To Touch With Reality

Mike walks into the room with a smile. "You know, I'm sure I've found you a roommate that'll stick around this time. His name's John."

Sherlock looks to the man that followed mike; he's stocky and suntanned with military-cropped blonde hair that's been lightened even more by desert sun. He's looking at Sherlock with the bluest eyes he's ever seen.

Sherlock scoffs and turns back to the microscope. "You know I'm not interested, Mike. Do stop plying me with old college friends."

Mike gives him a look. "Oh, come on, give him a chance. He's interesting! Crack shot soldier-doctor, and all that."

John's looking between them with exasperation. "I'm right here, you know."

"Not interested," Sherlock says, resolutely turning the magnification on the scope. He concentrates on the metal rim pressed against his skin.

"But-"

"Oh, just go away, Mike. I'm too busy right now to bother with this."

"Alright, suit yourself. I was just trying to help. I'll be off, then; see you next time, Sherlock."

Sherlock gives him a wave, then only hears one set of footsteps leave. He waits a few beats before sighing and looking up.

John is still there, looking a little guilty.

"What?" he snaps, and John looks away.

"I. Er. I just came back from Afghanistan, alright? I know I've got no right to ask, but can you at least give me a try as a flatmate? I don't really have the money to pay for my own place for more than a couple more weeks, and I love London. I don't want to leave."

He shifts his weight, and it catches Sherlock's gaze.

"What's wrong with your leg?"

"Oh, er, limp from the war, got shot in the shoulder."

"Except that you walked in here with perfectly even footsteps, even after exertion. I could see the fresh sweat on Mike's brow; I know he prefers to take the stairs in the hospital. It's four flights to this room; if your leg was injured, it would have at least become strained from the journey. And yet, it didn't affect you once, until you mentioned Afghanistan."

"So?"

"Isn't it obvious? That limp isn't an injury from war. It's psychosomatic."

John gapes at him. "Do you know my therapist?"

"Of course not," he scolds, "I only met you a few minutes ago. A therapist would not be inclined to tell me both their patient's name and their problems; in the unlikely event that they did, I would have preferred the more likely conclusion that they used 'John' as a pretence to protect your identity. John is a very common name, and as I am unaware of your surname, the likelihood of my knowing of your mental issues previously to our meeting today is rather infinitesimal ."

John gives him a look. "So you figured it all out just from those few clues?"

"Obviously." Sherlock knew what would happen now; the same thing everybody seemed to do when confronted with the 'freak'.

But then, John did something he hadn't expected. He laughed – and it wasn't mocking, or cruel. "That's brilliant!" John exclaimed.

Silence followed.

"Really?" Sherlock asked, after he saw John's enthusiasm fail to wane.

"Fantastic!" John replied with a grin.

Sherlock had to bite back the small smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. "That's not what people usually say."

"What do they usually say?"

"Piss off."

John's laugh came out more like a giggle, and Sherlock felt his lips twitch. Maybe he could wait and see how this flatmate thing might turn out, after all.

Sherlock was always a different type of child; always impulsive and erratic, but so impressively intelligent, with an imagination to match. He wove imaginary characters like candyfloss into being until they were teeming at the edges.

Then Sherlock started to grow up and the imaginary friends didn't go away, and the Holmes family began to realise that something was wrong.

Mycroft found him once in the gardens, slicing open the skin of a frog and pulling it apart with pins. He knelt down next to the five-year old Sherlock and traced the tip of a pin with his finger.

"What are you doing, Sherlock?"

"And experiment," he said, as he pulled something out with tweezers.

"Where did you find the frog?"

"In the pond, by the maple tree."

"That's on the other side of the house, Sherlock. What's it doing over here? Did you chase it?"

"No," said Sherlock, carrying on without looking up, "I caught it and I killed it so it wouldn't move. I can't do this experiment if it's moving."

"Sherlock, it's not good to kill animals."

Sherlock looked up then, to pull a scowling face. "I didn't want to kill it! But I had to!"

"Why?"

"Yorick wanted to know what it looked like inside a frog."

Mycroft had heard that name before; one of Sherlock's imaginary friends, that he'd come up with just the other day. A talking skull.

Mycroft put his hands gently on either side of his brother's face and made them maintain eye contact. "Sherlock," he began, slowly, carefully; "Does Yorick ever tell you to do anything else?"

"Yes," Sherlock nodded, and tried to turn back to his experiment but Mycroft's piercing attention kept him focused on their conversation. "This morning we sampled all the different types of soil that could be found around the gardens. Did you know mummy has had thirty-three soils from different places planted in our garden? And last night I licked the inside of the microwave, because Yorick wanted to know what radiation tasted like. It just tasted like metal and the leftover cheese I hadn't washed off yet that I put in before to see what it looked like as it melted. Isn't it cool that our microwave has a glass door?"

"Does anyone else tell you to do things, Sherlock?"

Sherlock's shoulders slumped and he tried to squirm away, but Mycroft's hand gripped at his shoulders.

"Tell me, Sherlock."

"Well," said his younger brother, still turning his head to look down. "There's a few. Like Adler. But I don't like her. She's bad."

"How is she bad?"

"She's – she just - she tells me to do bad things."

"Sherlock –"

"No!" he screamed, lashing out suddenly. "Go away! I don't want to talk about her anymore!" He yelled and tried to run away, but Mycroft held on. Sherlock's fingernails dug into his skin and scraped.

"No! I want to go! Let me go!"

They took him to see therapists, and they all said the same thing.

Whenever it was the holidays, Mycroft spent every day with his little brother. They had trained people to supervise Sherlock every day – they had a housekeeper, who was with him in the morning and then took him to school where the controlled environment kept him with other different children, trained staff on hand. The housekeeper was with him from after school until bedtime. Her job now entailed more than just simple housekeeping, and her salary reflected that.

But Mycroft preferred to spend as much time with his brother as possible; he took over for the woman whenever he was home. He wanted to create good memories with his little brother, as many as he could while it was possible.

Because Sherlock needed something real he could hang onto. He didn't like the way the world worked for everyone else; he didn't really want to live in it anymore. He'd tried to run away from it all already (Mycroft found him lying with mummy's pills, or looking for something in the drawer or at the edge of the deep pond) and Mycroft wanted to give him a reason to stay. Memories- good reasons why he should still fight to stay.

"The things you see," a therapist told Sherlock once, "You do know they're not real, don't you?"

"I know that you can't see them," said Sherlock in reply, and then proceeded to explain the affair the therapist was currently having. "No one sees any of that! But I do, and it's true!"

The therapist was flustered, but carried on. "Everything you just saw – It's all still there, Sherlock, even if no one else connects the dots. Your hallucinations only come from your mental illness, not from the physical reality."

But Sherlock found it hard to connect with the physical reality. If he wasn't stimulated – by real people or being focused on Yorick's curiosity – he felt himself drown in the daze of his mind. Sometimes, he would stop completely – just stop, for days at a time. Other times, he could lash out and rage.

Sherlock just couldn't entertain himself. If he wasn't occupied, he felt himself slip and stagnate under the mind that drowned him.

"I'm bored," he told Mycroft, "of everything."

"Is there anything you want to do?"

Sherlock shut his eyes and dug the palms of his heels into them. "There's nothing I want to do," he said as he tried to ignore the things that he saw, "I just don't want to do anything that they want me to do."

"You're a good kid, Sherlock, trying to do good things," a therapist once told him, "try not to let the bad things define you."

They gave him drugs every day; to make him 'manageable', they said. They stopped him from being quite so vicious and brutal. They kept him that little bit more lucid, more aware for more of the time.

He tried to act more normal. The kids at school called him a psychopath; his parents said he was a sociopath. Much better that, they decided, than for people to know what he really was.

When he was older, Sherlock fell in with harder drugs, the kinds of bad drugs he could find in back alley streets with seedy, horrible people. They made him numb to everything; as if he could just pretend like he didn't see anything else. When he came down, though, it was so much worse than the rages, than the time he tried to stab the housekeeper. If it weren't for his brother keeping him under constant guard, he would have done everything that Adler told him.

Mycroft made sure he stayed off the drugs for good.

Mycroft took him shopping for his eighteenth birthday. It wasn't a normal sort of shop; it wasn't much of a shop at all, but big brother assured that he could have anything he wanted.

Sherlock raced up and down the floor with the same manic energy he'd perpetually possessed as a child, until he came to a stop hours later.

His hands cupped a particular skull and cradled it close to his body.

"It's perfect," he breathed, smiling at his brother, "It looks just like him."

Sherlock lived for the cases. They kept him focused; busy, concentrated, active, engaging other people and forcing focus on everything the physical world could express to him. They kept him grounded in reality like nothing ever had before.

He couldn't rely on the 'fun' drugs, anymore. Mycroft didn't have the time to spend every day with him like he'd once experienced as a child. He absolutely refused to be locked away.

Without the cases, his mind rebelled at stagnation.

Jim Moriarty sneered at him from where he pressed the gun against Sherlock's head.

"Gotcha!" he whistled out, vicious smirk twisting his face.

Sherlock froze.

"Not so chatty now, huh, Sher-lock?" Moriarty drew out his name in a way that made him cringe down his spine.

"Didn't think to bring any back-up, did you? Not very clever of you, Mr. Detective."

"John isn't a part of this," Sherlock said with fierce determination. "Leave him out of this."

Then, Moriarty laughed. "Oh! This is absolutely precious! Ha! Ha!" The gun pressed forward with bruising force. "Johnny isn't real!"

The sentence was sung like a nursery rhyme and the absurdity cut through Sherlock's focus like a knife.

"What?"

"Oh, Sherlock, precious. I know all about your little disorder, hmm? Those little friends of yours? Your therapists kept quite neat notes, you know."

Moriarty laughed in his face again. "Oh, you didn't think anyone would really want to live with you, did you? Actually want to spend time with a freak?"

Sherlock gritted his teeth. "Stop toying with me, Moriarty! John-"

Moriarty cut him off with a pistol-whip. "Shut up! Has anyone you work with ever met him, hmm? Does he have any friends that ever come over? Have you ever met his sister?"

"I didn't want to take him to the Yard with me – they know about my mental state, Donovan or someone else would warn him away –" Sherlock tried to sit up from the ground, but Moriarty's boot came down with force.

"No, no, no!" Jim clucked, wagging the gun at him. "You're going to listen to me, young man! You're crazy like me. Crazy like a fox. It's time you left club denial and lived it up with the big boys. We have such good fun, don't we, Sherlock? The kind of interest you needed in your life that your messed up mind felt was missing. Oh, come on, Sherry; I read that little entry you put up on the internet about your new 'flatmate'. Psychosomatic limp? Really? Someone with something so perfectly interesting for you just happens to wander into your life?"

Moriarty slithered his foot up Sherlock's face and tapped at the other man's cheek. "It's sweet, really. Poor little lonely boy had no one around so he had to dream up a playmate. Really, Sherlock, you –"

He was suddenly cut off as Sherlock grabbed his leg, kicked out and twisted until Moriarty was on the floor. "Just shut up!" Shouted Sherlock, and then the gun was in his hand and it went off with a bang.

Sherlock staggered back into Baker Street. He leant against the door as it shut behind him, and closed his eyes as he listened to John putter around the Kitchen. They flew open when he heard a startled gasp.

"Sherlock!" John rushed towards him and gently hovered his fingers over the blossoming, ugly purple bruise on his cheek. "What on Earth happened? Are you okay?"

Sherlock's fingers dug into the knit of John's jumper and dragged the other man closer, clinging to him in a desperate embrace as he let his head drop onto John's shoulder. "I don't care," he mumbled into the jumper, "You're real enough. You're real to me. That's all that matters."

John carefully held him back, tightening his grip in concern. "Of course I'm real, you idiot."

Sherlock looked up into John's blue eyes. "Don't leave me," he blurted out.

John looked surprised. "Never," he promised, and didn't pull away as Sherlock lent into him again.

A/N: open-ended ending is open to interpretation.

I apologise if I got everything about the mental stuff wrong. This story was inspired by Oprah's: 'Girl with schizophrenia loses touch with reality'. It was a very moving insight into a very different way of life, and I would definitely recommend that people watch it. I hope no one gets offended by this story, as it is a work a fiction, and I mean no harm by it. I don't claim to be any kind of expert on any of this stuff, so it's probably gonna be a lotta wrong, but I hope you still liked it.