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Footsteps on the stairs. John, obviously. He didn’t even need to try for that. Mrs. Hudson was gone for several weeks visiting… a sister? Friend? Not important. The footsteps seemed to echo from a long way away. Detached from himself. Like sounds coming through a window pane.
“I’m home,” John called. He headed into the kitchen, threw his coat over the back of a chair, and began banging the kettle around as he made tea. Long day at the surgery, then. Several unexpected walk-ins. He couldn’t concentrate enough to deduce beyond that. Odd. Usually he could deduce John’s day without thinking twice about it.
John came to stand in the doorway, hands on his hips. “Seriously?” he snapped. “Have you been sitting there all day?” Sherlock didn’t so much as twitch. “You really couldn’t have even gone to the shops for a half hour? All that’s in the fridge are three toes and a bowl of moldy grapes. Why do I have to do everything, Sherlock? You don’t do the shopping, you don’t clean up anything unless something's actively filling the flat with noxious fumes…”
Sherlock tuned him out without noticing he did so and went back to watching his knees which were pulled up in front of him on the sofa. There was something odd going on with his breathing which he couldn’t quite get under control. It kept slithering away from him.
Begin listing the periodic table, echoed Mycroft’s voice from his Mind Palace.
Why?
Just do it, Sherlock.
“Sherlock! Sherlock, what’s wrong?” John caught a glimpse of the man’s paler-than-usual face and bent down in front of his friend. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, and his eyes were focused on something far in the distance.
“I’m floating, John.”
Sherlock stretched his faintly trembling fingers out in front of him, inspecting at them curiously. Why was he shaking?
“No, you’re not,” replied John sharply. “You’re not floating, Sherlock; you’re still sitting on the sofa like you have been since I left.” He knelt to get a better look at Sherlock, who barely seemed to notice his presence. “You took something, didn’t you? Bloody… What did you take? Sherlock, there’s supposed to be a list, isn’t there? Let’s see it.”
The detective’s slightly red eyes flicked up to his own and then away. “I didn’t,” he breathed in an almost inaudible voice.
“Yes, you bloody well did!”John roared. “Do I have to get Mycroft involved? I will. Gosh, I should have seen this coming. With Lestrade out of town, it's been days without a case and I’ve been working extra hours… I was just glad you hadn’t started shooting the walls again… Where’s the list, Sherlock? Give me the bloody list!”
“There isn’t a list,” Sherlock said in the same quiet voice. He hadn’t taken anything, although now he wished he had. Maybe it would have made this uncomfortable feeling go away. “I didn’t take anything. Haven’t taken anything for weeks. I don’t know what this is…” His gaze went from his shaking hands up to John’s face again and fastened itself there, looking for answers. “I don’t know what’s going on, John. I’m floating. Why am I floating?” His voice wavered.
Letting out a breath, John perched on the sofa next to the detective. “Alright, you haven’t taken anything,” he conceded carefully. “What do you mean you’re floating, Sherlock?”
What did he mean, he was floating? Sherlock didn’t know, didn’t even really know what he was feeling. Floating was as close as he could come to explaining the sense that he was becoming untethered from the world. There were several degrees of separation between his thought processes and his physical body, and then several more between his physical body and the world it was interacting with. From the window, he watched people passing on the sidewalk, deducing their lives while feeling like they existed on a different plane than he did. He couldn’t touch their simple, uncomplicated being, only watch it from the outside.
Sherlock tried to explain all of this to John, but it was exceedingly difficult to make someone understand something he barely understood himself. All John could do was stare as his friend’s explanation tangled and twisted up on itself, gaining speed so that it was faster than Sherlock’s deductions were but twice as impossible to follow.
“Okay, okay, breathe, Sherlock,” John interrupted when there were no signs he might stop soon and the detective’s breathing began to get worryingly rapid. “I need you to take a deep breath. Or two, better do two. You’re going to start hyperventilating.”
Sherlock’s muddled explanation ground to a halt as he sucked in air. Breathe, let oxygen flow to the brain, exhale carbon dioxide. Repeat. Breathing is crucial to sustain both physical and mental processes. Slowly, he turned a white face and searching eyes toward the doctor. “I don’t like this, John. Make it stop. Make it stop. I don’t feel real.”
He missed John’s sharp intake of breath. Instead, he was focused in front of him again, back on his own still-trembling hands. Sherlock began digging the fingernails of one hand into the other, trying to use the pain to ground himself. The semicircle imprints they left behind stood out, livid against his pale skin.
His movement snapped John out of the spiral of thought Sherlock’s words had sent him into. He yanked one hand out of the reach of the other and held it tightly in his own.
“Don’t do that,” he said roughly. “That won’t make things any better.” At the sound of a sharp inhale John went to drop the hand, but Sherlock’s other arm shot out to stop him.
“No, don’t!” Sherlock’s cheeks flushed and his eyes drifted down toward his knees. “That… That helps, actually…” he mumbled.
“This does?” John lifted their joined hands, but Sherlock’s only response was to turn a darker shade of red. He began trying to extract his hand.
“Never mind.”
“No.” This time John kept them from separating. “You said it was helping. Is it the pressure, you reckon?” he asked, inspecting their intertwined fingers as a thought occurred to him. “Like how people get those weighted blankets?”
Sherlock had recovered enough dignity after his outburst to say, “Honestly, John—” in a near replica of his usual tone before John cut him off again.
“Something’s wrong, Sherlock, and we’re trying to fix it—”
A petulant look.
“—Alright, I’m trying to fix it, and you’re going to cooperate. Pretend it’s another experiment. Would pressure help?”
Sherlock shrugged in a way that meant, Yes it would, but I’d rather not admit it. Coupled with his nervous posture and refusal to meet John’s eyes, it made him look surprisingly young, more like a lost teenager than a man.
“Don’t move, got it? I’ll only be a minute.”
When the detective nodded, John rose. He didn’t miss the slight shiver as he removed his hand from Sherlock’s grip, or the way his eyes followed him as he fetched their two cups of tea from the kitchen and balanced them on the table by the sofa. John disappeared down the hallway next, only to reappear almost immediately, clutching a blanket which he promptly dropped onto Sherlock’s lap.
“138 seconds,” was the only response he got.
“What?”
“It took 138 seconds. You may wish to amend your earlier statement—that’s over two minutes,” remarked Sherlock, watching the steam rise off their mugs. Odd patterns, the room must be drafty. All the windows were closed, but the steam from John’s cup twisted to the side instead of straight up and split into several tendrils.
“I’d say that’s quite efficient,” John replied and tossed the Union Jack pillow at Sherlock. It bounced off his chest and onto the man’s legs. “Now budge up.” John plopped onto the sofa again, wedging Sherlock tightly between himself and the arm rest. He turned on an old Doctor Who marathon while the detective arranged the blanket over their legs.
This is good, Sherlock thought dazedly. He clutched the throw pillow to his chest and felt the warmth of John’s body soaking into him. Odd, he hadn’t realized he was cold. Floating was cold. Of course it was, air temperature dropped with altitude and if it was possible for an unprotected human to float all the way into space their body would slowly freeze, body shutting down as the oxygen decreased. Atmospheric pressure lessened causing the blood vessels to—
“Knock it off,” John said, digging an elbow into the detective’s ribs.
“What?”
“You’re thinking too loud.” John smirked when Sherlock let out a huff somewhere between annoyance and laughter. “Seriously, Sherlock, just watch the show. You know you secretly like it…” He nudged him again, which Sherlock ignored and studiously fixed his eyes on the telly.
He couldn’t float away here. Between John and the arm of the sofa pressing into him, there was barely enough room to reach down and adjust the blanket over his feet. He wasn’t going anywhere.
John shifted until he was leaning almost against his flatmate’s shoulder and heard Sherlock let out a satisfied breath. The man’s head tilted back, resting against the wall, as his eyes slowly fluttered closed.
“Are you asleep, Sherlock?”
A drowsy hum was the only response John got. Sherlock was floating again, but this time a warm and soft sensation that led only to sleep, cocooned safely next to his blogger.
El fin.