I

John struggled his way back to consciousness and when he finally made it, he wished he'd stayed insensible. Whatever he was using for a mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable and crinkled with every pain-filled breath. He gagged on the sweet corruption of rotting fruit, and the coppery scent of blood, and wondered why it was so dark, because he was certain that he had opened his eyes. He tried to run his fingers over his face to check for a blindfold, and couldn't. His hands were bound. He rubbed them against his cheek instead and the restraining substance felt like gaffer's tape. He stared blearily at his wrists as his stomach roiled dangerously. He was about to be sick. There was something one was meant to do if someone in danger of vomiting was incapacitated, but he couldn't remember what it was. The fact he couldn't remember was irritating, because he knew the procedure should have been ingrained as part of his rudimentary training. In fact he was sure whatever he was meant to do was so basic they taught it to civilians as part of a first aid course.

At the last minute, he remembered. Clumsily, John rolled over onto his side into the recovery position, coughing and gagging against a torrent of bitter vomit. The effort exhausted him. He wanted to sleep. But his sense of self preservation told him that there was something very wrong about the idea. He needed to be elsewhere, and he needed to be there now. Moving within the confined space wasn't easy, especially, as it turned out, because his feet as well as his hands were bound, but John focused what little energy he had on pushing aside plastic bin bags and other refuse until he had created a reasonably rubbish-free zone, and then he stood on shaking legs, only to hit his head against a hot metal surface.

He fell back down again against one of the sources of the rotting fruit smell. A fresh blast of fermenting oranges and sickly sweet bananas assaulted his nostrils and kicked off a fresh round of gagging coughs. Wearily, John raised his bound hands and shoved the impediment to his freedom. The lid moved, allowing a sliver of fading daylight to penetrate the darkness. He blinked against it, and with a mighty sense of determination, got to his feet and tried again.

The lid swung open with a hollow crash. Using the side of the rubbish skip and a crate of spoilt bananas, John clambered free and found himself in an alleyway behind what appeared to be a row of small shops. He took a couple of ragged breaths to clear his nose of the scent of rotting produce, and tried to take a step. He promptly fell over. Breathing hard, he stared, perplexed, at the tape that bound his ankles, and realised he might be able to walk if his stride was unimpeded. It wasn't easy, but eventually the tape came away, and John found himself free.

Confused and disorientated, his skull aching, he clambered to his feet, using the skip as a support. On stumbling legs, John wandered, stopping to hug the brick wall every so often to rest upright, until he found a gap between the buildings. An indeterminable amount of time later, the new alleyway ended, and before John's unfocused gaze, a street filled with people and shops appeared. He reached out, knowing he needed help, but the people shrank away from his touch and called him vile names. Bewildered at their disgust, he staggered onward, knowing he needed to find... someone, although he couldn't quite put a name to the tall, dark-haired man whose pale, haughty featured face loomed in his memory.

As he started to pass yet another shop, an automatic door let loose a blast of cold air as it disgorged a large woman hauling a shopping trolley behind her out onto the pavement. John stared at the doorway, saw the garish signs in the window touting allergy remedies and cosmetics, and a light in his brain illuminated just long enough for him to get the notion that the business was a chemist shop and that going inside would be a Very Good Idea.

The cold air felt indescribably refreshing. Absently it occurred to John that he was very hot. Hot enough that he should be covered in perspiration. And yet when he ran a hand over his forehead, his skin was dry to the touch. This was Very Important Information, his brain informed him. Especially when it was coupled with his disorientation. It was important enough that he needed to pass it along to the shop assistant seated behind the till who was looking at him with an annoyed and unfriendly expression.

There were words he needed.

Hyper-something?

No, that was too complicated.

Too technical.

Besides, it was only a symptom of the bigger problem.

There was a more mundane layman's term. Something to do with Hot?

No, that wasn't it.

Heat.

That was it.

Heat … something.

Before John could remember what the Very Important Information was about his current condition, everything went black.

II

When John came to his senses the air was filled with familiar smells. They weren't comforting scents, but ones he knew well. Without opening his eyes he knew that the bed he was lying in was located in a hospital, and he was a patient in need of treatment rather than the doctor who was there to provide it.

He shifted against the pillow, wincing as a fresh wave of pain rode over his skull, and heard the sound of a body in motion. When he opened his eyes and blinked them into focus, Sherlock was staring down at him with a look of abject relief. Under the circumstances, John found the show of concern alarming.

"What happened?" he asked, and didn't recognise the sound of his own voice. Why was it so hoarse? he wondered, still unable to piece together the cause of his current misfortune. And why did his throat feel so irritated?

Sherlock disappeared from view, but only for a few moments, then he was back with a plastic cup, bending the straw to a comfortable angle so that John could take sips without choking. "Better?" he asked, after John had emptied half the cup of water.

John nodded absently, still processing. He was in a private room. There were no other patients, or even space for other beds. Outside the window, sunlight was breaking through a heavy fog, heralding a new morning. He tried to lift his right arm to push back the sheet, and found it restrained. He was hooked up to an I.V., and a partially empty bag was feeding a steady drip of fluids into his vein via a catheter inserted into the crook of his arm. Heart and pulse monitors were attached to his chest and finger. Leads and tubes snaked out from under his gown and fed information into a bank of monitors. He catalogued everything, but was unable to assign it meaning.

"What do you remember?" Sherlock asked, rather than answering directly.

John tried to think backwards in time. They were on a case, following the trail of stolen paintings. There had been a tip, delivered via one of Sherlock's less savoury contacts, about a possible fence working out of a legitimate art gallery. He had gone to watch the comings and goings of the patrons to see if there was any merit to the information before Sherlock decided on his next move...

"I was watching the gallery, making notes of the customers, like you wanted me to..."

Something had happened, but his recollection was fuzzy. John frowned as he struggled to remember, and then he had it. A weedy-looking gallery assistant with a sly expression on his face had come out to load a painting into the boot of a silver Mercedes. Their eyes had met and John knew he had been rumbled. But before he could get away, two men – who didn't look much like gallery assistants or customers – had emerged from another vehicle and cut off any avenue for escape.

"Someone took exception," he said at last. "Two big some ones, to be precise. I think they hit me."

Sherlock nodded. "Behind the right ear. And then they bundled you into the boot of a Ford Mondeo, probably silver, taping your wrists and ankles so you would be less inclined to struggle when you woke up."

No matter how he tried, John couldn't conjure the memory of being shoved into a car's boot. Everything after the confrontation was gone. Except for the memory of rotting fruit, sweet and corrupt, choking him.

"Having overestimated the damage they had done you, they dumped your body in a rubbish skip and left you for dead." Sherlock gave John a knowing smile. "Fortunately, you were only bloodied, and they left your skull intact. Although if you had taken much longer to regain consciousness, heat might have finished what their assault had started."

John marvelled at the recounting. It was as if Sherlock had been present at his kidnapping. "How do you know all this?"

Sherlock shrugged as if the source of his knowledge was self-evident. "There were traces of adhesive on your wrists, and your clothing held a wealth of other forensic data. Lestrade wanted to send it to the lab for processing, but I persuaded him to let me do my own analysis first."

"Heat?" John murmured as a new memory fragment, this time of trying to convey to someone Very Important Information about hyper-something came back to him. He glanced up at the partially empty bag of fluids and one of the words he had struggled for finally dislodged from his concussed brain. "Hyperthermia? Heat stroke. How bad?"

"Bad enough," Sherlock replied. There was a savage undercurrent beneath his clipped pronouncement. "Though your body has been brought down to a more appropriate core temperature, the doctors are concerned about complications."

John had treated his share of heat stroke afflicted soldiers. He knew about the potential complications. Muscle damage. Organ damage. A body temperature that could fluctuate precipitously for several days without warning. "Let me see my notes."

Sherlock frowned, but he removed the clipboard from the foot of the bed and handed it over without comment. John smiled as he read the initial intake comments. "Lucky for me there was an off-duty fire fighter picking up a prescription."

"Her cool head and quick thinking may have cost the shop a soggy floor, but it also may have saved your life," Sherlock replied just as John re-read the phrase episode of coronary asystole for the third time.

There was pain in Sherlock's eyes that made a lie of his aloof delivery, and even though he loathed hospitals and had no desire to be an inmate of one a second longer than it took to find a clean set of scrubs and sign himself out, John abruptly lost the desire to get out of bed. With a numb sense of realisation about how close he had come to death, he dropped the chart onto his chest, causing one of the leads to tug painfully at his chest hair, and sank back against his pillow.

"You've paled." Sherlock reached for the call button. "Should I ring for the nurse?"

John shook his head. He held out his hand. After a moment's hesitation, Sherlock grasped it firmly and then he nodded that he understood. "I'm sorry. I picked a poor time to remind you of your mortality."

A tired smile bowed John's lips. "Your timing wasn't nearly as bad as mine." He picked up the chart and waved it weakly in Sherlock's general direction until Sherlock took it away again. "There's a reason patients aren't supposed to have access to these things. Knowing what's really going on can be bad for their health." He did his best to chuckle, but the short burst of laughter sounded more hysterical than jovial.

Sherlock's grip tightened on John's palm. When he smiled his expression was filled with a seldom seen tenderness. "You need to sleep." Reluctantly, he released John's hand, but not before he had guided it down to rest against the mattress.

There was the tell-tale squeak of a rubber sole against the lino. John recognised the sound of a nurse approaching to let Sherlock know he had overstayed his allotted time. He didn't want Sherlock to leave, and he knew that because Sherlock could read his vulnerability he wouldn't want to go. Reluctantly, John put as much of Captain J.H. Watson into his tone as he could muster given his depleted state. "Go find the bastards who did this to me," he instructed Sherlock. The back of John's skull throbbed and a new memory fragment emerged; that of being struck with a length of metal pipe, and of seeing stars as he was lifted bodily off his feet. He pointed at the aching spot. "And when you catch up to them, return the favour."

When Sherlock's gaze met John's his eyes glimmered with anticipatory malice. As he swept out of the room his smile was that of a fox hunter looking forward to the chase.

John whispered, "Tally-ho!" and then submitted willingly to the fussing of the nurse.

end