It hits him almost instantly as he steps into the flat- the wallpaper shimmers in his field of vision, dipping in and out of space by it's on volition. Pale blue stripes wage war with the black victorian print, fighting for dominance on the wall. The couch, the bullet holes and the face do nothing, witnesses to Sherlock's slowly unfolding irregularity. Blinking against the abnormality, Sherlock stands still in the quiet flat. The shimmering in his right eye doesn't abate, and it's only after he gives it a moment of thought that his face falls in realization.
Stupid, stupid. After a week of traipsing around London without rest or respite, Sherlock could feel his body shutting down of it's own accord. Head swimming, he tries to calculate how long until he would be reduced to a quivering mess on the floor.
The persian rug advances slowly towards him, all kalidescope colors shifting towards an unusual pale blue, creeping moss in an otherwise still forest.
His head gives a savage pang; a warning if he's clever enough to take it as such. Not long at all then, it would seem. Senses jarred and eyes burning, Sherlock realizes he may only have minutes, and where is John?
Pulling out his mobile, Sherlock squints at the screen, the words swirling almost out of sight.
At work, whatever it is: no. JW
Sherlock's heart drops to the pit of his stomach. He wouldn't come, the surgery would be tied up with that nasty bout of the 'flu, and John would be stuck late, innoculating the locals.
Typing out a response is difficult, and Sherlock finds that for whatever reason, the predictive text on his phone doesn't know what a migraine is. After struggling with it for a few minutes, Sherlock manages to type out a more or less understandable message.
Migraine. Besoin de vous. SH
Sherlock only notices the switch to French after he hits send, but trusts that John will infer meaning well enough.
-Please, John, I need you.
Tossing his mobile onto the coffee table, he winces as it hits the hardwood, a fresh nick in the black plastic cover of his blackberry, but it would be none the worse for the wear. John would lecture him on taking better care of his things, when he got home.
If he got home.
It feels like ages since he sent the text to John, but the effort of retrieving his phone from the table seems herculean- impossible in his current state.
Mid afternoon sun drifts in through clean windows, cutting clean through his eyeballs to scorch his brain. Sherlock needs the slick comfort of a dark room and absolutely nothing on; something that the sunlit, cluttered sitting room cannot offer to him.
Looking around the room makes his head spin, and he is only just able to get to the small bathroom inside his bedroom before the megar contents of his stomach make a reappearence in the sink. Running the tap makes his head throb painfully, the ache spreading down the left side of his face. John, John John.
Toeing off his shoes and shrugging out of his jacket, Sherlock lies face first onto the bath mat, the soft mat providing only miniscule relief. Long, terry cloth fibres lick away the growing damp on the side of his face, but do very little in the way of solving his current problem.
Everything is amplified, battering against his normally strong mental defenses. But the tidal waves of useless information overcome him, drowning out any other sound. Mellow notes of jazz mingle with the heady lobster bisque being served next door, sick and soured through old wood and carpeting.
Clamping his hands to his ears does next to nothing, Sherlock feels small against the weight of his mind falling apart. His empty stomach churns, a product of his now raw nerves, and the rush in his throat is only too familiar.
Leaning over the toilet with his vagus nerve pulsing, he manages little more than bile. The harsh coppery tang clings to his mouth like a film, but Sherlock can't move anymore.
Strength gone, Sherlock collapses, face flush with the linoleum, veins pulsing against temples like rising water in a dam. John, John John. It's a steady mantra, interrupted only by the never ending teeth gnashing pain between his eyes.
John, John, John, John, John...
–
When John enters 221B, the silence in the flat is nearly deafening.
Sherlock should be postrate in his chair by a growing fire, the ridge of his lips pushed up against steepled fingers, his eyes closed in deep thought. But the scene is absent. Ashes lay undisturbed on the bottom grate of the fireplace, and the chair beside it lays curiously dormant.
This is an abnormality.
Using his rather shoddy deduction skills yield no result, and after shedding his coat and bag on the arm of the couch, he turns in a semi circle in the sitting room.
"Sherlock?" He should be home, where is he?
Suddenly remembering to check his messages, he finds an odd, hastilly typed message from his flatmate waiting in his inbox. A good portion of it is in french, oddly enough, but what Sherlock did manage to communicate in the proper language is cause enough for concern.
Grabbing up his bag, he heads through the kitchen, pausing at the half eaten breakfast still sitting on a table crowded with labware and petri dishes. Not odd, nothing unusual, moving on.
Continuing into Sherlock's bedroom, he very nearly trips over a discarded shoe, and it isn't until he peeks into the bathroom that he finds the detective in question.
Curled up on the floor, pale and sweating bullets, Sherlock had finally collapsed after a week long case. A strip of creamy white skin pokes out from between the hem of his socks and his dress pants, and the dark blue dress shirt that had looked crisp that morning was rumpled- he'd been lying like this for a while then.
John has a hard time looking at this objectively; the sight alone is enough to warrant more concern than usual. Sherlock had never before looked this fragile before- red puffy eyes and a tear stained face look so foreign on what could be called a malicious face.
"John," Desperation was a tone that John hoped to never hear from Sherlock. A slender, white hand reaches for him, and John kneels quickly beside his friend.
Voice hollow and rough from the silence he had no doubt imposed on himself, Sherlock tries again. "John, please." Shaking, freezing fingers make contact with John's wrist, the pad of his thumb resting on the crest of his palm. John watches Sherlock's brow furrow at the effort, his complexion paling further in the dark bathroom.
Reaching for the dark head of curls, it turns suddenly, shaking violently into a porcelain bowl, back muscles rippling visibly from the strain.
At once, Sherlock feels an arm wrap around his waist, peeling him away from the cold porcelain with a gentleness that only John can offer. Sherlock's head lolls back, John's soothing hand on his brow. Bereft of the maroon jumper that he had earlier, John's gingham arms pull him back, supporting him when his own strength had failed him like so many other times. Fabric rustles against his skin, stirring up a faint scent of antiseptic and tea- but its one of the few things that doesn't push Sherlock over the edge.
"Have you taken anything?" John shifts the ailing detective from his lap, standing up in the small bathroom. The silence, followed shortly by a telltale flare of his nostrils tells John all he needs to know.
"Right," Sherlock slumps back on the lip of the bathtub, listening to John's soft footsteps retreat from the room. The pounding between his ears had changed, moved. A shrieking, clawing agony seeped down the left side of his face, the skin tingling at the surface, and Sherlock wonders briefly if it's possible for the cumulative pain to kill him.
Breathless and in pain, Sherlock flounders as John presses a towel and a glass of water into his palms. The water leaves his mouth feeling clean-ish, but the heady stench of bile is still present.
The act of thinking is enough to make his head spin and give another painful throb.
Pills rustle in a bottle as a gingham colored blur kneels in front of him. "Here, take these, and we can see about getting you to bed."
Water slides down his dry throat, accompanying the two white pills that he had been handed, the paracetamol will take time to work, and Sherlock is nearly at his end from the pain.
"John," Sherlock moans, "John John John." The steady mantra brings John close, his hand brushing across the hollow of his cheeks. Black curls find John's shoulder, and a hand snakes into his hairline. Feeling his heart beating through his eyeballs, his head presses into John's shirt.
For his part, John is at a complete loss. Migraines are something that he just does not understand, and Sherlock's migraines are something probably completely different. "Tell me what I can do," John purrs into his ear, careful to keep his voice low.
Pale hands rip into his arms, digging into the flesh beneath the blue. "Make it end, please." His voice hitches, begging. Sherlock doesn't beg.
Not ever.
"Lets get you off the floor now." Sherlock's nearly dead weight beneath John's grip, sagging against John's front.
"Just close your eyes, we'll be there soon." John's murmuring voice continues, brushing into Sherlock's ears like the flowing fall. Sanctuary against the constant, bitter beating of the world around him.
Suddenly, Sherlock finds himself on his bed, limp on the edge like a marionette. Light filtering in from a slowly setting sun cuts into the room; and Sherlock winces, covering his eyes with his arm.
John's rifling through his drawers, trying to find his pajamas. The sorting scheme will be beyond him, and after a minute of unsucessful grunting, a pair of striped pants and a charcoal shirt are unearthed from their pine confines.
John's fingers brush his chest, pushing the pearl buttons through the holes one by one. Skin nearly against skin, Sherlock stays perfectly still, quelling the gooseflesh beneath his touch.
"Sorry," John mutters, pushing the shirt off of Sherlock's back. The clam of skin pulled too tightly over ribs and hips is incriminatory of Sherlock's poor eating habits, and John's concern ratchets up another few notches.
"I know you've not been eating, but I'm not going to press that issue just yet." John tosses the shirt in Sherlock's lap, giving him a deciding look. "You can manage that and your pants, I'll be right back."
When John returns from the kitchen with a cold compress and more water, he finds Sherlock curled up above the covers, still in his slacks and dress socks, but having managed the shirt. Sighing to himself softly, John plants a knee beside Sherlock, settling himself into the bed. Coaxing the detective from his fetal position yields no result, and John settles for rolling his rigid form into his lap. Soft brunette curls sprawl across heavy denim, caking the side of Sherlock's head and neck.
Pressing the cloth to Sherlock's face elicts a low moan, and Sherlock curls up closer to John, his head hugging John's hip.
"Has this ever happened before?"
Sherlock groans into John's shirt. "If I neglect myself for too long, yes."
John chuckles. "You think you would have learned by now." A red rimmed cerulean eye pokes out from a dark fringe, regarding him with indifference.
"My work, John."
"No," John starts, pulling the compress away slightly to garner his attention. "We need to lay down a few ground rules regarding this sort of thing."
"I've been perfectly fine up until now." Petulant, and stubborn through even this, and it's nothing less than John expected.
John snorts, peering down at Sherlock. "Right, perfectly fine."
"Well what do you want me to say?"
John resists the urge to throw up his hands. "Oh I don't know. Maybe 'I'm sorry I'm such an idiot John, I'll sleep eight hours a day and eat when I'm hungry.'"
The smile that Sherlock gives John doesn't reach his glassy green eyes. "John you know you can't expect that of me."
John moves the cloth to Sherlock's brow, dabbing at the beaded skin gently. "Well, this cannot continue." His voice is gentle as his fingers comb through sweat logged curls.
"This?" His voice is a whisper, and it very nearly doesn't reach John's attentive ears.
"You'll work yourself to death if you aren't careful."
Sherlock seems to consider this briefly, and John watches his gaze dim. "I know." It's a quiet admission, one that John didn't think to ever receive.
"I can't ever find you like that again. I mean it."
Sherlock's fading in John's arms, but very clearly resisting the sleep that John knew he hadn't gotten in a while. The cloth is removed, balled up and tossed into a hamper on the far side of the room, and John shifts beneath Sherlock.
A hand finds John's; pale and veiny in the low light. "Don't leave," Sherlock won't beg him to stay, he's done far too much of that already tonight, but the please is implied in the silence that follows.
John stays, his hands tracing the well worn patterns into Sherlock's temples as his breathing slowly evens out.
Bizarre as it is, the connection between himself and Sherlock is something that John cannot quite understand. Primal at it's core, friendship set on fire. Reliance, trust, love if looked at in the right light.
Maybe it would all go back to normal in the morning. Sherlock would be back to the chair in the sitting room with only his violin and his thoughts to keep him company in the hours that John was not present.
Tonight had changed things. The dynamics of the flatmate friendship had tilted into uncharted waters, pushed farther out to sea by the pulsing tide of Sherlock's unusual need.
Need.
Sherlock had need of him now, and he would again. It's the one thing that John can count on in their relationship, and for now, it's enough.