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Sherlock grows up in a manor house, with wrought iron gates so tall their fancy metal embellishments seem to reach out to touch the sky. There’s acres of land, a lake, a boathouse, and gardens with stretching lawns that look like they've been trimmed with nail scissors.
He has a governess. She makes him write out lines, calling him obnoxious and rude when he completes his maths and science and history and Latin in less time than it took her to set him the work.
It makes him more determined to better her, to better everyone, to look down on those who can’t grasp the lofty heights of his superior intelligence.
His brother leaves for boarding school, leaves in a suit that’s new and uncomfortable, and he keeps fiddling with the cuffs until mummy gives him an umbrella to hold instead and tell him to stand up straight for a photo.
When he returns for the holidays, he looks down his nose at Sherlock, who runs to the door to greet him and ask him for stories about school, and waves his younger brother away with his umbrella, accepting hugs and kisses from mummy with the patience of a martyr.
Sherlock puts the dead frog he was going to show him back into his pocket, and stays up much too late dissecting it with mummy’s tweezers and special sharp sewing scissors, trying to overhear what Mycroft is saying about politics through the drawing room ceiling.
He stores up all the things he’s noticed and wants to say, stores them all up in different compartments in his head, and knows that one day he can tell them all the things they should know. He can tell them all.
///
Come spring time, mummy pushes him out into the garden and tells him to stop messing around in the library.
He drags his feet in the dewy grass, and quotes out the Latin names of the herbs in the herb garden, so that all the birds can hear him.
He runs down the stretch of the fence in the gap between it and the tall hedge, letting his fingers skip over the railings.
There’s a housing estate there, backing onto the very boundary of the manor house land, and there is a boy, a boy of his age, playing football against the brick wall, noisy and shouting.
The boy spots him, kicks the ball towards him and somehow it gets wedged under the bottom rail.
He runs over, blond hair sticking up at all angles and his face smiling.
Sherlock stares.
“Hullo,” the boy says.
Sherlock stares.
“Why are you wearing a waistcoat?” The boy asks, and he must be older than Sherlock, he’s probably even nearly 10, but Sherlock is almost as tall, and has a fence between them, and feels quite important because the other boy is scruffy and common.
“Why are you wearing a jumper?” He asks haughtily in return.
The boy grins wider.
“It’s comfy,” he answers, simply. “And I use it as a goalpost when I get too hot.”
“You smile a lot,” Sherlock says fiercely.
“You have long hair like a girl,” the boy returns, eyes sparkling. “Do you want to come and play football?”
Sherlock looks pointedly at the fence between them.
The blonde haired boy shrugs.
“I’ll pretend you’re there anyway,” he decides, running a few paces away to fetch the ball.
Sherlock watches him dribble it round in a circle.
“Watson boots it past the defender, and GOOOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!”
He raises his arms into the air, and Sherlock stares.
“You were the defender,” the boy tells him, pointlessly.
Sherlock stares.
///
The boy’s not there the next day, or the next. Sherlock deduces that he must go to school, and stands at the fence watching the motionless house, because he’s hiding from his violin teacher, who says he plays everything much too fast, and tells him he should slow down and feel the emotion of the melody.
Sherlock doesn’t want to.
A few weeks later, he sees a familiar blond head and hears the sound of a stick being dragged along the fence.
“Watson.”
“Bloody hell,” the boy gasps, and Sherlock frowns at his language. “You scared me.”
Sherlock frowns some more.
“It’s John,” the boy grins.
“You go to big school,” Sherlock points out.
“Yes,” John says. “High school. I’m 11.”
Sherlock says nothing.
“Watch this,” John says, “I bet I can throw this stick to hit that tree over there.”
Sherlock watches.
“I could probably do that with my eyes closed,” John says, swaggering.
Sherlock can play Mozart with his eyes closed. It doesn't seem like quite enough to impress John. He wants to be better.
“You got hit today at school,” he says, instead, and John visibly balks.
“No I didn’t,” he says quickly.
“Yes you did,” Sherlock says.
John glowers at him. “Who told you?” He asks, suspiciously.
“You’ve rolled your sleeve down,” Sherlock explains, and you’ve got a red mark on your wrist.”
“I hit him back,” John says, defensively, “I hit him first, he doesn’t even know my sister.”
“I bet he couldn’t hit that tree from all the way over here,” Sherlock blurts out, and John looks up from scuffing at the grass with worn trainers.
“What’s your name?” John demands.
“Sherlock Holmes.”
John crinkles his nose. “Sherlock,” he tries, rolling the name on his tongue. “Cool.”
///
He’s sent away to school a year early. The boys laugh at him and laugh at his name and laugh when he tries to help them by telling them things they don’t know.
No one there asks him to play football with them.
No one there says he’s ‘cool’.
He rushes out into the garden when the car brings him up the drive of the manor house. He forgets his coat and it’s cold but he thinks he’ll be warm if he sees John’s smile.
But when John appears, a few days later, he’s not smiling.
“Hullo Sherlock,” he says, and Sherlock has so many things he wants to tell John, about all the things he’s learnt and he thinks that maybe John will hear him.
John sniffs loudly and sits cross legged on the grass, picking at it with his fingers.
Sherlock peers at him, pressing his head against the bars.
“John?”
“What’s your dad like, Sherlock?” John asks.
Sherlock thinks about the frowning dark haired man and the heavy hand on the back of his neck.
“He’s away a lot,” he says.
“Mine’s not coming back,” John says, and sniffs again, and Sherlock thinks he might be crying, because he shuffles round on the grass so his back’s to the fence, and Sherlock’s fingers flex around the bars.
///
Mummy talks in whispers to her friend Caroline over afternoon tea. A soldier, killed in action, the family just informed, only the mother now, and god knows how she’ll be able to raise two children in the tiny house on just her teacher’s salary, and what with her working hours, the kids will have to cope on their own most of the time. Should they invite them over for tea? Oh no, the younger girl’s a lost cause, a troublemaker, the family not worth the hassle, it will blow over soon.
He goes away to school again, and decides that they’re all idiots. He decides that everyone’s an idiot.
But maybe not John.
///
It’s nearly 2 years until he sees John again, and it’s summer, and John’s a teenager now, and grins at Sherlock through the fence and asks all about his school and Sherlock has to extrapolate a little, about his knowledge of the school sports teams, but it’s worth making some slight assumptions for the John’s complete devoted attention.
John talks mostly about a girl at his school, and over a few weeks, goes from loving her to hating her and back again, and Sherlock listens dutifully, so that he can get back to telling John about the encyclopaedia he found in the school library that is just about the biggest book he’s ever managed to read in one night.
John plays rugby at school now, and he’s not as big as the other boys but Sherlock’s sure he tries twice as hard as they do.
When Sherlock is due to be bundled back to boarding school, John says he’ll see him in a few months, and to make sure he remembers to eat and sleep, ‘cos otherwise he’ll never be big and strong enough to climb over the fence and help him train for rugby’.
Sherlock wonders if it’s the fact that the fence is there that’s allowing them to be friends.
///
At Christmas, John has a new jumper, and he wears it as though he’s been forced to by social decorum, and Sherlock knows exactly what that feels like, but is truthful when he says he likes it.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” John tells him, “like my uncle.”
He pauses. “My mum says girls like doctors.”
“Why?” Sherlock asks.
“I don’t know,” John says, but adds, “Maybe because they’re clever and they can sew.”
Sherlock can sew. And he’s clever. But no one seems to like him.
The only girl he knows is Lily Adler’s daughter, and she’s silly and wears dresses and has never once said he’s cool.
///
Sherlock is sent to a boarding school in France, and that means spending holidays with his grandmother.
Sherlock steals her cigarettes for the sole purpose of rebelling against the force of higher power, and climbs up onto the roof of the summerhouse to blow smoke into the still night air.
After 18 months, his grandmother has finally had enough, screaming at him in a mixture of French and English, screaming at him because he won’t go to church, because he torments her hens, and because of his awful experiments.
He’s sent back to the boarding school in England, and the boys laugh at him because he offers them French insults from a distance.
///
When he sees John next, it’s his own birthday, he’s a teenager now, and Mycroft is staying at the manor, and rearranging the whole of mummy’s household staff, and Sherlock is in a foul mood, which only turns blacker and darker when he gets to the fence to find John in some sort of entanglement with a girl on the grass.
Neither of them notice Sherlock, and he stomps angrily around in the rose bed.
John calls him over, a bit later, and he’s smiling warmly, but unlike usual, this time it makes Sherlock angry.
“Hello Sherlock,” he greets, running a hand through his blond hair. “Bloody hell you’ve got tall!”
You’re an idiot, he tries to say, I didn’t want you as my friend anyway.
John’s grown too, not taller, he’s filled out with muscle, his shoulders broad and sure.
“It’s my birthday,” he says instead, coldly, as though John should have known.
“Happy birthday,” John says, dutifully, and smiles at him.
It’s infuriating.
“How old are you anyway?”
“13.” He puffs out his chest a bit, but he doesn’t need to, he’s at least 2 inches taller than John now, and probably not as tall as he will be. “Does that matter?” he challenges.
“No,” John says quickly. “It’s fine- it’s all fine.”
Sherlock wants to be better, wants to be able to impress this young man on the other side of the fence, but he can’t think of what to say, so he stays silent and eventually John has to get back to his revision.
///
Sherlock sees a lot more of John, after that, without really meaning to at all.
John seems to want to tell him all about his girlfriend, Mary, and how they’re going to get married one day, once he’s been to university and becomes a doctor, and how he loves her so much it makes other things seem so much less important.
Sherlock’s grandmother comes to stay at the manor the next holiday, and he chain smokes stolen cigarettes and wishes John still wore a cable-knit jumper and wishes John’s smiles were still just for him.
It doesn’t matter anyway, he knows.
People are idiots.
///
The next holiday, he doesn’t see John at all, and he plays Schubert like it’s never been played before, with the maudlin echo of sombre sadness.
Victor knows people are idiots.
Victor acts like a Russian prince and talks like an 18th Century poet.
He tells Sherlock that no one understands tortured souls like them, and that the world will forever be beneath them in its rightful place, as they float over it in salvation.
Victor passes Sherlock a smoking roll-up and Sherlock takes it, because he doesn’t know what this means, and he wants to know what everything means.
Stuff starts to fade together a bit, then.
He finds he can laugh, then, he can laugh at the ridiculous concept of John and Mary, being married, when he’s never even met John, not without a fence in the way.
Mycroft is sent to fetch him, when he refuses to be taken back in the car.
Mycroft tells him he’s to go to Oxford or Cambridge, just like he did, and so he chooses Cambridge, since Mycroft went to Oxford, and he’s 17 and Victor sticks his tongue down his throat and gives him a generous packet of white powder to take with him away with his A level grades.
///
He returns to the manor, if only to collect his things, but he gets pulled into the hedges that line the winding drive.
It’s John.
He feels hot and cold all over.
“I can train as a doctor in the army,” he says. “It can all be paid for, and it means I have to sign up, but I probably won’t have to go out there anyway… it would make me dad proud it would, and I wouldn’t be a hero, not like him, but I could help people, and that’s what I want to do, I just want to help.”
“There are no such things as heroes,” Sherlock snarls, and there aren't, not on his side of the fence.
At least he’s one person that John will never be able to help. It makes him sickly thrilled at this idea.
“I need you to help me,” John says, earnestly, and Sherlock freezes solid as a warm hand clutches his arm.
“I don’t know who else to ask- no one will give me a straight answer.”
He takes a deep breath.
“If I do this, I lose Mary,” he says, delivering the punch line with another flash of swirling honest eyes. “If I do this, my mum can have the money I won’t need in uni, I’ll be doing something for my dad, and he never got to see me make him proud…”
“You should go,” Sherlock urges.
“Should I?”
Sherlock feels hateful and brilliant and alive.
“Go,” he repeats, and he hates repeating himself.
He hates everyone. Especially John.
“Okay.” John says, and Sherlock breathes a sigh of relief, that catches and rips at his throat as John squeezes his wrist and lets go.
He goes.
Sherlock doesn’t stop him.
///
It’s easy to hide in Cambridge, where everyone expects him to stand out.
Everyone hates him. They don’t laugh like they used to- they hurl clever insults and make his life as difficult as possible when he points out things that they just don’t seem to see, and makes it some sort of sick game to break up relationships and friendships and stand at the edge and watch the chaos unfold through cold blue eyes.
He gets drugs, somehow.
He pushes for more, for less, for a few lucid moments of just being able to not see. To not see the details, to not see every tiny detail, to notice everything, and not be able to stop himself on fixating on that until he could. To not see John, a blond haired boy with a cable knit jumper on the other side of the fence. To not see the possibility of life and an end of loneliness, had there not been a forest of iron between them.
Mycroft is in London, he pleases mummy with exaggerated extravagance, not actually showing his face but having Sherlock shepherded around the city in a whirl of three-piece suits.
It’s enough and it’s too much.
He finds the best of the best, and he’s laughing, he’s laughing so much because people are idiots, and he’s always been circled off with a fence, and now he’s screaming, he’s screaming at the top of his voice because there’s a fence all around him and he can’t escape.
A police detective. Married, two kids. No. Delete. Failing marriage, two kids.
“Shut the fuck up,” he shouts, and Sherlock twists his arms and legs because he wants to twist the gates of time.
He cries then.
He’s never cried.
The man sighs and gathers him in his arms with barely any effort at all.
John would have reminded him to eat and sleep.
John was gone. Gone.
///
Lestrade is no good at his job, Sherlock points this out to him when he’s sober.
Lestrade just raises his eyebrows and tells him he’ll be happy to pay for him to put a few hours in to help out, if he knew he wasn’t going to fly high on it.
Mummy turns up in London, he doesn’t really get a choice on going to rehab, because if he’s cut off from the family money, there’s no one else.
He doesn’t have friends.
Lestrade has taken it upon himself to keep half an eye on Sherlock, Sherlock acts like this is a huge imposition on him, but when Lestrade asks him one morning, after he’s spent the night on his couch, who ‘John’ is, he walks around London until he finds a case to solve to put a roof over his head.
He is a police detective though, and however terrible Sherlock claims he is at his job, his wife’s left him and he’s not got much to do on the weekend that’s not his turn to have the kids other than find out who John is.
He’s completely forgotten about it when months later, months filled with trying to keep Sherlock from completely ruining his career with his nonchalant treatment of crime scenes, he receives a phonecall.
“Mr Lestrade?”
“Er… hello?”
“We have received an inquiry in your name about Captain John Watson.”
“Oh?”
He’d contacted Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, who had given him this name, but since there had been a ‘sudden crime wave’ in the city, he hadn’t chased up the information.
And there had been that weekend, with the whiskey, and his ex-wife…
“I’m afraid he’s been shot.”
Lestrade feels a heaviness in his stomach. He’s never met the guy but this news shook him more than it would if it were a complete stranger.
“Shot dead?” He asks.
There’s a dry laugh, it’s more of a sneer.
“I think that was the idea,” he’s told, “He’s been transferred to St Bartholomew’s hospital, London, as of this morning.”
“Wow, okay, thank you.”
///
He goes there that afternoon, looks through the glass at the tired soldier looking terribly small and helpless and grey against the blue hospital gown and cold sterile sheets of the hospital bed.
Sherlock asks why he’s been to the hospital, and he doesn’t even know what to say.
“If John Watson had been killed in service, how would you feel?”
The sharp convulsion this brings tells him everything he needs to know.
Sherlock’s fingers twitch, and the intricacies of the room suddenly scream and bellow at him, the walls are closing in, crushing him.
“Where is he?” He asks, after a long while.
He wishes he had learnt to knit, he could have made a jumper.
“Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re clean and dry,” Lestrade tells him.
“John wouldn’t care,” Sherlock spits back, “John went away.”
He told him to go.
“Friends care,” Lestrade says lowly, and Sherlock curls his fingers into his palms, and he can almost feel the cruel fence bars held there.
///
He makes sure he visits only when John is asleep.
He stands the other side of the glass and presses his fingertips so firmly against it they hurt.
He memorises the lines of fighting and horror and war on a beautiful face.
John lies still in sedated sleep.
Sherlock stares.
///
Sherlock lives in an apartment with 2 bedrooms, more than a few illegally procured police files, and a human skull.
He has a landlady, who is not his housekeeper, but brings him tea and biscuits and cleans his kitchen sink anyway, and fusses around him and completely ignores the fact that he’s obnoxious and loud and rude.
Mrs Hudson, her name is, and she answers the door to a young man with a cane and blonde hair that looks like it’s been sticking up at all angles, and then flattened down with a damp hand.
He smiles.
“Hello.”
Sherlock stands at the top of the stairs, hears Mrs Hudson send him right up, with the promise that she’ll be up later with a cup of tea, because he’s not to touch the milk in the fridge, it’s probably not that safe.
“I never wanted you to go,” Sherlock yells, and John smiles, like he’s so happy to see him he doesn’t really care what he says or does.
“You’re still skinny,” he comments, casually, “But I reckon you could find a way to get over that fence now… would you still want to?”
Sherlock is incapable of a reply, and unsure of the etiquette to use in the presence of his one friend.
John solves the problem for him, and he already knows he’s going to get pretty used to that happening.
John’s lips brush his like the first sweep of an artist’s paintbrush, steady but wary, and Sherlock closes his eyes, and he’s better now, he’s so much better, and he’s going to impress this man likes he’s always wanted to do.
///
He sleeps, with John entangled with him in the sheets, their naked bodies exhausted and sated and happy.
He’s so happy, because he tells John everything and John listens, and John helps him to see the things that he didn’t know he needs to see, and John means that he doesn’t have to see everything, and John means that it’s not too much, it’s always enough, it’s amazing, fantastic, brilliant.
///
John wakes up the next morning and pulls on his lucky cable knit to go and make tea.
Sherlock corners him in the kitchen, arms circling him, lips pliant and seeking warm skin, yearning and learning and soft with seduction.
“Why are you wearing a jumper?” He asks.
John pulls it off.
///
Finis.