Chapter Text
There is this child he sees, and the boy makes no sense - Sherlock looks and looks, but nothing makes sense: Despite his normally calm exterior, he reacts too intensely to certain stimuli - a black dog, flaming oil, spirographs - a sure sign of intense trauma; he intensely enjoys the wind, lifting his hands and laughing; he hates the death of spiders - you killed one in front of him, and he just stared and stared and stared.
And sometimes, when he’s alone in a corner, you see him crying, and you use his flurry of body motion and the way that he clutches himself to deduct that he has lost sometime important, so very important, and this is what causes you to talk to him.
“So, Mr. Egbert, what went missing?” And this is the moment John looks at you, and you decide that this kid is an enigma, and that he will be solved.
It had taken a hardly a modicum of time to figure out his profession – a businessman. It was obvious from the way his hair was cut – a short cut often required by leading enterprises. His fingers were well worn, the type of worn that one gets when one does nothing but type, and sign papers, and type some more. His skin is pale, but slightly worn in the way that occurs when one does nothing but get exposed to fluorescent ultraviolet lights in cubicles.
The last clue is that he fidgets, and looks around, the way that someone does when they’re trapped in a life they don’t want. The thing that makes you curious is that he isn’t looking in general – no, he’s looking for a specific someone. His eyes flicker and pause over certain key things – a pair of black shades, particularly round glasses, a short blond bobcut, and one time he stopped and looked particularly long at a ventriloquist performing with a poorly crafted puppet.
It’s so pathetically easy to get him to start talking.
“Someone went missing,” you say. “Short blonde hair, a particular affinity for sewing, occasionally dabbled in Lovecraftian theory, like spiders and had a particular affiliation for the number eight. Probably wore loose clothing – likely just a T-shirt and jeans. ”
The beginning of the sentence had gone well – a particular dilation of his eye revealed hope, excitement, but somehow you messed up. The spider track had been all wrong – you’d manage to associate it with a girl, he showed the same signs of remembering, possibly think he recognized, someone he had formed a mating fondness for: a slight parting of the lips, a flaring of the nostrils.
It wasn’t a stretch to say that the girl who liked horrorterrors was the same one who had a particularly fondness of spiders – but no, it was two separate girls, and you made some obvious mistake somewhere, didn’t see some slight difference in reaction.
“Sorry, but I don’t think I recognize her.”
-_-_-
The second time you see him is in an investigation of a murder suspect – if you can even call it that, because it took you two seconds to realize it was the woman whom John Egbert had turned out to be dating. A renowned gambler, alcoholic, and self-proclaimed fortune teller, Abigail Smith had been a lon dark-haired beauty well known around that area of town. The case had appeared to hold at least a smidgen of challenge, but an unnoticed cartridge filled with too many references to luck and a slight ‘elooooooongation’ on several of the words had made it so simple that well, a normal person could’ve figured it out on their own.
The crime scene had been bloody enough, and you are hardly shocked when you enter her house hold and she that she was stupid enough to not even clean up before going home.
The young man had become unnerved when you saw him, so unnerved that even though you lacked a police badge, or any form of identification, he’s rambling everywhere.
“I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen! She just picked up up that cash register and threw it, and- I would’ve done anything! She’s the closest thing I have! Please, I’ll take the blame for her, just let me keep in touch with her and…”
You ignore the rambling and simply take a look at the small apartment complex. Spider motif on the pillows, pet tarantula trapped in a cage, an unorthodox amount of webbing bundled up in a corner of the room.
You lead him outside, and he’s still talking, and he looks so small when you look down on him.
“You’re looking for an approximation of someone . An approximation of several someones. Whenever you find someone similar enough, you latch on, blatantly ignore whatever obvious mental disorders are apparent within them. Maybe you relate – you might suffer from paranoid personality disorder, yet you seem to lack the maladaptive social functions inherent with it. Search of such archtypes indicates that you are trying to find some small trace from the past, and you’ll use whatever charm you need to find it. However, on the contrary-“
John Egbert raises a hand to interrupt you, but you steamroll over his words.
“On the contrary, you’ve mastered a complex system of maintaining a safe emotional distance from everyone. You approach people who fit one of several predetermined sets of characteristics, and sometimes you become close, you try to tell them what the hell happened to you, and they leave you. But you’re prepared for that too, aren’t you? You were hardly nothing in that room, just a small dufflesack resting in the corner – no one who had planned to stay for long would’ve let it sit and accumulate that weeks worth of dust. And finally, when you are evicted from their life, you can simply pick it up and go, and meander your way across someone else’s mind scape.”
John Egbert is dumbfounded, which is the exact same way everyone else has reacted when they first heard one of your deductions. It is also a handy marker saying that ‘Yes, you are right.’
“There’s a coffeeshop down the road that is supposedly very popular, despite the lackluster ingredients that few ever bother to notice. We can go down there. You can help me figure you out, and maybe, in exchange, I can give you someone who’ll believe what you have to say.”
In the end, he follows without complaint.