Help us to survive (8/17)
Summary: A crime scene involving a dead anorexic woman hits close to home for John and Sherlock, leading John to discover a disturbing pattern and Sherlock to face his eating disorder in new light.
Note: This is part of the Eating us Alive verse. The raw first draft of this story was written around the time I finished posting Eating us Alive again. At that time, its sole purpouse was to entertain a friend. It was never my intention to create actual plot and make it public, but with the help and inspiration of willowmeg that happened anyway. I’m so grateful for the support throughout this, thank you.
I apoligise in advance for the severe hand waving I’ve occasionally done when it comes to medicine and to criminal law.
-x-
“Sherlock, I think I’ve got something.”
Sherlock came over to the table, leaning over John’s shoulder to read the blog that John had open on his laptop. They had been working on the case for four days now, and they had got virtually nowhere. Sherlock had tried to further track down the identities of the women John had already found, but since he refused to look into the death of the woman at the Rosewood Hotel, he hadn’t got very far. With the help of the forum entries, he had been able to pin point one more of the women to the Greater London area, but that was about it.
John, for his part, had tried to find out where the insulin might have come from, but he’d had even less luck than Sherlock since the possible search area right now was ‘the world’. He, too, kept his distance from Micha, since there were no obvious reasons for him to ask Lestrade to see reports on a suicide. Instead he had started working on finding other victims, partly in hopes of discrediting the idea that the perpetrator was someone on LovED Ones and now, finally, he thought he had found something.
It was a personal blog, a twenty-something woman’s detailed description of her fight against calories and pounds. The latest post, posted five months ago, was written by the woman’s girlfriend, who had found her dead in their shared flat. According to the girlfriend, it was suicide by insulin. At the end of the post was also a big ‘Fuck You’ to everyone who had visited the blog, and encouraged the girlfriend’s disorder.
John watched Sherlock’s profile as he read the blog post; he didn’t look the least bit tired and his breath smelled of toast and strawberry jam. It eased John’s worries about this case, but when Sherlock reached for the touchpad to scroll down, he still stopped him by grabbing his hand. Sherlock looked at him, confused.
“You don’t want to see the rest of it,” John said, not letting go of his hand. Sherlock’s eyes darted to the address field, but John quickly had his free hand up on the screen and covered the URL.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sherlock. “If I’m to investigate this properly and be able to track her down I need to-“
“I’ll do it.”
Sherlock huffed.
“I’m serious,” John said. “I’ll take screenshots and show you some of the text posts, but I won’t have you on this blog if I can help it.”
“Oh, please,” Sherlock said condescendingly.
“You don’t have anything to prove by looking at it,” John said, still stubbornly holding a hand at the computer screen.
“I’m not the one trying to prove something with this blog,” said Sherlock, vaguely annoyed. He straightened up and pulled his hand away from John. “If the killer is someone on your precious forum, denying me access to a blog is not going to change that.”
“I know, but I don’t want you to-“
“You have to give me some credit, and not believe that I would fall for whatever ruse this man is using.”
“Because you’d use heroin, anyway,” John muttered.
“Yes, and because I don’t want to die!”
John felt his ears turning red, embarrassed by how much that statement surprised him. It felt incredibly good to hear, and he was just barely able to contain the smile that the reassurance prompted.
“The killer is not why I don’t want you on this blog,” John said. “Some of the posts are rather… encouraging.”
“You think that after reading about my own restriction habits and purging techniques for a week, this is what’s going to push me over the edge?”
“Sherlock.”
“I don’t need you to protect me. I’ve been dealing with this a lot longer than you have.”
“I’ll cross-reference what I find on her with what we got off the forum to see if she’s actually a new one,” John said. “If she is, then okay, but if she isn’t… can you promise me to not go there?”
Sherlock snorted. “You know, at some point you have to trust me with my own life.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d want more,” said John. “But right now, I promise me that you won’t look at this blog until I’ve made absolutely sure there’s a good reason for you to do so.”
Sherlock rolled his eyes, but when he spoke he sounded very collected: “Fine. I promise to not do anything that can be even remotely productive until you’ve confirmed what you already know, if it makes you feel better.”
“It does,” John said, reaching out to take Sherlock’s hand again. He squeezed it lightly, finally removing his other hand from the computer screen. Sherlock’s eyes darted there right away, but other than that he didn’t move a muscle.
“This is your issue, John, not mine,” he said when he met John’s eyes again.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Tell me when you’re ready,” Sherlock said, nodding once before he went back to trying to find markers on the one victim from the forum that he hadn’t placed geographically yet.
John closed his eyes. He knew Sherlock was right; he knew this was a new victim, and that the best way to get to the bottom of this was to let Sherlock study all the evidence. No matter how he rationalised it, though, he wasn’t sure he could ever get to a place where he would be comfortable showing Sherlock a blog called Thin Actually.
Sherlock tilted his head, looking at the contents of the fridge. It was surprisingly full. He felt a disproportionate amount of pride every time he opened the fridge and it wasn’t empty, even if he knew it was John who should have most of the credit. John had gone to bed hours ago, since he apparently had an early shift at the surgery tomorrow. He had urged Sherlock to do the same, but Sherlock was too restless to even think about going to bed.
Hence, the fridge.
It felt like he had been eating constantly since he took this case, primarily to keep John calm, but he was still hungry, and falling behind on his calories. Not to mention that the blog John had found earlier, and finally had allowed him to go through, had stirred up a lot of memories. Mostly bad ones, but he felt a disturbing nostalgia about a lot of what he had read.
Apple cider vinegar, ice cubes, prune juice.
Caffeine, nicotine, cayenne pepper pills.
Distance, Distraction, Delay, Decision.
With huge determination, he began rearranging the items in the fridge; the dairies up top, perishable in the pull-out at the bottom, bottles in alphabetical order in the door, jams and other sweet things at the first shelf, meat, eggs and other proteins on the second shelf. When he was done, he closed the door.
His hand rested on the handle. That… wasn’t what he had planned to do. He needed to eat something. He needed to prove to himself that eating after nightfall really wasn’t a problem. That he was past all of that. With a sigh, he opened the fridge again. There were perishables in there, he should do something with them before they went bad. That was a good start. Vegetables and fruit always felt safe.
Sherlock closed the door again without taking anything out. He didn’t need safe food because he wasn’t ill. He was, well, he hadn’t been fine in years but he was okay. He was. He was okay, and he did not need safe food.
He didn’t.
Because he was okay.
He opened the fridge for the third time. Dairy products. Milk for the tea, cream for the tomato soup, cheese…. Sherlock frowned. He loathed cheese. How could cheese be allowed to take up space in his fridge? There couldn’t be cheese in his fridge!
Holding his breath, Sherlock reached in, took the terrible thing out, and tossed it in the bin under the sink. The door to the fridge had slid shut again and he had to open it for the fourth time. His stomach had turned into a hard knot by now. He knew this was becoming ridiculous, but he just stared at the food.
Not vegetables, because he didn’t need safe food.
Not meat, because it was past 9 o’clock.
Definitely not the left-overs. It had been bad enough to eat that yesterday in the first place.
Eggs. Eggs were good, about seventy calories, a fair amount of proteins. He was growing increasingly tired of the taste, though.
Yoghurt? Sweet but small. It had a good amount of calories, but it wouldn’t fill him up; he would still be hungry, and he couldn’t allow that. He had to stop being hungry, because it felt just a little bit too good.
In the end, Sherlock concluded that there was no food in the fridge that he could eat. Therefore, he closed it and backed away until he hit the table.
He looked around the kitchen, drumming his fingers against the table. Did he have beans? And bread? With that much in the fridge (though all of it useless!) there had to be at least something in the pantry.
Besides John’s emergency toothbrush…
Sherlock opened the pantry - which was acceptably full - and started looking for the toothbrush. It wasn’t there; he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t tell if John had stopped keeping an emergency toothbrush all together since she had written that forum entry, or if he, in light of recent events, just had moved it someplace else. Either way, Sherlock found the lack of toothbrushes in the pantry comforting, even encouraging.
With that, he took out a can of beans and some bread, feeling much more at peace than he had in days. As he went through the drawers to find a can-opener, he also efficiently managed to ignore the small alarm bells that had been ringing in the back of his head for the last three days. It was easier than it should be. He would most likely be able to fill his calorie quota today, and that was what mattered right now.
When John woke that morning it felt like he had overslept, but his phone told him that it was still forty minutes until the alarm would go off. At first he thought about turning around and getting those last minutes of sleep, but then he heard that Sherlock was moving downstairs. With a grimace John forced himself out of bed.
Sherlock was sitting with his computer at the table, foot on the seat of the chair, absently stroking his shoulder. He looked up when John came downstairs. “I didn’t hear your alarm.”
“It’s not seven yet.”
Sherlock glanced down at the computer clock. “Right,” he said, rubbing his face with one hand. “I put the kettle on some time ago, but I forgot to actually make the tea. It’s probably still warm.”
“Thanks,” John said, half-chuckling. “Do you want me to make you some?”
“Sure,” Sherlock muttered, already with his focus back on the computer.
In the kitchen John found a half-eaten toast with beans next to the stone-cold kettle. He gave Sherlock a quick glance, before refilling the kettle and putting it on. He considered putting sugar in Sherlock’s tea, but in the end he decided that he better not.
“How long have you been up?” John asked when he came back with their tea.
“Never went to bed,” Sherlock mumbled, accepting the mug without as much as looking at John. He wrapped his fingers around the mug and inhaled the scent of the tea.
John just sighed.
“When I was going through the blog yesterday,” Sherlock began, looking at the screen with an unfocused gaze. “It occurred to me that if you were to seek out people to kill, or ‘save’ or whatever it is he thinks he does, it would be idiotic to do so through the people who are actually trying to protect them. Freya, the girl behind Thin Actually, had been active on a couple of forums, and most of the traffic on her blog seems to have come from there - both her posts, and the comments refer back to at least three different communities.”
He paused for a moment to have a sip of tea; if he noticed how John stared at him, he didn’t let on. He just cleared his throat and continued.
“Anyway, I realised that it would be far more likely that venues like these were his hunting ground, rather than forums such as yours. So I went to the one Freya talked about most frequently, and created an account. It took some time before I found her there, because obviously she used a different username there than on her blog, and there was just so much other…”
Sherlock trailed off. Then he shook his head, blinking rapidly twice, as to wake himself up again or to pull himself back to here and now. For the first time he looked straight at John, who by now was pale as a ghost.
“I found Micha. She called herself mosquitobite, and she talked about how she booked the room at the Rosewood Hotel. She even had someone edit her suicide note - which was just as well, she had terrible grammar. This isn’t where our Angel of Death contacted her, or Freya, if it wasn’t done through some PM system I haven’t figured out yet. Either way, I can’t access their inboxes. However, Micha’s posts do refer to a man in association with this plan, so at least our statistical assumption that the killer is a man is correct. And that there actually is one, for that matter.”
John kept staring at him, gaping in disgusted shock. “You-you’ve spent the night combing through pro-ana forums?”
“Forum, but yes, the last… five hours, or so.”
“How do you… Are you okay?”
“I am,” Sherlock said, putting on a smile. It was a default smile, John would recognise it from miles away, but there still was an excited spark in his eyes. John just stood there, blinking. He didn’t know what to think or where to turn. In theory, this was all good news, they were finally getting somewhere, but John couldn’t shake the image of Sherlock wading through page after page of... that. And creating a goddamn account!
“John.” Sherlock snapped his fingers in his face. “I’m okay. I’ve found a link between two of the victims, and I’m feeling rather confident that I’ll find the others, either here or on other sites like this. If nothing else, this exonerates the users of LovED Ones.”
It took an insane amount of willpower, but John managed to smile. It probably wasn’t even half as convincing as Sherlock’s, but Sherlock had already turned his attention back to the computer.
Just as John was about to leave the room to get ready for work Sherlock muttered: “I told you that you didn’t put me in danger.”
John looked back over his shoulder; he wasn’t at all sure about that.
-x-
Chapter 9
Note: This is part of the Eating us Alive verse. The raw first draft of this story was written around the time I finished posting Eating us Alive again. At that time, its sole purpouse was to entertain a friend. It was never my intention to create actual plot and make it public, but with the help and inspiration of willowmeg that happened anyway. I’m so grateful for the support throughout this, thank you.
I apoligise in advance for the severe hand waving I’ve occasionally done when it comes to medicine and to criminal law.
-x-
“Sherlock, I think I’ve got something.”
Sherlock came over to the table, leaning over John’s shoulder to read the blog that John had open on his laptop. They had been working on the case for four days now, and they had got virtually nowhere. Sherlock had tried to further track down the identities of the women John had already found, but since he refused to look into the death of the woman at the Rosewood Hotel, he hadn’t got very far. With the help of the forum entries, he had been able to pin point one more of the women to the Greater London area, but that was about it.
John, for his part, had tried to find out where the insulin might have come from, but he’d had even less luck than Sherlock since the possible search area right now was ‘the world’. He, too, kept his distance from Micha, since there were no obvious reasons for him to ask Lestrade to see reports on a suicide. Instead he had started working on finding other victims, partly in hopes of discrediting the idea that the perpetrator was someone on LovED Ones and now, finally, he thought he had found something.
It was a personal blog, a twenty-something woman’s detailed description of her fight against calories and pounds. The latest post, posted five months ago, was written by the woman’s girlfriend, who had found her dead in their shared flat. According to the girlfriend, it was suicide by insulin. At the end of the post was also a big ‘Fuck You’ to everyone who had visited the blog, and encouraged the girlfriend’s disorder.
John watched Sherlock’s profile as he read the blog post; he didn’t look the least bit tired and his breath smelled of toast and strawberry jam. It eased John’s worries about this case, but when Sherlock reached for the touchpad to scroll down, he still stopped him by grabbing his hand. Sherlock looked at him, confused.
“You don’t want to see the rest of it,” John said, not letting go of his hand. Sherlock’s eyes darted to the address field, but John quickly had his free hand up on the screen and covered the URL.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sherlock. “If I’m to investigate this properly and be able to track her down I need to-“
“I’ll do it.”
Sherlock huffed.
“I’m serious,” John said. “I’ll take screenshots and show you some of the text posts, but I won’t have you on this blog if I can help it.”
“Oh, please,” Sherlock said condescendingly.
“You don’t have anything to prove by looking at it,” John said, still stubbornly holding a hand at the computer screen.
“I’m not the one trying to prove something with this blog,” said Sherlock, vaguely annoyed. He straightened up and pulled his hand away from John. “If the killer is someone on your precious forum, denying me access to a blog is not going to change that.”
“I know, but I don’t want you to-“
“You have to give me some credit, and not believe that I would fall for whatever ruse this man is using.”
“Because you’d use heroin, anyway,” John muttered.
“Yes, and because I don’t want to die!”
John felt his ears turning red, embarrassed by how much that statement surprised him. It felt incredibly good to hear, and he was just barely able to contain the smile that the reassurance prompted.
“The killer is not why I don’t want you on this blog,” John said. “Some of the posts are rather… encouraging.”
“You think that after reading about my own restriction habits and purging techniques for a week, this is what’s going to push me over the edge?”
“Sherlock.”
“I don’t need you to protect me. I’ve been dealing with this a lot longer than you have.”
“I’ll cross-reference what I find on her with what we got off the forum to see if she’s actually a new one,” John said. “If she is, then okay, but if she isn’t… can you promise me to not go there?”
Sherlock snorted. “You know, at some point you have to trust me with my own life.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d want more,” said John. “But right now, I promise me that you won’t look at this blog until I’ve made absolutely sure there’s a good reason for you to do so.”
Sherlock rolled his eyes, but when he spoke he sounded very collected: “Fine. I promise to not do anything that can be even remotely productive until you’ve confirmed what you already know, if it makes you feel better.”
“It does,” John said, reaching out to take Sherlock’s hand again. He squeezed it lightly, finally removing his other hand from the computer screen. Sherlock’s eyes darted there right away, but other than that he didn’t move a muscle.
“This is your issue, John, not mine,” he said when he met John’s eyes again.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Tell me when you’re ready,” Sherlock said, nodding once before he went back to trying to find markers on the one victim from the forum that he hadn’t placed geographically yet.
John closed his eyes. He knew Sherlock was right; he knew this was a new victim, and that the best way to get to the bottom of this was to let Sherlock study all the evidence. No matter how he rationalised it, though, he wasn’t sure he could ever get to a place where he would be comfortable showing Sherlock a blog called Thin Actually.
Sherlock tilted his head, looking at the contents of the fridge. It was surprisingly full. He felt a disproportionate amount of pride every time he opened the fridge and it wasn’t empty, even if he knew it was John who should have most of the credit. John had gone to bed hours ago, since he apparently had an early shift at the surgery tomorrow. He had urged Sherlock to do the same, but Sherlock was too restless to even think about going to bed.
Hence, the fridge.
It felt like he had been eating constantly since he took this case, primarily to keep John calm, but he was still hungry, and falling behind on his calories. Not to mention that the blog John had found earlier, and finally had allowed him to go through, had stirred up a lot of memories. Mostly bad ones, but he felt a disturbing nostalgia about a lot of what he had read.
Apple cider vinegar, ice cubes, prune juice.
Caffeine, nicotine, cayenne pepper pills.
Distance, Distraction, Delay, Decision.
With huge determination, he began rearranging the items in the fridge; the dairies up top, perishable in the pull-out at the bottom, bottles in alphabetical order in the door, jams and other sweet things at the first shelf, meat, eggs and other proteins on the second shelf. When he was done, he closed the door.
His hand rested on the handle. That… wasn’t what he had planned to do. He needed to eat something. He needed to prove to himself that eating after nightfall really wasn’t a problem. That he was past all of that. With a sigh, he opened the fridge again. There were perishables in there, he should do something with them before they went bad. That was a good start. Vegetables and fruit always felt safe.
Sherlock closed the door again without taking anything out. He didn’t need safe food because he wasn’t ill. He was, well, he hadn’t been fine in years but he was okay. He was. He was okay, and he did not need safe food.
He didn’t.
Because he was okay.
He opened the fridge for the third time. Dairy products. Milk for the tea, cream for the tomato soup, cheese…. Sherlock frowned. He loathed cheese. How could cheese be allowed to take up space in his fridge? There couldn’t be cheese in his fridge!
Holding his breath, Sherlock reached in, took the terrible thing out, and tossed it in the bin under the sink. The door to the fridge had slid shut again and he had to open it for the fourth time. His stomach had turned into a hard knot by now. He knew this was becoming ridiculous, but he just stared at the food.
Not vegetables, because he didn’t need safe food.
Not meat, because it was past 9 o’clock.
Definitely not the left-overs. It had been bad enough to eat that yesterday in the first place.
Eggs. Eggs were good, about seventy calories, a fair amount of proteins. He was growing increasingly tired of the taste, though.
Yoghurt? Sweet but small. It had a good amount of calories, but it wouldn’t fill him up; he would still be hungry, and he couldn’t allow that. He had to stop being hungry, because it felt just a little bit too good.
In the end, Sherlock concluded that there was no food in the fridge that he could eat. Therefore, he closed it and backed away until he hit the table.
He looked around the kitchen, drumming his fingers against the table. Did he have beans? And bread? With that much in the fridge (though all of it useless!) there had to be at least something in the pantry.
Besides John’s emergency toothbrush…
Sherlock opened the pantry - which was acceptably full - and started looking for the toothbrush. It wasn’t there; he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t tell if John had stopped keeping an emergency toothbrush all together since she had written that forum entry, or if he, in light of recent events, just had moved it someplace else. Either way, Sherlock found the lack of toothbrushes in the pantry comforting, even encouraging.
With that, he took out a can of beans and some bread, feeling much more at peace than he had in days. As he went through the drawers to find a can-opener, he also efficiently managed to ignore the small alarm bells that had been ringing in the back of his head for the last three days. It was easier than it should be. He would most likely be able to fill his calorie quota today, and that was what mattered right now.
When John woke that morning it felt like he had overslept, but his phone told him that it was still forty minutes until the alarm would go off. At first he thought about turning around and getting those last minutes of sleep, but then he heard that Sherlock was moving downstairs. With a grimace John forced himself out of bed.
Sherlock was sitting with his computer at the table, foot on the seat of the chair, absently stroking his shoulder. He looked up when John came downstairs. “I didn’t hear your alarm.”
“It’s not seven yet.”
Sherlock glanced down at the computer clock. “Right,” he said, rubbing his face with one hand. “I put the kettle on some time ago, but I forgot to actually make the tea. It’s probably still warm.”
“Thanks,” John said, half-chuckling. “Do you want me to make you some?”
“Sure,” Sherlock muttered, already with his focus back on the computer.
In the kitchen John found a half-eaten toast with beans next to the stone-cold kettle. He gave Sherlock a quick glance, before refilling the kettle and putting it on. He considered putting sugar in Sherlock’s tea, but in the end he decided that he better not.
“How long have you been up?” John asked when he came back with their tea.
“Never went to bed,” Sherlock mumbled, accepting the mug without as much as looking at John. He wrapped his fingers around the mug and inhaled the scent of the tea.
John just sighed.
“When I was going through the blog yesterday,” Sherlock began, looking at the screen with an unfocused gaze. “It occurred to me that if you were to seek out people to kill, or ‘save’ or whatever it is he thinks he does, it would be idiotic to do so through the people who are actually trying to protect them. Freya, the girl behind Thin Actually, had been active on a couple of forums, and most of the traffic on her blog seems to have come from there - both her posts, and the comments refer back to at least three different communities.”
He paused for a moment to have a sip of tea; if he noticed how John stared at him, he didn’t let on. He just cleared his throat and continued.
“Anyway, I realised that it would be far more likely that venues like these were his hunting ground, rather than forums such as yours. So I went to the one Freya talked about most frequently, and created an account. It took some time before I found her there, because obviously she used a different username there than on her blog, and there was just so much other…”
Sherlock trailed off. Then he shook his head, blinking rapidly twice, as to wake himself up again or to pull himself back to here and now. For the first time he looked straight at John, who by now was pale as a ghost.
“I found Micha. She called herself mosquitobite, and she talked about how she booked the room at the Rosewood Hotel. She even had someone edit her suicide note - which was just as well, she had terrible grammar. This isn’t where our Angel of Death contacted her, or Freya, if it wasn’t done through some PM system I haven’t figured out yet. Either way, I can’t access their inboxes. However, Micha’s posts do refer to a man in association with this plan, so at least our statistical assumption that the killer is a man is correct. And that there actually is one, for that matter.”
John kept staring at him, gaping in disgusted shock. “You-you’ve spent the night combing through pro-ana forums?”
“Forum, but yes, the last… five hours, or so.”
“How do you… Are you okay?”
“I am,” Sherlock said, putting on a smile. It was a default smile, John would recognise it from miles away, but there still was an excited spark in his eyes. John just stood there, blinking. He didn’t know what to think or where to turn. In theory, this was all good news, they were finally getting somewhere, but John couldn’t shake the image of Sherlock wading through page after page of... that. And creating a goddamn account!
“John.” Sherlock snapped his fingers in his face. “I’m okay. I’ve found a link between two of the victims, and I’m feeling rather confident that I’ll find the others, either here or on other sites like this. If nothing else, this exonerates the users of LovED Ones.”
It took an insane amount of willpower, but John managed to smile. It probably wasn’t even half as convincing as Sherlock’s, but Sherlock had already turned his attention back to the computer.
Just as John was about to leave the room to get ready for work Sherlock muttered: “I told you that you didn’t put me in danger.”
John looked back over his shoulder; he wasn’t at all sure about that.
-x-
Chapter 9