This is one I actually found in a file of discarded fics, and I thought I'd resurrect it and post it since I haven't posted anything in a while. It's a precursor to "In Not So Many Words," if I remember right, which is why I think I never uploaded it...I didn't like it as much, and it says kind of the same thing but with a lot less dialogue (ok, no dialogue at all).

But I read through it, decided I was fond of it, tweaked it a little, and here it is. A character study set during HLV answering the question where was John in the mind palace?, written back when all the angst was still just days old.

Emrose

Standing at the Gates

The bullet entered his body with a dull snick, and he felt nothing at all. An uncomfortable pressure, there in his right ribcage, but no pain. His mind had gone unnervingly blank, and the woman facing him was staring at him with soulful, unrelenting eyes; he wondered vaguely why she looked so sad.

"Mary," his voice said, for it was Mary standing there, though she had begun to blur around the edges. Her voice murmured something like a great rush of water in his ears, something about sorry. Why were people always apologizing? He knew she was sorry, but things were starting to narrow and fade, and he knew now that he had been shot, and that Mary had done the shooting, and she was sorry, yes, very sorry, but why…

He could no longer see Mary. He could no longer see anything, and somewhere the part of his brain that was still thinking knew that he was falling. He was falling, and there was absolutely nothing he could do.

And so he entered the Mind Palace.

It was a dizzying, dazzling place that was all too familiar and yet very, very strange. He had never been here when he was dying before, and everything was rather like a painting of somewhere he had once known very well—an Impressionist painting, perhaps, with blurred lines (like Mary's face) and dull, pastel colors mostly in shades of white and gold.

Molly: The Healer. White and pale, distressed and anxious. A center point, a fixed point, a focal point…always, always she had been a fixed point, unchanging, always there exactly when he needed her. Molly. Sweet, gentle, fierce Molly. Fall backwards.

Anderson: The Courtier, the face of the world. The foil—unfortunately necessary, and occasionally and rather shockingly intelligent. He still had that odd beard -why had he come back from the dead and everyone had facial hair? Was it a thing people did, grow facial hair when someone died? Whatever was the point?-but his analysis of the situation was succinct, corresponded with Molly's, and therefore must be correct-right this time, Anderson, fall back indeed. Give yourself a round of applause-.

Mycroft: The King. Omnipresent. Annoyingly accurate. Ruling the Palace like he ruled the British Government—with a heavy, vicious hand that was always genteel, always condescending, and always ever-so-slightly brotherly. Don't go into shock. Always so tactful. Regrettably indispensable.

Mary: The Court Jester, the two-face. The clever one. The wife, the woman –not The Woman, but a woman, a very clever, very quick woman- who had lied, the woman who had sent him here to His Palace, the woman behind a mask who left all the clues he had been too stupid and sentimental to follow. Stupid. Human error. And she had beaten him because he let her, because he had not been able to destroy her instead.

Redbeard. A whole room that he had never opened belonging to Redbeard. And Redbeard came, and saved him from himself.

But then he fell again, and he was in a cell he had never before entered, with the one man he had never known resided in this darkest part of himself (the Enemy had breached the Mind Palace, but if he was honest, James Moriarty had breached it from within, because this man belonged here as much as if not more than any of the other players).

James Moriarty: The Devil incarnate. The shadow in the back of the hall who tears worlds down and claims the throne for his own.

And as he lay there on the cold, cold floor with a madman and nowhere else to go, he locked them all away again. All of those people in his Palace, who had all exploded from their rooms to thunder about his corridors and shepherd him back towards the light, had failed. They had all failed, and he lay there with a hole in his chest and his life draining away, and he no longer cared.

John had not come.

Molly had come. Anderson had come. Mary had come. Mycroft had never left.

John had never come.

Sherlock woke to the hum of monitors and the gentle whirr of the machines that were holding him so tenuously to the thing called life. It was dark—only the faint blue-green glow of the machines illuminated blurred, shifting shadows that chased each other across the walls.

He was not quite himself—there was something drawing at his brain, something dampening, like rain on a window—he could remember the alacrity of his brain working at optimum, but he could not grasp it. He closed his eyes again. Even the lights of the machines hurt his eyes, and even if there had been much to see he did not know that he would have understood it or cared.

He lay there, hazy, for several moments. He did not know how long, but it felt only seconds had passed before he felt himself drifting away again, and he did not know how to stop himself, or if he even wanted to.

But then something down near his right hand (useless thing, lying there on the bed, couldn't move it, couldn't feel it, useless) shifted in the dark, and he cursed his disloyal, sluggish eyes as he wrenched them open again and blinked against the harsh glare of his vital signs blinking at him from six different monitors.

He opened his mouth, but his throat was cracked and tight. He did his best to focus on whatever it was down there (miles and miles away) by his hand, but the shapeless lump would not resolve itself into anything coherent to his drug-induced (morphine, and lots of it) consciousness.

He had just decided that rising up on one arm to get a closer look just might be worth the pain when the lump stirred and heaved a deep, sleepy breath. It snuffled into the bedclothes, groaned stiffly—Sherlock caught a flash of a wristwatch and a gold glint—wedding ring—and fell silent again.

John.

John, who had refused to enter his mind palace when Sherlock needed his stabilizing influence most, was holding a midnight vigil at his bedside.

Sherlock closed his eyes and tried to process this new data. It didn't make sense, not in the confused, scattered thoughts wandering through his brain, not in the haze of pain and thirst and loneliness that was making it difficult to breathe, much less think.

But John was there, that was obvious, and even if it didn't make sense, it was, so that much he could work with.

Sherlock told his right hand to move, and it twitched sullenly. He demanded that his right hand move, and it edged painstakingly across the miles of empty bed sheet between his little finger and the lump that was John until it made contact with the cool, smooth skin of John's wrist. John's breathing hitched gently, but he did not wake.

But even that minute, insignificant contact was enough to clear the haze in Sherlock's mind, and his cracked lips tried to smile. He still hurt, he still couldn't keep his eyes open, and he wanted desperately to just float away again and not be awake or alive, but he knew now why he was.

John had not been in the mind palace because he had been waiting outside it.

John Watson is definitely in danger.

What had that ghost, that spirit of a long-dead Moriarty said? Sherlock didn't know how much of those precious few seconds before he'd blacked out had been in his own mind and how much had been hallucinations, but he supposed that, in the end, they were the same thing. But Jim Moriarty had mentioned John, had mentioned the name that belonged to the very man that Sherlock had been searching for but could not find, and now here he was, forehead resting on the edge of Sherlock's bed, sound asleep but waiting, waiting patiently as he always had.

It's always you, John Watson. You keep me right.

Very suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to hear John's voice, just to make sure…of what, he didn't know. But he opened his mouth and forced what he thought might have been a reasonable approximation of John's name from his aching vocal chords, and moved his hand more firmly against John's.

But even as John stirred, mumbled incoherently under his breath, and then sat up groggily and peered in his direction through the darkness, Sherlock was slipping away again. He heard John say his name, felt a gentle pressure against his hand and then something cool against his forehead, and a single word drifted in and out of his head as if it had passed by on a silent, dark river of drugs and pain.

Cerberus.

But the connection was vague and indistinct, and he wasn't sure it made complete sense, because John certainly wasn't a giant three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hell.

But before he analyze it further or share the reference dredged deep from his memories of Mycroft reading him Greek myths on cool summer nights out on back porch with John, who would surely laugh at the whole preposterous allusion, he was gone. Lost in another dreamless, morphine-induced sleep while John rang for the doctors and inspected the monitors himself in bleary impatience.

John had never come, but he was there now.

John Watson: The Champion. The Guardian of the Palace. Never inside, but forever and always standing without the walls to guard the rooms and the towers and the bulwarks against invaders and injustice and bullets and psychopaths and even Sherlock himself.

You keep me right.

And since Sherlock was alive and breathing, John must have done right, must have defeated the enemy at the gates and kept the Mind Palace standing against the latest and greatest from the enemies who wanted it destroyed.

He always did.

Thank you, as always, for stopping by. -Emrose