Calm
There was a siren blaring, making Sherlock press his hands heavily against his ears. "What is that? What's happening?" he asked desperately. Normally his mind palace was so quiet unless he allowed audio files to turn on, but he hadn't allowed for this intrusive, incessant noise to happen. This was all wrong. He turned at the sound of a metal door clanging open and saw his body wheeling out of a morgue chamber, a gaping dark hole in his chest.
"You're going into shock." he looked up to see Molly, talking calmly despite the noise and his pallid, naked, cold body between them, "It's the next thing that's going to kill you."
"What do I do?" Sherlock asked. It felt strange, such a question coming from him. Usually it was him that knew everything and everyone else clamoured for answers. But now everything was a blur and every sensation that filled him was unfamiliar, so he clung to Molly's calm demeanour and informative speech for answers, clues, directions as to what to do, what to do, what to do. But it was not Molly who answered him.
"Don't go into shock," said Mycroft, sounding bored by his brother's stupidity and weary of his panic as though it were all so trivial and simple, "obviously." Sherlock just gaped at him, stared at him, stunned by it all. But he listened to his brother nonetheless, who had always been so no-nonsense and sensible, and surely such a man as he would have answers for him. "Must be something in this ridiculous memory palace of yours that can calm you down." he continued, and then he stared firmly and resolutely into Sherlock's searching blue gaze, "Find it."
Yes. Yes. All his important memories – ones significant enough to have survived deletion many times over – were stored in here. Something in here would have a calming effect, surely. Classical music, perhaps? Maybe the taste of tea? An interesting serial killer on the loose? No, something more. But what was it? He closed his eyes, the better to dig through the ligaments and fibres of his mind, and thought hard.
John.
There he stood, sun-soaked, every single hair defined and bleached gold by the rays from the window behind him, all of it, however, outshone by the curl of his mouth, the gleam of his incisors, canines, premolars, molars, the wheezy chuckle that breezed past his chapped lips and warmed Sherlock from the outside in, where the constant buzzing and ticking of his mind stopped, replaced by another noise – a constant, persistent beating and beating and beating and beating – becoming louder and louder and faster and faster until it threatened to swallow him, but he couldn't bring himself to care, not with John standing there, smiling and smiling whilst Sherlock whispered his name like a prayer, over and over, until he was numb to everything that wasn't sun-kissed hair and skin and lashes, and eyes that were neither blue nor brown but a million hues of fascinating, and knitted jumpers that smelt of tea and pages and perspiration from running, running, always beside him, ever loyal, ever trusting, ever caring, ever loving, ever John, John, John, John, John…
Calm.
Notes: When Sherlock had been shot and used his mind-palace to figure out how to deal with it, at the part where he was told to cling to a calming thought I genuinely thought he was going to think of John. That's the shipper in me though, heh. I did like that he thought of Redbeard in canon - - so much so that I wrote a story about it - however, this persistent, unyielding shipper within me couldn't banish the thought of Sherlock thinking of John in order to become calm, and so here I have wrote the scenario out. By the way, that John-worshipping spiel is a sentence of 177 words. I think that's the longest sentence I've ever written. Anyway, I hope I wasn't the only one who thought he was going to think of John.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock Holmes, Molly Hooper, Mycroft Holmes or John Watson. They are the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Thank you for reading, I appreciate it.