A/N: And now for something new… that is, I'm still setting the story, but... it hasn't been posted previously.

By the way, I now do this thing where I switch some POVs. John's in the first person POV and includes useful descriptions in broad strokes, it's honest and balanced, naming emotions and describing scenarios. Sherlock's POV is more detached, approaching third person descriptions and periodically hyper-focused on some insignificant detail for the odd excessive deduction, while he might miss the bigger picture and hardly ever describes the real emotion though he recognises superficial ones. The fact that both POVs at times seem similar, I'll blame not on the same writer (me), but on that strange effect that proximity brings to two people, that they start acting and talking with their own shared microculture.

Still not a writer, British, nor do I have a wildlife pond. You should be aware of the first two, at least. -csf

2.

'Greg, I need your advice. It's about… Sherlock.'

The inspector's rough voice falters on the other side of a decent phone call, and he lets out a sigh that carries the weight from his shoulders.

'John, I promise you: he didn't mean it.'

I blink and almost fall for it. No, Greg doesn't know what this is about, he just picked up the call, he cannot know, and I wouldn't tell. "He didn't mean it" is the default Lestrade answer when it comes to Sherlock and any fights we may have.

I stuff some t-shirts into my duffle bag, followed by some underwear.

'Cut it out. I want to take Sherlock on a weekend getaway, he's getting lost in his head again.'

'Well, he's got a big head…'

'Precisely. Once in a while I need to distract him. But I'm out of ideas. What do you think would work?'

'Really, John? You're asking me now?'

Why is the inspector so surprised? 'You know Sherlock the longest.'

'And you know Sherlock the best. Hell, you finish each other's sentences, and you each know how the other likes their sushi without having to ask.'

I pinch the bridge of my nose.

'Just to clarify, I'm forcing Sherlock away from London, not taking him to dinner.'

'Maybe that's where you're going wrong, ever thought of that?'

What? Is that some sort of code I'm missing? What is he on about?

Reading my confusion, he clarifies: 'You're trying to force Sherlock to follow your lead, and we both know he's rebellious in the face of authority. Just… take him somewhere he'd like to go, that way it's hard to be against it. Always worked for my wife.'

'You're divorced, Greg.'

'Thanks for the reminder, but we had nine good years together.'

I take a deep breath and surrender to the wasting clock. Okay. Something fancy, elitist, secluded, then. Good thing I've got some savings.

'Thanks, mate.'

'Keep me posted, alright?'

I make a non-committal noise and hang up the call, already browsing the internet.

.

'It's the most luxurious hotel and spa I've seen in ages, Sherlock,' John states as he drops his dusty duffle bag on the waxed floorboards. Why go so far for waxed floorboards; Mrs Hudson waxes our floorboards just fine once a year? John seems to approve of this place and with an unstudied carelessness that becomes him, he makes a backflip onto the bedspread of a room with two single beds. Silk linen with pretentious monograms lie beneath John's sun-bleached hair. He closes his eyes breathing in the expensive bergamot oil diffuser reeds and his noses twitches, his blonde eyelashes spasm in a mini-earthquake of recognition.

Earl grey tea is flavoured with bergamot. Well done, John. You know your tea well.

Outside, someone laughs affectedly as they walk the topiary gardens with a dandy paramour. A glance from the window and I can tell that she is going on her fourth rhinoplasty and he is thrice divorced, yet the show must go on as his signet ring calls for a peerage in the family, while she demands yet another couple selfie with this man. From the other side of the gardens, a man in a gardener's apron hides away a photographic camera with a long distance camera and the money shot that will feature in the next tabloids editions. I wonder how long until Mycroft calls me to try to ensnare me with their boring affair.

I sigh and take a cautious approach to the bed John has left me. My former soldier would not be himself if he hadn't taken the bed nearest the ingress point for any enemies coming into the room, to keep me protected behind him. Little does he know that he cannot protect me from my worst enemies, they live inside me these days. Testing the firmness of the mattress in the bed, I realise I hate it – like everything else, top quality and marred by the hundreds of paying guests that left their ghostly imprints for me alone to see. What John cannot tell, this claustrophobic encroachment around me is suffocating me, their conversations swirling in a rising tide around me, their faux laughter, their affectation, their mockery as they lie dormant in the shadows, taunting me to recognise their individual identity, to define them, to bring them to the surface level of consciousness, when they are all vacuous, they are all pointless, useless, a waste of hard drive space. Still they are jabbing each other, pushing, shoving, determined to gain atoms and molecules and substance. They are the shadows of events taken place, non-important, but in my weakened state they are all consuming and I shudder because I cannot reel them back.

'Argh!'

I'm rubbing my eyes so hard that I see stars where before I saw their faces, their behaviours and their thirst for material presence. I hardly noticed that I had succumbed to a sit on the bedspread and slowly slithered to the floor, the bed between me and John, seeking refuge, not until John's warm and rough calloused hand materialised as a comfortable weight on my shoulder. I stiffen at once, put on the act, that bravery and fortitude that John expects from me always, before I seemingly carelessly glance his way.

His ocean blue eyes are deep and stormy as he studies me silently. Then, with the nonchalance of a true friend, he sits by my side on the rug, facing a patch of uninteresting beige and dusty rose motif wallpaper. Repetitive, but predicable, lowering the heightened overstimulating world around me for a bit.

John keeps his hand on my shoulder in silent solidarity, and I won't tell him that this gesture alone is keeping me from getting up and smashing the whole room to smithereens, in an attempt to release that pent up frustration, anger, hurt, for a boring, dull, mechanic world where everything is so meaningless to me.

'You do understand,' John says softly out of the blue, 'that at short notice I cannot give you the level of sophistication you probably grew up in, for all I know, mate.'

I huff, not denying nor confirming. 'Why would you think that?'

'I've noticed your hair care routine takes up a second bathroom shelf now.'

'You're just jealous.'

He shrugs, unaffected. It's aways nice to banter with John. It helps.

'I've just booked us a little B&B a good walk away, Sherlock. I think this may fit you rather better, actually.'

'But you just spent most of your savings on this vacuous spa place.'

He shrugs, with the lightness of a man attached to very little in life – a side-effect of a nomadic army life.

'Yeah, definitely borrowing your credit card, mate. But for now, we're moving. Grab our stuff and come along, Sherlock. We're late.'

'Late for what?'

'Life,' he answers me with a very daring sunshine smile that zooms in all my focus on him, much as he expected. John still has the magic.

.

John demanded to drive.

I wish he would engage in driving soon. This travesty of an urban obstacle course on a countdown would be better suited for the deliverance of a transplantable heart between two hospitals that happened to be located between the most pothole riddled town in Britain.

I roll my eyes, knowing full well that John doesn't need to see me do so, he has a sixth sense for this sort of thing.

As a retaliation, the omnipotent former army soldier floors the accelerator pedal. Facts and figures from medical studies flourish behind my closed eyelids on regards to whiplash and neck braces, but even that is familiar territory and it feels promising.

Take me to the right place this time, John. Take me away from myself. Expunge me from my overcrowded mind and lead me somewhere restful. Please.

'Sherlock, are you asleep? Well, if you're not, our ETA is 10 minutes. I thought you'd like to know that.'

He sounds worried, his vowels deep and pregnant with reluctance. There are things he wants to say but will not.

It's easy to guess; he wants to know what happened, what brought me to this reduced state of myself. I evade an answer, knowing that John is stubborn and John is constant, so one day I'll answer him. But today the words jumble in the chaos of my jagged edged thoughts.

It's confusing and discordant through my mind's clutter, but I think I hear John cursing Lestrade through gritted teeth, and it's a million guesses as to why, so I keep my eyes tightly closed and just take in the whisp of a breeze from the fractionally open car window.

.

TBC