A faintly familiar scene presented itself to him shortly after he closed his eyes in agony. His first cocaine crash in years brought him to the foreign part of his mind, the most intimate part of his being. Lucid, but alienated him from a part of himself he knew too well. He was uncomfortable, but intrigued.
Mycroft Holmes was looking directly to his eyes, drilling a daring stare. Except for his eyes, his face betrayed no emotion. He stood straight and confident. Young, too young for a mask as strained as the one he wore.
He was eleven years old.
Sherlock Holmes was standing beside his brother. Shorter and frail figure beside his older brother's dominating poise. Facing behind, as if refusing to meet the ghost of his other self.
Four years old, according to his now-gradually returning memory.
He recognised the landscape as a fragment of his childhood memory.
There was an oak tree in the distance with tall grass covering one-third of its stem from the roots to the lowest branch. Surrounding it was light green on the ground and spotless white above it.
The tree being the only landscape he could recall as a part of his memory.
A far-fetched memory. Incomplete, partially missing.
He felt broken, glitching with traces of damaged data.
It was when a soft voice speak beside him he realised he was not alone in this fleeting vision of his nearly forgotten past.
"So this is where you lock away all your sentimental mementoes."
The fact that this was merely a dream in his drug-induced restless sleep failed to factor in his suddenly increasing heartbeat when he turned to see Irene Adler, or at least his mind's recreation of her general facade. Her appearance was similar to the persona she had donned in 221b Baker Street. His dressing gown, her plain and straightforward look, without the shadow of her dominatrix side, yet still dangerous and puzzling. Challenging him in a way no one had ever done before.
"It is necessary…." Hearing his own voice was peculiar, he didn't feel like opening his mouth and commanding his vocal chords at all, "In order to pursue the most efficient logical reasoning, one's mind mustn't be clouded by emotions that are prone to lead to subjective decisions and conclusions."
Like sharing the same line of reasoning and being a dutiful part of his own mind, she replied before he completed his sentence.
"You decided to see the world as what it is." Beyond layers and layers of misleading viewpoint,
"Through the perspective of their original purposes." The world he chose to live in.
"A man as a man." Devoid of many factors that form their identities, at first, and then they become suspects, witnesses, victims…
"Object as objects." Evidence, silent witnesses.
"Social interactions as…."
"Contact with other individuals to fulfill a specific intention." Interrogation, investigation, the hunt.
"Friends?"
He paused.
"Friend." John.
"How is he different?" What is a friend to you, Sherlock Holmes, the Great Detective?
"We have a mutual understanding with each other." We share the joy and the thrill of the chase, as well as the pain.
Pain? He started to question himself. Had he now capable of empathy?
His strayed attention diverted him from their conversation. He was suddenly aware of their situation.
For some reason, she was sitting on a sofa (the one from her Belgravia home, he could tell), holding a teacup in hand (which upon closer inspection he identified the distinctive pattern as the one from an identical set that he and John were served to in Buckingham Palace). He was staring down at her one step away, hands behind his back.
There was no dead hiker this time, just them and the company of his incomplete memory, unmoving.
She brought pieces of external information to invade his deepest memory, almost like trying to fill the holes and the gaps.
A glance at Irene and he saw curiosity, the same kind she was indulge in when she asked him her not-so-delicate question: Have you ever had….
"Me?"
I'm sorry, "What?"
"I'm not your friend." You have but one.
"No." He agreed.
"What am I, then?"
He answered with the first word that came into his mind every time he considered this question to himself countless times before.
"An anomaly."
She raised her eyebrows, challenging him like when she dared him to guess the passcode of her most intimate heart, protecting her life.
His mind had manufactured this mental representative of her from his memories of her. But Sherlock calculated it was no more than 75% accurate, a surprisingly low percentage for his mind's standards.
He grew agitated.
"How very thoughtful of you." As she spoke, he considered her vocal qualities.
"You are merely a mental representative of your real self."
"Your mental representative of my real self. Not a reliable one, mind you. My voice could be too deep…"
"Too hoarse, too low, or a hairbreadth too high." His frustration was showing.
She sounded amused when she speak again, leaning to him but still far beyond his reach on her seat.
"The memories which you've taken as a base to form me in your subconscious…"
"Are too dubious." He could never read her after all, "Not enough data." He almost sure he was gritting his teeth.
To his surprise, she offered a different explanation. Emphasising her position as a part of his mind, logical no matter how potentially compromised his analysis was.
"Or you are simply in the process of erasing them."
He dismissed it immediately. "That's not true."
For a moment she stopped teasing him. With a smile, she lifted her teacup slightly, initiating a gesture of taking a sip. But she stopped halfway, frowning as if something wasn't right.
Sherlock briefly wondered what this gesture means when she dropped another question.
"Why wouldn't it be the truth?"
He answered without hesitation. "I didn't travel all the way to Karachi to save you and then forget."
"So you saved me for the memory of it. Your triumph over me, the damsel in distress. You, ever the knight in shining armor." Not a hero. "But you already took satisfaction from defeating me at the time by taking my cameraphone, you wouldn't need to come at all. Was it really your massive ego that you ride on all the way from London to get to Karachi?"
Her voice drifted to a different frequency, changing, shifting.
He fell silent. Knew that he don't have the answer to her sarcastic remark.
She steered him to a different direction.
"What am I doing here?" A whisper.
Sherlock looked away from her to find the frozen scene of his far younger self and Mycroft standing side-by-side again. It took quite a while for him to recover the memory, but now he remembered their mother had taken a picture of them. It was a scene inside an old photograph capturing their rare moment of sharing each other's space, being unusually together. That was the reason they weren't moving. They were a memory of a preserved memory inside a fading picture.
Irene Adler was present to fill the holes and the gaps of one of his most intimate memories.
"I…..somehow connect the notion of death to you." He was dead to the world but very much alive. She was dead to him but turned out alive.
Once again proving her origin, she retorted.
"Or loss."
"Or loss. " He agreed unwillingly.
"A concept of melancholy. You think about me when you're…."
"No."
"Sad."
He was taken aback by her words, stammering "If…if you're suggesting that I…"
She caught him mid-sentence.
"Oh, but I'm not the one suggesting it, Mister Holmes. You are."
He continued forcefully. "That I have succumbed to sentiments by saving you…."
For a second he was astonished.
Only Irene Adler would manage to make him flustered in his own dream. The idea just made her seem more dangerous for him.
"It's very you, actually." With a flick of her delicate wrist she tipped her teacup.
"Trying to deny yourself of ordinary feelings and emotions." Sand came pouring out from it onto the intangible ground that he couldn't see. He was hypnotised by its flow.
"Even when your own," She cleared her throat. A voice from a different frequency. "subconscious plainly surfacing them for you to see. To feel."
A breeze passed and brought the endlessly flowing sand along, scattering them in the air. They reminded him of a cold desert night. She was there too at the time…..
"Maybe it's time for you to wake up, Sherlock."
When Sherlock opened his eyes and lifted himself groggily from the bed drenched in his cold sweat, the first thing he saw was his room's window ajar. It brought in the noise of morning traffic and hasty spring breeze of New York City to his mostly empty room.
As he approached it, he noticed a small post-it note sticking to the dusty glass. A hand of the most feminine touch had written a mischievous warning.
You'll need a stronger lock, darling. But stay away from windows, nonetheless.
x
He grinned involuntarily.
Hey-ho folks
I deliberately made this ambiguous, so I'm terribly sorry if it's kinda horrible. There might be some grammatical mistakes too, I was high on school exam materials when I wrote this. So, so sorry.
And yes, the ship indeed sails.
Drop an insult or a question or anything, please!