Sherlock hesitated at the edge of the room as the bathroom door swung shut behind him, unsure of which way to go. The volume in the room was uncomfortable after the silence of the streets; so many voices, clashing against each other with their multiple conversations; so many people. On the streets he was anonymous, but here he could feel too many eyes watching him, sizing him up. Their gazes were generally curious rather than threatening, but somehow that bothered him more. It would only take one person to recognise him and to shop him to the police and all of his plans, all that time spent surviving on his own, would be wasted.

'Will!' came a voice and he started, eyes flickering round the room to identify the nearest exit, wondering if he could get out before he was caught. Then he realised that he was being called by his street name, the one that he had given himself - that it wasn't over after all. The relief flooding through him was almost as welcoming as the warmth in the room. He wondered what it would be like to stop jumping at every shadow. He clenched and unclenched his fingers, focusing himself for a moment, before turning to look across the room to where Tom was waving him over to the tea table that he seemed to be manning.

'Do they fit okay?' he asked. It took Sherlock a moment to realise that he was asking about the clothes.

'They're fine,' he mumbled, knowing that he should thank him again, but feeling oddly reluctant to acknowledge the charity. 'I could do with a belt, though,' he added, realising that pride was one thing, having to employ one hand at all times to prevent your trousers from falling down by your ankles was another issue entirely.

'I'll see what I can find for you. Now have a cup of tea. We'll start serving food in an hour or so. Most people here are fairly friendly, or there's a quiet corner over there if that's what you'd prefer,' he nodded to the far side of the hall where several wipe-clean sofas were arranged around a battered coffee table covered with books and magazines in a pitiful approximation of a 1950s living room.

Sherlock nodded his thanks, took the mug of tea he was being offered, and headed over to the quiet area. At least it was empty, unlike the trestle tables in the middle of the room, which were rapidly filling up with people, more coming in every few minutes. There were a good thirty or forty of them by now, and Sherlock wondered uncomfortably if they were all planning on staying the night, and if so where on earth they were all going to sleep.

There were a couple of today's newspapers on the coffee table, presumably donated by one of the volunteers. Sherlock picked up The Metro and flicked through it, wondering what he would do if he saw his own face staring out at him from the pages. Would he slip out of the back door, taking the paper with him? Would he shove the paper into his rucksacks feigning ignorance, as if the boy in the picture had nothing to do with him? He realised that he didn't know, and turned each page more slowly than the last, the relief when his picture failed to appear alternating with rising panic with each new page he turned, then relief again, in a seemingly never-ending cycle.

When he reached the final page he felt an odd sense of deflation. What had he expected? That Mycroft would resort to a full page advert to expedite his return? Advertising that he had misplaced his little brother was hardly Mycroft's style. And it wasn't as if he didn't have other resources to hand. His typical methods would be more direct, more targeted. Hidden behind the paper, Sherlock allowed his gaze to flicker round the room, wondering if any of the people there were plants, sent to try to seek him out. He could feel the effects of the diazepam fading, the paranoia beginning to return. He forced himself to take a few slow deep breaths before his pulse raced out of control and he spiraled into a full-blown panic attack.

The breathing techniques calmed his panic but had an unwanted side-effect as they triggered another spasm of coughing, which had been only temporarily appeased by the warm steam of the bathroom. His lungs felt as if they were on fire and his chest was rattling alarmingly. Sherlock threw the paper he was reading onto the chair next to him, planted his elbows on his thighs, and braced himself against them as he tried to control the coughing fit.

'Here,' came a voice, and a plastic tumbler of water was pushed into his hand. He drank it rapidly, spluttering a little with inadvertent coughs until the coldness numbed his throat enough to quell the episode and he took a few grateful gasps of much needed air.

'Sounds as if you could do with some antibiotics for that cough,' came a female voice. He looked up to see a woman in her late thirties. Casually dressed in jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Sherlock wondered what her story was, but found himself too tired to care. He shrugged, wary of speaking for fear of the cough returning.

'There's a walk-in centre just across the road that's open late' the woman continues. 'We could get you seen after supper?'

He shook his head, eyes focusing on the plastic tumbler of water, on the beads of condensation running down the side, not wanting to meet the woman's gaze, not wanting to be seen by her. This was what he had been trying to avoid - being memorable, sticking out from the crowd, and now his body had betrayed him. A walk-in centre will mean having to divulge or make-up personal details - name, address, date of birth, GP. And the way he was feeling at the moment the changes of slipping up, of making a detectable error were high. Even if he managed to get away with it, his details would still be on a database, his face on CCTV. His entire game-plan of staying under the radar, remaining off grid, would be scuppered. If Mycroft was having details of people of his age booking into health-care settings sifted then it would only be a matter of time before he found him and all of his hard work would have been for he went to the walk-in centre. He might as well put a flashing neon arrow over his head. The effect would be the same.

'I'm fine,' he murmured, picking up the paper again in a clear message that he wanted to be left alone.

'Your choice, but if you change your mind I'd be happy to take you over later. My name's Helena, by the way.'

The woman was still standing there, why was she standing there? He looked up and realised that she was waiting for him to tell her his name. 'Will,' he said reluctantly, and then almost subconsciously stuck out his hand in an odd parody of normal manners. On the streets people tried hard not to touch each other; even in shops, the cashier would put your change down on the desk rather than risk touching your dirt-ingrained fingers, as if they were afraid of catching something - beyond the obvious. They were afraid of catching poverty, as if failure was as contagious as the common cold. They were afraid of caching the very thing that had made Sherlock fall between the cracks. What they didn't realise was that sometimes you had to choose to allow yourself to fall.

Helena's hand-shake was firm and confident, and Sherlock wondered how long it had been since he had last touched another human being. A week? Longer? The last person whose had he had shaken had been the Cambridge Chemistry Professor who had taken him for that fateful interview.

'Pleased to meet you, Will,' she said. 'If you change your mind about the doctor later, then come and find me and I'll take you across.'

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, almost overcome by the simple humanity of it. Being treated like a person and not an object was somehow strange. It almost made him believe that there could be another way of doing this, a less painful way. But, he had a plan and he was going to stick to it: keep his head down, stay anonymous, minimise the risk of being recognised, prevent Mycroft from finding him. It was December twenty-third; less than two weeks to go before his eighteenth birthday. After that,he could do whatever he wanted. Mycroft wouldn't be able to touch him. And yet somehow, that didn't give him the warm, comfortable feeling that it always had in the past.

What if it wasn't going to be that simple? This was Mycroft after all. When had he ever given up at anything? What if he had a way of keeping Sherlock within his control even after he reached his legal majority? What if -'

'You new here?'

He jumped at the voice, jolting him out of his contemplation. The voice was rough; Scottish he thought, probably Glaswegian. He looked up to see a man who could have been anything between fifty and seventy; life had obviously not been kind to him. His nose had been fractured more than once, the broken veins across its bridge and his ruddy complexion betraying years of hard-living. The man's hair was more salt than pepper and he could have done with a hair-cut, but he looked cleaner than most of those in the shelter that evening, with a just-scrubbed look which suggested that he had availed himself of the showers.

'Yup,' Sherlock replied quietly, focusing on his newspapers, scanning the same sentence over and over again, hoping that the man would take the hint and leave him alone.

'It's okay here,' the man said. 'Better than some of those other places. At least it's clean. You won't get no creepy crawlies here and they're less preachy than most.'

Sherlock grunted in a non-committal way, not wanting to make himself memorable by his rudeness, but not wanting to give any suggestion that he wanted to enter into a conversation ether.

'Quiet one, eh?' the man said. 'Fair enough. I'm Jock by the way.' Of course he was. Nothing like a good stereotype. Sherlock fought back the temptation to say something sarcastic.

He looked up and realised that the man was holding out his hand to shake. Christ, what was this? International hand-shaking day? He lifted his to meet it reluctantly. 'Will,' he said.

'Not been on the streets long, have you,' Jock said looking him up and down, his eyes lingering for too long on Sherlock's watch. His expensive inherited watch that didn't remotely fit the persona that he was trying to project. Damn, he would have to keep it better hidden from now on. He didn't want it to make him a target; worse still, he didn't want it to make him stick out fro the crowd.

'A few months,' Sherlock said, putting the paper down.

Jock made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a snort. 'Few weeks, more like,' he said and Sherlock opened his mouth to protest but was prevented from doing so by another violent spasm of coughing.

'Run away from home, have you?' Jock asked.

'Foster home,' Sherlock gasped between coughs, turning to the back-story that he had invented for himself.

And there was the snort again. 'With an accent like that? I don't think so,' Jock said, and Sherlock realised with a sickening jolt that in the effort to talk without coughing he had forgotten to adopt his Essex accent.

He scrambled to his feet, trying his hardest not to cough, and grabbed his bag from by his feet, wondering if he dared to try to get his sleeping bag back before he left. He looked frantically round the room for Tom to ask for it back, but he had disappeared from behind the tea table and was nowhere to be seen.

There was suddenly a hand on his shoulder, and he twisted to shake it off. Jock held up both his hands to show he meant no harm, 'Hey, I'm sorry,' he said, and Sherlock could smell the alcohol on his breath, 'I was just trying to be friendly. Where you come from is your business.'

'Everything okay here?' and there was Tom, looking concerned. Where had he sprung from so quickly? 'You're not leaving already are you, Will? Food's almost ready.'

Sherlock hesitated, just for a moment, and Jock mumbled another apology and shuffled away.

'He's okay, Jock,' Tom told him. 'He just likes to try to help the newbies.'

'Who said that I was a newbie?' Sherlock snapped.

'Come on, Will,' Tom said. 'Calm down. You're safe here.' He reached out to put a hand on Sherlock's shoulder in reassurance, but Sherlock flinched away from him, reflexively. Why was everyone so keen on touching him all of a sudden? Why couldn't they just leave him alone? He was aware that his breath was coming in quick, fast gasps as he tried to work out which way to run. He knew that Tom was right - that he needed to calm down, but he could no longer remember how to do that. The room was beginning to swim round the edges and he knew that if he didn't hang onto something, anything, then he was going to pass out.

He side-stepped Tom and headed for one of the trestle tables, stumbling into a chair and sitting down in it more quickly than he had intended, resting his head on the table, his arms coming up to cradle it, creating his own personal space, just as he had been taught. Through the buzzing in his ears, he could hear a familiar voice among all of the other voices clamouring for his attention - Mycroft's telling him that he was coming to find him; his father's telling him that he was evil and needed punishing; Tom's talking to him in a constant stream of what was probably reassurance. But the voice that he finally managed to latch onto was female, someone that he trusted, someone who could pull him through the haze and the panic. It was telling him to concentrate on the coldness of the table, on its smoothness against his forehead; it was telling him to concentrate on his feet, grounded on the floor; to take a deep breath in, hold it for three, then breathe all the way out and repeat. She prompted him to concentrate on the breaths, on the air filling his lungs, on the sound it made as he breathed out.

Gradually the room swam back into focus and the buzzing in his ears subsided. Eventually, Sherlock raised his head to see that Tom had taken a seat next to him, looking concerned.

'Look, I'm sorry,' he said. 'I should have looked out for you better. It's not easy here the first time, I know. Stay, please. Have some food at least. You'll feel better with a hot meal inside you.'

Sherlock nodded slightly, not wanting to acknowledge that he didn't think he would have made it across the room even if he had tried to leave.

The food when it arrived was hot and filling. Mycroft would have sniffed at the basic cooking, but Sherlock didn't care. Food had only ever been fuel to him anyway. He didn't understand all of the people who went into raptures about Michelin-starred cooking. Food was food, and this food warmed him up in a way that neither the warmth of the room or the hot shower had been able to.

When Tom offered him a second helping, he found himself agreeing without thinking. When he had finished eating, exhaustion hit him like a solid wall. Walking across the room to the sleeping quarters at the far end of the hall was effort enough; he couldn't have left if he'd wanted to. He flung himself onto the camp bed that Tom pointed out to him, pulled his sleeping bag over himself, too tired even to get into it, and fell asleep within seconds, one arm curled protectively around his rucksack.