Did a quick rewrite, nothing drastic.
I'm so exited that people are actually following this!
chapter 3 up soon!
It had been three hours since Sherlock had vanished, the pass code to Jeremiah Balusi's laptop locked away in his mind. He had been waiting until the computer was retrieved, waiting to impress everyone as he opened it with five precise keystrokes and used the photographs on the hard drive to link Sanders back to the human trafficking operation which (he was planning to remind everyone) had thrived so verdantly under Lestrade's jurisdiction. He was already choreographing his great reveal on the way from the tube station to Scotland Yard when the chemical in his coffee made it impossible to resist the clinging hands suddenly pulling him into the back of a nondescript blue minivan.
His body is some faraway island founded on whimsical irrational faith.
Through the fog he hears questions, he hears his own voice but it's sleepy, garbled under the horrible weight of drugs.
Flashing lights bring him a moment of hope, his eyes cast upwards through the haze, people are running, there are shouts about cops, and inventory. Then someone strikes him, there's a cruel jab at his shoulder.
The source of the pain doesn't register for a moment, and then it hits him.
Sherlock inhales deeply through his nose, only fighting for a moment to cling onto his sanity before his head rolls back and a sudden rush of delirious joy blossoms in crinkling laugh lines around his eyes. Chemical euphoria gushes across his brain, sparking through his skin like an orgasm.
...breathe...
His heartbeat rocks him gently, and succumbing entirely to the deadly liquid ecstasy in his blood he lets his head drop to his chest. He's just so tired…
"Shit!" the word hangs sluggishly, meaningless in the vacuum of Sherlock's mind. He can feel the weight of his brain in his skull, rolling like a bowling ball between his ears.
"Sherlock?"
J-o-h-n his cortex supplies over a few seconds which seem to me melting into days.
"Sherlock!"
His head falls against something warm and fruity smelling, J… what comes next?
"Cummon, look at me." Sherlock's eyes open half way and focus somewhere far beyond John's face, pinprick pupils shine in steely grey pools.
Sherlock winces at the sudden terrible pressure of fingers lifting his head. But oh! The movement causes the room to spin, as if he's attached, tied down to that horrible rubbing weight in his skull. It's a cannon ball, a boulder, a black hole grinding itself to dust in its own gravity. He's atlas, with the world on his shoulders, Prometheus, chained to the accursed rock.
His hands are tied behind him, he has no idea if it's been days or mere hours.
With a gasping shutter and no bodily control to aim anywhere but down he vomits into John's sweater.
"I'm shrry," he mumbles and blacks out for a second.
"It's alright, you're fine, just breathe Sherlock."
There are fingers at his throat and they burn like needles pushing into his skin. Breathe, he chokes, he can smell blood.
"Cut his wrists free!" someone orders and a moment later Sherlock feels his body being guided by confident hands to fall limp into a sea of wool and a chemical compound which he cannot identify as artificial strawberry fragrance.
John's confident hands are on his shoulders, guiding his fall as his feet skid uselessly underneath him.
His head touches the floor and his eyes roll back.
"No, no, no!" a frantic order from somewhere long ago and abstract. "Keep your eyes open, say something." His body's burning, every vein is lined in grey ash, and he can feel the crisp regularity of his heartbeat slurring.
"Sherlock? Speak to me."
Sherlock considers vaguely why John doesn't reflect so much light from this place between the atoms in his own body. It's dark. He so wants a rest, for the first time in his life he wants to take the slow route. Sleep for a bit in the place where his brain had once been.
"I need to know what they gave you." John's voice is serious, and a little bit afraid.
"Whathey – gave –m?" is all he can manage to articulate, his tongue feels like a strip of beef jerky down his throat.
"Sanders injected you with something," John's voice is earnest, this is important.
He's done this before, where has he felt this before? Back when the drugs felt good.
Barbiturates his mind grinds against the inside of his skull, heroin. He wonders if it's too many syllables for him to manage. He can see his own hands on the cement floor, strange foreign objects, the mechanics of which he cannot fathom.
John's face is close to his, he's repeating the question but the words don't make any sense.
Sherlock swallows in an attempt to speak; he pushes the words through parched lips.
"Sodium thiopental," he somehow articulates, the chemical formula more easily accessed than anything colloquial, "f-f-r thinteerigation," breathe, breathe, speak, "diacetylmorphine." He pronounces flawlessly, "m-little reward - " Sherlock feels himself laughing, but he's struggling to breathe the constriction in his diaphragm makes him heave violently, a hand rubs across his shoulders as they tremble with muscle spasms. John's moving him, elevating his head, Sherlock can smell furaneol, "too-much?"
"Just a bit, yeah." The room washes around him in dull, sludgy hues, Lestrade stands, bug eyed on watery knees and feet which refuse to stay fixed against the ground. He's barking something over a radio, his voice sounds like Beethoven. The dark ceiling is melting into shiny black sludge. Everything is inexplicably pink.
"Sherlock do you know what day it is?"
Days? What were days but the earth turning round the sun, trivial.
"Answer the question, don't let yourself pass out." That would be bad.
"-day," he mutters.
"Tell me our address, where do we live?" he feels John wiping blood from his nose.
Through a crack in his eyelashes Sherlock can see the twisting, rolling textures of John's jumper, he can smell vomit and the lingering scent of sheep in the fabric. He wants nothing more than to sleep. Wouldn't be that bad. The fibers in his field of vision are writhing, sliding in amongst one another, and then suddenly they are white snakes, with their powerful bodies coiled around his friend. Sherlock makes to move away from the hallucination but finds his body unresponsive, his legs spasm of their own accord dragging his boot heels on cold cement.
"Shh sh, two…" John is prompting.
"John?" His voice comes out scratchy and weak and he doesn't recognize it.
"It's okay, there's an ambulance coming."
"I'm halucnnt-t-tiinng." This morning he had been confident and brilliant, he had been in recovery, he had been happy. Sherlock shuts his eyes to find that his mind palace is burning. There's nowhere to run from the fire and the darkness and the horrible smoke which has filled his head, he can feel his brain falling apart around him. It occurs to him that the damage may be permanent. This morning… His breath has been repressed to an alarmingly shallow gasp. Kind fingers drag through his hair, drenched with sweat.
"You're going to be okay." John says because it's what he's meant to say. But Sherlock's eyes are rolling back into his head, eyelids a flutter.
"Hey!" he shouts, shaking his friend's face forcefully, "don't fall asleep."
But there's no response, Sherlock tries meekly to draw breath around a mouthful of rising bile.
He is vaguely aware of the salty intrusion of fingers in his mouth. Of John's voice, impersonal, business like. The army doctor cradles his friend's frighteningly unresponsive body. Sherlock's muscles are stiff and trembling and there's no light in his pinpoint eyes.
What had once been a haze has turned into a shadow, a deadly, vacant weight; he can feel his body shutting down. Flames tear at the high architecture of his mind, beams are crashing down around him in showers of crimson sparks, the smoke makes his eyes water and his lungs burn. But there was so much left to do?
Darkness swallows him finally; he's tired of fighting, so tired.
John crouches over his unconscious friend, with a sudden professional alacrity as he rolls Sherlock onto his back and begins chest compressions. His lips are white and pressed thin, he doesn't even look up as Lestrade kneels down beside him to begin rescue breathing.
twenty nine-twenty eight-twenty seven
once, in Afghanistan, he had kept a boy alive for thirty minutes with nothing but his hands and his lungs.
It takes ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. To john Watson it feels like an eternity.
six-seven-eight
When the paramedics appear outside the hangar where Sanders had been keeping the Consulting Detective the blessed clatter of a gurney attracts Lestrade's gaze. Red and blue lights slide across the high ceiling, cut to ribbons by the leaded windows.
ten-nine-eight
The sanguine petrichor of body fluids in sand. John holds a weak pulse at the tips of his fingers, he wipes his friend's blood from his mouth with a cringe.
"Over here!" the detective inspector yells, the three of them are bathed on the shifting tricolor florescence of the emergency lights. John doesn't break his rhythm as he watches the medics descend on Sherlock's body like hungry vultures picking at a piece of carrion. Sherlock's hand is curled into the curve of his hip uselessly.
seventeen-eighteen-ninteen
Someone's rattling off medical history and a repeating Sherlock's deduction concerning which combination of chemicals had ben pumped into is body, john realizes that it's his voice. He never wants to feel the texture of the words, intravenously administered opiate toxicity in his mouth again. one of the medicspushes him back with a syringe full of what he suposes is naloxene. He watches, arms folded and mouth straight as Sherlock is intubated, his dark shirt is pulled open for sensors to be pasted unceremoniously to his chest. The tube in his mouth slurs his features imperceptibly, but enough to remind john of a corpse.
A fresh corpse, not yet picked at or coarsened with the desert wind, or rolled in a prayer rug and buried with gravel and only their mutilated helmet as a grave marker. Formed from a life beneath his confident hands, the only things reaching to snatch him from his fate. He never worried about weather they were strong enough. He couldn't risk hesitating, because sometimes they weren't.
"John?" he jerks back to reality at the touch of the detective inspector's hand.
Did Lestrade hear that machine gun fire?
The doors of the ambulance are flung wide to that brilliant white interior. Someone's holding up an IV bag, while another of the paramedics bends low to check pupil reactivity. Hands reach out to close the doors and with a crunch of tires over gravel the bus speeds away.
"Theyre taking him to Montmercy."
John looks up through his head for a brief second before blinking.
"Let's go." He folds his arms and jerks his head, watching the lights of the ambulance with a mixture of envy and fear.
"Get in." Lestrade orders, opening the passenger door to his cruiser. John silently obeys, feeling oddly empty, adrift, terrified. He hears the siren click on and they follow the ambulance out to the main road.
Sirens are public screams. As Lestrade steers skillfully through the respectfully parted traffic it begins to rain. John feels itchy and terrified and unspeakably lonely as he leans back and watches the little rivulets on the window bend the flashing light towards him. Tires hiss on wet pavement and all John can do is breathe.
Please, God, let him live.