A/N:

Sorry for the suspense… but never fear, the resolution is almost here! Thanks as always to everyone who's sticking with the story, and my wonderful beta-reader :)

"Taking your own life… Interesting expression. Taking it from who?"

Somebody was talking, shouting really. It was too loud, too bright, too white.

"Oh, once it's over, it's not you who'll miss it."

The voice continued, clawing at Sherlock's temple. He tried to twitch away, to cover his ears, but he discovered that he had no body to move.

"Your own death is something that happens to everybody else."

Beneath the words, a new sound started up, a horrible ringing that reverberated in the space where Sherlock's head might have been, if he still possessed one.

"Your life is not your own."

Sherlock tried to cry out, to tell the voice to stop, and suddenly he realized the words were his. He was standing at the edge of a river, eyes fixed on the swirling water below. A thin iron rail separated him from the emptiness beyond, and he felt himself lean forward over the turbulent grey current.

"Keep your hands off it!"

Sherlock's mouth moved, the voice echoed in his skull and he was falling, tumbling towards the water.

"Your life is not your own… Keep your hands off it!"

His lips were still moving as the air rushed past, the water surged up to meet him until all at once it was not water but a pair of dark eyes. A maniacal laughter filled his ears and he reached out for something, anything to stop his fall.

The black pupils widened, they were swallowing him whole and then he was plummeting towards a familiar expanse of concrete.

"NO!"

He tried to struggle, he clawed at the air around him and the sidewalk rushed closer still, the laughter was inside him and around him and with all of his disembodied willpower he reached out to grab onto—

"Sherlock!"

The detective opened his eyes and the horrible laughter ceased. It was replaced by silence, a sterile emptiness broken only by a regular beeping noise from somewhere to his left.

Sherlock felt his toes come back into existence, then his feet, his calves, his knees. Awareness spread upwards through his body in a wave of pain and his lungs expanded suddenly, sucking in a breath of faintly-chemical air.

In the same moment that Sherlock felt his fingers rejoin the physical world, his vision cleared and a hospital room materialized around him.

A hospital room in which John Watson was standing over him.

A John Watson whose wrist was encircled by a set of pale, slender fingers.

It took Sherlock 4.89 seconds to realize they were his fingers wrapped around John's wrist.

"Sherlock?"

John's voice seemed to travel through Sherlock's bones, through his metacarpals and carpals and radius and ulna and humorous until his sternum was vibrating with the sound of his own name and—

"John!"

Sherlock jerked away from the apparition, the ghost hovering over him. He reeled backwards, ignoring the sharp tug of needles and tubes that objected to his movement. Scrambling over the edge of the bed, he collapsed to the floor in a heap of white sheets and attempted to scramble away on all fours, dragging the IV machine with him.

"Sherlock, please!"

John's voice cut through the chorus of angry beeps from the heart monitor and Sherlock wrenched himself to his feet.

"Mind or matter, mind or matter…"

Sherlock's lips were moving again, the words were spilling out and he tasted blood and—

"You're NOT REAL!"

John froze, his hand aloft. Sherlock held himself completely still, the heart monitor stuttering drunkenly into the silence between them. He counted 37 beeps before John took a tiny step forward. His eyes, lit from the side in stark fluorescence, found Sherlock's.

The detective lurched backward, his hands finding the smooth hospital wall. He realized he was shaking, in fact the wires drooping from his arms were rattling against the metal hook of the IV machine.

His voice shook, too, when it finally emerged after 26 more beeps had passed.

"You're not real, John. I know you're not."

John- not the real John- didn't blink. He didn't take another step closer, but he didn't move away. Sherlock could not read anything on the man's normally expressive face. His eyes, his cheeks, his lips were perfectly still—

His lips. His lips… I—

"I kissed you."

Sherlocked flinched at the sound of his own voice, but he was backed against the wall with nowhere to go and the thoughts were pouring back into his brain like the saline flooding his veins.

"I kissed you, it's not allowed, John, you're not real- the real you has gone away, I ruined everything, you're only—"

Now John did take a step forward. His hand was still aloft; it hovered inches from Sherlock's chest. A tiny volume of air and a paper hospital gown were all that separated John's skin from his.

"You can't touch me, John, I know you're just in my mind, I imagined you because the real you is gone, you can't touch me—"

And John's hand collided with his chest.

It was a gentle touch, fingers landing lightly on paper and skin and bone, but it forced the breath from Sherlock's lungs. Suddenly he was body-less again, reduced to a single point of contact with the man standing only inches away in the newly-restored silence.

Sherlock watched in slow motion as John realized the implications of the abrupt quiet. His eyes were no longer unreadable, the specter of fear flickered into life as John looked towards the silent heart monitor. His eyebrows lifted, his lips parted, he was turning towards the solid line flickering across the screen and each movement seemed to take a century. Meanwhile Sherlock could feel all the blood he still possessed racing towards the point on his chest where John's fingers still brushed against his sternum, drawn inward by an unfathomable gravity.

Sherlock was passing the event horizon, it was infinite, this moment—

And then he collapsed around the singularity that was John's touch.

Somewhere in the distance a door was slamming. Footsteps echoed on the tiled hospital floor, the light patter of a woman's feet and the louder click of a man's stride. John stirred against the sharp edges of the plastic chair he had occupied for the last three hours, pulled up as close to Sherlock's bed as he could manage. The man hadn't stirred since he'd collapsed and been hauled back onto the blank white mattress by no less than five nurses. Apparently his attempt at escape had triggered an alarm in the nurse's station down the hall, and half the floor had come running.

Not that John minded. In his opinion, Sherlock deserved the attention of London's entire medical staff.

Twisting his stiff neck to glance towards the increasing racket emanating from the hall, John turned just in time to catch the door bursting open to admit a tall man in an impeccable suit along with the same gaggle of nurses that had occupied the room hours earlier.

"Mr. Holmes," one of them was saying, "You really can't be in here without a visitor's ID, you—"

She was cut off by a glance from Mycroft.

"I think this will be sufficient," he replied icily, brandishing some sort of government identification and leaving the nurses to glance at each other in trepidation.

In two long strides he had crossed the room to Sherlock's bedside, ignoring the bustle behind him as the nurses jostled back into the hall.

"I see this is becoming somewhat of a common occurrence, Doctor Watson."

Mycroft spoke without lifting his eyes from Sherlock's prone form.

John barely heard him. He was staring at the space by Mycroft's side, usually occupied by an umbrella but now conspicuously empty. The taller man looked… somehow deflated without his usual companion, and John had to wrench his gaze back up to Mycroft's face. He was met with a look of unfiltered disdain.

"I wasn't going to ask," John said coldly, knowing full well that Mycroft had probably deduced his exact thought process.

"And I wasn't going to tell you," Mycroft replied as he looked back towards his brother.

John sighed, beginning the explanation he knew the taller man expected.

"When I arrived they said he hadn't woken up since…"

John paused. He was suddenly unable to force the words past the barriers of his teeth and tongue. Aware of Mycroft's gaze on his tired face, he squared his shoulders and continued.

"He hadn't woken up yet, but he seemed to be having some kind of nightmare… He was moaning something and then he reached out and—"

Mycroft raised his eyes. "You can't possibly believe I didn't have this room on live surveillance the moment my dear brother entered its four walls? I know exactly what happened. In fact, it was already prepared when you—"

This time John cut him off.

"Yeah, about that."

He scowled, curling and uncurling his hands on his thighs.

"When we—when we made this plan and set up the cameras, you told me he'd be safe."

Mycroft's face remained as impassive as ever, and John stood to close at least some of the gap between his shadowed eyes and those of Sherlock's brother.

"My idea of safety does not include him bleeding out in a hospital room while you're halfway across Britain doing God knows what."

Mycroft's eyebrows twitched.

"You always were rather protective," he said smoothly. "You are quite right to think that this entire situation could have proceeded with less discomfort for everyone involved."

John clenched his teeth. Why did Mycroft have to make everything sound so bloody okay? This was definitely not okay, this was—

"It is my job to remain calm in situations such as this, Doctor Watson."

John glared, but Mycroft was clearly intent on continuing.

"I'd always known we'd need to set up a plan in preparation for the initiation of today's unfortunate events. However, I was—" here Mycroft assumed an especially distasteful expression- "—unaware that there would be chemical substances exasperating the urgency of implementing operation Lazarus2."

John gaped.

"You think this was because of—you think he was back on drugs?"

Mycroft sneered down at him. "Come now, Doctor, surely you've noticed the absence of marks on my little brother's arms?"

John had, indeed, noticed this. He'd checked, as per his habit, while they had hurtled through the streets of London in an ambulance.

"I knew he wasn't on drugs," he said, attempting to match Mycroft's haughty tone but coming across rather shaken. "I was angry you would even consider the idea that he had taken something, not after—"

Mycroft rolled his eyes.

"Yes, let's cut to the important part, shall we?"

John snapped his jaw shut.

"Sherlock was not on any drugs- or not on any self-inflicted ones, anyway."

He looked down at John, "Can't you deduce the answer?" written across his features.

John shook his head. "Look- I'm not in the mood for your games. We all know I'm the resident idiot, so just drop it and tell me how Sherlock managed to get high enough to jump off a rooftop without actually injecting anything."

Mycroft sighed. He made a little motion as if to lean on his now-absent umbrella, a twitch John noticed with satisfaction.

"I'm not sure high is quite the expression I'd use to describe Sherlock's mental state over the past week."

John sucked in a breath. "The past week? He's been like this since—"

The realization sent John falling backward into his flimsy plastic chair.

"Since Sherrinford."

Mycroft said nothing as John's brain reeled, flashing red screens and train whistles and concrete walls and blood, so much blood—

Mycroft's hand on his shoulder pulled John back to reality with a crack of metal chair legs on tile. Since when had Mycroft… touched people?

The hand was gone before John could say anything, but Mycroft's voice rang out again over the steady beep of the heart monitor.

"We can't have you passing out on us now, Doctor Watson. I'm afraid my brother needs you too much for that, at the moment. Time to be soldiers again."

John would have strangled the man for his choice of words if he hadn't been consumed with rage for another person at the moment.

"What did she do to him? What did she do to him, Mycroft?"

John's voice had taken on the chilling tone it assumed when he was about to snap, about to pull the trigger or leap on someone from behind.

Mycroft looked away from the two men at his side for the first time. He fixed his eyes on the window, speaking to the sliver of grey sky visible through the curtains.

"I'm afraid we don't exactly know," he said, clearly annoyed at the prospect of not knowing something.

"It's possible he was injected with a hallucinogen at some point during the events at Sherrinford. It's unlikely to have been something he inhaled, or you and I would have been equally affected."

John's hands had ceased moving at his sides. He was possessed by the merciless calm he had first discovered somewhere within himself in Afghanistan, the kind of cold adrenaline that seemed to course through his arm and meld his finger delicately with the trigger of a gun.

"Your sister- your sister- poisoned Sherlock so he would think he was hallucinating and try to commit… try to…"

Mycroft did not attempt to finish John's sentence. He was still turned away, but John could see the man's reflection in one of the screens at Sherlock's bedside.

"No," came the reply, barely audible over the ringing that started in John's ears as he caught a glimpse of the pain in Mycroft's eyes.

"Hallucinogen, yes- but attempted suicide, no."

Mycroft turned back to John, finally, and continued.

"She wouldn't have willingly induced Sherlock's death- you saw her reaction in Sherrinford."

John fought the tide of images that resurfaced from the dark place he had carefully stored them.

Sherlock with a gun, pointed at him- Mycroft's cold drawl sinking into his heart, the truth of those words eating at the tiny part of him that hoped maybe Sherlock would choose him. The gun swinging, wavering, pointing instead at Mycroft, hovering there for an instant and then turning, pointed upward into Sherlock's beautiful skull, his brain with so many beautiful thoughts—

John pulled himself back to the hospital room this time. Mycroft's eyes were closed, and for a brief instant John allowed himself to feel the torrent of loneliness and guilt that washed so plainly over the man's face.

The British Government is falling… John heard some part of his mind say.

The umbrella, the hand on his shoulder, this rare flash of emotion… How much more can Mycroft take before even his practiced façade shatters under the weight of Sherlock's fragility?

But the moment evaporated and Mycroft was staring back down at him, eyes carefully sharp again.

"In all likelihood, Sherlock knew he'd been under the effects of some sort of drug. Most likely to enhance the effects of my sister's experiments…"

John winced, but he didn't look away.

"Unfortunately, it seems my brother didn't foresee that it would exasperate the part of him that was once prone to… self-destructive thoughts."

Mycroft coughed lightly, but resumed speaking almost immediately, "And he misinterpreted exactly which parts of his world he'd been hallucinating."

At this, the detective's brother cocked his head to one side.

"Have there been any incidents—" he said delicately, "that might have convinced Sherlock something was different about you? Something… out of character?"

John rolled his head backwards, looking up at the ceiling with a groan.

"You really do have cameras bloody everywhere, you absolute—"

"Cock?"

Neither John nor Mycroft were prepared for the voice that coughed into life behind them.

"You've used that one before," said Sherlock weakly.

"Pick a new one… I do get tired of hearing the same old insults while I lie dying in a hospital bed."