Author's Note: With apologies- for some reason, this did not load last night. So, despite promising you two chapters yesterday, I think I only delivered the one. So I will compensate with another later today
Chapter Seven:
There were noises in the room- at least three different sound patterns that his brain vaguely recollected as voices. He tried to tune them out.
His sensory memory program was malfunctioning. He couldn't find the audio function to turn it off. Not NOW; can't you understand, I'm busy? The voices continued. His ears heard, his brain registered the words, but it was taking too long to understand them.
Slowly, despite his best efforts, the sounds took meaning. "Sherlock, you must focus." Voice recognition programs came on stream. Oh, bother. It was his brother. He tried to open his eyes, but his lids felt like they had weights on them. No, actually, he was wrong. They were open, it's just the data coming in wasn't connecting to anything. Great, audio on, visual off. COME ON, isn't anything working?!
Something blurred and then took a shape of contrasting colours. A face with dark blue eyes, receding chestnut brown hair, an image that came with a veritable directory full of negative memory files. He searched for the speech function.
(ERROR 57 0x37 ERROR_DEV_NOT_EXIST)
Oh, damn. This needed to work. He tried again. "Mycroft." Even to his ears, his voice sounded odd.
"Well, at least he isn't catatonic." A female voice. Not the one usually associated with this environment, the Baker Street flat. But recognisable. He was too tired to try to unzip the data store that would have told him who she was.
"Nor so far gone that he can't recognise you." That was a voice he associated with the flat. The most familiar voice of all. "John." Did I say that out loud? His ears heard it, but the voice function was most peculiar; he wasn't consciously using it.
"Yep, it's me, Sherlock. Welcome back to the land of the living. What's going on?"
"You're interrupting something important. Go away."
"No. That's what you said the last time you said anything, and that was three days ago. Keep talking to me. It's important."
"No, it's not. Something else is more important." Sherlock sighed. Maybe he should try the delete vocal function again. He didn't really need to talk.
He felt something pressing into the skin under his collarbone, and then it pinched. It was annoying. "Stop it."
"No. Not until you open your eyes again and look at me."
Had he closed his eyes? He wasn't aware of it. He tried to access visual data again. Swirling pixels, colours, shapes, then John's worried face emerged out of them. "What's so important?"
"You are. Stop trying to ignore me."
His addled brain tried to make sense out of that statement. There were hands that were pulling him upright, moving his legs from the sofa. He felt the floor under his bare feet. Cold. John's hands. He didn't flinch. He recognised the touch. Warm; John always ran a higher body temperature than Sherlock. It was one of the odd things that he had realised when occasionally they had come into body contact. John's scent was all around him, too, as he was held and then pushed upright. That was… reassuring. He was propped up against the back of the sofa, glad that someone else was taking responsibility for putting his body in a sitting position. He didn't think he'd be up to that level of muscle memory and control. He felt those warm fingers on his right wrist, chasing a pulse. At that moment, he became aware of some encumbrance of his left side. Something had trapped his arm; cloth, odd. He tried to move it and was rewarded with a hefty shaft of pain that made his eyes widen.
And with that pain came a jolt of adrenaline, a firing of neurons. Synapses connected and electrical impulses moved. Code was overwritten. Systems on standby suddenly came to life. Declarative memory resumed. His brain re-booted.
Now fully aware, he looked at the three faces that were staring at him, and recognised the woman, who was standing in front of the sofa, scrutinising him carefully. He frowned.
"Doctor Cohen. Why are you here?"
"Do you know where you are, Sherlock?"
He made a face. "Of course, I do. Now answer the question. Why are you here at my flat?" There was a distinctly hostile tone in his voice- he made no effort to disguise his anger.
"Because we are worried about you, Sherlock. You haven't spoken for three days. You've barely functioned at all, and were heading towards catatonia. Mycroft asked me to come here for my professional opinion. "
"Well, you can see that such an idea is ridiculous. I am fine. Just go away, all of you." He gestured with his right hand as if shooing a pesky fly away. Then he tried to lift his feet back onto the sofa so he could lie down again, but found John sitting beside him- blocking just such a manoeuvre.
His brother was standing by the fireplace. "What are you doing, Sherlock?"
"Minding my own business, which is what all of you should do."
"And just what is that business?"
"Piss off, Mycroft. It's none of your business, that's for sure."
His brother walked over toward the sofa. He stood looking down at his brother, using his height to dominate, a frown on his face. "Explain it to me. Why isn't it any of my business?"
Sherlock looked incredulously from Mycroft, to John and then to Esther. "What's going on? Why are you three here? What's happened?" There was the slightest tinge of uncertainty creeping into his voice.
A silence fell. Mycroft broke first. "You've been having flashbacks to the first time you broke your wrist. A melt-down, panic attacks- several of them. Can you remember them?"
"No, why would I want to? I must have deleted them. It doesn't matter."
Esther butted in. "Yes, Sherlock, it does matter. These are not normal reactions. They aren't healthy. They are your mind telling you something, telling you to pay attention to something that happened back then. So, what did happen, and why is the memory of it doing this to you now?"
"Doing what? It's only his word that these so-called reactions occurred. I don't remember them happening. Why should I? Whatever happened or didn't happen, the first time I broke my wrist was decades ago. It's irrelevant. I'm fine."
"You can't…
"That's not…
Both Mycroft and Esther started at exactly the same time to say something to try to convince Sherlock. Looking more and more angry, he cut them off, "Shut up! You are both wrong. Leave me alone!" Sherlock's face was flushed and he started to stand up. John knew he was moments away from getting up and storming down the corridor to slam the bedroom door behind him.
"JUST STOP THIS!" It was his parade ground voice that cut across the three arguing voices. A stunned silence fell for a moment. Even if he could convince Sherlock to stay, John knew how the rest of this conversation was going to go. Mycroft would argue, John would cajol, Esther would try to get Sherlock to understand. All three approaches were certain to fail.
"Right. Now that I have everyone's attention, Mycroft please sit down- you are making everyone nervous by your hovering." John's voice was calm but very firm.
The elder Holmes gave him a scathing look, but then shrugged and backed away from the sofa. John pointed to the leather and chrome chair. A trifle reluctantly, Mycroft sat down.
John continued. "Doctor Cohen. Would you mind taking the other chair by the fireplace?"
She eyed Watson carefully, as if thinking through whether to go along with this.
"Please." John made his request firmly, but politely. His eyes said Trust me, so she did as he asked. John got up from the sofa and went over to the table, pulling a chair out and sitting down in it. He was giving Sherlock some space, so he wouldn't feel so threatened, and it seemed to work, as the pyjama-clad man did not get up. It was noticed by everyone in the room that John was sitting half way between Sherlock on the sofa and the two in the chairs. While fighting was a form of engagement, he knew it was counter-productive if they wanted Sherlock to recognise that there was a problem. To do that, John would have to get Sherlock to trust him, and then appeal to logic, not emotion.
"Sherlock, do you remember what you said to Reginald Musgrave after you told him that you'd solved the case in the first twenty four hours? He wanted to know why it had taken you four days more to come out with it."
Sherlock was eyeing John cautiously. "Yes, of course I remember."
John answered for him, so that the other two would understand his point. "You said that you would have done it faster if you hadn't been forced to spend 36 hours in hospital. Your injury clearly interfered with your ability to do the Work. That makes it…important, even by your standards."
Sherlock looked down at the sling with distaste. "I fell. Accidents happen. Tediously inconvenient."
The doctor was watching his friend's reaction. "Tell me, Sherlock- when was the last time you fell out of bed?"
"I fail to see the significance of your point, John."
There was steel in his voice, "Just answer the question, Sherlock."
His friend looked away. "I'm not sure. Probably when I was under the influence of drugs, most of which was before your time, but I'd guess it was also likely after the Woman drugged me. Why?"
"At Musgrave Hall you weren't on drugs, you were having a nightmare, weren't you? That's what made you fall."
Sherlock considered for a moment, then "I don't know. I have no recollection of it."
"Why would you delete that? Why would having a nightmare be so distressing, or debilitating that you would feel the need to delete it?"
"I don't know. I don't even know that I was having a nightmare. That's your idea."
John pursed his lips. "Okay…moving on to something I do know for certain happened. You had a melt-down in the car on the way to the hospital. Why?"
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Because sometimes pain can trigger synaesthesia, and that can lead to a meltdown; it's a side effect of sensory processing disorder. You know this. What are you trying to imply?
"I'm not implying anything. Why did you, in the middle of that meltdown, start smashing your left hand and wrist with all the force you could muster?"
Sherlock went very still. "Did I?"
"Yes, Sherlock, you did. I'm not making this up. I was there and Brunton was driving. He saw it too. Why?"
He looked confused. The other three people in the room watched him think it through. Eventually, Sherlock muttered, "I don't know."
"Doesn't that bother you?"
For a moment, John thought he might have made a breakthrough, as he watched his friend process the revelation. Then the man's eyes narrowed, his chin set and a full-blooded glare erupted from those grey green eyes.
"No, it doesn't. If I deleted it, then it's irrelevant and that's enough for me. For the same reason I can't be bothered to remember who's the latest soap opera celebrity, or the fact that the sun doesn't go around the earth, or any one of a million other pieces of useless trivia that you seem to stuff into your heads. So, all of you, just piss off." Awkwardly, but still surprisingly fast, he stood up and was halfway out of the room before either of the two doctors could react.
Mycroft was just fast enough. Despite being the furthest away from him, his long experience of reading Sherlock made him recognise the signs of flight before the others. He was out of the chair and with three quick strides, he caught Sherlock by the right wrist, locking it in a firm grip. Given the younger man's forward momentum, the effect was to spin his brother around so he backed into the doorframe instead of carrying on down the corridor to his bedroom. There was a gasp of pain as the impact must have been felt in his left arm.
"LET GO OF ME!" There was anger, but more fear and panic in that baritone. John was on his feet, too, and moving instinctively to protect Sherlock, when he felt Esther's hand on his shoulder. He glanced at her briefly. She shook her head and said quietly, "Don't interfere, John."
That's when he realised what Mycroft was trying to do- he was attempting to provoke a panic attack, to make it clear to Sherlock that it was a problem that needed to be dealt with, rather than ignored. And the tactic appeared to be working.