AN: I really want to thank all of my amazing reviewers for their kind words, some of you have actually, all unknowing I'm sure, cemented a good half of the stories plot in my mind. Thank you very much :D

Fro the record I still know nothing of how DWB actually functions or any of the other organizations for that matter, maybe they don't ever work together at all? But I have immense respect for what they do regardless. Also I only know what I found on Google about the illnesses.

Sendi mentioned in a review that the tension keeps building. Yup (grin) It will go on for a bit longer to so... I hope you can hang in with it I'm not being very nice to John and Sherlock at all just yet. It will get worse before it gets better. Thanks for your kind regard though.

As always I do not own Sherlock.


Eighteen months after arriving in South Africa found John once more boarding a tiny rickety plane to lands unknown. Well relatively unknown, John had never been there anyway and in all honesty he, once more, knew next to nothing about the place.

But he was needed.

Nigeria had one of the least efficient health care systems that John had ever heard of; combined that with the general poverty level of the country and you had a biological recipe for disaster. To compound the problem you had to take into account how remote a good deal of the little villages in the country really were, as a city boy John was aware that he was in for one hell of a steep learning curve.

Even so he had never dreamed that he would actually be faced with treating and immunizing against Polio. There hadn't been a case in the United Kingdom since 1982.

For John the idea was rather like walking down to Hyde Park and being eaten by a dinosaur. Horrible... but also bewildering.

He did of course study it idea of Polio extensively while in medical school, the creation of the Polio vaccine was a large milestone in modern medicine.

The disease rather reminded John of the taxi cab killer in A Study In Pink. It was always lurking around but very seldom was it seen. Ninety nine percent of people who caught it never showed a single symptom; so it seemed to pop up out of nowhere and was next to impossible to track. Anyone could be in the presence of a killer and never know it.

The World Health Assembly had been trying to eradicate it for years, and they were doing a very good job of it. It was difficult though because you had to make sure that every single person had the vaccine.

A single missed case could lead to thousands.

So when twelve cases where reported in a small remote village in Nigeria it was considered a global crisis and it was all hands on deck. John would be joining dozens of people from all over the world from Doctors Without Borders, The WHO, and representatives from the World Health Assembly. With any luck it would be one more nail in the coffin for Polio and one more step towards the conclusion of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

John would be just one more person knocking on doors and setting up clinics trying to be certain that every single person received a vaccine. Thankfully the ringing system of circling the disease with vaccinated people and working their way outwards had been perfected during the global smallpox eradication years before.

John felt rather guilty that he was looking forward to seeing his first ever iron lung. But seriously it was an iron lung and he was going to be helping his patients use it. It was trippy.

Being excited about seeing sick children was a bit not good John decided absently

Even so… iron lung! He thought with a grin.

Glancing at his watch he was surprised to see how much time had passed; had three hours really passed without his knowing it?

Not long later the crackly intercom announced that they would be landing in five minutes.


John had worked on the Polio case for just over six months before transferring to the Tuberculosis Division fifty miles away from his original starting point in Nigeria.

After the relatively tame, there had only been twenty three confirmed cases but lots of administering medicine to anybody with a pulse, Polio work he had done the Tuberculoses victims caught him completely off guard.

Parallel lines of beds stretched in front of him like something out of an apocalypse movie. The people in them were so sick, so alarmingly miserable that John was momentarily stunned that he had been so upset by the Meningitis.

But that wasn't really fair to himself, he decided. Meningitis had been bad enough to be getting on with, but this… he wouldn't have been able to imagine this if it had been described to him.

People were skeletal, shivering, hacking up blood.

When he had walked in for the first time he had stopped in the doorway and just stared.

The American doctor that was showing him the ropes had, thankfully, been very understanding.

"I threw up the first time I walked in here." Dr. Ramose had said with a dry laugh. "It's like something out of a nightmare."

John and several other of the DWB had joined up with a large group of American doctors sent by the USAID for the TB DOTS program that had been set up there in 2009.

They were a cheery lot for the most part. It helped that it was all volunteer workers, they all had personally compelling reasons to be there and a drive to help that may not have been there if they had been forced to be there by work obligations.

The work was fast paced and demanding. The turnover of the patients was so swift that John often only saw any given patient once.

It was a good thing though. John's Post Traumatic Stress had taken a turn that he would have happily lived without.

Nightmares of Afghanistan were mostly a thing of the past. Instead of reliving being shot in the shoulder he had begun dreaming of swimming pools and explosives. He dreamed of shooting taxi drivers and being kidnapped by Chinese circus performers. He dreamed of Detective Inspector Lestrade's concerned oftentimes exasperated voice, of Anderson and Donavan's insults, cold and bloody murder victims, and erotic breathy ringtones. He dreamed of phone calls and kidnap victims.

The worst nightmares though were a little different. John would see Sherlock; beautiful brilliant Sherlock excitedly deducing crime scenes while exclaiming about it being like Christmas. He would see Sherlock, eyes unusually warm, asking if John was alright while throwing a semtex jacket across the room. He would relive dinners at Angelo's with its amazing food and romantic candles that always found their way to the table.

He would see Sherlock, insubstantial and evanescent, disappearing towards Molly Hooper's laughter while being unable to follow, no matter how desperately he tried.

It had been more than two and a half years now since he had left England. Shouldn't he have moved past this by now? Shouldn't he have at least begun to move on? It honestly didn't feel as if he was any less in love with Sherlock now then he had ever been.

This wasn't to say that he hadn't come to have a clearer and more realistic opinion of some things. Time and space had, at the very least, given him the gift of perspective.

John no longer labored under the impression that Mycroft had been being deliberately cruel when "checking up on him". It was, in hindsight, rather kind and even flattering that someone as important as Mycroft had taken the time out of his meetings with the Queen and his job of practically running the country to care how one insignificant ex army doctor was doing even if he was lying to him and passively helping cause the pain. Somewhere along the way John had realized he genuinely liked Mycroft. When had John begun to consider the creepy kidnapping stalker a friend? It was difficult to find a man who clung to an umbrella like a child with a blanket and had a cake fetish threatening or, really, anything but vaguely amusing.

He also acknowledged that several of his friends had probably not had anything to do with it, such as Sarah, Greg, and Mrs. Hudson, and John had disappeared on them as if they didn't matter. He wondered if that made him no better than Sherlock in the end.

He wondered if he should at the very least let them know that he was alive.

But the more time passed the harder doing so seemed to become.

And the sting of Molly and Sherlock's betrayal was, even now, still so raw. Still too close to his heart.

They probably hardly thought about him at all by now anyway. He doubted that anybody even really cared that he was gone by now. They all had their own lives to live and John wasn't all that important to anybody. Right?


Sherlock had been moving from country to country for so long that he almost couldn't remember what it was like to stay in one place. What it was like to have a home and a bed and a friend to go back to at the end of the day.

This wasn't to say that Sherlock had forgotten Baker Street, or John. He desperately missed his skull, his oldest and at one time dearest companion. He missed rambling deductions off to it and having it grin coldly back in approval. He missed tea a rather lot as well. He hadn't had a proper cup of tea since he had jumped off of that thrice damned building. Was John Watson the only person left of the planet that knew how to properly boil tea leaves?

And his coat! It had been nearly a year since Sherlock had tracked down that stupid sniper (the one that had been trained on Mrs. Hudson.) and watched in fury as the bastard had burned down Sherlock's hotel room.

The man had recognized Sherlock and tried to kill him. Apparently he had thought Sherlock was inside the room when he had set it on fire.

Instead he had burned down a mostly empty room that had contained forty thousand francs, three guns, and Sherlock's beloved greatcoat.

That sniper's death had been particularly gruesome. Mycroft's men had had to clean his remains up with mops.

Sherlock wasn't sorry at all.

But more than his skull, his coat, and all the tea in the world Sherlock missed John.

Sentiment, Sherlock thought, was a horrible illness. It clung to Sherlock like slick black oil clogging up his mind, making his skin itch, and coating his heart (and when did that ridiculous organ decide to make its 35 year late appearance?) so that Sherlock couldn't go a day, and often not even an hour, without thinking about John. He wondered if John was healthy, if he was happy, if he had a girlfriend now that Sherlock wasn't there to drive them all off, if Mycroft was driving him insane breathing down his neck like he had better be doing.

He wondered if he still missed Sherlock, if he thought about Sherlock at all. It had been two years and nine months since Sherlock had "died". Thirty three months twelve days nine hours thirty seven minutes and fourteen seconds since Sherlock had so dramatically left his life.

Not that Sherlock had been counting.

Nope, not at all.

But surly that was more than long enough for someone normal to forget all about someone else?

Sherlock was embarrassed to admit, if only to himself, that part of the reason he had Mycroft bothering John so often was so that John would not stop thinking about him. So that he wouldn't forget.

Not that John would, Sherlock decided. John was all about pointless sentiment.

How humiliating that Sherlock was so grateful for the fact.

But what else could he do? He had been gone from John's life longer now than he had been in it.

The fact that Sherlock was still calling out to John when he was in a hurry that they were going to be late could be ignored, he decided. The fact that Sherlock was still constantly spinning around to address John when he was excited, and would glance up in hopes of seeing John's impressed approving smile when Sherlock had unraveled a particularly tricky park of Moriarty's trail wasn't even worth acknowledging.

The fact that Sherlock's long overdue heart was behaving strangely at the very thought of John, fluttering alarmingly, and occasionally skipping entire beats, meant nothing.

The strange dreams that he had been having but not really remembering left him flushed and breathless.

Strange dreams, hot flashes, shortness of breath, and arrhythmia. It couldn't be good.

Was he ill? Should he give in and see a doctor?

Was he dying?

He had been in some pretty disgusting places and around some really nasty people. He could have picked up anything anywhere! Where was John? He should be here as Sherlock's doctor! Sherlock didn't want to die confused, alone, and Johnless!

Thankfully after Sherlock was finished here in Ethiopia he would be heading back to England.

Moriarty's Ethiopian sect was enough to turn even Sherlock's stomach of steel. Human trafficking was a disgusting practice. Especially when they were collecting and selling children. Not just Ethiopian children though, they would bring children from all over the world here for "training" and "processing". Some of the children were captured run aways, or sold by unscrupulous family members for cash. Most of the children were kidnapped right out of their own beds, or yards, or parks. Sherlock had seen some of the tiny terrified faces and he was determined to free them and make the perpetrators pay dearly.

So his illness would have to wait a while longer.

After he was finished here Sherlock had only one more target. Sebastian Moran, the sniper that to this day was supposedly trained on John, was as wily as he was dangerous. While not as intelligent as James Moriarty, Moran had been his favorite for a reason. Highly trained and even more highly loyal Moran was a dangerous adversary. All of Sherlock's and Mycroft's resources together were failing to pin him down. Every time Sherlock got close Moran slipped through his fingers like water.

It was decided, after a great many arguments (Sherlock for and Mycroft for some reason very much against) that Sherlock would come home. He would have his name cleared and return to Baker Street. Hopefully it would be enough to draw the sniper out of hiding.

Of course it would only work if John didn't kill Sherlock himself and allowed him to, at the very least temporarily, come back home and into his life.

But of course he would, he was sweet forgiving John Watson, Sherlock's best and only friend. It would be hard but John would listen and understand. After he broke Sherlock's nose.

Sherlock allowed himself to smile; he was going home to John. Soon.

His heart fluttered and stuttered.

Frowning now he rubbed his chest in irritation.

He really would have to have that looked at.