Welcome to Baker Street

60. Angels and demons

Author's note: Just to inform you that in the first part of this chapter, I tried to describe the complex mechanisms at the basis of both nightmares and dreams as they get mixed with real scenes that the mind can create when in a half-sleep status. I hope it doesn't get too confusing. The brain is a mysterious muscle.

Two weeks later – Early January

3:30 a.m.

Giulia suddenly jolts awake with palpitation.

She had a nightmare, a lucid dream that she knew was not real. It couldn't be: everything had already happened in real life but with a different ending. Initially, it was that woeful sense of déjà vu that forewarned her. She could sense that something was off with that dream the minute she saw a familiar gun pointed at her heart: it was Sherlock's Browning L9A1.

She should have screamed just like she did when she had a nightmare on her first night in London: crying so loud that she eventually woke her body up. But this time she didn't: she stayed quiet, unable to speak, incapable of protesting. She remained speechless, staring into the eyes of her shooter: a pair of unmistakable green-blue eyes.

Sherlock.

She awakens with his name on her lips, terrified by that nightmare. She tosses and turns on the bed, striving to find an explanation for what she has just seen. She rationally analyses her dream. It wasn't the same scene that occurred at the bank. There was one major difference: back then, Sherlock had aimed at her head. In this darker version, though, he went straight for her heart... Incoherent.

Yet that wasn't the only inconsistent detail: why didn't she scream? Why did she stand by and let that happen? Why did she let him do that to her? Would she ever give him the power to break her heart?

As she wraps her duvet around her shaking body, she recalls one last, disturbing element: his eyes were dead, inexpressive. The fire she described to his mother wasn't there. It was nothing like him: in reality, his eyes host universes while that nightmare version of him only showed a blank look—a mask of utter detachment. What was her mind trying to communicate to her? What was killing her: Sherlock or his indifference?

She stares at the ceiling of her bedroom, unable to go back to sleep. She takes a deep breath. Inhale, exhale, it shouldn't be too difficult, right?

She can feel her muscles relax, but her mind is restless, a thousand questions incessantly swirling inside her brain. She groans. Why can't the chaos in her brain stop just for one night?

She closes her eyes, desperately trying to get a few hours of sleep, but the moment her eyelids shut over her pupils, and she dreams again, a sudden streak of images crashes down on her mind. Her fantasy reproduces the swift movement of a hand holding a gun, the muzzle facing her just like she saw it happen inside the bank, and the deafening sound of a gunshot seems to resonate inside her skull. That detonation brings back another scenario in her brain: it's the explosion of the underground station during her first case with Sherlock and John. It looks as if she was witnessing the building collapsing again among tongues of flame, helplessly staring once more at the smoking ruins.

But there's more. In her imagination, the lines of the station get blurred and distorted as they shape-shift enough to replicate a different building, something very familiar to her. She can feel tears pooling in her eyes when that lost place resurfaces from the deepest recesses of her mind. In her half-sleep state, she instinctively raises an arm toward that vision as if she was trying to touch it, hold it for as long as possible. Oh, how she misses it.