A/N: Written for an anonymous Tumblr prompt which read: "Can u write something about adlock in hospital or amnesia adlock? The thought of Sherlock or Irene dying isn't very nice, but I think it's an interesting plot"

They wasted so much time Before, all part of the elaborate game. Only, it wasn't a game of their own devising, and neither of them won, not really. Yet, she can't find it in her heart to regret the game for without it they would never have crossed paths.

She would send a bouquet of roses to Jim Moriarty if she could, if he was still living. A thank you for services rendered, though he didn't realise it at the time.

She should send him two bouquets, actually. It was the turn of the game when he forced that rooftop showdown that ultimately led to the two of them together in Saint Petersburg. Sherlock was pale, then, and drawn, his hair blond and he moved stiffly thanks to the knife wound scored along his ribs. And she had the information he wanted, though she was auburn then and it took him a moment.

They broke cover together and stayed that way until Serbia, and then…Then.

She got word to Mycroft, and he should have had her disappear but even then he could see what she was blind to.

Mary Morstan. Agatha Gwyneth Rennick-Ashbury. She recognised her in a heartbeat, how could she not? And as Sherlock slept in the bed that for so long was his though now was theirs, she slipped out and extracted a number of promises. Safeguards and guarantees.

Information is power. She can never forget that. One carefully dropped word and Mary would have ceased to be a problem.

Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side.

She should have listened. She should have paid more attention. Sentiment. How blind could she have been? And now look where it's gotten them!

She'd kill that woman herself if John didn't look ready to do it for her.

(If it didn't mean leaving this room. Leaving Sherlock, for any amount of time, and how her heart aches at the very thought of not being here beside him.)

She's never said the words, and now they crowd her throat alongside all of the stories, the memories. How odd that she never once murmured them, whispered them, declared them to the world and now-

No. She must not think like that. She cannot think like that.

But his fingers are so cold.

She rubs them between the palms of her hands, and permits herself to think that maybe he can feel her.

There should be music. He should have music. Yes, the whoosh of oxygen through the tube that parts his lips is rhythmic but it's not music. And nor are the footsteps in the hall, the muffled voices and words that they think she can't hear.

Pneumonia…second surgery…cardiac…must consider the possibility

Whispers borne to her ears on a gentle breeze and they're wrong, they're all wrong, they must be. It's not Sherlock, it's someone else. It has to be someone else.

Distantly, she is aware of the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks, but it is as if it is happening to someone else. She cannot be sitting in this chair and Sherlock cannot be lying in that bed, his fingers so still entwined with hers, face ashy pale.

It's not her Sherlock. It may look like him, but it can't really be him.

And it's all her fault, that woman, that she-devil. He trusted her, they both did, and now –

Sentiment. Such a flaw. She tried to burn it out of herself, she did, but then she saw Sherlock in that crowded street in Saint Petersburg and the scars split right open.

I was just playing the game.

The game is over. Dead. And has been for so long. How could it touch them now? How could it leave Sherlock splayed on a wooden floor and his dark red blood soaking the crisp white shirt that he put on not two hours before after rolling out of their bed, the stain a rose unfurling into bloom?

(If she'd known what was going to happen, how soon he'd be wired to machines and a surgeon forcing his heart to beat, could she have said the words? Or would he have looked at her as if she were mad?)

They staged a fight. Staged a break-up. Nothing new, all part of the plan. They planned to stage a reconciliation. Then suddenly he was in emergency surgery and he wasn't breathing and his chest was cracked open so the bullet-torn damage could be repaired, and next thing the whole story came tumbling out from her half-numb lips, the streak of blood across John's cheek from where he wiped on hand across his face looking black against his blanched skin.

And now, she squeezes Sherlock's hand, brushing her thumb gently over the smooth pale skin before setting it down to rest next to him. Ever so carefully, softly, as if she could hurt him now unconscious and pumped full of morphine, she presses her lips to his forehead and murmurs, "This wasn't part of the game, you know."

They are not the three words she longs to say, the three words that she has never said and he has never heard. Those words have no place now. They will not help them to win.

This is just losing.