Foreword: this is the first part of a series consisting of two stories. The sequel is called "On the Rack", and it's co-authored with Sevenpercent, which is why you'll find it published under her account. "The Breaking Wheel" was originally published at AO3, where I will be posting the sequel simultaneously with sevenpercent's chapter uploads in this archive.
He is marooned in his cortex.
- Walker Percy
'Breathing is boring' is a phrase John has seen fit to remind him of several times lately. It's something he'd once said in a fit of pique, for lack of a cleverer retort.
At present, he doesn't need to perform the act of breathing himself at all, which is deeply unnerving. It's only one of the things he isn't able to do at the moment. Instead, he feels his lungs filling and emptying in a steady rhythm commandeered by a respirator. It should be reassuring, and Sherlock knows that modern Intensive Treatment Unit respirators have numerous fail-safes and backup systems in place, but still he finds it hard not to worry.
Like any man-made machine, it could easily malfunction. This is what it must be like for parachute jumpers and scuba divers - to be deeply dependent on a contraption, and to be acutely aware of that very dependency.
Like all machines, biological or otherwise, humans break down too. There are thousands of known diseases, and it's a miracle any human ever sees a healthy day when taking into consideration all the things that could do wrong.
It's a selective ignorance that protects humans from worrying about all that, and when the Transport is functional, Sherlock doesn't think about these things, but when it fails this severely, it's all he can think about.
Air in, air out. Every breath is a relief in itself, but offering no guarantees if the next one will ever come.
At home, in his own bedroom, he has often shrouded himself in the quiet and the darkness, but now the silence is somehow sickening and makes him feel weak and abandoned.
During most of the hospital visits in his past he has always had the option to escape as long as he'd been conscious. He'd made a habit of self-discharge, relishing the feeling of deciding himself when he was sufficiently mended. He knew best - it was his Transport after all, so how could the doctors know when he was healed enough to leave?
Not this time. This time he wouldn't leave of his own volition, because he can't even get out of this bed.
There's an empty chair beside his bed, its regular daytime occupant tucked into bed at home.
John. As much consolation as his presence offers during the day, at night the empty chair beside the bed feels like a gaping wound.
He has all the time in the world, now, just to think. He doesn't like it. Paranoia is just around the corner, ready to whisper in his ear how easy it would be for some minion of an old enemy to sneak in, disguised as a nurse, and to turn off the machines that are keeping him alive.
John says that this will pass, with a reassuring smile that's only two thirds honest. Medicine is unpredictable. Life is unpredictable, and Sherlock wonders if his quota of unlikely survivals, rescues and dumb luck has already run out.
If there is not change for the better soon, there's a possibility he will remain locked into his own body, like a restless ghost tethered to an abandoned house, reliant on occasional visitors for human contact.
If that happens, what will he do?
He isn't usually like this, but this place has a strange tendency to make his emotions bleed out as though they were an undammed river.
He tries to blot the desolation out with memories of home, but that only serves to allow fear to gnaw at the edges of those recollections - what if that's all they'll be now, memories, instead of being reassuring promises of the future? What if home will no longer mean 221b Baker Street with John, but this: staring infinitely at the ceiling of some medical facility?
What will he do, then, if he can no longer do anything?