thewhitelily

“No,” Sherlock told the woman in the white dress firmly. He turned away before the gun could fire…

…and his mind palace collapsed. Again.

He was sitting in his chair. In 221B. Alone.

It should have been a safe place to enter his mind palace, so he could to work out what to do. It was a safe place—but for the recurring sequence of images that hijacked his every attempt to begin.

He needed… help. Someone to act as a mouthpiece for the thing inside him that kept dragging Mary to the front of his mind, the thing that made her presence too distracting to focus on the problem at hand: what to do about John.

He needed someone to play the role John did, who could say the obvious things so that Sherlock didn’t have to think them. And he needed to distract Mary, somewhere he would assume she was safe and alive and happy, while he tried to work out what to do, now that she was dead, and John hated him.

He started with the church. The bride; the wedding guests; John, glowing with happiness on the biggest and most important day of his life. He added a mezzanine floor near to the vaulted ceiling and brought himself there, chair and all.

And, reluctantly, brought a guest as well.

A room where the walls didn’t make it all the way to the floor to allow for privacy might not be quite believable as a psychologist’s office; nor was one with a vaulted ceiling and half a stained glass window—but at least here, there was no woman in white, dark red despair and failure blossoming over her chest as her heart—John’s heart—Sherlock’s heart pumped out its lifeblood.

A different woman sat across from Sherlock, one who had known John almost as well as Mary.

“You’ve been having dreams,” prompted Ella Thompson. “A recurring dream?”

That wasn’t worthy of a response; idiots always focused on the wrong problem. Mary had died; died saving Sherlock, after he’d sworn he would keep her safe.

“D’you want to talk about it?” she tried again.

He needed to think how to fix this: how to make John understand he was sorry, how to make everything better, how to make John happy again.

“This is a two-way relationship, you know.”

Assuming it was possible to fix this.

“The whole world has come crashing down around you. Everything’s hopeless, irretrievable.”

Sherlock scowled. That was the problem with his mind palace. The residents cheated.

“I know that’s what you must feel,” she pressed, “but I can only help you if you completely open yourself up to me.”

“That’s not really my style,” Sherlock denied her. Even inside his own head; even to a construct he’d pulled together as a mouthpiece for his own emotions from her profile photo and years of offhand comments and his own—far more extensive than hers—knowledge of John. “I need to know what to do,” he said, to remind her of her purpose.

“Do?” she asked.

Somewhere in Sherlock’s head would be a way to get through to him. All he had to do was find the way to tease it out.

“About John,” Sherlock said.

 

A/N: Ella’s gorgeous new 'office'. NO WAY that is a real psychologist’s office. Just saying. No.