Abandonment [Sherlock/Portal] [PG] [1/2]
Title: Abandonment
Rating: PG (R? Probably not)
Words: 8,057
Fandom: BBC Sherlock/Portal
Summary: Sherlock and John are driven to the countryside to investigate a bunch of missing persons. While there, they stumble across the abandoned Aperture Laboratories and can't resist taking a look inside.
Warnings: Angsttttt. No portal spoilers, and you don't have to play portal to understand but I think it may help a lot.
Notes: Welp, I'm in love with Shortal. I think that's obvious now. I need it all the time. I admit this is unbeta'd, but I needed to get it out of my system and I think I'm kind of happy with the result. I'd love some feedback!
The view outside of their window passed quietly as the train ran on. John found himself watching the countryside, relieved at his ability to admire the peace and quiet surrounding them. Sherlock was sitting in the seat opposite him in their cabin, fingers steepled to his lips, slightly stubborn glare boring into the wall behind John’s head.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” John tried, nodding his head towards the window. It was a lame attempt to fill the silence which had swallowed them an hour earlier. As nice as the countryside could be, he was dying for some company too.
Sherlock just exhaled impatiently and removed his hands from his chin. “Please don’t bore me with such vanilla attempts of small talk when I’m trying to think.”
John pursed his lips and leant back in his seat. Despite the hours they’d spent travelling, Sherlock had been quiet to the details of the case. He had only managed to see a glimpse of the request email which had been sent to him the previous day, so he only had a glimpse of an idea about the case.
Finally, when he realised Sherlock had nothing more to add, John leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees to get comfortable. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about? I don’t even know why I’m coming with you.”
Sherlock seemed to snap out of his thoughts when he realised that John wasn’t completely aware of the details. “Missing persons,” he quipped, “Several, over time. Some disappearing all at once. We’re going to Blackmoor to investigate the situation.”
John’s brow furrowed as he digested the handful of information. “Blackmoor?” He repeated. “That’s just a farm, isn’t it? Tiny little place, down south -”
“Yes,” Sherlock interrupted. “And nearly everyone within a 20 mile radius has disappeared from the face of the planet, and I want to know what’s going on.”
The consulting detective turned his gaze to the window and resumed his thinking position from earlier, his fingers again steepled in front of him. John lifted his head to watch him once he’d finally turned over the thoughts in his head.
“Have you developed a theory, yet?”
Sherlock’s response was quick and simple; he didn’t need to explain to John that he lacked sufficient data. “No.”
A pause as Sherlock’s eyes flickered across the passing countryside. John thought he saw something mirroring uncertainty in them, and he dared lean forward and ask, “Do you know who sent the email?”
Sherlock parted his lips, but no sound came out. After a few moments of idle thought, he replied, “No.” Neither of them chose to speak until the train finally pulled up to their station.
---
The pair were the only two to get off at their station, which was unsurprising considering the recent disappearances, but still made the whole ordeal just that little bit creepier. There was no one to greet them, nowhere to book into, but Sherlock walked like he had a purpose, so John had little choice but to follow him closely with their luggage in tow.
John didn’t bother asking as Sherlock walked them to a small, empty house in the centre of the Blackmoor area. There were few other buildings and they were otherwise surrounded by a mass expanse of field. John began to wonder how exactly Sherlock would crack this one.
“If you don’t know who sent the email,” he began, those being the first words to break the silence for at least an hour or two, “Then how exactly are you going to solve this? Who is there to talk to? Whose house is this?”
They had made themselves as comfortable as possible (which, considering the situation, wasn’t very) in the sitting room of the cottage, trying their hardest not to touch anything which the missing family had left out. There was half eaten bread in the kitchen, a few dirty dishes and unlaundered clothes, like the owners of the house had just upped and left without looking back. Only, matters that were usual considered important, like wallets, cell phones and a personalised address book, were all left behind as well.
“The I.P. address of the email told me that the sender was writing the email from the London area.” Sherlock had his fingers steepled to his lips, his mouth moving as he spoke but otherwise sitting completely still on the edge of the small sofa.
John took a moment to register this information. “So they weren’t - hang on, they’re no where near here. Sherlock... This could be some kind of trap. Moriarty could have just set up some kind of bait of a case for you, to drag you away from civilisation, to-”
“To what? Kill me?” Sherlock snapped, hands fallen from his chin to his lap and bawled into loose fists. “You heard what he said all those months ago, John, don’t act like you’ve forgotten. He wouldn’t rush something like that.” John shifted out of obvious discomfort but Sherlock paid it no mind. “Why would he employ someone to lure me from such an obvious distance? Besides. This area has had legitimate disappearances. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting that simple thefts and domestic murders.”
After a few minutes of silence, John realised Sherlock had finished. He’d already scuttled around the cottage when they had arrived, looking for clues on the disappearance of this particular household, and John knew he wouldn’t need to search again. So he took the opportunity to lay down on the rug, using his suitcase as a pillow, and try to get some rest. He would feel too guilty to sleep in the beds of the abductees.
“Tomorrow,” he heard Sherlock mumble softly, while he was in between sleep and consciousness. “Tomorrow we will go searching. You sleep. I need to think some more.”
---
Whether Sherlock had left the house during the night, John didn’t know, but he was relieved to find him there when he woke up, meaning that there had been no abduction of his friend. The detective seemed tired, but agitated. He wouldn’t be thinking about sleep for a long while.
John was woken up much too quickly and rushed out of the house by a hand pushing at his lower back. He could tell Sherlock was eager, not frightened, so he decided against rushing himself too much and instead lingering to catch up once they were outside.
“There’s a working phone line in the farm house,” Sherlock told him. “Most of the other landlines here have been cut at the wires. Quite cleanly, too,” he paused, “too cleanly.”
John would have laughed if it weren’t for the information he was being given. “What’s the situation in the rest of the buildings?”
Sherlock turned, looking from the farmhouse to another cottage half a mile away from them. They stood on a dirt road, the bright morning sun doing enough to wake John up as he tried to come to terms with Sherlock’s observations.
“Struggle,” he said simply at first. “Always a struggle. There wasn’t one in the cottage we’re squatting in, but there was one outside. Just out the back. They were lured out of their home, then taken. A woman, an older man, and a young adult, presumably their son.”
John felt sick to his stomach.
“In the farmhouse there are obvious signs of somebody who had lashed out in response. No blood, never any blood, except a few drops where one of the farmers had cut himself by smashing his arm through a window.” He paused again, deeply but shakily inhaling the fresh country air, before settling his attention directly on John. “We are not dealing with some kind of supernatural force like my anonymous emailer suggested to me. We are dealing with something not human, however, and I need to find out what it is. We’re going to find where it’s come from.”
For a moment, John had a terrified idea that Sherlock meant to set one of them up as bait to be dragged back to wherever it was that these people were being taken. But Sherlock didn’t have that pleading look in his eye, where he would ask an impossible task of his companion. Instead, he looked a little bit frightened, and very excited.
“Where do you plan to start?”
“The fields.”
John frowned as he followed Sherlock’s path out into pasture behind the main farmhouse. He didn’t understand the point of this; there was nothing but land for as far as the eye could see, bar the occasional tree or tin shed. But Sherlock walked like he had already pinpointed his exact destination, until of course he would make a sharp turn, or notice something on the ground that would send them back the way they came. It was tiring, but John kept up.
Once the sun began to fall from its higher point in the sky, John felt like they were getting closer to something. There were no obvious clues so far, not even a thoughtful mutter from his companion. But as noon seeped into afternoon and threatened to fall to evening, John’s left hand began to twitch and he feared something looming behind him.
“Sherlock,” he murmured, pushing past the weak feeling of hunger and fatigue as he sped up to walk by his colleague’s side. “Sherlock, when were these people taken? After dark?”
“Random, it’s all entirely random,” Sherlock responded, although his muttering and frowning made it seem like he was talking more to himself. “Why so random? It’s like they just took people as they needed them, without any real regard for-”
He stopped speaking as he stopped walking, catching John off guard and forcing their shoulders to bump together. John followed Sherlock’s gaze as he looked to their left, out further into the nothingness of one of the empty wheat fields.
After a moment of hard searching with his eyes, John noticed what Sherlock saw from the corner of his. A shed, barely visible in the field with the tall stalks of wheat, but in the late afternoon breeze, the stalks would bend and the rusted tin roof could be seen. They had made sure to check all of the sheds in the area, ensuring there was nothing and no one inside, but this one seemed to have escaped their attention.
Before he realised what was happening, Sherlock had started at a run. Perhaps John was right in that feeling of something dark and sinister waiting for them around the corner; perhaps Sherlock felt it too.
They reached the shed fairly quickly at their hurried pace and found themselves standing upon a concrete foundation. John stood back, keeping watch around them as Sherlock knelt and crawled and shuffled around the small shed, barely large enough to house a generator. He kicked at the rusted wind turbine laying broken on the ground, then dropped back to his knees to inspect the base of the shed’s walls.
“This foundation was put down for a reason,” Sherlock thought out loud, “Not just for a shed. The shed was put here for a reason too.”
He stood up, John now by his side at the door of the old, rickety structure. One of the detective’s pale hands reached out to run his fingers down the fraying, fading posters stuck on the door. Danger, they all read. Warning signs. Safety precautions. Electrical Shed, one said, with a monochromatic graphic of a stick figure being electrocuted by a stray wire.
John saw the longing look in Sherlock’s eyes, and knew there would be no point in denying him the opportunity. They’d come this far.
“Do you need me to find bolt cutters for the-”
Sherlock had ducked down and grabbed a cut piece of metal from the turbine on the ground. John only just stepped back in time to not be hit when his companion wielded it tightly and struck it to the padlock on the door. It came loose easily, weakened by time, and the door swung open.
They both stood still and quiet as they looked down at the large, bulky hatch door on the ground. No generator. No electrics. Sherlock exhaled as the metal bar slid from his grip.
“I suppose it would be foolish to try and talk you out of this,” John muttered, but Sherlock wasn’t listening. He was already walking inside, lowering himself to his knees and inspecting the hatch with his bare hands. The hinges were thick and large, but the locks on the side were flimsy and detached. He didn’t hesitate to grab the handle with both hands, heave it up, and let it fall open with a loud, echoing thud.
The door of the shed tapped against the wall in the evening breeze. The sun was getting dangerously low in the sky outside.
“Sherlock,” John started again, this time with a little more authority, a little more certainty than before. “Sherlock, we should leave this until tomorrow.”
Sherlock still didn’t even glance at his friend as he untucked his legs from under himself and lowered himself down into the hatch.
John had no choice but to follow.
---
That sick feeling hadn’t gone away. Perhaps it was hunger, more likely fright. Sherlock had lost that sense of purpose to his step and instead moved slowly, like there was thought in every movement of his feet touching the ground. They had found themselves in a broken tunnel, what seemed to be an elevator shaft, with an unstable floor of what was undoubtedly the top of the elevator itself. They quickly moved away, squirming through a large ventilation system, before finally dropping down into a white walled, white floored hallway.
Half of the floor was ripped up, panels from the walls having fallen and cracked the beams which held the whole place up. John was more worried about how stable the structure was, while Sherlock just seemed amazed at its existence.
They turned a corner and stopped in time to avoid falling down a gaping hole in the floor. John’s first instinct was to step back, so of course, Sherlock stepped forward. He knelt down, leaned over and peered down at whatever he could see. John could hear his breathing pick up and knew he would have to look as well.
Rather than being some form of basement or tunnel, it seemed like the entire world was upside down. Somebody had built an entire factory - or what must have been a world a long time ago. They could not see buildings or houses or anything that would be required for a civilisation, but they could clearly see the outsides of elevator shafts delving down into the unknown, the corners and walls of large buildings, hanging in the emptiness. There was no soil under their feet, just space and open air. Too much of it. Too much of it for John to feel comfortable.
“We need to go back up,” John demanded, but his voice only came out as a whisper. He hadn’t noticed his own fear until Sherlock’s eyes fell upon the vice like grip of his hands around the edge of the floor.
“John,” Sherlock uttered in response, leaning his close so he was sure to catch the eager look in his eyes. “John, I’ve never seen anything like this before. You can’t devoid me of it because you’re a little frightened.”
The doctor stood up, forcing himself away from the edge and focusing his energy on looking for an exit. The vent they had dropped down from was high up in the busted ceiling, and the walls themselves were taller than two Sherlocks standing on his shoulders. The only possible exits were the hole in the ground, or the sealed door to their right.
“Where do we go?”
Sherlock gave him a pointed look before easing into a smile. He stood up and walked closer to the door, eyeing it curiously. John made sure to point out that it was sealed, so Sherlock dared defy him. Cautiously, he took those gradual steps closer, freezing when his right foot pressed a tile on the ground that seemed to activate the door to open.
The detective grinned at his companion and made the move to walk through, but John was quick to grab his arm. “Sherlock,” he whispered furiously, “No. No. I am not going to wander down some hallway just because I can. This is too rabbit-hole for me, okay? How the hell does this place have enough power to supply that door to open? It’s abandoned. And yet, the door has opened. So someone has to be here. I don’t like this.”
Sherlock let John finish stuttering out his frightened phrases before he carefully unhooked his vicelike grip from around his arm. “John,” Sherlock said quietly, easily, trying to calm his friend’s nerves. “John, you’re with me. We have no where else to go. What could possibly go wrong?”
Sherlock stepped through the door with his eyes still on his friend. When he was on the other side, he turned around and began to walk. John shut his eyes and whispered to himself, “Everything,” before forcing himself to follow.
---
Despite the good doctor’s many objections, Sherlock touched everything he could find. And there was a lot. Occasionally they would come across a flickering light, which he ran his palms across as it buzzed at him from behind glass. There were security cameras, disconnected from the walls and left for dead on the floor, which Sherlock actually picked up with his bare hands to stare directly into the lens to. He spoke to one, as if it could speak back, and it was then that John knew Sherlock also share his suspicions of them being watched.
The mould and flora was the worst. Occasionally they would come across a wall that was completely busted through, taken over by roots and plants and leaves and moss. Sherlock had to touch everything. John stood back, ready to help him at a moment’s notice if something terrible happened, but nothing did. Not yet.
After what felt like hours of wandering through halls, vents, dropping down into rooms and surveying vast interiors, they came across a light that didn’t flicker so much. The two stood back outside of another automatic door, looking up at the giant white sign on the wall, the light behind it slightly faded but bright enough to read. There was mould growing around the edges, which Sherlock did not touch, but instead decided to focus on reading the words on the sign itself.
“Seventeen,” John read the large numbers at the top, then frowned. “Seventeen-slash-nine-hundred and twenty-three. What does that mean?”
Sherlock was too busy studying the pictures on the bottom half of the sign. They appeared to be warning signs, all pictures, with the same familiar stick man getting himself into more and more trouble. Some were lit up, others were faded. Sherlock ran a finger around an unlit picture of a slice of cake.
“I think we’re in the seventeenth room,” he said after a moment. “The seventeenth room out of nine-hundred and twenty-three possible rooms. And this is what’s inside.” His hand pulled back to gesture at the lit up warnings. John looked over them slowly.
“What do they mean, though? This could be anything.”
Sherlock frowned in concentration and deciphered each picture slowly for John’s sake, pointing at them as he did. “This man, he’s falling into water, see,” he paused, skipping over a few to point at another, “And this is a ‘No Drinking’ sign. That’s obvious. So there will be water, a large body of it that we can swim in, or fall into. But it’s indigestible. I’d say dirty, but going by the state of this place, or at least, imagining what it once looked like...” He turned his head to look at the stained white walls, fabricating the perfect picture of an immaculate hallway from long ago. “I’m guessing the water is toxic.”
John licked his lips nervously and inspected the remaining warnings. “There’s... cargo? What’s that?”
“Heavy lifting,” Sherlock deduced by the picture of the man holding a box. “Heavy lifting... And, by the looks of it, a dispensary system to watch out for.” His finger tapped the icon of the man being hit in the head by his box.
John eyed the shut door to their right before looking back at Sherlock for confirmation. “We’ve come this far,” Sherlock said to him, and without a further thought, stepped up to the door for it to open.
The room was large, like one of the halls they had encountered. The ceiling was much higher and there was a moat-like area, filled with murky green liquid and dripping from a leak in the ceiling. There was another room above them, Sherlock deduced, but paid it no mind for the moment.
“There’s something not right about this,” John mumbled to himself, knowing it was an obvious statement, but needing to say it nonetheless.
The room was in no condition to linger in, for they could hear the creaking and groaning of the metal beams holding it into place, and the water in the moat sloshed at the sides of the walls occasionally. They were rocking.
Luckily, though, part of the walls were smashed through, although there were no tree roots present. Even the metal beams and bars acting as a cage around the walls had been bent out of place, so there must have been a serious force that collided with the room. Sherlock realised quickly that they needed to move on, so he grabbed John’s sleeve and tugged him towards the damaged wall to find a way out.
---
“Sherlock, how long have we been down here? And what have we found?” John was exhausted, breathing heavily as they scurried along further hallways. It seemed that the further they travelled, the less destruction they came across, the whiter the walls and the stabler the structures. Sherlock had begun to move faster, spinning around corners and gasping whenever they found a room which hadn’t been partially destroyed from the mystery accident from long ago.
“We’ve found exactly what they wanted to keep secret,” Sherlock uttered in response. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek to a door, one that hadn’t opened for them. The signs on the door had all faded beyond legibility, so Sherlock had instantly become curious in what was behind it.
“Right. And who’s ‘they’ exactly?”
Sherlock frowned, but he kept his place at the door. “That’s what I want to find out. What is all of this for? It appears to be some kind of testing facility, but... I can’t be sure. I need to find an area of administration, somewhere with data.”
While he spoke, his hands had brushed over the jammed handle of the door to twist at the bolts and ease up the pressure on the hinges. He eventually pulled his head back to push at the door, forcing it open and sending him tumbling inside.
John didn’t bother inspecting the layout of the room. It looked just like any other, and he was beginning to grow tired of this escapade.
“Administration is normally stationed by an entrance,” Sherlock told him, but John’s disinterest was now obvious and he more or less began to think out loud instead. “But there’s nothing less inviting than a rickety old shed in the middle of a farm in Blackmoor.” God, Blackmoor. What John would give to sit out in the open, breathing in that country air. “So there has to be other entrances, other exits. Something a little classier. This place is top-notch, or it used to be.”
“Sherlock,” John sighed, watching as his colleague spun around the room they found themselves in, running his hands along the white panels on the walls and searching for cracks and ruptures. “There’s no way of telling if this is related to the disappearances. But if it is, wouldn’t you think it’d be better to contact the police? Think of how much faster we’d get this uncovered if we had more people to help us look. And for safety, too. There’d always be someone watching out for us.”
“I have every confidence in you that if I fall, you will catch me,” Sherlock said lowly, even though he hadn’t appeared to be listening. John was caught a little off guard by that and shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably, watching as the man ran his fingers along the edge of one of the wall panels which seemed to be jutting out of place from the rest.
“Besides,” he continued, “A S.W.A.T. team would run past everything of importance. Tamper with the facts. I need to see this first hand. And such a crowd would surely draw attention to us, if there was indeed somebody here. I’d say judging by the amount of time we’ve been down here, we have gone unnoticed.”
He gasped as the wall panel shifted and buzzed, creaking from some mechanics behind the wall. Sherlock only just stepped back in time for the panel to twist and fold away, breaking the barrier between two rooms to reveal another hallway. This one appeared completely untouched by the world. Sherlock walked through.
“Who’s to say we’re not being watched?” John questioned as he followed the detective step for step. “And they’re just biding their time? If this entire building is run by mechanics and electrics, then surely someone would see on some kind of... control panel, which doors are being opened. It’s like the whole place is one giant computer.”
Sherlock clapped his hands together and whispered quickly his agreements. “Then we will be close to finding out what it is they want, and if all goes well, we may even find the location of those missing persons.”
He rounded a corner and bounded up a set of stairs - something which should have shocked John. For all their wandering, he’d yet to see a simple set of stairs, even ones made of metal grates like these. He heard Sherlock gasp before bolting along a grated mezzanine at the top of the stairs, John having to stop to read the sign Sherlock had noticed. The second he registered the large, faded letters of RECRUITMENT on the wall, he was off at a run to catch up with the detective.
---
“John, this is it,” Sherlock hissed, hands up to his face as he wandered through the hall. It was similar to the other white walled rooms, only there were chairs. Comfortable chairs, with velvet ropes blocking off certain areas from others and leading lines to administrative desks and portraits on the walls. John could practically see the information being absorbed into his companion’s mind as he slowly walked his way around the room.
“Computer,” John quickly barked, the moment he saw one behind the desk. He pointed, but Sherlock had already seen, not hesitating to run up to the counter and hoist himself over the top. While Sherlock attempted to turn it on and hack into the system, John sauntered around him to peer through the filing cabinets against the walls.
Each file was sorted by last name, and every one appeared to be an application form. All of them in the filing cabinets he examined had a stamp of pending on them, neither accepted or declined. The applications were rather thick, all signed by different people, initialled at certain points. They had at least five pages of each that had differing hand writing filling out blank spaces, and the rest of the pages were typed. Perhaps some kind of contract.
“Sherlock...”
Both men jumped as soon as the computer screen flickered to life. Sherlock jumped because of the blinding backlight of the screen, John jumped because of the loud crackling of a speaker from somewhere above them. Both men stood still as stones as they listened to what sounded like a skipped recording.
“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-”
Slowly, John and Sherlock turned to look at each other, then at the computer screen. A circular logo with angled interior edges flashed up, spinning as the letters APERTURE joined it. As the logo shrunk into the corner of the screen to make way for a password request, the deafening speakers stopped skipping and they were greeted by a cool, feminine, yet robotic voice.
“Ah-Aperture Laboratories welcomes you, strangers.” John felt a shiver run down his spine. “Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock paid the voice no mind and instead set to work at the keyboard. John stayed put, however, breathing slowly as he turned around to watch the doors in the room. The one they had come through was left open, there was another door at the opposite end of the room which was locked with a staff only warning on the front, and a larger door which was presumably where the voice expected them to go.
Sherlock growled after his tenth failed attempt of cracking the security.
“Please do not override the computer’s core database. Only licensed Aperture administrative staff members are permitted to use these computers,” called the voice.
John tensed, but Sherlock brushed it off with a wave of his hand before he continued typing. “Automated security breach message, obvious. This building had been uninhabited by humans for years. If there was a security alert to be sent, then no one would be around to answer it.”
Somehow, this didn’t ease John’s nerves. It only took him a stray glance towards the ceiling for him to freeze again, as his gaze fell upon a security camera directed towards them. The red light was on and he could see himself in the lens.
“Sherlock.”
“Unless if it helps me get into the database,” Sherlock interrupted, “Keep quiet.”
“Sherlock, I think we’re being watched.”
His breathing quickened when the camera lens zoomed in a fraction.
Sherlock made a double take at the camera, narrowing his eyes at it as he lifted his hands from the keyboard. There was silence as they both kept still, then finally the voice started again,
“Thank you.”
John backed up against a filing cabinet and fisted in his own jacket. “Sherlock, I want to leave. Get us out of here, now. I don’t care about this bloody case any more, I want to leave.”
Sherlock moved much slower as he stood from his chair and approached the camera. It was at least a metre too far for his reach, but he craned his neck up towards it anyway. “Where are you?” He whispered to it, eyes still narrowed as he tried to understand. “What are you?”
They both spun around at the sound of a door opening, just in time to see the larger door open for them to step through.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock carefully reached out to stop John’s hand from fisting in his jacket and lace their fingers together. John’s hand shook. There was no thrill, here, no high from the thought of being caught or killed. There was fear in John’s eyes, true fear, of not knowing what it was they were trying to escape.
Sherlock led them out, back through the door they’d come and ignoring the awaiting disinfection chamber. Their footsteps echoed in open air as they ran along their grated pathway, looming over miles and miles of nothing but space and fogged air. He was surely hurting John with how tight his grip was, but he needed to stop that hand shaking. Anything to avoid realising that he had put his only friend and colleague in such danger.
They pushed through a door that opened to a black hallway. The walls were crisp and clean and angled differently to the plain white tiles they had become so used to running past. They noticed a door up ahead and made for it instantly, but were stopped short when one of the wall tiles, about three metres squared on its own, was thrusted across the hall in front of them by a mechanical arm. The two men skidded to a halt, nearly crushed by plate they had narrowly avoided.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock could feel John squeeze his hand tightly. He dragged them towards the open space around the mechanical arm, which had now blocked their path to the door, and crawled through the space to another room.
Sherlock shushed John before the doctor had a chance to open his mouth. “I don’t know what this is,” he murmured. “I don’t know where we are. We have been down here for so long that I wouldn’t be surprised if we were miles from the surface.”
John finally tugged his hand out of Sherlock’s grip and held it close to himself. He wasn’t mad, Sherlock could tell the fear was overriding all other emotions, but he needed the space so he could turn around on the spot and inspect the room they were in.
“Elevator,” John whispered. “We need to find an elevator. We need to go up.”
Sherlock opened his mouth to agree, but was cut off by a deafening alarm that rang through their ears. He groaned and held his head, looking up at the high ceiling and around at the distant walls.
He finally found the source of the alarm, spotting a frosted glass window that hid what appeared to be either a security bay or an observation window. Sherlock tugged John’s arm to pull him over, only stopping when they reached the wall. Glass at the bottom corner of the window was smashed, supplying a way in, but it was still too high.
John was reluctant to give Sherlock a bunk up but obliged nevertheless. Once Sherlock had stepped up from John’s lift, he elbowed the rest of the glass to make the opening a little wider. Once he was able to pull himself up and inside, he reached down to help his friend along with him.
The alarm was louder up there but they tried to pay it no mind as they ducked through a doorway and down another hallway. The area was much smaller here and John actually began to feel a little claustrophobic, after leaving all of the high ceilings and mechanical rooms behind.
“There has to be an elevator here somewhere,” Sherlock uttered as they rushed around corners. “Whatever that room behind the glass was, people would have been working there. Obvious signs of human inhabitance. So, they would need a way to get out. Surely this place would supply and out for their employees.”
John swallowed down his pessimistic opinions and nodded in understanding.
As they ran, skipping down stairwells and ducking under collapsed ceilings, the alarm began to fade and become muffled from the distance they made. John was finding it hard to pinpoint whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, and tried his hardest to trust Sherlock’s judgement in which corners to turn and which straights to follow.
They stopped dead in their tracks when they came across a smaller set of stairs leading up to a door in the middle of the wall. They slowly made their way up, pushing the door open to find a translucent blue wall blocking them off from the rest of the room.
Sherlock leant back as his eyes narrowed at the wall, partially see-through and waving gently, like a sliver of water standing of its own accord. He reached a hand out to it, but John quickly barked in protest, warning him that it could be anything at all.
“What’s the worst it could be?” Sherlock muttered, eyeing John carefully. He knew John didn’t trust anything in this facility, which was all the more reason for it to be Sherlock to test it out. He was the one who got them into this mess.
He thrust his hand out to the wall and ended up punching straight through it. He gasped, frowning at the cool sensation around his arm. The wall was thin. It moved around him, like it was barely there.
He eventually stepped through, looking down at his body and then at his hands. A glance back at John was enough to have the doctor scurrying through after him, relieved that it hadn’t been deadly.
“We may have triggered some kind of alarm,” Sherlock suggested, his voice ragged as he fixed his coat around himself; a nervous twitch.
John was sure as he shook his head. “No,” he answered simply. “Emancipation grid. It did no harm.”
Sherlock frowned and turned around, only to find John reading a small safety sticker on the wall. Surely enough, brief details of the emancipation grid’s texture was jotted down in short hand, with another of those stick figure men running through.
They forced themselves to relax rather than become tense about nothing, but as they turned to inspect the room they were in, both their hearts sped up with excitement. The elevator in the middle of the room was like a beacon of light to their exhausted searching, and neither hesitated to run towards it.
“We’re getting out,” Sherlock whispered, barely able to believe it as he shut the bars around them and pressed a button for them to travel up. The elevator paused, rumbled and stalled, but eventually, started to move.
Down.
“Sherlock,” John croaked. He pressed urgently at the UP button, but it seemed to change nothing.
Their quick, panicked breaths were drowned out by the skipping voice overhead.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
“Let us out!” John shouted into the darkness as the elevator began to speed up for a lengthy travel. Who knew how far down they were travelling, who knew how much air there would be so far under the crust of the earth. “We refuse to take part in this experiment! I, John Watson and my companion Sherlock Holmes, refuse to stay any longer!”
They stood still, gripping the bars tightly as they descended, listening to their own echo.
The cool, calm robotic voice in response made skin crawl: “Oh... That’s too bad.” Then, a sultry addition, “Speak for yourself.”
The elevator sped up at an alarming pace and it felt like they would be thrown from the elevator if they did so much as adjust their grip. They were hurled to a stop, relieved to find that they weren’t at the base of whatever this was. Some of the way down was a lot better than all of the way down, even if they had still travelled pretty far.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
John shut his eyes tightly. They were forced to let go as the barred doors of the elevator opened, giving them no choice but to step out and come to terms with their surroundings.
The room was darker than the others, with fewer lights in the ceiling. It was still vast, but there was only one door at the end of the room.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock took a deep breath and began to walk towards it. “It’s the only way out, John,” he said to his friend’s look of horror. “Perhaps there will be a way to get out. Maybe there are more faulted walls. We’ll figure it out. There are other elevators.”
“Which she seems to control,” John muttered with a vague gesture up above at the voice which had momentarily left them alone. Sherlock took no notice and began to walk ahead.
John walked slowly, watching the walls as he did. He frowned gently to himself, confused at his own perspective of the room. The further they walked, the closer the walls seemed. It felt a little too Willy-Wonka to be normal. “Sherlock,” he called, uncertain, “Stop walking for a moment? Look at the walls.”
They both stopped and looked around, realising that it had nothing to do with perspective. The walls were moving. Slowly, so slowly, so it was barely noticeable, but the ceiling that getting closer as well.
John panicked and made the move to run up to his friend, but at that moment, there was a loud groaning of metal and the walls stopped. There was a click, like everything had locked into place, leaving them standing twenty feet from one another in a much-smaller room than before. The door was still accessible, as was the elevator, but it would take a hundred-yard dash to reach either.
“Do you still want to go through with this?” John questioned, his voice almost failing him and having to shout it across to the detective. Sherlock was yet to answer, so John followed his gaze to a slit in the ceiling above and between them.
“John, I-”
John jumped back when a screen slid from the ceiling, dropping down with a loud thud to create a glass wall between them. John screamed for his companion, a frantic shout of his name, over and over, but Sherlock looked at him in fear, like he couldn’t hear him.
The doctor ran forward, slamming his fists against the glass but to no avail. He uttered Sherlock’s name, over and over until it faded into a frightened groan. He saw Sherlock’s mouth move, a tiny, soundless utter of John’s name, confirming John’s fear that the glass was sound proof. This wall separating them didn’t seem to be moving any time soon, but if Sherlock was stuck there, John would be stuck too.
Slowly, eventually, John lifted his head from where his forehead had been resting against the glass, only to find a murky mist falling from the ceiling of Sherlock’s half of the room. He followed it down, catching where it was thicker at the corners of the ceiling. He swallowed thickly and looked up, trying to spot if it was in his half of the room as well, but he saw nothing.
“Sherlock,” he called, slamming his fist on the glass again before pressing a finger up towards the gas. Sherlock turned, looking up, fear in his eyes, but as he turned back, he seemed clueless as to what John was trying to tell him. He asked, repeating John’s name over, asking what there was to see, but John couldn’t hear a sound. He said it again, “Sherlock, the gas. You’re being gassed,” and his voice came out as a mere whisper.
John blinked away frightened tears and punched the glass, watching the wall shake and feeling the pain rip through his knuckles. Sherlock had his back to John, now, looking up at the gas, trying to find what it was he was looking for. Sherlock couldn’t see it. It had to be the glass - John could only see it because of the glass.
“I, John Watson, take full responsibility for Sherlock Holmes and refuse on his behalf to take this test!” John practically screamed into the open air. Sherlock turned around to see him repeating this phrase, shouting to no one, and began to say the same. John watched his mouth as he lifted his head, breathing quickly and deeply as he began to call the words.
I, Sherlock...
“Sherlock Holmes,” John egged him on, having given up on punches and moved onto banging the glass with his palm. “I, Sherlock Holmes, refuse to partake in testing.”
Sherlock blinked hard and shook his head, eyes glazing over as he tried again. I, Sherlock... Holmes, refuse to... to...
John had to stop himself from screaming again when Sherlock stumbled under his own feet. The gas was thickening, falling to Sherlock’s level and being inhaled with those frightened breaths. He opened his mouth soundlessly still, tried to speak, but barely getting another word out before he crumpled as a heap on the floor.
The second Sherlock fell, John began to slam at the glass again and scream into the open room. He watched through teary eyes as the gas slowly began to filter out of Sherlock’s half of the room, leaving him unconscious on the floor. It took a long while for John to stop shaking and concentrate on his friend, but eventually, he spotted the slow movements of his friend’s chest, indicating he was breathing and very much alive. But still unconscious.
“Sherlock,” John whispered again, dropping his head forward against the glass as he slid down to his knees.
“Please vacate the immobility chamber,” echoed the robotic woman’s voice, causing John to lift his head. “You are excused from testing.”
“You didn’t even give him a chance!” John shouted at her, trying his hardest to claw at the glass as he stared at the blank ceiling. “He wanted to refuse! You didn’t let him! I said no!”
There was a pause as the speakers flickered with static. The voice responded coolly, as if he hadn’t spoken, “Please vacate the immobility chamber. You are excused from testing.”
The doors of the elevator opened behind John but he couldn’t bear to look at it. The elevator no longer meant escape or freedom; it meant abandonment. He couldn’t abandon Sherlock, not now.
“He trusted me,” John whimpered to himself, although knowing he wasn’t alone, knowing he was being listened to. “He trusted me to catch him if he fell. But you wouldn’t let me. I broke my promise.”
It was hard to keep his eyes open with the tears welling up inside them. He may have just given Sherlock a death sentence to stay down here in this dilapidated, sinister place. Why hadn’t Sherlock listened to him? Why hadn’t he just left it like John wanted to?
He slammed against the glass again, just for good measure before he slumped against it. “You’re only wasting your own time,” the voice said, Your friend will be well looked-after. I’m already fixing the broken test chambers as we speak.”
John exhaled shakily and dared open his eyes, although he kept them pointed at his own lap. “I’ll wait for him to wake up,” he challenged.
A quick, impatient response, “Then I will gas him again.”
John bit down on his knuckles, chewing nervously as he lifted his eyes to Sherlock’s limp form.
“Please vacate the premises,” she said this time. “Aperture Laboratories is under renovation until further notice.”
---
Sherlock’s lungs hurt as he tried to breathe in. His legs, arms, neck, even his eyelids ached as he came to consciousness, barely able to comprehend how he was even alive. It hurt to move from where he was laying, it hurt to remember his last moments before passing out. Where was John?
The lights in the room were blinding and he was met with a dull headache, only made worse by the loose jazz playing softly from a radio in the corner of the tiny room. There was a toilet in the opposite corner, next to a makeshift table, and it took a moment to realise he was lying in bed; clothes changed from his trousers, button-down and his thick coat into a regulation uniform. He recognised the logo on his orange jumpsuit to match that on the computer screen, even though his vision was slightly blurred.
He hissed when a voice sounded from overhead; a voice too familiar, of the robotic woman in the laboratory.
“Thank you for your co-operation during preparation. The testing will commence in 5...
4...
3...
2...
1.”
Further Notes: I'm considering a follow-up just to make the anonymous emailer cleared up, but I'll leave it at this for now.
ETA Part two is over here
Rating: PG (R? Probably not)
Words: 8,057
Fandom: BBC Sherlock/Portal
Summary: Sherlock and John are driven to the countryside to investigate a bunch of missing persons. While there, they stumble across the abandoned Aperture Laboratories and can't resist taking a look inside.
Warnings: Angsttttt. No portal spoilers, and you don't have to play portal to understand but I think it may help a lot.
Notes: Welp, I'm in love with Shortal. I think that's obvious now. I need it all the time. I admit this is unbeta'd, but I needed to get it out of my system and I think I'm kind of happy with the result. I'd love some feedback!
The view outside of their window passed quietly as the train ran on. John found himself watching the countryside, relieved at his ability to admire the peace and quiet surrounding them. Sherlock was sitting in the seat opposite him in their cabin, fingers steepled to his lips, slightly stubborn glare boring into the wall behind John’s head.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” John tried, nodding his head towards the window. It was a lame attempt to fill the silence which had swallowed them an hour earlier. As nice as the countryside could be, he was dying for some company too.
Sherlock just exhaled impatiently and removed his hands from his chin. “Please don’t bore me with such vanilla attempts of small talk when I’m trying to think.”
John pursed his lips and leant back in his seat. Despite the hours they’d spent travelling, Sherlock had been quiet to the details of the case. He had only managed to see a glimpse of the request email which had been sent to him the previous day, so he only had a glimpse of an idea about the case.
Finally, when he realised Sherlock had nothing more to add, John leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees to get comfortable. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about? I don’t even know why I’m coming with you.”
Sherlock seemed to snap out of his thoughts when he realised that John wasn’t completely aware of the details. “Missing persons,” he quipped, “Several, over time. Some disappearing all at once. We’re going to Blackmoor to investigate the situation.”
John’s brow furrowed as he digested the handful of information. “Blackmoor?” He repeated. “That’s just a farm, isn’t it? Tiny little place, down south -”
“Yes,” Sherlock interrupted. “And nearly everyone within a 20 mile radius has disappeared from the face of the planet, and I want to know what’s going on.”
The consulting detective turned his gaze to the window and resumed his thinking position from earlier, his fingers again steepled in front of him. John lifted his head to watch him once he’d finally turned over the thoughts in his head.
“Have you developed a theory, yet?”
Sherlock’s response was quick and simple; he didn’t need to explain to John that he lacked sufficient data. “No.”
A pause as Sherlock’s eyes flickered across the passing countryside. John thought he saw something mirroring uncertainty in them, and he dared lean forward and ask, “Do you know who sent the email?”
Sherlock parted his lips, but no sound came out. After a few moments of idle thought, he replied, “No.” Neither of them chose to speak until the train finally pulled up to their station.
---
The pair were the only two to get off at their station, which was unsurprising considering the recent disappearances, but still made the whole ordeal just that little bit creepier. There was no one to greet them, nowhere to book into, but Sherlock walked like he had a purpose, so John had little choice but to follow him closely with their luggage in tow.
John didn’t bother asking as Sherlock walked them to a small, empty house in the centre of the Blackmoor area. There were few other buildings and they were otherwise surrounded by a mass expanse of field. John began to wonder how exactly Sherlock would crack this one.
“If you don’t know who sent the email,” he began, those being the first words to break the silence for at least an hour or two, “Then how exactly are you going to solve this? Who is there to talk to? Whose house is this?”
They had made themselves as comfortable as possible (which, considering the situation, wasn’t very) in the sitting room of the cottage, trying their hardest not to touch anything which the missing family had left out. There was half eaten bread in the kitchen, a few dirty dishes and unlaundered clothes, like the owners of the house had just upped and left without looking back. Only, matters that were usual considered important, like wallets, cell phones and a personalised address book, were all left behind as well.
“The I.P. address of the email told me that the sender was writing the email from the London area.” Sherlock had his fingers steepled to his lips, his mouth moving as he spoke but otherwise sitting completely still on the edge of the small sofa.
John took a moment to register this information. “So they weren’t - hang on, they’re no where near here. Sherlock... This could be some kind of trap. Moriarty could have just set up some kind of bait of a case for you, to drag you away from civilisation, to-”
“To what? Kill me?” Sherlock snapped, hands fallen from his chin to his lap and bawled into loose fists. “You heard what he said all those months ago, John, don’t act like you’ve forgotten. He wouldn’t rush something like that.” John shifted out of obvious discomfort but Sherlock paid it no mind. “Why would he employ someone to lure me from such an obvious distance? Besides. This area has had legitimate disappearances. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting that simple thefts and domestic murders.”
After a few minutes of silence, John realised Sherlock had finished. He’d already scuttled around the cottage when they had arrived, looking for clues on the disappearance of this particular household, and John knew he wouldn’t need to search again. So he took the opportunity to lay down on the rug, using his suitcase as a pillow, and try to get some rest. He would feel too guilty to sleep in the beds of the abductees.
“Tomorrow,” he heard Sherlock mumble softly, while he was in between sleep and consciousness. “Tomorrow we will go searching. You sleep. I need to think some more.”
---
Whether Sherlock had left the house during the night, John didn’t know, but he was relieved to find him there when he woke up, meaning that there had been no abduction of his friend. The detective seemed tired, but agitated. He wouldn’t be thinking about sleep for a long while.
John was woken up much too quickly and rushed out of the house by a hand pushing at his lower back. He could tell Sherlock was eager, not frightened, so he decided against rushing himself too much and instead lingering to catch up once they were outside.
“There’s a working phone line in the farm house,” Sherlock told him. “Most of the other landlines here have been cut at the wires. Quite cleanly, too,” he paused, “too cleanly.”
John would have laughed if it weren’t for the information he was being given. “What’s the situation in the rest of the buildings?”
Sherlock turned, looking from the farmhouse to another cottage half a mile away from them. They stood on a dirt road, the bright morning sun doing enough to wake John up as he tried to come to terms with Sherlock’s observations.
“Struggle,” he said simply at first. “Always a struggle. There wasn’t one in the cottage we’re squatting in, but there was one outside. Just out the back. They were lured out of their home, then taken. A woman, an older man, and a young adult, presumably their son.”
John felt sick to his stomach.
“In the farmhouse there are obvious signs of somebody who had lashed out in response. No blood, never any blood, except a few drops where one of the farmers had cut himself by smashing his arm through a window.” He paused again, deeply but shakily inhaling the fresh country air, before settling his attention directly on John. “We are not dealing with some kind of supernatural force like my anonymous emailer suggested to me. We are dealing with something not human, however, and I need to find out what it is. We’re going to find where it’s come from.”
For a moment, John had a terrified idea that Sherlock meant to set one of them up as bait to be dragged back to wherever it was that these people were being taken. But Sherlock didn’t have that pleading look in his eye, where he would ask an impossible task of his companion. Instead, he looked a little bit frightened, and very excited.
“Where do you plan to start?”
“The fields.”
John frowned as he followed Sherlock’s path out into pasture behind the main farmhouse. He didn’t understand the point of this; there was nothing but land for as far as the eye could see, bar the occasional tree or tin shed. But Sherlock walked like he had already pinpointed his exact destination, until of course he would make a sharp turn, or notice something on the ground that would send them back the way they came. It was tiring, but John kept up.
Once the sun began to fall from its higher point in the sky, John felt like they were getting closer to something. There were no obvious clues so far, not even a thoughtful mutter from his companion. But as noon seeped into afternoon and threatened to fall to evening, John’s left hand began to twitch and he feared something looming behind him.
“Sherlock,” he murmured, pushing past the weak feeling of hunger and fatigue as he sped up to walk by his colleague’s side. “Sherlock, when were these people taken? After dark?”
“Random, it’s all entirely random,” Sherlock responded, although his muttering and frowning made it seem like he was talking more to himself. “Why so random? It’s like they just took people as they needed them, without any real regard for-”
He stopped speaking as he stopped walking, catching John off guard and forcing their shoulders to bump together. John followed Sherlock’s gaze as he looked to their left, out further into the nothingness of one of the empty wheat fields.
After a moment of hard searching with his eyes, John noticed what Sherlock saw from the corner of his. A shed, barely visible in the field with the tall stalks of wheat, but in the late afternoon breeze, the stalks would bend and the rusted tin roof could be seen. They had made sure to check all of the sheds in the area, ensuring there was nothing and no one inside, but this one seemed to have escaped their attention.
Before he realised what was happening, Sherlock had started at a run. Perhaps John was right in that feeling of something dark and sinister waiting for them around the corner; perhaps Sherlock felt it too.
They reached the shed fairly quickly at their hurried pace and found themselves standing upon a concrete foundation. John stood back, keeping watch around them as Sherlock knelt and crawled and shuffled around the small shed, barely large enough to house a generator. He kicked at the rusted wind turbine laying broken on the ground, then dropped back to his knees to inspect the base of the shed’s walls.
“This foundation was put down for a reason,” Sherlock thought out loud, “Not just for a shed. The shed was put here for a reason too.”
He stood up, John now by his side at the door of the old, rickety structure. One of the detective’s pale hands reached out to run his fingers down the fraying, fading posters stuck on the door. Danger, they all read. Warning signs. Safety precautions. Electrical Shed, one said, with a monochromatic graphic of a stick figure being electrocuted by a stray wire.
John saw the longing look in Sherlock’s eyes, and knew there would be no point in denying him the opportunity. They’d come this far.
“Do you need me to find bolt cutters for the-”
Sherlock had ducked down and grabbed a cut piece of metal from the turbine on the ground. John only just stepped back in time to not be hit when his companion wielded it tightly and struck it to the padlock on the door. It came loose easily, weakened by time, and the door swung open.
They both stood still and quiet as they looked down at the large, bulky hatch door on the ground. No generator. No electrics. Sherlock exhaled as the metal bar slid from his grip.
“I suppose it would be foolish to try and talk you out of this,” John muttered, but Sherlock wasn’t listening. He was already walking inside, lowering himself to his knees and inspecting the hatch with his bare hands. The hinges were thick and large, but the locks on the side were flimsy and detached. He didn’t hesitate to grab the handle with both hands, heave it up, and let it fall open with a loud, echoing thud.
The door of the shed tapped against the wall in the evening breeze. The sun was getting dangerously low in the sky outside.
“Sherlock,” John started again, this time with a little more authority, a little more certainty than before. “Sherlock, we should leave this until tomorrow.”
Sherlock still didn’t even glance at his friend as he untucked his legs from under himself and lowered himself down into the hatch.
John had no choice but to follow.
---
That sick feeling hadn’t gone away. Perhaps it was hunger, more likely fright. Sherlock had lost that sense of purpose to his step and instead moved slowly, like there was thought in every movement of his feet touching the ground. They had found themselves in a broken tunnel, what seemed to be an elevator shaft, with an unstable floor of what was undoubtedly the top of the elevator itself. They quickly moved away, squirming through a large ventilation system, before finally dropping down into a white walled, white floored hallway.
Half of the floor was ripped up, panels from the walls having fallen and cracked the beams which held the whole place up. John was more worried about how stable the structure was, while Sherlock just seemed amazed at its existence.
They turned a corner and stopped in time to avoid falling down a gaping hole in the floor. John’s first instinct was to step back, so of course, Sherlock stepped forward. He knelt down, leaned over and peered down at whatever he could see. John could hear his breathing pick up and knew he would have to look as well.
Rather than being some form of basement or tunnel, it seemed like the entire world was upside down. Somebody had built an entire factory - or what must have been a world a long time ago. They could not see buildings or houses or anything that would be required for a civilisation, but they could clearly see the outsides of elevator shafts delving down into the unknown, the corners and walls of large buildings, hanging in the emptiness. There was no soil under their feet, just space and open air. Too much of it. Too much of it for John to feel comfortable.
“We need to go back up,” John demanded, but his voice only came out as a whisper. He hadn’t noticed his own fear until Sherlock’s eyes fell upon the vice like grip of his hands around the edge of the floor.
“John,” Sherlock uttered in response, leaning his close so he was sure to catch the eager look in his eyes. “John, I’ve never seen anything like this before. You can’t devoid me of it because you’re a little frightened.”
The doctor stood up, forcing himself away from the edge and focusing his energy on looking for an exit. The vent they had dropped down from was high up in the busted ceiling, and the walls themselves were taller than two Sherlocks standing on his shoulders. The only possible exits were the hole in the ground, or the sealed door to their right.
“Where do we go?”
Sherlock gave him a pointed look before easing into a smile. He stood up and walked closer to the door, eyeing it curiously. John made sure to point out that it was sealed, so Sherlock dared defy him. Cautiously, he took those gradual steps closer, freezing when his right foot pressed a tile on the ground that seemed to activate the door to open.
The detective grinned at his companion and made the move to walk through, but John was quick to grab his arm. “Sherlock,” he whispered furiously, “No. No. I am not going to wander down some hallway just because I can. This is too rabbit-hole for me, okay? How the hell does this place have enough power to supply that door to open? It’s abandoned. And yet, the door has opened. So someone has to be here. I don’t like this.”
Sherlock let John finish stuttering out his frightened phrases before he carefully unhooked his vicelike grip from around his arm. “John,” Sherlock said quietly, easily, trying to calm his friend’s nerves. “John, you’re with me. We have no where else to go. What could possibly go wrong?”
Sherlock stepped through the door with his eyes still on his friend. When he was on the other side, he turned around and began to walk. John shut his eyes and whispered to himself, “Everything,” before forcing himself to follow.
---
Despite the good doctor’s many objections, Sherlock touched everything he could find. And there was a lot. Occasionally they would come across a flickering light, which he ran his palms across as it buzzed at him from behind glass. There were security cameras, disconnected from the walls and left for dead on the floor, which Sherlock actually picked up with his bare hands to stare directly into the lens to. He spoke to one, as if it could speak back, and it was then that John knew Sherlock also share his suspicions of them being watched.
The mould and flora was the worst. Occasionally they would come across a wall that was completely busted through, taken over by roots and plants and leaves and moss. Sherlock had to touch everything. John stood back, ready to help him at a moment’s notice if something terrible happened, but nothing did. Not yet.
After what felt like hours of wandering through halls, vents, dropping down into rooms and surveying vast interiors, they came across a light that didn’t flicker so much. The two stood back outside of another automatic door, looking up at the giant white sign on the wall, the light behind it slightly faded but bright enough to read. There was mould growing around the edges, which Sherlock did not touch, but instead decided to focus on reading the words on the sign itself.
“Seventeen,” John read the large numbers at the top, then frowned. “Seventeen-slash-nine-hundred and twenty-three. What does that mean?”
Sherlock was too busy studying the pictures on the bottom half of the sign. They appeared to be warning signs, all pictures, with the same familiar stick man getting himself into more and more trouble. Some were lit up, others were faded. Sherlock ran a finger around an unlit picture of a slice of cake.
“I think we’re in the seventeenth room,” he said after a moment. “The seventeenth room out of nine-hundred and twenty-three possible rooms. And this is what’s inside.” His hand pulled back to gesture at the lit up warnings. John looked over them slowly.
“What do they mean, though? This could be anything.”
Sherlock frowned in concentration and deciphered each picture slowly for John’s sake, pointing at them as he did. “This man, he’s falling into water, see,” he paused, skipping over a few to point at another, “And this is a ‘No Drinking’ sign. That’s obvious. So there will be water, a large body of it that we can swim in, or fall into. But it’s indigestible. I’d say dirty, but going by the state of this place, or at least, imagining what it once looked like...” He turned his head to look at the stained white walls, fabricating the perfect picture of an immaculate hallway from long ago. “I’m guessing the water is toxic.”
John licked his lips nervously and inspected the remaining warnings. “There’s... cargo? What’s that?”
“Heavy lifting,” Sherlock deduced by the picture of the man holding a box. “Heavy lifting... And, by the looks of it, a dispensary system to watch out for.” His finger tapped the icon of the man being hit in the head by his box.
John eyed the shut door to their right before looking back at Sherlock for confirmation. “We’ve come this far,” Sherlock said to him, and without a further thought, stepped up to the door for it to open.
The room was large, like one of the halls they had encountered. The ceiling was much higher and there was a moat-like area, filled with murky green liquid and dripping from a leak in the ceiling. There was another room above them, Sherlock deduced, but paid it no mind for the moment.
“There’s something not right about this,” John mumbled to himself, knowing it was an obvious statement, but needing to say it nonetheless.
The room was in no condition to linger in, for they could hear the creaking and groaning of the metal beams holding it into place, and the water in the moat sloshed at the sides of the walls occasionally. They were rocking.
Luckily, though, part of the walls were smashed through, although there were no tree roots present. Even the metal beams and bars acting as a cage around the walls had been bent out of place, so there must have been a serious force that collided with the room. Sherlock realised quickly that they needed to move on, so he grabbed John’s sleeve and tugged him towards the damaged wall to find a way out.
---
“Sherlock, how long have we been down here? And what have we found?” John was exhausted, breathing heavily as they scurried along further hallways. It seemed that the further they travelled, the less destruction they came across, the whiter the walls and the stabler the structures. Sherlock had begun to move faster, spinning around corners and gasping whenever they found a room which hadn’t been partially destroyed from the mystery accident from long ago.
“We’ve found exactly what they wanted to keep secret,” Sherlock uttered in response. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek to a door, one that hadn’t opened for them. The signs on the door had all faded beyond legibility, so Sherlock had instantly become curious in what was behind it.
“Right. And who’s ‘they’ exactly?”
Sherlock frowned, but he kept his place at the door. “That’s what I want to find out. What is all of this for? It appears to be some kind of testing facility, but... I can’t be sure. I need to find an area of administration, somewhere with data.”
While he spoke, his hands had brushed over the jammed handle of the door to twist at the bolts and ease up the pressure on the hinges. He eventually pulled his head back to push at the door, forcing it open and sending him tumbling inside.
John didn’t bother inspecting the layout of the room. It looked just like any other, and he was beginning to grow tired of this escapade.
“Administration is normally stationed by an entrance,” Sherlock told him, but John’s disinterest was now obvious and he more or less began to think out loud instead. “But there’s nothing less inviting than a rickety old shed in the middle of a farm in Blackmoor.” God, Blackmoor. What John would give to sit out in the open, breathing in that country air. “So there has to be other entrances, other exits. Something a little classier. This place is top-notch, or it used to be.”
“Sherlock,” John sighed, watching as his colleague spun around the room they found themselves in, running his hands along the white panels on the walls and searching for cracks and ruptures. “There’s no way of telling if this is related to the disappearances. But if it is, wouldn’t you think it’d be better to contact the police? Think of how much faster we’d get this uncovered if we had more people to help us look. And for safety, too. There’d always be someone watching out for us.”
“I have every confidence in you that if I fall, you will catch me,” Sherlock said lowly, even though he hadn’t appeared to be listening. John was caught a little off guard by that and shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably, watching as the man ran his fingers along the edge of one of the wall panels which seemed to be jutting out of place from the rest.
“Besides,” he continued, “A S.W.A.T. team would run past everything of importance. Tamper with the facts. I need to see this first hand. And such a crowd would surely draw attention to us, if there was indeed somebody here. I’d say judging by the amount of time we’ve been down here, we have gone unnoticed.”
He gasped as the wall panel shifted and buzzed, creaking from some mechanics behind the wall. Sherlock only just stepped back in time for the panel to twist and fold away, breaking the barrier between two rooms to reveal another hallway. This one appeared completely untouched by the world. Sherlock walked through.
“Who’s to say we’re not being watched?” John questioned as he followed the detective step for step. “And they’re just biding their time? If this entire building is run by mechanics and electrics, then surely someone would see on some kind of... control panel, which doors are being opened. It’s like the whole place is one giant computer.”
Sherlock clapped his hands together and whispered quickly his agreements. “Then we will be close to finding out what it is they want, and if all goes well, we may even find the location of those missing persons.”
He rounded a corner and bounded up a set of stairs - something which should have shocked John. For all their wandering, he’d yet to see a simple set of stairs, even ones made of metal grates like these. He heard Sherlock gasp before bolting along a grated mezzanine at the top of the stairs, John having to stop to read the sign Sherlock had noticed. The second he registered the large, faded letters of RECRUITMENT on the wall, he was off at a run to catch up with the detective.
---
“John, this is it,” Sherlock hissed, hands up to his face as he wandered through the hall. It was similar to the other white walled rooms, only there were chairs. Comfortable chairs, with velvet ropes blocking off certain areas from others and leading lines to administrative desks and portraits on the walls. John could practically see the information being absorbed into his companion’s mind as he slowly walked his way around the room.
“Computer,” John quickly barked, the moment he saw one behind the desk. He pointed, but Sherlock had already seen, not hesitating to run up to the counter and hoist himself over the top. While Sherlock attempted to turn it on and hack into the system, John sauntered around him to peer through the filing cabinets against the walls.
Each file was sorted by last name, and every one appeared to be an application form. All of them in the filing cabinets he examined had a stamp of pending on them, neither accepted or declined. The applications were rather thick, all signed by different people, initialled at certain points. They had at least five pages of each that had differing hand writing filling out blank spaces, and the rest of the pages were typed. Perhaps some kind of contract.
“Sherlock...”
Both men jumped as soon as the computer screen flickered to life. Sherlock jumped because of the blinding backlight of the screen, John jumped because of the loud crackling of a speaker from somewhere above them. Both men stood still as stones as they listened to what sounded like a skipped recording.
“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-”
Slowly, John and Sherlock turned to look at each other, then at the computer screen. A circular logo with angled interior edges flashed up, spinning as the letters APERTURE joined it. As the logo shrunk into the corner of the screen to make way for a password request, the deafening speakers stopped skipping and they were greeted by a cool, feminine, yet robotic voice.
“Ah-Aperture Laboratories welcomes you, strangers.” John felt a shiver run down his spine. “Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock paid the voice no mind and instead set to work at the keyboard. John stayed put, however, breathing slowly as he turned around to watch the doors in the room. The one they had come through was left open, there was another door at the opposite end of the room which was locked with a staff only warning on the front, and a larger door which was presumably where the voice expected them to go.
Sherlock growled after his tenth failed attempt of cracking the security.
“Please do not override the computer’s core database. Only licensed Aperture administrative staff members are permitted to use these computers,” called the voice.
John tensed, but Sherlock brushed it off with a wave of his hand before he continued typing. “Automated security breach message, obvious. This building had been uninhabited by humans for years. If there was a security alert to be sent, then no one would be around to answer it.”
Somehow, this didn’t ease John’s nerves. It only took him a stray glance towards the ceiling for him to freeze again, as his gaze fell upon a security camera directed towards them. The red light was on and he could see himself in the lens.
“Sherlock.”
“Unless if it helps me get into the database,” Sherlock interrupted, “Keep quiet.”
“Sherlock, I think we’re being watched.”
His breathing quickened when the camera lens zoomed in a fraction.
Sherlock made a double take at the camera, narrowing his eyes at it as he lifted his hands from the keyboard. There was silence as they both kept still, then finally the voice started again,
“Thank you.”
John backed up against a filing cabinet and fisted in his own jacket. “Sherlock, I want to leave. Get us out of here, now. I don’t care about this bloody case any more, I want to leave.”
Sherlock moved much slower as he stood from his chair and approached the camera. It was at least a metre too far for his reach, but he craned his neck up towards it anyway. “Where are you?” He whispered to it, eyes still narrowed as he tried to understand. “What are you?”
They both spun around at the sound of a door opening, just in time to see the larger door open for them to step through.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock carefully reached out to stop John’s hand from fisting in his jacket and lace their fingers together. John’s hand shook. There was no thrill, here, no high from the thought of being caught or killed. There was fear in John’s eyes, true fear, of not knowing what it was they were trying to escape.
Sherlock led them out, back through the door they’d come and ignoring the awaiting disinfection chamber. Their footsteps echoed in open air as they ran along their grated pathway, looming over miles and miles of nothing but space and fogged air. He was surely hurting John with how tight his grip was, but he needed to stop that hand shaking. Anything to avoid realising that he had put his only friend and colleague in such danger.
They pushed through a door that opened to a black hallway. The walls were crisp and clean and angled differently to the plain white tiles they had become so used to running past. They noticed a door up ahead and made for it instantly, but were stopped short when one of the wall tiles, about three metres squared on its own, was thrusted across the hall in front of them by a mechanical arm. The two men skidded to a halt, nearly crushed by plate they had narrowly avoided.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock could feel John squeeze his hand tightly. He dragged them towards the open space around the mechanical arm, which had now blocked their path to the door, and crawled through the space to another room.
Sherlock shushed John before the doctor had a chance to open his mouth. “I don’t know what this is,” he murmured. “I don’t know where we are. We have been down here for so long that I wouldn’t be surprised if we were miles from the surface.”
John finally tugged his hand out of Sherlock’s grip and held it close to himself. He wasn’t mad, Sherlock could tell the fear was overriding all other emotions, but he needed the space so he could turn around on the spot and inspect the room they were in.
“Elevator,” John whispered. “We need to find an elevator. We need to go up.”
Sherlock opened his mouth to agree, but was cut off by a deafening alarm that rang through their ears. He groaned and held his head, looking up at the high ceiling and around at the distant walls.
He finally found the source of the alarm, spotting a frosted glass window that hid what appeared to be either a security bay or an observation window. Sherlock tugged John’s arm to pull him over, only stopping when they reached the wall. Glass at the bottom corner of the window was smashed, supplying a way in, but it was still too high.
John was reluctant to give Sherlock a bunk up but obliged nevertheless. Once Sherlock had stepped up from John’s lift, he elbowed the rest of the glass to make the opening a little wider. Once he was able to pull himself up and inside, he reached down to help his friend along with him.
The alarm was louder up there but they tried to pay it no mind as they ducked through a doorway and down another hallway. The area was much smaller here and John actually began to feel a little claustrophobic, after leaving all of the high ceilings and mechanical rooms behind.
“There has to be an elevator here somewhere,” Sherlock uttered as they rushed around corners. “Whatever that room behind the glass was, people would have been working there. Obvious signs of human inhabitance. So, they would need a way to get out. Surely this place would supply and out for their employees.”
John swallowed down his pessimistic opinions and nodded in understanding.
As they ran, skipping down stairwells and ducking under collapsed ceilings, the alarm began to fade and become muffled from the distance they made. John was finding it hard to pinpoint whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, and tried his hardest to trust Sherlock’s judgement in which corners to turn and which straights to follow.
They stopped dead in their tracks when they came across a smaller set of stairs leading up to a door in the middle of the wall. They slowly made their way up, pushing the door open to find a translucent blue wall blocking them off from the rest of the room.
Sherlock leant back as his eyes narrowed at the wall, partially see-through and waving gently, like a sliver of water standing of its own accord. He reached a hand out to it, but John quickly barked in protest, warning him that it could be anything at all.
“What’s the worst it could be?” Sherlock muttered, eyeing John carefully. He knew John didn’t trust anything in this facility, which was all the more reason for it to be Sherlock to test it out. He was the one who got them into this mess.
He thrust his hand out to the wall and ended up punching straight through it. He gasped, frowning at the cool sensation around his arm. The wall was thin. It moved around him, like it was barely there.
He eventually stepped through, looking down at his body and then at his hands. A glance back at John was enough to have the doctor scurrying through after him, relieved that it hadn’t been deadly.
“We may have triggered some kind of alarm,” Sherlock suggested, his voice ragged as he fixed his coat around himself; a nervous twitch.
John was sure as he shook his head. “No,” he answered simply. “Emancipation grid. It did no harm.”
Sherlock frowned and turned around, only to find John reading a small safety sticker on the wall. Surely enough, brief details of the emancipation grid’s texture was jotted down in short hand, with another of those stick figure men running through.
They forced themselves to relax rather than become tense about nothing, but as they turned to inspect the room they were in, both their hearts sped up with excitement. The elevator in the middle of the room was like a beacon of light to their exhausted searching, and neither hesitated to run towards it.
“We’re getting out,” Sherlock whispered, barely able to believe it as he shut the bars around them and pressed a button for them to travel up. The elevator paused, rumbled and stalled, but eventually, started to move.
Down.
“Sherlock,” John croaked. He pressed urgently at the UP button, but it seemed to change nothing.
Their quick, panicked breaths were drowned out by the skipping voice overhead.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
“Let us out!” John shouted into the darkness as the elevator began to speed up for a lengthy travel. Who knew how far down they were travelling, who knew how much air there would be so far under the crust of the earth. “We refuse to take part in this experiment! I, John Watson and my companion Sherlock Holmes, refuse to stay any longer!”
They stood still, gripping the bars tightly as they descended, listening to their own echo.
The cool, calm robotic voice in response made skin crawl: “Oh... That’s too bad.” Then, a sultry addition, “Speak for yourself.”
The elevator sped up at an alarming pace and it felt like they would be thrown from the elevator if they did so much as adjust their grip. They were hurled to a stop, relieved to find that they weren’t at the base of whatever this was. Some of the way down was a lot better than all of the way down, even if they had still travelled pretty far.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
John shut his eyes tightly. They were forced to let go as the barred doors of the elevator opened, giving them no choice but to step out and come to terms with their surroundings.
The room was darker than the others, with fewer lights in the ceiling. It was still vast, but there was only one door at the end of the room.
“Please continue to the testing bay, where you will be disinfected and prepared for testing.”
Sherlock took a deep breath and began to walk towards it. “It’s the only way out, John,” he said to his friend’s look of horror. “Perhaps there will be a way to get out. Maybe there are more faulted walls. We’ll figure it out. There are other elevators.”
“Which she seems to control,” John muttered with a vague gesture up above at the voice which had momentarily left them alone. Sherlock took no notice and began to walk ahead.
John walked slowly, watching the walls as he did. He frowned gently to himself, confused at his own perspective of the room. The further they walked, the closer the walls seemed. It felt a little too Willy-Wonka to be normal. “Sherlock,” he called, uncertain, “Stop walking for a moment? Look at the walls.”
They both stopped and looked around, realising that it had nothing to do with perspective. The walls were moving. Slowly, so slowly, so it was barely noticeable, but the ceiling that getting closer as well.
John panicked and made the move to run up to his friend, but at that moment, there was a loud groaning of metal and the walls stopped. There was a click, like everything had locked into place, leaving them standing twenty feet from one another in a much-smaller room than before. The door was still accessible, as was the elevator, but it would take a hundred-yard dash to reach either.
“Do you still want to go through with this?” John questioned, his voice almost failing him and having to shout it across to the detective. Sherlock was yet to answer, so John followed his gaze to a slit in the ceiling above and between them.
“John, I-”
John jumped back when a screen slid from the ceiling, dropping down with a loud thud to create a glass wall between them. John screamed for his companion, a frantic shout of his name, over and over, but Sherlock looked at him in fear, like he couldn’t hear him.
The doctor ran forward, slamming his fists against the glass but to no avail. He uttered Sherlock’s name, over and over until it faded into a frightened groan. He saw Sherlock’s mouth move, a tiny, soundless utter of John’s name, confirming John’s fear that the glass was sound proof. This wall separating them didn’t seem to be moving any time soon, but if Sherlock was stuck there, John would be stuck too.
Slowly, eventually, John lifted his head from where his forehead had been resting against the glass, only to find a murky mist falling from the ceiling of Sherlock’s half of the room. He followed it down, catching where it was thicker at the corners of the ceiling. He swallowed thickly and looked up, trying to spot if it was in his half of the room as well, but he saw nothing.
“Sherlock,” he called, slamming his fist on the glass again before pressing a finger up towards the gas. Sherlock turned, looking up, fear in his eyes, but as he turned back, he seemed clueless as to what John was trying to tell him. He asked, repeating John’s name over, asking what there was to see, but John couldn’t hear a sound. He said it again, “Sherlock, the gas. You’re being gassed,” and his voice came out as a mere whisper.
John blinked away frightened tears and punched the glass, watching the wall shake and feeling the pain rip through his knuckles. Sherlock had his back to John, now, looking up at the gas, trying to find what it was he was looking for. Sherlock couldn’t see it. It had to be the glass - John could only see it because of the glass.
“I, John Watson, take full responsibility for Sherlock Holmes and refuse on his behalf to take this test!” John practically screamed into the open air. Sherlock turned around to see him repeating this phrase, shouting to no one, and began to say the same. John watched his mouth as he lifted his head, breathing quickly and deeply as he began to call the words.
I, Sherlock...
“Sherlock Holmes,” John egged him on, having given up on punches and moved onto banging the glass with his palm. “I, Sherlock Holmes, refuse to partake in testing.”
Sherlock blinked hard and shook his head, eyes glazing over as he tried again. I, Sherlock... Holmes, refuse to... to...
John had to stop himself from screaming again when Sherlock stumbled under his own feet. The gas was thickening, falling to Sherlock’s level and being inhaled with those frightened breaths. He opened his mouth soundlessly still, tried to speak, but barely getting another word out before he crumpled as a heap on the floor.
The second Sherlock fell, John began to slam at the glass again and scream into the open room. He watched through teary eyes as the gas slowly began to filter out of Sherlock’s half of the room, leaving him unconscious on the floor. It took a long while for John to stop shaking and concentrate on his friend, but eventually, he spotted the slow movements of his friend’s chest, indicating he was breathing and very much alive. But still unconscious.
“Sherlock,” John whispered again, dropping his head forward against the glass as he slid down to his knees.
“Please vacate the immobility chamber,” echoed the robotic woman’s voice, causing John to lift his head. “You are excused from testing.”
“You didn’t even give him a chance!” John shouted at her, trying his hardest to claw at the glass as he stared at the blank ceiling. “He wanted to refuse! You didn’t let him! I said no!”
There was a pause as the speakers flickered with static. The voice responded coolly, as if he hadn’t spoken, “Please vacate the immobility chamber. You are excused from testing.”
The doors of the elevator opened behind John but he couldn’t bear to look at it. The elevator no longer meant escape or freedom; it meant abandonment. He couldn’t abandon Sherlock, not now.
“He trusted me,” John whimpered to himself, although knowing he wasn’t alone, knowing he was being listened to. “He trusted me to catch him if he fell. But you wouldn’t let me. I broke my promise.”
It was hard to keep his eyes open with the tears welling up inside them. He may have just given Sherlock a death sentence to stay down here in this dilapidated, sinister place. Why hadn’t Sherlock listened to him? Why hadn’t he just left it like John wanted to?
He slammed against the glass again, just for good measure before he slumped against it. “You’re only wasting your own time,” the voice said, Your friend will be well looked-after. I’m already fixing the broken test chambers as we speak.”
John exhaled shakily and dared open his eyes, although he kept them pointed at his own lap. “I’ll wait for him to wake up,” he challenged.
A quick, impatient response, “Then I will gas him again.”
John bit down on his knuckles, chewing nervously as he lifted his eyes to Sherlock’s limp form.
“Please vacate the premises,” she said this time. “Aperture Laboratories is under renovation until further notice.”
---
Sherlock’s lungs hurt as he tried to breathe in. His legs, arms, neck, even his eyelids ached as he came to consciousness, barely able to comprehend how he was even alive. It hurt to move from where he was laying, it hurt to remember his last moments before passing out. Where was John?
The lights in the room were blinding and he was met with a dull headache, only made worse by the loose jazz playing softly from a radio in the corner of the tiny room. There was a toilet in the opposite corner, next to a makeshift table, and it took a moment to realise he was lying in bed; clothes changed from his trousers, button-down and his thick coat into a regulation uniform. He recognised the logo on his orange jumpsuit to match that on the computer screen, even though his vision was slightly blurred.
He hissed when a voice sounded from overhead; a voice too familiar, of the robotic woman in the laboratory.
“Thank you for your co-operation during preparation. The testing will commence in 5...
4...
3...
2...
1.”
Further Notes: I'm considering a follow-up just to make the anonymous emailer cleared up, but I'll leave it at this for now.
ETA Part two is over here