Points of Light Chapter 1
Title: Points of Light: Chapter 1 (follows on from Prologue)
Author: pennypaperbrain
Beta: Chloe and eldritchhorrors
Rating: R
Warnings: Risk-taking behaviour, mental health issues, suicidal ideation (just like canon, basically), plus childhood trauma. General references to kink but not the actual stuff. Also, there are funny bits. No, really.
Pairing: Sherlock/John. Still no slash but they’re starting to think about it.
Wordcount: 2,881
Spoilers: A Study in Pink
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Although neither Sherlock nor John are poster boys for healthy adjustment, they’ve each learnt to survive on their own. But when they meet, they start to realise there may be a better way to live. This chapter tracks the events of A Study in Pink - exploring underlying reasons for some of the eccentric behaviour - and adds missing scenes.
Also on AO3
Deep night at the bitter fag-end of winter in central London. Sherlock Holmes walks the sodden streets, down Kingsway to the river to check in with the homeless network under their dank arches, back to Montague Street via Holborn past shuttered shops and drifting swirls of rubbish, the crushed body of a pigeon, all these things whispering stories too dull to deduce but which unfold anyway in his brain because it does not switch off. He has no case so he should be sleeping but he slept for sixteen hours two days past.
The hours between two and five in the morning have a particular flavour for Sherlock. At night in his childhood, while sixty imbecile tormentors snored in the dormitories beyond, he crouched in an unheated bathroom, pressing his forehead against the wall to stop the shaking, fist in his mouth to choke the tears. He branded himself with control, at a level so deep that not even the judging voices could strip it from him.
Do try to get on with the other children, Sherlock. Mycroft can do it. The connections you make at boarding school will set you up for life. If you won’t try, I’m afraid I’ve got no sympathy. How could anyone like you, the way you behave? What do you expect?
He held himself apart, and cold and desolation entered into him. Eventually he became them. But, he does not trouble himself with memories of those years, although they resist redaction. He is what he is, now, and he can do as he pleases.
0420: Sherlock has been walking for two hours, and he has slowed down. Not much, but the restlessness that drove him out has been blunted. London’s diurnal cycle, meanwhile, has reached its tipping point as the desultory lurching revellers mix with, give way to yawning cleaners, nurses, bakery staff. A lighted bendy-bus wallows awkwardly around the junction of Holborn and Kingsway, assaulting Sherlock with a dozen sleep-softened faces, and for a moment he thinks… almost nothing. They’re just people.
These stray moments are convenient for the consideration of matters which are not worthy of his intellect when at full strength. For example, he needs to find himself a flatmate if he is to afford another central London rent, even the conveniently obliged Mrs Hudson’s, and he does need a zone one base, the way he needs eyes in his head. Well, later today he is going to Bart’s, and the relatively high-functioning idiots who occupy lab space there can scout for him.
It is so very quiet, as he heads through Bloomsbury Square. The trees drip, clasped in a black chill, flanked by silent rows of Georgian housing. A light wind gusts around the corner from Great Russell Street and Sherlock unwinds his scarf, letting the cold freshen him up, before tying the cloth back in place and starting to walk faster. Alone at this hour, he is unusually conscious of his body and its movements; he feels he would like to touch someone, which has not happened in a long time. He would like sex, with all that sex entails for him. But there is no-one now; they never last and he would not want them to. Nor is cottaging exactly his style.
Sherlock is nearly home. He turns the remaining corners into Montague Street and climbs the stairs to his room, moving with brisk care since the complaints which arise from not doing so are a waste of valuable time. He logs on and follows various lines of research until the groggy light of dawn shows above the stacked boxes almost blocking his window. Waiting for pages to load, he reviews his night’s journey and conversations for useful data and files it away.
He discards his petty impressions regarding bendy-buses and trees and sex. Once let trivia settle, and it would never end.
*
It’s 11:08am, his watch tells him, as John Watson hobbles through pale February streets. In his old lives, time and place meant something - lectures, surgery, patrol schedules - but that has changed. Locations now are simply hard or easy to negotiate with the step-click, step-click motion imposed by his damaged body and the appalling crutch. All other rhythms are gone.
Spring is coming in spite of him; it’s not visible yet but as he limps across Russell Square gardens he can sense it in the ground. Yesterday, his therapist told him to nurture himself, as he would a plant. He could find no reply.
He hates being like this. Hates his own emptiness. Hates worst of all seeing it perceived and reflected in a pitying look from someone else. He will talk to no-one today; do the world the only favour he can.
step-click
step-click
step-click
‘John! John Watson!’
Mike Stamford breaks in. John does his best to prevent it, but the cheery fat face brooks no refusal, beaming away and at the same time missing nothing, all through the small talk and the coffee and the grinding awful cringing pretence. But eventually the awkwardness does ease slightly, because Mike knows an ‘interesting chap’ who needs a flatmate. Mike won’t say any more, just taps his nose and chuckles, but now they have a reason for talking and, John thinks, with a tiny spark of something, what does he have to lose?
In a lab at Bart’s hospital, a familiar place now made strange by screens and expensive test kit, John stops dead.
There is a ridiculously beautiful man seated at the corner workbench. Tall, dark, slender, intent. This is his potential flatmate, John realises; and he can’t stop looking. He forces himself to stare at the desk. The feeling, whatever it was, dies away.
The apparition wants to borrow a phone. John offers his, and the sound of his own voice assures him that he is anchored to earth.
But he has some difficulty staying there once the apparition, thin fingers flickering on the iPhone keypad, really starts talking. Expounding. Ranting. First he plucks John’s combat history out of thin air, then insults some unfortunate lab tech who brings coffee, then proclaims his personal eccentricities - the violin? well or badly? - before suggesting they rent a flat together, tomorrow, without giving the location.
‘Gotta dash, I left my riding crop in the mortuary,’ the apparition concludes - and that’s when John finds himself stung into responding, because he’s known this guy for all of one minute and can already tell that nothing he says is accidental. God knows what he’s heard about John’s past or somehow reads in his face, but the tone and the absurd riding crop reference say loud and clear Let’s tease the pervert.
‘Is that it?’ he snaps, intending sarcasm over the missing address of the flat. But while the words come out right his tone says Are you trying to insult me? Because I can knock your head off.
John expects a confrontation, and it seems he might be about to get one. The extraordinary man turns as if braked, and if his expression was intense before, now it’s hungry and searching and guarded at the same time, like a harder version of the look John more usually sees on faces asking ‘Doctor, can you save my legs?’
He feels for a moment that he should shiver, but that’s not the way John Watson handles things. Really, this guy is just putting on an alpha male routine, and those amuse him. Always have. And it does suggest that a flatshare would not be dull.
‘We’ve only just met, and we’re going to look at a flat?’ he says, feeling a laugh start to creep up his throat.
‘Problem?’
His bluff is being called.
‘We don’t know a thing about each other,’ John takes the bait. ‘I don’t know where we’re meeting. I don’t even know your name.’
The apparition stares at him for a long moment.
Then he takes the lid off John’s mind and casually rifles its contents.
Finally he gives his name and their prospective address, follows up with a frankly cheesy wink then waltzes away into Bart’s.
‘Yep, he’s always like that,’ Mike says.
John says nothing. There are at least a dozen things he can’t work out about the last few minutes, but somehow the most pressing question is, why do I feel like that was a test, and I passed?
*
Sherlock Holmes established long ago that the best way to find out whether a given individual deserves his attention is to Sherlock at them full-on. If anything is left standing after that, he can decide whether it’s something he wants around.
The psychosomatically damaged army doctor with the amusing scowl - John Watson - did quite well yesterday at Bart’s. Sufficiently well that Sherlock tries to keep things muted for the flat viewing, focusing on John’s convenience so intently that he even realises his having moved in already might seem impolite. And when a case turns up, Sherlock’s judgement is vindicated.
‘You’re a doctor,’ he says. ‘In fact you’re an army doctor.’
John has been staring at The Times - at the suicides story, of course. As he announces he’s ‘very good’ and tilts his chin defiantly, he’s so easy to read that Anderson could do it, which should qualify him as supremely boring - but how could Sherlock be bored, when the game is on?
‘Oh, god, yes,’ John says.
The crime scene is down in Brixton. It takes time to get there, and while in the taxi Sherlock feels an itch. John will surely recoil into standard banality at some point, and he does not want to waste time wondering when this will happen. So he gives up the normal act and expands the conclusions he arrived at earlier, about Harry and the phone, getting caught up as he does so in the joy of logic which carries him onward, tracing the one true pattern through infinite variables even as he waits for the inevitable denials and denunciations, which will hopefully at least supply him with useful data about the accuracy of his work.
‘That… was amazing,’ John says.
Sherlock’s mind skips a beat. A surprisingly un-unpleasant feeling of surprise.
*
John has known Sherlock for one day now, and he isn’t sure quite what he’s got himself into, and he can’t bring himself to care. His situation could not rationally be called ‘improved’- not when he finds himself staring at a murdered body for the first time in months, still less when Sherlock leaves him to limp home alone from the crime scene and he gets abducted by some kind of evil genius with the ability to control CCTV cameras - but there has been a change. It’s as if Sherlock really did rummage through his brain and put his thoughts back in a different order. The same raw material, but with a spark he thought was gone. It had been gone. Damn ‘rational’, John is alive. He can tell because it hurts.
The change pulls him violently in different directions, and hurls him into walls. One moment he’s facing off against the car park-lurking ‘arch-enemy’, giving as good as he gets, and almost, incredibly, enjoying himself. Then he’s wincing under Sherlock’s asexual disdain in an Italian café, not even knowing what he wants beyond the fact that suddenly he does want it, but it’s clearly not on the cards. In between, he watches his new flatmate smirk at a pink suitcase, with Donovan’s ‘psychopath’ echoing in his mind.
He doesn’t believe the policewoman’s warning; doesn’t quite disbelieve it; doesn’t know what Sherlock is. But then John no longer knows quite what he is, either. There is one truth, and that’s the impossibility of going back. He leaves his crutch in the restaurant and scrambles after Sherlock over rooftops, down alleys, with his mind bathed in neon Soho light, a new landscape singing bright with danger as if he was born again invulnerable - no, not that, he just doesn’t fear being vulnerable, because he has already been dead.
But always Sherlock is so much faster than him, spinning onwards through predictions, deductions, seemingly offhanded snarks so humiliating to their victims they make John wince. The man obviously considers himself superior to the entire world, with John just about worthy to be audience instead of target - and the fuck of it is, Sherlock may be right.
Then, in the space of a moment, Sherlock spins too far and too fast. He ‘pops outside’ for ‘fresh air’ and John, like a loyal mutt, thinks the decent thing to do is let him.
His flatmate is gone. In a taxi with a murderer. Out of John’s reach.
John experiences in full the peculiar stupidity of Sherlock Holmes.
*
Sherlock is standing in a deserted college with a serial killer who has offered him a choice of pills, one lethal and one benign. In theory the man may be lying, but he is not. Sherlock has dissected him and found him sincere. The challenge thus presented is of interest.
Sherlock is standing in his own head, watching his reason disintegrate. That’s dis-integrate in a precise, technical sense. Idiots lose their minds; he has simply allowed part of his to detach and stir beyond the bounds he has long set for himself. It turns its venomous face to his.
The murderer keeps on talking. It does not matter exactly what he says, because Sherlock has already decided. He wants with an absolute desire the ends the pill in his hand has to offer. Both of them.
He previews his twitching abjection on the polished floor. In his teens he took an overdose, but within reach of ‘help’. If his choice is wrong now, he will have time to know it, and endure simultaneously the punishment and the escape.
And if he succeeds, he buys another triumph, another bow on the world’s stage, an infusion of the fear contempt admiration that keeps him moving shark-swift, shark-hungry through the void.
This is not chess, as the murderer claims. Chess is a closed system. Such things hold no interest at last. Sherlock has walked for thirty-four years inside his mind, in a closed system, and perhaps this pill, this bullet-white fragment, will finally smash it apart.
He doesn’t hear John’s shout of ‘SHERLOCK!’
A man drops, blood spraying, violated in an instant of rupturing walls, glass, hearts.
*
John has killed again.
He was shooting at his old self, his old uncertainty; he realises that even as he flattens against a wall out in the deserted corridor, blood roaring in his ears, a familiar beigedesertPAINgriefflashback wrestling him for control. He wins.
Sherlock was raising a pill towards his mouth when John saw him. There was no coercion from the cabbie. John only had seconds to make that judgement of course, and perhaps he was mistaken… he knows he wasn’t.
John and Sherlock have shared a death. The question of whose seems to be blurred.
If Sherlock was here at this moment, John would kiss him. He would pin those elegant wrists to the wall, bruise that extraordinary body, hurt him long and sweet and dirty because they are both alive and they want. The fantasy seems possible now, though he knows it will soon fade. He lacks the stamina to hold on to that much of himself, yet.
It is so very quiet in the hallway, until he hears the police sirens wail in the distance. He has bare minutes to slip out of here, compose himself, and be ready to talk to his... well, he supposes the word would be friend.
*
Sherlock is alive. Raging. Bereft.
‘Was I right? I was, wasn’t I?’
No answer. He’ll never know. He dashes the pill to the ground by the cabbie’s lolling head. A bullet has crashed through the system, and there is no control or compass. There is a howl inside him, propelling his limbs.
He must make sense, keep control of this. He won’t die now; that could never have happened. So he must win.
‘Your “sponsor”, who was it? I want a name!’
The murderer is still alive, but for all his genius Sherlock cannot punch into synaptic tissue and rip out information. He stamps on the cabbie’s shoulder. Blood and gristle crunch and slide. He tortures and does not feel.
He grinds his boot into the wound.
‘MORIARTY!’
The agonised wail comes just before the body goes limp. Sherlock is left ahead of the game, by a single piece of information; and that’s enough. The world makes its old constructed sense.
He’s won.
He glances around in the sudden silence, running Moriarty through the software in his brain. He is in control of everything. Everything is control.
*
John stands for a long time beyond the police tape, adjusting to the calm of the present, watching Sherlock for signs of shock, or just regular distress. Nothing doing.
Psychopath? he asks himself. Sociopath? He never specialised in psych. What he sees is a brilliant man failing to understand a blanket. It makes him smile.
With the smile comes a tiny click in his back brain, like a safety catch locking back into position. There is one thing he’s sure he wants. He waits to see if it’ll happen.
Sherlock notices him.
On to Chapter 2
Author: pennypaperbrain
Beta: Chloe and eldritchhorrors
Rating: R
Warnings: Risk-taking behaviour, mental health issues, suicidal ideation (just like canon, basically), plus childhood trauma. General references to kink but not the actual stuff. Also, there are funny bits. No, really.
Pairing: Sherlock/John. Still no slash but they’re starting to think about it.
Wordcount: 2,881
Spoilers: A Study in Pink
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters. I couldn’t be trusted with them. There’d be kinky slash everywhere.
Summary: Although neither Sherlock nor John are poster boys for healthy adjustment, they’ve each learnt to survive on their own. But when they meet, they start to realise there may be a better way to live. This chapter tracks the events of A Study in Pink - exploring underlying reasons for some of the eccentric behaviour - and adds missing scenes.
Also on AO3
Deep night at the bitter fag-end of winter in central London. Sherlock Holmes walks the sodden streets, down Kingsway to the river to check in with the homeless network under their dank arches, back to Montague Street via Holborn past shuttered shops and drifting swirls of rubbish, the crushed body of a pigeon, all these things whispering stories too dull to deduce but which unfold anyway in his brain because it does not switch off. He has no case so he should be sleeping but he slept for sixteen hours two days past.
The hours between two and five in the morning have a particular flavour for Sherlock. At night in his childhood, while sixty imbecile tormentors snored in the dormitories beyond, he crouched in an unheated bathroom, pressing his forehead against the wall to stop the shaking, fist in his mouth to choke the tears. He branded himself with control, at a level so deep that not even the judging voices could strip it from him.
Do try to get on with the other children, Sherlock. Mycroft can do it. The connections you make at boarding school will set you up for life. If you won’t try, I’m afraid I’ve got no sympathy. How could anyone like you, the way you behave? What do you expect?
He held himself apart, and cold and desolation entered into him. Eventually he became them. But, he does not trouble himself with memories of those years, although they resist redaction. He is what he is, now, and he can do as he pleases.
0420: Sherlock has been walking for two hours, and he has slowed down. Not much, but the restlessness that drove him out has been blunted. London’s diurnal cycle, meanwhile, has reached its tipping point as the desultory lurching revellers mix with, give way to yawning cleaners, nurses, bakery staff. A lighted bendy-bus wallows awkwardly around the junction of Holborn and Kingsway, assaulting Sherlock with a dozen sleep-softened faces, and for a moment he thinks… almost nothing. They’re just people.
These stray moments are convenient for the consideration of matters which are not worthy of his intellect when at full strength. For example, he needs to find himself a flatmate if he is to afford another central London rent, even the conveniently obliged Mrs Hudson’s, and he does need a zone one base, the way he needs eyes in his head. Well, later today he is going to Bart’s, and the relatively high-functioning idiots who occupy lab space there can scout for him.
It is so very quiet, as he heads through Bloomsbury Square. The trees drip, clasped in a black chill, flanked by silent rows of Georgian housing. A light wind gusts around the corner from Great Russell Street and Sherlock unwinds his scarf, letting the cold freshen him up, before tying the cloth back in place and starting to walk faster. Alone at this hour, he is unusually conscious of his body and its movements; he feels he would like to touch someone, which has not happened in a long time. He would like sex, with all that sex entails for him. But there is no-one now; they never last and he would not want them to. Nor is cottaging exactly his style.
Sherlock is nearly home. He turns the remaining corners into Montague Street and climbs the stairs to his room, moving with brisk care since the complaints which arise from not doing so are a waste of valuable time. He logs on and follows various lines of research until the groggy light of dawn shows above the stacked boxes almost blocking his window. Waiting for pages to load, he reviews his night’s journey and conversations for useful data and files it away.
He discards his petty impressions regarding bendy-buses and trees and sex. Once let trivia settle, and it would never end.
*
It’s 11:08am, his watch tells him, as John Watson hobbles through pale February streets. In his old lives, time and place meant something - lectures, surgery, patrol schedules - but that has changed. Locations now are simply hard or easy to negotiate with the step-click, step-click motion imposed by his damaged body and the appalling crutch. All other rhythms are gone.
Spring is coming in spite of him; it’s not visible yet but as he limps across Russell Square gardens he can sense it in the ground. Yesterday, his therapist told him to nurture himself, as he would a plant. He could find no reply.
He hates being like this. Hates his own emptiness. Hates worst of all seeing it perceived and reflected in a pitying look from someone else. He will talk to no-one today; do the world the only favour he can.
step-click
step-click
step-click
‘John! John Watson!’
Mike Stamford breaks in. John does his best to prevent it, but the cheery fat face brooks no refusal, beaming away and at the same time missing nothing, all through the small talk and the coffee and the grinding awful cringing pretence. But eventually the awkwardness does ease slightly, because Mike knows an ‘interesting chap’ who needs a flatmate. Mike won’t say any more, just taps his nose and chuckles, but now they have a reason for talking and, John thinks, with a tiny spark of something, what does he have to lose?
In a lab at Bart’s hospital, a familiar place now made strange by screens and expensive test kit, John stops dead.
There is a ridiculously beautiful man seated at the corner workbench. Tall, dark, slender, intent. This is his potential flatmate, John realises; and he can’t stop looking. He forces himself to stare at the desk. The feeling, whatever it was, dies away.
The apparition wants to borrow a phone. John offers his, and the sound of his own voice assures him that he is anchored to earth.
But he has some difficulty staying there once the apparition, thin fingers flickering on the iPhone keypad, really starts talking. Expounding. Ranting. First he plucks John’s combat history out of thin air, then insults some unfortunate lab tech who brings coffee, then proclaims his personal eccentricities - the violin? well or badly? - before suggesting they rent a flat together, tomorrow, without giving the location.
‘Gotta dash, I left my riding crop in the mortuary,’ the apparition concludes - and that’s when John finds himself stung into responding, because he’s known this guy for all of one minute and can already tell that nothing he says is accidental. God knows what he’s heard about John’s past or somehow reads in his face, but the tone and the absurd riding crop reference say loud and clear Let’s tease the pervert.
‘Is that it?’ he snaps, intending sarcasm over the missing address of the flat. But while the words come out right his tone says Are you trying to insult me? Because I can knock your head off.
John expects a confrontation, and it seems he might be about to get one. The extraordinary man turns as if braked, and if his expression was intense before, now it’s hungry and searching and guarded at the same time, like a harder version of the look John more usually sees on faces asking ‘Doctor, can you save my legs?’
He feels for a moment that he should shiver, but that’s not the way John Watson handles things. Really, this guy is just putting on an alpha male routine, and those amuse him. Always have. And it does suggest that a flatshare would not be dull.
‘We’ve only just met, and we’re going to look at a flat?’ he says, feeling a laugh start to creep up his throat.
‘Problem?’
His bluff is being called.
‘We don’t know a thing about each other,’ John takes the bait. ‘I don’t know where we’re meeting. I don’t even know your name.’
The apparition stares at him for a long moment.
Then he takes the lid off John’s mind and casually rifles its contents.
Finally he gives his name and their prospective address, follows up with a frankly cheesy wink then waltzes away into Bart’s.
‘Yep, he’s always like that,’ Mike says.
John says nothing. There are at least a dozen things he can’t work out about the last few minutes, but somehow the most pressing question is, why do I feel like that was a test, and I passed?
*
Sherlock Holmes established long ago that the best way to find out whether a given individual deserves his attention is to Sherlock at them full-on. If anything is left standing after that, he can decide whether it’s something he wants around.
The psychosomatically damaged army doctor with the amusing scowl - John Watson - did quite well yesterday at Bart’s. Sufficiently well that Sherlock tries to keep things muted for the flat viewing, focusing on John’s convenience so intently that he even realises his having moved in already might seem impolite. And when a case turns up, Sherlock’s judgement is vindicated.
‘You’re a doctor,’ he says. ‘In fact you’re an army doctor.’
John has been staring at The Times - at the suicides story, of course. As he announces he’s ‘very good’ and tilts his chin defiantly, he’s so easy to read that Anderson could do it, which should qualify him as supremely boring - but how could Sherlock be bored, when the game is on?
‘Oh, god, yes,’ John says.
The crime scene is down in Brixton. It takes time to get there, and while in the taxi Sherlock feels an itch. John will surely recoil into standard banality at some point, and he does not want to waste time wondering when this will happen. So he gives up the normal act and expands the conclusions he arrived at earlier, about Harry and the phone, getting caught up as he does so in the joy of logic which carries him onward, tracing the one true pattern through infinite variables even as he waits for the inevitable denials and denunciations, which will hopefully at least supply him with useful data about the accuracy of his work.
‘That… was amazing,’ John says.
Sherlock’s mind skips a beat. A surprisingly un-unpleasant feeling of surprise.
*
John has known Sherlock for one day now, and he isn’t sure quite what he’s got himself into, and he can’t bring himself to care. His situation could not rationally be called ‘improved’- not when he finds himself staring at a murdered body for the first time in months, still less when Sherlock leaves him to limp home alone from the crime scene and he gets abducted by some kind of evil genius with the ability to control CCTV cameras - but there has been a change. It’s as if Sherlock really did rummage through his brain and put his thoughts back in a different order. The same raw material, but with a spark he thought was gone. It had been gone. Damn ‘rational’, John is alive. He can tell because it hurts.
The change pulls him violently in different directions, and hurls him into walls. One moment he’s facing off against the car park-lurking ‘arch-enemy’, giving as good as he gets, and almost, incredibly, enjoying himself. Then he’s wincing under Sherlock’s asexual disdain in an Italian café, not even knowing what he wants beyond the fact that suddenly he does want it, but it’s clearly not on the cards. In between, he watches his new flatmate smirk at a pink suitcase, with Donovan’s ‘psychopath’ echoing in his mind.
He doesn’t believe the policewoman’s warning; doesn’t quite disbelieve it; doesn’t know what Sherlock is. But then John no longer knows quite what he is, either. There is one truth, and that’s the impossibility of going back. He leaves his crutch in the restaurant and scrambles after Sherlock over rooftops, down alleys, with his mind bathed in neon Soho light, a new landscape singing bright with danger as if he was born again invulnerable - no, not that, he just doesn’t fear being vulnerable, because he has already been dead.
But always Sherlock is so much faster than him, spinning onwards through predictions, deductions, seemingly offhanded snarks so humiliating to their victims they make John wince. The man obviously considers himself superior to the entire world, with John just about worthy to be audience instead of target - and the fuck of it is, Sherlock may be right.
Then, in the space of a moment, Sherlock spins too far and too fast. He ‘pops outside’ for ‘fresh air’ and John, like a loyal mutt, thinks the decent thing to do is let him.
His flatmate is gone. In a taxi with a murderer. Out of John’s reach.
John experiences in full the peculiar stupidity of Sherlock Holmes.
*
Sherlock is standing in a deserted college with a serial killer who has offered him a choice of pills, one lethal and one benign. In theory the man may be lying, but he is not. Sherlock has dissected him and found him sincere. The challenge thus presented is of interest.
Sherlock is standing in his own head, watching his reason disintegrate. That’s dis-integrate in a precise, technical sense. Idiots lose their minds; he has simply allowed part of his to detach and stir beyond the bounds he has long set for himself. It turns its venomous face to his.
The murderer keeps on talking. It does not matter exactly what he says, because Sherlock has already decided. He wants with an absolute desire the ends the pill in his hand has to offer. Both of them.
He previews his twitching abjection on the polished floor. In his teens he took an overdose, but within reach of ‘help’. If his choice is wrong now, he will have time to know it, and endure simultaneously the punishment and the escape.
And if he succeeds, he buys another triumph, another bow on the world’s stage, an infusion of the fear contempt admiration that keeps him moving shark-swift, shark-hungry through the void.
This is not chess, as the murderer claims. Chess is a closed system. Such things hold no interest at last. Sherlock has walked for thirty-four years inside his mind, in a closed system, and perhaps this pill, this bullet-white fragment, will finally smash it apart.
He doesn’t hear John’s shout of ‘SHERLOCK!’
A man drops, blood spraying, violated in an instant of rupturing walls, glass, hearts.
*
John has killed again.
He was shooting at his old self, his old uncertainty; he realises that even as he flattens against a wall out in the deserted corridor, blood roaring in his ears, a familiar beigedesertPAINgriefflashback wrestling him for control. He wins.
Sherlock was raising a pill towards his mouth when John saw him. There was no coercion from the cabbie. John only had seconds to make that judgement of course, and perhaps he was mistaken… he knows he wasn’t.
John and Sherlock have shared a death. The question of whose seems to be blurred.
If Sherlock was here at this moment, John would kiss him. He would pin those elegant wrists to the wall, bruise that extraordinary body, hurt him long and sweet and dirty because they are both alive and they want. The fantasy seems possible now, though he knows it will soon fade. He lacks the stamina to hold on to that much of himself, yet.
It is so very quiet in the hallway, until he hears the police sirens wail in the distance. He has bare minutes to slip out of here, compose himself, and be ready to talk to his... well, he supposes the word would be friend.
*
Sherlock is alive. Raging. Bereft.
‘Was I right? I was, wasn’t I?’
No answer. He’ll never know. He dashes the pill to the ground by the cabbie’s lolling head. A bullet has crashed through the system, and there is no control or compass. There is a howl inside him, propelling his limbs.
He must make sense, keep control of this. He won’t die now; that could never have happened. So he must win.
‘Your “sponsor”, who was it? I want a name!’
The murderer is still alive, but for all his genius Sherlock cannot punch into synaptic tissue and rip out information. He stamps on the cabbie’s shoulder. Blood and gristle crunch and slide. He tortures and does not feel.
He grinds his boot into the wound.
‘MORIARTY!’
The agonised wail comes just before the body goes limp. Sherlock is left ahead of the game, by a single piece of information; and that’s enough. The world makes its old constructed sense.
He’s won.
He glances around in the sudden silence, running Moriarty through the software in his brain. He is in control of everything. Everything is control.
*
John stands for a long time beyond the police tape, adjusting to the calm of the present, watching Sherlock for signs of shock, or just regular distress. Nothing doing.
Psychopath? he asks himself. Sociopath? He never specialised in psych. What he sees is a brilliant man failing to understand a blanket. It makes him smile.
With the smile comes a tiny click in his back brain, like a safety catch locking back into position. There is one thing he’s sure he wants. He waits to see if it’ll happen.
Sherlock notices him.
On to Chapter 2