Archive of Our Own

He is sick. He remembers someone telling him he’s sick. He must hold on to that knowledge. That knowledge explains things, and when things have an explanation it makes them less scary. His brother—the much taller and bigger of the two at the time—used to tell him that.

***

It’s too hot, too loud, too dry, too much. His body is continuously turned inside out and back again, like those finger puppets his au pair used to crochet, her fingers moving as if they were made of soft rubber, the needle criss-crossing in flashes and piercing the little yarn form like a voodoo doll, flipping it and stabbing it again, flip and stab, flip and stab, and all the while she was smiling at him, not even looking at the bloodless victim in her fingers. Regardes, mon petit, encore une poupée, viens (Look, my little boy, another puppet, come)—

He thought he had deleted that memory; there must be a glitch in his brain: random bits of information are retrieved in a constant stream, haphazard and fast. It’s hurting his head. Do I still have a head? he wonders, because he can see himself standing right there, headless. It’s wrong, because what is he but a head? Next he sees only his head. It’s propped on the mantel; this is wrong, too; why is there a fireplace in here? (Someone says, There’s no fireplace in here. Shh, shh, someone says. You’re delirious.)

The head on the mantel looks like his head, but the hair is grey and thin and long. It starts growing thinner and longer, and the skin starts drying like parchment and falling off his face, followed by fast-rotting flesh, finally revealing spots of eggshell skull underneath. He is unable to look away. He watches bits of dead skin float suspended in the air, square inches of epidermis with encoded data: cell growth and age, pigmentation, rate of decomposition—and he can see it all. Then the eyes in the head open and they are just empty sockets. No eyeballs. Where are the eyeballs? (We threw them away ages ago. Drink now, come on. The voice lies, because someone passes him the jar with the eyeballs. Why would he drink from that?)

He suddenly remembers where the eyeballs are: he’s boiling them! They are in the microwave but they’re also in his head, both at the same time, and it hurts so badly he wants to scream, so much pain, oh—Stop the microwave. No one was there to stop the microwave before, but someone is always here to stop it now, please stop it! (Is it the same someone who’s asking Stop what? Shh, tell me. Stop what?) He tries to touch his own expanding eyes, but he feels his fingers go through the sockets into cold and clammy emptiness instead, and he’s so scared, and the microwave hollers, the temperature rising, someone has to stop the microwave or his head will burst, someone stop it—

Someone does. Then removes his clawing fingers from his eyes and places something on his face. His eyelids are cooling down and for a blissful moment the light is mellow orange and soft through them.

He realizes he is looking at the curves on the inside of the lids. Bits start appearing on them, like text on a wall. Random again: formulas of chemical reactions, receipts, text messages, numbers, information on height and weight (Whose height and weight?), letters in Cyrillic. Then slowly pictures get added, and maps, and cut-outs from papers; they start piling up so quickly he can’t manage to read them all, can’t take them all in but he has to, nothing must remain unexamined, everything needs to be peeled off layer by layer until it’s broken down to the basic code of the Creation; Mummy used to pray on Sunday; whose creation is he, he asked, Mummy’s or God’s—and Mummy talked and he upset her, and she talked more, too much, too much, the pain! Someone’s whimpering and he wants them to stop… (Someone asks them to stop too. No, someone pleads with them: Shh, stop. Here, here; it’s okay, shh, I’m here.) He tries to shush the whimpering but he can’t; there’s a hand down his throat, scraping it with sandpaper in vicious exultation, oh God—

He gags and someone presses something wet and cold on his forehead, while propping his head up. He tries to breathe but then he’s falling, images and sounds rushing in like billions of bytes of data through his circuits, and he burns with them. He flings his arms desperately, trying to grasp at something with his fingers, to catch onto something and stop the fall; he does—no, no, someone catches him. In that second of stability he risks and opens his eyes to see who, and of course, of course!

What is going on? he wants to ask him. Make it stop, or Help me, or Stay here, don’t go, please. There is more; more words are fumbling to come out. He listens to their rustle in fascination, he watches them curl into their meanings, their letters the colour of sugar at 160 degrees, brown and golden and transparent. And all the words are intended for him, he’s made them tasty for him. Eat my words, he tries to tell him, but he can’t; he can’t and he thrashes—

And then he hears one sound separate itself from the cacophony: soft air whooshing out in a soothing frequency, and it sounds like someone’s name being said over and over again or like a shushing sound. It clicks into some sort of a slot, assigned to it only. He hushes under the sound and his eyes barely open into slits. He distinguishes familiar lines, that nose. The lips are pale and wrung thin in tension, yet they too are soothing to look at. He’s touched them, he knows them—he knows him. And he can smell him, too: the only scent that doesn’t overwhelm the senses. He feels his own fingers gripping the hands that touch his face and he fears his fingertips will burn through the cool skin like tips of cigarettes through paper, but it remains undamaged.

He clings to these sensations. His brain tries to work something out through the traffic; there’s something missing that he knows would make this all a bit more bearable. He struggles so very hard, but he fails and he starts slumping back. Strong arms prevent him from falling. He tugs at them, drags them closer and feels the weight attached to them follow. And as his eyelids strain up again, the answer waits for him, without the help of science or deduction: Skin. The skin on the throat, so close… Clarity cuts him a sliver of tangibility and he mumbles, “I need to— Let me taste. I need to taste, please—“ His own voice dissolves back into incoherence and he hears the other voice saying something, asking maybe; there’s this tone in it and if truculent hands weren’t ripping his inflamed body to pieces, he would know if that tone was forbidding, or tender, or disgusted. He shakes violently, the skin on the throat his single point of lucidity, of hope. He tries to touch it; he begs its taste again...

How long he begs he cannot say, but at last he feels the back of his head being supported and the throat moves closer and offers itself. He trembles and nuzzles, then presses his open, hot mouth to it, taste buds in a frenzy of anticipation. He draws the skin between his teeth gently and starts sucking, while steady fingers cradle his head in place. The scrambled diagram of unconnected dots transforms under his tongue into beautiful patterns of understanding and rises up in front of him like stained glass. He isn’t afraid anymore: he’s found his touchstone and he can let go.

***

When he resurfaces again, he feels weaker than the time he infected himself with Leptospirosis, and just as fragile. He still isn’t sure if now isn’t that time and he begins feeling cold shivers again— when he remembers he’s sick! But he’s only got normal fever. That’s what’s going on. And this time he remembers who was it that told him he was sick. John told him. John.

“I’m here,” says John, one hand on his upper arm, the other stroking his hair back from his brow. Sherlock looks at him and wonders if there wasn’t something else he should remember, too.