When John walked into the living room of 221B at about ten on Tuesday morning, he found the detective sitting perfectly still at the unusually empty kitchen
table. His attention seemed to be focussed on the only object on the table top – a small piece of milk chocolate (or what appeared to be milk chocolate, one
never knew with Sherlock) on a white saucer.
"Morning," John said loudly, hoping against hope to jolt his friend out of his contemplation.
Sherlock, to his credit, gave a brief grunt of recognition and resumed his stare off with the lonely confection.
"Evidence?" John asked, moving into the kitchen and putting the kettle on. "Left overs from Moriarty's Mercury Madness? Cuppa?"
"It was here when I woke up," Sherlock said. "And I slept in the chair. Quite a feat."
"Window or door?" John asked.
"Door, I imagine," Sherlock murmured distractedly. "She was always better at picking locks than at scaling walls."
"Why would Thea leave you chocolate?" John put the tea down next to the saucer and pulled out a chair.
"Excellent question." Sherlock's face was ever so slightly creased with the effort of scanning his memory for chocolate references. "I'd be confident in what she
was getting at if it wasn't November."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Alethea's retaliating. I jogged her memory, now she wants me to recall something. The chocolate is my clue."
"What chocolate memories do you have that involve your daughter…God, that sounds odder out loud than it did in my head."
"One. She tried to trap the Easter bunny when she was four and nearly killed the woman who lived upstairs in the process. Two. After we read Charlie and The
Chocolate Factory, she became obsessed with having instant tomato soup mixed with drinking chocolate, absolutely disgusting but she adored it. Three. If she
impressed Mycroft on their instructional outings he'd buy her ridiculously expensive chocolates and she would sit on the sofa, eating them one by one, gloating
at me. That's it. None of it seems particularly pertinent…unless she's warning me that she's obstructed the stairwell with cling film, which seems unlikely seeing
as you have made it up here without issue."
"Right." John sipped his tea and regarded the chocolate. "It's strangely sweet that you remember these things."
"Sweet?" Sherlock's tone would have been more suited to pronounce gonorrhoea or pustule. "What kind of a heartless clot do you take me for, calling it strange
that I have memories of my only child?"
"I just meant…considering that you only put things on the hard drive that are really important – and I quote directly – it's-"
"Alethea is important," Sherlock blurted and looked suddenly almost bashful. "She's a source of a great many good recollections."
John look at the chocolate, brow creased.
"Have there been any unpleasant incidents involving chocolate?" he asked slowly.
Sherlock cocked his head.
"Because, see," John said, "you've been trying to get her to remember the good things to soften her up. Maybe she wants to remind you of the very opposite."
"To prove her point." Sherlock looked at John with genuine amazement. "Of course. It's so obvious. Why didn't I think of that?"
"'Cause you're a twat," John offered.
Sherlock didn't appear to hear.
"Nothing," he announced after a while.
"Nothing?"
"Nope."
"Any chance you deleted it?"
"Fair chance," Sherlock admitted.
"Maybe you best eat it."
"Why?"
"Because perhaps the taste will remind you," John said. "Sensory memories are quite a powerful thing if pop-psychology be believed. Might be a particular kind
of chocolate."
Sherlock popped the piece into his mouth without hesitation and chewed slowly.
"Ah," he said flatly, flew out of his seat and across to the sink, where he proceeded to spew like it was the end of days.
John started in alarm and then watched with disgusted fascination as Sherlock heaved and hurled his guts up for what seemed minutes.
"Then again," he said when the detective was apparently finished, his forehead rested on the edge of the basin, panting slightly, "perhaps she's just
unleashing her own special brand of revenge."
"No," Sherlock said thickly. "I remember now. There may have been one slightly uncouth use of chocolate."
John raised his eyebrows.
"It was an emergency," Sherlock said, clearly anticipating his friend's judgement. "The landlord was practically beating the door down, Mycroft had frozen my
accounts in a pathetic attempt at intervention, I had just gone to sleep for the first time in days…I'm surprised she'd hold it against me. Frankly, I'm surprised
she still remembers."
"Holds what against you exactly?" John asked with a good deal of apprehension.
"John, you, of all bleeding hearts, must understand that no decent human being would dare begin a conversation about something as trite as rental arrears
when faced with a young father racing for the hospital with his distressingly unwell child."
For a moment John just looked at him.
"You," he said finally, "are awful."
"Please," Sherlock scoffed, reminding John so much of Thea it was nigh absurd. "Alethea was perfectly alright by the time we got down the street. I seem to
recall she ate her own weight in chips not half an hour later."
"You poisoned your daughter to get out of being evicted?"
"He was hardly going to evict us, but it did spare me a tedious conversation. And I didn't poison her, don't be so dramatic."
"How old was she?"
"Why would that matter?" Sherlock met John's glare and seemed taken aback. "Five. Nearly six."
"Sherlock!"
"What? Is your moral outrage exponential to her youth? That seems rather hypocritical."
"Children get special dispensation," John shouted.
"Why?" Sherlock shouted back. "Why is everyone so insistent that the common toddler should be treasured more than the average teenager or twenty-
year-old or middle aged person? What happened to 'a person's a person, no matter how small'?"
"Are you quoting Dr Seuss at me?"
"Are you suggesting you're sensibilities would be less offended if I'd fed Alethea the corpus delicti three years later?"
"You're missing the point," John growled, ready to tear his – or, better, Sherlock's- hair out in exasperation.
"No, you are being superior. And possibly ageist."
"Are you aware of how ironic it is that you, an alleged genius, require an explanation for practically every single view the rest of the human race takes on
almost every situation?"
"The human race is largely composed of imbeciles."
They faced off across the table now, the empty saucer between them. Sherlock's phone buzzed.
"There's a disembowelled man waiting for us at Bart's," he said after scanning the message. "You'll be pleased to hear he's in his mid to late thirties."
"Twat," John muttered as he followed Sherlock's billowing coat tails towards the stairwell.
()()()()()
On Friday an elevator carrying John and Sherlock towards the bowels of an underground car park, groaned, shuddered ominously and stopped.
"I told you we should have taken the stairs," John said drily. "This whole building is dodgy. Press the call button."
Sherlock heaved a sigh.
"There's a call button, isn't there?" John craned his neck to look past Sherlock to the row of buttons on the wall. "There. The one with the little telephone on."
Sherlock pressed the button. Nothing happened.
"Try again," John demanded.
"We're losing time, John."
"Yea, sorry about that. Let me just get out my magical elevator fixing kit-"
"Oh, for goodness sake," Sherlock spat.
"You-"
"Not your attempt at humour," Sherlock cut him off. "The music. Listen."
The elevator might have ceased motion but the soothing muzac buzzing from the ceiling was still doodling away. It was something classical, not For Elise or
anything else John might have identified by name, but something piano-y and violin-y at any rate. To the doctor it sounded like perfectly ordinary elevator
music. Perhaps just a smidgen nicer than what they played in the elevators at the hospital. A tad speedier maybe. A littler sweeter, too.
"Resourceful little viper," Sherlock muttered.
"What?"
Sherlock mashed his fingertip on the call button once more.
"Alethea, kindly restrict your ludicrous campaign of misconstruction to times when I'm not in the middle of work," he barked at the intercom, only to be met with
silence.
"Are you high?" John asked.
Sherlock rolled his eyes.
"How on earth could Thea possibly be responsible for this?" John searched Sherlock's pupils for irregularities, his hands for tremors, his brow for sweat. "Quite
apart from the fact that she's – hopefully – at school right now, how would she know we were in this exact elevator at this exact time? And even if she was
stalking you, which she's not, I can assure you, how would she have stopped it? You're being paranoid."
"She is practically rubbing my face in it," Sherlock sighed. "Listen."
"What are you on about?" The music, admittedly, seemed to have gotten a little louder, the quality of sound a little better…John's heart sank a little.
"Ligeti's violin concerto. Obviously." Sherlock leaned with his back against the wall.
John massaged the bridge of his nose.
"Enlighten me," he said.
"Well," Sherlock cleared his throat. "When Alethea first became disillusioned with the education system and decided school was a waste of her time, I offered
her a deal."
John sighed and waited.
"I told her if she learned to play Ligeti's violin concerto, she'd never have to go to school again."
"Why?"
"Because it steered the conversation away from never ending cyclical nagging and whining." Sherlock smiled ruefully. "She could be unbelievably relentless
even when she was quite young."
"Seems a risky deal," John said. "What if she'd learned it?"
"Impossible," Sherlock said simply. "It's an absurdly – and I mean absurdly – complex piece of music. I might as well have told her she could quite school if only she learned to fly by flapping her arms. The risk was virtually nil. Plus, if she had turned out to be
an exceptionally gifted violinist, the kind of violinist who can learn such a piece before they even age into double figures, I could have taken her out of school
with a clean conscience. Her future as a concert violinist would have been assured."
"You know, I can't quite make up my mind whether you're genius at parenting or absolutely crap." John was shaking his head.
"In this particular instance, I fear the latter might be more appropriate."
"Why?" John asked.
"I underestimated her stamina and tenacity when it came to practise," Sherlock said quietly. "The possibility of escaping school overrode all sense of
self-preservation, well, what little of that one has at the age of eight. She practised the piece until she got acute tendonitis. It was a pretty ugly business.
Doctors barred her from the instrument for months-"
"How much does one have to play the violin to develop tendonitis?"
"Hours," Sherlock said. "Hours and hours every day."
"Why didn't you put a stop to it?"
"Ah." Sherlock became rather interested in the elevator's dirty linoleum floor. "It may have escaped my attention. People in useful positions were just starting
to take me seriously. I got busy and a little distracted."
John opted not to reply to this but could not suppress and rather judgemental grunt.
"I'm not solely to blame here," Sherlock said huffily. "You've lived with Alethea for the last two years – technically the last four years, actually – you know
perfectly well how capable she is of developing obsessions and how difficult it is to dissuade her."
"True," John admitted. "Only of course in the example at hand, you were the one to suggest the obsession and did not actually attempt to dissuade her."
"Yes, yes…" Sherlock rolled his shoulders and pressed the call button again. "I allow that this was not one of my most glorious moments, Alethea, but in the
grand scheme of things it was only a couple of months in a fancy glove. You didn't lose an arm."
The music got a little louder still. The elevator remained motionless.
"Are you sure that was all?" John asked, raising his voice a little to be heard over a mindboggling vibrato.
"What do you mean?" Sherlock shouted.
"Did she just end up with tendonitis or was there more? Maybe she wants you to remember it all before she lets us move on." John pressed the call button
now. "Turn that down," he barked. "It's driving me up the wall and I've got nothing to do with this. I'm an innocent bystander, Thea, just turn it down a notch."
The music became slightly more muted and Sherlock sneered at the intercom with real hurt in his eyes.
"I'm pleased to see the two of you have such excellent rapport," he snapped.
"Shut up and recall," John snapped back.
He leaned back against the wall and watched Sherlock's face slacken ever so slightly, his eyes glazed over and flickering unsteadily, all sure fire signs he was
off into the palace, oblivious to the outside world. John couldn't help but wonder how often Thea had been faced with this exact expression throughout her
childhood and how long it had taken her to work out that it meant her needs would not be met until further notice. Probably not long, considering how
self-sufficient Thea had been even at ten, when John had first met her. Then again, perhaps she was still fighting against it, trying to break through the shell,
because – as Sherlock had pointed out – Thea was nothing if not persistent. Sherlock's snapping out of his scanning process in turn snapped John out of his
ponderings – the detective pressed the call button once more.
"You can't hold me responsible for all aftereffects of your own demented actions," he said. "Actually, you should probably thank me for helping you eradicate
them."
The music ratcheted up immediately, enough for John's hands to fly to his ears.
"Come on!" he shouted.
"I haven't got time for this!" Sherlock roared into the intercom.
The music turned nothing short of deafening.
"This is ludicrous!" Sherlock smacked his hand on the wall next to the call button. "It's ancient history and no apology of mine – even if I meant it – will have an
impact on anything."
The walls were no vibrating with crescendo.
"No one in their right mind would expect an apology from you," John yelled. "Just tell me what happened!"
"What – like a confessional?" Sherlock spat, barely audible over the violin.
"That's what you get for sending her to Catholic school, I suppose," John said wryly, unsure Sherlock would even hear him.
"Fine!" Sherlock's mouth was practically touching the intercom now. "Could you alter the conditions so John can receive my shocking confession, you utter
drama queen!"
The music stopped so suddenly both men flinched.
"Go on," John said, completely intrigued against his will.
Sherlock rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head.
"As it tends to happen when one focusses all one's mental energy on a single task, that task – when taken away – will leave certain imprints on the mind. It
can be unpleasant. It was unpleasant. But we took care of it, eventually."
"What on earth are you on about?" John looked at his friend with complete incomprehension.
Sherlock sighed.
"When Alethea stopped practising the Ligeti piece, she experienced something akin to the symptoms of cold turkey. She became very moody. She didn't sleep
well. She would hear the piece in her head over and over like some kind of highly evolved tinnitus; that was what was keeping her awake. That and…uhm…the
twitching."
"The twitching," John repeated lamely.
"In the fingers of her left hand and or right wrist," Sherlock said. "She had become so accustomed to repeating the same motions her hands were seemingly
unable to cease, even when deprived of the instrument."
"That sounds bloody awful."
"It was inconvenient. She kept dropping things. Writing was impossible once the right hand got going. There was some rather intense cramping. Her head
would jerk towards the left as if to hold the violin in place and become locked in that position."
"Fucking hell."
"It was suggested," Sherlock went on, apparently on a roll now, "that Alethea might take some time of school until she was recovered. But that of course
would have been counterproductive to my strategy, so I insisted she went. There were some unfortunate incidents of particularly ghastly children dubbing her
a spastic and so on, on account of her…well, spasms…so they weren't necessarily incorrect. In true form Alethea retaliated by attacking the mocking parties
physically and ended up getting expelled from that particular school."
John stared. The elevator groaned back into action. They rode to the bottom most level in silence.
"However," Sherlock said as soon as they exited the sliding doors, "it turned out to be an invaluable teaching opportunity in terms of controlling one's impulses.
It took some time, naturally, but Alethea learned to suppress her ticks and getting rid of the never-ending Ligeti loop was the first deletion she accomplished.
Quite the achievement, really. It had really dug its teeth in, so to speak."
"Marvellous," John muttered.
"So?" Sherlock stared at John intensely. "Is her ploy coming to fruition? Are you beginning to view me as a callous, child-mistreating monstrosity yet?"
"Well," John said, rubbing the back of his neck, "yes."
Sherlock's face fell a little.
"But that's not a recent development," John continues with the faintest hint of a smirk. "I think it might have started when you sent your ten-year-old out for
take-away at midnight on the day I moved in."
"Barely two-hundred yards away," Sherlock murmured, his face a perfect mask of composure yet again.