I DID THE THING.
Sep. 3rd, 2013 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artinthebloodSherlock did not have flying dreams. His dreams were disjointed meaningless flashes, his mind reordering the day's impressions and flinging its leftovers into his short term memory. They did not tell stories about flying. But that first moment of falling, it was still familiar. For a moment, for a moment as long as a gunshot, he remembered flying, that it had felt like this, arms spread and air pressing up against him.
And then there had been the ground. He had crashed through it like thin ice into cold, heavy blackness.
And then there had been the ambulance, and the acute feeling of bruising fingers on his wrist, fingers that were gone. Someone's voice had risen in a long, shaking moan, and he'd gone blind when he tried to turn his head.
And then there had been... a room. A black room, with electronic beeping, and a distant voice. His ears were ringing, and there was something- there was ridged plastic in his mouth, his throat. A tube, a... He knew what it was, but the word wouldn't come to the surface. He was trying to find it, struggling, when the voice came closer.
"- not optimistic," it was saying. "It's been six weeks." Had it been? Really?
"But there's brain activity, they tell me." That voice tasted intimately familiar, sharp and a little high, the accent affected and distant. He could name the school that voice had gone too, but
"Yes... a few spikes today, in fact," said the first voice, with a cautious note that should have told him something. "And we'll keep watching. No one is suggesting taking him off the machines. But his body is failing. And even if-"
The familiar voice responded like a gunshot, but either they were moving off again, or he was. He grasped after the meanings of the words that continued on and on, but it was as though they had suddenly went into another room and shut a door on him. The rhythmic ringing in his ears was rising like an approaching storm.
And then there was cold. Still the hard plastic in his mouth and throat and now everything else was cold. Something like ice pressed against his cheekbones, across his forehead, the sides of his throat. There was nothing else.
There was nothing else.
And then.
And then there was blue light. And he was upright. And the chill blue light was wrapped around him like fluid, the only thing he could see. Blinking was a languid movement, slow and foreign. He bit down on the tube in his mouth, felt it shift clear down his throat. There was a strap around his head, that held it in place, and he could clearly see every step to take it off, simple and clear, but the movements weren't there. He could feel hands; There was a pressure on one index finger that he knew was an oxygen meter, and a sting in the other forearm that could only be an intravenous needle. But there was no tension in them, all the muscles slack and cold, and they were not intimately /his./ He could feel them again, them and his chest and his belly, but it did not feel better than the nothing that had come with the cold, because they weren't his.
No, that was irrational.
But they weren't. And he could not deny it. And he still couldn't find his legs. He tried to move them. Something moved, something that disturbed the chill blue light, and logic said it was his legs, but he couldn't feel them, or look down to see. The tube that he couldn't remove kept his head tilted upwards, looking up into the thick blue.
So he simply stared upwards as his mind worked. Because /that/ was his, and /that/ was finally working as it ought.
The blue light never changed. Sherlock could feel time passing by the flux and flush of drugs in his system. There must have been a muscle-relaxant; probably pancuronium, if the flushes of heat he felt were an indication. And some kind of benzodiazepine, that was certain. He knew that feeling, like a fishing net thrown into the school of his thoughts, tangling everything and forcing him to struggle through until it eased once again and he could think clearly. And that all took time; so much time. But measuring it was pointless. He would find out when he got out of this how much time he'd lost.
As for what 'this' was...
Sherlock remembered the ground, and the way his shadow on it had looked, racing towards him. Twenty-three meters, maybe twenty-four. And he was alive. Alive with a tube in his throat, alive and unable to feel his legs. He spent two cycles of the benzodiazepine cataloging his body; he could feel with detail the parts of his head and neck, his shoulders. He could feel with vagueness his arms from elbows to fingertips, his chest, his stomach, his spine down to approximately the third lumbar vertebra. He could feel not at all his hips, groin, legs, or feet. So he'd broken his spine just below his waist. And perhaps in his neck - his mind, /his/ mind shied away from that until he forced his thoughts against it. That would explain why he couldn't move anything, why the tube was still in his throat. If it had been an open injury, exposing the spine, that would also explain the isolation. So this was simple. He was in medical care, in sterile isolation, awaiting surgery or increased function or simply for something to change. On ventilation and a feeding tube.
When his mind was running as it should, he could avoid the traps of speculation. But in the grips of the drugs, he found himself grindingly obsessed with trying to move. He could scrunch his face, work his jaw from side to side, and work his tongue. He could blink, and move his eyes. He tried to draw attention a few times, blinking rapidly, then in patterns, but the second time he tried that, he passed out, and lost an unknowable amount of time. It seemed a much longer period after that before he could clear his mind again, and he presumed that his medications had been adjusted. Somewhere down in his mind, a red light flashed, but he shut a firm door on it. Suspicion was one thing; distress would do him no good here.
And then there was a morning - he had arbitrarily assigned time to the period he spent coming out of the haze - a morning when he felt something different. There was a sensation, crawling down- down. And he was so invested in following the extent of it at first, as it outlined his hips and thighs and knees... His new mental map was nearly to his ankles before he realized that the sensation was pain.
He regretted the realization as soon as he'd made it. The pain was a splintering, twisting thing, up and down the long bones. If he were prone to metaphors, the comparison would be shattered glass rods sheathed inside him, or needles that grew from the inside out and in again. And he had the distance, at first, to make that kind of observation, to try to diagnose the cause. But it wasn't centered anywhere, was all but uniform in intensity from his hips down. Not a break, then, or even a number of breaks. He felt short of breath, but that was because his heart was beginning to race, and there was no stomach pain, so it wasn't compartment syndrome. A clot, lodged in his spinal cord, perhaps. Or in his brain. An infection. Nothing he could picture was not potentially catastrophic.
Objectivity became harder as the pain went on and on. He felt light-headed, the tube not delivering enough air to keep up with his racing, crashing heart. A salt-wet-lemon taste seemed to rise up out of his throat, and he couldn't swallow around that tube. He felt like an overheating computer, and the image became so acute that he would have sworn he could smell burnt plastic. Ridiculous, in a hospital.
Ridiculous.
So was the gratitude he came to feel for the ventilation tube. He ground his teeth into it and it kept him from trying to scream. And he was grateful for that. After the pain came darkness, and he was grateful for that too.
Time did strange things as the pain became a standard part of his cycle. Before, it had been just the haze and the clear times. Now it was several cycles of haze and clear, and then a long, long build and plateau of that shattering agony. It was never quite the same twice. That first time, it had felt as if his bones were all outlined in neon agony. But in sessions after, it seemed to move outward, the bones disappearing as it moved through muscles, and finally to skin, an all-surrounding and hollow horror.
He counted seven sessions before it ceased, but it could have been as many as nine. It was hard to keep track, and he was not trusting his mental count, with nothing to verify it. He would have killed for a clock, and he was putting together a painstaking visualization of one when he realized that something new was changing. The blue light was fading. He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision, and realized that it was in fact clearing. He could, for the first time, see the lines of a light fixture above him as its bulbs faded to black. There was still light, a dimmer, whiter light from somewhere to his left, but he couldn't strain his eyes far enough in that direction to see a source. Nothing but a smooth white surface that seemed to wrap around him.
When he began to move, or rather, to be moved, his vision went gray and opaque. When it cleared, the white surface was abruptly gone. Instead, there was a ceiling above him, distant and crossed with pipes and hanging fluorescent lights. There was something familiar about the cool tint of the light, and the humming quality to the air, but trying to pin that down made the gray threaten again. It lingered, creeping through the cracks in his thoughts like moss.
Focusing on the immediate, he could tell there was a pillow under his neck, allowing his head to remain craned back. Something warm and thin, probably a lead, was draped across his throat and shoulder. He was trying to see if he could feel where it went when a hand moved it, brushing his skin in the process. His head jerked, and he strained to try to turn enough to see who was there, but he couldn't.
He didn't need to. The hands touched him a few more times, adjusting and moving things, and then their owner leaned into his line of vision. She was a black woman, with the upper lip of childhood music lessons and a three-day-old dye job in her hair. The thumbprint on her glasses wasn't hers, he noted with interest when her hand came into view, adjusting the tube that led into his mouth. Sherlock squinted up at her, working his mouth around it.
"No, no... I know you want to talk, but that tube is still breathing for you, Mister Holmes. You won't need it much longer, we hope. Signs are good. Blink twice if you're understanding everything I say." She spoke with a North Indian accent much overlaid by London, and a loud slowness that was medical prudence, not condescension. She was speaking to a head trauma case, after all.
Knowing that, Sherlock blinked twice, deliberate and firmly, and only added a single roll of his eyes. The woman smiled with raised eyebrows, and held up a little pointed probe where he could see it. "Good. Now, can you follow this with your eyes? And blink rapidly if it hurts at any point."
He cooperated with the test willingly; mind recording the results while he focused on problem-solving. He had questions, and very limited means to ask them. How fast could the doctor pick up on Morse code?
When she was done, he had learned that his peripheral vision had /expanded/ beyond what he was used to. What /had/ happened to his skull? He was sweating, too, though he only realized that when the doctor gently blotted at his face. He tried to twitch her off, blinking an irate dash-dot, dash-dash-dash at her.
"One for no, two for yes," she said gently, and he would have snorted if he could. He had to settle for another roll of his eyes, and a little twitch of his head. She had to ask the questions, then, if he was going to be so restricted. This was absurd.
An hour later, that dimness was smoking at the edges of his vision again, and he would have killed for a cigarette. But he knew more than he had and he did not know several telling things. He knew that her name was Doctor Rawn, and that he had never heard of her before. He did not know if she was a surgeon or a chemist; her hands could indicate either. Or both. And she typed more than she performed medicine. He knew that his memory was intact up until the moment of impact. He did not know the extent of his trauma; she had deflected every line of inquiry in that direction. Bad, then, bad enough that someone had decided that telling him would be detrimental to his recovery. That was fine, John would tell him when he got here.
He knew that he would be allowed visitors once he was off of the ventilator. She had told him that there would be some rehabilitation before he could speak again - his own experiments with his mouth had told him he at least remembered how.
And he did not know a single thing about the pain episodes. Nor about his body beneath the lowest rib. Nor the blue light or his treatment plan or anything they expected of his recovery beyond the ability to breathe and speak on his own again. If Doctor Rawn had wanted to fill him in, she had done the worst imaginable job. As she spoke like a competent, educated woman, the massive gaps were clearly deliberate. As she showed not the slightest hint of guilt, they were likely not an order, but her own decision.
Interesting.
The cycle of haze and clarity continued after she left. After that, it was back and forth. Six cycles of the benzodiazapine in the blue light, and then a few exhausting hours on his back in the white. There was Doctor Rawn, most commonly, and seven more doctors, five nurses on rotation and a small army of technicians. There were tests; blood work and exams where they showed him cards and asked him to blink responses to them, an interminable investigation of what he could feel in his upper body, and measurements taken of the strength in every muscle he could move. There was physical therapy.
The therapy came nearly as a surprise. After that frustrating initial one-way conversation, he had suspected that her mentions of him being about to talk soon were only a carrot. A lure to keep him cooperative and maybe even hopeful. But by his estimate it was only a week before he woke up one morning to find his mouth clear. Bruised and dry, still tasting of plastic, but clear. He still wasn't breathing for himself - working his jaw, he could feel a thick, telling numbness in his throat. So they had replaced the endotracheal tube with a tracheostomy tube, he could assume. He tried to angle his head, and found it even less mobile than before; there was a strap across his forehead. and something rigid to either side of his neck.
The next time Rawn came to check up on him, he mouthed, in exaggerated shapes, a question. An easy question. Would he walk again? It wasn't his main concern, and he doubted it, but he wanted to see her answer.
To her credit, she made no claim of misunderstanding. She watched his mouth carefully, and repeated some of the shapes with her own to make sure she understood him. And then her face shut down into perfect professionalism.
"Mister Holmes, I know this isn't the answer you'll want to hear, but it's still too early to know that." Five months, he tried to interrupt her, but that was a draw-back to forced silence. She kept speaking. "I assure you, /no/ stone has been left unturned in your care."
Curious, the way her pupils dilated at that. It wasn't the first time she'd shown that level of excitement in the idea of his overall, undefined 'care.' Or the first time that her eyes had flicked down the length of his body when she said it.
Could he see himself? he asked next, careful to look troubled and tired. Weak took no acting, shamefully. But he did spot acting in the regret she painted on her face as she shook her head, once she had parsed him.
"Oh, I am sorry... I will have a mirror brought down for you." But she sounded about as sincere as Mycroft's smirking assistant, and he would not be surprised if one never materialized. He twitched his head to the side, lip curling, dismissing it, and made sure the next thing he mouthed was perfectly clear.
He wanted to see Mycroft Holmes.
It took approximately three hours for Mycroft to turn up, and Sherlock put three separate theories to that. Seeing his face, he discarded the first. And the second went when he saw which coat his brother was wearing; he would never have worn that jacket for a car-ride, however long.
How was the helicopter? he mouthed, not needing nearly the same level of precision. He saw his brother's face go into that mask he knew so well; a hundred reactions suppressed at once. Mycroft had never been as good at that as he was. And like Rawn, Mycroft's eyes flicked tellingly down the length of his body. Unlike her, he pressed his lips together so tightly the skin around them was pale, and his pupils contracted to points. Was that /grief/, Mycroft Holmes?
"Doctor Rawn tells me you've been making better progress than she expected." His eyes did another sweep, this one slow and clearly meant to be noted. And while Sherlock was meant to be watching his eyes, he got better control over the muscles of his mouth.
'What did she expect?' was Sherlock's silent retort. 'Me to be a vegetable the rest of my life?'
"Well, frankly..." All Sherlock could see of his brother were his head and shoulders where he leaned over him, but he could tell that his hands were clasped firmly behind his back, bereft of umbrella. "Look, Sherlock. If you had seen yourself."
Was he telling him to count his blessings? he asked, as much to rile his brother as out of skepticism. He was rewarded with an eyeroll.
"Don't be ridiculous. Do you remember what you did?"
He'd rather not, he answered quickly. Stupid. He grimaced at the sweat that rolled down between his eyes. He didn't want Mycroft to see how much effort this conversation, brief as it had been, was costing him. But his brother's eyes weren't on his face again, he realized. They were somewhere in the vicinity of his knees.
"I'm not going to disagree with that. Though I believe we've pieced together your reasons," Mycroft said, after a short pause. He looked down, and Sherlock could hear his shoe tapping - sure sign of incomplete thoughts. His brother had not been at all prepared to see him today. And Mycroft was sweating too.
Did he visit? He mouthed the question suddenly, just to see his face. He was having to force the shapes already, nowhere near the speed he'd managed at first. 'Five months. Three hours outside London by helicopter, must be eight by car. No, that would be too much time out of your busy-'
"It's almost six months now," he answered, lips drawn tight as Sherlock's jaw began to jerk, the overtaxed muscle shaking. The ugly grayness in his vision swelled up sudden and dizzyingly. Sherlock was trying to blink it back when two nurses appeared suddenly, crowding Mycroft back. One adjusted something in his throat, the tracheostomy tube, he presumed. The other did something in the vicinity of his right collarbone, and the gray only intensified.
"We're sorry, Mister Ho-" he heard. And then he did not hear his brother leave.
When he woke, fighting his way through a heavier drug load than usual, he asked for three things: A calendar, a clock, and an airway. He had the first two within an hour, mounted on the ceiling above his bed. He couldn't see them when he was in the blue light, but they were there each time he was brought out of it, and as near as he could tell, no one was tampering with the clock. One of the nurses ticked off days on the calender for him, and only six more had been marked off when he won the third request, Rawn herself deflating the tamponade in his throat to allow him to breathe past the tube. His voice was weak and strange, and he had no control over tone or pitch, but he could speak aloud at last.
"Never got th-that mirror," he said with a stammer that made his lip curl. Not /one/ of the nurses ever let their eyes drift down his body, the way Mycroft had, the way Rawn and the other doctors did. And Sherlock needed to know why.
He still hadn't gotten his mirror the next day when the doctor in charge of his physical therapy (white male, late thirties, grew up in London before moving somewhere much north, two daughters under ten, second marriage) began to work with him on his left hand. His left side had been stronger from the start, and he could learn to be left-handed, Sherlock reasoned. It shouldn't even be hard, after this long, enforced reset.
A few sessions gave him half that hand. He could move two fingers and they were working on a third. Doctor Seally, the therapist, held Sherlock's arm up where he could see it, with a trio of leads stuck to his wrist, buzzing intermittently with a mild shock meant to reawaken the atrophied muscles. He barely recognized the limb; it was wasted and bony, the skin colorless and almost translucent; he could see every blue vein in his wrist, follow them out to the fingertips he was trying to move.
"Just bring that thumb to your palm. You know how it feels to do it, you're halfway there." Seally's patter was nearly nonstop, and perfectly typical and unhelpful. Sherlock tolerated it, or rather, ignored it, focusing instead entirely on the exercises. But he was fighting atrophy and nerve damage both, and it was not long before his hand was spasming. Abruptly, those fingers he'd been fighting so hard to move might as well have been made of wood.
He knew they were done for the day before Seally called it, but he still snorted in irritation when he lowered his arm back to the bed, on top of the blanket, and peeled the leads off. "Good progress to-"
"I know. Come back in two hours," he said shortly.
Seally, of course, refused. Pushing too hard, he said, would slow down his progress or even reverse it. Sherlock, of course, disregarded him, doing his best to push through anyway. He was alone when he felt recovered enough to try moving his hand again. It was harder, unable to lift his arm into his limited field of vision, but he shut his eyes and focused intently on that thumb once more. Slowly, with many a tremor, he brought it to his palm. When it touched, he allowed himself a silent, smug smile. And then just as slowly, he made himself stretch it outwards, flattening his hand on the soft hospital blanket.
He thought that he had nearly reached full extension when he brushed something. Under the blanket, something hard and vertical lay between his hand and his thigh. He tried to tap it with his trembling thumb, but the thick cloth and his own weakness kept that from giving him anything useful. Whatever the object was, all he knew was that it was there. Perhaps part of a traction system? Or part of whatever restraints held him upright, he realized, after a few moments. That made the most sense.
Trying to lift his hand to find the extent of the device, though, was too much. His hand began to jerk, the fingers clawing inwards, and he made a sound, disgusted at himself. How long would he be this weak?
The scoff drew Doctor Rawn, to his chagrin. He tried to shoo her away, but she hovered around him like a wayward wasp, checking the tube in his throat, the IVs in his inert right arm, the leads on chest and wrist. She ignored his protestations and set his hand back in its place on the bed. "Don't think I won't tell Seally you're overdoing it," she said, with a motherly tone that grated horribly.
"Tell him," he snapped back, irate. "But I want a mirror. And I want to speak to John Watson."
She made vague sounds of commiseration, but she was already distracted. "Your sats are a little low." And then she made not even a pretense of listening to his protests as she re-inflated the cuff in his throat, putting him back on the ventilator and silencing him. Displeasure was putting it mildly. He almost gave into the temptation to bite her when she patted his cheek after checking his pupils, went so far as to bare his teeth. She just gave him a smile in return, and went about her examination before putting him back into the blue light.
Sherlock fumed through the usual cycles of haze and impatience, slept angry and woke angrier. And he let Rawn have the raw edge of his tongue the instant he could. And she stood there, infuriatingly patient, not even looking at his face.
"And what in God's name is so interesting about my thighs!" he demanded at last, panting for ragged, painful breaths. "What <i>reason</i> could you possibly have to avoid every question I ask?!"
Slowly, she raised her eyes to his at last, irritation and... anticipation there. He stared at her, practically able to see the thoughts moving behind her eyes in the way she worked her jaw, her throat moving infinitesimally.
"Your brother insisted we not tell you until he deemed you ready," she said at last, taking off her glasses to occupy her hands in polishing them. It was a practiced affect, he could plainly see, allowing her to pace her words out slowly. For drama, he was sure. For an alleged scientist, she appeared to thrive on it. "But he tells me you're smart. Rational. And in possession of all your wits, so far as we've been able to see. Not prone to... panic."
Very deliberate word choice there, and Sherlock could not deny that it chilled him slightly. "If it's amputation, why wouldn't he want you to tell me?" Complications? An ongoing infection? No, none of that explained at all the blue light or the traction.
"It's not," she said, confirming his thoughts. "You understand, you're very lucky-"
"Don't. This isn't luck, this is only the result of my available resources. Now <i>tell me.</i> Pl-plainly." The stammer was a cough, a spasm in his throat. He took a shallow breath, trying to relax the muscles that were so quickly overworked. The tracheostomy ached fiercely.
"Oh, believe me, luck was involved. You see, Mister Holmes... and I'll be indelicate - your brother brought me an organ donor. Minimal brain function, spine a splintered mess, no autonomic functions and a heart that had already had to be replaced once." She tapped a blunt finger on his chest, out of his field of view but high enough for him to feel it. "You're on your second donor, so you know, and if you lose this one, there will not be any more. You aren't a compatible recipient anymore."
That stopped him, rebuttal on his lips. "... Why would that be a definitive statement?"
"Getting to that." She checked his IV tree again, just as much a fidget as the glasses-cleaning. "Your brother's more patient than you are. But he's just as bad about taking no for an answer, isn't he? Go to any lengths, he said, and so I did. When I said you shouldn't be alive, Mister Homes, I don't mean you are lucky. I mean, you are criminal. The genetic experimentation that has been done on your behalf would put me in jail, if it weren't for... well, a few protections. But it was supposed to be discreet."
"Returning from the dead is never discreet," he objected. "At least a dozen people saw me fall, my face is known. It would have been in the papers."
She was already nodding before he'd finished, as eager now as she'd been obfuscating before. How frustrating. "It was, it was. Ugly. You won't want to read the things they said about you. That was all planned for, though. There's a doctor in Hong Kong who's hinted a few times that he has a celebrity patient, and another in the same hospital who has published three articles on white cell spinal regeneration. And a story in a London blog, quickly syndicated and confirmed, that no official record of death exists for you." She shook her head with a low whistle. "I <i>like</i> your brother, Mister Holmes."
"Keep him," he said shortly, not following the obvious red-herring in the mention of the blog. "Tell me why you said it was <i>supposed</i> to be discreet. Past tense. No longer possible. Why?"
"Side effects," she said succinctly. "Unexpected side effects." Again, the infuriating glance down Sherlock's body, too quick for him to read the reflection in her glasses. Again the fascinated hint of a smile. "I've seen genetic drift in experimental subjects before, but the extent of this-"
"I am not interested," he ground out. "Just get to the point! What. Has. Happened to me?"
She made an entirely unprofessional roll of her eyes, and pulled something from the top of the bed. There was the click of a button, the whirr of a motor, and the mattress under Sherlock's head and shoulders began to lever itself upwards, letting his field of vision travel down. He saw, for the first time, the door of the room. There was a camera above it, aimed at him, and a narrow, wire-reinforced window. Then he could see a long rack of machines, all displaying data of one kind or another. Rawn pulled the blanket off of him, and stepped back.
When the motion stopped, and he could see, for the first time, that he was not on a bed at all. From his waist down, he was enclosed in a pod, looking for all the world like half of a space-age iron lung. It was white plastic, and a translucent seal connected it to his body, just below his very apparent ribs.
"Explain this to me," he demanded, gesturing to the device with his chin. Rawn nodded, and stepped back to tap out a four-digit code on a panel to the side of the pod. Sherlock felt the sequence of numbers as if she'd spoken it aloud.
"It's a modified hydrotherapy tank. And I'm going to open it in just a moment, and you can see why we're using it for yourself. To prepare you, however; We have not amputated anything. But you are not going to recognize your body. We've introduced DNA into your system that was meant to stimulate the regrowth of your spinal chord. The rapid regrowth, when we mixed it with carefully calibrated radiation. We've had several <i>hundred</i> successful experiments. Mice, rats, cats... There was no precedent for what has happened in you, our first human applicant."
It wasn't apology in her voice, and he had to have a grudging respect for that; it was excitement. "What was the DNA?"
"<i>Thaumoctopus mimicus</i>. Amazing creatures," she said, and then turned a valve. Above Sherlock, the blue light came on with a click. And in front of him, the top of the pod split apart and drew slowly open.
He had expected mutilation. Perhaps even exposed bone and living muscle. Bone deformity. He had braced himself for that much.
In the pod - no, the tank. It was a tank. Under a hands-breadth of green-tinted water coiled a half-dozen... appendages. Certainly not legs, much less his legs. They were tapered, jointless, with muddy, slack skin that was bluer than could be accounted for by the ambient light. Inert, they lay a good two meters, maybe two and a quarter, curled slightly in on themselves.
A trick, he wanted to say, but if it was one (and how he hated that word, 'if'), he could not see how. The appendages were absolutely part of the same body that continued above the plastic seal. He traced each of them with his eyes, and discovered it was eight, not six. None was thick enough to be concealing a human leg, ruling out costume, unless Rawn had lied and he <i>was</I> a double-amputee. But what possible motive could she have?
He was still staring, mind working, when she spoke again. "The reason you can't feel anything from them is that we have you on an epidural. Tests indicate that the mutation is continuing, and we don't really know yet how your nervous system is handling... this. Oh, but I have to show you-" She produced the familiar little pointed probe from her jacket pocket, and touched the paler, puckered underside of one of the appendages with it. Gave it a good firm poke. To Sherlock's surprise, the limb contracted suddenly, coiling tightly in on itself in response to the prod. The slack skin tightened and smoothed suddenly, as if the flesh beneath had swollen or tightened. It held a moment, slowly tightening in its coils, and then relaxed smoothly back into the lax shapes.
He would have to read up about octopodes, observed a dry voice deep in his mind. Dig out those marine biology books from his childhood. "Fascinating," he breathed, for lack of a better word.
Doctor Rawn gave a satisfied nod, glancing up at Sherlock's face with lines of surprise across her forehead. "Isn't it?" she said, with a note in her voice that he couldn't quite identify. It only came clear as he began to prod with questions, trying to fill in the gaps in his biology knowledge, knowledge that had been extraneous and unneeded until today. She answered his questions succinctly and without any more irritating condescension or hyperbole. She answered them like a scientist speaking to a colleague, and it was immensely gratifying. Perhaps that was just the deprivation of equal conversation.
They talked until he fell asleep despite himself, and the first thing he asked for when he woke up was John Watson. And after that, every three hours, by the clock. All of the doctors now spoke to him frankly about his treatment, about the tests they did while he was insensate in the radiation, but his requests for outside contact went unmentioned, ignored. And for some time yet, he was helpless. He had no leverage. The only thing he could refuse to cooperate with was his physical therapy, but he couldn't afford that, not with the slow progress he was making. Even Mycroft came only once, and would only tell him that John had moved out of Baker Street.
His opportunity came nearly a month after Rawn's disclosure. His strength training had progressed, at last, to a point that had both Seally and Rawn almost embarrassingly excited. He had full use of his upper body, if limited sensation, and they were going to take him off the epidural. And if that went well, he was to be allowed out of the bed. But first, the nasogastric tube had to be removed. And that was his chosen leverage.
Once it was out, he continued to be a good little test subject. He did his radiation treatments, though they were slowly decreasing the frequency. He did his PT, helping Seally develop techniques for limbs without bones or even proper muscles. Learning to control them was both more and less difficult than Sherlock would have imagined, even while they had no strength. Making them move was simple. They contracted at the slightest effort into snug coils. Making them move independently was... impossible. And yet do-able. He could lie there, half propped up, and stare at one particular appendage, the one marked with an orange band. And yet the one with the blue band would make the motion he was envisioning, or the yellow.
But that was fine. It would be overcome. The brain, /his/ brain could accomplish anything. It was not his focus. Staging a hunger strike that would not make them put him back on the nasogastric tube was. So he ate the gelatin, every day, and the white bread and rice, the lettuce out of his salads and off of his sandwiches. Anything of actual nutrition, he broke up into morsels, scattered around the plate, hid in his napkins and occasionally dissolved in the fluid of the tank, when it was left open. So it was three fulls weeks after the removal of the tube that Rawn came out of their schedule.
"The nutritionist says he's upped your calorie load three times and you're still losing weight." Her arms were already crossed as she adjusted the bed-tank so he was sitting up. He smirked; she was quick and suspicious. "And the orderlies say you are very picky about the food."
"I'm pining," he said blithely, expression deliberately opaque. "Missing old friends."
That wasn't all there was to it. Sherlock had the advantage in that he was willing to begin a prolonged battle of wills and Rawn was not. But it was still a game of negotiation and resistance that lasted another entire week before they reached the compromise. He would eat, and he would exercise, and when he was transferred from the bed to an observation room with an actual tank (This, he objected to, and made more than one quip about SeaWorld before conceding), John Watson would be invited.
Soon after, just a few days, a car was sent to fetch the doctor. Anonymous and sleek, it pulled up in front of his lodgings, and simply waited, the driver reading a book behind his tinted windows.
And then there had been the ground. He had crashed through it like thin ice into cold, heavy blackness.
And then there had been the ambulance, and the acute feeling of bruising fingers on his wrist, fingers that were gone. Someone's voice had risen in a long, shaking moan, and he'd gone blind when he tried to turn his head.
And then there had been... a room. A black room, with electronic beeping, and a distant voice. His ears were ringing, and there was something- there was ridged plastic in his mouth, his throat. A tube, a... He knew what it was, but the word wouldn't come to the surface. He was trying to find it, struggling, when the voice came closer.
"- not optimistic," it was saying. "It's been six weeks." Had it been? Really?
"But there's brain activity, they tell me." That voice tasted intimately familiar, sharp and a little high, the accent affected and distant. He could name the school that voice had gone too, but
"Yes... a few spikes today, in fact," said the first voice, with a cautious note that should have told him something. "And we'll keep watching. No one is suggesting taking him off the machines. But his body is failing. And even if-"
The familiar voice responded like a gunshot, but either they were moving off again, or he was. He grasped after the meanings of the words that continued on and on, but it was as though they had suddenly went into another room and shut a door on him. The rhythmic ringing in his ears was rising like an approaching storm.
And then there was cold. Still the hard plastic in his mouth and throat and now everything else was cold. Something like ice pressed against his cheekbones, across his forehead, the sides of his throat. There was nothing else.
There was nothing else.
And then.
And then there was blue light. And he was upright. And the chill blue light was wrapped around him like fluid, the only thing he could see. Blinking was a languid movement, slow and foreign. He bit down on the tube in his mouth, felt it shift clear down his throat. There was a strap around his head, that held it in place, and he could clearly see every step to take it off, simple and clear, but the movements weren't there. He could feel hands; There was a pressure on one index finger that he knew was an oxygen meter, and a sting in the other forearm that could only be an intravenous needle. But there was no tension in them, all the muscles slack and cold, and they were not intimately /his./ He could feel them again, them and his chest and his belly, but it did not feel better than the nothing that had come with the cold, because they weren't his.
No, that was irrational.
But they weren't. And he could not deny it. And he still couldn't find his legs. He tried to move them. Something moved, something that disturbed the chill blue light, and logic said it was his legs, but he couldn't feel them, or look down to see. The tube that he couldn't remove kept his head tilted upwards, looking up into the thick blue.
So he simply stared upwards as his mind worked. Because /that/ was his, and /that/ was finally working as it ought.
The blue light never changed. Sherlock could feel time passing by the flux and flush of drugs in his system. There must have been a muscle-relaxant; probably pancuronium, if the flushes of heat he felt were an indication. And some kind of benzodiazepine, that was certain. He knew that feeling, like a fishing net thrown into the school of his thoughts, tangling everything and forcing him to struggle through until it eased once again and he could think clearly. And that all took time; so much time. But measuring it was pointless. He would find out when he got out of this how much time he'd lost.
As for what 'this' was...
Sherlock remembered the ground, and the way his shadow on it had looked, racing towards him. Twenty-three meters, maybe twenty-four. And he was alive. Alive with a tube in his throat, alive and unable to feel his legs. He spent two cycles of the benzodiazepine cataloging his body; he could feel with detail the parts of his head and neck, his shoulders. He could feel with vagueness his arms from elbows to fingertips, his chest, his stomach, his spine down to approximately the third lumbar vertebra. He could feel not at all his hips, groin, legs, or feet. So he'd broken his spine just below his waist. And perhaps in his neck - his mind, /his/ mind shied away from that until he forced his thoughts against it. That would explain why he couldn't move anything, why the tube was still in his throat. If it had been an open injury, exposing the spine, that would also explain the isolation. So this was simple. He was in medical care, in sterile isolation, awaiting surgery or increased function or simply for something to change. On ventilation and a feeding tube.
When his mind was running as it should, he could avoid the traps of speculation. But in the grips of the drugs, he found himself grindingly obsessed with trying to move. He could scrunch his face, work his jaw from side to side, and work his tongue. He could blink, and move his eyes. He tried to draw attention a few times, blinking rapidly, then in patterns, but the second time he tried that, he passed out, and lost an unknowable amount of time. It seemed a much longer period after that before he could clear his mind again, and he presumed that his medications had been adjusted. Somewhere down in his mind, a red light flashed, but he shut a firm door on it. Suspicion was one thing; distress would do him no good here.
And then there was a morning - he had arbitrarily assigned time to the period he spent coming out of the haze - a morning when he felt something different. There was a sensation, crawling down- down. And he was so invested in following the extent of it at first, as it outlined his hips and thighs and knees... His new mental map was nearly to his ankles before he realized that the sensation was pain.
He regretted the realization as soon as he'd made it. The pain was a splintering, twisting thing, up and down the long bones. If he were prone to metaphors, the comparison would be shattered glass rods sheathed inside him, or needles that grew from the inside out and in again. And he had the distance, at first, to make that kind of observation, to try to diagnose the cause. But it wasn't centered anywhere, was all but uniform in intensity from his hips down. Not a break, then, or even a number of breaks. He felt short of breath, but that was because his heart was beginning to race, and there was no stomach pain, so it wasn't compartment syndrome. A clot, lodged in his spinal cord, perhaps. Or in his brain. An infection. Nothing he could picture was not potentially catastrophic.
Objectivity became harder as the pain went on and on. He felt light-headed, the tube not delivering enough air to keep up with his racing, crashing heart. A salt-wet-lemon taste seemed to rise up out of his throat, and he couldn't swallow around that tube. He felt like an overheating computer, and the image became so acute that he would have sworn he could smell burnt plastic. Ridiculous, in a hospital.
Ridiculous.
So was the gratitude he came to feel for the ventilation tube. He ground his teeth into it and it kept him from trying to scream. And he was grateful for that. After the pain came darkness, and he was grateful for that too.
Time did strange things as the pain became a standard part of his cycle. Before, it had been just the haze and the clear times. Now it was several cycles of haze and clear, and then a long, long build and plateau of that shattering agony. It was never quite the same twice. That first time, it had felt as if his bones were all outlined in neon agony. But in sessions after, it seemed to move outward, the bones disappearing as it moved through muscles, and finally to skin, an all-surrounding and hollow horror.
He counted seven sessions before it ceased, but it could have been as many as nine. It was hard to keep track, and he was not trusting his mental count, with nothing to verify it. He would have killed for a clock, and he was putting together a painstaking visualization of one when he realized that something new was changing. The blue light was fading. He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision, and realized that it was in fact clearing. He could, for the first time, see the lines of a light fixture above him as its bulbs faded to black. There was still light, a dimmer, whiter light from somewhere to his left, but he couldn't strain his eyes far enough in that direction to see a source. Nothing but a smooth white surface that seemed to wrap around him.
When he began to move, or rather, to be moved, his vision went gray and opaque. When it cleared, the white surface was abruptly gone. Instead, there was a ceiling above him, distant and crossed with pipes and hanging fluorescent lights. There was something familiar about the cool tint of the light, and the humming quality to the air, but trying to pin that down made the gray threaten again. It lingered, creeping through the cracks in his thoughts like moss.
Focusing on the immediate, he could tell there was a pillow under his neck, allowing his head to remain craned back. Something warm and thin, probably a lead, was draped across his throat and shoulder. He was trying to see if he could feel where it went when a hand moved it, brushing his skin in the process. His head jerked, and he strained to try to turn enough to see who was there, but he couldn't.
He didn't need to. The hands touched him a few more times, adjusting and moving things, and then their owner leaned into his line of vision. She was a black woman, with the upper lip of childhood music lessons and a three-day-old dye job in her hair. The thumbprint on her glasses wasn't hers, he noted with interest when her hand came into view, adjusting the tube that led into his mouth. Sherlock squinted up at her, working his mouth around it.
"No, no... I know you want to talk, but that tube is still breathing for you, Mister Holmes. You won't need it much longer, we hope. Signs are good. Blink twice if you're understanding everything I say." She spoke with a North Indian accent much overlaid by London, and a loud slowness that was medical prudence, not condescension. She was speaking to a head trauma case, after all.
Knowing that, Sherlock blinked twice, deliberate and firmly, and only added a single roll of his eyes. The woman smiled with raised eyebrows, and held up a little pointed probe where he could see it. "Good. Now, can you follow this with your eyes? And blink rapidly if it hurts at any point."
He cooperated with the test willingly; mind recording the results while he focused on problem-solving. He had questions, and very limited means to ask them. How fast could the doctor pick up on Morse code?
When she was done, he had learned that his peripheral vision had /expanded/ beyond what he was used to. What /had/ happened to his skull? He was sweating, too, though he only realized that when the doctor gently blotted at his face. He tried to twitch her off, blinking an irate dash-dot, dash-dash-dash at her.
"One for no, two for yes," she said gently, and he would have snorted if he could. He had to settle for another roll of his eyes, and a little twitch of his head. She had to ask the questions, then, if he was going to be so restricted. This was absurd.
An hour later, that dimness was smoking at the edges of his vision again, and he would have killed for a cigarette. But he knew more than he had and he did not know several telling things. He knew that her name was Doctor Rawn, and that he had never heard of her before. He did not know if she was a surgeon or a chemist; her hands could indicate either. Or both. And she typed more than she performed medicine. He knew that his memory was intact up until the moment of impact. He did not know the extent of his trauma; she had deflected every line of inquiry in that direction. Bad, then, bad enough that someone had decided that telling him would be detrimental to his recovery. That was fine, John would tell him when he got here.
He knew that he would be allowed visitors once he was off of the ventilator. She had told him that there would be some rehabilitation before he could speak again - his own experiments with his mouth had told him he at least remembered how.
And he did not know a single thing about the pain episodes. Nor about his body beneath the lowest rib. Nor the blue light or his treatment plan or anything they expected of his recovery beyond the ability to breathe and speak on his own again. If Doctor Rawn had wanted to fill him in, she had done the worst imaginable job. As she spoke like a competent, educated woman, the massive gaps were clearly deliberate. As she showed not the slightest hint of guilt, they were likely not an order, but her own decision.
Interesting.
The cycle of haze and clarity continued after she left. After that, it was back and forth. Six cycles of the benzodiazapine in the blue light, and then a few exhausting hours on his back in the white. There was Doctor Rawn, most commonly, and seven more doctors, five nurses on rotation and a small army of technicians. There were tests; blood work and exams where they showed him cards and asked him to blink responses to them, an interminable investigation of what he could feel in his upper body, and measurements taken of the strength in every muscle he could move. There was physical therapy.
The therapy came nearly as a surprise. After that frustrating initial one-way conversation, he had suspected that her mentions of him being about to talk soon were only a carrot. A lure to keep him cooperative and maybe even hopeful. But by his estimate it was only a week before he woke up one morning to find his mouth clear. Bruised and dry, still tasting of plastic, but clear. He still wasn't breathing for himself - working his jaw, he could feel a thick, telling numbness in his throat. So they had replaced the endotracheal tube with a tracheostomy tube, he could assume. He tried to angle his head, and found it even less mobile than before; there was a strap across his forehead. and something rigid to either side of his neck.
The next time Rawn came to check up on him, he mouthed, in exaggerated shapes, a question. An easy question. Would he walk again? It wasn't his main concern, and he doubted it, but he wanted to see her answer.
To her credit, she made no claim of misunderstanding. She watched his mouth carefully, and repeated some of the shapes with her own to make sure she understood him. And then her face shut down into perfect professionalism.
"Mister Holmes, I know this isn't the answer you'll want to hear, but it's still too early to know that." Five months, he tried to interrupt her, but that was a draw-back to forced silence. She kept speaking. "I assure you, /no/ stone has been left unturned in your care."
Curious, the way her pupils dilated at that. It wasn't the first time she'd shown that level of excitement in the idea of his overall, undefined 'care.' Or the first time that her eyes had flicked down the length of his body when she said it.
Could he see himself? he asked next, careful to look troubled and tired. Weak took no acting, shamefully. But he did spot acting in the regret she painted on her face as she shook her head, once she had parsed him.
"Oh, I am sorry... I will have a mirror brought down for you." But she sounded about as sincere as Mycroft's smirking assistant, and he would not be surprised if one never materialized. He twitched his head to the side, lip curling, dismissing it, and made sure the next thing he mouthed was perfectly clear.
He wanted to see Mycroft Holmes.
It took approximately three hours for Mycroft to turn up, and Sherlock put three separate theories to that. Seeing his face, he discarded the first. And the second went when he saw which coat his brother was wearing; he would never have worn that jacket for a car-ride, however long.
How was the helicopter? he mouthed, not needing nearly the same level of precision. He saw his brother's face go into that mask he knew so well; a hundred reactions suppressed at once. Mycroft had never been as good at that as he was. And like Rawn, Mycroft's eyes flicked tellingly down the length of his body. Unlike her, he pressed his lips together so tightly the skin around them was pale, and his pupils contracted to points. Was that /grief/, Mycroft Holmes?
"Doctor Rawn tells me you've been making better progress than she expected." His eyes did another sweep, this one slow and clearly meant to be noted. And while Sherlock was meant to be watching his eyes, he got better control over the muscles of his mouth.
'What did she expect?' was Sherlock's silent retort. 'Me to be a vegetable the rest of my life?'
"Well, frankly..." All Sherlock could see of his brother were his head and shoulders where he leaned over him, but he could tell that his hands were clasped firmly behind his back, bereft of umbrella. "Look, Sherlock. If you had seen yourself."
Was he telling him to count his blessings? he asked, as much to rile his brother as out of skepticism. He was rewarded with an eyeroll.
"Don't be ridiculous. Do you remember what you did?"
He'd rather not, he answered quickly. Stupid. He grimaced at the sweat that rolled down between his eyes. He didn't want Mycroft to see how much effort this conversation, brief as it had been, was costing him. But his brother's eyes weren't on his face again, he realized. They were somewhere in the vicinity of his knees.
"I'm not going to disagree with that. Though I believe we've pieced together your reasons," Mycroft said, after a short pause. He looked down, and Sherlock could hear his shoe tapping - sure sign of incomplete thoughts. His brother had not been at all prepared to see him today. And Mycroft was sweating too.
Did he visit? He mouthed the question suddenly, just to see his face. He was having to force the shapes already, nowhere near the speed he'd managed at first. 'Five months. Three hours outside London by helicopter, must be eight by car. No, that would be too much time out of your busy-'
"It's almost six months now," he answered, lips drawn tight as Sherlock's jaw began to jerk, the overtaxed muscle shaking. The ugly grayness in his vision swelled up sudden and dizzyingly. Sherlock was trying to blink it back when two nurses appeared suddenly, crowding Mycroft back. One adjusted something in his throat, the tracheostomy tube, he presumed. The other did something in the vicinity of his right collarbone, and the gray only intensified.
"We're sorry, Mister Ho-" he heard. And then he did not hear his brother leave.
When he woke, fighting his way through a heavier drug load than usual, he asked for three things: A calendar, a clock, and an airway. He had the first two within an hour, mounted on the ceiling above his bed. He couldn't see them when he was in the blue light, but they were there each time he was brought out of it, and as near as he could tell, no one was tampering with the clock. One of the nurses ticked off days on the calender for him, and only six more had been marked off when he won the third request, Rawn herself deflating the tamponade in his throat to allow him to breathe past the tube. His voice was weak and strange, and he had no control over tone or pitch, but he could speak aloud at last.
"Never got th-that mirror," he said with a stammer that made his lip curl. Not /one/ of the nurses ever let their eyes drift down his body, the way Mycroft had, the way Rawn and the other doctors did. And Sherlock needed to know why.
He still hadn't gotten his mirror the next day when the doctor in charge of his physical therapy (white male, late thirties, grew up in London before moving somewhere much north, two daughters under ten, second marriage) began to work with him on his left hand. His left side had been stronger from the start, and he could learn to be left-handed, Sherlock reasoned. It shouldn't even be hard, after this long, enforced reset.
A few sessions gave him half that hand. He could move two fingers and they were working on a third. Doctor Seally, the therapist, held Sherlock's arm up where he could see it, with a trio of leads stuck to his wrist, buzzing intermittently with a mild shock meant to reawaken the atrophied muscles. He barely recognized the limb; it was wasted and bony, the skin colorless and almost translucent; he could see every blue vein in his wrist, follow them out to the fingertips he was trying to move.
"Just bring that thumb to your palm. You know how it feels to do it, you're halfway there." Seally's patter was nearly nonstop, and perfectly typical and unhelpful. Sherlock tolerated it, or rather, ignored it, focusing instead entirely on the exercises. But he was fighting atrophy and nerve damage both, and it was not long before his hand was spasming. Abruptly, those fingers he'd been fighting so hard to move might as well have been made of wood.
He knew they were done for the day before Seally called it, but he still snorted in irritation when he lowered his arm back to the bed, on top of the blanket, and peeled the leads off. "Good progress to-"
"I know. Come back in two hours," he said shortly.
Seally, of course, refused. Pushing too hard, he said, would slow down his progress or even reverse it. Sherlock, of course, disregarded him, doing his best to push through anyway. He was alone when he felt recovered enough to try moving his hand again. It was harder, unable to lift his arm into his limited field of vision, but he shut his eyes and focused intently on that thumb once more. Slowly, with many a tremor, he brought it to his palm. When it touched, he allowed himself a silent, smug smile. And then just as slowly, he made himself stretch it outwards, flattening his hand on the soft hospital blanket.
He thought that he had nearly reached full extension when he brushed something. Under the blanket, something hard and vertical lay between his hand and his thigh. He tried to tap it with his trembling thumb, but the thick cloth and his own weakness kept that from giving him anything useful. Whatever the object was, all he knew was that it was there. Perhaps part of a traction system? Or part of whatever restraints held him upright, he realized, after a few moments. That made the most sense.
Trying to lift his hand to find the extent of the device, though, was too much. His hand began to jerk, the fingers clawing inwards, and he made a sound, disgusted at himself. How long would he be this weak?
The scoff drew Doctor Rawn, to his chagrin. He tried to shoo her away, but she hovered around him like a wayward wasp, checking the tube in his throat, the IVs in his inert right arm, the leads on chest and wrist. She ignored his protestations and set his hand back in its place on the bed. "Don't think I won't tell Seally you're overdoing it," she said, with a motherly tone that grated horribly.
"Tell him," he snapped back, irate. "But I want a mirror. And I want to speak to John Watson."
She made vague sounds of commiseration, but she was already distracted. "Your sats are a little low." And then she made not even a pretense of listening to his protests as she re-inflated the cuff in his throat, putting him back on the ventilator and silencing him. Displeasure was putting it mildly. He almost gave into the temptation to bite her when she patted his cheek after checking his pupils, went so far as to bare his teeth. She just gave him a smile in return, and went about her examination before putting him back into the blue light.
Sherlock fumed through the usual cycles of haze and impatience, slept angry and woke angrier. And he let Rawn have the raw edge of his tongue the instant he could. And she stood there, infuriatingly patient, not even looking at his face.
"And what in God's name is so interesting about my thighs!" he demanded at last, panting for ragged, painful breaths. "What <i>reason</i> could you possibly have to avoid every question I ask?!"
Slowly, she raised her eyes to his at last, irritation and... anticipation there. He stared at her, practically able to see the thoughts moving behind her eyes in the way she worked her jaw, her throat moving infinitesimally.
"Your brother insisted we not tell you until he deemed you ready," she said at last, taking off her glasses to occupy her hands in polishing them. It was a practiced affect, he could plainly see, allowing her to pace her words out slowly. For drama, he was sure. For an alleged scientist, she appeared to thrive on it. "But he tells me you're smart. Rational. And in possession of all your wits, so far as we've been able to see. Not prone to... panic."
Very deliberate word choice there, and Sherlock could not deny that it chilled him slightly. "If it's amputation, why wouldn't he want you to tell me?" Complications? An ongoing infection? No, none of that explained at all the blue light or the traction.
"It's not," she said, confirming his thoughts. "You understand, you're very lucky-"
"Don't. This isn't luck, this is only the result of my available resources. Now <i>tell me.</i> Pl-plainly." The stammer was a cough, a spasm in his throat. He took a shallow breath, trying to relax the muscles that were so quickly overworked. The tracheostomy ached fiercely.
"Oh, believe me, luck was involved. You see, Mister Holmes... and I'll be indelicate - your brother brought me an organ donor. Minimal brain function, spine a splintered mess, no autonomic functions and a heart that had already had to be replaced once." She tapped a blunt finger on his chest, out of his field of view but high enough for him to feel it. "You're on your second donor, so you know, and if you lose this one, there will not be any more. You aren't a compatible recipient anymore."
That stopped him, rebuttal on his lips. "... Why would that be a definitive statement?"
"Getting to that." She checked his IV tree again, just as much a fidget as the glasses-cleaning. "Your brother's more patient than you are. But he's just as bad about taking no for an answer, isn't he? Go to any lengths, he said, and so I did. When I said you shouldn't be alive, Mister Homes, I don't mean you are lucky. I mean, you are criminal. The genetic experimentation that has been done on your behalf would put me in jail, if it weren't for... well, a few protections. But it was supposed to be discreet."
"Returning from the dead is never discreet," he objected. "At least a dozen people saw me fall, my face is known. It would have been in the papers."
She was already nodding before he'd finished, as eager now as she'd been obfuscating before. How frustrating. "It was, it was. Ugly. You won't want to read the things they said about you. That was all planned for, though. There's a doctor in Hong Kong who's hinted a few times that he has a celebrity patient, and another in the same hospital who has published three articles on white cell spinal regeneration. And a story in a London blog, quickly syndicated and confirmed, that no official record of death exists for you." She shook her head with a low whistle. "I <i>like</i> your brother, Mister Holmes."
"Keep him," he said shortly, not following the obvious red-herring in the mention of the blog. "Tell me why you said it was <i>supposed</i> to be discreet. Past tense. No longer possible. Why?"
"Side effects," she said succinctly. "Unexpected side effects." Again, the infuriating glance down Sherlock's body, too quick for him to read the reflection in her glasses. Again the fascinated hint of a smile. "I've seen genetic drift in experimental subjects before, but the extent of this-"
"I am not interested," he ground out. "Just get to the point! What. Has. Happened to me?"
She made an entirely unprofessional roll of her eyes, and pulled something from the top of the bed. There was the click of a button, the whirr of a motor, and the mattress under Sherlock's head and shoulders began to lever itself upwards, letting his field of vision travel down. He saw, for the first time, the door of the room. There was a camera above it, aimed at him, and a narrow, wire-reinforced window. Then he could see a long rack of machines, all displaying data of one kind or another. Rawn pulled the blanket off of him, and stepped back.
When the motion stopped, and he could see, for the first time, that he was not on a bed at all. From his waist down, he was enclosed in a pod, looking for all the world like half of a space-age iron lung. It was white plastic, and a translucent seal connected it to his body, just below his very apparent ribs.
"Explain this to me," he demanded, gesturing to the device with his chin. Rawn nodded, and stepped back to tap out a four-digit code on a panel to the side of the pod. Sherlock felt the sequence of numbers as if she'd spoken it aloud.
"It's a modified hydrotherapy tank. And I'm going to open it in just a moment, and you can see why we're using it for yourself. To prepare you, however; We have not amputated anything. But you are not going to recognize your body. We've introduced DNA into your system that was meant to stimulate the regrowth of your spinal chord. The rapid regrowth, when we mixed it with carefully calibrated radiation. We've had several <i>hundred</i> successful experiments. Mice, rats, cats... There was no precedent for what has happened in you, our first human applicant."
It wasn't apology in her voice, and he had to have a grudging respect for that; it was excitement. "What was the DNA?"
"<i>Thaumoctopus mimicus</i>. Amazing creatures," she said, and then turned a valve. Above Sherlock, the blue light came on with a click. And in front of him, the top of the pod split apart and drew slowly open.
He had expected mutilation. Perhaps even exposed bone and living muscle. Bone deformity. He had braced himself for that much.
In the pod - no, the tank. It was a tank. Under a hands-breadth of green-tinted water coiled a half-dozen... appendages. Certainly not legs, much less his legs. They were tapered, jointless, with muddy, slack skin that was bluer than could be accounted for by the ambient light. Inert, they lay a good two meters, maybe two and a quarter, curled slightly in on themselves.
A trick, he wanted to say, but if it was one (and how he hated that word, 'if'), he could not see how. The appendages were absolutely part of the same body that continued above the plastic seal. He traced each of them with his eyes, and discovered it was eight, not six. None was thick enough to be concealing a human leg, ruling out costume, unless Rawn had lied and he <i>was</I> a double-amputee. But what possible motive could she have?
He was still staring, mind working, when she spoke again. "The reason you can't feel anything from them is that we have you on an epidural. Tests indicate that the mutation is continuing, and we don't really know yet how your nervous system is handling... this. Oh, but I have to show you-" She produced the familiar little pointed probe from her jacket pocket, and touched the paler, puckered underside of one of the appendages with it. Gave it a good firm poke. To Sherlock's surprise, the limb contracted suddenly, coiling tightly in on itself in response to the prod. The slack skin tightened and smoothed suddenly, as if the flesh beneath had swollen or tightened. It held a moment, slowly tightening in its coils, and then relaxed smoothly back into the lax shapes.
He would have to read up about octopodes, observed a dry voice deep in his mind. Dig out those marine biology books from his childhood. "Fascinating," he breathed, for lack of a better word.
Doctor Rawn gave a satisfied nod, glancing up at Sherlock's face with lines of surprise across her forehead. "Isn't it?" she said, with a note in her voice that he couldn't quite identify. It only came clear as he began to prod with questions, trying to fill in the gaps in his biology knowledge, knowledge that had been extraneous and unneeded until today. She answered his questions succinctly and without any more irritating condescension or hyperbole. She answered them like a scientist speaking to a colleague, and it was immensely gratifying. Perhaps that was just the deprivation of equal conversation.
They talked until he fell asleep despite himself, and the first thing he asked for when he woke up was John Watson. And after that, every three hours, by the clock. All of the doctors now spoke to him frankly about his treatment, about the tests they did while he was insensate in the radiation, but his requests for outside contact went unmentioned, ignored. And for some time yet, he was helpless. He had no leverage. The only thing he could refuse to cooperate with was his physical therapy, but he couldn't afford that, not with the slow progress he was making. Even Mycroft came only once, and would only tell him that John had moved out of Baker Street.
His opportunity came nearly a month after Rawn's disclosure. His strength training had progressed, at last, to a point that had both Seally and Rawn almost embarrassingly excited. He had full use of his upper body, if limited sensation, and they were going to take him off the epidural. And if that went well, he was to be allowed out of the bed. But first, the nasogastric tube had to be removed. And that was his chosen leverage.
Once it was out, he continued to be a good little test subject. He did his radiation treatments, though they were slowly decreasing the frequency. He did his PT, helping Seally develop techniques for limbs without bones or even proper muscles. Learning to control them was both more and less difficult than Sherlock would have imagined, even while they had no strength. Making them move was simple. They contracted at the slightest effort into snug coils. Making them move independently was... impossible. And yet do-able. He could lie there, half propped up, and stare at one particular appendage, the one marked with an orange band. And yet the one with the blue band would make the motion he was envisioning, or the yellow.
But that was fine. It would be overcome. The brain, /his/ brain could accomplish anything. It was not his focus. Staging a hunger strike that would not make them put him back on the nasogastric tube was. So he ate the gelatin, every day, and the white bread and rice, the lettuce out of his salads and off of his sandwiches. Anything of actual nutrition, he broke up into morsels, scattered around the plate, hid in his napkins and occasionally dissolved in the fluid of the tank, when it was left open. So it was three fulls weeks after the removal of the tube that Rawn came out of their schedule.
"The nutritionist says he's upped your calorie load three times and you're still losing weight." Her arms were already crossed as she adjusted the bed-tank so he was sitting up. He smirked; she was quick and suspicious. "And the orderlies say you are very picky about the food."
"I'm pining," he said blithely, expression deliberately opaque. "Missing old friends."
That wasn't all there was to it. Sherlock had the advantage in that he was willing to begin a prolonged battle of wills and Rawn was not. But it was still a game of negotiation and resistance that lasted another entire week before they reached the compromise. He would eat, and he would exercise, and when he was transferred from the bed to an observation room with an actual tank (This, he objected to, and made more than one quip about SeaWorld before conceding), John Watson would be invited.
Soon after, just a few days, a car was sent to fetch the doctor. Anonymous and sleek, it pulled up in front of his lodgings, and simply waited, the driver reading a book behind his tinted windows.
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Date: 2013-09-05 07:22 am (UTC)Things like this just didn't happen to him. Not anymore. Not to someone who lived in a bedsit flat on an army pension. It was the 'not anymore' that actually had his attention. He didn't know what it meant, but he knew his heart beat a little faster because something was happening. And there was a time when that had meant he wasn't alone.
"Is it a patient, then?" he finally asked. One of the men looked at him blankly.
"You're a doctor."
John could not honestly tell whether it was a question or not, but he decided that, given the fact he was outnumbered and he now had an excuse, he'd best assume it was a statement.
"Right," he said. "I'll need my kit, then."
So he got his medkit, in the bottom of which he'd stashed his revolver. Wherever he was going, he might be going alone. But not unarmed.
On the drive, he considered pulling it out, just to relieve the monotonous tension with some of the immediate sort. But he didn't. He just stared out the window, bag on his knees, asking some variation of the same question every few minutes. Just to make sure they remembered he was there, of course.
The whole thing smacked of Mycroft Holmes. John found himself almost nostalgic over those little rides. How many lengths the man had gone to to pull one over on his brother--
John's mouth tightened, and he deliberately steered his thoughts away. It had been months. Nearly a year. And he could not shake the feeling of limbo.
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Date: 2013-09-05 09:08 am (UTC)Eventually, however, it was the scenery outside that grew more informative. They entered Devon, well after dark, and the road began the long, steep climb up onto the rim of the Moor. Dartmoor. The suit in the back finally put his book away as the rail fence and barbed wire loomed up in the glow of the headlights, and the sign.
The car stopped just before the gate, and John's companion got out with alacrity, coming around to open the door for him. In the headlights, a woman stood, hugging her elbows against the night wind in a labcoat.
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Date: 2013-09-07 09:56 am (UTC)But Baskerville? He felt himself shake his head, involuntarily, rejecting the associations that accompanied the view outside the window. There was no longer any denying this was about Sherlock. Though really, it had always been about Sherlock.
Nothing interesting ever happened to John Watson that wasn't.
Reluctantly, John stepped out of the car, squinting towards the woman in the lab coat. Getting out was just as involuntary as the shake of his head, though the impulse was opposite. John might have retreated from the world, but that was not the same as retreating from danger, or the unknown. He'd retreated from the mundane. In doing so, of course, he'd underscored the lack of novelty in his life, but that hardly mattered now. He did not want to be here. And yet, his blood was racing, his body alive with anticipation. Something was happening. And even if he hated it, John could not help but give in to the lure.
He took a step towards the woman. The men had clearly been ordered to tell him nothing. But she didn't look like a grunt.
"What do you want?" he called out.
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Date: 2013-09-07 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-09 07:02 am (UTC)There was only one thing that would get him in there again. Which was, ironically, the one reason he'd had such a hellish time of it.
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Date: 2013-09-09 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-09 09:04 pm (UTC)Unless, of course, she did.
"Fine," he said, taking the clipboard and signing almost desultorily. It didn't matter, anyway. He would have signed it, because he had nothing more to lose. And no one to tell. "There. You own my soul, or whatever it is you're looking for. Now why am I here?"
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Date: 2013-09-09 09:16 pm (UTC)"Bringing you in wasn't my choice, you understand. Especially not like this. I'm a doctor; this is too cloak and dagger for me. But this... this wasn't up to me." She tapped her card to the reader, then held the door open for him once it unlocked. "We have a patient here. And he insists on seeing you."
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Date: 2013-09-09 09:20 pm (UTC)"Why should he want to see me?" he asked, working a little to keep up with her.
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Date: 2013-09-09 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-10 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-10 07:23 am (UTC)"No. Sherlock Holmes," she said evenly. "Sherlock is my patient."
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Date: 2013-09-10 07:34 am (UTC)"Don't," he began, and had to stop, swallowing. Flexing his hand once, twice. He wanted to leave. He wanted to yell. He wanted to hit something and he wanted to sob. "This isn't all right. I don't care what sort of perverse game you or Mycroft is playing, I can't... I won't go along with it."
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Date: 2013-09-10 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-10 08:28 pm (UTC)"I don't... I'm not... Jesus, if he's alive, I want... I need..."
I want to bloody ask him why he hasn't contacted me, why he let me think he was dead. And then I want to punch his smug older brother in the face.
He straightened, trying to pull himself together. At least on the outside. "No. It won't be a problem for me. What do you mean... radical?"
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Date: 2013-09-10 09:06 pm (UTC)"We had... something of a mixed success with Mister Holmes. He's recovered far beyond what we expected, so that's good. But the side effects were startling. He- I can only call it a kind of genetic drift. He's begun to express characteristics of the DNA donor."
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Date: 2013-09-11 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 07:31 am (UTC)"Honestly, I'm tempted to say just say see for yourself, but that would be-" She shrugged, waving away whatever it would be with a flap of one hand.
"It's his legs. And yes, I would call it a mutation. Our therapy focused on his spine, of course, but- Wait, no, I know a better place to start. Doctor Watson, did you know that the mimic octopus can regrow its legs? And that it has the most complex nervous system of any animal with this ability?"
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Date: 2013-09-15 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 08:20 am (UTC)John's lips thinned into an unforgiving line, and he Mar as if to press a button to take the lift back up. Of course, with this sort of security, it didn't work that way.
"This was never funny," he said. "And right about now you've reached the end of my patience."
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Date: 2013-09-15 08:27 am (UTC)"It's funny because it's unbelievable," she said earnestly. "But I'm not joking. He's three doors down."
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Date: 2013-09-15 12:47 pm (UTC)It wasn't funny. Nothing about this was funny. But something in her smile or tone of voice, or the dilation of her pupils or some other thing /he/ would have understood and had measured and cataloged minutes ago stopped John. He peered down the hall, expression nakedly anxious.
Three doors. He could do that. He could move to that one there, stand in front of it, push it open not knowing what was on the other side because what he was being told was impossible, but wanting to believe so much that the impossible wasn't out of the question.
This went beyond improbable, he thought. No matter what Sherlock thought about pat, clever little phrases. He wasn't even thinking about the other bit anymore, because he'd heard the word "tentacles" and his brain was still in denial.
He was a quiet man, but he was also a man hungry for action. And finally, something was happening. Without conscious choice he began moving down the hall.
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Date: 2013-09-15 05:52 pm (UTC)Restricted Access, read a laminate on the door in inch-high red letters. Level B12-2. HS-1895-G. Rad-tags required if blue light is on.
Rawn glanced up, at a dark little bulb above the door, and nodded before swiping her ID badge across the lock, just as she'd done upstairs. This door took a moment to cycle open, and when it did, there was the breezes of positive pressure. Beyond was an antechamber with a glass wall, and that wall overlooked a white tile room that had been remodeled, and recently by the look of it, to house a large square tank, a meter-high metal box with small inset windows. Across half the surface of the tank was a deck. And Sherlock was there, elbows propped on the edge of it, bare-chested and staring suspiciously down into the water beside himself, intent on some kind of effort. His hair was a short, thin buzz-cut, and he was thinner than ever, but that only made that particular set of features more unmistakeable.
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Date: 2013-09-15 06:17 pm (UTC)"What have you done?" he asked hoarsely.
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