Part six:
It was the sharp, biting pain radiating up his arms that told John not to open his eyes. He had played this role enough to know that he has being restrained and that he needed time to adjust that would be foregone the minute his captors realised his consciousness.
His arms were forced at odd angles around his back, their twisted joints adding a dull ache to the sharper pain from the wrist cuffs. His head hurt, like he had been hit hard with a brick wall, but there was a distinctive blankness in his mind, a blindness around the edges of his consciousness. John fought to hold onto lucid thought. They had drugged him with something. What?
When John came around for a second time, it was with a jolt of pain, sending his body into a reflexive arch, straightening his back as much as the confines of the chair would allow. He could no longer hide the fact that he was awake, so he opened his eyes and studied his surroundings.
The first thing that he saw, or rather felt, was the pull of a tube in his arm. They had released his arms from their position behind him and they were now tied to the arms of the chair. It seemed that they were feeding him intravenously. Probably drugging him too. He disregarded his discomfort, there was nothing he could do about that now.
Most of his mental faculties had returned, the throbbing in his head faded, but no one came to check on him. He couldn't see much, just the darkness that seemed to draw closer then retreat. The floor was dirty, so were the walls, and as far as John could see there was only one door, on the wall facing him. In the gloom he could only make out the outline of it, a series of straight dark lines against a darker background. The little light came in through a window directly above him. John couldn't strain his neck back that far without feeling dizzy, but he knew that it was there from the small play of light and shadow on the floor. It was stark, bare, and horrifying. All it needed was a drain on the floor and the torture chamber would be complete. And for all John knew there was one.
After he had woken the third time, he was rocking a confused panic. Where were they? What were they going to do with him? Where was he? How was he going to get out, or even understand his position, if no one came to talk to him? He'd been in similar situations, and seen enough spy films, to know that the only chance he had were if someone made a mistake and gave him an opportunity. It seemed that these people weren't taking any chances. No one came into the room, at least not while he was concious. No demands were made, no long monologues or speeches. No threats. Nothing.
John thought until he ran out of questions, knowing that there was, in reality, no way to collect answers.
The only thing he didn't ask himself was why. There never needed to be a why when one was Sherlock's companion. The why was an integral part of the job description.
The fourth time he woke it was with a felling of worthlessness. In a fit of nostalgic panic, an attempt to escape the weak vulnerability that had suddenly come upon him, John got angry. It was something that he generally did quite well, but as he yelled out into the empty room, rocked the legs of the chairs against the stone floor, loud noised echoing through the dim corners, he got no more attention than he had when he was silent.
John felt the chair wobble precariously after a particularly energetic thrust, felt his stomach drop as the chair began to fall, only just able to bring the seat back under control and save his fingers, knees, bones, from the impact of a fall.
The worthlessness set back in. John didn't fight it this time, just let it wash over him, feeling the ridiculousness of the situation. Of all the emotions that he could be feeling, all of the things that he should be thinking, that was the most shallow, petty and selfish.
But he couldn't clear his mind of the fact that they hadn't come to see him. They, who ever they were, had gone to the trouble of kidnapping him and putting him in this god forsaken room, but they hadn't even come to visit or spoken a single word to him. Given his current clarity of mind, they hadn't even thought that he needed to be drugged again. He was nothing to them. It wasn't him that they wanted.
It was never him that they wanted. It was never him that anyone wanted.
They wanted Sherlock.
Everyone wanted Sherlock.
John would never admit that it made him jealous.
Sherlock was a great man, interesting and powerfully brilliant, and the only thing that John wanted more than to be like him, was to be wanted by him. Being accepted, chosen by the man, even if it were just to live in the same space, to accompany him on cases, to be his friend, it was the highest form of flattery that John could imagine. But being wanted by Sherlock was something else entirely.
John remembered the flash of emotion behind the blue green eyes as Sherlock had kissed him.
Kissed him.
Kissed him.
John was still in the silence of the room. The self destructive thoughts faded away into the dark, coiling black and thick in the confining corners. They couldn't help him so there seemed little point in entertaining them.
John wasn't going to play damsel in distress for these people, or for Sherlock any more. It wasn't the role he had been trained to play. He was a soldier, he was going to be a soldier.
He trusted Sherlock with his life, and he trusted him to come after John.
But John refused to just sit and wait for him to come and sweep him off his feet. If these people though he was worthless, he was going to use that to his advantage.
John didn't have a plan, but he had time to make one. Sherlock probably hadn't even noticed he was missing. When John had left the apartment, Sherlock had been off somewhere, not moving at all, eyes wide open and barely blinking. When John had pulled back from the kiss and seen the panic in Sherlock's eyes give way to the blank expression, he had spent a moment or two worrying that he had broken the world's only consulting detective. But his own panic cleared and he recognised the signs of Sherlock's departure into his mind palace.
In the room, the memory make John chuckle. Only Sherlock would need a whole castle to hold his information. Pretentious prick, John thought fondly.
The room stole his voice, echoed it around him in fading circles. John chastised himself. For the purpose of his half formed plan, he needed them to believe in the role that he was playing, he needed them to believe that he was helpless and worthless, and that he was scared out of his mind.
A true fear didn't enter John's mind. He could recognise that perhaps his environment should scare him, it was indeed intended to have just that affect, but the dank walls of torture chambers had stopped scaring him long ago. The light from the skylight window was already fading, or perhaps fading again. For all John knew, he'd been stuck in the room for more than twenty four hours. By the time darkness had truly fallen, and no light seeped through the square above his head, John had escaped the stark, bare walls of reality and sunken into dreams.
