Sherlock's mind was in constant motion as the aeroplane shuddered with turbulence somewhere over the Channel. Her flight was expected to land at 7:00am at Heathrow, and she was exhausted by disappointment in her failed ventures. For some reason the case in Belarus had seemed appealing, though thinking back on the first message it was obviously a dud.

She had not been thinking straight, that much was obvious, and only made her long-harbored hate for her mother more profound. In the four years since she'd last seen the woman Sherlock had managed to file her emotional levels and reactions down to near non-existence. Nothing could touch her, and nothing could hurt her. Then she'd had to go and have a baby, and of course she had to make emotional exceptions for her son - not that her hormone levels gave her much choice in the matter. She'd made preparations to account for the spike in emotional state, knowing that a hormonal change was inevitable with pregnancy and childbirth. What she hadn't accounted for was that those changes might not be temporary. Her mother's reappearance had toppled down whatever flimsy walls had remained to protect her once-impregnable mind.

It was humiliating to buckle under the simple words that she'd tried so hard to push away, especially in front of John, so she'd attempted to suppress it all until it made her physically ill. Not Good, as John liked to say. She hated being in a position of vulnerability, but it seemed she could be nothing else when her mother was near. Something about the woman's presence reverted her back to the state of a terrified, damaged eleven-year-old.

Once in the airport she nearly walked right past the man bearing a sign with her name, too distracted when a year previously she would have seen and intentionally missed him. Instead once she recognized that he was there for her she slowed and hesitated, cursing herself as soon as she did and he gestured her away. It was obvious that Mycroft would be waiting in the nondescript black car on the curb, but she was tired and didn't care to pay for a cab and it would be easy to ignore him.

"Welcome back," her brother said as she slid into the back seat. "I hope your trip was successful?"

She closed her eyes and leaned against the window. If he kept on with the trivialities she might snap, but otherwise his voice might even be able to help her sleep.

Mycroft was annoyingly unruffled, as usual. "I wanted to tell you that I've had a word with Mummy." Every nerve in her body sprang to attention, but as her heart began to race she kept herself still. "She won't be coming near you or your son again, and I am sorry I ever used her to threaten or influence you."

She remained still, though bile burned in her throat and chest.

"I wish you had said something," he continued quietly. "It's not your fault, of course, and it's useless to have regrets for something one cannot change, but I do wish you had said something." He took a deep slow breath; it was shaky and unsettled Sherlock to her core. "From the moment you were born, Mummy and Father were telling me to protect you, to guide you, to look after you and teach you, and nearly three decades later I find out the greatest threat was inside the walls meant to shield you. I hope you can someday forgive me for never seeing."

He didn't speak again for the rest of the journey, didn't ask anything of her or try to make her forgive him. At long last she had the space she always craved, but at a price that flushed her whole body with shameful heat.

The car pulled up at 221B, and for appearances' sake she pretended to be asleep until Mycroft shook her arm before getting out without a word. There wasn't anything for her to say that wouldn't come out sounding acerbic or ingenuine. The driver retrieved her bag from the boot and she hurried up the steps to the building, forcing herself not to look back at the car as she unlocked the front door.

John and Alex were already awake, though sleepily subdued as they greeted her with wide smiles. Feeling as though her skin was too tight and on crooked, she wrapped her arms around the both of them at once and tried to dismiss the feeling with a sigh. John kissed her temple as she leaned down to kiss Alex before pulling him into her own arms. "Was he okay?" she asked, allowing Alex to grab her finger and swing it around.

"He was brilliant," John beamed, "we had loads of fun, didn't we, lad?" Alex smiled toothlessly up at him, and he drifted back to where he'd been at the cooker. "I was just going to make some breakfast. Want any, or are you having a lie-in?"

She weighed her options carefully. If she stayed up he would make her eat, and she felt heavy and slow enough after the flight as it were. However, if she went to sleep she would probably wake up ill again, and would have to put off spending time with Alex even longer. It was a lose-lose situation. At last she sighed, "I suppose I'll have a bit of toast." John looked sickeningly pleased.

After her modest breakfast Sherlock took Alex into the sitting room, and laid out a blanket on the floor before lying across from him on her stomach. They played with his plush blocks for ten minutes, and for another five with a sheet that she would hold up between them and then drop down, theoretically to help him recognize her face. It was inconclusive whether or not it actually helped, but the joyful look that crossed Alex's face every time he saw her again made her feel like it was worth it even without the progress. No one had ever looked at her the way Alex did before, with so much trust, so much faith. It both buoyed her when black moods threatened to roll in and terrified her when she finally felt as though she were getting things right.

She was tired enough after playing with Alex - should have slept the night before, but the disappointment in the bad case and anticipation of another bad night - that John insisted if she wasn't going to go to bed she ought to at least have a lie-down on the sofa, and she didn't disagree. John was a special case too, after all. Somehow or another he was able to convince her to do things no one else was capable of. In the past years if Mycroft or Lestrade would have suggested she take it easy or lie down she would have laughed in their faces and flounced off wherever she damn well pleased - even if it had resulted in a heart-attack when she was twenty-five. But John...when John asked her to do something, she found it difficult not to want to please him.

During her brief rest on the sofa she had a disturbing dream, in which she was in the hospital giving birth to Alex while surrounded by Victor Trevor, her mother, Seb Wilkes, General Shan, Jefferson Hope, and an androgynous black cloud that she knew deep down was the untouchable being Moriarty. They were all staring at her, waiting, and a voice - John's voice - broke through the mayhem as the crowd of malicious onlookers drew nearer, calling out her name. Her mother and Victor pulled her legs back, waves of violation rolling over her as contracting pain and the straps around her arms crippled her from fighting back. The cabbie, Jefferson Hope, stuck his filthy hands inside of her and she screamed in his face. With a horrendous surge that felt like half of her organs had fallen out Hope raised Alex from between her legs, looking just as he had when Sherlock fell asleep. Somewhere John was shouting her name.

"Give him to me," she tried to say, but no sound come from her lips. Hope held him out to her in offering and she tried to reach for him, but her arms were still strapped down. "Give him to me!"

With a look of comical bewilderment, Hope held the squalling baby to the room at large like an offering. Sherlock pulled against her restraints as her own name echoed through her mind. The black cloud Moriarty drifted forward until Alex and the cabbie were completely engulfed, growing larger until it filled half the room.

John called her name again, but it did nothing to quell the sudden panic swelling in her chest. "Give him back! Let him go! Let me go! John! John, they took him!"

A pair of hands grasped her shoulders and she woke up gasping, shoving a hand knuckle-deep into her mouth in just enough time to keep from screaming aloud as terror shrieked through her veins, even as her mind already started building walls against it. Each breath curled into a ball in her throat, building and fighting against each other until it felt like she was choking on her own air. The hand that wasn't muffling her cries was curled around her now-concave stomach, as though protecting something that was no longer there.

A hand settled, warm and rough, on the back of her neck, but she shuddered away into the back cushions of the sofa. He instantly backed off. At least she wasn't vomiting like the night before, or the night before that. "Take it easy, Sherlock," John said. "You've just had a bad dream."

"Yes, I know, thank you John," she growled into the cushions, crawling up onto shaking legs to get as far away from his hovering and the sofa and the chilly window as possible. There were any number of things that could have triggered the dream, and she was not going to put up with them for another moment. They would have to redecorate the flat. That would fix it.

She spent the rest of the day in a restless flurry of activity, checking her emails for new cases and texting Lestrade. The first only annoyed her with needless idiots who had problems that didn't matter, and Lestrade just kept replying to her texts with You have a concussion for fuck's sake take a few days off. As if.

Still idly puttering on her computer in the kitchen while John read the newspaper, she decided on a whim to look up the ridiculous blog she'd found the night after she met John. Naturally she had looked up her potential flatmate before allowing him anywhere near her or her son, and had stumbled upon the blog on accident. At first she'd found the posts of "Nothing," and "How do I delete this?" to be annoyingly self-depreciating. Then she'd found his message to his therapist asking if she was happy he was finally writing something. All of that had been to annoy that Ella woman, and the idea made Sherlock smile to herself at the time. He found authority and being bullied around just as tedious as she did. Then of course there had been his mention of the serial suicides that would eventually lead up to...

A Study in Pink?

He hadn't mentioned that she had a son, probably to protect him in case anyone off-color ever did happen across her name online and find that information, which she appreciated. As Sherlock read the account of the mad cabbie case, how she had read him like a book and moved in with her after only a few hours' deliberation, she felt a deep pit of warmth forming in her chest. "It's no use trying to hide what you are because Sherlock sees right through everything and everyone in seconds. What's incredible, though, is how spectacularly ignorant she is about some things."

Sherlock hadn't expected reading that to feel like a kick to the chest. Nor had she expected it to put her in the foulest mood she'd experienced since the rigorous therapy she'd been forced through in childhood. For the rest of the day she harrumphed pointedly around the flat until it became clear that John wasn't going to notice - namely when he left.

Instead she called the morgue and had Molly - a very easily-manipulated mouse of a girl who worked at St. Bart's who was so desperate to be Sherlock's friend that she would do nearly anything - bring a head over and stick it in the fridge. Once her new experiment was safely situated Sherlock "accidentally" dropped a book, waking Alex from his nap and making it all too easy to ask Molly to come again for girls' night another time. That done, she took up the penknife from the mantle and started carving faces into the wallpaper. For a touch of flair she used a can of yellow spray paint the Chinese smugglers had left behind and colored in the faces' yellow eyes. Then she gave them yellow hair too, so they looked like John bloody Watson, and picked out their teeth in little chunks of wallpaper.

"What the hell are you doing?"

It was surprisingly easy to turn her head toward John, who was gaping at her from the door, and lie. "Bored."

"What?"

"Bored!" she roared at him before stabbing the wall again. "I'm so - bloody - bored, John!" With each word she punctuated it with another vicious strike into the ugly wallpaper. Alex gave an indignant shriek from his basket, and she stormed to his aid once John had pried the penknife from her hands. "I see you typed up the taxi driver case," she continued as she hugged her son to her chest, sussing in his ear in an effort to comfort him and, in her own way, apologize. "'A Study in Pink'?"

Still staring despairingly at the wall, John shook his head and sank into his chair. "Yeah, I dunno, it made sense. Pink lady? Pink phone? Thought you'd be pleased."

"'Sherlock sees right through everything and everyone in seconds. What's incredible, though, is how spectacularly ignorant she is about some things,'" she quoted.

"I didn't mean it like that!"

"Oh, you meant it in the nice way?" she retorted sharply, then brought her tone down when Alex whimpered and batted a fist at her. "I don't care about that pedestrian rubbish. Stuff like who the Prime Minister is or which celebrities are shagging-"

"-or whether the Earth goes round the sun-"

"What the hell does that matter? I get my work done in the end all the same."

"It's primary school stuff, Sherlock!" argued John.

"I just said it doesn't matter! Whether we go round the Earth or the sun or round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, I don't hold many things in high esteem, John, but the few things that I do are-"

"Your work and your son, I know," John dismissed quickly, not meeting her eyes.

Sherlock bit her lip and glowered at him over Alex's head. He'd forgotten another vital party in his haste to be contradictory, but she wasn't about to point it out if he were being deliberately obtuse.

Sensing her irritation, John sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Fine, whatever. My parents are coming into town later, and I'm going to Harry's to see them. I don't imagine you'll want to tag along, my life being so dull and all. Have we got anything in?" He got up and went to the fridge, exclaiming loudly over the severed head. Sherlock smiled to herself. "Actually, I think I'll just go to Harry's now." He stormed out. Sherlock frowned as Mrs. Hudson padded up the stairs past him. She hadn't meant to make him leave, only to admit he was wrong.

"You two have a little domestic?" chirped the landlady, dropping a kiss onto Alex's head before peering out the window after John. "He should've wrapped up a bit more, poor la- Sherlock Holmes, what've you done to my bloody wall?"

Within three minutes and seemingly endless platitudes about how a charge in their rent would cover the damages, Sherlock was left alone. Well, not completely alone, but infants rarely counted as intellectually stimulating company. Still, there was something in how Alex smiled sleepily up at her as she put him back in his cot under the window that made her feel better. She disposed of the head, deeming it a lost cause for the night, fed Alex, then sat in the other window to try and think quietly for a while before falling asleep.

John told her he loved her. Why had he done that? Certainly, it had had a strong affect on her - unable to contain the maelstrom of pent-up hideous feeling clawing away at her insides, Sherlock had cried out and pulled her arms around his waist - but she would only be kidding herself if she took such a declaration seriously. He'd been trying to placate her in the wake of her mother's destruction. That was all.

She felt the explosion milliseconds before the boom, and had no warning before being thrown halfway across the sitting room with broken glass raining down over her head. Blinded by dust and smoke, Sherlock groped helplessly as her ears throbbed and rang, trying to find purchase in chaos. Her pulse thundered in her head, and she fought to keep it upright even while feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds. Then Alex's screams broke through. It felt like time stopped as Sherlock tried to get up, tried to find him, because oh, god, the basket was in the window-

The door banged open, and two sets of hands griped her as her vision grayed out, her son's cries echoing in the destruction.