Daylight

Part 4

Warning: Some forced imprisonment in this chapter.  Some fleeting thoughts of suicide.

     Sherlock waited in the room at the end of the hall for the next three days.  It was a plain room, with white walls, a small pallet bed, a sink and a toilet.  No one hit him; they just left him alone.  Twice a day, his door opened and a man appeared.  He brought Sherlock a tray with very bland food and commanded him to, “Eat.” Later he came back and took the barely touched tray away.

     Sherlock might actually go mad from boredom if things didn’t change soon.  He’d tried to escape but the door to his room had no lock to pick.  Jim’s lackey controlled it with a key card.  They kept him on a chain attached from an ankle cuff to the wall that allowed him to use the sink, the bed, and toilet but not reach the door.  The room offered no distractions, no TV, no books, not even a window.   

     He spent a great deal of time lying on his bunk in his mind palace.  On the first interminable day, after he realized he’d been abandoned,  he reorganized his mental collection of poisonous plants that could kill humans by color, then by size, then by potency.  He’d eaten very little of the food left to him and his captors commands to, “Eat!” began to be punctuated with a forceful fist pump in his direction.  He didn’t know if that meant the meaty man would punch him if he didn’t eat more, but he ignored the warnings and continued to pick half-heartedly at his meals.  He missed John’s goading attempts to get him to consume nourishment.  He’d eat for John.  He missed John.

     He missed John so much he replayed the one morning they’d spent together over and over in his memory.  John had kissed him willingly by licking his lips open with his soft, urgent tongue.

     Sherlock remembered his surprise at John’s sudden ardor.  He didn’t want to believe that John had just been leading him on by giving him exactly what he wanted.  John had kissed him in the kitchen pressing his trim torso into Sherlock’s chest.  The move had quickly disarmed him and he felt John’s arms come up in a tender embrace. His own hands moved to cup the back of John’s head and ass. 

     As the kiss deepened, John ran his hands run along the length of Sherlock’s back.  Sherlock thought he tasted deliciously like tea and raspberry biscuits.  Kissing John like this satisfied something deep inside him.  He couldn’t seem to breathe enough of John’s air.  He wanted so much more of John so he sucked on his bottom lip and John had moaned just a bit and kissed him harder. 

     Sherlock replayed this over and over in his head.  Their first real kiss.  Had John been plotting his escape even as he pressed his lips onto Sherlock’s?  The thought maddened him. 

    

     He hadn’t showered or even bothered to “freshen up” in the sink.  He began to smell ripe after the third day and his hair fell in limp, greasy clumps.  There was no mirror, but he could run his hand across the growing stubble on his neck and face.  He hated facial hair, but now it didn’t matter.  No one could see him and no one seemed to care whether he lived or died.  During the three days he’d been locked in his horrible room, he often wondered what John would think of his current predicament.  Would he laugh at him?  Would he say, “Now you know what it feels like to be caged up like a dog?  Now, you know what I felt like.”

     But Sherlock still couldn’t regret the methods he used to keep John safe.  He hadn’t kept him locked in a room like this.  John had been able to freely roam Baker Street, type on his laptop, watch TV and do everything he normally did anyway.  It wasn’t the same thing at all, he petulantly thought to himself.  But, a smaller voice said, “Perhaps it was.”