Not Talking Now that You're Here
Chapter Two
Author's note: This story takes place AFTER my Pocketful of Rye story arc in Got My Eye on You, after Devonshire Squires and after Magpie: One for Sorrow
He cracks one eye open, and immediately regrets it. Sunlight drives a spike of pain right through his retina, ricocheting with a whine somewhere deep in his brain. It is streaming in through the kitchen window, which tells him that it is morning, not afternoon.
But, which morning? When had he fallen asleep? After days and nights of chronic insomnia, Sherlock's sense of time is completely distorted. His morphine and cocaine use during the Devonshire Squires case has shifted his mental tectonic plates. Ever since he'd gotten back from Hartswood Manor, he's been dealing with the aftershocks of memory impairment, mood disorder, lack of concentration and an inability to take decisions. Lestrade wasn't willing to test his stamina with anything interesting- the case work had been thin and boring, making him even more frustrated. All of it added up to cognitive tremors, and he knows he is building up to the inevitable earthquake. Waiting for something to happen led to agitation- and that made sleep impossible, so he'd given up on it at five o'clock and tried to get himself interested in an experiment.
To shut out the sunlight, he tries to close his eye but it has a life of its own and is intent on focusing on the half-completed slide set only a few centimetres away from where his head had come to rest on the table.
Sherlock tries to think, but the process is complicated by the buzz saw of headache that is putting a flavour and sound to the texture of the cheap wood of the table pressing into his cheek. Given the crick in his neck, he must have slept right through the entire day and night; it feels far too stiff to have been just a few hours. His ears hear the sigh that accompanies this realisation as a sharp metallic tang on his tongue.
Withdrawal is a complicated process. The people around him over the years had come to fixate on the first days, when the physical effects were visibly obvious. But for him, as awful as those were, it was the aftermath that was worse. After the initial physical symptoms were over and done with, he's always had to ride out the waves of post-acute withdrawal syndrome. And this morning was the first hint of the tsunami of synaesthesia yet to come.
He hears a groan that comes with a lime tinged taste, and knows intuitively that it had come from him even though he has no conscious thought of making the sound. Sherlock wonders if he has the strength to find his way down the corridor to his bedroom. But he lacks the motivation to make the decision, let alone translate it into action.
Executive dysfunction. He can hear Esther Cohen's diagnosis echoing down a corridor of his mind palace- the one that smells of hospital disinfectant. There is a separate door on that corridor for every time he's been in hospital, and the entire wing is full of terrors. Needless to say, he prefers to keep entry to that area under a double electronic lock, with a fingerprint pad needed for access. He might not be able to delete any of those memories, but he is certainly not letting anyone but himself the right of access.
A metronome starts ticking- a slow tempo in purple, alternating with grey. Then there is a squeak of electric blue. Through the sensory fog, he recognises the footsteps coming up the stairs; Mrs Hudson reaching the tell-tale seventh floorboard.
"Hoo- hoo; Sherlock, I'm back."
Deciphering the meaning of that statement takes him the whole time from when it is uttered on the landing to the moment Mrs Hudson reaches the living room. Eventually he remembers that she had gone away on the early train to visit her sister on an overnight trip- that was yesterday. So that confirms that at least twenty four hours have elapsed since he fell asleep, head down on the kitchen table.
This time his groan is gooseberry, tart with reproach. When he's this far gone, his ability to interact is very limited, and the thought of talking with Mrs Hudson is impossible. Doctor Cohen's voice speaks again ("psychosocial impairment; Sherlock, you know that means you have to try to focus more.") It is strange that the voices in his head are so much easier to understand than the one that just spoke to him from the living room. Sherlock knows his current inability to speak will create an opportunity to upset all and sundry, including his landlady as she comes around the corner to see him sitting at the table.
"Oh dear. You didn't fall asleep there, did you?" She bustles into the kitchen.
Sherlock tries to access his drop-down menu of scripts- the one titled "Responses-Mrs Hudson"- but gets an error message. Nothing is working properly in the Mind Palace, not even the most basic oral communication programmes.
He tries to lift his head, but can't control the muscles from cramping viciously, and he hisses in pain. Sherlock forces his eyes to focus on the pattern of the dress worn by the woman standing beside the table. He can't angle his eyes to see her face, even if he'd wanted to, so he doesn't. A noise escapes his lips, more a whine this time, certainly nothing approaching speech.
"Oh Sherlock, you look terrible. Are you coming down with something? Let me get you some tea."
Sherlock watches the pattern on her dress fragment and reform by the kitchen sink as his brain tries to grapple with the disconnected sounds that bear no relationship to one another. He tries to re-configure them as words with meaning. Do they require a response? Would he be able to formulate one? He doubts it.
Meanwhile, his autonomic nervous system responds to the presence of another human being by driving up his respiratory rate, speeding up his heartbeat and making him swallow in an already dry mouth. Fight or flight? The pain down his throat takes priority for just a moment, but then beats a hasty retreat as he levers himself into an upright sitting position, and props his aching head onto numb hands. Flight might just be possible.
The room seems to rock and sway as if he were on a ship, but slowly the stimulation of random noises to his left shape themselves into the sound of a kettle being filled, cupboards being opened and the clash of china as a cup finds its way into a saucer. He wonders whether he can use the horror of the noise as a way to make his retreat to the bedroom actually happen.
Esther is now tutting at him. "You know the symptoms of post-acute withdrawal syndrome. PAWS is a persisting physiological consequence of the central nervous system adjusting to the drug related disturbance in neurotransmitters, and the resulting hyper-excitability of neural pathways."
He wants to snark back at her, something along the lines of knowing what it is makes it no easier to bear. But, he can't even talk in the confines of his own Mind Palace; words fail him even as a cognitive construct. When he's this bad, talking is simply beyond him.
Instead, Sherlock lurches forward, putting his weight onto his right arm and then pushing the chair backwards with his left as he suddenly stands up. The chair tips over backwards as he staggers off down the hallway toward the bathroom. He hears a startled yelp from Mrs Hudson at the crash of the chair onto the floor. He knows he has only moments before the vertigo and vestibular imbalance make him throw up, and he has to reach the toilet before it happens. The bedroom will have to come later.
Moments later, when he is congratulating himself on making it to the loo in time, there is a soft tap at the bathroom door.
"Sherlock? Please talk to me. What's wrong?"
He could no more answer her than he could fly to the moon. It was a physical impossibility, an unbridgeable chasm of non-communication.
Sherlock's lack of reply doesn't seem to deter Mrs Hudson who continues speaking on the other side of the door. "Your phone just rang; you left it on the kitchen table. I answered it, because I could see from the caller ID that it was John. He's coming over. I told him you were feeling a bit under the weather, but he wants to talk to you about something, and this is the first chance in almost a week that he's had the morning off. He'll be here in about an hour."
Sherlock couldn't find any words to say to her in time, before she gives up and walks away. He listens to her footsteps going down the stairs. Not talking when Mrs Hudson is there doesn't really matter- his landlady always makes up for his silence by talking too much. He just filters it out.
But John is different. The woman's meddling means that the one person he really does want to talk to is on his way to Baker Street, just when he is totally mute.
The thought distresses him. They'd not had a proper conversation since he'd returned from Hartswood. During the few paltry cases since then, they'd been cautious around each other, and Sherlock kept his focus on the detective work. John had been coming to Baker Street to see Diane Goodliffe for EMDR therapy, but it made him tense and uncomfortable. The presence of a third party on those occasions made it hard, too.
So, if John is coming today, then he needs to take advantage of the opportunity. Sherlock looks at his haggard reflection in the mirror. He is going to have to have a bath, shave and get dressed. But he knows that none of that will be enough.
There is only one solution for it. If he is going to be able to talk to John, he will have to resort to some chemical lubrication. He crouches down and reaches under the sink, finding the tile- the one that used toothpaste instead of mortar to hold it in place. Colour matched perfectly, but with one good tap, his secret stash yielded its prize.
Cocaine will loosen his tongue.
