sherlock holmes (assertion) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-01-02 20:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !trigger warning, kitty winter, sherlock holmes |
Who: Kitty and Sherlock
What: Realising the dreams are more than dreams
When: 1 January 2016, early morning hours
Where: Their place
Warnings: Talk of rape, torture
Status: Log | Complete
Kitty hadn’t put much stock into the dream talk. Even when she’d had the one about a life that was vaguely similar to her own. It was just that. A dream. Easily brought about by the constant talking about it on the network. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about dreaming of people she had put behind her and tried to forget she was related to, but it was still easy enough to explain away. That night though, things changed.
She’d been at a pub. Nothing too shocking about that. And then she was somewhere else. Chained up. Raped. Tortured. Branded. It felt endless. Time was inconsequential. Just the pain. The fear. The numbness.
Waking with a start, Kitty felt like she was going to be sick. She knew that the dream before had felt more real. But this? This was something else entirely. This was a different feeling. Her entire body felt on fire and sore and it just hurt. She couldn’t breathe when she woke up, her lungs constricted. Stumbling out of bed, Kitty rushed to bathroom where she promptly was sick.
Why did she feel like she wanted to cry? Why did it feel so real? Like she had actually just escaped three days in a basement? Not even caring, she turned the shower on as hot as she could and stood under the water, trying to scrub everything away. The feeling of a faceless man, his hands, mouth, everything on her. Her skin was crawling. Gasping for breath, Kitty slid down against the wall of the shower and started to hyperventilate.
It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It was just a dream. It hadn’t happened.
Eventually the water ran cold and Kitty pulled herself out of the shower, her breathing short but at least not so shallow. She needed to change. Grabbing a towel, she pulled the pyjamas she’d been wearing off and that was when she noticed it. The bruising all along her body that shouldn’t be there. The branding on her back.
There was no real way to know how to react. She stood there. Numb. Then she dried off, wrapped herself in the towel and quickly made her way to her room to change into dry pyjamas, a cardigan over the vest top (tank top here) and went downstairs to where Sherlock was. Pale and bruised, water dripping from her hair.
“The dreams are real.”
There was nothing else to say. She didn’t think she could say anything else. Her voice felt off. Hollow. Numb. Who knew, she didn’t. Because Kitty had no explanation for what had just happened.
Since entrusting Kitty with the task of investigating the network, Sherlock had not bothered with it. They had work to do outside of the Internet, after all. As much as he enjoyed engaging trolls from time to time, it wasn’t going to have anything to do with something as absurd as a second life while sleeping. Dreams were dreams, and he hadn’t had one in a very long time much less one that felt so real that he’d commit himself to a community.
Weekly meetings for his old drug habit would suffice.
Wide awake already, Sherlock was thumbing through a cumbersome book in search of answers for the active case he’d been working. Completely immersed in it, he somehow went entirely undisturbed by his protege’s arrival with an unsettling revelation. Visibly undisturbed for the moment, his eyes continued to pass along each line on the page until he’d reached its end. Silent still as he saved the page he was on, Sherlock put the book aside and slowly stood in a rigid fashion to finally observe Kitty.
When he did, his entire posture became unnerved and ill at ease. He hadn’t noted it in her tone, but considering it a second time in his head assured him of something impossibly raw. Rather than belittle her or dismiss the claim, Sherlock began making his way toward the kitchen.
“I’ll put on some tea,” which was his own way of suggesting that she follow him, and more importantly: that he would listen.
Kitty wasn’t sure what she expected Sherlock’s reaction to be. In a way, it wasn’t all that shocking that he just continued his reading of a different case they had going on as well. After all, it wasn’t like they were making all that much headway on the network case. It simply… was. Frustrating, confusing. And all together not giving way to any answers.
She also didn’t know why it made her tense when he stood. Why she had a hard time meeting his eye. No. She knew why. The fear from the dream. The self loathing. The sickness gnawing at her insides, making it so that she just wanted to hide away from everyone. That she didn’t want to talk. To see. It was possible, wasn’t it?
So she stood, tugging at the arm of her cardigan. For once she wasn’t self assured and willing to take anything. She was trying to hide within herself, disappear. Even after everything with her father, it hadn’t been like this. Of course not. She hadn’t been harmed in that. Just everything shattered and realising she could trust no one. This….
Then Sherlock was saying he was going to make tea, his own way of saying he was willing to listen. Not that Kitty knew what to say. But she followed, keeping her distance and arm around herself as if a barrier, tense and listening for any sound that didn’t belong until they were at the kitchen.
“I had one before. It was easy to dismiss as power of suggestion.” Nothing had happened. Just living her life normally even if she then wanted to get something to drink or...who knew what because it had involved her father as a normal man. “This one could have… I….”
Finding words was hard. Her voice was detached still, but also quiet. Almost afraid.
“The case from New York you’ve been looking at periodically,” Because she knew he was keeping tabs on it with the developments that had taken place and the presence of the girl who had been in them. “I….”
Shaking, Kitty took a breath.
“I woke up branded.” Bruises and scratches? Those could feasibly be explained away. But brands?
Being bad with people as a general rule didn’t mean he was utterly inept. That was his one saving grace in this instance, the deeper understanding of victims and what they’d been through. While he had yet to experience any dreams for himself, he had enough experience in his work to have a tiny bit of empathy. Kitty was different, she was his protege, and more than that: she’d become his friend, particularly when he’d needed one most.
Setting a kettle on the stove, he lit the burner and kept his back to her. If she couldn’t meet his gaze, he wouldn’t force her to. The important thing was that she felt safe. So, every movement he made would be well calculated and with her in mind. Whatever had happened while she slept was enough to turn her into a completely different woman, enough so that he wasn’t about to mock her or insult Kitty’s intelligence for suggesting something obviously absurd.
With the mentioning of the New York case, Sherlock flinched. That poor girl, what she’d endured had been a heinous crime. He had no patience for rapists, the law did too little against them, but he still abided by those laws. Squinting narrowly at the kettle as Kitty suggested the impossible, Sherlock chose then to slowly turn. His head remained tilted down, contemplating any conceivable way that a copy cat could have turned up and done so in her sleep.
He would have known. Very little escaped him in his household.
Hands cautiously clasped behind his back, Sherlock maintained the easiest posture he could manage with the growing tension he experienced.
“You have experienced a parallel life to that of another individual of which I have researched and kept in occasional contact with,” he reasoned aloud, attempting to make sense of it for himself and failing. None of that could be possible. “To have a dream about a case is not unheard of, but this brand--that is troubling for a myriad of reasons.”
While he didn’t want to accept the dreams as real quite just yet, he did want to soothe his protege’s mind. Finally, Sherlock looked at Kitty with gentler eyes.
“Does it continue to hurt? I’ve a salve for that.”
It was a strange day when even Sherlock couldn’t make sense of what was going on. Then again, it wasn’t like Kitty had expected him to be able to. She hadn’t been able to make sense of it. Dreams shouldn’t have this pull on people, this effect. If it had just been a dream though as he was trying to reason, one that was just produced from looking over a casefile, it wouldn’t have been like this. Kitty wouldn’t be so anxious, so uneasy and ready to flee at a moment’s notice. Even if she trusted Sherlock as much as she trusted anyone, he was her friend and someone who didn’t hold her father’s sins against her, she was still ready to bolt.
So she appreciated that he wasn’t forcing her to look at him. That he wasn’t pushing for answers. She’d seen the police do that all the time. Try to balance the line of needing information and victims reactions but always more on the side of pushing for information. Especially in rape cases.
God. What had her life become?
So it was trying desperately to focus her breathing, to keep a hold on her emotions. She was too caught up in the emotions, the fear and anxiety. It was unsettling. But it had been real. Everything still hurt. So when he asked about the brands hurting, she just nodded. Kitty really didn’t trust her voice at the moment. She’d had enough issue trying to tell Sherlock what happened. If she didn’t need to speak, in that moment, she really wasn’t going to.
What had life become, indeed. There was a chaotic mess right before his eyes, one he could not piece together. Not without sacrificing support for the troubled woman in front of him. He absolutely refused to believe in the dream phenomenon being real, but he believed Kitty; she was the only validation he required to soldier through the heavy revelation.
He was almost formulaic in his treatment of her, but it was the best Sherlock Holmes had to offer. That Kitty was responsive to it at all sufficed, so he faintly nodded before disappearing from the kitchen to fetch a plaster and ointment. He returned with more than that, a throw blanket was in his right hand while the other carried various sizes of plasters and the soothing cream.
Placing the items on the table across from her so that she had control of when she wanted to grab them and which she wanted, Sherlock slid out of arm’s reach. He knew the details of Annie’s case extremely well, so any additional method he could employ to keep her at ease would be utilized to the best of his ability.
“Take whatever you require,” he said, gesturing to the tiny pile accompanied by the throw. “The tea will be ready shortly, and if there is anything else I can do for you…” She need only ask in whatever way she felt best.
As Sherlock left to get what she would need, Kitty finally sat down at the table, adrenaline seeming to leave her system now that she had told him what had happened. Haltingly, yes, but she had told him. And he had believed her. It wasn’t like she had wanted to accept the dreams either. It all had seemed so ridiculous but sometimes the only way to believe something was to experience it. Waking up with her back covered in brands was one way to accept that.
What she wouldn’t give for her skepticism back. But the price had been paid. And even then, they still didn’t know the hows of it.
Not that Kitty cared in that moment. She just wanted to disappear. She hadn’t cried. Not yet. She didn’t know if she would or if it would remained locked away behind the hollowness, the anxiety. The tensing as Sherlock returned. Still, she just nodded and slid off the cardigan with a wince as she looked at the ointment and plasters, aware of Sherlock even as he stepped aside.
Only to move her arms was painful and she knew that there was no way she was going to be able to reach. There were some brands visible along her upper back and shoulders but the way it had been done…. She was going to need help and that meant she was going to have to trust Sherlock. Which she did. But she wasn’t the type to ask for help on a good day let alone…
“I won’t be able to reach most of them.” Still hollow and detached. Still quiet. She was staring straight ahead at nothing but she also knew it to be true. She needed help and the only one there who could, and that she had any sense of trust in, was Sherlock.
The brands being on her back made for additional unfortunate circumstances. For Kitty’s sake alone, Sherlock held no consideration for himself in the equation apart from staying within the barriers of her comfort zone. He knew the line was drawn thin from her dreams, whatever phenomenon that may have caused them, and it took a great deal of trust in Kitty for him to simply accept it at face value.
Wordlessly, he moved behind at her and observed the evidence with a grimace. He couldn’t deny the facts, and his belief in Kitty was strong enough that he knew doubtlessly that this wasn’t a farce let alone self-inflicted. The angle alone of the wounds was enough to disprove that, but he couldn’t help but to run it as a brief possibility.
“I can see to them,” he said simply, diligently setting to work on applying the ointment slowly. They were raw as he’d anticipated from her declaration, something that only made his frown all the more pronounced the longer he tended to each one with the utmost care. He could think of dozens of people more qualified for this than him, one in particular stood out in his mind, but he was all she had; he’d look after Kitty just fine.
“Later,” he started in a still hushed tone of voice. “I will see to getting you some painkillers.” He kept no drugs in the apartment for good reason, but procuring some for her would be a temptation he’d gladly risk. She’d been through inexplicable hell, so affording some grace was the least he could do for his protege.
Kitty remained absolutely silent as Sherlock worked, thankful that she didn’t have to look at him during this entire exchange. She trusted him enough with this, but she was still on edge and anxious. So she focused on a spot on the wall, jaw clenched and eyes closed in a desperate attempt to keep her breathing at a slow and even pace. Partially because she didn’t want to show anymore vulnerabilities despite the trust, and also because it simply hurt to breathe if she didn’t keep it focused and even.
Silence was good. Mostly. While it meant that she didn’t have to speak or use her voice when she didn’t trust it, it also meant thinking. Or in her case, trying to avoid thinking about what had happened. How real it all was.
When Sherlock spoke up, she jolted some before relaxing as much as possible (not much). She registered the words and she knew the risk that was involved. He was an addict. He may be clean now, but he would remain an addict the rest of his life. Painkillers were just as dangerous as any street drug, but she also couldn’t deny that she needed them and that in the immediate aftermath of waking up, she had no desire to leave the brownstone.
“...Thank you.” She knew what it meant so the least she could do was acknowledge it.
The comprehension she had for the lengths he was going to for her could be measured in the simple words of gratitude. Without any hesitation, he’d gladly walk the gauntlet of a chemist’s for her sake, she’d experienced something so heinous that some relief was necessary. If anything, it meant he’d make extra time for an additional visit to a meeting the following week. As much as he was loathe to admit their usefulness, he needed them.
Not as much as he needed to be there for her. So, as soon as he had finished tending to her wounds, he’d see to pouring her some tea and be on his way. Any plans for the day would have to be suspended, but that was fine, too. Any time lost on open cases could be made up for at night while she rested. If she had trouble doing that, then he’d sit with her in companionable silence until she was ready for something else to distract her.
He only offered a nod before ultimately leaving her side, but he’d make haste. It wouldn’t do to leave her on her own for too long with whatever unpleasant thoughts carried on swirling on inside her head.