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"Rory, what were you afraid of as a child?" Smith asked over the man- Sherlock's -headgear. He was fiddling slightly with it, the way a violinist fine-tunes his instrument before playing a concerto. Calculated movements of the bow, fingers placed precisely on the neck of the beautiful, delicate wooden object, the sound emanating around a concert hall as if it were the size of a cupboard.

"Spiders. The dark. Heights. The usual things. Why?" Rory replied over his own work, adjusting the headset of the girl who's name he still didn't know.

"Him. He wasn't afraid of those kind of things. Snakes, yes, but what he was really afraid of...failure. Being abandoned by people he cared about. What kind of child is afraid of that?" He asked in an offhand kind of way, with curiosity rather than empathy.

"His father left when he was three years old. His mother blamed him. I'd say that reaction would be normal." Smith looked up at him as if he was reminding him he had slightly, very slightly offended him, and that he hadn't finished the sentence properly. He flinched under the light yet intense glare and remembered that he could have him killed and no one would ever know what happened. He coughed awkwardly. "Sir."

"And he's a diagnosed sociopath, isn't he?"

"Yes. He's got a history of mental illness, too; drug abuse, depression. He was described as emotionally detached."

"He cut himself off."

"In short, yes."

"A normal reaction."

In the distance, three vans, filled with armed police hurtled through the rough, hilly countryside towards the hospital like heavy, ominous clouds approaching a village. Neither of them felt the oncoming storm.

In the middle of the night, the room dark, the fits of macropsia subsided, a miracle happened. The door fell slowly open, revealing a plain of grass and mud and moonlight. They could leave, finally, for good; and they did.

Alice walked close to Sherlock, her hair grey under the silver lowlight, walking through the grass almost silently. They didn't speak, not needing too, but they both knew that they hadn't really left, that they were both still stuck in their own minds, the most terrifying, debilitating places to be trapped in.

John wondered briefly what was taking Rory so long, but then he realized that he knew, really. He wasn't stupid, just gullible.

He called Mycroft, who informed him with some kind of superiority that he had 'people' coming to help him out; what that meant he didn't know.

"What do you mean? Are you paying them?" he had asked

"A country, John, is made up of ordinary people trying to be extraordinary, and ran by people who are trying to prove that they relate with the ordinary people."

"So?"

"I pay them with the chance to become extraordinary. To have power."

"You mean if they do it well you'll promote them to...to a higher rank?"

"Precisely."

Mycroft Holmes, John reflected, was in power for a reason.