Thirst woke him shortly before dawn. He emptied the glass of water that had been left next to his bed, then stumbled to the tap and drained glass after glass until he had had his fill. Returning to sit on his bed, he contemplated his situation.

He had agreed with James Harrison yesterday that he needed help, that this was as much of a danger time to him as the episodes of depression that had plagued him since his discharge from Elmhurst. James had suggested a clinic in Surrey, had said that he would talk to the director there and organise an admission, and Sherlock had reluctantly agreed. 'No medication though,' he had said, 'I'm not going back on medication.'

'First things first,' James had told him. 'We need to get you detoxed and safe. You can discuss the rest with the staff at the clinic later.'

But now he felt trapped, just as he had done in his rooms at college. The walls were too close, threatening to close in on him. A quick rifle through his bedside drawer revealed that someone - under Mycroft's instructions no doubt, had removed his last remaining strip of lorazepam. He went through his trouser pockets, but the contents of those had been removed too. Damn Mycroft and his need to control him.

Quietly, so as not to risk disturbing Mycroft who had a room at the opposite end of the corridor, and carrying his shoes in his hand, he padded in his socks out of his door, wincing at the quiet squeak of the hinges and towards the door in the corridor that divided the area with his room in it, from that containing Mycroft's, and the rooms that had been his parents.

He turned the handle as quietly as he could. He would have to walk past Mycroft's room to get to the stairs, and he didn't want to risk waking him. The handle turned silently, but the door failed to open. Twisting the handle with a little more force, he realised that the door was locked. Damn Mycroft again. He had locked him in? How dare he. He was tempted to throw his shoe through the glass door, but as it was unlikely that Mycroft had left the key on the other side, there seemed little to gain from this. While he could probably climb through the half glazed partition, the chances of cutting himself were high, and while the pain was irrelevant to him, he couldn't face the blood, or the inevitable fuss that would ensue.

Instead he banged with the flat of his hand on the glass door. 'Mycroft! Let me out!'

He continued to shout and bang until Mycroft's door finally opened, and his brother came to the door, tying the cord of his dressing gown. The top half door was made of a mosaic of pieces of stained glass, dating back to the 1920's, another reason that Sherlock had been reluctant to smash it, so that Mycroft appeared only in parts, through the transparent pieces of glass. It gave him an odd disjointed appearance, which fitted in with Sherlock's slightly blurred state of perception perfectly.

'It is five o'clock in the morning, Sherlock,' he said wearily. 'Go back to bed.'

'You locked me in?' Sherlock said in disbelief, no longer caring who he woke. 'How could you? I need to get out. I need to get outside. I can't breathe in here.'

'I locked you in for your own safety,' Mycroft told him calmly from behind the door.

'And the lorazepam and the diazepam, did you take those away for my own safety too?'

'Of course,' Mycroft replied, still looking unruffled. 'Now go back to bed, we'll discuss this in the morning.'

'Mycroft if you don't let me out, then I swear I'll smash this door, or I'll climb out of the window.'

'Good luck with that,' Mycroft said, as he turned and returned to his room.

Exasperated, Sherlock returned to his own room, and went to raise the sash windows. Locked, of course. The window in the corridor was locked too. Defeated he sank down on his bed, trembling and shaking as the withdrawal from the drugs started to kick in. He was panicking, he knew it, and there was only one thing that could make this better.

He picked up his phone, and pressed the button to dial.

'Please,' he whispered, when Mycroft finally picked up the phone 'You don't understand. I need something, Mycroft, to stop me withdrawing. I'm not going to run away, I swear, but you don't know what it's like. It feels as if all of my nerve endings are on fire. I'm going to lose it Mycroft, I can't control this, I can't stop it, I...'

His door opened, and there was Mycroft, offering up the strip of lorazepam. With shaking hands he took the tablets from Mycroft, pressed three out from the foil strip and swallowed them. The relief was almost instantaneous, even though the drugs couldn't possible have reached his blood stream yet, still, the panic was still receding. 'Now let me go outside,' he mumbled.

'Give me five minutes to get dressed, Mycroft said, 'and I'll come with you.'

Sherlock looked up sharply. 'Don't trust me?' he asked.

Mycroft sighed. 'I just thought that you might like a little company, that's all,' he said.

Less than ten minutes later, Mycroft was letting them both out of the kitchen door. It was just getting light, the dew on the grass still wet, and while it promised to be another sunny day, there was a chill in the air, and Sherlock was glad for the jumper that Mycroft had thrown at him as they walked down the stairs. He shivered a little despite it, and noticed Mycroft's concerned glance. He knew what Mycroft was thinking, almost as transparently as if he could read his mind. 'Thin, too thin, no wonder he's cold,' but Mycroft did not say it, instead he remained thankfully silent as they walked away from the house.

'Here?' Mycroft asked, indicating a bench in a corner of the main lawn.

Sherlock nodded and sat down, filling his lungs with the cold air, instantly feeling better for being outside the house.

'I'm not angry,' Mycroft said quietly, shooting a quick look at his little brother - just..'

'Disappointed?' Sherlock asked bitterly.

'Yes, but not with you,' Mycroft said.

'You think that you're responsible?' Sherlock asked incredulously. 'This was my doing Mycroft, nobody else's.'

'I am told that it is a symptom of your illness,' Mycroft said. 'One that I had been warned about, one that I had watched for early signs of. I missed them, so for that reason, yes, | am disappointed with myself.'

Sherlock sighed, lent back against the back of the bench and closed his eyes. 'It is my life, Mycroft, you can't lead it for me.'

'No,' Mycroft said quietly, 'but I am sorry, nonetheless.'

'As am I, Sherlock replied.

They sat there in silence for a long while, as the sky turned from pink to blue, and the sun slowly became visible from behind the summer house at the end of the garden.

'I'm scared,' Sherlock said quietly, then turned to look at Mycroft, to assess his brother's reaction to this rare display of emotion.

'I know,' Mycroft replied calmly. 'But you know what you have to do.'

'And if I can't do it?' Sherlock asked, looking straight ahead across the garden.

'You can do it,' Mycroft told him. The question is - will you.'

'Are you going to give me a choice?'

'I could lie,' Mycroft said.

'But you won't.'

'No, I won't,' Mycroft said, leaving the implied meaning heavy in the air.

'So when do I have to go?' Sherlock asked.

'This morning, straight after breakfast, I thought. The sooner, the better.'

'Couldn't I just..' Sherlock broke off, knowing that there was little point in protesting. He had laid his cards on the table yesterday, to both Sarah and James Harrison, because he had wanted help. Now he just wanted to be left alone, to deal with this in his own way, to go and get the only thing that could possibly make this better, and he knew that Mycroft would never allow that. He was trapped, he had allowed himself to become trapped.

He could run, that was still an option. He had the element of surprise on his side, he could get to the woods at the side of the garden, then through, to the road at the edge of the estate, hitch a lift, get away, get what he needed, what his body craved.

'This will destroy you, Sherlock, if you allow it to,' Mycroft told him, and Sherlock was grateful for his logical, dispassionate tone.

'I know,' Sherlock mumbled, then again more quietly, 'I do know that Mycroft.'

'And yet - still,' Mycroft said.

Sherlock looked at him sharply. 'It isn't logical, Mycroft, I never said that it was logical.'

'Then explain it to me.'

Sherlock considered for a moment trying to do exactly that, to explain to Mycroft - not the need, the craving so much, as the ritual. The delicious anticipation that came before a hit that every addict knows. The anticipation, the ritual of obtaining, of planning, of preparing was almost as important as the hit itself. Almost. But the drug itself - ah that was something else entirely. For Sherlock, drugs offered him one of two things; the mechanism by which he could shut outside world, either by sharpening his perception with cocaine, narrowing his world to a perfect prism of light, removing external distractions, giving him perfect focus, sharpening his senses, giving him greater clarity than he ever had when sober; or the slow blur of diazepam, numbing the pain of external stimuli, making the world softer, gentler, easier to cope with. And then there was the heroin, the beautiful white smoke which led to perfect oblivion - which wrapped him in it's soft white blanket, and shut off - everything, perfectly and beautifully. Somehow in that moment of ecstasy, he always wished that it could be forever. That this beautiful peaceful sleep could be the last one, that he could slip into it's warm arms and never wake up.

Death no longer scared him, life did. Life was painful, jagged, it caused pain and damage, and he had had enough of it. Stopping the drugs would cause more pain, more damage, and without the drugs to ease him through the days, then what was there?

But he could explain none of this to Mycroft. 'I can't,' was all that he could say.

'You've got through this before,' Mycroft said calmly, as if he was trying to talk Sherlock into his first day at school or swimming his first length of the swimming pool.

'Not without drugs,' Sherlock said heavily.

'I won't let you destroy yourself,' Mycroft said, without looking at him.

And Sherlock felt - not angry, as he had expected to, but somehow safe, so safe, because he knew that it was true. That whatever he wanted, whatever his body was telling him, whatever his mind wanted him to do, Mycroft would always do what was logical, what was right.

He wanted to tell Mycroft that he knew, that he depended on that, but he didn't trust his voice not to crack. So he simply nodded, and stood to walk back to the house, Mycroft walking beside him, as he always did.

I read a post on tumblr recently about the dangers of glamourising drugs in the fandom, and I hope, beyond all else, that I haven't done that. So just to be clear, and at the risk of sounding a little preachy; drugs destroy lives, drugs kill, I have seen drugs kill. And the only thing worse than having to walk into a room and explain to a parent that their twenty-something or thirty-something child is dead, or is dying because of their addiction, is knowing that you watched that same addict walk out of the door six months previously, having refused help, and that there was absolutely nothing that you could do to stop them.

So there you go - not glamorous, not clever, and it destroys not only the life of the addict, but also the lives of their family and friends. I don't believe for a second that Sherlock could have done the things that he did if he was still an addict, but the fact that he has that in his past shows that even the most brilliant and intelligent among us can still become addicts. And each and every addict will tell you that in the beginning they were sure that it was within their control, and in the end it never is.

So this story is dedicated to all those amazing individuals who work for community drug and alcohol services. You do an amazing job. You deal with people who others often find infuriating, and who are almost impossible to help. But despite this, you somehow manage to see past all of that, and sometimes, just sometimes you manage to rescue the person inside.