PROTECT

John fought to the surface, blinking at the side of Sherlock's face; there was a pink mark there, like he's been hit with a spoon. Sherlock is holding a spoon. Wooden spoon. What?

HURTSHURTSHURTS

"I told you he's alive! I told you Mycr-"

John went back under.

****

Poison, Poison and it was burning him.

****

Hide. Need to hide.

No more, please. Its eating…

Too deep. Help, I'm too deep.

****

"I don't even know what he's supposed to be!" said a voice high and panicky, "or even a- a zoologist or- or- or a crypto-zoologist. How am I supposed to help?"

"He's not an animal," said a familiar voice, a deep rumbling voice, angry and sandpaper grating, balancing on the razor edge of absolute rage. "And he's a better man than you'll ever be- don't touch me, so help me- Mycroft inform your minions they are not to touch me."

"He's cells are insane, I can't even describe his blood, it's like there were a few hundred different donors that all pumped into him. I-"

"Fix him," said a voice, The Voice and John struggled up briefly to rise but he couldn't, he couldn't- Sherlock. Sherlock was about to lose his temper, but he mustn't, Lestrade would get mad and the witness won't talk. His hand reached out weakly, all the strength of a bird fallen out of the nest and fell atop Sherlock's long pale fingers.

That's enough, he meant to say but it wouldn't come out.

****

It hurt.

****

"John," said the Voice, soft and undeniable. Sherlock's voice. It hurts John that Sherlock sounds like this, subdued. Concerned. Sherlock doesn't do subdued or concerned.

Sherlock was far away, but the voice always connected them. Just like comfort and companionship and laughter did. And the hearts. This hurts more than when John was shot and he had the obsession while on the heavy medication he had to take to stay sane that there was sand in the wound, sewn inside and it was going to wear him down internally until he started bleeding to death and no one would know. He knew it was in his head, that it wouldn't kill him, that there was nothing inside him, but at times it like it drove him mad.

That's what this was like now, it was in his head. But this time it was enough to kill him.

And he had failed the Hunt too. He felt the subtle shame of a hardworking man who'd left things unfinished.

The Voice caught him again, like a needle pulling golden thread and stitched him up close to the surface that wasn't so mad and poisoned and pained.

"I'm coming John, whatever you need to do to let me in, you need to do it."

John didn't understand, didn't think this was a good idea. But he trusted.

"I don't even know if it's possible. Or if it is and it's no use anyway because you can't hear me. Or if it is and you can and you'll eat me." There was a long pause and Sherlock's voice whispered husky and deep and it reverberates through John's bones. "I never should have done it. I never should have done any of this. If I had just shot him instead of being selfish none of this would have ever happened and you'll be safe. Are you mad at me John? Are you furious inside your head? Will you rip me apart until I'm nothing but red steam and unrepentant bone? Because I am. I am unrepentant. I was bored John. You can't understand what it's like. But I don't think I want to pay this price. Not this. I was only going to pay with myself."

There were quick, drip, drip, drips against John's skin. Piercing silver and John was mad. He was bloody furious that Sherlock would risk himself like that, be so stupid. But he wouldn't hurt Sherlock, other than maybe a swift kick. Two, maybe, for luck.

"I'm coming John and maybe I'll never wake up again, let you carry by bones around inside your head for the rest of your life. Think of me fondly then. I'm coming."

I won't hurt you, John thinks. Never. Never. I'll take you past the water but I'll never drown you.

Sherlock stepped through the pool doors, the scent of chlorine, strong and burning. Stepping from the dark hallway to a blue, grey and red world lit in ugly florescent. Everything was bleached here, pale and nearly colorless. It made his eyes go oddly blank, too public, too bare, too much/little data. Too much sensory information. Analysis going wild and impotent. The heavy half hollow echo of the door as he let it fall shut behind him. His feet making soft knocks against the floor. He turned leisurely; scanning the viewing balcony above him to be sure it was abandoned. That was where they'll be. Moriarty. Above him on the balcony looking down at him. He saw no one. That doesn't mean anything.

"I brought you a little getting to know you," he started and then paused, eyes narrowing, "present." Something isn't right, this isn't right. It hovered on the tip of his mind, blocking any other word that might come traipsing out of his mouth. A thought slid across his mind like mercury beading over a table top, Oh, that's right. I'm dreaming. "Oh this is good John, this is spectacular. You are extraordinary."

This was about the time John should step out and Sherlock would see the coat and have that awful epiphany, because what else could it be but semtex? Surely not betrayal, Sherlock had known even then, bone deep that John wouldn't betray him. Not unless it was for his own good. But John wasn't stepping out from anywhere.

Well then. There's no reason Sherlock couldn't go to his death like a man.

A quick flip through his memory and Sherlock took long careful steps to the stall that John had emerged from all those months ago. In the stall, curled up in the corner, was a little blonde boy in a green parka clutching what appeared to be an old scratched bugle to his chest with one arm like it was a teddy bear. The other arm hangs limply at his side, the turned up cup of his palm filled with something too black to be blood. Sherlock made a little soughing sound, his arms hanging limply. Sherlock breathed out a shocked little, "John."

John's eyes blink, foggy with pain, and John, John as a child, a defenseless child, tried to smile. He stared up at Sherlock with his big dark eyes, hazy with pain. The child's eyes were so wide and so trusting it stabbed him.

"Well," Sherlock said, staring at him, arms hanging limply. "This is a turn up."

****

This time Sherlock doesn't rip anything off anyone. He eased the fluffy parka open (no semtex this time, no need with the threat inside) and slid the coat off gingerly one arm. When it was time for the second sleeve the stench of necrotic flesh and blood nearly made him gag, even though logically he knew he couldn't really smell anything. That this was some kind of psychological representation of John's mental state, an illusion that far exceeded anything he had considered, is a thought truly awe inspiring. John collapsed against him weakly for a moment panting. The hair of John's head is soft and fine and stirs with Sherlock's half panicked breaths. Sherlock sets two fingers rest against the silky soft hair, his palm curving down to press against the soft mouse like vulnerability of his ear. Something had to be done, John realized the time for resting was over about the same time Sherlock did. He fell back to lean, hissing in pain, against the stall wall. Blood and black sludge soak the cardigan and button up beneath the parka, and Sherlock isn't sure what to do, how to treat this.

"A child John?" his hand still bracketed John's small round head. John blinked back at him, trying to keep him in focus.

John clung to his bugle (military, standard issue, seen action, polished daily) with one hand, looking seriously at Sherlock, "Dinit want you to be afraid."

"Oh John. Quite a mess," Sherlock's other hand hovered in the air above the red-brown and black stain sprawled across John's shoulder. The scent made him almost want to gag, but as a man who spent a good deal of his professional life working with corpses and crime scenes he had excellent self-control when it came to his gag reflex. "What do I need to do?"

"Get it out," and there is the sound of grownup John's mouth, oddly incongruent on a child's tongue, the sound of a field medic's voice. "Its poison and it'll contaminate me. I've been keeping it out of my blood stream, but if I weaken too much, it'll get into my heart and I'll be done."

The cardigan comes off first, the bugle held between John's knees, and it's thrown off to the side. Next is the little plaid button up. It's sticking to the wound, that much it obvious. Pulling it off will pull off any scabbing, but its unavoidable. "I don't want to hurt you."

Child John raises his eyebrows at him, "Sherlock, life is, more often than not, pain. You're sympathy will help me get through."

When Sherlock rips the cloth away John screamed high and shrill; a reedy little sound, over top a man's bellow and a canine howl.

He pressed John's back to the floor, the small soft body shivering against the cool tile. His bare shoulder was swollen obscenely with poison like buboes. How appropriate, he thought. "I'm going to try and press it out now." John's mouth swung and his teeth, too big and sharp to be a child's, caught on Sherlock's scaphoid and radius. He didn't break the skin, just used a sharp pressure, holding himself to something. Sherlock struck his fist into the wound and watched the poison bubble out.

"My dear John," Sherlock said tenderly, John's teeth kissed dimples into the skin of his wrist in response. The strongest urge hit to lift the child, cradle him against his chest, press him up under his rib cage like a modified Heimlich, let them share the poison. "Bite as hard as you need to. My marrow is yours, do be careful of my fingers though, will you? If you leave me alive, I'd like to be able to play the violin still."

Little tears like stars squeezed out of the corners of John's eyes as Sherlock struck the skin (there was the sound of flesh striking flesh, boxing class all over again) black poison bursting out like blood splatter. "We can do this John. I can do this."

****

"I'm not sorry," Sherlock said slowly.

John giggled, all teeth, and shook his head. John's shoulder isn't as swollen as it was before, the cluster of wounds stand out like black stars, still oozing. "Course not."

"No one asked me," Sherlock hissed, he was blinked something quick as a bird's heart, "I never got any say in the matter."

"Course," the boy agrees.

This somehow makes Sherlock even tighter wound, irrational, irrational. He opened the conversation in the first place. "Now I'm supposed to be responsible for all this? Of you?"

"You don't own me," the little boy smiled up at him with his mouth, small like a secret. Keeping his lips unobtrusive as a rabbit's so no one would know underneath was written freak. The little boy, his little John Watson, was soft bodied with lingering baby fat and warm and nonthreatening. There was no expectation; Sherlock could love him without being pinned with romantic expectancy sharp through his lung until he floundered and drowned in it. This was good and true and innocent enough. It was clean. He wanted to curl around this tiny John Watson and protect him. Be brother to him; adore him as brothers loved the soft, talcum scented, caterpillar shape of their baby brothers.

He had a sudden pinch of sympathy for Mycroft.

"What if I want to?"

John shook his round genial head so it rolled back and forth, "I'm a wild thing. I need to Hunt. I don't belong for long in house for people or in cages with bedrooms and kitchens, I'll batter myself to death without the Hunt, I'd drown in the silence. It would fill me until I could breathe. Might as well pour cement down my throat."

"You're poetic like this," Sherlock pressed hard on John's small shoulder again and had images of olive presses, the black poison presses out of the soft skin of John's shoulder and flows across the tile to the stall's drain.

"It's the lot of my folk," he turns his head to blink at the wall. "It hurts."

"I'm trying," Sherlock pressed harder, gritting his teeth, his wrist aching with the pressure. "You know I have to get it out."

In the end Sherlock finds a pumice stone hiding around the fuzzy zone his peripheral vision starts to fade to black and burnishes off the damaged tissue as thin as onion paper and then John, his John is well again.