Throbbing.
Everything. It was all pain.
He knew of people who broke when they were like this. He couldn't remember where or why he learned this, he had long ago discarded the information in favor of further compacting his mind.
The smaller and tighter together all of JohnHamishWatson was, the further and more protected he was from Them.
He had to hide as well as he could, or they would find him and drag him out of his mind and out into the open where they could break him into little pieces. Break him like they break his body.
Hurt. That's what outside was. That's what awareness and being in touch with his useless body was.
SherlockHolmes would say something about the mind being superior to it's carrier. He would tell JohnHamishWatson that his emotions associated with the torture orchestrated by the Them were meaningless and distracting. They were only hurting him more. So JohnHamishWatson made sure to put a block between himself and them.
They weren't as important as The Names. He was supposed to remember them, just in case he saw the people who owned The Names.
The two most important were JohnHamishWatson and SherlockHolmes. Then there was Harriet(Harry)Watson. Then . All the others weren't important enough to waste strength reviewing. He still held onto them anyways.
He had details on them. All too hard to review though, except JohnHamishWatson because that one was most important. He had to protect it, or everything would break and crumble.
Everything.
That would make him die.
Hurting. He was hurting again. Always. Hurting.
It meant Vulnerable. Which meant Dangerous. Which meant Death.
That was not good.
He knew Them wouldn't kill his body- not purposefully anyways. But the mind where JohnHamishWatson lived was a bit more than fair game.
They said it was funny. The Them.
They said it was funny to watch him squirm. They said it was funny to smear food over his bony Halloween-skeleton ribs and mock him when he tried unsuccessfully to lick it off. They said it was funny to tie him to a rope and play Pendulum with him over a fire.
JohnHamishWatson didn't think they were as funny as they thought they were.
They thought he was wrong.
To prove it, they made him lay in a coffin with mutilated human parts for days.
When they took him out he did readily agree they were very funny.
Letting them be funny scared him so badly though. When the Them came to get him he froze up in place every time. Like a rabbit.
The only time the Them weren't scary was when they decided he was cute. They said he made cute faces. They said he looked like a hedgehog. When they decided he was their pet hedgehog, they would then decide they were Thebestpetowners and hug him and pet his hair and feed him and tell him he was a good pet. He would comply and play Pretend with them as long as they wanted.
Because they could only be Thebestpetowners for a while before the game got boring.
And suddenly he wasn't their "good pet".
He was their prisoner. And prisoners were entitled to torture.
No matter how much like a cute hedgehog they were.
So they ran cheese graters and sandpaper all over his skin until he looked very sunburned, and they experimented with things that lashed like chains and belts and wires, and they experimented with things that dug in like fish hooks and knives and needles and teeth.
And they laughed when he screamed. And they laughed when he cried.
And their smiling faces began to hurt as bad as both experiments.
So JohnHamishWatson made it a rule not to look at smiles.
When they dressed him up like a princess and made him kiss their feet, their eyes sneered and told him he wasn't human.
So JohnHamishWatson made it a rule not to look at eyes.
He tries really hard to hide from them. He really did. But they just kept sneaking in through cracks in defenses caused by Pain and Emotion.
Weakness.
And they would grab at him and jerk at him and say through their spiteful laughs "come out and play! We want to break you John{Hamish}Watson!" And with every grab they chipped JohnHamishWatson.
He knew it would destroy him if he couldn't find a place they couldn't get to.
.•∆•.
He was alone on the floor.
It was time for their Snacktime. That's what they told him with high pitched giggles and clapping hands.
Snacktime.
It gave him the vague sense that he might have once thought they were a little insane.
He wondered why he didn't now.
The topic is dismissed and unimportant and he moves onto a more immediate goal.
Getting them to play Thebestpetowners again. JohnHamishWatson knew he needed to be handled gently right now. There were glass walls in his brain around JohnHamishWatson and the Them were very close to it. Until he could refortify, he couldn't afford to have them break his walls.
It would hurt. Even more than experiments.
So that was why he was currently listing all he knew about hedgehogs.
It had been info he hadn't thrown away simply for safety's sake since they had been fond of the game around the time he had been pushing away memories and compacting.
Hedgehogs burrow. He idly scratches at the concrete below but recognizes it's a bad idea.
Hedgehogs rely more on smell and hearing due to poor eyesight. Not useful.
Hedgehogs can hibernate (but not all do). He considers it before dismissing it as impossible.
There was a fairytale called Hans my Hedgehog about a boy who was half hedgehog. It didn't appear to be helpful unless he began playing bagpipes for lost kings.
Hedgehogs curled into balls to protect themselves. Oh. He did do that sometimes, didn't he?
JohnHamishWatson shifts against the cold concrete, trying to ignore the stinging in his back. For some reason, as he ran over the short list again and again, the first one seemed to resound in his mind.
Maybe that meant he knew something, somewhere in his mind, that enabled him to use that in some way.
There was no place that could be used for digging in this room. Everything was too hard and would break off his sore nails (bleeding from clawing, reacting to pain). There was nothing he could take from either the Them or the cell to go through concrete.
He couldn't think. He knew this. What was it?
It reminded him of a riddle book. One of the riddles had been about an insane asylum (Why did he keep this memory? It wasn't even clear enough to remember) and a patient trying to escape. There were saws and hammers and all kinds of random objects not frequently found in mental hospitals.
There had been several different answers.
Not one had made any kind of logical sense.
He felt like the patient. How could he twist that word, burrow, so it became some sort of twisted clarity?
No burrowing into concrete. No using tools to burrow. No using Them.
Burrow. Burrow. Burrow.
If he couldn't burrow physically... Could he burrow some other way?
In his head somewhere maybe?
Where?
JohnHamishWatson stood at the center of himself and looked around.
There were a lot of options. But... Perhaps the best would be...
Straight down?
.•∆•.
It was like walking straight into a pool.
A sudden, straight drop.
And he was gone.
He was in a very, very deep place in his head.
He wondered if SherlockHolmes ever found this place in his mind. He wondered if it was part of the Mindpalace.
He wondered if it was safe.
It felt safe.
He seemed to be completely disconnected from the outside here. The only pain he could feel was mental strain. It was a nice change.
Maybe he could stay here. Move in and unpack, burrowed deep in him mind.
Protected.
A safe burrow. The thought itched and reminded him of something similar.
Wearing a stiff uniform. Being ushered frantically with others into a small building of stone and down.
A bomb shelter.
A shelter in his mind. Like the Mindpalace, only not.
A Mind Shelter.
There really is a Brother's Grimm story called Hans My Hedgehog. Like a lot of Grimm stories, it doesn't seem to make sense in the way real life tries to.
I looked up hedgehog facts for the sake of accuracy, but only put down a few because it would have been weird if he just so happened to be an expert on them.
Internet memes aren't so funny when sadistic authors reference them.
