AN: WAIT! Have you read 'A Study In Silver'? If not, GO AND READ IT, because it's the first instalment of this series! I also recommend 'Please Respond', which is a sort of prequel to the series, set in 2006. It's not essential to read it, but whatever . . . ;D

Surprise! It's the prologue to my sequel to 'A Study In Silver'. I'm full of birthday cheer, so I'm letting you have this bit earlier than promised. Look out for updates in the new year! - B.

p.s: I don't get a lot of reviews - it would be nice if you could drop me a line to say what you thought after the forthcoming chapters! Constructive criticism welcome. Thanks a lot x

Also, I ALWAYS forget to do this . . .

DISCLAIMER: I do not own BBC Sherlock, nor any of the characters. I hope you read that because I won't remember to do it again, probably. You'ce had your fill. :)

Rated T for language, dark themes, violence, blah blah blah. Glad that's out of the way, too!

"Just tea for me, thanks,"

Blood spurted in pulses, ever quickening with his frantic heartbeat. Agony tended to do that to the number of beats per minute his cardiac muscle racked up. The sheer amount of it never failed to shock him: on the work surface, on the floor, on the mugs . . .

Sherlock sighed, twitching with the strain of inaction. His feet were up on the arm of the sofa, knocking together in an absent fidget, as he lay sprawled in what looked like an exact, accurate tableau of boredom. His fingers were knotted on his chest, and he blew out his cheeks, following the lines in the ceiling's patterns. It was difficult to stave off boredom at the best of times, but John wasn't exactly helping. He wasn't being overly chatty this morning, if the utter silence from the kitchen was anything to go by.

He couldn't read his flatmate's mind, either. Since gaining his friend, he'd made a vow to stick to the motto he'd set himself:
Conversation is for friends. Telepathy is for others.
Well, it only applied to John, seeing as John was his only friend. Everyone else was, to him, fair game. He would still talk to John in his head if he needed to say something that he didn't want others to hear, but he wouldn't pry into particulars that weren't already being freely shared.

He wasn't sure what John would make of this, but he was too proud to admit that he'd made an altruistic decision - it would be the death of his reputation. Besides: it would be interesting to see how the constant fear of having his mind read altered John's behaviour. Maybe after a while he could tell who knew about his powers from their behaviour around them by equating it to John's right now.
You've got yourself a fan, Mr. Holmes.

The sort of sickening regret that came as an afterthought to grievous accidental injury swept over him in waves, almost bodily grabbing him and seeping deep in through his pores as an adrenaline-fuelled rush of cold. He held his wrist with his right hand, and plunged it into the sink to prevent further spillage. It seemed gruesome that he should care about the cleaning up, as he stared at his own red-tinted expression on the back of the knife. Crimson spurted at a sickeningly low velocity all over the stainless steel, every time causing him to wince, as if the hugely dehabilitating pain he was already experiencing wasn't enough.

It would be a few minutes yet . . . Maybe it would go unnoticed . . . ?

"Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows . . . Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapter One, line one. That should have been deleted, I suppose. But with all of the questions I get about the case it concerned, it's probably best to keep it stored . . ."

There was a long pause. No spluttering surprise came as a result of Sherlock's sudden literary outburst, nor its unusual nature. Clearly John was too occupied with unloading the dishwasher, he supposed.

"Biscuits would be nice, too," Sherlock continued, adding to his monologue, "I could have a case at any moment, you know . . . No chatter as of yet, but there's always something . . ."
Chatter. It was a normal-people-friendly code to refer to thoughts that Sherlock could hear – sometimes they could come from all the way across London if he was desperate for crimes to solve, and he really focussed solely on searching. If that didn't work, he'd use nicotine patches – or something stronger, in days gone by – to broaden his range.

Obviously, though, when he 'heard' a crime being committed, he'd learnt to begin trying to solve the case before the police came to get him, but only in the comfort of his own head. If he turned up at the scene of a crime before the police did, even he couldn't convince them that he wasn't hiding something. More than once, of course, he had been accused of being the killer. It was a difficult charge to shake, but he'd always managed – so far.

Trust the criminals of London to abstain from committing any crime he could possibly have some fun solving at in these desolate, useless days of endless waiting.

He leapt up, irritably throwing himself into the chair next to the desk, and opening John's laptop up. When he thought of the injustice of having to hide the thing he was best at, it always put him in a bad mood. This was currently the case, worsening his already dire temper, on top of the impatience he couldn't abide at having no real way to apply himself. No minds to read; no cases to solve. Bored.

He checked his email.

He checked the bleeding index finger: half-amputated, hanging on by about a quarter of the fibres. It would stop bleeding of course, though not soon, and blood loss was a definite issue. Even he got faint from blood loss sometimes, it was only human . . . Proof if it was needed that he was human, after all, perhaps.

He heard his flatmate get up, and then slump himself into the chair by the desk. He wanted to call out in protest, as he heard the sleuth typing on his laptop, clearly hacking it as he stood powerless at the sink; he couldn't possibly accost the detective, without his voice sounding weak with pain. If he opened his mouth; if he stopped gritting his teeth for just one moment, he'd groan and Sherlock would know something was up. Frankly, it was a bloody miracle he hadn't had his mind read already.

The dishwasher. He's been unloading the dishwasher, when he'd been confronted with a knife draw with a jar of human eyes in it. That was all it had taken: the knife he'd been going to replace into the draw had jerked as a natural reflex, trapping his index finger between it and the kitchen work surface .

Seemingly of its own accord, the knife had hacked not quite all the way through his flesh. Biting back a sigh, John realised it would only be proper to finish the job. He'd learnt that it was better to just cut off seriously damaged fingers rather than continue in the hope they'd heal by themselves: a few times, he'd had to wait several days, with it just hanging off by a few fibres or a piece of skin, for it to heal. If he got rid of it totally – while it would hurt much, much more – he wouldn't have to go around explaining why his finger was still hanging on by a thread, and why he hadn't gone to A&E.

So, he took the already scarlet knife up in his clumsy right hand, and contorted his face as he pressed his left palm flat to the bottom of the sink. He tried not to think and not to breathe as he slammed it down on the already extremely deep cut, driving the blade down with sudden, brutal force.

He couldn't stop himself; he couldn't contain the curse that slipped out from between his gritted teeth, and through traitorous lips.

"John?" A low voice asked, sounding curious. His telepathy lapsed from its scan for interesting crime: after all, it appeared there was something interesting going on in the flat.

He hauled himself up, and strode, intrigued, across the room towards the kitchen. His arms he held at his side and his fingers he bent like question marks, as they took a hold of the curtain, and pulled it back with rare curiosity.

He was confronted with John abruptly turning to him with a forcefully blank facial expression: lying or at least concealing the truth was not his forte. He mumbled that nothing was happening, though Sherlock hadn't asked. Did it even count as lying if you were this bad at it?

He was clearly trying to hide something in his hands from his flatmate; he was standing at the sink, which was the perfect place to conceal something messy. What if he'd broken one of Sherlock's jars? What if he was trying to hide his guilt by hiding the wrecked experiment in question?

However, the edge to the air indicated blood: the tang of metal and salt was enough for him to pick up on it. He caught on, and his eyes widened, his mouth even falling slightly agape in a dumb, almost caricature depiction of surprise.

"What did you do?" Sherlock hissed, suddenly urgent, dashing up to John and easily peering over his shoulder.
"No! Don't-!"John protested. But it was too late: Sherlock's bright eyes were fixed on the gory carnage in the sink. "-Look . . ." John finished lamely.

He watched closely the sleuth's reaction. He seemed shocked, but there was something else in his glassy, pale silver eyes that he couldn't identify:
"Oh, God – you're not one of those, are you? Does blood freak you out?"
"John," Sherlock said, drawing his eyes with great strength away from the four-fingered left hand in the sink to look the doctor in the eye, "That is probably the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say. I am a consulting detective. I deal in brutal crime and serial killers, and you think I'm scared of blood? A lost finger at the bottom of my sink? I've had fingers in the sink before - Granted, this particular situation is a little out of the realms of my experience, but . . . I'm extremely willing to learn, if only you'll teach me . . ."

His body was pressed up against John, as he muscled in to have as good a look as he could at the still blood-spurting hand. However, he was lightly holding John's shoulder, stroking it in a way that John thought maybe, just maybe, was supposed to be comforting. He was clearly in pain: he held himself awkwardly, uncomfortably, and was rigid and still, lest the pain increase.

"No, no – relax, obviously. The tenser you are, the more it hurts. I'm surprised you haven't discovered that by now, with all your experience . . ." Sherlock mumbled in a low whisper. He continued, "You've made a mess, though. Mrs. Hudson would be shocked . . ." He smirked. "I demand a forfeit for wrecking the kitchen-"
"What sort of forfeit . . . ?" John asked warily, twisting round so he didn't have to stand with his hands around his back. Sherlock was perpetually in contact with him, bent over to get a better look at his hand. John was slightly fearful as to what one of Sherlock's forfeits might include, especially with the way he was being stared at and the constant low whispering.
"Oh, let's say – a few beakers of your blood? . . . And maybe the old finger – unless you're going to reattach it? I'm not sure how it works . . . Do you have to – what I mean to say is, must you grow a new one, or could you possibly-?"
"Yes, I grow a new one - and no, no! You cannot have the old one! That's sick! You can't - you can't just collect bits of me that I cut off by accident, that's – that's just-"
"You don't understand. If I collect a sample of your cells, I can compare it to my own! I'll compare the blood, too!
"Don't you see? As a medical man, if not as the owner of the blood - with cells from normal people collected from Bart's morgue, and my own, and yours to make sure mine's standard for people like us-"
"You'll be able to identify cellular discrepancies between the normal people and, um . . . Us . . . If there are any - but it's a finger, Sherlock! How're you going to use a finger?"
"Come on, John! With a tissue sample as large as that, I could conduct all sorts of pioneering experiments! - Don't you want to know more about your power? – What's the limit? How long will it last? – Will you live forev-"

"Sherlock," John cut in: a growl of a warning, designed to stop him in his tracks. "Has it ever occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, I don't want to know if I'll live forever? . . . No one should be able to live forever . . . No one. It's not right – it's totally . . . Well, it's . . . It's lonely, and-"
"John," Sherlock gripped John's shoulder tightly, his long fingers digging into John's shirt. His eyes flicked to his flatmate's hand for a second in surprise, before he caught on.

It was happening: John had to concede, even though his power was vaguely repulsive to him, this bit was rather amazing. First, the bones: new ones appeared to stretch out of the stump, and Sherlock heard John's barely-concealed pain, as he tried to breathe through it. Bone-growing was clearly almost as painful as the original wound had been. Sherlock tried to disregard whether or not his friend was in pain: this was an amazing, unseen phenomena. He couldn't be distracted, even if it did make him, for perhaps the first time, empathise with another human being.

The muscles, veins and nerves were next, growing up like vines from the stump of the finger. They interwove, and eventually reached the point where the old finger had ended, and they stopped, and retraced their paths, consolidating until an exact replica of the muscles and veins and nerves of the old finger remained.

After this, the skin: it spread like mist across the exposed tissue, covering it in pale, unblemished flesh-colour that was brighter than the faded-tanned skin of the rest of John's hand. It appeared to Sherlock to have a cooling effect, as he observed John sighing with relief.

John wished he hadn't been so overtly in pain: he usually managed to keep the pain for things like this to a minimum on the outside. However, he thought Sherlock was probably distracted by the processes taking place in front of him to care much about whether or not he was suffering.

Lastly, the fingernail: it grew up from under the skin, and finished at the tip of the finger, short and perfectly rounded at the end. John flexed his still blood-covered hand, and for the first time creased the perfect skin of his finger, stretching the stiff new muscles in it.

"Bravo . . ." Sherlock breathed, as John looked up at his attentive, prying and fascinated eyes. He was like a child; he was seven again, and discovering toads under rocks and foliage, and cataloguing them in accordance with the book he'd taken from Mycroft's room.

"You do know you said that out loud, right?" John teased, a weak smile prevailing as the last of the pain and trauma subsided. The entire ordeal, from first cut to total recovery, had taken three minutes.

"Pretty slow that, actually," commented John, as he watched Sherlock, who was still totally transfixed on the finger. His eyes and the twitches of his lips and eyebrows indicated that his mind was processing the new data at a mile a minute.

"It'll be a little stiff for writing or typing with for a while, if you're interested in the functionality. The skin isn't as elastic as the old skin . . . I hadn't cut it full off, by the way – I severed it completely, because it's quicker to heal that way. Appendages regrow, rather than reattaching," He clarified.
"Appendages?" Sherlock asked, raising his eyebrows but not looking away from the hand.
"Yeah – fingers, toes . . . You get the gist . . ." He said, but his new finger was suddenly cold, and he realised Sherlock had gone a step further than staring, and had taken his hand in his own. His hands were cold, yet soft. Good for pastry-making, something crazy in the back of John's mind half-remembered, making him frown.

Sherlock felt that the skin was free of time's contours, as he crouched slightly to its level, trying to be as gentle as possible with his mobility tests.

"Um . . . Sherlock?"
"Complete and immediate motor function, no need for neural pathways to be reconstructed, it's an exact replica of the previous appendage, yet . . . A newer, more pristine edition . . ." Sherlock was muttering to himself now, and could barely hear him.
"Strangely, it took you less time to recover after you got shot than it did to regrow this, but I suppose it's easier, or at least less complex, to heal damaged organs and skin than to regrow an entire new appendage – intriguing, to say the least . . . Yes, John?" He asked eventually, as he bent the finger this way and that, and John felt slightly awkward. It was a sentiment he knew the consulting detective wouldn't reciprocate.

John used his right hand to point over to the laptop, which he could see had a small icon that had just popped up on the email programme.

Sherlock stood up suddenly and flashed a satisfied look at him, his face lifting and lighting up with smirking, unholy glee, as he said:
"You've got mail,"