Oh shit. Too long away and I have exactly zero excuses.

see part 1 for disclaimers.

"They look a damn sight better now, don't they?"

It had taken them nearly three hours to completely neaten up all of Lestrade's feathers but finally the job was done and Lestrade himself was so far into sleep that he resembled a coma patient. The little smile and occasional movement of his eyes beneath his lids betrayed his infrequent good dreams. It was the most peaceful John had ever seen the man: the look suited him.

Smoothed down and tidy, the feathers looked even more beautiful than before. With the soft golden light as well, they looked damn near heavenly.

"He's beautiful," Sherlock replied absently, like his normally rapid brain hadn't really comprehended the statement because John hadn't expected a reply and definitely not one like that. Even more intriguing was the fact that he hadn't realised he'd said something considered odd coming from that mouth: normally Sherlock would have said something scathing like "Of course they look better, John, we've just spent two hours, forty eight minutes and seventeen seconds tidying them" or not deigned to reply to what he considered a stupid statement. Apparently the task had calmed Sherlock's racing mind to the level normal people worked on and John liked it. Maybe he wasn't wasting his time trying to help Sherlock be more human, although he'd made quite a bit of improvement since he came back

Not going there.

So in addition to making Lestrade sleepy and making Sherlock human, smoothing Lestrade's feathers also made John emotionally fragile. That one, John could have done without.

Perhaps it was because he was still running his hands over Lestrade's primaries, the soft fibres surprisingly soothing to John's own mind, still jumping from the adrenaline from getting shot at earlier. The DI was clearly aware of it on some plane of consciousness because he murmured happily in his sleep and snuggled (no other word for it) into the soft blanket John had dug out from the bottom of his wardrobe. It was much appreciated by Lestrade, they could tell.

"Sherlock?" Something had suddenly piqued John's curiosity and given Sherlock's track record with appeasing said curiosity, he was surprised when the detective 'hm?'ed to show he was listening. "How did you find out about Lestrade's wings?"

There was a very long silence, so long that John began to wonder whether Sherlock would deign to answer him. Then in a flurry of quick movements, Sherlock stood up, returned the desk chair to its regular place and left the room, calling back "Tea would be wonderful, John!" as softly as he could, so as not to disturb Lestrade. The fact the he did that at all was testament to Sherlock's regard for the man.

John however stayed in Sherlock's room for a moment, just watching Lestrade sleep. His breathing was soft and even and the little smile just lighting on the corners of his lips made the man look like he was thirty instead of coming up forty five.

When John entered the living room, he found Sherlock sprawled in his customary position on the sofa, hands beneath his chin and staring unblinkingly at a cluster of bullet holes in the ceiling that John still hadn't gotten round to plastering over yet. He had of course done nothing to get himself a cup of tea: John still wasn't sure if it was because, as Sherlock said, he made it better or whether Sherlock was just lazy. Sherlock himself argued the former but John was much more inclined to believe it was the latter.

Sensing that he wuldn't get any answers oout of the man until he was bribed with an appropriately brewed brew, John decided to save himself the trouble of arguing anf put the kettle on himself. While he waited for it to boil, his mind kept drifted back to Lestrade and his wings: the doctor in him was worried that he'd stitched something up wrong, the friend in him was worried that Lestrade would be seriously pissed when he woke up and realised that yes, he had been shot in the wing and the child in him wondered whether Lestrade could actually fly.

Considering the wings were huge while Lestrade himself was barely taller thna John and much slimmer (seriously, than man survived on coffee and the occasional McVitie's, so him telling Sherlock to eat was a touch hypocritical), chances are the wings would be strong enough to allow him to fly. Sherlock had probably done about sixty four complex equations in his head to hypothetically test whether it was possible.

John had to wonder whether Lestrade had ever tried.

Sherlock didn't seem to hve blinked in the four and a half minutes John had spent making the tea but he responded remarkably quickly when John held a mug basically over the detective's face, snapping up to vertical and plucking the boiling mug from John's hands. So used to it that he didn't even flinch in surprise anymore, John simply took a seat in the armchair with his own tea and waited for Sherlock to reply.

It took a while. Sherlock didn't really have a deep in thought expression but John could just tell that he was thinking long and hard about how exactly to answer. Or maybe he already knew what to say, it was just how to say it and how much to censure that was being considered. John hoped for one of Sherlock's typically blunt responses: that way, there was an infinitesimal chance of a cock-up or a misunderstanding.

"I'm afraid it doesn't paint me in a very good light but then you have an infinite capacity for forgiveness when it comes to my attempts to quiet down," Sherlock began. John was certain he had never heard the man speak so slowly when he wasn't threatening a criminal. "I first met Lestrade back when I was a student during my fourth degree. I wasn't hugely interested in university but the opportunity for study and experimentation was an allure I could not resist. As you know, it was there that I was introduced to drugs, namely cocaine and heroin, and once I realised that when I was high my mind would calm down, I quickly became addicted.

"Lestrade arrested me no fewer than twenty times for drug use. Luckily, he never found me before I took it and I never sold a grain of the stuff, so usually it was just an overnight stuff and a disproportionate amount of paper work the following morning. Inconvenient but not particularly dangerous.

"However, I overdosed several times. It was one of those times that I saw his wings the first time.

"My mind wasn't just quiet, it was at the same level normal peoples' minds would be at had they taken my regular dosage, at that level where people believe and do stupid things. I don't remember what I was thinking at the time-"

"Which just goes to show how high you actually were," John chipped in. He hadn't noticed but he was slowly leaning further forward in his armchair.

Sherlock frowned at him, one of those why-are-you-doing-that-it-makes-no-sense looks. "But for some reason, I may or may not have fallen from a fourth storey balcony. Lestrade was nearby and he caught me just under the first floor. My momentum however was much greater than his and we landed on some old biddy's fence, crushing it and one of Lestrade's wings. Needless to say, he was not amused. We took turns nursing each other over the next two weeks and after that it just became something else vaguely interesting. I still got high on occasion and Lestrade would arrest me: nothing really changed."

John sat back and just frowned for a moment. Having a whole wing crushed sounded excruciatingly painful, so it was no wonder that Lestrade had barely flinched earlier (though blood loss had probably helped). The doctor had known for at least a year and a half that Sherlock had once been an addict and most addicts had several close calls with overdoses and spent several nights a month in jail, so it seemed fairly typical of the pair of them to meet like that.

Of course, John also knew that it had been Lestrade who persuaded Sherlock to go clean and work for Scotland Yard as a consulting detective.

"So what did Lestrade mean earlier, when he called you a hypocrite after you said he hadn't been taking good care of his wings?" John asked, just as a thought crossed his mind. "Oh hell, you're not going to tell me that you have wings too?" If he sounded a tiny bit hysterical, he decided to ignore that: it had been a long and decidedly odd early morning.

It was a mark of how truly ridiculous that idea was that Sherlock actually laughed. "Good lord, John, of course not! If I had wings, I would actually use them, not keep them shyly tucked away in his subconscious like Lestrade does," he replied scornfully but still smiling so John knew it wasn't a truly bitchy comment on his intelligence. "No, he was just referring to the fact that I don't eat or sleep quite as frequently as he thinks I should, because I do of course remember than he is quite obviously my mother."

Dear Lord, could Sherlock be sarcastic when he wanted to be.

"Any theories on why he has wings in the first place?"

"Not a one: he won't let me study them properly and he actually manages to avoid my questions whenever I ask him about them, even when I'm being more subtle than Mycroft at one of his oily government parties. Oh, speaking of Hell's slave-driver..."

Sherlock's phone had of course chosen that moment to ring, rather obnoxiously. Thankfully, the detective had actually remembered to change his ringtone from that slutty sigh Miss Adler had set it to: it was now, rather bizarrely, the Doctor Who theme tune because, for all that Sherlock professed to hating the show, he did rather admire Steven Moffat's scripting.

"Yes, dear brother, what in the blazes could you possibly want at five in the morning? Surely you have your beauty sleep to catch up on?" And that tone of voice was distinctly pissy, though this was by no means the first time Mycroft had called the flat or Sherlock at stupid o clock in the morning for something he needed doing.

John still hadn't forgiven the elder Holmes for calling him at exactly two twenty three in the morning just to Goggle something about Claude Monet's paintings. Apparently he couldn't because the House of Lords' Wi-Fi hotspot could only support so many browsers on one device, a number Mycroft had somehow managed to exceed.

He'd woken Lestrade up with a similar request the next night, just as they'd finished a long, difficult, time-consuming and exhausting case. Which made Lestrade's incredibly dark mood the next morning and when he next saw Mycroft perfectly understandable. Even Sherlock had commended him for the dressing down he gave Mycroft.

That had been just before Sherlock had 'left'.

"Whatever, Mycroft, just tell me what you need me to find out," Sherlock snapped. 'Go check on Lestrade before we go' he mouthed in John's direction just before he launched into a verbal confrontation with his older brother. John decided to leave them to their intellectual bashing and make sure Lestrade was comfortable. If they had a case which would require them to leave the injured man alone for a significant length of time while he was recovering, then John was going to make damn sure that the DI would be perfectly safe.

So with a mug of freshly brewed camomile tea ready in the microwave should it become necessary (long boring stake outs had occasionally dissolved into whispered conversations on just about anything, which led to Lestrade confessing that he preferred herbal teas to pretty much anything else), John padded down the hallway to Sherlock's room and cracked the door open just a touch.

Lestrade hadn't stirred one bit, though he would twitch every few seconds and the slightest move of his upper body would make the feathers rustle against one another, like wind blowing through leaves in a forest that Lestrade would probably suit. John stood just outside the door for a few minutes while Sherlock bitched at his brother, first in English then in what might possibly have been a very unusual Spanish dialect, though he was almost certain that Catalan was technically an entirely separate language.

"Yes, alright Mycroft, I'm sure between us we'll be able to convince a heart surgeon and a pharmaceutical scientist to talk to us. Mycroft, I already have access to the bloody hospital! No, we'll take a taxi. No, I've never heard of him, why? Fine, I'll try and talk to hm, though I really don't see why one heart surgeon would be better than another, considering they all have exactly the same education and training. Yes, brother, goodbye."

Well, that sounded like a riveting conversation, though the bit about the heart surgeon and the pharmaceutical scientist sounded like they might be interesting.

"How is he? Can we leave now?" There was a typical bite of impatience to Sherlock's voice: he had a case, he wanted to be away this instant (and they could, for once they were both dressed) but he actually gave a damn about Lestrade and he was trying to show some consideration.

John had to give him points for that.

"Away with the fairies: I doubt he'll wake up while we're gone," the doctor replied. "So, how come we're actually taking this case? Normally anything involving actual doctor-work is only a four or a five."

Sherlock just grinned, that manic, slightly insane grin that always prompted John's hypothalamus and adrenal glands to start working early because he knew what was coming.

"No, this case is an eight easily, if only because of the fact that it should be utterly innocent," Sherlock said. "Grab your coat, John, and make sure you lock the door. We've got a chemical killer to find!"

This probably didn't make up for the hiatus but I've tried my best and chapter five should be up in a few weeks.

Goddamn writer's block.