Author's note - Reviews are love. :)
04
'Rachmaninoff's Concerto Number 3! Doesn't this remind you of that? And where are we, do you think? Page five? Page four? Three minutes in? Intermezzo, even? That part was dull, wasn't it? Let's pretend there's only two parts. You know, I've always preferred piano to violin. All those whiny strings just sound like a little kid whining about his Daddy issues. Oh, my Daddy never loved me. Oh, my Daddy hit me with a riding crop.' Moriarty's voice sailed up the claustrophobic staircase, and each word was a tiny steel rivet drumming into Sherlock's skull. Definitely a migraine. He felt physically weak, he struggled to remember that it was all just a dream. He could hear himself breathing and he couldn't seem to make that stop.
He could hear the footsteps now, coming closer. Scuffed-but-new boots grinding into the burnt wooden steps.
Sherlock loathed migraines. They were one of the few physical ailments that drove multiple wedges into his ability to think. Oh, certainly, there were some moments of brilliance when the auras began, but when the pain started, it was a struggle to hold all those balls in the air, to stay balanced.
Wake up, he tried to command himself, but the words were only words now, not a resounding mental slap.
He swallowed nausea when he felt the small hand press its faux consolation into his right shoulder. The fingers squeezed as though in reassurance, and then Sherlock almost smiled when he felt the squeeze turn into a merciless grip. There, he thought, that's more like it.
'Such an ordinary child, ordinary bullying, ordinary reactions to it all. I expected better from you, Sherly. Cock Robin. Chéri.'
'You're not even real.' Sherlock said, in lieu of all the questions he wanted to ask about why and how.
'No. Try again.' Moriarty said, the hand on his shoulder becoming two, pushing him into the wall. Sherlock's mind scrambled, not liking that he'd gotten something wrong. Vaguely he was aware of how preposterous it was to be doing this in his head, against a figment of his imagination. He stepped sideways to remove the touch from his shoulders, but all he succeeded doing was slumping against the wall as dizziness swamped him.
'You,' Sherlock said, closing his eyes and trying to find a sentence. 'You're not real.' He said again.
'I broke you,' Moriarty sighed, withdrawing his hands. 'Already?' A high whine in the back of his throat.
Sherlock made a noise of disagreement. The lights were too bright. Except his eyes were closed and he was in the darkness but he could feel it. He could feel the glare. He raised a hand to his eyelids and pressed hard, as though by pressure alone he could remove the pounding flashes.
'Don't ruin it, my dear. You won't stay? You won't play a little longer?'
He felt something wet and soft against the side of his face. Cool and gentle. Lips. Moriarty was kissing, no, mouthing him. Sherlock flung an arm out and Moriarty stumbled backwards, catching himself on the wall. Sherlock had his eyes open now, finding some last reserve of revulsion. He stood, awkward, breathing like he'd just run a marathon.
Moriarty grinned.
'We'll call that one a prelude. I always did prefer the Preludes to the Concertos anyway, you know, dear Sherlock. Not that it matters. We have plenty of both to keep you company here. Go then, go fan that spark of resistance. Come back with guns blazing and all those other trite and eensy weensy methods of resistance. Do you know what I like about these little tête-à-têtes of ours?' Moriarty crooned, and Sherlock closed his eyes against the throbbing lights again, nociception spinning out of control, sensory receptors stimulated all along his neck and the back of his skull.
He never did find out what Moriarty liked so much. He woke up.
'The light.' He groaned, arm coming up, a gag causing his throat to clench. There was a murmur, a sentence that was spoken out loud and therefore too painful to be heard clearly, and then the overhead light was turned off and the room was plunged into darkness. His nervous system perceived the whole process as taking an awfully long time, but he knew it must have only been a few seconds.
Information filtered in more slowly than what he was used to. There was the cold disk of a stethoscope pressed against his sternum. He could smell John's toothpaste. He was covered in sweat, though he did not think he was still sweating. He was cold despite blankets. He could feel the pressure of Moriarty's hands on his shoulders, that wet mouth over his jawline.
He expected John to talk, to ask questions, but John operated silently now. The stethoscope was removed, and Sherlock's face twitched when he felt the backs of fingers gently resting on his forehead. Not as clinical as a thermometer, but he was sure that if he had to open his mouth for anything right now, he'd throw up on it. The fingers stayed, but a moment later he felt the push of an infrared ear thermometer. He knew it was supposed to be non-invasive, he knew John was just making sure everything was okay, but the push upset his internal equilibrium and the whole world began to spin even though his eyes were closed. He couldn't swallow down the sick moan of protest in time.
'Sorry, sorry.' John said, but he didn't remove the thermometer until it beeped.
The fingers stayed on the back of Sherlock's head, and then the hand turned, and he felt the curve match his forehead, the warmth of fingerpads on his temple. In contrast to Moriarty's cloying presence, this felt allowable.
When John went to remove his fingers, Sherlock's head followed the motion. Not much, not more than half a centimetre. The fingers hesitated, and then returned to his forehead. Sherlock sighed and listened to the sound of his breathing, felt the pounding of his heart.
'Tachycardic?' He murmured, keeping his voice as even as possible.
'Hm, yes. Blood pressure elevated. That was a hell of a nightmare, Sherlock.' John said, and Sherlock swallowed.
'BPPV.' He said, because he knew John's medical knowledge would take care of the rest. There was a silence where he expected questions to clarify the acronym, but after about thirty seconds, John's fingers moved from Sherlock's forehead and rummaged around in his medical kit instead.
'I didn't know you got migraines,' John said, and Sherlock listened to the precise sounds of a syringe being removed from wrapping, a needle being affixed. Most doctors would want good light for that kind of work, but John had been in a warzone, and making up dosages in the dim light of evening would be nothing. For a moment, Sherlock allowed some gratitude at John's history, his experience, his medical kit.
'Sumatriptan?' Sherlock said, trying to give himself something to focus on. Something other than the sensation of John's fingers not being on his forehead, something other than Mac and his boys, laughing and holding him down, the sharp don't-breathe-don't-breathe pain of broken ribs.
'Have you had it before?'
'Just do it, already.' Sherlock said, and felt a wisp of amusement curl inside him when John chuckled.
The prick of the needle, the slide of metal, was nothing at all compared to his head, the nightmares, the mind palace, Moriarty, all of it.
'Why do you have it?' Sherlock asked, and ignored the way the last half of the sentence slurred. He hoped John would realise the whole question sounded more like, 'why do you have it? That's not a standard addition to a medical kit and I've never seen any signs of you having migraines in the past.'
'Harry. She used to get them all the time. Is this volume alright? I'm not talking too loud?'
'Everything is too loud. And too bright.'
'Do you want me to leave you alone?' John asked, and Sherlock heard the pause, as though he wasn't sure it was a good idea. Neither did Sherlock.
'Please stay. Isn't that appropriate for a doctor anyway? To monitor the sumatriptan? Make sure I don't have an ischaemic stroke or something?'
'Hush. Stop talking.' John said, and Sherlock could hear the smile in it.
Silence stretched out between them. John was kneeling by the side of his bed, elbows on the mattress, like a religious boy offering lazy prayers. Sherlock's family never forced him into religion, though he did choose to experience some of it, just to know, just to see if he was missing out on anything. He knew very quickly that he was not, though he did enjoy the pomp and ritual, and secretly wished people made room for elaborate stained glass windows in other areas of their lives.
All at once the content of the music box came back to him. The tune of Cock Robin, the laughter, the biting aroma of a boy's urine late in the afternoon. The horrible, cruel jerk of being pulled from his wonderful focus by those boys. Mummy banning him from visiting the park again, and the boys finding him anyway, at other moments. None of it deleted after all.
The quietness of the room turned into a sharp inhale, a hitched breath, and Sherlock damned his body for its expressions even as John raised up and leaned towards him in the darkness.
'Sherlock?' John said, concerned, and Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut.
'Would you,' he paused, wondered if he'd regret this in four or six or twenty four hours; however long it took for the worst of the migraine to fade. 'Would you...check my temperature again?'
A pause, and Sherlock damned himself and damned his lack of filters and buffers and damned that it was John and damned that he'd ever thought it was a good idea to share with a flatmate in the first place. In the space of the pause, it felt like John had whispered a thousand denials, or had misinterpreted, and he had almost fully prepared himself for the push of the tympanic thermometer.
He started when he felt fingers resting hesitantly on his forehead. Not the backs of John's fingers, but the fronts, curving carefully around the arch of his right temple.
'Like this?' John asked, and Sherlock knew that John was giving him an out. All it would take was for him to say, 'no, you twit, who checks a temperature with the flat of the hand, knowing full well that the backs of the fingers are more appropriate? Or better yet, an ear thermometer?' John would turn his palm over, test the temperature, and withdraw. It was a perfect out.
'Yes, John,' Sherlock said, the drowsiness of the sumatriptan finally kicking in, 'just like that.'
John shifted and his hand rested more comfortably on Sherlock's forehead.
'So you were right,' John said, his voice closer now, and Sherlock could pick the tiredness. He didn't know how long John had been awake, maybe even trying to rouse him, before he'd woken. Had John slept at all?
'I'm always right.' Sherlock murmured, gritting his teeth against the pull of sleep. He was not scared of falling asleep. He was not.
'It is getting worse.'
Clear off then. Sherlock thought.
John sighed, a heavy sound.
'Sherlock, I'm not going anywhere. Just...just let the drug work, I'll be here when you wake up.'
Sherlock's mind sank into blackness. He had a moment to ask himself if he'd spoken his thought aloud, a moment to try and decipher whether John really had just caressed his temple with the side of his thumb, if any of that had actually happened at all, before the darkness folded him into an empty space that was blessedly free of nightmares.
It took a full 48 hours for the migraine to pass, and in that time John gave him multiple doses of sumatriptan and ended up needing to duck down to the pharmacy to pick up some more. Sherlock spent a lot of time in his room, lying down, squinting up at the ceiling in the moments when he felt brave enough to open his eyes and brave the light. John didn't even bother trying to get Sherlock to eat anything on the first day.
They didn't talk much at all, over those two days. John was attentive but used the time to neaten the flat some more and do some cleaning, so that Mrs. Hudson didn't have to. The lights were kept off, and Sherlock took pleasure in listening to John effortlessly navigating the flat in the dark. Probably good night vision then. More likely; a geospatial awareness that was confident and well-honed.
Sherlock would have been bored, but it was too much effort to summon up any restlessness. When he drifted into dozes, the dreams stayed far away. He was sure he was slipping into REM cycles, but for whatever reason, Moriarty and the cavern of memories were leaving him alone.
He suspected he knew the reason. Twice now, Moriarty had told him to rest, and in those periods, the nightmares seemed to hold back. It felt so mundane to be dragged into this cycle of rest, remembrance, rest, remembrance. He had better things to do. And clearly his brain – for once – thought otherwise.
On the third day, he got out of bed, tested his head by shaking it a little, and then strode to the window and looked outside. Somewhere out there, the real Moriarty was waiting. Little insect tarsus, complete with claws and sticky tarsal pads, dug into his heart at the thought.
Moriarty should feel flattered, he thought, that his unconscious mind had singled him out as an appropriate manifestation of the self-saboteur, or whatever archetype was going through and picking out memories never deleted. Sherlock mostly felt frustrated. Why his mind felt the need to explore it all in this highly symbolic manner instead of just playing a reel of memories back to him and leaving him to sort out the damage was beyond him. He was used to understanding the way his mind worked, and using it efficiently. Everything now was messy. Worse, the mind palace felt wrong, skewed.
He'd gone into his mind palace twice, consciously, since the last significant nightmare with Moriarty. While awake, he had far more control over what was happening, and there had been no more memories, no more internal manifestations of villains, but things hadn't been quite right either. The damage inflicted during sleep extended into his waking hours. It was as though he had woven a complex mental tapestry over the years, and now someone was taking potshots at it. How to re-knot all those individual threads and make the thing seem whole again?
He wanted to feel useful again.
John was out of the flat, so he commandeered his computer and looked at his website to see if any interesting, new cases had come through. The glare of the screen as well as the motion of reading still hurt his eyes, so he took it slowly, and dropped more words than usual as he speed read the information in front of him. Nothing. Nothing interesting. Still, he felt like he was returning to form when he dashed off a couple of quick answers. The gardener, on the first. And: Argyria, colloidal silver, stop bothering me with the consequences of your hippie supplement habits. The second one didn't even bear typing, really, except that Sherlock had always liked the words Argyria, colloidal. They sounded pleasant in his head.
Sherlock heard John with the first precise step on the creaky steps. He pushed the laptop away from him and was digging through his CD collection when John entered, carrying two bags of shopping. He paused, when he saw Sherlock awake.
'The pain?' John said, and Sherlock took a brief second to enjoy this medical shorthand that had developed between them so quickly. He kept rifling through his CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Rachmaninoff Concertos Nos. 1 – 3, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Cleveland Orchestra. One of the best recordings he'd found, so far.
A puzzle piece fell in place, and Sherlock chuckled at the workings of his own subconscious. Of course, he thought, as he turned on the CD player and inserted the CD. He skipped forward to track four, and took a deep breath as the notes started, exhaled on a huff of amusement.
'Sherlock?' John said, waiting for an answer to his first question, and clearly wanting to know what was going on.
'Of course,' Sherlock said, as the music began, 'Thibaudet is dressed by Vivienne Westwood.'
'What? Who?'
Sherlock winced, a characteristic flash of frustration. He'd have to start at the beginning. First, the Rachmaninoff reference. Second, that Moriarty wears Westwood himself. Third, the subconscious connection. Fourth, that Thibaudet is the pianist that Sherlock thinks of second, when he thinks of Rachmaninoff. Fifth, that the pianist himself wears Westwood, tying everything together. His subconscious offering a little zing of pleasure at pieces falling together like so.
Sherlock didn't have the patience for any of that, nor did he want to explain about his mind palace, exactly what he was dreaming about. He felt embarrassed about it. What would he say? Moriarty's a bad man? Moriarty's scaring him? Childish. Ridiculous. John would laugh at him.
'Westwood, John.' Sherlock said, as though John was the stupid one, though in this instance he knew John didn't have nearly enough evidence to put any of it together. He closed his eyes as the rolling piano began to weave through him in colour and sensation.
'This is nice,' John said, changing the subject. 'Just grandiose enough for you, I think.' Amusement, then, so John clearly knew the Concerto well.
'The Rach 3?' What Sherlock really meant was, you know it? He knew John played clarinet, but hadn't expected him to listen much outside of his instrument, or to have cultivated any sort of appreciation for classical. Though he'd never complained when Sherlock played violin (there were exceptions, like the time when Sherlock decided to experiment with trying to produce to most discordant sounds in order to find what would best work in sending Mycroft on his merry way), and though he'd never complained when Sherlock played classical music; he'd never put it on himself either. He rarely commented on it.
'Well, then, the pain's obviously not that bad. We'll stay off the triptan for now and if you need anything else I've stocked up my medical kit. But you let me know immediately if you get any auras again, or sensations of skull or neck pressure, okay, Sherlock?'
Sherlock grunted, though he wasn't really listening. There was something about the music. Something. He hadn't listened to Rachmaninoff for so long, over a decade, over a decade and a half. He'd just never found a reason to, since he owned an incredible amount of music, and could always compose his own or play whenever he felt like it. There was something in those notes, something, what was it? His brow furrowed and a frown etched its way across his face and stayed there.
'Okay, Sherlock?' John repeated, and Sherlock nodded absently and then waved his hand to send him away. Couldn't the man see that he was thinking?
John muttered something and walked into the kitchen to put away the shopping. Sherlock closed off the noise and withdrew into the Concerto. He could visualise the notes, and his fingers twitched, though he only had a rudimentary knowledge of the piano; he had always preferred violin.
'You know, I've always preferred piano to violin.' Moriarty's line, then, floating back to him. Except it wasn't Moriarty's varying cadence. It was a deeper, rougher, more jovial voice. Sherlock jerked, but the notes surrounded him in a spiral and he was caught. It was as though someone had opened the music box again, but instead of Cock Robin it was different now. The scent wood polish of university corridors. The smell of all the waxes and oils used to condition instruments. The feeling of a grand pressing up against his back. The stark sensation of confidence draining away to nothing at all and a body pressed up against him.
'I've always preferred piano to violin.' A pause, Sherlock's palms flat against the back of the Steinway. 'Some of the others are jealous of you, you know. That you come in here and play so well, even though you're not even taking music. You just use the rooms.'
A bubble of dread, of foreboding, the same sensation in those quiet moments before a bully stopped being charming and went straight to harm instead. Sherlock knew it well, by the time he reached university. He knew the full spectrum of human hatred for that which is different, or brilliant. Though for some reason, Mycroft never copped it in quite the same way. His palms moved and he pushed at the body against him. David stepped backwards, but Sherlock sensed it was only a temporary reprieve. And all the while, Rachmaninoff playing in the background, grand and imposing.
'If you would excuse me.' Sherlock had said, and David laughed.
'Oh, come on then, stay a while, would you? I always wanted to see who would dominate in a battle of wills. Violin? Piano? What do you say? Winner takes all?'
'All of what?' Sherlock snapped.
And in the present, Sherlock smashed the heel of his palm onto the stop button and then ejected the CD and threw it across the room with hands that were shaking, a muffled shout of irritation. He sank onto his chair and pressed his hands against the side of his hand, against his ears, blocking out the piano even though his mind kept playing the notes precisely. He jerked when a presence knelt in front of him, but it was only John, just John.
'I think,' Sherlock began, and then swallowed the rest of his sentence. Even though he'd stopped the worst of the memory, it still filtered back in slivers of detail. Sherlock knew where all of it was headed even though he could have sworn he'd never seen any of the event before his entire life. Well, except the event itself, that is. He cleared his throat.
'I think there's something wrong with me.' He said the words he hadn't wanted to say ever, let alone to John. Because hadn't he always thought that? Oh, certainly, he could compensate such dour thoughts by instead persuading himself that there was something wrong with everyone else, but the evidence was against him. But now that something else was wrong, something new, something different, it felt even worse. He pressed his hands harder to the side of his head, and the pressure seemed to help.
'Look, I'm going to ask you something and you're going to want to dismiss it, but I'm asking you not to. Will you please start from the beginning? Any beginning? Because this? You with nightmares and a migraine and being wroth at the Rach 3? I can work things out for myself, with enough time, but I would prefer you just talk to me.'
John was frustrated. Concerned and frustrated. Sherlock lowered shaking hands and stared hard at the man in front of him. It was John, who hadn't betrayed him at the pool, who wasn't some secret villain hiding in plain sight like so much of the rest of humanity. Sherlock told himself this in the tone he often used with other people who were doubting his superior knowledge.
'I don't like to talk about matters of a personal nature.'
'Yes. I know that, Sherlock,' John said, patiently. 'I'm not asking you to suddenly become comfortable with it, or good at it. I'm just... look, here, I'll lay it out for you. I'm worried about you. I think something's going on that's upsetting you, and I think you're not accustomed to dealing with whatever it is. I think it's bad enough that you're having nightmares, I think it's bad enough that you're remembering disturbing memories that you thought you had deleted; and if I didn't know you better, I'd put forth a damn good case for you having developed some kind of post-traumatic stress after the pool incident.'
'If you didn't know me better?' Sherlock said, low and quiet. John paused, stared at him and then blinked once. He got up and sat opposite Sherlock in his own chair, reclined and sighed. Sherlock watched him, watched for judgement or rejection, and found nothing explicit, nothing that could be confirmed.
Sherlock sorted through all the possible beginnings he could think of. Childhood. Adolescence. Starting with the pool incident. Talking about the memories themselves.
But in the end, only one beginning seemed the easiest to start with.
'My mind palace, I've been building it for a long time, and I was almost certain I knew how it worked...'
And so he began.