Note for author: Whew, I've been parked on this one for far too long. Sherlock will get more of a response soon. I think. Hooray for finally writing a reasonably sized chapter.

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Sherlock gracelessly clamored through the doorway with his fist raised back, surveying the room before him for John's aggressor. His shelf in the corner had been turned over and leaned ajar haphazardly on the footboard of his bed. Its contents sprawled out like the rubble of a collapsed building to litter most of the floor. In a contrary manner, his desk had only a spattering of items remaining on the surface, less cluttered than it had been in months. There, out of the corner of his eye was movement. John was doubled over in the far corner. Damn it, he was hurt.

Head still swimming, he stagger forward and cursed abruptly when he stepped on the shards of his bedside lamp's bulb.

"John? Where is he? Is there more than one?" The words were slurred and urgent, hushed in case the enemy was lingering in the hallway.

His flat mate, however, straightened and spun around with a seemingly vacant expression. Sherlock strained for any sound, but there was only the thrum thrum thrum in his head and the wet splats from his shower-soaked trousers.

"Sherlock, what-?" Suddenly John blanched, his mouth dropping in dawning realization. "Oh this is rich! No one is attacking me, you dolt."

"The room…you shouted. There was a scuffle, I heard it." His hand dropped to his side and he flitted the information together, lining up the edges like puzzle pieces.

John let out a short snicker as he yanked open the top drawer of the dresser with a raucous 'hu-thnk'.

"You deliberately refused to tell me what you took, how much, and where it was." He seemed almost smug as he shoved the contents of his top drawer to the side, several socks thumping softly onto the hardwood. "I decided to find it myself." Still angry. Yes, very much so.

John sucked the pad of his hand, eradicating a drip of blood from a cut received during his initial war against the inanimate belongings.

"Frankly I'm not going to put up with you drugged and blacking out again. It's pathetic."

"Pot and kettle." Sherlock hissed lowly, restraining a shiver as the cool London breeze latched tiny glacial pins from the waning window to his damp chest. Enough of this. Though he was still shifting, vision still seemingly a millisecond off from real time, he felt a trickle of his coherent thought returning."The number of times you've come home highly intoxicated has been quite…notable…in the last year."

"Oh – bolluc-!" John spat, shooting his finger accusingly, swallowing with a staunched 'ahum' sound as if to internally dissuade himself from overturning the oak wardrobe.

Sherlock didn't wait for a retort, "Point fourteen percent blood alcohol content given how abundantly that cut is flowing; how many pints is that? Most of my experiments had more…say, scientific measurement practices – but given that I'd say you weigh…thereabouts of 176 pounds that would constitute you having four pints in the last hour of returning here." Sherlock crossed his arms over his chest as if he meant to look clever, but it was fair to note that it was becoming rather cold in the room dripping wet and in lack of clothing. "That's an awful lot to drink in the last hour of your date. Though I'm sure you paid the bill when you told her it wasn't working out."

John's hands, in tune with his jaw, clenched to the point bones grating together could virtually be heard. "Wrong, you know what, Sherlock, this time and not that I care how big of an ass you're being - you should know you weren't ever witty as usual. If you hadn't doped your self up so much you would have been quicker."

The detective narrowed his eyes at the layaway insult. Four pints was a large amount to drink on a date. Surely John possessed more discretion. He wouldn't actively slight the woman by getting drunk before leaving her.

And there is was - the obvious bit of detail practically in neon blinking lights, how was it missed? Traces of rose-tinted gloss highlighted the crest of John's cheek. Given the placement and slight distortion, John had been seated and she had been standing.

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Oh. How completely apparent.

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"Why would she end things?" Sherlock hardly desired a response, but John scoffed and provided one all the same.

"Oh, I don't know, Sherlock. The same reason the last three have?" John panned his arms out as if to an invisible crowd surging in laugher at his equally invisible punch line. Sherlock blinked and fought back another gust from the outside air, awaiting the acerbic finish. The roaring phantom theater died out, and it was only John and Sherlock.

Ah.

...

That had been a rhetorical statement.

"I hadn't even met this one, it's rather unfair to hold me at fault for it."

The sound that emitted from John was entirely void of mirth, but vaguely resembled a laugh.

"I get dumped and then have to deal with you high as a kite as soon as I get home. I'm sick of this, Christ, you are the last person I need to worry about more than I already do – And forget it, that's not what we're on about anyway. I'm not going to even attempt to explain how relationships work to you. " He snatched up a small trinket box from the room's wreckage and emptied the contents. Teeth from varying sizes and locations in the mouth - 13 central and lateral incisors, 8 first and second bicupsids, 14 molars, 5 wisdom teeth – 15 of which procured from heavy smokers – tumbled to the floor. The small bones skittered out like jacks across the grain of the wood, waiting for the ball that would never bounce with hands to sweep them up.

"No, you know what, I see what you're doing." John rubbed the back of his hand over his draining brow and finally noticed that it was far to cold outside to have let out the window. He slammed the frame down against the sill and rummaged around the stacks on the dresser.

"Don't even try to distract me from the bloody issue here." His edged voice echoed out from the wall he was facing. "This is about you being more of a carelessly egocentric git than your standard." He spun around shaking out one of his books by the spine and again thrust out his fore finger in his companion's direction menacingly. Military habit, more than likely. "You – poisoning yourself for God knows why. I swear if I had had to come home to…if you had fucking miscalculated your tolerance…"

Sherlock was quiet with his response and his words seemed to cling to the back of his throat. Like peanut butter again, detested peanut butter. His gaze eased up limply with a constrained sigh, forming letters into order slowly. "Tell me you're not actually concerned about me…finding me incapacitated…? That's a ridiculous conclusion to form just from tonight."

"Damn it, Sherlock." John snapped shut his encyclopedia number 20 covering Geomorphic through Immunity, likely looking for cut out papers to store something. How endearingly prosaic. "Yes, of course I'm worried about that, but I know you - " He let out a frustrated chuckle, shaking his head "- You're anything from so unintelligent to try to, or think you would over dose. It's not…"

He paced heavily, as though if he didn't he'd kick something over or rip off Sherlock's window curtains. He opted to toss the hard cover down with manifest force to join the mound of others that had slid off his shelf. Meta carpals and phalanges of fingers straightening, radius and ulna of the lower arm twisting with the action, brachioradialis and flexor carpi radialis more prominent of the anterior muscles from the release –

Stop.

John rubbed both his hands over his face now calculating what to say, John – infuriated to the point of this: ripping apart a room. His room. 37% more displeased than usual.

"There are limits to you, Sherlock." John fastened a severe gaze to him, stabbing an unwelcome tremor in his chest at the weighty words.

"It's not just about that…you can't just…" Another nettled shifting of the head side to side, this one darker – more internal. "You can't do something like this to your self and think that it won't affect anyone else," his voice dipped softer now, but he didn't look up from his cyclical movement across the floor.

Sherlock meant so say something, his mouth even moved wide enough to form the words that were on his lips, though unexpectedly? No. Frustratingly he wasn't yet sure what they were. John didn't have the courtesy to pause so he could work it out in his compromised mind, however.

"It matters to more people that you think, more people who care about you, and," An added sarcastic pseudo-smile. "Probably to more people than you care about."

Oh that familiar tightening of the risorius and buccinator masseter, elongating the lips horizontally, brow furrowing in a decidedly fuming fashion indicating John was, for lack of at better word, disappointed.

The still sopping detective finally found a voice to interject, though it was hardly much of one at all.

Weak, actually. Still not wholly cognizant, but close; becoming bothersome.

"This is my business, not theirs."

Not theirs, they know nothing about the rational behind this. Slow, dull, judgmental, maudlin – all those barren old maids reveling at the chance to mend those they viewed broken – vainly attempting to revitalize their long passed motherly daydreams and place in needles with a piteously ineffective ruse of drugs – like being patched up with a kiss on the scrapped knee, those brainless portly nurses in pressed white and nauseating seafoam with sympathetic gazes and delusions that they – behind brick gates and colorless walls, hideous linoleum tiles, in the reek of bleach and bodily fluids forever imbedded into the atomic make up of the recycled air – they could make it all better, dive deep to the bottom, find the crack that would otherwise be filled with chemicals, and slap a bandage over it.

Had quite enough of the 'they' Dr Watson. My business.

"No -" John's hands flexed and then clenched into fists, light vermilion shading over his features, his voice surging up to an, until recently, untried level of ire. "It's not just about you, you selfish bastard! And you know what?!"

He breached the space between them rapidly, planting a vice grip on Sherlock's shoulder to the point his blunt nails cut into the flesh and pushing him back several fumbling steps. The other hand wielded the index finger that jabbed dangerously close to Sherlock's nose to accentuate every other word. "It's not even about finding you half dead on the sofa, or whether you've done this lately or whether you care about the people around you!"

His voice waxed into an impossibly more furious one, shaking Sherlock harshly just once, as if he thought it would bring him out of his stupor. "I'm the one that has to be able to trust you! I have to follow you blindly without you telling me a damned thing every day, so the least you can do is make sure I know you're doing it completely aware you're risking both our lives!"

He laughed bitterly then, but his face was still tight snakes hurriedly tunneling under the skin everywhere. Quite the infestation.

"You expect me to come bounding to your side at your every beck and call and I do – for fu -" There was a slight choke of composition slipping, but his eyes locked back onto Sherlock's with conviction, "I do. And despite all that, I come home to a needle on the floor with you drooling on the cushions like you've been lobotomized and tomorrow – I know you," He sneered, "Had I not said something now you would have acted like nothing happened, like I was the idiot, and still expected me to rely on you unquestioningly even though you've compromised yourself!"

John paused for half of a moment, practically egging on one of Sherlock's uncouth quips.

John - I…

"Well I'm sorry, Sherlock, but no, I won't. I might as well tell you even though you're all doped up. I'm not some well trained dog you can command around." The fingers on the taller man's bicep constricted just slightly - subconscious. "Last I checked I was your friend. You said it your self and you claim to never be wrong. I don't give a damn about all those obnoxiously complex justifications you're weaving together in that over-sized brain of yours right now. For once, just listen to someone who…who cares about you and has a good right to."

Some tension in him seemed to deflate at that. He guided his mute companion to the edge of the unmade bed, but still tersely shoved him onto it.

At least a minute passed with Sherlock fidgeting with the cotton knit blanket he thought of so fondly what seemed like hours ago. Maybe it had been. Now the cloth seemed to drain all cognitive thoughts from his mind through invisible water gates in his fingertips. John remained standing before him, tense, unrelenting, expecting an answer but he hasn't knelt as though he was dealing with a child, should thank him for that. No, out of context, he's expecting an actual answer. An answer to the hurricane up rooting brain stems, trying to process even half of it. When did thinking become so difficult?

Oh that's right…needle piercing the median basilic vein, gentle push down of the index finger, nothingness radiating out through the body. That's when. He has a point. Does he?

"Well?" John snapped. "What's you big excuse this time? Don't tell me now is the time you actually have nothing to say. How convenient!"

Another impregnated quiet wrapped gloved hands around Sherlock's vocal cords.

"Ridiculous!" John jeered darkly, turning on his heal toward the hallway. "Next time forget putting you in the shower, I'll just drag you to the emergency room and let Mycroft deal with you."

The door crashed shut behind him leaving the lanky man alone with that thought, though it felt like a thousand eyes were instantaneously scrutinizing him.


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