Still Talking When You're Not There

Chapter Thirteen

"Don't. Just stop it now."

It was John's voice. With the same levels of distress that Sherlock had heard in it when he was standing on the roof of St Bart's and John was on the phone. The worry and the barely suppressed realisation of what Sherlock was about to do.

I can't, John. This time I think I might be going mad, and if something doesn't happen soon, I think it will be too late.

Trying to shut the voice down, he opened his eyes. Unfortunately, it made no difference. He was in total darkness. His Chinese guards liked to play tricks with the light. The one naked bulb overhead (and well out of reach, alas) was turned on at odd intervals. Sometimes it would be on for only a few minutes; other times it might be hours. But his ability to judge days was getting very wobbly. With no natural light, it was hard to tell the diurnal cycle. He guessed that his prison- a former store room of some sort- must be deep underground, because there was no discernible difference in temperature- it was always cold and damp.

He knew the drill- conduct under capture. Stay strong by establishing a routine of mental and physical exercise. But without a better sense of time, it was getting very hard. He couldn't count on food- sometimes it seemed to arrive too close together, when he wasn't hungry. But if he didn't eat, they took it away, and then it felt like days before something else came. They were purposefully messing with his body clock. He had tried to use the water as a method of keeping track, but they liked to play games with that, too. Sometimes it was a small bottle, sometimes large. He had learned to drink whatever came, because he had no idea how long it would be before the next. He would drink it and then count the time it took before the need to urinate was overwhelming. By his reckoning, that should be about 3 hours.

"Who's the doctor here?" His avatar John was standing in the Mind Palace corridor, hands on hips, and a frown on his face. I should have asked you this sort of thing; I got lazy, relying on you being there to answer my questions whenever I needed this sort of information. You have no idea, John, how useful it was to have a doctor as my partner when investigating.

That made him feel odd. Is this guilt? I'm not really familiar with this feeling. He had not spent enough time letting John know how useful he was.

The one thing the guards couldn't affect was the growth of stubble. He hated the way it felt; he'd never been tempted to grow a beard or mustache. By what he could feel when he rubbed his chin in the dark, he estimated that he had to have been held for more than two weeks- probably nearer to three. But hair grew too slowly for it to be any reliable guide apart from that.

What's taking so long? Avatar John just shrugged. "Don't ask me. You never bothered to tell me anything about your trip to Russia, so how do you expect me to have a view on whether Yelena Barsovna will ransom you?"

Sherlock sighed. Towards the end, he'd had to keep John in the dark about too many things. His first "high profile" case from Elizabeth –the return of the stolen Turner watercolour- had been an opportunity to start putting distance between himself and the doctor.

It was for your own good, John. If you'd known what I had planned, then you would have tried either to get involved, or to stop me. That would have made you even more of a target, and defeated the whole process of putting Moriarty in a position where he had to confront me.

"Like that turned out so well." His John avatar was not happy. The doctor shrugged. "But what do I know?"

Yes, precisely. What you didn't know, wouldn't hurt you.

The light came back on, blinding Sherlock completely, making him cry out in pain. The over-stimulation hit his senses like a flood, and he gagged. Nausea was becoming the stock response of his body now to just about everything, so he guessed that it was a good thirty six hours since he'd eaten anything. He staggered to his feet and started walking. The room was only two meters wide and three in length, but he had learned to keep his hand on the wall to keep track of where he was. He paced the length, turned at the metal door and then back the other side. His prisoner's shoes- a strange combination of recycled car tyre sole and cotton upper were too tight. He supposed that he had big feet compared to the native Manchurian. The clothes – a thin tunic and trousers that were too short- did little to keep the cold out, so he walked in part to stay warm and get his circulation going again. Part of the routine.

He'd learned about conduct under capture early on. Figuring out how to rescue the banker who had been kidnapped gave him a legitimate excuse for research into the subject. He never told John that he also had a personal reason to learn more. After all, he'd soon be spending months in close detention- virtual house arrest- by the CIA. The Americans had only been told by Elizabeth that he was an asset turned – a Moriarty henchman that MI6 had taken and convinced to turn against the network. The cover was perfect; Lars Sigurson's credentials had been built up over the previous six months, so he was perfectly believable and no one would ever associate Sherlock Holmes with the man- not even Mycroft. He spent six months as a prisoner, being shuttled between the CIA HQ in Langley and a secure facility run by the FBI n Quantico where he was kept in solitary confinement. He was under surveillance the entire time (what's new? Mycroft's been doing that for years). Still, he'd prepared for it by reading up on what to do when kidnapped; it was much the same experience. Working under apparent duress for the Americans was part of a deal- he'd help out with their pursuit of the network, in exchange for his freedom at the end of it. It got him out of the UK in a CIA plane, which he never told Mycroft about. And it earned him liberation at the end of it, when he slipped across the border into Canada, able to pick up the first of his four cached fake passports, assuming another identity that his brother knew nothing about. What you don't know, can't be used against you, brother mine.

In those final months, there had been arguments between him and his brother- real ones, not just the ones they did for show, to keep Moriarty thinking that he had the pair of them at loggerheads. Their enmity was quite close to the truth. Mycroft had not really forgiven him for coming up with the whole idea, and then making him sit on the side lines, recused from active involvement. Only at the end, he needed Mycroft's help with the thirteen rooftop scenarios.

"Ahem." Oh, bother. It was his Mycroft avatar's way of attracting his attention. That rather pompous way of clearing his throat when he wanted Sherlock to pay attention. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. Can't you see I'm busy? He kept walking, starting to feel his muscles stretching into something like their normal configuration.

"That wasn't the only help I gave you. I also made sure you didn't weaken when it came to John Watson." Mycroft was wearing his light grey pinstripe suit, the one that made him look more than ever like the minor British Civil Servant that he liked to claim that he was. Sherlock was about to open his mouth to tell him to piss off, when the room was plunged into darkness again. Only four circuits of the small room- less than two minutes of light, even with the shuffling gait that he could manage with the wretched shoes. He kept his fingers on the wall and kept going in the darkness, his other hand now stretched out in front of him to make sure he didn't walk face-first into the stone wall. He had to go slower, but he would keep at it. The exercise was important- a target of twenty laps as often as he could face it. He could measure his progress by the difference that his fingers felt when he passed the metal door- that and the smell of the plastic slop bucket that served as his toilet. The first time he'd "kicked the bucket" when walking in the dark had taught him to position it a good meter away from the far wall.

Oh, well; I will grant you that little victory regarding John. You were SO sure that he would never be able to lie, you just couldn't resist the opportunity to prove it to me with that ridiculous story about Irene Adler. It had been one of the worst moments in the run up to the final showdown on the roof. Mycroft had obviously asked John to tell him that Irene had been put into some ridiculous witness protection scheme. Of course, he'd been able to deduce from John's horribly bumbling efforts that his brother was trying to tell him that she was dead. That's what you think, you fat git. He'd taken a great deal of pleasure organising her rescue, if only to be able someday to tell Mycroft what had actually happened.

"Ahem" His brother's avatar was now glaring at him."That little charade proved my point. Even when he thought he was lying to protect your feelings, he was so blatantly incapable of it that it made you realise that you could never tell him. If you were going to go through with your master plan, then you had to have the courage of your convictions. It was my duty to point out your weaknesses, brother mine, and to try to save you from them."

We've had this argument before; I concede you were right on the matter of John. Move on; get over it. He hated to admit that he'd nearly caved in several times; the temptation to share the truth with John had become nearly overwhelming the closer the final confrontation came. Just when he needed to talk to his only friend the most, he wasn't able to. Sherlock had to face alone the strange combination of adrenaline fuelled anxiety as his plans against Moriarty started to bear fruit and the odd cloud of depression that settled around him in the last few months.

Sherlock was no stranger to depression; it had dogged him all his life, and he knew the symptoms well. He'd grown quieter, more withdrawn. The case work – what little Elizabeth was able to feed him- came too rarely; he was forced back onto the occasional private client able to circumvent Mycroft's interdiction tactics. And he'd delved into a number of historical cases of miscarriages of justice, like the Peter Black case, just to pass the time. His only other occupation had to be done surreptitiously – building up Lars Sigurson's reputation as an astute player in Moriarty's network took time- and it was hard to do so without being able to take on the persona physically. The strain of it all wore him out, and he'd felt like depression was loitering with intent, on the edges of his mind palace.

He was feeling that same black cloud now. He had tried hard to keep it at bay. Along with the walking and the occasional Tai Chi exercise, he kept his mind going with recounting each and every part of the network he'd smashed, embedding the data even deeper in his Mind Palace. For light relief, he resorted to rehearsing the inner workings of the Periodic Table, or musical composition. It was almost impossible for him to sleep, so he also went through the meditation exercises he'd learned in the Tibetan monastery, even to the extent of chanting out loud the texts that he had learned by heart. One advantage of a near eidetic memory- he could remember them easily.

But no matter what Sherlock tried to keep his mind busy and distracted, the black gloom broke through his defenses. As time wore on, the idea of rescue became dimmer and dimmer. If a ransom was going to be paid, then an exchange of e mails confirming that fact would have taken hours, not days. The longer he sat in the dark cell, the more laps he added to his total of seven hundred and twelve circuits, the more his chances of getting released were slipping away.

The depression hugged him as tight as the darkness surrounding him. He knew that it was the unknown that had triggered this current bout. Not knowing how long it would take his captors to realise that the Russian ransom would not be coming. Not knowing how they would decide to kill him once they did realise that he had no value for them. Odd that- the method was important to him. He'd not been one to be afraid of dying; he'd rather expected it when he was younger. If it wasn't the chance criminal getting lucky, it might have been the bouts with drugs. He'd overdosed on purpose a couple of times, prepared to accept death at his own hand rather than carry on in the dark place that he had become marooned within.

A bit like this room. There was no contact with his guards, no one spoke to him. Oddly, he'd welcomed the beatings he got on the first two days in captivity –close physical proximity gave him a chance to use his deductive skills to probe for a weakness, try to get them talking. But, once they got Yelena's name from him, all contact stopped. The hatch at the bottom of the metal door would open- nine inches wide and four inches from the floor to the top of the metal flap- and a plastic tray would slide in, sometimes with water or food. It always happened when the lights were on. The very first time the tray was accompanied by the curt command- "空水桶"*. He'd take whatever they were delivering out of the tray and empty his toilet bucket in. He tried not to think too much about the hygiene issues associated with the common usage.

When he tried to get them to talk, there was no reply. The one time he decided to do nothing, the tray was slid back out, and he had to cope with no food, no water and no light, as well as a stinking toilet bucket for ages. His sensory distress at that meant he only tried it the once.

Another time, he'd waited for the hatch to open, then drew the plastic tray in and placed it aside, before heaving the contents of the bucket straight through the hatch. He wanted to catch a guard unawares, soak him in the urine and excrement. Sherlock wanted to provoke an angry reaction- for someone to come into the cell and try to beat him- it would give him a chance to make contact and start a conversation that could lead to his freedom. But, even this limited hope faded when there was no reaction to the thrown effluent.

Depression about the hopelessness of it all seized his chest from the inside, and his cuticles hurt. He stopped walking and sank down on his haunches in the dark, back to the wall. He hugged his knees to his chest and rocked. If Yelena was going to pay the ransom, it would have happened before now. The delay in killing him was getting too much to bear. He kept wondering how he would be dispatched. Would they spend a bullet on him? Or try to strangle him? He doubted that; he'd fight and they knew that. Perhaps it would be poison in the food; it would surely be the easiest and cheapest way, with minimal risk.

He wondered if he should stop eating now. He thought he might. Dying through starvation would be less painful than poison. And it would be a last act of defiance. He decided that it would be best to stop drinking the water, too. Poison could be ingested that way, and dehydration would speed his loss of consciousness and hasten his death. Yes, I've had enough of this.

"Just stop it now." The John avatar was back. "You don't get to give up."

Be quiet and go away, John. If you were real, I might be willing to argue with you. But the real you thinks I am dead already. You aren't worrying about me anymore; and Mycroft will eventually realise that I am not coming back. He gets to say he was right all along about my crazy plan. Peace at last, for all concerned.

Sherlock recalled an earlier moment, in a grave yard, where he had observed John's soliloquy. His friend was speaking out loud, even though in theory he believed that Sherlock was buried under the tombstone. The real John had said, "please, there's just one more thing, mate, one more thing: one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't ... be ... dead. Would you do ...? Just for me, just stop it… Stop this."

Sorry, John; I'm fresh out of miracles.

The lights came back on, and he growled his annoyance as his eyes were blinded by the glare again. He heard the metal door being unlocked. So, they have decided to kill me now. He staggered up to his feet, and tried to get his eyes to focus on the shapes. He wanted to look death in the eye, but it was very hard to see anything through the retinal overload. Two people, he could tell that much but little else.

"Видите? Он жив, как мы и обещали. Теперь заплатить и уехать."**

The Chinese guard's Russian was a little rusty, but Sherlock got the gist of it at the same time as his nose identified a scent he had not smelled in a very long time.

"Right. A little worse for wear, but he'll do. Wrap him up; I'll take him home with me." Matter-of fact, as if speaking to a shop keeper after making a purchase. In English, and delivered by a voice he recognised as well as her perfume.

Sherlock smiled. "Miss Adler. You have no idea what a pleasure it is to see you again."

Author's note: * "empty the bucket". ** "See? He is alive, as we promised. Now pay up and leave."

As ever, for the script of the broadcast episode, I rely on the incomparable Ariane de Vere's transcripts.