John Watson wrenched his hand free of the strange woman's grasp, panting, his eyes wide with terror. He jumped out of the chair next to the fireplace and scrambled away.

"John," Sherlock said, his voice full of that low, patient drone John knew too well.

"Sherlock, no," he groaned. He pointed at Sherlock's new friend, that undeniably attractive woman with the blue eyes and the weird hair, colored somewhere between ginger and ash-blonde. "That is not okay."

"I warned you."

John turned to look at his friend, aware of the new tone in his voice. What he saw confirmed his suspicions; Sherlock Holmes found all of this amusing.

"Are you laughing at me, you git?"

Sherlock clamped down on his laughter, cleared his throat, and shook off the mirth. "No! No. Of course not." Then he did something that only people unfamiliar with him wouldn't have noticed. John noticed. Of course he noticed.

Sherlock's eyes had cut over to the woman's eyes for a split second.

John was on the verge of asking what their secret joke was and whether or not it was at his expense when he felt a flood of calm swamp through his system. It was so odd to be on the verge of panic, then suddenly as serene as – well, he only ever felt this calm after a wonderfully fulfilling coital adventure, and he hadn't had one of those since –

Oh. Sadness.

He was watching this new friend of Sherlock's carefully, and he noticed that her face fell when the wave of sadness had hit him. The merriment that seemed to always be frothing in her eyes evaporated.

"Are you alright?" she asked in that blank American accent. Sherlock had introduced her as Astrid Smith, but since that time he'd called her Counsellor. There wasn't much similarity between her and his old therapist, or there hadn't been until this moment when she'd shown a sincere concern for his well-being.

"Sherlock," John said, turning his attention back to his ex-flatmate, "I heard a voice in my head."

"I warned you about that."

John sighed. "Yes, you said she could talk directly into your brain and that she could manipulate people's moods. But it's a little different hearing you say that happens and actually feeling it happen."

The world's only consulting detective had the nerve to look offended. "Did you think I was making it up?"

"I don't know. I just don't know what I thought. Okay, yes. I probably thought that you were . . .exaggerating."

"Why would I exaggerate?"

"Because you wanted me to be impressed with your new . . .friend." John looked around at the flat his old friend shared with this – well, what was she? A psychic? That hardly seemed to be Sherlock's bailiwick, but maybe things had changed. After all, none of the furniture here was familiar. The parlor was very modern: grays, whites, blacks, and soft tans, chrome and leather and what had to have been faux fur, all of it speaking volumes of luxury and largesse trying to hide itself in form and function. It didn't seem like Sherlock at all, not any of it. The man had been in possession of a Union Jack pillow and a rather Shakespearean skull companion when they'd met. "Where's your skull?" John asked, feeling thick and hating it.

Whatever it took to forget the pain and sadness, he reminded himself.

"I can help with that," the American woman said.

"With what?" John snapped, turning his focus back to her. "Did you read my mind just now, is that it?"

She shrugged. "Maybe."

Another silent glance passed between Sherlock and the Counsellor.

"What was that?" John asked, pointing between the two of them. "What the hell was that?"

The Counsellor shrugged again. "He thought something, I reacted."

John pursed his lips for a moment, then shook his head. "No."

"No?" Sherlock asked, as if the problem was all John being inflexible and not this situation being clearly insane.

"No. This is too much, even for you. It's been four months since I've even seen you, and in that time you've met – whatever she is, a psychic, I suppose – and you've found a new flat and started in on your cases again. And that's grand, but it's too much for me."

The Counsellor let out an offended grunt. "I am not a psychic."

"Where are you staying, John, hmm?" Sherlock asked, despite John's certainty that the man had already deduced the answer. He hadn't bothered to hide it. He knew that threads of the low quality, frequently laundered hospital linens surely clung to his rumpled clothing.

"You know where I've been staying," John said. He pulled himself up to his full height, trying desperately to push away whatever traces of shame clung to his circumstances.

The Counsellor sighed and rose from where she'd been sitting on the ottoman in front of the chair John had just vacated. She approached him slowly, her hands held out in front of her, palms up as if she was waiting for him to hand her something. He noticed again the silver rings on her index fingers, the silver bracelets around her shapely wrists, and the thin strands of silver connecting the rings to the bracelets. He looked up into her face, skepticism poisoning any trace of attraction. He pointed to her hands. "Sherlock, do you think her jewellery might, you know . . .?"

Sherlock sighed heavily, then wrenched up his right shirt sleeve to display his own bracelet and ring assembly. There was no evidence of the connecting silver strands, but he turned his hand and traced something, a slick reflection of light across his palm. "It's not a trick," Sherlock said, then cast another of those meaning-laden glances at the Counsellor.

She nodded and removed her jewellery. "Please," she said to John. "Let me try to help."

"Help what?"

"You're in pain," she said.

John let out a sharp bark of laughter. "And you think holding your hand will help me get over that, do you? I buried my wife two weeks ago. I'm in no position –"

"Neither am I," she said. "I finalized a long, drawn-out divorce about a month ago. Believe me, I have no patience for that kind of . . .thing."

John looked from her to Sherlock, then around at the flat again. "Your circumstances would say otherwise."

He wanted to get a visceral response from his provocative taunt; it would have reduced her to his own, low, raw level of coping and responding. She didn't give him what he wanted. "We aren't shacking up in that way. We're sharing living quarters. The most we ever do is hold hands, I assure you."

John frowned. "I'm not jealous."

She cocked her head at him, an unspoken challenge: Are you sure? That light mirthy froth was back in her attitude, and it reminded him very much of Irene Adler. "I didn't say you were jealous. I just wanted to back up my assertion that I'm not looking for any romantic attachments. Taking my hand should mean no more to you than a handshake."

"Except that I've already held your hand once and I didn't like it much."

Sherlock hummed as he paced across the room. "That's odd. I've found it a very stimulating experience from the very beginning."

"To the entire outside world that would sound like an admission of sexual attraction at the very least," John said.

"I'm sure it would."

"I don't see how this could help."

The Counsellor approached him again, moving very slowly, her hands still palm up in a gesture of supplication. "I won't bite."

"You have a slightly better idea of what to expect," Sherlock said patiently, his baritone voice thrumming through the room and sending John back in time to before, before the pain and the loss and the confusion. "It won't be so startling this time."

Another pulse of mood washed through the room. John looked around; the neutral colors on the walls and in the furniture seemed reassuring now, calming, peaceful . . .encouraging. He frowned at the Counsellor.

"I'll take it very slow," she said.

"Why are you trying to help me?" he asked.

"You're important to Sherlock. That makes you important to me." She gave him another shrug. "Besides, I've been browsing through your mind. You're a good man and you're in pain. I can't help my impulse to help."

He had so many things he wanted to say, so many questions to ask: "Sherlock, how could you take up with a psychic?" "So are you telling me you two have not been shagging? Not even once?" "I don't want to believe this. Stop making me believe this." But John knew that all of this was stalling at this point. Sherlock wanted him to understand what had changed in his life, and he sincerely believed that touching this "Counsellor" of his would do the trick. Frankly, John was pretty sure of it, too, because the last touch had blown his mind wide open and –

He sighed. He reached out to her and took her hand in his.

Close your eyes, that voice, similar to the Counsellor's but somehow richer, more immediate and intimate, said. He gasped, but closed his eyes.

John Watson, army captain and doctor, widower. Let me explain to you how I met your friend, Sherlock Holmes. John watched the scenes unfold from this woman's point of view: he felt a strained sense of anger and loneliness, a choking sense of duty, and a breathtaking gift as she followed Sherlock to a bar and outlined her proposal to him. She offered to take him on a tour of space and time if he would just help her find her wayward spouse. He saw the difficulty the two of them initially had in trusting and communicating and he understood completely. He saw how her case baffled Sherlock, and he understood that, too. Then he felt the change in her, the way Sherlock's dogged determination to do what she asked and the way the intimacy of the thought-sharing led to trust and a profound new friendship that neither had even known they needed. She was unwaveringly loyal to him as a result and, John suspected, Sherlock was returning the faith in spades.

Naturally, the adrenaline of how the case ended and the mind-blowing spectacle of the Counsellor's regeneration would have been fulfilling to Sherlock's endlessly striving brain.

He thought to pull away from her then and absorb everything she'd shown him, but she persisted. A sweet, heady sense of adventure filled him, and he saw something Sherlock had seen before him: distant stars growing into large suns, mysteriously atmospheric planets, faraway moons and fantastically elaborate nebulae.

Doctor Watson, you aren't like most humans. You aren't built the same, seeking an easy, anonymous existence of little tragedies and joys. You seek the rush of danger and the razor's edge of mortality. I can give that to you.

His face cramped in a paroxysm of pain and sorrow. Mary. He filled his thoughts with memories of her, of blonde hair and blue-green eyes, of softness and tenderness and the promise of a thousand tomorrows just the same. She represented home and forgiveness, and it had been no real hardship to give up the mad chase at Sherlock's side in favor of the richness of his Mary.

Slowly, tenderly, carefully even, the image in his mind – yes, even he was willing to admit it was a bit romanticized – changed. He had buried these memories, but the Counsellor had dragged them back out for him to recall. There had been fights after the honeymoon, extreme fights. He hadn't realized the depths of Mary's debilitating depression, hadn't wanted to face the prognosis and warnings he'd been given by her family. The dopamine of new love had saved her from it all at first, but there was no saving her from the tragic chemical imbalance that made her doubt everything he said of his permanence. She accused him of secretly wanting to rejoin Sherlock, both in his madcap detective work and back at Baker Street, even though he'd pointed out to her repeatedly that the place had been re-let and there was no chance of that happening.

Then – he'd found her ridiculously early that Tuesday morning. There had been no witnesses to her fall, but he knew as soon as he'd rolled her over from where she'd fallen, looking like nothing more than just another vagrant sleeping on the street. The flash of blonde hair, her favorite scarf woven with butterflies, the faraway gaze of her blue-green eyes. His Mary was gone where he couldn't follow.

For about an hour after she'd been loaded into a mortuary truck he'd tried to hold on to hope; after all, Sherlock had taken a very similar fall, had worn the same faraway expression, and he'd come back. But that was Sherlock, and he had been engaged in a war of wits with a madman. Suicide wasn't a part of him. He wasn't meant to be dead, so of course he'd returned. Mary had been courting death since she'd been a teenager.

Besides, locked deep in a pressurized chamber in his mind he'd hidden a secret from himself, a secret that the Counsellor had gently pried out and now showed him: It had been a hardship to trade his life with Sherlock for a life with Mary. Maybe not at first, not when she had been so accommodating when Sherlock had been so difficult, but eventually. He'd had to race home from his work at the surgery to ensure she hadn't cut herself, as she'd taken to doing a week after they'd returned from their honeymoon. She woke him up in the middle of the night, distressed that she was ruining his life. He could say nothing to encourage her, and several nights he'd stayed up and thought about how Sherlock never needed positive reinforcement, how he was confident to a fault – arrogant, some would say. He had missed the cocky idiot, and the guilt over that – the emotional distance from his wife, his increasing regret for having traded everything for her – well. It was probably enough to say he was sure he bore some of the blame for what she'd done.

John finally pulled his hand away and slumped into that same nearby chair. He was silent for a while, simply staring down at his hands where they'd come to rest in his lap. For a miracle, Sherlock and the Counsellor preserved his silence, the former by gazing out the window of this posh new flat and the latter by closing her eyes and, very likely, reading his thoughts as they flowed through his consciousness. He flashed his eyes at each of them, then felt a small smile erupt on his face.

It was just like Sherlock. Bloody just like Sherlock.

"So what are you proposing?" he asked, wiping tears from his face.

Both faces directed their unsettling gazes at him again. "Move in here," Sherlock said, no politesse, no preamble, no games.

"Sherlock," the Counsellor said, and the tone of her voice reminded John of the way he'd said it once up on a time.

"No, no, it's okay," he said, rushing to Sherlock's defense. "It's nice to hear someone's wishes stated so plainly." He sagged a little, considering his alternatives. He could continue to sleep at Bart's, sneaking into whatever empty patient rooms were available because he couldn't bear to return to the home he'd shared with Mary. He could go back to that home and try to recreate something of a life, even though he knew the family he'd found with her would have nothing to do with him due to his spectacular failure at saving her from herself and her suicide meant there was no money to sustain it. He could try – again – to patch up his relationship with Harry, but she hadn't been any more impressed with his failure than Mary's people. Those were his only other options, really.

Or he could stay here. He could pick up the thread of the life he'd led before and try to figure out how it would work with this Other, this woman who'd supplanted him, replaced him, and yet welcomed him on Sherlock's merits alone.

"Where would I stay?" he asked.

They both grinned. "Oh, just you wait and see," Sherlock said.