Piter Raw Chapter 5
Title: Piter Raw (part three of Four Corners of the Western World) Chapter 5 of 8
Author: pennypaperbrain
Fandom Sherlock BBC
Betas: Chloe, eldritchhorrors, russpick by madoshi
Rating: R for Chapter 5, NC-17 for the fic
Warnings for this chapter: depictions of bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation and behaviour, BDSM references
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Wordcount: Chapter 5: 5,589. Fic so far: 22,268
Spoilers: All six episodes
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Having failed to take down Kolyvanov, Sherlock and John are trapped and desperate. The lithium Sherlock is taking to combat his bipolar is having no effect, and his endurance is running out.
Please note that the mental health trigger warnings should be taken very seriously for this chapter in particular.
Also on AO3
Each fic in this series is self-contained, and they can be read separately with the help of the intro summaries, but for the best experience they should be read in order.
Four Corners of the Western World
1: Vegas High (complete): LJ, AO3
2: Malta Bright (complete): LJ, AO3
3: Piter Raw (in progress): LJ, AO3
4: Always London
Sherlock
Four o’clock on Monday morning. Sherlock paces barefoot back and forth on a ruined carpet. They are in the north of Vasilevsky island, somewhere in a sprawl of towerblocks that makes Thamesmead look like a village, in an eleventh-floor flat that has been abandoned mid-overhaul by some bankrupt or neglectful landlord. Of the two bedrooms, one has been freshly wallpapered and contains John, whom Sherlock left asleep on the floor rolled up in a blanket. The other bears signs of use by teenagers or squatters, with scrawled graffiti and charring in one corner.
This is where Sherlock paces, back and forth, eight steps each way. Then around in a circle of nineteen. He is containing himself. Quarantine. Letting John sleep.
This has been their base while they wait for Monday afternoon. They are not just waiting, of course; Sherlock has been thinking, or he has promised John that he has been thinking. In fact, after his final forced performance on the phone to Kolyvanov, something in his mind has snapped, or gone. He can think of nothing except to do as the mafioso says, to save Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. Kolyvanov’s threat is not an original one but it does not need to be: copying Moriarty has the desired effect.
All through this, Sherlock has been dutifully taking lithium. It hasn’t worked, and he is unsurprised. If he believed substances ultimately help, he would find his own cocaine. But at best a drug could only mask the core reality, which is that Sherlock is wrong, not about facts as a little mind might be, because his apprehension of facts remains unimpeded to the point where his consciousness is a tuning fork for the resonance of pain, but purely wrong in himself. He knows this, as they spend their days scrabbling for non-existent ways to get at Kolyvanov without being captured, and their nights cowering here. John rarely looks at him, and when he does it is with a distorted expression that Sherlock’s intellect reports to be distress and concern, and yet he knows that his intellect is incorrect, and John feels disgust. Sherlock is a liability.
He has failed. It would have been better to let John continue believing in Zoya; they are screwed anyway. Instead, John has stopped answering her calls. There is no plan now except to wait for Sherlock to get better. That does not happen.
What has happened is that violence has built up inside him, burgeoning until he feels it slamming against his skin. There are no distractions here. The only sound is the ping and click of metal expanding and contracting as the building’s heating system vies with the snowfall. Sherlock is infested with a sensation like white noise that drives his limbs as he paces eights steps from some Cyrillic scrawl on one side of the room to the window on the other. The window is a rectangle of half-dark, eerily snow-lit from underneath. When he looks out and eleven floors down, he sees a huge communal area dotted with smaller buildings and bounded by a march of towerblocks. Beyond them, a faint line in the farthest darkness marks where frigid sea meets sky.
He has come to the edge of the world. To the edge of himself. Everyone is behind him now. Again he remembers Zoya. For John’s sake, he almost liked her. For a while she seemed to help, like Molly, who also looked at him with that dreadful all-smothering female pity, just because he is not like her, not governed by emotion... and that is a lie. He is broken. Who did this to him? No one. His mother. His genes are corrupted.
Corrupted. Sherlock shakes his head. There is acid and static in his brain, but rationally he identifies the sensations as chemical malfunction, and remembers the words in John’s voice, bipolar disorder. Rational, survivable. He is aware of tossing his head, and whimpering, and continuing, and he is thinking very clearly and calmly, I am not doing this, because he is Sherlock Holmes, and he would never... No.
Earlier in a crowded street he repeated to John that John’s best chance of survival lay in Sherlock’s going to work for Kolyvanov, and John shouted ‘I can’t leave you!’ Sherlock wondered why the hell not, and simply walked away and then ran, and managed to lose John. It felt like the proof of something terrible and inevitable as he blundered down random streets, body slowing until he felt like an old man picking through the ubiquitous lumps of ice, and then into the Metro, his mind suffocating, his vision a blur of ungraspable gibberish. There is nothing holding John to him, he realised. He has never believed in human ties anyway, so why this one?
One of his phones kept ringing and eventually he answered. It was John, making various assertions that he liberally qualified with bloody sodding fucking hells. ‘Stay right there, I’m coming to find you,’ John said at last, so for a while Sherlock wandered up and down the same sparsely-peopled side street, trying to think of nothing, or even not think. How do you not think?
A ginger tom was lying stiff in the snowy gutter. Sherlock walked past twice, but on the third pass he knelt beside it with his magnifying glass. He deduced the time of its death and the angle and nature of the vehicle strike, and then he could not look away, although a woman across the road was staring, because something had changed in his relationship with death. Death was no longer an external fact for him to study and assess, but an extension of his self, a home, a language far more intimate than words. He touched the cat’s bloodied, frozen face, and accepted the need to balance the equation between his own sound body and broken mind. He needed, needs to die. The clarity of that is terror and relief.
No. Sherlock is here, and even asleep John grounds him. Sherlock is reason. Sherlock is in this room on Vasilevsky Island and he will hold his mind intact, through reason. He wheels and paces right up to the wall again. He cannot read the words - Эта женщина больна, эта женщина одна... Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает... Ночь... - but he is Sherlock, and he can and will read the world itself instead. The graffiti, apparently lyrics, was written by a tall female with long fingers. She was using an isopropanol-based marker pen. Yes, that is reason. Facts in their place, like the solidity of the towerblocks beyond the window, the itch of the mouldering carpet under his toes, the pressure of his hands clutching the sides of his head, the knowledge that there is no way out, that he has failed John, that he cannot read, cannot think, acid is eating his brain... Sherlock falls to his knees, hands hitting dirty concrete where the carpet is ripped, and grit bites into his palms, and the pain is a fragment of life, as if this was SM, but no touch answers his.
There was John... Sherlock searches his mind for John, catching at images and sense traces: how he met John’s eyes over police tape at the college, how he fell through grief and pain and John fucked him and held him and loved him. The memories glint, defined and perfect, then spin away from his grasp, pebble-smooth and inaccessible as snowglobes. Sherlock rolls onto his back in the dust and thinks John, John, and he cannot remember meaning or taste or texture but the name still has weight to it, the heft of a hand taking his hand, although there is nothing there and his knuckles scrape concrete.
It is not enough. Sherlock’s life is being taken from him, as surely as if Kolyvanov had shot him. Worms riddle his brain, and his head jerks up, down, up, because there is no way out of this thing that is not a thing and is everything. Far above the suffering, his sovereign intellect reports that he is going insane, and he holds on to John’s phantom hand as he lets the fantasies irrupt: he walks into the sea as his mother did... he buys chemicals from a corner kiosk and dies convulsing and biting through his tongue... he pays Kolyvanov to kill him so his suicide will bring John less pain... he takes the rope from the bottom of John’s backpack, attaches it to the exposed girder in the half-wrecked ceiling over his head and chokes and thrashes as he dies... Die. It is a command and a solace, a duty and a right. After all, John was angry with his failure at Bart’s. It is logical to complete what he started and align flesh with reality. He could go to John now, and ease one of the pistols from underneath his sleeping body. John might even wake, and sit up, and see, and Sherlock would shove the grease-cold barrel against the back of his throat, and John would nod, smiling a cold, mild smile, and Sherlock would... so good, so right. Release.
No. In the graffiti room he staggers back to his feet. All he wants is a moment of forgetfulness, rest from fighting this, the blissful freedom to simply yank open the window that is metres from his head, climb over the sill and end - but inside him is a stark, stripped voice, repeating Please don’t kill yourself, and if he cannot identify or answer it then still it allies with the fragment-self that pins him to the body that breathes and moves and blinks and wants to piss. There is nothing to worry about: he cannot be mad, not when he is so relentlessly present in his exhausted flesh, this ragged, snow-lit room. Foul images teem like flies from the root of him. Blood. Entrails. Kolyvanov. Death. Please don’t kill yourself. Yet the only way to escape from death is to die. He must get closer to death.
Sherlock stumbles over and throws open the window so that it hits the wall with a crash. He leans outside. A freezing snow-flurry slams into him as he looks down eleven floors at the bland whiteness of the ground, and imagines his body ruptured and still, blood staining the snow, internal and external realities at one. Such violence, such peace, and the suffering would disperse like breath into the wind that whips ice into his face as he leans further out, lifting his knee to the sill. In three seconds he could be dying. Massive blunt force trauma: there is relief in the description, its solid, impersonal truth. Mundane concepts atomise into disconnected slivers - John. lithium. hope. John. - and are carried away on the gale. Meaning is no longer relevant. Sherlock rolls his head down, up, down with the currents of air. All that is left to him is what he sees, white ground, black sky and grey buildings between. The anticipation, the tangible imminence of death.
In the furthest of the huge apartment blocks, something catches his eye.
Sherlock blinks. Automatically his mind attempts to identify and deduce... but it skids on an absence of detail. All he knows is that he observed movement. Then he sees it again, in a block much closer to him, and realises: it’s a light flickering on in someone’s window. Every few seconds, in fact, now that he pays attention, he can see a tiny square somewhere in the maze of concrete either kindle to yellow or fade to black. He draws back a little, knee still on the ledge but body almost vertical, and stares at the slow dance of the lights. It has no system and no meaning, but it gives him pause. Like London, St Petersburg is a city of souls. Sherlock is suspended among them, between Zoya and Kolyvanov, between the distant lights and the lines on the wall, between his mangled corpse and John’s warm body spooned around him. He is of the world. No respite.
Please don’t kill yourself... he remembers. You’re why I stopped.
Behind him, Sherlock hears a faint creak. And the voice:
‘Sherlock? Fuck - get away from the window! SHERLOCK!’
John
John stirs in his blankets, dimly aware of a noise elsewhere in the flat. Sherlock seems to be gone from his side; probably having a piss. John hopes he hasn’t blundered into Mama Yevdokimova’s room, which was a mistake John nearly made the other night.
John wraps himself more tightly in the covers, and lets his mind wander on the edge of dreams. He’s warm and drowsy and vaguely aware that there are facts he’s forgotten, but he doesn’t want to retrieve them right now. His thoughts wander to the exposed beam in the other room, and how he would bind Sherlock’s hands over his head and Sherlock’s long body would stretch down naked from his captured wrists to his waist. In John’s mind, Sherlock is not gaunt but simply lean, muscled and healthy again. His dark hair curls against his neck, and when John looks into his eyes Sherlock is there, expectant and arrogant and fierce.
When a braided whip appears in John’s hand he strikes with perfect accuracy at Sherlock’s naked back and jeans-clad arse. Sherlock jerks and cries out, his bare feet scuffing the floor. John sees and owns the twist of his muscles as he struggles to cope with the pain, and the arch and flow of his neck as he masters it, whimpering out hurt and arousal and need. The fantasy blurs, and simultaneously John is behind Sherlock, hurting him, and in front of him, holding his waist, kissing him, tasting and sharing heat and want. ‘John, it hurts,’ moans Sherlock, and the pain in his voice is aphrodisiac, and John holds him tight and bites his throat while Sherlock ruts against him, because this is how they make love, out of nothing, out of fear and grief and the world’s rejects, a profusion of kisses, welts, pain, comfort, need and satiety, and John throws out his whip arm... and it hits the hard floor, and he wakes up properly, and Sherlock is not with him.
John sits up and rubs his eyes. He feels heavy, with the beginnings of a headache at the base of his skull. Now he remembers where he is, and registers that Sherlock has been gone for some time. That is unlikely to mean anything good.
John does not panic. If he was going to do that, it would have happened at some point during the dismal past two days they’ve spent scrabbling around the edges of Piter’s criminal underground, achieving nothing, while Sherlock visibly fades. Instead, he wraps himself in a couple of blankets and pads out into the chilly corridor, alert for sounds. The lithium isn’t working, he knows that much, and Sherlock has point-blank refused an additional anti-depressant. After they were up most of Saturday night fruitlessly chasing an elusive contact from bar to bar, John had planned to get a good night’s sleep and then do... something. Something decisive, somehow. He feels that he’s been waiting, without even knowing for what, and Monday afternoon is getting close.
When he hears sounds in the other bedroom, he can’t quite identify them. A last wisp of sleep seems wrapped around him, as if this were nothing more than a small-hours excursion to the bathroom at Baker Street. Blearily, he opens the door.
The icy air on the far side wakens him like a slap. A trail of snow is scattered, melting, across the charred carpet. It leads to the window, where Sherlock, in jeans and a thin sweatshirt, is leaning out into the air, kept from falling only by his knee on the sill and one hand on the frame.
John’s eyes fix on that hand, where it grips the plastic. Such long fingers Sherlock has, he thinks. Such long, elegant fingers to search a body or draw a violin bow or twine with his own. Those thoughts fill his mind. They are trying to block the entry of the realisation that this is what he was waiting for: to fail, to see Sherlock die. Again.
The horror and the grief are not banished, they are the one reality. The rest was a dream.
‘Sherlock! Fuck - get away from the window! SHERLOCK! ’
John is shouting, and he doesn’t know how he’s doing it, because inside he is pant-pissing terrified. The bravery and the fighting and the bearing and the coping were only swagger, because he cannot handle this reality, the final confirmation that he is just a fool in love with a madman who will die. But he’s trying anyway, he’s starting across the acre of floor, feeling like his limbs are lead.
Then, before John can reach him, Sherlock has coiled around somehow, and is thank God fully inside the building. His feet hit the floor and he stands half-crouched, staring at John with his head cocked like a bird. His eyes glint in the half-dark against the backdrop of whirling snow, but there is so little expression in them that John almost wonders if this is really him.
‘What? ’ Sherlock demands. His voice is contemptuous, distant. Has he had a psychotic break? John cannot handle this.
John will handle this. He has treated acutely traumatised soldiers, more than one of them suicidal. He had more drugs to hand then, but really you cannot ‘save’ someone. You can only offer your human self. And John dedicated himself to Sherlock some time ago.
He unwinds one of the blankets from his shoulders and holds it out. His hand is trembling.
‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Come back. Whatever is - I - please, you.’ Apparently dealing is one thing and making sense another. ‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock...’
Possibly John’s gone mad himself, because he can’t stop repeating the name. Sherlock stops him by taking the blanket, if only to drape it over his arm, and shutting the window.
The movements are so ordinary that John feels his heartbeat settle. He reclaims the blanket and drapes it around Sherlock’s shoulders, and Sherlock huddles into the extra warmth, as if he was coming back to his body. John steers him towards the wall and he leans against it then slides down to sit, his head bisecting the Cyrillic graffiti Где же ты теперь, воля вольная? John bloody well hopes that means something pleasant. He himself sits on the floor as well, watching as Sherlock continues to come at least part way back, his face losing some of its rigidity, the look in his eyes exhausted and scared but more natural.
‘Of course - I’m bloody - I’m here,’ says Sherlock, though the words crack so badly that John has to fill in missing syllables. John reaches for Sherlock’s hand, which is freezing, and presses it between both his own.
‘Sherlock, what’s the fucking point of me loving you if -’ John stops because it is not the right time for a rant, and then starts again because he can’t leave that sentence hanging. - if you’re going to die again?’
A long pause. John scrambles to collect himself enough to speak calmly the next time.
‘I was trying not to kill myself,’ says Sherlock. ‘I...’
Another pause. John squeezes Sherlock’s fingers, and Sherlock’s thumb curls around John’s in response. What Sherlock said doesn’t make a lot of sense, but John is trying to believe it, because the alternative... he cannot protect Sherlock from the alternative, not alone. He needs the resources of the NHS, and specialists, and probably a locked ward. Oh God, Sherlock on a locked ward... better than Sherlock dead.
‘OK, but you - you weren’t doing very well,’ John says, letting his words catch and trip over each other. ‘Do not leave me! We’ll sort out Kolyvanov somehow. We are going to get home, and you are going to get better. I know you can do this. I know how strong you can be.’
John hopes for a response, but Sherlock stays silent. His body is limp, with his back against the wall and his legs flung out akimbo. He seems to be retreating inside himself, and John does not want to let him go. He grips tighter, and Sherlock looks down at their entwined hands, as if in thought.
‘Before I met you I would not have bothered to try,’ he says. It comes out all in one smooth sentence, almost normal-sounding, and John has to think for a moment before he matches it with Sherlock’s previous words.
Jesus Christ. There isn’t really a follow-up to that, or not one that doesn’t involve John sobbing. He rubs a hand over his face, leans forward to hug Sherlock, and then stops himself, because Sherlock really is unnaturally still now, as if he had simply switched off, and pawing at an unresponsive body is not what John wants to do either.
‘Sherlock, you are taking the lithium, aren’t you?’ asks John sharply. ‘Lithium and nothing else?’ The man sprawled in front of him looks all too much like he must have done when...
‘Yes,’ Sherlock says, his voice slightly slurred.
John relaxes a little, and arranges the blanket more tightly around Sherlock’s shoulders. He is slumping inch by inch further down the wall, as crumpled as if he’d just landed there after being thrown. The sight is frightening; and it actually makes John a little less afraid. It’s necessary communication, Sherlock finally allowing John to see how ill he is.
‘I still think the lithium will kick in,’ John says. ‘If it doesn’t, we add an antidepressant.’
Sherlock doesn’t respond. He has his head turned as if he was listening to something inside. Maybe he is, or maybe he’s just stalled and is thinking of nothing.
John could worry about that but it wouldn’t help. Instead, he scoots around to sit against the wall, placing his hand in Sherlock’s before fixing his eyes on some Cyrillic scrawl and trying to sound it out as a way of inducing patience. Before long he fails to remember what the letter that looks like a ‘3’ sounds like and gives up. So much for that.
John looks side-on at Sherlock. He seems to be thinking, except that the unnatural stillness of his face, as he apparently studies his own forearm protruding limply from the blanket, gives him away.
‘Sherlock?’ says John. He would rather let Sherlock come back in his own time, but the thought of him somehow wandering lost in the ruins of his mind palace until he’s out of reach... ‘Sherlock!’
Sherlock draws his knees part-way up, leans forwards and starts to bang his head from side to side. He is staring with a bewildered, utterly inward gaze. His eyes and also his clenched teeth glint in the half-light. A low moan intermittently escapes him.
Jesus. John doesn’t, can’t, think. He just moves around in front of Sherlock, wraps an arm around his shoulders and tries to simply be present. For a few seconds they sway awkwardly together, then abruptly Sherlock goes statue-still again. John is steeling himself to accept this when Sherlock pulls away with such a jerk that his head thuds against the wall.
‘I am behaving insanely!’ he announces in an almost conversational voice. ‘I am not physically...’ Sherlock stops talking as if a signal had cut out. ‘... impaired,’ he finishes three seconds later. ‘I do not want normal, but.... I can tell a man’s life history from his clothes but I am losing the end of sentences. If my brain is broken, what’s the use?’
The sound of Sherlock’s voice is a relief in itself. Yet he is apparently fighting to analyse his own thought processes while they disintegrate. John tries not to choke on the idea.
‘Well, things can be broken but still powerful,’ he manages to say almost lightly. ‘Like... like... Chernobyl.’
Sherlock brings a hand up and slaps himself on the side of the head.
‘Chernobyl!’ he says, and there is a ghost of amusement in his voice. ‘What do you think.... in here?’
John watches intently, his thoughts racing. He will help.
‘I think you’re very deep inside yourself,’ he says. ‘But you’ve left a part at the surface so we can talk. An avatar.’
‘Yes. Ten per cent... of me. Ten per cent is ample for holding -’ a long pause, and a nod that seems strangely drunken, like the slap ‘- a conversation with you. Sorry.’
John hesitates. An apology? There’s something off about that. Yet he has to respond.
‘Don’t apologise for being ill,’ he says. ‘You can only manage what you can manage.’
John suspects this is the wrong answer. What he hasn’t anticipated is Sherlock lurching to his feet to stand there looming and swaying slightly.
‘Only?’ he demands, voice suddenly almost crisp. ‘I can “manage” anything, John! It’s all a choice!’
Jesus, now what? John blunders to his feet, trying not to twist his numb ankle. Before he can work out what else to do, Sherlock almost skips into the middle of the floor and becomes someone else... It’s Zoya, doing what John thinks of as the ‘mad foreigners in my flat’ routine, with one hand nervously rubbing the other forearm. Then Sherlock shifts, and he’s Kolyvanov, piercing-eyed and open-mouthed, extending a hand with an invisible cigar toward John’s eye. The impressions are pitch-perfect.
‘What...?’ demands John, disturbed on enough levels that he doesn’t know where to begin. ‘What...?’
Sherlock snaps back to being himself. He steeples his trembling hands at his lips.
‘The point, John, is that everything is an act. I choose to be weak or I choose to cope. Everything is willpower, and I am...’ Sherlock’s voice is vibrating with tension and disgust. ‘There is no excuse for me. No excuse for what I inflict.’
John massages his forehead. He finally thinks he knows what’s going on here; at any rate he has to believe he does. ‘OK, fine,’ he says. ‘Sometimes there is no excuse for the way you behave, you’re bloody right. But it’s you all over, to admit that at the one moment when it’s absolutely not the case! Do you actually think you chose to be ill, and I should blame you for it? Sherlock, even in the army they don’t make you march until you drop dead!’
‘I do not see the relevance of that statement,’ Sherlock replies in a low, almost threatening voice, scrutinising John as if expecting an attack.
‘Well I do!’ John has to suppress an hysterical laugh. ‘You are desperately bloody ill, and I can see it’s not an act even if you can’t. What you’re doing right now, putting on this show, is using resources you don’t really have. You’re chopping up bits of yourself and chucking them on the fire for fuel. And yes, it’s amazing that you’ve got the willpower to do that. But it terrifies me, because it’s also the surest fucking route out the window!’
John stops. He thought he was going to say more, maybe soften the message, but with Sherlock there would be little point. Either reality works on him, or nothing will. John can only hope the part that wants to live is listening.
To give Sherlock space, John busies himself adjusting the blanket he is, rather ridiculously, clutching around himself. When he looks up, he regrets his inattention. Sherlock has moved back to lean against the wall, hunching over, hugging himself as if cold.
‘What do you suggest, then?’ he says, looking up in the half-darkness. The familiar bitterness in his tone is easier to bear than the new humility blended with it. ‘I should accept... the loss of my mind?’
‘It isn’t lost for good,’ says John. ‘You should fight - but not now. When the time comes. When we take down Kolyvanov.’
‘And you believe we will do that? With me like this?’
Silence. John is caught between a lie and what he fears is the truth.
‘I do not know how to bear this,’ Sherlock says, as if explaining, as he slides down the wall and then tips over to lie on the blanket. ‘I seldom experience the impulse... to cry. Now... capacity is gone.’
John goes down on his knees, and tucks the blanket around Sherlock. ‘I understand. I’m not going anywhere. Just quit doing live commentary on your own nervous breakdown.’ Pause. ‘Or maybe you can’t stop.’ Maybe it’s what Sherlock has left.
Sherlock convulses, drawing his head down under the blanket and his legs up into foetal position. John strokes a curl that pokes out into the air, and waits.
‘I remain able to refrain... from this exhibition, yet... on medical advice...’ Sherlock says, voice muffled. ‘If I am a machine, I... self-diagnostic. Abhorrent... Lacuna... Misfire.’
‘You’re not a machine,’ says John. That word is his fault, but at least that gives him the right to deny it. ‘You’re a genius. We aren’t dead yet, and we’ll get the better of Kolyvanov, because...’
John does not actually know because what. He pauses for a moment to take stock, and listens to Sherlock’s breathing - it’s no longer quick and pained. Instead it’s slowing down, drawing out, and as John waits he realises to his surprise and relief that Sherlock is actually falling asleep. Eventually he hears a little snore.
Either Sherlock is faking, which seems unlikely at the moment, or some healthy part of his mind has mercifully shut him down. This is an unexpected respite.
John goes to the window and leans an elbow on the sill. He can hear his own breath, and Sherlock’s, and the moan of the wind outside as snow whirls past. He looks at his palm and fingers, and they curl into a fist on their own while his mind seems to be blank. Delayed shock, he registers.
Looking outside, he sees what Sherlock must have seen when he crouched here - hundreds of windows, mostly dark, with a few lights coming on. Down on one of the plank-paths laid across the snow a small figure is trudging towards the door of the boiler room for this block. The day is starting, even though, this far north, dawn doesn’t come until mid-morning.
Ordinary life. The kind of things that always tether John to earth, even in battles where death and extremity are daily currency. To Sherlock they are data at best, and usually just inanities. Is Sherlock right? Is their best and kindest hope for John to take his gun, lie down with his temple against Sherlock’s, and...
The shock detonates.
John doubles over, torched by the horror of things he has seen, and things barely averted, and what might happen yet. Tears course down his cheeks and he bites into his fist to keep silent. So many times he has failed to protect the ones he loves, and almost it happened again. It will not. Not because of a treatable illness, and certainly not for a thug like Kolyvanov, who thinks he survived Afghanistan but instead was driven mad.
John survived. His rage is a living rage. He is a soldier, and he has the measure of darkness and fire. While Sherlock fights in the world, John will fight beside him. While Sherlock fights in his head, John will stand guard.
He straightens up. He must not make a noise so he marshals control in each of his limbs before padding through the dark to the wallpaper room, and returning with his clothes, a gun and the flat’s one wooden chair. Sherlock must not wake alone, so John fights off his own need for sleep, arranging himself bolt upright and turning over plans in his mind.
None of the plans are viable. He is not a strategist, he knows, and when on guard duty in the army he usually daydreamed of the wife and the kids and the semi that he never seemed to want when he got home again. Now for sustenance he turns to images of himself and Sherlock back in London, running, laughing, fucking, chasing criminals over rooftops. That is the life they chose. They will survive to return to it.
Snow falls, and the night lengthens.
Out in the hallway, there is a harsh buzz.
It’s the door entry system. John stiffens. He grasps his gun and heads into the dark corridor. The buzzer goes again, twice. Then silence.
Sherlock appears in the door of the graffiti room, a dishevelled silhouette. What mental state he’s in, John has no idea, but it’s possible sleep has helped. John assumes it has; they’re probably dead otherwise.
‘It could be a mistake,’ says John, staring at the white entryphone, which of course tells him nothing. ‘But that’s not how our luck goes. Grab the important stuff, quickly. Your gun’s in the wallpaper room. Get ready to shoot and run.’
Sherlock nods and does what he’s told. By the time he comes back, dressed, the buzzer is going bananas.
‘If they were going to shoot their way in, they’d have done it,’ says Sherlock. ‘If we make them talk to us we at least gain data.’ He picks up the handset and says in a disguised voice, ‘Zdravstvuite?’
Heart beating, John leans in to listen.
‘Sherlock Holmes, idiot, let me in, or ask John to come down if you are suspicious! Everyone is looking! It’s me, Zoya!’
Author: pennypaperbrain
Fandom Sherlock BBC
Betas: Chloe, eldritchhorrors, russpick by madoshi
Rating: R for Chapter 5, NC-17 for the fic
Warnings for this chapter: depictions of bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation and behaviour, BDSM references
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Wordcount: Chapter 5: 5,589. Fic so far: 22,268
Spoilers: All six episodes
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Having failed to take down Kolyvanov, Sherlock and John are trapped and desperate. The lithium Sherlock is taking to combat his bipolar is having no effect, and his endurance is running out.
Please note that the mental health trigger warnings should be taken very seriously for this chapter in particular.
Also on AO3
Each fic in this series is self-contained, and they can be read separately with the help of the intro summaries, but for the best experience they should be read in order.
Four Corners of the Western World
1: Vegas High (complete): LJ, AO3
2: Malta Bright (complete): LJ, AO3
3: Piter Raw (in progress): LJ, AO3
4: Always London
Sherlock
Four o’clock on Monday morning. Sherlock paces barefoot back and forth on a ruined carpet. They are in the north of Vasilevsky island, somewhere in a sprawl of towerblocks that makes Thamesmead look like a village, in an eleventh-floor flat that has been abandoned mid-overhaul by some bankrupt or neglectful landlord. Of the two bedrooms, one has been freshly wallpapered and contains John, whom Sherlock left asleep on the floor rolled up in a blanket. The other bears signs of use by teenagers or squatters, with scrawled graffiti and charring in one corner.
This is where Sherlock paces, back and forth, eight steps each way. Then around in a circle of nineteen. He is containing himself. Quarantine. Letting John sleep.
This has been their base while they wait for Monday afternoon. They are not just waiting, of course; Sherlock has been thinking, or he has promised John that he has been thinking. In fact, after his final forced performance on the phone to Kolyvanov, something in his mind has snapped, or gone. He can think of nothing except to do as the mafioso says, to save Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. Kolyvanov’s threat is not an original one but it does not need to be: copying Moriarty has the desired effect.
All through this, Sherlock has been dutifully taking lithium. It hasn’t worked, and he is unsurprised. If he believed substances ultimately help, he would find his own cocaine. But at best a drug could only mask the core reality, which is that Sherlock is wrong, not about facts as a little mind might be, because his apprehension of facts remains unimpeded to the point where his consciousness is a tuning fork for the resonance of pain, but purely wrong in himself. He knows this, as they spend their days scrabbling for non-existent ways to get at Kolyvanov without being captured, and their nights cowering here. John rarely looks at him, and when he does it is with a distorted expression that Sherlock’s intellect reports to be distress and concern, and yet he knows that his intellect is incorrect, and John feels disgust. Sherlock is a liability.
He has failed. It would have been better to let John continue believing in Zoya; they are screwed anyway. Instead, John has stopped answering her calls. There is no plan now except to wait for Sherlock to get better. That does not happen.
What has happened is that violence has built up inside him, burgeoning until he feels it slamming against his skin. There are no distractions here. The only sound is the ping and click of metal expanding and contracting as the building’s heating system vies with the snowfall. Sherlock is infested with a sensation like white noise that drives his limbs as he paces eights steps from some Cyrillic scrawl on one side of the room to the window on the other. The window is a rectangle of half-dark, eerily snow-lit from underneath. When he looks out and eleven floors down, he sees a huge communal area dotted with smaller buildings and bounded by a march of towerblocks. Beyond them, a faint line in the farthest darkness marks where frigid sea meets sky.
He has come to the edge of the world. To the edge of himself. Everyone is behind him now. Again he remembers Zoya. For John’s sake, he almost liked her. For a while she seemed to help, like Molly, who also looked at him with that dreadful all-smothering female pity, just because he is not like her, not governed by emotion... and that is a lie. He is broken. Who did this to him? No one. His mother. His genes are corrupted.
Corrupted. Sherlock shakes his head. There is acid and static in his brain, but rationally he identifies the sensations as chemical malfunction, and remembers the words in John’s voice, bipolar disorder. Rational, survivable. He is aware of tossing his head, and whimpering, and continuing, and he is thinking very clearly and calmly, I am not doing this, because he is Sherlock Holmes, and he would never... No.
Earlier in a crowded street he repeated to John that John’s best chance of survival lay in Sherlock’s going to work for Kolyvanov, and John shouted ‘I can’t leave you!’ Sherlock wondered why the hell not, and simply walked away and then ran, and managed to lose John. It felt like the proof of something terrible and inevitable as he blundered down random streets, body slowing until he felt like an old man picking through the ubiquitous lumps of ice, and then into the Metro, his mind suffocating, his vision a blur of ungraspable gibberish. There is nothing holding John to him, he realised. He has never believed in human ties anyway, so why this one?
One of his phones kept ringing and eventually he answered. It was John, making various assertions that he liberally qualified with bloody sodding fucking hells. ‘Stay right there, I’m coming to find you,’ John said at last, so for a while Sherlock wandered up and down the same sparsely-peopled side street, trying to think of nothing, or even not think. How do you not think?
A ginger tom was lying stiff in the snowy gutter. Sherlock walked past twice, but on the third pass he knelt beside it with his magnifying glass. He deduced the time of its death and the angle and nature of the vehicle strike, and then he could not look away, although a woman across the road was staring, because something had changed in his relationship with death. Death was no longer an external fact for him to study and assess, but an extension of his self, a home, a language far more intimate than words. He touched the cat’s bloodied, frozen face, and accepted the need to balance the equation between his own sound body and broken mind. He needed, needs to die. The clarity of that is terror and relief.
No. Sherlock is here, and even asleep John grounds him. Sherlock is reason. Sherlock is in this room on Vasilevsky Island and he will hold his mind intact, through reason. He wheels and paces right up to the wall again. He cannot read the words - Эта женщина больна, эта женщина одна... Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает... Ночь... - but he is Sherlock, and he can and will read the world itself instead. The graffiti, apparently lyrics, was written by a tall female with long fingers. She was using an isopropanol-based marker pen. Yes, that is reason. Facts in their place, like the solidity of the towerblocks beyond the window, the itch of the mouldering carpet under his toes, the pressure of his hands clutching the sides of his head, the knowledge that there is no way out, that he has failed John, that he cannot read, cannot think, acid is eating his brain... Sherlock falls to his knees, hands hitting dirty concrete where the carpet is ripped, and grit bites into his palms, and the pain is a fragment of life, as if this was SM, but no touch answers his.
There was John... Sherlock searches his mind for John, catching at images and sense traces: how he met John’s eyes over police tape at the college, how he fell through grief and pain and John fucked him and held him and loved him. The memories glint, defined and perfect, then spin away from his grasp, pebble-smooth and inaccessible as snowglobes. Sherlock rolls onto his back in the dust and thinks John, John, and he cannot remember meaning or taste or texture but the name still has weight to it, the heft of a hand taking his hand, although there is nothing there and his knuckles scrape concrete.
It is not enough. Sherlock’s life is being taken from him, as surely as if Kolyvanov had shot him. Worms riddle his brain, and his head jerks up, down, up, because there is no way out of this thing that is not a thing and is everything. Far above the suffering, his sovereign intellect reports that he is going insane, and he holds on to John’s phantom hand as he lets the fantasies irrupt: he walks into the sea as his mother did... he buys chemicals from a corner kiosk and dies convulsing and biting through his tongue... he pays Kolyvanov to kill him so his suicide will bring John less pain... he takes the rope from the bottom of John’s backpack, attaches it to the exposed girder in the half-wrecked ceiling over his head and chokes and thrashes as he dies... Die. It is a command and a solace, a duty and a right. After all, John was angry with his failure at Bart’s. It is logical to complete what he started and align flesh with reality. He could go to John now, and ease one of the pistols from underneath his sleeping body. John might even wake, and sit up, and see, and Sherlock would shove the grease-cold barrel against the back of his throat, and John would nod, smiling a cold, mild smile, and Sherlock would... so good, so right. Release.
No. In the graffiti room he staggers back to his feet. All he wants is a moment of forgetfulness, rest from fighting this, the blissful freedom to simply yank open the window that is metres from his head, climb over the sill and end - but inside him is a stark, stripped voice, repeating Please don’t kill yourself, and if he cannot identify or answer it then still it allies with the fragment-self that pins him to the body that breathes and moves and blinks and wants to piss. There is nothing to worry about: he cannot be mad, not when he is so relentlessly present in his exhausted flesh, this ragged, snow-lit room. Foul images teem like flies from the root of him. Blood. Entrails. Kolyvanov. Death. Please don’t kill yourself. Yet the only way to escape from death is to die. He must get closer to death.
Sherlock stumbles over and throws open the window so that it hits the wall with a crash. He leans outside. A freezing snow-flurry slams into him as he looks down eleven floors at the bland whiteness of the ground, and imagines his body ruptured and still, blood staining the snow, internal and external realities at one. Such violence, such peace, and the suffering would disperse like breath into the wind that whips ice into his face as he leans further out, lifting his knee to the sill. In three seconds he could be dying. Massive blunt force trauma: there is relief in the description, its solid, impersonal truth. Mundane concepts atomise into disconnected slivers - John. lithium. hope. John. - and are carried away on the gale. Meaning is no longer relevant. Sherlock rolls his head down, up, down with the currents of air. All that is left to him is what he sees, white ground, black sky and grey buildings between. The anticipation, the tangible imminence of death.
In the furthest of the huge apartment blocks, something catches his eye.
Sherlock blinks. Automatically his mind attempts to identify and deduce... but it skids on an absence of detail. All he knows is that he observed movement. Then he sees it again, in a block much closer to him, and realises: it’s a light flickering on in someone’s window. Every few seconds, in fact, now that he pays attention, he can see a tiny square somewhere in the maze of concrete either kindle to yellow or fade to black. He draws back a little, knee still on the ledge but body almost vertical, and stares at the slow dance of the lights. It has no system and no meaning, but it gives him pause. Like London, St Petersburg is a city of souls. Sherlock is suspended among them, between Zoya and Kolyvanov, between the distant lights and the lines on the wall, between his mangled corpse and John’s warm body spooned around him. He is of the world. No respite.
Please don’t kill yourself... he remembers. You’re why I stopped.
Behind him, Sherlock hears a faint creak. And the voice:
‘Sherlock? Fuck - get away from the window! SHERLOCK!’
John
John stirs in his blankets, dimly aware of a noise elsewhere in the flat. Sherlock seems to be gone from his side; probably having a piss. John hopes he hasn’t blundered into Mama Yevdokimova’s room, which was a mistake John nearly made the other night.
John wraps himself more tightly in the covers, and lets his mind wander on the edge of dreams. He’s warm and drowsy and vaguely aware that there are facts he’s forgotten, but he doesn’t want to retrieve them right now. His thoughts wander to the exposed beam in the other room, and how he would bind Sherlock’s hands over his head and Sherlock’s long body would stretch down naked from his captured wrists to his waist. In John’s mind, Sherlock is not gaunt but simply lean, muscled and healthy again. His dark hair curls against his neck, and when John looks into his eyes Sherlock is there, expectant and arrogant and fierce.
When a braided whip appears in John’s hand he strikes with perfect accuracy at Sherlock’s naked back and jeans-clad arse. Sherlock jerks and cries out, his bare feet scuffing the floor. John sees and owns the twist of his muscles as he struggles to cope with the pain, and the arch and flow of his neck as he masters it, whimpering out hurt and arousal and need. The fantasy blurs, and simultaneously John is behind Sherlock, hurting him, and in front of him, holding his waist, kissing him, tasting and sharing heat and want. ‘John, it hurts,’ moans Sherlock, and the pain in his voice is aphrodisiac, and John holds him tight and bites his throat while Sherlock ruts against him, because this is how they make love, out of nothing, out of fear and grief and the world’s rejects, a profusion of kisses, welts, pain, comfort, need and satiety, and John throws out his whip arm... and it hits the hard floor, and he wakes up properly, and Sherlock is not with him.
John sits up and rubs his eyes. He feels heavy, with the beginnings of a headache at the base of his skull. Now he remembers where he is, and registers that Sherlock has been gone for some time. That is unlikely to mean anything good.
John does not panic. If he was going to do that, it would have happened at some point during the dismal past two days they’ve spent scrabbling around the edges of Piter’s criminal underground, achieving nothing, while Sherlock visibly fades. Instead, he wraps himself in a couple of blankets and pads out into the chilly corridor, alert for sounds. The lithium isn’t working, he knows that much, and Sherlock has point-blank refused an additional anti-depressant. After they were up most of Saturday night fruitlessly chasing an elusive contact from bar to bar, John had planned to get a good night’s sleep and then do... something. Something decisive, somehow. He feels that he’s been waiting, without even knowing for what, and Monday afternoon is getting close.
When he hears sounds in the other bedroom, he can’t quite identify them. A last wisp of sleep seems wrapped around him, as if this were nothing more than a small-hours excursion to the bathroom at Baker Street. Blearily, he opens the door.
The icy air on the far side wakens him like a slap. A trail of snow is scattered, melting, across the charred carpet. It leads to the window, where Sherlock, in jeans and a thin sweatshirt, is leaning out into the air, kept from falling only by his knee on the sill and one hand on the frame.
John’s eyes fix on that hand, where it grips the plastic. Such long fingers Sherlock has, he thinks. Such long, elegant fingers to search a body or draw a violin bow or twine with his own. Those thoughts fill his mind. They are trying to block the entry of the realisation that this is what he was waiting for: to fail, to see Sherlock die. Again.
The horror and the grief are not banished, they are the one reality. The rest was a dream.
‘Sherlock! Fuck - get away from the window! SHERLOCK! ’
John is shouting, and he doesn’t know how he’s doing it, because inside he is pant-pissing terrified. The bravery and the fighting and the bearing and the coping were only swagger, because he cannot handle this reality, the final confirmation that he is just a fool in love with a madman who will die. But he’s trying anyway, he’s starting across the acre of floor, feeling like his limbs are lead.
Then, before John can reach him, Sherlock has coiled around somehow, and is thank God fully inside the building. His feet hit the floor and he stands half-crouched, staring at John with his head cocked like a bird. His eyes glint in the half-dark against the backdrop of whirling snow, but there is so little expression in them that John almost wonders if this is really him.
‘What? ’ Sherlock demands. His voice is contemptuous, distant. Has he had a psychotic break? John cannot handle this.
John will handle this. He has treated acutely traumatised soldiers, more than one of them suicidal. He had more drugs to hand then, but really you cannot ‘save’ someone. You can only offer your human self. And John dedicated himself to Sherlock some time ago.
He unwinds one of the blankets from his shoulders and holds it out. His hand is trembling.
‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Come back. Whatever is - I - please, you.’ Apparently dealing is one thing and making sense another. ‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock...’
Possibly John’s gone mad himself, because he can’t stop repeating the name. Sherlock stops him by taking the blanket, if only to drape it over his arm, and shutting the window.
The movements are so ordinary that John feels his heartbeat settle. He reclaims the blanket and drapes it around Sherlock’s shoulders, and Sherlock huddles into the extra warmth, as if he was coming back to his body. John steers him towards the wall and he leans against it then slides down to sit, his head bisecting the Cyrillic graffiti Где же ты теперь, воля вольная? John bloody well hopes that means something pleasant. He himself sits on the floor as well, watching as Sherlock continues to come at least part way back, his face losing some of its rigidity, the look in his eyes exhausted and scared but more natural.
‘Of course - I’m bloody - I’m here,’ says Sherlock, though the words crack so badly that John has to fill in missing syllables. John reaches for Sherlock’s hand, which is freezing, and presses it between both his own.
‘Sherlock, what’s the fucking point of me loving you if -’ John stops because it is not the right time for a rant, and then starts again because he can’t leave that sentence hanging. - if you’re going to die again?’
A long pause. John scrambles to collect himself enough to speak calmly the next time.
‘I was trying not to kill myself,’ says Sherlock. ‘I...’
Another pause. John squeezes Sherlock’s fingers, and Sherlock’s thumb curls around John’s in response. What Sherlock said doesn’t make a lot of sense, but John is trying to believe it, because the alternative... he cannot protect Sherlock from the alternative, not alone. He needs the resources of the NHS, and specialists, and probably a locked ward. Oh God, Sherlock on a locked ward... better than Sherlock dead.
‘OK, but you - you weren’t doing very well,’ John says, letting his words catch and trip over each other. ‘Do not leave me! We’ll sort out Kolyvanov somehow. We are going to get home, and you are going to get better. I know you can do this. I know how strong you can be.’
John hopes for a response, but Sherlock stays silent. His body is limp, with his back against the wall and his legs flung out akimbo. He seems to be retreating inside himself, and John does not want to let him go. He grips tighter, and Sherlock looks down at their entwined hands, as if in thought.
‘Before I met you I would not have bothered to try,’ he says. It comes out all in one smooth sentence, almost normal-sounding, and John has to think for a moment before he matches it with Sherlock’s previous words.
Jesus Christ. There isn’t really a follow-up to that, or not one that doesn’t involve John sobbing. He rubs a hand over his face, leans forward to hug Sherlock, and then stops himself, because Sherlock really is unnaturally still now, as if he had simply switched off, and pawing at an unresponsive body is not what John wants to do either.
‘Sherlock, you are taking the lithium, aren’t you?’ asks John sharply. ‘Lithium and nothing else?’ The man sprawled in front of him looks all too much like he must have done when...
‘Yes,’ Sherlock says, his voice slightly slurred.
John relaxes a little, and arranges the blanket more tightly around Sherlock’s shoulders. He is slumping inch by inch further down the wall, as crumpled as if he’d just landed there after being thrown. The sight is frightening; and it actually makes John a little less afraid. It’s necessary communication, Sherlock finally allowing John to see how ill he is.
‘I still think the lithium will kick in,’ John says. ‘If it doesn’t, we add an antidepressant.’
Sherlock doesn’t respond. He has his head turned as if he was listening to something inside. Maybe he is, or maybe he’s just stalled and is thinking of nothing.
John could worry about that but it wouldn’t help. Instead, he scoots around to sit against the wall, placing his hand in Sherlock’s before fixing his eyes on some Cyrillic scrawl and trying to sound it out as a way of inducing patience. Before long he fails to remember what the letter that looks like a ‘3’ sounds like and gives up. So much for that.
John looks side-on at Sherlock. He seems to be thinking, except that the unnatural stillness of his face, as he apparently studies his own forearm protruding limply from the blanket, gives him away.
‘Sherlock?’ says John. He would rather let Sherlock come back in his own time, but the thought of him somehow wandering lost in the ruins of his mind palace until he’s out of reach... ‘Sherlock!’
Sherlock draws his knees part-way up, leans forwards and starts to bang his head from side to side. He is staring with a bewildered, utterly inward gaze. His eyes and also his clenched teeth glint in the half-light. A low moan intermittently escapes him.
Jesus. John doesn’t, can’t, think. He just moves around in front of Sherlock, wraps an arm around his shoulders and tries to simply be present. For a few seconds they sway awkwardly together, then abruptly Sherlock goes statue-still again. John is steeling himself to accept this when Sherlock pulls away with such a jerk that his head thuds against the wall.
‘I am behaving insanely!’ he announces in an almost conversational voice. ‘I am not physically...’ Sherlock stops talking as if a signal had cut out. ‘... impaired,’ he finishes three seconds later. ‘I do not want normal, but.... I can tell a man’s life history from his clothes but I am losing the end of sentences. If my brain is broken, what’s the use?’
The sound of Sherlock’s voice is a relief in itself. Yet he is apparently fighting to analyse his own thought processes while they disintegrate. John tries not to choke on the idea.
‘Well, things can be broken but still powerful,’ he manages to say almost lightly. ‘Like... like... Chernobyl.’
Sherlock brings a hand up and slaps himself on the side of the head.
‘Chernobyl!’ he says, and there is a ghost of amusement in his voice. ‘What do you think.... in here?’
John watches intently, his thoughts racing. He will help.
‘I think you’re very deep inside yourself,’ he says. ‘But you’ve left a part at the surface so we can talk. An avatar.’
‘Yes. Ten per cent... of me. Ten per cent is ample for holding -’ a long pause, and a nod that seems strangely drunken, like the slap ‘- a conversation with you. Sorry.’
John hesitates. An apology? There’s something off about that. Yet he has to respond.
‘Don’t apologise for being ill,’ he says. ‘You can only manage what you can manage.’
John suspects this is the wrong answer. What he hasn’t anticipated is Sherlock lurching to his feet to stand there looming and swaying slightly.
‘Only?’ he demands, voice suddenly almost crisp. ‘I can “manage” anything, John! It’s all a choice!’
Jesus, now what? John blunders to his feet, trying not to twist his numb ankle. Before he can work out what else to do, Sherlock almost skips into the middle of the floor and becomes someone else... It’s Zoya, doing what John thinks of as the ‘mad foreigners in my flat’ routine, with one hand nervously rubbing the other forearm. Then Sherlock shifts, and he’s Kolyvanov, piercing-eyed and open-mouthed, extending a hand with an invisible cigar toward John’s eye. The impressions are pitch-perfect.
‘What...?’ demands John, disturbed on enough levels that he doesn’t know where to begin. ‘What...?’
Sherlock snaps back to being himself. He steeples his trembling hands at his lips.
‘The point, John, is that everything is an act. I choose to be weak or I choose to cope. Everything is willpower, and I am...’ Sherlock’s voice is vibrating with tension and disgust. ‘There is no excuse for me. No excuse for what I inflict.’
John massages his forehead. He finally thinks he knows what’s going on here; at any rate he has to believe he does. ‘OK, fine,’ he says. ‘Sometimes there is no excuse for the way you behave, you’re bloody right. But it’s you all over, to admit that at the one moment when it’s absolutely not the case! Do you actually think you chose to be ill, and I should blame you for it? Sherlock, even in the army they don’t make you march until you drop dead!’
‘I do not see the relevance of that statement,’ Sherlock replies in a low, almost threatening voice, scrutinising John as if expecting an attack.
‘Well I do!’ John has to suppress an hysterical laugh. ‘You are desperately bloody ill, and I can see it’s not an act even if you can’t. What you’re doing right now, putting on this show, is using resources you don’t really have. You’re chopping up bits of yourself and chucking them on the fire for fuel. And yes, it’s amazing that you’ve got the willpower to do that. But it terrifies me, because it’s also the surest fucking route out the window!’
John stops. He thought he was going to say more, maybe soften the message, but with Sherlock there would be little point. Either reality works on him, or nothing will. John can only hope the part that wants to live is listening.
To give Sherlock space, John busies himself adjusting the blanket he is, rather ridiculously, clutching around himself. When he looks up, he regrets his inattention. Sherlock has moved back to lean against the wall, hunching over, hugging himself as if cold.
‘What do you suggest, then?’ he says, looking up in the half-darkness. The familiar bitterness in his tone is easier to bear than the new humility blended with it. ‘I should accept... the loss of my mind?’
‘It isn’t lost for good,’ says John. ‘You should fight - but not now. When the time comes. When we take down Kolyvanov.’
‘And you believe we will do that? With me like this?’
Silence. John is caught between a lie and what he fears is the truth.
‘I do not know how to bear this,’ Sherlock says, as if explaining, as he slides down the wall and then tips over to lie on the blanket. ‘I seldom experience the impulse... to cry. Now... capacity is gone.’
John goes down on his knees, and tucks the blanket around Sherlock. ‘I understand. I’m not going anywhere. Just quit doing live commentary on your own nervous breakdown.’ Pause. ‘Or maybe you can’t stop.’ Maybe it’s what Sherlock has left.
Sherlock convulses, drawing his head down under the blanket and his legs up into foetal position. John strokes a curl that pokes out into the air, and waits.
‘I remain able to refrain... from this exhibition, yet... on medical advice...’ Sherlock says, voice muffled. ‘If I am a machine, I... self-diagnostic. Abhorrent... Lacuna... Misfire.’
‘You’re not a machine,’ says John. That word is his fault, but at least that gives him the right to deny it. ‘You’re a genius. We aren’t dead yet, and we’ll get the better of Kolyvanov, because...’
John does not actually know because what. He pauses for a moment to take stock, and listens to Sherlock’s breathing - it’s no longer quick and pained. Instead it’s slowing down, drawing out, and as John waits he realises to his surprise and relief that Sherlock is actually falling asleep. Eventually he hears a little snore.
Either Sherlock is faking, which seems unlikely at the moment, or some healthy part of his mind has mercifully shut him down. This is an unexpected respite.
John goes to the window and leans an elbow on the sill. He can hear his own breath, and Sherlock’s, and the moan of the wind outside as snow whirls past. He looks at his palm and fingers, and they curl into a fist on their own while his mind seems to be blank. Delayed shock, he registers.
Looking outside, he sees what Sherlock must have seen when he crouched here - hundreds of windows, mostly dark, with a few lights coming on. Down on one of the plank-paths laid across the snow a small figure is trudging towards the door of the boiler room for this block. The day is starting, even though, this far north, dawn doesn’t come until mid-morning.
Ordinary life. The kind of things that always tether John to earth, even in battles where death and extremity are daily currency. To Sherlock they are data at best, and usually just inanities. Is Sherlock right? Is their best and kindest hope for John to take his gun, lie down with his temple against Sherlock’s, and...
The shock detonates.
John doubles over, torched by the horror of things he has seen, and things barely averted, and what might happen yet. Tears course down his cheeks and he bites into his fist to keep silent. So many times he has failed to protect the ones he loves, and almost it happened again. It will not. Not because of a treatable illness, and certainly not for a thug like Kolyvanov, who thinks he survived Afghanistan but instead was driven mad.
John survived. His rage is a living rage. He is a soldier, and he has the measure of darkness and fire. While Sherlock fights in the world, John will fight beside him. While Sherlock fights in his head, John will stand guard.
He straightens up. He must not make a noise so he marshals control in each of his limbs before padding through the dark to the wallpaper room, and returning with his clothes, a gun and the flat’s one wooden chair. Sherlock must not wake alone, so John fights off his own need for sleep, arranging himself bolt upright and turning over plans in his mind.
None of the plans are viable. He is not a strategist, he knows, and when on guard duty in the army he usually daydreamed of the wife and the kids and the semi that he never seemed to want when he got home again. Now for sustenance he turns to images of himself and Sherlock back in London, running, laughing, fucking, chasing criminals over rooftops. That is the life they chose. They will survive to return to it.
Snow falls, and the night lengthens.
Out in the hallway, there is a harsh buzz.
It’s the door entry system. John stiffens. He grasps his gun and heads into the dark corridor. The buzzer goes again, twice. Then silence.
Sherlock appears in the door of the graffiti room, a dishevelled silhouette. What mental state he’s in, John has no idea, but it’s possible sleep has helped. John assumes it has; they’re probably dead otherwise.
‘It could be a mistake,’ says John, staring at the white entryphone, which of course tells him nothing. ‘But that’s not how our luck goes. Grab the important stuff, quickly. Your gun’s in the wallpaper room. Get ready to shoot and run.’
Sherlock nods and does what he’s told. By the time he comes back, dressed, the buzzer is going bananas.
‘If they were going to shoot their way in, they’d have done it,’ says Sherlock. ‘If we make them talk to us we at least gain data.’ He picks up the handset and says in a disguised voice, ‘Zdravstvuite?’
Heart beating, John leans in to listen.
‘Sherlock Holmes, idiot, let me in, or ask John to come down if you are suspicious! Everyone is looking! It’s me, Zoya!’