John lurched forward in his chair, an unknown force startling him, the mental effect as powerful as a hand grenade's explosion.
He observed his environment quietly for a moment, taking the time to observe the makeshift piles he had made with Sally scattered around the room.
It was his home, destroyed, then patched with the help from an unexpected friend. John considered his luck, his fortune in finding an unexpected companion. Sally, who was so ready to hate Sherlock, put that aside to perform an act of kindness, despite her selective blindness to the insane extremists worshipping Moriarty/Richard Brooks.
John walked to the kitchen, opening a cabinet in search for tea. He did not want to call Mrs. Hudson, not wanting to bother her nor be bothered and fussed over. There was nothing he wanted more than a simple cup of tea and his familiar chair, which fit to his body like an old leather glove to the owners hand.
An odd smell emanated from the cabinet, making John slightly lightheaded. He scowled, cursing the most-likely-year-old experiment hiding in the back of the cupboard. The smell trickled in through his nose and wrapped around the circumference of the inside of his skull, then moving inward. Both his vision and his mind were consumed in grey clouds, menacing thunderheads stifling his thoughts and sight.
"Let's play a game, John." A too familiar, demonic voice spoke.
The floor suddenly came up to meet John's face.
Crawling, thin legged, tickling in the most horrid and frightening way. A feeling anyone would recognize, that would make most throats rip out a horrible, ripping, blood curdling scream. Spiders. Creeping up John's body, teetering over him, ignoring him.
He groggily looked up, following their trail.
In a black swarm, a man's figure stood. Slicked back hair, strong posture donned in an austere suit, stolid but not plain expression.
Instinctually, John grabbed a kitchen knife and hurdled himself over to the mass that began to change colors, skin becoming a pale pink and suit turning navy blue, head rolling in a reptilian fashion from side to side, chin cutting a figure eight.
John plunged the knife deep into where the heart should be, if this man had one. He sliced through thin air.
The room filled with a horrible, echoing laugh. John turned to the source, Moriarty standing on Sherlock's chair. He smiled like a Cheshire cat, grotesquely beaming as if he enjoyed being stabbed.
"Come on, Joooooooohn, a knife? You're a trained army doctor! Surely you must know hand combat? Let's play fair."
The steel blade started to drip, a metallic puddle forming on the floor. He dropped the plastic handled, panting slightly, eyelids forced back into his skull. The absurdity of the situation became apparent, which Moriarty realized.
"What a loyal pet you have been, so brave and strong. But, I'm afraid you're running out of time." Moriarty stepped gracefully off the chair. "You better find the present I left for you in this flat, or you will have a lot more trouble with hallucinations, reality and fantasy morphing into one… Try and remember what is real…" His face turned from sadistically bemused to demonic "And what's only an illusion."
The jigsaw puzzle of spiders that had apparently knit together to form Moriarty began to come apart, raining down what remained of his body and scuttling in every direction. John jumped on them, trying to crush them with his feet desperately until they all but disappeared.
John scanned the room, looking for the next onslaught of hallucinations as well as their source.
His eyes found the spot where the knife had melted, but it was no more. He quickly got on his knees in one agile motion and groped the floor for any sign of the knife – metal or liquid. He was unsuccessful.
Rising in a panic, he fled to the kitchen, where one cabinet was left ajar. John's hands scoured every shelf, he flung open every drawer and cupboard in the entire flat, desperately trying to find the source of the hallucinogen.
Slumping against the counter, he glanced at the knife-holder. All were present, probably not even disturbed for a year.
It was John's second day back in 221B, he did not remember falling asleep, but found himself curled in a ball in the corner of Sherlock's room, behind the door and beneath a poster of the periodic table.
He awoke with a start, bolting into a standing position, but crumpling in two as his leg complained violently to the sudden movement. Blinking heavily, John tried to focus his eyes, but they shook uncontrollably, the image of Sherlock's bedroom morphing into a street, the world tilting slightly under him as he stumbled forward.
The bedroom disappeared completely as John staggered towards a body, his head lolling on his shoulders helplessly.
No one else was there around the body. It was only John, but he grit his teeth and pushed towards it, remembering the vertigo and discombobulation after being too close to an exploding grenade, rushing to aid a fallen comrade in battle.
He rolled the body so that the face and full damage was visible, the man was dead, John determined, his pulse was gone and his hand icy cold.
It was Sherlock.
He head surged upwards, the back of his head soaked with his own blood. He grabbed John's shirt, tugging him in close enough to hear the rustling of his hair, the tickling and rapid breaths Sherlock was taking.
He whispered quietly, barely audibly; words John knew the real Sherlock would have never uttered.
"You were just part of the act."
John recognized that it wasn't real. But in front of him lay his best friend, appearing dead, physically dead, but still able to somehow imitate life.
John clenched the man's hand, a giant weight pressing down on him as he lay Sherlock's head on his knee.
"Don't. Don't do this, please don't. Not you. You're dead, you died because of Moriarty. He said it himself, in a letter; you were protecting me from his assassins. It wasn't an act. You weren't faking it."
Sherlock's face twisted angrily, anger John had only seen when Moriarty stood behind Kitty Riley in her flat, claiming to be an actor.
"IT'S YOUR FAULT!"
John shut Sherlock's eyes, silencing him, returning him to his original death.
It isn't real. This isn't real.
He repeated the two sentences in his head, blinking rapidly to expel the street scene around him.
An itchy comforter scratched his skin as he turned his head, the smell of burnt fabric seeping down his throat.
He was back in his apartment, laying in the fetal position on Sherlock's burnt bed.
The sun was rising in the sky, a whole day had passed while he was locked inside his own mind, being tortured by his deepest fears.
He could not eat.
His paranoia level escalated so high that the thought of food was repelling, even if there was any to be eaten.
He did have to drink, but only allowing himself water from the tap, and alternating to every tap within the flat.
This third day was when he tentatively gripped the doorknob, turning it but barely so, it stuck on a lock.
He flipped every lock on the door to open, and tried again to no avail.
With a great sigh of annoyance, John slumped in his favorite chair. He knew to expect a horrific reincarnation of Sherlock or Moriarty to appear out of thin air.
He did not expect the door to click. He listened, frozen in place, waiting for a violent and raging storm to come through and decimate the place. It was not a storm, it was Ella.
She stood in the doorway, looking morose, and walked in without asking permission.
"John, I'm so sorry to hear about your friend. I know you were close with Sherlock."
"He died about a year ago, Ella. You know this. He makes you crazy."
She raised an eyebrow at him, and then crouched to eyelevel with John in his chair. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, he died just last week."
John stared at her wildly before she nodded at the ground, understanding. "I see. It's okay, John, this is very normal. Your mind has decided to skip over the most painful time after someone's death, you probably have trouble remembering all that happened. Am I right?"
"No. You're not. I remember clearly what happened. I went to do therapy sessions with you, and you were completely nuts. You trashed this apartment!" He spastically gestured to the unusual state of the room. "You blackmailed a detective; you had control over all these lunatics… I remember."
He expected another explosion from her, like the last visit John had with his therapist, but her voice remained calm, it was almost gentile, caring.
"And how did Sherlock die, John?"
"He jumped from a roof, to stop the assassins Moriarty hired."
"Who is Moriarty?"
"He's a genius, an evil genius; he was playing games with Sherlock with the bomb killings. You remember, they were in the news!" John pleaded, seeing the look of confusion on Ella's face. "He was the one who robbed the bank of London, he wore the crown jewels and opened the prison!" The only change her face made was to one of making a grim decision.
Frustrate, John stood up, catching Ella by surprise by moving without any apparent motive.
"I think you will want to come with me, we can run a few tests and get this all sorted out. It will all be fine"
John boiled over with rage. This awful, psychotic woman was intruding on his home, trying to trick him out of her own insane needs.
"Go, Ella. Leave now."
Luckily for the therapist, John's true emotions could always be seen on his face as plainly as if they were written in giant words. She disappeared into thin air, John pressing his palms into his eyebrows.
He had no phone; it was left in his jacket pocket at his once flat, now crime scene.
He tried every window and the door, all tightly sealed, unable to be unlocked.
It was the dead of night, somewhere in between the fifth and sixth day that had passed in a series of living nightmares. Moriarty had been right, John could barely recognize the difference between real and fake, illusion and reality constantly swapped positions.
Finding the right way out of a hallucination became like trying to find the right cup of five, the one with a ball underneath. The cups used to switch places, sliding around in a doe-see-doe in an effort to confuse John. It was a simple game. By now, though, the ball could be pulled out from the cup from underneath and placed under a different cup – all unseen to John. He could still distinguish where the ball was based on locating the sound of the ball under the cup, but he was slowly becoming deaf.
The absurdity of the situation was not decreasing, but John's ability to recognize it was increasing.
Throughout the fifth day, he experienced traumatizing nightmares, his friends – dead and alive – that he cared for came to him and tortured him. Physically and mentally he was beaten and tormented mercilessly.
The situation had become so desperate that he stood with his gun in his hand, the safety off.
The sound of a single shot boomed through 221B.
The bullet lodged itself in midair, millimeters from the lock on the door where John was aiming.
He cursed a stream of swears loudly and bitterly. John tried to keep the image of the stopped bullet in mind, to remind himself that there would be a hallucination to ensue so he could braced his mind for any deterring talk against Sherlock, desperate attempts to convince John that he was just a con.
In the dark room, Sherlock's familiar stance stretched upward, his hands the size of John's entire body alone. The ceiling stretched to accommodate to the giant.
The bullet, remember the bullet!
John concentrated so fiercely, he shouted at the monstrous Sherlock above.
NO!
The giant howled and began to decompose vividly before John's very eyes, shirking down to Sherlock's normal height.
The gruesome image shook John to his core, but he held steadfast, even as the rotting corpse croaked one pathetic word, one single plea.
"Help."
John grinded his teeth and slammed his eyes shut, erasing Sherlock's decomposing body from his mind.
He threw the gun aside, almost forgetting that he was holding it to begin with, and slammed himself blindly against the door.
A force shoved back, surprising John enough to let the door move enough for petite Mrs. Hudson to come in, absolutely bewildered.
"John! What in the world are you doing?" John stared at her blankly, not sure if he could trust the woman before him. "Well come on then, I was just going to Sherlock's grave, you know it's been a year today." She added grimly.
John obliged, stumbling from whatever part of hell that had decided to occupy his flat.
Sherlock watched John, agonized by the obvious hallucinations he must have been subject too. Sherlock had only gone to stop by 221B when he spied a half crazed John wielding an empty gun, spinning wildly around, trying to follow some figure on the ceiling's movement, then screaming and throwing himself against the door.
Mycroft knew Moriarty would start his horrible games with John, and Sherlock was too late to protect both his brother and his best friend.
Sherlock contemplated his options for some time until he decided to follow John and Mrs. Hudson to the cemetery. He needed to at the very least keep a diligent watch over John from this point onward.
He had let John be alone for too long, but was only just realizing the effect it had on both of them.