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The world around Sherlock Holmes was pleasantly fuzzy with all the sharp lines smeared. The thoughts that had been careening through his head like fifty trains rocking along on their tracks had come to a creep or stopped entirely. Only cocaine could bring him this while his body kept moving and bouncing around. There was something sweet and full of relief about not being a prisoner to his own mind. The problem with cocaine was that after awhile, his body adapted and more was always needed to achieve that same plateau as before. His heart protested the increase in self-dosage, but Sherlock dismissed its feeble protests. It served him, didn't it?His dazed eyes rolled upwards as the heavy beat of wings rang in his ears as if he expected to see some prehistoric thunder-lizard of the skies hovering above him. There was nothing but a warrant card being flashed in his face.“Drugs bust,” someone said. That 'someone' was a going-grey all too early man was studying Sherlock as if he were some interesting species of bug. That was wrong, wasn't it? Only Sherlock was allowed to look at people like that. Not this person.Sherlock groaned as he was pulled to his feet.The rest of the night was spent in the hospital. Mycroft's men looked like the walking dead to Sherlock's sobering eyes when they secured his room.“I hear it,” he whispered to a hatchet-faced nurse.“Yeah, you probably hear all sorts of things,” she replied with a shrug of her beefy shoulders and checked his IV line. “Tell me if the elves start singing.”Sherlock watched the dark window long after the lights were out and only the smallest sliver of moonlight defined it in the night.----------------“You're not afraid of Mycroft, are you?” Sherlock asked even when he knew the answer. He faced the graffiti covered brick wall in front of him. The serial killer he had been chasing through the maze of London's backways laid dead beside a bin. What a horrible death, he thought to himself. Covered in rotten cabbage and used condoms from some quick coupling for a few coins. To die like that, to be left like that. To be just that.“No,” the man behind him said calmly.Sherlock had sworn a few minutes ago that he had heard the sound of massive wings, right before his would-have-been killer had died of what he assumed was a heart attack. There hadn't been a gunshot or any of signs of a violent death.“You should be,” Sherlock whispered as he squared his shoulders, telling himself that he didn't feel a worm of fear gnawing at his innards like a maggot.“Perhaps.”Sherlock watched a luridly green bottle-fly crawl its way sluggishly across the dead man's glazy eye, probing at it as if it could find a sweet treat. Words dried up in his throat as his mind that dwarfed all others (except for maybe Mycroft's) struggled. “But you're...”“And sometimes I'm an overworked detective inspector with the Metropolitan Police in London,” Lestrade said quietly as he drew up to Sherlock's shoulder, chill breath caressing the back of the consulting detective's neck.“Why?”“One can't appreciate humanity unless they experience it.”“So?” Sherlock asked, refusing to turn around while some underlizard brain part of him insisted he should, same as a jungle native had to turn to face their unimaginable idol.“Mercy can't exist unless one understands the quality of it.”A shudder worked through Sherlock's shoulders despite his best efforts to stop it. “It's not my time.”“No, it isn't,” Lestrade replied from over his shoulder. His breath fogged over Sherlock's shoulder in plumes, too cold for the warmth of the London night.That was how the dead man and consulting detective were found by the beat cops. Sherlock turned to face them only when human voices drowned out the wings he thought he could still hear. Far as anyone knew, Lestrade wasn't even on duty that night.---------------------Concrete dust fell into Sherlock's eyes, clung to his eyelashes, as he stared up at Lestrade. The pool had been destroyed by the explosion, slabs of stone feeling as it was crushing him and John. That didn't stop him from keeping John as close to his chest as he could protectively. “You can't have him,” Sherlock hissed, ending in a cough that ended with what felt suspiciously like blood on his lips.Lestrade shook his head slowly, leaning over Sherlock and John Watson like a raven deciding which eyeball was best to pluck out and consume first... if purification had reached the best stage for consuming yet. “I'm not here for him.”That words were so final. Too final.“I'm not going either,” Sherlock insisted stubbornly.“No, you're not,” Lestrade said agreeably, crouched there with the remains of the rubble creaking above and around them as if it could collapse at the slightest shift.“Then why are you here?”Lestrade flashed his warrant card at Sherlock with a smile that was out of place here. “It's my job.”Sherlock was still choking on laughter and blood when they were rescued.----------------------------Sherlock couldn't watch 'Meet Joe Black' or other films like that. Not that he had ever been big on watching any movie unless it was to point out the flaws.Although he never said or gave a hint of why, Sherlock was the same with those cemetery monuments to the Angel of Death. He avoided them or skirted around them quickly if one was in his path.----------------------------The water was thundering in the background as he crawled out, coughing up what felt like lung-fulls of it. His hand groping for the shoreline fell on a scuffed black shoe. Sherlock wasn't too surprised when his eyes moved up to Lestrade too tired and worn face.“It's not my time,” Sherlock wheezed, thinking of John. Oh John. Why hadn't he said one last time what he meant to him, what he felt? Was it too late now?Lestrade said nothing, out of place in these surroundings as he stood on a muddy bank gazing down at Sherlock with eyes that saw too much, knew too much.“Mycroft will never forgive you,” Sherlock growled, gambling as he tried to struggle out of the water.Lestrade didn't try to help him or hinder him. The only thing he did was stare down unblinkingly at Sherlock without mercy or emotion. He could have been carved of stone for all the reaction he gave.“I swear, Mycroft won't...”“Mycroft knows,” Lestrade said, interrupting him. “I never made a secret of it.”Sherlock had no reply at first, words stoppered in his throat in a hot lump. All he could do was try to sink his fingers into the slippery mud to pull himself out of the water as he thought of John. John. He couldn't let John think he died here.“Mycroft has always known,” Lestrade continued, ageless eyes studying Sherlock. “I never lied to him. He knows that everyone get the same thing: a lifetime.”“Do you love him?”Lestrade gave Sherlock a wan smile as he offered a hand down to him. “As much as I can.”Sherlock couldn't imagine something more horrible than lying next to someone at night and knowing what they were. How did Mycroft manage it? Or John for that matter? John knew what Sherlock was though, and they laid together whenever they could. Was he the same? A monster in human flesh?“I'm not dead,” Sherlock insisted again, his hand reaching and grasping Lestrade's frigid one.“No, you're not,” Lestrade said, his eyes finally lifting off Sherlock and to the body that drifted behind Sherlock in the water. “But he is.”The sound of beating wings filled the air as Sherlock found himself pulled out with superhuman strength onto the shore. Then his fingers closed on emptiness, sitting in a heap alone on the shore of Reichenbach Falls with the corpse of Moriarty floating behind him.Sherlock crawled out and back to life. Back to John. Back to telling himself that Death wasn't Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade lingering at his shoulder.