Bendict Cumberbatch Imagines

Enigma (Part 4) - I'm Sorry

When he opens the door, he's surprised to see you; his eyes look glassy and underneath are dark, heavy eye bags, his face pale and stripped of the usual Alan life he had. Even his usually perfectly gelled hair was disheveled and messy. "(Y-Y/N)... p-please, come in." He said, opening the door and closing it behind you; even his apartment was a mess, with papers scattered along the floor and cups decorating every flat surface in the room. "Take a seat, i-if you'd like..." He says, quickly fussing around, embarrassed at the state of his place and trying to clean up for you. "You never responded to my letters. I would have come. I would have testified." You said guiltily, crossing your legs as you sat on one of the chairs.

"And what would you have said? That I wasn't a homosexual?" He asked sarcastically, taking a moment to look up at you before going back to fussing over cleaning up.

"I would have said something. This is serious. They could send you to jail..." Alan tries to move a glass of water, but he drops it and it shatters on the ground. "Your hands... You're twitching." You quickly say, standing up and kneeling on the ground, helping him with the broken pieces.

"No I'm not." He denies it, placing the pieces in a tiny bucket that was pretty much overflowing with crumpled with papers and tissues. 

"Alan." You whisper, placing your pieces carefully in the bucket before standing up again and looking straight at him, already knowing he's lying. "Talk to me, please?" He looks down, ashamed of what's happening to him. 

"It's the medication. I have to go in for weekly estrogen treatments. At the hospital. The judge gave me a choice. Prison... or 'hormonal therapy.' Essentially... chemical castration.  To cure my homosexual predilections. Of course I chose that. I wouldn't be able to work from prison." He finally looks up to your horrified face, but he just continues while you're frozen in shock, still looking up at this man. "Well how would I even have got parts in jail? It just makes no sense." You can't even laugh, looking from his trembling hands then back to his face.

"A-Alan... I'm so sorry. Oh my god, oh my god." You take his hands in yours, feeling exactly how much they're shaking actually makes you want to burst out into tears. "I'm going to speak to your doctors. I'm going to speak to your lawyer. We're going to find a way out of this. You are not thinking clearly. There are a million chemicals flowing through your brain. This treatment-" 

"I'm fine." He waves you off, taking his hands from yours.

"Please let me help you."

"I don't need your help." He denies again, walking towards the end from the room with his back turned. This isn't Alan. The medication is altering his brain and it kills you to see him this way.

"You do not have to do this all alone, Alan."

"Alone? I'm not alone. I never have been." He looks lovingly at his machine - at Christopher. He never did tell you the origin story about why he named his machine 'Christopher' or why he loved the thing so much. You guessed that maybe it was a boy he'd had a crush on when he was younger, or maybe he just really liked the name. "Christopher has gotten so smart. If I stop the treatment, they'll take him away from me. You can't let them do that. You can't." You take a small step towards him as he begins to fall into a panic attack. "Don't let them leave me alone." He starts twitching and begins to cry, backing away from his machine as you run up to him, grabbing him from behind to make sure he didn't fall. He leans into your embrace, turning around so he can cry on your shoulder. 

"Hey... it's alright. It's alright. Sit down." You take him to a chair and sit him down, breathing slowly with him to control his hyperventilating. You take his face in your hands and begin stroking the tears near his eyes, placing a soft kiss on his forehead. "Hey, it's okay? They won't take him away from you, I promise you I won't let it happen. You just have to stay strong. Can you stay strong for me?" Avoiding the question completely, Alan focuses on something else, something on your ring finger and tries to remain normal - and failing miserably.

"t's a much nicer ring than the one I got you." He chuckles gently as you look around the room for a tea cup, a glass of water, anything that isn't moldy he can sip from.

"His name is Jock. We work together in Eastcote." You see a newspaper, and grab it, sitting beside him on the floor. "Do you want to do a crossword? For old times' sake. It'll only take five minutes. Or in your case, six." You try to get him to smile at your joke, but unfortunately get nothing. Your Alan is gone. He stares down at the puzzle, confused as his hand twitches. He doesn't remember how to do it, and he moves his hand away from the paper. 

"Perhaps later." This treatment is worse than you thought, wrecking his brain so badly that he didn't even understand how to do crossword puzzles anymore. Just seeing the nearly lifeless Alan makes your heart break into a million pieces, but you try to blink back the tears forming in your eyes. But you can't... how can you? He's gone forever. Alan sees my sadness and sighs, still angry and bitter, but mostly embarrassed of what he has become. 

"At least it worked out for one of us, right? You got what you wanted, didn't you? Work. A husband. A normal life." You look down guiltily before taking one of his hands in yours and moving a soothing thumb along the back of his hand. 

"But no one normal could have done this." You gesture to the giant machine with its own private room in the house, smiling at it. "This morning I took a train through a city that would not exist if it wasn't for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn't for you. I read up on my work, a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you." He refuses to meet your gaze, his grey eyes red-rimmed and aimed at the carpet. "If you wish you could have been 'normal', I can promise you, I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't." Now the tears were flowing freely down your face as you looked desperately up at him, trying to emit some sort of reaction. 

"Is that what you think?" He asked lowly, his head still hung to the ground.

"I think that sometimes it is the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine." With that, he brought his head up to meet yours. You smiled gently up at him, running your fingers through his hair soothingly as he began to cry again. Carefully, you began to inch towards him on his chair, and within a few seconds he just wrapped his arms around you while he cried, accepting the fact that you cared for him and nothing could change that. Sure, it'd been a year since he broke your heart in front of you, but you promised yourself you would always be there for him. And here you were, letting the man you loved cry on your shoulder as he thought things you couldn't even begin to comprehend. But such things weren't going on inside Alan's head in this moment. His head was reeling. Sure, part of it was the medication as it fucked up his brain beyond compare, but there was something else. Sure, he was a homosexual - men, not women - obviously. But in this moment he'd felt something he hadn't felt since... well since Christopher entered his life. Love. In this moment, Alan Turing had felt so incredibly loved by a woman he met through chance. He was broken out of his bitter shell for a fraction of a second to feel such emotions as these. 

"(Y/N)?" He sniffled against your shirt, taking his head out so he could look at you. You nodded your head as a continuation for him to go on. "Can you stay with me?" You looked away for a moment, opening your mouth to speak but he cut you off by grabbing your hand and continuing. "Just for tonight... please I need your company here." You sighed softly, unable to resist those minty grey eyes even if they did look like the life had been sucked out of them.

"Okay... yes, of course... I'll stay with you." And for the first time in a while, you saw him give a small smile.

But the disaster that smile would bring...

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Hello? *knock knock* is anybody actually still here??? It's been a disgustingly long time since I updated and I bring you this piece of garbage. Sorry 'bout that.

Have a great day my lovelies xx