Behold the story that required a whole night of googling medical information! I apologize in advance if any of this googled information is false!
This one is turning out a bit longer then I thought, stay tuned for part 3!
"I've got medical departments of all sorts breathing down my neck about this, Sherlock!" Lestrade growled as the detective and his blogging partner showed up at the unusual crime scene. A few of the Yard's finest were standing in front of the flat where the most recent death had occurred, but they were milling about as though this sort of thing didn't require their full attention. "I've got about five minutes before powers above me take this whole thing out of my hands!"
"And isn't it humbling to realize how low you are on the social scale of London, Lestrade?" Sherlock shot back, clearly not in the mood for the D.I.'s characteristic grumpiness.
"I'm doing all this for you, you know." Lestrade folded his arms over his chest. "You could be grateful."
"I am." Sherlock shrugged mildly, his words mangled by a sudden cough. He gathered himself and inhaled sharply, glaring at John when he noticed that the doctor was giving him a concerned look. "I'll see the body now." He snapped, pushing his way past Lestrade and into the flat.
The flat belonged to Doctor Jason E. Cummings, he was the fourth victim of the same disease that killed the first two doctors. He was also employed at Northwind Hospital. Unlike the previous victim's home which had been small and devoid of personal belongings, Dr. Cumming's home was cluttered with all sorts of odds and ends. John had no idea how Sherlock was making any sense of all the mess as he weaved through piles of paper and sorted through mugs of cold tea sitting on the kitchen counter.
The doctor himself was laying rather unceremoniously on the floor, his skin looked gray and his face was frozen in an expression akin to terror. Sherlock knelt by the body and gestured for John to join him.
"What do you think?" He asked, his vibrant eyes looking over to the doctor. John always loved this moment, when Sherlock told him without words that he valued his opinion and that he was useful in these matters.
John examined the body as thoroughly as he could, but he couldn't ignore Sherlock's coughing growing worse. The detective sounded pretty bad, but any sympathy or care from John would only result in Sherlock lashing out for pride's sake. So John focused on the corpse.
"Hey, look here." John pointed to a small mark on the victim's neck. "Injection site."
"Brilliant. Took you long enough to notice." Sherlock smirked, but his face looked too pale to be confident. "So what does that mean?"
"Someone's been infecting the victims?" John sighed, trying to resist the urge to throttle the annoying git.
"We can only guess at this point. Unless the other victims have the same mark. There needs to be a connect-" Sherlock broke off his sentence, coughing. John waited for him to continue, but the cough grew worse. Suddenly the detective fell onto his side, his limbs began spasming and his breath choked off and ceased all together.
"Sherlock!" John yelled. He recognized the symptoms of a seizure immediately and did what he could. He turned Sherlock on his side and pulled the detective's head up onto his lap. Lestrade appeared, summoned by John's yell.
"What's going on?" He shouted, dropping to John's side.
"He's seizing, he'll come out of it." John knew he was the one talking but the words sounded distant and quiet. Finally Sherlock stopped convulsing and lay still on John's lap. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were shut.
"Has he...has he ever done that before? What happened?" Lestrade gaped, his voice concerned and confused.
"No, he doesn't have any history of..." John suddenly stopped mid sentence and felt the weight of his own ignorance bear down upon him all at once. He could hear the news reporter from last night in his head, describing the symptoms of the killer disease.
"Witnesses say the victim showed all the symptoms associated with this illness: flu like symptoms followed by seizures, delirium and finally death."
Sherlock had been all over that dead man's flat, and he'd...
He'd come in contact with the victim's blood.
"I'm such an idiot..." John breathed. "He's sick. He's got what they had, Greg. He's sick and he's dying."
"If you don't let me out of here I swear to you I will make your life a living hell!" Sherlock yelled at the glass, snarling at every doctor that happened to be staring in the window at him. The detective paced in the quarantine room like a caged animal, stopping every now and then to insult the doctors, the nurses, and the white hospital gown that he was currently wearing.
"List mood swings under the symptoms." Dr. Jackson whispered to the nervous nurse next to him, who was taking furious notes on her clipboard.
"Ah, actually don't." John sighed. "He's just...he's just like that."
"Interesting." Dr. Jackson watched Sherlock throw his tantrum for a bit and then turned back to John. "So you think it's the disease that has been on the news lately?"
"It couldn't be anything else." John confirmed, and then added: I think it's transmitted through contact with the blood. After all I was at the crime scene and so was the Detective Inspector but no one but Sherlock fell ill."
"Well we can't take any risks, hence quarantine. Even if your theory is correct, we must take every precaution." The doctor replied.
"Every precaution isn't good enough!" John let himself explode for just a second, then he took a deep breath. "That's my...best friend in there. Dying."
"I know. Well rest assured we are doing everything in our power to find a cure." Dr. Jackson turned away from the glass and looked John in the eyes. "But...the odds are not in our favor...the victims of this illness...they die very quickly after infection."
"I know that." John snapped. His body felt cold and his heart wouldn't stop pounding. Of course he'd taken that into account, his best friend fallen to a deadly disease and these doctors were wasting time telling him the odds of survival.
"...and finally death."
John shook his head. He didn't need to focus on that right now, what he did need to do is find the person responsible for the deaths. Obviously someone carrying around a disease that deadly wouldn't risk contact with it without a cure. It was Sherlock's last hope, he had to find the murderer.
"Can I talk to him?" John asked the doctor.
"Of course. You can't enter the room of course, but we have a communications system. Just press that button to talk." Dr. Jackson pointed John to a panel of buttons in front of the window that looked in on the quarantine room. John chuckled, the whole setup was similar to the room the police used for interrogation, and god knows Sherlock had been in that room plenty of times. John walked up to the window and pushed the button.
"Sherlock?" He said into the microphone that stood upright next to the button.
"Traitor." Sherlock snarled, glaring at John.
"Oh shut up." John scolded. "Would you rather I let you run yourself to..." John trailed off, he had been about to say 'death' but then couldn't make himself say the word. Sherlock seemed to pick up on John's concern because his glare softened.
"I need to find the man who did this, John." Sherlock said coldly and slowly. "I can't do that from inside a cell."
"It's not a cell. It's a hospital. It's Northwind Hospital actually so think about how convenient that is." John nodded. "You could do some investigating from the inside."
"Inside one room." Sherlock scowled and then went into a coughing fit that had him doubled over for some time. When he stopped he looked pale and dizzy, and he stopped his pacing to sit on the edge of the bed at the far end of the room. "John, I need you to be my eyes on this case." He said, his voice ragged and broken by heavy breathing.
"I think I can do that." John agreed.
"But, John..." Sherlock paused and looked right at John's eyes. "Don't get emotional. I need you to be efficient, not emotional."
John stood in silence, his stomach was tying itself in knots. He felt so powerless, he was a doctor but there wasn't a single thing he could do in this situation. The only thing he could do was...as Sherlock told him to do.
"I...I will." He sighed.
"Good..." Sherlock leaned against the pillows as though the very act of talking was tiring him. "Go look at the other victim's bodies. Tell me what you can find..." The sentence trailed off and by the end of it Sherlock was asleep. John looked away from the room, the room that Sherlock could likely die in. The sickness was still in early stages and still his friend looked like hell. If it got worse...when it got worse...
John shook his head and turned around. He had a murderer to catch, and when he found him...he was going to give him hell.