever having been programmed. It's magical, what the doctor does, like being able to speak to jungle creatures, or communicate with the weather. Perhaps everything will be all right after all.

They have starlight and crime scenes, and they'll not need anything else.

"Are you coming home, then?"

John huffs out a slightly crazed laugh. "I've forgiven you, so—supposing you agree to forgive me—yes. Will you?"

"I don't care about forgiving you one way or the other. It's completely irrelevant. I'm not even angry."

"How in hell could you not be– no, no. What am I thinking? It's not surprising. None of this is a bit surprising. Let's go home."

They start walking, fingers intertwined. Sherlock is still baffled by half of it, but John will doubtless explain everything later.

He only hopes that  _later_ lasts just as long as it possibly can.

They don't go home.

John drags Sherlock into the first restaurant they pass, which happens to be Vietnamese, and forces pho into him. Then they walk along the edge of the river for a while. The sky is darkening above and the water ripples beyond and there are trees here, and poetry underfoot. The colours are present and vivid again. Things begin to feel better. The threads of what-might-have-beens, all the ways they already match each other and the ones they haven't even imagined yet, are back in Sherlock's mind, a hopelessly tangled skein running wide and deep and slow like the Thames. He didn't burn them after all. What a fortunate circumstance.

"You can say you love me if you really want to," Sherlock says a bit sheepishly. "I promise not to fuss about it."

"I don't have to," John returns with an easy smile. "You love me, and you don't want to hear it at the moment. And I think it just so happens to be my greatest joy and privilege to be with you. You lucky, lucky,  _bastard._ "
The Dying of The Bees

John doesn't take to Irene. He doesn't take to Irene at all.

I. The Detective.

John doesn't take to Irene.

He doesn't take to Irene at all.

Sherlock assumes that's because John is confused. His brain is quite pedestrian, after all, even if the rest of him is a quantum singularity in a questionable jumper. John loves Sherlock almost obscenely, Sherlock hasn't once doubted it since the horrible almost-breakup over the horrible almost-dying, he can feel it in his marrow, and Irene is confusing. She is beautiful, she is dangerous, she is... Sherlock. And John is bisexual. And now there are two of them. Potential objects of affection, possibly. Or so Sherlock assumes is the problem, because Irene sending him dozens of text messages when she's been told he and John are a couple, when she knows the fact and speaks of it freely and easily... nothing else makes sense.

When Sherlock first saw Irene—naked as a jaybird and a hundred times more cocky—he'd felt momentarily frightened.

At her blankness, her nothing, she wasn't wearing perfume no hand soap no shampoo no eye cream no nothing god nothing, just pale English skin and lipstick like fresh blood and she was beautiful the way mathematics and star systems and particle physics are beautiful, hair up like a lady or a goddess, amazing, literally amazing.

When he claws his way back to consciousness and finds himself in his own bed, his coat returned to him, Sherlock wants to stand up and find Irene and clasp her shoulders or possibly her head and twirl her in a circle and say  **you're amazing.  **He's never felt so before in his life. John Watson is a miracle. But Irene is an aberration, and one he understands.

When you drugged me, it was quiet. So quiet. Is it ever that quiet for you? Do you ever allow it to be? Isn't that wretched?

I could let you be quiet. If you wanted me to. I'd ask nothing else, would be repulsed by more, this isn't sentiment, it's sameness. I can help you in identical fashion. I could forcibly drug you and ////////// NOT GOOD...

redact...

rethink...

You're just like me. I could help. Did you realize?

I hope that now you do.

I. The Doctor.

John doesn't take to Irene.

He doesn't take to Irene at all.

"But then you saw, didn't you, the way she– god,  _everything_ ," Sherlock gushes after the surprise intravenous sneak attack wears off and he staggers into the light of 221B Baker Street's sitting room. Right before his phone starts making lewd noises two and three times per day.

His friend lifts a single blond eyebrow from where he's seated in his armchair with the paper. His small hands tighten slightly on the newsprint. John isn't intending to broadcast malcontent, but he is aware he's hinting at it, and that to Sherlock Holmes, hints are like large block typeface. He can't help but hint just now, though. For hours, he has been mopping up the mess made of Sherlock Holmes, the great slopping drooling semi-conscious mess which was  _entirely_  Irene Adler's doing, and now... this. Whatever in hell  _this_  is.

"She can hear it too," Sherlock whispers. He's still swaying a little. Only a little, but he isn't nearly at his usual level of rapid-fire coherence. "I think, I think she can. She's like me, you could see it, couldn't you? Oh, she's worried about them too, I'm sure of it."

"About– sorry, who?"

"The bees, John. They're dying. It worries me."

"Oh."

Sherlock is much paler than he should be. Even the wide ribbon of his lips seems too pale. There's a bruise on his neck where the horrid naked female struck him. The pained sweat from when the horrid crop-wielding female was beating him has dried into his dark curls, leaving them bed-mussed and disheveled. And John still hasn't managed to determine what the horrid falsely purring female jabbed him with. John isn't okay with any of this. The entire day makes him want to drug Sherlock himself and summarily retire both of them to Australia. He stands and goes to Sherlock, passing a hand over his white temple.

"You're less upset at being shown up than I thought you'd be," he points out.

Sherlock shakes his head a bit frantically. "No, no, no. Winning is predictable. She... wasn't boring."

It's the highest possible compliment Sherlock can offer anyone. Which makes a crap day that much worse. John keeps his peace for the most part, spreads his feet a bit wider in their sitting room, goes at once to the place inside him as little and as hard and as deadly as he is himself and says nothing. Well, almost nothing.

"I'll frame one of those kinky photographs of her, shall I, and you can treasure it always," John remarks dryly.

Sherlock regards John as if John were speaking Pashto, and that's a familiar look by now, one that can lead to trouble, and so John falls silent. They simply stop talking. John flicks on the telly and Sherlock putters about in the kitchen, dividing his time between a book on the history of ciphers and a very dubious-looking petrie dish with an earlobe in it. He is apparently entirely unconcered that the horrid nude female got away with her camera phone and humiliated him en route.

John cannot, cannot understand that.

The silence isn't comfortable exactly, but it's familiar enough not to be frightening. And later, at around eleven, after a cobbled-together dinner of tinned tuna and cheddar and the end of a bread loaf for John, and nothing for Sherlock, John allows himself to be coaxed into bed, allows himself to be half-smothered after they turn off the light. In the meanwhile, he is thinking.

If you could be with someone who understood you entirely... wouldn't you?

The thought brings a lump to his throat.

"John?"

"Nothing. Go to sleep."

Moving away, huffing a little, Sherlock settles, with his smallest finger tucked neatly into the inner crook of John's elbow. It shouldn't feel like a marriage proposal, but then, the smallest things Sherlock does are often the most important. Sighing, John closes his eyes. Sleep reaches him sooner than he expected it to, pulling him down into a safe black coccoon.

Maybe it's the drugs in Sherlock's system.

Maybe it would have happened inevitably.

Maybe it's actually the drugs, though, and it's all Irene's fault.

Tempting to think so.

John doesn't know why it happens. Or why drugs in Sherlock's veins should affect John's central nervous system. But when he dreams one of Sherlock's dreams for the first time that night, he is very nearly violently ill in their bed.

John is walking along a gravel path adjacent to a sizable estate. It's summer in this world, and all tinged yellowish, and the air hangs heavy and still. There are oak trees, and pleasant dips and curves, and John hears the mild buzzing of honey bees in the clover patches. The house is of red brick, ivy-draped and stately, smaller than a mansion but bigger than a house. It's also immaculately taken care of, but for some reason John doesn't care about the house. He knows where he's going. And he needs to arrive sooner rather than later. He quickens his pace, heading along a path through the thick summer grass. Up ahead, he can just see the sagging, splintering grey roof of his goal.

He reaches an abandoned barn which must long ago have served some essential purpose for the estate and is now a tax loophole. The door is gritty, ashen to the touch, but John presses it open. He's urgently needed. He knows it. He plunges into the fray.

But there isn't any. There is only a barn filled with mildew and dust and rotting wood and creaking timber and pollen motes floating through the air.

John breathes.

Then he turns, and he finds what he's looking for.

A little boy is sitting in the sunlight on a hay bale with his knees pulled up to his chest. He is a skinny, ethereal creature, perhaps seven years old, wearing a blue t-shirt and jeans, his hair a riot of black curls. His grey eyes are far too big for his hollow-cheeked face.

"Hullo," John says gently, sitting down next to the lean little boy on the hay.

Sherlock is cradling a remarkable object in his small hands. It is the skeleton of a mouse, perfectly dry and apparently re-assembled. It's a beautiful, delicate thing. It's a work of art. It could be displayed in a museum of natural history and marveled at by tourists.

"What've you got there, then?"

Luminous, tear-glistening eyes turn up to John. "I made it." His voice is much higher than Sherlock's will become after puberty, but it is already almost uncannily precise.

"It's remarkable. How did you do it?"

"I gave it a lethal dose of the arsenic we use on the weeds and then scraped the flesh off and cured the bones. I read a book about it. Father has glue for his model ships. I used that. I was very careful."

John nods. "You should display it."

The child shakes his head fiercely. "It was a birthday present. For Mycroft. Today is his birthday. He's fourteen."

"He'll love it."

At first, Sherlock doesn't answer. His throat is working. There is a curl hanging in his eyes and John brushes it gently back, waiting.

_"He  _didn't  _love it_ , _" the boy says through his teeth._

"No? What did he say?"

_Sherlock is trembling, fine vibrations running the length of his arms into his perfectly clean fingertips. "He asked what was  _wrong _  with me. He asked if I hurt it. If I liked hurting it. If I like hurting other things. He told me I had to tell him the truth, if I hurt it first. He kept saying that. Tell me the truth, tell me the truth, over and over. He looked frightened. But I didn't, I didn't, I killed it quickly, why would he say that? Why? I didn't like hurting it, I wouldn't, I told him I only wanted it to last forever because I loved it, and he said the only sort of person who would take his pet mouse and kill it as a present for his brother–"_

Sobbing, Sherlock smashes the fragile bones between his palms. They slice a little gash into his left hand, a scar John has seen countless times and assumed was inflicted by some petty criminal or other.

"No, hey, it's all right," John exclaims, reaching for the boy. He has never seen a human being weep like this in his life. Sherlock can hardly breathe for crying, huge gasps catching in his throat and turning to wracking howls. "Hey, hey. Mycroft didn't mean it. You– Sherlock. Please. It was brilliant, what you made for him, he was confused, he–"

"I'm not disturbed," Sherlock moans. He's nearly hyperventilating. "I'm not. Why, and in front of everyone, why, and now I haven't even my mouse to talk to, and–"

"Oh, god. Sherlock, no." John pulls the tiny frame toward his own, wraps his arms around the boy. Sherlock clutches at his shirt for dear life, burying his face in John's neck, crying as if his heart has been broken, because it probably has, hasn't it, and there they sit in the hay and the scattered small bones and the distant whirring of honeybees and the too-sweet clover smell hanging in the–

"John, for god's sake–?

John lurches awake on a choked-back scream, Sherlock's hand tight around his wrist and his head throbbing like a gong. The light is on. Sherlock is staring at him, aghast. John's stomach is roiling, because that was agonizing, he'd felt all of it as if it really were him in that stable, and John is reasonably sure he is going to be sick on the sheets. He kneels up and puts his hands on his thighs, hanging his head and breathing very deep breaths. His consulting detective is standing at the edge of the bed, thirty-six years old now and much taller, looking as if he is trying to determine how to deal with a wild boar.

"That wasn't Afghanistan. It wasn't. John.  _John._ "

"Fuck me. Oh, Jesus, Sherlock, what in– how are you in my head?"

Sherlock recoils as if he's been slapped.

"No, not– stop. Oh, god. Christ. Don't look like that. It's not your fault."

"How is that not my fault?" Sherlock demands, and his voice is pitched so high that for a moment he sounds like the little boy in the stable who lost his mouse, his brother, and his trust in his own sanity on the same day. "Our bloods are mixed.  _How is that not my fault_?"

"Come here," John commands. "Over here. Just. I dreamed you, I think, it must have been you. Didn't you say you dream of deserts? Fuck, Sherlock. Let me see your hand."

"What?"

"Come  _here._ "

Sherlock crawls over to John, who is now seventy percent certain he's not going to vomit everywhere. John grabs the sinewy wrist and turns Sherlock's left palm over. There's a tiny white scar there, like a hook. It's the most painful thing John has ever seen. It looks at present like open heart surgery without anesthesia.

"Where did you get this scar?" he asks very quietly.

Glancing down, Sherlock blinks. He seems more frightened by the second. "I don't know."

"Don't know or won't say?"

"I don't know. I deleted it. So I don't know."

"Right. Good. Keep it deleted. Do not... undelete that file. Keep it jolly well deleted. Now, you listen to me." John reaches up and takes Sherlock's face in his hands. Sherlock smells of sleep, and mint, and unwashed hair, and  _home_ , and John simply loves him and that is final. "You are amazing. You're a complete arsehole and madder than a March hare, but you are amazing and you are perfect. And you are very particular about language, but I don't give a good goddamn at the moment. I love you so fucking much I can't see straight. I love you. You're so morbid it's ludicrous, you're like the Rembrandt of Gore, but I love every fucking piece of you, do you understand me? I love you."

"I know," Sherlock says, dazed. "I mean, I love you. Are you going to tell me what you dreamt?"

"Nope. Not a chance. No way in hell."

Sherlock considers this, tilting his head to one side, thoughts and calculations and inferences clearly screaming at breakneck pace through his head.

"But you love me."

"Yep. And you love me. Right, that's well sorted."

John collapses back onto the bed and Sherlock follows, curled on his side and regarding John with wide, wounded eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind, John knows all this to be impossible, dreaming parts of his life Sherlock has erased, but everything about Sherlock is impossible anyhow. If everything is already impossible, does it matter? Slowly, his breathing evens out. Slowly, Sherlock's does too. The room seems smaller now, somehow. Diminished. John closes his eyes. His chest hurts. His eyes ache. And god, Sherlock had been alone when it had actually happened. He had been  _alone._

"You're being  _brave_ ," Sherlock whispers. "Queen-and-country. I hurt you."

John shakes his head. "Not on purpose."

"It's never on purpose."

"I don't blame you."

"That doesn't make it better."

The clock ticks onward. After about five minutes, Sherlock switches off the light again. John is too drained for further conversation, so he rests his hand on his belly and allows his mind to drift. It's cozy in Sherlock's bedroom, watched over by the periodic table, listening to the rain beginning to fall and the distant hum of traffic in Baker Street. John thinks about open heart surgery. He thinks about guns. He thinks about his college girlfriend. He thinks about the horrid naked female inside Sherlock's coat. He thinks about anything, anything but the stable and the little boy wailing as if he'd been gutted. His thoughts drift like sea foam. He dozes.

John wakes up.

A slim fingertip touches his flank and begins a gentle  _S-_ curve. John knows what's coming, and stays still, his breathing silent and even.

Nothing happens.

Seconds later, the touch is withdrawn, and Sherlock seems to have tucked his hand under his own pillow.

It was a definite movement. Determined, although not violent. Like his friend was encasing the errant hand under a feather prison.

It's absolutely grotesque.

What the fuck does that mean?

John is so horrified for a moment that he forgets to breathe. Before realizing that Sherlock will observe any such thing, and instantly notice that John is awake. And sure enough... the man behind him gives no clear sign, but Sherlock nuzzles into the pillow his head is cradled upon with a silent movement like a brained bird who has just smashed into a glass pane.

John clears his throat, more obviously awake.

Nothing.

He thinks. God, how hard he thinks.

This is not the sort of thing to be solved with questions. Sherlock loathes questions.

John needs to puzzle it out on his own, and without the aid of a brain as big as the London Eye. And this clearly needs very careful handling.

"There's a better blank space on the back of my arm," John whispers.

Seconds later, he is alone, the sound of Sherlock's departure no more than a whisper of bedsheets.

John dives after the mad genius with whom he is utterly obsessed, nearly tripping over the quilt. Sherlock switches the light on in their kitchen and John stumbles blindly into the glare, cursing when his foot strikes a pile of books in the hallway. He finds Sherlock with his hands on his slender hips, grey t-shirt rucked up and askew on one side, looking as if he had just cured cancer. Sherlock is aglow in a way he is never aglow unless he just  _solved something.  _He points an accusing finger at John's head.

"My blood is the problem. It creates echoes of me in your subconscious. But if I change myself, the echoes of me won't hurt you."

"What?" is John's only response to this.

Sherlock presses forward and dips his head. The kiss is soft, undemanding. It is a kiss without expectations. It is very, very un-Sherlock.

"From now on, I'm going to be normal," Sherlock Holmes announces happily.

II. The Detective.

Sherlock's decision to be normal goes brilliantly. At the beginning.

It's maddening not to know what John's dream consisted of, Sherlock thinks, but it can't be helped. When he imagines telling John about his desert nightmares, cold sweat breaks out over his back. So this is fair. Maddening, but fair. More frustrating still, John thought Sherlock's plan to be normal from henceforth laughable. As in, he had actually  _laughed_  at Sherlock, laughed bending over and supporting himself on the Experiments Table, before informing him in no uncertain terms that this plan was bollocksed. But Sherlock can do normal, if it's for John. It will be an experiment. Like with Charles the Archaeologist, but less extreme. More like Sherlock actually is, which is what John enjoys, after all.

That way, he can maintain it indefinitely. Forever and ever. Amen.

Sherlock's first effort involves making John breakfast the next morning. It's the sort of thing people do. Before John awakens, he runs down to the market for supplies. Eggs, bread, milk, et cetera. It occurs to Sherlock that, while Sherlock occasionally eats soft-boiled eggs with John at their little sitting room table, he doesn't know if that's due to their being simple for John to prepare, or if John actually prefers them. So he decides to hedge his bets and err on the side of generosity.

Food preparation is very simple science, and Sherlock once read  _The Joy of Cooking_  in order to understand the chemistry involved in the culinary arts in case the subject ever came up in a criminal context, and he decided not to delete it after that incident over how far the parsley had sunk into the butter proved the information was useful. So the process doesn't intimidate him. The shopping does, though. The white glare of the lights in the little grocer's is unsettling, and the eight varieties of tinned beans are infuriating, and Sherlock thinks he can feel the gears in his head grinding when he reaches the dairy section and there are forty-one sorts of cheese, and the shelves of jams and jellies are hideously colorful in an  _amber-purple-crimson-yellow-pink-fuchsia-scarlet-STOP_  way that makes his heart flutter painfully, and there will have to be a decision of some kind about organic versus conventional tomatoes, and his throat closes when he thinks about salted or unsalted butter, and he's getting sick to his stomach already by the time he realizes how many types of sausage there are in the world.

Sherlock bites the bullet and plucks a jar of Hartley's Damson Jam from the shelf, thinking scientific ingredients might be more bearable.

Energy (kJ) 1037kJ 156kJ Energy (kcal) 244kcal 37kcal Protein 0.2g 0.0g Carbohydrate 60.8g 9.1g of which – sugars 55.5g 8.3g of which – starch 5.3g 0.8g Fat of which – saturates of which – mono-unsaturates of which – poly-unsaturates of which – Trans Fatty Acids Fibre 0.06g 0.01g Sodium (g) Equivalent as Salt.

The detective only barely manages to shut his eyes before an aneurysm forms. Or at least, that's what it feels like.

But it's for John, so he swallows sour-tasting spit and pays for everything. And by  _everything_ , Sherlock is fairly sure he's taken one item of everything in the store. A survey of sorts. He has to take a taxi home even though it's only eight blocks away.

Once back at Baker Street, Sherlock makes certain John is still sleeping and sets quietly to work. After half an hour, it's excruciating. The calm, sure little tasks, the banality of it.  _Breakfast._ Hideous. His hands are shaking.

But he's going to be normal.

Then a thought occurs to him, or a theme rather, and Sherlock smirks his smuggest smirk at the pot of beans he's heating and seasoning with garlic and salt and pepper and dried thyme.

John finally emerges from the bedroom at eleven in the morning, just as Sherlock is putting the finishing touches on the baked tomatoes. The doctor stops, staring at the table in blank awe.

"What is. What. What the hell, Sherlock."

Clapping his hands, Sherlock removes the apron he was wearing and tosses it on the Thinking Couch.

"It's breakfast, of course."

"For us and what army?"

John moves toward the table, rubbing his fingers over his lips.

"I didn't like the colours of the preserves, they were making me ill, and there were too many sorts of bacon, and the dry goods hurt my head until I thought I might be forced to abandon the whole project, but I selected a theme and that was easier. It's the requested last meals of my favourite American criminals who've been executed in the past century," Sherlock explains. "This is filet mignon with red wine sauce and sunny-side up eggs and asparagus—that was Abe Slaney the Chicago strangler's final meal. Here we have sausage, bacon, a classic French omelette, beans, and tomatoes—Boss McGinty's. This one is smoked salmon on brioche with poached eggs and béchamel and–"

"I didn't know you could cook," John says from behind his hand. He sounds like he's smiling. Is he smiling?

"Of course I can. It's science."

John says nothing.

That isn't the way this is supposed to happen.

"You... is something wrong?"

Giggling helplessly, John shakes his head.

"I made you breakfast." Sherlock is vaguely hurt. A knot is forming in his stomach, and John hasn't even tasted the mushrooms he sautéed in white wine yet. "It's the normal thing to do."

John laughs and he laughs and he laughs, twirling in a little spinning circle and then sitting down at the table and spreading a napkin over his lap. He lifts his knife and fork in each hand, grinning, looking grateful and boyish, and he regards Sherlock with disbelieving eyes. They're very blue this morning. They're like watching small, concentrated oceans. They're perfect. Sherlock hated seeing them as they were last night—horrified, agonized by something Sherlock couldn't see. But now they're shining. Sherlock has done the right thing. He can see  _right_  and  _good_  reflected in John's face.

"You make a remarkably beautiful normal person," John says affably. "Now, go fetch Mrs. Hudson and tell her she's breakfasting with us. I know better than to imagine you'll do more than pick at this, and I'm not a competitive eater."

II. The Doctor.

Sherlock's decision to be normal goes brilliantly. At the beginning.

The fact that Sherlock wouldn't recognize normal if it flashed him on the street in the June midday sunshine doesn't fuss John much. In fact, he's more relieved than he will admit to himself. So at first, he allows Sherlock to think he is succeeding. He's really rather charming, this version of Sherlock. John can't imagine he'll last long. But for the moment, John plans to enjoy being wooed by a sociopath.

For instance, John works a shift at the clinic and arrives home to find Sherlock posed like a swooning maiden on the couch, half-asleep and self-satisfied looking. On the kitchen table, a small jungle has appeared. In a vase.

"What is this?" John asks. He hangs his green coat. "Is it for a case?"

Sherlock's expression momentarily shifts to disgust, the face he makes when John is being dense, as if John acts dense simply to annoy him.

"People like being given flowers. So I gave you flowers. I told you already, don't make me repeat myself. I'm going to be different. Normal."

John stares at the floral arrangement in silent awe. It consists entirely of poisonous plants. There are little sprigs of deadly lily-of-the-valley intermingled with gorgeous sprays of violet foxglove and delicate nightshade, oleander mixed in with larkspur and tiny bunches of periwinkle. This bouquet is the maddest thing that John has ever seen, its colors wildly sparring even as the shapes of the blooms do battle for supremacy. It isn't even  _symmetrical_ ; various segments arc frenetically outward like blood spray from a head wound, and a few spears of delphinium rise triumphantly tall above the rest of the mortally dangerous plant life. Four or five buttercups peek out from the lip of the vase. No one in the world could possibly mistake this bouquet for a gesture even approaching  _normalcy._

John loves it. He can feel his heart clench and unclench within his chest, as if he'd started gnawing at the blooms. Sherlock pads in bare feet up behind him and kisses the back of his neck.

"They're all poisonous."

"Yes," Sherlock says, deeply pleased. "Deadly, in the proper quantities. You're welcome."

"I didn't say 'thank you.'"

Frowning, Sherlock turns his friend around to study him. "I ought to have waited. But... don't you like it, then?"

"No." John grins, gripping Sherlock round the waist. "I adore it."

III. The Detective.

Things go dreadfully wrong when The Woman—the  _woman_  woman—dies.

Sherlock doesn't think much about Irene after the matter with the phone. When she texts him, he reads the messages, and thinks for a moment about how soothing a sound her little sigh is, even though he knows technically it shouldn't be soothing, and then he goes on about his business with crime scenes and violin musings and John. But he can feel her. He can feel her in his epidermal cells. Sherlock once watched a film in a theatre—he wasn't really watching the film, but he was trailing someone who was—and he'd actually been able to appreciate the activity far more than usual due to observing his mark's reactions. Irene can hear the chaos in the world, the entropy and the violence of the details waiting to rip them all to shreds. Irene would know what Sherlock meant if he told her his head was shrieking. Irene cares deeply about clothing that fits, just as he does, because clothing that doesn't fit properly makes both of them want to panic due to the bloody  _imprecision  _of it, he is certain of this. Irene is probably worried about the bees. It's like carrying a heavy burden a very long way, and then splitting the load with someone. It has been quieter between his ears ever since she arrived.

When she dies, and he sees her body cold and pale on a slab at the morgue, things go back to normal. And he despises normal.

He eats still less than he usually does and sulks in his blue dressing gown. He flings himself into cases, all the cases he can lay hands on, a matter to do with a queer club for ginger men, and then a stolen carbuncle of an unusual shade, and then a homeless deformed beggar in a wheelchair covered in veterans' stickers who wasn't really deformed or crippled or a war hero, merely an out of work banking clerk. He experiments with oil of vitriol and stops making breakfast. It's too loud in his head at the moment, he can't, he  _can't,_  there are far too many sorts of cereal and too many ways to prepare an egg. Which is, after all is said and done, only a fucking  _egg._  He shoots the wall and ignores when John snarls.

John, of course, is in a complete strop over Sherlock's mood. And—as usual—entirely misinterprets it.

Matters come to a head one late night when Sherlock has had enough of the programme John is watching—something to do with animal rescue—and turns the set off after taking the remote control out of John's hand and pitching it down into Baker Street. It makes a very satisfying little  _smash._

John is up in a moment, bristling, hands on his hips, breathing hard, two inches from Sherlock's nose where he stands by the window. That, too, is somehow satisfying.

"I was watching that."

"I did observe."

"You really think it's a good idea, pining yourself into fits over a lesbian criminal while your  _boyfriend–_ "

"Don't be jealous, it's horribly tedious. It's  _common.  _You know better."

"I don't know better. What the bloody hell is wrong with you?"

"It was  _quieter_ ," Sherlock snarls, "she made it  _quieter_  because she was listening to the same thing _,_  she made it fractions instead of the whole, just by being there, she shared it with me and so there was less total volume to be borne individually, and you are making it a  _fucking cacophony_."

Turning, John storms out of the room and up the stairs, slamming the door. Sherlock hears the  _click  _of the lock. He's already sorry, but that won't help matters, he knows from past experience. Fidgeting, he undoes the button of his suit coat. He smooths his hand down the placket of his white shirt. He paces left, then right. John's anger is simmering and loud and charcoal-smelling above him. It's terrible. Sherlock takes a very deep breath. Then he climbs the stairs.

Sherlock seats himself with his back against John's door. There isn't another way out of John's room. The window isn't close enough to the plane tree to be a handy escape route.

"I'm apologizing," Sherlock calls.

No answer. The charcoal smell Sherlock knows is only in his head worsens and he winces.

"John, come out. This is boring."

That was never going to work, he realizes, and rests his head sadly against the door.

"I'm not going anywhere until you come out," he says. "Ever. Do you honestly think you are making any sense at the moment? If you were dead, I would be dead too. Not bored, not annoyed like I am now. Dead. It would be over for me. You aren't listening. She made it easier. She was like maths, very very complicated mathematics. She was like the color teal. I wanted her to exist, the way the Tibetan mountain ranges exist."

He doesn't add  _and I wanted to put her to sleep and fold her in a little box with a key and then let her out again and she'd have been smiling in that way she has because I'd have made it quiet and then she would have known how it felt, how grateful I was, for the quiet. We solved the boomerang case and then nothing. There was nothing at all. And now I can't ever repay her for being who she was._

It's simply not a topic he's comfortable with around John.

Ominous silence. If he didn't know better, Sherlock would swear their flat was on fire. It reeks of resentment in this hallway.

"It's nearly midnight," Sherlock observes, glancing at his wristwatch. "I'll make you tea? Herbal tea, it's late. I'll be normal. I promise."

In the end, Sherlock finds that John isn't saying anything, isn't about to say anything, and that he is himself very tired. He's tired of the noise, yes, but he is also something simpler—sleepy. Pulling his arms out of his suit jacket, he folds it up for a pillow. Sherlock curls up facing the door with his head on his arm and on the folded cotton. Something wet and pathetic is prickling at the back of his throat. He shouldn't be left out here in this dark stairwell, with the noise in his head, and the charnel house aroma, and no John. He wasn't being normal, though, which has been going well for them. So perhaps he deserves it. He doesn't want to deserve it. He's amazing. But perhaps he deserves what he's getting and John will remain in his bedroom for the rest of their lives. The prickling feeling intensifies.

"Please?" he says to the crack between the door and the floor.

The light in John's room switches off.

John still hasn't forgiven him when he falls fretfully to sleep.

III. The Doctor.

Things go dreadfully wrong when The Woman—the  _woman_  woman—dies.

After Sherlock makes it completely clear to John that John is useless, and John locks himself in his bedroom, he curls up in his jumper and blue jeans and simply stares at the ceiling.

Irene Adler made things quieter, did she. That's a laugh. Because neither of you pair of geniuses could fucking hear a word I said when you were in the same room together.

John belatedly realizes Sherlock is talking through the door. He cares deeply about how lost Sherlock sounds, and that infuriates him. John is intensely angry that the horrid female with the pricey shoes could waltz in and make things quieter for Sherlock and then die and leave him an overgrown child in a tantrum and then make John feel useless and then make John feel  _guilty_. It's utterly fucked. It's wrong to feel guilty over being angry over being belittled. That's simply ludicrous.

"Please?" he hears through the door.

John leans over and turns off his lamp. For an hour or more, he doesn't sleep.

But then he does. And he falls into a dream.

The wind here is cold, and the stars are out. Thousands of them, starlight like fireworks at New Year's. John is back at the red brick mansion. There is a light scattering of snow on the drive, but the steps have been cleared. Knowing just where to go, and feeling vaguely unsettled by it, John walks up to the carved front door with the elegant holly wreath hanging from it and tries the handle. It's unlocked, and John steps inside.

The corridor smells of Christmas, of cinnamon and pine. The lights are dim. John begins peeking into rooms—library, study, parlour. The parlour is large enough not to be dominated by the massive gold-trimmed tree, but only just. Everything in this house, John realizes, is obscenely expensive—the art, the carpets, the lamps and the vases and the books. The books are rare and the vases are antique and the lamps are designer and the carpets are lush and the art is real.

There's a terrible argument happening in the room at the end of the corridor.

John cautiously approaches a slender boy of ten who stands with his arms clutched around himself. He is dressed in a blue cashmere jumper and a pair of dark trousers. Sherlock's hair is longer, still wild, and his eyes glint manically in a way that's all too familiar. He's listening through the half-open door from the shadows.

"But it's monstrous, I tell you. We can take care of him here." A woman's voice, cultured and insinuating. Similar to Mycroft's, John realizes.

"Monstrous? Don't be dramatic, you know I can't bear it," a deep man's voice drawls. There are centuries of land ownership and government connections and public schooling in that voice. "How many British boys every year are sent away to study? They will be better aware of how to handle him. They will be fully apprised."

Sherlock shudders. John moves closer and slides his arm around his thin shoulders. Sherlock leans into him, but his head is still cocked, listening.

"I will not be accused of dramatics when you are the one proposing to send our son away on a whim."

"A whim!" The sound of two drinks being poured into glasses interrupts the man's speech. "Darling, he is manifestly intelligent, but he requires professionals. They will perform more tests, doubtless, and a therapist is provided at the facility, and surely you can see that it would be better for him to have access to constant care."

"I don't argue that he needs care."

"Well, I should hope not indeed."

"It would be better for him to stay here, with me. He's not–"

"For god's sake!" The glass slams down to the tabletop in the chamber beyond. "Our son was about to pour pure bleach into his own ear canal, and he would have done if our other son hadn't caught him red handed. He's psychotic. He's beyond our control."

Sherlock is crying again, but this time he is trying to hide it, clutching his hand to his mouth. He looks up at John and slowly takes the hand away.

"I did," he says. "It hurt so inside my head, and bleach is clean. Isn't it? For cleaning things. It makes them white. It would have cleaned out my skull."

"Oh, Sherlock," John says helplessly.

Wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Sherlock tucks himself further under John's arm. "I hate Christmas, until the day arrives. Christmas is always hardest."

John cradles Sherlock's downy head in his hand. He can't breathe, this is too much. It's cruel. Sherlock is shaking like a leaf. And John is remembering a tiny burn scar on Sherlock's left ear lobe. For a moment, his throat closes. John reaches down and softly turns Sherlock's head.  
The burn is there, red and angry, and oh. What to do with this beautiful creature?

"He's our little boy," Sherlock's mother insists. "Of course he isn't beyond our control."

A pause. "I've made my decision," Sherlock's father declares.

Sherlock buries his face in John's belly to muffle the sound, and cries. And cries.

John becomes belatedly aware that the love of his life is throwing himself against a locked door and shouting his name. Trembling violently, John turns on the lamp. He pushes to his unsteady feet and unlocks the door just as Sherlock threatens to break it down. When he opens it, a likewise fully dressed Sherlock tumbles in, chalk-faced and frantic.

"I heard you. I didn't mean to," he's gasping. Sherlock falls to his knees rather gracelessly and throws his arms around John. "Whatever it was, I didn't mean to, I didn't."

"I know, Sherlock, god, I know." John is off-balance, and he manages to back himself into the bed and sit down, Sherlock's head in his lap.

Sherlock looks up. His hair is flattened on one side, and his shirt is half unbuttoned, trousers dusty and hopelessly wrinkled. He's been sleeping out there, John realizes, and suddenly John hates himself for that. "Why are you crying?" Sherlock asks.

"I didn't mean to, either. Someone else was crying." John wipes his eyes with his fingertips and then, because he knows it will matter to the madman before him, brushes them against Sherlock's bow-like mouth.

Sherlock's eyes flutter on an exhale. Tentatively, he touches his tongue to his lip.

"Was I really making it a cacophony, earlier?" John inquires. He wants to know this time.

"No, no, no, that was beastly. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too. I'm sorry you miss her. I'm sorry she made it quieter and she's gone. I'm sorry I can't do the same."

"I want her back," Sherlock admits hoarsely. "I liked knowing she was there. That isn't normal."

"Yes, it is, you barmy wanker. It's called sentiment."

"I only have that for you."

"No, for the past few weeks I've been  _wanting_  you only to have that for me, which is Not One Sodding Bit Fine. Reminds me of you, actually. I've stopped being a complete prat. Talk about her all you want." John brushes Sherlock's hair back from his ear and finds a miniscule burn scar. "What happened to your ear, long ago?"

Sherlock shakes his head. "Deleted. Do you know?"

"Yes," John says, and fresh tears well up, and he gives more of them to Sherlock's lower lip, and then he laughs brokenly, because this is madness. This is certifiable insanity. "Yes, I know. You don't have to. I know. It wasn't important."

"I don't believe you," Sherlock whispers. "I remember it was important. I simply don't remember what it was."

"Hey, come up here," John suggests thickly. "I'm sick of this. Listen, here is what we are going to do. You're going to take your clothes off, and take my clothes off, because you like that for some reason, and then we're going to lay here for a minute and pull ourselves together, and then we're going to do what normal couples do and have normal sex with each other. You can bugger me in the missionary position like a normal boyfriend, and I'll know you're not quite normal, because you'll be too good at it, you're ahead of the curve there, but we will have normal sex in my normal bed and I love your scars and it doesn't matter. Normal sex would start with normal foreplay, presumably, so in a minute I'm going to want my cock in that pretty mouth of yours, and your fingers in my arse for a while after that, and everything will be fine. There will be normal kissing, normal sex, then normal cuddling. Everything will be completely normal."

Sherlock looks thoughtful, his cheeks flushing slightly. "Is that an achievable goal?" he wonders.

John laughs, a real one this time. It's infectious, and Sherlock smiles cautiously.

"No, it isn't," John admits, swooping down and kissing Sherlock all along his hair line. "But let's see how close we can come to the mark."

IV. The Detective.

Except that Irene Adler isn't actually dead.

Leaving Battersea Power Complex, Sherlock is hurt that she lied to him, that she forced him to endure miserable months without her, but he understands. People have to die sometimes. It's what people  _do._  And it must have been very pleasant for her, he supposes, being dead.

Silent. Restful. Serene.

Sherlock himself has hardly ever been dead. But on each occasion, only one of which he can recall, it has been absolutely smashing.

IV. The Doctor.

Except that Irene Adler isn't actually dead.

John is already fraying, as it happens.

After Sherlock discovers that his muse is alive and well and wants to have dinner, John takes his time returning to Baker Street and then is forced to have another conversation about  _torture_ and  _not good_  with his clinically disturbed friend after Sherlock decides to throw an American operative out of their first-floor window four times. This conversation would have gone better, John is certain, if John hadn't enjoyed the sound of that low sod crashing into Mrs. Hudson's bins quite so much. Sherlock loves Mrs. Hudson with a possessive ferocity bordering on the feral, and John is extremely fond of her, and her wrists are bruised, and that is enough to cause both men considerable rage.

_Four times, though_ , John thinks, putting Mrs. Hudson's kettle on as the CIA man drops past the window for the final time.  _Not the done thing._

"Oh, dear me, do you think he's through now?" Mrs. Hudson frets. She is seated at her breakfast table, fiddling with a handkerchief, still visibly shaken. "Only bins are expensive, you see, and I had to pay to have the gutters done only last month, and I wouldn't want to take it out of Sherlock's rent, heaven knows, under the circumstances, but the bins–"

"You're finished," John says, opening Mrs. Hudson's door and poking his head out as Sherlock drags the man back inside 221.

"I'm not," Sherlock says icily.

"Torture, Sherlock. Torture.  _Not. On._ "

"Not torture, vengeance. I'm restoring balance to the universe. The universe is crooked, John.  _Crooked._  I'm fixing it."

"You've already fixed it, that last time. That was the clincher, there. Time number four."

Sherlock has the barely conscious, moaning American by the shirt collar and the forearm. He looks dubiously at John. Then he looks again at the tiny scratches on the wall halfway up the stairs and his face hardens to stone.

"Yep, I'm certain, Sherlock. Felt it. No more vengeance. Irene Adler is alive. Isn't that marvelous? She hurt this bastard too, remember? At her house? She helped you with the balance, months back. You're all done."

The teakettle whistles. Behind John, Mrs. Hudson goes to switch off the hob. "Sherlock, dear, do phone someone and get that man out of our house," she calls out. "He's putting me off, I can't help it."

"I already called Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson."

"Well, then come and have a sit with me, please, I'm all a-flutter. At my age, you know, a fright like that stays with you for a spell."

Sherlock remains still, pondering. Then he begins to haul the man upstairs once more, a grim look in his eyes.

"You're right," he says over his shoulder to John. "Irene helped to balance it, before. Thank you for reminding me. Isn't she wonderful?"

_As wonderful as a goddamn lightning storm on an aeroplane,_  John thinks, shutting 221A's door emphatically.

V. The Detective.

The woman ends up in Sherlock's bed, in Sherlock's dressing gown, her hair smelling of Sherlock's expensive shampoo, her smooth legs soothed by Sherlock's moisturizer. Sherlock's bedroom has never seemed so quiet as it does when he discovers Irene sleeping there, nestled deep in his sheets.

Breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat, flicker of lashes, breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat, flutter of eyelids, entering REM cycle, breath, heartbeat, slow, slow, slow, quiet, slow, breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat, breath, heartbeat.

Sherlock adores her.

V. The Doctor.

The woman ends up in Sherlock's bed, in Sherlock's dressing gown, her hair smelling of Sherlock's expensive shampoo, her smooth legs soothed by Sherlock's moisturizer.

John has never loathed anyone so much in his life.

Sherlock shows off for her in a flamboyantly obvious fashion that borders on the lewd, though to be fair, he doesn't appear to notice that he's doing it, and after all he is England's foremost braggart, so John allows his preening to pass with a minimum of snark. Sherlock is Sherlock. Sherlock shows off.

It's what he does. So it's fine.

But later, after much talk of phones and planes and a supper of takeaway Chinese, Sherlock falls into a near-catatonic Thinking State in his chair and John decides he has had enough.

"Could you maybe put your clothes back on?" he asks Irene coldly, drying his hands off on a kitchen towel after putting the last plate back in the cupboard. He washed Irene's twice. To get any trace of  _Irene  _off of it.

Irene smiles from where she reclines on the sofa. Her smile is toxic. She smells like Sherlock, all of her smells like Sherlock and his dressing gown and his hygiene products and it lights a fire deep in John's belly. He wants to reach out and take the robe back himself, but that would be utterly wrong and indecent and John is a gentleman.

So he asks instead.

"Poor little doctor," Irene says softly. "You don't know what to do with me, do you? With someone who misbehaves."

"I know exactly what to do with you. Look who I'm with, for god's sake. I just don't  _want  _to do... well. Anything with you whatsoever."

"That's a shame. You like girls as well as boys, I can tell. I have a sixth sense that way. Knowing what people like. I'd be gentle with you, if you asked. You could ask me for practically anything, you know."

"Fantastic. Will you take off that robe and put your own damn clothes back on, if I ask?"

Irene sidles into the kitchen. Irene doesn't walk anywhere: she glides, just like Sherlock glides, and it makes John crazy. No one else should glide like that. No one. It's unfair that she should be so graceful, as graceful as Sherlock himself. John loves women, or he did when he had the chance, but he hates that he sees  _her_  all over  _him.  _John is putting the pepper shaker back where it belongs. She reaches for John's wrist, and John pulls it away. So she smiles her cat smile, just as Sherlock would do, and raises her arms in a lazy stretch.

"You don't think royal blue is my colour?" she teases.

_It's HIS colour, you horrid, horrid female,_  John thinks, but that sounds ridiculous even in his head.

"You're angry I flirted with him. But you needn't be, you know," Irene points out. "I like detective stories, but I like medical dramas and war stories too. I could like a man who told me some."

"Are you trying to fuck everyone in the world, or just in this flat?" John snaps.

"Oh, not  _everyone  _in the world," she purrs. "Only the interesting ones."

Sherlock's eyes have closed, meanwhile. He clearly isn't hearing a word they're saying.

"That man in there," John hisses, pointing at the place where they live and eat and breathe, "seems to find life more bearable with you in it. So fine, come back from the dead, play with him like he's one of your sex toys, I know what I am to him, I'm in his head constantly. He has conversations with me when I'm not even in the fucking country. I don't have to be in the room for him to direct whole monologues at me. I'm his audience. His entire consciousness is  _me-_ oriented. He is bloody John-sexual. I don't care if you want his help, take his help, but don't try his life on as if you're putting on a costume for a fancy-dress party and expect me to enjoy the show. This is  _our_  house, not  _his  _house. The space you are in, that dressing gown, that bed, is  _mine._ "

Irene's grin only widens. Her fingers rub luxuriously up and down the blue fabric draped over her shoulders.

"You clearly don't care for my company, so why don't you leave?" she asks softly. "Or are you afraid that if you do leave, and I'm still here, all alone with him, he'll want... dessert? That would be an understandable concern."

John's heart twists painfully. His left hand twitches and clenches and grips and then opens again. He trusts Sherlock with sex, even if he trusts him with nothing whatsoever else. He knows that's an unusual way to run a relationship. Never mind, though. It's the way they are. Sherlock could be in the same room with a hundred naked Irenes and John wouldn't worry half so much as if Sherlock was in a room with one loaded gun with the safety off, or a room with a serial killer and a poison pill meant to be taken  _voluntarily for fuck's sake_.

But if this horrid invading female says one more word, he will slap her, and that is untenable. So John stalks to the door, limping ever so slightly, and puts on his coat.

"I need some air," he announces in a voice that could melt steel. "Try to get a leg over, be my guest. Text me if you manage it. With pictures, you like pictures."

"You needn't hate me so. I can share."

She is very striking, it occurs to him as he leaves. He doesn't find her beautiful. But she is very striking, after all.

"You're not worth hating," John replies, keys in his hand as he flees the scene. "And I can't."

VI. The Detective.

Sherlock beats Irene at her own game, but she escapes nevertheless. And some time afterward, Sherlock flies to Karachi after learning she is in mortal danger.

Karachi doesn't go quite as he expected it to.

The stars here make his head whirl like a carousel. He has dreamed them before, similar ones, whenever he is dreaming John's desert dreams, but seeing them in person makes him gasp. They are very close akin to the ones he has seen in Afghanistan, though not identical—in actual life, they slice across his retinas like well-meaning razors. Sherlock failed to inform John that he was departing for a few days to infiltrate a terror cell, primarily due to the fact that John can't hear Irene's name without scowling, and seeing John's stars suddenly makes him miss the smaller man with a dull, dry ache.

The constellations have never been so close, and—if he concentrates—he can see the way they would look when reflected in John's blue eyes, the way they shone bouncing out of the depths of John's pupils when John was busy surviving and healing people and killing people. The image is dizzying. And the silence here is so profound, once out of the city proper, once in the wilderness. Silence so deep seems too good to be true, after the helicopter he convinced the British government to give him, after forging Mycroft's signature

after after after

The chopper has dropped him and departed. Sherlock can hear his own eyelashes going  _swish._

Swish.

"When I say run, run," Sherlock says to the kneeling woman before him, raising the sword high above his head.

Irene smiles an odd little smile. He can see her. This is right, he thinks, this is the way. He needs her existence. Her death now would be haunting and raw, like the death of a twin. Sherlock gives the signal.

Irene stands up and uncovers her head. Her hair is down, and she shakes it. It's curling, waves dancing in the starlight like ripples on the sea.

She isn't running.

Puzzling.

"Gentlemen," she says softly.

Three terrorists converge on Sherlock. One knocks the sword from his hand with the butt of a pistol, one kicks him in the back of the knee so he staggers and falls, and one punctuates this development by pressing a gun against the back of his head.

"I thought this might appeal to you," Irene says, waving at their surroundings. "A chance to rescue me. A chance to peek into John Watson's memories. You'll remember that just before you unlocked my phone, I had listed some thoughts about my compensation and protection. It was rather silly of me to use your name, of course, but I am  _so  _fond of you. I couldn't resist. You're such a beautiful creature. But I've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle, you see. These men... you've gathered by now that they're working for me. Their leader is quite a ruthless man, and I know what he likes. So you're going to take that phone of yours and call Big Brother and tell him that if he doesn't take my generous offer of accepting his apology and his original offer of cash and security, then I am going to start chopping off Junior's fingers. One by one."

Sherlock laughs. There is an explosive weapon digging into his skull and he laughs and laughs, and soon Irene has an answering smile for him.

"May I stand up?" Sherlock asks.

She nods her head at the terrorist with the pistol, who smells of musk and sweat and cold desert nights. The gun is still trained on Sherlock, but he doesn't care. They need him alive. He walks up to Irene and lifts her by the waist and twirls her in a circle, the stars above them whirling in a mad waltz.  
Irene laughs, staring down at Sherlock.

"You're amazing," Sherlock tells her.

"I know," she answers.

VI. The Doctor.

Sherlock beats Irene at her own game, but she escapes nevertheless. Whether or not Irene has anything to do with Sherlock's brief and sudden disappearance some weeks later is up for debate. John hasn't any direct evidence of such.

But when he asks Sherlock where he was, Sherlock says "Working," and when John asks on what, Sherlock says "A case," and when John asks how it went, Sherlock says "Amazing," and when John asks directly if he won, if he solved it, he says, "No," and so John suspects. Then Mycroft tells him as the rain hammers down outside of Speedy's Cafe that Irene Adler is dead for the second time, in Karachi, and that it would take Sherlock Holmes to have fooled him, and John knows.

He  _knows._

"How much did you have to give her, in the end?" John asks. "When she'd got her hands on your brother?"

Mycroft's face curdles in dismay before he can prevent himself. Mycroft doesn't expect deductions from John. He expects acceptance. But John lives with Sherlock,  _knows_  Sherlock, and Sherlock was gone for four bloody days, and that is unheard of.

He never leaves John behind. He never wants to.

"It put rather a dent in the wealth of a nation," Mycroft admits sourly.

"And you figured I'd never notice Sherlock's little undercover excursion. Because that makes so much sense. Because I'm fucking  _blind_. I make my way about by echolocation."

Mycroft sighs through his nose.

John can feel his blood rising, a steady  _thump-thump-thump_  of anger and hurt and fury over the way the Holmes brothers operate him, manipulate him. "And now you want me to lie to him about her being in witness protection, but not really lie to him, since the lie is for the messenger. Me. I'm the loose end. I'm the one meant to think she's actually dead."

Mycroft looks as if he is watching something that is considerably beneath him take an unexpected turn, as if the pavement had reversed course or a street side shoe shiner had spat in his eye. He clears his throat ostentatiously. John has never before wanted to punch him as much as Sherlock does, so this is a new sensation. The man who is the British Government ponders how to make John behave himself for exactly five seconds too long.

"Sod this," John says, grabbing the evidence bag. "I'm going upstairs. He'll tell me the truth. He will. You watch him."

Mycroft is silent. He seems different under cafe lighting. Less expensive, more sallow. He seems very alone. John is perversely glad of it.

"You can't see her again," John says to Sherlock upstairs, standing there with the plastic bag and rain on his coat and feeling simply wretchedly small. John may be aware that nothing sexual occurred between Sherlock and Irene, but the thought of her importance is like a spear in his side.

He lies about witness protection in America, and that is easy.

Sherlock pretends to believe him, and that is hard.

Sherlock insists on keeping the phone, and he says  _please_ , and that is hardest of all.

VII. The Detective.

After Irene, Sherlock discovers John is still very angry about her.

"I am presently at a loss to know whether you can't understand or simply won't understand," Sherlock snaps when John finds Irene's photo in the drawer of his bedside table along with her phone, and a stony look comes into his beautiful eyes. "Awareness of her helps me to think."

John just strides out of the bedroom on his small feet, angry. So very angry. They were about to begin dressing for bed, but he's still wearing the blue and black striped shirt with jeans and Sherlock is barefoot in black trousers and a new green dress shirt that made John's mouth go soft when he first saw it. Sherlock wants the softness of John's mouth back, but he doesn't know how to go about that project. Everything he touches turns to sand and then sloughs away in waves. It's wretched.

"I had her phone already, how can you be angry I put it in a drawer?" Sherlock cries.

"I'm not angry you put it in a drawer," John snarls, showing his petite white animal teeth. "You fucking moron. I've angry you have a little shrine to her next to your bed. I'm sodding furious that you let her flirt with you and touch you and kiss your cheek and sleep in our bed and then flew to Karachi to rescue her, yes I know about that, I'm not fucking stupid, and I'm angry that she can do things for you I can't, that you admire her for them, and I know for a fact she tried to get into your pants despite the fact you're mine,  _mine_ , and yes, that makes me pretty bleeding furious, Sherlock Holmes, she has no boundaries whatsoever, and then you let me lie to you about witness protection, and none of it can be solved, and none of it really even needs to be solved, because I'm being jealous and petty, and that makes me bloody angrier than any of the rest of it, but you have keepsakes of her in your drawer and I want to  _hit something._ "

Sherlock sinks down onto the sofa. He shoves his hand through his curls, deeply disturbed.

There was a night sky and a desert and it was you, all I thought of was you, you simply weren't the reason I was there. But there aren't any stars without you.

"You knew about Ka–"

"Yes."

"So when you–"

"Yes."

"And the witness pro–"

"Failed that test with flying colours, didn't you?"

Thinking very very hard, Sherlock makes an attempt at English.

"The stars in the Middle East are beautiful, but they don't know it unless you're looking at them," he says. " _You_. No one Else. I know what that feels like."

John makes a terrible scoffing sound that means poetry is out, even if Sherlock finds it to be literally true. Perhaps that's why his poetry so seldom works, he realizes. For most people, poetry is imaginary. Not a picture of the literal world. He can't tell the difference, all he knows is he's rubbish at it.

"I didn't have sex with her, it would have been impossible," he attempts instead.

"I know you didn't, I'd have murdered you."

Shivering, Sherlock decides not to tell John why that statement was wonderful. Because John will doubtless find his thoughts on the subject deeply inappropriate.

John paces in front of the fireplace, left hand fidgeting in little jerks. "You don't just take off for a potentially deadly combat situation in Karachi without me and then lie about it because you know I'll disapprove after the fact. How old are you, five? You sick son of a bitch."

"Are you going to stop being angry with me?" Sherlock whispers. "Ever?"

"Possibly."

"What can I do to help?"

"You can shut up for once and let me calm down. Shit, Sherlock.  _Shit_. You make it so fucking impossible sometimes."

Flinching, Sherlock flops backward on the couch.

He doesn't mean to make it impossible,  _he doesn't mean to_ , he means to be normal. But nothing he does is ever enough. He wants to invent a new language with John and never speak English again  _(fine)_  and weave a piece of cloth from his lost blond hairs and carry it as a kerchief  _(fine)_  and cast his lovely worn face in wax  _(fine)_  and make a violin bow from his heartstrings  _(not fine)_ , and John is still stupid enough to think that Irene makes a difference. The ticking clock on the mantel is too loud, too loud. John's soft steps are better. They're slowing gradually. Sherlock listens to them instead.

"I think I know what to do," John says slowly.

Sherlock looks up. There is a smile lurking behind John's eyes now.

That is... odd.

"What, then?" Sherlock sniffs, twisting into what he supposes is a more dramatic shape on the couch. Then he abandons this plan in favour of stalking up to John and looming.

John steps away from him, eyes glinting strangely, and moves a small stack of books off the little window table. His laptop he likewise relocates to the seat of Sherlock's leather chair, leaving the table where Irene kissed Sherlock cleared of objects. He surveys it with satisfaction.

"Your safeword is  _safeword_ ," John answers, sounding amused. "I know you have a self-destructive streak a mile wide, but that much you can remember for me since you won't pick one yourself. That list you have? Two birds with one stone. Take off your belt and hand it to me."

Sherlock's train of thought stutters, skips, stumbles. He blinks.  
Surely he can't have heard that correctly.

Take

off

your

wait

WAIT

Number thirty-two was previously on the  _Fine_  list, because it wasn't dangerous to anyone save Sherlock, but John moved it to the  _Not Fine_  list, where it is presently number twelve, and reads:

12. As an experiment, arrange for John to beat me, for as long as he likes, to see how far he can take it, and I'll be covered with marks John put there for days even if he doesn't kill me, and that will be lovely.

Oh.

Yes, that would be lovely.

But...

Swallowing, Sherlock discovers his throat is dry. John is watching him. He isn't acting in any way impatient, and Sherlock comprehends that he can still say no if he likes, even though it was his own slightly twisted idea. Sherlock isn't a masochist, but the concept sprung from wanting every sensation John could possibly deliver to him, and there John is standing, almost-smirking, expectant, clearly thinking about Irene Adler and having Sherlock over a table until he begs for mercy.

Twice.

Which made John angry, her saying that, he recalls.

Extremely angry.

_Oh_.

Slowly and rather mechanically, Sherlock slides the belt out of its loops and hands it over. John takes it with a businesslike nod as if none of this is at all unusual and holds the buckle end, wrapping it a number of times around his hand.

"Over you pop," John says lightly, nodding at the table.

At first, Sherlock is frozen still. Then something pools in his abdomen, electric and sweet as cocaine. Dazed, Sherlock walks to the table and leans over it until he is resting his elbows on the surface. Time has slowed to a slow, sugary, honey thickness. There are bees in his ears. John moves behind him. They are both underwater. No, bees cannot survive underwater. That's wrong. The air has thickened. Sherlock isn't afraid. He hadn't expected to be. He's curious, however. Deathly curious. John is a very good person. He knows right from wrong. Sherlock can't breathe air this thick. If John doesn't get a move on–

Thwack.

It doesn't hurt like he had thought it would, just a light burn and then a fading sting, and of course John is being careful, starting slow, and over trousers and all it really couldn't possibly hurt as he'd hoped it would, but still–

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

After exactly ten more of these, Sherlock shifts his feet carefully, breathing a slow breath through his mouth. That was nothing if not... rather pleasant. Mostly harmless, which is the title of a book John likes. The bees in his ears have quieted. They are listening. John approaches him and palms a hand up the front of his trousers. Sherlock presses into the touch, already hard as granite beneath the thin wool and unwilling to be ashamed of the fact.

"I'm not punishing you for needing her, for the record," John declares with his lips against Sherlock's ear. "Well. That does drive me round the twist, but. You can't help that part. That part is fine. Karachi, though, and without me. A  _terror cell.  _What were you thinking?"

"I meant to–"

John steps back. "Strike that, I don't give a shite what you were thinking. But begging for a strapping, that's what you were  _doing._  Trousers down. Pants, too."

Sherlock stands and complies. His fingers are admirably steady when he considers the beehive in his ears and his stomach and the fact he has never done this sort of thing before. When his trousers and pants rest at half-mast, he bends his forearms back down to the table. John rubs his right hand up his back and he shivers at the unexpected gentle sensation.

"Don't tense up. Drop your spine."

He does, hollowing his lumbar curve. For some reason, John laughs. He's staring. But then, John is always staring.

"Gorgeous," he murmurs. "Christ, you are deadly gorgeous. You're so fair-skinned, you're already pink as a grapefruit. It's. Um. Very pretty."

"Thank you," Sherlock says politely, smiling.

"You're welcome," John chuckles, and then swings the belt again, much harder.

Sherlock's mouth drops, but no sound emerges. And John keeps going. Over and over again, the cracking sound ten times louder now, like the snap of a distant gun, the burn blazing into a fire and then into an ache and then into something else entirely that sends its signals back up his spinal column to his brain and then careening back down to his groin. Trying to count grows impossible after fifteen. He's panting slightly, shallowly, and when John aims a blow that lands square on the curve where his arse meets his thigh, he gasps.

"Yeah, meant for you to feel that one." John, inexplicably, drops Sherlock's belt in front of his nose on the table. "Stay put. Keep your hands in front of you. Be right back."

Obeying, Sherlock dances on the balls of his feet for a moment, trying to catch his breath. There was no reason for John to banish this activity to the  _Not Fine_  list, he thinks. Tentatively, he reaches out and touches his belt. It's warm. That's to be expected, friction is a scientific principle, but it feels as hot and living as human skin. His backside throbs, from top to thigh, but it isn't unbearable. His cock throbs too, but he can ignore it for the moment. Where is John?

Where is John?

John returns with a pleased skip to his step and rests something on Sherlock's back. Apparently now Sherlock is furniture. A shelf of sorts. Sherlock deduces that the object is his own riding crop and feels a first flutter of anxiety. Then John reaches down and cool slick meets his hot cheeks and John is carefully, efficiently insinuating a finger in...

The sound Sherlock makes is not a whimper. It isn't.  _Because it simply isn't._  Whimpering is undignified.

"You've got more punishment coming to you," John says mildly. "All right?"

A second finger breaches him and Sherlock moans breathily. Moaning is acceptable. His nerves are sparking like firecrackers and he's so aroused he wonders if his brain is getting enough oxygen. John should not be able to unravel him this quickly. John's touch should be the same as any of his previous partners. It isn't, though.  _Because it simply isn't._  John is working him open and it's too much, it's not quite enough, it's freefalling, it's terrifying.

"Answer me," John orders, slapping his arse with his free hand.

"All right, I'm all right," Sherlock groans, pushing backward. "John.  _John._  Oh, Christ."

"Hold still."

"I'm trying."

"You're doing a crap job."

"I'm sorry."

"You  _will  _be sorry."

"Oh, god."

"Has anyone ever beat you like this? Spanked you, paddled you for being an unbearable smart arse?"

"Shockingly, no, never."

"Did you want them to?"

"No."

"Did you want Irene to, when she was here?"

"Of course not."

John pushes in harder and Sherlock sees stars. "Do you want me to, then, now? I hated her when she marked you, that day at her house in Belgravia. Is this what you want me to do? To mark you?"

"God  _yes._ "

"Ask me nicely, in that case."

Sherlock bites his lip to keep from screaming as John pistons slowly in and out, in and out. He forgets he is meant to be talking. He forgets what he is meant to be talking about. Minutes pass, he knows, but not how many. The bees in his ears are silent. They drowned. The bees in his belly have moved to his pelvis. The burn from what feels like thousands of bee stings doesn't seem to be fading, on the contrary.

"Come on, Mister Punch Line, ask me and make it pretty."

The sleuth snaps back to alertness. "Please would you give me a whipping."

"Gladly."

"Oh, god, god,  _Christ_ ," Sherlock gasps. There are three fingers now. Coherence is rapidly becoming impossible.

"And then?"

"And then fuck me."

"Oh, I am definitely going to fuck you," John says, and he's laughing again, and Sherlock can barely stand. He's breathing too fast. He's going to faint.

"Please," he whispers. "Oh, please. I can't anymore. Get on with it, please."

"That's once," John says blithely. But he doesn't stop, placing a steadying hand on Sherlock's hip bone while the other brushes over and over and over against–

Sherlock cries out, loud in the stillness of the room, and then sinks his teeth into his shirt sleeve. And John isn't stopping, he isn't stopping, he–

"Gorgeous," John says, and it sounds like  _You love me._  It sounds wonderful. "You're going to count as you're ready, all right? Take your time. When you think you can, just say the next number. I'll tell you when you're done. Understand me?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Clever boy."

John's fingers draw away slowly, and Sherlock swallows a sob that has nothing whatsoever to do with having his trousers and pants taken down and his backside thrashed. He plants his feet and relaxes his hunched shoulders, distressingly aware he was just on the verge of an orgasm. When he feels safe enough, he speaks.

"One."

_Thwip_  goes the crop and lands smack in the middle and Sherlock clenches his teeth and  _shit, shit, that was different, that was a line of fire and it's swelling and I can't and it feels bloody fucking marvelous and oh god I can't_  but he grits his teeth and says "Two." Lower this time, but still right on the full, two parallel lines and John put them there and it's far too much. "Three," Sherlock whispers, and that lands lower still. His fists are clenching involuntarily. "Four" earns him a diagonal strike, as does "Five," while "Six" finds the top of his thigh and involuntary tears spring into his eyes. "Seven," said in a strangled tone, matches six but on the other side.

Sherlock makes it to twelve before his knees start buckling and he hears the crop fall to the floor. John has him by the hips an instant later, though, so that's fine, he's fine, everything is–

"Please," Sherlock moans. "Please, I can't. John,  _please._ "

"That's twice. You're perfect," John breathes. He presses his nail into a welt and Sherlock hisses. "You are a goddamn angel. So to speak. Did you tense up, or are you ready?"

John's fingers are checking, strong fingers, slow fingers, and Sherlock lets his shoulders fall all the way to the table top and presses his chest there, trying not to die prematurely. It isn't working. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he pants. There is sweat pouring down the back of his neck.

"Why? That was amazing."

"Because–" Sherlock says, and he's about to explain what is likely to happen next, but then John's fingers are gone and there is his cock replacing them, and it is suddenly all the way in and Sherlock is coming, coming so hard it hurts, gasping out John's name and  _please_  and  _I'm sorry_  and John says, "Oh god, yes, that's it, love, beautiful, you're so fucking beautiful, that's it, come on," and he snaps his hips fiercely over and over and over again until Sherlock is about to shriek  _safeword_  at the top of his lungs and then John stills suddenly, gripping Sherlock's waist with steady hands, pulsing.

The next moment Sherlock is aware of, he is on his back on the floor, and his arse is on fire.

John lies next to him, still clothed and with his pants pulled back up. Sherlock's have migrated to the region of his ankles. Staring at Sherlock, head propped on his hand, John smiles. "Medically speaking, you're all right. I checked. Are you okay, though?"

Sherlock honestly has no idea.

After a long silence, John makes a humming sound. "Talk to me."

Normally light tastes like rainstorms, but you shut it off and it was only a color spectrum.

Normally I can remember my name, but I couldn't.

Normally pain is boring, but this wasn't, it wasn't, you're never boring.

Normally I'm not frightened when you take me, but I was the first time, and this time too, and I love being frightened.

Normally I don't feel like a Cubist painting, but I did, pieces of me were rearranged.

Normally loving you only hurts in my heart, but this was better, it made more sense.

Normally I want to be a gift for you but I'm more like a hospital bill and that is slowly killing me but not this time, this time I forgot about it.

Normally

Normally

Normally

None of this is normal.

"I'm just a bit... blank," Sherlock says slowly. "I think you erased me somewhat."

"That will go away," John says soothingly.

"No," Sherlock whispers, turning his head toward John. "No, I like it. Are you still angry?"

"No, not since you called me  _Captain._ "

Sherlock giggles, and then John giggles, and then John says, "Come on, shush, we can't giggle, it's a BDSM scene," and then Sherlock howls until his chest aches with laughter.

VII. The Doctor.

After Irene, Sherlock discovers John is still very angry about her.

John sorts this problem with a hard spanking he can't pretend not to enjoy, and afterwards, he cleans them both off, removes their clothing, puts aloe on Sherlock's magnificent scarlet tapestry of a bum, takes him to bed, and wraps his arms around him.

"Why haven't we done that before?" Sherlock wonders quietly when the lights are out.

John yawns, hand deep in Sherlock's hair, rubbing his smooth scalp. "Because I'm not really a dom, and you're not really a sub. You like to fuck me on my knees in strange hotel rooms and choke me while wanking me off, and I like being able to handle it. It's brilliant, I love it, never fear. But you're also a sensation fiend with a dirty streak and a danger addict who compulsively pushes my buttons. So this worked, this time. It wouldn't work all the time. I don't want it to. But Karachi was the last straw."

Sherlock is silent. Thinking, John assumes.

"Why were you so good at it?"

"Oh." John is momentarily rather embarrassed. "Cheers. Er, ta, I mean I, I had a pretty venturous girlfriend or two. And I like getting people off if I'm dating them. And I'm a doctor, so... um, dunno. I know when to stop. Most of that will be gone tomorrow, and the rest the day after."

Sherlock makes a displeased sound with his nose that causes John to smile broadly.

"Shall I be normal again in that case, tomorrow?" the lunatic asks at length. He sounds exhausted, but content. "I think I can manage it this time."

John presses his lips to his friend's skull. "I don't want normal."

"What do you want, then?" Sherlock asks hoarsely.

The doctor thinks about late nights running through filthy corridors, the stink of cheap grease in their nostrils and a killer just out of reach. He remembers thinking that he would have to teach medicine anyhow, wouldn't he, after all he'd done, and taking the loaded pistol out of his drawer and then putting it back because there was nothing whatsoever to shoot at. He thinks about the inside of Sherlock's wrist, pale like dove's feathers and nearly as delicate. He thinks about how he'd slipped once on a fire escape and Sherlock had thrown himself backward and caught him with a look in his grey eyes like the eye of a hurricane. The doctor thinks about all the beautiful things in the world he's ever seen, and how none of them are as beautiful as the one in his bed.

John pulls Sherlock's hand up by the wrist. There's a blank space on his throat, so John takes the pliant index finger he's gripping and writes SHERLOCK HOLMES in capitals across his own Adam's apple.

VIII. The Detective.

In the end, Irene Adler matters to Sherlock in a way that matters less to John.

Sherlock doesn't speak of her much. He has her phone, and her photograph, and once in a while he receives a cryptic email about what people like in Naples or in Bucharest, and they make him smile. He doesn't show them to John, but he doesn't hide them from him either.

In every conceivable way, Sherlock fails to be normal, because he is too busy being amazing. But he still makes John breakfast from time to time, because it makes his friend laugh.

It isn't easy. And they aren't happy. But Sherlock still thinks of John as the  _sole requirement._  That is, until the third occasion John dreams one of Sherlock's dreams, and Sherlock begins to wonder whether having starlight and crime scenes will ever be enough glue to hold them together.

Because they have the starlight, on this occasion, and the crime scene as well. There is a bicyclist in Farnham being stalked by a serial rapist and murderer, a vile little monster named Woodley who likes to make himself known to his victims before spiriting them away, and Sherlock and John are running, racing, plummeting through bracken, the tall Surrey trees flashing by straight and proud in the moonlight, and Ms. Smith's self-appointed boyfriend (she appears to disagree with Bob Carruthers on this title) is there too, and he shoots Woodley with a concealed weapon in a clearing, and things get a bit hectic after that.

Soon enough, John has Woodley stable (why bother, thinks Sherlock, but there's John for you), and Violet Smith is finished screaming. Soon enough, the authorities arrive. But the pair aren't about to return to London, not at two-thirty in the morning anyhow, and after all Carruthers is grateful for their help and a man who owns a country house. It makes perfect sense to pass the night at Chiltern Grange half a mile away.

"Well, thank god for that, then," John says when Sherlock informs him of this plan. "It's better than an hour back to London, supposing we could even get a driver."

Chiltern Grange is... nice, Sherlock supposes. It reminds Sherlock of the London digs he found just after he left college. Sherlock doesn't recall much of college save for the fact he didn't like it. But this house is definitely similar to the renovated public one he stayed in afterward. It's squarish, simple grey brick, fairly unadorned, and the door whines in the same way, and there the resemblance ends. Otherwise it's just an Edwardian era house, with ivy and moss and a roof that probably leaks. Very uninteresting, in the same way that Carruthers is very uninteresting. He is in love with Violet Smith, who doesn't care. That makes him merely a man in love, and they are a common breed. John talks to him, thanks him, smiles at him, learns the way to the guest bedroom from him, and then Sherlock is off like a shot.

The bedroom is likewise uninteresting, though Sherlock appreciates that it's at the opposite end of a large house from Carruthers. It's patterned in blue striped paper, with white bedding on the four-poster.

Dull.

"You still have powder smoke on your face."

There is John, who looks grey in the moonlight. John is never, never dull. He licks his thumb and draws it along Sherlock's sharp cheekbone.

"Crime scene," he says fondly, heading to the en suite bath to wash up.

Sherlock toes his shoes off and strips to his pants before curling up atop the duvet. He means to stay awake for John. But before he realizes his eyes have even shut, Sherlock has fallen fast asleep.

VIII. The Doctor.

In the end, Irene Adler matters to Sherlock in a way that matters less to John.

John stops being in a strop about her, which is easy, because Sherlock makes it easy. She fades out of their lives, and if she remains a brighter presence in Sherlock's head than in John's—bloody brilliant, that's as it should be. Smashing. God knows John doesn't want to think about her.

So he doesn't.

He follows Sherlock to crime scene after crime scene, and one night in Surrey he emerges from the guest bedroom of an industrial-looking country house called Chiltern Grange to find Sherlock curled up asleep on the bed with starlight in his hair. John is exhausted, so he creeps across the carpeting and switches the light off, nestling likewise on top of the covers with a quilt pulled up, because it's warm indoors and Sherlock's metabolism after a case has just concluded resembles a furnace at full blast. He expects to be awakened either by the dawn sunlight or by Sherlock developing post-case grabby hands.

He is mistaken.

John looks up at a grey house wedged between a restaurant and a garage, a lodging house probably built during a similar decade to the house called Chiltern Grange. The exterior is quite plain—it has clearly been converted to communal living. There are many more buildings surrounding it, featureless for the most part, all swallowed by greater London, and night has fallen over a clear spring evening. Lights are on in countless windows, sounds of raucous laughter drifting through the air, stale smells of chips and curry lingering in doorways. It isn't a nice neighbourhood. The girls drifting by aren't wearing much, and the men have cold eyes and hard fists. The grey house is an in-between sort of place. A place for waiting.

A very, very thin young man of about twenty-two emerges, dropping his key in his coat pocket. He looks distinctly unhealthy, in the way only young skin resting over young bones can look unhealthy if treated poorly. He is dressed all in black, with a black leather jacket that was once fine but now isn't and black jeans that fray at the cuffs. His gaunt face is pale, but perfectly shaven. He stops to light a cigarette before striding off into the night.

The instant John realizes he isn't moving, he breaks into a run after Sherlock.

He doesn't get very far. Or rather, Sherlock doesn't get very far. A little knot of people is approaching from the west. Three of them, to be precise.  
One is tall, with a familiar swagger. The others are unknown to John.

John sees a start go through Sherlock's entire body when he spies the small band. For a moment John thinks he'll turn around, but he doesn't. He adopts the most neutrally aloof Sherlock Holmes expression John has ever seen and keeps walking. The road is narrow, but at first they don't see him, these interlopers, and he's nearly passed them by when one of the men shoves him roughly in the shoulder.

"Oi!" the fellow says. "Well, bugger if it isn't. Seb, Eric, look what the Thames has washed up—it's Sherlock bloody Holmes."

Sebastian Wilkes is also thinner, and carefully dressed not to look like a target. His friends likewise look tasteful, but not expensive. The three are slumming it, John realizes, out for a nastier variety of fun than they can come by in the West End. Sherlock, meanwhile, lives here. His expression is schooled to conceal the fact, however.

"Seb," he says cautiously. "Eric. Tom."

"Oh, god," laughs Eric. He is smaller than the others, fair haired, and clearly drunk. "I prayed never to see this freak again. I prayed to all the saints on my knees. Sherlock, what in hell are you doing in Rotherhithe? Renting?"

Sherlock smiles frigidly and keeps smoking. He says nothing.

"That's right," the one called Tom agrees smugly. "Of course. This manky little poufter, he always was gagging for it. That's it, eh, Sherlock? Do you charge hourly, or by the hole?"

When the others laugh, Sebastian laughs the softest. But still he laughs, no matter how quietly, and Sherlock's eyes turn dark as iron.

"Why?" he asks, supercilious and lilting. "Are you in the market?"

Tom stops laughing. He seems less drunk than Seb and Eric, but darker. More vicious. Walking up to Sherlock, he makes a sudden strike and yanks him backward by the hair until Sherlock is pressed up against the wall of the alley with Tom's other hand at his throat.

"Tom, don't be a bore," Sebastian suggests, but he seems startled. "We're expected. Come along."

_"Listen here, you self-important prick," Tom hisses in Sherlock's wide-eyed face, "Your mouth isn't of the variety that's any good for talking. When it's talking, it does things like tell Meg that I was seeing Johanna on the side just before graduation, and you know something? I don't even think you were fucking  _listening _  to yourself. So perhaps you can make it up to me? Hmm? Maybe you can show me what that mouth is actually good for?"_

Sherlock thrashes in an ill-advised scramble to get away, but he's too thin, and he's too spent, and now that his jacket has been pushed back John can see punctures at his wrists and up his forearm, and John doesn't want to be in this dream anymore.  
John wants out, and fast.

Eric looks frightened. "Stop it, Tom, you'll upset Seb. You know they were together."

Tom doesn't drop Sherlock, but his head whips backward to Seb in disbelief. "They never were. Eric, I ought to wash out your mouth. Sebastian, you fucked the Freak?"

"What?" Sebastian cries. "No!"

Sherlock spends exactly one second looking devastated before he looks... like nothing at all. Empty.

_"Jesus, Eric, whatever you put in those pipes was laced," Sebastian protests. "No. I wouldn't touch him for love or money. Just look at the wretch. Like the ghost of a consumption victim out of some ghastly melodrama. Unlike some, I'm not actively soliciting AIDS. Eric, what is  _wrong _  with you?"_

The lie is simple, but the lie is effective in two ways. First, Tom roars with laughter directed at Eric's stupidity, which breaks some of the tension. And second, Sherlock goes limp. He simply closes his eyes and stops moving. Tom slaps him lightly across the face and his eyes flick open, but otherwise he doesn't react.

"Ah, hell, he's too far gone for any sport," Tom concludes, stepping away. "Let's be off. Wine, women, and song await. Oh, and men. We've wasted enough time on gutter trash. Fuck you, Freak, Meg was the girl of my dreams."

Eric and Tom saunter off.

Sherlock leans back against the wall, his eyes still closed, his expression grim.

Sebastian lingers. He walks up to his former classmate. "Sherlock–"

_"That was a  _lie _," Sherlock says in a choked, small voice._

"Oh, of course you don't have AIDS, I had to–"

_"You didn't have to," Sherlock hisses, gripping Sebastian by the shirt. "And not that lie.  _Not that lie _, Seb. The other one."_

"The– oh," says Sebastian, bewildered. "Why would– you didn't actually expect me to admit we'd been together once, did you?"

Sherlock laughs mirthlessly. He searches his pockets for another cigarette.

"Listen, do you need money? Food? Something stronger? Here's twenty quid if you–"

"Fuck. Off," Sherlock spits, lighting his fag.

"Don't be like this. It's ridiculous. I have a reputation."

Sherlock is fast recovering himself, his silver eyes flashing live sparks. "I hope one day your reputation is at risk," he grinds out. "And I can fix it, and I don't. And I will never need money from you, do you understand me? Thank you for telling my schoolmates I have a deadly virus. Now, go play with your rapist friends."

"Sherlock–"

Sherlock is striding on long legs back to the plain grey house. John is following, half frantic already, because he knows what's next. He knows exactly what is next. His friend's key is already in his slim hand. Then the door is open, and they are in a very dark and narrow hall. Sherlock is bounding up a flight of dusty stairs long before John's eyes adjust to the gloom.

John catches up to him, and Sherlock latches his bedroom door behind them both before turning on the light switch. The place is clean and very bare. A microscope rests on the table and a skull on the mantel. Not much else can be said of it, as a residence. Tears are running down Sherlock's cheeks and he angrily wipes them away.

"Sebastian Wilkes is a brain-damaged cow," John offers, his eyes stinging already.

"Actually, he's brilliant," Sherlock says exhaustedly, dropping his leather jacket on the floor before sitting down on the bed. He reaches for a morocco case beneath the box spring and pulls it out. "Why else would he refuse to admit to fucking me?"

John goes to Sherlock and kneels in front of him. He doesn't know if he can stop this or not. But he has seen Sherlock's medical file. And he is going to try, even if it's insane. Somewhere down the hallway Kurt Cobain is wishing that he was like everyone else, easily amused, and Sherlock grimaces as he rolls up his sleeve.

"You're amazing," John says. He puts both arms on Sherlock's knees and leans in. "You know you are. Look at me."

"I don't care anymore."

"You do," John says fiercely.

Sherlock looks so tired. His skin is like the film that clings to the top of milk left to sit on a counter. He purses his chapped lips and shakes his head. He reaches into the box for a short length of rubber tubing and wraps it around his upper arm.

"Listen to me," John growls, grasping both his emaciated wrists. "You know who I am, don't you? Sherlock? You know who I am?"

He pauses, seeming confused. "I do. But not... I don't know why. And I don't know why I let you in my flat. You must live... here somewhere. I know you've been kind to me, but don't involve yourself with this."

"I have to."

"You can't change anything."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to live here anymore!" Sherlock screams. He sobs once, and then stops. John still has him by the wrists, but he isn't fighting. "I hate it. Do you know how many types of cigar ash I can identify by sight alone? Do you know how many different brands of toothpaste exist, and that they all have the same active ingredient? Yesterday I went to the park thinking it would be quieter and there was a street fair in the way. I almost set fire to it, I was moments away from pushing over a sausage grill. I don't mean anyone any harm. It's been like this before, but never to this degree. My neighbour Marie down the corridor loves Nirvana. She has been playing that song over and over again, the Apologies one, for three days now, and it's so beautiful, that song is like Chopin, and I can't feel it, I lost it on the fifty-eighth time she played the track, and there isn't any point now. I don't care that everyone hates me–"

"They don't, and you do," John corrects him.

"And you can't know how I hate everything–"

"I don't, but I'll listen, and then I'll guess at it."

"And you seem like a good person, but I don't understand what you have to do with me."

John lets Sherlock go. He at once pulls a clean disposable syringe out of the case from a small supply of them and then palms a small bottle of morphine.

"I love you," John says as calmly as he can. "Not now, later. Well– for me, also now, but. Never mind. Not for you yet. Listen to me. I might be a figment of your imagination, and this might be a nightmare for either you or me. I don't know. But here is what you are going to do. You are going to show me the dosage you're planning, and then listen to my advice. That's all."

Looking lost and grey and puzzled, Sherlock readies the syringe. John studies his own knobby knees, studies the floor, stares at his steady hands. This had better be a goddamn nightmare, he prays. Because he doesn't want to live here either.

No one would.

Sherlock stills.

John looks up.

Right, then.

John shuffles forward until he's between Sherlock's legs, entirely invading his space but not touching him much, and puts one hand on his shoulder. It's all John can handle at the moment, because he wants to put the other hand on the side of that beautiful face and kiss him until he knows what living is actually like, but he can't. He's only going to know what living is like later. Sherlock smells like Sherlock, but also of chemicals and cigarettes and despair. John clears his throat.

"You're going to nearly die twice in your life. Well, several times, actually– no, strike that, a great many, but here are the two closest calls I know about. One is years later, when you experiment with a drug called devil's foot root for a case, because you are a consummate wanker and perversely enjoy scaring me witless. And the other is now, and they save you. And you're angry for a while about that. But oh Christ, please, Sherlock," John begs, and now his voice is wavering, and he's clutching the young man's black shirt, and the young man looks frightened. "That is a lethal dose. That is– that could kill an elephant, Sherlock. And I need you. I'm not going to tell you that you're a hero to millions or that you save the world, but oh god, love, you matter to me. You matter to me like nothing else does and I shout to the rooftops that I'm fucking you, because I will be fucking you, and loving you, and don't take that away from me just because someone else missed his opportunity. Please. I'm nothing like you, I don't even make it quieter when you feel this way, but when you do feel this way, I still think you're the best man, the most– you're the most human person I've ever known, and somehow I won you. Lower the dose. You're worried about other things, later. About the bees. The bees are not doing well, Sherlock. And neither am I, just now. You don't care about me yet. But do it for me. And for the bees."

Narrowing his eyes at John, Sherlock's tense muscles ease a fraction.

He lifts the syringe, and points it back in the bottle, and changes the–

john isn't

john wasn't

there was a

no

back

scarless john waits in afghanistan for

no

back

christ have mercy

SHERLOCK!

John awakens on the dewy grass in the middle of a beautiful Surrey night. He cannot imagine why he is out here. His face is wet, and the jeans he was sleeping in are too, and Sherlock is behind him, John's head is in Sherlock's lap, Sherlock is stroking up and down his temple with soft fingers, and all of a sudden the stars make him dizzy. He closes his eyes again.

Passing the time making deductions is generally useful, so John deduces that Sherlock is wearing the impersonal white terrycloth robe that was hanging in the wardrobe for anonymous guests of Bob Carruthers. He then deduces that Sherlock is only calm because John isn't.

"This is nice," John sighs. He rubs at his eyes. "What are we doing out here?"

"You were–" Sherlock swallows. "You were unresponsive. I mean, you were talking to me, but not making sense. You said I'd never see the stars again and I'd miss them. I brought you outside. I don't know... I don't know."

John nods. Reality is returning. He has no notion of whether the events he's been experiencing in his dream cycles are simply elaborately imagined nightmares or not. But he knows where the scar is, the very white little scar on Sherlock's left arm, and he knows that the overdose was ruled accidental, and... and that's enough to hurt. It's enough to ask how it came to be that way. He never did. So perhaps Sherlock, in his own peculiar way, is telling him. The man beneath him shifts slightly. John feels very cradled, and warm despite the damp.

"I didn't get to choose this," Sherlock says carefully. He isn't looking down anymore. His eyes have grown distant, just shreds of far-away fog. "Decide whether or not to... to  _feel_  this way about you. I know it hurts you constantly. You don't have to tell me. I saw. If I could change it all, look at you the way I look at Lestrade or any other man on the street, of course I'd wish none of this had happened. Now it's already too late, I can't help being myself along the way. Sometimes I don't even bother trying to temper it at all. Did you know that? I do intend to, always, but the threads get tangled. Anyhow, I... I wasn't meant to have a heart, and we were all of us rather mistaken about that, sadly, but I'd get rid of it if that meant never hurting you so again. I'd throw it out this instant."

Pursing his lips, John filters through layered meaning and tender hoarseness and a baritone so silken that he could curl up in it like a nest. John realizes that it ought to be very painful to listen to the man you'd walk through a napalm firefight for describe at length and in detail how he'd erase your entire relationship if such was possible. Most blokes would find that to be just about the final straw. One too many drops of acid in a jar that's meant to hold strawberry preserves, identical to the jar currently in the door of their refrigerator.

But John also knows Sherlock. And so he knows that the previous admission was akin to purposefully treading on a grenade for the taller man beside him. It might just be the most difficult thing he has ever said.

"You utter prat," John says lightly. "Fine. No, that's perfect. I give you my heart and you hand over yours, and then you talk of binning the one you've currently got stashed in there. Well, that's mine, so you had better keep hold of it." John taps Sherlock's chest, twice. "And I have no intention of giving up custody of the one I'm minding. Think of something else. You're the genius around here."

"I can't think of how to love you without hurting you," Sherlock answers.

"I don't give a flying fuck," John observes.

The detective turns still further away from John, face now entirely sideways and taut with defeated intentions. Then Sherlock's hands pull both of John's up over a warm but eccentrically beating heart beneath the robe, because Sherlock is still Sherlock. He wants this enough to allow it to happen. And John approves. It's better than what used to be enough, and more than most, and beyond what he expected even from a marvel.

So John feels the steady and deceptively normal cardiac vibrations pulse beneath his fingers, doing his level best to listen to whatever story his friend is now telling him.

Whatever the tale, John is listening.

Postscripts

About the Author

References and Related Works
About the Author

Hello! My name is Kate Forsythe (sometimes Katie), and I am delighted to meet you. Tweet me @wordstrings if you like! Feel free to roam about my work at will—you'll find very strange slash hereabouts, and do pay the warnings/tags heed before you dive in.

Please be aware that I have a single attitude as regards all my fanworks: for god's sake, take them and do whatever you like with them. I am honored that you enjoyed them at all, as they're completely crackers. You do NOT need my permission to create and post:

translations  
art  
mixes  
podfic  
Lego sculpture  
fanfic written in the Paradox 'verse or Best and Brightest  
or anything else whatsoever

Thank you for reading!

Katie is also the author of All the Best and Brightest Creatures, in which a ten-year-old Sherlock sends Jim Moriaty to prison for the murder of Carl Powers. She has also written several shorter pieces, set in the original Arthur Conan Doyle universe, which can be found on liquidfic.

You can read more about Katie and her work in An Open Letter about Fic Writers to Fic Readers.

If you would like to send kudos or to comment on _The Paradox Series_ , or would like to read the author's tags and warnings, visit the original posts.
References

The songs and poems this work refers to are, in order, the following:

"Carry that Weight" by The Beatles

"Karma Police" by Radiohead

"The Young British Soldier" by Rudyard Kipling

"Moon River" by Andy Williams

"Little One" by Beck

"Dance Me to the End of Love" by Leonard Cohen

"You've Escaped" by Aloha

Related works

Pirania has translated _The Paradox Series_ , Paradoks, into Polski (Polish).

allison3939 has translated parts one through three of The Paradox Series, 패러독스 시리즈 (here), into 한국어 (Korean).

RevolutionaryJo has created a podfic of "A Thousand Threads of What-Might-Have-Beens."

Please see the original postings and their creators' profiles for copyright information on translations and podfics.

