Sherlock walked swiftly to the bed, avoiding looking at the person in it as he snatched the chart off its clip. He scanned the information. Yes, yes it was all correct. John's body had responded to the antidote—it had halted the deterioration of his circulatory system and redirected his body to heal itself. There were improvements: steady heartrate, blood pressure still low but approaching normal numbers. But the injection had been late. Sherlock knew that. Like a knife in his chest he knew that. John's body had already shut down by the time he got it—coma: the body's the final, desperate method of conserving energy in order to heal from trauma. He was stabilised now, but comas like this one were unpredictable. John could wake up in an hour or a year or never. He had been here like this since Friday night and Sherlock hadn't known. Mycroft had lied to him.

Sherlock jammed the chart back down onto its clip. His brother had lied to him to get him stay in bed and finish his treatment. The doctor had said he'd needed another twenty-four hours on the IV to fully recover, and Mycroft had known exactly how to get him to do it. He'd put John in the once place Sherlock couldn't follow him: voluntarily back at Mary's house. To thank him for it, the next time he saw his rubbish older brother Sherlock would give him a lesson on the subtlety in variation of twenty-eight different kinds of pain.

He stepped carefully to the side of John's bed, finally forcing his eyes to take in the unconscious figure in front of him. John. There were no visible injuries on him, yet Sherlock knew if he shook him he wouldn't wake. He was here. Right here. And yet he wasn't. He wasn't here at all. The liminal space of a coma. He could take John's hand and still not be able to reach him.

He sat down in the chair next to the bed. It didn't look like sleeping. He was too still, too posed. Sleeping was more random. John lay on his side when he was sleeping. He shifted and moved when he was sleeping. But most importantly he always woke up from sleeping, whenever Sherlock touched his shoulder to wake him for a client or a case, eyes fluttering open, murmuring Sherlock's name in the form of a question.

He swallowed hard at the memory. He reached out to touch John's arm but he hesitated.

He'd never had a problem touching John before. On cases they often they communicated by touch: light taps to signal, urgent grips and holds to warn, gentle pushes and pulls to guide… They even used touch in their arguments, holding each other in place or pushing back, displays of strength serving as reminders they were well matched. He'd never given a second thought to the intimacy of the contact. But now…

Now there was no case, no argument. There could be no other meaning in the touch at all—no excuse for it—other than intimacy. Sherlock slowly closed his hand on John's arm, feeling his lack of reaction like a physical ache. How many times had he seen John wake up and taken it for granted? When John napped on the couch, when Sherlock went up to his bedroom to wake him-But of course he'd taken it for granted. He'd never considered there could be a time when John might not—

His grip on John's forearm reflexively tightened.

A memory surfaced in his mind: Another time they'd been so close but at the same time impossibly separated. It was the cemetery. John reaching out and touching his gravestone. John had spoken to him. Sherlock was there, just a few metres away, watching. He could hear everything.

He remembered the study that found increased brain activity in coma patients who could hear familiar voices. The patients who were constantly spoken to by family and friends recovered significantly faster than those who heard unfamiliar voices or silence.

So he could talk to John now when he was in a coma the way John had talked to him when he was dead.

He let go of John's arm and stood up. He felt stupid, but he knew it was the least he could do for John after everything—

No, he couldn't think about it. He just had to talk.

"I, erm, I saw how you killed Moran. They did a story on the telly. They don't know who shot him, but obviously I do."

Pause.

"You're an idiot for just walking in like that. The plan was underdeveloped. I'd almost call you a genius for pulling off something as brilliantly stupid as that."

Pause.

"I meant, thank you. Moran was a powerful target. With him eliminated Moriarty's gang might never recover."

Pause.

"But, erm, the problem is that none of it matters unless you wake up. Nothing matters without..."

Pause.

"I can't work with an incapacitated blogger."

Pause.

"Will it work if I promise not to leave dishes around the flat anymore?"

Pause.

"If you come back I promise to put the dishes in the sink."

Pause.

"John, I—"

Pause.

"John, I'm sorry. I should have been faster; I should have known sooner. I don't deserve to have you back but I'm asking you to come back anyway because I'm spoilt and selfish and I need you. There. I've said it. I need you. I'm sure it was obvious anyway but now I've said it. So..."

Pause.

"You asked me once to come back. Just for you, you said. You asked me to come back and I did. It took a long time but I came back. And now I need you to do the same for me. Please, John, I need you to wake up. For me. I know it would be fair if you made me wait two years. I would, of course I would wait forever, because there will never be anyone else who—"

Pause.

"But please don't make me do that. I'm not as patient as you are, you know that. I need you to wake up and I think you will, because since the day we met you've been there when I needed you and you've done what I've asked. You've been my flatmate, my blogger, my doctor… the only friend I've ever—the only person…"

Pause.

"John, you, erm—"

Pause.

"You've been my inspiration throughout the cases and a reason to live between them. You've saved my life in more ways than I would have thought possible. You've always been everything I've ever needed, and now I need you to be awake."

Pause.

"And I need you to be awake because—"

Pause.

"Because you are everything to me."

Sherlock dropped his gaze to his shoes, wishing the silence wasn't so loud. He looked at John.

What were the odds that one man could have such an exact combination of genetics and life experiences and ideas to make up such an appealing person? A person with dark blue eyes and soft blond hair and a charming, youthful face; a person who could save people as skilfully as he could kill them; a person who liked to wear jumpers and make tea and run after murderers with him through London's alleys; a person who admired him and chose to be his friend in spite of everything; a person who thought him worth protecting; a person who laughed at crime scenes and made him toast…

Before he could think better of it Sherlock was gently brushing his fingers through John's fringe. He sat down in the chair, leaning over the bed and circling his hand around John's wrist.

He wished he could sleep. His mind palace was currently inaccessible. There was nothing but a vacuum of black space where it normally existed in his mind. Since Mycroft brought him to the hospital his sleep had been blissfully blank. He wished he could go back to that empty nothingness until John woke up.

He laid his head on his elbow on the side of the bed and continued to hold John's wrist, fingers resting on his pulse point. He willed the steady beating of John's heart to drive back the frenzy of thoughts that were gathering on the periphery of his mind—buzzing, angry, black swarms of thoughts. He knew he wouldn't have the strength to keep them back this time. And he knew they would tear him apart.

Nine p.m. approached and Sherlock braced himself for an assault from Mary. She would come in screeching about her right to stay overnight with John and he wasn't sure he would be able to prevent himself from tossing her through the window.

There was a hesitant knock at the door. Odd. Mary wouldn't knock like that. A second later Molly was standing in the doorway.

"If you're still in mediation mode you may go back downstairs and tell Mary I'm not leaving," Sherlock said. He didn't care whether Mary, the hospital staff, or the British Army came through that door. He wouldn't leave without a fight.

"No, I'm not—" Molly started. "I just came to tell you you can stay. I guess the hospital's records must have been changed because Mary's name isn't on the clearance list anymore. Only yours is now."

Mycroft. Manipulative bastard. He'd done this as a way of balancing the lie—weakening Sherlock's justification for being angry with him. Rubbish older brother, blocking Mary from John's room. Sherlock might even get him a Christmas gift for this.

"Mary was furious," Molly continued. "They had to get security to escort her out."

A nice Christmas gift.

Sherlock looked up at her. "Thank you, Molly."

She started to speak but hesitated, pulling at the cuff of her sleeve. "Do you think," she said slowly, "that John divorced Mary because he's in love with you?"

The thought had occurred to him. More than once. Especially the other night when John had kissed him. But he couldn't think about it now. He'd failed John so irredeemably it only made him sick to think John might love someone who made so many mistakes.

"Thank you, Molly," he repeated.

She took the hint. "Can I get you anything before I go?"

"No, nothing."

She left.

Sherlock shut his eyes and let the swarm of thoughts descended on him.

Worthless. Useless. Cleverness: Is that all you have to separate you from the ordinary people blundering their way through life like herds of cows? What good is all your cleverness if you can't even keep John safe? Cleverness: You can't use it now, can you? No, you're just like everybody else now. All of those idiot people sitting stupidly by their loved ones in the hospital. That's you now. You're just as helpless as they are. You and Mycroft used to mock these people. You thought you were better than them. But you're not, are you. Chemical defect. You thought you were too clever to end up here. Dangerous disadvantage. And look where you are now. The losing side. Weak. Powerless. Worthless. Look what you've done. John wouldn't be here now if it weren't for your mistakes. You make so many mistakes. You were supposed to be alone. You were selfish. You wanted him. This is the consequence. You have to be alone. There's no other option for someone like you. Weak. You thought you didn't need people. Pathetic. Mycroft can be alone. Mycroft doesn't need people. But you've never been able to do the things Mycroft can. Inferior. You don't deserve someone like John. He was sick and you didn't notice. It only proves you're not capable of caring for someone the way John deserves to be cared for. You forced him to watch you die a bloody death; there can be no better justice than that you should watch him die now. Of course you'll have to kill yourself if he dies, but you might consider killing yourself even if he lives. Do everyone a favour. They hate you. They all hate you. They've always hated you. Even John might not miss you now. If John wakes up he should hate you for not noticing he was poisoned. He might really be done with you this time. John. Think of his smile. Think of his laugh. Think of his eyes. Now think of him shaking his head, 'No, I can't do this anymore.' And he would be right. It's what he should say. It's what he will say. If you haven't killed him, that is. Picture his gravestone. He didn't have to picture yours. You'll never see him again, if they put his body in the ground. His voice, think of his voice. Do you understand you might never hear it again?

It was midnight. The thoughts were relentless. Hours and hours. They tore at him. He was nauseous. He couldn't breathe. He hadn't let go of John's wrist. John's pulse was the only thing anchoring him in the torrent of vicious abuse. The steady pulse reminded him there was hope, a way out of the all-consuming dark.

He deserved this, he knew. The pain was nothing compared to what he'd done to John. But Sherlock was not used to being at the mercy of emotion and he didn't know how much longer he would be able to tolerate it.

These thoughts were not new. He'd been left alone with them once before. A week in prison. Solitary confinement. They'd driven him mad. Mad enough upon his release that it had taken sleeping pills and then painkillers and eventually heroin to silence the voices that tormented his waking hours.

"It's my fault; I should have known. Placing you in solitary confinement was locking you up with your own worst enemy." Mycroft, a memory.

"It was nothing to do with you."

And it wasn't. Mycroft liked to make everything about him (at least Sherlock had thought the solar system revolved around the Earth. Mycroft believed it revolved around himself). Prison might have been the trigger, but the truth was Sherlock would have found drugs anyway. His brain was like a rocket trapped on a launch pad, tearing itself to pieces, and the distractions that the world had to offer—school, research, experiments, even the violin—would have lost their effectiveness with time. He was young, but even then it was inevitable that he would discover the euphoric effects of the chemicals that could save him from himself.

With cocaine he solved problems in whirlwinds of calculations too fast for any of the bad thoughts to catch him, speeding up time to evade the torturous drag of insipid minutes and hours. And with heroin—there was nothing else that could still his racing, self-destructive mind to such a blissful state of numbness. There was nothing else that could shut his thoughts up so completely.

He wouldn't have survived long if it weren't for Mycroft and his damned lists. Ever since that first night. Mycroft had found him; he didn't know how. Wrecked and shaking—wrong doses; he was sure he hadn't cared by that point. But still it wasn't his worst overdose. Lestrade had found him for that one. It was a wakeup call that wouldn't have lasted. For almost a year he'd stayed mostly sober (perhaps a few minor relapses using doses less than half of what he liked), but the needles sang to him at night and the familiar locations of his dealers pulled at him like a magnetic force no matter where he was on the city streets, growing stronger and harder to resist if he neared one.

Sherlock had more or less resigned himself to the tides of life-long addiction, struggling to the shore for periods of sobriety before being swept out again. He'd had a good run, after the episode with Lestrade, but he could feel his will to remain sober ebbing, the drag of the tide calling him back to depths that blurred hours, days, and weeks. The inevitable overdoses that someone would either pull him back from or they wouldn't. He'd been lucky so far, he knew that. He also knew there would be a day when his luck would run out. But he found himself caring less and less as tedious time dulled even the thrill of the cases. Without drugs it was all boring and useless and the cases were all obvious and the whole of Scotland Yard was stupid and he was sure he was losing his grip on sobriety, because the cold fear of an overdose is a short-term memory, and in the maddening silence of his flat Sherlock was forgetting the point of being sober at all.

And then he'd met John Watson.

John was fascinated by him, and he was fascinating to Sherlock. And suddenly there was a reason to focus again. In John's eyes the intrigue of the cases was heightened, and in John's blog there was a better version of himself than had ever existed. Within days John Watson had drowned out the whispering words of his addiction almost completely, and for the first time someone's praise had resonated in his mind loudly enough to fight back even the worst of the bad thoughts that seeped into his mind in the nights without heroin.

John said he was wonderful and extraordinary and amazing. If someone like John could believe these things, then perhaps Sherlock's ideas weren't entirely true.

He didn't need drugs when he had John. Only the certainty of losing him—the private plane that would take him to Eastern Europe and never bring him back—had made him reach for his syringe again. And now… If he lost John now...

Not even heroin would be strong enough to help him.

Sherlock gripped John's sheets as another wave of venomous thoughts ripped through him. He couldn't do this. He wasn't strong enough. He was weak. Worthless, useless…

Wave after wave.

His phone was in his hand. He didn't remember pulling it from his pocket. Dialling. Who?

"Sherlock," his brother's voice was sharp, "what is it?"

Mycroft. In a moment of childish regression he'd called his older brother. He had never acknowledged it, not even when he was younger, but hadn't he always relied on Mycroft to save him from whatever scrape he got himself into? Didn't he still?

It was a testament to how far gone Sherlock was that he didn't hang up immediately. Instead he said, "Mycroft, please," hating the pain in his voice. "I can't—"

"I'll make a call."

Several minutes later a nurse entered carrying a syringe. Morphine. It was morphine. Mycroft understood. A low tar cigarette for Irene Adler and morphine for John.

Sherlock let the nurse give him the injection. He felt the sharpness of the thoughts that were cutting him apart dull. The voices condemning him quieted. He knew he should endure it all unmedicated because he deserved it. But John was lying there in front of him with his warm skin and his steady breathing and he wasn't waking up and Sherlock couldn't… He couldn't.

He laid his head back down on John's bed, stroking his thumb over John's wrist as his consciousness slipped away.

Mycroft ended the call and, frowning, placed his phone down on his desk.

As much as he hated to give his addict (or, what was it Sherlock had called it? 'Occasional user') brother a drug like morphine, he felt he'd made the right decision. In this circumstance it was undoubtedly preferable to have Sherlock sedated in a controlled environment than it was to leave him up to his own devices.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hand over his brow. It was almost one o'clock in the morning and he still had a lot of work to do, but Sherlock's call gave him pause.

The drug Sherlock invented for John had worked. It had stopped the progression of the poison and had acted as a catalyst to allow John's body to begin healing itself. Mycroft had ordered Sherlock's notes brought to him from the lab. It was nothing short of incredible what his brother had been able to do in a span of seventy-two hours. The imagination he'd used in selecting chemicals, the balancing reactions: beautifully intricate equations, intriguingly experimental mixtures.

It was a new level of genius for Sherlock and Mycroft was impressed. He had a good knowledge of chemistry himself, but he'd never been passionate about it the way Sherlock was. Mycroft had never been given to passion of any kind. Generally he viewed it as an unnecessary excess of emotion. But passion was Sherlock's greatest strength as well as his biggest flaw. It drove him to breathtaking heights, but gave him much further to fall. Mycroft had always been steadier, climbing securely from one place to the next, always in control. The result was that he occupied arguably the most powerful position in England while Sherlock was internet-famous for being the detective in the funny hat.

But looking over Sherlock's notes, Mycroft knew he couldn't have done anything like it in such a short amount of time. It had been a dangerous exercise in passion: Sherlock's passion for chemistry tested by his passion for John, and he had pushed himself past his own limits, accomplishing in three days what would have taken even the most brilliant researchers months if not years. But the cost had been high.

Undernutrition. Overdose. Collapse. They had treated him immediately and Mycroft had waited by his side. He'd done it once before. Six years ago. Sherlock had overdosed on heroin. A detective inspector from Scotland Yard had brought him to the hospital and Mycroft had sat by his bed all night, only getting up to leave sometime mid-morning as Sherlock woke.

But now Sherlock was in John's hospital room. He was alone in John's hospital room and he had called Mycroft for help.

He was nine years old. Mycroft folded his fingers and rested his chin on them, not seeing the table or the room in front of him but instead looking at a young boy with unruly curls. Sherlock was nine years old. Mycroft couldn't help seeing him that way. Whenever his little brother got into trouble he was nine years old, looking up at him with tearstained eyes: Mycroft, please.

When they were younger he had done his best to train Sherlock to ignore emotions in order to prevent him from ending up exactly where he was now. But Sherlock had met John, and evidently no amount of training could keep him from falling for the military doctor. Mycroft had seen it right away. And from that point on it had merely been a countdown to this moment. He supposed he could tell Sherlock, 'I told you so,' but he didn't want to.

Because the truth was it hurt him more than he would reveal that his younger brother had asked him for help and there was nothing he could do. Mycroft, please. When they were younger there was no problem Mycroft didn't already have the solution to, no threat Mycroft couldn't make disappear. Sherlock resented him for it, of course, but he trusted him at the same time, coming to him for help when he'd exhausted his other options. Sherlock had always been bitter that Mycroft had answers he didn't, but Mycroft knew he grudgingly respected him for it.

But now—Mycroft unconsciously clenched his jaw—now there was finally something Sherlock was asking for that he couldn't do. Sherlock's MI6 big brother who had saved him from bullies at school and terrorists in Serbia could do nothing now but give him morphine.

Mycroft, please. He was nine years old and he was hurting.

Mycroft rubbed his hand over his eyes. I told you not to get involved. This is what happens when you fall in love. They leave, Sherlock. One way or another they leave, and there is no one who can help you then. Not even me, little brother. It's the only thing I can't save you from.