Chapter Text
“Nothing here,” the man whispered, running his index finger down a page of notes. “Nothing—nothing!” He slammed the folder shut and pounded its leather surface with a closed fist. “Why is there never any connection? There has to be!” Snarling, he picked up the folder and hurled it across the room, wrinkled pages spilling out the sides as it hit the polished wooden wall of his study and fell pathetically to the floor. The man paid it no mind; he rose from his overstuffed chair and stalked towards the filing cabinet in the corner, digging through the sparse collection of files. “There’s a connection. There has to be,” he muttered, wrenching folders out seemingly at random and throwing them haphazardly in the direction of his desk. “Not this one, not this one—damnit, there has to be something. Anything! If I can just—“
It was clear that he would find nothing. With a groan that bordered on a wail, he sank to the floor, pounding a fist childishly in the worn carpet. It could do with a cleaning; indeed, the entire office was a mess of tracked in dirt and old coffee stains, its air reeking of neglect. The man buried his face in his hands, desperation seeming to radiate from his body. “Why?” he whispered finally, clutching at his hair and pulling at it, seemingly oblivious to his actions. “I know there’s a connection. I know it! My life’s work—” He groaned again, slumping forward until he was nearly prostrate on the floor.
“I have to do it,” he muttered, his words slurring together slightly. “My life’s work, my entire reason for living, if I can’t find the right connection, it was all for nothing. Look at them, all those people who said I couldn’t do it!” He laughed, but there was no mirth in the noise. “I’ll show them they were wrong. They are wrong! We can understand this, it’s all so simple—it just has to be proven!” He slammed his fist against the filing cabinet, adding yet another dent to the myriad that adorned its surface. The cabinet creaked in protest, but the hardy thing would have never survived its owner if it could not handle a few blows now and again.
Trembling, the man rose and made his way back to his desk, trembling and stumbling over loose papers and cracked leather folders. With a sigh, he sank into his chair and leaned forward, clearing the debris from off of his keyboard. The old desktop computer whined and whirred as he turned it on, bypassing the warnings that it had been improperly shut down the last time he had used it. “No funding, no grants, not even a good word for my name—damn it all, I’m going to have to rely on volunteers,” he growled, pulling up his word processor and hammering away at the keyboard. “I’ll show them. I don’t care how. I’ll prove it—they’ll never say it can’t be done. I can prove it! Even if they don’t give me a chance!”
He sat in silence for a few moments, and then returned to his writing. When he had finished, he read it over a few times, making edits where they were needed until he had produced a perfectly innocuous piece of writing. He rubbed a hand over his bloodshot eyes and reached through the mess of papers, digging through them until he saw the edge of his most recent bank statement. He scanned the paper briefly, checking the balance on his main account. It was low, far lower than he would have liked. He was going to have to sell the house if he could not produce publishable results in enough time—and he couldn’t stand that. The house was all he had left of his own, the only thing that was his and his alone, not to be shared or fretted over or even known of by friend or family or wife.
Still, there was enough money in his bank account to place an advertisement in the local newspaper. He had done this often enough that he had the appropriate email address memorized. With a growl, he pulled up his email account and typed away furiously, pasting the document he had just finished into the body of the email, and attaching it just in case—he could afford to have nothing left to chance here. His livelihood, his reputation—everything he had was on the line with this. He could not afford to fail, not now.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Three months after graduating from college and moving to London, Sherlock already had his routine down. Wake up in the morning, run down to the shop on the corner to pick up a bagel, coffee, and the newspaper; eat breakfast, have a smoke, briefly check his investments, read the newspaper and scan for anything interesting—not that there was ever anything interesting; the rest of the day was spent in vain attempts to amuse himself. It was all so dull, so ordinary—nothing that he would have ever imagined himself doing in his plans for his life. His internship with the local psychiatrist’s office had ended several weeks ago, and the stimulation he had hoped he would find there had not been forthcoming. People were so petty, with their tiny concerns and their small minds, never anything new and interesting. They were all the same, and the several months he had spent as an intern had only served to destroy any thoughts he had had about actually going into the psychiatric field. In the end, he had been left with a graduate degree in psychology that he had no interest in using, and what looked like a seemingly endless life of boredom and monotony.
It was with reluctance that he pulled himself out of bed and made his way to the shop. The cashier recognized him coming in and already had his cigarettes in her hand by the time he reached the cash register, coffee in hand, bagel and newspaper tucked under his arm. She no longer bothered asking him for his ID; she knew full well that he was of age, the number of times he came into the store. With a polite smile and a quick thank you, Sherlock was out of the shop and back onto the street in a span of only a few minutes. Well, he supposed he had nothing better to do than eat his breakfast and thumb his way through the paper yet again. How perfectly dull.
Some scandal involving a politician, a few sports players suspended for their conduct—the newspaper was full of uninteresting stories, scrounged up to fill space and keep the news industry afloat. Sherlock paused to read a short piece about a girl found drowned in her bathtub by her parents, but it was cut and dry, already solved, and lacking in the sorts of details that would actually make for an interesting story. Within half an hour he had read all the news of the day, and was onto the obituary section. He lit a cigarette, skimming through the obituaries to see if there was anything of note, but nothing interesting popped up. He sighed and closed the page, flipping it over to look at the advertisements in the back. One or two times he had seen ads of interest, but for the most part they were all the same—used cars for sale, missing cats, job offers.
The only thing of note today was an advertisement placed for volunteers in a psychological study. Accepting people of all backgrounds—men and women; people of any racial, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds would be considered. There was no mention of the point of the study, only that hours were flexible and the person who had placed the ad was willing to accept anyone who could make time for it. No doubt it was a grad student who realized that he or she was late in forming a thesis. Sherlock skimmed it over a few times, before throwing the paper down with a sigh. It did not seem like it would be terribly interesting, but nothing else in his life was—maybe this study would surprise him.
In any case, he supposed may as well see what it was all about. It was not as if he had anything better to do.