Six months after the Fall
John
Sherlock.
Well. I'm back. Everyone's being nice. It's stifling. People come in and they treat me like I'm the patient, avoiding topics of conversation such as:
You
Mysteries
Tall buildings
Anything even that has even a smidge of a hint of a reference to you somewhere in it at all
It's meant to be kind, I know, but I almost relish those patients that come in every few weeks or so and give me hell about "running about with that lying detective wannabe" and "misleading the innocent public" and, occasionally, "tormenting poor Richard Brook." That last one really set me off, and I launched about twelve feet into the air out of my seat before landing on the bloke and beating the shite out of him. Almost got sacked for it. Almost wish I had. They wrote it off, though, telling me they would overlook it as a product of my "recent emotional trauma."
I find it slightly hilarious that so many people can discount your fall like some sort of unfortunate but impermanent mental condition that I'll just have to get over. They call you things like that all the time. Recent emotional trauma. Depression. PTSD. (That's an entirely different thing.) (Is it bad that you've upset me more than anything else that's ever happened to me? I've had my shoulder shot straight through, and that didn't affect me anywhere near as much as you do.) (Damn you, Sherlock Holmes.) When they say these things, I know they mean when you jumped, but I want to tell them. I want to tell them that if you weren't you and you had still jumped, then I would be fine. If you weren't you, but anyone else, and you had made me watch as you leaped to your death, I would have been back on my feet in a few weeks. Damn you, Sherlock Holmes. Damn you straight to hell.
I miss you.
John.
Sherlock
I am developing excellent peripheral vision.
"You're a nutter, you know that?" John pants. Out of the corner of my eyes I can see him, jogging to keep up with me. It annoys me that I can't turn and look at him fully. (This is, of course, because he isn't really there and I've simply constructed him from bits and pieces of the real John that I have scattered about in my Mind Palace in a way to cope with the loss of my best and most treasured homo sapien companion. Doesn't make it any less annoying.) "Absolute nutter. There's no way you can outrun them, you idiot."
I want to answer him but, fact: my breath feels like it's being ripped out of my chest by something with very long, very sharp claws, and using any of that precious air to form words just to quarrel with John would be fantastically stupid. So instead I dart to the left.
I don't know where I am anymore. (In Serbia. I know I'm in Serbia. That's it.) I've stumbled my way into some sort of open courtyard, all dark and shadowed, and my feet echo with a loudness that makes me cringe on the flagstones. John: running beside me (on the right), a smudge of familiar gray and cream and stripes beside me, footfalls silent. I envy him. My (would be) captors: just feet behind me, all four of them. (I take a tiny bit of pleasure in the fact that their footsteps are even louder than mine. Blundering fools.)
"Well I see that catty motivation isn't helping you, eh?" John growls. "Fine." Voice: taking on a different tone. He sounds more like my John now, the John at home, and less like phantom-John. (He sounds scared.) (It terrifies me.) "Sherlock, love, running behind you are four highly trained assassins with fully loaded assault rifles. I know you can't breathe well right now, and I know all you want to do is stop and sleep─" (He's right. I'm so tired, more tired than I've ever been before) "─but listen to me. If you get caught, you're never going to see me again. And neither of us want that."
I skirt the edge of a fountain. Feel the cool mist of it sneak down the collar of my coat.
I run.
John
Sherlock.
Saw Molly today. She didn't ask me to tell you hullo specifically, but I'm sure she wanted to. Was always this side of in love with you, was Molly. We all were, you know. Some of us more than others.
Anyway. Hullo from me and Molly.
Come home.
John.
Sherlock
They catch me.
And I am furious. Furious because my body has never given up on my like this, isn't supposed to give up on me, is supposed to go and go and go and go like it always has. Not freeze in the middle of a road. Not collapse out from under my own mind, hit the cold concrete with a crack, and refuse to move even when four men kick it and slam down on it with the butts of their quite large guns.
I try to twist out of their tight grip. (Voices above me. Sharp and cold, a language that I never bothered to learn. Jeering.) Try: fail. Hands grabbing at my limp arms, squeezing my (now bruised) ribs as they haul me to my feet and begin to drag me.
"John." (I wonder when I started saying his name instead of calling for help.) I feel like I'm screaming, but in my ears I hear only the harsh, unfamiliar taunts of the men who are hurting me, and my throat feels like someone has taken a dull knife and shredded it. I want to see him, and I want to touch him, but my eyes won't open and none of me will move─
"Sherlock, fight back." Voice: quite close, somewhere above my (right) ear, and rushed. Scared. I try to do what he tells me, but... but...
"C'mon, Sherlock, c'mon, just move, just punch one, please─
"John I can't," I whisper. (I think I whisper. I either whisper it or nothing comes out at all.) (Because, even though they have caught me, and even though they are beating me to a pulp, and even though they are more likely than not taking me someplace where I will die, I don't want these four men to know that I communicate with a hallucination of my best friend every few seconds. Pride is a shallow thing.)
Pain, suddenly: exploding out in a spiral from my core down into my limbs. Feel like I've been struck by lightening. Feel like there is fire lighting me up from the inside out. My eyes fly open, and a gasping moan is forced out of my mouth, taking any last shred of my breath with it. Four dark faces swim above me: features lost in shadow, nothing but glinting teeth visible to my watering eyes. One of them has a black thing in the shape of a stubby gun. My delayed brain realizes now that it's a taser, and that I am shaking, convulsing, every single part of me out of control. My back bows up off of the cold ground and then slams back down, over and over again. Vision: narrowing to a tunnel. Breath: short─short─
Blackness.
Nine months after the Fall
John
Sherlock.
Today was one of those really terrible days.
You know the ones. The ones where every little thing reminds you of your dead best friend, from your morning tea to the guy you see crossing in front of your cab to the way a female patient that you can't remember the name of ties her scarf. The ones where you can't remember why you thought anything was worth it and you end up in a graveyard at ten o'clock in the evening while all of your living mates are off at the pub doing normal things.
Oh yeah. I'm at your grave now. Just in case you wanted to stop by. You probably don't, though. There's nothing much to see here. Just a funny little man sitting in the dirt, scribbling in a tattered notebook and very decidedly not crying. Boring.
It was a dream I had that brought me here, you see.
Started out like the night that I met you. You'd run off with that cabby without telling anybody (did I ever tell you how stupid that was? I probably did. Oh well. That was fucking stupid, Sherlock) and I was making my way toward you, running about London like a chicken with my head cut off. Cut to the part where I'm in the building next to yours and aiming my gun at the cabby who's in there trying to make you kill yourself (I have a couple of things to say. Firstly, yes, I do see the irony. Secondly, what the hell was I thinking, Sherlock? I'd not even know you forty eight hours then. You were just too damn you, if that makes sense. Never mind, I know it doesn't make any sense) when suddenly there are all these people in there with you, dressed in black and swarming you, knocking me to the ground and beating the shite out of you. And I shoot at them, I shoot at them over and over and over again with my own puny gun, but the bullets just bounce right off of them and fall to the floor. And pretty soon I can't see you anymore, but it gets worse, because then I can hear you, and you're screaming, these great, gasping, absolutely tortured screams, and there's not one single thing that I can do.
I woke up before it ended. But Sherlock...
Jesus. I don't have to ask you again, do I? I'm not going to. You know. This time I just want to say... fight back. Because in the dream you didn't, and I'm not saying that I've developed psychic abilities since you've been gone or anything, I'm just saying...
Fine, I'll say it again. Come home.
John.
Sherlock
After twelve weeks of the same thing, I usually become bored with it. My mind, always spinning, always working to collect as much new data as it can, usually shuts off when the data begins to repeat itself and I move on to something new.
I find now that there are three exceptions to that norm. First: John Watson (I find him endlessly fascinating: the way he takes his tea, the product that he puts in his hair, that expression he gets on his face when I do something clever.) Second: murder. (Not committing. Investigating.) Third: being tortured.
It isn't that I like being tortured. In fact, there are few things on this earth that I like less. But as these men gather around me and lash my bare back for the twelfth time in the past month, my brain will not stop taking it in. Every single sting of the metal wire that they are flogging me with shoots a sharp, rippling wave of pain throughout my body. It sticks in my brain and my brain records it all (even though I don't want it to) burying it away in my Mind Palace. I try to delete it after every one of these sessions but, fact: in order to delete something I have to review it, to replay it, to run my mind over the details, and my body is never strong enough to undertake that agony two times right in a row.
I am on my knees now. Arms out to my sides. Taught. Fists wrapped up in rope, rope connected to metal brackets in the walls. Holding me up. Neck: hanging, loose, my head too heavy to try to hold up. Can feel something warm and slick running down the curve of the (right) side of my ribcage. Coming from a burning slice on my (right) shoulder blade. Blood. Real blood this time, not like when I fell.
Noise, too: my own breath, loud and crowded in the shell of my ears, intermittent moans that eek there way out of my throat providing a muffled undertone. Grunts above me as one man steps back, tenses his shoulders and biceps, grits his teeth, swings─connects solidly with my spine. My own back buckles forward, and my arms are wrenched backward in their sockets as I fall.
John is standing in the corner of the room next to another man in a dark green coat and muffler, yelling obscenities at my torturers that I don't bother to listen to. I don't look at John (that's getting easier to do) but I look at the other man as the wire is brought down upon me again and again and as tears spring to my eyes and run down my dirty cheeks. I want him to see. I want him to see what they are doing to me─
He steps forward. His face is in shadow, but I know who it is. John stops yelling (I wish I had been paying attention. He comes up with quite colorful things when he really gets going) and falls silent, and, miraculously, the men beating me fall a few steps back.
The room hangs. (Waits.)
The man in green says a few short words in the harsh language of this country and the two men leave. (The one with the wire lets it drag on the floor behind him, and I see a trail of blood mar the dirty concrete. My blood.) He stands perfectly still, arms folded behind his back, head listed to the left, and we do not move until the echo of booted feet fades away from hearing.
(John is gone. I think he left after the two men who were beating me did, but he isn't real, and so I am not as disappointed as I would otherwise be. I miss my own John too much to miss this incorporeal one as well.)
Finally the man in green tips his head up, and his face is revealed to me. He smiles.
"Hello, brother dear."