A.N. I normally can't stand over-extended author's notes, but I feel that some grovelling is long overdue. I sincerely apologize to everyone who took the time to send me reviews and messages for not acknowledging them – and a huge 'I'm sorry' for the many, many days I have gone without updating this compendium.

I'm afraid I came down with dengue fever on a weekend visit to the tropics and, after my platelet count dropped astronomically, I really wasn't in any condition to think straight, never mind write. However, after I started recuperating, I was too apathetic and all 'I-hate-the-world' to look at my laptop, so that is where my cause for apology begins.

The following snippet is based on something a friend mentioned to me, which struck me as both bizarre and perfect.

If I Could Tell You

Sherlock Holmes / Harry

Because I love you more than I can say,

If I could tell you, I would let you know.

W. H. Auden

There were some things, he thought blearily, that could not, that should not, be reduced to mere facts pinned across the board of one's mind like so many butterflies. Sherlock searched through the box, long fingers preparing a shot of cocaine with the practice of long use. Waiting for the drug to take effect in his veins, Sherlock moaned at the pain of the memories that overwhelmed him at the slightest hint of lucidity.

A pair of magnificent green eyes, dull with resignation and a sort of hopeless love, floated across his mind. Snarling in rage, Sherlock hurled the syringe at the door, as though giving in to his passions now could take away the hurt inflicted through countless heartless experiments conducted on the disoriented, frightened boy that had materialized in his living room ten years ago, wearing the oddest necklace with an hourglass pendant and looking as though he had been through hell and back.

With trembling fingers, he dug out another syringe. He obviously needed a stronger dose if he could still remember this much. Images floated through the drug-inflicted haze he was in.

.*.*.*.

A beautiful boy kneeling before the man who had realized the potential of a sexual submissive who was lacking all memories prior to his arrival in Sherlock's home, his eyes shining with a love unsullied by the horrors he had seen . . .

A terrified, but still-trusting boy anchored to electrodes, as Sherlock tested his hypothesis on whether differing levels of electrical activity in his body could affect this strange phenomenon that the silly child called magic . . .

Blood running through the cracks between the stones on the floor as Sherlock attempted to ascertain whether the boy's abilities increased his tolerance to pain and various stimuli above that of an average human . . .

An absent kiss given during rough sex lighting the boy's face for days . . .

Hatred in Watson's and Mary's faces as they attempt to kidnap the boy to heal the strategically broken bones, while Sherlock shouted obscenities at them for daring to disrupt the process of his experiment on healing times and their relationship to the quantity and quality of wounds present . . .

A resigned hurt lingering on the boy's face as he is laughed away for desiring to be held. A warmed blanket properly wrapped about oneself has a far greater thermal insulating effect than the human body, after all . . .

A moment from a life on the run, as the boy polishes the floor of a room even after the chemicals he uses have caused his hands to start bleeding, in the hope that, by making himself useful and not using any of his abilities that logically should not exist, he will be noticed and perhaps, just perhaps, treated better than an experiment that walks about on its own . . .

A brilliant, innocent smile that Sherlock hadn't seen after the first time he had flogged the boy, and hadn't realized he had missed . . .

A bemused, almost fond look on his face as Sherlock woke to a silky mop of hair ensconced on his chest . . . memories of this sort had been few and far between.

.*.*.*.

A bitter laugh broke free from Sherlock's lips. Of all the memories that were inundating him now, the worst was the one at the graveyard, even worse than the horrific scene at the Reichenbach falls, now forever imprinted in his memory. He had watched the boy gaze around, wonder that he had not seen in years filling his eyes, an expression of serenity and content, alien on that too-tormented face, settling on his features.

When they had walked to the waterfall from there, he felt the strangest chill run through him, defying those laws of logic that Sherlock espoused so fervently by taking place in high summer. He had turned to the boy, intending to assure himself of the constant presence in his life for the past decade, and one long taken for granted.

He had been unable to move a muscle, terrified beyond belief. The expression on the boy's face – to Sherlock, he would always be his boy, eternally young in a world too old and cruel for him – was one Sherlock had seen on soldiers marching to their deaths, accepting death as an old comrade as it marched alongside them.

The look in his green eyes before he leaped gracefully over the edge, soaring through the air as though suspended in the flight he was once famous for, would haunt Sherlock till the day, fifteen years from now, he threw himself off the Falls to join the one he loved, loved as much as his fractured mind was capable of allowing.

The resigned despair at a fate there is only one release from, the hopeless love that knows it will never be returned, that had eaten away at a face that should be too young to know such things . . . all these had been etched in the boy's eyes for years and it was only now, at the end of it all, that Sherlock saw what he had done, what the final outcome of his great experiment was.

.*.*.*.

Fifteen years later, soaring through the same spray that had cleansed his Harry of the woes he had borne in life, Sherlock laughed. It had taken the boy's death to make him see what he had, indeed, felt for him, in his own twisted fashion.

Perhaps now, in a world unfettered by the rules he had tried to impose on the one he left, he would see that beautiful smile again, when he told Harry he loved him.