"The doctors say you can't hear me...I'm a doctor, too, and I know you can't, but maybe...maybe it'll help you wake up sooner. Help you wake up...wake up at all." John said, sitting in the chair next to Sherlock's bed. He looked like he would if he was asleep, but he barely ever slept, so it looked strange to John, to see his best friend lying in bed, limp, lifeless, useless. He was probably bored to death, he thought, grinning weakly. He really had been dead, at one point, although he came back to life, somehow. That was Sherlock; if he was going to die, he would do it when he wanted, how he wanted, and if it wasn't perfect he would change it. Change his fate.

"Sherlock...if you can hear me, you should know that...when I thought you were dead, my whole world crashed down around me...I thought that was it. No more cases. No more you. No more Sherlock, my best friend in the world...so promise me something. Promise...promise me that you won't die. Not now."


Sherlock sat on the sofa of what must have been the living room of the mind palace, listening to the pain in John's voice, and knowing that there was nothing he could do to stop it. He promised silently not to die, but that wasn't a promise he could keep, not really. John kept talking after that, but Sherlock couldn't listen. He tried to get away from the sound of his best friend's voice; hiding in a bedroom, a bathroom, an attic, a cellar. The harder he tried to block out the sound, the louder it got. He found himself screaming shut up, shut up, shut up, but, of course, it didn't work. Sherlock ran up the doors from the cellar into the hallway, running to the front door and pounding on the solid wood, hurling himself against it, trying to get out. He tried desperately to smash a window, but the glass wouldn't break. He eventually lay under a double bed in one of the many bedrooms and waited for John to stop talking, crying, talking. Sherlock wept too; for himself, for his best friend, for the fear he felt that he would never wake up...
When John finally stopped, it was late at night in mind palace world, and Sherlock crawled out from under the bed, collapsing on top of it and sleeping immediately.

Sherlock has read about out of body experiences, but he had never had one. His dream was of John sitting by his bedside, asleep. He saw himself, his soft skin even paler than usual, his eyes closed. Everyone looks younger when they sleep; they just look more vulnerable when in a coma.
Sherlock tried to talk to John, but he couldn't hear him. He touched his best friend's shoulder, and his fingers went straight through the wool of his jumper. He walked through the door of the private room, morphing through it as if it was nothing more than air, to find Lestrade and Mycroft sitting next to each other on the plastic hospital chairs. They were awake, but didn't talk. Sherlock tried to wake up but couldn't pull himself out of the dream state, and instead ran out of the hospital doors, into the car park, hitting some invisible barrier when he reached the edge of it. He tried to speak to the people milling about, but no one could hear him. He willed himself to wake up several times, but couldn't until the morning came, and he returned to his hospital room, pulled by some invisible force and falling into his own barely breathing body, waking in the mind palace, covered in sweat, his curly hair plastered to his forehead. He had no desire to face another day in the mansion, a place that once felt safe but was transformed into a house of nightmares.