John came home feeling like he got hit by truck. The adrenaline rush of the day had drained down to an oppressive exhaustion. His limbs felt heavy and numb, his limp was making a slow but sure come-back and the gash in his arm was making itself known. But what irritated him most at the moment was that his jumper and shirt were both ruined and he didn't exactly have the budget to spare them.

221b looked deserted when he entered. He figured Mrs. Hudson had already gone to bed and Sherlock was still off chasing that murderer. A worry nagged at the back of his exhausted mind, but he ignored it in favor of tackling the gargantuan task of hiking the staircase. It was by far the most daunting task of the day.

By the time he collapsed into his bed, he distantly hoped that he wouldn't ever wake up. Because he knew that when he did, he would be so sore and the wound that he hadn't the energy to treat would probably be infected.

He woke up to the feeling of something looming over him in the pitch black darkness. In his semi-conscious and thoroughly spent state, this seemed only a little odd.

"John," Sherlock rumbled, purring from where he perched on John's stomach like a giant cat. A set of marble-cold fingertips brushed his cheek. It felt fundamentally wrong, like touching a sculpture in a museum. "You disappeared during the chase. Why?"

"I was kidnapped." He explained simply, as if there was anything simple about it. "... Why are you on top of me?"

"Of course. I didn't think you were the type to run at the first sight of danger." Sherlock sighed, more relieved than concerned. He lifted John's injured arm. John tried to pull it out of his grasp but it was useless. He couldn't tell if it was Sherlock's strength or his own exhaustion that made the act seem effortless. There was a tearing noise as the sleeve of his ruined jumper was stripped away. John felt a set of fingertips, or it might have been a nose, brush against the open flesh of his wound. "I can fix this if you let me."

"It's fine. Just let me sleep." He tried to jerk his arm back into his own possession again and failed.

"It's causing you pain. It doesn't look very clean. Might even get infected." A cold breath fluttered through his arm hair. That was definitely a nose. "Please, let me help."

John wondered drowsily how Sherlock could see anything in the utter darkness of the room. But the matter immediately resolved itself as a weird vampire thing. "If I do, will you let me sleep?"

"Yes." John mumbled something that sound almost like 'do what you like'. Sherlock hummed, deep and low. It filled the room like a finger circling a wineglass. John winced as something wet swiped across his wound. He felt himself begin to drift off when the vampire began to speak again in between licks. "It's not exactly good manners, this. Taking your blood from the flesh so soon after we've met." The stinging pain of the wound faded quickly until it felt as fuzzy as his head did. It occurred to him that he should be remembering something important. Something about danger. But it drifted away as he fell further asleep. "But your flesh is already broken. And it's less polite to let it fester."

He was hardly conscious enough to feel Sherlock's mouth wander down his forearm to his hand, sucking and licking the skin clean. "Hmm. It should be a crime to let your blood go to waste. If that accursed knife hadn't already been admitted to evidence, I'd suck the dried blood off it's edge." He locked his mouth around the soldier's wrist, irreverantly pressing his teeth into the delicate flesh. Not hard enough to break the skin, just to feel the heat of him against his tongue. "Ooh, if that damn painter didn't have a death sentence in her future, I'd kill her myself."

John was dead to the world when Sherlock placed his arm back onto his chest. "That was a bit much, wasn't it?" He apologized bashfully to the sleeping man, carefully tracing the fine lines surrounding the edge of his ocular orbit with his fingertips, thumb trailing against his zygomatic bone. "I don't exactly have the largest frame of reference. But..."

He smiled shyly in the dark as he stepped out of John's bed. "Goodnight."