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Why Do We Fall?	By : darkangel1210 Category: S through Z > Sherlock (BBC) > Sherlock (BBC) Views: 1587 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don’t own BBC Sherlock or any of the characters, nor do I make any profit from writing this. Just too inspired by the show that I had to borrow them.

Chapter List
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A/N: Thank you to the people who have continually shown their support for this story! I hope you enjoy this next part and I'm sorry it took so long to complete. Hopefully the next update won't be so far away.
By the way, please don't read too much into the locations which are in this story. I don't really know what happens at these sites because I don't work there (and I'm definitely not insinuating that anything in this story actually happens there for real). I've just chosen them because they're out of the way and, in my opinion, are almost perfect places for something like this to happen :-)
I mean, it is fiction after all. Right?
Part Three
Throughout the aftermath of Sherlock's declaration John remained by his side, holding Sherlock's hands firmly in his own as his trembling finally started to end and keeping Sherlock's eyes focussed on him the entire time, an anchor in the turbulence following his dream. Except that it wasn't a dream; it couldn't have been, not when his skin still tingled with the memory of the young man straddling his legs. Not when Sherlock could still feel where the man's hands were on his temples as he, for lack of a better description, shared his memories with Sherlock. And the memories… God, the memories. He shut his eyes against them and wrapped his arms more firmly around John's body, trying to pull them closer together although there was barely a hair's-breadth of space between them.
Shortly after he'd woken up he'd been a mess, struggling to get out of bed from underneath John and saying that they needed to leave.
Now.
Right now, because there were only a few days left and, "we can't leave him there!" It had taken John more than a few minutes to calm Sherlock down from his tirade, pinning him down when necessary and shushing him with quiet lulls that were everything Sherlock couldn't stand because they were the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
They were now lying down with Sherlock's head tucked under John's chin, allowing him to bury his face in John's chest and trace his pectoral muscles with his tongue although neither of them were remotely aroused. It didn't mean, however, that Sherlock hadn't spent the last thirty minutes roaming his hands and mouth over John's body; over his back and around his waist, his lips following the thirty-three vertebrae that made up John's spine and reciting their names in his head as he started at the top and worked his way down. 'Cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum, coccyx.'
He ran his hands through John's hair and along the muscles of his neck and shoulders, tracing the trapezius muscle which connected John's occipital bone through to his thoracic vertebrae, and along to the spine of his scapula; between his thighs and around the soft curves of John's buttocks, noting the position of the gluteus maximus on both sides and pressing his fingers into the muscles, loosening any tension that was present and making John moan with the endorphins which were released once the muscles finally gave in.
By the time Sherlock was finished John was a near-human puddle in his hands, contented hums coming from his mouth as Sherlock burrowed himself into John's arms again and sought out his warmth against the chill that still seeped in from outside the flat. He nuzzled his face into John's neck, breathing in his scent and tasting the salt of John's skin on his tongue, wondering if it was wrong to say that his exploration of John's body had been just a distraction away from the dream and the confusion and distress that it had caused. Whilst it was true that naming the different muscles and bones in the body below him had calmed him down to some degree, (for there was a great deal of comfort in what was actually real under his hands, with responses he could measure and facts that had been tried and tested the world over) his more carnal side had taken great pleasure in mapping the contours of his lover's form, as though each kiss and caress were of his own mark and every single one of them were claims on the body, the man, that he'd chosen to share them with. John himself hadn't dissuaded Sherlock from muttering the different names for the areas he was focussed on, for when Sherlock gave you his attention you had it to the fullest degree, and the intimacy of having your lover know you inside and out was a high that neither of them had experienced before.
The closeness that Sherlock's actions inspired in them both continued to linger long after they'd settled down, John's fingers running through Sherlock's curls in a rhythmic slide that made Sherlock want to shut his eyes and bask in it. To forget everything and everyone outside of his bedroom for a moment's respite from all the chasing, fleeing and hunting that his life had become. It wasn't to last, not when Sherlock could sense John's growing curiosity, the need to understand what Sherlock had been through and to help him make sense of it now that the emotional barrage had come to a close. He could almost time it to the exact second, the subtle tension in John's body giving him away as he steeled himself for the asking, figuring out the best way to broach the subject after Sherlock's attentive care in diverting them both away from it.
He decided it would be easier to beat John to it. "I don't have it," he said, the words murmured into the skin of John's neck.
The hand in his hair never faltered from its stroking. "How can you be sure?" John asked; turning his head so his mouth was near Sherlock's ear. "You haven't been tested for it yet."
Sherlock shook his head. "No tests. I know I don't have it." There was a moment of silence. "I had another vision, John. The man was there again."
There was a faint tension in the hand that remained buried in his hair but John continued with the stroking, using the motion to centre himself. "Is that why you were thrashing like someone was trying to kill you?"
Sherlock pulled back from John's neck, cupping his face in his right hand and meeting John's eyes which still retained the tiredness he was feeling from Sherlock's abrupt wake-up call. "He wasn't trying to kill me."
John didn't look like he believed him, his mouth pursed in a frown. "So what was he trying to do?"
Sherlock stroked his thumb across John's cheek underneath his left eye, tracing the line of his jaw with his fingertips. "We spoke in this one but not for long; he said that he didn't have much time. He wanted to show me something."
"Do you know what it was?" John's eyes hadn't yet wavered from his, a good sign that he wasn't just being humoured although that was probably what John was doing. Entertaining the fantasy of a man gone mad to identify the root cause of his illness.
"No," Sherlock replied honestly. "I don't know what I saw."
There was another moment's silence. "Were you in the office again?" John asked. "Where everything had been left out?"
'In a chaotic and paradoxically organised mess,' Sherlock thought. "Yes."
"And did you ask him why he hit you?"
Sherlock made himself release the breath he'd held in at the question. "Yes." He waited for John to say something, perhaps ask him another question, but when it didn't come he went on to explain further. "He said it was the only way to send me back."
John blinked at him, the statement throwing him off of whatever train of thought he'd been on. "What do you mean, 'send me back'? From where?"
Sherlock shifted his head on the pillow, bringing his left arm up underneath him so that his upper body was partially leant over John's and sliding his right hand from John's face to around the back of his neck. "I'm not sure," he replied, pressing a kiss to John's forehead. "I can only assume that he meant from the first vision I had of him. I asked you when we'd got back, do you remember?"
John nodded, pushing his head up a fraction to lick at Sherlock's lips before putting his head back down on his pillow. "Yeah, I thought it had something to do with your concussion."
"As did I. The events thus far are leading me to a different conclusion." Sherlock pushed himself up from the bed, tugging on one of John's hands in a clear message to follow, before scooting his way to the edge of the bed and retrieving his tartan dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door, a warmer comfort than his usual blue one. He heard the shuffling of John behind him as he slipped the material over his bare shoulders, tying the sash around his waist in a quick movement before meandering his way to the living room and over to where his laptop was still on the table from earlier.
He heard John come into the living room behind him as he switched his laptop back on, listening as the other man's bare feet smacked against the stone of the kitchen floor. "Tea?" John called to him, the fridge door opening and closing as the milk was taken out and placed on the nearest clear work-top.
Sherlock didn't bother to respond immediately, having already heard John take out two cups from the cupboard before making a, "Hmmm," sound in his throat that he knew John would take as a yes as he finished logging into his laptop. The time in the bottom right-hand corner caught his attention momentarily as he waited for John to join him in the living room, noting that it was only just half past twelve in the morning of the sixteenth of December; it felt far later than that but his own awareness of time passing had been less than satisfactory recently, yet completely understandable. There was too much else to focus on, too many distractions, but he couldn't let himself become lost in them; as with Moriarty's Great Game, time was of the essence.
John soon came into the living room with a cup in each hand, the liquid steaming within them as Sherlock turned to take his own and slip his free hand around John's waist. "What're you looking for?" John asked; taking a sip from his tea and sighing as warmth of it made him relax tense muscles that Sherlock knew John hadn't been aware of.
Sherlock placed his own cup on the desk beside the laptop without drinking from it, turning away from John and bringing up the Internet. "When I was speaking with him he said that he wanted me to understand what was happening to me," Sherlock said as John leaned around him to look at the screen. "What he showed me appeared to be his memories from his earliest to his most recent; he wanted me to know what was happening to me by showing me what had happened to him." He typed the letters 'GMCB' into Google and hit 'enter', watching as the results appeared on the website; the first ten were displayed on the screen, ranging from the definition of the letters through to the various news reports regarding a company of the same name. The first was a link to a BBC news report containing details of when the company went into administration after several of the staff were reported as missing, including the managing director and the chief executive, with potentially as much as half of the overall profits in their pockets before they disappeared.
Sherlock knew differently, of course, but it wasn't anything that the Press needed to be enlightened of.
"'GMCB'," John said, quoting the letters from the website. "I remember seeing this on the news. Why are you looking up a company that dealt with pharmaceuticals?"
Sherlock didn't answer immediately, instead bringing up a new window and loading Wikipedia onto it before typing the company name into the search bar. Two results appeared; GMCB. For the business, click here. For Genetic Manipulation and Molecular Cell Biology, click here. He highlighted both links and brought them up in separate tabs, picking up his tea and stepping back to allow John a moment to look at them both. "They went into administration on the eighteenth of September, twenty-thirteen, to be precise," he said as John finished looking at the pages. "They had one day to clear the offices before the site was shut down."
"Yes I know, it says that here. But what does this have to do with your dream?" John asked, taking another sip of his tea and turning around to see Sherlock standing in front of the fireplace.
Sherlock stared into his cup for a moment, watching as the last tendrils of steam left the surface of the tea in the firelight before he took a mouthful of the liquid, swirling it around his mouth and swallowing it down. "I need to tell you about the memories first before you can understand why I've shown you this. The memories themselves were from the man's point of view and I was looking through his eyes at what was happening to him. It's easier to think of it as two consciences inhabiting one body; one is in control of the physical form and the other is the bystander, able to feel what is happening to the body but unable to contribute to its movements.
"The first memory was more to do with the man's sensorial awareness than anything else. He couldn't see anything because he couldn't open his eyes, but he could still sense the environment around him. The memory itself wasn't pleasant; he was clearly disorientated from the medication that people had been using to keep him unconsciousness and his body resisted it when they tried to wake him up. He would have gone into cardiac arrest if not the actions of the people there with him at the time.
"The second memory had more detail. His anxiety over his location was limited, tempered with the understanding that the emotion itself would do him more harm than good if he let it control him. Before he awoke, he heard that they were commencing a project called 'one, zero, one, A', with the directions of the experiment being given by an Australian man to another woman who was there. They had surgical masks on but there weren't any tools in the room that suggested an operation was taking place, so they were there for another purpose. In total, there were four people in the room with him; two scientists and two security guards."
"Hang on," John interrupted, holding a hand up to stop Sherlock. "How do you know these people were scientists? You said that there wasn't any sign of a surgery taking place, but that doesn't necessarily mean that these people weren't doctors. I'm an army doctor and not every patient I've seen needed to be cut open to confirm a diagnosis."
Sherlock didn't disagree with John, but he was missing the point by quite a wide margin. "Yes, that's true, but you still don't look at your patients in quite the same way as you do my experiments." He went into the kitchen, motioning for John to follow him, and stood in front of his latest experiment before his Fall. He still had a tissue sample which was in a closed Petri dish under his microscope, left over from where he was cataloguing the experiments he could throw away and the ones which held promise. This particular one had long since passed its use-by-date, given the fact that the sample had been a bright pink when he'd had it delivered all those months ago and was now a greyish mass that no longer resembled muscle in any form.
When John came by and looked at what Sherlock was trying to show him, his face quickly turned into a grimace before he schooled it into a look of forced neutrality, as though he were completely unaffected by its presence in the flat and that it wasn't something which should be disposed of immediately. "What's the point of keeping that?" John asked. Ok, so John wasn't able to have quite the same disposition as the man and woman in his vision, Sherlock conceded, but his initial reaction to the leftover experiment was still key to Sherlock's interpretation of what the younger man had shown him.
"Do you see, John?" Sherlock said, placing his cup on the table and turning to take John's face in his hands, his eyes afire in his skull given the flush which spread over John's face when Sherlock looked at him. "Your reaction to this sample was almost exactly what I saw when those people looked down at me on that table. There wasn't a person lying there; he wasn't a patient who needed the care of the people around him after an incident. He was looked at in the same way I look at my experiments. What can I do to get the reaction I want, how do I test for this outcome, what can I do to make this sample, whatever it is, tick?'" He turned back to the Petri dish containing the muscle tissue and removed it from the microscope, putting it into a bin that would be taken to Bart's later on for proper disposal. "The third vision he showed me had irrefutable evidence that he was an experiment to them anyway, at least initially," he said, taking his tea again and moving back to the living room. "The man was called Steve and the woman was called Jean. I don't know how they did it specifically, I'd need to see the equipment first-hand to be able to understand its intricacies, but they put the man I saw into a form of suspended animation."
John choked on the tea he'd taken from his cup, spluttering as he tried to get his breath back. "I'm sorry, what?" Another round of coughing as John put down his cup. "Did you say suspended animation? As in 'cryogenics' suspended animation?"
Sherlock finished his tea, placing the empty cup on the table before putting his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown. "Not strictly speaking, no. The man was put into a machine the likes of which I wasn't able to observe because he'd been put under again. They opened the machine at his head and placed him on a platform which was lined with a type of gel that moulded around a person's frame to better suit their comfort. Why would they be concerned about his comfort though? Why, if he's just an experiment, would they be concerned for his welfare?" Sherlock stopped speaking and watched John out of the corner of his eye in his peripheral vision. "That was a question, John. I'm asking you to think about it."
John seemed startled by the abrupt change in the conversation, his mouth dropping open for a second while his brain tried to catch up and come up with a rational answer that he could agree with. "Um… Ok… From my experience with you, the level of care you have over an experiment depends on how complicated it is and how long it took you to get it to that stage. By the way, the experiment where you grew mould in the bath on purpose was just foul, Sherlock, but that took at least two weeks of 'gestation'," John finger-quoted the word, "before you were happy with the results."
"Precisely!" Sherlock said, clapping his hands together once and grinning. "The length of time it takes for an experiment to reach fruition greatly impacts on the emotional state of the individual conducting it. So what do you think would happen if an experiment took weeks? What if it was months? Or even years? Would you be happy to throw that away if circumstances dictated it or would you try to salvage it?
"That's what Steve and Jean did, John! They put the man into suspended animation to preserve him and whatever tests they'd been conducting before GMCB went into administration. Steve said as much in my vision; he wasn't willing to throw it away, all his hard work, so he took measures to counteract any potential failure." Sherlock turned back to the laptop and read through the article on Wikipedia about the company, quickly finding what he was looking for and highlighting it so John could see it for himself. "Everyone thinks they were shut down by the Government due to bankruptcy; it even says that on this article here." Sherlock pointed to the screen, knowing John watched his every move.
"Let me guess," John said, looking back up at Sherlock. "You had something to do with it."
"GMCB was heavily embroiled in financing from Moriarty's network," Sherlock explained. "Their primary focus was human experimentation, but I never delved into it enough to see what it was they were doing. Remember that this only happened three months ago; you could say that I was too busy tying up all the loose ends, many of which were relying on Moriarty's illegal funding of them to continue their work. Once the money ran out, or they lost the ring-masters at their head, everything else naturally broke down." Sherlock turned back to John, placing his hands on his partner's shoulders. "GMCB was a company that was, on the whole, ridiculously easy to shut down compared to the other, more complicated hierarchies that I've had to deal with."
"Yes, yes, very clever," John said, clearly not amused. "So you're saying that someone is still under the control of the company in forced hibernation and … what? You want us to go in and break them out? No, they asked you, under some sort of mind control, for you to go and get them? Seriously?"
Sherlock nodded, flushing slightly under the intense, very sceptical look that John gave him. "Yes, I'm being serious. How else do you explain the swelling on my temple? The visions? I've never experienced anything like this before, John, not even when I under the influence of drugs. All I'm asking is that we at least investigate it further, preferably before you call the local psychiatric ward and inform them that you have a new patient that needs admitting."
John turned away from Sherlock at that point, bringing his hands up to his face and huffing into them before sliding them down to his sides with his head bowed. He finally shrugged his shoulders, an irritated noise coming from him before he turned back to Sherlock. "Even if I did buy into everything that you've said - and I'm not saying I'm not, just hear me out - how on earth are you meant to find this man? You have no idea where this facility is where he's supposedly being held and, even if you do find out, how are we meant to get in? The place is likely to be guarded due to the fact that they were doing human experiments there; it'll be Baskerville all over again."
"It won't, John," Sherlock said, turning back around to his laptop and bringing up a new webpage. "We have already have an idea as to where they are by the information Steve gave to the man before he was put into the machine. All we need to do is bring that information together and find a site run by GMCB before they were shut down that matches that data." He went back to the webpage which still had the information for GMCB on it, scrolling down the page until he saw the link for the official site. Clicking on it, a new window appeared on the screen and the website soon displayed the company name and their logo, 'Turning potential into reality.' Mentally scoffing at the words, Sherlock accessed the locations of the company which brought up only two sites. Both were based in the south of England, about an hour and half's drive outside of the London area depending on traffic, but one was for its customer care centre and the other was where the pharmaceuticals were processed before they were shipped out for distribution. Sherlock took a mental note of the location, 'Cody Technology Park, Farnborough,' before opening up another tab on the same window.
On this one he opened a website for the National Grid, normally only accessible to high-level employees of the business, and logged into it using the information Mycroft had yet to revoke under Sherlock's name when he'd been in exile. Once his credentials had been verified, he had full access to the south of England's electricity, which included a layout of the sites which currently had power and those which were still connected but had no electricity running through to them.
"Woah, Sherlock, hang on!" John had come round to see what Sherlock was doing and was more than a little flabbergasted when he saw what Sherlock had access to. "What are you doing?"
Sherlock couldn't restrain his eye-roll or his sigh of impatience. "I'm looking for information regarding sites in the south of England which have had their electricity cut in the last three months," he said, clicking on the map for the south of England until it zoomed in and showed all the cables running from their central power sources. "The location I found on the GMCB website is based in Farnborough's CodyTechnologyPark; it's where they used to make the drugs before they were distributed. See here," he pointed to a section of the map, "they had their electricity cut around three months ago, shortly after the company went into administration."
John leant down to look at the screen a little closer, his eyes darting over the websites as Sherlock watched him connect the dots in his head. "If we're going to do this," John said, "how do you propose we get there? It's over an hour and half's drive away from here in this weather and I'm not paying for a taxi to get us there."
John had a good point; if the young man from Sherlock's vision was even on the site, and there was still the high possibility that this was only in his head, they couldn't rely on the taxi to wait for them once they found the man, plus they didn't have enough information to be able to answer the most basic and fundamental questions. Was the site deserted or was it, as John suggested, under armed guard due to the state secrets which may still be inside? How big was the site itself and how long would they need to search it for until they found him? Would they find the man from Sherlock's vision at all?
The search itself could take all night, for Sherlock wasn't going to chance going there in the middle of the day and being spotted by any patrols which may still be in the area, so it was going to have to be a midnight call to ensure they utilised the darkness to their advantage. Not that this was difficult for him, having had to make last minute adjustments in his own hunting before the target got wind of him and slipped away, but it had only been a one-man mission during those instances. This time would be different because he would have John with him but, although John was an army man and trained by some of the best forces in the world, he could still be used as a liability against Sherlock if they were discovered. Moriarty's threat against John had hung over Sherlock's head for far too long and he was reluctant to put John in the line of fire again because of a vision that he had no empirical way of proving to anyone, let alone himself. Sherlock was reluctant to share this with John though. There wasn't any chance that the other man would agree with him, or let Sherlock out of his sight for as long as this venture might take, something that Sherlock was glad about considering the changes in their relationship so far.
And he was also keenly aware of the fact that two pairs of eyes were better than one. Having John there beside him would prove mostly beneficial, considering how many times the other man had saved his life when they first moved in together. He just had a few more hurdles to leap across and then they would be in business. "I can download the blueprints of the site to my phone and then we'll have on-site navigation while we're there," he told John, picking up his mobile from the table. "It's likely that they won't have a signal due to the vegetation there and this way we won't have to rely on it. I wouldn't worry about transport, we can hire a car to get us there. I know a place that allows you to pick the car up in advance and they bill you for each day you have the usage of it, plus any extra charges at the end for any damage caused, etcetera. They're very reasonably priced."
Sherlock ignored John's, "Hurumph," at his comment, his fingers working on the keypad of his phone as he accessed the MI5 database (another discrepancy of Mycroft's) and used the on-screen navigation to locate the information held by the Government about GMCB before their closure which included profit-margins, staff rotation and the blueprints of the sites themselves. He brought up the blue-prints of the building, locating all the entrance and exit points with ease and highlighting them on the plans, quickly making calculations of the best ways in and out of the building before downloading the information to his mobile's memory.
When the download was completed he opened up the attachment, scrolling through the main levels of the building; there were two floors in all with the first floor being the ground floor, followed by one more which had been built underground. There were over twenty different rooms within the site itself, mostly on the first floor, with numerous locks and points of entry which would require DNA access to get into certain, more than restricted areas, but this was something that wouldn't be a problem now as the main power for the site had been stopped.
For all the information that had been stored on the security of the site, Sherlock noted that there had been little more than a skeleton staff present there at any one time. A disproportionate amount of guards and armed personnel had been assigned to round-the-clock patrols but less than twenty-four scientists were employed by GMCB; they were all geneticists, according to the profiles that had also been downloaded, but they were all experts in a certain field of the genetic program. Some dealt with the interactions between multiple genes, others with gene regulation, medicine, DNA sequencing, recombination and linking; there wasn't a single person, besides the head of the current project, who had more than one qualification to their name. They had each been chosen for their specified field of study and Sherlock realised that it was a very clever way for the company to ensure that no one individual had access to all the information at any one time, the staff having been monitored regularly with limited interaction between the other members.
The main project leader, a Dr Steven Johnson, was the only man at the site to have access to all the different areas, but his profile picture was missing and his exact role within the company had not been found out by MI5. He wondered if this Dr Johnson and the man who'd spoken to him at the end of the last memory were one and the same.
"Right, so now that you've got the plans of the site and you've figured out how to get there, when exactly are you planning on doing this?" John asked beside him, his hands in the pockets of his own dressing gown. "Because if we're doing this tonight I'm going to need more coffee."
Sherlock locked his phone before placing it back on the table, smirking a little at John's sense of humour and running the calculations through in his head. If they were to go tonight they would need to leave by one o'clock at the latest, with the journey itself taking just over an hour and a half to get to the Park from London. Arrival time would therefore be at a little after half two with a predicted sunrise of about quarter past seven in the morning. That would give them a total of four complete hours in which to find the man from his visions, spanning a total of at least twenty rooms over two floors. Sherlock could admit that the statistics weren't in their favour, especially if the site was still under the protection of an armed force, but he reasoned that the odds weren't entirely against them either and the sooner they dealt with this, the better.
"We're leaving tonight," he told John with a grim finality. "We're going to need Thermoses of tea and coffee, something to eat for the return journey and remember to bring extra clothing. You may need your gun and take extra bullets with you. Whatever we find, this is going to be a long night."

If there was one thing Sherlock was good at, it was timekeeping; a necessity during his exile as tardiness could not be tolerated, not when people's lives hung in the balance, and this was proving to be no different. One o'clock soon saw the both of them on the road in a two litre Audi A-three Sport, the Black edition, a few years old but still at the top of its class and having the required speed that Sherlock needed to reach Farnborough long before the sun rose.
The snow that'd started earlier the previous day had almost stopped by the time the car had been dropped off at the flat by a disgruntled hire car employee, but the roads had been kept clear and maintained since the weather conditions had first taken the British public by surprise in the winter of two thousand and eleven. It wouldn't help them on some of the A roads if the snow had reached them, mostly because the emphasis from the Government was to keep the motor ways clear and there simply wasn't enough grit for the entirety of the tarmac in the United Kingdom. If the worst came to the worst and the car got stuck, Sherlock had ensured that they'd worn enough winter clothing (including boots, gloves, scarves and hats) to keep them warm should they need to finish the journey on foot, depending obviously on their distance to the site should that happen.
John, being the stubborn man that he was, had not fallen asleep in the passenger seat at Sherlock's suggestion, insisting on being awake for the duration of the trip despite the fact that he would probably be the driver of choice on their return home. Sherlock took his eyes off of the motorway for a fraction of a second to absorb John's profile, looking at the way he was sitting and measuring the alertness of the other man before returning his eyes to the road, keeping half an eye on the satellite navigation to ensure he was still headed in the right direction and noting their estimated time of arrival, which was expected to be twenty minutes from now.
They entered the Farnborough area shortly before two pm, which John considered a fantastic time due to the fact that the roads had become slick with ice and snow after they exited the motorway to begin travelling on the A-three-two-seven that would take them almost directly to the site itself. Sherlock hadn't given the time much thought except on how he could gain it in his favour, speeding around corners through thick woodland and using the snow and ice to his advantage, making the car slide around the round-a-bouts rather than driving around them in an effort to push back the clock.
When they were close, roughly ten minutes away, Sherlock slowed the car down, pointedly ignoring the satellite navigation as it tried to direct him to a residential area and instructing John to keep a look-out for the Park itself while he watched the signs along the road. Eventually, after what seemed an age, they saw snow-blasted signs showing the directions to 'Cody Technology Park' as they came closer to its location, a nervous tension filling the interior of the vehicle as both Sherlock and John were kept on high alert in preparation for what was to come.
The car crept forward along the road, coming to an opening in the woodland to an area which had a chain-link fence all around the exterior of the property. From what they could see in the car headlamps, there was only one point of entry to the grounds (an unmanned checking station which had the gate secured) and the lights around the outside gate's perimeter only showed one building in the near vicinity with the letters on the side of the wall gleaming in the bright light, Sherlock's eyes tracing the shape of the letters which had become so distinctive to him.
GMCB.
Sherlock stopped the car at its present position, eyes flicking between the CCTV cameras that were dotted around the site, calculating that their car had already been seen and footage was being taken of it. Slowly, so as not to draw any unwanted attention, he put the car into reverse and drove the car back down the road into the cover of the trees to make it appear that they'd taken a wrong turn, using the particularly wide area of the road to turn the car around so it was facing the way they had come before turning the engine off and pulling his phone from his pocket.
He could feel John's eyes on him as he opened the attachment for the blue-prints of the building they wanted to access, comparing the location of the letters on the building they'd seen to the one's on the prints and, from that comparison, finding the locations of the two other entrances to the building that were, effectively, the back way in. Sherlock opened up another attachment, one which concerned the security of the Park, and brought up the CCTV footage that was being taken at that time.
John leaned over in his seat for a closer look, watching as Sherlock accessed the film of the cameras and set them to replay the last two minutes before their arrival in a looping sequence. "If there is anything out of the ordinary in the footage we can always amend it later," Sherlock said when he saw John's sceptical expression. "The likelihood of there being a huge difference between the films is insignificant at best; only someone who knew what to look for would see the loop as it happened."
"Well, you're the expert," John replied, his amusement over Sherlock's actions evident in the smirk on his face. "How long have you set it for?"
"For as long as we need it." Sherlock closed down the programme and got out of the car, his boots crunching on the snow beneath his feet as he walked around the vehicle to open the boot. Inside was all the equipment that Sherlock had asked John to retrieve while he had finished finalising the plans for their break-in; a backpack which held the extra winter clothing; the Thermoses of drink, bottled water and food in sealed containers that would be needed later and, perhaps the most important of all, another backpack containing the torches, chain cutter, wire cutter and his lock-pick. Sherlock picked up the one with the tools inside it and slung it over his right shoulder, lifting the other bag up and passing it to John when he came from his side of the car, before locking the vehicle and turning in the direction of the Park, keeping his profile low as they came into the open air.
The silence of the space around them seemed to press down on them where they stood, each absorbing the atmosphere and the tucking their faces into the scarves around their necks to mask the breath which would have fanned out in front of them. Sherlock turned to John once he'd established that the coast was clear, nodding once before walking to the left of the woodland by the fence to find a more secluded spot. When they were facing the side of GCMB's building rather than the front entrance, Sherlock motioned for them to stop and put his backpack on the frost-bitten ground, pulling out the wire cutter and making strategic cuts in the fence. Once he was done, the wire was pulled out of the way and the hole was big enough that they only had to bend over to get through it, rather than crawling on the ground. Once they were through the gap Sherlock set a fast pace to the side of the building, his coat flaring around him with John on his heels, the both of them panting slightly when they stopped in front of the right entrance to the building.
The entrance was actually two doors that had been chained together to prevent entry, the chain of a fine quality and showing no signs of rust despite being in the frigid temperatures of what was a bitingly cold winter. The doors were made of a steel sheet with two small windows at their head height, allowing Sherlock to peer inside although he couldn't see anything in the darkness, unwilling to shine a torch into the building for reasons that went above and beyond his normal caution. The chain itself provided little resistance to the cutter that John used on it, breaking free and hitting the ground with a muffled thump when it came into contact with the snow. The door was a little more of a hassle, requiring careful manoeuvring on Sherlock's part to pick the lock and resulted in his muffled curse when the pick didn't catch the first time; he blamed on it his shaking fingers but didn't know whether it was down to the cold or a sudden attack of nerves.
Under his coaxing, the lock soon gave the desired thump of the bolt sliding back into the door, with Sherlock taking one door and John the other as they each pulled the metal towards them and entered the interior of the building. Sherlock pulled the torches from his bag, passing one to John before turning on his own and pointing the beam down the corridor in front of them. It was deserted as he expected it would be and when he turned to his right he saw the panel of the wall next to the door which had a keypad and a card reader on it, looking over it briefly before turning and pointing his torch up at the top of the doors and seeing the magnetic panels that had been bolted onto them. Both the card reader and keypad had needed correct entries before the door would open when the building was in use and, with those entries, the magnetic locks would have also been released. Now, with the electricity gone, the lock had proven amenable to Sherlock's administrations, something that he would have had no chance of succeeding at had the security been fully functional.
When he turned back around he saw that John had already preceded him into the corridor, shining his torch on the floor and being careful not to trip up on the items which had been left on the floor. Most of it was stationary; a few pens were up against the wall and sheets of reports which had been left behind in the mass exodus. They had nothing of note on them; financial figures at the most and these were results that Sherlock had already had access to when he'd taken down the company to begin with. He looked at his watch, quarter to three, and followed John down the corridor to another area of the building.
There hadn't been any effort made to make the place feel welcoming. The walls were in the same grey colour that he'd seen in his dream, the room they entered being a basic reception area for the clocking in of staff at their pre-arranged times. The ID readers were covered in a thin layer of dust and the reception area, if it could be called that, had been left in disarray with the telephones off the hook and the drawers pulled out and left on the floor, their contents spread over the desks. When Sherlock looked at John to see what he was doing, the look his partner gave him was one of apprehension, but it wasn't fear; the emotion John was feeling had more to do with the frenzied atmosphere of the place, the pandemonium which had been left behind when the building had been emptied.
Sherlock gave him an encouraging nod, one which John returned with a small smile, and they both continued on through the ID checking to another area that had three corridors leading off from the reception. It was at this point that Sherlock pulled out his phone and opened up the blueprints, leading John further into the building by following the plans, and passing what had been offices and staff toilets. They made sure to check the rooms to ensure they were clear of any personnel until they arrived at a set of stairs which led down to the second level, both of them shining their torches down the steps as they descended.
In front of them were two doors, one in front and one on the left-hand side, again requiring the key pad and card entries for admittance, and Sherlock allowed John to take the lead as the other man opened the door on the side first. Sherlock followed close behind John as he entered the room, hugging the wall and keeping his torch at eye level so he could see what was happening in front of him, and felt his mouth drop open when he saw what was in front of him.
It was the same room from his vision. They had come into it on the opposite side of the platform, on the same level as the desks, and he quickly grabbed for John to bring them closer together. "This is it, John," he whispered frantically, shining his torch around the room and locating the bare patches on the walls, the platform which was to across and to their right, the six desks which had been left exactly as he remembered them. "This is where the first vision was."
"Are you sure?" John asked; his voice low in the room. "You're being serious?"
"Of course I am," Sherlock said, walking to the platform and up the steps, looking down at the spot where the younger man had straddled him. "This is where it happened." He heard John come up the steps behind him and look around Sherlock's frame, could almost hear the cogs working in John's head as he replaced the images he'd created when Sherlock had told him his vision with the reality of it.
"Where does this room lead to?" John asked finally, looking down at Sherlock's phone where he still had the blueprints on the screen.
Sherlock directed his attention back to the plans, scouring them for any clues. "There are two rooms which lead from here. The first one is to the left here," he pointed his torch towards the end of the platform and they saw a door on the left. "The other is on the floor below us and is on the left, over there." Again, he pointed his torch in the direction of the room, showing the other door.
"Ok, so where are we going?" John asked, shuffling his feet where he stood to keep the warmth in them; the room's temperature was colder than Sherlock remembered, the frostiness biting at his skin where the air seeped through the pockets in his clothes.
"There's what appears to be the main hall which is accessible from the room down there," Sherlock said, referring to the door on the ground floor. "This door here," he pointed to the one closest to them, "leads into a room which has only been partially separated into two spaces. It's much smaller than the hall; we should check that one first before moving onto the larger area." John nodded his agreement, following Sherlock as they both moved to the door and looked inside the small window to check the area first. With his breath held, Sherlock tentatively opened the door, hearing the sound of the wind whirring past his ears before easing it open and stepping inside, making sure his torch preceded him so he didn't trip up on anything.
The first thing he noticed was the noise. There was a faint whirring sound, as though a fan were being used on his left and hadn't been turned off, but the sound didn't come with an accompanying wind that he would have felt on stepping into the room. He pointed his torch in the direction of the noise and found a box on the floor, which only came up to his knees and was just about the width of his shoulders, with various leads trailing from it. The leads were bound together in a neat line to stop them from tangling and they went further into the room and around a corner to the right, evidently where the other section of the room was. Sherlock stepped up to the box, laying his hand on its surface and finding the temperature hot, almost too hot to maintain the contact even through his gloves, and he took his hand away quickly before following the direction of the leads on the floor. As he proceeded into the room, there was a faint glow which was coming from the area where the wires had gone, and when he looked around the corner to see where the cables led to, he soon had the reason why.
It was exactly what he'd been expecting and yet it was also the furthest away from it. There it was on the wall in front of him, the machine that he'd heard in his vision when it had powered to life and sealed him in. A circular door, which was wide enough to fit a person inside it, was on the wall (the machine had been built into the wall as part of the building) with two monitors on either side of it, each with power that Sherlock realised was coming from the box in the room behind him. So that had been the backup generator that Steve had been talking about…
He walked up to the machine, hearing John curse behind him when he came around the corner and also saw what lay ahead, and looked up at the monitors on either side of the machine. They each displayed various statistics on the person's health, including blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory measurements; anything that would be needed to ensure that the person was still alive. Below the monitor on the left there was the keyboard that Steve had used to ready the machine for use; the keys were also covered in a fine layer of dust that made his fingers come away with a grey smudge on them from where he'd taken his gloves off and lightly drifted his right hand across the buttons.
"Sherlock?" John came up behind him to his right side, resting a hand on Sherlock's lower back. "Are you ok?"
The feel of John's hand on his back made Sherlock keenly aware of the trembles that shook his frame, his fingers shaking in front of him as he lifted a hand towards the light of his torch. "It's real, John," he murmured, his voice cracking on his partner's name. "It really happened." He looked down at the machine on his right, his heart in his throat as he thought about the possibility of what lay beyond it, the life that had been saved by the scientists of the company who couldn't bear to let their hopes go. But for what purpose?
"Is he really in there?" John moved towards the machine and laid one hand on the cool metal of the door, leaning his head down towards it as though he could tell who was inside just by hearing the other's heartbeat. His fingers traced the lock that kept the door sealed, across the valve that would release the door once it was opened and admiring the workmanship that had been on the design. "The man you saw… These readings are all his?"
Sherlock looked at the monitors again, seeing that the vitals of the person inside were stable but also that no other information was displayed about them. Name, age or gender weren't a part of the information that was being monitored; therefore the only way to know for certain who inhabited the capsule was to open it, if anyone was in there at all. "We'll have to open it to find out," he said to John, turning back to the screen and seeing in the bottom right-hand corner the button to release the valve on the door, the start of a chain reaction that would awaken the person inside once they were free of the machine. Given the limited information on the screen, Sherlock had no idea whether opening the door would kill the person outright, or if they would slowly succumb to a weakness that would eventually lead to their demise, but Sherlock didn't believe that that would be the case here.
He thought again of Steven, the scientist who had been here before him, and his overwhelming resolve to see project one-zero-one-A succeed despite the hand that had been dealt to him. Above all else, the life of the person inside was the highest priority, hence his last message to the man before he was sealed into the machine. That he must survive at all costs.
It was that determination that guided Sherlock's hand, his right index finger hovering over the button that would open the door. He heard John's questioning murmur in the background; was he really sure about this, how could they be really sure what it was that they would find inside? The questions were the rational thinking of a mind that had seen its fair share of danger and something that Sherlock had questioned himself upon finding the machine that he'd only thought as part of a dream.
"Do you promise?"
Sherlock shut his eyes briefly, the words echoing through his mind in the voice that had somehow been ingrained in his memory. His promise to help a person who had badly needed it, who hadn't known what salvation was until Sherlock had been there and told him that help was coming, that he would be safe now.
It was with the image of the young man's face in his mind, hurting and hopeful, that he activated the switch which would open the door.
To be continued
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