"You do realize this is completely unacceptable."
"Sorry – what?" Sherlock, suddenly awake, blinked against the light which now flooded the small room. His limbs felt heavy and warm, and there was a familiar feeling behind his eyes and at the base of his spine of having taken it a bit too far, of powering down the hard drive, of ceasing to give a fuck. The worst part about this particular feeling had always been the coming back.
"How long have you been here?" Mycroft cast his eyes around the dingy bedsit with his customary distain. "No, don't tell me, I can see. Really Sherlock, you could at least make an effort. It's hardly a challenge anymore." He did sound disappointed at this. Sherlock took a quick mental inventory of his body. Finding everything in its proper place he began to lever himself upright as Mycroft continued. "I'll have to take you back to hospital myself. I am a busy man, you know." He stopped and blinked at his brother. "Do try and make a go of it this time. The university has agreed to take you back for the summer semester when you've completed the program."
"I'd rather stay here. Goodbye." Sherlock let his hands rest on his knees, testing the sensation in his fingertips. Dulled, just as he'd expected, but somehow deeper than before. The touch bypassed his brain and shot with electric warmth from the skin of his legs to the pads of his fingers and back again, stopping at every cell in his body along the way. The scratch of the cheap upholstery covering the musty couch on which he was sitting felt delicious against his bare back. The drugs were still doing their work admirably; the dance of carbon and hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.
"It wasn't put to you as a request," Mycroft said with infuriating calm.
Sherlock was out again in three days, long enough for the aches to start - longer than he'd gone in a while. The hospital Mycroft had taken him to this time put him in their high-security ward. He could only imagine the things Mycroft must have told them in order to have him placed there. They would have noticed he was gone by now. The janitor's coveralls he had stolen from the employee locker room were ill-fitting and offered little protection from the spring chill. He allowed himself a moment of regret for the loss of his favorite blue overcoat, which he'd left in the bedsit. He couldn't return there; Mycroft would have eyes out already.
He ducked into a well-lit coffee shop as the gray sky began to spit rain and found a seat near the back. He tucked himself up to wait. He sat and listened to the hissing gurgle of the steamer, inhaled the scent of coffee and scorched milk, and tried to let everything pass through him. To be as clear as air. It was only a matter of time before a young man (a college student studying philosophy going by the packet of rolling tobacco in his left breast pocket and the carefully cultivated rumples in his hair) left his corduroy blazer on his chair to go to the toilet.
Five minutes later Sherlock was chain smoking, walking along a crowded street with the collar of his new jacket turned up against the wind. The bits of tobacco which flew onto the tip of his tongue with each inhale were pleasant and sharp. He sipped at the vanilla latte he'd taken from the student's table and wished the young man had better taste in coffee. It was a small matter – tedious really – to pick the pocket of a man in an expensive suit who was obviously planning to cheat on his wife and so had withdrawn a large amount of untraceable cash. Now to business.