John returned to the unit to find Molly sitting in the chair by the bed, staring at Sherlock's face as he slept, as if trying to work out the answer to some very complex puzzle.

'Everything okay?' John asked quietly as he walked in, after nodding hello to Sherlock's nurse for the night shift, a silent presence at the desk in the corner of the room.

'What do you think he dreams about?' Molly asked, without looking at John. 'Or does he? I don't know - do sedated patients dream do you think?'

'We know that they do,' John said, after a quick check of the numbers on Sherlock's charts, making sure that nothing had changed in his time away. 'Propofol in particular gives people very vivid dreams, I don't know about midazolam. The alfentanil is probably fairly trippy though.'

'Do you think he's dreaming about solving cases, and will be really pissed off when he wakes up and realises that it was all just in his head? That he hasn't solved them at all?'

'I think that he'd just be pleased that he'd worked them out,' John said, pulling up a chair next to Molly and joining her in her contemplation of Sherlock. 'It's never about the actual case for him, you know. That's why he doesn't really care if it's a case from yesterday or one from a hundred years ago. It's all about working it out, the deductive process, working out who and where and why and how. That's all he cares about. The justice is just the cherry on the cake.'

'He does like catching the bad guy though,' Molly said. 'I always thought that was important to him. Restoring some kind of balance to things.

'Sometimes,' John said. Feeling as if this was sailing perilously close to the wind, but being unable to stop himself from speaking the truth. 'But sometimes he lets them go, too.'

Molly turned to look at him, frowning slightly, 'Why would he do that?'

'Because sometimes he can see the bigger picture, even if we can't,' John said, reaching over and squeezing Sherlock's hand.

'He'd do anything for you, John, you know that don't you?' Molly said quickly, as if wanting to get the words out before she could stop herself.

'I think that I've finally worked that out,' John said, glancing up at the cardiac monitor above the bed which was registering the odd ectopic beat. It was nothing to worry about, he knew, but it was an excuse to avoid eye contact with Molly.

'The only thing he won't ever do, is say what he wants for himself,' Molly said.

'He does that all the time,' John said, surprised, thinking of the number of times Sherlock had interrupted him at work, or in the middle of dinner with Mary, or at any other number of inopportune times to tell John that his presence was urgently required for a case.

'Not for himself,' Molly said quietly. 'He does it for the work, but never for himself.'

'What's that meant to mean?'

'He missed you, John. More than he would ever care to admit.'

'I know,' John said, staring at Sherlock's face, examining every line, every mark on it as if to etch it in his memory. When Sherlock was better, when he was awake, would he ever get the chance to spend so much time looking at him like this? And why did the thought that he might not make him feel so inexplicably bereft?

'As long as you do,' Molly said, then she stood up, and picked up her coat from the back of the chair. 'Do you want me to come back tomorrow? Give you a chance to have another break?'

John started to refuse and then stopped himself. 'Would you?' he asked. 'That would be great.'

And Molly just nodded quickly, but with one of those smiles that lit up her whole face, showing how pleased she was that John was allowing her to help.

'I'll see you tomorrow, then,' she said, as she let herself out of the door.

...

The night passed peacefully, with no major dramas, and John dozed comfortably enough in the reclining chair that the nurses had found for him. By the following afternoon, things slowly but irrevocably had begun to take a turn for the better. Sherlock's oxygen requirements began to decrease, and he was needing less ventilatory support to push the fluid out of his lungs. His cardiac function, which had been gradually deteriorating, started to slowly improve. John hardly dared to hope, scared of the well-known Lazarus phenomena, or rather the reverse Lazarus phenomena, where patients got better and then turned up their toes and died just when their relatives are sure that the worst was over. But as time went on it became more and more obvious that Sherlock Holmes had no intention of dying. It looked very much as if, against all the odds, he was going to live.

And Molly came up trumps too, bounding into the room just after six in the evening, waving a piece of paper at John.

'Histoplasmosis!' she told him excitedly, as if she was announcing the winning lottery results. 'The PCR results from the lesion on his hand came back and I was right - it is fungal; it's histoplasmosis!'

'What's that when it's at home,' John asked.

'Histoplasmosis capsulatum,' Molly told him. 'It's a non-capsulated, bimorphic fungus, found mainly in the American mid-west, often in soil contaminated by bats' droppings.'

'How the hell did he get that?' John asked.

'Goodness only knows,' Molly said. 'It's mainly a disease of cavers and spelunkers. There hasn't been a case reported in the UK for over fifty years.'

'Trust Sherlock,' John said. 'He would get something bizarre. He couldn't just get a bog standard staph infection like everyone else.'

'But the good news is it's treatable with amphotericin, and it's the only fungal cause of endocarditis that doesn't always require surgery.'

'I'll take any good news I can get at the moment, ' John said with a grin.

By the following day, Sherlock's white cell count was slowly creeping down, and his CRP had levelled off, a good indication that the infection was finally responding to the treatment. Better still, his kidneys were showing the first sign of recovering from the triple insult of two prolonged periods of low blood pressure within a week, repeated surgery and powerful kidney- poisoning anti-fungals. John knew they were improving because the catheter bag was starting to fill up with urine, where previously it had been almost empty. He had never thought he would be so glad to see somebody pee.

By the sixth day after they had made the diagnosis, they were talking about a sedation-hold, and seeing if Sherlock could manage off the ventilator.

It was a long, slow process. Turn down the sedation, switch the ventilator to demand to see if he would start to trigger it himself. At first there was no response, then Sherlock took a breath on his own, then another.

John reached for his hand. 'That's it,' he told him. 'Just like that, keep doing that and you'll be home before you know it.'

After a couple of hours the signs were looking good. Sherlock was breathing for himself, and the arterial blood sample taken from his arterial line showed that he was breathing effectively. The sedation was switched off entirely, and it was John who then was asked to perform the acid-test for extubation - to see if Sherlock would wake up and obey commands. In short, to see if his brain was functioning normally after all that it had been subject to over the last week or so.

If John could get Sherlock to wake up and respond to him, then the tube could come out. If he couldn't then they would have to re-sedate him and try again at a later date. Within a few minutes of the sedation being turned off, Sherlock began coughing on the endotracheal tube.

'Sherlock,' John said, feeling like an idiot, aware of the audience of the ITU nurse and the registrar, who was standing, syringe in hand, watching him and watching Sherlock's reaction to him, ready to pull out the tube if the signs were good. 'Time to wake up. Can you open your eyes for me?'

Sherlock shifted on the bed, coughed and then gagged on the tube.

'I know,' John murmured. 'If you stop being such an awkward bastard and just open your eyes, then we could get that out.'

Sherlock coughed again, then opened his eyes and stared at John, blinking repeatedly as he tried to focus.

'Thank fuck for that,' John breathed. 'Welcome back.'

Sherlock's hand came up and tried to push the tube away from his mouth.

'One thing at a time,' John told him, grabbing his hand and holding it tight. 'Squeeze my hand and we can take it out.'

Sherlock did as he was asked, squeezing John's hand tight, and then releasing it, his eyes fixed on John, silently asking him to remove the tube.

'Happy?' John asked, looking up at the registrar who had one last look at the monitor to ensure that Sherlock's oxygen saturations were still at an acceptable level.

She nodded, 'Happy,' she agreed. 'Sherlock, I need you to breathe out when I tell you, and we'll get that tube out.'

Sherlock did as he was asked, cooperating for possibly the first time in his life, John thought with amusement, as the tube was removed and replaced with a tight-fitting CPAP mask. The numbers looked good, but the effort seemed to have exhausted him and he quickly drifted back into sleep, without any further attempt at communicating with John.

They watched him closely over the next few hours. Sherlock remained asleep, but his oxygen saturations were stable, and the repeated arterial blood samples that were taken all indicated that he was breathing effectively on his own.

That night, John felt safe enough to leave Sherlock's bedside for more than a few hours for the first time in nearly a week, although he was not yet confident enough to leave the hospital entirely. He fell into the bed in his room in the hospital accommodation and slept for twelve hours straight.

...

Recovery was frustratingly slow. All of Sherlock's numbers were improving. The CPAP was weaned down over the course of the following day and eventually switched to a low trickle of oxygen through nasal prongs. Sherlock's lungs had become less congested, although the infection in his lungs was proving slower to resolve. He was off the inotropes and his kidneys had recovered enough to stop the haemo-filtration. After that it became a game of watch and wait. The antibiotics and anti-fungals needed to be continued for a good six weeks, but the chest drain would be coming out in a few days, now that the flow of fluid out of his chest had slowed to a trickle.

But Sherlock himself remained drowsy and uncommunicative. He would open his eyes, stare at John, occasionally squeeze his hand, and then drift back into sleep. John was starting to worry about the state of his brain. While rare from right sided infection, emboli from endocarditis could affect the brain, causing small micro-infarcts, tiny strokes, or the period of low blood pressure could have caused brain damage. A CT scan done the morning after his extubation looked remarkably normal, which was reassuring. The intensivists were optimistic, blaming the prolonged period of ventilation and so called 'ITU syndrome', the phenomena where patients become confused and disorientated simply due to the severity of their illness and the strange environment that was the intensive care unit. Sherlock was still on massive doses of opiates to control his pain, and this was also thought to have a role. John wanted to believe their explanations, but he couldn't shake his sense of unease as the hours ticked by and Sherlock failed to wake up fully.

In the end, it was Molly who got the first sense out of Sherlock, sitting with him that evening while John went to get dinner in the canteen.

She was sitting in the chair next to Sherlock's bed, chatting to him about her most recent case, in the hope that he would either wake up and tell her to shut up out of irritation, or be interested enough in the case to chip in and give him the answers. Instead, he woke up, stared at her and asked, 'Molly?' his voice croaky with disuse

'Hello,' Molly said.

'Am I dead?' he asked, squinting at her, his words whispered, difficult to make out.

'What? Oh no, you're alive, you're not in the mortuary. I just came to visit.'

'Where -'

'You're in intensive care. At the Royal London.'

'No, where's John?' Sherlock said clearly.

...

Alerted by a phone call from Molly, John came running up the stairs to the unit, having left his dinner half eaten on the table, to find Sherlock, eyes open, visually following his progress through the unit through the open door.

John flung himself into the room and wrapped his arms around him, pulling him into a hug.

'Ow!' Sherlock said, as John's arm snagged on his central line.

'Sorry,' John said, pulling away to inspect the damage and finding none. 'No, actually, I'm not sorry,' and he hugged Sherlock again, as Sherlock's spare arm came up to embrace him back.

'You okay?' he asked Sherlock, finally letting him go. 'No, I mean of course, you're not okay, I just mean -'

Sherlock gave him a look - the one that meant he thought John was being idiotic.

'What year did the Second World War start,' John asked,

'1939.'

'And who is the Prime Minister?'

'Why on earth would I want to know that?' Sherlock asked, with all of his old indignance at being asked a ridiculous question.

John grinned and hugged him again. 'Have you got any idea how ill you've been?' he asked him.

'Molly told me,' Sherlock said. 'What day is it?'

'Friday, October 15th.'

'How long -'

'Since you did your escape act and collapsed at Baker Street? Two weeks to the day.'

'Magnussen…'

'No, Sherlock, absolutely not,' John shook his head. 'No more Magnussen, no more cases for a while. You nearly killed yourself. You're not going to be going anywhere for a long while.'

'It's important,' Sherlock said, frowning slightly as he struggled to focus on John, obviously exhausted just from the effort of talking.

'No, it's not. You're important, do you hear me? Christ, you injected fungus into your heart via your central line, did you know that? You nearly died. You managed to take our your lungs, your heart and your kidneys in one foul swoop. Your liver isn't looking too chipper either. It's a miracle that you're still here, so just shut up and behave yourself, will you?'

Sherlock stared at John, and John felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.

Molly obviously felt it too, because she muttered something about leaving them to it, and let herself out of the room.

Unwitnessed now, John sat on the edge of the bed, and cupped a hand behind Sherlock's neck, bringing his head down so that their foreheads were touching. 'I need you to get better, you hear me?' he murmured. 'I can't do that again. I thought I was going to lose you. I won't do that. I can't do that.'

'John?' Sherlock said, and the words were spoken gently.

John pulled away and looked at him. 'What?' he asked.

'Mary?' There was regret in Sherlock's voice, as if he was seeking to return John to reality.

John kept his eyes locked with Sherlocks and shook his head. 'No, not Mary - you,' he said firmly.

'It's important.'

'Why? Why Sherlock? Why are you so intent on me staying with Mary?'

'Because I can't give you what you need,' Sherlock told him, the words spoken slowly and with effort, his eyes locked with John's.

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' John stared at Sherlock, lying pale and weak against his pillows, and wondered why it was so hard to tell him how he felt.

'John, listen to me,' Sherlock reached out for John's hand and squeezed it hard, 'I am not what you think that I am. I can't -'

'I don't care, you idiot, don't you see? I don't care what you can or can't give me. I just need you to know that I -'

They both jumped at the knock on the door.

'Not interrupting anything am I?' Mary asked as she walked in. 'I just came to see how you were doing as John doesn't appear to be answering his phone anymore.'


I know. I'm evil, but you all love the suspense really...

This chapter comes with huge thanks to J_Baillier for the expert med-picking and for talking me through the complex process of extubation. Who knew that it was so complicated?

And thanks to sevenpercent for the betaing and pointing out that Sherlock wouldn't know who the Prime Minister was...