The Chemist

I started writing this story the week after TAB aired, but the amount of research I needed to do on withdrawal and case background was so large that when S4 aired the story was only half finished and I hadn't published any of it. I planned a ridiculously complex case that needed so much knowledge!

After TLD was aired I found this fitted way better into a withdrawal setting there than after TAB and I changed the setting, which didn't take that much work in comparison to the other stuff I read into.

This summer I spent my whole vacation working this over and working out the plot.

So, here it finally is.

Hope you enjoy it.

Many thanks to Ernil i Pheriannath/ Sparkypip for her beta work, medical knowledge and feedback in moments when I was lost. :)

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Disclaimer: Sherlock, John and all other mentioned characters belong to BBC, Mr. Moffat, Mr. Gatiss or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I just borrowed them for fun. I wrote this for my personal delight and improving my English, no copyright infringement intended. No money changed hands and no profit is being made.

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2016 - Day 1

Sherlock tried to roll to his other side, but the pain in his joints – especially his shoulder and hips - made it an agonising endeavour. The last moment he remembered people where listening and stifled a moan. John, Mrs Hudson, Molly and Mycroft were in the living room. They had brought him home from hospital a few hours ago, but he was far from recovered.

He had refused to go through withdrawal at the hospital and since his kidneys were responding well to treatment and had resumed their work, he had been released. Against medical advice of course, at least against the hospital doctor's one. John had agreed with him that he needed to get out of there.

Also, he wanted to recover at home.

In his own bed.

During the long nights at the hospital he had so much yearned to be at home.

But now that he was here, the world was still rubbish. Hard edges and odd lights wherever he turned, physically and mentally.

Something about home felt foreign and not home at all.

Also, going through this alone would be preferable, let no one witness his misery.

But it seemed right now he didn't have a choice.

It was either doing it with them present of at a rehab centre.

Another thing was, that after the recent events Sherlock was desperate to have John around, no matter what cost.

He had felt bad for too long, now. His patience was wearing thin.

Withdrawal was always a very ugly endeavour, he had known that.

The past weeks - in which Mary had died and then John had refused to talk to him - had been the most miserable ones in recent history.

Sherlock had no doubts Mycroft would knock him out and cart him to a rehab centre if he refused to have them present. His sibling was well aware that going through withdrawal in a hospital would worsen his mental state. Mycroft was aware he was everything else than fine, but not willing or able to put one of the main reasons he was in this state into words.

During the past two days withdrawal symptoms had started to become more severe, though he was still in the 'crash phase' mostly. At the hospital he had been given reduced doses of some of the stuff he had taken to soften the whole ordeal as well as other meds to help him with the process. Now John was the one administering everything and deciding what would be given when.

To his surprise Mycroft and John agreed that 221b was preferable to a clinic because such a place usually caused the detective more stress than it was worth. They acknowleged that - most of the time - it was counterproductive; due to the personnel, the noises, the scents, and - to Sherlock's annoyance his brother had argued with - loneliness.

The reverberations of his solitary confinement after Magnussen left Mycroft with a sour understanding what it did to his little brother and that it should be avoided at all cost.

In hospital, John and Mycroft had discussed this as if he hadn't been there. It had irked him, but he was much too tired to bother really.

He knew his ailments would get worse soon and he was desperate to find a way to escape all this, for a bit at least. In his current state visiting the mind palace was difficult, but he was sure he could manage.

Keeping up the concentration when his body was plaguing him with the side effects of his abstinence was sometimes a problem, but he had no choice, he needed a healthy break from this to get through the night.

During his hospital stay, he had tried to escape to his mind palace once already. The result was some seriously freaked out nurses, who then had tried to convince a doctor to delay his release and do more test. It was sheer luck (and Mycroft maybe?) that he had managed to avoid the impending psychiatric assessment.

If he was honest with himself, he was aware that he felt quite depressed.

Luckily, he had been able to sleep a lot, which was just another issue during the crash phase.

Massive exhaustion and tiredness had hit him like a brick wall.

But at least being aware of the symptoms and conscious enough to handle them was improvement.

Although he was in quite some pain he felt more present than during his medical treatments.

More present, more himself.

He could hear John and Mycroft in 221b's kitchen, now, talking softly, before steps came down the hall and John entered his bedroom.

The doctor stepped close to his bed.

"Hey?… Can I touch you?"

John had learned before that touching Sherlock was what could tip him over the edge, cause a meltdown.

That hadn't been pretty. For the past few days Sherlock had been hypersensitive when it came to all kinds of sensory input.

And he had woken half the ward yelling at John and the nurses who had touched him when he couldn't stand it.

"No," he breathed.

His whole body seemed to itch and that was one more argument for escaping to the palace as soon as possible. His transport was just too difficult and annoying to endure.

"It's time for your meds."

Of course.

Mycroft had supplied them with the best drugs there were to soften withdrawal and help with the symptoms, but it was all a drop in the ocean.

"I can't keep them down," Sherlock mumbled, wishing they would in fact do work as they should, which at least half of them didn't do.

"I know. Dehydration will become a problem if we don't stop this soon. I have an antiemetic here for starters."

John held up a small syringe.

Sherlock reached out for it, "I'll do it."

"No, you won't. Hands are shaking," John pointed at his friend's outstretched hand.

Sherlock growled when he saw the other man was right, but being touched seemed currently a much worse idea than hurting himself by using his own uncoordinated hands.

He groweled again.

"No, Sherlock. Just no!" John produced a piece of gauze and carefully rolled up his sleeve.

Sherlock closed his eyes and concentrated on ignoring the touch.

Within a few seconds John had injected the medication, overall he was good at it, Sherlock was aware, able to do it with little discomfort due to long years of practise.

"Let's wait a bit before we try a bit of tea. This should work fast. Need anything?"

"No," Sherlock closed his eyes and John left without another word.

For god's sake, he needed to escape this for a few hours. Rest while he could. Things would get worse soon.

During his solitary confinement after shooting Magnussen, he had been close to losing his mind due to boredom and the endless emptiness around and inside him. The sorrow and anguish were getting to him, back then he had tried using the mind palace.

Most of the time it hadn't worked.

But now, John was here.

Since he could hear his friend while inside the palace the risks of it being a negative experience were lower.

He knew it would be an escape - kind of.

Pathetic and cowardly.

But this - waiting for worse things that lay ahead to come - was amplifying his mental distress and the typical psychological side effects were starting to become hard to endure. It lowered his resistance profoundly when they had started, and he feared severe complications of the mental kind might be ahead because of it.

He had hoped to prevent that John witnessed the state he was in.

His former flatmate was unwell, one alarming sign was that John's eyes seemed smaller, swollen, somehow.

Sherlock had seen this on several occasions, when the doctor was sick or very exhausted. It hadn't happened often, though. But the last times had been when Sherlock had pulled him out of the bonfire and on the plane after he had come out of his case in the Victorian era mind palace.

John was still in deep grieving mode and also he was having enormous problems with the fact that he had beaten Sherlock in the morgue only a few days ago.

He himself had been too busy being in pain, being drugged, and trying to hide both to really pay attention to the emotional after effects this event had – on both of them.

Sherlock had given John a lot of his attention when his friend was visiting him.

It seemed John was in a very bad place, he had finally understood Sherlock had gone on a suicide mission to save him and was now even beyond anger.

Though Sherlock did not understand why he was. There was still a great amount of anger, yes, but at what exactly, Sherlock was not sure. The silence John's sorrow caused was far worse than any obvious anger.

There was so much regret in his gaze that Sherlock felt uneasy – maybe even guilty - for having caused it all, although a good part of it was in fact caused by Mary's past.

This version of regret was an intense feeling... one with an aftertaste and Sherlock didn't like it at all, it added to his distress.

He tried to hide from John how poorly he felt, he was ashamed, wanted to sleep it out, wait it out, ignore it all.

A year ago, his excursion into Victorian England had been more comfortable and enjoyable than he had thought.

And now he felt a need to dwell in that decade a bit more to distract himself, while tossing and turning on the bed and fighting his cravings.

Breathing deeply, he started to roam through his mental index of interesting cold cases from that period.

But his mind was muddled and dark, the palace's lighting was insufficient, he needed another source of outside input.

Slowly, he shoved his feet over the edge of his bed to get his laptop from the dining table.

It took some effort to reach his bedroom door and he had barely stepped into the kitchen on weak legs when John came his way.

"Sherlock? You okay?"

"Laptop."

"You want to sit in the living room or shall I bring it to your bedroom?"

Sherlock said nothing but shuffled past him, barely lifting his warm socks from the wooden floor.

Apparently, Mycroft was not in the flat any longer, probably glad to escape the situation.

"Right."

As soon as he had booted the device John placed a cup of steaming tea next to him and silently sat down opposite.

Within minutes Sherlock found some of the files he was looking for in the police database. Using Lestrade's login was always handy. The man was quite uncreative when it came to passwords.

Sherlock considered to print out a list of what might be interesting, one of those seventeen printers must have some toner left... or ink... but he was too tired to plug them in, so he just created pdfs and saved them.

He couldn't get the data itself on his own anyway, it was in paper form or in the MI5 archive, he needed someone to get it.

"There's a tablet computer, in case you need to lie down and want to go on with that," John pointed at a still packed touch screen device that must have been left by Mycroft, it looked quite expensive.

Sherlock looked at John again, silently asking where it came from and then the deductions started coming in.

The doctor looked awful, indeed. They had both lost weight and were both quite broken currently.

Sherlock had known his friend wouldn't take a relapse lightly but had never expected things to go bad to this amount. John seemed to suffer immensely from the fact that he hadn't gone to save Sherlock from Culverton on his own - and the fact that Sherlock had turned this self-destructive.

Would this observation pop up in his mind every time he saw John from now on?

Make him see only that guilt when he looked at the person?

It was a bit annoying.

And counter productive.

His mind was returning to foul thoughts quite frequently these days. The spiral down into depressing thoughts had started right after Mary's death and he had been unable to slow it down. Struggling to stop the decent, he had realised it was a lost cause.

He was here now because now there was a chance that he could remain in John's company, stay alive near him.

He found it was all he wanted...

After Mary's death, Sherlock had assumed it would probably be more merciful to John if he just stayed out of his life, as John had demanded.

Leave him to be a father.

But recent events made him aware that his friend wasn't safe just because Sherlock wasn't there to cause trouble.

Mary had mutated into a source of trouble thoroughly on her own.

His absence wouldn't mean John was out of danger, therefore leaving him was not worth both their sacrifices, or grief, or the horror of loss.

There were lousy days ahead.

Also, whoever had broadcasted the Moriarty video was still out there.

John would be far safer with than without him, not just because of the external factors. Sherlock had deduced John had drunken himself into numbness on more than a few nights after Mary's death and this also needed to stop soon.

Sherlock was more relieved than he could ever express that they had been given another chance.

He was also well aware that Mycroft had worked hard on that solution, had been a proper big brother in fact, although Sherlock would never admit that in his presence.

John must have felt his gaze because he looked up.

Their tired eyes met and John gave him a small smile, which's sadness was more than the detective could handle.

Lost for words Sherlock lowered his eyes, his emotions unclear and surrounded by a heap of unknown needs.

Frustration.

He had been told it was not enough to name his emotions with this single term.

His lack to differenciate between negative feelings was hindering him a lot these days and the counsellor at the hospital had stated they were against letting him go because Sherlock was not cooperating with her and opening up, talking about his feelings.

Mycroft had finally interfered, understanding Sherlock's lack of cooperation was not only caused by the inability to sort through all the distress he experienced but also by the incompetence of the woman to see the finer issues that were really the ones that mattered.

Now, Sherlock carefully tried to collect whatever he might be feeling, trying to sort it out. Not to share it with anybody, though, just to have it clear.

Gratitude.

Pain.

Resentment.

Discomfort.

Loss.

Uneasiness.

Sorrow.

Shame.

Guilt.

Grief.

Affection.

He had not the slightest idea how to show gratitude for John's grumpy presence, or any other of those weakening struggles with himself.

Those things were surrounding him, causing disorientation and dismay and he couldn't really sort them out or process them just because he was able to name them.

How does one get over them, as long as working through them was not possible?

"Sherlock? You okay?" John frowned.

Lost for words, the detective shook his head and the doctor stood up.

Only when his friend stepped closer he realised his headshake might be interpreted as a 'no' to the question if he was okay, not - as he had meant it - as a sign that he would not grant that question an answer.

"Get these files from Lestrade. Make Mycroft get into the MI5 database again, find out what..." he rudely shoved a piece of paper towards John, who looked taken aback.

Sherlock closed his eyes, clenching his teeth.

He was not a good friend right now and not easy to be around, he was aware. John was the only one who had ever caused reflection on himself like this. But he felt like going mad and his body tried to kill him with feeling worse than he had in a long long time.

He simply didn't have the energy to behave in the way John deserved and needed.

Saving John had wrecked him.

He lowered his gaze, "Sorry," he whispered.

All he wanted was John to stay.

Correction... needed.

Now that he expected to live - the shock about that still hadn't worn off since he had been sure Culverton would kill him... or that he had doubts anyone would come to save him - he wanted the other man close by.

The only thing that could ease the path that was ahead of him, the things he'd suffer through, was John.

Taking drugs again had woken demons that he had forgotten existed – no, he had never forgotten they were there, he had just buried the memories of them deep down where he couldn't stumble into them accidentally... and it had worked.

Until now.

The thing was those demons were easier to keep incarcerated while sober and also easily dismissed as bad dreams.

But now they had returned full force and he was too weak to fight them properly. Also, he wasn't twenty any longer. The side effects were much more vigorous than he remembered them, as was the hangover.

Lost for words and lost in his crippled emotions, he stood up and shuffled back towards his room, aware that John's gaze followed him.

"Sherlock?"

"Hm?"

When John didn't speak Sherlock turned back around.

For a moment they were just looking at each other - the same desperate silence like on the tarmac - a thousand things needed to be said but they couldn't say them.

Lost for words.

Finally, John shook his head.

"Will you be able to say so if you need anything?"

Quite a dumb question.

John should know better than to ask this.

Sherlock did what he knew he shouldn't, he turned away, but he just couldn't stand the heavy auburn mist in their communication and he felt mentally nauseous once more.

Also, the anguish hovering in the room made it hard to breathe.

He returned to his room and fetched his violin.

An hour into playing whatever came to his mind, the doorbell rang.

Sherlock ignored it, not wanting to see anyone. A minute later John knocked at his doorframe, the door was not closed, one of their agreements, and he held a large bundle of manila folders.

The old files, obviously.

That was fast. How had he managed that?

John must have seen his eyes lit up at the sight, because he smiled at him.

After only an hour of reading in the living room, next to a warm flame in the fireplace, John sent him to bed, arguing he was looking too pale to sit up any longer.

Unnerved - about the fact that he felt weak and tired - Sherlock shuffled into his bedroom, ignoring the bathroom entirely.

Groaning in pain he rolled into the bed as he was, in his dressing gown and warm socks, and clumsily pulled his duvet over his legs.

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A/N:

This will be about 25 chapters long and I hope I will manage an update every 7 to 10 days.

I'd love to get some feedback.