Tick Tock
By: SneakAttack29

Disclaimer: I don't own Sherlock. All rights go to their respective people - I only own any OCs that crop up during the duration of this fic.

Quick Author's Note: Sorry, kind of a short chapter. Need to get a bit of technical stuff out of the way before we get to the good bits. As always, if I screw up too badly trying to explain something, please correct me!

Enjoy!

Chapter 2: Crawling

"All alone he turns to stone while holding his breath half to death.
Terrified of what's inside.
To save his life, he crawls like a worm from a bird."

-The Used, "The Bird and the Worm"

Day 1—23:39

Utter chaos—that's truthfully the only way Elisabeth can describe it.

Of course, she's pretty sure that it seems worse in hindsight than it really is, but the situation notwithstanding is excruciatingly, undeniably dire. Lestrade, during the rather tricky maneuvering to carefully transfer them all to a facility containing an emergency quarantine without exposing them to other people, had confided that the hazmat team did find samples of…something, labels meticulously and suspiciously absent. The suspected agent, but there wasn't a chance for word on what, exactly, the substance actually is. He admitted to the three of them that it had been found in the hot lab, under containment, and such was met with disapproving anxiety from Elisabeth, condescending scoffing from Sherlock, and wide-eyed, terrified incredulity from Donovan. Not that any other responses should have been expected. It's an aerosolized pathogen of some kind, the same that had been waiting on a trigger behind the air vent to be released at the leisure of an untraceable, remote switch. They'd walked right into a trap and had nothing but fear-fueled incompetence to thank. To say that Elisabeth teeters precariously on the verge of crying tears of pure frustration would be a vast and gross understatement.

The quarantine was facilitated by emergency personnel experienced with contagious diseases and biological hazards, though Elisabeth is afraid of the very real possibility that the medical men and women have never seen anything quite like that to which they've likely been exposed. She's also concerned by the very fact that they've never had to deal with as petulant a patient as Sherlock Holmes. The man whined and put up an impressive fight at having to leave the lab, something he obviously did not want to do. His argument consisted of the claim that he was already infected, so he was the perfect candidate to continue investigating the space. It was quickly shot down, but the fact that he tried at all gave Elisabeth a whole new level of exasperation with the man. She's fairly certain now that someone at some point during this whole ordeal is going to have to stop her from strangling him out of sheer annoyance. It clearly takes a special kind of patience to deal with Sherlock Holmes. How Dr. Watson and Greg do it, she can't fathom.

The quarantine "cell", for lack of a better term, amounts to an emergency clean room lined with six ordinary hospital beds in rows along opposite walls. For all intents and purposes, it's a small, pressurized, Plexiglass box of a room within another sealed room, behind several doors and wash stations for that extra safety measure. It's sealed entirely through a handful of airlocks, though there are entry points and intercoms for careful, regulated contact with the outside world if the need should arise. It's essentially the quarantine version of the BSL-4 lab complex the four of them had been standing outside the true entrance of when this whole mess started. There's a boxed off area in the back as a shared bathroom that Elisabeth is not too keen on, but there's privacy and she'll gladly take what she can get at the moment. Everyone else seems to be in silent agreement with this. Even Sherlock, beneath his whining and stomping and complaining, isn't pushing too much.

They've not been allowed any suited visitors to loiter outside their sterile, mostly translucent box, though the professor suspects that has something to do with the ever-continuing string of doctors and nurses parading in and out of the room in clean suits of their own, taking blood and other various samples for tests, meticulously checking temperatures and vitals as if whatever was released in the lab is going to cause them to rapidly begin showing symptoms. Elisabeth knows it's precautionary, but that doesn't stop her and Sherlock from repeatedly complaining about the prodding that is verging on being a tad too much. None of the four of them have been able to eat yet, and more than anything, everyone just wants to sleep. Well, all save Sherlock who appears completely unperturbed by the lack of basic necessities. Between medical staff barging unceremoniously into their cell, he seems to be either chained to his bed still as the dead or pacing agitatedly between cots and rows in equal measure. She caught a mutter of "thinking" on his lips, but the specifics of his temper tantrums are lost to her through the veneer of irritation and exhaustion hanging over her eyes.

At current, Elisabeth's reclined back on the bed in the back corner and across the row from Sherlock that she'd quickly claimed as her own (to the consulting detective's antisocial displeasure, something she was endlessly amused over). A needle is stuck into the crook of her elbow, yet another tube collecting a steady stream of her blood attached on the other end. The nurse, a kindly woman nearing the end of middle age named Shelly, is covered head to toe in protective scrubs, masks, gloves—the works. Elisabeth wants to grimace, but the caution is warranted.

"This'll be the last one tonight, promise," reassures the nurse, strained smile visible even beneath the facemask she's wearing. "Final round of tests, then we'll get you all something to eat."

Elisabeth huffs a sigh of relief. "Thank God. I haven't eaten since breakfast."

"Did someone mention food?" Lestrade calls from his bed adjacent and two down from Elisabeth's, next to the wall closest to the entrance to the box. The joking grin belies the contradictory story his comically wide eyes tell, and the professor cracks an involuntary smirk at the sight. The DI mimics it a second later, proving that it had been his intention all along.

"No!" She calls across the room. "Just your imagination. Going deaf in your old age, Greg?"

He chuckles, strained. "Piss off, Kardon!"

"Oh, both of you, shut up!" The baritone cuts sharply through the already tense atmosphere, adding another layer of discomfort all its own and causing poor Shelly to jump. This, in turn, causes the needle in Elisabeth's arm to be jolted, and the professor hisses at the feeling of the vein being blown from the movement, sending the fiercest glower she can conjure to the source of the voice. Where one Sherlock Holmes had been reclined on his own secluded bed across the aisle from Elisabeth's and thankfully going through a quiet stage, he was now bolted upright and sending a scowl of his own at the two who had been talking. Donovan sneers at him from where she'd planted herself as far away from him as possible, two beds down the same row as Elisabeth and also next to the door, but she goes unheeded. The Sergeant was unusually subdued from what Elisabeth's gathered, but she supposes the weight and fear of the situation can be attributed to that. She can't quite blame the woman.

"Why?" Elisabeth snarls, partly from pain, partly because the man is getting on her nerves, and also partly because the wash of guilt over Shelly's face as she quickly does what she can for the professor's arm raises her own. She's grown to like the kindly nurse covered head to toe in shades of blue. "It's not like any of us are trying to sleep or will be sleeping anytime soon. This is all bloody terrible! But there's no sense brooding in a goddamn corner and acting like an inconsiderate ass over something that can't be changed, now is there?" Ice eyes become even colder, the scowl deepens, and the professor suddenly gets the odd feeling she may just be playing with fire under all that stoic frigidity.

It appears the silent accord they struck in the lab only extends so far, and it decidedly does not cover cordiality outside of mystery-solving. Good to know. "If you wish to confuse thinking with…brooding," the word causes a sneer to pass his face and leave just as quickly as it appeared, "then you're far more dimwitted than I initially assumed."

The woman scoffs before replying in a faux cheerful tone, "Well, then, Mr. Holmes, you ought to know not to assume. Makes an ass out of you and me, after all."

"Quaint," he drawls in unimpressed response, face falling blank. Donovan sniggers from her corner, earning her a glare, but no one gets a chance to comment before poor Shelly clears her throat.

"I've got to get these to the lab, now. I'll inform staff that you'll be needing food and it shall be up shortly. And sorry about the vein, dear. Honest mistake, really."

Elisabeth grins brightly. "It's alright! I completely understand—it's not your fault in the least. And, actually…if it's not too much trouble, do you think it would be possible for me to get something to write with? I'd kill for a whiteboard right about now, but paper will do just as well." An awkward, uncomfortable smile is the nurse's response before she collects her samples and equipment and scurries out of the room. As soon as her back is turned, Elisabeth can't help the sympathetic wince.

"Why d'you need something to write with?" Donovan questions from her perch. She's dressed in the blue scrubs like the rest of them had been forced into and is perhaps the only one of the four of them to not be paler than the fabric. Still, while she's lucky in that the clothing doesn't drain her pallor, it seems exhaustion and stress are doing the job instead. She's sideways on her claimed bed, facing them all with her legs crossed in front of her. Her posture is hunched a little, and while Elisabeth hadn't been getting the best of vibes from the woman, she can't help but soften a little towards her in sympathy.

The professor smiles. "Because I've got a few things rattling around in my head. I just want to write them down, try to organize them better. It seems Mr. Holmes is not the only one who has been doing some thinking." She taps her temple for emphasis.

"You're…," Sergeant Donovan blinks, "thinking? About the lab?"

On his bed, the consulting detective throws his hands up in exasperation. "Yes, Sergeant, thinking. I know that is a difficult concept for you to struggle your mind around, but you clearly have ears. And she's obviously thinking about the case."

Sally glares harshly, "I don't recall anyone asking your—"

"Alright!" cuts Lestrade. "Alright, already! All of you, take a goddamn breath!"

Sherlock clearly ignores the detective, continuing to prattle on as if he'd not been interrupted to begin with. "It's a pointless endeavor on which to waste whatever meager brainpower she has, anyway. No one in an official capacity would let Dr. Kardon be involved in this case—she's clearly the one being toyed with, just look at that note. They don't let suspects work on cases."

Elisabeth scoffs. "Or victims, if you'll recall. Though, at this point, they might as well. We're no good in here waiting to be effective lab rats and then to either walk out perfectly fine or die horribly." Donovan squeaks an indignant exclamation from her corner when Elisabeth cackles dryl\ at some joke to which only she is aware.

"Great, I was wrong—you're probably just as bad as he is!" The professor rolls her eyes at the accusation.

"Oh, come off it. Stop acting like you've never heard gallows humor before. Besides that, we were exposed to some unknown, deliberately unidentifiable, aerosolized, presumably biological agent whilst standing outside the entrance to a BSL-4 laboratory in a government ghost lab that doesn't technically exist. Do you really think that the chances point to that being something like the common cold? I've mulled over about seventeen things it could be, and none of them are necessarily harmless, Sergeant Donovan."

Lestrade interrupts the glaring contest seeming to pass between the two women, pinching the bridge of his nose. "BSL-4?"

"Biosafety level 4," Sherlock drones, almost sounding bored, before Elisabeth can even open her mouth to answer the inspector. "They're highly secure laboratories. Highest level of precautions taken, and they handle easily-communicable, severe and fatal human diseases. The name ought to have given it away, it's rather obvious. Now if you lot are quite finished…"

"It's also called a P4 lab, for shorthand, typically referring to pathogen or protection level. They're mazes, effectively," the professor mutters with her scowl swiveling to Sherlock and pressing on despite his drawn-out sigh of suffering. "Mazes of rooms, chemical showers, normal showers, airlocks, disinfectant tanks, ultraviolet lights, filtration systems, and the actual labs and storage rooms housing all sorts of nasty pathogens like Bacillus anthracis and Clostridium botulinum. There are officially nine P4 laboratories in the United Kingdom. Three are in Greater London, another three are in Surrey, two in Wiltshire, and one in Hertfordshire. The Francis Crick Institute in Camden, however, only has the laboratory capacity—they don't officially work with human pathogens, let alone anything warranting a level 4. The Health Protection Agency's Centre for Infections in London and the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response in Wiltshire are both part of the European Network of Biosafety-Level-4 Laboratories and focus on diagnostics research for highly virulent diseases. However, it's the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory in Wiltshire that focuses on biological weapons and biodefense. At least officially."

Lestrade's brows rise to his hairline, and he parrots, "'At least officially'?"

"Well, we were obviously at an unofficial P4 lab, weren't we? That building is definitely not in Greater London, Wiltshire, Surrey, or Hertfordshire—we were in Kent, south of Sevenoaks. Like myself and Mr. Holmes stated, the place was clearly military. Military testing of biological pathogens isn't unheard of or necessarily alarming—USAMIIRID in Maryland is a good example; it's part of Fort Dietrich. Has U.S. Army in the name. I can only think of two reasons why a governmental facility containing at least one P4 lab exists off the radar. Neither of them are particularly cheerful."

Donovan stiffens and narrows her dark eyes suspiciously at Elisabeth. "How do you even bloody know it's a P4 if we didn't actually go in any lab? No one told you." The other woman's hands slide over her face, clearly out of exhaustion if the way her expression comes away drawn is any indication.

"I've been in one before, once. Quick tour through courtesy of the university after completing a research project for the institution we were partnered with. Had to kick, fight, and scratch for it, though. You can't really miss the stench of that much Lysol—in order to get out of a level 4 you have to take a rinse in the stuff, and not even a freshly-scrubbed lab is going to smell like disinfectant quite that strongly." She grimaces at the thought.

Greg laughs a little, humorlessly. "It didn't smell that bad, Ellie."

"Elisabeth," she corrects with a snap. "And yes, to me, it did. Forgive my sense of smell for being a tad sensitive, yeah? Besides, it wasn't like it took rocket science to figure out it's a P4, anyway." Crickets practically chirp.

A few more seconds drag on before Sherlock groans as if the whole situation is physically paining him. Elisabeth is fairly certain that the consulting detective at least believes it actually is. "It said so on a plaque next to the door, not to mention all the biohazard signs scattered about—as she said, 'not rocket science'. Now, shut up, all of you! Your senseless blathering is distracting me."

Elisabeth smiles sweetly, though her eyebrow twitching belies her anger. "What's the magic word, then?" All she receives is a nasty glare for her efforts, but it doesn't diminish her sarcastic grin whatsoever.

"For your sake, I hope you remember it," she continues once it's made apparent that the man across the aisle from her isn't going to do much more at her words than pout like a child, "lest all our senseless blathering give you too much of an earache."

Sherlock Holmes does not take condescending words nearly as well as he dishes them, and his eyes sharpen razor-quick. "Yes, well, I hope for all our sakes, Dr. Kardon, that you find some way to get past your rather annoying and suffocating levels of claustrophobia before you nag all of us out of our wits. By your own admission we're going to be here a while, so I'd suggest you make that your top priority before subjecting everyone to your Wikipedia-level explanations!"

"Wikipedia-level explanations!?" Elisabeth screeches, dumbfounded and incensed at how easily her discomfort with the confined space was able to be discerned. Her back straightens in a flustered sense of rage, cheeks tinging pink from the full-body effort not to lunge across the room and throttle the consulting detective to within an inch of his life. The sound of the airlocks whirring to signal someone entering the clean room, most likely to bring their food, doesn't even deter her from contemplating a nice, violent homicide. "Excuse the ever-lovin' hell outta' me?! Oh, why I oughtta'—!"

"You ought to sit calmly, Dr. Kardon. You as well, Mr. Holmes."

At the new, silky voice slicing quite effectively through the room, the two heads that weren't already staring at the newcomer whipped in that direction. As per usual with clean rooms, their visitor is decked head to toe in blue protective equipment like all the medical professionals that have been parading through the quarantine cell, but Elisabeth gets a nagging feeling the caramel-skinned woman is anything but a doctor if the startled looks Lestrade and Donovan are shooting her are any indication. Fringed, dark eyes sit intelligently over the surgical mask she's forced by protocol to wear over her face, and black eyebrows belie the color of her hair that is tied up and hidden away behind a scrub cap. She's standing just past one of the ultraviolet lights above the inner door, a total of four beds down from where Elisabeth's is nestled in the back corner, and this woman's arms are crossed with authority. Stern is the first word that comes to mind, and the professor supposes it may be secondary to intimidating on that of the two meek nurses who scurry in behind the new figure with food trays.

Lestrade winces, averting his gaze when the woman's own sweeps over him and Donovan disdainfully, and he rubs the back of his neck. His muttering does not go unnoticed by either Sherlock or Elisabeth, though they don't catch the precise words. It appears to be a greeting of some kind, however, from the reaction it garners.

"Inspector, Sergeant" the woman acknowledges coolly before turning back to the professor and consulting detective. She nods in lieu of striding forward for a handshake for admittedly obvious reasons. Elisabeth admits to herself that in her shoes, she wouldn't be wanting to shake her own hand, either. "Dr. Kardon and Mr. Holmes, I'm to presume?" Her accent is crisp, quick, and to the point. No signs of exhaustion tinge it despite the hour.

Sherlock stubbornly refuses to answer, but Elisabeth gives a cautious squeak of, "Yes?"

Dark eyes meet dark eyes, and Elisabeth feels her heart drop into her stomach. "I'm Chief Superintendent Rishima Elyounoussi with Scotland Yard." Suspect, that's right. Lestrade had said they thought her a suspect—a ridiculous notion, but one she certainly has no clout with which to argue against. And Lestrade…he'd defied orders, hadn't he? A gulp runs subtly down the professor's throat, one Elyounoussi notices. The superintendent's head tilts curiously to the side.

"Dr. Kardon, while I apologize for the situation in which Inspector Lestrade's…oversight has landed you, I'm afraid I have to inquire if you'll agree to a few questions here considering the circumstances. It seems our little debacle has become a tad bit more serious, hasn't it?" Elisabeth can't tell if Elyounoussi is smug or considering. Neither feels like a winning option.

Eyes wide in true apprehension this time, she rasps, "How serious?" She's fixed with a look. A commanding look, actually. One that demands no shenanigans or gallows humor. Not that Elisabeth thinks she could manage that if she tried with this turn of events.

"National security serious."

"…oh…" The gulp makes a return appearance. "In…in that case, Superintendent. Ask away."

Elyounoussi nods, as prim and professional as one can get when in medical protective gear. She moves to sit on the bed next to Elisabeth's just as a nurse is setting down the quarantined woman's food tray. "I am glad you see the urgency. Shall we get started, then?"

Final Words: So, there we have it. Hope Elyounoussi doesn't seem too tacked-on - it feels flat to me, but I'll let you guys decide. I am my worst critic, so I leave judgement to others.

USAMRIID: US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - located in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The army-run research institute focuses on biological threats posed to the U.S. military. They were a key responder during the Amerithrax attacks in October-November 2001.