They almost made it.

He felt it like an Olympic runner who had missed the gold medal by a hundredth of a second, felt it as the tiny pinprick of hope that they justmightbe able to die without being turned into some sort of sacrificial ritual was burst with the force of an atom bomb and he learned just how incapacitating hope could be.

Had he admitted that, at the time of the actual incident, he had momentarily taken on John Watson's personality and reacted in precisely the same manner that the doctor just had, he would never have heard the end of it.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?!"

"Shortcut."Click, click, click, click,she disassembled the sniper rifle as though it was a child's puzzle. Click, click, click, click,The pieces of the plan he had been carefully formulating to attempt to evade maximum damage fell apart.

Dust. They had been turned to dust. He had been shot by Mary's gun but it had been in theheadthis time, and it sent all of the facts, figures, numbers, faces, data, data, data, sent it all skittering away into the abyss of uselessness.

She didn't give a damn, either, face dispassionate as she made to move past him. Without thinking, he reached out to grab her arm—truly a testimony to his state of shock, he rarely made contact with people if he could avoid doing so.

"You can't just—" Moron, she most certainly could just. She had just. But she spared him the trouble by whirling around to face him, narrowly missing his head with her ponytail in the process.

"Be completely honest with me," she hissed, a French accent dancing around the edges of her speech. "Did you really think we would be able to take a man like that alive?"

Well, apparently she hadn't. He wanted to say yes just to spite her.

"You're Sherlock Holmes," she carried on, tugging her arm out of the grip he hadn't realized he was still holding and tossing the rifle's remains into a nearby suitcase. "They put me on my first case after months of being stuck behind a desk for killing a suspect weneeded alive." She shot him a look over her shoulder and added, "For the second time." Oh, god, she was walking out of the room.Oh,god, she was going to try and get into Konevski's room.Oh, god,Sherlock wasfollowing her.

Not even following, precisely—more like practically jogging in an effort to keep up.

"Moreover," was she still on? "they did so with the clear instructions that he was to be taken alive for want of information, and then they gave me a sniper rifle in the luggage they had specifically sent to our room." She turned back around to face him, coming to a dead stop so that Sherlock almost slammed into her.

"Make your deductions, Mr. Holmes," she said it like a challenge. "What do you think they intended to happen?"

"Not murder!" he protested, but even as he spoke, even as Lily made a noise of exasperation and began moving again, he knew that it was his pride speaking, distressed over the fact that he had clearly underestimated her, that she was painfully right and she had seen it before him. "I am not a—"

"No." Hands grabbed the lapels of his jacket and derailed him with the strength of a soldier—tiny hands, how were they so powerful?—slamming him against the tiled wall of a staircase he only just now realized they were descending and cutting him off before he could taste the hypocrisy on his tongue. "You're not. But you're not a detective either. Not here, not now, and quite possibly not anymore."

Her eyes were burning into his.

Did she know?

She couldn't have known.

Could she?

He had underestimated her. She had figured out what he had been too distracted to notice. She knew a ploy when she saw one. How far did that perception go?

Farther than his? Different circumstances.The circumstances have changed. I'm sure you're used to hearing that. Had she known since then?That simple, yeah? Most certainly. But how much had she worked out while they had lain across the room from each other, thinking what turned out to be the exact same thing?

He didn't have time to search for the answers in her face, because she had already slipped away and reverted back to the cool mask of the trained killer. He'd seen it on Mary as she shot him, seen it waver as he fell. Lily's didn't waver.

"For now, Mr. Holmes," her voice bounced from wall to wall, halfway down the staircase, "you're just like me, and if you can't handle that then you can sit in the room an ponder facts while I actually take care of the mission." She said facts like Sherlock would have said Anderson.

And then, somewhere between his head shouting I am not like you and his increasing level of respect for her, Sherlock began to feel it.

It poked at his awareness while they were rounding the landing that looked down at the lobby, crossing over to the other side of the hotel.

It bloomed in the back of his head as he found himself going along with her train of thought before he had thought it through properly, counting down the time they had left before the red flag was waved and the stillness coming from Konevski's room was too pronounced to ignore.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

It seeped into his bloodstream as he pulled her in for a fierce kiss in order to avoid the gaze of a passing maid that Sherlock had pinned as a member of the security team, and by God, he was actually putting trust into that kiss.

The room key he had swiped from the hotel clerk clicked in its lock and the door swung open and Sherlock was watching as though from above as he and Lily entered the room with absolutely no one watching from the hall. That should have been a clue, right there, because of course there had been people watching. But this was to be the day that Sherlock Holmes discovered that hope was poisonous, a blindfold that made people run into situations they couldn't possibly walk out of because they had the smallest inkling that they might. They might.

They didn't.

Ninety seconds, as he strode over to Konevski's still form and checked for a pulse he knew he wouldn't find.Perfect marksmanshiphad been one of the first things he'd deduced about her—checking for a pulse when she had been aiming to kill was practically an insult.

He thought back to Mary, shooting through the head of a coin without even looking. How utterly terrifying women could be.

Eighty seconds, as Lily, who hadn't even spared Konevski's body a glance, tapped at his laptop so fast that her fingers nearly blurred, and he realized that she was setting up the process of sending every bit of information on his hard drive directly to the MI6 headquarters back in London. For want of information. Well, that was one way to go about it.

Sixty seconds, as the screen told them that the files were being extracted and he noticed the spike in her breathing, the way her fingers began to stumble erratically over the keyboard in an attempt to speed up the process, the way she kept glancing at the window.

Fifty seconds, as it was his turn to stand at the window and stare out into the night beyond Konevski's balcony. Trajectory. Angle. Distance from the ground. Speed of acceleration upon falling that would result in a force of impact that would have to be compared to the greatest of which the human body could handle. Could they jump and survive? The ground beneath him beckoned, but it didn't seem likely. Regardless, they were up high enough that a fall of that severity would result in their hospitalization, where he had not a single doubt that they would be overtaken by Konevski's men and eliminated before anyone was the wiser.

Thirty seconds, as she growled "Come on," at the laptop and he decided that they would have to attempt to leap from balcony to balcony until they were close enough to the ground to fall without too much injury. It was daunting, but possible. He'd leapt from a building before, though admittedly this flight had far less time to plan, so he was well-versed in the different methods with which he could do so and walk away relatively unscathed.

They could do it. They could do it.

Across the way, the window out of which Lily had fired was still open, curtains flapping in the breeze.

They would have to do it now, though, and fast. He whirled away from the window and said, "Lily, we need to go."

She let out a huff of air that could have been categorized as desperation and stuttered across the keyboard, which clearly showed that the files she was attempting to steal were not nearly done with their processing.

"It's not-"

BANG.

Ten seconds Their time was up.

Ridiculous.

He was losing his staring contest with the porcelain bin of his toilet, and John was kneeling next to him, rubbing circles into his back and muttering some poetry or another about how Sherlock was safe-moron, of course he was. Of course there was no reason why his hands were shaking and it felt as though all of the oxygen had been hoovered from the room. The idea was ridiculous.

"John, I am perfectly capable of handling my own panic attacks," he claimed, spitting the phrase panic attacks like it tasted foul. Or perhaps that was just the film his bile had left over his tongue. He needed to brush his teeth, but the sink was all the way up there.

"Sherlock," John's voice was sickeningly gentle, God just go awaaaaaaaaaaay, "it's the fact that you had one at all that's got me worried."

"Well you needn't worry about me, Mother," Sherlock sneered, but the fact that he couldn't quite look his friend in the eye took a bit of the edge off of his words.

Worried. Who on earth gave anyone the right to worry about him? It was his father, trying to convince him to keep in touch more because "She worries." It was Mycroft, trying to buy a look through John's eyes before the man had even gotten to know Sherlock properly-undoubtedly trying to see if he was slipping back into the arms of his favorite drugs, making sure he was alright, worrying. People worried about him because they thought he needed to be taken care of, which was positively disgusting.

John just kept rubbing his back. "It's perfectly normal to have flashbacks when you've had a traumatic experience-"

"It's not as though I haven't dealt with this sort of thing before!" he bit venomously, and he regretted doing so less than a second later as John's hands stilled.

There was a year's worth of silence, and then, in a voice that was far too calm, John said, "Come again?"

Damn. Damn.

"I have dealt with victims of various crimes, John," Pointless. "More than a few have undergone-"

"Bullshit." Dammit.

He switched tracks at record speed. "I once solved a case by proving that the perpetrator was not in fact a victim due to the inaccurate symptoms of physical trauma-"

"Sherlock."

Mary must have taught him how to do that.

Staring determinedly at the bin over which he was kneeling, he muttered something along the lines of "You would not be entirely wrong in assuming that I may or may not have undergone an indeterminate period of physical debilitation and/or mental duress quite possibly during the expanse of time during which you were under the impression that I was less than alive," stumbling over his words purposefully in the hopes that it would distract John enough to buy him more time.

John nodded in his peripheral vision. "Lather, rinse, repeat. Got it." he said.

Sherlock tsked and began focusing on getting his limbs to cooperate for long enough to help him flee the bathroom. No, nonsense. Why should he have to flee his own flat? It was John who should be leaving. John should leave right now, before he could figure out what Sherlock had let slip and before Sherlock had to see the look on his face when he did.

John's hand reached out to grip his shoulder again, more tentatively this time, but Sherlock still had to grit his teeth to keep from flinching.

"Mind repeating that in English?" John asked gently.

He'd have flushed himself down the toilet if he could. He briefly considered telling John to go away again, but God, the prospect of facing an empty flat in his current state was even worse. How utterly pathetic.

"There was...a branch of Moriarty's network centered in Serbia that more or less discovered my intentions. They...well, they were hardly hospitable." He blew out a long breath through pursed lips and waited.

John was utterly, painfully silent. Sherlock could hear him replaying the time he had been back, searching for the signs of trauma he should have seen before but hadn't, because Sherlock had done everything in his power to squash them. And he could feel the weight dropping in the man's stomach as he went back over the night Sherlock had known his mind would jump to.

"So..." Don't say it. "How recently after that did I first see you?" He said it.

He wanted desperately to lie, but the words "A bit less than a week" slipped from between his lips unbidden, sinking into the toilet basin to join the contents of his stomach.

"Oh, Jesus," and the hand on his shoulder was gone, moving instead to grip John's hair as the doctor fell back against the tiled wall behind him. Mercifully, Sherlock's limbs chose that moment to regain mobility, and he scrambled upwards-embarrassed by the fact that he had to use the sink basin as leverage-swiping a bottle of mouthwash on the way out. He wouldn't look at John's face. Wouldn't see the guilt he knew it would spell.

"Oh, stop with the guilt trip," he said in a brave attempt at dismissal, "There was no way you could have known."

"No, there wasn't, because I never asked," John had followed him into the sitting room, hands still tangled in his hair and something like horror etched into every line of his face. Sherlock took a large swig of mouthwash to avoid replying.

"You'd been in captivity less than a week before, and Jesus, Sherlock! The first thing I did was attempt to strangle you!"

You were angry, Sherlock wanted to say. And quite justifiably so. And why should he have been concerned about what Sherlock had been up to while he was away? He'd had a fiancee, a new job...quite frankly, it was a wonder he was currently here at all, considering the bundle of joy waiting for him at home.

"God knows," John was still going, and Sherlock realized far too late that he had chosen a bad time to have a mouthful of alcohol. "God only knows if they did that too. Jesus, they probably water-boarded you, they always do-"

Sounds like you speak from experience.

"-and I shoved you down and nearly broke your nose, because I was too damn focused on my anger, my hurt, to realize that you'd been sodding tortured-"

You're going to go bald if you keep tugging at your hair like that.

Finally ridding himself of the mouthwash, which had begun to burn a bit, he snapped, "What would you have done if you'd known? Hugged me?" He tried to sneer, but it didn't quite come across the way he intended. "You wouldn't have been angry, John. Not properly."

"Oh, right, well, isn't that what's really important?" John threw his hands up in a gesture of exasperation. Good. But then he made a sort of aborted gesture towards Sherlock's chest region and said, "Shirt. Off."

No.

"Really, John, what would Mary say-"

"Now." An order. He'd been given an order, Captain Watson voice and all. John had ordered Sherlock to do very little during the time that they had known one another, and when that Voice came out, one didn't exactly refuse.

Please don't make me.

He would kill for John. Had killed for him. Had gotten dressed up and appeared as civil as possible and made a bloody speech at the man's wedding. There was very little left in the world that Sherlock would not do, should John Watson ask-save perhaps buy milk, but he had Mary to do that now. But even as his shirt rustled against his fingers, which were creeping downwards as slowly as possible, he wished desperately that he had the ability to say no his friend.

That was what had gotten him in this mess in the first place. Blown wide open to the disgusting cocktail of chemical reactions that ordinary people labeled as emotions and forced to watch as his best friend's respect for him slowly dwindled into pity. Because he couldn't say no. Not to John.

"What were they thinking?"

"Probably something about making friends."

"Oh yes. 'Friends'. Of course, you go in for that sort of thing now."

Yes, and he was beginning to see why Mycroft didn't. Perhaps he'd have been better suited with a goldfish.

The shirt puddled to the floor in a heap of white fabric, and John swallowed hard. Sherlock didn't bother looking down, because he knew exactly what sort of patterns had been carved into his chest and abdomen, could map out the constellations of bruises his captors had created when they felt least like using their imaginations. They'd been dull, so dull, trying to use the most common methods of brutality to break him...even Moran, who'd been Moriarty's right hand man, had just barely gotten creative, though it had been he who was responsible for the embroidery that danced across his skin in thin scars, just barely darker than the pallid skin they marred.

It honestly hadn't been that bad. He could deal with marks on his body, could deal with blood. The problem had arisen when they had taken away his right to sleep, which had robbed him of a good deal of his defenses and allowed each strike of the whip to sink into his mind and fester there.

The bruises from Moran's crew had long since faded, and the only ones that remained visible now were from his most recent encounter. John's limited imagination could probably supply him with the rest, though.

Three strides forward. Hand raised, hovering. Hesitating. It was John who wouldn't look at Sherlock now, but Sherlock wasn't about to complain.

Two fingers lightly brushed the most gruesome of his souvenirs, which rested just below his left clavicle and would probably help Sherlock to predict the weather once he got older. If he made it to that state of life. It was looking less and less likely given his lifestyle.

John had been shot in the shoulder. Called it his "bad shoulder", and constantly rubbed it, especially after witnessing someone else's shoulder get damaged, as though the pain of another served as a reminder of his own. Once, in the midst of a particularly spirited tussle with a fugitive he had apprehended, Sherlock had been allowed to appreciate the brilliant power the man could pack into a single kick and received a broken collarbone for his trouble. John had rubbed his shoulder every time he looked at the sling Sherlock had whined about having to wear, and didn't stop until the cast came off (prematurely; Sherlock sat at the kitchen table and power-sawed it off while John was out getting milk). So it was hardly surprising that that was the first injury he took note of.

"What's this then?" he asked, failing spectacularly at sounding offhand.

Pain, white hot. Skin painted red. Flesh yielding to serrated metal that screeched as it jarred with the ribs beneath. Sherlock shrugged. "Stabbed me with a letter opener." he remarked.

"They what?"

"Stabbed me, John," Sherlock snapped. "I was hardly there to play Cluedo."

The fingers dropped from his scar as John chuckled at that. "Yeah, well," he said, "if I had to play Cluedo with you one more time I'd probably stab you as well."

He was joking around again, and Sherlock could have leapt for joy. But the smile faded swiftly as the older man circled around to gaze at Sherlock's back, to stare at the criss-cross of lacerations that had torn his skin to ribbons, the more recent ones still grotesquely sewn shut with the most indiscreet possible surgical string. He hadn't had the strength to put up a good enough fight when they had handed him over to whatever nine-year-old that had just been made a doctor; he would probably never get rid of the scars that would result from the sloppy stitching.

"You would have done a much better job," he said aloud. John gave a startled "Hm?" that showed he had been riding a completely different train of thought.

"The stitches..." he clarified, twisting a bit to gaze at John over his shoulder. His friend's expression would have been unreadable if Sherlock either hadn't known him so well or hadn't made a business out of reading people; he could read John's horror in the twitch of his jaw, the slight widening of his eyes, the way his neck was strained as though he was being strangled, as though it was written across the man's forehead, which was creased ever so slightly at the brow. He could see John's restraint, too-he was trying with all of his might to keep his expression stony instead of throwing something out a window. Afraid that would upset Sherlock? If he thought that, he was far from correct. Sherlock would have welcomed violence. It was when John Watson got quiet that Sherlock got restless.

"...you would have been neater about them." he finished lamely.

John ignored him, reaching out two fingers to trace the most prominent of the scars, which spanned from his shoulder diagonally to the dip of his hip. His touch was warm.

"Jesus," he breathed.

"While I'm sure he would appreciate the strength of your faith, I doubt that the man himself was on hand at the time." Sherlock replied, shifting a little. John ignored that, too, his hand dropping from Sherlock's skin. For the love of God, smile.

But the doctor turned a deaf ear to Sherlock's silent plea, clearing his throat the way he did when trying to maintain his stony soldier appearance.

"And this," he said in a tight voice, hands fluttering in a vague gesture between Sherlock's back and the bathroom. "How badly did you have to deal with this last time?" He cleared his throat again and added, "Alone?"

Don't.

Don't do that to yourself. Don't.

The truth was that there had been very little mental disturbance following his return to London from Serbia; only nightmares when he chose to sleep and the occasional flashback if he ever hit his head or back too hard. But John would not have appreciated hearing that the most violent of repercussions had occurred directly after he got home on the night he had returned to John-the night the good doctor had spent periodically assaulting him.

"Not nearly as bad," he muttered evasively. He bent down carefully to retrieve his shirt from the floor and eased it back on, shielding his skin from his friend's scrutiny and hoping desperately that John didn't call his bluff.

"So what was it about this time that was different?" John asked as Sherlock turned back around to face him, eyes lingering over the scars on his chest as Sherlock hastily buttoned his shirt. "Was it her, or...?"

Sherlock tucked his shirt back into his trousers and furrowed his brow, because even now he didn't have a precise answer to that.

Smell came first.

He'd always prided himself on his olfactory senses, mainly because it was one of the main things that helped him notice what ordinary people were quick to overlook. Sergeant Donovan, sharing Anderson's deodorant. Claire de la Lune permeating Magnussen's apartment. Thousands upon thousands of scents assaulted the nose at once, making it so easy to get them jumbled, but sometimes it was the wrong type of cleaning fluid or the lingering echo of a cigarette that pulled an entire case together.

Now it was gasoline, oil, mould, and the stale rubber of a spare tire. Car boot. Lovely.

Touch came next, and with it vertigo, telling him that he was lying on his side, sandwiched between the edge of the boot and another, prone body. Arms twisted into a wildly uncomfortable position behind him. Plastic encircling his wrists in one of those horrible zip-tie things John used to try and repair the latest casualty of Sherlock's experiments. His head, positively throbbing.

Breath, hitting his face.

Memory came next. Sight lingered near, but danced out of reach every time he attempted to grasp it. Instead, he witnessed an entourage bursting through the door. Surrounded. Stripped of his gun. Forced onto his knees. Bright lights blinding him, a stiff blow to the back of the head, and then blackness.

And then came feeling.

Feeling anger, because she had rushed headlong into a situation they couldn't possibly pull off.

Feeling hopelessness, because she had just wrecked their mission, and so it was highly unlikely that anyone was going to spare the time coming to get them.

Feeling bitterness, because they probably wouldn't have sent anyone anyway.

Feeling fear, because he knew what was coming next.

Feeling.

His mental GPS-as John called it-had been thrown off by the lapse in time he had suffered. But in the minutes he had been conscious the car had struck two pot holes and shot through a red light, going by the muted blaring of horns and the slight skid of the tires to avoid a collision. They didn't want to slow down, so they'd been driving at this rate the entire time, and if they weren't even off the main road yet, then they hadn't gotten far. Not that that really mattered, in the long run-it wasn't like he had every street of Eastern Europe memorized, like London.

Transport.

The car was just an assortment of contraptions wielded together and given fuel to make them go. His body was hardly any different.

Regardless, he was hardly looking forward to having it broken.

He'd been tortured before, of course. There had been the occasional criminal who couldn't seem to just kill him without showing off first for their (literally) captive audience. Sherlock sympathized.

The Serbians, too, had been a noteworthy encounter, but they had been disgustingly unimaginative, focusing mostly on repetition of brute force to break down his barriers so that Sherlock was reduced to talking to a hallucination of John to keep standing. He'd never told John about that. Probably never would, now.

For the better.

His head bumped against the edge of the car boot as they made a hard left-the third in five minutes, they were going in circles-and he wondered idly if all Eastern Europeans shared the same technique in turning an individual inside out. Could having to spend 20+ years living with Mycroft count as a form of torture? He braced himself against the car's braking and decided that yes, yes it could.

It didn't relieve the feeling that someone had attempted to knit a scarf out of his intestines.

"Sherlock."

His eyes opened, and met with a pair of shocking blue ones.

"I'm sorry," she breathed.

Good.

Blood was trickling sideways down her forehead.

"Don't tell them anything that's actually true," he instructed. "You only live as long as your utility does."

"I know," she breathed, closing her eyes and sighing in a way that spoke to Sherlock of past encounters not unlike his own.

Someone slammed on the breaks, sending Sherlock and Lily flying forwards and colliding painfully with the back of the boot and each other.

"That doesn't make sense," Sherlock mused aloud as the car door slammed and Lily's breath spiked. "We haven't even left town. Why would they-"

Light flooded the boot as the hood flew open, blinding him for just a moment, but it was coming from the torches his captors held, and they were soon discarded so that he and Lily could be properly hauled out of the car and onto the icy wet pavement below. He tried to take in his surroundings, but his head was spinning and his vision blurred and all he could focus on was the fact that Lily was being lifted over some burly man's shoulder and swept away, through the back door of a nondescript brick building.

They were to be separated, then. Was that better? He wondered if torture was less traumatic with someone there to share the experience.

No. Of course not. The image of her skin marred with lacerations-hair tinted red with blood-flashed through his mind's eye, and he decided that separation was a far more agreeable alternative.

A spectacular head-rush turned his vision yellow as he was lifted upright from his position on his knees by a pair of hands gripping him above the elbows-strong, calloused, worked in metallurgy-but he wasn't lifted as Lily had been. He very nearly thanked the man for allowing him that small remnant of dignity.

The way he staggered forwards and very nearly crashed to the ground didn't do his dignity any favors, though.

Inside was a set of crumbling walls adorned with a collage of varying colors of slime and decay. Green...no. Not green. Brown. Brown? He should have been able to tell that. He should have been able to discern exactly what type of building he was inside simply through the coloration of the decay clinging to the walls.

Well, there was decay for one, which was something. Abandoned something, then. Not headquarters. Probably not often utilized.

But...

Wires? Wires. Those were definitely wires that snaked across the floor and traveled upwards to the ceiling, finding purchase in a set of what looked like a speaker system in the far corner.

Another, finding a security camera. Others, attached to a chair.

Oh.

Not headquarters. Just a small, personalized hell.

It was truly pathetic that he actually attempted to drag his heels as his captor steered him over to where the electric chair sat. He would later attribute that to the pounding sensation in his head, because really, there are worse things.

But sat he was, and the plastic around his wrists were cut so that they could be replaced by bands of steel, locking him in place.

"Do you know," drawled a voice from the doorway. "what is the maximum voltage a human can withstand?"

Sherlock raised his chin just a little so that the clack clack clack of the shoes of the fair-haired burly man approaching him would not seem as intimidating.

"Approximately 300 volts," he replied in Russian. "Varying depending on the milliamperes and the body's resistance."

The man nodded as though in approval, and dragged a chair over so that he could sit in front of Sherlock, allowing his eyes to momentarily rake over Sherlock's body. Blue eyes.

"Oh, that's something, isn't it?" said Lily.

It was a credit to the control Sherlock had over his instincts that he didn't jump at the sound. He did allow his eyes to flick to its source, however, and he was rewarded with the sight of her standing in the doorway the fair-haired man had just entered through. There was no more blood on her forehead.

No.

Everything slowed down, slowed down, n, n-

Stopped.

"Come, now, Sherlock," said Mycroft from beside him.

He was standing back at the MI6 headquarters, Spectacles jabbering on about floor plans while Lily listened impassively.

"She was never supposed to be on this mission," Sherlock said, feeling lightheaded.

"No," Mycroft agreed. "Obviously," he added. "I'm not entirely surprised it took you this long." His brother smirked. "It seems you have a sort of blindness when a pretty face comes into play."

"I can see just fine," Sherlock snapped, riling at the mention of Irene.

Mycroft quirked an eyebrow. "That so?"

They were in the hotel room, watching a mirror of Sherlock ponder over his computer while she did-

"Yoga," Sherlock noted.

"She never gave a damn about what you were planning," Mycroft said, watching Lily go through her patterns with undisguised amusement. "Did you really never stop to consider that one of MI6's 'finest agents' couldn't be bothered to ensure that you both would be as safe as possible when executing the mission you had to carry out?"

"She knew it would be impossible-"

"She made sure it would be impossible." Mycroft shook his head and heaved a put-upon sigh. "In the end, Sherlock," he lamented, echoing the words he had spoken about Irene years before, "are you really so obvious?"

The hotel room again, with the black night air flowing in through the open window at which Lily knelt, eye pressed to the viewfinder of a sniper rifle.

"So," Mycroft mused, "Why kill the head of the organisation if she was a member? Why not just kill you and eliminate the threat?"

Exactly, Sherlock wanted to cry, because he couldn't have been wrong. Couldn't have. Couldn't have missed this.

"I don't understand," he confessed, hating that it was the image of his brother to which he was speaking. He watched himself burst through the door just as Konevski crumpled to the ground.

Mycroft's answering laugh dripped with derision. "Of course you don't." he sneered. "Although," he added, "Your self-diagnosed 'sociopathic tendencies' really should have led you to the answer."

He was gripping Lily by the arm. She was whipping around to hiss in his face. In the smallest of French accents.

"The people in this organisation do not care," Mycroft declared as Sherlock and Lily raced from the room. "If the head is compromised, it is lobbed off and regrown like a lizard's tail. No fuss, no sentiment, no repercussions."

He couldn't think. The information was there, but it wouldn't go through. Could not compute.

Lily was skittering over the keyboard of Konevski's computer, but the files weren't processing. Of course they weren't processing.

And Sherlock, dammit, was leaning over to check if Konevski was dead as though it mattered, and then gazing out the goddamn window like some sort of daydreamer without ever questioning what she was doing.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid,stupid.

"Lily, we need to go."

"It's not-"

BANG.

"If Sherlock Holmes was put on the case of overtaking the head of a terrorist organisation, said organisation would have no trouble believing that he would succeed," Mycroft observed, watching as the other Sherlock was struck across the head. He turned to face his brother. "I've no doubt that what you did to Moriarty's network did not go unnoticed in the criminal world, brother mine." He gave Sherlock half of a smile.

His head was pounding.

"They didn't know who I-" he started.

"She did," Mycroft reminded him.

Oh.

"So Konevski had to be eliminated before you did your job," Mycroft continued. "Remember how Moriarty shot himself to keep you from getting the call-off code?"

Stupid.

"And instead of you and MI6 gaining information, they took the opportunity to gain information from you."

So, so, stupid.

"She put herself on the case," Mycroft hissed, speaking fast now. "She ignored your plan to ensure a safe mission. She shot Konevski before you could apprehend him and she made sure the only person divulging information would be you.

"And you, brother mine," Mycroft was laughing. "You actually put trust into-"

Lily screamed.

This time, Sherlock actually did jump at the sound.

The fair-haired man turned to where Sherlock's eyes had wondered, looking at the door with disinterest.

"Yes," he said lazily. "I'm afraid that's what you get for killing my brother."

But Sherlock kept his gaze locked on the doorway.

Because Lily had screamed, but the Lily before him hadn't opened her Lily before him hadn't moved, had just watched him. Waited for him to figure it out. The Lily before him was-

"A hallucination," she finished the thought for him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. "Really, Mr. Holmes," she said sadly. "Is your faith in me so easily broken?"

A hallucination.

He could have wept.

No. The French accent, the ranking as one of the "finest officers", the fact that the rifle had been packed for her instead of brought with her. It didn't fit. He hadn't missed anything, he had been right. He had been right.

Whatever reason it was that she had been assigned to him, that wasn't it.

The fair-haired man had turned his attention back to Sherlock, raking his gaze over Sherlock's form once more in a way that almost made him uncomfortable. His expression shifted when he noticed how badly Sherlock was trying to stay conscious, though, mouth twisting into a horrible sort of smirk.

"You didn't kill my brother, did you?" he asked jovially, as though asking a child whether he had eaten the brownies that had been out on the counter. "We know you didn't; we were watching. Have been since you entered the hotel. So," he got up and made his way over to where a table stood in the far corner of the room, where Sherlock just now realized a tray of meager food was sitting. The man picked up a carrot and bit into it, turning back to Sherlock and showing it to him as he chewed. "We're going to give you a bit more of a chance," he finished.

He was already striding towards the door by the time Sherlock thought to ask what that meant. He paused in the doorway, almost looking directly at Lily, who hadn't moved.

"I'm going to let you have a little listen to what happens when you kill someone in my family," the man informed him casually. "When I come back, you're going to have two choices." He glanced at the food. "Either you're going to tell me what I want to hear and eat something, maybe even get a bit of sleep, or we're going to flip the switch on that chair, and you're never going to taste food again."

"You make it sound as though you plan on killing me quickly," Sherlock called after his retreating back. Lily raised her eyebrows at him.

But the man just smiled over his shoulder at him and said, "Don't be silly, my friend." before disappearing.

He didn't come back.

Not for hours, or so it felt. And without the presence of any living person in the room, there was very little to distract Sherlock from the pulsing in his head, the frantic drumming of his pulse against the fingers that wouldn't release their grip on the arms of the chair that could kill him with the flip of a switch.

And Lily never stopped screaming.

The hallucination of Lily was wildly unhelpful, having walked over to the table on which the food sat and perched herself on it without saying a word. She sat there without looking at him, even though he could scarcely drag his eyes from her, and listened to her own screaming with the polite interest of someone attending a classical music concert.

The more he looked at her, the clearer it became that she couldn't possibly be real. Her skin was flat, her movements blurred and her eyes had no depth. He gave himself a pass for automatically assuming she was real because he wasn't quite sure how well his brain was functioning at the moment.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Breathe. Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. In. Out. In. out.

But his breath wasn't the only thing fading in and out. The walls he faced were constantly blurring, sometimes even going alarmingly black before swimming back into focus. He knew, in the back rooms of his mind palace, that these were the signs of a rather severe concussion, but there was no one there to yell at him to keep consciousness. John, Mycroft, Molly, even Anderson—all the people who normally coached him through lethal situations had fled.

There was only Lily.

"Listen to me go," She drawled over the strangled screeching that was assaulting his ears. "Quite the vocal cords, eh? I could've been a singer if my childhood hadn't been dominated by cancer." She glanced up from her examination of her under-painted fingernails. Her eyes were smudged with mascara, but his imagination didn't do the color justice.

Even her hallucination was swimming.

"Leukemia," she reminded him in a lilting voice. "You deduced that the moment you saw me. Was it the thinness of the hair?" She tossed it back as she spoke so that it would catch the light, and a bloodcurdling shriek sliced through the air once more.

Yes. No. I don't know anymore.

But the poor excuse for an imaginary Lily didn't wait for him to answer, returning to her nail inspection and leaving him alone with his thoughts. He wished John would visit him again. John was kinder. John cared. John would have told him that this wasn't his fault, but instead he was left in silence as the real Lily's cries died down to aborted grunts that no doubt accompanied blow after vicious blow.

Magnussen hadn't made a sound as he'd crumpled to the ground. Konevski probably hadn't, either, when Lily's bullet had ripped through his cranium. But Lily screamed and screamed and screamed.

Why was she here, of all people?

"Guilt," she answered what he hadn't asked, jerking him out of his thoughts. "Last time you saw John because you were feeling guilty over breaking his heart." She pushed away from the table and sauntered towards him, blurring in and out of focus with every step.

"But what is it about me that makes you feel guilty?" She asked as she came to a stop in front of him, bracing her hands against the arms of the chair and leaning into his face. He'd definitely gotten the eyes wrong. "I'm nothing special, especially not to you-just collateral damage, really." she raised her eyebrows and laughed as he fought to keep his eyes open. "You don't find me attractive,"she continued, leaning back a bit, "Not really your area. Or even interesting, really, and we've barely even talked so far except about our mission and my little heart to heart about the fiancee I shot."

He jerked his head up to stare at her at that, but she just smiled and slipped away from him, walking around and surveying the room with mock interest.

"Oh come on, love," she scolded. "I'm in your head, so you can't just be realizing it now."

"I..." What? I didn't? Sherlock shook his head in an attempt to clear it, but that only made the blood rush through it with even more ferocity. Lily kept talking as though he hadn't attempted to reply.

"I don't still wear my engagement ring," she noted, studying her left hand. "People do that," she nodded at where he sat and added, "Sentiment.

"But if he had just kicked the bucket and left me behind, I would still love him, wouldn't I?" she continued as though she didn't care whether Sherlock was listening or not. "No reason for resentment or any sort of unbearable pain attached to a rock on a band of metal...unless there was something else."

Sherlock had begun to drift, so it was with a violent jerk that he was brought back to full awareness at the sound of a crash as she knocked what sounded like a plate to the floor. But when he wrenched his eyes open and floundered about for some sort of visual purchase, the food that the fair-haired man had left to rot was still sitting primly on its tray.

Lily watched his confusion for a moment, then laughed once without an ounce of humor. "Guilt," she said again. "It's the reason I don't wear a ring and it's the reason why I'm standing here right now."

He shook his head again, but that was an idea worthy of Anderson.

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked, noting in the back of his mind how his words slurred in a way that was almost comical. "Mostly whenever I hallucinate people they're coaching me on how to stay alive-"

"Did John do that?" She asked.

Had he? He couldn't remember.

"Did he talk you through it, tell you about how to stay alive, teach you how to ignore the pain?" She asked, getting closer. "Or did he spend the whole time trying to convince you that you were doing the right thing? Or maybe telling you you'd done the wrong thing in leaving him, telling you about how he was never going to forgive you, that you were going to die and he would never know it was to protect him?"

"I..."I don't know. I don't remember.

"Sherlock Holmes," Lily said, standing over him. "The self-diagnosed sociopath who simply doesn't care." She laughed once without humor. "Who's distanced himself so much from the spectrum of human emotion that his brain needs to conjure up the image of another person to tell him when he's feeling guilty."

She leaned in close and stroked a hand over his cheek, but he didn't actually feel it. Couldn't feel it. Couldn't feel his own fingers.

"What might we deduce about his heart?" She breathed.

When the blackness finally took off its shoes and got comfortable, it was a relief akin to morphine.

John glanced ruefully at the bag of Chinese food that sat unopened on the table, then back at Sherlock.

"You're not going to eat a bite of that, are you?" he asked sadly.

Sherlock very nearly smiled. "No," he admitted.

But John walked over to the table anyway and began unpacking it, turning his back so that Sherlock couldn't see his expression. Purposefully? Most likely.

There was a minute or so in which the only sound in the flat was that of rustling paper and plastic hitting the table as John set out the containers with deliberate care. Sherlock felt his silence like a lead weight in the pit of his stomach.

This was how he reacted to Sherlock's mental duress. What was he going to do when he heard of what exactly had physically happened?

He didn't want to do this. He didn't want to put all of this on John's shoulders, wanted to carry it all himself and let the image of John's face when he looked at his daughter replace the image of Lily's face when she had-

"Is that..." John started suddenly, voice tight as he spun in an aborted motion to face Sherlock again. His face was unreadable, but the muscles in his neck were taut. "Is that what goes through your head every time you make a deduction?" he finished finally. "People telling you what a moron you are, throwing shit in your face like you should have seen it before?"

Sherlock felt his brow furrow, confused by what John had chosen to take away from that. "Only when I don't fully understand it, or if I missed something," So what?

"There's always something," John muttered, turning back to the food. "You said that yourself the night after we met."

But what does that have to do with anything? he almost asked. It was how he solved problems. Molly, slapping him to get him to focus. Mycroft, calling him stupid when he was trying to figure out if there was an exit wound using the type of gun. Moriarty, telling him he was abandoning John to danger and getting him to restart his own heart.

It was how he survived. He couldn't see why that had John looking like he wanted to break something expensive.

"There's no problem with-" he started.

"Yes, there is." John almost yelled, turning back around. There was fire in his eyes, passion, humanity. "There is a problem with that level of self-deprecation and there is definitely a problem with you accepting it as normal."

"It's not-"

"Sherlock," John moved to grip the back of his chair as though he needed something to ground himself. "Your work...Your mind is something that scientists are going to write research papers about for the next thousand years."

Sherlock snorted, but rolling his eyes would have egged John on and the man seemed to be on a roll as it was.

"You are..." John paused, the hand he had raised to point at Sherlock closing into a fist as he licked his lips the way he did when carefully choosing what to say. "You are something to be marveled at, Sherlock." he said firmly, as though the heavens could open up and God himself could descend and tell him that Sherlock was unremarkable and he still wouldn't buy it. "And I can't accept that you spend half your time allowing voices in your head to tell you you're anything short of fantastic."

Where did this come from?

He would never understand the man. How had Sherlock-unsociable, rude, careless Sherlock who had broken his heart and left him twice-gained a man like John Watson as his friend? How could a man who had a voice that spoke of sand and heat and burly men jumping to attention still look at Sherlock with the naive wonder of a child who was meeting his favorite superhero?

John licked his lips again and let out a shaky breath as he let his hand drop. "Jesus, Sherlock," he said, "can I hug you?"

"I'm not some teenager going through a self-loathing phase," Sherlock snapped.

"No," said John thickly, of for the love of God don't you dare start crying, "you're brilliant." He was already striding forwards, making it clear that whether Sherlock wanted a hug or not he was about to get one. "Completely and utterly brilliant, you wanker."

And with that, Sherlock was pulled down in the embrace of Captain John Watson, the man he had killed for and the man who thought he could solve anything he set his mind to. John Watson, who was warm and inviting and tough and solid, who had never let his experiences on the battlefield interfere with his ability to be painfully kind. Who kept him grounded. Kept him right.

Who, after a moment, after weeks of tenseness and nightmares and feeling inherently skittish around nearly everyone, finally got Sherlock to relax.

Author's Note:

This chapter was like pulling teeth. I'm so sorry to those who have been actually waiting for an update; I promised myself that wouldn't happen with this one.

So I decided to skip the worst of the torture and save it for the next chapter, because I wanted there to be something that really messed with Sherlock's head and this chapter is way longer than my normal ones anyway. I feel like the only way we would be able to see Sherlock truly reacting in a way that reflected PTSD would be if he underwent mental duress as well as physical. He'd probably do a bang-up job of completely ignoring a lot of what his body went through; it took him a shave and John's forgiveness to get over what happened in Serbia.

Reviews are my favorite things in the world bye