The Lies I Tell Chapter Two (Part 2)
Part two!
Scene Four: With or Without You
When John reads the email, he thinks a hammer has just hit him in the chest. He can't breathe for staring at the pixels on the screen in shock, or maybe he's just numb, or maybe he doesn't even know what this is because this is not supposed to happen and Sherlock must have misunderstood something vastly important this time. He doesn't even register grabbing his jacket and hotel key and jamming his shoes on his feet until he's out the door and running to the tube.
He spends the tube ride impatient, aware that the other passengers are staring at him as he paces and mutters for the train to go faster, but as the stops tick by his pulse slows and his nerves calm. Sherlock is nothing if not dramatic, and this could just be the dying end of a series of attention-grabbing events. He surely doesn't think John's leaving him for good. Surely not.
But even so, when he approaches Baker Street he can feel his breath quicken and his fists clench. It's worry, not anger. Not any more. Two weeks have passed, and John's thought about Sherlock every single day.
The next moment he's at 221b, dropping his keys and unlocking the door with fumbling fingers, stumbling up the stairs. He's dimly aware he's yelling Sherlock's name the same way he did when he'd thought the flat had exploded at the beginning of Moriarty's game. Panicked, like he'd never see the man again.
But then John takes a look around the flat. For midday, it's dark, very dark-the curtains aren't drawn, and in the darkness the furniture looks like mountains. Sherlock obviously isn't here right now. He moves to the windows and the flat is flooded with light. The flat has obviously been lived in; the scattered books have been kicked into a corner and there's congealing cups of tea lying about. Of course Sherlock hasn't cleaned the floor or his chair, the lazy-but no, he did nearly die. He was probably too weak to handle the scrubbing it would taken to get bloodstains out of a solid wood floor.
On autopilot he moves to the kitchen to get the few cleaning products he's kept beneath the sink, and the smell of the kitchen nearly makes him gag. The chemicals that had been covering the kitchen table haven't been cleaned either, and the stench of them makes his head swim. He covers his mouth and nose with his sleeve and throws the windows open to let the odor out. He'd better check on Mrs. Hudson later and make sure that nothing had seeped down into her flat; for all John knows, Sherlock could have been using poisons again.
John looks around, cleaning spray and scrubber in hand. Sick and weak or not, even Sherlock Holmes wouldn't leave the flat this chaotic. He can feel his jaw clench and pushes down the queasiness of foreboding. John's been stupid. He should have checked at least once that Sherlock was coping on his own.
The backbreaking labour of scrubbing bloodstains out of wood occupies John's mind for the next hour. The rug and Sherlock's chair can't be salvaged; he decides he'll carry them to the alley before starting on the kitchen.
The kitchen. John doesn't want to go back in that room. That room had always been solidly Sherlock's-he'd tried to contain his experiments, but of course they had spread like a mould to occupy every available surface. But now, instead of being filled with the manic energy of Sherlock's research, the room is filled with the aura of life that's been slashed open and desecrated.
He doesn't look at the bloodstain on the wall. Thank God it's tile and will come off fairly easily. He carefully pours the liquid chemicals into the sink, keeping the water on to hopefully dilute the acid Sherlock was using. He takes the red-stained scrub brush and begins attacking the table and floor, finding Sherlock's bloody shirt tangled up in a corner; that goes strait into the rubbish bin.
It should be cathartic, ridding the flat of the remnants of that night, but it's not. It brings the somewhat dulled memories to the forefront of John's memory and now with each breath John can see Sherlock's crumpled body swim before his eyes as he scrapes the dried blood off of the walls. He grits his teeth and tries to ignore it, ignore the lingering panic and fear and anger, but it pounds in his ears and pulses in his fingertips and greys his vision. Finally he drops the brush, leans on the newly-cleaned table, and digs the palms of his hands into his eyes, but there's no escape from the haunting sight of Sherlock's cold body. This is a nightmare John knows he'll have forever.
His fingers are shaking like rattling bones, but John ignores them as he tries to hold together the pieces of himself that are flying apart. His best friend nearly died and all he wanted was to see John, and what did John do? Started an argument about the very emotions and reasonings he knew confused Sherlock and then walked out on him as soon as he got out of the A&E.
Sherlock nearly died, nearly died, and John left him because he'd cooked up the plan himself. It shouldn't have mattered to John if Sherlock had gotten stabbed chasing down a criminal or if he'd been hit in a freak accident with a drunk driver or if he'd put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. He'd been seriously hurt and John wasn't there, had actually said he wasn't going to be there for Sherlock any longer. That went far beyond simple overreaction; what he'd said and done was unforgivable.
And what if Sherlock hadn't been eating? What if he'd tried to go out and wrestle a few thugs right after John had left? It was John's responsibility to make sure Sherlock was recovering, and he'd walked out on it. Well, better late than never, John tells himself, getting off of the table. He washes his hands carefully and decides to just throw away the rags and brush he'd used to clean all the blood, feeling absurd to be worrying about biohazards in a flat like theirs.
The refrigerator door opens, and John's already sensitive stomach rebels. He makes it to the bathroom just in time and it's only after his stomach has emptied its contents that he realizes something is wrong. He'd reached for his toothbrush and his fingers had grasped only air. That's odd; had Sherlock moved his toothbrush? So John opens all the cabinets and searches the under the sink and finds that none of his toiletries are in the bathroom. Not his shampoo. Not his spare razor. Not even the shaving cream that Sherlock habitually stole.
But he doesn't have time to worry about that now with the refrigerator as it is. John heads back to the kitchen and opens the door cautiously, holding his breath.
The sight of it astounds him. It looks as if Sherlock had opened every single container, placed it on the counter, and allowed its contents to spoil before returning it to the refrigerator. White and green mould is peeking out of the openings of nearly every container and bottle; the milk is yellow and thick with bacteria; that sandwich John hadn't eaten for lunch two days before the incident is actually liquefied. The stench makes John's chest shake with dry heaves.
He decides to throw away absolutely everything in the refrigerator and then sterilize the inside with the strongest cleaner they own, because right now he'd rather lick a plateful of Sherlock's dried blood than reuse even one container in that fridge.
The work is easy, if disgusting, and John finds himself done far quicker than he'd thought. His feet naturally gravitate to Sherlock's room, the only room he hasn't checked save his own. He opens the door with trepidation, prepared to see something as sick and disturbing as the blood all over the living room or the refrigerator full of rotted food, but what he sees is at once far less disgusting and far more disturbing then either sight had been.
It looks like Sherlock had destroyed nearly everything he owns. His bedcovers have been thrown off the bed and are half buried with ripped-out sheets and shattered paperweights and shredded books. His clothes lie in heaps on the floor and a large map of Ireland is pinned carelessly to one wall; the marking pins have ripped viscously through the thin paper and have gouged the wallpaper behind them. Various locations have been circled with a red marker and then crossed out or written over or torn out of the map; at the top of the map he'd written 'WHAT DOES IT EVEN MATTER' in large block letters.
John steps back in shock and feels something crunch under his foot; he looks down and finds Sherlock's framed Diploma of Graduate in Biochemistry at Cambridge University has been hurled against the wall to lie shattered where his foot now rests.
A horrible suspicion begins forming in John's mind and it flutters in his gut like a twisted version of a butterfly. Let's consider this, John, he tells himself viscously, furious at his stubborn selfishness that night. Two weeks ago, Sherlock tries to manipulate you home and nearly dies whilst doing so; you blame him, yell at him, and then leave, despite the fact that he's still very weak and obviously unhealthy. He utterly destroys his room, lets all the food spoil, and leaves the blood and chemicals all over the flat. He blames himself for making you leave, and he's letting it destroy him.
I never should have left.
It's never taken John longer to climb the stairs to his room, but he's never dreaded seeing it more.
His room-unlike the rest of the flat, unlike how John himself usually keeps it-is spotless. Pristine. It's never looked better. The dressers are perfectly dusted; the bed is perfectly made; his clothes are expertly folded, and his spare pyjamas have been arranged carefully on the bed along with one of his thick jumpers. His laptop is shut off and carefully tucked into a corner, and the little book John uses to keep notes in during cases has been left in the exact centre of the desk. Leaning against the wall behind it is a photograph, a photograph Sherlock has always carried in his jacket pocket.
John leans in closer. It's a slightly blurry copy of the shot Mrs. Hudson had snapped of them last fall, and seeing it makes John's chest burn. They're standing quite close together, and Sherlock is looking at him and grinning as John smiles contentedly at the camera. He remembers that night. It had been before he'd gotten involved with Susan.
They look so happy, and John realizes that he may have misunderstood far more that night than Sherlock did.