Fire, and a Confession

"John."

"Mmm?"

"I've had a bit of an accident."

"Mmm?"

"Long story short, the bathroom is...on fire, and there is a slight-very, very slight-issue with the electricity."

By this point, I was thoroughly awake. Usually, Sherlock stays up all night, then wakes me up at 4.00 in the morning, after finally deciding that sleep might be advisable. Or, he actually goes to bed like a normal human being, and gets up at some unearthly hour in the morning, waking me up in the process. A standard, eight-hour night's sleep with Sherlock in the house is nigh on impossible.

This however appeared to be no ordinary rude awakening, if the smoke seeping under our bedroom door was anything to go by.

"Sherlock! What the HELL have you done!"

"It was an experiment, John."

"What...kind of experiment, Sherlock?" I Said through gritted teeth. The pungent smell of burning chemicals and smoke was starting to reach the bed, and I was in no mood for a ridiculous (and most likely unsatisfactory) justification for this latest disaster involving one of Sherlock's 'experiments'.

"Well, I..." Sherlock paused, and looked at the floor.

" I needed to see how long it took flammable gas to reach a candle 2 metres from it's source."

"So, let me guess, you lit a candle, put it two metres from the bathroom door and filled the bathroom with gas."

"Yes." Sherlock's face lit up "The results are astonishing you know, you see-"

"SHERLOCK!"

My fuse is very, very short in the middle of the night.

"How in your bloody BRILLIANT brain can you possibly justify risking people's lives for your BLOODY EXPERIMENTS, SHERLOCK!"

Sherlock shrank away from me , like a wounded puppy, his eyes betraying the hurt he was attempting to hide. I regretted my anger immediately, and backtracked.

"I'm...sorry Sherlock. I know how important your experiments are. I just worry about you sometimes. You care more about your work than yourself or...other people!"

In my head, I thought 'or me', and Sherlock must have sensed it somehow, because he came and sat next to me on the bed. Looking down at me, he said:

"John, you come before everything else in my whole life. I know I barely ever say it, but my life would be empty without you. A year ago in two weeks, I married you and made i public that you were the most important person in the world to me. That will always be true. I'd give up anything for you, John, anything at all. Yes, the work matters to me, but not as much as you, nowhere near as much as you do."

He cupped my face in his hands and I leant against his stiff chest. After a few moments together like this, wrapped up in just each other, I suddenly remembered, courtesy of a stinging sensation in my eyes, why Sherlock had appeared in the first place.

"Sherlock... Oh hell, the FIRE!"