Warning: References to drug use
Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock
Chapter 1 – Slipping
It had been too long. It was nearing a month since any case was interesting enough even to grab his attention, let alone to inspire him to leave the flat. His boredom had started exactly three weeks, five days, twenty hours and fifty-three minutes ago. He was used to the boredom; that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that it was nearing its final stage.
Sherlock's boredom had always developed in stages, each one easier to deal with the number of times he experienced it. The first stage was irritability. This was the one that John seemed to hate the most, though that was probably only because it was the one that he had to endure the most often. In the first stage, he would get snippy and shout at everything – even trees; he had once complained that one was 'too green'. Even now he still wasn't entirely sure what he had meant by that.
The second stage was the experiments. For this, he needed to venture out of the flat, for – despite his constant insistence that it was needed – Bart's refused to offer a delivery service for body parts. So he would leave the comfort and boredom of 221b, and hail a taxi bound for the hospital. He would come back with various body parts – eyes, ears, a head – and begin the experiments. He could hardly remember the last time that he had managed to finish an experiment, for usually half way through, a case would call for his attention and the experiment would be left festering and forgotten in the kitchen – again, much to the doctor's annoyance.
The third stage was the need to use patches. Patches were used most often during cases themselves. The kick of nicotine helped him to focus when, when a particularly irksome piece of information seemed determined to remain hidden from him. Yet when the third stage hit, he needed the same kick to stop himself going completely insane.
The third stage had ended exactly five hours, twenty-eight minutes and three seconds ago. Now, he was at the mercy of the fourth and final stage. The most dangerous stage.
He needed drugs.
"I'm clean!"
"Is your flat?"
He hadn't said anything in response to the Detective Inspector's question, because he didn't feel right lying in front of John at that particular time, and he couldn't admit the truth to the makeshift drugs squad. The drugs were hidden in the violin, accessible only by the utilising of tools and a very steady hand. The police would never have found them, but he knew where they were, and right at that moment – 1:15am (and eighteen seconds) – they were calling to him.
He couldn't answer that call. He wanted to, oh how he wanted to, but he couldn't. He couldn't disappoint his army doctor. John knew of his former – and current – problem with cocaine, he had done since the fake drugs bust on the evening that he had moved in. Since that night, Sherlock had left the violin alone, and he could now forget what was hiding within it when he played it at all hours. Since John had moved in, though the correlation was not statistically plausible, the time between cases had never stretched long enough for him to reach the fourth stage. As a result, the doctor had yet to experience it. And Sherlock would like to keep it that way.
John was upstairs, asleep, blissfully unaware of the turmoil his flatmate was in on the sofa just down the stairs. Sherlock briefly entertained the idea of asking the doctor for help. But that would mean that John would see him like this, and that was not something that the detective ever thought he would be able to live with.
In the end, he had no choice.
"Mycroft Holmes."
"Myc," he gasped, using the nickname he only ever uttered in stage four. "I… I… help me."
"Where are you?" Mycroft asked. Sherlock knew that it wasn't a ridiculous question; the last time stage four had hit, he had waited until he was already high in an alley in a backstreet of Covent Garden before contacting his brother.
"Baker Street," he answered. "I haven't taken anything. Yet."
"I'll be there as soon as I can."
"Thank you."
The phone line went dead.