Hello all! Thanks for stopping by to read chapter one of my Sherlock story! I've been such a fan of the show and simply couldn't hold out any longer against writing my own story with Sherlock and John. This story will be very firmly JohnLock, and there will eventually be sexual scenes. A note of caution for this first chapter: it contains descriptions of the abuse Sherlock suffers at the hands of his captors in some detail. Please be aware of this before you start! Hopefully you'll enjoy the stage I'm setting, and be ready for the curtain to fully rise on Sherlock and John!

As always, Happy Reading!

The Special One: Chapter One

Sherlock Holmes had known from an early age that he was, in many ways, special. Very special. He was intelligent in the extreme, observant and his powers of reasoning were unparallelled in all of Great Britain- if not the world. For the total of his adult life he'd found other people boring, unimaginative, tedious. What they had to say rarely interested him, their thoughts simply too mundane to capture his attention. The few exceptions to that rule were usually psychopaths. Funny that so many people mistook him for one as well. Missing the subtle difference between a psychopath and a sociopath was just one of the many reasons most people were simply too dull to be considered worthwhile.

It followed, then, that his life was more valuable than others. Putting silly sentiment aside, he had more worth than most random people on the street. Not only did he solve crimes and thus prevent new ones from occurring, but intelligence of his sort was far and few between. He was a commodity. A rare wine on a shelf full of common vintages. Because of that, Sherlock was never heroic. He took chances when it suited him, when he wished to. Not when it would save another. To him it wasn't at all selfish. It was logical. If he stepped in front of a bullet for the sandwich shop owner down the street, the man would go home to his wife and kids, lead a perfectly average life, then die someday down the road. He would never do a single extraordinary thing in his life. The world would have lost, in his place, its only consulting detective. Quick mental math could lead Sherlock to estimate that he would, indirectly, save the lives of almost three thousand people in the next year if he kept working cases at his current rate. So in terms of human lives, he far outweighed everyone he knew.

Simple logic.

But all the logic in the world couldn't stop him from choosing to give up his own life to save John Watson's. Sherlock couldn't have told anyone precisely when it had happened. When foolish sentiment had crept its way into his heart and overruled his cold, unyielding logic. Silly, pointless sentiment. John was a doctor, he surely would go on to save lives. But he could have been a plumber and Sherlock would still have given his life for the man. Foolish, useless sentiment. It made him stare into the eyes of a mad man and choose, without pause, to give his life in order to spare John Watson.

In those moments, things became perfectly, terrifyingly clear to Sherlock. He'd let his flatmate into his life, into his heart, and he was about to -gladly- pay the ultimate price for it. He wouldn't have used such a naive or ridiculous word such as love for what he felt for the doctor, but at it's base, that's what it was. Love. Pure, unadulterated, selfless love. John had become central to his life in every way. Without John Watson, there was no Sherlock Holmes, pure and simple. It made the sacrifice so much easier. Why loose both lives when one could be saved? And it was crystal clear in Sherlock's mind that John's was the life to save. Because Sherlock wasn't special.

John was.

John with his big heart and unflinching courage and unwavering loyalty. A brilliant mind could be born, bred, engineered. But a beautiful soul...that was the true rarity. John was everything Sherlock had scoffed at in his youth. Ruled by his heart and so many scruples that Sherlock found too restricting. But what he'd once seen as weakness and foolishness he had to come to see as ultimate strength both of character and will.

A thousand possibilities flashed through his mind as he took those last few seconds to consider. A thousand memories tumbled to the fore and he pushed them back. There was a chance, a slight chance, that he could pull the ultimate trick. That he could come back from this. It was slim, but it was there. Even with no chance, he'd still have sacrificed himself to save John, but the hope that he might see his friend again had his mind functioning at break neck speed, racing through the possibilities, gears turning so quickly that if they'd been true metal and grease pieces they'd have melted.

He calculated the risk. It was going to have to be enough. If it didn't work, he would die with the knowledge that John was safe. And if it did...well then, there would be a price to pay. A price for the pain his apparent death would cause John. A price for every second John mourned. And Sherlock would extract that price from his enemies with a cruelty that would shock the good doctor if he ever found out.

Two years later:

It was almost over. They had been hunted down and eliminated, in one form or another, all except for this last one. He'd been clever, very clever to escape Sherlock's clutches. He never came out of hiding. Which was why the only way to get him had been to fall into his hands. Let the careful, brutal man think he'd captured the great Sherlock Holmes. When in fact, it was Sherlock who would be capturing him. He'd made all the calculations twice, three times, a dozen times. The plan wasn't optimal. There would be repercussions that lasted years for Sherlock. But he wanted to go home. He wanted to be with John. He'd forgotten, really, just how lonely his life had been before John Watson had walked into it.

The endless drudgery of every day events, the darkness that crept upon him when his mind was idle too long. The tedium only able to be broken with drugs that at once both cleared his brain and addled it. He'd forgotten the way things had been before. And so maybe he'd never really appreciated John the way he should have. The light John had brought to his life. So much of his time was spent in cool calculations and heartless deductions that he'd let it pass, almost unnoticed, all the small things that John did to brighten his life. They were things only an idiot would miss, which John had aptly called Sherlock so many times. Not that John would go get the groceries, but that John would make sure to pick up the particular kind of tea Sherlock favored. Not that John put up with Sherlock disappearing into his mind palace for hours on end, but that he was always there to listen when Sherlock came out of it. Had he thought he'd appreciated the doctor before his faked death?

He'd been wrong. It had taken two long years missing his best friend to truly understand just how much John Watson meant to him. Which was why he knelt in the dank cave, back sliced to ribbons, three ribs broken, all of them bruised, clenching his teeth tight so that he didn't accidentally bite his tongue off when the impact of the next blow shot through him.

The careful calculations had been right, of course. They hadn't wanted to kill him right away. That had been the most risky gamble of the venture. If they'd wanted to kill him at the very start, the whole plan would have been fucked. But no, Sherlock had guessed correctly that his enemy's brutality would outweigh his desire to see him dead. The one thing he'd miscalculated on had been his coping mechanisms.

When they'd taken him into the cell that would be his home for nearly two months, Sherlock had assumed he would deal with the pain the way he'd dealt with every other kind of pain in his life. He would retreat into his mind, barricade himself in his mind palace until it was over. In the past, it had let him distance himself from the physical, divorce himself from his own feelings.

But he'd never felt pain like this before.

The beatings were manageable. Burly men lashing out in predictable ways. The damage could be calculated, tallied and totaled. Dismissed. The first time they'd opened his back with the whip he'd felt the stirrings of fear. It shook him. Even from inside his mind he'd felt the pain of it. At times, the innocuous coil of leather laid him open to the bone. Nerves screamed at him, sending shock waves of agony through him. Worse, a few days after a whipping they would do it all over again, scourging wounds that his body was trying desperately to close.

Even that, though, he could still hide from. He managed some distance from the red hot agony and spent his time calculating the risk of infection, the rate at which it would grow, which bacterium would most likely enter his wounds and how it would need to be treated. Each blow, he would let the cold analyst within him sense and analyze. He would consider how many stitches it would take to close the slice, then the calculations became more intense as the whippings continued and he had to factor in other wounds, reopened or deepened gashes, and how much skin was left on his back to work with.

He knew there would be scars. He deduced analytically how many years it would take each scar to fade based on how deep the gash was. Which ones would never fade completely.

He had even counted on mutilation. Loosing fingers, toes, maybe some permanent disfigurement to his face or irreparable damage to a limb. Simple matters of physical disability that would need to be overcome. So far, he hadn't lost any appendages, but he didn't count on that lasting long. He judged that the reason they had yet to divest him of one was simply to prolong the torture. Infection would set in fast with a wound that big. Or they risked loosing him to blood loss. No, they wanted to prolong their fun with him too much to risk it yet.

Of course, Sherlock had figured sexual assault into his calculations as well. When they realized he didn't react the same way to torture a normal person did, they were bound to explore other options. Historically, rape was a tried and true form of humiliation, domination and torment. Sherlock was in no way ignorant of all things sexual. He'd been unable to gain the mind numbing pleasure from sex acts because his mind simply couldn't be numbed. Sex didn't make him skittish or embarrassed. It just didn't interest him. He'd never lost his breath, felt his heart rate increase, lost track of a thought because of attraction. So after the brief, clinical studies he'd done of both himself and others, he'd put the issue to bed. But that in no way meant that he was unaware of the drive in others. The mechanics of the act and the emotions that accompanied it.

Rage, in this case. Hatred, anger, desire to inflict pain. Desire to dominate. So rarely was rape about sex. Statically, it was about control and anger. Of course, there was desire as a factor as well, but that wasn't Sherlock's concern. He'd been able to catalog each of those things and total them up. Over the course of his life he'd read many reports on sexual assault statistics and the psychology that went along with recovery. For the average mind, overcoming it was a matter of time, support, and understanding that there was no fault on the part of the victim. Sherlock was in no way an "average mind." He knew going in that anything done to him was not his fault. Logic would prevent him from seeing it otherwise. Pain he could dismiss. Degradation was nothing new to him. He'd been called 'freak' so many times that he now took a certain kind of pride in it.

All those things should have prepared him. They should have let him easily dismiss the attacks. And when his assailants realized it was not an effective form of torture, they would grow bored with it and move on. Perhaps electrical torture. Caning. Water-boarding.

But nothing, no amount of preparation, no cold calculations, no clean rational thought, could have prepared him for the reality of it.

He'd been able to tell instantly when it was coming. The man broadcasted his intentions in the way he walked, the set of his jaw, the glint in his eyes. And of course there was the tell tale unbuckling of his belt. He had the two guards unhook Sherlock from where he'd been dangling from the ceiling. The relief flooding through his limbs at the release was only momentary, though, as he was bent over the dirty bench and his arms once more pulled taut. He took deep breaths through his broken nose and set his jaw, knowing the best way to make the bastard loose interest would be to stay perfectly still and give no outward sign of distress. As his trousers were ripped down, he closed his eyes and retreated behind the walls of his mind palace. The man's words became distant, then were lost all together. He could no longer feel the pain of the gash on his cheekbone being pressed into the rough grain of the wood bench. He could no longer feel the cold, unyielding floor beneath his knees. Casually, he strolled to his favorite door in the palace, leading to his favorite room. Memories about his favorite thing. John's room. He began to examine the contents carefully, cherishing each one.

The invasion stole his breath and caught him so off guard that he didn't even have time to brace for it. It was as if a wrecking ball had torn through his mind. It wasn't something that pain or humiliation could do. It was intrusion. Desecration. His mind spun out of control as his body struggled to process each new pain. He desperately clung to his memories of John, then thrust them away in disgust, unwilling to taint those precious memories with the atrocity that was happening currently. Instead, he tried to bring his whirling mind to heel. If only he could latch onto one thought, form a calculation, analyze and deduce. But he couldn't catch a single shred of thought from the maelstrom in his mind.

It was pain and darkness and degradation and violation. The assault was as much mental as it was physical. Why had Sherlock never known how intimate the sex act could be? Maybe, maybe if he'd been aware of the light end of that feeling, he would have been prepared for the dark end of it as well. It wasn't just something being done to him, but something being taken from him. Stolen brutally. Secret, private things were laid bare and plundered. Parts of himself he'd never shared with another were callously tormented.

His eyes, which he'd screwed tightly shut, flashed open. He knew then, beyond a doubt, that each moment of this would be forever burned into his mind. The ugly stains on the floor, the water trickling down the walls, the fiery ingress and tearing pain, they wouldn't be stored in neat boxes inside his mind palace. They would be carved into the walls. Etched into the floors. And if he brought the whole damn thing down and put up another, they would rise from the ashes and imprint themselves on his new one as well. It was inescapable. Against his will, a single tear escaped his eye and fell, slowly down his cheek, across his nose, and dripped onto the bench. He couldn't catch his breath, felt as if he was going to suffocate. In desperation, he tried to count how many seconds it would take without oxygen before he blacked out. How long could the human body survive without air?

His swirling mind threw a number at him, and he began to count. His count took on a sickening rhythm with the thrusts of the man behind him. As he counted, other figures came to him from the darkness. Average length of time a middle aged male maintained sex before ejaculation. Statistical chances of getting an STD from this encounter. How much that percent would multiply if others used him this way.

For a moment, his mind was cast into the darkness, the stark chaos once more at the thought of others taking him. He struggled to push it away. Struggled to regain some form of control.

His thoughts began to flicker, his vision starting to fade. That returned some calm to him again. He was reaching the point at which he would black out. As he took up his count again, he only hoped that if he was to be deprived of air like this, he would be without long enough to kill him. The thought of surviving with brain damage truly terrified him. He repeated the numbers again in his head as he waited for the darkness. Once he blacked out, how many more seconds until his heart stopped. How much the chances of brain damage increased with each passing moment.

Just as the darkness had him in its cold fingers, he felt the immense weight on his back shift. Automatically, his lungs expanded, taking in huge gulps of dank air. While he tried to process all the pains wracking him, it was impossible to ignore the insults hurled at him. The ugly words. Logically, he knew they were more a reflection of his attacker than himself. So why did he feel so dirty? Why was there shame painting his cheeks? He'd done nothing wrong. But still, he couldn't suppress it.

He was quickly jerked upright, then hooked back to the chain in the ceiling. A small groan of pain escaped him. The lacerations on his back were opened again, his muscles screaming in agony from being wrenched so hard. The pain of the assault itself was immense, a fiery agony consuming him from the inside out. Somehow, worse than all that, was the cool trickle of blood mixed with semen dripping down his thigh.

Sherlock didn't loose track of the number of times he was used -Used, taken, abused, somehow the word rape was uncomfortable for him to think. Shameful. How had his world shifted so radically?- No, he didn't loose track. They didn't blur together. They were each burned into his mind. Each thrust, each moan, each clutch of dirty fingers at his hips. Somehow, those bruises seemed the ugliest to him. Round smudges of black in the shape of fingers digging into him. They were ugly and terrible. They would fade, Sherlock knew that. He could tabulate the number of days, the number of hours until they would be gone. So why did they bother him more than the scars that would never leave his back?

As time wore on, Sherlock continually reminded himself of why he'd allowed this to happen. Why he'd let himself be captured. It was the only way. He couldn't return until all his enemies were dispatched, couldn't risk John that way. He wanted to return to his life, to 221B, to his work and his only real friend. This had been the only way. So he could handle it. He would have to.

In the end, it took less time than he'd originally guessed. A total of seven weeks, two days, five hours and eight minutes before his opportunity came. He had long before memorized the faces of the thugs, their rank amongst the group. He knew which of them carried keys, which had weapons. He knew the one with the rifle had an ever so slight limp in his left leg, obviously from weak cartilage in his knee. He knew that the man with the key to his cuffs had a small bladder and went to relieve himself an average of once every two point seven hours. And he knew that the man he needed to kill in order to return home, return to John- keep John safe- was in a room eight meters down the hall, then two meters to the right. Guard at the door, hand gun, no extensive training.

He moved quickly when the time came. It wasn't revenge or retribution that drove him. That would get in the way, would cloud his thoughts. He forced himself to be cold, distant. Get the key from the guard on duty. Unlock his cuffs, silence and disable said guard. Two shots, kill the two thugs on either side of his cell door. One more shot for the one at the end of the hall. Boot heel to the knee of the one with the rifle. Cold cock him to save bullets. Take out the guard with the hand gun as he comes running around the corner. Five more steps to the object of his search. No more bullets left in the gun. Discarded. Brief hand to hand engaged. Blow to the solar plexus, another to the temple. A simple step to get behind the man, heels of his hands pressed to jaw and back of the head. A quick twist. A loud pop.

Then it was done. The last one taken out. He was free. He could go home. Home. John. The adrenaline that had taken him that far suddenly ran out. He'd expected that, prepared for it. Pain was a sharp lance burning just beneath his skin, embracing him like an old friend. He used it to push himself just a little further. Pick the lock on the desk, get out the cell phone. Dial the number with shaking fingers.

"Its done. Come get me." Then his world went black.

I promise a quick update and cookies all around if you're willing to take a moment and tell me what you thought! ; )