Chapter Text
Edward Marston, arsonist extraordinaire, is a rare breed of criminal in that he's really given Sherlock a run for his money. Fifteen locations in Greater London have gone up in flames, the fires triggers remotely by activating inventive remote devices which had prompted a rare admission of being impressed from Sherlock. As usual, that had been frowned upon by the Met team, even though Sherlock's level of enthusiasm and engagement reversely correlates to how long it takes for him to solve a case.
You refuse to be impressed by someone who thinks endangering people's lives and destroying their property is fun, even if they put a lot of thought into it.
The thing about Marston is that he can resist the urge to stay and watch the flames go up, which seems to go against every constant known about his type of criminal minds. When Lestrade had pointed this out, Sherlock had scoffed and said that, for this particular culprit, the gratification is cerebral: achieving the technical feat without getting caught. Sherlock has described Marston as an artist, not someone who feels compelled to — direct quote from the world's only consulting detective — 'masturbate to the sight of a burning skip'. That was among many of his statements which had raised some eyebrows, and you had chuckled not-even-that-secretly. They should be all used to the terrible, terrible, humour between you and Sherlock by now. You love those oddly private moments with Sherlock amid a crowd — it's you against them, us against the rest of the world. In those moments, he takes the time to direct his words and his attention at you and only you, drinking in your response. In those moments, you feel as luminous as he is, bask in the warmth of his intellect, and it's almost a physical jolt when he slips his work persona back on, hardens the angles of his features and gets back to the business at hand. You almost miss him then, though he's right there.
As the case progresses, you feel that familiar, tinglingly exciting tension of getting closer and closer, a sense of a predator circling their prey as Sherlock's deductions close doors to investigative cul-de-sacs and open new ones towards revelation. Finally, finally you catch sight of the suspect who has taken the bait after being taunted by Sherlock on national television as part of a plan devised with the Met to smoke him out. Marston is everything you expected: young, arrogant, educated — just the sort that Sherlock enjoys playing games with. For him, catching disorganised, unintelligent, brutish offenders is like shooting fish in a barrel since they're more predictable and not very creative.
Arsonist Edward Marston is also fast. Thankfully, Sherlock is fast, too. He never purposefully seems to exercise, his diet is appalling, and he smokes sporadically but heavily. Yet somehow he looks like an Olympic athlete darting after London's foulest, as case after case inevitably leads to chases and arrests. He is fast, and he is formidable — a sight to behold as he vaults over things like a parkour professional.
Except… not today. Rounding a corner, expecting to have lost sight of both him and the suspect, it surprises you to find Sherlock leaning against a portico, breathing so hard he's gasping. He raises his head just a fraction when you call out his name, and he gestures you to continue pursuing Marston, too winded to speak.
"Are you o–––"
He flaps his hand like an irate eagle. "Go!" he rasps.
You curse and launch back into a sprint. You're winded, too, since this pursuit has been going on for a while. Sherlock had probably just tried to find a shortcut and climbed over something which had temporarily exhausted him, so you're not really worried. Not really surprised. He just got too out-of-breath from over-exerting himself. That's what you tell yourself and focus on finding Marston.
Minutes later, you're sitting on the man's shoulders on the spot where your tackle had made a softish landing on a pile of leaves left behind by Hyde Park gardeners. Lestrade's in the first panda on site and gets to do the honours with the cuffs. You pat your trousers clean of colourful maple leaves and grin like the madman you've left behind to catch his breath.
Any second now, Sherlock going to stride in and collect his prize of getting to face who he's been chasing. It's the moment of seeing the minotaur at the centre of the labyrinth, and you know Sherlock cares more about that than getting to tackle someone into a pile of wet maple leaves.
As you wait, you watch Marston as he glares at the Met officers, most of all Lestrade who's reading him his rights. The man in cuffs doesn't look that impressive, really. They never do, not to you. Especially not the serial killers. Their visible humanity as they are caught strips the lore and the legend away, leaving just a person with depraved tastes and an impulse control problem. What interests you are not them but watching Sherlock best their efforts at remaining uncaught, listening to him strip through their rationalisations and deflections as he gets them to confess. 'The clever ones want to get caught,', he has told you, 'they can't wait for the world to find out what they've done.' Sherlock is who many of them want to show off to most of all.
Sherlock, who's still not arrived. Lestrade glances at his clock, eager to process his detainee. "The fuck's taking him so long?" he asks you.
"He was just––" you start, just as a fourth car pulls up to the scene. You're just off the car park of the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.
This is an unmarked vehicle driven by Donovan, and you're surprised to see Sherlock clambering out from the backseat. Donovan turns off the engine and climbs out herself, looking as put off as she always is when having to deal with Sherlock. You watch, that odd sense of concern you'd felt earlier upon seeing him returning full force as Sherlock is forced to lean his palms on his knees by the car, breathing hard still. There's a slight wobble when he tries to straighten his form and starts striding towards you, and it's Donovan of all people who has to grab hold of his arm, directing an angry glance at you as though you were neglecting your duties.
You left him behind because he told you to do that. He calls the shots, always. He was just a bit winded from all the running.
You're by his side, now, while he swats Donovan away and tries, to no avail, to catch his breath.
"Just dizzy. Stop fussing," he warns you both.
"He was sitting on the ground," Donovan says disapprovingly. "Didn't look like he was going to make it in time for the arrest." It sounds like she is trying to explain why she'd ever deign to offer Sherlock Holmes a ride.
You ignore her and direct your words at Sherlock. "When did you last eat something?" you demand.
This isn't the first time he's got dizzy on a crime scene. Any case stretching beyond three days, and you start seeing signs of fatigue and a lack of fluid and nutrition. He needs you, then, to keep him functional. Always needs you to remind him he's not just a brain, and that his mind needs fuel. You wonder how he managed before. Did Mycroft keep swooping in and taking him home for a stern talking-to and a plate of cold cuts? You suspect it might have been so, and Lestrade occasionally shows a tendency for nagging Sherlock about Transport maintenance, too. There's a friendship there which seems to span years before you met them. You haven't asked for details because a part of you senses it might not have been a very good time in Sherlock's life. He doesn't ask what yours was like before you got shot. There is only you and Sherlock now, united and both better for having met the other. No need to dwell on the past, is there?
You take his pulse from his radial artery, though you could have just counted the beats from his neck where distended veins over pale, slightly sweat-shiny skin are pulsating fast. He's very tachycardic, likely with some extrasystolic beats. Maybe this is the after-effect of nearly fainting from some vasovagal spell brought on by, well, not eating and drinking enough and then trying to break some sprinting record.
You berate yourself for not watching over him better. Then, you berate yourself for thinking you need to do that for a grown man.
He coughs. Maybe he's coming down with some virus. That seems the likeliest and would explain the sudden lack of exercise tolerance. As much as Sherlock likes to think he's above such pedestrian things, he does catch the odd gastroenteritis and respiratory bug and acts as though it's a reverse miracle that such a strange thing could happen to him. He studies his own mucus samples under the microscope until he falls asleep at the table. When that happens, you cover his shoulders with a blanket and deny — with absolute conviction — the intensity of the feelings you have for him when you get to see that vulnerable underbelly of his soul. You look after him and he lets you, a silent pact not meant for others to see.
Lestrade is watching you both, Marston firmly in his grasp. He's just about to shove the guy head-first into a marked police car. "Sherlock? Did you want to––" he starts asking.
Before, you could wave away the worst of your worries. Before, you just thought he was a bit dizzy. A bit winded. A bit this and that, maybe a head cold. Now, when you see Sherlock shake his head, witness him deny himself the chance to face the man who has run him ragged around London for weeks, you realise that he feels even more rotten than he looks. And he doesn't look too good at all.
"Could you give us a lift home?" you ask Donovan.
"Whatever," she says. She'll get to go home now, too, because the case is solved. She should be grateful to Sherlock for that, but she'd never admit to such a thing, so she's just going to drive you back to Baker Street.
In the car, Sherlock says nothing and simply continues breathing in a very conscientious manner, pulse still sky-high. You don't take his hand again; the gesture seems too intimate for Donovan's presence, but you can count the beats on his neck. You know you should be asking questions, making a cursory examination, but Sherlock always makes you second-guess yourself. Besides, he's walked away unscathed from such insane situations that a part of you is always sceptical that any of his symptoms are serious. It also doesn't help that a proper head cold will bring on such histrionics that you'd think he had the bubonic plague and not just a three-day snot virus.
Once parked in front of your home, you climb out of Donovan's car and thank her as joylessly as possible. Sherlock says nothing, but appears relieved at the sight of the front door. He manages to get out of the car and walk slowly the short distance to the entrance without visible difficulty. There, he waits for you to dig out your keys.
The stairs turn out to be a problem. He lags behind, breathing like a pair of bellows. Three times, you want to help him and three times you abort that mission, aware that he might snap at you. Your eyes go wide as he eventually calls out your name with pinched lips, hoarse and struggling to catch his breath. His colour is ashen, and you almost make him turn around so you could get back to the street and haul a cab to the nearest A&E. Almost. The safety of home beckons irrationally, and a part of you clings to the esoteric belief that if you get him up there, things will be better, and you can gather your wits about you together and solve this.
You know, of course, that this isn't his mystery to solve — it's yours, because this is your profession, but you still long for his genius to assist you. The pressure for answers grows immense as you descend three steps and wrap an arm around his waist, feel him sag against you.
"Together, yeah?" you ask, rhetorically, trying to reassure yourself as much as him.
Once in the flat, Sherlock collapses onto sitting on the sofa, sticks his head between his knees. He must be dizzy again. The muscles on his neck which connect to his clavicle are withdrawing with every breath, his chest expanding and deflating with the frequency of sea waves in a gale. He's not cyanotic, though, and you find that odd. There is no blue tinge on his lips, though he's in obvious respiratory distress. He's not cyanotic yet, but might just be getting there, you tell yourself, and then want to make that thought evaporate just like he sometimes swishes away invisible things he digs out from his Mind Palace. You wish you had one right now — all your knowledge and experience arranged neatly, ready to be deployed. If your mind is anything, it's not a palace, but a closet stuffed too tight, and you don't want to open it in case things start falling out. Things you don't want to look at.
"Talk to me," you bark. Captain Watson has entered this space and taken over because John Watson is currently frightened and unfunctional. You were always shite at this when it was your family. Always got suspended in some gawking state of confoundment, even rather basic medical knowledge abandoning you. Thank fuck for mnemonics and protocols. They always saved you when there was someone you knew on the table — friends, fellow soldiers.
Sherlock kicks off his shoes — they seem oddly tight — and even peels off his socks. You can now see his ankles and shin and frown as you see thick trunks instead of the delicate bone structure you are used to after watching him promenade barefoot frequently in the flat. The elastics of his socks leave lace-like patterns in the doughy, puffy skin.
You kneel, sink your thumb above his medial malleolus. It leaves an indent which disappears very slowly. "When did this start?" When did it start, and why hasn't he told you? He always conceals these things, brushes them off. It's just the Transport. It's meaningless, unless it's betraying him to the extent that it can't be ignored as much as he tries.
This is one of those moments. Instead of imperious dismissal, there is an urgency in his gaze; he's pleading you wordlessly to fix this, because you're the doctor. You're his doctor.
He doesn't seem to be recovering from ascending the stairs and now, he digs out one of his white-starched fabric hankies from his coat pocket, the dark wool sprawled around him like a cape on the sofa. "A week… maybe two," he tells you and coughs into the fabric.
Your breath hitches a bit, too: when he lowers his hand and you can see the scrunched-up white fabric, there are streaks of crimson there.
"What else?" you press, and when he doesn't immediately answer due to being mesmerised by the sight of the blood, you snap, "Sherlock! What else?"
"A bit… short of breath. Not much. Nothing… like… today," he gets out. Maybe he was a man of so few words in the car because even talking is a bit much.
"It got bad when?"
"Started running… after Marston. Got some… chest pain."
"Is that pain still going on? What's it like?"
"Don't… know," he answers and finally seems to be able to draw a calmer breath. He closes his eyes momentarily and leans against the backrest. "On the… stairs, yes. Haven't been… sleeping well."
"You never sleep well on cases," you point out, itching to go get your medical kit, but you want his story first. First week in medical college, they taught you that the legendary William Osler always told his students never to rush an anamnesis: 'listen, and the patient tell you the diagnosis'. You're pretty sure Sir Osler never had to try to wrench the truth out of someone like Sherlock Holmes.
Come on, Sherlock. Be as observant about yourself as you are about others.
"No, it was… a few weeks ago. Kept waking up sh… short of breath."
You can't delay getting your equipment any longer, and soon return to the sitting room with your bag. You don't keep the medication selection inside very well stocked because you rarely bring the kit on cases and most of it would expire. Lidocaine you always have, though, because you need it for suturing wound. Sherlock regularly gets himself cut and bruised on cases and prefers you to fix things. Always you. 'It's always you, John Watson, you keep me right.'
That's why you can't afford to be wrong now, can't allow false leads to lure you down roads leading to bogus diagnoses. Because he's relying on you.
He doesn't protest when you unbutton his jacket and shirt. Placing the stethoscope near the apex of his heart, you feel a flutter in your fingertips — like a bird trying to escape from inside cupped palms. You listen to one spot, two, three, and what you find is the same in all spots. It’s a long, intense murmur like an approaching wave. It's coarse, rumbling, systolic, and loudest near the apex. The trill you felt in your fingers could be blood flowing back turbulently. Lots of it. His pulse is strong on his neck, weaker in his fingers, which are now cold and sweaty but swollen — why hadn't you noticed that before? You always watch his hands because they're beautiful and graceful and watching them is less inconspicuous than fixating on his face.
"Has anyone ever said you've got a murmur?
"No."
"Have you even had echoc–– a heart ultrasound done?"
"Years ago. Normal."
"Well, you definitely need that exam redone now."
You put down the stethoscope, pull your phone out of your jeans pocket and dial the number for the emergency services. Sherlock hears it all and doesn't protest.