Ch. 10: Pulse
Warning: references to suicide.
The flat is dark. John fumbles for the light switch.
"Where are you?" he screams. Afterwards, asking this question will be the last thing he remembers doing in civilian mode for some time.
Grimly, as though the hot winds of the Afghan summer are on his face and heavy boots are on his feet, he begins the search. Sitting room: clear. Kitchen: clear. Sherlock's room: clear. Bathroom: Oh sweet fucking hell.
The man is lying motionless in the bath, his head completely underwater. He looks like something that has washed up on a beach. His legs are tossed against the sides of the bath like driftwood. His mother-of-pearl eyelids curve like shells, and he's as naked and self-contained as a stone in a dead man's pocket.
The center of John's world is now located in that submerged, indifferent body. He runs towards it.
"Sherlock!" he shrieks, although it's not at all clear that the collection of limbs and curls has any further use for a name. John lifts the other man's head out of the water and finds the lump near the brain stem. The pulse in the carotid artery is so faint that it could be an echo of his own, but it isn't, and John's heart rate soars at the feel of it.
Blunt force trauma to the back of the head, consistent with head striking the side of the bath. Please, God, let him live. Accident? Live, damn it. Not breathing. Get the water out of him.
It's been well established in recent months that John's wounded shoulder doesn't do heavy lifting. This would matter if he were currently aware of owning anything as commonplace and fallible as human body parts. The realisation that Sherlock is still alive has hollowed him out and replaced all his organs with force of will.
He lifts Sherlock out of the bath with steady hands and shaking arms. As he holds the taller man against him, he feels two heartbeats in the vicinity of his chest – his own, strong, and Sherlock's, desperately weak. It's as quiet as the flapping wings of a cabbage moth. It shouldn't be medically possible to feel a vibration this light stop as you are manoeuvering a patient into position for rescue breathing. But it stops cold, and the survivor feels it.
John grits his teeth. You bastard. You complete, raging fucker. Get up this instant so I can kill you myself.
John dumps his infuriating flatmate on his back on the bathroom floor. There will be time for tenderness later, either in the flat or at the funeral, but for now, there is only determination. John places his left hand palm down between the other man's nipples, places his right hand on top of that, locks his arms, and starts pounding like a jackhammer on Sherlock's marble heart.
… 28, 29, 30.
John tilts Sherlock's head back. There's a shivering moment of déjà vu as he fastens his mouth to his lover's – yes, it's all right, you can think of him that way, it will make you work harder – and breathes into him. John files away the remembrance as another thing that can wait, and keeps on working.
John's oxygen seems to be at home in the other man's thoracic cavity. He watches out of the corner of his eye as Sherlock's lungs rise once, then fall. The uncharacteristically silent man is not respiring on his own, but at least his lungs can hold air.
I thought I told you to live. John breathes into him again, then rolls him on his side. Water drains from Sherlock's open mouth.
Then it's time for another furious round of chest compressions. John alternates between pounding on his flatmate and breathing for him. At about the two-minute mark, Sherlock begins coughing and weakly slapping at him. John has never been happier to be struck in all his life.
"Let go," Sherlock demands. His voice is feeble, but his attitude seems the same as ever.
"Idiot," says John. He is crying and laughing at once. "You fucking idiot. What have you done?" John collapses next to Sherlock and presses his face against the other man's long neck.
"You're dripping on me," complains Sherlock, wiping off one of John's tears. "Stop it." Tentatively, he runs a shaky hand through short, dark blond hair.
"You deserve it." John wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, then checks Sherlock's pupils for symmetry. When they check out, he watches the gentle rise and fall of his flatmate's chest. He touches it to make sure the movement is real, then sits up and reaches into his pocket for his phone. The #9 tone beeps in triplicate.
"There's no need to dial emergency." Slowly, gingerly, Sherlock props his lanky frame against the bathroom wall.
John grabs a towel off a nearby rack and throws it at him. "Hello, I need an ambulance. My friend hit his head in the bath and almost drowned. Did drown, in fact. I gave him CPR."
"I'm fine," Sherlock rasps, dabbing at himself with the towel.
"No, he's not bloody well fine. He's sitting up now, but he stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating and he needs a CAT scan to determine whether he's fractured his thick, idiotic skull." John takes the towel away from Sherlock and begins aggressively drying his shoulders with it.
"I'm not going." Sherlock struggles against the onslaught of terry cloth.
"I'm his doctor, and he is going. I will superglue him to the trolley if I have to." John rakes the towel up and down Sherlock's chest for emphasis.
"Oh, you'd love that," groans Sherlock. John notes that the muscles that allow him to roll his eyes are completely functional.
"221B Baker Street. Thank you." John puts the phone down. "That's sorted," he says. It's a relief to have the medical aspects of the evening taken care of, because now he can get to work on chewing Sherlock out. He folds his arms and sits on the edge of the bath.
"So," he says. "Maybe now you can tell me what this is all about." It's not a request.
Sherlock struggles to his feet, grabs his dressing gown off a nearby radiator, and wraps it around himself with all the bearing of a Roman emperor. The effect is ruined when he totters dizzily and has to sit back down.
"What makes you think it's about anything?" he demands. "Can't a man slip in the bath without it being the subject of a criminal investigation?"
The only sign that John gives to acknowledge that he has heard him is to lift his jaw and fold his arms just a hair more tightly.
"Fine," says Sherlock. "I knocked my head, sustained a concussion, and woke up to you pounding on my chest and calling me an idiot. Nothing new there. Isn't there somewhere else you should be? Your girlfriend's, for instance?"
"I wasn't in Sarah's flat, and she's not my girlfriend."
Sherlock's nose wrinkles. "You smell like her."
"I smell like work. And we're not discussing me. We're discussing you. What the hell did you think you were doing?"
Sherlock's focus is not diverted. "Since we're asking questions, what makes you think this wasn't an accident?"
John breathes deeply.
"Sherlock, this is not my first day at the fun fair. You didn't slip. There are no bruises on your back or your legs or your arse that weren't already there this morning. The bath water is cold. You always start with a hot bath – I can see the steam rising from it when you neglect to close the door – which means that you ran the water and then lay it in for a long time, working out whether or not you wanted to die. You apparently decided you did, which, by the way, was a fucking terrible idea. Really. The decision to keep maggots in the meat drawer looks like genius in comparison."
Sherlock opens his mouth, but John continues steamrolling over him.
"Then there's the position I found you in. Your back was flat, and your legs were splayed open and bent at the knees. That's how you usually bathe: first, because you're a relentless tease who likes maxing out my blood pressure, and second, because you are built like a string bean and can't stretch out in small spaces. It's not a position you would have randomly tumbled into after a fall. You were having trouble drowning yourself, so you lay down and knocked the back of your head hard against the enamel on purpose. Then you blacked out, and drowning got a whole lot easier."
Sherlock stares at him. "That's astonishing."
"No, Sherlock, it isn't. It's fucking obvious. What the hell were you thinking? You could have ended up a vegetable. Is that what you want?"
"You wouldn't understand." Sherlock looks away, as though suddenly fascinated by wainscoting.
"No, you don't understand. Look at me." When Sherlock does not turn his head, John pounces on him and grips his lightly stubbled chin.
"I don't have the luxury of deleting this," says John, quietly. "The least you can do is look at me before you do."
Sherlock glares, his lips twitching with fury. "I have never deleted anything about you."
John gives a short, sharp laugh. "Nothing? Really? Does this ring any bells? 'A long time ago…'"
"'In a galaxy far, far away. It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships…'"
"You've got to be kidding me," says John. He lets out a huff of surprise. "I thought you deleted that."
"I wanted to. I left it in my cerebral recycle bin for 24 hours, then brought it back. God, John, it's horrible. If it happened a long, long time ago, why use the present tense? Why start the whole thing with a sentence fragment? I can't even imagine. I only kept it because it reminded me of you."
"Is that why you kept your memories of our fight this morning? Couldn't you have just deleted them and not, you know, tried to off yourself in the tub? Successfully, I might add. Your heart stopped cold, and you were lying there dead in front of me."
John bites his lip. The feeling of helplessness is only hitting him now.
"I won't delete them," says Sherlock, stubbornly. "I won't delete anything about you. John, I…"
"No," says John.
"You don't know what I'm going to say."
"Yes, I do. I see the words drifting above your head, and you don't get to say them while you're concussed. You do not get to flood your lungs with water, die in my arms, and then pop back up and tell me you love me. You don't, Sherlock."
"But…"
John grabs Sherlock's hand and holds it in his lap. "Listen to me, damn it. That is not love. Did you think about how I would feel when I found you? Look at my face. Take a good, hard look. Now deduce what will become of me if you…"
John's face crumples. He lets his eyelids drop and his head fall forward. Sherlock gently extricates his hand, then holds the small body close and rubs his cheek against the side of his friend's wet face.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "John, I'm so sorry." Time passes as Sherlock rubs John's shuddering back.
"Fucking Mycroft," John mutters, wiping his eyes on the hard ridge of Sherlock's shoulder. "Why didn't he catch this?"
"Because I made modifications to the surveillance equipment in the flat."
"You turned off the bugs? Why?" John is amazed to find himself arguing for Mycroft's right to spy on them both, but it's been a long night.
Sherlock's breath ruffles John's hair. "I wanted you," he admits. "I was hoping you and I might be intimate. I wanted to make love to you without exposing you to any undesired attention."
John's face softens. "That's … sweet, actually. Bizarre, yes, but coming from you, it's quite …"
Sherlock hears the sirens a second before John does, and John cranes his neck to catch the sound. More and more, John finds himself reacting to things because he notices Sherlock reacting to them, not because he's aware of them himself. He tries not to let this make him feel staggeringly co-dependent.
"Will you go quietly?" John wants to know.
"It depends. Will I have company?"
"Yes." John shucks off his sweater, which is soaked from wrangling his damp flatmate, and smoothes his button-down shirt. Then he rises to his feet and extends his hand. Sherlock takes it.
As they reach the sitting room, the consulting detective hesitates. The red lights shining through the windows flicker against his skin.
"John?" Pairs of boots clomp up the stairs.
"What?" John stares up into a pair of silver eyes. They look elegant and dangerous, like the headlights of an oncoming Bentley.
Sherlock's voice is deceptively casual. "Are you planning to have me sectioned?"
Special thanks go to snoopydance4me for serving as my emergency medical consultant. (Any medical errors are mine.) All other thanks go to the brilliant verityburns, Jodi2011, random-nexus, LuffyMarra, AfroGeekGoddess, inconcvbl, Atlin Merrick, drjamband, Charm and Strange, thisisforyou, Shi Feng Huang, Terror-of-the-Mind, Petunia-Potts, Thorn Wild, C. Hillcrest, helenecolin, pufftin, FYSlytherin, Carley, chasingriver, Withershins, OryonUK, strangegibbon (the fearless Britpicker of ch. 8), Firedraike08, and on LJ, elmathelas, anarion, arianedevere, and uwsannajane.
Reviews are the only thing that has kept me writing through what has been a major patch of angst in this fic. Thanks so much to everyone who has commented. And thank you to the person who set me up with an Ao3 account, whose name will be revealed next time. :)