get you through the night.

Mary’s new flat, more accurately her rich doctor-boyfriend’s flat, isn’t as big as the house she moved out of, but mind you -- still huge, makes 221B seem tiny in comparison, definitely more crammed. What with how her boyfriend’s style doesn’t exactly involve skulls or tightly packed bookshelves, science equipment in the kitchen… Things like that.

He is attending a conference in New York, John knows, her boyfriend, that’s why he turns up at her doorstep in the first place, why he considers it an option at all. She gives him one long lookover, then wordlessly lets him in.

They sit in the kitchen, across from each other, drinking tea out of mugs and he tells her, in more detail than he’s talked about any of this since returning home, what’s going on. She listens. Reaches across the table and puts a hand on his arm. Strokes his wrist through the fabric of his sweater with her perfectly manicured thumb.

John empties his mug.

“How long since your last drink,” she inquires.

“Four hours,” he replies.

“So, we’ve got a couple of hours to get you installed and then, it’s only a matter of getting you through the night, John.”

The night and every day that follows, he thinks to himself, but smiles tiredly, thanking her. Meaning it.

She has him move his things into the guest room, the bed freshly made and everything smelling untouched and unused, no dust, no weird bachelor smells, burned food, old coffee, home. No traces of anything like that.

It’s an almost physical relief.

The first many hours are bearable. They play board games that he can never play with Sherlock, because they both get fed up with the rules and with each other, while he drinks water and coke -- and John thinks about the other man, high as a kite, back at the flat, doing God knows what. Solving cases he’s not supposed to be working, supposedly, or shooting up in the bathroom, it’s all about the next fix.

It’s all about the next fix.

As long as he’s not in control of his own addiction, he can’t help Sherlock with his, it’s that simple. Just as Sherlock hasn’t been able to help him, due to his own little cluster of issues that John, of course, doesn’t know anything about, because Sherlock never bloody well talks about them… any of them… anything personal enough to build on, really…

He beats Mary at Cluedo and then, the first symptoms set in.

He starts sweating first. Sweating and shaking, the restlessness running like an undercurrent beneath the physical aspects of it, making him anxious and irritated, too.

“Okay, benzo time,” he says eventually, voice rough as he gets up. Except, Mary grabs him by the arm and shakes her head.

“You’re not the medical professional here, John, you’re the patient,” her voice is soft, but her tone firm and he stops, stares at her, one eyebrow going up. Oh, he feels like arguing, reminding the nurse how rank works, but he doesn’t, because she continues, “if you want me to help, you’ll need to let me call the shots.”

A shrug as he looks away from her. “Of course, good,” he replies, reminding himself of when he was sent home from Afghanistan, from Yemen. It’s a pattern, isn’t it? Of course, good. The always oh so quaint John Watson.

She brings him two diazepam, two Aspirin and a big glass of water, asking him to empty it. At least she doesn’t insist that he shows his tongue. By God, small blessings.

After the sweating and the shaking comes the vomiting and he stays in the bathroom for a full hour, emptying absolutely everything he’s eaten into the bowl -- which isn’t much, most of it liquid, most of it stomach acid, all of it eating at his throat, at his teeth. He feels sore once it finally starts easing out, the nausea. No matter how many times he brushes his teeth, some of the rankness stays behind. He tries to swallow as little as possible. The workings of his throat makes him remember that time not too long ago when Sherlock and him blew each other on the bed and it was good and he bought the man a bloody engagement ring afterwards, that was how good it was, actually, then…

He drags himself to bed. Mary sits down by his bedside, dabbing at his forehead with a cold, wet cloth and it feels nice. It feels very nice, very good and he could fall asleep like this -- despite not having been able to really sleep for days. He could sleep here, now. He could.

It doesn’t get better, not as such. The symptoms wash over him like a constant ebb and flow and John really has no choice but to let himself be swept away, off his feet. He stays in bed long into the following day, Mary making him breakfast in bed, then lunch in bed, then water in bed and he eats what little he can get down for the nausea, drinks enough water to keep his system on the right track, tries not to think too much about it, about any of it.

All the things that only make him want to scour her flat for beer or wine -- or anything at all pertaining to this particular craving. Somewhere, he is well aware, Sherlock is fighting (or embracing or who the fuck knows) a different one. Alone.

It’s his luck that Mary has her eye on him.

By evening, he feels slightly more human.

By midnight, he once more can’t sleep. He lies awake in the nice bed in the nice bedroom, counting shadows on the walls and thinks about Dana, specifically, a couple of amputees he worked with in Afghanistan, the unchangeable facts. Sherlock. He thinks about Sherlock a lot and shit, he doesn’t want to.

Finally, after an hour of restless shifting about in the sheets, John gets up and pats into the living room in his t-shirt and his pyjama bottoms, feet hushed against the floorboards. He looks around the darkened room, trying to decide where to look first -- and that’s just pathetic, he’s not going to steal wine or whiskey from Mary, come on, but he looks anyway.

She hears him, apparently, and you’d think she were a ninja, right? Bloody perfect hearing. She pauses in the doorway, clad in a t-shirt that’s too big for her, probably her boyfriend’s and regards him with a not quite pitying expression, but close enough that his pride takes a round. He turns towards her, raising his arms to both sides to indicate -- what, that he just doesn’t know? He just doesn’t know, all right.

“Want to talk? I can make tea,” she asks and John can feel how that’s probably the one thing in the world he’s least inclined to do right now. Going through the same stories over and over, messing about with things that are over and done with, Dana’s lower body, mangled, Private Williams’ left arm that he cradled with his right, Sherlock on the pavement, head smashed in, blood everywhere…

He draws in a deep, shaking breath and looks at her, really looks.

It’s not a matter of whether he finds her pretty or not. He isn’t blind, he isn’t stupid. Mary is objectively a very beautiful woman and John’s always liked beautiful women, hasn’t he? Always.

She doesn’t stop smiling when he moves closer, although her eyes take on an edge of something he doesn’t know how to interpret. Maybe he doesn’t really care to try, either and that should worry him more than it does. A lot of things in this constellation should worry him more than they do, but there you have it.

They look at each other for a second or two, then John leans down and kisses her.

Foreign feeling that is.

The deal was 48 hours, his and Mary’s, they’re on the 31rd now, but as they lie next to each other in the guest room’s rather narrow bed, John knows he can’t stay. It’s almost five in the morning now and he can’t stay here with her, not when he’s cheated so intimately on Sherlock, just because they’ve run into a bump in the road and Christ, he’s an idiot, such a big, idiotic cock and -- Sherlock will know, of course, if he goes back to Baker Street now. He’ll be able to tell.

Which is, of course, the very reason John will have to.

No more lies. No more omissions.

No more.