Author's Note: Hey all, sorry it took so long for an update! I didn't forget about it, I promise! I had it written out and ready for posting, but being homeless kinda puts a damper on finding time/internet connection and all. But anyway, hope you enjoy! :D

Oh and if the chapter's title sounds familiar, its part of a line from Pink Floyd's "The Trial" off The Wall. I thought the themes of both songs kinda matched (a little?).

Also I deeply apologize for any/all mistakes; I wanted to post it as soon as possible so I didn't spend my usual amount of time editing

A Second missed call from Mary buzzing intrusively through the hazy morning pulled John out of his hangover slumber. He groggily rolled off of his stomach with a groan, his back whining with him. Momentarily he had no idea where he was, not expected to be waking up in an unfamiliar room. Wait no… this wasn't so unfamiliar…yes, it was Sherlock's room. At some point during the night he must have crawled up to the pillows, and was now lying under rumpled sheets, surrounded by bed on all sides.

"My God," he thought, memories of the wretched night before attacking his consciousness. Rubbing his face as if he were trying to rub the night away, he pushed himself up into a sitting position, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and squinted down at the screen with half-closed eyes.

8:30am

Five New Messages

Seven Missed Calls

Three Voicemails

With a heavy exhale he began dialing her number to call her, laying down on his back. A muted dial tone was cut off by the startling sound of Mary's physical, unexpected voice calling his name from the living room, making him jump.

"I'm in here," he called back and hung up the phone, his voice heavier than usual from having just woken up. He heard her anxious footsteps as he pulled himself over to the side of the bed and swung his feet down to the floor.

She burst through the door with an "Oh thank God!" and was at his side at once.

"Are you ok? Are you hurt?" she asked hurriedly, checking him over for any injuries. He yawned and shook his head.

"No. Mary, no, I'm alright. Honest." John said, shooing her protective panic away. She dropped her hands in her lap with a heavy sigh filled with a mixture of both anger and relief.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? You scared the shit out of me when you didn't come home last night. I fell asleep waiting up for you. It was only Lestrade's phone call that woke me up," she scolded as he stood up and stretched. He tried to only concentrate on her and not on anything else around him. Last night he had liquid courage to keep him brave enough to face this place, but this morning all he had was a headache and building nausea.

"Lestrade called?" he asked, turning around to look at Mary, who was still sitting on the bed.

"He wanted me to come in, and then asked how you were doing. I told him you didn't come home last night. Then he let me know he dropped you off at 'home'. I came as fast as I could…what happened?" She looked at him concerned, and then let her eyes wander to take in the rest of the room. It didn't look anything like his room back at their own flat.

His sigh mixed with a cringe, embarrassed at the bits and pieces he could remember from the previous night. He vaguely remembered Lestrade pealing him off the sidewalk and into a cab.

"I don't know," he admitted, running a hand through his hair, "I must have drank too much. I think gave him the wrong address."

She nodded, still looking around the room. Her eyes landed on the bottle of Sotch lying abandoned, nearly empty on the floor. She picked it up and looked incredulously at him.

"How much did you drink, exactly?"

"Plenty by the feel of it; I've got a pounding headache. Can we leave?" he asked quickly, wanting to get out of there as soon as possible.

"Sure," she agreed, jumping to her feet. She then paused and asked, "You want to, um, bring anything back with you? It looks like you left some things here. I like the framed periodic table, very modish." She nodded with a smile to the hanging behind the door.

His lips tightened. "This, er, wasn't my room." John kept his eyes focused on the floor. As Mary's jaw dropped with her heart.

"Oh! John, I'm so sorry, I hadn't realized-"

"No, it's fine. I don't really remember how I ended up here...It's fine." It was hard to hide the embarrassment he felt, for being caught spending a drunk night in his dead friend's bed.

"Let's get out of here?" she asked sympathetically, picking up her purse she had thrown down in a rush.

"Please," he responded, and followed her out of the room. On their beeline for the door he tried not to look around, his heart beginning to feel like a can being crumpled, but she stopped in the middle of the main room and turned to look at him.

"Do you want to…say goodbye? Or anything? Maybe grab a few things?"

"No. No, thanks, but I really just want to get the hell out of here," he said, only looking at her. It was too early in the morning to face the pain this place seethed. She nodded and patted him on the arm.

"Alright," she turned to lead the way out, "but I have to warn you, we're late for an interrogation." John followed her.

"Lovely. Can we stop by home real quick?" he asked, gesturing at his current state of bedraggled mess when she turned back round to look at him.

"Of course," Mary responded with a smile. Without turning back, he closed his eyes and followed her.

He sat cadaver-still in the lab at St. Bart's, staring unseeingly at the microscope in front of him. His mind rushed around as if caught in a blizzard. It was almost moving too fast for him to catch up with, skyrocketing into blackness too high above for even he to comprehend.

What exactly did he just witness?

It was nearly five in the morning, but the storm of effects just seeing John after so much crippling time pushed him far away from being okay. He had to go somewhere he trusted, somewhere clean, blank, logical. Where he can sift through the illogical mess that had so violently fallen into his lap. He knew for a fact no one would be in the lab for the next three hours, so he took this time to cautiously peer down into the swelling pit of sentiment brewing dangerously over his psyche.

Digesting and absorbing human emotion had never come first hand to him. He felt things, sure, but they were generally simple and explainable- like excitement, frustration, anger and satisfaction. He even had relative ease dealing with complex confusion or maddening adrenaline. They were what he was used to.

But this...What he was beginning to feel now was quite obtuse in nature, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't wrap his stoic logic around it. He had never sought after human connection in such a way he seemed to be feeling now, for it was largely something he'd scorned and rejected his entire life. He had always been alone, it's what had protected him as he had told John last they shared a room. Alone was a sanctuary that secured him. Never before had he felt loneliness a curse. Something that, somewhere deep in his heart, he desperately wanted to eradicate.

In his heart.

How obscure, for him to suddenly pay mind to its desires. He never cared what it wanted before, mainly because it never wanted before. There was never anyone or anything it had called out for, always being quite content with satisfying his obstinate brain. So why now, when it was most important to stay concentrated on the case, would his challenged heart alter its path of silence?

Moreover, he puzzled over what it was even making such a fuss about.

This would all be a lot easier had he had a lifetime of practice with these sorts of things, if he had known the language of the heart. But being completely novice at it, he found studying his heart's reactions to be uncomfortably tangled, far more disconcerting than any of his cases.

So what was this? This swelling, sweating, gnawing sensation he felt permeating through his veins like an evasive poison in his blood. Going logically, this could simply be a chemical reaction in his brain after not seeing his only friend for a long time. Just a normal— completely asexual— reaction. Probably won't last very long then, and it was obviously nothing to worry about. But there was no way to prove what he was feeling was just an average reaction to this type of situation? (This was hardly a researchable phenomenon to gather data about). Alright, so if this is not just a temporary cause-effect response, what exactly was this possibly-permanent activity?

Love?

He felt mildly ridiculous even thinking it; he wasn't programmed to feel love. Furthermore, he hardly knew what it even entails, so how could he possibly deduce that was the culprit inflicting him. He loved his mother once upon a time, but growing up severs so many childish attachments. And at the moment he didn't long for John to make him food or read him stories. He cared for people, he supposed, but he had always known his affections for John were growing. That wasn't dangerous or annoying. And he knew what strong love love felt like in his life today in his marriage. He loved the work. He loved to impress, to deduce, to solve. Up until a few hours before he was unaware there were facets of his emotions he hadn't experienced. And if this were love, then it went into territory he was widely unfamiliar with. The only feature of love he wasn't acquainted with went beyond platonic- into the murky, mind-numbingly boring subject of romance. And the closest he'd gotten to that was John's string of girlfriends and on the telly. But that's not what this was, not by a long shot. He wasn't feeling the need to write poetry or buy flowers or any other absurd thing love motivated people to do. So that's not what it was, it couldn't be.

But he did miss him.

Thinking that made his newly-acknowledged heart sink.

Yes, he missed John, and as he sat in that cold room he couldn't help but think how much warmer it would be just to have John there to talk to.

So there, that must have been it. He simply had grown massively tired of being so alone. Three years without anyone at all was a long time, indeed….

No, that can't be it though. He had gone his whole life without anyone, why should he care that he had no-one once more? It had hardly mattered before. But now it did, It mattered far too much. What changed? The frustration of not knowing boiled him into standing up and pacing. Now the thought of returning to another empty room, of eating another dinner alone, of having no one to listen to his deductions, left him utterly cold inside. It was not the familiar coldness he had welcomed so often, but a strange frost, like the burn of ice.

What was even more frustrating was that he didn't just not want to be alone anymore; he wanted to be with John. No one else would do. Molly was boring, Mycroft was dreadful, Lestrade was mildly tolerable, and he wasn't about to go search the world full of ignorant people for good company. He had already found good company and he had given it up.

It was beginning to make sense now. He had gone his whole life without human connection, and once he had it and lost it, he found that he missed it dreadfully and he wanted it back. You can't miss something you've never had, so he had never known how much he wanted it. Well that wasn't quite fair, was it? It's not like he could do anything about it at the moment anyway, and he grew anger at his stupid little heart for not understanding the situation. What was the point of all this? Of dealing with emotions that could never be realized? He had a mission, one that stood in the way of returning home.

"Well, that's not exactly true…" An annoying voice nagged at the back of his mind.

Yes, technically he had already hunted down and dispatched the three immediate threats to his friends Moriarty had set out, and thus cleared up his path home. But the door that it had opened up, the grand task that spread out before him offered a rare, wildly important path to explore. However with this new life it was safer not to have anyone close anymore- for their sakes and his own. If you wanted to dismantle an entirely complex spider web string by string, it was easier to be able to move in silence, no strings of your own attached. It should have been a dream life for him- a massive heap of questions and puzzles, leads and cases to follow down, never boring. This was the ultimate life, not having to deal with people, only with the work, and that was what mattered.

Yet he had noticed, as time dragged him further and further from his past life, he found himself increasingly discontent, uncomfortably burdened with bouts of sadness, anxiety, and lonesomeness that he gotten better and better at burying away. The life of the ordinary was not a place for him, the great Sherlock Holmes. He didn't feel he belonged in the tangles of everyday life, and had decided to detach himself from it all together. To spend his life unraveling the morbid web of the spider who tried to ruin him. It had always been satisfying, but it was growing less and less so by the day and the repressed emotions of three years were beginning to push back.

"Forever is a long time to be gone, my friend."

John's broken, drunk voice attacked his train of thought, causing an angry rush of frustration ending in a tray of beakers being crashed on the ground. What were the odds that the one night he dared venture back to the flat to find some old notes crucial for his case, was the one night John stumbled back too? It was wildly maddening that he had to come and mess everything up.

And what had he meant then, when he said he was in love with him? It was entirely perplexing. Something he wanted to hound with questions and observations, more enticing of a query then the massive case he was working on right now. Of course, there's the obvious possibility that John could have meant a platonic love. Then there's the factor of his highly intoxicated state which could have easily altered his affections towards him. Moreover there was a factor he didn't want to consider, that John could just have a twisted memory of him, glorifying the past to make Sherlock better than he truly was. There was no way to varying the certainty of these theories without direct observation. But the more he thought on them, the more they seemed less like theories and more like excuses. He knew what he heard, the pain and longing in John's voice. That couldn't have just been a hankering for an old friend. There was something more there, something much more serious. And Sherlock couldn't tell, in the confusion of his newly acquired emotions, whether or not he wished the confession of love was true.