A/N: I admit I haven't been working on this as much as I should because I was distracted by an idea for another fic which is currently in progress. I've started on the next chapter, but I haven't completely worked everything out yet, so it might be a while before it's published—rest assured, though, I'm far from being finished with it. Also, there are a few key things that will be explained at the end of their next adventure, so stick around! C:

Reviews are much appreciated :3

A Study in Scars: Part Three – The Secret

The thought made him retract, and for one long moment, he simply stared at the man—if he was, indeed, a man—trying to puzzle out how this was possible. He couldn't be human, could he? But if not a human, then what? He certainly looked like a born-and-raised Earthling, though it would explain quite a lot about his behavior…

What had the Kafkan called him? A "Time Lord"? What was a Time Lord? It sounded more like a title than anything, but John couldn't think of anyone on Earth who would receive such a designation.

The idea of Sherlock being a different species was a difficult one to grasp, but oddly enough, not all that surprising to John—perhaps the recent confirmation in the existence of alien life had numbed him to all other impossibilities.

Before long, he caught sight of the gash on Sherlock's temple and he remembered his obligation as a doctor to treat it. Human or not, that kind of blow could've caused a concussion, and he couldn't very well leave the man lying on the chill concrete.

Sherlock woke with a dull headache to find himself laid out across John's bed. His brows drew close in confusion as he sat up, ignoring the throbbing in the back of his skull that the sudden action instigated. He remembered being caught off-guard when the Kafkan lunged out of the shadows at him, and he remembered a sharp pain from the side of his head as it struck him, but beyond that… He looked at the alarm clock. It was ten o'clock—an hour had passed since then, and he was missing his coat, scarf, and shoes. He touched the place where he'd been hit and felt a rough line of stitches. What on Earth had happened?

He stood, stifling a groan, and half-staggered to the door. Squinting against the lamplight from the sitting room, which seemed suddenly blaring in his aching head, he spotted John, reading a book with—surprise, surprise—a mug of tea at his elbow.

"What happened?" asked Sherlock, taking a seat in his chair.

"The Kafkan hit you in the head," he said. "You were lucky it didn't crack your skull or give you a concussion."

"I observed as much," replied Sherlock, "but how did I end up here?"

"I carried you," replied John, trying to look as though he were still absorbed in his book.

The look of puzzlement on Sherlock's face cleared instantly, replaced by one of mild surprise. He had known John was strong, but he didn't think to that extent. "And the Kafkan?"

"Dead. I had to shoot it, it was about to kill you. Once I'd gotten you patched up, I used your phone to find Lestrade's number, and he took care of the body."

"Thank you," said Sherlock.

"Well, you know, facing aliens… Apparently it's what I do now."

"No, I mean… thank you."

Something about Sherlock's low tone made John look up. He saw in the other man's eyes the same sincerity he'd seen when Sherlock first told him he believed him. "Don't mention it," he said. Then, after looking down at his book, he added, "I suppose I should thank you for doing in a day what my therapist hasn't accomplished in weeks."

"What's that?"

"My leg."

"Ah."

"Didn't even notice my cane was missing until I got back in and saw it by the chair."

"Well, I told you it was psychosomatic, didn't I?"

"Yes. Yes, you did." Despite himself, the corners of his lips twitched up in the suggestion of a small smile. Sherlock settled into a more comfortable position in his chair which involved swinging his legs over one armrest and leaning his head back on the other; when he closed his eyes and said nothing more, John, no longer very interested in the book in his hands, glanced up from its pages. "Sherlock."

"Yes?"

"When you were unconscious, I wasn't sure if you were breathing, so I took your pulse."

Sherlock's eyes opened, but he didn't look at John, nor did he reply.

"You have two hearts?"

He didn't answer immediately. "Yes." He sat up, meeting John's eyes as he continued, "Side-effect of being a Time Lord."

"And a Time Lord is…?"

"An alien race native to the planet Gallifrey. Intelligently superior to just about anything, but all but extinct now."

"Oh. Alright, then."

Sherlock's brow furrowed. "That's it?" he asked in surprise. "No 'you look human,' no 'that's really weird,' no 'I can't believe I'm sharing a flat with an alien'?"

"To tell you the truth, it explains a lot," said John wryly, giving up on the book completely and setting it down. Sherlock frowned to himself, trying to figure out if he'd just been insulted. "Anyway, it's not like it's all that surprising anymore—aliens, I mean."

"Wait until morning before you judge that," Sherlock warned. "You'll think it's all a dream." John didn't reply. His expression was just slightly softer than a brick wall as he added a moment later, "Get some rest."

"That, I will," agreed John, standing and departing for his bedroom. He picked up his cane, but not to use it; he had a feeling, if he ever needed it again, it would not be for a very long time. So, he buried it at the back of the closet he could now call his, behind the clothes and things he had unpacked while Sherlock was sleeping.

After he had undressed and crawled into his new bed, he lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. He heaved a satisfied sigh, contentment weighing heavily on his eyelids. Whatever was in store for him now, he had no doubt it was better than everything he was leaving behind. Sherlock might be an arse—and a strange, socially-oblivious arse at that—but he had a heart somewhere. Two hearts, in fact, he told himself, and the thought made him smile slightly. A Time Lord. He was certain that meant more than simply having two hearts and being very smart, and whatever he was concealing probably had something to do with the impossible room across the hall, but John brushed the thought away for now. Let him keep his secrets. In time, John would show him that he could be trusted.

As he reviewed the day's events, however, a disturbing thought came to him, one that made his eyes open and refuse to close for another hour. This case had been unnervingly similar to A Study in Scarlet, even disregarding his meeting Sherlock Holmes. Two men were poisoned in revenge for killing the murderer's family. The alien was even red, for Christ's sake.

Maybe he had gone bonkers in Afghanistan, and his hallucinations were revolving around a book series he'd read as a child. This couldn't possibly be real, could it? But then he pulled up the leg of his injured calf and felt the marks where he'd been bitten. Of course it was real.

After a while, he fell into a dreamless sleep, and though it felt deep, it didn't last long. At two o'clock in the morning, he was woken up by the hissing of steam and the outrageous screeching sound of some raging machine. It was slightly muffled through the door, but it was loud enough to send him bolting from under the covers so quickly that he lost his footing and fell on the floor. Once he recovered from suddenly finding himself staring at the underside of the bed, he hastily pulled on a pair of jeans over his boxers and a jacket over the tattered shirt he'd worn to sleep before bursting through the door, buttoning up his pants as he went.

It was dark in the hallway, but a flickering light from under the impossible door gave the pale carpet floor a ghostly outline. The sound, unmistakably, was coming from the other side of it. John, who remembered the urgent tone Sherlock had used when he said not to enter it, struggled for a moment with the decision of knocking on the door. He eventually settled on leaning close to the frame and calling loudly, "Sherlock?" when there was a lull in the noise.

Sherlock's distinguishably deep tone came from inside: "Don't come in! I'm alright!"

"What in God's name are you doing?" shouted John, conscious that they were probably waking the whole block with this ruckus.

"An experiment! Go back to sleep!"

John was about to do just that when he heard a crash of clattering metal, a sudden blaring alarm, and, above it all, a strained yet unbelievingly loud line of very creative curses.

From what he could gather from that single outburst, he assumed Sherlock was in danger and, privacy or not, who else was going to help the man? So, without a second thought, he twisted the knob and flung open the door.

Whatever he was expecting to see, it certainly wasn't this. He got the brief impression that distant-future-technology had somehow fused with the Industrial Age before he spotted Sherlock, on the floor of some vast compartment beneath the main platform and straining to lift a large lead pipe off his chest. He leapt across the metal floor and wrapped his hands around the pipe which was pinning Sherlock to the ground, and together, they managed to get it a few inches in the air, enough for Sherlock to scramble out from under it. John's fingers, sweaty from the effort, slipped, and it clanged against the floor's steel panels.

"Help me out with this," said Sherlock breathlessly, jumping to his feet. Above John's head, a canopy of pipes looped down like vines in a jungle, smoke whistling from open valves and a cacophony of lights flashing red. The alarm was still blaring. "Shut up!" shouted Sherlock, pointing his sonic device at the control center. A moment later, the alarm ceased, but the lights continued blinking and the entire machine screamed through the night.

"What do I do?" asked John above the commotion, his eyes barely able to absorb everything he was seeing. He couldn't make heads or tails of any of the wires or pipes.

"Grab the thermal adjuster and attach it to—"

"The what?"

"That blue pipe, there!" John grabbed it, a swinging rope of a pipe that was blowing ice-cold air on his toes, and Sherlock nodded. "Just hold it still!" he shouted. John did as he was told, and Sherlock shoved the end of an identical pipe against it. The two tubes shuddered violently and it was all John could do to hold his end steady as Sherlock grabbed a tool from a belt at his waist and used it to latch them together. Little by little, the dangerous-sounding roar emitting from the lead pipe at John's feet dropped to a low hum.

It was in this manner that they managed to soothe the beast of machinery around them. They reattached pipes, snapped grating gears back into their places, hooked up wires, and twisted valves shut. Occasionally Sherlock would shout out the name of a part that John had never heard of before, and he'd have to point at various cables or tubes until he was indicating the one Sherlock wanted. At one point he connected two thick wires which sprayed so many sparks John thought for a moment he had just seen the last of Sherlock Holmes. But though his hair was singed and his eyes were wild, he got back up, very much alive.

Finally, when the noises had died down so that only an ominous rattling remained, Sherlock enlisted John's help in reattaching the heavy lead pipe to its place against the single central column. Three times they lifted the thing with trembling arms, hoisted it onto their shoulders, and attempted to hold it in place while Sherlock screwed in the latches; twice, it hit the floor with a deafening clang, and it was all they could do on the third try not to let that sound assault their eardrums again. Finally, Sherlock managed to twist enough screws into place that they could release it, and they stood there, doubled over and panting with their hands on their knees.

Sherlock promptly took a seat on the floor while John, once he had caught his breath, slowly straightened. The other man remained where he was while John slowly walked about the place, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

The room was enormous—it could've fit snugly inside a large cathedral. The walls were made of spiraling patterns of bronze and brass panels, dotted occasionally with blue artificial lights that flickered like torches. Curving staircases created a vertical maze of glass floors and silver railings across the back wall, five different doors leading to God-knows-where. Twisting metal pillars stretched from floor to ceiling with curling strips carved away to reveal glowing veins of either pale blue or pink bubbling fluid. John had to stare at them for a moment before he realized that the bubbles were moving down instead of up. Just looking at them was enough to screw up his sense of balance; he felt like he would fall to the ceiling any second.

Here and there, scattered about the room, were bits of home that seemed like relics of ancient history compared to their surroundings: a long tube of some sort shooting out periodic puffs of steam like some old locomotive; a few simply-designed mahogany chairs with burgundy, leather cushions; a coat hanger by the door; and, unbelievably, hanging upon the top hook of said coat hanger, the renowned deerstalker. It appeared to be dusty from lack of wear, but just the sight of it made John smile somehow.

The most beautiful part, however, was the center. A single glass pillar, two feet in diameter, rose from the floor near the place Sherlock was sitting, a core of blue tinted light illuminating the entire room. A glass ramp, etched with intricate white patterns, led a swerving trail from the door to a glass platform through the center of which the column stood. It was the same platform he'd just been standing under, hooking up pipes and wires. Above it, however, was an intricate mass of machinery so organized and symbiotic that it had to be a work of art.

No longer aware of Sherlock's presence, he slowly ascended the ramp, regarding the treasure before him as he would a pearl at the bottom of the ocean. Hell, a thousand pearls. A million.

A hexagonal console expanded out from the central column, each of the six glass panels covered in all kinds of buttons, levers, switches, even a keyboard. A screen on a swivel displayed flashes of the same swirling designs found etched in the walls and staircases. And beneath the glass, all manner of mechanical gears and springs clicked and whirred, functioning together in a fashion that should've been impossible. A few of them were too large for the confines of the glass, so slots had to be cut into the surface of the console so that their spines rotated endlessly above it. There were so many moving parts that glittered, shined, and flashed in the light that his eyes wouldn't hold still. All the while, inside the column, the tube of light, which was ringed with metal circles like ridges on a windpipe, moved up and down in a slow, steady, consistent beat. It was accompanied by the deep breathing of some kind of massive engine.

He moved forward, stretching out his hands until his palms pressed flat against the panel. The turning of the gears seemed to move as one, the steady ticking of a clockwork heart against his hands.

"What is this place?" he asked in awe, following the glass column all the way to the ceiling, where it met dizzyingly high above in another explosion of cables, pipes, and tubes.

"Would you believe me if I said it came with the flat?" asked Sherlock, who had somehow managed to walk up the ramp behind John without making himself heard.

"That depends. Is Mrs. Hudson an alien?"

"Well, yes, but she had nothing to do with this."

John laughed briefly before he realized that Sherlock wasn't doing the same. He decided he'd ask about that later. "Really, though," he said, turning back to behold the majesty of machinery before him. "Where are we?"

"Well, we're not in Narnia," said Sherlock. John frowned at him and he reluctantly answered, "It's my TARDIS."

"Your what?"

"Time And Relative Dimension In Space."

John gave him a blank look.

Sherlock responded with an honestly-do-I-need-to-spell-it-out-for-you?-face. "It's my time-and-space machine. All Time Lords have—" he cut himself off and corrected, "had them."

"Time machine."

"Yes."

"Time machine."

"Yes."

"This—I'm in a time machine?"

Sherlock looked about in mock puzzlement, as if checking to make sure they were in the right place. "Yes."

"Christ, Sherlock," said John, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Anything else you're hiding?"

"Quite a lot, actually," said Sherlock, gesturing to the far wall. "I don't know if you noticed, but there are five doors over there."

"I did notice, actually," replied John. "How does that work, exactly? We should be standing ten feet above the road right now, shouldn't we?" He looked around as if expecting to see an aerial view of the street through a window or something.

"Transcendental dimensions."

"Bless you."

Sherlock gave him another look. "It's bigger on the inside," he summed up. "Wherever it lands—whenever it lands—it picks an outer shell which will best blend in with its environment. I landed it in a flat; so, it disguised itself as a room of the flat."

"Bit rubbish, isn't it? The door's on the wrong side of the hall."

"Well, generally a perception filter keeps people from noticing that, but you seem to be an exception." Sherlock hesitated. "I suppose I'll figure that one out later. Anyway, it could be worse. If the chameleon circuit was broken, it could permanently disguise itself as, say, a 1960's police box, and then I'd never get any peace."

John didn't even pretend to understand what had just been said. He turned back to the central column, drawn to its light like a moth at midnight. "I'm in a time machine," he said, still hardly believing the idea. A time-machine. And this was no DeLorean—it was the Ferrari of time machines. He was in a space-time sports car.

"Astute observation," Sherlock remarked sarcastically. Then, realizing something, he looked at John in surprise and mild confusion. "You like it?" he asked in disbelief.

"It's beautiful."

"It's just a machine."

"No, there's something…" He placed one hand on the beating heart of the console and the other against the glass pillar, feeling the vibrations and letting its low, soothing hum seem to flow through his very blood. "It feels alive."

For a moment, Sherlock was silent, and John thought he might agree, but then he remarked scathingly, "Would you two like some time alone?"

"Shut up," John retorted, pulling his hands away. "So, what happened down there, then? Did it just spontaneously fall apart?"

"Of course not! It's not some piece of scrap metal," snapped Sherlock, offended. "No, I was just trying to fix a rattling in the main pipeline, but my efforts only succeeded in detaching a few of the more important pipes from it. Next thing I knew, the damn thing fell on me."

Before John could rub in the fact that he'd rescued Sherlock, a phone rang. John, startled, searched for the source and spotted the device on the side of the console. It was an old phone, like the type you might've seen in the 1930s complete with a turnstile. It rattled in its place with each ring until Sherlock picked it up.

"What is it?" he asked sharply. He waited, listening. "Calm down. Deep breaths." Another pause, though this one shorter. "Tell me what happened." In the silence that followed, Sherlock's eyebrows raised—a little quirk at first, but as more time passed, they slowly climbed higher. Then they dropped, abruptly, drawing close over his eyes. "You're positive she said that? Those exact words?" he asked, his first words in over a minute. "Sounds intriguing. Do you know where you are?" Another pause. "It's alright. I'll use the signal to lock onto your location. Don't hang up." He pulled the phone away from his face and began punching in commands.

"Is that a phone?" asked John. "On a time machine? How does that work?"

"Would you really understand if I explained the temporal physics of it to you?"

"Suppose not."

"Then don't ask me to."

"Who was that?"

"That," said Sherlock, "was a case."

"Oh." John took a few hesitant steps toward the door, saying, "Guess I'll leave you to it, then."

Sherlock didn't answer, so he reluctantly continued on his way and was two-thirds down the ramp when the other man suddenly said, "Seen enough for today?"

John turned. "Enough what?"

"Aliens."

"Yes. I live with one now."

There was a break in which Sherlock turned to John with a grin in his eyes, and suddenly he knew what was about to be said: "Want to see some more?"

A smile split John's face as he dashed back up the ramp. "Oh, God, yes."