Work Text:
Baker Street. Danger night.
MH
Victor didn’t even finish reading the message that had already come down from the stool of the hotel bar.
He wasn’t surprised: he had had a bad feeling looming over him all day long. And yet, as the night was approaching, he had begun to hope that he had imagined everything, that he had simply made a bad, non-existent dramatic movie in his head.
"S-sir? Your drink..." the bartender called him up, raising the Gin and French he had just mixed, puzzled by his sudden haste.
"Charge it on my room, and toast to me," he announced hastily; then he added softly, "I'm afraid we'll need it."
The taxi driver seemed deliberately slow and lazy, every car in front of them, every red traffic light, every pedestrian seemed to hinder him from reaching Baker Street.
Victor had wanted to be at Sherlock’s side that day, but objectively it would have been bizarre: an old university friend of the groom's best man, who had been in town for less than a week, who asked to take part to the wedding of a complete stranger? It wasn’t a thing.
Shortly before the taxi reached its destination, he received another message:
There is a copy of the keys under the doormat.
MH
At first, Victor gnashed his teeth, angry: if Mycroft had thought about that, why didn’t he help Sherlock? Why did he delegate the task to him?
But then Victor thought about how delicate the balance between the two brothers was, how much Sherlock's ego should be handled with care. No, Mycroft’s intervention would have done nothing but worsen that "danger night", whatever the meaning of that message was.
The taxi left him in front of Baker Street, and he looked up at the windows on the first floor: they were dark, and the whole building gave him the strange impression of being deserted.
Dead.
He forced the thought away, recovered the keys as quickly as possible and went in, switching on the light in the hall; the wall lamp illuminated faintly the corridor, immediately revealing the evidence of something wrong: a trampled boutonnière at the bottom of the stairs, a jacket leaning against the railing, pulled out with such force that the joint between the sleeve and shoulder was tore, a shoe on the third step.
"Christ..." Victor murmured, picking up the clothes quickly. As he stepped up the stairs, other things appeared in front of him: a cream-colored waistcoat, all balled up, a book, the remains of a radio scattered in an avalanche of bolts and gears, fragments of ceramics that had been a teacup.
"Christ," he repeated, as if his vocabulary was now limited to that single imprecation; but it was the sight that appeared before him, once he switched on the light and crossed the threshold of the apartment, that threw him definitely into a panic attack.
'Devastated' didn’t make at all the idea of the state of the room, that seemed to have suffered the passage of an angry mob: every book had been taken down from the library and blindly thrown to the ground, the coffee table and everything that was on it had been knocked over, the mirror had been torn away from the wall and reduced to a pile of gleaming glass in front of the fireplace.
Blood stains streaked the wall.
Victor turned slowly toward the kitchen, swallowing loudly a couple of times: there the devastation was no less. The oven door was shattered, the kettle had been repeatedly slammed against the table until it became a grotesque mass of twisted aluminum, probably there was no longer a single intact dish, white ceramic shards covered the floor like a painful snowfall, dotted with bright spots of red.
It was that alarming contrast of colours that made him find his voice again.
"Sherlock!" He called firmly, but received no answer. He ran down the hall and looked in his bedroom, only to find more chaos, in the shape of a swirl of clothes pulled out of the drawers and thrown to the ground.
"Sherlock!" He opened the bathroom door, his voice echoing in the small, empty space.
Sherlock had tried to pull off the medicine cabinet from the wall, but he couldn’t, and now the little piece of furniture was tilted downward with the door open.
"Sherlock, where are you?" He shouted in the direction of the corridor.
Why did Mycroft direct him to Baker Street, if Sherlock wasn’t there? Returning to the kitchen, Victor eyed the stairs leading upstairs. And he understood where his friend could be.
In the only place where he could be.
There was more blood on the steps, because Sherlock had cut himself walking on the broken dishes. Along the wall, a series of bloody handprints climbed towards the room upstairs; in the smudged and crawled outlines Victor could read all his fatigue: having destroyed the apartment must have left him without any energy.
But not only that.
"Christ," he sighed again, perhaps to give himself courage before he too faced the flight of stairs, perhaps because there were no words in front of such mess, perhaps because “Christ” described the situation perfectly.
The door was closed, no light filtered through it, and the room seemed as empty as the rest of the house, hadn’t it been for a series of heavy and not completely regular breaths that betrayed someone's presence.
Victor exhaled a sigh that was both a relief and an attempt to give himself courage.
"Sherlock, I'm coming in," he announced. He didn’t forget manners, and he wanted to give a moment to his friend to compose himself, if necessary.
The light that lit up immediately afterwards, however, illuminated a man who seemed to have no interest in recomposing himself. He seemed to have no intention of doing anything, and this time not even a "Christ" was enough.
John's old room, the only one that Victor wanted to see devastated, hadn’t been touched by Sherlock’s fury. It was clean and tidy, and the only disturbing elements were the blood stains that dripped on cream-colored bedspread from the cuts on Sherlock's feet and hands.
Sherlock was curled up on the bed, shoulders against the wall, knees drawn to his chest, his head hidden between his legs.
A hand lay abandoned along his side and a tourniquet was tightened around the arm. It must have been there for a long time, because the limb was even whiter than the usual pallor of Sherlock’s skin, and the veins stood out so much that they seemed to want to pierce the skin.
The other hand held a syringe by the plunger, and Sherlock was making it dangle hypnotically in the air like a pendulum that marked the seconds that separated it from the inevitable.
No.
Not if Victor could prevent it.
He sat on the bed, holding himself at a certain distance from Sherlock, and barely extending his hand to touch his toes, because Sherlock gave no sign of having noticed his presence.
"Hey..." he tried.
Victor didn’t think it would be enough to rouse him, but Sherlock surprised him, because he lifted his head and two gray eyes, red-rimmed and half-hidden by a curtain of sweaty curls, stared at him.
"Vic," he whispered hoarsely, and this hit Victor like a fist in his stomach for two reasons: Sherlock's voice was almost inaudible, and this gave him the idea of how much he had screamed while he was destroying the apartment. Besides, Sherlock had never called him with a pet name, not even when they were children, because he said that each person had their own name and had to use that one, endearments were silly, mawkish, they were a sissy thing.
He had always been ‘Victor’ for Sherlock, always.
How much he had to be vulnerable, damaged, desperate, to call him ‘Vic’?
"Hey," Victor repeated again, venturing a caress on his foot: the skin was icy. He cursed himself for his miserable eloquence, for not being able to find a single word to comfort his friend. He curled his fingers tightly around his ankle, hoping to be able to make him understand that he was there for him, but he doubted that at that moment Sherlock was able to feel anything.
"You should have been there today, Vic."
Sherlock’s voice was so feeble that Victor had to come closer to understand the words.
"I wanted to be there, Sherlock. I wanted it so much."
"You should have been there today, Vic," he repeated, "you should have seen me. I gave my best man speech, and I also had a killer arrested. Amazing, right?"
From that position Victor couldn’t see Sherlock’s lips, but he could imagine his hollow smile.
"Typical of you," Victor replied, trying to give him a smile that was more reassuring.
"I played the violin."
Sherlock grabbed the syringe like a bow and mimed the gesture of playing.
Victor followed with open concern the movements of the small medical instrument.
"I played the music I composed for them, until the last note,” Sherlock went on, his voice raising in the unreal silence of the room, “I wished every good thing to their new family, their new, perfect, happy family. I did my duty to the end, I won my fight, Vic."
He jerked his head up, offering him a delirious face that made Victor’s stomach contort.
A dull noise came from downstairs, probably the medicine cabinet that had lost its battle against gravity.
"I have no doubt you would have done it," Victor replied, even if he didn’t understand what battle Sherlock was speaking of.
"You should have seen me, Vic," he said again. "You should have seen how good I was. I was impeccable, brilliant, fantastic, the best..."
"I know."
Victor gently interrupted his ramblings, before he burst into tears. He had never been a particularly strong man.
"You know?"
"I know how good you are, Sherlock, I don’t need to see you to be convinced."
Sherlock smiled again, a small ripple of the lips that died away immediately, leaving room for a confused expression.
"But then I had to leave, I couldn’t stay there anymore. I got home and... I don’t know... things are a little confusing from there."
"It's all right," He tried to reassure him, but Sherlock shook his head vigorously and leaned back on his knees.
"No, you don’t understand, Vic! It was all a fiction, a fiction that enveloped a lie. A lie. Even if you don’t know you're lying, you're still lying. Have you ever thought about this, Vic?"
"No, I never thought about it," his friend admitted.
"A lie," he murmured again, then grabbed the syringe in the correct position to give an injection and raised his other arm.
"No!” Victor begged him, but without throwing himself on him to snatch the syringe out of his hand. “Sherlock, don’t do it, don’t do that to you."
"By now..."
"No!” Victor said again, this time in a more firm voice, extending his hand towards him like a beggar. “Give it to me. Finish winning your battle."
Sherlock didn’t seem persuaded at all by his words, and continued to look at his arm, searching for the ideal spot to pierce.
"No. It isn’t worth doing this for him!"
And for the first time that evening Victor’s voice shouted, bitter and angry.
Sherlock winced, and when he looked up at him, his eyes seemed more focussed and less lost than before.
"Give me that thing, Sherlock."
To his relief, Sherlock deposited the syringe in his palm and let his hand fall back onto the mattress. Victor closed his eyes for a moment and murmured a "thank you", then untied the tourniquet, that twisted and jumped off like an angry snake.
"Now I'm going to get rid of this, and then I’ll take care of these cuts, okay?" Once the fear had passed, Victor was recovering a minimum of common sense.
"It's useless," Sherlock told him.
"What? No,” Victor reassured him, gently taking his hand in his, “they aren’t deep."
"It's useless." Holmes repeated, stubborn.
Victor flew down the stairs, divided the syringe into three parts and threw it into the toilet, then recovered some clean towels, plasters and disinfectants.
He was about to go back upstairs, when Sherlock's phone rang somewhere in the devastated living room. Driven by the sound, Victor found it, buried under the remains of a laptop: he believed it was Mycroft, but when he read the name of the caller, he didn’t suppress a growl of rage.
"What do you want?" He began, dryly.
"Uh?” John stuttered, confused. “Who am I talking to?"
"I'm Victor, a friend of Sherlock."
He deliberately raised his voice on the word 'friend'.
"Ah yes, Victor, Sherlock’s university mate that returned from abroad. Sherlock mentioned something to me the other day."
"What do you want?" He asked again, making sure that from his tone, John understood that he wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries.
"I was looking for Sherlock. We were dancing, and at one point we realized that he was gone. I wanted to know why he had left so soon."
"This question surprise me, John: Sherlock is incredibly bored by public events and ceremonies, he has always hated them. You know him, so you should know it well."
"Ah... yes, yes, I imagined it," John stammered, taken aback by such malevolent animosity. “But is it possible to talk to him? Mary and I wanted to thank him for everything, before leaving."
"No, he's resting and I don’t want to wake him up."
"Well, sure, if he’s asleep... then, can you pass him the message, Victor?"
"Yes," he interrupted John and then closed the call, without giving him the opportunity to reply again.
He squeezed the phone between his fingers until the plastic cracked. He wouldn’t tell Sherlock anything, he wouldn’t let John do more harm to Sherlock.
Sherlock.
He had to take care of him.
He went back upstairs: his friend hadn’t moved, but another vial of cocaine was shining in his fingers.
"I told you, Vic. It's all useless.”
Sherlock looked at him, tired, but with a pinch of challenge in the eye. “You can’t always be here. You can promise it if you want, but it’s a lie, you can’t be here forever. Nobody is here forever," he spoke very fast, breathless as if he had a fever.
Victor reached out and put a hand on his forehead: yes, he was feverish.
"Calm down, please. All this is making you sick, Sherlock."
"Nobody is here forever. Nobody. You can’t be here forever, promising it it’s useless."
Sherlock was right: Victor could promise it, could swear that no, he would have always been there and he wouldn’t left, but he didn’t.
And not because he was afraid of not being able to keep his promise, but because whatever he had said, Sherlock wouldn’t have believed him now: his wound was too fresh, still bleeding, and stupid, empty words thrown to the wind, didn’t have the power to heal it.
"We'll see," he only said, and he thought it was a good compromise.
He grabbed one end of the vial and pulled it, pulling it out of Sherlock’s hand, meeting no resistance, then went to the window and threw it into the street. What would have happened to it, if it ended up under the wheels of a car or in the hands of someone, wasn’t his business.
He sat back on the bed, patiently laying Sherlock on his side, and began to medicate the cuts. The deepest one was on the right foot, but fortunately there were no splinters in the wound, and it wouldn’t have been necessary to go to the hospital. He cleaned the blood with the disinfectant.
"Does it burn? Does it hurt?" He asked.
"No. I don’t feel anything. I feel absolutely nothing," Sherlock murmured in a small, defeated voice.
Victor squeezed his eyes shut to keep him from crying. He wasn’t a strong man at all.
When he opened them again, Sherlock stared at him intently; even if he was broken, his brilliant mind never stopped working and he read right through him.
Victor didn’t even try to hide what he felt.
"Now I really want to smash something myself. But I'm afraid I’m late for that," he tried to joke, and when Sherlock responded with a tremulous but sincere laugh, he felt a glimmer of hope for the first time since he had stepped into the apartment.
"Give me your hands, let's see how deep are the cuts."
He medicated Sherlock, and eventually tried to convince his friend to sleep a little.
"It would be better if you went down to your room."
"No," Sherlock answered, without moving from his fetal position.
"All right. Then I stay."
Not that he had intended to leave, even if Sherlock had decided to sleep on the shards of the dishes on the kitchen floor.
He recovered a blanket from the closet, stored away in a plastic bag, never used, that smelled only of mothballs, and Victor used it to cover both him and Sherlock.
"It's useless,” Sherlock insisted, “you can’t be here forever."
"Goodnight Sherlock."
Neither one of them really slept much. They had never shared a bed before, and that one was too narrow, they bumped every time they turned around, and they were both too nervous to do anything but to doze off for short periods.
A couple of times that night, Victor opened his eyes suddenly, finding Sherlock watching him.
"You can’t always be here," he said both times, and Victor's answer was always the same: "We'll see."
In the morning he was awakened by an insistent vibration against his left side: he had left the phone in his jacket pocket and someone had just sent him a message. He focused the letters of the text with groggy eyes:
Outside.
MH
He glanced at Sherlock, who now seemed to rest more quietly, slipped on his shoes and quietly left the room.
"Mycroft," he greeted him with a yawn, running a hand through the honey-colored curls.
"Victor. Thank you for what you did last night. It was a delicate moment."
"I'm perfectly aware of it."
"How's Sherlock?"
"The danger night has passed uneventfully, if that's what you want to know, and now he's sleeping."
"Very well. From here on we can take care of it." He gestured to Anthea, standing by his side.
"No, there is no need," Victor answered with a shrug.
"I appreciate your goodwill, but this is not a game."
"Do you think I didn’t realize that?" He asked, referring to the state of Sherlock's apartment and psyche.
"It's not a game,” Mycroft insisted. “I don’t think you have any idea how things are."
"Instead I know. We'll manage, Sherlock and me."
"I'm sorry," Mycroft said after a long pause, and the sentence surprised both Victor and Anthea, who stopped for a moment to type on her Blackberry.
"For what?" Victor asked.
"It seems that I have misjudged you in past years, relying solely on your father’s actions, instead of considering you for the man you are."
"Well, thank you."
"Are you sure you don’t need anything?"
"Hm..." Victor scratched his head, smiling, "perhaps an interior decorator?"
"I'll send someone in the morning."
Victor went back upstairs to find Sherlock sitting at the kitchen table, contemplating the ruin he had created. In his hands there was another vial of cocaine.
"I told you," he said. "You can’t always be here."
Victor extended his hand and Sherlock dropped the drug, that Victor hurried to empty in the sink.
"We'll see," he said again, trying to put in those words all the hope he had.
"Scribere oportet aqua," Sherlock said.
"We'll see that too," Victor replied, before sitting down next to him and taking his hand.