"I think I'm going to die," Sherlock told Molly. Didn't that mean she was supposed to be in on all the plans? Then why does he end up on her slab doing a pretty good imitation of a dead person even for her line of work? A slight miscalculation in the wind speed, a small misstep and even the best laid plans of mice and consulting detectives…

XXXX

Will crying help them, John? Sherlock remembered asking his friend not long ago. The answer was no; and it was still no, but here Sherlock was, on the roof of St. Barts, crying, Moriarty having left the door to the archives of his mind palace wide open after he'd left the building so to speak.

Sherlock stepped to the precipice not wanting to look down. A car backfired from somewhere in the blur below throwing him off balance. He rocked on his heels. His arms windmilled to pull him back – but back to what? His grotesque evil "twin" who just blew his brains out? No, that would only mean more death and either way he'd be alone. The backfire echoed, which was actually a good thing, it drowned out the thrumming of his heart which would soon be silenced. It drowns out John's screaming. This is chance if ever anything was, less than fifty fifty and either way it would end in heartbreak. Somewhere in his childhood tucked away in his bed with a book lying open in sleep-slackened fingers he'd soared with a Lost Boy with no shadow, become a pirate, fought Captain Hook; but consulting detectives can't fly. He lets the next backfire carry him over the edge like a starter's pistol.

XXXX

…Wheels; why were they always squeaky? Didn't anyone else notice those grating, spinning rubber casters that hadn't been oiled for who knew how long? Sherlock clamped his jaws together and counted each click-click of the wheels of the gurney as they rolled over minute grout lines in the tiles of St. Barts. His body hydroplaned around on blood and water in the plastic mat. The cotton sheet over his head dulled the fluorescents flashing overhead and still he counted - twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one – th –

And then the lights went out but the gurney didn't slow. Maybe he'd closed his eyes? No. They were open. The voices all around him muted until they were silent and still they sped on. Yet another door bashed open with his head it seemed this time. He forced his eyes closed and swallowed the panic; it was scarcely darker than with them open. And there were supposed to have been three hundred and thirty tiles precisely to the morgue, a hundred and twenty fluorescents, one lift-flight down, two thousand, two hundred, and twenty one licks to get to the center of those wonderful American Tootsie Pops Mycroft had brought home each year at Christmas when he was a kid and yet here he was, formaldehyde doesn't lie … and where the hell did that memory come from? Something was very wrong with his mind palace.

XXXX

If he breathed it was imperceptible under the white sheet that drooped over the steel table. The celebratory air in the morgue annoyed Molly Hooper so much that it wouldn't take Sherlock to point out her intense eye tick.

"Glad you get to do the autopsy," Donovan sneered to Molly making scissor motions with her right hand and picking up a bone saw to inspect with the other. "Almost like revenge for the freak's taunts, eh? Maybe you can give her a hand, Anderson, see what's wrong with his brain." The female cop positively beaming with pride pulled the sheet off of Sherlock's feet. "Wonder if what they say is true, then, about big feet?" She then made to pull the rest of the sheet up to put her naked trophy on display for all to see.

Lestrade cleared his throat, snatching the blood-soaked fabric from his subordinate's hands before she actually got to fulfill her perverted pleasure. "That won't be necessary, besides last I heard you two were going to lift a few pints in celebration."

"Right, we'll save a stool for you at the pub," Donovan called over her shoulder as she shrugged her jacket on, narrowly missing Anderson with a sleeve as the door swung into his face. Anderson sheepishly opened the door and had to speed to keep up with his colleague. Donovan turned around, mouthing to Molly, let me know, and pointing to her feet while gesturing toward the figure under the sheet with her index finger wiggling back and forth and that horrible grin on her face.

"Well, I'll leave you to it then, Molly, the head sees no conflict of interest here so…" Lestrade trailed off.

"Leave me to it? There's no it, I mean I don't, you know … what Donovan said…" Molly said helplessly as she covered up Sherlock's feet like they were indecent.

Lestrade put his hand on the much shorter Medical Examiner's shoulder. "Yeah, sorry about Donovan, she can be a bit..."

"Of a pig … I mean that in the … not in the cop way … Ohhh!" Molly stammered.

Lestrade tried his most understanding face on; under any other circumstance this would have been hilarious.

"I'll call you with the results you requested," Molly assured, body language if nothing else escorting Lestrade to the door.

"I'm not going to the pub. I'm going upstairs to check on John; got himself a nasty concussion colliding with a bicycle. The least I can do is tell him he's been released on his own recognizance for punching my boss. I convinced him to drop the charges based on Sherlock's manipulations and the kidnapping." Even as Lestrade said the words aloud it was apparent they were bitter in his mouth. "Then I'm going home, there's nothing to celebrate," he seemed compelled to add.

Molly nodded. She figured as much. It didn't seem to please Lestrade as it had the others that the young man who had been so insufferable to all of them, and a master criminal to boot, was dead. There was even regret on Lestrade's face like there was something missing he couldn't quite put his finger on despite all of the evidence before them laid out like a gift. The door closed, the dark shadow beyond the frosted window disappeared and Molly lifted the sheet.

XXXX

Sherlock would know everyone was gone, even with his eyes closed he would sense the change in the air, the diminished scents, the shuffling of feet on the tiled floor. And he'd confided in her. He knew he could trust her. So why didn't he open his eyes?

"Sherlock? They're gone. I did everything you asked. You can open your eyes now…"

Molly let out an involuntary gasp and stumbled back a step despite the fact that she expected the sharp intake of breath long held by the person on the table. It just wasn't every day that one of her patients moved or breathed.

"It's aliiiiive!" Molly yelled just under her breath, her attempt at humour failing her utterly.

Not that she expected him to laugh.

But he didn't come up with an insult to let her know how utterly un-funny she was either.

He didn't open his eyes.

The only thing that betrayed Sherlock's death-like visage was his clamped jaw and the oddly controlled intake of breath that he held so well moments before, even under the glare of the fluorescents and the gloating police gawkers who'd come to pay their last disrespects to the criminal mastermind who'd been their puppet master for so long.

"Sherlock, open your eyes, you're scaring me," Molly asked nicely.

It was just like Sherlock to be obstinate at a time like this. To sulk. Just like John Watson had often described in a fit of irritated venting from time to time.

"Sherlock Holmes, you open your eyes this instant!" Molly demanded, hands on her hips that she really surmised he could somehow see, even through his tightly closed eyelids.

So she tried slouching. He always told her off for that.

"Sherlock, this isn't funny. Look, I helped you, what do we do now?" Molly's voice took on an air of pleading. Not that Sherlock ever responded to that…

He opened his eyes, the effort ripping a breath from him like a death rattle. His shaking hand reached for his chest and his lips moved, counting along his ribcage under the goose- bumped flesh in the cooled room.

Molly gathered some clean towels and ran them under warm water, having to make due with hand soap to wipe away the sweat and blood from Sherlock's brow.

But the blood was supposed to come off. Sure, it was his blood; that was the whole point; there could be no mistaking the DNA. It had been a perfect plan. Sherlock was to pour his stored blood over his body just after plummeting out of sight.

"You're bleeding!"

For one second, Sherlock's countenance reverted to his usual, but rather more casual, well, duh mode and in that moment he'd silently reminded her that she was a medical examiner and should be used to blood.

"No, don't pull that with me. Not tonight. My patients don't usually bleed anymore. I'm allowed to be a girl about this. Lord knows you don't let me be one any other time," she scolded as she none too gently raked the cloth across his chest eliciting a cry of pain that she was ashamed to admit shocked her. Sherlock Holmes; if you pricked him, he did indeed bleed. Hm…

Blood pulsed lazily from a cut above Sherlock's right eye. Molly fished for some bandages in the first aid kit on the wall for mishaps with staff but the cut revealed by a little cleaning would need stitches. She continued her examination. Sherlock's stomach sucked in at her touch as her fingertips lightly palpated his chest.

"Sherlock, your ribs are broken," Molly informed the bruised corpse on the table as she looked around in a bewildered state for a stethoscope. Before Sherlock closed his eyes she made a mental note to look for a penlight to check his pupils which were eclipsing the blue eyes she never noticed … ever.

"Clothes?" Sherlock gasped to Molly who was hustling just out of his sight.

The gurgling in his voice told Molly everything she needed to know before she even put the stethoscope she'd liberated from an office across the hall against his chest.

"I think your left lung is collapsed. You have six broken ribs but I think they're all intact; it must've been the fall. Molly pulled an ancient X-ray machine across to the table.

If Sherlock could have rolled his yes, he would have as Molly set the machine and ran for cover behind a wall.

"It – was – wasn't the f- fall - it was the sudden stop at the bottom," Sherlock ground out through clenched teeth. "If the bloody – weatherman could get his – story straight – There would have been no = open windows f-for me to hit on the way down - GAH! This wouldn't – have happened. I practiced - everything when Mrs Hudson was - attacked and I threw the = perpetrator out the window several times. He was o-okay, well – except for –perhaps some…"

"Sherlock, you have to keep still. I need some pictures of your chest," Molly coaxed. "And strictly speaking, this X-ray machine is for corpses, it's not inspected for radiation output as often as it should be so be a good boy and make the pose count."

Sherlock's head dropped back onto the pillow she'd given him as soon as Lestrade left and Molly knew he'd love nothing better than to give her one of his famous sighs of impatience but the fact that he didn't scared her.

"M – Molly. I have to get – out of here. You can't be implicated – in this – if you haven't touched me yet. Tell them – th-that – you went to get some – tools and – and – I was gone when you got back. It was never – my intention to get you – into trouble. Where are m-my clothes? Molly, please."

He said please. That was never good.

"You know what, Sherlock? No. There I said it," Molly snapped the X-ray into a light box rather loudly for affect. "You might be smarter than me in most things, but I'm a doctor, not a mouse. Did you know that? I didn't spend all my schooling cutting up corpses and dissecting frogs. And you = have a collapsed lung," she informed him, tracing her distinctly unpolished finger over a sad image of Sherlock's left lung.

"C –clothes, Molly. Now," Sherlock demanded.

There was fear in Sherlock's eyes that no one but John Watson had seen a very long time ago in a moor not so very so far away.

"If you try to leave now, you're going to die for real. We have to give this up. I'm calling a surgeon. This is bad, Sherlock. You can get treated and then with your stupid brilliant mind you can escape later."

"I – I didn't do any – of those things they said. Don't tell John; I just wanted one person to – to know. I can trust you, M – Molly Hooper. Now let me go." Sherlock gathered the sheet around his shivering body and forced himself up. His feet touched the floor and he balanced for a minute, quite convincingly. He needed no one. Then he slumped to the floor. His lip bled from where he'd bitten it to keep from crying out. Sherlock Holmes didn't cry.

Indecision raced through Molly's entire being as she knelt beside the curled up body on the floor. Sherlock had warned her that if anyone found out he lived, they would fall victim to a war that for once, he had no control of.

"Okay, I'll be right back," she promised the curled up figure on the floor.

He relied on the sound of her footsteps to stay conscious until he could no longer hear them and then he imagined them as hard as he could until his diminishing senses picked them back up. She was alone. She hadn't betrayed him. Her steps faltered a few times; so she was carrying a heavy burden and towing something behind her, he deduced.

A sterile sheet hit the floor none too gracefully. Various instruments and a laptop littered the sheet a second later. A masked face appeared inches from his.

"Sherlock, you have to straighten out. I need to drain and re-inflate your lung," Molly coached sternly through the cotton mask covering her mouth and nose.

Sherlock's eyes found the laptop open to a Googled page as he did further damage to his blue-tinged lip complying with her command.

"L – Lung inflation f-for dummies I ass-assume?" Sherlock gasped, the chords in his neck standing out against his pale features, sweat beading on his forehead.

"You're a git, you know that, right," Molly said fondly as she fumbled with an oxygen mask and placed it over her patient's face before readying a needle and tapping a vein in his arm.

Before Molly could insert the IV needle, a strong hand clasped hers.

"You can't – give me - anything for pain," Sherlock gasped, his watery eyes betraying his need. "Con-concussion, remember?"

Molly dropped the needle and jumped to her feet, her hand clasping her forehead.

"I could've killed you."

"You didn't," Sherlock assured her. "I doubt it would have worked – anyhow - I have a – history w-with that stuff. Not too = proud of it."

"Sherlock, I'm not good at this. What if I kill you?"

"- 'm d-dead anyway," Sherlock gasped, locking his blown pupils with hers before his back arched up off the floor and his shoulder blades and the back of his heels were the only parts of his body grounding him to the earth.

"No, you're not, damn it, Sherlock Holmes! I'm a doctor, not just a medical examiner!"

"Y= you're a = Trekkie?" Sherlock gasped, the mask over his face fogging and clearing with each pain filled syllable.

"Let's just say I had to research the history of Vulcan to understand you," Molly said, smiling under the cotton mask. She waited for him to tell her how un-funny she was but he silently studied the parts of her face that were showing instead, focusing on her eyes.

"You're n-nervous," Sherlock pointed out as Molly started an IV with normal saline.

And he got one of his well duh, eye rolls right back.

Sherlock hated the noises that escaped his lips as fingers probed the intercostals space between his broken ribs. He sucked the oxygen from the mask greedily trying not to cry out. He kept his hands clutched to the mask until Molly commanded him to keep his left arm down and out. "Okay, this is going to really hurt but it'll be over quick," Molly said not too convincingly as she raised the scalpel. "Ready?"

He wasn't.

His forehead wrinkled. His eyes scrunched shut. The scalpel cut into his chest. And it was going to burn the heart right out of him. Moriarty's fantasy fulfilled. His heart thrummed, pulsating in his temples like a geyser whose only release was the new hole it was tapping in the top of his head.

"GAH! Make it st –stop!"

Fire replaced breath before his world went black.

XXXX

"Bad idea, buddy boy. Of course Molly likes corpses anyway, that's why she was always vying for your attention. Now she can put you in a jar on her mantle and you'll be just as charming and warm as you were in life. In fact it gets better than that, I'll buy you a double honeymoon urn once I burn her too and you can both burn in hell. Boring. This was so boring. I could watch Coronation Street if I wanted a soap opera, 'oh, he didn't die after all; it was his evil twin or some other nonsense."

The back of Moriarty's head was missing, his voice coming maybe from the black gaping maw or the jagged pulpy marrow behind it. The sound was dimensional; it was inside Sherlock, burning hot as the torch clutched in his arch enemy's hands.

For an insane minute, Sherlock was validated; only an 'arch' enemy could pursue after death. Take that John Watson. People did have arch enemies. Well, special people anyway.

John … he would never know the truth. That he really was the best friend Sherlock ever had; that he was the only one who could really make him laugh; that truth be told, the doctor was in fact one of the smartest people he'd ever met and that was saying something when your name was Sherlock Holmes.

"Sherlock! Come on! Don't do this to me! You have to fight!" Molly's voice pleaded and Sherlock could hear the tears hit the sheet beneath his body.

"Yeah, come on Sherlock, I'll race you to her!" Moriarty taunted as he turned his back and started running into the abyss before them, his grotesque head contents spilling behind him, his torch, weapon of choice for heart burning held aloft like an Olympic torch.

"You can't have her! You can't have any of them!" Sherlock screamed after his arch enemy.

XXXX

The wheelchair in the corner was useless; there was no way Sherlock's newly re-inflated lung would withstand the ride to the parking lot and subsequent folding of his tall frame to get into Molly's Mini. Molly peaked from the partition window as she took another X-Ray of Sherlocks's chest. Sherlock moaned and willed his hands to obey not to claw at the spasm in his chest as his muscles reacted to the recent assault of re-inflation.

"It worked," Molly said into the speaker, allowing herself a minute before she'd stitch up the incision. Thank God.

Molly wished Sherlock would close his eyes, not that there was any possible way he could see her hands shaking as she concentrated on making tiny, proper stitches. After all, none of her other patients had ever complained, scars were the least of their problems.

Sherlock's hyper-vigilant senses heard every knot tied with each stitch, the cold Betadine solution Molly sloshed liberally down his side and the hesitation on his left side with each breath he pulled.

Too noisy.

He tried to go to his mind palace but it was closed for renovations, yellow crime scene tape with razor wire barring the entrance.

Too noisy.

Molly tried to wipe the sweat of concentration from her brow uselessly with the back of her hand. Vinyl gloves squeaked on her brow before scraping across her tied back hair.

Too noisy!

He squinted and tried to breathe, his broken ribs floating in place but disconnected, sloshing around in him mingling with the loud tattoo that beat like a drum with each heartbeat into his ears. A single tear betrayed him as it overflowed his eye socket and spilled down his temple making him shiver before it splashed onto the sheet beneath him.

"Done," Molly soothed.

But she wasn't.

Tape ripped off in measured amounts, gauze unwound from its roll, a bandage application ignited every sense in his torso which sent messages like a frenzied switchboard operator through every nerve in his body.

Too loud.

"M-Molly, 'm gonna be…" Sherlock slurred as he ripped the mask from his face and rolled to his side with a silent spasm of agony.

Molly pressed a basin against Sherlock's chin, her hand gentled on his back in circles. A few more wretches and he rolled back onto his back with nothing but a moan left in him. Even in Molly's haste, she breathed on the stethoscope to warm it, startled at his ever heightened sense of touch. Sherlock Holmes had seemed impenetrable even by the sword but in one of life's greatest ironies, the pen was mightier. What must it be like to be him? To have every thought and sense refuse you downtime until you had to drown it out with music that you had to physically be a part of, to concentrate on with every fiber of your being just to drown one tenth of it so you can think?

Molly hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath but the respite it had given Sherlock's ears was more than welcome. So too was the return of her breath after she finished listening to his.

"It's still good," Molly said, shaky relief evident in her voice.

Sherlock lay panting after expelling the water Molly had allowed him to rinse his mouth with before fixing the oxygen mask back into place.

There were no windows in Molly's dungeon to tell the time, no clock on the wall, the clients who were usually here were at their very last appointment, no pressing schedules any longer. But it was time to go.

"Molly I have – to get out of here," Sherlock told her, carefully controlling the few slurred syllables he could manage.

"You're not going to make it, Sherlock," Molly told him.

"I'm dying then?" Sherlock asked, sounding infuriatingly indifferent.

"No, you're not dying," Molly scolded. "I meant you're not going to make it out of here on your own."

"No one - can know I'm alive," Sherlock gasped, sucking one more breath of oxygen from the mask before trying to discard it again.

"Then no one will," Molly vowed. "I told you I'd help you."

XXXX

Sherlock made an effort to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth against the pain as Molly helped him onto a gurney and zippered him into a black plastic bag which was covered in tacky velvet. She tucked his IV under his arm and left an inch gap near his head. She hid the portable oxygen next to his feet. She pushed the gurney up the slight incline to the morgue parking area unnoticed by anyone. She pushed the button and the glass doors opened letting in a whoosh of bitterly cold air. And this is where her plans ended.

"Okay, we're outside," Molly said without need, for the flaps of the black plastic were whipping about in the wind. "I don't know why we couldn't have called a cab. I could have disguised you."

"They'd know," came the weak but resolved voice from within. "Look around, Molly. Do you see an unattended work van, a hearse, anything with the engine running?"

"No, nothing. Sherlock we can't just…" Molly trailed off as Sherlock shushed her into silence.

"Molly … am – ambulance over – over there," Sherlock whispered and Molly jerkily slapped the corpse's hands down as he accidentally gestured beneath the body bag

"Stop moving!"

…Wheels! Why didn't anyone ever do anything about that infernal racket? The shocks and struts of the parked van not five feet in front of them grated on Sherlock's nerves as it rocked back and forth like it was going over a gravel road with twenty years of neglected potholes.

"Van's – a rockin', Molly. Go – uh, knockin'." Sherlock thought he was rather clever to have retrieved the rhyme from the rubble in his brain from the bumper sticker on a van used in a murder on one of his cases.

"What?' But Molly did as she was told. There really was no choice and he'd never steered her wrong before. But then again he was out of his mind with concussion and low blood pressure.

The noise of the ambulance doors creaking open scraped across Sherlock's

shattered brain. The subsequent scream of a woman made him retch but he stifled his will to curl into a ball to escape it.

"What the bloody hell are you doing!" the nurse screamed as she jumped up from her straddled position over an orderly who drew his pants up nearly to his chest in his haste for cover. But Molly had already captured the Kodak moment on her mobile and pressed send to her email.

"Right then, if you both value your…" She glanced at their ring fingers in disgust. "Marriages and your jobs, you'll get lost right now and say nothing or those pics will be on every billboard from here to Timbuktu. You saw nothing, you got me?"

The nurse nodded, red blotches replacing pale cheeks as she hiked her white skirt back down and pulled up her nylons.

"It wasn't love," Molly mocked. "She never took her duty shoes off. Good deduction, eh?" she whispered behind her.

The nurse and orderly vacated the ambulance. "And don't look back," Molly called after them.

Molly fumbled with the gurney and with an, "OOF!" Sherlock rolled into the ambulance, hitting the far wall.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Molly shouted as she slammed the ambulance doors.

"No – you were bril – brilliant," Sherlock said as she released him from his velvet tomb. His eyes closed in relief as she fitted the oxygen back onto his face.

"Where were you going to go? Where should I take you?"

And for once in his life, Sherlock Holmes didn't have all the answers. In fact, he didn't even have one. None of this was supposed to happen. He swallowed the panic but it only made his legs feel numb. He wished Molly would stop taking his pulse; he could assure her verbally that his heart was beating because it was in his throat, the password for his mind palace flashing locked over and over again as the concussion won out and he knew no more.