"Sherlock, not the time to talk!"
"I don't see how," Sherlock replies, "this is any worse than when you had a heart-to-heart confession about feelings while I was putting peroxide on the gallbladder—"
"Because," John wrenches out in between gasps, "we were not in mortal danger then."
Sherlock scoffs. "We are not in mortal danger. The roofs are perfectly broad, your balance is unimpaired—"
He takes the jump from one house to the next. His coat is the most discomfited thing about him. John tamps down all the bits of his mind concerned with the way his lungs seem to have been given a light coating of acid and halved in capacity, and lurches across. He catches himself clumsily and scrambles off after Sherlock and, distantly, the man in the red jacket.
"And we're the ones doing the chasing, not the other way round."
John refuses to bother with even saying what.
"The gallbladder was atypical, too. Much more interesting."
Do you even connect with reality anymore, John thinks. "Gun," he coughs.
Sherlock flings his arm across to the left and lets their would-be assailant fall into a skip with a bullet in his knee.
"I didn't kill him," he says flatly. They take the next jump.
"I'm glad," John says. "I know."
Sherlock races off, black and blue.
