Disclaimer: BBC Sherlock is not mine. I wish it were. Constantly.
Warnings: PTSD, naughty shenanigans and crazy.
The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated and your assassination attempts require much refinement. -MS SH
Hypothetically
Chapter Six: Criminal Insanity
Gunshots peppered into the cloudless sky as smoke coiled above the toppled Land Rover. They were only five men: two lieutenants, one dead colonel, a sergeant in a bad way, and a very pale captain who had to literally somehow stitch this mess back together. The army doctor fought down his sprinting pulse while another round of gunfire crackled into the desert. He had already lost the colonel; a sniper planted a round in his head and god dammit, there was nothing, fucking nothing, he could do but watch that man smile as he bled into the sand.
Now John was kneeling over the sergeant—Sergeant Oliver—with two fingers clamped over his femoral artery in a pitiful attempt to staunch the bleeding. He did not even like Oliver; the man was an insufferable shit who just the other morning threw everyone's shorts into the stalls for a laugh. Now that irritating bastard was staring up at him with uncurbed terror, but with the snipers raining bullets over their heads and his medical kit beneath the Land Rover carnage, there was little he could do but keep pressing his fingers against the sergeant's nicked artery.
"You bastard! Fucking do something! It's my leg, don't let me lose my leg, Captain!"
He wanted to say something to calm the poor arsehole under his care, but his throat was dry. His fingers were shaking. He knew he couldn't hold on much longer—not as long as it would take to keep this man alive. Before he had to make an inevitable and impossible decision, John felt something hot and solid push through his left shoulder. He went blind with agony, and his head turned somersaults until he felt the rough kiss of sand against his face. His arm outstretched to the fading sergeant. The other man's blood spurted out in crimson ribbons. Under the lullaby of streaming bullets and a cursing dead man, he allowed the blackness to overtake him.
The hot air went blissfully mute, and as John nearly gave into his cold finality, he felt something wet and cool slide past his forehead. His vision blurred over the simpering, decomposed face of Joey Smallish, which now stared at him in the place of Sergeant Oliver in a puddle of murky water. The ocean-saturated corpse of the gangster lurched towards him with a squelch. The two lieutenants who were once returning gunfire with vigour about-faced. They were no longer his mates that only minutes before were laughing at a letter Three-Continents Watson had received from his sister. They were not even human. Robert Thomas shuffled alongside Parker Blake, whose intestines were swinging out of his chest cavity.
The three dead men descended over him. Their moist, peeling hands closed over his arms and dragged him in the sand. Metres away John could see a scuffed metal door. Was there always a door in this place, in the middle of the desert? At the side of the closed doorway a figure materialised shouldering an HK417 rifle. Sebastian Moran, as though he had stepped out of his sombre military portrait, winked at him with his distant blue eyes. John followed those piercing eyes to the letters engraved on the doorway:
AUTOPSY.
No, dear god, no! Please let me be alive! John thought with every fibre holding his brain together, and he would have shrieked it into the hills if it gave him any strength to escape his undead captors. If he had screamed, however, it was likely that his tormented voice would have been cut down by a drifting noise. The melody weaved in and out of the blistering air, but its tenor was deep and steady. The breeze entrained speckles of sand with the crescendo of the tune, and as it scraped over John, he felt the unforgiving hold of the rotting hands dissolve. The three dead men had been swept away into piles of dust by the rippling music.
John, hissed a low voice. The undulating melody summoned a burst of air. He hazarded a glance to the stark metal door that loomed over him. Moran stood frozen beside it, smirking, even as the flesh of his hands and face caked over with sand.
John, wake up! Urged the voice in the wind. Moran swivelled his head in his direction and unfurled his grin. The grains of sand now composing his face blew away in clumps, and John witnessed Moran's head crumble away into dust.
Wake up John!
John launched himself free of his sweat-drenched duvet, and he opened his eyes to the soothing dark of his bedroom. He covered his eyes with a broken moan and bent himself into a foetal position. Only then did he hear it: the gentle waxing and waning of music resonating into his room. Violin music.
The song curled over him, spreading calm over his panicked mind. He turned his head towards the glow of copper light beneath his bedroom door and the shadow that eclipsed it. Sherlock must have heard him groaning in his sleep. The clock on the nightstand read 3:33 AM. He looked up at the grey ceiling with a wry smile; of course Sherlock refrained from a full night's sleep. John found it ironic that after a concussion and days without rest that Sherlock would be assuaging his sleep troubles.
"John." The violin came to an abrupt rest, and Sherlock's whisper permeated the room with such clarity that John was certain he was on the other side of the door. "John, I wish that I could crack open a fragment of your skull and pick out the pieces of your brain one by one. I would pull out your amygdalae, the seat of your irrational memories, and unravel it into individual fibres."
John forgot to breathe as he wound the duvet back over his vulnerable person and fought down a shiver at the image those words cast into his overactive mind. The shadow beneath his door shifted. "Sleep well, John," Sherlock whispered.
The violin resumed its serenade with decreasing volume as the shadow beneath his door receded. The song persisted for sometime, although John could not have been asked for how long. He let the wooden notes carry him back into a fitful, but nightmare-vacant slumber.
Four hours later, the persistent electronic chime of his alarm sent him trudging downstairs to the washroom. He hardly regarded his haggard expression in the mirror, but when he yanked off his cotton tee, John grimaced at the purple, crescent-shaped marks over his right shoulder. The ponce had given him love bites!
As he tore his gaze away from his mussed reflection, he noticed an unopened jar of Tiger Balm sitting on the counter. It was the closest thing to an apology he was likely to receive from Sherlock. While he twirled the small jar between his fingers, he reminded himself that months ago, his flatmate would probably have disregarded such a gesture entirely.
John raised his left elbow, and confirmed that the range of his injured shoulder was too limited to apply the balm to his bruises. In defeat, he turned to the darkened corridor and sighed, "Do you mind?"
He was not surprised when a second later, Sherlock poked his head into the washroom. John gave him a disapproving shake of his head, more irate at the fact that he had removed the bandage on his head at some point last night than anything (John had grudgingly come to accept Sherlock's voyeuristic tendencies within the first month of their cohabitation).
Sherlock wore an unintelligible expression that drifted to his speculative green eyes as he entered the bathroom behind John and took the jar. John caught him resting his eyes briefly on his scar and he tensed, but Sherlock did not even raise an eyebrow. A smile escaped him at that—friends, doctors, lovers—their expressions had all reflected a silent horror or pity at his gunshot wound, even when they did him the courtesy of saying nothing. There was no greater comfort than seeing his best friend observe it with absolutely no reaction.
An icy burn at his right shoulder blade dragged him from his thoughts. In the mirror he noticed Sherlock gingerly dabbing the salve on the bite marks. He forced an awkward laugh. "I suppose I'm in luck that you're such a bloody awful cannibal, or else we might need more than this jar."
Sherlock glanced up from his shoulder with an indignant frown. "I was not an awful cannibal. You were impatient."
John glared at Sherlock's reflection. "You haven't been stammering all morning. That's a good improvement. Rather strange, though, I've read that it's common for those suffering head trauma to revert to childhood speech impediments. Were you a stutterer, Sherlock?"
Sherlock's haughty expression plummeted from his face. "No," he replied a little too quickly to avert John's suspicion. His smile widened. He absolutely had to interrogate Mycroft about this when he had the opportunity.
It was so rare that he had the drop on Sherlock that John was tempted to tease him further; however, he found himself strangely content to let the other man trace geometric shapes over his shoulder with a fresh dollop of balm. It only took a minute of Sherlock's frustrated silence for John to soften his expression. "Last night…it was about to become a lot worse before you…just. Thank you, Sherlock."
Sherlock traced a neat spiral pattern over his shoulder. "This was the fifth night terror you've experienced in the last two months. Before the business at the pool, you had them less frequently."
He sighed. "Which is why I have an appointment with Ella today rather than a shift at the clinic."
"I'll come with you." After observing what must have been a bewildered expression, he added, "We cannot waste any more time dithering while this case grows cold—"
"Dithering? Sherlock, you had a concussion. You hadn't eaten or slept properly for days!"
"And we are under threat to find which one of the Rogues harbours the trigger. Although I would hardly consider the threat from those imbeciles terrifying, John, I would prefer to understand what is worth the stomachs of three men, before the murderers come calling, not to exclude one Sebastian Moran. Every moment is vital."
John suppressed the image of the three dead Garrotter Street Rogues lurching towards him in his nightmare. He shuddered while Sherlock traced Roman numerals against his shoulder blade. "Look, you can follow me to the appointment if you must. And mate, I think the shoulder has nearly all the jar on it by now."
"Hm? Oh, yes." Sherlock abruptly parted his fingers from John's shoulder, and turned his face away from the mirror.
"While I find your concern for my welfare touching, Sherlock, just promise me that you won't actually follow me into Ella's office. I don't want a repeat of my dental exam."
Sherlock folded his arms. "Why would you still be upset about that? Your doctor did not even file charges."
"You released a tank of nitrous oxide into the air vent because you were bored in the waiting room."
A lopsided smirk alighted his face at the memory. "Which is why I suspect he did not call the authorities. That was a proper hallucinogenic—even I found its effects rather pleasant."
John had not even washed his face, and he was already regretting his decision.
Sent 9:50 AM
It was not my fault.
Sent 9:52 AM
I am not apologising.
Sent 9:56 AM
John?
John ignored the whirring of his mobile from his trousers pocket while he fended away the seething glares of the waiting room staff. He squirmed in his thinly cushioned seat and failed to keep his attention on the pile of month-old periodicals that were arranged on a coffee table when the mobile buzzed once more.
Sent 9:57 AM
It was just as much your responsibility.
John's resolve melted away. He set his jaw short of grinding his molars and punched at the keys on his phone.
Sent 9:58 AM
My fault? How the hell can you even remotely blame any of what happened on me? -J
Sent 9:59 AM
Aren't you always insisting that I attempt 'small talk' with individuals as one of those social things? -S
Sent 10:00 AM
Sherlock, you told the schizophrenic patient in the room that the government was monitoring him. -J
Sent 10:01 AM
Only because it's true. -S
Sent 10:01 AM
Honestly, if he was going to carry on about 'them bugging us', I should think the kind thing is to offer advice on how to disable the cameras. -S
Sent 10:02 AM
They had to sedate the man, Sherlock. They had to call security. -J
Sent 10:02 AM
I'm well aware. One of them took my picture as I was manhandled out. -S
Sent 10:03 AM
I really don't know why I bother at times. -J
"John Watson," bit out the receptionist. "Dr Thompson will see you now."
John sighed at his mobile, unsure why he had been drawn into a texted argument with a madman in a psychology office, of all places. He shoved the mobile back into his trousers pocket and stood from his chair.
"Thank you," he said with his warmest smile to the receptionist. "And, again, I'm really sorry about all of this." He gestured at the turned over furniture at the other side of the waiting room and a scowling security guard tasked with righting it all. "My friend, he's really not right in the head. Uh, you must see that a lot, though."
The receptionist groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. John took that as his cue to leave as quickly as humanly possible.
If Ella had been informed of the Sherlock-induced chaos that transpired in the waiting room, she certainly did not show it as she rose to greet John from her chair.
"John, it's been a while since our last meeting. You look well."
"Ah, well thanks, I suppose. Listen, the reason I never rescheduled all those months ago-I have a lot to explain—"
"Actually, I've been reading your blog. While it's certainly unconventional, you've seemed to improve your circumstances a great deal with your adventures—you and your new flatmate." She paused and frowned at a sheet of paper. "Before we get started, I thought you should know that I took a glance at the eval form you filled in at the front desk. It indicated that you believe you are 'persistently under the threat of grievous bodily harm from a friend or family member'. What did you mean by that?"
"You probably should just ignore that bit. It's really nothing, only some hypothetical murder plots Sherlock concocted for me while he was bored."
Ella stilled her fountain pen against her notebook. "Murder plots? Your flatmate is planning to murder you?"
"Hypothetically! It's all purely hypothetical! Everyone seems to be forgetting that! Hell, I even volunteered to be his victim."
Ella raised an eyebrow and underlined something three times in her notebook. "And you're certain that there is no actual chance he would actually harm you?"
John must have paused longer than he intended by the concern that flashed over Ella's face. "He did take a bite out of me yesterday, but he wasn't entirely lucid," he explained, before realising that he was not improving the situation. "Look, it's not as if he can really dissolve me in a vat of hydrofluoric acid or work my eyeballs out with an ice cream scoop. That's mental, even for Sherlock Holmes!"
She blinked. "Did you just say an ice cream scoop?"
His mobile vibrated against his thigh. John gratefully fished it out, while rethinking his animosity towards technology. "Sorry—it might be an emergency at the clinic, just a moment."
Sent 10:18 AM
When I finish with the amygdalae, I want to splinter your skull apart with a cordless drill and strip away your brain tissue down to the stem. -S
"It's from him?" ventured Ella, in her irritatingly neutral voice.
John snapped his head up from the mobile. "Hold on, how did you know that?"
"Your posture relaxed when you read the text. You actually trust him, don't you?"
John tightened his lips into a thin line. "He said that he wants to poke holes into my head with a cordless drill until my skull shatters."
Her eyes widened, and she scribbled something into her notebook in a panic. "And how, exactly, would you respond to this hypothetical threat on your life, John?"
One of his fingers brushed the keyboard of his mobile. "I would tell the git that we don't own a cordless drill, but he could borrow a wired one from our landlady if it didn't terribly restrict his plot."
He took some guilty pleasure in watching his therapist ponder over everything that was wrong with that statement. Personally, John was still disturbed by the collection of power tools that dear old Mrs Hudson had stored away in her closet. After several false starts, Ella at last found her voice. "G-Go on, then."
John quickly punched out the text on his mobile and set the device aside. He braced himself for her inevitable interrogation. "Have you ever considered that your relationship with Sherlock Holmes is especially unusual, maybe even—"
John felt his brow knit at the word relationship and sighed. "Not you, too. Listen, Sherlock and I, I'm not gay. He's a bloke—a brilliant, irritating, amazing, mad, childish—bloke. It's just not like that."
"It sounds as though your feelings for him are complicated."
John opened his mouth to stammer out a reply, but a reprieve came when the mobile vibrated again. He snatched it off the arm of his chair and scanned the message.
"John?" she prompted after a long moment of silence.
John broke eye contact from the lit screen. "He says a wired drill would limit the kill-room to one possibility instead of four."
John did not understand why she abruptly stood from her chair to shutter and lock the window. Then again, the practice of psychology had never been his specialty.
Sherlock cracked a smile at the text on his mobile before his restlessness came itching at the back of his head with a vengeance. He irritably paced along the bottom step of the nondescript office building. It was the closest he was allowed to approach the front door, he realised, before the security guard—overpaid, police academy dropout, insomniac internet pornography addict—would push open the double glass doors and threaten to set his taser on him should he come any closer.
Sherlock slumped down on the step and frowned at the view of the street. There were cars and taxis queued against a red light—boring—a yellow LED display scrolling the day's top headlines over the bank entrance across the road: GLOBAL SUMMIT ON ENERGY CONTINUES TODAY AT PARLIAMENT—banal—and average businessmen and women decked out in their ill-fitting work attire were obnoxiously yammering into their mobiles—hateful.
He weaved the tips of his fingers together as his thoughts galloped back to the case. As he had suspected for some time, Moriarty was involved in the plot. Not long ago he would have been exhilarated for another opportunity to challenge such a fascinating adversary, but now the realisation that Moriarty was so close struck him with a crippling wave of gravity. He did not understand this, nor why every time he thought of Moriarty the image of John's horrified expression flashed before his eyes.
It did not help matters that he did not know who Sebastian Moran was, even though it appeared that he played a central role in this plot. When he awoke lucid from his concussion, Sherlock scanned the file on Moran that Lestrade brought to the flat. While it was enlightening to note the connection between Moran and Ireland (and without a doubt, a certain Irish consulting criminal), the file hardly gave Sherlock the means to crack the case. In desperation, he had even appropriated John's mobile to text the number on the white business card. Not surprisingly, the text had returned unsent, the number belonging to Moran no longer receiving service. It left him only with a story of a soldier named Sebastian Moran and a growing sense of irritation at the dead ends that remained in his wake.
What Sherlock did know was that the conspiracy itself was not something that terribly concerned him. An amateur gang of drug peddlers had been recruited to transport an impressive amount of heroin from Dublin, but unbeknownst to all of them, one of the gangsters carried an item of far greater importance. When that item became lodged in the digestive system of one of the mules, the entire gang became accountable, desperate, and most unfortunately for two of the members, homicidal. It would seem that whether it was Moriarty or this mysterious Mr Moran, the entire gang was under the threat of death until this item had been retrieved.
The blaring of car horns chipped away at his reverie, and Sherlock glanced away from his folded hands with a frown creasing his face. Columns of cars were lined behind a blinking traffic light. Beyond the stagnant intersection, he could see that the lights at the next two blocks were faulty as well.
"Hello?"
"Are you there?"
"Can you hear me?"
The irritating voices of common London salary men floated over the droning horns.
As if it were choreographed, three of the pedestrians halted on the sidewalk, checking the screens of their mobiles for signal. Sherlock would have found this sort of social frenzy amusing if it were not for a growing uneasiness constricting his lungs. It prompted him to scrutinise his own phone, which currently had zero bars of signal. When he pocketed the useless device, he noticed that the LED display over the bank entrance was frozen between headlines.
"They can see us right now, you know." A jittery man with horn-rimmed glasses muttered. From nowhere the schizophrenic man from the waiting room had materialised by Sherlock's side.
He would have wondered how the man, who only minutes before had been sedated by three security guards, escaped a psychology office so easily, but with the chaos unfolding, he barely gave him a sideways glance. "Traffic lights, mobile phones, and a wireless news display. What do they have in common?" He said aloud more to himself than his new companion.
The schizophrenic man chewed the nail of his right index finger. "They have little chips planted under our skin that take frequencies that can track us."
"Frequencies. Yes, radio frequencies. The trigger!" Any criminal with an advanced enough understanding of radio waves could have hijacked the local wireless networks and render these few blocks into a dead zone. He would not put it beyond Moriarty, regardless of how he was involved. But what if there was a device that could hack any radio frequency at long range? Such a device would cripple the very infrastructure of the government. Certainly a thing such as this would be smuggled into the country with extraordinary care.
"They're coming for us. They're coming for us!" chanted the schizophrenic.
"Shut up," hissed Sherlock. The headline frozen on the LED display suddenly winked out of sight, and the entire screen fizzled with gibberish. Numbers, nonsensical letters and symbols flickered faster than the ordinary eye could see. Then the lights of the LED settled into a clear message that left Sherlock cold.
HELLO SHERLY.
Sherlock stopped breathing as he took a step towards the curb. The LED blinked back at him.
YOU DON'T LOOK WELL.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD SEE YOUR DOCTOR.
I CAN.
"John," he breathed out with a desperate realisation. No longer in a collected state of mind, Sherlock raced up the steps of the building two at a time. He would find John in his psychologist's office on the second floor. He would find John safe, as he must be, because Sherlock would absolutely not let this happen again. He repeated those words in his head as he took each step and resolved to make it past that waiting room to prove it so.
He only made it past the double glass doors before the security guard tased him. Seconds after he fell to the floor fighting the involuntary convulsions of his muscles, a fire alarm sounded through the building, and he heard several shouts from the second floor. John's floor. Someone had opened the emergency fire exit.
Sherlock managed to fight down his pain and crawl back outside the building. It was not the first time he had been shocked with a taser, nor was it likely to be his last, and by virtue of that, his recovery time was above average. Despite every fibre of muscle tissue screaming in protest, Sherlock clambered up the side of a stair rail. What he observed on the street only confirmed his worst premonitions.
A grey panel van screeched from the back of the building onto the pedestrian curb. Through the rear window, he glimpsed a familiar sandy beige patch of hair in the rough grasp of a thug. They had John. Forgetting that he currently had no muscle strength, Sherlock made a dash towards the van but merely tumbled down the steps. By the time he hit the pavement, he could hear the van's tires screeching into the city.
Glinting above him in mocking canary lights the same message repeated:
SHERLY COME AND PLAY.
SHERLY COME AND PLAY.
SHERLY COME AND PLAY.
Reviews are not only appreciated—THEY ARE WORSHIPPED!
tarcy: Thanks, I do it for the lolz. SweetChi: Thank you for your sweet review…sorry the update ended up being so late. CristaLake: Ha, I'm glad you liked that line. It remains perhaps one of the most fun things I wrote .notquitesomethingelse: Thank you, thank you for your flattering review! It really got me motivated to keep going with this! Ju Lara: I love you so much for reviewing all my chapters in strange order. I had good times reading them. CharmingKarma: Cheers for your review! Hope you like the next chapters, and I'm happy you had a good time with the stutter =) Icy Sapphire15: I can't argue with the simple approach. Especially if it involves railroad tracks. A-Witty-Thing: Well, it's been a while sense I've updated, but I mean it when I say reviews like yours are big motivators—I'm glad that the plot is also entertaining! sycamoretree: I honestly had way too much fun writing concussed Sherlock. He's an adorable dangerous sociopath we love. laceypinkdream: I like chilling. TSylvestrisA: I thank your morbid heart, and do hope that the mystery is decent, if not the insanity. It's-Teatime-Somewhere: Happy you enjoyed my anagram (and homicidal, concussed Sherlock). Corey5268: Concussed Sherlock is adorable because he is confused and vulnerable and must do something with his mouth if he cannot speak properly ;). meredithriddle: Hold on, you made me think of kittens with facemasks at play…even they are smarter then Anderson. Mew. crownedclown3293: Thank you thank you! I have to say that I had fun writing that last chapter! TheDoctorSherlock: Thank me? I'm just doing my crazy thing, but thank you very much for enabling me! And best of luck hypothetically killing your friend. I would recommend dishwasher fluid, mercury and some saltines. You'll know why when you get there.