[Fic] Raw Data
Title: Raw Data
Prompt: Sensory deprivation (H/c bingo, round 2)
Rating: G
Pairing: Gen
Warnings: None
Beta:
lady_ganesh
Set in the Push!verse following Step Two.
As a side note, cuz I've gotten pretty deep into this now: Pushverse is a series of fics set in an AU that I fused with the 2009 action film Push. It's a fun movie but it's not necessary to have watched it to understand these fics. If you want to go back and get into it, the series starts with VIP.
When he was a boy, he was an explorer; when he was a teen, he was a scientist; as an adult, he’s an adventurer and a detective. He doesn’t need other people, but he does need the stimuli that they provide.
Sherlock lives inside the data, and there’s no data here.
When he opens his eyes, he only knows he’s not blind because he can feel his lashes brushing against some surface, and the faint pressure of layers of cloth on his cheeks and forehead. This is the first time he’s been in darkness so complete that there isn’t the faintest touch of light to sense from behind his eyelids. The novelty is interesting for about two seconds, and then it’s just an absence of input: dull. He shakes his head and rubs his cheek against the surface beneath him- cool, smooth metal, untouched by bare human hands and therefore totally neutral- but the cloth does not shift.
He breathes softly through slightly parted lips. His nose is pinched shut at the bridge by some kind of device- a swimmer’s clip, perhaps. He can’t get his head at the right angle to dislodge the clip against the floor, and there’s nothing else to rub his nose against. The bindings on his wrists yank his shoulders firmly downward, and try as he might he cannot inch one high enough to touch his face to it. The absence of odor is surprisingly unnerving; the sense of smell is one that apparently even he has taken for granted, and not just in matters of his ability. Equally bothersome is the inhibition of his normal breathing. When he briefly shuts his mouth to wet his lips, it is an effort to stave off the panic caused by his inability to temporarily breathe through his nostrils.
He drops his jaw and works it forward, back, sideways, again and again to the point of pain, trying to work loose the soft masses of silicone he can feel clogging his ears. The plugs don’t move, but he persists until it occurs to him that they could shift deeper into his ear canals and become trapped instead of working loose. He lies still then, and slows his breathing, but all he can hear is the rushing of the blood in his veins.
Every inch of skin besides his face is covered with clothing, and his hands are snugged into his butter-soft leather gloves. He rubs the tips of his fingers against the inside of the leather, but of course it only gives him impressions of himself.
No new information, nothing he can process to rebuild the time since he walked out of Wentzler’s home and was rendered unconscious by an unknown party. He vividly replays the meeting, the walk down the stairs, the silence of the local fauna, his realization that something was wrong. There are only so many pieces there, and no way to assemble them that reveals who his captors are or what they might want.
An ordinary man might relive past memories, or recall old books and plays and pieces of music to pass the time. But he’s not ordinary and he can’t focus on any of that nonsense. He needs a mystery, a puzzle, something he can work at and solve, but there’s nothing.
Nothing.
Emptiness. Silence. It covers his mind like a smothering pillow over the face. The inside of his head is a cage, a shell in which he’s trapped away from all stimuli. He pounds at the mental walls, then kicks at them, then desperately scrabbles. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, and the boredom is like a vicious animal that has crawled inside the cage and made its nest there.
His brain unfettered and unsupplied is like the ouroboros, devouring its own tail. For all he sometimes despises the world and its people for their innumerable stupidities, he never wanted to shut himself out of it entirely. He's losing even his tenuous sense of time; if he had counted every second since he woke up, it would still be meaningless because he has no idea how long he was unconscious.
Underneath the blindfold, his curls cling damply to his forehead. His arm and leg muscles are twisting with painful cramps, but the pain is nothing- mere discomfort. It's not enough to distract him from the roaring emptiness in his head.
A sudden sound drags him back into reality- no, not a sound, just faint vibrations, conducted through the floor. Desperately he presses his head into the metal, straining to push his stoppered ear to the ground. It must be multiple people; there are two sets of dissonant vibrations. The short, hard impacts indicate dress shoes, and the treads are too heavy to be high heels- heel impacts are shorter still- so probably the two people are men. This is the first time he has heard footsteps in all his interminable time here, and it's driving him almost wild with anticipation. Please please please come closer, yes, excellent, and then a pause that makes him despair. He strains to feel something else, their movement, an echo of vibration from their voices, anything.
He holds his breath until his body screams for oxygen, then gasps in air until he is able to hold his breath again. Minutes move past, uncounted, as he strives again and again to hear or feel something, anything. But the footsteps do not resume, either to come closer or to depart. Is someone standing by, watching him? He tries to speak, but with no idea what to say, the first thing he produces is a sort of strangled, wordless exclamation. He draws another breath and tries again.
“Is someone there?”
Useless, but anything he can say is useless. It’s disconcerting to be unable to hear his own voice; it’s enough to make him wonder if he really spoke at all.
“Is someone there?”
A shout this time, better because he can feel the burn of the effort in his throat and it’s proof that the noise emerged after all, even if he can’t hear it. No one responds. There’s no reason to respond, of course; if they brought him here to talk, they wouldn’t have disabled him this way. But surely they don’t want him dead: if he was in danger, they might intervene.
He lifts his head and experimentally gives it a sharp crack against the floor. Pain arcs through his skull from the rear to the front, but he just hisses and then raises his head and cracks it down again. After half a dozen evenly spaced blows, he has to concede that as a strategy, this is a failure. He lays his head back down and presses his cheek to the cool metal, savoring the throbbing of his head as a momentary respite from the dull emptiness of his dark and silent prison.
He listens fiercely until he falls into an exhausted half-doze, but the footsteps still do not resume.
When he wakes, it’s to a fresh set of vibrations: more footsteps, this time too many to clearly distinguish. But something is odd- his ears are still blocked, but he’d swear he can actually hear the shoes ringing on the metal floor, getting louder and closer. Perhaps his mind is writing the memory of the sound over the actual sensory data? He shakes his head a bit, making it ache again, in an attempt to dispel the illusion. The footsteps come closer and stop.
His shout this time is a wordless scream of frustration, and garners as little response as before. But this time, he hears when the crowd of footsteps departs: one set at a time, walking away until the vibrations and the phantom sounds disappear into the distance.
After they are all gone, he remembers how the temporary agony of his head’s impact with the floor had momentarily stopped his brain’s endless circling, and he repeats the experiment. He loses count of the number of times he bounces his skull off the metal. No one comes this time either, but that’s all right. The resulting headache is sufficiently diverting.
When the aching has faded and left only dull emptiness in its place, he amuses himself by observing the habits of the tiny dots of white light that flit around the periphery of his vision. His eyes are wide open behind the blindfold, and the swirls of color that the lights leave behind trace obscure shapes that seem to float in mid-air before him.
He’s tempted to ignore the footsteps when they begin to approach again, but his mind immediately latches onto the stimulation and clings. Each echoing vibration of the floor beneath his head is like a hammer blow to the base of the skull. The steps stop, and he feels almost resigned to the long, empty interval that is coming.
A hand seizes him by the tie binding his ankles and drags him backward, sliding him over the metal. He gasps, the sudden influx of new sensations exploding into his brain with violent euphoria. He can feel the side of knuckles brushing against his right ankle- over the sock, regrettably, can't get much of a sense of how big the fingers are, but it’s the first touch of any kind since he’s been here and it’s delicious all the same. The tie grinds against his ankles, but even that is muted by the hateful layer of cloth that separates him from outside sensation. When he gets out of here, he's going to strip himself bare naked and just feel for as long as he likes, nothing at all between his skin and the world of information that comes from light, warmth, air currents; everything has meaning and he doesn't know why he didn't see it sooner. He's going to touch everything he can reach.
He lifts his chin up but can feel his body bumping over some kind of lip or ledge and onto another surface set at the same level. It slides smoothly beneath his trousers, but minute catches in the fabric as he is dragged betray wood, rather than more metal. Different textures, so delicious, he’s almost giddy with delight. His feet are dropped to the floor and he wriggles, twisting his body a bit but still lying curled up on his side, with ankles awkwardly pulled up behind him and tied to his wrists. Footsteps retreat away.
He very nearly panics, writhing in his bonds and making some kind of noise that he can’t hear. He doesn’t think it’s language. His patience is non-existent at this point. The only thing that keeps him from losing himself entirely is his realization that only one of the two sets of footsteps has left, which means the second man is still there. The hair on his arms is standing up beneath his shirt; he has no idea where the man is standing or what he's doing.
A hand brushes against the shell of his right ear, which is turned up to the ceiling. Barely a touch at all, but enough for Sherlock to determine that the man's wearing gloves, damn him, and they're as neutral as the blindfold for all the information they give him. Still, ability or not, it's sensation, it's data, and he unthinkingly tilts his head up into the caress like a dog. It's a measure of the deterioration of his already poor impulse control that it takes nearly two seconds for him to realize what he's doing and return his head to perfect stillness.
The gloved fingers move to his collar and begin to unfasten the buttons. Until now, his shirt was buttoned right up to the chin, presumably to keep exposed skin to a minimum. Now the strange man opens the shirt almost down to his abdomen, fingers whispering over the skin of his chest. There's no pressure at all, just the light tickle of leather over his skin; a tease that is in no way sexual, but still absolutely sensual in its intimacy after his isolation.
The fingers part the shirt, exposing his venous port. One hand presses flat against Sherlock's chest, rolling him slightly onto his back and forcing a pained snarl from him as his bound hands are trapped under his body at an awkward angle. He revels in the feeling of the hand on his chest, trying to stave off desensitization so he can feel the unique press of each joint of each finger as long as possible. The gloves the other man is wearing fit so perfectly as to be almost skintight, and the fingers are short and strong, but not broad. The thumb and forefinger are spread wide to frame the port. With an effort, Sherlock manages to keep from pushing up into the touch. He registers no surprise when he feels a needle puncture his chest. The port isn't a part of his body, of course, but he can imagine the needle sliding easily through the membrane, depositing its payload, which will jet through the catheter and into his vein, and thence into his heart.
Minutes pass in silence, and then Sherlock's fingertips begin to tingle and the back of his head to buzz faintly. This does not surprise him either: these are classic side effects of psychosteroids. But oh, it’s torturous, absolutely inhumane, to bind and fetter all his senses and then give him the drug that will heighten them further still. He's come so close to the edge of madness already that he is very nearly afraid of what sensory deprivation in the throes of boosting could do to him.
“What’s one more dose?” the man crouching over Sherlock says. “It's what that catheter was installed for, after all.” The voice is unmistakably English- Oxbridge, definitely. Sherlock has always prided himself on his ability to place accents.
The second needle does surprise him, making a new puncture mark right next to the first: two tiny, throbbing aches on his chest now. “We both have an interest in the field,” the man says. “So here's a fun fact for your collection: small doses of amobarbital have been found to counteract the general stimulant effects of psychosteroids, without suppressing the increased neurotransmitter production of the Havel cells.” There's something subtly wrong with the accent. It's too perfectly unmistakable, Sherlock realizes, which means it’s almost certainly a deliberately adopted accent. Damn it.
“That's from Wentzler and Barnes, 1964. Every advance in the field of psychic augmentation has built upon the previous studies, in an unbroken chain stretching back to Brandenburg-Gorden in 1940.” The man chuckles. “Always with the goal of weaponizing us. Theoreticians can be so narrow-minded.”
A circle of metal is pressed against his upturned cheek. Small diameter, upraised rim but nothing felt in the center, so either it's concave or there is no center. A ring, perhaps, but it's dangerous to speculate. All this is determined in the first instant that the item touches his skin: the deductions are so reflexive as to resemble an instinct. In the next instant, his ability takes over and Sherlock's mind floods with a rush of images: Aaron Wentzler's wrinkled hand and face, the teak house where he lives, the village. The impressions are intensely strong, and not just because of the psychosteroid injection; the item was handled by Wentzler every day for years, the images stretching back until the hand ungnarls and the skin smooths. Sherlock clearly sees the wooden box on Wentzler's nightstand where he kept the object.
Sherlock's mind is muddled by barbiturates, and it is harder than it should be to focus his perception and shift through the images for Wentzler's current location. Nothing. When he tries to sense Wentzler, there's nothing. In an object with such strong, clear impressions, that can only mean two things: either Wentzler is being shaded by a very talented Shadow, or he's dead. Whoever is holding Sherlock prisoner not only abducted him within minutes of his visit to Wentzler, they have now provided an item that was taken from the man; it can't be a coincidence. Sherlock hasn't enough information to parse why, but he can see that these men are responsible whether Wentzler has been killed or simply disappeared.
“Doctor Wentzler is dead,” says the man crouching over Sherlock.
Irritating. The man deserved death, if anyone did, but Sherlock had intended public trial, public excoriation, and not incidentally public humiliation for HM's Division of Asset Management. Now Wentzler will never face justice in the legal sense and the extent of his crimes will remain a guarded secret. Sherlock likes secrets, but only because he enjoys revealing them. Losing this one makes him feel cheated.
“You really are rather slow this way,” the man says teasingly. If Sherlock could shut his mouth without suffocating, he would be grinding his teeth. Tranquilizers are hateful. “Obviously we know where Wentzler is. We're looking for the man who owned this before him.”
Sherlock could withstand physical pain, has done it before, but he's utterly unprepared for this: to be stripped of every possible entry point for data and then offered not just data, but work, a puzzle to set his mind to. It's too tempting, he can't pass it up. Besides, reading the object will only give them an advantage if he chooses to share his observations, which he won't. He can accept this invitation to analyze without agreeing to give anything away.
Try as he might, however, Sherlock can perceive nothing except Wentzler. It's not so much how he touches the object- his cheek gives him an impression no less vivid than his hand would- but he can't manipulate the thing with his cheek. That means he can't get as much physical information. And when he examines an object with his ability, especially a particularly complex one, it's best to use more than one sense. The use of all five is the ideal.
The man slides the object across his cheek until it is touching his lips. The pressure is enough to pop part of his lower lip into the indentation. No, not an indent, a hole. Sherlock's mouth gapes a bit wider as he tries to get his tongue on what is now obviously a ring, and the gloved fingers immediately pushes the ring into his mouth. The fingers withdraw quickly, as if the man fears Sherlock will bite. He can only spare a second to be offended by this before he's rolling the ring around his mouth, lost in an attempt to process and sort the myriad impressions it is giving him now that he can apply two senses to the problem instead of one.
Putting images in order and blocking those that are irrelevant is a matter of training, not inherent ability, but it still takes concentration; especially with the amobarbital slowing his processing speed. Sherlock is at last able to separate the impressions of Wentzler and set them aside. He trawls farther back in time, until he sees the ring in a different palm entirely. He pushes the ring into the roof of his mouth with his tongue, so hard it leaves an indent, and locks onto that new hand. It's paler than Wentzler's, with narrow fingers but knuckles that are quite lumpy, as if repeatedly broken. Jagged fingernails, but clean- a nail biter, not a laborer- and an ink-stained writing callous. The man’s a scholar, then, perhaps a colleague of Wentzler's.
More images. Now that his boosted ability has caught hold of the right person, it's easy; the ring is on the man's hand in every single image, which explains the strength of the impression. The man is writing, eating, smoking a cigarette, handling a syringe full of black liquid- oh yes, definitely a colleague- and inserting the needle into the skinny arm of a sandy-haired boy with wide, frightened eyes. Sherlock makes a small surprised noise. That image did not come from Wentzler’s Kenyan research station.
“An unbroken chain,” the man says to Sherlock, momentarily snapping him out of his concentration. “Wentzler's work was founded upon his, just as your own Doctor Piers' work was founded in part on Wentzler's.”
Clearly this man and whoever he represents know far more about Sherlock than he does about them. When Mycroft had sunk his fingers into Division far enough that he could have Piers' research project cut off, he had buried the records under so many layers of secrecy that even Sherlock technically lacks the clearance to see them. Sherlock wonders if anyone told the blond boy what was being done to him or why. If they did, they probably lied; it took Sherlock six years to learn exactly what had been done to him by the repeated injections of psychosteroids.
Sherlock shakes his head minutely. His mind is wandering. The amobarbitol decreases inhibitions, among other side effects; his mind is evidently more prone to flights of empathic fancy in this state. The blond boy's experiences are irrelevant now, as he is far beyond any help Sherlock could provide.
“Most of the children from that study are dead,” the man notes. “That was an early iteration of the drug. It tended to cause hemorrhaging in the cerebral cortex.” Sherlock is tonguing the roughness inside the ring; it's probably an inscription of some kind. “They used to take their brains out and study them, after.” Sherlock grips the ring tightly between his teeth. The psychosteroids Sherlock has been exposed to were never dangerous enough to kill, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous at all. How many chemical assaults can his neurons withstand before they- and his ability- die? He's seen his own MRIs and CT scans; he can easily picture the bright dots of Havel cell activity on the monitors, winking out one by one as the neurons lose oxygen and expire.
His teeth grate against the ring and he sucks in a ragged gasp of air around it. Forget that line of speculation, it’s fruitless. Focus on the problem, on the data. Where is the ring’s prior owner now?
Gray pavement, gray stone, spires and silhouettes and sky: the answer is as obvious as it is immediate. London. Sherlock has spent two decades learning his home practically brick by brick, and even drugged it’s the work of only a few seconds to identify the particular building where the scholar is located. He even knows the address. Finished, he spits the ring onto the ground. He can’t resist a small smile of pleasure at a challenge faced and conquered.
“You do justice to your reputation, my dear, even handicapped,” the man murmurs, and Sherlock hears the slide of fabric against skin and a tiny clink as he bends to pick up the ring. “If only Doctor Piers had been more ambitious...I would dearly love to see what you'd be capable of if your ability was taken off its leash.”
Another slide of cloth, and another needle plunges into Sherlock's chest. He flinches with surprise, and thinks that Piers had been rather too ambitious for his own tastes.
The man chuckles as he buttons Sherlock’s shirt back up to the collar. Sherlock can feel an even greater lethargy stealing over him, and surmises that the last syringe contained more of the sedative. He can’t muster the energy to fight the hand that pushes another plug of silicone into his ear, cutting off his hearing once more.
He can barely even manage to be angry at the fact that now, when he finally has data to work with, his mind is so fogged by sedatives that he can’t process it. He struggles to keep his eyes open, knowing that if he lets them shut he’ll be dragged unwillingly down into sleep. Knowing that he’s picking at the edges of a realization about his captor that’s vitally important. His thoughts typically move at the speed of sound or faster, the sensation of having something on the tip of his tongue is unusual and frankly intolerable. He has the facts, he just needs more time to process than normal; just a few more minutes conscious and he’ll have it. Just a few more-
He has the data.
What is he missing?
Prompt: Sensory deprivation (H/c bingo, round 2)
Rating: G
Pairing: Gen
Warnings: None
Beta:
lady_ganesh
Set in the Push!verse following Step Two.
As a side note, cuz I've gotten pretty deep into this now: Pushverse is a series of fics set in an AU that I fused with the 2009 action film Push. It's a fun movie but it's not necessary to have watched it to understand these fics. If you want to go back and get into it, the series starts with VIP.
When he was a boy, he was an explorer; when he was a teen, he was a scientist; as an adult, he’s an adventurer and a detective. He doesn’t need other people, but he does need the stimuli that they provide.
Sherlock lives inside the data, and there’s no data here.
When he opens his eyes, he only knows he’s not blind because he can feel his lashes brushing against some surface, and the faint pressure of layers of cloth on his cheeks and forehead. This is the first time he’s been in darkness so complete that there isn’t the faintest touch of light to sense from behind his eyelids. The novelty is interesting for about two seconds, and then it’s just an absence of input: dull. He shakes his head and rubs his cheek against the surface beneath him- cool, smooth metal, untouched by bare human hands and therefore totally neutral- but the cloth does not shift.
He breathes softly through slightly parted lips. His nose is pinched shut at the bridge by some kind of device- a swimmer’s clip, perhaps. He can’t get his head at the right angle to dislodge the clip against the floor, and there’s nothing else to rub his nose against. The bindings on his wrists yank his shoulders firmly downward, and try as he might he cannot inch one high enough to touch his face to it. The absence of odor is surprisingly unnerving; the sense of smell is one that apparently even he has taken for granted, and not just in matters of his ability. Equally bothersome is the inhibition of his normal breathing. When he briefly shuts his mouth to wet his lips, it is an effort to stave off the panic caused by his inability to temporarily breathe through his nostrils.
He drops his jaw and works it forward, back, sideways, again and again to the point of pain, trying to work loose the soft masses of silicone he can feel clogging his ears. The plugs don’t move, but he persists until it occurs to him that they could shift deeper into his ear canals and become trapped instead of working loose. He lies still then, and slows his breathing, but all he can hear is the rushing of the blood in his veins.
Every inch of skin besides his face is covered with clothing, and his hands are snugged into his butter-soft leather gloves. He rubs the tips of his fingers against the inside of the leather, but of course it only gives him impressions of himself.
No new information, nothing he can process to rebuild the time since he walked out of Wentzler’s home and was rendered unconscious by an unknown party. He vividly replays the meeting, the walk down the stairs, the silence of the local fauna, his realization that something was wrong. There are only so many pieces there, and no way to assemble them that reveals who his captors are or what they might want.
An ordinary man might relive past memories, or recall old books and plays and pieces of music to pass the time. But he’s not ordinary and he can’t focus on any of that nonsense. He needs a mystery, a puzzle, something he can work at and solve, but there’s nothing.
Nothing.
Emptiness. Silence. It covers his mind like a smothering pillow over the face. The inside of his head is a cage, a shell in which he’s trapped away from all stimuli. He pounds at the mental walls, then kicks at them, then desperately scrabbles. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, and the boredom is like a vicious animal that has crawled inside the cage and made its nest there.
His brain unfettered and unsupplied is like the ouroboros, devouring its own tail. For all he sometimes despises the world and its people for their innumerable stupidities, he never wanted to shut himself out of it entirely. He's losing even his tenuous sense of time; if he had counted every second since he woke up, it would still be meaningless because he has no idea how long he was unconscious.
Underneath the blindfold, his curls cling damply to his forehead. His arm and leg muscles are twisting with painful cramps, but the pain is nothing- mere discomfort. It's not enough to distract him from the roaring emptiness in his head.
A sudden sound drags him back into reality- no, not a sound, just faint vibrations, conducted through the floor. Desperately he presses his head into the metal, straining to push his stoppered ear to the ground. It must be multiple people; there are two sets of dissonant vibrations. The short, hard impacts indicate dress shoes, and the treads are too heavy to be high heels- heel impacts are shorter still- so probably the two people are men. This is the first time he has heard footsteps in all his interminable time here, and it's driving him almost wild with anticipation. Please please please come closer, yes, excellent, and then a pause that makes him despair. He strains to feel something else, their movement, an echo of vibration from their voices, anything.
He holds his breath until his body screams for oxygen, then gasps in air until he is able to hold his breath again. Minutes move past, uncounted, as he strives again and again to hear or feel something, anything. But the footsteps do not resume, either to come closer or to depart. Is someone standing by, watching him? He tries to speak, but with no idea what to say, the first thing he produces is a sort of strangled, wordless exclamation. He draws another breath and tries again.
“Is someone there?”
Useless, but anything he can say is useless. It’s disconcerting to be unable to hear his own voice; it’s enough to make him wonder if he really spoke at all.
“Is someone there?”
A shout this time, better because he can feel the burn of the effort in his throat and it’s proof that the noise emerged after all, even if he can’t hear it. No one responds. There’s no reason to respond, of course; if they brought him here to talk, they wouldn’t have disabled him this way. But surely they don’t want him dead: if he was in danger, they might intervene.
He lifts his head and experimentally gives it a sharp crack against the floor. Pain arcs through his skull from the rear to the front, but he just hisses and then raises his head and cracks it down again. After half a dozen evenly spaced blows, he has to concede that as a strategy, this is a failure. He lays his head back down and presses his cheek to the cool metal, savoring the throbbing of his head as a momentary respite from the dull emptiness of his dark and silent prison.
He listens fiercely until he falls into an exhausted half-doze, but the footsteps still do not resume.
When he wakes, it’s to a fresh set of vibrations: more footsteps, this time too many to clearly distinguish. But something is odd- his ears are still blocked, but he’d swear he can actually hear the shoes ringing on the metal floor, getting louder and closer. Perhaps his mind is writing the memory of the sound over the actual sensory data? He shakes his head a bit, making it ache again, in an attempt to dispel the illusion. The footsteps come closer and stop.
His shout this time is a wordless scream of frustration, and garners as little response as before. But this time, he hears when the crowd of footsteps departs: one set at a time, walking away until the vibrations and the phantom sounds disappear into the distance.
After they are all gone, he remembers how the temporary agony of his head’s impact with the floor had momentarily stopped his brain’s endless circling, and he repeats the experiment. He loses count of the number of times he bounces his skull off the metal. No one comes this time either, but that’s all right. The resulting headache is sufficiently diverting.
When the aching has faded and left only dull emptiness in its place, he amuses himself by observing the habits of the tiny dots of white light that flit around the periphery of his vision. His eyes are wide open behind the blindfold, and the swirls of color that the lights leave behind trace obscure shapes that seem to float in mid-air before him.
He’s tempted to ignore the footsteps when they begin to approach again, but his mind immediately latches onto the stimulation and clings. Each echoing vibration of the floor beneath his head is like a hammer blow to the base of the skull. The steps stop, and he feels almost resigned to the long, empty interval that is coming.
A hand seizes him by the tie binding his ankles and drags him backward, sliding him over the metal. He gasps, the sudden influx of new sensations exploding into his brain with violent euphoria. He can feel the side of knuckles brushing against his right ankle- over the sock, regrettably, can't get much of a sense of how big the fingers are, but it’s the first touch of any kind since he’s been here and it’s delicious all the same. The tie grinds against his ankles, but even that is muted by the hateful layer of cloth that separates him from outside sensation. When he gets out of here, he's going to strip himself bare naked and just feel for as long as he likes, nothing at all between his skin and the world of information that comes from light, warmth, air currents; everything has meaning and he doesn't know why he didn't see it sooner. He's going to touch everything he can reach.
He lifts his chin up but can feel his body bumping over some kind of lip or ledge and onto another surface set at the same level. It slides smoothly beneath his trousers, but minute catches in the fabric as he is dragged betray wood, rather than more metal. Different textures, so delicious, he’s almost giddy with delight. His feet are dropped to the floor and he wriggles, twisting his body a bit but still lying curled up on his side, with ankles awkwardly pulled up behind him and tied to his wrists. Footsteps retreat away.
He very nearly panics, writhing in his bonds and making some kind of noise that he can’t hear. He doesn’t think it’s language. His patience is non-existent at this point. The only thing that keeps him from losing himself entirely is his realization that only one of the two sets of footsteps has left, which means the second man is still there. The hair on his arms is standing up beneath his shirt; he has no idea where the man is standing or what he's doing.
A hand brushes against the shell of his right ear, which is turned up to the ceiling. Barely a touch at all, but enough for Sherlock to determine that the man's wearing gloves, damn him, and they're as neutral as the blindfold for all the information they give him. Still, ability or not, it's sensation, it's data, and he unthinkingly tilts his head up into the caress like a dog. It's a measure of the deterioration of his already poor impulse control that it takes nearly two seconds for him to realize what he's doing and return his head to perfect stillness.
The gloved fingers move to his collar and begin to unfasten the buttons. Until now, his shirt was buttoned right up to the chin, presumably to keep exposed skin to a minimum. Now the strange man opens the shirt almost down to his abdomen, fingers whispering over the skin of his chest. There's no pressure at all, just the light tickle of leather over his skin; a tease that is in no way sexual, but still absolutely sensual in its intimacy after his isolation.
The fingers part the shirt, exposing his venous port. One hand presses flat against Sherlock's chest, rolling him slightly onto his back and forcing a pained snarl from him as his bound hands are trapped under his body at an awkward angle. He revels in the feeling of the hand on his chest, trying to stave off desensitization so he can feel the unique press of each joint of each finger as long as possible. The gloves the other man is wearing fit so perfectly as to be almost skintight, and the fingers are short and strong, but not broad. The thumb and forefinger are spread wide to frame the port. With an effort, Sherlock manages to keep from pushing up into the touch. He registers no surprise when he feels a needle puncture his chest. The port isn't a part of his body, of course, but he can imagine the needle sliding easily through the membrane, depositing its payload, which will jet through the catheter and into his vein, and thence into his heart.
Minutes pass in silence, and then Sherlock's fingertips begin to tingle and the back of his head to buzz faintly. This does not surprise him either: these are classic side effects of psychosteroids. But oh, it’s torturous, absolutely inhumane, to bind and fetter all his senses and then give him the drug that will heighten them further still. He's come so close to the edge of madness already that he is very nearly afraid of what sensory deprivation in the throes of boosting could do to him.
“What’s one more dose?” the man crouching over Sherlock says. “It's what that catheter was installed for, after all.” The voice is unmistakably English- Oxbridge, definitely. Sherlock has always prided himself on his ability to place accents.
The second needle does surprise him, making a new puncture mark right next to the first: two tiny, throbbing aches on his chest now. “We both have an interest in the field,” the man says. “So here's a fun fact for your collection: small doses of amobarbital have been found to counteract the general stimulant effects of psychosteroids, without suppressing the increased neurotransmitter production of the Havel cells.” There's something subtly wrong with the accent. It's too perfectly unmistakable, Sherlock realizes, which means it’s almost certainly a deliberately adopted accent. Damn it.
“That's from Wentzler and Barnes, 1964. Every advance in the field of psychic augmentation has built upon the previous studies, in an unbroken chain stretching back to Brandenburg-Gorden in 1940.” The man chuckles. “Always with the goal of weaponizing us. Theoreticians can be so narrow-minded.”
A circle of metal is pressed against his upturned cheek. Small diameter, upraised rim but nothing felt in the center, so either it's concave or there is no center. A ring, perhaps, but it's dangerous to speculate. All this is determined in the first instant that the item touches his skin: the deductions are so reflexive as to resemble an instinct. In the next instant, his ability takes over and Sherlock's mind floods with a rush of images: Aaron Wentzler's wrinkled hand and face, the teak house where he lives, the village. The impressions are intensely strong, and not just because of the psychosteroid injection; the item was handled by Wentzler every day for years, the images stretching back until the hand ungnarls and the skin smooths. Sherlock clearly sees the wooden box on Wentzler's nightstand where he kept the object.
Sherlock's mind is muddled by barbiturates, and it is harder than it should be to focus his perception and shift through the images for Wentzler's current location. Nothing. When he tries to sense Wentzler, there's nothing. In an object with such strong, clear impressions, that can only mean two things: either Wentzler is being shaded by a very talented Shadow, or he's dead. Whoever is holding Sherlock prisoner not only abducted him within minutes of his visit to Wentzler, they have now provided an item that was taken from the man; it can't be a coincidence. Sherlock hasn't enough information to parse why, but he can see that these men are responsible whether Wentzler has been killed or simply disappeared.
“Doctor Wentzler is dead,” says the man crouching over Sherlock.
Irritating. The man deserved death, if anyone did, but Sherlock had intended public trial, public excoriation, and not incidentally public humiliation for HM's Division of Asset Management. Now Wentzler will never face justice in the legal sense and the extent of his crimes will remain a guarded secret. Sherlock likes secrets, but only because he enjoys revealing them. Losing this one makes him feel cheated.
“You really are rather slow this way,” the man says teasingly. If Sherlock could shut his mouth without suffocating, he would be grinding his teeth. Tranquilizers are hateful. “Obviously we know where Wentzler is. We're looking for the man who owned this before him.”
Sherlock could withstand physical pain, has done it before, but he's utterly unprepared for this: to be stripped of every possible entry point for data and then offered not just data, but work, a puzzle to set his mind to. It's too tempting, he can't pass it up. Besides, reading the object will only give them an advantage if he chooses to share his observations, which he won't. He can accept this invitation to analyze without agreeing to give anything away.
Try as he might, however, Sherlock can perceive nothing except Wentzler. It's not so much how he touches the object- his cheek gives him an impression no less vivid than his hand would- but he can't manipulate the thing with his cheek. That means he can't get as much physical information. And when he examines an object with his ability, especially a particularly complex one, it's best to use more than one sense. The use of all five is the ideal.
The man slides the object across his cheek until it is touching his lips. The pressure is enough to pop part of his lower lip into the indentation. No, not an indent, a hole. Sherlock's mouth gapes a bit wider as he tries to get his tongue on what is now obviously a ring, and the gloved fingers immediately pushes the ring into his mouth. The fingers withdraw quickly, as if the man fears Sherlock will bite. He can only spare a second to be offended by this before he's rolling the ring around his mouth, lost in an attempt to process and sort the myriad impressions it is giving him now that he can apply two senses to the problem instead of one.
Putting images in order and blocking those that are irrelevant is a matter of training, not inherent ability, but it still takes concentration; especially with the amobarbital slowing his processing speed. Sherlock is at last able to separate the impressions of Wentzler and set them aside. He trawls farther back in time, until he sees the ring in a different palm entirely. He pushes the ring into the roof of his mouth with his tongue, so hard it leaves an indent, and locks onto that new hand. It's paler than Wentzler's, with narrow fingers but knuckles that are quite lumpy, as if repeatedly broken. Jagged fingernails, but clean- a nail biter, not a laborer- and an ink-stained writing callous. The man’s a scholar, then, perhaps a colleague of Wentzler's.
More images. Now that his boosted ability has caught hold of the right person, it's easy; the ring is on the man's hand in every single image, which explains the strength of the impression. The man is writing, eating, smoking a cigarette, handling a syringe full of black liquid- oh yes, definitely a colleague- and inserting the needle into the skinny arm of a sandy-haired boy with wide, frightened eyes. Sherlock makes a small surprised noise. That image did not come from Wentzler’s Kenyan research station.
“An unbroken chain,” the man says to Sherlock, momentarily snapping him out of his concentration. “Wentzler's work was founded upon his, just as your own Doctor Piers' work was founded in part on Wentzler's.”
Clearly this man and whoever he represents know far more about Sherlock than he does about them. When Mycroft had sunk his fingers into Division far enough that he could have Piers' research project cut off, he had buried the records under so many layers of secrecy that even Sherlock technically lacks the clearance to see them. Sherlock wonders if anyone told the blond boy what was being done to him or why. If they did, they probably lied; it took Sherlock six years to learn exactly what had been done to him by the repeated injections of psychosteroids.
Sherlock shakes his head minutely. His mind is wandering. The amobarbitol decreases inhibitions, among other side effects; his mind is evidently more prone to flights of empathic fancy in this state. The blond boy's experiences are irrelevant now, as he is far beyond any help Sherlock could provide.
“Most of the children from that study are dead,” the man notes. “That was an early iteration of the drug. It tended to cause hemorrhaging in the cerebral cortex.” Sherlock is tonguing the roughness inside the ring; it's probably an inscription of some kind. “They used to take their brains out and study them, after.” Sherlock grips the ring tightly between his teeth. The psychosteroids Sherlock has been exposed to were never dangerous enough to kill, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous at all. How many chemical assaults can his neurons withstand before they- and his ability- die? He's seen his own MRIs and CT scans; he can easily picture the bright dots of Havel cell activity on the monitors, winking out one by one as the neurons lose oxygen and expire.
His teeth grate against the ring and he sucks in a ragged gasp of air around it. Forget that line of speculation, it’s fruitless. Focus on the problem, on the data. Where is the ring’s prior owner now?
Gray pavement, gray stone, spires and silhouettes and sky: the answer is as obvious as it is immediate. London. Sherlock has spent two decades learning his home practically brick by brick, and even drugged it’s the work of only a few seconds to identify the particular building where the scholar is located. He even knows the address. Finished, he spits the ring onto the ground. He can’t resist a small smile of pleasure at a challenge faced and conquered.
“You do justice to your reputation, my dear, even handicapped,” the man murmurs, and Sherlock hears the slide of fabric against skin and a tiny clink as he bends to pick up the ring. “If only Doctor Piers had been more ambitious...I would dearly love to see what you'd be capable of if your ability was taken off its leash.”
Another slide of cloth, and another needle plunges into Sherlock's chest. He flinches with surprise, and thinks that Piers had been rather too ambitious for his own tastes.
The man chuckles as he buttons Sherlock’s shirt back up to the collar. Sherlock can feel an even greater lethargy stealing over him, and surmises that the last syringe contained more of the sedative. He can’t muster the energy to fight the hand that pushes another plug of silicone into his ear, cutting off his hearing once more.
He can barely even manage to be angry at the fact that now, when he finally has data to work with, his mind is so fogged by sedatives that he can’t process it. He struggles to keep his eyes open, knowing that if he lets them shut he’ll be dragged unwillingly down into sleep. Knowing that he’s picking at the edges of a realization about his captor that’s vitally important. His thoughts typically move at the speed of sound or faster, the sensation of having something on the tip of his tongue is unusual and frankly intolerable. He has the facts, he just needs more time to process than normal; just a few more minutes conscious and he’ll have it. Just a few more-
He has the data.
What is he missing?