Author's Note: Dear patient - always much beloved - readers, I had to cut this chapter in half because otherwise the sheer tonnage of words would have killed me stone dead and you would have had to wait another fortnight before you got an update. I've been disgustingly busy lately hence why this update is rather late. I wrote most of this on a train because travelling from one place to another is the only time I have free to write. I'll shut up now. Read on:
Blood! The word burnt red behind his eyes, it flashed and throbbed like an illuminated heartbeat in his mind. Blood was everywhere, it had spread itself vindictively over the floor, it had soaked itself into the snow and into the fibres of Sherlock's coat and into the cells of his skin. It was on John but it wasn't in him, it was everywhere that it wasn't supposed to be and Sherlock found that he could hardly breathe through the smell of it.
It was acrid and harsh and suffocating. Intoxicating iron mixed with the smell of warm flesh, John's warm flesh that was rapidly turning cold, cold like corpses on metal tables or cold like vacuum packed meat in a fridge and it wasn't right! Because John was always warm and he didn't smell like this, not like acrid iron and cooling flesh. He smelled of tea – because he drank far too much of it – and of musty wool – because he wore too many of those oversized, ill-fitting, horrific-shade-of-off-white jumpers – and of that dreadful cologne that Mrs Hudson insisted on buying him every Christmas.
This wasn't John, this cold, bleeding body with its closed eyes and its barely audible breathing. This wasn't John, not his John, not John at all, he was an imposter, a thief, a rancid trick of the light, a chemical product of Sherlock's combined sleep deprivation and dehydration. This couldn't be John, because John couldn't bleed unless Sherlock gave him permission to and John couldn't die unless Sherlock was already in the process of beating him to the grave.
"Stop bleeding!" Sherlock hissed at John's lifeless form as he frantically ripped the scarf from around his neck and slid it beneath John's body. His hands trembled violently as he yanked the fabric across John's abdomen, pulling it as tight as he could against the wound. His fingers were wet and slippery with congealing blood which made it hard for him to tie to the two ends together. He couldn't grip the fabric, couldn't pull it tight enough without the ends slipping from his grasp. He let out a desperate whine of frustration as he tried, and failed, to tie a knot in the scarf for the third time.
Useless. You are a redundant waste of genetic material that is scarcely worthy of drawing breath because you know every chemical property of every element on the periodic table but you can't work out how to tie a fucking knot! You can't help him because you're useless because you've always cared more about solving cases rather than saving lives and now he's dying, dying, DYING! Because of you, because you don't know when to stop, because you know all of the wrong things like the rate of blood coagulation in sub-zero temperatures and the various ways in which a corpse can be bruised posthumously. But none of those things matter in this moment do they? Because being able to differentiate between 243 types of tobacco ash can't make him open his eyes and being able to work out the filial connection between two men by the turn ups on a set of jeans can't stop him bleeding and it can't keep him breathing and it can't save his life and it can't stop him from leaving you in a world that was so quiet before you realised that he existed!
Sherlock finally tied the knot, he tied it tight, so tight in fact that John groaned and his eyelids fluttered slightly. Alive. The word flashed white against the thousands of red, pulsing letters that were swarming through his mind. Alive, alive for now, alive for this second, for this moment because his stupidly loyal heart was still beating in his small, concaved chest and his lungs where still working despite the fact that his eyes were still refusing to open.
Sherlock wanted to scream. He wanted to be illogically counterproductive and bury his face in the crook of John's neck and whisper into his ear and beg him to open his eyes. That's what a normal human would do in a situation such as this wasn't it? If he was a normal man he would beg the almost dead body of the thing that he loved to stop dying. He would say: "Please don't leave me. You can't die because there isn't enough opiate based drugs in world that would dull the pain of losing you. And if you die and leave me hear in this world of white noise then I will go back to Baker Street and I will pry up the third floorboard in your room where I keep my emergency stash, and I will slide a needle in my arm and relish the sting that I haven't felt for so long, and I'll pump my veins full of so much cocaine that I'll be dead before my head hits the floor."
But because Sherlock isn't a normal man, and because he values pragmatism over sentiment, and because he knows that medicine saves lives not asinine pleas, he resisted the urge to curl into a ball and scream into the fabric of John's bloody jacket. Instead he slid one of his arms beneath John's knees and the other beneath his head and he hoisted John off the ground and held him against his chest as he carried his body across the roof.
Sherlock reached the door and kicked it opened, the sound of metal crunching against concrete echoed across the sky. It was satisfying to kick something, to fill up the silence with sound. Blood dripped off of the ends of John's fingers as they descended down the stairs and Sherlock was sure that he could hear the exact moment when each scarlet droplet splattered against the floor. It was that quiet. His footsteps echoed in the empty stairwells and his heartbeat throbbed in his ears but it was so quiet. John was so quiet. His head was resting limply against Sherlock's shoulder; his face was pressed against his neck. He was breathing, breathing quietly, so very quietly that if Sherlock hadn't felt the weak breaths against the sweating skin of his throat then he wouldn't have known that he was doing it at all.
It was suffocating, this quiet because John was such a loud human being, he made so much noise all the time. He snored and mumbled in his sleep and he angrily muttered things when he was reading the paper and he always put the teacups down on the table with a clunk and he ripped open the letters instead of slicing them with a knife and he sang in the shower and moaned loudly – even when he was trying desperately to be quiet – while he was touching himself in bed. He was a vibrating, breathing, living body of noise and Sherlock adored it. Most people would be annoyed but he wasn't. It was peaceful hearing John exerting the sounds of his basic human existence, it filled up the flat, made it buzz with warmth. It was like listening to Jean Baptiste Lully's Gavotte turned down low on an ancient record player.
But now John was too busy dying to make sounds and Sherlock was petrified because he could feel the silence creeping inside him like infected blood seeping out of a toxic organ and into a pulsing vein. He hated the silence because it made his brain feel like a wasteland, it made everything turn white and cold and lifeless, it made his thoughts feel like they were breaking apart and dying inside his skull like suffocating water-bound creatures that had been washed up on dryland. Silence could only be shattered by cases or cocaine or by John but John was dying and he was taking the sound away with him and it wasn't fair because…
I've only known you for three years, two months and nine days which is merely 9.665 percent of my entire life and mathematically speaking that is just not fair because that means that I've not even known you for a tenth of my life, and the other 90.335 percent of my life was awful because it was full of people who were the complete antonyms of you because they called me a "Freak-Psychopathic-Backwards-Wanker-Emotionless-Fuck" whereas you call me "Amazing" and you say it like you mean it, like you've never seen anything as wonderful as me in your entire life and that's almost better than a locked room murder or the feeling of a needle kissing the crook of my elbow_
"Sherlock!"
He had reached the bottom of the staircase now and Irene was running up to him, her face was colourless, completely washed white with a combination of shock and incredulity. Harsh white light, refracted from the piles of snow that had gathered on the ground outside, streamed through the broken window and caused the unfallen tears in her eyes to shine. She stared at him, then at the body in his arms for half a second, before she said,
"What do you need me to do?"
Sherlock adored her in that moment. He adored her for not being ordinary, for not being like any other normal person whose first response would have been "What happened?" But Irene wasn't a normal person, she wasn't ordinary, she never had been, that's why he liked her, that's why he had always liked her. The first time they met she had strutted around naked and had beaten him with a riding crop and now, now that the world was ending and the silence was eating him alive, she was asking him what she could do rather than what had happened because she understood that there wasn't time for reciting facts now. They were dealing in minus minutes.
He swallowed down the metallic taste in his mouth before he said, "Door."
She nodded and then quickly crossed the room. She yanked the dead bolts away from their latches, twisted the handle and then violently kicked the front door open. Dust exploded in the sudden presence of blinding light and Sherlock had to cough it out of his lungs before he was able to look at her again.
"Find Mycroft and then run."
He watched as her throat, almost the same shade of translucent white as his own, tensed as she swallowed. The second Mycroft got his hands on a phone London would be immediately locked down and she would be killed by any one of the hundred government agents looking for before she could get out of Westminster. She knew this, he didn't need to explain. Running would be the only logical, pragmatic thing to do. And yet as her eyes, hazy with a combination of moisture and smeared mascara, stared unflinchingly into his he quickly realised that she wasn't going to do that. She was going to choose sentiment over pragmatism and now, holding the bleeding body of John Watson in his arms, he finally understood why someone would do that willingly.
"I'll run when this is over," She said and then looked pointedly at John's limp, lifeless body, "And this isn't over yet."
Sherlock didn't experience time in the same way that other people did. He recognised time in the form of mathematical units opposed to appointed blocks of time appropriate activities. He slept when he was exhausted, not because it was night-time, and he ate when he was starving, not because it was dinnertime or lunchtime or breakfast-time.Time was a ridiculous human made construct that was created in order to provide structure to the chaotic, indifferent timeline of life. Because somewhere between the creation of the sundial and the invention of the pocket watch, people had come along and deemed that the hours 7-8am and 12-1pm and anywhere between 6-10pm where for eating various sorts of time appropriate foods and that night-time was for sleeping and daytime was for working and that the strip of time between work and sleep was allocated to relaxing.
Time had been personified, hatefully, and it was ridiculous because what was the appropriate time for killing? What precious hour was allocated for that pastime? Or how about setting fires or stealing jewellery or blowing up the Houses of Parliament or dethroning a monarch or starting a war or shooting up cocaine or catching a murderer or dying? What time was a person allowed to die? Was it only supposed to happen at night-time or very early in the morning before the day had properly begun as, God forbid should the dying of one person affect the time prescribed eating habits of another! What time was a person allowed to acceptably die in this day and age? Sherlock needed to know so that he could work out the exact second that he was going to lose John Watson.
Time was too disgusting a concept for him to deal with right now so instead he focussed on breaking it up into mathematical units:
It had taken three minutes for Sherlock to reach the hospital.
It had taken the paramedics and doctors and nurses twenty seconds to take John from his arms and set his body down on a gurney.
It had then taken them a full minute to cut away his shirt in order to expose the long, gaping wound that ran from his bellybutton to the bottom of his ribs. Then another two minutes to attach a network of wires to his chest and slide needles into his veins and place an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, all the while speaking in medicine and maths and codes that Sherlock heard but didn't understand. He could have understood if he wanted to but he was too busy staring at John's closed eyes, eyes which had not opened, not once, since Sherlock had found him unconscious and bleeding in the snow.
Then they had asked him what had happened and Sherlock had hissed, "He was stabbed, obviously."
"Is he allergic to any medications?"
"No."
"Blood type?"
"A negative."
"What's his name?"
"John Watson."
"Are you a close relative?"
"Yes."
"Do you need immediate medical help?"
"No."
And then they had whisked John away – Sherlock couldn't remember how long that had taken, some agonising unit of time he imagined.
Then he had stood in the hallway, blood dripping from his fingers, just staring at the door that John had disappeared through, for sixteen seconds until one of the on-call nurses had asked him:
"Are you alright, sir? Are you bleeding?"
To which he had replied quietly, "No," to both questions. Then she had taken his pulse and sat him down on a gurney of his own and had said things to him that he hadn't heard. She had asked him some other questions but he hadn't replied and after six minutes she had smiled sympathetically at him and said,
"Alright Honey, you sit still and I'll go get a doctor."
The nurse had left and Sherlock had sat in silence for nineteen minutes until a glum faced doctor had approached him. He had sagging cheeks and a fake orange tan that made him look like a rotting pumpkin. He took Sherlock's pulse, shined a light in his eyes, asked him if he was hurt, if any of the blood belonged to him and – finally – what had happened.
"He was stabbed."
"How?"
"Are you unfamiliar with the concept of stabbing? Do you require an explanatory diagram? Because if you do I suggest you ask someone else to draw you one as I currently have neither the patience, inclination nor the energy to turn teacher."
The doctor had hummed dispassionately – almost as if he hadn't heard what Sherlock had said, "This is a matter for the police I take it?"
"I wouldn't worry about that." Sherlock had said as he fleetingly turned his attention to the entrance, "The British Government will be showing up as soon as he's consumed an entire roast chicken dinner in order to make up for the half a day that's he's gone without food."
"Oh yes, indeed, are you experiencing any nausea or light headedness?"
Sherlock had answered the rest of the doctor's questions as monosyllabically as he could, then he had allowed himself to get poked and tapped and squeezed for five minutes until the doctor had come to the contented conclusion that Sherlock was fine. Which was a horrific misdiagnosis because Sherlock was sure that his brain was turning black from heavy bruising and some of his internal organs were weeping blood into his body cavity. He didn't mention it though because he was about 99.67 percent sure that the pain was psychological and if it wasn't then he wanted to be left alone to bleed to death beneath his own skin.
Thirty-two minutes later Molly had walked past with her hair down and her ridiculously long, striped scarf dragging across the floor – obviously having just arrived at work: there was still a smear of toothpaste in the corner of her mouth and she had yet to apply the sparse amount of make-up that she wore in order to convey the idea that she an attractive woman as well as an intelligent one.
She had seen him sitting on the gurney, shrouded in a shock blanket, soaked through with melted snow and blood. She had gasped so loudly that a few passing patients had turned to look. She had been frantic at first but after she had worked out that it wasn't his blood and that he wasn't physically harmed she had calmed down a little. She had said something, a number of somethings, she had touched his face and smoothed his hair all the while letting tears leak from her eyes. But when Sherlock had done nothing but sit there in silence she had run off and grabbed hold of the nearest doctor that she could find.
Sherlock had watched her dart from one lab coat cladded doctor to another until she finally found one who knew what was going on. Eight minutes later she had run back to him, her face noticeable paler,
"Right," She had said as she brushed tears from her eyes, trying to smile but failing miserably, "He told me, the doctor, the one I was just talking to, he told me that John… that you brought him in. He's not John's surgeon but he called the operating theatre and… well John's in surgery_ I mean of course you already knew that but the doctor said that it's going to be a while – John's doctor, not the one I was talking too, although the one I was talking to was the one who talked to the doctor who told him to tell me that_ sorry, I'm mumbling. But he_ they said that John is currently stable. Which is really good considering_ I… Oh Sherlock I… don't even know what to say I'm so… well you probably wouldn't appreciate me saying that I was sorry would you?"
She had reached out her hand to take his but had stopped. She had stared at the blood and had swallowed thickly. Sherlock had looked down and stared at it too. It was starting to take on the properties of glue and was effectively sticking his fingers together. Dried blood coated his wrists and dampened the knees of his trousers. He could feel it on his chest, on his throat, in his hair, he could still smell the pungent scent in his nose. He was covered in the life giving liquid that should have been inside John and the thought of effectively wearing a part of John Watson like a coat made him want to retch.
"Here," Molly had said quickly – obviously seeing the sickening disgust on his face - "take my keys, this one is for my locker and this one is for my lab. I have soap and shampoo and a little bit of conditioner, you can use them and take a wash in the decontamination shower. I'll stay here, they know who I am, if something… if there's any news I'll run down and get you immediately, I promise."
Sherlock had stared at the set of keys that Molly had thrust into his left hand and then he had stared at the tears running down her face. He should be crying too, shouldn't he? That's what normal people did in situations like this, wasn't it? They cried, they screamed, they begged a non-existent deity for mercy. But he couldn't cry, not now because he currently felt so hollow and dry, he felt like someone had skinned him, slit open all of his veins and left him to shrivel up in the sun.
He couldn't cry and John deserved tears. John deserved so much more than him, than what he could possible offer. He deserved more than to die with his mouth defiled by Moriarty's tongue and his stomach torn apart by a mad man's blade. If this was the way that John Watson was going to die then Sherlock wanted no part of it.
"If he dies," Sherlock had said, "Don't tell me. I don't want to hear you say it. I'll be able to work it out for myself." He hadn't meant for his voice to sound so harsh but it had and Molly had flinched away like he had struck her. She deserved more than him too. Perhaps he'd tell her that one day, but then again an admission such as that would probably make her cry and that would nullify the fact that he was just trying to say something nice.
The shower had taken an hour at least. He'd tried to prolong it as much as he possibly could. He had stood under the hot stream of water until there was none of John's blood left on his skin and then he had washed his hair and body with Molly's tea tree smelling shampoo and soap. And then he had lain down on the ceramic tiled floor, curled into a ball and tried to block out everything apart from the feeling of the water hitting his skin.
He didn't want to get out because the second he did he would have to go back upstairs and find out whether or not John was dead. And he didn't want to know – which was a feeling that he had never experienced before, this burning desire to be ignorant, to be blissfully unaware of something that was so incredibly important. He wanted to know everything, he always had, but if, in an operating room several floors above his head, John Watson's heart had stopped beating then Sherlock didn't want to know about that. He couldn't have that information in his head because it would start a fire in his mind-palace and that would be agonising because Sherlock would have stick his hands into the flames in order to retain the memories that were being burnt to ash and his flesh would blister and his skin would disintegrate and he would be left lying paralysed, with his nerves exposed and his heart still beating slowly beneath two lines of broken ribs.
He couldn't know that John was dead because if he was dead then that was it. Death is definite; death is a state of stagnant immovability. If John died he would be gone forever. The cells in his body would die and his flesh would rot and his eyes would never open again and Sherlock would never hear his voice or smell his skin or find out what it felt like to press his face against the warmth of John's stomach or what the scar on his shoulder would feel like beneath his tongue or what it would be like to share a bed with him or what John would look like when he was forty, fifty, sixty… There would be no more fights or talks of certain things being 'A bit not good', no more midnight chases, or quiet breakfast mornings, or shared late night takeaway dinners, or giggling inappropriately at crime scenes or the making of copious cups of tea or blog posts or cab rides and the cases would never excite him again and the flat would be silent and that, knowing that John's death would result in all of that absence and loss of things that he hadn't even realised that shared was more excruciating than the prospect of pressing his own eyes against a shard of dry ice.
Sherlock was just a man, a brilliant man with an amazing brain but a man nevertheless, and a man can't resurrect the dead. A man can't restart a heart that refuses to beat. That's why men invented omnipotent deities that have the ability to do it for them. These Gods with a capital 'G' who have temples built in their honour and books written in their name. These Gods that you can get down on your knees and pray to, who you can beg when the cold indifference of life comes along and rips the love of your life away from you and leaves hollow and bleeding and effectively dying from the inside out. That's why they invented God! They invented him or her or it in order to make the tragic randomness of life feel a little less random and chaotic and cruel. Because if you've spent thirty-two years of your life feeling suffocating loneliness and being called a "Freak-Psychopathic-Backwards-Wanker-Emotionless-Fuck" and then a man like John Watson limps into 9.665 percent of your life and calls you 'Amazing' and stops you from feeling alone anymore, then you want to believe that something as random and chaotic and cruel as an ill-aimed knife thrust couldn't take that all away from you.
But Sherlock was a man of science so he knew that God was an invention or a delusion or a combination of the two. So he knew that prayer was a useless activity and that no one was listening to him but, for the sake of a sociological experiment, if he was a religious man what would he say? If he could do nothing but lie here on this shower room floor with hot water beating against his skin while John Watson lay dying above his head, then what would he say to a deity that doesn't exist? He supposed that he would say something like:
Please. Please don't let him die, don't take him away from me even though I deserve it because I'm not a good person and I never will be. Let me have him, I promise, I won't get bored, I could never get bored of him because he's the least boring thing that I've ever encountered. And I'm not asking much of you – in fact, up until this very moment I haven't asked you for anything and that's mainly because you don't exist but that is beside the point. I can do without the cocaine, I have been for years now, and I could even do without the cases – even though it would be excruciating – but I can't… not him, please, anything, take anything but him, I promise you I'll take any form of punishment gladly, I'll even beg for more, just don't take him from me, don't let him die, please, give me a chance, let me have him for more than 9.665 percent of my life, I'll let him date women after he gets tired of me, I'll let him go and let him fall in love properly and get married, I'll even help organise the wedding. Please, let him exist and be alive somewhere in the world and I'll be contented, that will be enough, I promise, please, I won't be selfish, please, let him live, please, please… please…
"Please," Sherlock whispered into the wet tiles of the shower room as he curled his shaking limbs tighter into his chest, "Don't let him die."
