Author's note: Embarrassingly, it has taken me 8 chapters to give this story anything resembling a plot (I did warn for 'freewheeling' a few chapters ago). But I have a plot now, and a direction, and so...huzzah? Still can't promise it'll be any good though. Thankfully there are like a gazillion other excellent Sherlock/John hurt/comfort fics out there.

08

He woke up from a dreamless state. He felt John, asleep, face pressed into the sheets, though Sherlock knew that he would be dampening the threads beneath him as he tended to drool in certain positions. Sherlock's whole body ached; too long spent in stiff poses, spent crouched in an alley, locked up in flashbacks and nightmares. When there was a riveting case, pain faded into the background, became the white noise that no longer mattered and was easily ignored. Now everything was topsy turvy, he was upside down and reversed and inside out. He hadn't been entirely honest with John, about the sheer number of memories that had been coming back. Certainly, there were those that stood out from the patina of horror. Moments that were coloured more brightly, that reached more deeply into his well of emotions and spun them out.

His senses told him that someone else was in the room. He turned and looked into the dimness and saw someone who made him grimace.

Mycroft.

His brother raised his eyebrows in deep amusement and Sherlock slid out of bed, listening to John's breathing, hearing it remain steady and rhythmic. He wouldn't wake up. He stalked regally out of his bedroom, shoulder 'accidentally' knocking Mycroft on the way out. He didn't look behind him as he made his way into the kitchen, heard the soft click of Mycroft closing the bedroom door.

'You took a case recently,' Mycroft said, quietly, 'a dreary case. A boring one.'

Sherlock said nothing. He looked in the cupboards and finally the fridge until he found the last custard scroll that John had purchased for him. They were his favourite. But John didn't know they were his favourite pastry because they were Mycroft's favourite pastry. He turned around and bit into the scroll affecting a look of nonchalance, but inwardly he crowed when Mycroft's eyes narrowed in a mixture of envy and resentment.

'Low blow, dear brother.'

'Want some? They're delicious at this time of year. In season.'

Mycroft made an aborted gesture with his eyes that suggested he was about to roll them, and instead he rested his briefcase on the table and looked concertedly away from the pastry.

'You took a case and didn't solve it within the thirty seconds it would normally have taken you to resolve. I know your wealth of knowledge about moulds well, after all, don't I? I clearly recall you practicing on my dessert a few times.'

'Mine too,' Sherlock insisted, because honestly, it was like Mycroft wanted to make everything into an insult when it wasn't necessary. There was enough bad blood between them, enough insults that he didn't need to melodramatically consign more to the pile. And as always, he was offended that Mycroft felt the need to keep up with every single one of his cases, especially as the man could figure out so many of them himself anyway. Scotland Yard's solve rate would improve exponentially if they had Mycroft go over the cold cases.

'You weren't prevaricating in your delayed resolution of the crime because of ulterior motives, after all. Sources confirm that you were researching fungi in the early hours of this morning. Brushing up?'

Sherlock had difficulty swallowing the next bite of pastry, and then didn't take another, just in case. He could see where this was going. Mycroft, the bastard, so good at deduction and yet always directing it in the worst possible ways. He put the scroll down on the bench-top and folded his arms.

'I can't possibly see how this is any of your business.'

'Oh, au contraire,' Mycroft said, with a small smile, 'replacing knowledge missing from your vaunted mind palace? At first I thought head trauma, perhaps a degenerative disease of the mind, but of course that would be my first conclusion; since we who so desperately rely on our brains fear these things no matter how irrational the fear, don't we?'

Sherlock waited.

'And then I thought about incidents you have experienced recently; we've all read John's blog, and I have my own team supplementing that information further, of course.' There was a pause, and Sherlock placed his palms on the bench behind them, pressed down to literally brace himself for what was coming. Frustrating, because he had been stripped of so much of his usual self-control, hard to find it and rely on it when it was being eroded from the inside out. Mycroft, too damned smart for his own good, of course he'd figured this all out for himself. It didn't help. Mycroft was not the pillar of support he imagined himself to be.

'You, Sherlock, reduced to physiological post-trauma? How dull. Do you need your own Ella? Or is your own choice of 'therapy,' Mycroft's eyes drifted mockingly to Sherlock's bedroom, as though he could see the still form of John sleeping there, 'working for you?'

'Get out,' Sherlock hissed, and Mycroft's eyes pinned Sherlock, sharp now, all mocking having evaporated, something raw and bright and deceptively like concern beneath them.

'Of course, one always hopes one is wrong,' he said. He sighed and averted his eyes to the pastry scroll on the bench, and then looked quickly away to the experiments on the table. His eyes roved curiously. Chemistry had never been his department, but he still had a basic working knowledge. Sherlock himself catalogued in turn; new shoes, more fashionable than average, certainly more fashionable than Mycroft preferred, a high price-tag and fine leather workmanship. Who was Mycroft trying to impress? He wore expensive shoes often, but rarely anything fashionable, being someone who preferred tried and true patterns in his couture. Who would even rather commission someone to copy a redundant style rather than trying something new. So then someone who would see Mycroft at work, perhaps on a regular basis. Someone who might notice his shoes. It was uncharacteristically vain of him.

'How do you find the time to court someone, with all of your political machinations?'

Mycroft's eyes stopped flickering over the experiment, and then he looked up with a smile.

'It's good to know that mind of yours hasn't been entirely laid to waste. Which is why I'm here. I have a case that I'd like you to consider.'

'Thank you, no.'

'I don't have anyone else I'd like to be looking at the material, currently. I suspect I have a leak in the upper echelons of my establishment, and my own...sedate methods of deduction have only lead me to believe that someone more suited to gallivanting around London would be appropriate.'

Sherlock grimaced. The timing of Mycroft's visit, his perpetual lifetime evasion regarding sensitive personal matters alongside his unwillingness to see Sherlock suffer through anything; even if it meant burying his head in the sand for the majority of his childhood. Sherlock was well aware that Mycroft had personal issues with not having done more.

'You come to me with lies, thinking that will fixme? Give me a case to pique my interest, think that all I need is some brisk, polluted outdoor air and a quick run around and I'll be fine? I thought you were smart.'

Mycroft shifted uncomfortably.

'There is still a leak.'

'Stopper it yourself.'

'Everything I've said is true.'

Sherlock picked up the scroll and took a spiteful bite out of it, and Mycroft actively grimaced, insulted. It was a cheap ploy. To Sherlock, the pastry was overly rich, filled with refined white sugar and flour, poor quality egg and cheap milk. He swallowed down his bite with what could only be called a triumphant look in his eye.

And then they both stared at each other. Mycroft looked uncomfortable, eager to be gone, but his stance was that of a man willing to see out a battle. Not easy for him to do this then, to offer something that might help, to acknowledge his own dismal part in Sherlock's past – what he had remembered so far, anyway. And Sherlock knew that Mycroft could see in the way he was holding himself that he was tired, in pain. Mycroft would see the tension in Sherlock's jaw that he couldn't quite seem to release these days and he could probably see the weight of it all. The terrible weight of feeling like one is losing one's mind. For Mycroft was right, they both had an irrational fear of mental degeneration, early onset Alzheimer's (there was precedent), severe head trauma, brain damage and now, added Sherlock, the chemical contraption that appeared to be what John called, 'a good case for post-traumatic stress disorder.'

'Leave the file.' Sherlock said abruptly, and Mycroft withdrew it from his briefcase and laid it smartly on the table, corner lining up neatly with the table corner. He paused then, his fingers trailing along the edge of the tabletop, and Sherlock gritted his teeth, ire rising. He was certain that he wouldn't want to hear what was coming, and after the night he'd had, he couldn't summon his usual indifference. His toes curled against the floor, and Mycroft noticed. He looked up.

'I'm not unaware of how my actions, when we were younger, impacted you,' Mycroft said, and Sherlock swallowed around nothing now, still feeling like he had pastry cloying up the back of his throat.

'Don't.'

'I may have driven you to hospital, or tended you, when necessary, but we both know that I benefitted greatly from father's displeasure in you. We both know that I took advantage of that. I was a Medean evolutionist, always have been, I believed whole-heartedly in the survival of the fittest. Not in some Wallacean principle of cooperation.'

Sherlock said nothing, he said nothing because he was certain that if he spoke, he'd be loud enough to wake John. He contemplated dipping into his trust fund to send Mycroft vans of cakes and pastries and chocolates for weeks on end. He knew it would be less than nine days before Mycroft broke and started gorging himself.

'I should have realised much, much earlier that you were such a sensitive child that this would all revisit you one day.'

Sherlock, later, would blame it on fatigue and too many bad days and the disarming effect John's presence had on him. But in the moment, all he knew was the lurch away from the kitchen bench, the aggressive step towards Mycroft.

'Sensitive? The man, our father, made my life a...' he stopped abruptly. This was unseemly. In one moment he had been ready to spill about how much of a nightmare this all was. He could scramble his resources together and affect indifference, he could go on as though everything were in its perfect state of internal equilibrium, but it was not, and he loathed lying to himself, and he loathed that he couldn't just reconstruct the mind palace, evict Moriarty, re-delete the memories. He felt insufficient. He was inefficient. The knowledge that after all this time, he still couldn't get himself together, it was purely galling. He didn't want to throw the tantrum he'd been wanting to throw since this whole sorry state of affairs had begun. Not in front of Mycroft.

'The hospital staff asked me, once, where you kept getting your bruises from,' Mycroft, unusually garrulous, and Sherlock didn't want to hear any of it.

'Get out!' Sherlock shouted, pointing imperiously towards the door. He was bursting to show Mycroft the self-defence he'd learned over the years, his ability to throw a hard right hook, break a cheekbone. Mycroft saw the potential for violence and lifted his head minutely, expressionless always the calm one, always the one – pointing out through his own restrained actions – just how unrestrained Sherlock was. He picked up his briefcase and walked out briskly, and Sherlock stood and watched him, unable to move. He was trembling. Trembling.

He bared his teeth in a snarl of disgust at himself, at his own lack of control, and a moment later he had turned and ripped the toaster from the wall and hurled it onto the floor. The casing broke apart, and the elements lay exposed. At any other point, Sherlock would have hoarded them for future experiments, but instead he just stared at them, nostrils flaring.

John ran into the kitchen with the speed of someone desperately worried and already awake and eavesdropping and he stopped to take in the scene before him. Sherlock could hear his audible breathing. He reached for the case file and opened it, pretending to read the words in front of him, wanting something to look at so he wouldn't look up and see the disappointment on John's face. They were both men who very much appreciated toast, it was a staple in both of their lives, and this was now the third toaster Sherlock had broken in his time living with John. Though it was the first he'd broken in a fit of wrath, as opposed to, 'I needed that part, it was relevant to my interests.'

'The toaster had it coming,' John said, after a beat, 'it never toasted quite right.'

'No, it didn't.' Sherlock acknowledged, dismayed to hear the minor tremor in his voice, surprised at John's evenness. His fingers tightened on the case file and then he closed it and put it back down again.

'The first time I met Mycroft, I nearly decked him,' John said, conversationally, bending down to pick up broken pieces of toaster. He placed them all back on the spot where the whole toaster had once rested, and left them there. He approached Sherlock, and for a moment Sherlock thought – in a rush of horror – that John was going to touch him, offer comfort, but instead John opened up a cabinet door and took a glass, poured himself some water. Sherlock exhaled in relief, and maybe a little disappointment.

'How much did you hear?' Sherlock said, aware of exactly how thin and how un-soundproofed the walls were in his own bedroom. He decided that John may have woken as soon as he felt the body heat dissipating from the bed, as he was a sensitive sleeper. It could have even been the click of the door, sounding faintly similar to the catch of a safety coming off a weapon.

'Enough,' John said grimly, 'that I wanted to deck him again. I was going to give you some space, but then...toaster homicide.' John waved his hand at the broken toaster and Sherlock resisted smiling at the attempt of humour because the joke was so pathetic it didn't deserve acknowledgement.

'And I thought my childhood was bad,' John said, finally, running a hand through his hair and sounding a good deal more awake and alert than he had about five hours ago.

'It was,' Sherlock said, and John's expression became guarded. Sherlock had no desire to talk about his own deductions, having been relatively comfortable to mostly respect John's privacy about his background. Besides, revealing John's past to John would have revealed little more than John's irritation about having his privacy invaded, it would yield irrelevant information, and he wasn't interested in hurting him for irrelevant information.

'Not as bad,' John said, hesitantly, and Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'Do, please, show me this research you've done on quantifying the 'badness' of people's childhoods. I'd very much like to see it.'

'Shut up, you twat. I wasn't the one who just broke a toaster.' John's ribbing was affectionate and Sherlock's smirk became a reluctant smile, and he sat down at the table and tried not to think about how the past few hours had consisted of them both sleeping together on the same bed. He tried not to think about whatever conclusions Mycroft had drawn. However astute he could be about almost all areas of Sherlock's life, he was remarkably quick to jump to conclusions about his sex life. All this time, and Mycroft still struggled to accept asexuality as a perfectly valid reality, rather than a form of some kind of inhibited or repressed denial.

Sherlock watched as John went about his morning routine, and just as John started to walk to the bathroom to have his morning shower, Sherlock called out;

'Sun is setting in twenty five minutes. It's actually dinnertime, by your standards.'

John swore, and came back into the kitchen. He put a hand on his hip and shook his head.

'I hope you find my screwed up body clock deeply amusing.'

'It passes the time,' Sherlock said, and then, as they both continued to look at each other, John smiled almost shyly, and Sherlock nodded slightly in acknowledgement. Yes, the look seemed to say, we have just shared the same bed, and it's fine, isn't it? But just as quickly Sherlock realised why John had been so attentive and so physically affectionate lately and he felt himself go cold and a shiver curled up the back of his spine, piloerection made the hairs on his arms stand on end.

'Winner takes all,' David's voice hissed triumphantly throughout his mind, so present that he could practically feel the man's breath on his face, smell the light scent of alcohol mingling with his own toxic breath. He felt a slick hand on the erection he had desperately tried to will away and almost succeeded, almost, except that David knew and was patient, felt his sternum and ribs ache from desperate breaths and resistance against his own physical reactions.

'Sherlock?' John said, and Sherlock blinked and blinked, tried to bring the room back into the focus, aware that clamminess had turned into cold sweat, even on the backs of his thighs and behind his knees. His chest was heaving, but his was breathing silently, a remnant from a time when he didn't want David to hear him, and that reflecting a skill he'd learned so long ago – how to be frightened, terrified, breathe like your life depended on it, but still be silent. He waited for John to say things like, 'it's just a flashback,' and, 'it's not real,' but blessedly, he stayed silent. When Sherlock finally had the presence of mind to make eye contact, John was not looking at him in pity; Sherlock thought he saw understanding there. He hoped he wasn't fabricating an expression, human emotion had never been his strong point.

'It seems,' Sherlock said, pressing his lips together briefly, 'that sleep has given me enough energy to flashback. Fantastic,' he added.

'Ah, yes,' John said, sounding entirely familiar with the concept.

'I don't want to talk about it,' Sherlock said, and John nodded.

'Yep. You don't have to either,' he said, though he sat down at the table with Sherlock all the same.

'If I did talk about it,' Sherlock said, 'would you be a viable candidate, for that?' Sherlock remembered John saying 'who will you talk to?' and irrationally felt as though in that moment, John may have been asking him to find someone else. He looked up at John, who was looking at his own hands, clasped together on top of the table. He seemed to be searching for the right thing to say, and Sherlock had pursued eight different ways that John could gently reject him – which was likely – before John finally answered.

'This is really happening, isn't it?' John said, finally, and Sherlock's brow furrowed in confusion. 'I mean, this isn't just something that we're going to wake up from in two days time, and it's going to be gone. This is...I can't believe I was so happy when you thought I'd betrayed you. I'm such an idiot. Christ.' John's fingers tightened where they were locked together, his mouth pursed, and Sherlock resisted the urge to reach out and awkwardly pat John on the arm (it would never be anything but awkward, he thought, at a time like this). He wanted to tell John that he didn't actually want to talk about anything at all, so it wasn't like John had to seriously address the issue, he was just curious.

'John,' Sherlock began, but John cut him off.

'No, wait, look...yes, of course I'm someone you can talk to. I'm not saying that out of some misplaced sense of guilt, or even because I think I can fix you, though I'd be lying if I didn't wish that there was some miracle cure, and don't even start on about you getting a bloody needle to the back of the neck to fix your symptoms. I...care about what's happening, why wouldn't I? And, it's just, I think...' John paused, 'I think sleep, and Mycroft, these things have given me enough energy to realise that you've had some really shitty moments in your life and I'm not so good at feeling helpless, and you know that.' He stopped rambling, abruptly.

'You just described Mycroft as a 'thing,' Sherlock said, delighted and desperate to be away from this conversation and unwilling to stand up and leave, because John was helping him orient to the world and as loathe as he was to admit it, he wasn't willing to give up the benefits of being in his presence, for the sake of his pride. John knew post-traumatic stress disorder, even if his therapist had taken a deeply flawed approach to it, he understood what it was like to have his brain betray him. He was a stoic man, he knew.

'I know I'm not helpless,' John said, shaking his head at himself, 'I know that. But I don't like to see you in pain.'

Sherlock opened his mouth to trot out a denial. And then he thought about minimising the situation. But none of the words would resolve into whole sentences, and instead he was just left feeling deeply uncomfortable. This conversation, acknowledging pain; he'd spent his entire life deleting all of it and he wasn't used to the empathy of others, especially empathy that wasn't mostly pity. He didn't know the right thing to do. He looked at the file on the bench and wondered if it would be terribly rude to reach for it and announce that Mycroft had given them a case.

'I just want to help,' John said, finally.

'So long as you don't cripple yourself with guilt in the meantime. You had an ordinary human response to my thinking you were Moriarty. You can't significantly help your IQ or your belated lack of insight into the matter.'

'I feel so much better,' John said, sarcastic.

'Good,' Sherlock said, pretending that John hadn't added any derisive inflection to the statement at all. Ignoring his own twinge of mistrust, for though he could cerebrally understand that no, John was not – could never be – at fault, a part of him didn't believe it.

'Did you dream?' John said, a sudden and welcome change of subject, and Sherlock shook his head.

'Nothing I can remember. I've noticed a pattern however. After a particularly intense recollection, everything seems to abate, for a time. And perhaps...' Sherlock trailed off, because he was reluctant to say, perhaps you sleeping next to me helped. There was admitting vulnerability and then there was acknowledging whatever line they'd crossed into in the past 24 hours. Sherlock was still feeling it out for himself. He vaguely remembered telling John he wouldn't fuck him, and he vaguely remembered John's response, but it couldn't be so easy could it? It couldn't be so easy to assert a boundary and have it respected, surely? It seemed that too many other people in his life had heard his boundaries and treated them as battle-lines to be crossed. John was a trained soldier. Crossing boundaries was something he'd been professionally trained to do.

'Should you be taking cases?' John said, reaching over for the folder. Sherlock felt a burst of irritation and snatched it away before John could get his hands on it.

'Sleep has obviously done you some good,' John said, a hint of annoyance in his own voice, 'because you're turning into a prat again.'

'Yes, it's obvious you prefer it when I'm wrong-footed, you did enjoy it when I thought you were Moriarty, after all. Quick! Better come up with some other trauma in case I recover,' Sherlock said, shoving away the part of his mind willing to give John the benefit of the doubt, and latching onto his familiar agitation and disdain and contempt with a fierce grip. John's eyes widened with shock and he stood up as Sherlock did.

'Hang on a minute, where did that come from?' John said, indignant, and Sherlock ignored him. He decided the first order of the evening would be a shower, and then he would read the case file in his room, undisturbed.

'Sherlock!' John shouted at Sherlock's back, and Sherlock answered him with a slamming of the bathroom door.

Mycroft was right, the case did require legwork. Interviews or access to personal laptops and desktops were likely going to be the most reliable ways to get the information he needed, and – of course – because Mycroft's upper echelons mostly consisted of people used to subterfuge, obfuscation and being spied on, he'd need to be clever. Disguises were always a possibility, since it wouldn't do to risk being seen, he had no doubt that his four main suspects would have done their own research into Mycroft, would have likely learned about his wild, brilliant younger brother who didn't try especially hard to keep his face and name out of the newspapers or off the tongues of police and detectives. He knew he had a memorable face and manner. Though it did tickle him a little to think of these people, with their power and money and perhaps even intellect, perusing his website, realising that he actually was as brilliant as the rumours suggested.

Whoever was betraying information outside of Mycroft's inner circle of political machinations would likely already be suspecting some form of visual surveillance. Mycroft watched, and often listened, to everyone he employed. So they would be operating in a way that cameras and microphones could not detect; either geographically outside of the realm of detection (not enough travel outside Mycroft's purview to suggest this), or in manners that bypassed that detection even when it was present (computers, communicating in code, many other possibilities came to mind).

This case had a lot of potential to get Sherlock back on track, and he gritted his teeth because Mycroft would have known that. It required observation of human behaviour and looking for anomalous activity, as opposed to a comprehensive understanding of fungal species; the former had not been damaged and Mycroft would have known that too.

He was not tired, having slept a decent amount, and because his mind was starting to spark and fire as it always did at the beginning of a case. It was 1.00am when he emerged, dressed and ready to go out and contact his homeless network. He remembered to pocket his wallet. He'd need money for the kind of surveillance he was going to ask them to do for him. He'd need to be careful; homeless people tended to blend in by default, which came in handy, but he wasn't dealing with an average case of treason.

John was sleeping on the couch, shoulder twisted in a way that would pain him in the morning. Sherlock felt a momentary pang of some unidentified emotion that made him pause on his way out, to see John sacrificing his own comfort in order to keep an eye on him. He made it to the door before he turned around and wrote, uncharacteristically, on a piece of paper:

Taken the case. Gathering data. Back in, how long? Sherlock often lost track of time when he was on a case, unless it was particularly relevant. He crossed out the last two words and left the note on the table, where John would eventually see it.

Author's Note the Second: Reviews are love. :)