This is the first of a series of 'five plus one stories'. All are set in 221b immediately after Sherlock gets off the plane in TAB and John confronts him about his drug use. Some contain angst, some (mild) Johnlock, some are completely straight. And the others? Well you'll just have to wait and see..

Variation no. 1

'Don't tell me - you're not angry with me, you're disappointed in me?'

'Nope. I'm absolutely fucking furious with you.' John shook his head at Sherlock's expression, moved away and slammed his fist into the wall of the living room in 221b, leaving a slight dent in the plaster under the wall-paper that would have Mrs Hudson wringing her hands in horror. But it was better than his preferred option of making an even bigger dent in the soft tissues of Sherlock's face.

'John-'

'What?' John yelled, not caring that Mrs Hudson was downstairs and could probably hear every word. 'What can you possibly say to make this better, Sherlock? You lied to me. You've been using drugs. A whole bloody cornucopia of the stuff. Enough drugs to make the average junkie roll over with his legs in the air. What the fuck were you thinking?'

'You know what? I don't even want to hear your explanations. But you know what pisses me off the most? You lied to me. Over and over again you lied to me. And I thought -' his voice caught and he sat down with a thump in the armchair - his armchair. 'I just thought that you respected me more than that.'

'I do respect you John.'

The answer when it came was uncharacteristically quiet. It made John look up to see Sherlock standing by the window, a strange expression on his face, swaying slightly.

'Fuck. Sit down before you fall down will you?' He jumped up from the chair and taking Sherlock by the shoulders steered him to the other armchair, pushing him down into it. 'You look like crap.'

'It will pass.' Sherlock wearily rubbed his forehead, then leant forward, elbows propped on his knees, head resting on the tips of his fingers in his characteristic thinking pose.

John reached forward to check his pulse, but Sherlock shook his fingers off and John gave up, sitting back in his chair with a sigh.

'You could have killed yourself. You know that?'

'Unlikely given the doses and the precise mixture of agents. The heroin carries a risk of respiratory depression admittedly, but when offset by the-'

'Stop it, Sherlock,' John interrupted him. 'I don't want to hear you trying to rationalise this. I'm a doctor, remember? And I'm telling you that I've dead bodies who've taken fewer drugs than you did today.'

'I've taken worse.'

'I'm sure that you have. Is that meant to make it better?'

'I had to find the answers, John, don't you understand? I had to work out how he did it. I had to know if he was really dead.'

'And is he?'

'Yes. And no.'

'What the fuck is that meant to mean?'

'Moriarty the man is dead, unquestionably. The idea that lives on is harder to kill. There are any number of Moriartys out there, just as there were any number of Emilia Ricolettis. Innumerable copycats, willing to use a single identity to further their own cause.'

'So the actual Moriarty?'

'Is dead. Of course he's dead. He left half of his occipital cortex splattered over Barts' roof. How could it be otherwise?'

'It could been an illusion - he could have shot a blank, used a blood bag, a load of cows brains -'

'While I was looking at him? Impossible.'

'What if there were more than one of him. What if he had a twin brother? Identical twins - what if..'

Sherlock gave John one of his old looks of distain and sighed. 'It's not twins, John. It's never twins.'

He stood up, slightly unsteadily and headed towards the door.

'Where are you going?'

'Bath.'

'No, you're not,' John jumped up from his chair and cut between Sherlock and the door, blocking off his exit.

Sherlock stared at him blearily and then sighed. John held his gaze, hoping he didn't look as angry as he felt. Then Sherlock made a move to his left, which John moved to block, then changed direction at the last moment and dodged round John to the right. He would have made it if John, with a soldier's reflexes, hadn't turned at the last moment, and a brief scuffle ensued as he tried to grab Sherlock first by the arm, and then when that failed, round the waist before he could get out of the room

'Stop it, Damn you!' he shouted as Sherlock twisted away from him for a second time and John found himself dragged halfway down the corridor, grabbing the back of Sherlock's coat for purchase. But Sherlock was too quick, and John found himself holding onto a coat with no occupant as Sherlock reached his target destination and slammed and locked the door.

'Damn you,' John repeated in a whisper as he heard the sound of taps running, and defeated he slid down the door with his back to it, so he was sitting with his head resting against the door.

'I know what you're doing in there, you know,' he called through the flaking white paint of the Victorian panelled door. 'This is what you did before, isn't it? After Magnussen? When you came back from that squat looking like death warmed up, went all tiger-man at Mycroft on the come down from whatever you'd been injecting yourself with, and then came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later all bright eyed and bushy tailed. You took something, didn't you. What was it? Speed? Metamphetamine? Mephedrone? Or did you stick with the traditional and go for cocaine? You took something to 'get you through' that meeting with Magnussen, and I was too busy being shocked about you and Janine to notice it.'

There was silence in the bathroom, but the taps were turned off and there was a splashing sound as Sherlock, he presumed, climbed into the bath.

'Did Janine know? About the drugs? But then she was meant to, wasn't she. She was meant to tell Magnussen to make you think that you were a junkie, to make you less of a threat. And to make him think that that was your weak point, the trigger he could use to get to you.' His voice tailed off, not wanting to go where this trail of conversation would lead him.

'Damn it, Sherlock,' he whispered, struggling to keep his voice from cracking. 'Why couldn't you just have told me? I could have helped.'

Behind the door, Sherlock Holmes slid down the bath until his head was entirely submersed by the water, blocking out the sound of John's voice behind the door and closed his eyes. It was pleasant in his underwater world, the distant sounds soothing. The hum of the pipes, the tidal noises of the water moving in the bath with each tiny adjustment of his body. It would have been easy to just stay there and let himself drift off.

The drugs were wearing off now and with them the familiar symptoms of a come-down reasserted their presence. Every muscle ached, his head was beginning to throb and he felt vaguely nauseated. He could feel his mind beginning to slow and an all-consuming fatigue threatened to overwhelm him. He was careful to restrict his heroin use to within the boundaries of physical addiction, and besides, his time in prison had given him an obligatory week's long period of abstinence. He wouldn't withdraw, but the come-down from the cocktail of drugs that he had taken would still be unpleasant, as he knew from previous experience.

He had two choices now - sleep, or take more drugs. The drugs, frustratingly, were concealed in the lining of his coat. The coat that, had he known it, John was holding, almost hugging, on his lap, directly outside the door.

Eventually, Sherlock conceded to the burning of his lungs and allowed his head to float up above the water where he took grateful breaths of the humid air.

John was quiet now, but Sherlock could hear his soft breathing through the door. He was angry, Sherlock knew. He wanted an explanation but Sherlock couldn't give him one. He couldn't explain to him the sheer terror that had gripped him when he believed for those few minutes that Moriarty had genuinely returned. If Moriarty was back then all that he had gone through in those two years away had been for nothing. He had sought to annihilate Moriarty's network, his memory and everything that he had stood for, for one simple reason. To keep John safe. If he was back, then all of that had been futile.

And worse still, Magnussen had proved that Moriarty wasn't the only one who made John a target. Anyone who wanted to get to Sherlock had realised that the way to do that was through John. And to keep John safe, he had sworn to keep Mary safe, because even before he had realised who Mary was, he had realised what Mary was; a dangerous woman who cared about John as much as he did and would do absolutely anything to keep him safe. And anything for Mary he now knew to be an almost infinite resource. If he had picked a personal bodyguard for John, he could not have done better.

When he had received the telephone call from Mycroft, the elation of his reprieve had been short-lived, followed by the desperate need for knowledge and understanding that had sent him hurtling into his Mind Palace.

And now what he felt was a deep and overwhelming sense of depression. He was tired, too tired to go into battle again. If Moriarty had been genuinely alive he would willingly have hunted him down and destroyed him for a second time, and as many times as it took to see him truly defeated. But Moriarty now existed only in his mind, and no matter how many enemies he destroyed, he would remain there for as long as Sherlock's conscious mind survived. Moriarty was both his nemesis and his alter ego. His dark twin, a reflection of what he himself could have become without John, without Lestrade, without those who cared for him and kept him on the right path.

The solution that Mycroft had given him had in many ways seemed perfect. John was safe in the arms of Mary and would no longer be his responsibility. The choice was taken out of his hands and there could be no question of regret. Within six months it would be over and done with, and there would be no time within the mission for reflection or regret. Action, intellect, blood and oblivion. It had been more appealing than Mycroft could possibly have realised.

And now even that had been taken away from him and he was back exactly where he had been at the beginning. In 221b, with John, with another mystery to solve and yet he could get up no enthusiasm to do that. Without Moriarty, the case was - dull, boring. A copycat at best, and he suspected that it wouldn't even turn out to be that exciting. What he wanted to do was sleep, preferably with pharmacological assistance, and to try to forget.

The hammering on the door made him jump.

'Sherlock? You okay in there.'

'No,' he wanted to reply. 'I'm not okay, John. I'm not okay at all.'

But instead he remained silent.

'Sherlock, if you don't answer me, I'm going to break that door down, so help me. And we all know how angry Mrs H would be about that."

Reluctantly, Sherlock heaved himself out of the bath, wrapped a towel round his waist and yanked open the door so fast that John, who had been leaning against it, fell in an ungainly heap at his feet.

Sherlock stepped over him silently and headed towards his bedroom, pulling the door closed behind him.

'Oh no you don't!' John had somehow managed to scramble to his feet in time to get a foot into the doorway, preventing Sherlock from slamming it in his face. The face that was now only inches away from Sherlock's own. 'We need to talk about this, damn it.'

'No we don't. I don't need to talk; I need to think.'

'You mean you need to go back to your Mind Palace? The one that you convinced me was a product of your genius mind and instead turns out to be a product of a cocktail of hallucinogens?'

'No, John,' he replied wearily. 'I mean what I said - I need to think. And to sleep.'

'And you don't think that you owe me any sort of explanation - any at all?'

John's face had that expression. The forced grimace that meant he was about to become really, really angry and Sherlock knew that he couldn't bear that. Not again, not feeling like this.

So in a rare moment of insight, he chose instead to defuse the situation and removed his hand from the door, allowing John to swing it fully open, and then walked away from the doorway to sit down on the edge of his bed, head in hands.

'I can't explain, not now.'

'Then when, Sherlock?' The edge of anger was still there, but it had been joined by something else - concern and just possibly, compassion.

'Later. I'm tired, John. This last week has been - challenging. I just need to sleep.'

'With drugs? You really think I'm going to let you -'

'No, John. Not with drugs. It's not always about drugs you know. Just - sleep. Although a cup of tea would be nice if you're offering.'

He stood up and turned away from John to start pulling pyjama trousers and a top out of the chest of drawers, one hand holding the towel around his waist, and John was suddenly acutely aware of his friend's near-nakedness.

'Tea. Just - normal tea?' he asked uncertainly.

'If you'd be so kind.'

'And you promise you won't -'

'Inject or snort myself into a cocaine and opiate induced state of oblivion in the three minutes that it takes you to boil a kettle and concoct the complicated cocktail known as 'a nice cup of tea?' I think that I can resist for that long.'

'Right. Fine. John said, starting down the corridor before turning back towards Sherlock sharply, almost as if expecting to catch him with his hand in the sweetie jar, or in this case the illegal substances jar.'

'I'm not going to leave you alone, you know,' he told him, before continuing down the corridor.

'Don't think that I don't count on it,' came Sherlock's soft reply, so quiet, that John almost wondered if he had imagined it.

This is my first foray into the 'five plus one' format. Please do let me know what you think - I might be persuaded to expand on some of these if any of them particularly tickle people's fancy. Always open to requests and suggestions.

And reviews are what keep me writing - just in case you were wondering whether to leave one or not.

As always, this story comes with massive, massive thanks to 7percentsolution for amazing betaing and support. I couldn't do it without you!