Lessons in Friendship 7 – Needing something
Standard disclaimer: Sherlock, John and all other mentioned characters belong to BBC or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I just borrowed them for fun. I wrote this for my personal delight and improving my English, no copyright infringement intended. No money changed hands and no profit is being made.
Thank you so much for your reviews and your support :).
I left the days over the paragraphs, not to loose my sense of time, and decided to leave them there for your orientation, but Sherlock is definitely not away what day or time it is.
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Chapter 17 – Sherlock's POV
[Day 4 - Monday, noon]
In the morning Sherlock woke up when he needed to go to the bathroom - again!
He wondered how many kilometres he had moved by going this route in the past four days? It felt endless.
Maybe going around the table the other way or going through the stairway would make it less annoying, though right now he needed to go there soon.
He sat up and a dangling noise from the lamp made him look that way.
Right, he was still leashed. No time for that now.
He took the IV bag with him to the bathroom, the opposite of graceful. He'd ask John to disconnect it as soon as it was empty.
.
When he sat back down at the couch a few minutes later he thought about showering; he felt even more filthy than yesterday.
John would throw a fit if he removed the port, but he itched everywhere, and his own smell was causing his mind to fell rancid.
He didn't like feeling this dark olive sensation everywhere.
Should he yell for him to come down?
Don't get on a friend's nerves too much. Mrs Hudson had said he had not slept, maybe letting him sleep would be a sign of friendship? Would it need to be uttered to be recognised?
He decided he might disconnect the line but not to remove the port if John had not shown up when it was empty. He would patiently wait to have a wash.
He hadn't thought it was possible but managed to doze off again.
Some time later John came down, did not give him a dress down for not waking him and headed for a shower.
The smell of clean wavered through the flat.
He wanted to experience that, too, being clean.
When the doctor came out of the bathroom he brought more of that John-smell, in combination with soap and shampoo and shaving foam.
He longed for a shower. He needed a shower.
"If you make sure the IV port won't get wet you could have a bath," John offered.
That was really a nice offer.
John was acting in his interest. John was doing that often, wasn't he?… He had so often not recognised it, not acknowledged it that this had been done for him.
The past days had provided a shift of perspective.
How could he built this in, into his mind palace?
The shifting movement of his mind into the level of consciousness that observed John?
But maybe he didn't need to built in the process of shifting?
Maybe it was enough to just create a routine that… he was not sure how to even phrase this.
Was is necessary to counter-check from this perspective regularly?
It would be best to start a whole new database for John alone. Too much work to collect the information from all the others to observe them when needed. He had divided the topics until now. But John was present in every database he had.
Having all the John-specific information at one central point might provide a better output.
But leave tags on the old entries in case he searched there because he took another route to the database, a route that was not John-related.
He was so deep in thoughts and trying to figure out a way how to reorganise the mind palace and his databases that he only realised he had followed John into the bathroom when John spoke.
"You're awake?"
John added something smelling good to the water and gestured him to go ahead, then left.
The water looked warm and cosy and smelled good, he hurried in.
It felt even better.
The heat warmed not only his weary body but his mind, too.
He almost fell asleep, but John regularly made noises in the kitchen and the living room, reminding him to keep that hand dry.
Washing his hair turned out to be annoying with one hand. He wondered how silly he looked fully under water just one hand doing a periscope imitation.
Glad nobody was there… and nobody saw the large bruises on his thigh, hip and sheen.
Had he really managed to fall?
This was awkward.
Finally, the water got cold and he returned to the living area.
John had news. The source of the infection was the crime scene on the industrial farm. The doctor repeated the information Lestrade had given him.
So he was in fact the one who had caused this condition. He had managed to get the bacteria inside his body.
How had he been so stupid? Why was John still kind to him when he knew it was his own fault?
Anderson got it, too, but Anderson was an idiot, argumentum et contrario - he was also an idiot.
Under these circumstances he deserved his misery, for being careless.
Had the pathogen been on his clothes and he transferred them into his mouth or nose somehow later?
Only a very small amount of Campylobacter was needed to cause an outbreak.
Was it possible he had inhaled them?
But Anderson wore a mask - but he was an idiot.
He felt disgusted by his own yellowish stupidity.
It tasted nasty.
… And John had even tried to prevent this.
Maybe, if he had worn protective clothing, he'd have prevented this. He felt like as a child when he had done something wrong and realised it was in fact his own fault.
John did not rub it under his nose, maybe he thought that his misery was enough punishment.
If Mycroft would hear this, there would be an endless stream of sneering.
Well, he deserved it, but John certainly didn't.
Listen to John then - sometimes at least.
John was the voice of reason so often and killed fun with that quite regularly. But to some of his advice he could manage to obey, would be courteous to spare him of anything like cleaning his puke again in the future.
That would be nice of himself, wouldn't it?
John brought him things to drink and whenever the doctor did, the remorse bit him somewhere in the back of his mind… and stomach. But he drank whatever he was given and even when it made him nauseous he kept it down with sheer willpower.
They watched telly and it was annoyingly boring.
Sherlock drifted in and out of sleep for several hours.
It felt bad, he hated that state, in fact he tried to avoid it whenever possible. His thoughts went haywire there without the control of his mind, and not in a good way, now even worse than usually. The flowing state caused perception of pain to increase, dark thoughts run free and come back in circles or waves.
The embarrassment tasted bad in his nose and mouth, it inflated with guilt. But he didn't know how to evade it, he was too exhausted to get up and occupy his mind properly.
He dreaded for something to knock him into sleep but understood that he didn't deserve it. Even trying to listen to the TV brought no easing, but the topics were as pathetic as he was.
No use.
.
After what felt like days John send him to bed… and removed the port, informing him he was doing a lot better.
He tried to will his mind to fall into sleep, but again he was trapped in the drifting state.
The pain rose in his consciousness, his intestines, his hip.
Yes, that was another dumb thing.
The bed was supposed to be much more comfortable than the sofa, why wasn't it?
No matter how he positioned himself - it hurt more and more… the disturbing bright green pain changed a yellow and orange, in several areas.
He wanted to force the sleep to come to escape, but it eluded him.
Again.
… and again.
Whenever he thought it was almost there and he'd only need to let himself fall into it, it vanished and the impact was hard, tasted chemical and disgusting.
His legs were tingling and banished sleep even more.
He continued to drift on and of.
After what felt like hours, he managed to slip into sleep once or twice but something painful woke him again… with a distant bomb-impact association.
Drifting off and being awaken again repeatedly made him feel ugly, not because he was sick currently, it also made him feel nauseous when he was in full health.
Something felt like it wanted to explode in his mind… like he needed to get it out but he didn't know what it was or how to do it.
Pressure was building.
Suddenly a soft and gentle movement swept away the nasty drifting state.
"Come on, Sherlock, wake up."
It brought him back to his bed from the sensory hell he had just visited and… from memories.
"You're in pain. Here are some painkillers. Take them."
How did John always seem to know when he was experiencing pain?
Should he take the easy way out of this?
John's voice was low, but clearly carried an order in it.
He gave him water, too.
"You're okay?"
John deserved gratefulness for his kindness and patience with this.
"Yes, I am, I think…. Thank you, John… for being kind and… offering… help."
The words were not easy to find, were those the right ones?
"You're welcome… Good night."
John sounded neither angry, nor unnerved and not disgusted at all.
He touched his shoulder.
Sherlock looked at the new database with John's name and added some more things. And to his database where it concerned John.
The area felt… since when did database entries had an accompanied sensation? They were entries for god's sake!
His mind stared at it.
The entry felt… warm? - Not really a fitting description of the sensation - or maybe alive… or humming?
He turned towards the information cluster, one that contained information about structural engineering calculation of building bridges… That one was not warm, it was quiet and white
So it was not his perception of how the entries felt, it was the cluster itself.
This was odd.
He marked the sensation with a question mark.
John had touched him and it felt not-bad.
Not good either, but not bad was profound, since usually he evaded touch* because it felt uncomfortable… He was irritated by this whole being-sick-thing.
Desperately, he hoped the disarray in his mind would vanish soon.
Before he realised what was happening sleep cut of all further thoughts abruptly.
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A/N:
* I tried to explain that in more detail in "Lessons in Friendship 2 – Touch"