Chapter 23: The Akhyls Hour~
In that moment, Sherlock is painfully, utterly oblivious to everything and everyone around him.
He's still awake and still breathing, but his vision is as dark as comatose, for a fraction of a second after the accelerator drug has entered his bloodstream.
And then, rising up, from an imaginary river in his head, is the face, greenish white, covered in stringy ,sticky black hair, dribbling vomit and snot, and weeping blood, of the mythical creature Akhlys.
She screams as if greeting him, and he feels his whole body contort in sudden fear, as if he is a wraith, rendered the puppet of the sudden pangs of anxiety.
And then, as if his lungs are filling up with liquid lead, he is sinking in this imaginary river. His heart is beating so fast it is making his chest rise and fall in one spot like an extra breath.
He feels sick, but he holds it in, throat closing because of the visions that suddenly consume his mind.
He sees it... a dark field in his head, covered in bodies. His head hurts, his throat twists ,as if somebody has wrapped an elastic around it, and wound it up tight. The bodies,...have all been brutally tortured. Some of them are made of porcelain , and are crushed like eggs trampled over by legions of centurions. Some them are cut open ,and their internal organs are pulled out of their bodies, and wrapped in plastic, and put in chemicals, and hooked to portable machines, so that they can be transported, waking or comatose, surgically topsy-turvy. Some of them are cocooned in razor wire that is chemically laced, and there is a white caustic smoke rising from them. Still some of them are too horribly mutilated to make mention of here.
Their faces. Sherlock's stomach quivers and burns like he's being stung by a hornet.
They are all multiples of his own face. Here in this moment he feels every torment that a member of Moriaty's Network used on him ,all at once. These bodies lying here?He is sickened to realize that all of these things were actually done to him...and somehow he lived to tell the tale.
He is twisting turning, rendered a wraith by Akhyls, all of it happening too quickly, all of it too much for its own self. He feels like he is a candle flame, burning, twisting in the wind that is going to snuff him out, folding in on himself, shuttering, trying to make sense of it all.
He closes all those he ever knew and loved out of his mind. Won't let them into his private hell. He sees great mountains made of bone dust crushed together, rising up out of the river of Akhyls.
He sees himself, wrapped in all of the inventions of torture created just for him, like myriad of mummys in Pharaoh's afterlife, go to the edge of those mountains, spread forth their arms and leap.
One after the other. Hundreds of thousands. Millions of billions. Billions of trillions of times. Over and over and over again. Each hitting the ground with a dull "Thud'. Each of them sinking into the river to be slowly gnawed to string by Akhlys' teeth.
He gets to the place where he just can't watch it anymore. Wonders why even it all happened? When...out of the sky, like a blazing meteor, a man comes crashing into Akhlys' hell.
In that moment, with the appearance of that Light, the Akhlys Hour ends.
John is losing his breath.
If it wasn't for this precarious balance on the roof, and Magnusson's animal desperation now that he knows he's lost, John would have already beaten him now.
Somebody is going to fall.
John's head turned towards Sherlock.
He's trying to close his eyes against it all.
John isn't aware of this, because it seems like it's all happening so fast, but its been around 55 minutes since Magnusson injected him with the Accelerator Drug.
He needs only hold on for 5 more minutes and all of this will finally be over.
Maybe he and Sherlock can go home and do nothing but eat Chinese take out, and watch crap telly for days on end.
He's actually begging heaven that's all they have to do, when Magnusson makes his last move.
John does something he would not have done, even if he had gone completely insane. He only reacts to Magnusson's move, and suddenly he is looking down at New York City, pain shooting through his palm, from a needle point of the pinnacle of one of the world's tallest buildings. His legs are all bunched up in the air. His breath has caught. He feels his blood dripping from his hand, and his pulse is beating in his ears. There's a War going on down there. He doesn't care about that right now. Right now he is going to die, fittingly trying to protect Sherlock,and dying in the same way as he did for him, and that is all he can process. He won't be able to hold his balance for very long at all. He can already hear Magnusson screaming as he makes his way to the ground.
John holds his breath as his legs tumble over him in a cart-wheel sort of move he didn't even attempt. And then his breath comes out in a soft, "Ah ughh oh!" sort of sound.
So this is falling...
He's only aware of it for one sickeningly long second,when his armpits begin to sting with a very sharp blunt pain.
He opens his eyes, feeling like he's smothering ,unable to breathe.
Sherlock has caught him mid-air. Superhuman strong at the climax of his poisoning. He lifts John up, to look at him, to study his face.
For just a fraction of a second John is afraid that they will both fall. But he doesn't believe not even for a fraction of a fraction of a minute that Sherlock would drop him, purposefully or accidentally. As he told Mycroft, he would never hurt him.
"H-hey!" John gasps out of blue lips, as Sherlock blinks at him, having been staring at him in stupor, like a nocturnal animal does the sun...
"Light...I see...the Light..." he whispered.
"Yeahhhh...Can you put me down? Please?"
Sherlock takes a very ginger step back, to where there is enough room for both of them, and slides to sitting on the roof.
John lays there for a moment, panting, coughing, trying to catch his breath, as his heart beats go from violent, orange in the juice press squeezing, to an average rate.
Sherlock gasps...
"It's...over! Akhyls...I don't...it's...uhm...gone."
"Oh ,good. GOOD!" John howled, clutching Sherlock's hands in his own, shaking ones.
"You...you...you caught me...Sherlock. You caught me..." John gasped, moved to tears with gratefulness.
"I did...didn't I?" Sherlock laughed, remembering now.
"Seems we have saved each other once again, John..." he sighed, now that he had come off the drugs, utterly exhausted.
"Sherlock Holmes, John Watson! Please return to ground level, at once!" Mycroft shouted over the megaphone.
"Can't he...just let us...catch our breath...FOR ONE BLOODY MINUTE!" John whined.
"No, he can't. He hates field work, rarely ever has to do it, and wants to go back to sitting in a plushy desk chair, and inhaling pastry. Such a boring life..."
John chuckled nervously, as he and Sherlock got up on hands and knees.
"Oh my God...what happened to your hand?" Sherlock gasped, tearing a strip from the bottom of his shirt, and winding it tightly around the wound.
"I I I...handstand...off the...oh God..." John wailed, pressing his face into Sherlock's chest, and letting out a long howl.
Sherlock knelt there, with shaking hands entangled in the golden blonde hair, waiting for him to finish being so upset, so they could try and climb back into the building. It would be difficult since their legs had turned to jelly.
But they could do it, of course. Together they were unbeatable...