Author's Note: Dear everyone, thank you so much for all the support you have given this story. I have to say its been the toughest one I've ever done in terms of feedback, and there have been times when I've felt like throwing all my toys out the pram and giving up. But that would be pointless, and its the kind support from you that has kept me going. I hope this last part lives up to your expectations and answers all questions.

And just to reassure you, if you are waiting, Three Weddings Part 2 is in hand. I promise.

Three days. Three days during which John watched Sherlock and tended to him, nursed him and said nothing. Three days for the anaesthetic to leech out of his system, and the antibiotics to topple over this second, more insidious infection. Sherlock slept and John watched him. Meals came, and John fed him. The physio came and pumped Sherlock's wasted muscles as he lay on his bed, and John watched. Biding his time. Listening to his own heart.

The understanding grew inside him, minute by minute. Mike Trevose was right. There would never be a better time, and it was up to John to make it right.

On the morning of the second day, Sherlock had blurrily asked for them to shift the locker between the beds and move them together, so that John would be closer to him in the night. For part of that afternoon, he clung to John's hand, drifting in and out of sleep while John read to him. It was as if he knew something was coming.

John had made his mind up to wait, though. He wanted to be sure Sherlock was over the delirium and confusion of the infection, so that his mind would be clear. He wanted Sherlock to remember, and to understand what he had to say. He knew Mike was watching him, but he was determined not to rush. He would wait until the time was right, and then he would tell Sherlock, and ask for an answer that would decide the future course of his life. No more waiting, no more uncertainty. One way or the other, he would finally know.

Day four. Sherlock woke softly, gently, to find John sitting on the side of the bed watching him, holding his hand. He blinked and frowned.

'Thirsty,' he croaked.

John held the glass and the straw while Sherlock sucked at it. He watched the detective's cheeks hollow. Then his head flopped back onto the pillow and he panted for a minute or two from the effort.

'Enough?' John asked him.

He nodded.

John put the glass back on the top of the locker and took up Sherlock's hand again.

'You look about to burst,' the patient said.

'There's something I need to say, something I've been needing to say for a long time.' John told him. 'Something important.'

'You're leaving, aren't you?'

'No! What makes you think that? Where would I go?'

'Back to your wife.'

The words hung between them.

'You know?'

'Yes.'

'How?'

Sherlock huffed. 'Don't be an idiot! Of course I would have kept my contact network going in London! Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to-' But then the effort and emotion was too much and he collapsed into wracking coughs. It was several minutes, and more water, before he could speak again.

'Look, Sherlock-' John began.

'No. Go back to Mary.'

'Maria. Her name is Maria. Why do you always do this? Why do you spoil things when I'm trying to make them right?'

They were scowling at each other. John struggled back to his original purpose.

'Look, my marriage is over. Actually, I don't think it ever really began. We're getting a divorce. I shouldn't have married her. She's a good woman, she deserves better than being married to a man who's in love with someone else.'

Sherlock blinked at him.

'Yes, you pillock, put that in your pipe and smoke it,' John snapped. 'I love you. I always have, but I'm pretty sure you've always known it. Right from day one. So now I'm saying it. Properly. I love you. I'm devoted to you. You can do whatever you want with it, but here I am, and I'm staying because I've got nowhere else to go, and you're the only person I want to be with. Forever, right? The rest of my life.'

It had come out angrily when he had meant it to be a seduction, a romantic enticement. But Sherlock never made things easy. His way was always to complicate affection into a fight. No matter how frustrating, it was who he was, and John still loved him.

Only now he was looking pretty startled. Then, after a moment, he spoke. It wasn't what John expected him to say.

'I slept with Irene.'

It was like a punch in the diaphragm. John reeled for a minute and then struggled to regroup.

'Yes, but that was ages ago. Before.'

'No. Mycroft told you she was dead, didn't he? She isn't. She's living in Paris. I went there. After. I had sex with her. It was a disaster.'

'She's dead. The Taliban killed her,' John repeated, dazed, as if the repeating would make it true. And then he realised that if Sherlock could come back from the dead, then anything was possible.

'Look, Moriarty had a sniper on you that day,' Sherlock wheezed on. 'You, and Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade. They'd have killed you all if I hadn't jumped. Those were Moriarty's instructions. As soon as I realised he was the only one who could call them off, he blew his brains out-'

'He's dead?' John almost shouted.

'It was his body that fell, his body you identified as mine.'

'Don't be ridiculous! I'd have known the difference between you and that evil little runt-'

'Not with a dose of HOUND inside you.'

'But-'

'The cyclist who knocked you over?'

John gawped. And then it dawned. 'You'd pre-planned it all,' he gasped. 'You had help. Accomplices.'

'You would have been killed on the spot otherwise. What else could I do, John? I couldn't watch you die!'

And he collapsed back into wrenching coughs, his whole body convulsing. Head spinning, John held him till it was over, arms about bony shoulders, helped him to more water, waited for him to recover.

Sherlock went on, panting now between sentences. 'Once a contract is issued, the only way to terminate it is either to withdraw it, or to terminate the operative charged with it. Since the former was no longer an option, I had to undertake the latter. I had to stay dead long enough to eliminate the men contracted to kill you. If they'd had the slightest inkling I was alive, it would have been over, John, you have to understand that! I couldn't tell you, no matter how much I wanted to! And I did, believe me!'

He sank back into the pillow, ashen-faced and struggling for breath. John watched the cage of his ribs rise and fall in anguish.

'All this was to save me?' he managed after a while.

Sherlock nodded weakly. 'To save you and to take down the last of Moriarty's organisation so it could never threaten us again.'

'But you were going to come back?'

Sherlock looked away.

'You weren't?'

'I thought you would be safer without me. I couldn't bear the thought of anybody hurting you.'

'So you would have just left me to rot?'

'You started a new life! As far as I knew, you were happy!' He managed to supress more coughs, his body curling up away from the pillow as he clenched his stomach. 'Oh, God.'

John pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingertips and screwed up his eyes. It was all totally insane, but it had that undeniable Sherlockian logic to it, logic that failed entirely to take account of the emotional component of human behaviour.

'You couldn't bear to watch me die, so you made me watch you die instead? You know how fucked-up that is? I nearly killed myself, did you know that? I had the gun in my hand every night for months. The only thing that saved me one night was Lestrade walking in on me. That would have fucked up your clever little scenario, wouldn't it?'

Sherlock's eyes widened. For a moment, he seemed to judder, and then tears came, silently streaming down his cheeks.

'Yes, you've been a complete arse, haven't you?' John said, cruelly. 'Why the hell did you come back to London anyway?'

'To find the last one, Moriarty's last henchman.' Sherlock looked up at him, eyes pleading. 'Moran. His favourite. His Capo di Capo. He's still out there, somewhere, and he knows about you. But then they found me.'

'The Russians?'

'Yes.' Sherlock fell silent for a few moments as he wrestled with the truth. 'I lay there in that cellar and I knew I was going to die. Really die this time. It focusses the mind, doesn't it, that kind of realisation? And I knew then. The only thing that mattered. You. I had to see you one last time. Even if you hated me, I had to see your face, hear your voice. One more time. So that it was all worth it.

'So I waited. They made a mistake eventually. I knew they would.'

'They overestimated how sick you were?'

'Oh, no. They had a doctor on hand at all times to see to that. They underestimated my will to see you again. They left a door open. They thought I was too ill to get up and use it.'

'But you did.'

'I remember-' He frowned, his eyes on the far distance as he struggled to piece together fractured memories. 'The river. Darkness. Calling out for you. Then you came. Or I thought you did. It was as if you were there, beside me in the water, giving me your strength. I knew you'd find me, somehow. That we'd find each other. Does that sound ridiculous?'

He sniffed away the tears a little and started coughing again. John got a tissue and blotted his love's face.

'The mind is incredibly powerful,' he said.

'And then you were there,' Sherlock rambled on, lost in the scrambled memories of his trauma. 'Really there, holding my hand, and I thought I was dead, I thought I was in heaven. Because you were my heaven, John, all that time in that cellar. I don't believe in God, but I believe in you.'

They were both shaking. John felt like his heart had been minced. The tissue fell from his hand, unnoticed, onto the floor. He leaned forward and began kissing away fresh tears from Sherlock's cheeks, and then found that he was weeping too, and their tears mingled. And he kissed Sherlock's full lips softly because he couldn't think of anything more right, more perfect, at that moment.

'I'm so sorry, I really am,' Sherlock croaked.

John gazed down into his many-coloured eyes. 'I know, love. I know.'

'But you're going to make me say it anyway, aren't you?'

John raised a quizzical eyebrow.

'You've got me, heart and soul, John,' Sherlock groused. 'I don't see why you need me to come out with some stupid cliché to prove it!'

'Humour me.'

'Alright, I love you,' he huffed.

'Thank you.'

'And you won't leave?'

'Nope.'

'Never?'

'You're stuck with me now, so you'd better get used to it.'

'Good.'

John slid his arms around the fragile frame and snuggled up on top of the blankets, holding Sherlock as gently but as firmly as he could. Sherlock buried his face in John's chest with a sigh.

After a while, though, John's curiosity got the better of him.

'So what was she like in bed?'

'Mmmm?'

'The Woman?'

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'Come on, spill?' John pressed.

'Like fucking a cactus.'

John laughed. It was exactly what he wanted to hear, and Sherlock obviously knew it because he went on.

'Seriously, John, that woman is incapable of any kind of tenderness. I'm sure she tried, but it was like having sex with an industrial saw mill. Huge mistake. I threw up afterwards.'

'That bad?'

'As bad as you could possibly imagine.'

'So you didn't manage to-'

'Well, I didn't say that. A man has some pride, after all.'

'But on the whole? Scored out of ten?'

'I would say about minus seven hundred and twenty three.'

'Please say that again, it makes me very happy.'

'Gloating isn't nice, and it isn't funny.'

'Just now, I think I have the right.'

'Like I said. Cactus.' Sherlock lay in his arms, wheezing softly for a while, but in the end, he couldn't resist it. 'So what about you and Mary?'

'Maria.'

'Yes, alright, Maria. On a scale of one to ten?'

John shrugged and made a face. 'It was nice.'

'Nice?' How Sherlock managed to drip sarcasm in his current state was beyond John.

'Yes, nice. Nice is, well, nice, sometimes. When you're lonely and miserable and grieving for the love of your life, nice can be just what you need. And there weren't any obvious cactuses around at the time.'

'You could have gone to bed with Sally Donovan,' Sherlock suggested, mischief in his eyes.

'Oh, God, not even in jest, Sherlock, please!'

'Out of ten?'

'Alright, five.'

'Five?'

'Yes.'

'Pitiful.'

'It's a damn site better than minus seven hundred and whatnot!'

'Granted, but it's not good for someone you are married to.'

'It's probably better than most married people average! Anyway, as I said, I wasn't really in a fit state to judge at that point.'

They lay silently together, still and gentle in each other's arms. Then, just when John was sure Sherlock had drifted off to sleep, he heard his voice, a faint whisper.

'When this is all over, and I'm better, would you consider making love to me?'

'Yes, Sherlock.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'Only, I think I need a little of your tenderness.'

'You can have as much as you want.'

'Really? Thank you.'

'But not till you're better.'

'Okay.' There was a slight pause, and John could almost feel Sherlock's brain buzzing against his sternum.

'John?'

'Yes?'

'I've never been with a man before.'

'Neither have I.'

'Oh.' Slight pause. 'Will it be alright?'

'Out of ten?'

'Yes.'

'I should say if it's you and me we're talking about, probably about plus seven hundred and ninety-three. Or so.'

He felt Sherlock's cheek move against him, the muscle bunching into a smile.

'That's what I thought,' he whispered, and drifted off to sleep.

The End