Chapter Text
John was in a room with no windows and no doors.
He knew this because he had been pacing the room for a long time, feeling carefully, seemingly a perfect cube. The ceiling was too high to reach, probably there was an opening up there somewhere from which he had been dropped, but there was no way to reach it and no amount of straining revealed even the hint of an outline. One small opening in the floor for toilet and drainage purposes and a smooth, deeply recessed metal button he could push and a trickle of water spurted from a tiny opening in the wall, barely big enough to put a finger in.
A featureless black box with slick, seamless walls. Cold that radiated through and absorbed his body heat. Ventilation, somehow, silent and almost undetectable.
* * *
There had to be a purpose to this confinement, what he could not imagine. He was not drugged. He had been provided some unidentifiable drinks and bland custards in soft pouches such as were given to children, no straw, that presumably were nourishing. These, too must be somehow dropped from the ceiling but he never heard anything, only felt them appear at his bare feet at regular intervals.
The first few pouches John had tried to tear into strips, hoping to begin a ligature to use as a weapon. But the pouches were engineered to tear only into small useless fragments and the effort was a failure.
If Moriarty wanted him dead, given his situation, he would be dead already. And right now, he almost wished he was. Almost. Because he could not imagine any reason Moriarty would need, or want, to use him for anything. Not now. Now that Sherlock was dead.
* * *
The single solitary reason John had any will at all to explore his surroundings, forcing his brain to think, think, was the burning for vengeance that had taken him over like a parasite, undeniable and utterly overpowering. When he had avenged Sherlock, then would be the time for mourning, an endless mourning that he could not, would not permit himself to imagine.
If there had been any light at all, John’s face would be seen set in a brutal, soulless mask with death in its eyes. All humanity, warmth, kindness, all of the tender qualities that made John John, had been stripped away. And he was glad.
Finally, in this moment, with Sherlock gone forever, John felt himself in some way closer to him than ever in life. For he was becoming like Sherlock, the Sherlock before John, the Sherlock who could go for months and even years at a time permitting himself no more emotion than a robot.
I’m a high functioning sociopath, John whispered, baring his teeth at the darkness.
* * *
He had been stripped of his clothes, of course. Nothing from which to make a rope, or anything resembling a weapon. But as John paced in the blackness, the image of Golem’s hands appeared. Just hands, lethal hands. He started doing pushups on his knuckles. Then his fingertips. He periodically slapped the wall, making his hands ache. He spent what felt like hours every day doing the most challenging calisthenics he could invent, as silently as possible, although he was certain that even in the darkness he was being watched.
He was pretty sure he was not being fed enough to maintain this for long. He hoped it would be long enough. He could feel his body changing, bulky muscles becoming iron cords, all fat melting away, becoming slender and hard. Like Sherlock.
He never let himself think of Sherlock, all visions of Sherlock’s death locked away in a strongbox deep inside. Instead, he ruminated on every word, every image from his brief encounters with Moriarty.
"No one ever gets to me," Moriarty gloating, preening.
We’ll see about that, John promised the dark.
* * *
After the first few early hours in which John screamed like a madman at Moriarty, raging at him, begging him to come down and face him, John fell silent. He decided didn’t want to give anyone listening the satisfaction of hearing him talk to himself, and after his initial outburst, the few times he caught himself starting, he clamped down on his tongue.
John could endure the dark. The Taliban had vast cave networks. One of the things John had learned in Afghanistan was the art of spelunking. But the longest he had spent in a deep cave after he and his companion were temporarily lost, light sources exhausted, was 48 hours. For Sherlock, he could endure it for as long as it took.
There was only one way for John to affect his environment. The water spigot. When he pressed the button, the water flowed out onto the floor. When he stopped pressing the button, it stopped. There was a tiny, efficient drain, far too small to put an arm or leg in, let alone try to climb through. Whenever water pooled on the floor, it flowed down a slight slope and the drain had a sensor mechanism which swiftly and completely drained it away.
On what he thought was probably the second day, John formed a plan.
* * *
He continued shredding the drink pouches. He made a show of disposing of nearly all of the fragments down the drain. He hoped this activity looked to the watcher as either fastidiousness (he did his best to keep himself, and the cell, clean), or a little ritual to pass the time. If the watcher thought he would try to choke himself to death by swallowing the pouches, he imagined, then it was more likely than not that he would be expected to swallow them whole. The shredded bits looked even less of a risk than the useless pouches themselves.
The saved bits he scattered around the floor as though overlooked in the dark, and one set he blindly arranged as a makeshift chess set, spending several hours a day (as best he could tell) attempting to play
against himself. This recalled memories Afghanistan and playing chess at night in an ill-lit tent with Barton, the other surgeon.
While pretending to play chess, John practiced holding his breath.
* * *
On what John thought was perhaps the twenty-seventh day, he swiftly gathered up the all of the scraps. He crammed them down the tiny drain, adding a little leftover dried custard to make a sort of paste, praying that it was enough to hold. He pressed the button, then crammed more scraps tightly into the recessed space. He leaned on them with his now toughened, hardened thumbs, compacting the mixture. Water spurted from the spigot, the drain clogged, and the scraps held.
Water started pooling at the soles of his feet.
He now stopped up the spigot, holding his finger firmly against the opening with his whole weight, feeling the pressure instantly building, pushing against his finger till it burned.
If anyone was watching, any one of several things was likely to happen. One, they would assume John was trying to drown himself, and they would either let him, or not.
* * *
Trying to stop John could take several forms but the best option, the one he was praying for, was that they would send someone down to him, or somehow pull him back up, through the hypothetical opening in the ceiling.
If it was deemed acceptable for him to drown, they would let the water fill the chamber. That was also a desirable outcome.
Or, they could send down poison gas, or a live electrical wire.
Or, they could repair the drain, or turn off the water supply altogether. Then John would have to wait for whatever Moriarty had planned next. Maybe no one was watching at all, Moriarty barely curious enough to check in at the end, to see to whether John had found an amusing way to die alone in his cell.
The pipe to the water spigot burst through the wall from the pressure of the blockages, and water gushed into the chamber with the force of a broken fire hydrant.
It took at least an hour for the water to reach his chest. He was starting to shiver. But nothing else happened; the water rose steadily, the drain held.
There was no sign that anyone intended to change the course of events.