Chapter 1: Voices In The Night~

For My Freedom Song. With love :)

The martial arts form "baritsu" that is used throughout this story, was actually an early form of English free-style fighting, borrowing from several different Japanese styles ,as well as English boxing, that Mr. Conan-Doyle (to whom these characters rightfully belong, and their modern adaptions belong to Mr. Steven Moffat, and Mr. Mark Gatiss) modified the name of and had actually written as being the fighting style that Sherlock used to win the fight with Moriarty in the original story that was adapted into the "Reichenbach Fall".Because it's a free-style fighting art, I'm going to adapt it ever so slightly, changing the style throughout.

Sherlock is deep asleep. John is laying next to him on the settee, letting his head rest on his chest, for the two-fold purpose of a) monitoring his pulse and b) not having to try and move him so he could watch telly. And ,to be honest, he rather liked being so close to him again, after so long of his being dead and gone. Never mind what it looked like, Sherlock was supposedly dead anyway, so it's not like people were going to know about him being around anymore to talk about the two of them. John drew an easy breath, and flipped through the channels. He couldn't really hear anything but the steady "thump, thump ,thump"of Sherlock's heart , the tv set being just about muted, but he still liked to have it on for its light, and the water colored pictures swimming before his groggy eyes.

It was 3 in the morning. He counted out the hours ,the minutes, by Sherlock's steady heart. " Thump, thump, thump,"..." So much had happened..." Thump, thump, thump,"... How does he even begin to process it all?

It is two weeks after their adventure in New York City, playing the complicated game that Charles Magnusson, Mary Morstan, and Irene Adler had fabricated together, where Sherlock was hooked to a very dangerous poison to slow down his deductive powers by all sorts of psychedelic episodes, and then was pitted against the entire New York mob, as well as Mary and her extreme terrorist plan, and Magnusson, who was really using Mary as the puppet for his own extreme terrorist plan. Irene Adler had been there as a sort of tie breaker, and had ultimately killed Mary in a sort of vendetta move on her part. John was finding this really hard to process, as the master-assassin used to be his army nurse girlfriend ,that he had almost married once upon a time...

So much that had happened in the last few months was almost impossible to wrap his head around. It had all started with learning that Sherlock was alive again. I say again,because when he had jumped from St. Bart's rooftop, he actually had died, and had come to in a body bag by one of the most bazaar cases of Lazarus syndrome in medical history, 34 hours after attempts at resuscitation had been stopped. However it had happened, John didn't know, and didn't care, his prayer for a miracle had been answered! Sherlock was alive, and alive to stop Sebastian Moran, and during the same case prove that Major Sholto was innocent in the incident that lead to casualties of his new recruits. This had lead up to Sholto moving into 221 C, as their self appointed, eternally grateful body-guard.

The case that saved Sholto's name, also ending with him moving in, had also unfrozen John's PTSD traumatized mind from an almost decade long episode of psychogenic amnesia, where he had wiped from his memory the fact that he had actually met Sherlock in army academy, and that he and Sherlock had served together in Afghanistan, with John being an army-medic, and Sherlock being a consulting detective for the military police. So,now he was also trying to process all those years he had forgotten, had wiped from his mind when he thought Sherlock had been killed during a mission to solve war-crimes, that had landed him in an Afghani cartel, where he was force hooked to a nearly fatal mixture of cocaine ,heroin, and all other sorts of heavy IV drugs. He had to process this on top of learning that Sherlock had jumped from Bart's to save his life from Moriarty's snipers, had died for him, and had been tortured ,brutally and incessantly, by members of Moriaty's network, willingly taking the abuse so as not to reveal John's identity to them, to keep him safe lest they tried to harm him to get what they wanted.

John simply couldn't wrap his head around that. Almost wouldn't have believed the story, had Sherlock not been constrained to tell him, when they were in Finland. That case had been harrowing, and John remembered that during it Sherlock had been tortured, and had taken it so easily, that he was forced to believe all the things he had told him had really happened.

Shortly after they had finished the case in Finland, they got involved in a case to bust up a ring of modern-day rum-runners, and had been abducted and taken to a chemical weapon's testing sight in the Caribbean, known as "Baskerville Island". It was during that case that John learned the man he had called father since his childhood, the cruel and abusive man who had disowned him, was actually his uncle who had murdered his father. As punishment for solving this case, John's uncle , Solomon Watson,had sent John and Sherlock into the Carnival of Death that was on the island. Sherlock and John were both fatally electrocuted, and lay dead in the middle of a Caribbean island jungle for 20 minutes, before being sent back by "the Teacher" ,the Divine Spirit that Sherlock had met the first time he was dead.

So ,while John was trying to process having his best friend back, that had been dead for a little over a year, having learned said best friend had died and had been tortured to save him the entire time he was gone, having watched this friend being tortured on a psycho case, and take it with as much ease as somebody takes getting a haircut, and then process being abducted by pirates, solving the case of his family's domestic tragedy, being electrocuted to death with said best friend, and having a near death experience with him, then,after all of this!, along comes Mary Morstan with a cat glove full of Akhlys serum, and a suicide mission that results in watching Sherlock go utterly mental, totally wipe out the Crips and Bloods in New York City, and ends with John doing a hand stand off the top of the Empire State Building, and Sherlock catching him mid-air-and his old girlfriend being murdered by her girlfriend!_

There was a probably a good reason John couldn't sleep tonight...No, he was pretty sure it wasn't the pudding Mrs. Hudson had accidentally roasted in the stove, and then poured some of Sherlock's chemical solutions on, although that probably didn't help.

He lay here counting Sherlock's heart beats. They were surprisingly strong, after all the stressful things that had been done to it, (like the fatal mixing of IV drugs, for example. Or death by falling...or Akhlys. Not to mention all the absolutely horrific torment it had endured...) "Thump, Thump, Thump..." steady drilling against his bones, running like an engine, just like his mind does when he's awake. Not threatening to stop. Not going anywhere...

John dropped the remote on the floor, and reached, and took Sherlock's wrist in his hand. Now he could feel the rise and fall of his pulse. A little tapping against John's fingers, letting him know that he was here...wasn't going anywhere now. Had the warmth of living blood in him. Chest was rising and falling in steady sleeping breath, rising up and falling down and making John feel like his head was resting on the ocean.

John smiled, and settled into him, letting go of his wrist, and letting his hand dangle above the floor.

It might take forever to process the last few months. He might never be able to come to terms with it all. But it was all ok. All of that pain and chaos was worth this one moment here, lying down beside Sherlock, listening to his heart, now that he was sleeping for once (still recovering from the serum).

He was alive. Everything was fine, if only because he really was alive. And seemed to be on the mend.

After a long moment, John's eyes falling closed, as heavy as prison doors, drifting off to sleep for a little while, he felt Sherlock's gentle hand in his hair, and heard the detective let a shuddering breath, as he woke up out of a dead sleep.

"Mmm...you ok?" John asked, stirring, trying to make himself awake enough to sit up.

Sherlock's fingers fidgeted in John's hair, making it to stand up like amber waves of grain, like golden rows of wheat in the harvest fields. It tickled, and John smiled, wondering absently what had woken him up, this being nearly impossible to do when he actually did fall asleep.

"I hear...a voice. A woman's voice."

"JOHN!" shouted Sarah Sawyer from the sidewalk. "Please, JOHN! Help! They're back! That maniac Chinese woman is back!"

"Oh my God, it's Sarah! Sarah from the doctor's office, and she..."

John took one bound off the settee, and Sherlock was only a bound behind him, and they sprinted downstairs like two young deer that were twins.