TIME WELL SPENT
Chapter 3
Well.
Meaning...
John shot out of the water and gasped, not from loss of air, but from dismay.
Although he had been unable to hear anything beneath the churning turbulence, he was at first too stunned to fully register the ongoing conversation between Eurus and Sherlock.
"Eurus, you said the answer's in the song." Sherlock was talking fast, pleading, his voice shaking with uncharacteristic emotions. "But I went through the song line by line all those years ago and I found nothing. I couldn't find anything. And there, there was a beech tree in the grounds and I dug. I dug and dug and dug and dug." The dilemma from his childhood unearthed the childlike despair in his words. His voice wobbled and he pulled an agonizing breath to steady it before he continued. "Sixteen feet by six; sixteen yards; sixteen meters – and I found nothing. No one!"
"Sherlock?" The answer Sherlock sought was staring John in the face.
But Eurus was speaking over them both incessantly, taunting Sherlock with that certain cruelty only the insane could brandish. "It was a clever little puzzle, wasn't it? So why couldn't you work it out, Sherlock?"
Sherlock gave no reply. There was no sound at all, as if Sherlock was holding his breath.
"Sherlock?" John persisted with alarm in his voice. "There's something you need to know…."
John's earpiece picked up the panting breaths of his distressed friend.
"Emotional context. And he-e-e-e-re it comes," Eurus warned with enthusiasm.
"Sherlock?" John tried to keep apprehension out of his voice. "The bones I found—"
"Yes? They're dog's bones." Sherlock asserted with wavering confidence. His voice was strained as if he suspected he was wrong. "That's Redbeard!"
John shook his head as he examined what he held in his hands. "Mycroft's been lying to you; to both of us." John exhaled sadly, "They're not dog's bones—"
Eurus interrupted with a long-withheld clue. "Remember Daddy's allergy? What was he allergic to?"
John stood on tip toes to keep the rising flood at chest level and stared as if in a mirror. No blow aimed at Sherlock could be as crushing as this, and Eurus knew it well!
"What would he never let you have all those times you begged? Well, he'd ne-ver let you have a DOG!" she crooned with inappropriate glee.
Sherlock had withdrawn from the conversation, presumably sorting through painfully tender recollections that predated his Mind Palace.
"What a funny little memory, Sherlock." Eurus was savoring the process with diabolical pleasure. "You were upset ... so you told yourself a better story."
Beyond the noise of the rushing water John listened hard, expecting confirmation for the unspeakable truth.
"... but we never had a dog." Eurus revealed.
In the well, John knew the small skull he held in both hands—"Redbeard"—must have had a another name.
"Victor," Sherlock whispered softly as though an apparition had appeared before him.
"Now it's coming." Eurus prodded mercilessly.
"Victor Trevor." Sherlock's voice shook and trembled with horror. "We played pirates. I was Yellowbeard…" he broke off as if the images of his past were playing before his eyes. "And he was ..." The last phrase was partly a sob. "…he was Redbeard."
"You were inseparable." Eurus sounded suddenly petulant. "But I wanted to play too."
"Huh!" Sherlock exhaled and moaned as though he felt to blame. "Oh God."
John struggled silently against the flooding waters that swelled higher, breaking relentlessly across his chest. Yet listening to Eurus torment her brother set his teeth on edge.
Blame! Sherlock is not to blame for what you did!
In all the years John had known Sherlock, the man did not take blame well. Driven to be right and faultless in all things, all the time, sweating blood over the details, not just to be clever, Sherlock ensured he would remain blameless. Certainly Sherlock had all the classic signs of a genius obsessed with perfection.
Even when admitting, from time to time, to getting his facts wrong, Sherlock had been emphatic that being wrong about something was not the same as being to blame for something going wrong. Except, he was not perfect and though it was rare, Sherlock had once or twice been at fault. Accepting the blame for his failure, Sherlock would become excessively hard on himself, melancholy and sullen for days on end. He would persist in being withdrawn and silent, except for his violin playing. The most mournful melodies, some he composed himself, would be heard day and night in the flat until the shadows of his misery dispersed.
No greater darkness swallowed him than the blame he bore for Mary's death. When John, overtaken by despairing grief, had blamed him for killing his wife, Sherlock was stricken with self-loathing. To atone for her death, his broken vow, and the loss of John's friendship, Sherlock had put himself through hell and nearly died seeking forgiveness.
How much he abhorred being to blame, but Sherlock could not have known his phobia had stemmed from a childhood trauma—because he had replaced the truth by telling himself a better story.
Letting the skull sink softly to floor, John clutched his own head in distress, unable to do more than listen to the weeping of his distraught friend.
"What..." Sherlock soon recovered his voice in short breaths. "What did you do?"
Eurus resumed singing her answer, the words of the song apparently cutting deeper wounds in her grief-stricken brother.
Dumbfounded by all he heard, John was devastated for Sherlock. This secret had been torturing his friend from such an early age and explained the adult's predilection for declaring himself a "high-functioning sociopath," for pretending not to care about others, even for disregarding the consequences of his own risky behavior.
He couldn't solve the problem and blamed himself. Jesus! He was only a little boy!
Anger rising like the water around him, John could only imagine what Sherlock was putting himself through even now. With this new information he would be assembling the data about his innocent, childhood friendship and how it had led to this appalling outcome. Only recently Sherlock had told John that "if one could attenuate to every available data stream in the world simultaneously, it would be possible to anticipate and deduce almost anything." Would Sherlock feel he should have foreseen this?
"Victor." A grieving whisper sounded in John's earpiece.
"Deep waters, Sherlock, all your life." The elegiac tone in Eurus' revelation was spectral. "In all your dreams. Deep waters."
"You killed him." Sherlock's sorrow swelled. "You killed my best friend."
"I never had a best friend," Eurus reproached, again blaming Sherlock for not noticing. "I had no one."
Goddamnit! John seethed with fury. Despite his own danger, he was horrified by Eurus' game. The unsolved disappearance of Victor Trevor had been so clearly traumatizing, Sherlock had repressed it. Yet, it took nearly a lifetime to get past the scar it left, to overcome the loneliness it triggered, and to allow genuine emotions back into his heart. Sherlock had endured sacrifice, torture, vanquished his overweening ego, and experienced genuine remorse for the harm he had caused—all in the name of friendship. On this very day, John had witnessed Sherlock forgive his brother of a cataclysmic betrayal in one selfless act.
John's worries about his own survival in the flooding well were compounded by Eurus' obvious motive—to ruin Sherlock with failure, to wring him out emotionally yet again with blame for another drowned friend. Had this been Eurus and Moriarty's ultimate plan all along—to annihilate Sherlock's heart now that he had opened it to others?
John felt helpless. What could he do to stop this from happening to his friend?
"Try as long as possible not to drown," is what Sherlock had advised moments ago.
With absolute certainty, John understood that saving himself from drowning would be saving Sherlock, too. He would do his best.
*888
