Fic: Untenable
Title: Untenable
Wordcount: 6491
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: A few instances of strong language- four f's and one c, to be specific. Mild references to drug use and injuries. Jeremy Paxman.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything or anyone, woe etc.
Summary: Sherlock Holmes Works Alone. This has been known to backfire on him- sometimes badly- but old habits die hard.
Untenable [ʌnˈtɛnəbəl] adj.
1. (of theories, propositions, etc.) incapable of being maintained, defended, or vindicated.
2. unable to be defended against attack.
3. (of a house, etc.) unfit for occupation.
The theory had been sound.
Go to ground. Recuperate. Recover. In the morning, the whole gang would be his for the taking. One text would bring the entire might of Scotland Yard crashing down on top of them. As ineffective and obtuse as he was, Lestrade still made for a very effective blunt instrument, if used correctly. If you knew how to wind them up and send them bumbling off in the right direction, men like Lestrade could be surprisingly capable. It was almost as if they could think.
So that was all fine. Evidence gathered, mystery solved, perpetrators all gathered together in one place, ripe for the taking. Case closed. Another triumph for the world's only consulting detective, the most brilliant mind in London.
Sherlock crawled a little nearer to the bathroom door, then stopped for a rest. Behind him, a join-the-dots puzzle of dark drips and smudged handprints stretched all the way across the carpet, a SOCO's wet dream.
It wasn't even as if it had been a particularly well-planned attempt on his life. Farcical, it had been, almost. Shoddy. For a start, anyone wanting to do any serious damage should have kicked him in the head once he was on the floor, not the... well, everywhere else. It was practically an insult. After all, you wouldn't try to disable a supercomputer by going at its keyboard with a hammer.
Generally speaking, Sherlock took assassination attempts as a sign that he was doing his job properly. He was very good at surviving them- in fact, so far, his success rate had been as high as one hundred percent. The depressing fact was that most real assassins- as opposed to the ones film-makers were so fond of- were just uninspired thugs who provided other people's nasty little problems with mundane solutions like a sharp blow to the skull round the back of a nightclub, or a last, mysteriously brakeless, trip down the fast lane of the M1. Once the personal factor was removed from a murder, it seemed, the spark of originality went with it.
Caught in an alleyway and kicked senseless. Wallet and phone taken to make it look like a mugging. Dull, dull, dull.
The carpet was a horrible beige and clammy under his cheek, spongy, like dead skin. Everything in this basement flat was slightly damp, one of the reasons why the owner of the building was not, technically speaking, allowed to rent it out. It was unfit, in the words of the Housing Standards report, for human habitation. When he'd approached him about it, all that time ago, the owner had been half-convinced that Sherlock had been working for Housing Standards himself. It had taken a few convincing arguments- and a large down-payment, in cash- to change his mind.
Sherlock had places like this all over London. Small, forgettable, cheap places, off the books and off the map, where nobody noticed you coming or going. Anonymous little bolt-holes with neighbours that never looked twice. He used them infrequently, for cover, for meeting-places, for the addresses of other identities when he needed them, for safety when 221B was being watched, and sometimes simply for places to crash when the energy he expended finally caught up with him and Baker Street could have been across the Atlantic for all the use it was. They varied widely, from a room on the top floor of a cheerfully illegal Polish boarding house in Hammersmith, to a flat roughly the size of a broom closet above the Godiva store on Regent Street, which nobody else would rent because the previous tenant had had their head bashed in with a toaster.
This one though, he had to admit, really was the worst, the most dire, scummy little rat-hole he'd ever forked over large chunks of cash in unmarked brown envelopes for. It was also, not entirely coincidentally, the first. They went way back, him and this flat, they were old friends- yet another reason why he hadn't been down here for a very, very long time. He'd had different tastes, back then. Different priorities.
However, needs must when the devil throws up on your shoes. Pain ground in his chest like a fistful of wire wool, and he turned, inch by inch, over onto his back and breathed as levelly as he could, watching pale dragons of white mist flutter up towards the bulging, blotchy ceiling. The pain became regular, stabbing once on the inward breath, rising slowly on the outward. It ebbed like a tide as he walked his fingers carefully closer to his body, to his left side, to the wound.
He'd moved, which was why he was still alive. He'd moved quite a lot, and he'd knocked one of them unconscious by driving their head into the wall with the point of his elbow, which now felt like he'd used it to stop a Landrover. He'd turned from the collapsing body and seen the tiny glint in the corner of his eye and he'd moved, and the stab that should have severed his renal artery tore along his side instead, and he'd slapped the knife out of the man's hand out of sheer indignation more than anything else- you, kill me? Who the hell are you?- and it had clattered into a mess of rubbish bags. None of them had thought to bring a spare, apparently, so although they had eventually got the better of him- sheer numbers- they'd had to make do with fists and feet to drive their message home.
Still, they'd made their point quite well. A few really strong arguments, there, the powerful cut and thrust of debate, and there'd been a few important diplomatic breakthroughs, mainly in his ribcage area.
Bathroom. Come on. Not far now.
He'd done very well getting this far; he'd even walked away from the crime scene quite unsupported, once he'd regained consciousness, although that might possibly have had more to do with endorphins than fortitude. Certainly, by the time he'd reached this place he'd been reduced to pulling himself slowly from railing to railing, doing the most credible impression of a completely hammered drunk he would ever do in his life, which was a shame, because at half-past God-knew-when at night on a quiet residential street in the armpit of south-east London, there was absolutely nobody around to see it. Descending the six steps to the basement door in the dark had been an ordeal to match a full-scale military operation, as had been reaching up to retrieve the key from the cavity behind the broken area light, cold and clotted with spiderweb and dead beetles. It hadn't been an encouraging welcome.
And the flat. Beige carpet, bulging ceiling, the sweet open-crypt smell of damp. Sparse furniture adrift on the sea of beige, an enormous bright slithery spill of junk-mail underfoot that had tripped him, sent him staggering into a doorframe and then, perplexingly, he'd somehow ended up on the floor. Once off his feet, it hadn't really seemed worth the effort to stand up again.
Sherlock eased himself over the threshold and into the bathroom, one hand under his coat, tensed over the wet red patch on his shirt. It was beginning to dawn on him that- to borrow a medical term- he was somewhat more fucked up than he'd realised. Most of it was probably just bruising, but his chest-
Slowly, he began the process of standing upright.
Monolete, trilete, monosulcate. He visualised each word in the front of his mind, tasting each clean, informative syllable. He stacked them, one by one, on top of the pain, like sculpted blocks of heavy marble, forcing it back down. Tricolporate, bisacaate. With his free hand, he gripped the edge of the sink and used it as leverage, holding it close against his body and dragging himself upwards until the side of his face was pressed against the spotted surface of the mirror, breath hectic, mouth hanging open, his arm trembling from supporting his entire upper-body weight. Sulcus, colpi, intine, exine. Good.
After a few minutes, he felt a little better, good enough to remove his face from the unpleasantly cold glass and stand upright. A wobbly step took him over to the toilet, the cistern, the sealed plastic bag taped to the underside of the heavy ceramic lid.
He tore it open with his teeth and poured the contents out onto the lid of the toilet, scrabbling through things that he didn't even want to look at, let alone touch, snatching up the blessed, holy battered cardboard box from the jumble. Hallelujah, salvation in tablet form, a whole card, twelve little buttons of it nestling in there in a little plastic bag.
The box and the bag- and everything else- were slightly damp to the touch, but at this point Sherlock wouldn't have cared if they'd been covered in bees. He dry-swallowed two tablets, then ran water into the sink and gingerly shrugged his coat and jacket to the floor.
~~
Ten minutes later, he stumbled out into the flat's only other room again, wrapping his coat around him like a blanket, his arms full of things he didn't want to have to go back for. He'd cleaned and dressed the gash in his side with shaky fingers and the rudimentary first-aid supplies from the plastic bag, taping the edges together with something that wasn't that far removed from masking tape, stemming the blood with handfuls of wet cotton wool. The sink and the mirror now looked as if they had been involved in a particularly violent murder, complete with bloody handprints and a sink full of watery pinkness which refused to drain, presumably because of the amount of cotton wool he'd accidentally fed it while cleaning himself up.
Sherlock wasn't used to being clumsy. That sort of thing was for mortals without his sharp reflexes, without his perfect and absolute sense of where he was in a space, and how everything else fitted around him. He wasn't used to bouncing off doorframes and veering off course when he walked, he wasn't used to having to feel with outstretched hands for the edge of the table so he wouldn't hit it, to check the sofa really was where he thought it was before he lowered himself carefully down on it. He thought that part of it was the blood loss, but a growing part of it, he was pretty sure, was the pills.
The sofa smelled like mould. The cloying fungal stink of it surrounded him and he turned on his back and tried not to breathe too deeply- a sound policy anyway, for a man with an upper abdomen that felt as if it was full of broken pencils. Flat inhale, soft exhale, the white curl of breath from his nose and mouth. It was freezing down here, below the ground.
Soon- in about seven minutes, give or take- the painkillers would kick in properly. In the morning, things would be better, and he would leave this godawful dungeon and walk to the small café at the end of the road and use someone's phone to text Lestrade, who could add assault and conspiracy to murder to his charge sheet when he read the inconsiderate bastards their rights. There would probably be some small argument about a hospital, but hospitals meant time and forms and waiting and dullards asking questions like how did this happen? and anyway, he could get hold of painkillers in any one of a dozen places and he sodding lived with the only doctor he had any faith in-
Sherlock eased back on the brackish-smelling cushion and winced. John was probably not going to be very happy.
Why didn't you find somewhere to call us right away, Sherlock? Why didn't you-
“Syncolporate,” he breathed, “monoporate, angiosperm, gymnosperm...”
After a while, his voice trailed off into a mumble, and he slept.
~~
“We've found his phone,” said Lestrade.
John stood up, grabbing for his cane- the second action coming in the wake of the first, nearly as an afterthought. “Where?”
“Some idiot tried to sell it in Shepherd's Bush Market. Soon as they turned it on it made half the phones in my office go off like the last night of the Proms. One day, I'll find out how he gets that thing to do half the things it does.”
Although he hadn't slept at all since Sherlock had vanished- in fact, he'd been dangerously close to dozing off before Lestrade had walked in, John was suddenly wide awake.
He'd never go anywhere without his phone, he'd never just give it away-
“Well, good, now, can we concentrate on finding him?”
Lestrade gave John a look that suggested that he was a man with more problems than it was really fair to expect one person to cope with at once, and that furthermore, he wasn't entirely sure if John Watson represented a solution, or just another problem. It threw John slightly, finding himself on the receiving end of this particular look, because he was so used to seeing it aimed at Sherlock.
“We pulled the guy in. Seems like just some clueless fence, but you never know. Donovan!”
“Yes, guv?”
“Cancel the cake and get down to Interview 3. We've got a lead.”
~~
Something had gone wrong with the equation.
It was morning. Dirty grey dawnlight was creeping in around the edges of the windows, traffic hummed and blared in the street outside, muffled by the thick, half-sodden blinds. Five or six hours had just sort of vanished, gone like pages ripped out of a book. It was definitely morning, but things weren't better at all.
Sherlock tried to sit up, and failed to stop himself crying out as his stiff limbs objected violently, angry claws digging into his shoulders, his back, his chest. The pain was better but it wasn't anything close to gone, and worse, he felt light-headed, dizzy, weak. He was freezing and the dressing on his side was wet and heavy, soaking into the couch. It was almost as if it had been a bad idea to use first aid supplies he'd found in a toilet.
He felt for the plastic bag and swallowed two more pills with water from the glass he'd filled at the sink last night. The water was stale and tasted of mould; his gag reflex rebelled and he had to fight it to keep the pills down. The last thing he wanted to do was add vomit to his already not-inconsiderable list of problems.
He looked up. The ceiling over his head seemed even more distorted than it had the previous night, the lumps and bulges moving about slowly and without drama, like bacteria crawling beneath a microscope.
“I don't see that,” said Sherlock in a weirdly calm voice, and rolled gingerly over to stare at the wall. There was a tiny TV and a dead plant on the windowsill and a horrible art print of a dog in a flat cap; at some unimaginable point in the distant past, he must have thought it was amusing. The more he thought about it, the more he was struck by the irresistible urge to find that distant him from forever-ago, and punch him in the teeth.
He'd be easy to find. A young man, lying on a rancid sofa in a basement flat while rain ran down the walls and the room pitched and twisted around him like a summer fever, and his mind soared-
He found the remote stuffed down between the couch cushions- the batteries, remarkably, were still in one piece- and turned the TV on.
Sherlock loathed television. He didn't mind watching it with John, who didn't care that much if Sherlock's attention was on something else as long as he let him lean against him and didn't start leaping around- although John tended to get irritated if he started making loud, hard-to-tune-out comments about things that had nothing to do with whatever drivel he happened to be watching. Sherlock had learned to appease him by pretending to be tired and slumping over on him even more, which wasn't nearly as uncomfortable in practice as it sounded in theory. He kept meaning to do a study on all the different, unexpected parts of his body that fitted, tessellated, with parts of John Watson's anatomy, from the obvious to the obscure- like how the rough right-angle of his neck and his chin fitted perfectly into the corresponding location on John's shoulder. There was at least a short article to be had out of this theory, although it probably wasn't the kind of thing that John would want going up on the Science of Deduction.
Television without John to collapse on and irritate was boring, facile, pointless. He flipped from channel to channel, deciding in seconds flat that the best possible ending for the programme full of squeaking primary-coloured things with aerials on their heads was a quadruple murder/suicide, and the only way he would ever possibly be interested in what the old man with the annoying voice was saying about Arctic foxes was if a pack of them started eating people in Greenwich.
Finally, he settled on a repeat of yesterday's Newsnight, which John watched fairly often and fell asleep during, also fairly often. Watching irritating people he didn't know arguing about meaningless things he didn't care about, as if they carried some deep underlying significance- it was just like real life.
The pain was receding again, but the swelling dizziness was getting stronger. He cocked a surreptitious eye towards the ceiling, checked on its progress. Worryingly, it seemed to have got a lot further away, and instead of bulges it was now covered in fat puffed wrinkles, like a dying balloon. Not good, not helpful, not happening. He turned his attention back to Newsnight.
“We have to, now, actually, now, make sure we can grow this economy,” a woman in a bad pinstripe jacket was saying, as Jeremy Paxman watched her with the standard expression he reserved for interviewees, which was incredulous, half-horrified amusement, as if she had taken a small dog out of her handbag and started to eat it in front of him. “Now, what we've seen today is announcements of huge job cuts-”
“Are,” droned Sherlock, automatically, and then immediately wished he hadn't. Talking hurt.
“-and the withdrawal of support from our, ah, industrial base, such as the changes to investment allowances, which will make it harder for the private sector. We have to think about-”
“Right,” interrupted Jeremy Paxman, who was holding an index finger horizontally against his temples, as if he wished it was a gun, “but this report was delivered at lunchtime, you've had plenty of time to think about it-”
“Yes, but the key thing here, Jeremy, is that we disagree with the macroeconomic stance that they've taken. What we've got here,” the woman continued, ignoring the small incredulous noises that were coming from her host, “is not actually a blueprint for recovery, it's not actually a plan for a big society, and there has to be accountability-”
Sherlock's eyes had glazed over.
“Right, thank you, that's all we've got time for,” said Jeremy Paxman, a small eternity later. “Angela Eagle, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, thank you very much for your time. Now,” he added, turning back to face the camera as it panned gently around to focus on him, cutting the slightly flustered-looking Angela Eagle politely out of the shot, “with us now, live from 31C Camplin Street, Peckham, we have Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. Mr. Holmes, would you mind giving us your views on this state of affairs?”
Sherlock stared muzzily at the screen.
“Oh, good God.”
“Would you, or would you not agree,” said Jeremy Paxman, in his usual sardonic manner, looking straight back at him, “that your behaviour has been particularly asinine in this instance?”
“Oh, shut up,” mumbled Sherlock, derisively. “You're not real. You're a drug-induced hallucination brought on by a slight overdose of morphine.”
“First,” continued Jeremy Paxman, reading off a sheet of paper in front of him, “you decided to carry out final preparations for what you knew would be a high-risk operation on your own, without telling anyone what you were planning to do, thereby ensuring that when something went tits-up nobody would have a clue where you were. Then, instead of seeking help, you holed up down here, where it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever find you. You deliberately placed yourself in the position that you are now in, all because of- when it gets down to it- some misplaced sense of pride. Under the circumstances, it's my job to ask what every viewer wants to know- is there, in fact, a brain in that overinflated skull of yours?”
“It's fine,” growled Sherlock, laboriously turning his back on the TV. “I'll be fine. Just need to sleep it off.”
“That's not what I asked, Mr. Holmes,” hectored Jeremy Paxman's voice from behind him. “How does it feel to know you're an unmitigated idiot with such a preposterously large ego that you'd rather bleed to death in a squalid little basement than let your best friend know you made a mistake?”
“Go away!”
“Answer the question! Did you really think he wouldn't worry about you?”
Sherlock shut his eyes tightly and felt for the remote.
“In fact, Mr. Holmes, we conducted a survey to find out whether or not our viewers think- based on your imbecilic behaviour- that you really deserve him in the slightest, and we've come up with some extremely enlightening results-”
Sherlock's clumsy fingers finally found the right button. The TV snapped off, the haranguing voice silenced. He let out a great, creaking breath that wound into the air in a cloud of mist, and turned over onto his back again.
The ceiling was fluttering wetly in and out like a struggling heart.
“Those pills were pretty old, too,” said another voice. Quiet, conversational. Not from the TV, this time. This one was higher up, further to the left. “Years old. All that time, down here in this damp, in that little bag in the cistern. They're not going to have done you any good at all.”
Against his better judgement, Sherlock looked.
“Hallo,” said the picture of the dog.
~~
“These are all possibles,” said Mycroft.
John looked down at the list. It was better than looking at Mycroft, because it was clear that the man was really worried, and for some reason that was incredibly hard to look at. Seeing Mycroft anything other than impenetrably calm felt faintly indecent, embarrassing, like walking in on a girl you didn't know very well when she was unexpectedly half-dressed.
He didn't even have his umbrella with him.
“Clerkenwell, Newington, Peckham, Islington, Aldgate...” John scanned further down the page. “They're all over London.”
“Well observed,” said Mycroft, patiently.
“What are they? Places he...”
“If he's still a free agent,” said Mycroft, staring out of the car's tinted windows at the busy street outside, “and from what I understand, that's by no means a given, he may well have gone to ground in one of these.”
“And these are all... his?”
Mycroft gave a thin smile. “In my brother's kingdom there are many rooms,” he said. “And not all of them are registered with the Housing Association.”
There was a pause.
“Sorry,” said John, who was aware there were better things he could be doing, but found that he just couldn't leave it alone, “did you just compare Sherlock to Jesus?”
Mycroft pulled a pained face. “It doesn't really hold up, does it? Nevertheless, it would be a good idea if we found him as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people in this city who would dearly love to nail him to something.”
John looked down again, tapped the paper.
“This one's nearest to Deptford. That's where the bloke said he got his phone.”
“Well, it's a start, certainly,” said Mycroft, with a polite shrug. You could read a lot of things into a shrug like that. For example, if you were inclined to be paranoid because you were aware that the perpetrator of the shrug was an extremely intelligent and dangerous political polymath, you might suspect that he probably knew at least four good reasons why your guess was stupid, but wasn't about to tell you. You might also hazard a guess that this was because he knew you needed to feel like you were doing something useful, and it would get you out from under his feet while he conducted a proper search.
Well, to hell with it. Mycroft didn't know everything. It was as good a place to start as any. And there was something else, a tingle at the back of his mind as he looked at the address, eating away at the enormous corroding mass of worry that had perched securely on John's chest as soon as he'd realised that Sherlock was really missing. Sherlock despised the word hunch, but he might have called it a shot in the dark- a good one, too.
Mycroft was watching him.
“Of course,” he said, “you do realise that if he's not really in trouble, he won't thank you for interfering.”
“Thank me?” said John, incredulously. “Thank me? Mycroft, if he's not really in trouble, I'll bloody murder him!”
“Just as long as we're on the same page,” said Mycroft, darkly, turning to stare out of the window again.
John shook his head. “Let me out here,” he said, folding the list into his pocket. “I'll get a cab.”
~~
“Go away,” groaned Sherlock. He had pulled the sofa cushion over his head, which had only really made matters worse, because now he was hallucinating and smothering himself with a lump of stuffed fabric that smelled like a musty, lavender-soaked ashtray.
“You've lost an awful lot of blood,” observed the picture of the dog. Sherlock hadn't looked at it since it had started talking to him, but he had a very clear image of it in his mind, and something about the flat cap and the unpleasantly lucid look in its painted eyes must have fired a few short-circuited neurons somewhere, because its calm, self-assured voice was horribly familiar.
“You're dead.”
“Dead? Nah. I'm a picture of a dog. You should know, you hung me up here, way back when. We had some great times in here. Don't you remember?”
“Go to hell,” mumbled Sherlock, then started to cough.
“Your breathing's been getting worse ever since you walked in that door, too, and you never even noticed. I reckon you're allergic to all this mould. That and the cold, and this damp's something wicked- it's like the bottom of the Thames in here.” The picture of the dog tutted. “Nother day or two and you'll have bronchitis to add to your troubles. By the time anyone finds you, it'll probably be too late.”
Sherlock laughed, a grim stuttering sound that brought dull pain bubbling up from under the thick fog of the morphine. His breathing was worse, and it was hard to speak. “I think... I preferred Paxman.”
“That doctor of yours'll be sorry. Course, he'll be about the only one.”
“Fine by me.”
“The famous Sherlock Holmes, dyin' in some manky old flat, all alone. Bit of a waste, if you ask me. And just think, you could've avoided all this hassle, if you'd just told 'im where you was going.” Somehow, Sherlock could feel the dog grinning. It displaced the damp air nestling against his back, a dog-smile-shaped distortion in the warping room. “Bet you feel a bit silly now, don't you?”
Sherlock pawed numbly about on the sofa and the floor within his reach until he found the remote again. He could hardly feel it in his hand, but he managed to wrap his fingers around it and prop himself up and hurl it, heavily, at the picture.
There was a tinkle of breaking glass, and a thud.
Sherlock eased back down, and breathed. This time, the sound terminated in an ominous chesty squeak, and he coughed.
“There goes your damage deposit,” said the dog, cheerfully, from the floor.
Lying still- too drained, now, to do anything else- Sherlock closed his eyes to shut out the pulsating ceiling and gritted his teeth, trying to relax, trying to will energy and warmth back into his bruised, chilled body. His nose was itching maddeningly, but he couldn't even be bothered to work up the effort to scratch it.
The problem was that the horrible dog and Jeremy fucking Paxman were right, both of them. Of course they were, they were both him, after all, both bits of him, and he was hardly ever wrong, even when anaemic and under the influence of dodgy several-year-old opiates. But he'd been wrong to go out alone last night, he'd been wrong to crawl down here to hide for the sake of his own wounded pride- and maybe something even worse at the bottom of it, drawn from the dark, paranoid, always-hungry part of his mind that would never leave anything good he found alone. That part of him didn't believe in warmth and tessellation and falling asleep on someone else's shoulder. That part of him always wanted to poke and prod and analyse and doubt and dissect and tell him it couldn't be that way, not really, because the world ran on cold merciless logic and the only way to stay on top of the game was to be just as cold and merciless and logical himself. That sneaky clutching fear which told him that if John saw him slip up enough times, if John saw that he was less than omniscient, that he could be hurt, that he could be wrong-
“Gemmate,” he croaked, “baculate... echinate... ret- reticulate...”
~~
John glanced at his watch as he got out of the taxi outside 31 Camplin Street. It was an instinctive movement, meaningless, but it told him that it was nearly eleven o'clock, which meant that Sherlock had been missing for over fourteen hours. It felt like a lot longer.
If Mycroft was right, he thought, looking up at the house, which was terraced and white-painted and flaking around the windows and the guttering, if he's just taken himself off somewhere to do something Secret, or something he doesn't want me involved with because he thinks I might trip over his toys like the clumsy idiot I am, I'll do worse than kill him. If this is a false alarm, he can fuck off and find himself another psychological punch-bag. That's me done.
31A had a tie-dye sarong tied over the window. 31B didn't have any curtains at all, just a few plants and a suction-cup cat which stared out through the glass with an expression of stuffed lunacy.
31C was the basement.
He stepped down into the little outside area. The concrete stairs were quite steep and cracked at the edges, so he went slowly, watching his feet. The second step from the bottom was wet from a dripping pipe, and he almost slipped and put his hand on the wall to steady himself. Then he stopped, and stared, while his stomach flip-flopped like a hooked fish.
Just above his own splayed hand, a smeary, partial handprint, dark and dried.
“Oh, Christ. Sherlock!”
~~
Someone was yelling something. It was impossible to make out what, or who. A dark fluffy mist had descended, a sort of leaden black lethargy that wrapped around him like a dank-smelling blanket. He seemed to be sinking through thick, inky layers of silt, settling into the cold, yielding murk that was at the bottom of everything.
If I'd touched that ceiling, this is what it would have felt like. Slick, soapy, like the mud you get in the pockets of a drowned corpse on clay-based soil. Soft, and it goes on forever, and it's cold. Perhaps I fell into it, or it fell into me...
“Sherlock!”
He blinked. The movement felt as quick and easy as continental drift.
“Nn.”
“Sherlock. Look at me.” A hand, warm, squeezing his, another cupping the base of his skull, supporting his head. The riverbed receded, a little. “Jesus, you're like ice- Sherlock, I need you to look at me. Can you talk? Come on, course you can, you never shut up. Say something.”
“Jeremy... Paxman,” said Sherlock, concentrating hard, because he wanted John to understand this completely- if it was John, and not another hateful illusion- “is an... utter cunt.”
A thoughtful sort of pause.
“Right. Fine. Okay... what have you taken?”
Sherlock forced his eyes open. His tongue felt thick and heavy, his voice was slurred. “Oh, good... it's really you.”
“Of course it's really me,” said John, who looked worried and like he hadn't slept very well and a bit unshaven and wonderful and real. “Your pupils are pinpricks, so I'm going to assume you've been self-medicating. What did you take?”
Bonelessly, Sherlock managed to flop a hand in the direction of the little plastic bag on the floor. John snatched at it, read the blurring label, shook his head.
“Tell me you didn't take four at once.”
“Course I... didn't.” Sherlock felt mildly offended. “What... d'you take me for?”
“Do I really need to answer that? Now, where the hell are you bleeding from?”
Sherlock didn't have to answer, because John's clever surgeon's fingers were already feeling over his body, under his clothes, finding the sodden lump of gauze at his side, just above his hip-bone, stopping dead.
“Oh, you silly arse,” said John, in one relieved rush of breath. “I'm going to call an ambulance.”
“Ugh...”
“If you say dull, I'm going to feed you this cushion. We've been looking for you all night, I was worried sick. I-”
John broke off, and squeezed his hand harder.
“You found me,” said Sherlock. He was aware that this was a superfluous statement of a completely obvious fact, but it still needed saying, somehow. Sometimes, maybe, completely obvious facts just did. “I'm... glad, that it was you.”
John's mouth twitched. “You can thank your brother, although I think he'll be a bit surprised that he actually told me something useful.”
“John,” said Sherlock, a little more urgently, because his memory was starting to fire up like an old car starting on a cold day, and certain vital details along with it, “I need to text Lestrade.”
“No reception down here,” said John, now examining his ribs, grimacing as he uncovered fresh islands of bruising everywhere he looked.
“Then I-”
“You are not getting up off that couch till the ambulance comes. I'll send a bloody text if it's that important.”
Slowly, with lots of pauses for breath, Sherlock dictated exactly what needed to be sent. John typed, patiently, one-handed- the other arm was still supporting his head, and that was excellent because it put an arm-shaped, John-smelling cushion between his face and the stink of the sofa. Then he went outside, and Sherlock saw his shadow on the thick, wet blinds, climbing the steps- with no trace of a limp- and standing, briefly, at the top of the area.
“Done,” John said, returning to the sofa. “Now, we've got a few minutes, and I don't think you're in any immediate danger, as long as you stay awake. Do you want to tell me- actually, no, scratch that. Tell me what happened.”
“Wait.” Sherlock shifted, pulling himself half-upright on the cushion. It was as if he was feeding off John's presence, drawing energy he hadn't had before just by being near to someone else, this constant, comforting company. Thinking was easier, talking was easier, and the room had- for the most part- stopped wobbling like a poorly-constructed stage-set. All of which was completely illogical, yes, but he was finding it hard to give any proportion of a flying fuck at the moment.
“In the bathroom. There's... some bags... some... Get rid of it, all of it. What won't flush... goes through the window, into the light well. Quickly.”
John looked at him for a moment, then went. He took a few minutes, and Sherlock heard the toilet flush a couple of times, and a sticky hinged clank that could only have been the window.
“Sherlock,” he said, when he finally walked back into the room, “was all that yours?”
“No,” said Sherlock. “I'm not him any more. He put that dog on the wall. I wouldn't do that.”
John looked at the wall.
“It's not there now,” explained Sherlock.
“I think,” said John, slowly, taking his hand again, “that the sooner we get you out of here, the better.”
Sherlock smiled. It wasn't over yet, he knew that. There would be annoying paramedics and a boring hospital, and hours to wait while they x-rayed his ribs and cleaned and sutured the gash in his side, bandaged him up properly, gave him some fluids and antihistamines and antibiotics and whatever else they decided was necessary, and worked out what kind of painkiller it was safe to introduce to a system already buzzing with antique morphine. There would be a barrage of questions from Lestrade, who would have arrested the whole gang by then and be jumping up and down for wheres and whys and other endless trivialities, and at some point there would probably have to be some kind of meeting with Mycroft, who would want different, more difficult sorts of answers.
It didn't matter, none of it mattered. Eventually, there would be a taxi and a front door and a careful, assisted ascent up the stairs, and a sofa that smelled like books and electricity and chemicals and home. And there would be an explanation and an apology, a proper one, to the one person who really needed one. It was going to have to be good, because it would probably be the last time it would ever be necessary.
No more Sherlock Holmes Works Alone. He'd learned his lesson. If it meant he occasionally looked more like a mere mortal, he could trust John not to think any less of him for it. He should have trusted him in the first place, but then, sometimes, he could be just a tiny bit stupid.
Not that he'd ever admit that. Not out loud, anyway.
“Couldn't agree more.”