Hello poppets! A mighty big thank you to all my reviewers! Whoo! NicolieTheFace, I'm sorry about your day. Will this make it better? You are eternally epic. sneakysnakes, your name is cool and thank you for the grammar! I'll fix it very soon. Goosebumps is an interesting reaction to John & Sherlock's parenting...hmmmm *ponder, ponder* Mrs. VanchaMarch, you are lovely as ever and there is never a wrong time to quote Sherlock because Sherlock is always made of win and makes me grin like an idiot. Glad you like Ms. Moss! Scribblez, thank you!

This is the (short) second to last chapter!

Chapter 4: Disappearing

Alice started crying the minute I walked through the door and John did not follow me in. She had been waiting on the stairs with a blanket and her teddy. My only response was to scoop her up blanket and all, walk back out the door, hail a taxi, and be driven to the hospital.

A nurse tried to stop us from seeing John, but she was deemed irrelevant, brushed aside with the sight of a wedding ring and Alice's pleading eyes. I carried Alice to John's room where he was sleeping off the high dose of antivenin the hospital had given him. It had done its work, but...John remained unconscious.

"Papa..." came a whisper. I looked to our daughter. Her eyes were wet, but she had stopped crying. A quavering smile formed. "Oh." She reached up and kissed my neck, snuggling closer so to get under my coat. "Daddy did his best."

I sat down in one of the plastic chairs and waited. Alice fell asleep. I could not, just looking about the room almost unblinkingly. The only thing of interest was the rise and fall of John's chest and the steady beep, beep of the heart monitor. Alice's warmth-her own steady breath and heartbeat-was very welcome.

As the clock ticked by, I could feel myself growing cold again. Like during the absence. Everything was numb, disappearing. A tingling feeling pervaded throughout: just a jingle of fingertips, a dull slice of the wrist, a bent feeling of the knees, an twist of the gut, a feeling of dust settling on the face and shoulders. Soon that faded. Everything became a figment in a chair, a space of after thought, a nothing. A ghost.

Nothing was here anymore. Except Alice. Her solid weight and heat kept everything from floating away altogether.

Time meant nothing. The room's flickering bulbs lightened to signal daytime. Food was brought: meant for John, but he was asleep so Alice ate it. She kept mostly attached to what had been me, but it seemed not for her own sake. When the nurse left, Alice started talking. Her ideas and stories drifted out into the air like summer clouds, mostly unnoticed, but drops of water nonetheless. Just something to blow by the wind.

They were stories of school, stories of the park, stories of John. She held my hand as she said them despite the fact that the hand couldn't feel it.

Time passed. It meant nothing.

Then something happened. A sudden loud intake of breath from John's bed. The heart monitor beeped louder, faster. My eyes widened, examined, saw. John.

Blood pounded in my ears. I stood up and my head swam. I was so stiff, but I walked across the room and took his hand. I could feel it: his warm fingers giving life to mine, filling in the grooves and valleys of each fingerprint. He squeezed my hand and an electric shock zipped up my arm, up and down my spine until I could hear my brain revving back to life. John inhaled again and so did I. "Papa's back!" Alice delighted. She ran around us and climbed into bed, looking at him excitedly.

John's eyelids fluttered. "Sherlock?" he murmured. "Alice?"

"Papa!" she squealed. "Papa, Sherlock was very sad and didn't eat or drink anything. You must kiss him now so he starts living again."

He opened his eyes: God, his eyes. That blue flecked with brown: the most glorious brush strokes of all millennia. He looked at Alice and a smile formed. "Is that so?" He gave a weak chuckle.

"Don't laugh at me," I retorted, my voice a bit rusty. I had almost deleted what my voice sounded like: it hadn't mattered.

In an instant, I was in the bed beside John, trying to fit the side of my body to his and wrapping long limbs around him as much as I could to bind us together. It was so hot after all that coldness. I tucked my head under his chin, my nose in the hollow of his neck. He lifted a hand and stroked it through my curls, sending little sparks running around my skull, down my spine, into my chest. "Sherlock, you're freezing."

"No, no, Papa, you have to kiss him. Like in the Sleeping Beauty story."

"But I was the sleeping one. Doesn't that mean he has wake me?"

"No, no. Daddy was practically dead, Papa. Like, like, like a zombie. I had to talk you back or otherwise we'd all be stuck in the hospital tower forever."

John was tugging his hand away. "Doesn't that mean I have to kiss you?"

"Oh, stop this meaningless drivel!" I said, snatching John's hand back. "John, I forbid you to ever do this again." I lifted myself up and kissed him soundly on the lips. It tasted like lightening on bedsheets, embers on a cold night, lonely stars on fire. His mouth was cottony from sleep, but gloriously, magnificently alive. Everything was tinglingly with life, every last neuron seemed to be firing, feeling, my brain roaring in resurrection. And in the midst of it, my face was wet, something was slipping out of my eyes and falling onto John, but he didn't seem to mind.

The kiss ended and my body was wracking with dry sobs.

"God, Sherlock, you really know how to wake somebody up," John said.

I settled back down into my former position. "Do not mess in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." For some inane reason, Alice's comparison of me to Smaug had popped into my head. My body was still buzzing, but calming into a more normal state, if an exhausted one.

Alice and John both laughed. "Have you been telling him about The Hobbit?"

"Yes, Papa! I..."

I stopped listening to their words, just appreciating the music of it, the thrum and beat and buzz. Traitorous tears fell silently for a few more minutes, but John's hand was back on my head so I hardly think he minded. After awhile I drifted off to sleep, still wrapped in the sounds and feelings of the ones I loved.

Alice is a good little fangirl.

Please review! =D