Chapter Text
The therapist—Dr Frederick “please-call-me-Fred” Jenkins—had cautioned him against ignoring the “stored trauma” of his transport. “This is an anniversary,” the MI5-approved psychiatrist stated. “Your mind can rationalise it all it likes, but the body remembers.”
The body remembers. Sherlock snorts. His transport, once again, betrays him. Anxiety warps his senses at the oddest times: on the dimly lit stairwell to 221B. In broad daylight while arguing with Lestrade. When watching John cradle Rosie in a protective embrace before leaving for their boring home in the boring suburbs. His conversations with Mycroft are quieter and less contentious, which is alarming in its own way.
Then there are the dreams: John in the well. Victor in the well. John again. Sherlock, Eurus. A home in flames so hot he wakes in a sweat. A little boy, and a sword, an eyepatch, the slap of a child’s wellies against river rock. Clean smelling wind pushes against his curls and then...nothing. Everyone gone and Sherlock alone in a mildewed cell with no exit.
The dreams came after the night with Eurus. His memories have been rebuilding themselves, but gaps remain. A haze of sensation and sentiment rolls across the swampy areas of his Mind Palace. Eurus still plays her violin when he arrives, apparently content with the way things turned out. Meanwhile, Sherlock is getting less sleep than ever.
“Please-call-me-Fred” recommended Sherlock mark the anniversary to help his body and mind process the event. So here he is, tracing the English countryside with his eyes, his footfalls muffled by velvety green grass. The sun rises, a faded gold coin hung high in a blue-grey sky. He’s passed the blackened, skeletal structure of Musgrave Hall already, hemmed in by the jagged line of forest. A breeze touches his cheeks, and the seedheads of the grasses nod along. In the distance, what he seeks appears: the jutting stone structure of an old water well.
Flowers the colour of butter and yolk lace the green in a patchwork of places, their cup-like flowers wet with the dew of the morning. He fingers the delicate buds and petals of a nearby clump. Spines grow along the stem. Is it gorse? Botany isn’t his wheelhouse, unless it’s to do with poison. A drawer opens in his mind, and on a card he can read “somewhat toxic alkaloids.” Okay, so don’t eat it.
Flowers. It’s what people do on anniversaries, isn’t it? Place flowers at a silent grave, gift flowers to a loved one, centre flowers on the table at a wedding or a funeral or whatnot. What rot. Still, if it’ll help him get more sleep.
The leaves are a delicate filigree of sap green. He picks out a few, yanking them unceremoniously from the ground, and bunching them together in one hand, an offering of wildflowers to whatever power-may-be that reigns over his circadian rhythms. Eye roll.
It isn’t long before his footsteps bring him to the well. In the pearly dawn, it glimmers with warm russet browns and golden shades of grey. It’s not at all the mildewed, hulking stone that crowds his dreams like the sprawling ramparts of an archaic temple. It’s smaller than he remembers. Made of the same limestone as many of England’s country walls. There’s nothing as foreboding about it as he’s imagined.
They've boarded it up. After John was safe, Victor’s remains were excavated and then buried in Essex at a plot purchased by his parents. Sherlock didn’t ask for a cause of death—he hopes Victor died on impact. A broken neck, perhaps, rather than starve or die of hypothermia at the bottom of a forgotten well.
Sherlock looks down at the scraggly bouquet clutched in his hands. Should he say something? Apologise? To Victor? To Eurus? John? Why on earth is he out here?
“I suppose I should say something.” His own voice spooks him. The volume jars with the hushed quality of his surroundings. A bird calls in the distance, and he supposes on warm days, the insects buzz and chirp. But today, it’s quiet. Eerily so.
Laughter escapes him, just a short, high-pitched giggle. “This is ridiculous.”
He stares at the boards. His feet ache from the walk, but he’s content to stand and stare, to bring to mind the horrors of that night. To remember the ear-muffling rush of water, a muted roar as he stared down at a helpless John Watson. His friend. His best friend. John’s face kinked with a mix of worry and resignation, as if he’d accepted his approaching, waterlogged death. Reduced to Eurus' plaything, which would make Sherlock angrier if it weren’t just the most ridiculous thing to have happened to a Holmes. And the Holmes men are ridiculous. Puerile and foolish. He understands that now.
Good lord, this is all preposterous. He lays the flowers on the boards, but as the bouquet rustles, he remembers looking down into the eye of the well. John Watson neck-deep in turbulent water. The cold bite of weather on the back of Sherlock’s neck. Was it raining that night? Did he dare climb down the rope to free John from his chains?
He wanted to, but someone with bolt cutters had gone. Are the chains still there? They likely would have removed them while retrieving the last bits of Victor’s body, yes?
Sherlock taps one board. A hollow ring answers.
Stiff-backed, resolute, Sherlock considers his options, and then decides.
Good thing he brought a crowbar.
As if you hadn’t planned to do this. You know yourself better than anyone.
Taking a note from John Watson’s book, he drops the flowers on the ground, reaches into his trousers and brings out the crowbar. Uncomfortable, that, when it was lying against his thigh, keeping his walk a bit off-kilter. How did John put up with it?
He wedges the curved end into the crevice of a board and wrenches his end downward. The resulting crack rips through the air like a stab of thunder, and he works his way around until the boards are all off, the process even more satisfying than the day he ripped apart that absurd coffin. Eurus, and all her knowing. Knowing exactly how Sherlock felt about John, knowing that he’d redirect it to Molly for the sake of his friendship with John, even as he watched John in the mirror. How he’d paid for it with Molly, though, when he explained it to her later. She said she forgave him, but since then has been far more absent than present.
It’s an absence he feels. A Molly-shaped hole in the fabric of their lives.
When at last the boards lie in the grass, he lets the crowbar drop. The muscles of his arms feel alive, useful. Something his transport is good for.
“Well, let’s have a look, shall we?” This is it. The moment. He’ll look inside, shine his torch in the darkness, and see that it’s just a regular, plain old well, and not the hellscape of his nightmares.
Retrieving his torch from his pocket, he leans over the edge and directs the beam to the walls first, swooping in concentric circles. They’d drained the well when they retrieved Victor’s remains, but rain has since fallen, and so the stones gleam with wetness. He lets the light land on the bottom, where murky water sits. No sign of chains. Of course. Either they’re underwater, or they were removed. He’ll have to ask Mycroft if he really wants to know.
Nothing moves in the well. The water doesn’t so much as stir. It’s such an old piece of infrastructure that it’s not any maps—he’s checked. It’s the remnant of some past village, some place where people had congregated, long before his parents came to own Musgrave Hall.
It’s nothing more than a foregone relic, and a tool for Eurus' bit of childish, murderous revenge. Sometimes, he wonders why he plays with her, keeps her placated. This is one of those times, and like the other times, he tells himself what others have said: forgiveness is a process.
He switches the torch off and thrusts it into his pocket. Tilts his face up to the sky. The clouds have moved to obscure the sun. It’s another gloomy day. Seems fitting.
“This is bollocks.” He scoops up the bouquet from where it landed, fanned like a hand of cards. With an uttered “good riddance,” he tosses them into the well and turns to walk away.
“You forgot me.”
The voice spears him into place. It’s small, paper-thin, like the dying note of a songbird.
He looks around, peers into the shadows of the shrubs and trees in the short distance. Wonders if someone lies just over one of the small humps on the ground. “Who’s there?”
“You forgot me.” The whisper lifts into the air like the soft whistle of a breeze.
Sherlock whips around to face the well. Is that...did it come from there? Nothing’s in there; he just looked.
“You forgot me, Sherlock.”
Fear riddles up his spine like a dissonant flourish across an untuned piano.
“Who’s there? Is this a trick?” Stupid question. Of course it’s a trick.
“Help me. Help me, please.” It sounds like the voice of a little girl. Desperate. Crying.
And it is coming from the well.
“Help me, please, help me.”
Could someone have placed a mic in the well? Who would orchestrate such a thing? Did he miss it when he shone the torch inside?
He grasps the torch again and stalks towards the well. Whoever has set this up is going to receive a displaced patella once he’s solved it.
Leaning over the edge, he shines the torch. Water covers the bottom, a placid reflector of the light, and just as he’s about to inspect the edge of the rim for the mic, the water changes. Ripples. Burbles. Bubbles like some fictional witch’s poisonous cauldron.
Darkness swallows the beam from the torch. Unfurls like a black fog, rises like black smoke. It moves too quickly, rockets up the sides of the well on a track to collide with him.
Heart hammering, Sherlock flinches. His muscles bunch to pull back—
Retreat! Retreat!
He’s too slow—it’s coming fast, it’s nearly there, nearly got him, it's coming!
Pain. Blinding, fog-inducing pain.
Followed by nothing.