Life quickly settled into a rhythm for him, not pleasant nor unpleasant, just a constant expected beat. Sherlock had gone through a week of briefing and training for his assignment (total waste of time in his opinion) and was now out in the field. His job was solely to observe, deduce and report back. The situation around him was tense but not as dangerous at it appeared on first blush. It unfortunately left him with some occasional downtime - time to think and even worse, to feel. He filled these moments with experiments, research, any activity that kept his thoughts from straying to New York City and to his partner. Watson's safety was not an issue, he told himself, so there was no need to be concerned, to reminisce, to dwell... but for all his mental gyrations and attempts at compartmentalization, he ended most nights wishing he could just sit with her in silence by the fire for a moment.
A form of melancholy visited him this quiet evening when he thought of her, wondering where she was. He wondered if she had accepted Dr. Reed's help, if she'd moved past some of the trauma she had suffered, if she had found whatever it was she was needing, if she was relieved that he was not there. The melancholy soon turned to self-hate and he berated himself for putting her in danger, for being inconsiderate and cold, selfish when she should have been a better friend. Sherlock told himself Watson had moved on, and so should he. Solitude was his. No more attempting to form social connections. Not worth the effort.
He turned to old habits to quiet the mind. The conspiracy theory boards would do the trick. Sherlock knew better than to log on to the forum with his usual alias and created a new identity for himself - "justheretowatch." That should throw the regulars for a loop. He would observe. Make no comments.
Sherlock scrolled and jumped from topic to topic "What are they spraying," "Traffic Cameras searching for extraterrestrials," "CIA recruited Justin Beiber." Nothing really interesting tonight, he thought. Then he saw it. In the list of registered users currently in the forum - his user name. Someone had logged in as him. This was interesting. No one knew he frequented this site, nor his password or his username. Sherlock's first thought was some hacker from Everyone must have been bored and decided to cause problems. He clicked on his name and went to the topic "he" had commented in "Hybrid Roosters from the Future."
There he found "he" had posted: "u ok miss u"
That was all. Several replies had been entered under the message analyzing it, concluding it was possibly a threat to the universities of Oklahoma and Mississippi. He snorted at the ridiculousness of his fellow conspiracy theorists and in the same breath froze as he realized who had placed that there for him to find...