To my much beloved readers, I can only give you my heartfelt apology for taking so long to continue this story. Some difficult things have happened to me over this past year and so I haven't been able to write. However I don't think it's fair for me to leave these characters in purgatory any longer so... let me finish what I started.

Through the intoxicating smog like haze of morphine, he could see the faint glow of light shining through the thin skin of his eyelids. The light had a thick, almost gelatinous consistency and the longer he looked at it the more it felt like the light was attempting to ooze its way inside the creases of his eyes and the pores of his skin. It hurt, in the same way that migraines and bee stings and friction blisters hurt. It was a slow building pain which began at his eyes and trickled down into the hollow nothingness that his body currently was. He had felt like this before, like someone had taken a knife and hollowed out his body until he was nothing more than a bag of skin stretched across bone, but he couldn't remember when. He couldn't remember anything beyond this moment of insistent light and building pain.

Something was changing though, he was starting to feel things. The more intense the light became the more he felt like he was being drawn further away from the expanse of unconscious numbness that he had been tethered to for days. He could feel the weighty drag of his limbs, almost as if he was being pulled across the sand smooth floor of a dark ocean, and as he watched the weak pulsing of the light intensify he became aware of his own heart contracting and relaxing in his chest. And then he became aware of other sensations, like the stinging pressure of a needle lodged in the crook of his elbow and the metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

He tried to move his head in the direction of his arm but the action caused the world to spin so violently that he felt as if he might vomit. He tried to speak but his throat felt so raw and his mouth so clogged with dried blood that all he could do was groan out a few incoherent syllables. He was about to groan out again when suddenly from nothing he began to hear something, he heard a voice, a man's voice. The man spoke with urgency but the words echoed in the empty chasm of his brain and he couldn't understand what the man was saying. The memory of the voice and the man it belonged to were being held just out of reach of his consciousness and the more he struggled to remember the more the memory seemed to fade. But the man kept on speaking and as he spoke he began to bring with him other sounds, those belonging to other voices, to bleeping machines and dripping IV lines.

And then the light and the pain intensified. More needles were being slid into his arm and his heart was beating so hard that his lungs began to burn. He wanted to cry out but he couldn't, there wasn't enough air, there was too much pain. All he could do was lie still and listen to the incoherent voice of the man – the man who now sounded like he was screaming – and feel his body shudder with each aching contraction of_

Everything stopped. The light died, feeling was lost, the man no longer spoke. There was nothing until, suddenly, he felt his body pulsing with electricity as he was shocked back to life. His eyes flew open and he caught a brief glimpse of blurred figures and scorching light before he failed again and everything retracted to nothingness.

The light had returned although this time it didn't hurt. It was waking him up. The smoggish haze had receded and, despite the fierce aching of his head, he was finally able to open his eyes. At first the world was nothing but a blur of colour but after his eyes began to adjust to light he was able to make out his surroundings.

It was early morning, he could tell because weak golden light was falling through the bare window and onto the green hospital blankets covering his bed. He followed the stream of light to where it landed on his forearm. The skin around the crook of his elbow was bruised various shades of yellow and blue from where numerous needles had been forcibly pushed into his veins. He stared at his abused flesh for a long while, trying to recall how it had happened. He opened his mouth and relished the feeling of clean air replacing the stagnant breath that had been trapped in his mouth for however many days he had lain in this bed unconscious.

After a while he turned his attention from his arm to the rest of the room. It was vacant however there was a chair sitting in the corner of the room facing the bed and a paper cup full of some sort of steaming liquid perked on the window sill. Someone had been here and someone was coming back very soon, but he couldn't find it in him to care, he was being pumped full of too much morphine to think about anything more than the steam flowing out of the cup. As he watched the steam swirl and dance in the early morning light he felt his eyelids growing impossibly heavy and even though he fought to keep them open darkness claimed him once more.

The next time he woke it must have hours, or possibly days, later. The window was dark but the room was being dimly lit by the reading lamp affixed to the wall above his head. Although the room was half cast in shadows he could still make out the suit clad figure that was sitting in the empty chair of the morning.

The man had yet to notice him as his eyes were bent towards his lap where he was writing on a document with a heavy looking fountain pen. His suit, although expensive, appeared to be somewhat creased from days of continuous wear. His pale skin had taken on a sickly, ghost like pallor and the crease in his brow had grown significantly more defined. He stared at the man for a few long moments until comprehension began to bleed back into his brain.

He opened his cracked, bone dry lips and hoarsely managed to whisper, "Mycroft."

Mycroft Holmes looked up from the paperwork he had been completing and stared back at him. His ice blue eyes were surrounded by skin tainted purple from lack of sleep and his chin was covered in a fine, almost invisible, layer of stubble that had yet to be strategically removed. He looked haggard and drained, older even, and overwhelmingly racked with worry. The two men stared at each other for an immeasurable amount of time before Mycroft's lips curled into a small, barely perceptible, sardonic smile,

"Ah, Dr Watson," he said, placing his pen gently down on the stack of papers in his lap, "What a pleasure it is to have you back with us in the land of the living."