Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XCIV - Red Riding Hood

-Millie-

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The first ebbs of pain solidify in my joints. I become aware of them slowly, gradually, in small cumulative waves, each little throb providing a foundation for the next. I shift, uncomfortable and caught in the cotton cage of my sheets. The morphine must be wearing off. I have a drip attached to me at intervals; a welcome prick, a rush of cool liquid, a sweet, rounded unawareness. Its grip slackens after a few hours. I use the slow spikes of pain as means of portioning time, marking out my days and nights and hazy grey-areas between the two.

It is my only stimulation. Without it, I am inertia personified: I lie here in this vast plane of a bed unfeeling, unmoving, virtually unseeing, until he comes back with his unfocused face and sad silence and dazzling needle. Sometimes I imagine myself as transparent, a crystal case containing various suspended organs in various stages of decay, all wound up neatly in a wire-complex of veins. When he pierces my glass skin, I see the morphine as gold. It moves through this canister body like light.

That same light is beginning to dim, flicker, fade back to red. He's late. His appearances are usually timed like clockwork, coinciding with pain's first handshake, so that agony is kept locked behind its brittle bars and withdrawal satisfied by a morphine hit. I am forced to open my eyes and contemplate the reason for his absence: the ceiling is blue in the dark, the light fitting cold and inactive, the air thick, unstirred.

Memories of this morning begin to take shape.

He'd entered the room softly, just as I'd begun to come around from the latest morphine paralysis. I knew something was wrong the second he stepped through the door – it was a sense of unease, of tension, accompanied by a faint hint of rosewater and talcum powder. There was a baby in his arms. It took me a few moments to connect the foreign object with the agony of that night, when my world was slashed open and bled dry. The lines in my memory are blurred: that evening is carved into my consciousness like a welt, and I have recollection of waking up in a different house, a different opulence, back at square one. I don't, however, have any sense of certainty regarding the time between the two. My mind insists there was a period of reprieve. It constructs a hospital; I can build pictures of Sherlock and John and Emily, all of them sat round me, their faces serious and pale as bottle caps on tarmac. I can imagine their voices, the feeling of their hands, the intangible beginnings of conversation.

I don't know if this is real. The transition between agony and his new living space was too quick. I must have been hospitalised at some point, because I am alive – a modern tragedy – and largely functioning, save for my absolute reliance on morphine. However, I struggle to remember how or why I got there, and how or why I left: I only know that one moment I was living in my fantasy world with fictitious detectives and doctors and morally unplaceable hackers, and the next I was here, with the shadow of a man beside me.

He's changed, too. Until this morning, I hadn't heard him speak – in fact, I'd forgotten exactly what his voice sounded like. I only had the impression of a memory; an imprint of textured Russian. I saw him when he came to give me my liquid light. The white smile ceased to exist.

However, this morning, my circumstances changed. He brought his living cargo over to the bedside and sat down on the mattress. I remember being captivated by the contrast: his arms were very pale against the black of his sleeves, rolled to his elbows and exposing his skin. Fine sand-coloured strands of hair caught the light. The baby was faceless, swaddled in white, but I could still feel its awful breathing, hear it eating my oxygen. He turned his attention to it and, after a moment's pause, asked me if I would consider a certain name – something Russian and punctuated with syllables. Sashenka, Savina, Svetlana. One of those. I remained silent, and wondered why he thought I cared.