Mycroft who had waited in the hallway looked alarmed. "What happened?"

"I don't know. I just touched his mark and he cried out in pain." Greg answered, standing paralyzed in the middle of the hallway.

Mycroft stormed into Sherlock's room while Greg moved to the opposite wall, slowly sinking down to the floor. He was in shock. He definitely didn't want to hurt Sherlock. He saw another doctor ran past him into the room. Shouldn't he make Sherlock better once they bond? Is that not what a broken soulmark meant? He was waiting in the hallway for what felt like hours. His thought orbited around his and Sherlock's past, about the strong feelings he had about Sherlock right from the beginning. And he couldn't help but envision what might have happened if he had discovered all this back then. His thoughts were interrupted when Mycroft and the doctor who had rushed in last suddenly stood in front of him. Greg jumped up. "Is he okay?"

"Yes, he is okay." The doctor said. "Let us find a place to talk."

Mycroft, Greg and the doctor went into one of the doctor's offices at the end of the hallway.

"Okay. Well, I am Doctor Rajendran, I am a specialist in that field. You two have broken soul marks and that means one of you …" The doctor started.

"Yes, I know, one of us is the healer, which is me, and the other one is the broken one, which is him, I know that." Greg interrupts the doctor impatiently.

"Yes, and that means when you two bond, the broken one will relive every pain he has ever experienced from that day backwards. You will also feel his pain, but that should be just a faint perception. Today the moment when you touched his mark he just felt the pain of being stabbed again and due to the pain and his movements he ripped out the chest tube." The doctor explained.

"But he is okay?" Greg asked again. "I didn't want to hurt him."

"He is okay. They fixed the chest tube and raised the pain medication." Mycroft answered.

"Yes. The bonding procedure has to wait. While a healthy young person is able to endure the bonding process Sherlock in his current state is surly not. The wound needs to heal first." The doctor made a pause before he continued. "And even then it might be too much for him. It is quite unusual for broken souls to bond so late and he had not only experienced emotional pain like most broken ones but according to his medical records a rather high number of physical injuries as well as drug abuse. I would strongly advise doing the bonding in hospital or at least in attendance of a doctor and if only to administer pain medication if necessary to make it easier for him."

Greg was shocked by what he had just heard. He hadn't thought about that. Of course he knew about the procedure, has read about it when he was young. "You mean the bonding could kill him?"

"That is hard to predict." Doctor Rajendran answered.

Greg looked to Mycroft. "Then maybe we shouldn't bond at all." Greg whispered. "I don't want to hurt him or kill him."

"That is a decision only you two can make. For you not much will change. For him though." The doctor didn't finish the sentence.

Yes, Greg new the end of this sentence. A broken one who will not bond will die young. They get tired of life, they say. Some committed suicide once the symptoms started to show. Other just withdrew from life and faded away very fast, sleeping most of the days and nights. In the final stage the tiredness was accompanied by pain. And Greg just realized that Sherlock might be on the brink of that development as he had never seen him so tired. He even had caught him sleeping several times he spontaneously showed up at Bake Street.

"He already has symptoms, right?" Greg asked.

"Yes, he has. He came to me about six month ago. And now his mark has already two cracks." Doctor Rajendran explained. Greg could see the brink of tears in Mycroft's eyes before the man turned around and took a deep breath.

"Can I see him?" Greg asked.

"Sure. As I already said, we had to raise the pain medication. He should be okay now. Just don't touch his mark. And he also shouldn't touch your mark. But we already explained that to him." The doctor said and went away.