Let's go with number 6: What’s your favourite piece of dialogue you wrote this year?
Oh bless you for taking pity on my neglected ask box lol! And forgive me because I want to actually include the dialogue, but that means this answer is gonna be a bit lengthy. Pretty sure this fic is one of the best things I came up with from s4, and dang how I wish something like this had been on screen. From my one shot Night Shift…
His brow furrowed again. “What could you possibly have to feel guilty about?”
She licked her lips. “Nothing I did, of course. It’s more how I feel sometimes.” The next part was what really got her pulse racing. “How I feel when I see you.”
She could feel his focus on her heighten at that moment, and the lightness of mood very quickly vanished.
“Do you know what I thought that day?” Molly asked, going on while twisting one of the buttons on her cardigan. “When Mrs. Hudson called and told me what had happened? She told me everything and I- I though-“ She stopped, feeling her breath catch again, having to whisper her next words. “Thank God he’s alive.”
Sherlock looked almost terrified as he watched her eyes well up again.
Molly gulped back some tears. “And every time I see that beautiful baby girl, and I see John barely able to get up every day and put one foot in front of the other…” She inhaled in gasps. “In the same breath I feel myself thinking about how glad I am that you’re still alive and here with us, and then I hate myself for being so selfish!”
She didn’t dare look over at him then, but kept her eyes safely downward and only occasionally lifted a hand to wipe the moisture away from her face. He was silent, and she was grateful. Because in that moment she wasn’t sure she’d want to hear what he was thinking. She’d come this far and figured she may as well keep going.
Molly blew out a heavy breath and then leaned back. “I wish they could have Mary back. I wish that for John and Rosie, I really do. And I’d do anything to make that happen!” she said firmly. But her face crumpled again quickly. “But God, I’m so grateful it wasn’t you.”
There was a long silence as Molly took cleansing breaths and dried her face. She had almost begun to wonder if Sherlock had decided to mentally check out. She wouldn’t blame him. Probably not the best timing for her to heap her emotional burdens on him when he was just doing his level best not to shoot up in the loo.
“It means that much to you?”
The low sound of his voice made her finally look over. And what she saw made her eyes cloud over once again. He looked awestruck and humbled, his eyes searching hers desperately.
She licked her lips and nodded. “Yeah, it does.”
He pressed his eyes shut, turning away for a moment before looking back at her just as intensely. “How can it? How is that possible?”
Molly felt the blood pumping in her ears again. “Because it’s just- that’s how much I, um-“ She faltered and chewed her lip for a moment. She was going to try again, but she forgot how when she felt his hand enclose hers.
She looked over in shock. He wasn’t looking at her, but his hand was squeezing hers so tightly and his thumb was moving just a bit over her knuckles.
“Thank you,” he said, almost inaudibly.
He paused for quite a long time and Molly was too frozen in awe to move or say anything else.
“I know I have certainly considered it an error,” he added. “For Mary’s life to be lost in place of mine. The trade seems so incredibly unjust.”
Molly could barely stand to hear him speak that way. “Sherlock, nobody feels that way. No matter how destroyed everyone is to lose her, nobody would ever want to lose you either.”
He turned and his eyes reached out to her again. “Yes, but don’t you see? Nobody else has said it. They’ve all admitted it can’t be changed, I’ve been helped and supported, and even forgiven and assured I’m not at fault. But I hadn’t heard anything like your words till now…thank God he’s alive,” he said, repeating her wording with a very slight tremor in his voice.
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He opened his eyes, cotton-mouthed and gasping on the floor. His limbs were leaden, slow to respond. Â
 Sherlock was crouched over him, warm palm cupping his cheek, the tips of his long fingers just barely brushing against the hair at his temple. His other hand was up against John's neck, a light pressure, measuring his pulse.
 John worked his jaw, struggled for words. He tipped his head to the side. His vision swam.
 The red rug was scratchy under his cheek. There was grit caught in the fibres, little bits of dirt and gravel. Sherlock could probably identify where it had all come from, could map his steps through London by the dirt he'd left behind.
 He blinked once, hard, struggled to focus. The room was very bright. There were clouds behind Sherlock, grey clouds, thick and rolling along the far wall.
 No. Not rolling. Static. Patterned. Wallpaper.
 "Wind," he said, because it seemed important. His voice was slurred, his tongue heavy and sluggish in his mouth. "East wind."
 Sherlock's grip tightened on him. He slipped his hand from John's pulse point to brace against his back, helped him to sit up. The room righted itself with some reluctance.
 John shifted, groaning a little bit, frowning as his hand pressed up against something sharp. Glass. Broken glass all around, a jagged mosaic surrounding him on the floor, and the ugly red rug seeping out beneath him like a bloodstain.
 The chair was tipped on its side, one cool metal leg pressed against his right arm.
 There was a breeze. The sound of birds, of light traffic. John turned his head, slowly, and looked at the sliding glass door.
 It had been shattered. Knocked half off of the frame.
 Well, that explained the glass on the floor.
 Sherlock still had not spoken. His eyes were quite wide. There were tiny cuts on his hands, thin rivulets of blood where the glass had bitten. He hadn't wiped it away.
 His hands were shaking.
 There was a pink line just over his left eyebrow, new skin, freshly healed. Barely noticeable.
 John had put that line there. So. He noticed it.
 The silence had grown heavy, strange. Sherlock's face was pinched in a way that John could not recall ever haven seen before. He was not wearing his coat, nor his suit jacket. He did not typically go out in just his shirtsleeves, even in warm weather.
 John craned his neck, found the coat and jacket on the ground, tossed aside. A hasty, careless pile. Not at all the way Sherlock normally treated his clothes. John stared. Sherlock's gloves were slumped lifelessly by the door. They were torn, dark and wet at the edges of the frayed leather.
 He looked again at Sherlock's hands, at the blood smeared on his knuckles.
 "I'm not dead," John said, just to have something to say. "That's—surprising." His throat was dry, and his voice emerged graveled and hoarse. It seemed very loud in the close stillness that had enveloped them.
 Sherlock's right hand went back to his pulse point, smoothing along the skin at his neck. His fingers quested, stilled as they found their target. His eyes did not leave John's. He shook his head, once, slowly.
 "Sherlock," John said. "You're scaring me, a bit, now."
 Sherlock blinked. Paused. Blinked again. His grip tightened, released. Life crept back into his face, his eyelids fluttering. He drew a breath.
 "This was in your neck," Sherlock said. His voice was very quiet. He lifted something from the floor, pinched between his fingers. A dart.
 "She shot me," John said. She had been holding a gun. A real gun. Of that, he was certain.
Sherlock jerked his head in the direction of the toppled chair. John shifted, craned his neck.
 There were two singed holes in the chair back, the white leather curling outward. Someone (Eurus) had taken a knife to it, had split the fabric in a jagged grin beneath the holes, a grotesque parody of the smiling face on the wall in 221B. Chair stuffing poked through, soft and gauzy, not unlike clouds.
An investigation of a series of strange occurrences leads John and Sherlock to the Welsh Marshes, to face ghosts weird and ancient as well as close and personal.
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 I really meant to write something sweet, and instead it came out super angsty. Whoops!
 It was later, after the pulse-pounding rush to the hospital, after wrenching Culverton Smith away from where he loomed, flushed and dangerous, over Sherlock's damaged frame, after the crackling tension and nervous silences and raw, disbelieving laughter—after all of that, that John found it.
 He'd left St Caedwalla's in an odd state, at once jittery with nervous tension and sluggish with a bone-deep exhaustion he thought he might never again shake off.
 Mrs Hudson's Aston Martin, with its gleaming paint and butter-soft leather seats, had only added to the surreal quality of his evening.
 He'd driven it back to Baker Street, had traveled slowly, cautiously, as if to make up for his frenzied, harried driving only hours before. His hands shook where they gripped the wheel.
 He'd gone inside, had found Mrs Hudson not in her own flat but upstairs in Sherlock's, tidying.
 She'd taken one look at John and burst into tears, and he'd found himself hugging her, making vague soothing noises and stroking her back with a hand that shook too badly to do anything else.
 "Oh, John, we nearly lost him this time, didn't we?" she'd said against his shirt, and he'd swallowed around the lump in his throat, unable to respond.
 My fault, he thought grimly. My fault this time. Again.
 "It's late," he said, finally. He gestured vaguely around the flat. The drug paraphernalia was gone, courtesy of Mycroft, but the room was in a considerable state of disarray. Moreso than usual. And that was saying something.
 "I don't want him to come home to it like this," she said, pursing her lips.
 He opened his mouth to dissuade her, to tell her that, as Sherlock had proven perfectly capable of making the mess in the first place, he should be responsible for cleaning it up. Instead he found himself saying: "Let me help you."
 He thought of Sherlock, gaunt and pale and alarmingly fragile in that hospital bed, his face bruised, his eye red and inflamed. The smile that had tried to curl at the edge of his mouth regardless, the way he'd met John's gaze, the trust that had, somehow, survived harsh words and fists.
 He had not doubted that John would come for him.
 He had no idea how close he'd come.
 And so John busied himself tidying the flat alongside Mrs Hudson, stacking up papers and books and sweeping away broken glass. And it was then, while lifting a pile of waterlogged books from his chair, that he found it.
 The wilted remains of a red balloon, drooped, the hastily-drawn black lines muddled together into something unrecognizable.
He set the books down, picked up the balloon, stared.
 It seemed like a relic from another time, from a time where he still knew how to smile, where he didn't feel like a stranger in his own skin.
 Sherlock had been sitting across from him in his chair, alternating between lengthy silences and rambling monologues on strange and seemingly unrelated topics. John had indulged him for a while, but had eventually found himself bored and restless. He'd gone to the window and watched the traffic creep by down on Baker Street, and his attention caught on a bundle of balloons tied to a table in front of Speedy's. He'd been seized with a fit of mischief—he'd always enjoyed teasing Sherlock, particularly in the odd moments when he found himself able to wrangle the upper hand—and so he'd gone downstairs and pilfered one of the balloons.
 Initially, he'd intended to take advantage of Sherlock's distraction (the world's most observant man, indeed!) and simply pop the balloon behind his chair, startling him, but Mrs Hudson had caught him on his way back up the stairs and asked if he'd mind helping with her Sudoku, and he decided that, rather than startle Sherlock into a fit of pique, it might be nice to buy himself a little time to himself.
 So he and Mrs Hudson had stood in the kitchen and tittered to themselves while he drew a little face on the balloon, and they'd giggled quietly behind their hands as John had tied the balloon to his chair, not making any particular attempt to hide what he was doing, while Sherlock stared up at the ceiling and droned on about soil composition and various species of jellyfish.
 And of course Sherlock had eventually caught on, and he'd been startled and blinking and bemused, and John had laughed, and—
 Christ, how had it all gone so wrong?
 And Sherlock had kept it. He'd kept the stupid red balloon with its stupid drawn on face, and he'd left it in John's chair even as it withered and drooped, even as Sherlock himself had begun to wither and droop.
 Go to hell, Mary had told him, and Sherlock had leapt straight down into the flames, unhesitating.
 My fault, John thought again, and he pressed a trembling hand against his mouth, breathed in sharply through his nose.
 "John?" Mrs Hudson said, and she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
 "I'm sorry," he said, straightening up. He set the withered little balloon back down on his chair. "I have to—I just—"
 She smiled at him, a tired, watery little smile, and he knew she understood.
 *
 There was an officer posted outside of Sherlock's door at St Caedwalla's, but he merely looked up and nodded wordlessly at John as he approached.
You should stop me, John thought, wildly. I'm the one that put him here, don't you know that?
 He went through the door, stood looking down at Sherlock's huddled frame in the bed. Listened to the rhythmic beeping of the monitors.
 His cane was gone. Evidence, now. They'd be listening to it down at the Yard, unspooling all of Smith's secrets. Listening to the rasp of what had very nearly been Sherlock's last breaths.
 He took a shaky breath, went around the side of the bed, sat down. Fiddled with the item he'd brought, tied a string with fumbling fingers.
 Sherlock's skin was sallow and pale in the dim light. His eyes were closed, his breath steady.
 "Are you all right?" Sherlock rumbled without opening his eyes.
 John jolted where he sat, smiled in spite of himself, scrubbed his hands over his face. "Christ, Sherlock, I thought you were sleeping."
 "I was," Sherlock said, his eyes slowly creeping open. "I'm not now."
 John flinched away from that gaze, unable to look very long at that angry red sclera.
 "Just—" John said, and then he sighed. "Just making sure. That everything is—that no one else—"
 "He was working alone," Sherlock said. "I'm certain. Well. Fairly certain."
 "Right," John said. He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable, feeling raw and exposed. He was not sure why he had come.
 "Are you all right?" Sherlock asked again.
 "I'm the one who should be asking you that."
 Sherlock shrugged, just a faint shift of thin shoulders.
 "I should go," John said. "Let you sleep."
 "Mm," Sherlock said, his voice heavy. His eyes drooped, but he turned his head and fixed his gaze on John. "Thank you."
 "No," John said. He laughed, once, a miserable sharp little sound. "You definitely should not be thanking me."
 Sherlock made a low sound, unhappy. His eyes fluttered, bleary, struggling to focus.
 "Look," John said, quiet. He set a hesitant hand on top of Sherlock's, surprised by the warm flush of his skin. He'd been expecting his hand to be cold. "I don't know why we—why this is—" he stopped, looked up.
 Sherlock breathed in quietly. His eyes were fixed on where John's hand covered his.
 "Rest," John said, finally. "Get your strength back. The—" he paused again, pressed his lips together before continuing. "The world needs Sherlock Holmes."
 "Mm," Sherlock said. There was a small smile in his voice, a weary amusement. He shifted his fingers under John's, a quiet acknowledgement. Shut his eyes.
 "And so do I," John said, his voice so low he doubted Sherlock had even heard over the beep of the machines. He cleared his throat, stood up.
 Sherlock did not make another sound. His breathing had evened out once more.
He patted the top of Sherlock's hand once more, then turned and left the room. He paused once more in the doorway, looked back.
 Sherlock's face had gone slack and peaceful with sleep. And bobbing next to his bed, tied to the chair that John had just vacated, close enough to keep watch, was a smiling red balloon.
