The Mind Palace Minotaur

WARNINGS: Sherlock whumpage, hurt/comfort, angst, abuse and rape. John/Sherlock (but no magical healing sex, sorry).

SPOILERS: Everything up to and including The Great Game.

Author's Note: This will be multi-chaptered, and probably alternate between viewpoints (though I haven't decided yet, it's early days). PTSD frequently manifests in non-standard ways, and while Sherlock will meet the requirements for pretty much all of the diagnostic symptoms, his unique personality traits and developmental adaptations create a situation where he's completely ill-equipped to deal with what's happening (indeed, as many people are in the early days of PTSD). I like whump in general, but Sherlock whump makes me inordinately pleased. My apologies!

01

He wandered down the peaceful corridor that stored the rooms that housed his information of the English countryside. He wanted to refresh his workable knowledge of the North Yorkshire Moors, specifically their flora. He didn't have time to do this during the day; too much to do, new things to learn, and so he maintained this general upkeep while he was dreaming.

He entered into a plain, rendered room filled with shelving units, filing cabinets, stacked high with books. The flora cabinet was off to his left and he made his way over, unrushed, unhurried, enjoying the actual setting itself. He'd constructed this room back when he was able to take considerably more time with visualisation, and this section of the mind palace was well-textured, the walls themselves containing information. The renders were made from dyes of carefully processed moorland plants; just looking at them helped him to remember those processes, prints – photographically memorised and stored were tacked onto the walls – the blueprints of the cottages on Percy Rigg. Biologically correct illustrations of the lapwing, the curlew, the delightfully named redshank.

The first drawer in the filing cabinet opened easily, and he pulled out a file on sphagnum moss bogs, carefully scanning the information pages. When sleeping, he could enjoy moments of information for the sake of information. His body slumbered and shifted, useless and dull, but his mind was still active. Not conscious, but still dedicated to The Work.

Each of the pages was ordered neatly, and he lost time, maybe even a couple of hours refreshing his knowledge. He almost didn't hear the noise the first time, so absorbed in the processes of sleep and dreaming. But he did hear it, and on a massive time delay, many minutes later, he lifted his head and narrowed his eyes. This was his space. Strange things didn't happen here unless he wanted them to. His mind palace was utterly inviolate. He'd made it that way. The body was unpredictable, and the mind had its messy spaces that he preferred to avoid; the finicky, maudlin basal ganglia, even the limbic system. Give him the clean and ordered spaces of his own neocortex.

The noise came again, a clattering, something shifting in a nearby room. He carefully replaced the folder and stood up, feeling an unusual chill shift over his entire body. He looked down at the hairs that had risen on his forearms. Piloerection, goosebumps. Rolled his eyes. His subconscious was choosing to let him know that his sympathetic system was activated. Fear was so tedious.

He mastered himself quickly and strode down the corridor towards the source of the noise. He could hear other noises now, quieter shuffling and other movements. He'd stored no memories of the movements of live animals in these rooms, but he supposed that as he got older, perhaps they were able to escape and make their way elsewhere. He dismissed this thought for its frivolity, and because the idea that his brain might degenerate as he aged was repellent to him. His body shifted restlessly as he slept on.

He opened the door, and froze when he saw a figure bent over a desk, rifling through one of his folders in the room dedicated to the Peak District. Several things occurred to him at once. A Westwood suit, navy blue, Moriarty, immaculate, busy fingers but no real absorption in what he was looking at, clearly waiting for him them, making a mess.

'Is this really all that useful?' Moriarty held up a folder on limestone. 'Why not delete any of this...redundant information? There's so much more you could be storing in here. By the way, hi!' He straightened and dropped the folder casually behind him. Pages fell out, scattered everywhere. Sherlock flinched, felt his breathing coming faster, wanted rationality even in unconscious states. But he did not want to believe what he was seeing. Several things occurred to him at once, but the most rational was that his mind had conjured a Moriarty. That his mind had conjured an accurate rendition of a man who should not have the power to make him feel this way.

His mind palace was no longer inviolate, and his own mind had trespassed upon him. It created a queasiness in his stomach, and stuck in his throat.

'Put it all back once you're done, please.' Sherlock said crisply, and then turned to walk away, and found that he couldn't. The compulsion to know Moriarty, even now, to find out how kindred they really were, pressed against him. It sent small thrills of adrenaline rushing through his body.

'But I don't want to,' Moriarty pouted, 'that takes time, and I'm looking for something,' he paused dramatically, 'important.' He half-smiled. 'But I got distracted with all this useless, dull information. Plants? Really? When are you going to grow up and realise there are more important things to be storing. But never mind, I've fixed it for you, the only puzzle for you to figure out, my dear, is which room is going to go boom first.'

'What?' Sherlock said, his heart racing now. He looked around, like he could somehow make it out. And then Moriarty laughed as Sherlock closed his eyes and did a quick scan, a computer program flipping through all the rooms by category to see if anything was out of the ordinary. Searching for some blip in his consciousness, something that would feel wrong. Where? Where? Where?

He was too late.

The boom shook his mind, rattled his whole body before he could finish the scan, and he fell to his knees aware that something horrifying had just happened to a whole section of his palace. No order now, nothing but fragmented words and pictures, nonsensical, disordered, bits and bytes polluting the pristine organisation. He gasped, and then gasped again, and shuddered when Moriarty leaned down next to him and he felt that calculating smile against his own ear.

'Well, there we are. Going to be waiting for you, the next time you sleep,' he finished in a singsong voice. 'My bombs are going to be waiting too. I have so many delicious surprises up my sleeve, and look at you, it's so flattering to see that you know it too. Wake up, then, Sherlock!'

He snapped awake with a jagged, rasping cry. His hands clutched at the blanket, his eyes stared up at the ceiling and he threw himself out of bed like it was a nest of vipers. He felt disoriented, his brain felt bruised, an unusual headache sprouting from the back of his head and pulsing along the nerves all the way to his eyes. He placed a hand over his face and waited for it to pass. It didn't.

Just a dream, he started to tell himself, but if there was one thing research had taught him, the brain was incredibly capable of self-sabotage. And he knew. He could feel it. Something was wrong with his mind palace. It could take weeks to fix.

The betrayal felt sickening and too dirty to be borne, so he withdrew into a different section of his mind and forgot to talk for three days, absorbed in a case, and reluctant to sleep.

He was only vaguely aware of John hovering nearby, concerned, observing. He had nothing to say. He knew he was feeling something close to doubt, maybe even doubt itself, and the idea was so repulsive that he cushioned himself with the Work. It made Lestrade happy, and it gave him something to do, and he loathed self-awareness in a way that made Mycroft remind him of it with a delicious glee. He didn't even want to think about Mycroft right now. He couldn't help it. Mycroft was better at assessing people, and he was curious to know what he'd think, but certainly not curious enough to ask.

He started occasionally checking the computer (his or John's, it didn't matter), for sightings of Moriarty. It wasn't that he was worried, per se, he just wanted to know what was going on. Dimly he knew that he was trying to regain control over something that was happening inside of him, and that he was probably going about it all wrong.

The headache lasted for three days. At the end of the third day, as it crept towards 2.00am, John walked out of the lounge into the kitchen, and came back with a glass of water and two painkillers. 'At least take something for your head,' he said, thrusting them towards Sherlock.

Sherlock only shook his head in irritation, as though a fly was trying to land on it.

'Sherlock.' John said, in that 'I am going to be stubborn and annoying and eventually I might even win this altercation,' manner that Sherlock found frustrating at times and endearing at others. Now it was just a nuisance.

'John. I am thinking. I do not need painkillers. If you've used your incredible insight to deduce I have a headache, maybe you could please take it one step further and realise that it's only minor, and that if I needed your help, I would have demanded it by now.'

'Yes, of course, because that's so like you, to look after yourself when you're in one of these moods. Look, will you just humour me and take them?' He held up the painkillers, shoved the glass of water forwards.

Sherlock glowered at him, and then seized the painkillers and swallowed them, drank back the water. Even that simple movement of shifting his head made the pain throb a bit, and he winced. John noticed, his eyes widened, but he didn't say anything. He took back the glass that Sherlock thrust at him.

'Thank you.'

'Now go away.' Sherlock said, but instead of waiting for John to leave, he walked to his own room instead, closed the door behind him. He stood there for a moment, lost. He looked at all the familiar sights and everything felt slightly off and alien, like he was a stranger in his own space. This was unbearable, it chafed at him like sandpaper, and he threw himself down onto his bed and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Partly, he was tempted to explore his mind palace again, to find the source of the damage and see what could be salvaged. He also wanted to see Moriarty again, feeling a strange pull to the man, yet vexed with the knowledge that the Moriarty in his head was not real, was only his perception of the spider himself. And then he didn't want to see the damage, because it would confirm that something had gone wrong. Something had backfired in his mind.

He thought, or suspected that he knew the reasons. The most unusual thing that had happened to him in some time was that he had invited a flatmate into his house and actually ended up enjoying his company. The second was that he had seen this man's life in danger, and had felt utterly powerless to do anything about it. The third was those few seconds, those few horrendous seconds, when he was certain that this man was Moriarty, and standing there in the pool, had felt bile rising in the back of his throat as his brain raced and raced and raced and didn't come to the right conclusion before his needy lizard brain whispered, 'he's got you, he's betrayed you, you foolish, foolish man.'

He knows these things, but he doesn't like to think about them. He knows he's human, but it's a frustrated knowledge. All the things the body needs that take time; how annoying it is to have to sleep on a regular basis, to find it food, to enjoy companionship when he had so little of it growing up and had convinced himself it wasn't necessary. And now John, John reminding him that there was something nice and...warm about praise and patience and doing the things for him that he forgot to do. It left him feeling sick inside, and he didn't know why. But it didn't leave him feeling sick enough to kick John out.

It was all too difficult. Sherlock sighed and his hands ended up falling limply by the side of his head as he turned on his side. Three days without sleep, three days of the blasted headache, and his body is asserting itself again. Sleep, it says. Please just for a little while.

He has come up with several good reasons as to why sleep would be just a waste of time, when he sunk deep into slumber, his body taking over.

There was blackness for some time, the sleep necessary for rest and body function. The blackness passed until Sherlock was aware of a charred smell, and then details drift in. Floating bits of burnt paper which fill him with horror, he has never liked to see papers destroyed, much to everyone else's chagrin when the paper just pile up. And then he saw the rooms; blackened walls, bits of debris everywhere, two storeys taken out, at least six rooms. He looked down and saw a ripped piece of paper with a paragraph on parasites and makes a face at it. These rooms were valuable. This information was necessary.

He crouched down, picked up some papers and looked at them all. Nematodes, hookworms, roundworms, and none of it in its rightful place, the information haphazard. He clutched the papers angrily in his hands and walked briskly into another room, saw display cases cracked on the floors, information on jellyfish, cephalopods, the murkiness of squid ink.

He's furious. He threw the papers he's holding down, and then scratched at the back of his head absently.

This is ridiculous, he wanted to shout in his own head. This is unhelpful!

Moriarty walked out of a room casually, like he was there the entire time. He was holding a tiny black leather box, like the sort you might find an engagement ring in. Sherlock stared at it, his eyes widened. He knows that box, it's vaguely familiar. He thought he'd...

'I deleted that...' He said, on a breath.

'Did you?' Moriarty said, with his lilt implying doubt, 'but here it is, right in my hungry little fingers. I knew you'd come back, by the way. So lovely to see you.'

'Don't-' Sherlock said, an aborted attempt to stop Moriarty opening the box, but the man only held up an impatient hand.

'Do,' he breathed, almost lustfully, and then the box was open, and Sherlock was whisked back into a memory that he was certain, utterly certain, he'd deleted.

He stood there at the stables, watching his younger self organising the tack obsessively, running fingers over the leather, the bits, putting jars of liniment in their rightful place. He was back home, on break from school, and his hair was starting to lose some of its neatly cropped look, he worried a bottom lip between his teeth.

'Not like this,' Moriarty said, like some demented ghost of Christmas past, 'you have to feel it to really understand what's going on.'

'No, this is ridiculous, what is the use of all this-'

And just like that, he is his younger self, full of racing emotions he had tried to forget. He did not like this day. Not at all. Inside the excitement of being in the stables, but the disappointment that his horse was not there and had been taken out by his father. He was done with being bullied by the quiet, taciturn man, and school had given him plenty of experience with bullies. He was starting to think that while he'd always be the butt of jokes, he'd certainly never be lost for one liners to scathe those who would turn their attentions to him.

He was frightened, too. His mind speeding ahead and going back to all those times his father had been so impatient with him. So unhappy. Mycroft could barely do any wrong in his father's eyes, but Sherlock? What a disappointment. All that razor sharp intellect and for what? Wasting it on horses and fantasy books about pirates and adventure and swashbuckling. An endless disappointment.

He was only thirteen, he did not yet have a mind palace. He found school boring. He had commandeered an old, disused science room and started a fire. It had cost quite a bit of money. More endless disappointments for his father to contend with.

He heard the sound of his horse first, followed by the dismounting of his father, and braced himself.

The tall, grim man entered the stables and aside from a brief, dispassionate glance, didn't give his son another look. Instead he removed the saddle, the bridle, rested the riding crop against one of the stalls and then calmly walked up to his son and reached past him to take a brush off the shelf. No words were exchanged, no glances. Sherlock bristled at being treated as though he were invisible. Mycroft would have gotten a 'good day, son,' something, but Sherlock was treated like a non-entity. He loathed being made to feel invisible. He'd rather have the yelling, anything but the cold ostracism his father offered.

He waited several minutes, and then several minutes more, as his father careful rubbed down the great, black trakehner. The horse swung his head towards Sherlock a couple of times, ears forward, eyes warm. Made to even approach, but his father stopped him with a word, some pressure.

Twenty minutes had passed before he had gathered the courage to speak.

'Father,' Sherlock said, drawing himself up imperiously, 'this is my horse. Tiberius likes me best, and you have your own.'

His father paused, and then turned and looked at him. It was a long, measuring glance. And then he turned back to Tiberius. He lead him into his own stall, gave him several handfuls of oats and then put the brush back. Finally he turned and picked up the riding crop and tapped it evenly against his leg.

'You make no measurable income, therefore, you have nothing that is truly yours aside from that which we allow to be yours.' The tone was calm, but cold. Sherlock held fiercely onto his anger, fiercely onto anything which would allow him to be visible.

'You allowed Tiberius to be mine, father. I don't want you to ride him anymore, without...without asking me.' He damned himself then, damned himself for the pause that gave away his uncertainty. There was a tiny part of him that he never succeeded in totally squashing, and that tiny part tells him to run away, to lock himself in his rooms with his books, to just stop this. His father will yell.

But his father did not yell.

Instead, his father drew back an arm, and then hit him across the side of the head with the riding crop, as hard as he'd hit a horse in full gallop. This is new, Sherlock thought, as he stumbled backwards and his hand flew to his head, blood already pouring from the gash. Head wounds look nastier than they usually are, especially once stitched up and clotted, he knew. But it felt nasty. It felt like it might need stitching.

His father said nothing, but Sherlock is hit three more times with the riding crop in quick succession. The arm next. He's wearing a long-sleeved shirt but the crop bites through and soon blood seeps into the cut material and he's left braced weakly against the wall, a hand against is head, a hand on his arm. He stared up in horror at his father.

He expected some sort of final line, for his father always did like to have the last word. But he must have decided that the riding crop was eloquent enough, because he walked out of the stables, tapping it evenly against his leg, without another glance at his son.

It seemed in a single semester, his father had gone from barely contained impatience to outright contempt and dislike.

Sherlock listened to the shuddering breaths that he made, angry at himself, knowing that he'd started this and he could have just kept quiet and ridden any of the other horses and it would have been fine. He knew his wounds need to be tended to, but he doesn't want anyone to see, and he doesn't want to explain anything to the maids, or to Mycroft, or to Mummy. He can't go back to the house yet. He'll just stay here a while. His head throbbed, he felt like he might throw up. His arm is not so bad. Bleeding, yes, but a more tolerable pain.

When he walked into Tiberius' stall, he paused for a moment, frightened that his father might know he is doing this and burst in with the riding crop whipping through the air towards him. But then Sherlock took a deep breath, attempted to push it from his mind, and walked up to the great horse. He leaned against him as the animal chewed his oats. Tiberius swung his head sideways, snorted hot air at the young man, and then went back to eating.

Sherlock stood there, knew he'd have to clean blood off Tiberius' side now, because he's leaning his head against him and he can feel the wetness of it pressing back into his head.

And then just like that, he is separate again from the young Sherlock, and watching in a kind of sickened horror. He turned away from his younger self in abrupt denial, and that's worse, because there was Moriarty, smiling like he's watching a kind of demented children's show.

'Oh, well, that kind of explains a few things, doesn't it? I found a lot more of these. Do you want me to show you?'

'Why are you doing this? Why have I conjured you up in the first place? Why would you do this?' Sherlock asked, aware that he sounded inane, that he has wasted a question by asking it twice. Moriarty closed the box and the memory disappears around them, and he's back in the charred mess of this section of the mind palace. He can't undo the memory now, can't unsee it, and Moriarty is holding the box and doesn't look like he wanted to give it back.

'Me?' Moriarty said, all innocence and widened eyes, 'I didn't do anything. I've never smacked you with a riding crop, no matter how disobedient you've been. I like naughty, it's unpredictable and leads to ever so much fun. But oh, your father, he reminds me of someone, you know. Another dour, brilliant man I've met.'

'I want to wake up now.' Sherlock said to himself, because he's had enough. His head ached, his arm stung. This is ridiculous, he thought.

'Did he belt you again? He must have been driven to distraction with all your arrogance and misplaced intellect. I bet he was bored of you the minute he realised your nature. He must have hit you again. Tell me he did.'

'I want to wake up NOW!' Sherlock bellowed, and his mind shudders and shakes like it's trying, but it's not quite working. He's locked in. Sleep has him fixed in place and he doesn't know what to do, without a brilliant plan here where he is vulnerable and disarmed.

'You don't have to tell me,' Moriarty purred sweetly, 'I already know. He did, didn't he?' Unctuous voice now, rich and chocolatey, like seductive pillow talk. 'Over and over again. He did it once and then couldn't resist. And how did you choose between school and home at the holidays? And what did Mycroft do once he found it? I can't remember. Do tell me. It wasn't...nothing, was it?'

Sherlock snapped, he reached out to smash Moriarty down with his fists, to see him prone and lifeless on the floor.

Moriarty disappeared, and he woke up with a shaky cry of the sort he hadn't made in years. He's sweating and clammy and cold, he's kicked all the blankets off his bed, and he can still hear the echo of a laugh in the background. He knew his bedroom door was open by the lighting and could tell someone was standing in the frame and it's just too much sensory input and he puts his head in his hands.

'Uh-' John began, awkward and sensitive, too much coddling, but Sherlock can't look up and glare at him, because he felt like he was trying to hold his own head together. He felt that this might be the most important thing he could possibly do at this time.

'So,' John continued, softer and more sure. He walked into the room, came closer. Sherlock flinched and cursed ten times in his head because he knew John will have noticed because John noticed things like that. Though he thinks John will have no idea what it means.

'Easy, easy.' John said in a voice so gentle it tugged at something hard inside of Sherlock, and he almost lowered a hand to his chest to hold it in. 'You were having a...it was just a bad dream. It's over now.'

That measured voice, so even and patient. So genuine. So real that Sherlock thinks it has to be a lie. He squeezed his eyes shut and wondered if his brain was together now, if he's held it for long enough. He lowered hands that he tried to stop from shaking by balling them into fists. He looked up at John, and he saw the cant of the eyebrows (worry? Concern? Confusion?), the tousled hair (the nightmare was loud enough to wake him up then), the slightly raised hands (like approaching a wild animal), the careful stance. He groaned impatiently in the back of his throat.

'Yes, I'm perfectly aware that it was a bad dream and that it is over. Now if you're quite done stating the obvious I'd like to...' He couldn't go back to sleep, he knew that now, he's probably only slept for a few hours, but he can't go back to sleep. 'I need to get some work done.'

'Sherlock, what's been going on with you lately? You can talk to me, you know.'

'No, I c-' He stopped himself, frustrated that he even started a phrase that always ends up with disagreement from everyone else around him. He waits for John to say, 'yes, you can.'

'Maybe you can't.' John said. He had a measured gaze now, an assessing gaze. 'But I've never seen you quite like this before. And sometimes talking helps. Look, trust me, I know how shitty that advice is. I know.' He said, and Sherlock believed that he did, because every soldier must have heard 'you can talk to me,' from at least one professional at some stage or another.

'Do you need some sleeping tablets?' John said suddenly, and Sherlock turned it over in his mind. Did he? Would they help, or hinder? What if they made it harder for his body to wake up, but his dreams continued unabated? No, that was not a tolerable answer. He shook his head, a single jerk.

'John,' he said, a softer tone than he's used to using, like he's going to say something meaningful. John waited, patiently, and so does Sherlock, waiting for what he was going to say. But nothing came, and after a couple of minutes of both of them waiting it out in silence, he got up and walked past John, sat at the kitchen table and stared at the beakers and solutions and solvents. He was too tired to work, but he doesn't wish to sleep. So he stayed there, in that pained state, until John went back to his own room with a sigh.

He picked up the violin and then placed it back down again. His body was too tired, the music would not be as soothing if he heard all the mistakes his body made.

He slumped into his chair and pulled his legs up to his chest. He refused to be scared of himself like this, and if he says it in that strict, brash tone of voice, he can almost believe it.

When he fell asleep again, it was with an odd, unpredictable fear. He didn't know what was coming, and for once, he didn't want to know.