Book I : Fantàsticque :: The Estranged Trilogie ::: A Sherlock Fanfiction

XXIII. The Fallen Angel

It took longer than it should have for Francesca to realise that Sherlock was, in fact, hurting from the blood loss. At this sudden dawning, she rushed the cabbie and upon their arrival at their destination, she lugged Sherlock out of the cab and dragged him into the flat in an air of emergence. When John walked over to the doorway to check where the sound had been coming from, he hitched at the sight of the two battered up individuals.

"Christ." John's eyes were wide and he seemed to be barely breathing.

"John." Francesca struggled to get Sherlock onto his back on the floor and through gasping breaths, continued saying, "You are a doctor. Help him. He's lost too much blood in the past who knows how long and needs medical attention." John nodded quickly and removed his coat, revealing his blood-soaked left arm.

Francesca helped roll up Sherlock's shirt sleeves, peeling the sodden cloth from his blood-covered skin. The carmine hues were dripping onto the carpet in glazed streaks, pooling into little red mirrors at her feet. She stood back and stared at the frenzy in front of her and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Francesca was dizzy and fatigued, and everything looked to her as if it had went through the other end of a kaleidoscope.

Mind the way you perceive it, don't let it fool you.

Francesca quickly became cognizant of the fact that as she was watching John clean the blood from Sherlock's wound, this sudden thought out of nowhere was no simple hallucination: it was an actual transmission humming in the back of her brain.

Don't just stand there, Francesca.

Francesca raised her hand to her mouth to muffle the scream she could not control, and suddenly, she found that she couldn't breathe.

"What the hell... Francesca, look at this, there's no woun-" John stopped talking when he saw her struggling.

"Francesca? Are you alri-" Francesca's sudden fit of coughing seized her, and she just couldn't breathe. Her throat was closing on her, trachea squeezing shut. Panic arose in her chest and she hunched down on the floor, trying to get some air into her lungs. Her thought processes faded and then became too glaringly sharp and fuzzed again.

At last, a breath was drawn and it became clear that John was yelling her name and that her hand was throbbing from gripping the table leg too tightly.

"Francesca, what's wrong? What was that?" John asked carefully. She avoided his questioning stare as she hugged her knees with her head tucked between her chest and her legs, taking heavy breaths in confusion of the event that had just occurred.

"Asthma attack."

She looked up in bewilderment upon hearing the deep sound that only belonged to Sherlock. John did the same.

Sherlock was staring up at the ceiling, hands pressed together under his chin in a mediatory position. He closed his eyes and lifted a corner of his mouth in a tantalizing smirk. Surrounded by the carmine mirrors, skin pale as Dracula's and looking as serene as still water, he was an angel, fallen from the heavens.

Broken, but beautiful.

"It's obvious, isn't it?" He sat up, breaking the haze of glory and majestic beauty. "She's an asthmatic." John looked at Sherlock in confusion, and then at Francesca, who was staring at Sherlock, dazed. Sherlock glared at her in urgency. He was saying: Play along.

Francesca snapped out of her reverie and coughed a bit, hiding her face in the cloth of her coat. She felt a smile creep up as she coughed into her jacket a few more times.

"Oh," John said. "Are you alright?" Francesca nodded and looked up, serious composure back. John sighed in relief and looked at the two people on either side of him, shaking his head in disbelief at the fact that both had gotten hurt. He stared at Sherlock's arms in particular, bamboozled, yet stunningly aware of why there was no wound.

But it didn not matter as to if there was a wound or not- blood loss still had its consequences.

~

"How the hell did this happen...?" Francesca muttered to herself as she examined Sherlock's alabaster arm. Nothing was there except for a long faded streak, pink in colour and thinner than a hair. Sherlock had his head laid back against the back of the armchair. He felt a little woozy and knew that this will continue for at least a day more while he willed his blood cells to replenish themselves.

Sherlock never felt the same physical pain as normal humans, having been able to successfully avoid and deflect any threats on his physical health.

But this magician...he could do anything.

Anything.

Sherlock stared at Francesca as she paced around the room. She stopped by the open window and bit her lip, staring out forlornly.

A caged bird that wishes to be set free...

One of the only reasons why Sherlock bothered to keep her around was the fact that she was puzzle and enigma, something that he needed to figure out. This woman's pages were glued together and it took time, a lot of time, to be able to unstick those pages without ripping them. And if those pages were ripped, there would be no getting them back.

A creeping thought slowly crawled towards the front of Sherlock's consciousness, and it urged him to ask something, to enlighten him, and so he complied.

"That day," Sherlock started. "Why did you say I was not good enough?"

Francesca looked towards Sherlock in surprise.

"Why, isn't it obvious?" A grin inched into her expression as she used Sherlock's words against him.

Scowling, Sherlock replied, "No."

"It is obvious. You didn't get anything about me that was even of the slightest importance."

"Not even my quips about your family?" Francesca's jubilance ebbed away at this.

"Except for that."

"I will uncover all that I can about you, Arlington."

"Well, Holmes," she breathed out dejectedly. "I bade you good luck on that." She smiled sarcastically and shut the window with a bang. "What do you think his game plan is?"

Francesca settled down in an armchair, and rested her head on her propped-up arm, waiting for an answer.

Sherlock sneered.

"Why I think that is really obvious."

"Shut the hell up and answer my question, Sherlock."

With a knowing smirk, he replied, "Oh, it's brilliant." Francesca threw a pillow at him, aware of his purposeful tantalizing.

"Your theory, I do wish to know, now."

Sherlock beamed in victory and consented to explaining.

"Venticelli is using his power to the point where it's crossed unfair and has bordered upon brutal and no longer intelligent, which makes it a very brilliant plan. We can't do anything about it, but watch as we try to sort through trauma and fear. Our chances are slim, and he knows that. But we can win. This is meant to be a game and games cannot be games without the probability of the side with an advantage losing. He controls the strings but we can snap them and break free."

"Ridiculous."

Sherlock shot her a glare.

"Well, how do you explain it then?"

"First of all, Moriarty is the puppet-master, not Xa- Venticelli. And if the strings do break, we die, we are not set free. As for my theory... He is hurting us, bit by bit, waiting until our marred remnants are all that is left, and then leaving us to recover painfully. He will wait, until the calamity has all been calmed. And then, he will attack once more, and this sick disgusting cycle will repeat over and over again, until our abilities to recover will no longer work, and then, we will be nothing more than shells of living bodies. After all, what worth is life when there is nothing else?"

"Nothing else?" Francesca closed her eyes as if to say 'yes'.

"Nothing else."