Yes, I know, this took me a while to get up. I struggled with this chapter and I haven't been able to get it quite to my liking. But, here it is finally. I do hope that it was worth the wait.

There will be mentions of self-harm and hints at past drug abuse in this chapter.

It's nothing to worry about

Chapter 5- I'm just cold (I don't want you to see my scars) Part 2

John spent the rest of the day pottering about the flat, cleaning and looking for other things to occupy his time. Every so often he went to check on his friend in his darkened room but every time he went in Sherlock was still lying in exactly the same position. A few times the doctor attempted to take his temperature again but it was impossible to get it into the detective's mouth, it was as if the man had completely shut down. No matter how many times John called his name, no matter how many times he tapped him on the shoulder or shook him nothing would rouse him. John didn't know if he was ignoring him, unconscious or somehow put himself into a trance of some kind. At one point he had reached for his phone to call Mycroft, to see if there was anything he could do but just as his hand made contact with the phone it buzzed indicating an incoming message.

He used to do this when he was little and something scared him. There's nothing you can do, he'll come out of it once he is ready. Mycroft Holmes

So that is what John did, he waited for Sherlock to come out of his trance-like state of his own accord. By early evening the doctor was getting nervous as Sherlock needed fluids. By eleven at night he was seriously concerned, concerned enough in fact that he picked up his mobile to ask Mycroft if he could deliver some IV fluids. The doctor had gotten half way through the text when his phone buzzed. Sighing he opened it, presuming it was Mycroft already knowing John was texting him and why. But it wasn't Mycroft; it was the younger of the two Holmes brothers.

Tea? SH

Normally the doctor would have been annoyed at Sherlock being both too lazy to get his own tea and to actually ask for tea properly. But this time he couldn't bring himself to be annoyed, he was just glad Sherlock had emerged from, well, whatever the hell it was. Pushing himself off his seat he made his way into the kitchen where he made the requested tea, poured a glass of orange juice, grabbed the thermometer and made his way into the Consulting Detective's room.

Gently he sat on the edge of the bed and set the two drinks down. "Before you drink anything I want to take your temperature, I need to know if it's changed at all."

"Hasn't," murmured Sherlock into the pillow.

"Well let me be the judge of that will you?" John replied in a tone which seemed light-hearted but firm at the same time. Reluctantly Sherlock obliged and opened his mouth allowing John to pop the thermometer in. A minute later it beeped, and Sherlock was right as always, his temperature was holding steady at 38.7◦C. "Alright, I have tea for you here but I want you to drink this orange juice first." For this John received one of Sherlock's signature death glares. However having lived with the man for a significant length of time the look was lost on him. "Oh, don't look at me like that. You've been unresponsive most of the day and your blood sugar must be pretty low and you're dehydrated anyway. Come on, drink up."

"I don't like orange juice," Sherlock stated irritably.

"And I don't like finding human body parts in the fridge even if they are part of an experiment. If you don't drink the juice there'll be no more body parts." Sherlock looked at John disbelievingly trying to make him back down from his threat. It did not work, John would not be swayed. "Fine," the younger man growled in frustration.

After this little victory Sherlock practically drained the cup of tea and demanded another one. John was reluctant knowing that the hot beverages would not be good for the fever but Sherlock didn't care and this was something John knew he would not back down from. So in the end the doctor obliged but made Sherlock drink some more orange juice beforehand as a compromise. After this Sherlock fell asleep so the doctor made his way up to his own room and also fell straight to sleep.

At quarter past four in the morning John was woken by a series of noises from downstairs. The Consulting Detective was shouting at someone to leave him alone and this was punctuated by the rhythmic sound of smashing glass. Even though he did not possess Sherlock's keen powers of observation and deduction John knew that this could not mean anything good. With a speed he only possessed when he thought his friend was in danger John jumped out of bed and thundered down the stairs. He could hear Sherlock shouting from the kitchen and the man actually sounded scared, not just scared but downright terrified.

Cautiously, so as not to startle him, John entered the kitchen from the side-door and took in what Sherlock was doing. He was shouting at some sort of monster that only he could see, grabbing whatever he could from the kitchen cabinets and table, and hurling them through into the living room. Just as a conical flask was sent flying his eyes came to rest on John and he opened them wide in fear. For a terrible moment the doctor thought his friend could not recognise him due to fever but this was not the case even though the reality wasn't much better than this. "J-John, what're you doing here?" he stammered, obviously very afraid, his voice taking on an almost child-like quality.

"I came down to see how you were feeling," he replied calmly taking small and slow steps towards the fevered man.

"Y-you need t-to leave, it'll hurt y-you otherwise." His eyes began to dart frantically around the room as if searching desperately for something.

"What'll hurt me?"

"The h-hound will."

This stopped John dead in his tracks. It was bad enough when someone's mind thought up some kind of monster but to throw a real and past horror into the mix was never good, it made reality and the fevered nightmare difficult to distinguish. "I'll be ok Sherlock, I promise," he said trying as hard as he could to sound reassuring.

"N-no, you d-don't understand," Sherlock continued to stutter. It looked as if the man was close to tears and it wrenched John's heart in two.

"Do you trust me?" John asked, taking Sherlock's bony shoulders firmly in his hands and looking directly into Sherlock's face.

"O-of c-course I do." John could feel tremors running up and down Sherlock's body; they were violent and felt almost painful.

"It's gone, I shot it outside. It's dead and I promise you that it is not going to hurt either one of us. Ok?"

The Consulting Detective practically collapsed into John's arms in relief. "Are you sure? W-we thought that we'd g-got it before but we were wrong."
"I am completely sure. Now, I think that you could probably do with going back to bed. Come on."

But apparently Sherlock was too weak to make it back himself, he tried to stand but his legs simply collapsed from beneath him. John caught him awkwardly and frowned at the heat emanating off the man and the sweat that was pouring off him. Once he had dragged Sherlock back to his room and got him lying down on his bed he grabbed the thermometer off the side and popped it into Sherlock's mouth, the younger man didn't even protest which deeply worried the doctor. He waited anxiously, not quite sure what to do with himself, until the tell-tale beeping broke the silence which had been punctuated only by Sherlock's heavy breathing.

"40.6 degrees," John muttered under his breath. "Crap." He really needed to get Sherlock's temperature down or else it would mean a trip to the hospital. Ideally it would be a hospital trip now but John knew in Sherlock's case he didn't have a mere dislike of hospitals; he had a complete inability to function in a hospital environment. He picked up Sherlock's phone from his cabinet and entered the PIN. He'd felt honoured when Sherlock told him it knowing it wasn't an honour that was handed out to many people, he was probably the only one Sherlock had told.

Urgently he found Lestrade's number in the contact and dialled it. He answered after three rings. "Sherlock, how're you…?"

"It's me Greg." There was a brief pause.

"Oh, hello John. I'm guessing he's not any better then?"
"He's worse."
"Ah, shame that. There's a case he'd be interested in."

"Sorry, he really can't. Look, are you still on duty?"
"Yeah I am mate. Is there something wrong?"

"He's got a temperature of over 40◦C and he's been hallucinating. I could do with a hand but if you can't I'll just have to call an ambulance."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
"I thought you were still on duty."
"I'll claim it's a family emergency; he practically is like family anyway. A bit of an odd member, granted, but family nonetheless."

"Well if you're sure, I need to move him but I'm not going to be able to do that by myself."

The fifteen minutes seemed to drag out into an eternity. For a while Sherlock just lay there, staring at the ceiling. John was worried that he had gone into a sort of lockdown again but he responded when John shook his shoulder to try to rouse him. His skin was chalky white and his eyes were clouded making them look an almost misty blue. Before long he drifted off into what John thought to be sleep. However, after Lestrade arrived and they tried to move him it turned out he was unconscious rather than simply asleep.

The atmosphere was tense, Lestrade had seen Sherlock in a state like this before when he was high and while he was going through withdrawal but all of this was completely new for John. The doctor asked Lestrade to start running a lukewarm bath. John tried to awaken him but to no avail, he was well and truly out of it. The two of them had to work together to carry Sherlock through to the bathroom, if wasn't that he was heavy, far from it, but he was completely limp and the fact that he was tall and had gangly limbs didn't help matters.

Once they had maneuvered him into the bathroom the two men had to take a bit of a breather, it was more tiring than they had expected. For a minute they watched the steady rise and fall of Sherlock's chest. They both found it weird, he was usually such an active man, if he was still his limbs would normally be twitching as if eager to do something or he would be fidgeting in his seat. If he was standing he would be pacing or playing his violin. John knew that even when he was asleep he wasn't still because he had heard numerous times the thump as his friend fell out of bed. But now he was motionless apart from his breathing, his limbs lay uselessly sprawled out on the white tiles, not even his eyes flickered beneath the lids.

Once they had regained their breath they both knelt down either side of Sherlock and Lestrade looked to John for direction. Even though he had helped Sherlock through his drug problem he had not dealt with the medical treatment as such. Mycroft had hired a few nurses to watch him, Lestrade was just there for moral support and to make sure the nurses would make it out alive.

Carefully the two of them lifted Sherlock's bony hips and gently eased his trousers over them. Getting the shirt off was the more difficult bit especially since Sherlock's shirts always seemed to be slightly too small for him. Gently he unbuttoned the shirt, it was a nice material and John could see why Sherlock was so attached to it. They then did what John had seen nurses at hospitals do numerous times; remove one arm from the shirt, roll the patient to the side and tuck it under them, roll patient to the other side and then remove the other arm. When had John started thinking of his friend as a patient? The doctor turned and threw the shirt out of the bathroom door.

When he turned back he saw Lestrade staring at Sherlock, mouth slightly agape. Curiosity piqued John turned to look also and he was sure he could feel bile creeping its way up his throat. Sherlock's arms were filled with scars, each one slightly raised up from the rest of the skin making it look sickening to look at. They were all different sizes and were scattered haphazardly across his arm. They were not in any neat pattern, just random criss-crosses marring his pale skin. But that wasn't the worst of it, there were some new ones too, not a lot but only one would have been too many. These ones were done more neatly than the rest, regimented in a row on his biceps; all of them were exactly the same length. The only difference was the age of them. The oldest would probably have been made a fortnight previously; the most recent could have been made earlier that day. John cringed, he knew Sherlock had been acting weirdly recently but he didn't know… he never suspected… not this, not Sherlock.

He reached out for his friend's arm and tentatively picked it up, turning it impossibly gently so as to see the full extent of the damage. Gingerly he ran a finger across the scars, each one spoke of a life filled with pain and seeing the physical evidence of what his friend had once endured, and was indeed enduring again, hurt him deeply. No wonder he didn't want me to take his shirt off him earlier. "Did you know about this?" he whispered to Lestrade, afraid of speaking normally in case his voice caught in his throat."

"I had no idea," Lestrade replied. He couldn't take his eyes off the damage, this shouldn't have happened to him, not to Sherlock.

It was John which broke the pained silence; they'd taken the shirt off him for a reason. They might as well carry on with what they were doing. "Let's get him in the bath then," John said quietly, he was no longer whispering but talking normally just seemed disrespectful in a way. Lestrade nodded and took Sherlock's feet whilst John hooked his arms under his armpits.

Getting him into the bath was more difficult than either of them had anticipated. Once he was in he kept on slipping down until his mouth was dangerously near the water and Lestrade pulled him back up. After this happened a few times John sighed, took off his shoes and jumper, and clambered into the bath behind Sherlock. The doctor sat behind him and wrapped his arms under his armpits and around his chest. He clung to his unconscious best friend as if, somehow, if he squeezed him enough, all of his pain would go away. Of course he knew it wouldn't but he had to do something. Never before had he felt so unable to help.

Ok, so that's that title done. There will probably be two more chapters, possibly three depending on how I feel. There is just so much angst and not enough words to describe it. I hope you guys enjoyed it, do let me know through a review! :D