2007
by J. Baillier & 7PercentSolution

MACBETH:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd;

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;

Raze out the written troubles of the brain;

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR:

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

– William Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act V –

Author's Notes: Although this story is part of the "On Pins And Needles" series, it can be read as a standalone piece. It contains detailed discussions of various psychiatric disorders, involuntary psychiatric treatment and family trauma; some readers may find some of the contents very upsetting and/or triggering. Especially noteworthy is the fact that some of the issues discussed here did not feature in "On the Rack" or "The Breaking Wheel".

Warning tags: Angst, Mental illness, Depression, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Psychosis, Hurt/Comfort, Sherlock's past, POV Sherlock Holmes, POV Mycroft Holmes, Disassociation, Sickfic, Drugs, Sherlock's Violin, Holmes' Brothers' Childhood, Anxiety, Family, Psychotherapy, Casefic, although the case has a minor role, Major Illness, Family Secrets, Tragedy.

To avoid spoilers, an explicit list of potentially triggering subject matters will not be provided on every chapter, but the authors are more than happy to answer questions and to provide a more detailed explanation on a one-to-one basis. Don't hesitate to PM us through the ff. net system, contact us through our tumblrs (jbaillier or 7-percent) or email Jessica (baillierj a.t. g-m.a.i.l.) if you're in any way worried about the precise contents.

Chapter 1 – Mind the Gap

He tries to avoid looking at people. Too much data is making him tingle and sting, akin to being brushed by the tendrils of a toxic jellyfish. Chironex fleckeri has always been his favourite kind, since its venom is so lethal that a single specimen could kill up to sixty humans. Things need to be ordered into good, bad, likes, does not like, knows, does not know, categorised, classified – things cannot be allowed to just be, because that's chaos, and chaos always makes him helpless, turns his head into a churning mass of panic.

He suddenly realises that he isn't wearing socks today, and he doesn't know where any of his spare clothes are. The latest bolt hole has been deleted, in the hope of keeping his whereabouts concealed. He shifts his weight, the toes of his threadbare trainers barely touching the worn yellow line on the concrete in front of him. It looks as if it has been eroded by thousands upon thousands of feet shuffling across, on their way somewhere else, because this is not a destination. This is an escape, a hiding place in motion.

There are other things he no longer possesses that he misses even more than a change of clothes. Since his phone had been highly dangerous as a potential way to keep tabs on him, he'd ditched it. It had felt like cutting the last string, severing the last connection to the rest of humanity. A final bridge burned. Had it been a week ago, or has more time passed than he realises?

A week means seven days, one hundred and sixty eight hours, ten thousand and eighty minutes, six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds, thirty-six trillion, two hundred and eighty-eight billion milliseconds.

This is how things keep disintegrating: into smaller and smaller bits, until they cannot be grasped anymore. Those particles then float beyond his reach, the ciliary muscles in his eyes unable to contract enough to punctuate their passage. Regrettably, it's hard to focus on things too small enough for his eyes to see. If only he could be that small, then he would be invisible to the naked eye. The notion makes him snicker – what would a clothed eye look like? A passer-by glances at him with a frown, and he quickly conceals his amusement with a feigned cough.

It should make him happy that remembers so little from the past few weeks. If he can't recall where he's been or even where he is supposed to be going, then the bugs can't either, which means that Mycroft can't pull that data out of his head. Amnesia gives him the best guarantee of safety.

To gain access to the Underground, he'd jumped the gate at a chaotic enough station, and since then he's been drifting onto and off trains at random intervals. He carries no Oyster card to be tracked. Until he leaves the system, he'll be safe. He knows that living eyes are watching him here, all the time, so he coils into his hoodie like a moth cocooning, carefully keeps his posture and movement different from his usual that he's not likely to be tracked by someone looking for him on station cameras or following him around. They don't know him well enough to see past this disguise. He only has one formidable enemy on his tail capable of recognising him easily no matter what he does to conceal his identity – Mycroft.

He's never understood why his brother seeks to control and assimilate, to discipline and mould him into someone he's not. He is uniquely and painfully ill-suited to conforming to any sorts of standards set by others. It's cruel, what his brother does; the pressure of his demands is the fuse on the bomb ready to go off when the restless energy in his head finally detonates from being kept too tightly reined. He doesn't know what lies beyond that explosion. Will he float around in an empty expanse of darkness, his soul cut from his body? Some time ago he would have rejoiced in the idea of such a separation of mind and matter, but he already feels like he's falling, slipping along a cliff face, desperately trying to claw at potential handholds, to grab onto any sign that he's still a part of reality, still in control, still here, still himself, within himself, of himself, as himself, in himself-

He clenches his fingernails into his palm to stop this looping train of thought. His thoughts aren't his anymore. They're like a living, writhing parasite inside his head that's trying to slither out and disappear into the cracks.

His eyes catch movement at the very edge of his peripheral vision: the eyes of a CCTV camera being repositioned. The surveillance network covers an astounding amount of London terrain. It's everywhere in the passages, platforms and halls, so he hides in the rush hour crowds like a fish in a shoal. When the hour is less inhabited by other passengers, he keeps on the move, random in his choice of direction, never staying still enough under any one camera's eye to make identification easy.

Fingering the few coins he still has in his pockets, he moves away from the edge of the platform and lifts his head a bit, risking a quick glance at the dot matrix screen: Circle Line via Edgeware Road – three minutes.

He rubs the edge of a one pound coin with his index finger. Having something to engage with haptically occupies his brain with reassuring sensation, offering an unobtrusive way to handle some of the anxiety building up. He doesn't have his wallet anymore, because the cards can be tracked by use, and sophisticated surveillance equipment could be planted in a magnetic strip. Someone could also have stolen it off him when he'd been sleeping in a portico or in a graveyard mausoleum with a broken door. He now lives in a cash economy, black economy, black like the darkness of the tunnel at the end of the platform – he needs to hide his secrets from the light of day. Credit cards leave trails of paper and electricity.

The keys to his bedsit are probably under a cracked paving stone somewhere in Camden, close enough to one of his boltholes. He doesn't know when he'd last slept within its four walls. Weeks have passed since he stopped being his brother's prisoner. He doesn't like to keep track of the date; he suspects that there's an inherent risk in such knowledge – a cerebral trip switch that could somehow betray his whereabouts. He briefly wonders if he's lost his lease to the bedsit since he hasn't been paying the rent. He remembers alarmingly few details of the place. The keys could still be there, under a rock, but the landlord would probably already have changed the locks.

Sherlock wonders how many keys to how many doors are lost in this city, and how many doors nobody even remembers anymore. People can even forget where stations once were. There are abandoned stations in the London Underground; he'd even thought of hiding in one for a time, but they are hard to get to without walking the tracks, which are increasingly well guarded by cameras.

His is a lonely existence but then again, the company of others has always been fraught with difficulty for him. These days, he finds solace not within the shelter of a home or in human contact, but in what comes out of a syringe. Just that thought is enough to push an adrenaline spike through the mist. The knowledge of the liquid relief he currently possesses makes everything brighter and a little sunnier, if just for a moment.

Not yet. Soon. The giddy promise he offers himself makes his blood sing in his ears and his skin hum with electricity. The crook of his left elbow throbs in expectation, the core of his very being suspended in glorious anticipation.

This platform is busy. The heaviness of humanity ripples in these subterranean corridors whenever carriage doors open. Everything pulses in a rhythm of monotonic, placid routine. Here in the bowels of the earth under London's teeming surface, the air is stale, made up of thousands upon thousands of exhalations. Decades of humans have moved through these tunnels, their exhalations like ghosts moving through his lungs and back out again. Sherlock inhales them as eagerly as he would fresh cigarette smoke. There is anonymity here; Mycroft cannot sniff him out because he is disguised by the breath of others.

Above him, St James is populated by pompous bureaucrats and civil servants, and Sherlock gets a momentary thrill out of being so close to his brother's natural habitat. He's away. I get to play. This is a game of chess: the white king is off the board and he gets to be a black pawn inching his way towards the promise of freedom on the other side. The other side of what?

Looking over the edge of the platform, his eyes fixate on the gleaming rail. People frequently jump in front of trains, and then these train tracks are scrubbed clean, a life quickly and efficiently erased after it ends. The cleaning staff are sometimes forced to go onto the rails or into the tunnels to pick up body parts. Sherlock had watched this being done once, after a train he'd boarded at Russell Square Station had hit someone. Some passengers shed tears, shocked by a sudden reminder of human mortality and misery. Such events are a slice of a paper knife through their parchment-thin sense of security. It had not been a shock of any kind for Sherlock. He never forgets that death is just behind the next door, but which one? That is always the question people don't ask. They ask why, not when, even though they all hold the power in their hands to end it all, or to continue drudging through their mind-numbingly boring lives. It's all a matter of which proverbial door to go through. What Sherlock carries in his pocket could easily offer that permanent oblivion, or just the transient bliss he's currently chasing.

Not yet, he tells himself again.

The train arrives and the doors open automatically. The recorded announcement announces the obvious – Circle Line – and his brain goes tearing off down the tracks as he enters the carriage. Twenty-seven kilometres, thirty-five stations. Almost everything along this line is comparatively old, though many stations have been updated. A bit of paint and a few new handrails do little to hide the truth: all this has been here before Sherlock, and will remain after he's gone. There's no one to mourn his fate here, whatever it may turn out to be. The Underground is the pulmonary vascular cycle of London's circulation, where he circles round and round, where he is nothing but a red blood cell threatening to hemolyse, to bleed out from strain.

In his pocket he carries what he needs to fix this disconcerting feeling of being ephemeral. He is like a street artist's painting on a sidewalk when it starts to rain: his tones are threatening to dissolve into incomprehensible swirls of pale hues swirling towards the nearest storm drain. He needs a fixative to keep from disappearing, a pharmaceutical solution to that problem.

Not yet, he tries to tell himself, but the compulsion is too strong now. He can't delay his relief any longer.

He waits for people to take their seats, the doors to close, the train to move. Then, he wanders from carriage to carriage until he finds one that's only half full. Standing in the area opposite the closing door, he faces the end of the train car. He tugs up his hoodie sleeve, arm outstretched to grasp the metal handrail beside the door between the carriages. In this position, no one nearby will be able to see what he is about to do.

He'd stolen an intravenous cannula, along with some other useful things, from a walk-in clinic. No more messing about with disposable needles every time he needs a hit – they make people uncomfortable and require repeatedly locating working veins, which is getting harder and harder. The cannula means that all he needs to do is to insert a syringe into a one-direction valve. No tourniquets necessary; it's all very fast and efficient. Even if he does get seen by passers-by, they simply assume it's some sort of a legitimate medication he's self-administering. Perhaps they stupidly suspect he is a diabetic. Whatever. Such assumptions keep him safe, allow him to hide in plain sight.

The cannula has served him well until three days ago, when red welts began creeping down his arm from it. His elbow is now swollen, the surrounding skin mottled blue and sensitive to touch. The colours are exquisite, like the lividity patterns on a corpse.

He breathes a sigh of relief when he locates the syringe in his pocket, pre-mixed hours ago in a quiet and clean bathroom at a bistro at Liverpool Street Station. Buying from City dealers is more expensive, but quality and discretion are as good as guaranteed. This particular dealer is willing to provide a line of credit, in exchange for something that Sherlock has deleted. He doesn't consider how much he has left of this last batch. He'll worry about that... later.

Now, he promises himself and his blood sings with approval. He feels light-headed, perhaps since he's been standing for a long time, but that will be over soon.

Once he's done with the hit, he pockets the syringe, pulls the sleeve down and slumps onto the nearest seat. He lets the darkness of subterranean London sweeping by on the other side of the window mesmerise him just for a moment.

The world shifts, calms down, focuses. Soothing waters flow into him, and that liquid salvation replaces everything that's coarse and annoying and sore and hateful and confusing and too much.Still, despite the warmth that is blooming in his head, the rest of him feels cold. He's been this way for two days, shivering even in the ambient warmth of the underground, a novel malaise making his bones ache. He can't remember when he'd last eaten. His muscles keep cramping, slight twitches traveling up and down his arms. He crosses them protectively around his torso.

The train stops and the doors open. A mechanical voice announces that they have arrived at South Kensington Station.

Drivers had stopped doing their own announcements years ago, their accents replaced by a recorded voice with an anodyne but understandable pronunciation. Impersonal. Boring.

The carriage begins filling up again. No one sits next to him, not even in the second seat over. People are finally giving him the space he's always wanted – an invisible cordon, a sphere of assumed notoriety. Maybe it's because he's underdressed for this time of the year, clad in just a worn hoodie and a T-shirt paired with worn jeans. It must be cold out – this he can deduce from what others are wearing. During the past few days, his own senses have become unreliable, and his personal thermostat seems to be malfunctioning.

He doesn't think about what he will do tomorrow, the day after that, next week, or next month. It doesn't matter. The future is a luxury he can't afford. He's going to stay below ground and remain unseen, which is all that matters. The only thing piercing through that monotony is the craving for the next hit, when it's been too long from the last one. He could quit, he could, yes he could, but why should he? What else is there?

Despite sitting down, he feels increasingly faint and infirm. Has the lighting in the carriage changed?

An odd hum begins under his skin, and he can instantly tell it's the bugs. He's reasonably certain they are palmetto bugs. People tend to mistake them for cockroaches, because people rarely know anything that's important anyway, such as what things this world contains. Frankly, the alternate title of Florida woods cockroach is a little derogatory. These beasts are four times the size of their English cousins and fascinatingly revolting. Sherlock had never seen them in the wild before they began inhabiting him.

The bugs used to go away when he dosed himself, burrowing deeper and staying silent, but during the past few days he has grown convinced that they're somehow important, that they're trying to tell him something. During more lucid moments, he wonders if their existence is a fact or the result of the idle gears of his head working separately from his consciousness, anthropomorphising his thoughts? It hardly matters – they're in him, regardless of how they came into being.

The bugs have been swarming, amassing in his left hip, above the iliac crest, in the soft tissue that shifts when he turns his torso. The thing he's been looking for must be there – a tracer, the existence of which must be more than just a hunch, since the bugs agree with him. He hasn't been able to work out when exactly the device had been put in. If the tracer is in there, then what are its owners doing with it? What is this watchful waiting, this game of cat and mouse and snakes and ladders? Does their reticence have something to do with that "quid pro quo for shaming your family" that has been going on and on and on and on; are they a form of punishment?

Archenemy,he'd called Mycroft once, mostly in jest as he had poked the big brother in the V of his white dress shirt revealed between the lapels of a very expensive business suit. Mycroft had called him a child and told him to grow up.

On occasion Sherlock feels important because Mycroft is willing to waste so much time on him. Sometimes, it is the only way he can measure his own self-worth; he certainly doesn't see any intrinsic value in his own existence.

His heart is pounding erratically, and there's an overwhelming sense of impending disaster, which must be akin to hearing a fleet of bombers in the distance before they appeared over London during the Blitz. His grandfather, now dead and buried, used to watch war documentaries muttering that television never captured the real sense of doom. Those scenes had frightened Sherlock as a child. A threat on the horizon, one he could do nothing about.

He can hear how the front of the train is now going over a bent rail or signalling fault, the wheels of the carriages ahead of him clunking in rhythm as each car follows. Whatever is waiting for him in the dark is drawing closer, and the sound is driving the bugs in his flank wild. Have they found the tracer? Is it signalling his whereabouts to the planes on the horizon? The palmetto bugs are now all on the move – the clunking has quickened as it is drawing closer, and Sherlock realises it must be a code. When this carriage crosses that spot, then the tracer will activate and he will be found.

"I know; it's time, can't wait any longer," Sherlock mutters to himself, and glances up, eyes darting from passenger to passenger when he realises someone may have heard him. These days he sometimes says things out loud, mistaking words for thoughts.

A man reading a newspaper in the seat opposite glances at him with well-concealed, mild worry, then snaps the newspaper into shape again and continues reading.

The next station is announced to be Gloucester Road. Sherlock waits until the stop is over.

There's a longer than average stretch between that station and High Street Kensington, which is useful because he needs time to take care of the tracer problem and hide his trail. He doesn't want to do this, not here, but he has realised the procedure is vital if he's to survive, if he is to go on. There's no time to find a secret enough spot, no time to hide.

There are thunderclouds on the horizon in his head, distant war drums echoing in the underground tunnels.

The pain will be irrelevant.

His fingers circle around the knife in his pocket.

o-O-o-O-o-O-o

Sometime later, he is leaning up against the trunk of a tree in a garden square, watching the colour red blossom on him. It's spreading up the cloth of the hem of his sweatshirt, darkening his jeans black. Capillary action wicks the liquid away from his side, and he wonders how the flower had taken root there so quickly. His right hand is slippery with crimson, and the pocket knife he used to have in his pocket is missing – he must have dropped it on the train tracks.

The sunset is almost hidden behind clouds, and he wonders if the palmetto bugs are finding the London climate a bit too cold. They seem to have gone quiet; maybe they used this opportunity to escape, or perhaps they just wanted the tracer so they could go home. A long way from Florida, this... wherever this is.

He has a vague memory of the man across the aisle from him taking exception to his effort to remove the device. One of Mycroft's minions? He'd waved the pocket knife in the man's general direction and he had retreated. Someone had then pulled the emergency alarm, and then the train had shuddered to a halt.

There had been voices: women's high-pitched shrieks of alarm, the sound of footsteps retreating to the opposite end of the carriage, chased there by tinny tones emerging from a speaker demanding to be told the nature of the emergency. Lots of shouting, his own voice joining in, but none of the precise words have been retained in his memory. When the noise had died down, the train had stuttered into life again, emerging from a tunnel into the twilight. As soon as the doors had opened under the glass canopy of High Street Kensington's open air platforms, Sherlock had stood up and staggered from the train, pushing his way through a crowd that very willingly parted for him. He ran where he was convinced south was – away from the station exit.

Eventually, he realised he'd walked right off the end of the platform. There were yellow signs shouting Danger, Moving Trains and High Voltage, assaulting his vision with their garish tones. There had also been a red one declaiming that Passengers Must Not Pass This Point; Offenders Will Be Prosecuted. He had shouted back at the signs that none of that mattered when they were all being watched, all the time.

He steps a precarious dance over the tracks, he'd made his way to a rail workers' maintenance hut, the roof of which had offered him a way to get over a brick wall and into this garden.

He looks up at the bare branches of the nearby tree, dark shadows against a darkening sky. The colour patterns of the bark are distinctive: Platanus acerifolia.

A great shudder runs through his body, and he wonders if it is just the cold or something else. Are the planes on the horizon again? Can he hear rumbling off in the distance? No, it's the crunch of gravel under his own shoes as he turns on his heels.

Time stops, because he must have run out of it. He doesn't know how to keep track of such things anymore. He touches his palm on his side and then looks at it. Burgundy, wine red, crimson, cerise, a sanguine scarlet.

Pain blooms like roses. It has painted his palm in the unbearable and garish red the name of which his tongue had just been chasing. Spots dance in his eyes, and the invisible trapdoor below him which he hadn't even noticed – clever, very clever – springs and plummets him into darkness.