Chapter Twenty Five

Author's Note: OKAY- so I lied. TWO more chapters, this one here, another one and an epilogue. Did I hear someone say thank you? One more of serious angst, the rest are consequences.

Sherlock heard someone talking, a girl's voice. He didn't care; it didn't matter. All that mattered was getting away- he had to move or the fire would consume him. Everything hurt. His wrist was on fire. He could feel the skin peeling away, flames licking at the wrist. Pirate in the stall next to the tack room was screaming- he could hear the sound getting louder and louder. His own heart was pounding so hard that he could hear it, even feel its movement in his chest. His blood was whooshing through his ears, he could hear the sound of his eyeballs moving; even though his eyes were shut tight, he still kept moving them, looking for the flames through the dark smoke. He head was full of a fuschia neon pink so harsh and garish that it burned holes in his brain. Every one of his senses was on fire. The smoke sounded a hard discordant note- somewhere around b flat. His mouth was dry and he was pulling in air as quickly as he could, terrified that he was going to be consumed by smoke and flame. Why did the air taste pink? Why couldn't he move? If he didn't, he was going to die.

Now it was a man's voice he heard. Was it his voice, the one who came down out of the ceiling hatch and attacked him? He was putting away the box of mane ribbons; he'd just finished counting them to be sure that there were more than enough for Gatcombe. He'd gone for white this time, to go with the white saddle blanket, the white trim on the bridle, in contrast to his own black dressage jacket and boots. White ribbons showed off Pirate's arched neck so well. He was looking forward so much to the nationals. At last, freed from the shadows that had been chasing him and Pirate for the past two years. His enemy had been banished. Fired, sent away by Guilliams. His father had not believed him, so he'd endured it for too long. But when the trainer finally caught the man hurting Pirate, he'd been fired on the spot. He didn't have to tell anyone what the man had been doing to him, just the horse.

Sherlock was going over the freestyle dressage sequence in his mind while his fingers counted the ribbons. So, he was slow to realise what the sound behind him meant. When he turned, his mind had trouble understanding the sight of legs in riding boots descending through the hatch, then the thud of his enemy landing on the tack table. The stream of vile swearing, the rage now unleashed. He'd thought himself at last free from the fear, but now his enemy was back. Panic just paralysed Sherlock until those rough hands grabbed him and started to hit him.

But this voice wasn't the same. And these hands weren't hitting him, they were holding him. Not the one who beat him, stripped his clothes off, tied him up and then picked up the riding crop. Not the one who started the fire. This voice was not angry and brutal. It was calm, insistent. It kept telling him to slow down his breathing. "Sherlock, you need to close your mouth and breath through your nose. Try to hold each breath, count it- two hundred and twenty one b- before you let it out slowly and take another. Can you do that for me?"

Impossible. I can't shut my mouth. The fire is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. The smoke is choking me, I have to keep breathing! I'm going to die if I don't get out of here! The Sherlock realised that Pirate had stopped screaming. Oh God, he's dead! Sherlock forced himself to open his eyes and he started to stuggle to sit up. His left arm and hand hurt like hell, his right tingled and felt numb as he used it to lift his weight. As his head started to get vertical, he felt dizzy, sick to his stomach, the walls seemed to tilt and he lost his balance again.

"Sherlock, SHERLOCK!" but he was lost. If Pirate's dead, then I don't want to live. He surrendered to the smoke and the flame; the darkness took him.

oOo

Doctor Onugbou switched on the light box on the wall outside the trauma room. "It's not great news, I'm afraid. This new bone chip…" he gestured to the film "…nicked the volar radial carpal artery. We haven't assessed for nerve damage, but there might be some of that as well. The fall also bent the plate and pulled out of line three of the screws." The West African doctor grimaced. "If anything, it's worse than it was originally. Forget all the king's horses and all the king's men. I'm not sure even Will Masters can put this one back together again. Quite frankly, it's a mess; he'll be lucky to escape a fusion of that joint."

John blanched. "Not an option." Without the violin as escape valve, Sherlock would simply not be able to cope. It was his security blanket, and a way, perhaps the only way, he allowed himself to express emotion- be it chasing Mycroft out of the flat with discordant atonal notes, or whispering of his ennui in the middle of the night.

"Well, we will have to wait and see what Masters says. I've just spoken to him on the phone. To say that he was not amused about the idea of returning here again from holiday in Cornwall- well, I'll leave you to imagine his reaction. We've managed to control the bleeding for now with a compression dressing. He's been cross-matched for four units and he's now upstairs, awaiting the Hb result to see how much to give him. Given Masters won't be here for a while yet; the vascular surgeon will probably have to tackle the arterial repair first."

John went up to the fifth floor Emergency Surgery department, and slumped into a chair. Deja vu didn't even begin to describe his state of mind. Since he'd last sat here, Sherlock had solved not one mystery, but four - he'd found the Wessex Cup, solved the 'murder' of Bill Stryker, recovered Highwood Blaze, and revealed Rosie Baxter's role in the it all. The young woman had been arrested by DI Pierson as soon as she left the tack room. John had scarcely noticed and cared even less. What price will Sherlock have to pay for this case? What has my selfishness of wanting to ride cost him?

The ambulance trip had been longer this time than on the night they had come from Musgrave Hall. Midday traffic didn't help, nor did the fact that Capleton was seven miles further east. At first John could not calm his injured friend, who resisted the ministrations of the ambulance crew. He'd been confused and struggled against the hands that moved him onto the trolley. Once he was safely strapped in, John tried to keep talking to him, fighting against the pull of the flashback, but it was a lost battle. He kept remembering Frank Wallace's description of how he'd taken Sherlock to Worthing Hospital in the middle of the night. Now they were re-enacting the same process, so it was hard to convince his friend that he wasn't re-living the original trauma. Sherlock's eyes were shocked wide- John couldn't tell if it was the pain, his hypersensitivity to the ambulance siren, or the flashback. But he did not speak again, nor acknowledge John's presence beside him. Somewhere on the outskirts of Gloucester, Sherlock lost consciousness.

As horrible as the wreckage of Sherlock's wrist was, John worried more about his state of mind. Traumatic memory had been well and truely unleashed. Pandora's box. Too many triggers- horses, loss and death, the broken bones and pain. Whatever coping mechanisms Sherlock had developed to deal with it twenty one years ago, they'd been undermined now to the point where sight, scent or sound were enough to trigger flashbacks and panic attacks. God knows what nightmares he's had; maybe that's why he fell out of bed in the first place.

There was one more task he was dreading. He had to call Mycroft. He explained where he was going to the nurse at the desk, and walked down the stairs to the ground floor and out the door. There was a series of benches outside, but under a glass canopy. He sat on one of them and wearily pulled out the phone, and hit last call redial.

"Doctor Watson, how can I help?" The calm voice of Mycroft's PA, not-Anthea, answered on the second ring.

"Oh...I need to speak to Mycroft, please? It's about Sherlock."

There was the briefest of pauses. "Mister Holmes has transferred his personal calls to me because he's in a meeting that's uninterruptable. Can I help?"

"How long will that meeting last?"

"Indeterminant. Could be another four to five hours. Is it a life-threatening situation? If it is, I can get a code message to him."

John thought about it. "No, not really. But, when he gets out of that meeting, tell him to call me. We are back at the Royal Gloucestershire Hospital."

Not-Anthea said quietly, "Is he alright?"

"No, no he's not 'alright'" John snapped, before remembering that she would have read the original medical reports from Worthing Hospital, before faxing them to Mycroft. He had no idea how long she'd been working with the elder Holmes, but probably long enough to know a great deal about his brother. Enough for Mycroft to trust her with this most delicate and personal research on his behalf. The doctor decided that she deserved to know a bit more than he might have been willing to share.

"I'm sorry; didn't mean to bite your head off. He's rebroken his wrist, badly, and had a series of bad flashbacks. PTSD is taking hold."

"If there is anything that Mister Holmes could do immediately to help you or his brother, tell me and I will get it done now. He's always given me full authority when something has to be done for Sherlock."

John thought about it. "Yes, there is ... Find a way to get the consultant Will Masters to Gloucester from Cornwall as fast as possible. The longer Sherlock has to wait for surgery, the worse the damage is likely to be."

"I'm on it. We used a helicopter last time. He will know the drill. Anything else?"

John realised that his call to Mycroft had been in part simply to share the worry he was feeling about Sherlock, and to seek his advice about how to handle the situation. Both of those things could wait; Sherlock would be in surgery and anaesthetised for hours to come. "Actually, no- once he gets into surgery, it's all about waiting. He will be unconscious for hours yet. Get Mycroft to call me when he gets out of the meeting, because I need to know how he wants me to handle things when Sherlock wakes up." With that, John thanked her, said good bye and hung up.

oOo

Four hours later and John was fed up with waiting. He had spent entirely too many hours sitting in plastic chairs, watching the tides of people washing through the hospital. As a doctor, working in his own hospital, the environment was familiar enough to ignore. When he was on duty, he had things to do, places to go, people to see, decisions to make. When he was at work, patients took priority, but even so, it wasn't about the individual person. An occupational hazard of being a surgeon is that one defines one's day not by the people one has operated upon, but rather the bits of them- a compound fracture, a gunshot wound, the shrapnel of a roadside IED, a car accident. 'Interesting days' involved complicated pieces of work, unusual techniques, a whipple, laproscopic work instead of open surgery, or an unusual bit of diagnosis- "Think medical deduction, Sherlock; it's what I do", he remembered trying to explain it to his flatmate in the early days. He'd tried to ignore the comment that followed, "Yes, John, but thereafter you become a transport mechanic."

As someone waiting on news about a particular patient, the experience was completely different. Mind numbingly boring, yet with an undercurrent of unrelenting tension and overwhelming frustration. He didn't care at all about the other patients, their families, the staff working in the hospital. At the London hospitals he'd been at while waiting for news about Sherlock, at least there he might well know some of the staff, and be able to talk to them informally. At some of those hospitals, UCH, St Thomas's and Barts, he now had locum privileges, so could move around more, go to the staff canteen- at least find someone with whom to commiserate. There were no such distractions here.

Royal Gloucestershire Hospital was a great unknown. And he would be happy if he never saw it again. Surrounded by the noises of the hospital, he tried to think through what he would say when Mycroft did finally get through. About how he could not leave Sherlock to ignore the PTSD, to pretend that nothing was different. He'd tried that strategy, gone along with his friend's refusal to even acknowledge the flashbacks and melt-down. He'd not raised it himself, because he also knew that forcing a traumatised person to "talk" about it was usually the worse possible thing you could do, if they were not prepared to engage with it.

But, neither could he ignore it. The sort of 'incident' (How dare Sherlock's father minimise such an assault with such a trivial word?!) – it was something that should have never been allowed to happen. But when it did, the hospital should have reported it, so Sherlock would have had support, therapy, help to get through it. And whatever remission he'd had over the intervening period, it was now back with a vengeance. Pretending that these were simply 'accidents' was no longer an option.

Yet, no sooner was he on his medical moral high ground, when a little voice whispered "Yes, but YOU haven't exactly been willing to take the support, use the therapy, have you, John Watson?" As a PTSD patient, John had been horrible. He knew it. He had not 'engaged' with Ella, the therapist at all. He'd gone through the motions. But he knew that it was his anger that he daren't express. His anger at being caught in the crossfire and getting shot, his anger at being deprived of his career, of that unique blend of excitement and fear that made warzone medical work so potent a mixture. The exultation of surviving another day, of making a difference and saving lives in that day- it was utterly intoxicating. All of that had gone with one well-placed shot. And he was still angry about it. But the therapy had assumed that he was terrified, traumatised by the experience of being shot. He had never confessed to anyone the real reasons that probably lay behind his nightmares and his psychosomatic injury. Mycroft had seen it at once, even taunted him with it. "You're not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson…you miss it."

He sighed. This line of thinking was leading him down a singularly unproductive path. If he'd been unwilling to talk about his own experiences of PTSD, then why did he think Sherlock would find it any easier?

He pinched the bridge of his nose. He got up and found the nearest gents, used the loo and washed his face, looking at the lined, haggard face staring back at him in the mirror above the basin. Sherlock had never pried when at the flat John emerged from his bedroom in the middle of the night and came down the stairs to make himself a cup of tea. Never commented on the nightmares that he must have heard. There were silent acknowledgements – the 'I know you are having a tough time' sort of gestures of Sherlock actually making him a cup of tea, easing off with his usual 'in your face' intruding on personal space, cutting back on the usual full throttle insults. Looking back on it now, he realised that on the mornings after such torrid nights, Sherlock gave him space, kept quiet, and gave him a chance to find his equibilbrium again. It was part of the reason why John never credited Sherlock's confession that he was a 'high functioning sociopath'. When John had woken up shouting twice in one night, he'd been lulled back to sleep by the sounds of a gentle violin, giving him something to think about apart from how miserable he was feeling. Just being around Sherlock was a form of therapy. The adrenalin-filled crime solving, the mental gymnastics of trying to keep up with the consulting detective, the distraction of complicated, dangerous crimes. It filled in the gaps, made life liveable. And his friend knew it, but never, ever had he asked John to 'talk' about why this was important. He'd cured the psychosomatic limp in one night, but done so without a word being said. What right did he have to intrude in Sherlock's situation now and demand that he 'talk' about it?

He decided to sneak a look at his phone to see if Mycroft had emerged yet. He'd always thought that the idea of hospital bans on mobile phones to be ...annoying and inconvenient. Very little medical technology these days could be interfered with by the signals. Still, he felt guilty as the phone acquired a signal and the reception bars grew in number. The vibration told him of a text coming through.

5.27pm Call me. MH

It was 5.45pm now. A man who was obviously visiting a patient ("Yes, Sherlock, even I noticed the bouquet of flowers were bought in the hospital gift shop") walked into the loo, and John stuffed his phone away, not wanting to be seen to be breaking the rules. He went down and outside, taking the same bench seat under the canopy, and hit last dial again.

"Hello, John. Tell me what happened." The phone had rung only once, so Mycroft must have been staring at it, willing him to call.

"He solved the case, but in so doing, provoked one hell of a flashback. He collapsed, and in falling, smashed his wrist again. Mason's at work on it now, trying to repair the damage. Arterial damage, maybe nerve damage. I don't know. But, you know something? I'm more concerned about his state of mind. He was ... manic in his determination to solve the case. Not once has he ... well, I don't know how to explain it. At times, I think no sooner does he have a flashback then he's deleting the memory. But it's been getting easier and easier to trigger the trauma. Two days ago, he rode a horse. Today, he couldn't even look at one without suffering a panic attack."

"How long has he been in surgery?" Mycroft's question was calm practicality personified. Does anything ever upset this man? If he'd thought of Sherlock as emotionally reticent, John sometimes wondered if the elder Holmes had simply had his surgically removed.

"The arterial repair and nerve assessment were done first- that was about ninety minutes, waiting for Masters to get here. By the way, please thank Anth...your PA for getting the helicopter sorted. It got him here hours before he would have if he'd had to drive back. He's been at it now for..." John consulted his watch "about two hours."

"How long do you think it will be before he wakes up?"

"Well, he may recover consciousness briefly in post-op, but that doesn't mean he will remember any of it tomorrow morning. If you are asking when he might be compos mentis, well, that's tomorrow morning at the earliest. And you know him, the first thing he will do is want to be discharged so he can go home. If that happens, and we get back to Baker Street, we may not get another opportunity to address this."

"Your choice of words, John- how do you think we should 'address this'? What makes you think he will acknowledge the original trauma?"

"Have you talked to Esther Cohen yet?"

"She's away in Italy at the moment at a medical symposium; due back into London tomorrow. I was planning to do so then." There was a pause. "I agree that this is something that cannot be ignored. I have been doing some investigations of my own to see what can be discovered about the events around the 18th of August 1994. But it will take time to build a picture. And I must tell you, John, that nothing in my experience of Sherlock suggests that he will be a willing participant in this. He is most likely to deny all knowledge and simply refuse to discuss it."

"And you would let him?"

There was a sigh on the line. "Do you really think he will give us a choice in this? The only way he has ever been willing to even consider the idea of external assistance in such matters is when he was so strung out on drugs that he couldn't put up a reasonable fight. And even then I had to section him. You know the form. You've seen him in action. he will only engage in therapy to the level that is needed in order to get released. So, is he actually benefitting, or simply acting a role to secure his release? Do you really think he is going to happily agree to go off for CBT sessions with a therapist? If so, then you know my brother far less well than I thought you did."

Now it was John's turn to sigh. "I know, Mycroft. It's just that, well, if he can come to some sort of understanding about this, then maybe some of those things that have driven you and now me to worry about him constantly, well..maybe with help, some of those things might go away."

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. An old saying, but true. Wishing for something like that won't make it happen." There was a pause, which neither of them knew how to fill.

Mycroft resumed first. "When he is fit enough physcially to be discharged, bring him home to Baker Street. That's what he will want. Once he's home and safe, we can then see what sort of impact all of this has had on his state of mind."

John drew in a breath. "Yeah, you're right. One step at a time. I will call when I know about discharge, or if anything else happens. Good bye, Mycroft."

"Goodbye for now, John."

He went back upstairs to the dreaded plastic chairs and resumed his vigil.