CHAPTER ONE

Sherlock rolls his brow on the cool, soothing tile of the tunnel wall. He's been walking for too long beneath the city and this heat, this ache that's engulfing him is a product of exertion. Nothing more. The fever from his meningitis has long since broken... twelve hours ago, maybe thirteen, maybe more... he can't be certain. Time has been strangely elusive... amorphous. The hotel room they'd kept him in had a digital clock on the nightstand... its red numbers had seared his brain, so they'd taken it away. The room before that, the blue bedroom, had no clock at all.

Drifting... his mind is drifting, struggling to pin down thoughts… which tube station is this… yes, Russell Square. He should be at Molly's well before dawn. He tunes in to her voice again, light, sweet… background now, like a soundtrack to his journey through the tunnels. He prefers it this way—low, quiet—although the musical tone is never objectionable, even when it twines like ivy around his own inner voice in a sort of duet. The words she says are silly; words she'd read to him when he'd been ill and floating between worlds in his delirium. It was irritating at first, that her voice had remained long after she'd gone... persistent, like a mosquito or tinnitus...

But now…

"NO!" he shouts, slaps his hand against the tiled wall and his own bass reverberates, rumbles down the dark track. Focus. His mind has become a stranger to him, following knotty trails to illogical conclusions or wandering away altogether, amorphous time passing slowly, maybe passing quickly... it's hard to know as he recalls the feel of her fingers on his skin…

He's gone away again, he realizes, and hauls himself back with a curse, disgusted by the tenderness echoing in his chest.

Exertion. That's all. Contaminated food. Bacterial meningitis.

Isabel had found him sniffing pipes in a disused access tunnel beneath Finsbury Park Station… was it Isabel? Yes, the one with short grey hair and nose rings. In his paranoia, he had tried to strangle her with his bare hands. Fortunately, he'd been weak. So weak. How absurd to ignore the obvious symptoms of illness in favor of untangling Moriarty's web... in favor of coming back to life.

Possible brain damage if left untreated.

Sets of large hands, no-nonsense hands had removed him from the tunnel at Isabel's direction and out into blistering cold. Then he was indoors...

He drifts away again, the dim tunnel fading... and the memory of the first room rises around him. He's feverish... Molly's voice envelopes him, eases him. He is distantly intrigued by her presence, but can't remember why it should seem strange. He's in a child's bedroom, a boy's, and the world is suddenly vivid: Robin's-egg blue walls, a poster of the table of elements, shelves lined with toy microscopes and models of pirate ships, the colorful spines of books. His feet hang over the edge of the too-small bed, except when he needs to curl in on himself to vomit. Cool fingers probe his overheated skin and a light, stern voice issues orders. He hears mumbles of hesitation, then a one-word shout that jolts him closer to consciousness:

"NOW!"

Blonde hair, tousled from interrupted sleep, and Molly's face swims into focus. Her brow is furrowed, her bottom lip swollen and bloody. His eyes must fix on the spot because she touches it and says, "You had a convulsion."

"No hospital," he tells her, but had meant to say something else.

She reads to him... for hours, or perhaps it is days in the amorphous time. Children's stories. The Hundred Acre Wood, the battle for Toad Hall... her voice is warm, musical, threading through his tangled fever dreams with familiar words about a rabbit who wants to be real, words that look like emerald sparkles he feels compelled to chase and catch but can't, because he is missing his hind legs. He wants so much to tell Molly about the sparkles and about his frustration that he can't reach them. He's certain she'll understand... but the words never reach his lips.

A pinch in his forearm and he is shivering in a cold bath, naked but for a sodden towel over his pelvis. An IV drip hangs from the shower rod above him. The room is dim but he can discern Molly crouching nearby, speaking to him in medical jargon he knows he should understand. She watches him for a response that never comes. Her clothes are wet and when she rises, she gasps and lays a protective hand on her ribcage just below her right breast. Suddenly the bare lightbulb on the ceiling flares at him, engulfs him in scorching yellow flames, and he hears her shout, "Turn it off, you idiot!" ... before he sinks into blackness.

At some point they move him, Isabel and the sets of no-nonsense hands, because when he awakes again, still dangerously ill but more lucid, he's tucked into an adult-sized bed in a threadbare hotel room with Raga music whining through the walls.

Molly was gone and she didn't come back.

###

Damp cold seeps into his bones, bringing Sherlock back to the tunnel. He gruffly shakes off the memories and moves on, accompanied by distant screeches, the skittering of small claws... and Molly's voice like a lullaby beneath it all...

He jerks to a halt. What station is this… Holborn?

He should know this!

Bacterial meningitis. Possible brain damage if left untreated.

Nausea and cold panic roil his gut. No. Not now, not with so much yet to be done. He'd escaped the hotel and the suspicious eyes of his minders on the pretense of needing a shower, had washed the sickness from his mouth, skin, hair. He'd slipped out the bathroom window after he'd dressed and ghosted the word IDIOTS into the fading mist on the mirror with one long finger. But maybe he'd left too soon...

Possible brain damage...

Is his mind truly impaired or are confusion and such... weakness... simply the last gasps of the illness? John would know. He may be, like the rest of them, a vacuous imbecile about most things, but he's an expert on Sherlock.

Can't go to John.

That leaves Molly.

He tunes in to her voice, sing-songing just below his muddled mental stream, notices the stubborn, irritating ache... and when he begins to follow it back to its source, he recalls with crystal clarity why he was so surprised by her presence in his sickroom.

She loathes him.

###

Resting now on cold concrete. Holborn Station, confirmed. He'd nipped above, stole a bottle of water and two bags of crisps; won't touch anything that's not packaged up now, not since calculating that it was a nicked kebab that did him in. The January air was bracing, slapped and woke him a bit before he returned below.

And as he eats and drinks, Molly is going on about the Velveteen Rabbit. This… thing, this ache… he'd managed to trace it back to its first appearance—when he'd asked for her help with his 'suicide'. Her eyes had been so fierce, trusting, devoted, and he'd realized then that she meant more to him than was… convenient. Yet, he told her everything. They schemed together, worked out details and contingencies, weighed ramifications... and when she meekly touched his sleeve, he didn't pull away.

She hesitated, chewed her lip like she meant to confess a secret. "You'll want to go to John," she'd said, and he'd felt a strange flush of... disappointment.

"It's like... his pain will call out to you. And you'll be desperate to ease it, but you can't."

He'd wondered briefly how she knew about such things. And he's sure he looked at her like she was mad; what she was describing could never happen. He was certain. But she'd taken his hand, fixed him to the spot with clear, fervent eyes.

"Ring me when it happens, and I'll come."

And sure enough, one critical night she'd come to him in a dismal room in Southwark and kept vigil as he engaged in a battle as fierce as any he'd fought with his other addictions. She'd listened as he ranted, kept a respectful distance as he wept... and she kept repeating, "You can't tell John, his life depends on it." Said it again and again and again until he found a way to accept that simple truth he'd known all along.

And he'd realized then, as the storm abated, that she had seen him. Defenseless. Exposed. And that was... intolerable.

So he had set about quite methodically, quite viciously, taking his revenge. Like her, he knew how to wield a scalpel of sorts, knew just where and how deeply to cut. Not once did he raise his voice or alter his tone; he simply told her all about herself that night, all that he'd observed of her in their time together, being sure to lay bare and carve into the tenderest, most sheltered and vital of her fragile emotional and psychological flesh. He'd watched her face turn ashen and her body slowly curl into a ball. When she'd begged him to stop, he'd obliged, and paused on his way out the door only long enough to hear her run to the toilet and vomit.

And he had smiled.

###

He stuffs one empty, one full bag of crisps into the plastic take-away bag he's been carrying, lets out a sigh that floats away into the tunnel's dimness, hugs himself deeper into his coat. He thinks of the blue bedroom, the too-short bed, the innocence of the place and of the boy who must occupy it, turns up the volume on Molly's voice, as crystalline as his own thoughts had once been.

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.'

Molly. So awkward. Fragile. He recognizes her, more than she'll ever know. He can imagine her as a child, huddled in a pink bedroom decorated with cats and daisies, mortified by herself, by the dawning, hideous awareness that she's so very different... struggling but failing to hide her secrets and finally choosing to hide herself instead.

Molly in her morgue.

Sherlock in his arrogance.

And the thing no one understands about him, even today, is that it's only possible to land his savage remarks because he knows precisely how much they hurt.

'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

He recalls Molly's bloody lip, the way she'd shielded her ribs.

He recalls how triumphant he'd felt that night in Southwark, watching the light fade from her eyes.

"Bollocks," he mutters, and pushes on.