Archive of Our Own ^beta

What is this body as I fall asleep again?
What I pretended it was when I was small --

A crowded vessel, a starship or submarine
Dark in its dark element, a breathing hull,

Arms at the flanks, the engine heart and brain
Pulsing, feet pointed like a diver's, the whole

Resolutely diving through the oblivion
Of night with living cargo. 

 

Robert Pinsky, ‘Vessel’

 

 

John wasn’t expecting it – oh not the word itself, although of course, of course,  no-one ever expected it and it was true, your mind did for the briefest second blank out the meaning of it so you were left with a vacuum where the understanding once was – but the delivery, from the well-meaning woman leaning across the space between them, one hand reaching out to rest on the clenched fists in his lap. 

It brought back this from his childhood: the way his mother had once said, it’s fish for dinner tonight I’m afraid dear, to his father as soon as he walked in the door from work.  And how John and Harry, even at eight and twelve, had heard the lift of relief in her voice as it stopped being the gnawing burden she had carried around all day (his father hated fish, hated the lipless mouths, the dead eyes), and became his.

That was the surprising bit – the way his doctor said it, eyes shining with sympathy but breathing it out, shifting it off her shoulders and thrusting it onto his, making him take it like an unwanted gift.

It was the delivery, John thought, dazed, not really the cancer itself.

-

When John got home, Sherlock was playing Brahms on the violin and shouting at a muted television:

“No, because he never left the bloody country!”, and,

“They found it last week, oh for Christ’s sakes, call this news? I get more news out of an AA meeting and a night at the Ealing soup kitchen, you miserable bunch of neutered morons!”, and,

“Are you coming in at all?” at the door, so John limped in.  Sherlock’s eyes flicked down to his leg.  He put his violin away, leaned back, closed his eyes, sighed, and said, “The biopsy results.  Tell me”. 

Tell me , with the same tone of voice he’d use to ask if John had missed his train, or if they’d run out of milk, and the terrible incompatibility of it all finally hit John low in the stomach, doubled him over. 

It was like nothing he’d ever felt – not even when he’d come to and found Moriarty gleaming over him, eyes shining in his head like bits of coal, the feel of the vest clamping down over John’s ribs (I just can’t wait for this next part, Moriarty had said, shivering with joy). 

Not even then, not even with all that had John felt like this: an  Ouroboros trying to swallow itself: I am cancerous, I have cancer, it has me.  What was the right sequence? Who was the mouth and who was the tail?

It shouldn’t still be surprising, but, “You knew?” 

Sherlock’s eyes were still closed.  “Your limp’s been worse since the pool.  Assumed it was the trauma.  Then a month ago you came home with a bruise in exactly the right place for a blood collection site and the hospital sent a confirmation email about your X-ray time.  Really should change your password”. 

“Ah yes,” said John. “Because that’s been so effective in the past.”

“—You stayed overnight at Sarah’s and you haven’t done that for, oh what, four months? Told me you were going to, which means you planned it.  You came home and slept all next day.  That suggests a sedative of some kind, which in turn usually means a procedure —“

“Did you want me to jump in at some stage?” asked John, head in his hands.  “Or shall we just let you announce it for me?”

There was a silence like when a fridge stops humming and the quiet suddenly crowds you in.  John looked up and Sherlock’s eyes were open, and his mouth had gone thin.

“Tell me,” he said again.

John straightened up.  “Cancer,” he said.  “Primary tumour in the distal femur.  Osteosarcoma.  Went in last month for a check-up, the leg had started up again –” and, quickly, because Sherlock was leaning forward,  scowling –

“ – Yes, I’m a doctor, but we can ignore things with the best of them.  Couldn’t ignore it forever though.  Went in and the bloods came back bad, and so did the X-rays.  Bone biopsy was last week.  The night I stayed at Sarah’s?  Didn’t want to say.  Couldn’t say.”

There it was, flat and final.  A gift passed on, thought John, with a spasm. 

Sherlock was still for the longest moment, hunched into himself, his eyes dark and flat, then he leaped up and for a minute the room was a flurry of coat and hair and hands and he was gone.

Gone.  Leaving John in the room, the fire unlit, the television flickering cold blue and white, and John with it knocking around in his head.

-

Mrs Hudson, who had developed a finely tuned sense for Sherlock’s door slams – loud enough to rattle the potted fuchsias by her fireplace meant Sherlock was desperate, anything quieter was just Sherlock throwing a Sherlock wobbly  – came up half an hour later with a sponge cake and a mug of tea. 

“The fuchsias fell right over, dear,” she said, handing John the mug.  “Had ever such a time getting the potting mix off the carpet.”

“Sorry, Mrs Hudson,” John said, and, because she would find out anyway, “It’s only, well, I’ve just had some bad news.  Cancer, I’m told.  Which, I’m afraid, Sherlock didn’t take very well.”

“Cancer!” said Mrs Hudson, one hand at her throat, throwing her other arm about John.  “Oh you poor love, oh you poor boy.”

She enveloped him in a haze of stale perfume and comfort, her thin old arms scrabbling to hold him.  And even that, John thought savagely at the memory of Sherlock’s disappearing back, beats your effort by a mile and a half, you cowardly, robotic git.

-

Sherlock, walking away from 221B Baker Street, saw:

a man playing the trumpet (started playing when he was ten/lost all sensation in his left index and right ring finger in a logging accident/only plays Gershwin now/badly),

a couple exiting a restaurant (he’s losing money on a bad stock/she’s stopped using birth control),

that the twelfth street light after theirs was flickering out of phase with the others, and,

in the dizzying space at the back of his head,

John .   

-

The next day, John woke up with an achy, throbbing leg, and the thought that perhaps he’d been a little hard on Sherlock. 

There were things to do, anyway: phone Harry, call the surgery, talk to Sarah, start arranging for life to keep on keeping on.

He took a couple of Ibuprofen for the pain and they buoyed him through breakfast so when the door opened as he was lifting his second cup of tea to his mouth and Sherlock came in, John was ready to be the one moving forward, to console him, guide him through whatever bout of survivor’s guilt had crossed him last night.

“Good morning,” he said, briskly.

“Wouldn’t know,” said Sherlock, which broke that spell.  He threw a folder at John and stole his tea.

“Oncologist reports, X-rays, biopsy and pathology results,” he said, pointing at the folder with the cup, “Your medical history going back to 1984 – couldn’t go back much beyond that, NHS and their poxy bits of paper in cabinets all across the country – accident reports with your name on them – the ones from your unit in Afghanistan are especially good –written opinions from two different oncologists, based on current information, obviously.  With the option of consulting a third.”

“Look—” tried John.

Sherlock paced the floor, fingers steepled under his chin.  “Found your father’s medical notes, god help us he was a stoic bastard but I think – think – if we comb through them we’ll be able to see if the accumulation of his symptoms as something more than just rheumatism.”

“Last night—” said John.

Sherlock pulled his scarf off.  “Seven doctor’s visits over his entire life, not much to go on, but ah – you said he died at 52? Young, for a country boy.  That last appointment: his recurring nosebleeds.  Common nasal infection or soft-tissue sarcoma? Which puts you –“,

Sherlock whirled round, pointed at John again with the mug,

 “—clearly at familial risk, but why, why,” shook the free arm of his coat off, trailed it after him as he paced again,

“Could we—”, said John.

“—why didn’t anyone think of it? Ten to one you had pain at that site before the war, the injury aggravated the soft tissue, but it was always there – ”

finally switched the mug to his other hand and dropped the coat onto the sofa, “—waiting -”

“You didn’t come back.” John said, very quietly. 

Sherlock flinched.

John advanced on him. “I thought.  But no.  Do you even. Waited for hours. No, nothing gets in the way of a case, all those lovely details to chase around.  A case, right, not even if I’m the case, not even … not even then, does it, does it,”

and then Sherlock was in front of him, had come up to him, was gripping him by the arms, saying, “John, John” as John sank to his knees, and then they were both kneeling on the carpet, John sobbing in great liquid huffs, like a child woken up by a fright. 

It was true, all of it, they both knew it; it was the only thing Sherlock had, and he would use it like a sword against whatever was coming but John was cold and afraid and had needed this other thing last night – this – Sherlock kneeling next to him saying again and again, like a litany, John John JohnJohnJohnJohn.

-

Once, when John was eight, a bird flew straight into his closed window.  He’d been looking through it to the night sky outside, trying to work out where Mars was, squinting to see the red.  The bird – just a tiny thing, really, a finch or a sparrow – flew into the glass and he heard the quick wet thud of it knocking its brains out.  There was another sound immediately after, like a wet finger rubbed around the rim of a bottle, and then the bird slid down the window and fell to the ground outside.

John, huddled in his bed that night, eyes staring at the wall, tried to remember where Mars was meant to be, where the flitter of red had edged at the periphery of his vision – thought, if he could lock that down, then the bigger memory would surely replace the other: that sound, the small life gone, would vanish and be swallowed up by the planet, the sky, all the constellations firing into light, as if the bird had never existed at all.

-

“My father didn’t have cancer,” John said.  A cup of tea and a packet of Digestives later they were both on the couch and the air was still full of unsaid things, but he wasn’t as swollen with grief anymore, and Sherlock was a marginally healthier shade of corpse.

“No?” said Sherlock, absently, looking into his mug, “No, I thought that was a reach.  It would have been absolutely perfect if he had.  Lovely correlation, I could have used that.”

“Yes,” said John, dryly, and Sherlock looked up at him with a half-apology in his eyes. 

“Look, I can’t—“ he began and John interrupted with, “I don’t want you to.  I don’t want anything.. you ... to be different.  I just.  I want it to stay the same, all of it.  Just the same, all right?”

Saw, in his mind’s-eye, the two of them rushing through the night, bound together by the fire of movement and danger, burning together in it.

Saw the look in Sherlock’s eyes that first time he’d asked, and how quickly John had said, god yes, leaning out toward that flame and  almost going up in ash from its roar.

“Yes,” said Sherlock, the angles of his face going strange for a minute.  “Just the same.”

“What I mean is,” John said, “Is that you have to keep being the insufferable maniac you are no matter what comes, and keep doing mindless, idiot things that puts everyone out and alienates all of humanity, so I always know where I am.  Who I am.” 

Saw himself as he had been before Sherlock: affable, genial, kind to the wounded, and underneath it, something hollow and dry echoing through him if you knocked hard enough. 

He stopped, cleared his throat.  “In case.  In case I, you know, forget.”

Sherlock frowned.  “Ridiculous.  You couldn’t be anyone else.  You haven’t the imagination.”

John smiled.  “No.”

*

Sherlock actually had found everything in John’s medical history as far back as John could remember having one.  They laid the most recent pieces of paper all over the carpet – tests and reports and photographs of stained human bone –  and John saw the progression of the disease on the floor laid out like drill of infantry, walking into war.

Left , history of intermittent and progressive left hip pain over the past 18 months, right, elevated levels of lactate dehydrogenase and alkaline phosphatase, left, frontal and lateral views show a circumscribed lesion in the neck of the left femur, right—

“— aaand … cancer!” John called out, strangled.  His leg ached and he was so frayed at the edges it was a wonder he wasn’t huddled in a corner somewhere.

“John,” said Sherlock, and John felt the hysteria ebb a little.

“Sorry,” he said.  “Stiff upper lip won’t kick in today, for some reason. I should stop.”

“I don’t care,” said Sherlock.

“Because all emotions are one to you?”

Sherlock gave him a Sherlock look.  “Because I want you to decipher these bone stains for me and I can’t do it when you’re sobbing.  You swallow your L’s.  It’s inconvenient.”

“Bastard,” said John. 

“Unnecessary,” said Sherlock, and John grinned as they bent over his results together.

*

“We can assume the trauma had something to do with the recurrence of the pain?” asked Sherlock, a day later, looking up from his microscope.

They’d met at St Bart’s; Sherlock had wanted John to take a look at the histological sections of his tumour.  Where and how Sherlock had gotten hold of them, John didn’t know. 

He suspected Molly, who was lurking in the background trying not to look mournful, but knowing Sherlock it was just as likely to be a case of wandering into the right pathology lab armed with nothing more than a white coat and a weary sense of his own superiority. 

“I don’t know,” said John, shrugging.  “It’s possible the stress triggered something, yes.  I expect there’s nothing like having a couple of kilos of dynamite strapped to you to get your pain receptors firing in anticipation.”

Sherlock went very still.    

“But you didn’t feel anything physically abnormal after you came to?” he asked, his voice hard and slow.

Only the bone-deep knowing that you would come , thought John.  Just that.  Was that an aberration? Being able to swallow the fear down because all of him, even the parts wired to explode, were waiting for Sherlock?

“Nothing out of the ordinary, for chloroform,” said John, “Usual disorientated/dizzy/slightly nauseous stuff.”

“Hm, pity,” said Sherlock, unfreezing and bending his head back to the microscope. “I can think of at least ten different things I could have done to you while you were under.  And all of them would have at least partially destroyed you.  Thought he’d show a bit more flair.”

“Can you,” said John.  “Ten, eh? Got lucky with him then, didn’t I?”

“Lucky?” asked Molly.  She was handing Sherlock slides to the beat of his snapping fingers.

“Yeah, it’s strange,” said John, trying to think, “Mo—”.  He swallowed.  The name still clung to the image of those pale white hands, that smile full of spit and teeth.

“Moriarty,” he tried again, “was fairly decent, really, all things considered.  I’d obviously been sedated, but apart from that I had food, water.  He didn’t talk much.  Just giggled and, you know, ah, rubbed the vest a lot.”

Sherlock said, drily, “So Moriarty was decent enough, excepting the explosives and the laser sights on me.  You’d have noticed if he’d taken a hammer to your hip though, I take it? Or would the tea and biscuits have cancelled it out?”

“Haha, oh yes, funny.  Have a go at the man who almost blew up South London with his chest,” said John, looking at his micrograph with its lacy fretwork of poor, riddled bone.  He rubbed at his leg absently until he noticed the room had gone completely still again and looked up.

Sherlock was pale and Molly was even paler. 

“If you could—” she whispered, “—If you could just please stop saying that.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” said Sherlock, and pushed her down into a chair.

John, swearing at himself, pulled up a stool in front of her.  “Sorry, Molly.  Didn’t think.  I say things to Sherlock and forget other people might be listening.  Didn’t meant to get into your head like that.”

“Oh no,” said Molly, instantly retreating, “no, oh, don’t mind me. Honestly.  I’ve just had a bit of a week, got roped into some stupid lab work that went on forever and I’m almost blind from it.”

“We shouldn’t be keeping you up then,” said John, even guiltier now. 

She shook her head.  “It’s nothing really, just some biopsy results that got mislabelled.  Someone’s first week in the lab.  Happens more often than I’d like.  Um.  Shouldn’t really say that though, I suppose.”

Sherlock had pricked up his ears.  “Mislabelled biopsy results?”

“Oh,” said Molly, apologetic again because she understood. “No, John wasn’t in that batch, sorry.”

Sherlock made a noise that perfectly signalled his immediate drop in interest.  John said to her, quietly, “You okay, then?”

“Oh yes, thanks,” she said, “Um.  And.  I don’t think I’m the only one who doesn’t want to picture it, by the way,” and glanced over at Sherlock, who was looking grim, and who bent his head back down to his microscope when he caught John’s eye.

-

They were at it for hours.  Sherlock pulled out slide after slide of John’s samples, insatiable, quick as lightning with the medicine.  Molly, patient and adoring, followed him down the winding labyrinth of John’s diagnosis.  John, restless with the idea of being so exposed and easily dissected, tried not to twitch too much.

“The morphologic markers weren’t conclusive,” said Molly, pulling Sherlock over to her microscope.  “See? That’s his bone biopsy, all that stuff that looks like the inside of a Crunchie bar.”

“And my bones shouldn’t be looking like something out of a Cadbury factory,” said John, “They’re supposed to look like boiled red cabbage.  Oncologists, eh? Mad.”

Molly giggled.  Sherlock rolled his eyes and sighed,  “When you’re both quite finished being twelve.”

The morphologic markers weren’t conclusive.  It was like looking into a different past, one where a shift in light meant John went home without a sword hanging over his head.  In that past, he was still close to the flame, still running through the dark.  But the light had gone a different way; just bad but not bad enough, he thought.  And then there they were, the soldiers of confirmation marching in, slides of his bone that had flared for cancer. 

Some anonymous lab technician, a drop of the right chemical, his samples suddenly tiny beacons signalling yes, yes, yes.

They went through it all: the antibody stains that confirmed what the markers couldn’t, the cells blinking and shaping in different ways – which Sherlock objected to, because the Bieling osteosarcoma paper successfully showed that the histologic demonstration of differentiating between tumours was difficult, and the Tsuneyoshi osteosarcoma versus malignant fibrous histiocytoma of bone paper had—

“God, enough, enough,” said John, waving his hands in surrender.  Even Molly was looking a little dazed.

“And, oh look, it’s time to go,” he added, because Sherlock was already eyeing Molly, and he could see a Sherlock-shaped sort of coercion coming on.

“We were only just getting somewhere,” Sherlock said loudly, but John thanked Molly, offered to help tidy up, squeezed her hand when she refused and clutched at him and whispered again how sorry she was about the news, and ushered Sherlock out in fifteen minutes. 

It was just past eleven, and the streets were bright and empty.

-

Going home on the Tube with Sherlock, who was texting, John said under the cover of train and carriage noise, “I don’t ever forget that you were there, you know.  I wasn’t ever alone in it.”

Sherlock stopped, though he didn’t look up from his phone. 

“You were alone long enough,” he said, so quietly John could barely hear him.  They passed a station, and the lights from the platform sidled across his face in thin white bars.  “Too long, and long enough.”

-

“I’m recommending neoadjuvant chemotherapy,” Connie Willard, his oncologist said, a week later.  “Surgery after.  I’d spare you if I could, but looking at the tumour now – she’s a tricky one – and considering the biopsy results, we’ve got a better chance going in if we deal to her a bit first.”  She wasn’t bad, hadn’t talked to John as if his nodding, good-humoured acceptance was based on nonsense and denial. 

Nothing was going to touch him, because he was a tourist in this land of decaying body and ruined cell structure.  Tourists left with everything intact.  They didn’t participate.  They had their own force-field.

Better that than giving in to the feeling that the world had narrowed down to a few points of light moving in a blackness so thick he could touch it.  Better that than thinking about how quickly life was stopped and contained. 

Better, better, best.  Shut it away, down, up.

If I leave it alone, it’ll leave me alone back , John repeated to himself every morning, rubbing at the sawing pain in his leg. 

 “When?” asked John, and despite himself, still felt a little ruined when she booked him in for the next week.

Telling Sherlock that night was anticlimactic.  “Next week?” Sherlock repeated, frantically sorting through X-rays and writing on each with a fluoro marker.  “Fine.”

“Oh,” said John, because to be fair he had asked for exactly this.  “Right.  Excellent.   Okay.”  

And, because he wasn’t sure Sherlock actually knew how to work a toilet, went to phone Harry to tell her and see if she could be there, too.

-

When he rang Harry up, she answered the phone with, “It’s about bloody time.  How long were you going to leave it, anyway? What sort of world is it where you don’t hear it from your own brother first? Ohjesusareyoualright, are you okay, what’s going on, how could you not know?” and burst into tears.

When she could talk without hiccoughing, John asked if she could come down the next week.

“Obviously,” she sniffed, all the way back to prickly now.  “But I don’t want to be fighting the boyfriend for territory.  Just to be clear.”

“He’s not – oh for god’s sakes,” John said, flushing, “Can you just come? Please?”

“Yes.  Idiot.  Be there this weekend,” she said, and hung up.

John went back into the sitting room to ask Sherlock how Harry knew, but Sherlock was muttering to his laptop, “High ALP levels from the initial tests, but calcium levels from yesterday are all normal, strange that.” Looked up at John, asked, absently, “Why are your calcium levels normal?”

John, frowning, said, “I didn’t do a calcium test yesterday.”

“Mm? No, I did,” said Sherlock.  “Took blood samples last night.  Did you know you’ve got a vein on your left forearm that’s almost exactly the shape of the Bakerloo line? These samples are bothering me.  I’d like to do another ALP and an ALP isoenzyme test as well, so nil by mouth till lunch tomorr—“

“Sherlock,” said John.  “Sherlock.  Do you mean to tell me.  Took a sample – while I was asleep? How? How?”

“Yes,  while you were asleep,” Sherlock said, blinking.  “With a syringe.  In your arm.  How else would I?”

John thought he should be more appalled, but then there was the sudden, arresting picture of Sherlock sitting by the side of his bed, picking up his arm, stroking his thumb over the inside of his elbow to find the blue vein and life underneath. 

Sherlock was watching him thoughtfully.

“Drugged your dinner first, of course,” he added.

-

Sherlock had told Harry and Sarah.  He had also told Lestrade, who had told Anderson and Donovan, so when Lestrade next dropped by, he had a box of chocolates and a card from everyone at the station for John.  John went bright red when he took them and felt like a complete fraud.

“Why,” he raged at Sherlock, limping behind him after Lestrade had left, “Would you tell them? Without asking me if I wanted them to know? Are you going to leave me no dignity in this? No privacy? At all?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock said, opening the box and throwing away the white ones.  “You need support people, it’s what all the pamphlets say.”

“I thought that’s what you were,” John said bitterly, before he could stop himself.

And then said, stricken, “No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that’s so unfair, I’m sorry.”

Sherlock looked up at John and for a minute there was a terrible dry nothing in his eyes that John had only seen once before, at the pool, when Sherlock had looked across at him and they had both seen the jagged precipice they stood on.

And yet, John remembered, even then he had seen in Sherlock’s eyes not the fear of falling, but of how he would work it so he could catch John.

John knew if he had to see that dry nothing in Sherlock’s eyes again it would kill him before the cancer could, so he did the thing they were both least expecting: stepped in close, wrapped his arms around Sherlock and pulled the hurt, cold body against him. 

Sherlock said stiffly, “Obviously I’m also investigating that aspect of things.  If someone would just –” but John, furious with himself, whispered, I’m sorry, you are, you do, I’m sorry, it’s all right, against the soft nap of Sherlock’s shirt and Sherlock went quiet, and his arms came up around John and held him back.

-

That night, Sherlock sat at the foot of John’s bed, watching him sleep.

It was impossible to believe there was something growing in him that Sherlock couldn’t touch, that his brain couldn’t break down and remake. 

Everything could be taken apart, everything could be crumbled and rubbed into individual atoms.  Trust, misery, illusion, even the nightmare John was currently shuddering through. 

Chemicals firing in the brain, building threads of life in the void.  And yet here was John being undone one cell at a time, the final mystery.

Sherlock leaned over and stroked his palm over John’s thigh.  John shuddered a little less so he did it again and again until John murmured and shifted into a different kind of sleep. 

Even this, he thought, was explainable, even the gnaw in his chest when John turned on his side and a bit of the streetlight licked at a corner of his neck like a tongue.

-

Mycroft came to visit the next day with a murmur of regret about John’s condition, and a small bunch of flowers from Anthea.

John stared at him, aghast.  “Anthea?” he repeated.  “Jesus, Mycroft, what aren’t you telling me? There’s a missile trained on me, isn’t there, just for that extra little touch of pathos?”

Mycroft sighed.  “It’s to be expected that you’ll get more detached from reality as the disease progresses,” he said.  “I just hope Sherlock manages to act as a grounding force of some kind.”

“I resent that,” said John.  “If it weren’t for my small but reliable range of normal human behaviour, this flat would actually function as a black hole that sucks all the feeling out of every human within a five-mile radius.”

“Look,” he said, pointing to the wall behind the sofa, which Sherlock had papered with pictures from the first three hundred Google hits on osteosarcomas, “I wake up and have my breakfast to that, every morning.”

Sherlock, who’d been highlighting the bottom left corner of the wall, scowled, grabbed the flowers and hurled them out the window.

“You’re violating all his emotional boundaries!” he hissed at Mycroft, slamming it shut.  He swirled out of the room, looking pointedly over his shoulder at John.

Mycroft cocked an eyebrow at John.

“Oh well, that’ll show me,” said John, almost choking, as something bright and enormous welled in his chest.  “Yeah all right then.  He’s been brilliant.”

-

John, who had handed in his notice at the clinic, ended up wishing he hadn’t, because he’d never had to think about medicine as much as he had to around Sherlock lately. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate it all, it was just that, in between having to read and then discuss – at great length, with written commentary and detailed footnotes --  every study in PubMed done over the last 5 years on metaphyseal tumours and then having to go back and apply all salient findings to John’s test results to see if they had any implications – between that and fielding Lestrade’s calls to Sherlock, which were becoming increasingly frantic, and trying to find a quiet moment to grieve in, a fortnight at the clinic would have been almost, comparatively speaking, meditative. 

The final straw almost broke one night he was lying in the bath, kneading his thigh, thinking about the chemo to come when Sherlock burst in, hypodermic syringe in hand.

“Jesus christ!” John said, sloshing everywhere.

“Just one sample,” breathed Sherlock.

“If you don’t get out of this fucking bathroom right now, I will – I swear on my life – shoot you,” said John.  “For god’s sakes, I’m in the bath, you madman,” and would have kept going except Sherlock had suddenly gone quiet and his eyes were everywhere John was.

Everywhere John was flushed and heavy and warm.

“No,” Sherlock said, when John shifted to try and hide what that was doing to him.  “Stay there,” said Sherlock, very, very quietly, and didn’t stop looking although his eyes got darker and darker.  John, shivering a little inside and completely out of his depth, said, helplessly, “Sherlock,” and regretted it with a vengeance because Sherlock blinked, licked his bottom lip, and backed out without a word. 

John couldn’t wash himself properly for the rest of the bath, his touch felt so utterly inadequate.

-

Harry turned up early Sunday morning.  She was staying for a week.  She and Sherlock, predictably, loathed each other on sight.  Harry because Sherlock had broken the news on the phone to her with, “You’ll want to start donating blood.  Build up stocks.”, and Sherlock because Harry had said if he was any sort of detective he’d be halfway to fixing John by now. 

John stared at her, appalled.  Harry flushed.  “The way you tell it…” she said loudly, but looked a little hesitantly across to where Sherlock was sprawled on the sofa, laptop perched on his ribs.

“Alcoholics can’t usually tell truth from fiction, John,” said Sherlock, equally loudly. 

“Sociopaths make the whole world a fiction!” Harry shouted.

“Better a sociopath than trampling your brand of guilt into him!” Sherlock shouted back.

Harry went even redder and stood up.  “He’s my brother!” she shrieked.

Sherlock leaped up too, almost knocking the laptop onto the floor, dressing gown sloping off one shoulder.  “He’s my JOB!” he roared.

John gaped at both of them, head and leg throbbing.  “Bloody hell, what are you like, both of you?” he said.  “Harry, come on, let’s go for a walk, all right?”, and because there were some things that just came inbuilt with being an older brother, “Go get your coat.”

Harry, fuming, left the room, and John turned to Sherlock.

“Call Lestrade,” he said. “Get on a case, go on.  Just to get away from it.  It’ll be good for you.  You could tell me about the case, couldn’t you?”

Sherlock looked at him steadily for a minute.  “If that’s your idea of how this works,” he said, turning away, “You’ve got it incredibly, incredibly wrong.”

Some texture in the room changed.  Sherlock was breathing hard, angry.   His skin was flushed around his neck.  John looked around the room, noticing – where had he been? –  for the first time that Sherlock was wearing the same pyjamas he had worn all last week, and that he looked thinner and paler than usual and that all the signs were there that no-one had been taking care of him; that no-one had cared.

Something suddenly clenched in John’s chest.  “How what works?” said John, urgently.  “Sherlock.  How what works?”

Sherlock was turning back to him, frowning, when Harry came back and sniffed, “If you’re ready,” and the moment melted away.  Sherlock flopped back onto the couch with the laptop, pointedly flipping the screen up to hide his face and John, biting the inside of his cheek with frustration, limped out after Harry.

-

When they got back, Sherlock was gone.  John put the curry he’d picked up for him under the box of toenails in the fridge and texted him to see where he was.  The answer, an hour later,

Really will need to cut your leg open at some stage. 

SH

wasn’t promising, but Harry had calmed down and was almost willing to admit she’d played it badly, especially after she examined the detritus of Sherlock’s last fortnight scattered around the flat.   

After she had picked up the twentieth set of Sherlock’s lab results in a row and a kilo’s worth of journal articles on metaphyseal tumours in rats, she said, huffing at the idea, “Anyone would think he was trying to cure you.”

And John felt like such a fool because all along, at the very back his mind, he’d half believed Sherlock already had.

-

Sherlock got home a little past midnight.  He brought the cold in with him, and his coat collar looked damp. 

John, sitting on the sofa, pointedly waiting for him, just as pointedly kept watching as Sherlock took it off.  His buttoned shirt was royal blue, and his wrist bones jutted out of his cuffs.  The fine, tense line of his neck flexed as he unwound his scarf.

“Harry home?” he asked, casually.

“No,” said John.  “Out with her mates.  Probably gone for hours.” Didn’t even blush from the obviousness of it, his voice was too busy drying up at the sight of Sherlock, so cold and crisp and perfect it felt like John needed permission to look.

John limped over to the microwave to warm up Sherlock’s dinner for him.  When he looked up from pressing the buttons, Sherlock was leaning against the kitchen bench, watching John’s hands with an odd twist to his mouth.  John cleared his throat. 

“Where’ve you been?” he asked.

“With Molly,” said Sherlock, taking the plate off John as it came out of the microwave and sitting down, “Trying to piece you – it – together .”

John flushed.  “It’s not me”, he said, stung.  “It’s not part of me.  It’s there under bloody sufferance.  You do understand that?”

Sherlock took a break from shovelling food into his mouth to look up at him. 

“If it’s in you, it’s part of you”, he said, flatly.  “I’ve got to start somewhere, John.”

John felt something small inside him spasm, like a nail bending backwards.  He clenched his jaw against words that shouldn’t – shouldn’t – be said.

Sherlock, as usual, was ten paces ahead.  He leaned back in his chair and sighed.  “You’re about to accuse me of not caring again”, he said.  “You’ve had the same look on your face every other time.”

The weary resignation stopped John in his tracks, made him rock back and look at Sherlock. 

Sherlock, with his flat acceptance of life and death, and the way he looked at both without compassion or denial.

Sherlock, who had bent the great will and force of his mind to … what? Curing John’s cancer? Giving John the luxury of blocking it out as effectively as amnesia, while he sank in it up to his elbows? 

Sherlock, who came home every night smelling tired. 

Right , thought John, as his heart thawed a little and the despair and terror he’d been holding off rushed in but he braced himself against it, and rightohbloodyhell focused it all into one tight movement and bent down and kissed Sherlock.

For one heart-stopping moment there was just more terror as Sherlock’s lips stayed cold and startled and John, throat aching, was pulling away when Sherlock tipped his head back, said, “No. I didn’t think—”, clutched at a fistful of John’s shirt, and hauled him back in.  

John sank into him, relieved at first and then frantic, because Sherlock was kissing him back as if his life hung in the balance, and all the gratitude and fear burnt away until there was only the fire again, the deep red heart of it. 

Sherlock licked into his mouth, sucked on John’s bottom lip, made a sound when John licked him back.  John knew he had never really kissed a person before, if kissing was light in your blood, and your limbs turning to smoke.  “This?” John said into Sherlock’s mouth, almost incoherent with sensation.  “Is this how?”

“Sometimes,” said Sherlock.  His eyes were so dark and hot it almost hurt John to look at them.

Sherlock stood up, and now it was John’s turn to tip his head, and they both murmured into each other’s mouths as the angle of the kiss changed.  John wanted to touch every spot they were joined; chest, stomach, the long press of Sherlock’s thighs, flexing on his, and, oh, thought John, as Sherlock scraped his teeth gently along his jaw. 

“What did you,” stammered John, almost blind with it, wanting, and bit down on the cold skin at the base of Sherlock’s throat, rubbed his lips over the pinkening spot, and then – feverishly, frantically – moved lower and did it again. 

Sherlock said, his voice so low in his chest it almost shook John’s ribs, “Yes, that, do that”, and then John, unbuttoning his way down Sherlock’s chest, found one flat, hard nipple, licked it and, dimly, felt Sherlock lean his head back and heard Sherlock gasp. 

He leaned against Sherlock’s chest for a moment, overcome and shaking.  Sherlock ran his hands down John’s back, lips against John’s ear.  “Please,” he whispered into Sherlock’s chest. 

Sherlock put his hands over John’s ears, tipped his face up and oh, his hands were shaking too, but he leaned in without stopping and kissed John again, pushed John with his body up against the bench and held him there.  Kissed John while his hands moved down John’s chest, his thumbs rubbing slow circles on John’s stomach.

It was almost too much.  It wasn’t enough.  The bench dug into his hips, and the dishes in the sink clattered.  His leg throbbed like an open cut.  John, drowning, wild, put his hands inside Sherlock’s shirt, against Sherlock’s ribs, felt the skin bumping over the bone, dipped his fingers down into the slight hollow of his waist.  

Sherlock hissed against his mouth, and then things moved quickly, because they were both glassy-eyed and mad with need now.  Sherlock almost ripped John’s shirt off, said, harshly, “This bloody belt of yours—”. “God, yes, help me”, panted John and they banged fingers and bumped knuckles as they tore it off, pushed down Sherlock’s pants and John’s boxers, and then their cocks were lining up against each other and the slide of Sherlock’s skin, there, right there.  All silky and pushing on John, leaking already, rubbing up one thick stripe of almost paralysing pleasure against him.   Sherlock gripped the back of John’s neck with one hand, wrapped his other one around both of them, murmured, ah.  John looked down: Sherlock’s long white fingers were wrapped around them, pulling on them, and their cocks jumped and throbbed until bright bites of the oncoming flood shivered under John’s skin.  He made a low, animal sound when Sherlock looked down too, and then they were both coming from the sight of it, the sound of it, skin alive on skin, one mouth landing on the other, desperate for more of it, for all of it.   Never enough it’ll never be enough, John thought, as he went under into the velvet stillness, with Sherlock’s mouth over him saying almost the same thing, fiercely, as they clung to each other.

-

They were still leaning against each other, breathing hard, when Sherlock went tense and pulled away.

Here it comes , thought John, doing up his trousers, watching Sherlock do the same. 

“Are we going to have a barney about my fragile emotional state and you not giving it any quarter?  I gave it at least another five minutes,” said John mildly, as Sherlock started buttoning up his shirt. 

“We could stop for tea,” said Sherlock, sounding so bored that John almost laughed, but that would have been completely the wrong move.

Sherlock still wasn’t meeting his eye, so – bugger that,  John thought and stepped right up to Sherlock, put his hands over the ones doing up the buttons and cleared his throat.

“It wasn’t gratitude,” he said, “All right?”

Sherlock said, a little scornfully, “Would you know if it was?”. 

Which was okay, he was entitled to that.   I’ve been the worst kind of blind, John thought. 

“Probably not with anyone else,” he said, “but if it was all the other way around—”, and had to stop for a minute because even the idea of it almost shut him down, “—if it were the other way around, I’d be doing all the same things.”

Sherlock stepped back, detached from John and waved his hand dismissively at that.  “I shouldn’t have involved you in any of it.  Would have saved us all this—”

“Oh don’t you fucking dare,” said John, going white with fury in spite of himself, and Sherlock, after a long, thoughtful look at him, was quiet for a moment.

He said, finally, almost reluctantly, “It wasn’t pity.”

John relaxed a little.  “I should bloody well hope not.” 

Sherlock gave him a twisted, half-smile that flooded him with relief, because maybe, maybe.  He decided to be brave for the second time that night. 

“Come to bed,” he said, holding out a hand.  “Come to bed, Sherlock.”

-

They crawled into John’s bed together, and John cleaned them both off.  Sherlock, normally so removed from such intimacies, accepted it with an lift of his eyebrow as he lay back against the pillows and let John wipe the flannel over his stomach.  The remaining tension in the air eased.  John laughed, said, “I’ve created a monster,” and kissed the spot he’d just wiped.

They left the bed lamp on so that Sherlock could crawl all over John and explore him.  He made John take off all his clothes and thank christ for central heating and Mrs Hudson’s enormous great radiators, because he was at it for what felt like hours:  lifting John’s arms, licking down the undersides, finding the places where arms joined shoulders and nuzzling into the small folds and crevices.  He turned John around and licked around John’s nape, whispering and cataloguing John’s shudders. He buried his nose deep into the back of John’s knee and ran his teeth along the tendon, licked down to John’s heel. 

It was probably meant to be simple discovery because, well, Sherlock. 

It drove John so feral with lust, he ended up flipping Sherlock onto his back and taking his cock into his mouth in one move. 

“No, that was next – gngh,” said Sherlock as John sucked him down.  Sherlock’s cock, bitter and salty in John’s mouth, was the taste of Sherlock gentled, Sherlock groaning in his beautiful baritone, “God. Fuck.”.  John slid his mouth up and down, scraped his teeth gently against Sherlock once on the downstroke – Sherlock almost came off the bed then— and then slid lower and sucked his balls into his mouth.  Sherlock said, “John.  John.  Now.”, shuddered, and came in flashes of white and fists clenched in the sheets.  John, almost dizzy from the sight of him lying there ruined and panting, rose up, dipped his hand into the pool of liquid on Sherlock’s stomach, and came in a few short strokes; not from his hand on his cock as much as Sherlock’s glazed eyes fixed on him,  watching John touch himself.

-

They curled up facing each other, legs and chests touching, John sleepy and marvelling.  “I never really thought.  Well, not till you almost punched Harry.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Sherlock, yawning.  “I should have left more obvious clues.  Singing telegram, flying monkeys, full page ad in the papers.”

“It’s a good job you don’t go all soppy after sex,” said John, putting an arm under Sherlock’s head and pulling him closer, “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”   Sherlock’s curls brushed against his cheek.  He tucked his head into John’s shoulder, lips against John’s collarbone. 

“Knew all about you, though”, Sherlock said.

“Oh that’s not what you were saying earlier,” said John, giving in to the urge and running the hand lying on Sherlock’s shoulders through his curls.  This, too: a hand in your lover’s hair after it was over, their mouth talking against your chest – the familiarity was almost unfathomable, but Sherlock was rubbing his lips against John’s skin in the absent, habitual way lovers do.  “And no, you didn’t, you smug bugger.  Even after you found out everything you could about my love-life, you didn’t.  There’ve been girlfriends, and,”

He hesitated.  Declarations of passion and Sherlock? He’d never thought of the two even coexisting in the same universe.  And yet here was this new world, all upside down and with Sherlock in it.  And yet not fifteen minutes ago, John had been licking at Sherlock’s cock, frantically trying to tell him with his mouth how perfect, the taste of him, the feel of him… 

“And, you.”  He tried not to make it a question.

Sherlock shifted, rolled John onto his side, tucked himself against John’s back.  He nudged the back of John’s knees with his own, fitted them in together, put one hand against John’s chest, buried his nose in John’s hair. 

Little touches, all over John’s body, sequential and measured.  It was an answer, of sorts.

“Sleep,” said Sherlock, behind him, so John slipped his hand into Sherlock’s, and did.

-

The first appointment was at ten the next morning. 

Sherlock, playing Bach at the window instead of eating breakfast, watched Harry, not John.  Harry, bless her, fussed and packed things as if John was a child about to be put onto a train by himself for the first time.  “Sandwich, tissues, extra jumper, boiled sweets, soothing Peruvian music – oh good, you are listening,” she grinned, holding up his bag when John wrinkled his nose at her. 

Harry was nervous, she jiggled her leg under the table all through breakfast, and clinked her spoon on the rim of her bowl.  She’d offered up a very stiff apology to Sherlock as soon as he entered the room, which he’d just as stiffly accepted.  John looking at them both, felt his heart squeeze with something that, for a brief moment, chased away his fear.   

Waking up next to Sherlock that morning would have had the resonance of every other awkward morning after – the shuffling hesitation, not knowing what was allowed and what was on last night’s cutting room floor – except John was waking up with Sherlock, who didn’t treat it so much as a morning after as an opportunity for a primer on multi-drug regimens in operable non-metastatic osteosarcoma. 

Twenty minutes of vicious argument later, he stopped, chanted, “Wrong, wrong, you’re so wrong,” slid down John’s body, and worked his mouth on John’s cock for oh god, years.   John came with his heart thudding in time to his whispers that went on and on, even after he’d stopped shuddering from his orgasm: please please please Sherlock please pleaseplease as the fear and pleasure and enormity of it all blended into one, until Sherlock, finally understanding, slid back up John’s body, pushed John’s face into his shoulder, and held him there until the trembling stopped.

-

John had insisted on going to the appointment alone – “No, I’m not having you both sitting there for bloody hours, don’t be ridiculous” – and because one breakdown a day in company was his upper limit.  They fixed it that Sherlock and Harry would pick him up after it was over.  Sherlock played thunderous, accusing Bach for about ten minutes before he agreed – grudgingly – with John’s: “You’d be bored stiff, you’d twitch, you’d drive me completely barking.”

It didn’t stop him from leaning against Sherlock for a minute before he left, their heads bent together.  Their breaths mingled for a moment, Sherlock smelling like toothpaste and something hauntingly old and familiar.  Harry sniffed in the background, managing to sound both put out and completely unsurprised, before she turned back to the paper and her tea. 

-

He’d had had his bloods done the week before, met with his team, talked about the treatment regime he was going to be on.  Everyone was brisk and efficient with only the dim kind of unspoken sympathy doctors reserved for one of their wounded own. 

Their shared medical language left little room for the usual sort of comforting buffers.  75% necrosis, said Connie encouragingly.   Non-metastatic, said the radiologist, nodding.  Variably cellular proliferation of moderately pleomorphic cells, as you already know, said the pathologist.  It was like talking about an old friend, John thought, someone you didn’t completely understand or even like, but whom you indulged anyway.

The ward nurses weighed him and took measurements, recorded things, gently passed him over to Connie.  He sat down in the grey armchair they’d given him.  It had his name on a plastic tab at the side, Dr. John Watson, and a little table next to it with a picture of a cat perched on top.

The Sister put the cannula in and other nurses glided around, patient and calm, dispensing Benadryl and saline and little random kindnesses.  When all the preliminary drugs were done, Connie brought out his bag, hooked it up and said, “She’s just going in now”. 

She plugged the drip in, and then there it was, in his veins, in his muscles, through the pathways of his body, moving in him like a cloud.

-

The Benadryl slipped John into a sleep and a dream where Moriarty sang, you’ve got to walk and don’t look back, while Sherlock wrote letters in the air that glowed and crumbled. 

When he woke up, his brain felt like it was covered in a fine layer of down, and the insides of his mouth felt bruised, but he felt a spasm of relief that the first day was over.  It must have shown in his face because the chemo technician, when she came back in the final time, smiled and said, “That’s right, well done,” and freed him.

She taped the cannula up and Connie came in ten minutes later.  “Okay?” she asked, briskly. “That went well.  Same time tomorrow.  You know how to get hold of me if you need to.”

“I don’t,” said Sherlock, walking in.  Harry was behind him.   Sherlock must have been flaring his coat a bit more than usual, John thought muzzily, because Connie had actually shrunk away from him for a second.  She recovered, though, and nodded at them both when John mumbled vague introductions.  “I’ll leave my number at the desk,” she said to Sherlock, held a hand up to John, and left.   Sherlock watched her leave with a slight frown, while Harry came over, gave him a hug, said “All right?” and got his things.

-

They were quiet in the cab back.  It was twilight.  John put his head on Sherlock’s shoulder, and Harry held John’s hand.  Sherlock watched dark London flash by the windows, heavy stone buildings against a sky that was turning inky at the edges.  John smelt bitter, a combination of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. 

Back at the flat, Harry dished up bread and soup and Sherlock sat next to John on the sofa, arm around his shoulder while John slumped against him.  By the time Harry brought their dinner to the sofa, John was almost asleep.  They managed, between the two of them, to get John to eat half of his meal before he pushed it away, groaning. 

“It’s delicious,” he said, “But I just can’t, Harry, sorry.”

“You have to,” said Harry, who seemed dangerously comfortable balancing gentle encouragement with outright, shameless bullying.  “Think of how Sherlock feels, seeing you like this.”

Sherlock stared at her.  She grimaced and motioned at John with her chin.  Was he meant to – oh.  He was.

“I’d absolutely like to see you get your strength up, John,” he said, baring his teeth a little.

Harry rolled her eyes, and John started chuckling.  “Helpful”, said Harry.

“No good?” said Sherlock, but John, patting his knee, got another couple of spoonfuls down, which was the point, wasn’t it? 

Harry and he ate while John put his head back against the sofa.  Harry, silent for a few spoonfuls said to him, “Not that it wasn’t inevitable, but do you both know what you’re doing?”

“Harry”, said John immediately, waking up. 

“I suspect”, said Sherlock calmly, “John knows what we’re doing more than I do.  He does, sometimes.  But what you actually mean is why did John and I have sex last night, when we could have months and months ago. To which the only real answer is: it’s really nothing to do with you.  Is it?”

Harry looked sulky but said nothing, and got up to clear the dishes away.  Sherlock looked over at John, who was gaping at him.

“I do? I know?” said John, astonished.  There was a crumb clinging to the corner of his mouth.

Sherlock put his thumb there and wiped it away. 

“I said sometimes,” he said, and pushed John back down into the sofa.  And, because it was obvious she could run rings around him when it came to looking after John and he desperately needed her, went to make it up to Harry and attempt to do the dishes.

-

When he got back, John was asleep, mouth slightly open, face pale in the soft gloom. 

“Come on”, said Sherlock, and got him to bed.  It wasn’t easy getting him out of his things, but the thought of John waking up with an olfactory reminder of the last six hours was unacceptable.  John would want to smell real life, his clothes, the bar of Lux he washed with, and probably, oh, me, thought Sherlock with a sudden flare of surprise, making a little more sense of Harry’s almost incomprehensible fussing during the day. 

She’d tidied, made soup with Mrs Hudson, found John’s softest pyjamas and laid them out on his bed.  Sherlock, ankle deep in articles on fine needle biopsies, had wanted to swat at her endless movement, the non-stop prattle. 

But here was John, his body shapeless in sleep, needing Harry’s brand of help: packed lunches, blankets and soup.  Packed lunches, blankets, and soup, thought Sherlock, making lists, remembering John leaning into him that morning, and being nervous enough so it shows.

-

John woke up in a panic, flailed at Sherlock.  The clock on the bedside table said 1.30 am.

“What—“, said Sherlock, leaping up with him, but John pushed him away and got to the toilet just in time.  He retched and clutched at the bowl, gagging on soup and bile, his body shaking with the force of it.  Sherlock bent over him, held his shoulders down while John moaned and tried to bat him away. 

“It’s all right—no, just – oh for god’s sake”, said Sherlock, working it out in in the seconds it took to watch John almost dive into the toilet.  He grabbed at the arms that were trying to push him away, knelt behind John, wrapped his arms around his chest, and held him till the shudders stopped and John went limp in his arms.

Harry had heard and came in, shivering, and between them they cleaned him up and got him back into bed. 

He crashed out of it twice more that night before they thought to bring a bucket in, and John leaned into it until dawn, vomiting until he was almost unconscious.

“It’s not supposed to be this bad right off the bat, is it?” asked Harry, slumped in an armchair. 

John, so white he looked bloodless, had his head in Sherlock’s lap.   “It can take people differently,” he said, coughing.  “We’ll have to up the anti-emetics in my mix.  I’ll talk to Connie.”

“I’ll talk to Connie,” said Sherlock, forcing a drinking straw into John’s mouth.  “I feel we should be friends.”

“God help Connie,” muttered Harry, and shuffled off to bed.  There were bits of pink streaking the sky, and slow, early-morning sounds coming in from the street.

Sherlock lay down, pulled John up beside him.  Grey, shrunken, vile-smelling John.  He stroked Sherlock’s hair.  “Why don’t you go back to your room and have a bit of a rest? It’s awful in here.”

Sherlock said, “It’s filthy in here, you desperately need a bath, and I’d murder someone for a cup of tea.” 

“Mm, yr’staying,” mumbled John, and curled in closer.

“Stop talking,” said Sherlock.  He hooked his ankle around John’s calf, wound his arms around him, and fell asleep.

-

John was asleep on his chair, hooked up to his drip and looking ashen, when Connie stopped by. 

“Dr. Willard,” said Sherlock, pulling up a chair and blocking her in.

“Oh hello,” she said.  “It’s Mr. Holmes isn’t it?”

“Did you need something?” she asked, and there it was again, that tiny flare he’d caught last night.  It had caught at him, nagged at him in his sleep.  “If it’s about John being sick last night,” she said quickly, before he could speak, “I’ve adjusted things so hopefully she won’t take him so badly today.  He’ll also have more anti-nausea stuff to take home tonight.”

“Sick,” echoed Harry, disbelieving.  “He just about fainted, he was gagging so hard.”

“She’s not an easy thing, chemo,” said Connie, looking sympathetic.

“He was terribly, terribly ill,” said Sherlock.  “Terribly ill.  Poor John.  I can’t quite place your accent, you know – mostly Mancunian, but there’s something underneath, isn’t there?” 

“I’ve no idea.  We’re from Manchester, yes, have been for ages,” she said, politely.  “Shall I give you a list of John’s medications?”

“Medications, fantastic.  Harry’ll have that.  And you’re single, childless, and both your parents were doctors?”

Her mouth was a thin line.  “I was told to expect this.  I am aware of what you do, Mr Holmes, I’ve read John’s blog.  I suppose I should be flattered you’ve singled me out.”

“Just trying to get to know you,” said Sherlock – admittedly, perhaps a little too brightly.

She looked thunderous, but left without saying another word.

Harry looked baffled.  “What was all that about?”

“She’s not from Manchester.  Why won’t she say?”

“Hm yeah,” said Harry, “Wonder what could have put her back up like that?”

“If people don’t want to hear the plain facts about their lives,” said Sherlock, a little irritably now, because it wasn’t like it hadn’t all been right there for anyone to see, “they should be a little more careful about how they dress in the morning.”

Harry rolled her eyes.  “If people wanted to hear it from you, they wouldn’t scurry away so quickly when they caught sight of you.”

“Yes, there’s a thing.  She lied to me,” said Sherlock, thoughtfully.  “And she’s afraid of me.”

Which wouldn’t have meant much ordinarily, but it was John’s life she held in her hands. 

He reached for his phone.  “Mycroft,” he said, when he heard the voice on the other end.  “I’ll be needing a file.”

-

He sat in bed that night, holding John’s shoulders back as he shook and retched over his bucket.  Harry took it away. 

They did it all over, again and again and again, for five days and four nights.  Harry ferried John to chemo in the mornings, and Sherlock held him down for the rest of the day as he vomited and convulsed over the toilet, any sink he could get to, into buckets all over the house.  The flat smelt permanently of sick. 

Connie gave them prescription after prescription.  Nothing seemed to work.   She came to see John at home one night, and shook her head, perplexed.  “Can’t know what’s going on till we do more tests on him,” she said, and hooked him up to a saline drip.  “The bloods are all coming back more or less right.  There’s more saline here for when he needs it,” she said, addressing the space to the left of Sherlock’s ear.  I’ll just go ahead and assume you know how to change her over, shall I?”

On the second night, there was blood in the vomit. 

“Mucositis,” said Connie.

“Mucositis,” agreed Sherlock, because what was he if not prepared? Blood, John’s mouth a mass of sloughed skin, John’s tongue covered in blisters.   

They cleaned him up every night.  He submitted to everything, silent, limp.  He kept his eyes closed.  His skin looked grey.  He didn’t try to speak. 

He nodded and smiled when Harry spoke to him, his head lolling.  There were teeth in that smile, and dark gums showing through the stretch of his lips.

“Open your eyes, John,” Sherlock said, that final night. 

His voice echoed in the dark, foul room.  He wanted to mark the terrible, papery skin.  To hurt the body that vomited yellow poison every night, the eyes screwed shut. 

John’s eyes.  John’s not-eyes.  John’s body.  John’s not-body. 

“John,” said Sherlock, louder.  Harry was sobbing in the background.

John opened his eyes.  They were blank and dark, and looked like they were sinking into his skull. 

Sherlock said, raging, “Stop it.  I can’t see you when you do that.”

John blinked and looked at him and something cleared.

“Oh,” John whispered, around the sores and blood, when he saw Sherlock’s face.  His voice was a burned rasp.  Sherlock put his head down on the ruined chest, and John’s hand came up and held his neck while he trembled silently against it.

-

There was an 8-day break in the chemo cycle, mercifully for everyone.  Harry was leaving – she’d run out of the compassionate leave she’d used to visit – but promised to come back the first weekend after John started the next one.

She clung to John until he had to unwind her arms from around his neck. 

“You’ll be late for the train,” he said the words thick and heavy.  He couldn’t speak properly for the blisters in his mouth.  “Silly woman, I’m fine, look,” he waved a hand up and down his body. 

It was the second day into his break.  He was tired and stooped, but he’d managed to keep a bit of soup down that day.  Harry had cheered and burst into tears.  “I’m fine.  Love, it’s fine.  Just the first round, always the worst.”

She gave him a watery smile.  A car beeped on the road.  “Taxi,” she said. 

“Taxi,” John said, kissing her forehead and pushing her towards the door. 

Sherlock walked her down, to her obvious amazement.  “Well, I—” she began awkwardly, as the cabbie was slinging her suitcase into the boot.

“—I’ve watched you every time, I’ve sat and watched you, I’ve watched and counted the steps and I still can’t get the toast right,” interrupted Sherlock.  “I’ve observed the method, I’ve observed the mechanism, I’ve tried to replicate it.  Nothing.  Doesn’t work.  He won’t eat it.”

“What is it?”  He angled his body into her, bent his head down.  “What am I missing? He eats yours.  What am I missing?”

It was as close as Sherlock would ever get to an admission of the dark communion they had shared over the week, and they both knew it; John’s body and blood broken and ruined every night.  But here they were after the fact and he was lying on a sofa upstairs; tired and worn, true, but safe.  Safe.

The cabbie beeped his horn. 

She said, “It’s the butter.  Right to the edges, see?  You stop too short of the crust.”

“The butter,” repeated Sherlock, eyes flickering, and nodded as she stepped into the taxi and it drove her away.

-

Mycroft came to visit, and brought Connie’s file.

She was married, so he’d been wrong there – had been married for the last five years.  “To Robert Finnaker,” said Mycroft.  They were back at the flat.  John was curled up in an armchair, half asleep.

“Of Bell pharmaceuticals?” asked Sherlock.

“The very same.”

“The background all looks thoroughly proper,” Mycroft said, “Manchester University for the degree, Bolton School from primary all the way through.”

“There,” said John, wearily, out of his huddle of blankets.  “For god’s sake can we leave the poor woman in peace now?”

You didn’t grow up with Mycroft Holmes, though, without getting to know that particular light in his eye.

“A little too convincing?” asked Sherlock.

“Nothing perfect ever fooled anyone,” said Mycroft, “I can’t think why people bother.  Anthea’s making a little trip as we speak.”

“Everyone’s scared of you Sherlock,” said John, heaving himself upright.  “Making a trip where?” he asked Mycroft.

“To the Home Office archival rooms.”

“What,” said John, “does the Home Office have to do with this particular witch hunt?”

Sherlock nodded.  “Hard to change where you’re born,” he said.  “And almost impossible to change an archived record at the Home Office.   That’s really not …too… bad, Mycroft.” He said the last unwillingly, because unfair advantage after all, what with Mycroft actually being the Home Office.

John had his head in his hands.  He looked up at Sherlock, exhausted and anxious.  “Can’t you just let it go?” he said.  “She’s my doctor.  You’re dredging up her life just because she won’t give you its details off the bat. This is all so bloody trivial.  I don’t want her hurt, Sherlock.”

“Our priorities appear to be little different, then,” said Sherlock, but he hunkered down in front of John and put his hand on John’s knees.

“She doesn’t have to know,” he said, as a concession, because he would do a lot to spare John that frayed, pinched look, “and it’ll all probably come to nothing.  But I need to be sure.”

Another man might have said to his lover, this is my place in the world, between you and harm.  Another man might have said, you would do this too, you would stand here for me.  There were probably ways to soften the bluntness of: no detail is too small, too unimportant, can’t you see?  

He felt the loss of those words, sometimes.

There must have been enough in his voice to let it show, though, because a flush stained John’s cheekbones.  He put his hands over Sherlock’s, and squeezed.  “All right,” John said, quietly.  “All right.”

-

Eight days went quickly.  John, still very shaky, got a little more mobile when one morning a black car came by and dropped off a wheelchair for him.  There was a small bunch of flowers on the seat.  The note read, Watch out for missiles, all the best, Anthea, which made John chuckle.  He got into it and they went for a walk, Sherlock pushing him.

The air outside was bright and clear after the flat.  John lifted his face to the sun.  He looked translucent in it, the light almost going through him.  He looked at Sherlock and smiled.  “I’d forgotten it was almost spring.”

When they got back to the flat, they lay down in bed together.  It was very quiet outside and had started to drizzle.

John rolled over.  “Help me,” he said.  Sherlock put an arm under him and together they moved John over him.  John propped himself up on his elbows.

His eyes roamed over Sherlock’s face.  “I’m not really pulling my weight in this relationship.  Feels like I don’t empty enough buckets, somehow.”

“You haven’t emptied one, you jammy bastard.”

“We’ll make up a duty roster.  Mondays can be laundry day, which I, obviously, will be in charge of—no, shut up, you don’t even know where the washing machine is.”

He’d grown self-conscious about smiling with his mouth the way it was, so now it was stretched across his face in a sort of grimace.  John’s smile.  John’s not-smile.

“You went away,” said Sherlock, watching him.  “For a while.”

Almost everything that made him John had vanished.  His face had become an anonymous combination of muscle over some stranger’s bone.  There was a slack fold of skin between his ear and chin that wasn’t there before.  The insides of his mouth were stripped raw and pale yellow with ulcers.

But John’s eyes.  Still narrowed in on Sherlock as if no other light could pass through them.  The way he looked when Sherlock turned away from a dead body, a set of clues, Molly or Lestrade – that solemn softness to his mouth, that wary hunger.

“I’m here now,” said John, through his decayed voice and failing body.  Through the air, the quiet rain sliding down the window, the dark dip of the bed. 

John pressed his lips against the soft underside of Sherlock’s chin.  His cheeks were wet.  Sherlock felt them as they brushed against his face.

Sherlock said, “Let me,” when John ran his hands down Sherlock’s body and reached for him, but John said, “No.  No, I need—”

“Anything,” said Sherlock fiercely.  “Nothing.  Whatever you need.  Whatever you want.”

“This,” said John, and pressed himself down on Sherlock, clothes still between them and Sherlock was already hard, already waiting, though he hadn’t known it.  John was soft and small against Sherlock’s belly, but the friction of his hips caught at Sherlock just right. 

He gasped, tried to slide away from it, said, “John, you’re not.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said John, hoarse.  “Please, just, this,” he said, and thrust even harder at Sherlock.  The world dimmed, narrowed in to the shape of John above him, arms braced, mouth thinned, driving Sherlock upward to something he was trying to resist because to go there was to leave John behind, to admit, finally, that John was alone and nothing he could do would alter that unalterable fact.

“Sherlock,” said John, seeing it in his face, “I’m here.”

He gritted his teeth.  Anything, he’d said.

“Ah love,” said John, bending his mouth into Sherlock’s hair,  “you don’t know.  You’ll never know.”

He rubbed his lips against Sherlock’s ear, wet face pushed up against him, and then Sherlock was coming, throat locked, body heaving against the awful power, the bitter beauty of it.  John whispered, brokenly, come on, that’s it, god you’re lovely, and held him as he came.

And John was right, he was here, he was still here, and this time it was him blocking out all the other light in the room.

-

The next cycle of chemo started. 

The first two days went the usual way, John losing little ground he’d made.  He vomited blood again, and the buckets went back into place. 

He started to lose hair, great clumps of it washing up on the tideline after his baths, rubbing off on his pillowslip.  Mrs Hudson shaved it all off, to spare him the indignity. 

“There, much better,” she said, beaming as they came out of the bathroom, John leaning on her.  The pink, tender skin of his scalp looked shrivelled and raw.   She blinked back tears when she put him down on the sofa, carefully, like he would break apart at the slightest pressure. 

“Anthea’ll never have have me now,” he said, smirking up at Sherlock, who had to look away for a moment before he could answer.

On the third day, he woke up with a raging temperature. 

“Christ,” said Sherlock, his heart sinking, and got them into a taxi in minutes.  “They can deal to it, stop worrying,” John said, teeth chattering.  He was ashen and the bones in his face looked like they were breaking the skin.

Connie was waiting for them at the hospital, her face an odd mix of grave concern and more of that nervous tension.  They got John into a room and ran tests, while he lay against white sheets and shivered.  “I’ll put him on antibiotics,” she said.  “Best if we keep him here overnight.”

“He should have had them prophylactically,” said Sherlock, climbing into the narrow bed with John.  “Methotrexate’s not exactly kind to bone marrow.  And you’ve been to the flat.”

“It’s a low dose,” she snapped, but collected herself when John looked blearily up at the two of them.  “There’s nothing to suggest the bone marrow’s been affected by the doses he’s been on,” she said, calmer but still icy, “the tests are all looking like he’s holding up well.”

“Really,” said Sherlock, dry as a desert wind.  He curled into John, closed his eyes, and heard the door snick close as he tumbled into sleep.

-

The fever went down.  They ran tests on him the next afternoon.  “He’s okay to go home after his chemo,” said Connie, “but same again next time, bring him straight in.”  She gave Sherlock a bottle of tablets – “instructions on the label” – and left.

-

John had two visitors while he was getting his chemo the next next day.  Mycroft came with Connie’s updated file in his briefcase.  He took it out and slipped it to Sherlock, and then looked at John, his face shadowed. 

“I can’t quite believe he’s meant to be looking like this,” said Mycroft, standing a little way away from John, and quite close to Sherlock.  “Is he meant to be looking like this?”

Sherlock sighed.  “I don’t think I’ve managed to antagonise her quite that badly yet,” he said. 

Mycroft looked troubled.  “I hope not, Sherlock.  For both your sakes.”

-

Mike Stamford dropped in half an hour later.

“Only just heard,” he said, sitting on the stool beside John’s armchair, “oh my word,” taking in the ruined body and ghoulish eyes.  

“Looks worse than it is,” John murmured, shaking his hand. 

“I can’t see how, to be honest, mate,” said Mike, “and that’s physician to physician.”

He looked at John’s chart, tsked and clucked.  “It’s not the type of thing you see coming, is it?” he said sympathetically.  “And we think we’re immune to it somehow, though I don’t know why.”

He stood up and looked at the drip bag, squinted and peered over the top of his glasses.  “Hm yes,” he said and then sniffed a bit.  “Didn’t know Harris was changing labels over at the pharmacy.”

“Anything you need?” he asked, kindly.  John shook his head, tried to smile, but the medicine was already starting to shrivel him up.  Mike patted his shoulder and came over to Sherlock and Mycroft.  He looked dismayed.  “I would have thought they’d have got the meds well sorted by now.  Look, really, if there’s anything I can do.”

Sherlock was staring at the drip bag.  “A script for Levofloxacin and a bag of Platinol,” he said.  “And I want you to fill it at the hospital pharmacy.  Make sure Harris serves you.”

To his credit, Mike never even blinked.  “Okay.  Do I want to know?”

“Not yet,” said Sherlock, “text me when you get them”.  He took the bottle of tablets out of his pocket and handed it to Mycroft.  Mycroft looked down at it. 

“I think,” he said to Sherlock, “You had better read that file.  Soon.”

-

They took John home.  Sherlock dropped Connie’s file onto the kitchen table and her birth certificate slid out.  John groaned from the sofa.  Sherlock grabbed the nearest bucket, reflexively, thrust it under him, and sat down.

“No, s’okay,” John mumbled, and slumped back down, which was usually a prelude to being sick, and had a routine of its own.  There was a pile of flannels next to him and a jug of water.  Sherlock wet one, wrung it out in the bucket, and laid it on John’s forehead.  “Ice chips or lemonade?”

“I can’t just now, thanks,” said John, and closed his eyes again.

Mycroft was watching them with the strangest expression in his eyes.  “So quick bright things come to confusion,” he murmured. 

That was surprising.  Mycroft was seldom recklessly cruel. 

“I’ll have to tell John you’re comparing him to that drippy Lysander,” Sherlock said, mildly.

Mycroft looked away, his jaw flexing.  “You were never like this when Mother was ill.”

“This again,” said Sherlock, thinking to shrug it off like all the times before.  And yet perhaps he understood Mycroft differently now, amidst this nagging, emptying grief.   The weeping boy across Mother’s open casket hadn’t been his brother, but another broken link in a chain that had slipped wide open while Mother slowly declined.  Hard for a seven year-old not to resent the added grief.  

How quickly that had set in, became unmoveable.

“Mycroft,” he said, trying to remember something before that, before the cold silences had started echoing in the house.  “I didn’t have to be.  The family had.” 

And remembered that Mycroft had arranged the open casket, to make it real for Sherlock, so there could be no confusion after the fact.  It hadn’t felt like love then.  But now.

“The family had you.  We all had you.”

There was a long silence.  Mycroft was very still, hardly blinking even at the watery sunlight  slanting across his eyes.

“Indeed,” said Mycroft, quietly, quietly, into the room.

John shifted in his sleep.  The rustle of movement broke the spell.  Mycroft met Sherlock’s eyes.

“Well.  To business,” he said.  He looked unmoved, but one of his hands trembled a little.  He gestured at Connie’s file, at the birth certificate lying half exposed.  “Place of birth – you’ll note, is not the North of England.”

Sherlock looked at it, and.

“Sussex,” he said, a buzzing sound in his ears and his head.

Mycroft’s eyes gleamed.  “Brighton, Sussex.”

They both turned and stared at John.

-

Sherlock texted Mike

When you said anything…

SH

The text came back five minutes later.

What was I thinking.

MS

-

“It’s almost impossible,” said John, wearily, propped up in bed, “to understand what it is you’re trying to tell me.”

“And by almost, I mean, completely.”

“Mike Stanford has very kindly agreed to do a closed biopsy on your tumour.”  Sherlock sat facing him, legs crossed, elbows propped on his knees, trying to be patient. 

“Terrific,” said John.  “Why? And haven’t you always had aspirations towards slicing me open yourself?”

“Mike wouldn’t let me.” Sherlock scowled at the memory. “I’ve got a theory.  It requires a sample of your bone.  How is this not mind-numbingly easy?”

It was less than ideal, Sherlock thought, to have to explain it all when a taxi to St Barts and a quick jab in the arm would be so much more efficient, but it was a brave new world he was navigating and there was every chance John might not be as accommodating this time when he came round.

“I need your diagnosis confirmed,” he said.

John rolled his eyes.  “Good grief, how drugged do you think I am? This isn’t about Connie and her dark past is it?” He was joking but his face fell when he looked at Sherlock.  “Oh come ON.”

“She lied about where she’s from, John,” said Sherlock.  “Mycroft’s confirmed it.”

“Everyone lies,” John said, shaking his head, utter defeat on his face.  “Everyone lies about everything.  I don’t care.  I. don’t. care.  Let her treat me, for christ’s sakes, without going off on some maniacal hurtle into blame and accusation because she wouldn’t give you what you wante—“

“— Listen.  Just listen will you? She was born in Brighton,” said Sherlock.  “Brighton, Sussex, not Manchester.  Brighton, John.”

John looked at him, uncomprehending for a minute.  He blinked.  “What are you… wait.  Carl Powers, he was—“

“Yes,” said Sherlock.  “Now listen to me very carefully.  What – exactly, and without leaving anything out – did Moriarty say to you when you were alone with him?”

-

Sherlock paced outside the theatre – another condition of Mike’s.  Harry was with him, she’d arrived for the weekend.

John had been in for an hour when the doors opened and Mike came out, looking grim.  It was a heart-stopping moment until he held his hand up.  “No, it’s not how it looks.  Sherlock, scrub up and come in.”

“What? What’s happened?” Harry almost lunged at him.

“I don’t know what the bloody hell’s going on,” said Mike, “but there’s nothing there.”

-

John was lying down, breathing hard. 

Mike brought up the images on the CT monitor.  “Nothing even resembling a tumour,” he said. 

“The chemo?” said Sherlock.

Mike shook his head.  “He’s only finished the second cycle.  Wouldn’t have shrunk it down to nothing.”

“What about the pain?” said John.  “I’m not imagining it.”

Mike pointed to a picture with striations at the top of the bone.  “There’s some ischemic damage.  I’d say avascular necrosis of the femoral head, as an informed guess.  That’d be causing it, most likely.”

Sherlock frowned.  “The blood supply to his femur’s been cut off? How?”

“Cut off or restricted,” said John.  His eyes were panicked.  “Radiation’s a good bet.  Easy to do to a sedated person, lots of pain after, and hard to identify as a cause.”

Mike was looking from one of them to the other.  “I don’t know what you two are on about,” he said, “but let’s focus on problem at hand for now, shall we? Where is the damn thing?”

“Don’t the x-rays mark where it should be?” asked Sherlock.

“That’s where he’s looking,” said John, “and there’s nothing there.  Oh hell.  Sherlock.”

Sherlock said to Mike, “Did you get the prescriptions?”

Mike looked hard at him.  “I did, yeah.” He was smarter than people gave him credit for, Mike.  “Could read the labels on mine.”

“Do the biopsy,” said Sherlock, almost trembling with anticipation.  He looked at John.

John took a deep breath, set his jaw and nodded.

He was whirling round to leave when Mike said, bewildered, “Do the biopsy where?”

“Where the x-rays tell you to!” he shouted, and ran out the doors.

He grabbed Harry when he got out.  “Stay with him.  Don’t leave his side.  No chemo, and don’t let Connie near him.  If anything happens and you can’t get hold of me, call Mycroft.  I’ve put his number into your phone.”

“What the hell?” Harry was angry and lost.  It didn’t matter.  She’d listen to him, help without knowing what she was being asked to do. 

It was, he’d realised, what family did. 

-

He’d called Molly en route, almost roaring from the urgency of it.  She was waiting for him in the hallway. 

“What’s happened?” she said, trotting to keep abreast of him as they swung into the lab.

He waved the blood specimens he’d taken off John before he went in.  “CBCs, quick quick, now now.”

She was back an instant later, face so fraught and afraid that he found time to say, “John’s bloods, something’s very wrong,” before Mike Stanford came barrelling through the door, almost wheezing.  “Here, quick.”  He thrust the sample tube at Sherlock.

“What’s this?” asked Molly.

“A Crunchie bar,” said Sherlock, dizzy and feverish, “with any luck.”

-

He called Mycroft while Molly started to prep.  “Well?”

“You were right, someone’s been into the online files and everything’s gone,” said Mycroft, “but Anthea’s been to the school and they found some old records.  Final years of school together.  The retired caretaker who lives next door remembers her and Moriarty being thick as thieves until towards the end of their Upper Sixth, when she suddenly left.”

“Upper sixth,” said Sherlock, doing the maths.  “That makes it 1989.”

He froze.  “When in 1989?”

“August,” said Mycroft, “exactly a week after Carl Powers was fished out of that pool.”

There was a pause.  “Give John my best,” said Mycroft, quietly, and hung up.

-

He and Molly started the long business of sectioning and mounting the slides.  It was concentrated work, and he was grim and almost shuddering from the tension of it.  Molly caught it off him and they bent over their work in silence.

She did come over halfway to give him the blood test results.  Mike, who was standing next to him, looked over his shoulder and whistled, low.  “Bloody hell,” he said, with feeling.

Sherlock felt like ripping Connie open with his teeth.   He turned to Mike.  “Go.  Stay with him.  Don’t let her near him.”

Mike nodded, frowning, and left.

-

Three record-breaking hours later, the slides were ready. 

He pulled one, piped the solution on and waited.  Next to him, Molly did the same with her sample.  Ten minutes later, they put them under their respective microscopes.

“It’s not lighting,” said Molly, aghast.  “No,” said Sherlock, and had to lean his head down on the table for a minute, hands white-knuckled on the edges, chest heaving, while Molly rubbed his back and said, “deep breaths, that’s it, deep breaths now.”

-

He called Harry.

She answered with a breathless, “I’m with him, I’m with him, all right? Mike’s here too.  We haven’t left him for a second.  There’s some admin people from the hospital here, they’ve called the police.  I think Mike’s in trouble.”

“Put John on”, he said.

John came on the phone sounding more alive and frightened than he had since it had all started.  “Tell me you’ve figured it out.  Jesus, Sherlock.”

“It’s not cancer,” said Sherlock, keeping his voice steady.

There was a long pause.  John said, almost whispering, “It’s not cancer.  It’s not?”

“It’s not,” said Sherlock.  “Hold on,” he said, starting to run, “Hold on.”

“Yes.  All right.  Hurry,” said John, his voice breaking, while Sherlock skidded and ran down the white corridors, panting, leaping down stairs, swerving around people until – there – the theatre was ahead of him and Harry and Mike were just outside with an angry looking group of people, everyone angry and disbelieving and tense.

Sherlock pushed past them all, though one tried to shoulder him away from the door.  He pressed three fingers into the man’s throat, and strong armed him away from it. 

John was sitting up on the trolley.  Sherlock climbed onto it, and wound himself around him.  John was crying.  “Oh christ, christ, how did you, how did you, you brilliant, beautiful nutter.”

The world was white noise and cotton wool, shapes moving around them, a hum that wanted their attention.  Harry and Mike, Molly, and other, strange new voices, shouting for attention.  One of them he recognised dimly as Lestrade’s.

It didn’t matter.

Sherlock’s hair clenched in John’s fists, the curls pushing lightly into his hands.

John’s back shaking under Sherlock’s palms, thin and narrow and beloved.

Letting go was unthinkable.  It would break them both.

“Fuck off,” snarled Sherlock, lifting his head for a moment, and after a brief, terse silence, there was the sound of feet moving and everyone left the room.

-

They were back at the flat and Mrs Hudson was feeding a shaken Harry tea and biscuits when Lestrade came round.  Mycroft was with him.

“It’s done,” Lestrade said, heavily, sitting down.  “Connie Willard’s been charged with attempted murder.  She went quietly enough but bloody hell,” he looked at John, “that was a narrow miss for you.  She had bags more of that stuff waiting.  The lab’s analysed it and another round would have had you well and truly struggling.”

“How did you know about the meds?” he asked Sherlock.

“She had the same label on the drip bag as the antibiotics she gave me for John.  Her husband runs a pharmaceutical company.  It wasn’t a huge leap,” said Sherlock.  “And she had those little Southern speech mannerisms.  I’ll always wonder why she lied to me.  It was her undoing, really.”

“Yes,” said John, dryly.  “God forbid the Holmes brothers feel you haven’t been completely, brutally honest with them.  They’ll find you in the archives.”

“I spoke to her,” said Mycroft, “I think she’s as afraid of Sherlock as she is of Moriarty.”

John raised his eyebrows.  “Afraid? No honour among thieves or something?”

“No,” said Mycroft.  “There’s a story there and it’s to do with Carl Powers.  They were all in the same school, you see.  He was a year older.”

“Willard claims he sexually molested her when they were both quite young, and assaulted Jim Moriarty around the same time.  Moriarty and Connie were friends.  They put together a plan to get rid of Powers.  Willard’s father was a doctor.  She provided the tainted eczema medication, Moriarty made sure it got onto Powers.”

Sherlock looked grim.  “Jim Moriarty’s not a man you trust with a secret like that.”

Mycroft nodded.  “Dr. Willard found that out.  Moriarty threatened exposure unless she cooperated with this exercise.”

“It wasn’t a bad plan,” said John, thoughtfully.  “Methotrexate will do a lot of damage and disappear reasonably quickly.  It wouldn’t have been easy to pin anything deliberate on her if I had carked it.”

“She narked on another member of the ‘team’,” Lestrade put in, “the pathologist was in on it.  He’d been fixing the lab results, which is why no-one else really picked up from the paperwork that you were the way you were.”

“And Connie made sure she was the central point of contact for your treatment,” said Mycroft.  “She was very thorough.”

Lestrade looked at John.  “Are you going to be okay, then? No long-term effects or anything?”

“We’ll see,” said John, “I’ll have to be careful about infections for a while, my immune system’s taken a beating.  But generally I think it looks promising, yeah.”

“Thank god,” said Lestrade, standing up.  “I’m that bloody glad,” he said with feeling, to John, “that you’re alright, mate.  For more reasons than the obvious.”

He pointed at Sherlock.  “You!  You can get back to helping us out.  No more ‘I’m looking after my sick boyfriend’ excuses, right?  I’ll be expecting you in on Monday.”

He nodded to everyone, and left. 

John grinned at a flushed Sherlock.  “Boyfriend, eh?”

“You’re just the bit on the side.  I really am married to my work,” said Sherlock, and went to steal Harry’s tea.

-

Connie Willard was granted bail four days later. 

Lestrade called them with the news.  “On grounds of her husband being that fucking rich,” he said, very bitterly, but it all came to nothing in the end.  They found her face down in her pool the morning after she got home.

Sherlock put his phone on the kitchen table after Lestrade hung up, and waited.  John sat by him. 

When it rang, Sherlock put it on speaker and Moriarty sang a Gaelic lullaby to them, tha chuthag 's a' choill 's an oidhche tighinn, o tha, and his voice was sweet and high.

“I told you the next bit was going to be good, John,” he said.  “Wasn’t I clever?”

“It was very good,” said John.  “But Sherlock was better.” He was shaking a little with rage, but Sherlock put a hand on his knee, and his warmth seeped through the thin corduroy of John’s trousers. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

“Oh? Oh? I didn’t? But she knew all my secrets!” said Moriarty, in his mock-falsetto, and then his voice changed, the way it did, and suddenly it was thick and venomous.  “You want to ask your fuckbuddy over there if that’s true, Johnny-lad.  Because we’re the same, him and me.  And I’d want her to twist and scorch if she’d touched one of mine.”

John saw Sherlock go very still, his eyes fixed on the phone.

“You did touch one of mine,” he said.

“Oh that’s the spirit,” said Moriarty, “I’ll be seeing you soon then, won’t I?” and the phone went dead.

They didn’t say anything to each other for a long minute, until, finally, Sherlock stood up and stretched.  “I’m going to bed,” he said, turning to go, and for one terrible minute it was like all the gates had clanged shut again and John was back out in the cold.

“You’re nothing like him,” he said, quietly. 

“I don’t care that she’s dead,” said Sherlock, not turning around.

John considered this.  There was a part of him that wished for a different ending for Connie, but that wish involved her never meeting Jim Moriarty, never being caught in his discordant, twisted net. 

John was tired and he had been hurt.  He’d had to watch as everyone around him turned inward with horror and pain, watching him disappear.   I don’t want you to see me like this, he’d whispered to Sherlock in one of his lucid moments, drowning in self-pity in the middle of the night, but Sherlock only turned in his sleep and pressed his side against John.  He’d never known if Sherlock was faking.  But the warmth and the scent of him had lulled John into sleep and in the morning he’d forgotten that he didn’t want it by his side.

“I don’t either,” he said.  “So if that makes us like him, then so be it.  The two of us, both like Moriarty.”

Sherlock did turn then, and his eyes were burning.  “Oh I don’t think so,” he said, reaching for John.  “You haven’t the imagination.”

John smiled, tipping his head a little as Sherlock’s mouth moved on his. 

“No,” he said.