He recalls the point of impact, the crashing sound of metal on metal, the shattering glass flying in his face, John screaming, an acute pain in his frontal lobe as he's nearly thrown from the cab but stopped by the quite solid frame meeting his forehead, he remembers the flashing lights, John's thin hands grasping at him, trying to pull him from the wreck, feeling him for injuries, more pain, opening his mouth to insist I'm fine, John, I'm fine, and finally darkness.
Everyone always wondered what the sleepy village of Leadworth held for a man as young and brilliant as Sherlock Holmes. He used to live in the city with the other young and bright people and his lover Irene, solving murders and saving lives instead of lying, helpless, in bed day after day. It had been such a close shave with that poison capsule, they all said, only minutes more and he would have surely died; they had yet to know even if he was mentally capable of returning to his previous work, as he was incapable of speech. His surgeons had advised the move to the country for the fresh air. He came without Irene but with a day-nurse.
John Watson, on the other hand, was in Leadworth because he had lived there all his life, grown up there, gone to school there, returned from military service there, met Sarah there, married her in the church there, and now would raise his family there, even though his own medical career suffered in the village's tiny surgery.
Occasionally, on particularly late nights where Sarah had already gone to bed and he didn't want to disturb her quite yet, his mind wandered to strange dreams he had been having of the new man in town, this Sherlock Holmes.
First, there is all blackness, and then there is Sherlock, surrounded by the blackness. He is breathing as heavily as though he had just run a long way uphill, but within moments he is able to recognize that he is not alone. His mind is too aware sometimes, he thinks, too active to be still and calm like normal people. Always thinking, always solving something. Only one small sliver of moonlight enters from a crack in the wall, and then he knows that there is someone there because the moonlight is shining in a space only an inch in diameter on the damp skin of the stranger with him. Their hand touches his shoulder. His skin is clammy, or perhaps it is their skin.
Then, as quickly as he came to, there is a flash of heat, of blinding white light that is more in his head than around it, and then blackness again. And then they have collided like trains on the same line, without warning; teeth gnashing together in desperation, his hands soaring through the stranger's short coarse hair, their hands roaming over him – he has hardly any clothes on at all – his hands slipping from hair to neck to shoulders just as easily, if not a bit more methodically. He moved his hands down to the stranger's chest, his mind blessedly empty just for once, until his hands brushed against the wiring of Semtex and those hands—!
—he wakes up breathless, aching and in a hospital, with no memory of the past three weeks save for the moment of impact.
When Mr. Holmes first arrived in the village, fresh out of hospital where he'd had to undergo countless surgeries, chemical treatments, and radiation treatments that would leave his lips black with sores for months after, some people wondered why the government had gone to such extremes to ensure that the man living from job to job survived this encounter with the poison capsule. Then the court case and the story of the genius (and once-handsome) hero Sherlock Holmes' deductive skills began airing on their televisions, and they knew then that the man was an indispensable commodity.
It wasn't long, however, before the government's indispensable commodity's day-nurse stormed out of his house with her Wellingtons squelching in the mud, raving about impossible men. John was, being over-qualified for his own job, the only man qualified enough to continue Mr. Holmes' treatment. The detective had been just barely well enough to travel in a medical van to Leadworth, and not much else was physically possible for him; he couldn't eat solid food, walk more than a few steps, or even clothe himself. He was still on three injections and four medications a day to flush the poison from his system, and it was passed on to John to take over these responsibilities.
Usually this sort of work didn't bother John in the slightest, having taken care of many invalids during his internship, but usually the people he cared for were cheerful or at least talkative. Mr. Holmes was unable to speak as of yet, and seemed ill-inclined to partake in any of John's attempts at engaging him, instead staring far off into space as if John did not exist at all.
"How are we feeling today, Mr. Holmes?"
Silence and staring from what must have been a handsome face once, now mottled with red and gray and black sores from the chemical treatments.
John rubbed his forehead. "Can you at least give thumbs-up or thumbs-down, Mr. Holmes? Maybe a scale of one-to-ten? How's the pain today, Mr. Holmes?"
The man who very well could be the smartest in the world closed his eyes.
"Mr. Holmes, I've been over this with you every day for two weeks, we need to get through this in order to—"
"Shh."
John blinked with surprise. "Excuse me? Mr. Holmes, you shouldn't be—"
"Shh," Holmes repeated, his lower lip cracking and oozing blood with even that small effort. He rolled his eyes as John fussed over getting a tissue and cleaning him up.
"I suppose that's what you get, shushing your nurse," joked John lightly as he wiped the blood from Holmes' chin. His patient's dark eyes bored into him like drills, slowly breaking his resolve. "What is it, then? You want a pad and a pen?"
"Shh…Shh…Sherlock," the man forced out, his voice barely more than a ragged whisper, even though it obviously took great effort and a few more splits in his lips.
It took several moments of cleaning the blood from Holmes' face and wondering why someone would go to such painful effort just to say their own name before he realized what his patient had implied with that one word.
"Sherlock it is, then."
The disfigured man fell asleep as John tossed the tissues in the bin.
"I just had the strangest dream," was the first thing Sherlock said when he regained consciousness. John seemed to have fallen asleep in the chair beside his bed, snapping upright and straightening his battered jumper as he did so. He watched as John carefully inspected the machine monitoring his heart and his brain waves, taking in the readings within seconds while John continued to stare. "Don't you want to know what I dreamt about?"
"You nearly died, Sherlock," replied John as though commenting on the day's weather. "You nearly bled to death in the middle of the street. Definitely not the way I'd imagined you to go."
Despite his thought process going at less than one third of its normal speed, Sherlock still had a hard time shifting his curiosity from what he'd been doing in a car when the last thing he remembered was waiting for John to come home so he could do the washing to what John had said only moments ago. "And what did you imagine?" he asked without much interest. "Did they give me morphine? Damn them, I feel like I'm thinking at the rate of a normal person."
John finally looked up from the readings and cracked a smile. "I imagined you'd die solving the crime of the century. The one that even you couldn't solve."
Sherlock looked strange, John suddenly realized as he looked down at his friend in the bed, without his scarf or coat, and smiling.
"I made progress with Sh-Mr. Holmes today," said John absently as he took off his shoes on the edge of the bed. Sarah was not paying attention, peppering his neck and shoulder with kisses. "He's told me I can call him by his first name now; put about four splits in his lips doing it, that was nice of him."
Sarah burrowed her fingers underneath the collar of his shirt, humming absently from her spot beside him.
As he thought back over the day, John smiled. "You know, Sherlock did the funniest thing earlier, he—"
"Darling, I don't care about what Sherlock—"
Don't call him that; he didn't say you could call him that, John thought out of nowhere.
"—did. I don't want to talk about him."
He fought a sigh. It had been a long day and he wasn't up for this. "What do you want to talk about, then?"
"Let's have a baby, John."
John practically did a somersault from jumping off of the bed so quickly. "Sarah! Goodness! You can't just spring that on a person, you know, that causes heart-attacks!" His wife scoffed, but he ploughed on regardless. "Sarah, darling, I just…I just don't think we're ready for a baby yet! We've only been married for…" Oh, good lord. "For…"
Oh, blast it all, he'd forgotten how long they'd been married, and Sarah was giving him That Look; he excused himself to sleep on the sofa with her shouting, "Five years, John!" at his back.
Had it really been five years? No, that couldn't possibly be right. He hadn't been out of the military for five years. His tour had ended six months ago, and he had married Sarah…he had married Sarah a year after his return. But wait, if he had been discharged six months ago and married Sarah a year after his tour and yet they had been married five years…something was wrong.
He jumped the last two stairs down to the sitting room and practically ran for the calendar in the kitchen. A deafening drumbeat filled his ears, drowsiness overwhelmed him, and even as he tried crawling across the linoleum floor he dropped and was asleep.
John fell, almost like a leap or dive, out of the hard plastic chair at Sherlock's bedside, gasping for air and clutching his head. His body was still bruised and battered from the accident – well, of course it was, it had only been a few hours ago – and he had to crawl upright. Sherlock was staring at him as if he had grown two heads.
"What on earth were you dreaming about?" asked the man in the bed. "You were pitching a fit, muttering and fidgeting. I had half a mind to call the nurse to drag you into another room."
"Sorry," gasped John, rubbing his eyes as he climbed haphazardly back into his uncomfortable chair, "strange dream."
Sherlock nodded knowingly. "I had a nightmare as well. Dreadful stuff, really, very nasty." There was a long pause in which John tried his very best not to ask about Sherlock's dream, only because his had, in some respect, been nasty as well. Those sores on the dream-Sherlock's face had been just indescribably horrible. "You were married, John. I shudder to think…"
He did his best not to snap to attention, instead locking his hands together between his knees and staring at them. He cleared his throat. "Really? I was married in my dream too. Wait, why is that a nightmare?"
Staring up at the ceiling with a small smile and a shake of his head, Sherlock looked only too delighted to answer. "You don't want to know, John."
After another three days of intensive care, John called a cab and he and Sherlock returned to 221B Baker's Street, where his housemate dove immediately into his next case, an intriguing one with very little clues to go by. In fact, there were no clues to go by, but that only made every millimeter of progress infinitely more exciting to the world's only consulting detective.
"No," John blurted in the middle of a long silence, in which Sherlock had been inspecting a fingernail-sized scrap of cloth under his microscope. He's been at it for four hours, plenty of time for John's doubts to gnaw at him. "No, I'm sorry, I need to know."
Continuing as if there had been no interruption, Sherlock casually nudged a dial with his long fingers. It infuriated John to no end, being ignored like this; he knew that Sherlock's work was important, but he had thought…well, he'd thought that their, well, their friendship had at least gone up a notch in priority in the past weeks. He strode purposefully around the table and, being sure not to jostle the evidence, boxed Sherlock round the ears until he looked up and scowled. "Why would the thought of Sarah and me being married be nightmarish to you, Sherlock?"
"Sherlock," he continued when his friend merely tried to turn back to his work, in a low voice that might have purveyed fear. "Sherlock…are you beginning to…remember something? From before the accident?"
There was a very long period of silence that was not quite as long as the one John had interrupted but still felt very long when Sherlock was staring at him like that. All he could do was wait and try not to think about the exact thing he was hoping, in the back of his head, that Sherlock would remember.
For several long, anxiety-ridden moments Sherlock stared into John's eyes. Then, with the fwoosh of his coat around him as he sank into a chair, he said, "Ah, well, nothing to be done about it. Why? Did we solve a case?"
John let out a heavy sigh and leaned against the wall, trying not to think about how strange that night had been so long ago. "No. Never mind."
As he moved toward his computer to pound out his frustration on his blog, he thought he heard the faint beginnings of a drumbeat in the back of his mind.
"Will you turn your computer down, John?" called Sherlock, absorbed in his microscope again. "I can't focus with…those…drums…"
There was a loud thump, and when John turned to see Sherlock asleep on the floor he fell as well, vision blurring and blacking out.
"Alright, what is going on?" John shouted to empty air as he arched his back to sit up on the hardwood floor. He was met by only silence until he strained his ears and made out a faint sound across the house. "Do you hear me?" he repeated, "What's going on?"
As he rounded a corner he made out a dark shape crumpled across the bathroom floor, letting out little moans of pain. "Sherlock! Oh, Sherlock, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I must have…" He trailed off, carefully pulling the invalid up from the floor, cleaning him up, and then half-carrying him to bed. "How do you feel? Where does it hurt? Sherlock?"
The dark-haired man opened his eyes and stared into John's so intensely that there had to be a deeper meaning behind it. His slender fingers twitched toward the pad and pen at his bedside, and with shaking hands John helped him get a grip on both, writing large child-like letters with his scarred and unsteady hands.
DREAM?
John fell back into the armchair at Sherlock's bedside, eyes impossibly wide with shock. "You had the same dream? This is just weird…"
Sherlock was tapping at the pad again, having written something else while John was having a minor heart-attack.
OR REALITY?
"What?" asked John slowly. "What are you talking about? Of course we're in reality; what are you thinking?" He laughed to himself. It sounded too high and unnatural. "I should talk to your physician about your medications if…you're…Sherlock?"
DRUMS.
"You hear them too?" he whispered, unable to stop himself from leaning forward before shaking his head. "No, stop, this is ridiculous. They're just dreams."
"Are you so certain, John?"
John spun around at the sound of a second voice in the room to see an attractive young man in an expensive suit watching them with a smirk setting his manic eyes sparkling. "Who the hell are you?" he shouted defensively.
The new man laughed; it was a harsh and unforgiving sound that grated against John's eardrums like nails on a blackboard. "I am no one, John Watson. But, for simplicity's sake, call me Jim the Dream Lord." As he spoke he strolled casually around the tiny bedroom, knocking things to the floor as he went. "Where are you right now, John? Leadworth or London? Has it been a year or six since you left the military?"
Floundering under the weight of the war his mind was raging against itself, John opened and closed his mouth several times as he gained his bearings. He instinctively – although he didn't know how it could be instinct if he'd never recalled doing it before – looked to Sherlock for help. He was asleep.
"No-no, John," teased Jim mockingly in a haunting falsetto, "no phone-a-friend in this game, and even if you could he has just as much idea as you. He can't speak in one world and can't remember in another. You'll just have to soldier on – pardon the pun – alone. Oh, and another thing." He pointed one finger at Sherlock's chest, and the ill man began wheezing and moaning in his sleep. "You've got a time limit in both, and there's only one way to get back home. Die in the dream, and you'll wake up in reality."
Having rushed to his patient's side the moment he started ailing, John barely registered what the strange younger man had said, and his brain didn't respond quite as quickly, too busy trying to steady Sherlock's breathing. "And if we die in reality?" he asked frantically over his shoulder, only for it to be clapped down by the Dream Lord.
"You die," he said loudly. "That's why it's called reality, you idiot. Ta-ta."
John turned completely around to face him, and found that Jim had gone, scrambling for a syringe to help Sherlock as the drums began echoing in his mind. Within moments he had slumped across the bed, heedless of Sherlock's sensitive body cavity as he was overwhelmed by sleep.
"Oh, god!" groaned John as he woke up on the sofa in 221B with a splitting headache, the Dream Lord's laugh still echoing in his mind. He lay still with his hands hiding his face from the light, trying to keep the details of the bizarre dream from slipping away like water in cupped palms. Sitting slowly up, taking absurd stock of where he was (definitely 221B, but why should he be doubting that?), wondering if Sherlock was alright (of course he was alright, why wouldn't he be?), and trying to discern if there was someone besides him and his friend in the flat (what?).
Ripping his face away from his hands like pages from a book, John leaped to his feet and started pacing the flat, shouting for his partner all the while, in a frenzy until the commotion drew Mrs. Hudson's attention from downstairs. "Mrs. Hudson, where is Sherlock?" he asked a measure too loudly, grasping the old woman's shoulders in his hands.
"Goodness, John!" squealed the little woman. "Sherlock is right there! You could have given me a conniption!" Still giggling with fright she ran downstairs again, and John followed her direction to find Sherlock staring down at his microscope, back erect and hands hanging limp at his sides, frozen, clutching thin air.
Cautiously, knowing his friend's penchant for shooting things when bored, John put his hands on Sherlock's shoulders. "Sherlock?"
The man did not flinch, probably due to the fact that he had already been alerted to John's presence from all the shouting, but he did turn slightly toward him. His eyes were bloodshot and he was blinking slowly.
"The person who murdered this man was not a psychopath or an enemy, as previously suspected; they're too clever for that," hoarsely said Sherlock. "We're clearly dealing with…well, a high-functioning sociopath."
It couldn't have been helped; John knew those words too well in his flatmate's constant arguing against Donovan calling him "freak" and "psychopath". He staggered away from Sherlock's stiff frame, hitting the cluttered table with the bang of falling books. It couldn't be possible. Sherlock could not be a killer. He was too clever to think that he wouldn't be caught.
Someday, he's gonna get bored.
Someday, we're gonna be standing around a body and he's going to be the one who put it there.
"John?" asked his friend's – his friend's! – voice from somewhere up above (he had slipped and fallen to the floor without realizing it), his thin face seeming to float. "John, pull yourself together, man; are you a soldier or not?" He was dragged to his feet and dumped into a chair, Sherlock's face inches from his. "Listen to me, John," he urgently said, deep commanding voice lording over all traces of cognitive thought in John's head. "I…I could be wrong, but I don't remember anything from the weeks before the accident, in which I could have done anything when you were gone for more than an hour. This is vital; do you remember anything different or strange in my behavior?"
John's eyes fell closed. Yes. Yes, of course there had been something different or strange in Sherlock's behavior. John had come home soaking wet from the downpour outside to find Sherlock lying on the coffee table and staring at the ceiling in a way John had never seen, even in his friend's lethargic phases. John has asked if everything was alright and Sherlock had told him he had to get out of his clothes in a deadpan voice and before he could agree he had started sneezing and the next thing he knew Sherlock had guided him into his bedroom and pulled his jumper off for him and then he was kissing John, all the while muttering, almost whimpering, I am human, I am human, I am human against his lips and jaw and god, he had never done this before but it was nice, and with only a minor struggle he had been stripped down to his damp shining skin and they were plunged into darkness with only a sliver of moonlight marking their way through the unknown.
"John, look at me," Sherlock sternly said, taking his shoulders so roughly in hand that his head bounced uselessly against the back cushion of the chair. "Which is it?"
"Wh-what? Which what?"
"Was I behaving oddly or not? Which one?" demanded Sherlock as if John were acting dumb on purpose, and he pulled himself together.
"Of course," he choked out to steady himself. "Of course, what am I thinking? I…well, I mean to say…I suppose…"
Sherlock leaned closer, eyes glinting suspiciously, rooting out the truth that he might not even want to face. "What is it?" His hands tightened slightly, and John felt his face grow hot.
"We…well, you, you and I…"
"John, what?"
John closed his eyes and let out a sigh, pressing his fingers into his eyelids. "We…we shagged," he said in a voice that struggled to even reach the volume of a whisper as Sherlock's hands flew away from his shoulders. "We shagged, and you don't remember it. It was the only time you acted out of the ordinary at all."
When he dared look up his flatmate was sitting, dumbfounded for probably the first time in his life, on the edge of the sofa, hands steepled in front of his mouth while his wide eyes stared at the space two inches above John's left shoulder. "You and I had sexual intercourse," he said in his level, steady voice that came with recording data, making John flinch.
"Yes."
"Did you enjoy it?"
Before John had time to do more than sputter both his face and body had betrayed how much he had cherished that night. He swiped a hand across his red face. "Christ, Sherlock…of—of course," he choked out. "Of course I did, Sherlock."
Either his mind was playing games with him or Sherlock Holmes was smirking.
"You utter bastard," he breathed in amazement, beginning to crack a smile himself. Sherlock was having him on. "I'm sitting here terrified out of my wits that you're repulsed by me, that we only shagged because you'd gone mental, and you're just trying to get me to admit you're good in bed?"
"Oh, I already know I'd be more than adequate," said Sherlock from behind his hand. "And I really do not remember, but that doesn't mean that…well, that I wasn't hoping for it to happen eventually."
Relief and joy flooded John so rapidly that his heartbeat pounded in his ears. Sherlock's eyes widened beyond even their usual size before he slumped over on the sofa. It wasn't his heartbeat in his ears, John realized; it was the drums.
When John awoke he was on the floor beside Sherlock's bed in the little house, and he instantly began looking around for his patient. Sherlock was still in the bed as before, scribbling on his pad.
John reached out one steady hand and knocked his knuckles gently on the hardwood floor. Solid. This place, this life, felt more than real. The colors weren't too bright or too dull, the smells blooming to life in his nose, every touch reliable and sturdy beneath his fingers. Surely, this was real, and that other life in London, where Sherlock was able-bodied and prone to crippling boredom, where they were friends or perhaps more than that, where Sherlock had such a lapse as to commit murder, was the dream. That would didn't feel real until he was in it. Of course, he supposed the same could be said of this world.
"J-J-John…" came a strangled whisper from the bed. Sherlock. Of course. He leaped to his feet and stumbled to the bed, checking Sherlock's condition and softly murmuring, "You alright? Okay?"
Instead of nodding or shaking his head Sherlock pressed the notepad into his hands, the childish scrawl spreading across the page with the ex-detective fervent passion.
WE LIVED TOGETHER. YOU WERE MORE THAN MY FRIEND, AND YOU STOPPED ME FROM TAKING THE POISON.
"Yes, but you had also killed a man," John reasoned, much more comfortable here than in the dream, forgetting for a moment that Sherlock's every movement caused him pain. Sherlock pushed weakly at the pad to get him to read more.
I WANT THAT WORLD. I DON'T CARE. ANYTHING BUT THIS.
John tried to put the pad down with a twist of pain in his gut. "You'd rather be a killer facing the chair than on the road to recovery?" He fought not to add the words "with me" to the end, and still Sherlock gave the pad another shove.
I CAN'T EVEN TOUCH YOU.
Swallowing thickly past the sudden lump in his throat, the doctor reached down and brushed his fingers against Sherlock's calloused ones. "Your motor-skills are improving," he choked out, and allowed himself to chuckle when Sherlock let out a small huff of amusement. "You should be up an about in no time, and once your medication has done its work the pain will be controllable, and then you can…well, you can touch all you want. Without pain, that is."
At the look Sherlock sent him, he turned furiously red and thought rather forcibly of his wife, but his determination was short-lived when the image of Sarah packing her things and leaving weeks ago bloomed, unbidden, in his memory. It was a most freeing sensation, and it helped John to lean down and brush his lips against Sherlock's dark curls. The younger man leaned into his touch, mottled lips pressing tightly together.
Their moment of silent companionship was interrupted by the sound of what seemed to be a distant explosion and many screams in the village outside. John straightened and, keeping out of sight, peered out the window just as a brick came soaring through the glass. Sherlock let out a strangled yell as the debris flew easily across the tiny room over him, shining like diamonds in his hair. "Sherlock, you alright?" he asked, his rushing to the bed interred by hands winding across and around his chest, slamming him to the floor as drums thundered him away struggling.
John's scream was cut off in his throat as he instinctively swallowed his terror, too used to nightmares of the war not to. He looked frantically around. Sherlock was lying prone on the sofa, still dead-asleep, still in Leadworth with those people who had broken in the window. "Sherlock," he rasped, crawling to the detective's side and shaking his thin shoulders. "Sherlock, wake up, please."
"You really think that's going to work, Doctor Watson?" drawled the oily voice of Jim the Dream Lord, stepping out from behind a stack of debris as though he had been waiting back there all along. A slow grin spread across his rugged face, igniting a burst of righteous anger in John's chest. "Come now, man, use your imagination now! What is the worst possible thing that could happen while the six-foot-four-inch consulting detective is unable to move, or, say, run?"
Right on cue, before John could hit him, the phone in his pocket started vibrating; in the second it took him to look down and see Lestrade's number and back up the Dream Lord had gone. Fine, good riddance. Shaking with rage and frustration, John pulled out the phone and answered with a hissed, "What?"
"John, where's Sherlock?" replied Lestrade immediately, skipping the niceties and, in fact, sounding extremely hurt and angry.
Cold dread, seeping through his chest and stomach, made it almost impossible for John to respond immediately. "I don't – he – what's going on, Greg?"
Lestrade sighed shakily on his end of the connection. "There's been CCTV footage found," he gritted out, "of Sherlock and the murdered man walking together to the alley where he was killed, only two hours before the body was discovered."
John might have choked or dropped his phone, because the next thing he knew he was kneeling on the floor, scrambling for purchase as the DI continued. "John, is Sherlock with you now? Dimmock's the one who got the video and he's sending a car your way now, and…and I…well if Sherlock would want to disappear now would be—"
He ended the call with the slam of hurried fingers, immediately jamming in a new number whole still crouched over, pressing the phone against his ear like a lifeline. It rang only once before being picked up. "Mycroft, we need help, we need a car and passports and—"
"I know, John," interrupted Mycroft in his steady politician's voice, "and I'm sorry."
Sherlock's hand slid off the edge of the sofa and hit the floor with a thud that made John flinch more violently than it should have. "No," he protested, knowing how desperate he sounded and not caring. "No, Mycroft, don't you do that; don't say you're sorry. You're the British government; you can fix this, you always fix it when Sherlock messes up."
"And I can't this time," insisted the older man, sounding tired and thoroughly miserable. "I am sorry, John, but Sherlock has killed someone. He has crossed a line, and his behavior can't continue." He paused briefly, as though seriously considering his next words. "It's a pity; I thought you would have helped him."
That broke the camel's back, and John screamed unrestrainedly in his frustration. "GOD DAMMIT MYCROFT, YOU CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS TO HIM!" His voice broke, he threw the phone clear across the flat, the world shimmered before his eyes, the drums swelled to a deafening beat that made his ears want to bleed, and he slumped to the floor.
When John awoke again he was handcuffed to the radiator, trying to sit up as quietly as possible. There was the Dream Lord, in another impeccable suit, standing over Sherlock, running the barrel of a pistol over his ruined lips with a terrifying grin on his face. There was glass digging into the palms of John's hands as he tried to move without being detected, but also reassure Sherlock that all would be alright.
"…a smart man, Sherlock," Jim was saying with an Irish lilt in his soft voice, teasing. "I would threaten you with the obvious, but everything I have to say has already crossed your brilliant mind, hasn't it?"
He reached up his thumb for the hammer, and John knew that there was no use trying to be quiet now. "N-no, don't!" he blurted out, unable to restrain himself at the sight of the resigned gleam in Sherlock's bloodshot eyes. "You, stop, don't hurt him. Talk to me, please, just stop this."
Jim smiled an eerily calm smile up at John. "How nice of you to join us, Johnny-boy," he greeted cheerfully. "I'm afraid we've started without you. Hi."
Unsettled by his disturbingly playful falsetto, John assumed that this Dream Lord really was mentally unbalanced and had heard about Sherlock in the news, determined to track him down for some reason, and John was no good with psychological things like that. He hadn't even been able to get rid of his own psychosomatic limp, for Christ's sake. "Alright. Hello Jim. What. Why are you doing this to us?" He made fleeting eye-contact with Sherlock; the ex-detective with nodding his head frantically in approval, reaching slowly for the gun now hanging loose at Jim's side.
The younger man made an odd, pitiful face that elicited much more disgust than pity from anyone witnessing it. "Well, Doc," he shakily said, "it's just that…I love to kill and hurt people, and Sherlock here likes stopping people who like killing people. And that's getting in my way. The cabbie should have done it if his stupid, fat brother hadn't intervened."
With a groan of rage brought on by the jibe about his brother, Sherlock made a swipe for the gun and nearly toppled out of bed when Jim swung around and hit him. "Now, now, Sherlock," he scolded, "let's not get carried away, or Daddy will be very cross." He swung his arm in a wide arc and aimed directly between John's eyes. "We wouldn't want an accident to happen, would we?"
Sherlock pushed himself to sit upright against the headboard, practically sweating with the effort it took, and glared daggers at the Dream Lord gone sour but otherwise seemed to silently comply. Jim was practically giggling with glee.
"Isn't this fun, talking nicely like big boys?" he asked. "Now Sherlock, I do hope you've been getting my emails, and my messages? They were rather important, you know. Shall I refresh you? One of you has to die today. I don't care who; I'm so very changeable." Still aiming the gun at John, he seized a handful of Sherlock's hair and shook him slightly for emphasis. "I told you I would burn the heart out of you. Remember, love?"
"Yes. I. Remember," choked out Sherlock between gasps of pain, his voice stronger than John had heard it outside of the London dream world. Seemingly satisfied, Moriarty released him. "I d-don't have…a heart."
John wanted both to protest against whatever the two men were discussing and also scream with the pain in his head when he heard the brokenly whispered dream-words I am human, I am human, I am human echoing in his head, more real than anything he had heard in this world.
"Jim," he said shakily to get the younger man's attention, who very reluctantly turned away from Sherlock to grin at him, because he knew now. John knew what the Dream Lord wanted. He wanted to hurt Sherlock, because no matter what he said about being a sociopath Sherlock Holmes was human. John would not make Sherlock decide when it would happen. "Jim, don't draw it out. Just shoot me if you're going to shoot me."
A laugh, cold and heartless and altogether unpleasant, rang through the room. "If you say so, Johnny-boy."
In a shaking hand Sherlock seized one of the syringes, pulled out the plunger, and jammed the needle into his own arm, pumping air into his vein. "iGame over," he snarled viciously before falling back onto the pillows and closing his eyes, waiting. John could almost see it in his mind's eye, the bubble of air travelling through his veins to his heart, where it would compress and block all blood flow, causing what looked like a heart attack to passers-by. John and Moriarty watched in shocked silence as it happened, Sherlock gasping desperately for air, and then not breathing at all.
"No," John gasped, pulling against the handcuff around his wrist until he felt blood dripping down his wrist. "NO! SHERLOCK!"
With much more dramatic flair than necessary, Jim the Dream Lord flung out his arms and dropped the pistol carelessly onto Sherlock's unmoving chest. "See you later, Johnny-boy; I'll just leave you there for now. I'm sure someone will find you, eventually." And with that, he strode out the door, abandoning John with the corpse of his patient and friend only a few feet away.
"Come back here!" he screamed until his throat felt raw. "Come back here! I'll kill you! Sherlock-!" His voice broke and he dropped his head, chin pressing to his chest as he breathed heavily through his mouth in an attempt to remain calm. But he couldn't remain calm, everything was wrong, Sherlock was dead, and John couldn't help him, he couldn't do anything; everything felt so surreal and—
He gasped as though someone had dumped a bucket of ice-water over his head. He looked around for something, anything that could help him, because he knew it now. He knew the truth. A shard of broken glass dug into his palm, a large one, and he grasped it tightly, too tightly, cutting his own fingers in his haste. He was a doctor. He was an army doctor, and he knew what vein to cut, how to make it quick.
It still hurt very much, and that cast a niggle of doubt in his mind that perhaps he had guessed wrong, but he pressed on because he was past the point of no return, and if he didn't continue it would be slow and painful. The blood ran over his arm and his leg onto the floor, coloring the wood crimson as the world swam before his eyes. He swayed, fell back against the wall, tried to go on to the other wrist but was too weak already. It was going so fast, too fast, he wanted to live, he wanted that life with Sherlock in London, he wanted to wake up, I am human, I am human, I am human…
John died on a bloody floor in Leadworth.
John woke up in 221B Baker's Street in London, tears streaming from his eyes as he lurched up from the floor, looking around to find Sherlock coming slowly to.
"John?" asked the detective as sirens approached. "John, what happened, I don't remember—"
The sirens were too close, too loud, Mycroft couldn't help, everything was swimming in and out of focus, his pistol was in his hand in the blink of an eye, and John knew; he knew again, the great and brilliant truth of it all was that he would have to go through it twice.
"John?"
He shot Sherlock in the head with a steady hand, and then turned the gun on himself as footsteps were pounding up the stairs.
They woke up in an empty warehouse, not even strapped down or secured at all, utterly disoriented and scrambling for a decent grip on reality.
"Both dreams," murmured Sherlock, running his hands shakily through his hair. "How did you know?"
Those sharp, silver eyes turned on John, and he stared down at the ground. Sherlock hardly remembered any of it. He didn't remember killing himself like John remembered killing himself, but he did remember John killing the both of them in the flat. And John couldn't tell him, not when there was still the threat of whoever had done this coming back and finding them, and so he seized the sleeve of Sherlock's jacket and pulled him out of the building.
Sherlock seemed satisfied with his seemingly-temporary aversion to the question until they had gotten four blocks away from the warehouse and John still hadn't answered. Then he pulled back and forced them to stop (how was he so much stronger when he was so bloody thin?), leaning against the wall beside where John practically fell against it, hands on his knees to catch his breath. "John," he repeated more firmly, "how did you know they were both dreams? They seemed so real every time we were in both; even I couldn't sort it out, and yet you—"
"You died."
That shut him up. He went ramrod straight and shoved his hands into his pockets. "Pardon?"
John swallowed roughly against the lump in his throat. "You. You died, Sherlock. In the Leadworth dream, you died. Killed yourself, so Moriarty wouldn't kill me." He turned his head away in a dreadful attempt at not letting Sherlock see the shadow of horror in his eyes at the memory of it. But even as he dwelled on it, the memories began to slip away, like all dreams do once the dreamer calmed down.
"Had I figured it out in Leadworth, that I had to kill myself?" asked Sherlock, looking uncertain. "Is that how you knew?"
"I knew it was a dream because a world where you're dead can't be real. I just couldn't be real; I couldn't…" he swallowed thickly and swiped a hand over his face, "I couldn't let it be real."
It seemed to be the first time in reality that Sherlock had been completely lost for words. He stared mutely across the gap between them, lips slightly parted, and before he could say anything else unsettling John kissed him. He had seen himself in those dreams, seen everything that could have gone wrong in his life, every consequence of him and Sherlock never meeting or Sherlock getting too bored and he was so glad that they had met, and that he would never let the world's only consulting detective stray from the path toward becoming a good man. Never.