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It was perfectly understandable that John elected to punch him in the face the first time he showed up at Baker Street 221b after the fall. He probably deserved it, too, and therefore made no effort to dodge the blow, barely felt the sting of it even though John must have put all of his strength behind it. He held on through the shouting and accusations, seeing too easily how half-hearted they were, and he thought he should have been able to grant John the least of possible dignities and be fooled by his rage. All he heard was relief, and when there were no more words and the silence that came was so much more honest, and when John started crying with hands clenched in his trench coat, something grew in his throat and choked him, choked all the words he had meant to say. It was surprising, shocking even, that for the first time in his life he had nothing to say, and his confidence crumbled to nothing no matter how hard he tried to find it again. There was nothing to say, nothing to make it better, and there was something hard-edged in his chest that was the realisation he could have done nothing else but fall.
He had enjoyed watching John from afar. It was a strange, perverse sort of pleasure, laced with guilt, again something unfamiliar. He had never felt the need to engage in this particular sort of social construct, this discomfort at something considered unacceptable. When he liked something, he had never felt the need to apologise for it. And yet now – strange. Then when he watched John quietly break apart, he felt like breaking apart himself, like there was something inside him dying little by little and he couldn’t even properly observe or understand it. He shied away from the feeling. It was nothing like other lingering pains that had always brought the need to poke and prod until he could categorise them away.
Life was rather hectic for a while when he came back, and he welcomed the distraction. Analysing his own feeling was something of a habit to him, but now he was afraid. It felt cowardly, and unlike him, and he had liked to think he had known himself enough to never flinch away from something that lurked inside his own brain. It was there, he could almost feel it physically, but when he thought of examining it, something curled tight in his stomach and he tasted bitterness on his tongue, an acrid taste of fear.
He didn’t examine it. He made excuses. Life was difficult enough, and it was understandable he was out of balance. He just needed a moment to get back on his feet again. It was so normal that it should have been frightening, but was better than the alternative. If gods had existed, they would have been laughing at Sherlock Holmes.
It was all about John, and piece by piece he understood it, understood how his brain twisted into a new shape, something that was unwelcome and held his throat closed tight while it should have been liberating. He’d done research. The results were inconclusive, even though humanity seemed to have devoted most of its time to this particular subject. So much information and nothing really useful. The world was apparently bent on making his life difficult.
Or maybe, he thought not for the first time, there was something wrong with him, not with the others. It was an obvious enough conclusion. He could have attributed it to smaller brains working wrong, but it happened too much, too often. The living tried to tell him that. The dead kept telling him that through pages of books and terabytes of data. He had never believed it, not really, because he could see obvious advantages to keeping himself sane, and there was no other way around it, because he could not reach into his head and turn it right, whatever right meant.
It had never been a problem, so he’d paid little attention to it anyway. But when it became a problem, he had no idea how to deal with it. He knew how to thwart a madman’s plan, how to reason and notice and save people in the process, mostly accidentally. He slowly and painfully learnt how to have a conscience, how to be a friend, maybe, though he made such a poor job of it. He could see it, of course, he saw everything, what a gift that was a curse, this clarity of sight. Back then, years earlier, he had thought about gouging his eyes out. He’d have done it in a drug-fueled haze, probably, but he hadn’t been able to coordinate his hands well enough, and then he forgot.
It wasn’t easy, remembering it, and yet seemed the simplest thing in the world compared to John. Surprisingly, shockingly enough, painfully enough. That was the worst part. Seeing and understanding with razor-sharp quality helped nothing when he couldn’t change himself, when it was all about something inherent, unchangeable, written into his DNA and seared into his brain. He couldn’t believe otherwise, because he knew he wasn’t sick, it was about his brain wired this way, and he was too clever to fool himself into thinking otherwise.
Accepting himself was fine. He had done it long before. As his brother was fond of saying, Sherlock was too much of a self-proclaimed, self-centered genius to do something as daft as hating himself for something he was born with. Accepting himself didn’t prevent it from hurting, for wishing desperately he was different.
It should have been easy, he thought, stupidly. It was his to decide, so why he couldn’t?
He watched John come to the realisation. It was calmer than he’d thought it would be. He’d expected a crisis, maybe more of a struggle, but then he thought that for John watching Sherlock fall had probably been harder than adjusting a facet of himself, something he must have suspected earlier anyway. Or maybe he hadn’t, maybe it was the fall that did it, and Sherlock felt sickeningly guilty for nights in a row, unable to sleep and masking it with sarcasm, with endless suites on his violin until it screeched and cried under his hands.
He was afraid to ask. He clung to the hope that it was all his imagination, again – for the first time engaging in something so pointless as self-deceit. That he wasn’t a woman, that John’s feelings for him were covered in too many scars, that what he had done was unforgivable and it was preposterous of him to think that John could possibly love him. He wished John didn’t. It didn’t matter whether John was attracted to him, he probably wasn’t, Sherlock didn’t think so, but it changed nothing, nothing at all. He wouldn’t be able to return physical attraction anyway. It was something about himself he had realised years earlier and rarely thought it troubling.
Love, on the other hand. It should have been easy to return. He was – fond of John. Obviously. He had taken a fall for him. And maybe he loved John, yes, but wasn’t in love, he could never be, and it had never been a problem, it had never troubled him until a moment he looked into John’s eyes and saw something that should have been a cause for joy but instead filled him with dread. Falling in love had never seemed appealing to him, but wanting it and being unable to, oh, what a twisted irony. He loved John, so he’d never want him hurt, so he wanted him happy and satisfied, and cold sure realisation he could do neither was chilling like a winter’s touch.
There were words for it and he knew them all, had been applying them to himself for years. It was clear they weren’t words for a sickness. He wasn’t sick. Calling himself sick would make all the others like him sick and he would never done that. He was just – himself. Nothing more and nothing less. He was just himself, and helpless, and ashamed for something he should never be ashamed for. It was a noose around his neck and he kept twisting it, all the time wishing he could just loosen his fingers and let himself breathe.
He had been called a freak many times. He wouldn’t dare to call himself a freak over something like this. It should have been easy. It should have been simple.
Never before had he felt more like an alien over something that should have never been alienating.