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The tangle of old scar tissue that gathered at John’s shoulder was catching Sherlock’s eye.
He had not seen it before - not properly. There had only been mere glimpses when his flatmate padded down the hall after his shower or when it peaked out from underneath an unbuttoned shirt before John hastily pulled the two sides of cotton together.
Sherlock wondered if his reservations to show much skin were down to the injury or the evidence of his once strong soldier body rounding at the edges due to sedate civilian living and the readily availability of Hobnobs and takeaway.
The scar was larger than he had expected, no-doubt interrupted in its healing process by a makeshift patch-up job on a battlefield and the heat of severe infection. The result was a web of pink-to-white lines, thick like veins, puckered with the effort of holding everything together.
John probably felt the dull ache everyday and Sherlock had never bothered to think about it.
But now, that old war injury was mere background noise. John was in pain, he could tell.
Despite the fug of sedation and intravenous painkillers, John’s brows were pinched together in discomfort. His eyes were shut, his mouth slack, but he had the look of someone at least partially aware of the aftereffects of a stabbing and - with it - severe blood loss.
He kept twitching, hands swiping down his front every few minutes, as if an electric current was sparking - pain hitting a pitch that needed to be addressed.
Sherlock had refrained from touching him. He was unable to recall a single time he had ever wanted to touch someone with the intensity that he felt now, but he couldn’t.
As shock and adrenaline receded, sat in this hard-backed too-small chair, Sherlock was quickly becoming consumed with cold guilt.
John had pushed him out of the way. And while, as an uninvested bystander, Sherlock would say ‘well, he knew what he was doing and there’s nothing to feel guilty about’, this did little to stem the dread and sickness threatening to break over him.
He had escaped the scuffle with a minor concussion - the result of John’s heroism and his head meeting a brick wall.
In the few seconds when his mind had caved to a heavy black weight of impact, the suspect had landed his blow and so had John.
When Sherlock had managed to gather his bearings, the scene had unfolded like a nightmare.
There was still blood under his nails now, no matter how much he had scrubbed his hands in the tiny corner sink of the hospital ward.
A warm, solid weight on his shoulder, indicated the arrival of his brother; the clip of a metal umbrella nib hitting the tiled floor confirmed it.
The hand slid to the back of his neck and there was a light squeeze.
Sherlock felt himself both mentally and physically brace for Mycroft’s introductory comment, surely a ‘we knew this was going to happen sooner or later’ or a ‘this is why you shouldn’t get involved’, but his guard was unneeded.
“Are you alright?” Mycroft said, the warmth of his hand burned on Sherlock’s clammy neck.
“Of course I’m alright, you have eyes.”
Sherlock ducked away from the touch. Yes, Mycroft had eyes and keen ones at that. What would he see when he managed to take in a full face-on image of Sherlock?
Would he notice the blotches of red above his cheeks, the evidence of cold water splashed liberally and in haste - his shirt collar still damp? Was it obvious that he had vomited in A&E? Was the pattern of blood smears across his trousers telling of his fumbled attempts of staunching the gore from John’s chest wound in the messy backstreet in Highgate?
From the look of Mycroft’s face as he sat beside him in mock composure, it was. It all was.
“The orderly says you’re under observation for a concussion,” he said.
The physical evidence of this wound was hidden in his hair, thankfully, Sherlock didn’t think he could stand his brother fussing with something so trivial when John lay not three feet away from them being force fed painkillers and oxygen.
“I’m fine,” Sherlock said with a slight wave of his hand.
“Your notes say y-”
“For once, can you just act like every other hospital visitor and remain ignorant of my maladies? I’m fine.” Sherlock emphasised his last word through gritted teeth, his head giving a tight pang which he felt behind his eye and at his ear - a mock from his transport as if to say ‘you are far from fine’.
“One of Detective Lestrade’s men apprehended the perpetrator at Brent Cross getting off the tube. He’s currently receiving treatment but you’ll need to provide a statement at some point.”
A wavering half smile graced Mycroft’s mouth for a mere second. He leaned over to Sherlock, clasping a wrist.
As he stared at his lap, at the foreign sight of his brother touching him, a memory presented itself to Sherlock. One of midday clarity and yet a longtime visited.
He had been nineteen and out of his mind outside Mycroft’s office. Security hadn’t let him in, why would they have? He had been wearing a hooded sweatshirt despite the summer heat. It had been far too big for him and scattered with cigarette burns.
He had had a frantic, manic, sense of urgency to speak to Mycroft about something. The guard at the door had told him to wait out on the street while they called someone.
He had sat on the steps waiting, chewing at his fraying sleeves and generally unnerving passersby who were not accustomed to seeing this sort of man in Knightsbridge.
Mycroft had come out, impeccably dressed, bringing with him a faint scent of coffee, expensive cologne and the office’s papery bureaucracy.
“Christ Sherlock, what’s happened?” He had said; maybe as a move to disguise his sordid family affairs from the security guard who had been watching from the threshold.
He had then perched beside him, taking stock of his brother’s filthy clothes, the sweet yet acrid chemical smell that clung to him, the dark circles around eyes that had dulled considerably in the last few months.
“What do you need?” Mycroft had asked, a look back at the security guard, who took the hint and slipped back inside.
Sherlock could have said an endless array of things and they’d all have been true - a cup of tea, a cigarette, a hug, a fix.
“You,” he had said before the reality of his state - sat there on the doorstep of some anonymous, faceless office, his brother’s figure carving a sharp contrast to his own - slapped him as hard as if Mycroft had done it himself and he began to sob.
Not the dignified tears that their mother often tried to hide when faced with Sherlock’s ‘episodes’ as she called them. His could scarcely be concealed by neatly folded tissues and watery sympathetic smiles.
His body quivered with the force of them, with the force of the realisation that he was too far in to his situation to hold head above water and he was continuing to spiral. His brother, for all his apparent power in the realms of national and international politics and warfare could not help him now.
Then Mycroft had pulled him to him, head to chest, one arm across his shoulder, the other placing a hand on the wrist that lay in Sherlock’s lap.
There had been a rough squeeze and murmurs of reassurance. He had buried his face in the lapel of his brother’s suit jacket, the soft cotton the first warm comfort he’d received in days.
“We’ll work it out,” Mycroft had said.
The memory fell away as Mycroft retracted his hand.
“Have you taken anything?” The older Holmes asked, adding after a beat, “for the head.”
The involuntary twitch of John’s hand drew Sherlock’s eye. In its movement, the thin bed sheet had slipped a few inches revealing the off-white wrapping of gauze and mesh hiding the extent of John’s injuries.
“No,” Sherlock said, eyes remaining on the bed beside him.
A smattering of rain at the window that he barely noticed until now reminded him that the world was turning still, weather was changing, London did not stand horror struck by a knife crime in leafy suburbia.
“What time is it?” He asked, the thick grey sky - not to mention the concussion and fatigue - skewing his perceptions of anything as grounded as minutes and hours.
“Ten to nine,” Mycroft said, looking at his watch. “Morning.” Then, with the eagerness of a man who had suddenly thought of a tactful way of leaving the room without seeming rude, he said: “Time for tea, I think.”
He got to his feet, and when Sherlock didn’t reply he added: “I’ll get you something for the headache,” and left.
The lack of the rhythmic tapping of an umbrella on the tiling as Mycroft’s footsteps faded down the hall, made Sherlock look to the now vacant chair.
The crook handle stood hooked around its back, keeping his brother’s seat.
It had taken Mycroft’s intrusion into his private devastation to remind him that he was in fact in dire need of things such as painkillers, sleep and - if nothing else - a strong tea.
His temples were throbbing, his back protested from his slouched position in this horrid chair, his arms and hands ached from executing chest compressions.
The pull of sleep, however unadvisable, had its merits. A deep dreamless state was what he needed, away from the reality of heart monitors and his flatmate’s blood under his nails.
He scraped his chair closer to John’s bed, crossing his arms on the mattress and resting his forehead on top.
In the absence of the harsh hospital lights, tangible thought soon melted away, replaced with a mental pacing of windowless corridors in his mind palace. Locked doors. Landings that looked over at nothing. Dead ends.
Descending stairs led to further darkness, nothingness. A cellar, usually stocked with information, turned up cold.
In the absence of anything but a hollow structure, he waited in the black like a ghost.
Then a voice, above him, questioned: “Who the bloody hell are you?”
Sherlock blinked, shifting his head to face the source of the query.
Lights bright in his eyes, he saw the silhouette of a woman peering down at him.
As his vision settled, her features came into focus.
Her hair was short and sandy brown, nose pink from the early spring air, eyes bright in a face that was prematurely lined.
She was unmistakably a Watson.
“Sherlock?” she asked.
“Harry?”
There was affirmation in their mutual questioning. This was, without a doubt, the faceless sibling Sherlock had often wondered about in the months of his and John’s friendship. The estranged wife of Clara, the alcoholic, the giver of a phone that had acted as a catalyst to a relationship that had led to her brother lying in this antiseptic room, three and a half pints of blood lighter.
When she discarded her raincoat, a heady mix of fresh air, rain and smoked Superkings engulfed the small space between them.
She slung the coat over Mycroft’s chair but didn't sit down.
When Sherlock sat up, she said: “You don’t look tall like in the papers but you're thinner in real life.
“I missed the coverage of the killer cabbie story but I remember seeing the hairpin on the front of the Standard.
“I says to John, why didn't they let you keep it, split the money two ways and you could be living somewhere nice and cosy, have an office too, proper official.
“He just laughed.”
A small smile, a swipe of her hair and a cautious glance to the bed.
Then as if this confirmed her worst fears and this wasn't just some sick joke, her head snapped back to Sherlock and she stared at him with the same eyes as John's.
“The doctor says he'd be dead without you.”
Biting back a comment of 'no, he'd probably be kissing a girlfriend goodbye and heading off to work if he'd not met me’, he said: “And I without him.”
The cold realisation in his words, coupled with those damn Watson eyes boring into him made him feel simultaneously anguished and nauseous.
Thankfully Harry looked away. She moved over to the head of the bed and pressed a hand to John's hair, smoothing it under her palm while taking in the surrounding equipment and machinery.
Her eyes then fell, much like Sherlock's had, to the scarring at his shoulder.
Bolder than Sherlock however, she ran a finger down the length of the longest white line, rubbing the unblemished skin beside it to feel the difference.
“It isn't the first time and it won't be the last,” she said.
“No,” Sherlock agreed, for there was little point in kidding himself.
“Mum thought it was a mercy blow, him getting invalided out of Afghanistan.
“She reads too many of the tabloids, thinks everyone fighting overseas is coming back in bits. She thought once he’d had his stint it would...I dunno...prove something, I guess. But John has always been fighting some cause, defending something..someone. That’s just how he is.”
More touching of the white webbing at her brother’s shoulder.
“What’s he told you about me?” She asked.
In any other situation this odd question would have goaded Sherlock easily into an account of everything he knew about the fairer Watson - from the points he had deduced mere minutes from his first meeting of John, to the snippets of texts he had read over his flatmate’s shoulder.
Harry was an exceptionally easy read.
The first and second fingers of her right hand were darker at the tips from heavy smoking. Both hands had a tremor that could be exasperated by the stress of her brother's current state but certainly had its root in withdrawal from excessive drinking after many years of being climatised to it.
Her haircut was recent, only a few days judging by the tiny stray hairs that clung to her coat collar. This suggested a new job or love interest.
A reconciliation with Clara was out of the equation if John's account of their last fight was accurate, so the latter seemed the most plausible.
The ID badge hastily stuffed in her coat pocket looked worn at the corners - old, at least a year since it was issued.
The lanyard it was attached to, though a little greying, was a vulgar clash of bright pink and acid green - likely a PR company - no other industry sector tried that hard to stand out.
John always said Harry had a lot to say about nothing in particular.
“Nothing much,” Sherlock answered, and then before Harry had a chance to question further, he said: “There's an unwritten rule in our flat banning the talk of siblings. My brother's a cock, we don’t mention him unless it’s 100 per cent necessary. Sometimes we don’t mention him and he’s sat in our living room.”
John's involuntary hand spasm caught their attention and the subject of Sherlock's prior knowledge of the life and times of Harry Watson was dropped.
“Has he been out of it since he came in?”
Sherlock nodded, watching as her hand hovered over her brother's, her decision to touch it halted by the intrusion of an oximeter and cannula.
“Christ,” she said. Then her hands were at her trouser pockets, patting them down.
She whipped round, her cigarettes evidently in her coat.
“And you?” She asked. “You've not been home?”
Sherlock didn't need to answer. The dapples of blood on his clothes, the creases on his shirt said it all.
“Christ,” she said again.
A quick glance at the window confirmed it was still raining but Harry seemed undeterred, retrieving her lighter and the Superkings.
“You gonna join me?”
She was already taking out a cigarette and handing it to him. “Gotta walk fucking miles mind. Can't even smoke in the carpark anymore. It's a bloody joke if you ask me, if there was ever a time you could justify a fag it's when you're in a damn hospital.”
Sherlock took the cigarette and felt no guilt. Harry was right, if he couldn't smoke now when was he allowed to? By the same token, if Harry asked whether she could down a few glasses of red when she went home, he'd hardly refuse.
A slippery slope for sure.
When Sherlock stood up it became apparent that Harry was almost exactly the same height as her brother if an inch shorter.
He pulled on his filthy Belstaff and unhooked Mycroft's umbrella from the back of the chair.
*
The unofficial smoking area, marked by a line of blank-faced nurses, paramedics and patients - one of which pulling along his drip, was at the very back of the hospital. It didn't have a shelter and cars passed it far too closely to be health and safety compliant. A low-standing wall was likely to have been used as somewhere to sit if it weren’t so wet from the rain.
Mycroft’s umbrella accomodated the detective and his smaller companion easily, so much so that a few of the other smokers shifted a little towards them, hoping to steal some protection from the black canopy.
Harry sparked up, inhaled, exhaled and handed the lighter to Sherlock in one swift movement.
Balancing the stick of the umbrella in the crook of his arm, he brought the lighter to the cigarette between his lips and clicked.
The first drag was like a breath of life, unravelling the invisible knot between his eyes, loosening the tension in his shoulders, scratching an itch he hadn’t even been aware he had.
The relief was so immediate and so apparent that his balance faltered and he had to put a hand out to the wall for support.
“Easy there, fella,” Harry said, a flat palm on the sleeve of his Belstaff.
As was the unspoken way with sharing a smoking break during a tense situation, they took a few more pulls before conversation rebooted.
“Have they caught the bastard?” Harry asked, eyes following a girl who looked no older than sixteen. She was paperwhite apart from the long stretch of purple marks up the inside of her arm.
“So I’m told,” Sherlock replied, he too watching the girl, her feet in tatty, once-pink slippers trudging across the wet pavement. The tails of her pyjama bottoms already visibly sodden.
“And what have they said to you about John?” Harry continued. “They said stuff to me but I couldn’t take it all in, not on the phone, not when they’d woken me up.”
A detailed account of all he had been told and overheard from the medical staff was not what Sherlock wanted to revisit. Not now, not with the rain lashing down, the vacant eyes of a young heroin addict staring through him, the extra long cigarette in his hand already burned down to half.
“It’s all a blur,” he said, filling his lungs with the cheap tobacco smoke so he didn’t have to elaborate.
Harry shifted closer to the detective, her shoulder now damp with exposure. She smoked some more before saying, in a voice a lot quieter than it had been: “But he’ll be alright?”
She sounded like a child in need of reassurance, maybe she realised this because before Sherlock could answer she said: “Yeah, he’ll be alright. He’s too stubborn to d-”
She didn’t finish her sentence, instead taking a long drag to fill the void.
*
By the time they returned to the ward, Mycroft had already left. A cup of tea sat on the bedside next to a small cup of tablets and a handwritten note.
May the image of your big brother walking back to the car in the rain bring you some amusement. Keep my umbrella safe, it’s in my top three. - Mycroft.
The message coaxed a smile and Sherlock downed the lukewarm tea and tablets in one.
Harry stayed a little longer, hovering at the bed, unsure where to put herself but not wanting to sit back down again.
At 11 she was pulling out her lanyard, turning the plastic ID card in her hands and saying: “Work told me I could have the morning off but I don’t want to take the piss. They’ve been good to me.
“You’ll call me, won’t you Sherlock? If anyt- when he’s awake.”
“Of course.”
Satisfied, she ran a hand over John’s hair one last time and said goodbye.
The solitude that lay in the wake of the two sibling visits was a lot less charged than it had been a few hours previous. The background rhythm of monitors beeping sounded less like a timer ticking down.
Sherlock resumed his position with his head on his arms at the foot of John’s bed and sleep rose to him almost instantly.
*
When he was roused some hours later it was not by a question or a polite tap on the shoulder but by a softened kick to the side of his head.
In his confusion he sat up abruptly, his back protesting at the sudden change of position after a long time hunched over.
“The great Sherlock Holmes drooling on my leg,” said a voice, barely audible over the hospital’s background noise.
John was looking at him from beneath half closed eyelids, the one corner of his lip curled slightly, “people will talk.”
And then the eleven short words seemed to exhaust him for John’s eyes slipped closed for a few seconds, the half smile faltering, the tense pained look he wore in his sleep returning to his brows.
For the first time in some years, Sherlock was lost for words. The warmth that washed over him trumped the feeling of solace he had felt from the cigarette tenfold. Whatever he said to his flatmate now would do little to communicate the vast abatement coursing through him.
“I met your sister,” he chose to say, unsure himself why this had any weight in conveying his feelings.
John gave a little laugh that turned to a cough which ultimately turned into a groan of pain.
“Jesus, things must be bad,” he said.
Sherlock didn’t answer but, knowing John, that would be enough for the older man to understand that yes, things were a bit not good.
In the few months that they had known each other, Sherlock had realised that not only was John the very best heart to his head, he had a way of knowing a lot about Sherlock instinctively - his moods, his behaviours, his habits - even if Sherlock's reactions to these things remained somewhat alien to John. Maybe this was a normal occurrence when two people were able to cohabitate relatively harmoniously over an extended period time. But Sherlock suspected they were particularly well matched.
Sherlock had been staring unseeing at John’s hand, it was only when it moved fractionally towards him did he actually notice the direction of his gaze.
John flexed his fingers, careful not to knock the oximeter and upset the machinery, then pushed his hand closer to Sherlock.
The detective took the proffered hand, or at least the last three fingers.
John's skin was cool, rough at the tips, and despite dealing with a near-fatal injury his grip was strong.
Sherlock could scarcely remember another instance in which he had held someone's hand. In infancy probably - mother's or an au pair's.
“Are you okay?” John asked.
Sherlock had been expecting the question. When he didn't answer, John gave a squeeze of his hand and said: “Sherlock?”
“Yes of course I bloody well am,” he snapped. Then after a beat, “look at yourself.” A wave of his hand breaking their physical connection.
“Look at yourself,” John said back at him firmly, retracting his hand.
And if out of a mutual defiance they locked eyes with each other, holding their gaze.
When Sherlock had met John at the very beginning all those months ago that now seemed like a lifetime, he had thought him - aesthetically at least - plain.
He was a man who had grown out his clipped military haircut, who donned chequered shirts that aged him, whose face wore the creases of someone who had little to smile about of late.
But then when they had had dinner after John had delivered a fatal bullet thereby bringing their first case together to a blunt end, Sherlock had looked at him anew.
Much like how a fractional shifting of a light source can alter an image, the John that had sat across the table from him sipping wine and eating Chinese while a body he had put there lay cooling in a morgue, was strikingly different to the John he had met days prior.
The same stood now; a light source at another angle had been cast. Here was a John who had not only thrown himself in front of a knife for Sherlock but had been resurrected and then had the audacity to ask if Sherlock was okay.
The horrid hard-backed chair scraped across the tiles and Sherlock heard the screech of it before he realised he had stood up.
In two quick strides he had crossed over to the head of the bed and crouched down, his eyes not leaving John's bewildered face.
“Sherlock, what the h-”
But before John could finish his exclamation, Sherlock had silenced him, sealing the limited space between them with a firm kiss.
John didn't respond, albeit for a long, sharp intake of breath.
In a sudden moment of stark clarity, Sherlock realised what he had done - brought back to a hyper-reality where there was in fact an uncomfortable metal bed guard between them, the intrusion of a nasal cannula at John's upper lip and - as he pulled away - a look of almost terror on the older man's face.
“Good God, is it not enough that I've been stabbed you're going to give me a heart attack as well?” John said, his hand brushing over the patch of lip where Sherlock had just been.
“John...I….”
But what words he began formulating were lost in a second fevered pull of spontaneity that drove him back beyond the breached space between them, back to the lips below a thin oxygen tube.
“Mmph ‘erlock,” John said, his hand gripping the bedside rail to stop himself being pushed sideways.
A small reciprocating peck from John was enough to bring Sherlock back to his wits and he stumbled away.
“Sorry John, I don't know w…”
He stood up to his full height, mumbled something about getting a cup of tea.
A quick glance at John's amused face reassured him that he hadn't done something inexcusable.
Satisfied, he left the room, closing the door on John and the phenomenon that had just risen between them.