He types at his blog the next morning, a coffee mug beside his laptop. He tells John, in Sigerson's embarrassing narrative style (LOL 3), about his awful walk through Berkeley. Then, because it is a fashion blog he's running, he writes about a thin pair of leathery shoes he had seen on many feet in the city.

Too flimsy by far, no good for clubbing, he types. This blogging thing is getting easier. Dr. Madder is sitting across the hotel table, sipping her own coffee. She hasn't said a word. Clearly wants to say something. Wants to discuss the Asperger's, the possibility that he has the illness – no. No, no. She's probably already decided, he's already hopelessly nailed down as an "Aspie" in her head. The thought is so painful that, eventually, he's forced to stop typing and says, "You have questions."

What's it like to be socially clueless? Why can't you control your little freak-outs? Can I call you "Aspie" now?

He waits for it all.

She looks up, seeming surprised at being addressed.

"Yes, I do," she says.

"Go on," Sherlock says impatiently.

"Did Jim have a funeral?"

He pauses, but only for a second. "Moriarty?" he says.

"Mr. Moriarty, yes. Jimmy. James. Jim. Him. That guy. Did he get a funeral?" she asks.

"I'm not sure. Is it relevant to the Sasaki Code?" he asks.

"Oh, no. I was just curious," she says. "How's the blog going?"

He ignores this; she can check his blog updates any time she wants. He says, "Shall I text Mycroft and ask?"

"If you'd like." She shrugs.

A few minutes later, he receives an answer:

8:09 A.M.: Moran got to Moriarty's body before we could; it was removed from the hospital. We have been unable to find it.

Ugh. Mycroft's minions. Incompetent as always.

"He probably wouldn't have wanted a funeral," Dr. Madder decides when she sees the text. "Probably thought funerals were boring. An orgy in his name would have worked, though."

Sherlock is sorely tempted to further inquire about her relationship with Moriarty, but he refrains, if only because she's refraining from mentioning the Asperger's. She'll mention it soon, of course. But at least he's ready now. She's just handed him his defense.

Time to discuss Asperger's, Sherly, she'll say, patronizing.

How about that Jimmy, Dr. Madder? Did you know him for long?

Yes. That will work.

She keeps silent for the rest of the morning, at least. Once he sips the last of his coffee he shuts his laptop and rises. Reaches for his violin beside the bed, trying not to lean on his toes too much (they're still blistered from his walk). He cranks out a couple of discordant tunes; strings of notes that clank into each other, making the ears wince. He likes, sometimes, for the notes not to go together quite right; he's never had a proper respect for rhythm and the like. Violins were made to be mirrors, not paintings; the difference is that the former isn't always aesthetic.

Dr. Madder doesn't complain about his clashing chords. He used to have to soothe John with a couple of John's favorite pieces, on nights when he felt like playing very badly. Apparently Dr. Madder doesn't need that type of compensation. Convenient.

"Sigerson," she says around noon, breaking into his reverie. He turns to her, setting his bow on his lap.

"Yes?"

"We need to go back to UC Berkeley today," she says. "The library was where I spent most of my time, but while I was developing the computer code there I also – "

"You left hints of the Sasaki Code elsewhere," he interrupts, having anticipated this. "This university was your home for a number of years, after all. Where? Your dorm room?"

She grins. "Yes, very good. It's already fairly hidden, but I'd like to be safe…"

He's about to ask what, precisely, is already fairly hidden, but she interrupts, "With which are you more comfortable: Matches or axes? Or maybe just a scraper, if you're feeling delicate."

He raises his eyebrows. "I won't make a decision until I get the particulars of my mission."

"As you wish," she says, and sets her own empty coffee mug on the table. "Regardless, we'll have to stop at a hardware store first. I'm ready when you are."


What would the dorm room of a blossoming genius look like? Sherlock's had been a confused smorgasbord: his table had been layered with microscopes and beakers; his shelves stacked with everything from Nietzsche to Goethe, Cicero to Catullus; his walls decorated with anatomy diagrams and taxonomy. Everything about his room had said "Major Undecided." There'd been a time when Sherlock Holmes had been an intellectual curiosity, interests thorough but unfocused. Strange to recall.

Anabelle Madder's old dorm room is nothing like this. Someone else boards here now – it's been years, of course, since Ms. Madder slept between the walls where Sherlock now stands. But the signs of her presence are there. He sees it in the way the wooden floorboards squeak in certain places across the room, a sure sign of an incessant pacer. He sees the faded square where a small cot once rested upon the floor, like the precedent for Dr. Madder's current preference for futons. He can picture her room clearly: Neat and to the point. Nothing but mathematics.

Dr. Madder is standing next to him, hands in her jean pockets. She's frowning and muttering irritably to herself: "…Why did they decide to put a bed in the middle of the room? Takes up all of the space. That's ridiculous, completely inefficient… And why are the students who live here somessy? It was never so messy in my day… Not enough stuff to make a mess with…"

"There's wallpaper in this room," Sherlock says. Dr. Madder brings her rant to a halt.

"Yes," she says, turning to him. "Horrible, isn't it? Who picked out the purple wallpaper, do you think? It's oppressive. How is anyone supposed to breathe in a room wrapped in purple flowers?"

Sherlock, who quite misses the wallpaper of 221B, makes no comment to this, but continues to his point: "I caught glimpses of other dorm rooms while we walked up here. They all have uniform peach-colored walls. Painted."

"Yes. I wanted white while I boarded here, but peach was better than this." She gestures to the wallpaper.

Wallpaper. Lots of fond memories regarding wallpaper. In the Before John days, Sherlock had once caught a serial killer with a proclivity for old women. The police hadn't suspected it was murder; they'd dimly thought that old women dying was suddenly becoming a trend across London. No one but Sherlock had noticed that all of the old women died in rooms with wallpaper. It was only once Sherlock insisted to Lestrade that someone rip off the wallpaper in one of the victim's houses that the signs of the murder were revealed. Wallpapering a house to cover up a murder: As funny as it is ineffective.

"What's beneath the wallpaper, Dr. Madder?" Sherlock asks, looking around the room. "Where is it hidden?"

Dr. Madder frowns, but after a moment she points to the wall across from the bed. It's windowless, but has a small bookshelf leaning against it.

"That's where it took me," she says.

"Where what took you?" Sherlock asks, approaching the wall. He pushes the bookshelf away, careful not to move anything; the students who board here now are in class, won't return for several hours. Best to leave little evidence of Sherlock and Dr. Madder's presence.

"The obsession," she says. "I didn't eat for five days, didn't drink water for eighteen hours. When the idea for the Sasaki Code first came to me, I forgot about everything else. I was consumed. So, naturally, it seemed frivolous to stop and look for paper. And with no one around to hand me a notebook…"

"…The wall seemed a perfectly optimal tool for catching all your thoughts," Sherlock finishes. He knows that lust for an idea, the drive that is the farthest a human being can get from primitive. It is an ecstasy, a type of intellectual mania that few individuals could even hope to experience. He feels a certain kind of respect for her. He only knows one other person, besides himself and her, who could become so obsessive. But that man had been insane.

Together, Anabelle and Sherlock spend time tearing and scraping off the wallpaper of the dorm room. They scratch and rip their fingernails, but are too intent upon their mission to give much notice. Sherlock's spent so many years aiming to discover clues, and now he's working to cover them up. Must hide the marks of Dr. Madder's initial obsession with the computer code. He thinks of Moran, or perhaps Gruner, coming into her old dorm room, looking for evidence. No reason why they'd let wallpaper stop them. Need to make sure there's nothing for them to find.

Once the old, peach-colored paint of the wall is revealed, Sherlock and Dr. Madder step back to absorb their work. The evidence has been revealed: Mathematical equations have been scrawled all over the wall. Sherlock envisions a young Ms. Madder, working from her height of 5'8", reaching up over her own head in her enthusiasm, so that the numbers are, from Sherlock's height, at eye level. She worked from the right, vertically, in the way traditional Japanese is written. The work starts out hesitantly. Plenty of things crossed out. The math is tentative, simple for someone adept in discreet probability. Then she delved further, using her own mathematician's shorthand, becoming more explorative. His eyes move slowly across the wall, until the numbers become too complex for him to understand. He sees that her hand moved quicker the farther along she went, turning from a girlish print to a nearly-illegible scrawl. He can hear the years-old thoughts that once raced through her head: This is possible, isn't it? This code, it's mathematically feasible – I could make this. He feels her beating heart, her rush of adrenaline, her salivating mouth, all the symptoms of that intellectual lust he knows so well. He hears her shallow breathing, and imagines how she must have heard it too, how it must have made her aware of her own solitude. One steady stream of inhales and exhales, echoing throughout the mostly-empty room. He knows she must have made believe that she wasn't alone, that someone was behind her, watching, witnessing the genius being made. He knows that feeling. Has a theory that a lonely genius was the first to imagine an omnipresent god.

Yes. Anabelle Madder snatched the first inklings of something wonderful in this room. He can see the Inspiration like it's tangible.

He realizes that he's been silent for a considerable length of time when Dr. Madder, very gently, takes hold of his hand. Slides her thumb across his wrist, interlaces her fingers with his. He draws in a breath and pulls away.

"We need to destroy this," she says.

He doesn't want to. This is beautiful. This is like the art Mummy is always so moved by. He never appreciated the paintings she collected, but he appreciates this. He even appreciates paintings, now, in a way. Understands the artist's urge to replicate. He wants to replicate this, wants to preserve it forever. This is evidence that someone else in the world – someone close to his age, living in his era – someone standing right beside him – has experienced his same type of intellectual joy. Looking at these crossed out numbers that he can only partly make sense of, he realizes how not-alone he is. The average human memory on visual matters is only 62% accurate, but he needs to be above average. Needs to rememberall of this, precisely as it is.

"Let's do so," is all he says. It doesn't dawn on him to tell her what he's feeling, and she doesn't seem to suspect that he's experiencing a revelation. He pulls his scraper out of his pocket and presses the blade against the wall. It's over the top equations, the first ones written in that neat, feminine handwriting.

Across the wall, at a random part of the number mural, Dr. Madder begins to scrape off the paint and writing.

"Stop," Sherlock commands. She looks up.

"Problem?" she says.

"Let me do this on my own." He needs to scrape everything away precisely. Must do it top to bottom, right to left, just as it was written. Must absorb every intricate detail of this genius and never, ever forget it.

"But it'd be faster if – "

"Please," he says. Please be like John and always do what I say if I say "please."

For some reason, she smiles and, to his relief, steps back.

"Alright," she says, holding up her scraper as if in surrender. "As you like, Sigerson."

"Thank you," he says, and begins his work.


"What are you doing?" Dr. Madder asks. It's hours later, and they're back at the hotel room. Sherlock is standing by the window with his violin balanced on one shoulder, a pen between his lips, lined paper on the window sill. He misses the convenience of his folding music stand and music sheets, but the instrument currently touching his skin makes up for it.

"Composing," he says. His accent sounds even more ridiculous when he's speaking with a pen between his lips. Dr. Madder doesn't laugh, though. And, even better, she doesn't ask what he's composing. He's not sure how to explain that he's converting the numbers in his head – the ones she'd once written on her dorm wall – into music notes, and turning it into a song. It might be something she'd enjoy, now that he thinks of it; a type of cryptography, although perhaps crude by her standards. Yet it doesn't dawn on him to ask her to join him in the effort, or to inquire as to whether or not she has any knowledge of music. He continues on alone, and she continues working on her laptop. In silence they proceed into the night.