Chapter Text
Sherlock is seven years old and already unruly. It is the deepest, coldest part of February and he has trudged through the snow and over the crunching, frozen grass to the edge of the Holmes estate, where its border is defined by a large pond. The relentless chill of winter has rendered the water a perfectly flat, white space amidst the trees and scrubby bushes in the between-spaces of other large, old houses. He wants to slide across it on his belly like the penguins he saw on the telly, or perhaps take precise steps so as to write his name on the surface in huge letters that people might be able to see from aeroplanes. He wonders if the fish and turtles are still alive beneath the thick surface, and makes a note in his head to remember to look it up in Mummy’s encyclopædia.
“Father isn’t going to like it when he realises you’ve gone out without permission.”
Mycroft’s voice behind him makes him startle; he’d got so absorbed in his thoughts about aquatic life that he hadn’t even heard him come shuffling through the snow. Mycroft is fourteen and thinks he knows everything, and Sherlock is worried that he just might. But Sherlock can still pinch at his belly and mimic his voice when it cracks in the middle of him speaking, and Mycroft will still turn red.
Sherlock wonders if he should tell Mycroft Father won’t realise Sherlock is even gone at all because he’s in the guest room with the housekeeper called Elsa making stupid noises again and wouldn’t be out until Mummy comes home at four. Sherlock came outside because it was annoying, and because it made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t even really know what they were doing, just that it seemed like it might be wrong.
“I only wanted to look at the pond,” Sherlock settles on saying. “I want to walk on it.”
Mycroft looks back at the house, then out over the blank expanse for a few moments, considering.
“I saw some men walking across it yesterday,” he says. “Let’s see if we can get to the Fillmore’s bank.”
Sherlock is surprised and secretly delighted that Mycroft didn’t think his idea was stupid. It’s becoming rarer now that he’s anything but dismissive of anything Sherlock suggests. Sherlock runs out onto the ice, slipping and sliding around, giddy with excitement. He falls down, but takes the opportunity to spin on his bottom in a circle. Mycroft goes by in a blur as he takes careful steps toward where he’s spinning. Sherlock decides he wants to make it to the Fillmore’s side first, and so he scrambles up, still dizzy, and makes a break for it.
Suddenly there is a loud crack. It echoes through the space above them, making the crows squawk and flap and fly off in a great, black rustling cloud.
Sherlock turns and Mycroft has disappeared.
Then he sees it: one red-mittened hand flail up from the ice, throwing off an arc of water that shimmers in the cold afternoon sun.
Sherlock’s heart begins to beat very hard up inside the base of his throat. But though he is only seven, he is a very smart boy. He gets as close to the hole as he can then lunges forward and slides on his front like the penguins after all, spreading himself out like a starfish. Just below the murky surface, he sees a flash of auburn hair, and when the red mitten flies up again, he catches hold and pulls as hard as he can.
Mycroft’s round, pale face breaks the surface, and he is spluttering and gasping Sherlock’s name. His other arm flings out of the dark water and scrapes across the ice. Sherlock clamps onto it, and inch by inch, manages to pull Mycroft out of the hole far enough that he can grab him by the belt and heave him the rest of the way up. He rolls out and over onto the ice, soaking wet and shivering and gulping in air. Sherlock lays next to him, willing his birdlike heart to slow again, watching both their steamy puffs of breath rise up above them and become part of the clouds in the sky.
After the adrenaline passes through them, Mycroft wordlessly grabs Sherlock’s hand and holds it tight. They sit up and carefully drag themselves across the creaking ice back to their own bank of the pond.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Sherlock says. What he means really is Are you all right and I was scared to death.
“I know it wasn’t,” replies Mycroft, and means It’s okay, I’m fine and Thank you.
As it happens, Mummy comes home later and finds Mycroft’s sodden coat hanging in the cellar, and she knows what happened without them even saying a word, as she always seems to. She begins to shiver like she was the one who fell into the freezing water, and Sherlock watches Mycroft try to calm her, until she asks where their Father was when all this happened.
Mummy looks like she is desperate to know, and Sherlock hates the feeling of wanting to know something and not being able to. So Sherlock tells her Father was with Elsa making stupid noises upstairs, and then she goes very still. Mycroft turns redder than he’s ever seen him turn before, and Sherlock thinks his brother might be ill until he shoots him a glare that makes Sherlock’s insides drop.
Mummy doesn’t shout until later, when she thinks Sherlock and Mycroft are asleep. But Sherlock listens through the doors of the library.
How could you, Siger? I thought you were through with all of that, and He could have died! They both could have, while you were up here with your –
“It’s not good to eavesdrop, Sherlock,” says Mycroft from behind him, and though he didn’t hear him come down the hall, this time somehow Sherlock expected him to be there.
The next day, Father leaves. Sherlock doesn’t see much of him at all after that.
Both Mummy and Mycroft look at him differently from then on, and it doesn’t take long for Sherlock to realise there must be something wrong with him.
---
Victor is strange.
Not the same kind of strange as Sherlock, but somehow they discover their strangenesses are compatible. They even meet under the oddest of circumstances; Sherlock bears a scar on his right ankle, the crescent shape of a dog’s bite. Victor gives the bullish thing away to a friend and apologises profusely for days before Sherlock realises he means it sincerely, and finally decides he’s worth talking to. When Sherlock tells Victor things about himself Victor had never mentioned out loud, he doesn’t jeer or look at him askance like the others. He smiles, and asks mischievously, “What else?”
Victor is brilliant in ways Sherlock is not, and it’s the first time in his life Sherlock realises that there are ways to be brilliant that aren’t anything like he’s understood before. He’s creative where Sherlock is analytical, his thoughts are frenetic compared against Sherlock’s rigidly ordered mind. Victor wears all his emotions on his sleeve: laughs too loud when he finds something funny, freely weeps when he’s had a stressful day. It’s a little terrifying for Sherlock sometimes, having never been around someone so open – but he thinks that’s why he is so drawn to Victor. It’s unpredictable, and yet he never has to work at interpreting what Victor’s expressions mean.
Sherlock tries very hard not to like him. It doesn’t work.
They spend a summer at Victor’s family home in Norfolk the year they both turn twenty. Victor does not laugh or look at him any differently when Sherlock admits he’s never kissed anyone before.
Victor just leans over and presses his lips to Sherlock’s, and after a moment pulls back again and says, “There. Now you have.”
Sherlock laughs then, and it feels like something that has built up thick inside him is being shaken loose.
“Do that again,” Sherlock says. Victor rises to the dare admirably.
They explore each other’s bodies without shame for the next month. It’s the best experiment Sherlock’s ever done – Victor indulges nearly every curiosity Sherlock can think of, and his reactions are immediate and clear. Sherlock runs his tongue along the curve of Victor’s neck, and he shivers and gives a little moan. Sherlock pinches his nipple too hard and Victor yelps and pushes his fingers away, then tells him how to do it better. Sherlock doesn’t even get bored when they do things like this almost every day. He does get nervous though; he tries not to let on that he is, but Victor can somehow tell. He asks, “Should I stop?” instead of “Do you want me to stop?” because he knows which answer Sherlock needs to give him.
Bit by bit, Sherlock lets himself loosen his vice-grip on controlling his body, the involuntary noises Victor draws out of him, the throb and thrill of nerves through him, if only for a little while. Whenever it happens, Victor holds him tight against his own body, and Sherlock doesn’t feel strange at all.
In fact, it is the happiest he can remember being in a very long time.
But Victor’s father catches them one afternoon, and it ends in shouting and tears Sherlock had neither predicted nor understood the reason for. Sherlock is sent back home that very night, without so much as getting to wish Victor farewell. He sends Victor countless e-mails and even calls him on the phone, but Victor never answers and the housekeepers have been told not to let him come to speak. Sherlock feels his insides tighten and clog up again, though he tries to take solace in the fact that he will at the very least see Victor when the next semester at Uni begins.
A week before that time, he receives a letter from him, handwritten and very short.
Father has transferred me to a different university, it says. He said it will help to cure me. Please don’t try to contact me any more.
Sherlock pores over it for two days searching between and behind each character for a code, a substitution cipher, a double meaning – anything that might make the words less stark and hopeless. It’s wrong, and so stupid. It’s a problem he has got an answer to, except the answer doesn’t make sense at all. He’s furious at Victor for believing the rubbish his father had spouted, but even more so at himself for causing the whole thing to catalyse.
He burns the letter with his cigarette the next day in the garden, watches it curl into brown ashes, grinds it into the wet grass with the heel of his black boot.
“I told you,” says Mycroft, padding over the lawn toward him in expensive shoes. “Emotional investments are anathema to the cultivated mind. You would do well to avoid them.”
Mycroft is back at home unexpectedly; he knows his brother has heard of the way Sherlock has been acting since he was sent home from Norfolk. But it’s too little too late, and Sherlock has felt the resentment growing inside him for Mycroft for a long time. He is twenty-six and thinks he owns the world, and Sherlock is afraid he actually might – if not now, soon. His belly is gone, and so, apparently, is any tendency for him to react with visible emotion to anything.
“I cared for him,” says Sherlock, sounding both defiant and as if he is divulging a secret. It is the clearest truth and yet also a lie; Sherlock suspects care is perhaps too shallow a word for what he actually felt for Victor.
“Caring is not an advantage,” answers Mycroft. It is not the first time he has said it, and it is far from the last. But it is the first time Sherlock truly understands what he means.
Sherlock learns that there must only be pain in allowing himself to become this vulnerable, and so he vows never to let it happen again. He shoves the memory of the entire summer down, far from the usual pathways of his thoughts. It pales, then fades, disintegrating until when recalled the thought of Victor Trevor brings up nothing more than a remote echo of regret and a vague explanation for the scar on his ankle.
---
It is September, and even in the heart of London, Sherlock can sometimes smell the scent of wet earth and fallen leaves. Mummy died a week ago. He never did apologise to her for any of the trouble he’s caused – not with Father, or with the drugs, or with Mycroft.
It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s gone now.
Mycroft is thirty-five and Sherlock doesn’t give a fuck about him, or his insidious surveillance attempts. He flips two fingers at every sleek, black car that rolls by when he comes home from having scored; he offers 20 quid for every closed-circuit camera lens his growing network of eclectic streetwise cohorts blind with spray paint. At the funeral, Sherlock tried to be maliciously delighted that his brother’s waistline had thickened again. But it just made him feel like Mycroft was irritatingly inconsistent in shifting shape, and for some reason it had only made him angry in a sort of hollowed-out way. They didn’t speak a word to each other. They didn’t need to; everything Sherlock was sure Mycroft wanted to say to him was contained in the looks they exchanged, by turns piteous and hostile and withering.
Tonight he’s in his manky flat on Montague Street, and the cocaine is singing inside his veins for the first time in months. The drugs are wonderful. They sharpen his already razor-edged mind, make the idiots tolerable for a while and numb out his useless, inconvenient feelings until even when he’s down he can feel they’ve begun to atrophy. He can only hope they fall away from disuse. There is nothing but the next hit, the next case, the next puzzle for his mind to wrap itself around to keep from going mad.
Sherlock has spent the last week tearing through cold cases he’d filched from the Met’s archives. Grainy crime scene photos are tacked up on his wall and his eyes dart from one group to another. He’s solved six of them already, plus one robbery that took place on Tuesday and a hit-and-run that happened Thursday night. It’s late Friday, possibly very early Saturday and it has been exactly a week since Mummy died and Sherlock is humming with energy and high on triumph and ego. He can’t remember when he last ate or showered, or where exactly his shirt has got to, but it doesn’t matter. He’s fine, he’s better than fine, he’s excellent. He’s perfect. He’s going so fast and being so clever –
And then it’s dark.
And everything smells bitter and tastes bitter and he can’t see or lift his arms or feel and his brain suddenly goes wide and white and blank and –
It’s fucking bliss.
And then everything hurts, and doesn’t stop hurting. His veins burn beneath his itchy skin, but not in the good way he’d come to be so fond of.
“You’re a goddamned bloody idiot, kid,” says the man near his bed. He’s got dark hair just beginning to go silver round the edges, and his words drip with authority and concern.
Lestrade, his addled brain supplies.
“I am, emphatically, not any of those things,” answers Sherlock, and his throat feels raw. He reconsiders as his eyes crack open wider. “On second thought perhaps I am damned by God.”
Lestrade gives a small, rumbly chuckle.
“Certainly seems like you were trying to send yourself to the narrowest circle of hell, amount of junk you had in you.”
“It’s not junk,” Sherlock rasps. “I mixed it myself. It was a precisely balanced seven-percent cocaine solution. I just got a bad batch, is all.”
“You do remember I’m a police officer, right?”
“Oh please. If you wanted me arrested, I’d at least be handcuffed to the bed already. You’re not that much of an idiot. You have some other reason for being here. It’s not a case, though. Pity.”
Lestrade laughs again.
“You’ve been in and out of consciousness and lucidity for the past twelve hours, and yet you knew all that with your eyes barely open. How do you even do that?”
“It’s a sickness,” Sherlock spits sarcastically.
“It’s a gift,” Lestrade retorts, and Sherlock is surprised by the sincerity of his tone, though he doesn’t show it. “Listen – your brother –”
“Oh, this day is just getting better and better isn’t it,” Sherlock interrupts, letting his head flop back against the thin pillow. “Is he here? Do me a favour and just – if any of these machines I’m hooked up to is keeping me alive, unplug it. I’d rather expire than have to see his fat, smug-faced–”
“I’m telling you, I’ve kept him out.”
Sherlock blinks at the ceiling, then lifts his head to look at him again.
“What?”
“He was trying to get in, and I told the nurses to keep him out for a few minutes so I could talk to you. I know what it’s like, brothers – sometimes you need to get your wits up before you can face ‘em.”
“You don’t know my brother, Lestrade,” Sherlock scoffs. “He’s one hair’s-breadth away from actually being the human avatar of the entire British Government, and if you think that’s rubbish consider the likely anonymous call you probably got to come to my aid.”
Lestrade frowns, and Sherlock takes it that he’s got it right.
“What I mean to say is,” he continues, haughty and disgusted, “If my brother wants to get in somewhere, whether it’s a bakery or a secret underground prison, he gets in. And especially if it has anything to do with catching me off-guard. You think you can hold him off from coming into my hospital room?”
“He’s obviously never been up against an overworked third-shift A&E nurse. I’ve yet to come across a person more formidable. I’ve got friends here, and from what you’ve said and the bit I’ve seen of him down in reception, I doubt he does. That counts for a lot.”
Sherlock is silent. Friendship isn’t a topic he can speak on with any authority at all. Lestrade sighs and comes round the bed to drop into a chair. He leans back, crossing his arms.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Have friends,” Lestrade says. “Someone you call when you’re feeling low instead of pushing shit into your veins.”
“I don’t need friends,” Sherlock snaps insolently, and drops his head back to stare daggers at the ceiling and hope Lestrade has a sudden fit of spontaneous muteness.
“Yeah, you do,” Lestrade says.
“Well it’s not something I can just pop down to the shops and gather up for a few quid, is it? I work fine alone, and I always have – and it’s actually none of your fucking business, so if you’d kindly piss off that would be great.”
The itch under his skin has got him swearing and snippy, and his head is pounding so hard he fears his skull will crack right in two. Sherlock wishes his arms and legs didn’t feel so leaden, so that he could get up and unplug himself from these machines and go back to his own flat.
But Lestrade is a brick wall. And probably, Sherlock suspects, just as stubborn as he is.
“You want me to be able to let you in on my cases, you need to stop this.” Lestrade waves an illustrative hand at Sherlock, in his bed hooked up to his machines and fighting for coherence. “And I don’t just mean for the work – which is the part that does make it my business. I mean, you’re a bloody genius, which you so kindly remind everyone every time you turn up at my crime scenes uninvited. But that’s only going to take you so far, if this is what you fall back on doing when that isn’t enough. You’re right. You can’t buy friends. So here’s me, offering you one.”
Lestrade holds out his hand. Sherlock looks at it, then at his face. The man is absolutely serious, and something about that makes Sherlock’s stomach hurt in a way that has nothing to do with the nausea of withdrawal.
“There’s a reason I haven’t got any, you know,” Sherlock says instead, achieving the note of petulance he was hoping for. Lestrade drops his hand down again, but his expression isn’t affronted. It’s disappointed, which Sherlock realises is worse.
“Yeah.” He stands, still looking at Sherlock. “But it’s not the one you think it is.”
Sherlock finally looks away. No one has ever wanted to connect with him on this level. Not since Victor, but even that was in a much different context. He’d been content to believe it was because he wanted it that way, but perhaps he’s been deceiving himself.
“You don’t need to like me,” Lestrade continues. “That’s fine. No skin off mine. But what I said stands – you keep this up, I’m never letting you near another case again.” Then, slightly quieter, “Don’t make me do that, because I know they help.”
Sherlock whips his head back up.
Perhaps Lestrade is much more clever than Sherlock gives him credit for.
Lestrade shrugs, raises his hand in a vague farewell and turns to leave.
“My mother died a week ago,” Sherlock blurts out. He doesn’t know why he does it, what relevance it even has to the situation, but the knot in his stomach seems to loosen when the words leave his mouth.
Lestrade stops with his hand on the door handle. He turns around.
“My condolences,” he says, and what’s better is that Sherlock can tell he means it, by the way his brows fall together and his eyes soften. Lestrade wanders back over to the chair he vacated and sits down again.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, after a long moment of silence.
“No,” Sherlock says.
Lestrade nods understandingly, his mouth a crooked downward curve. But he doesn’t go to leave again. Sherlock finds that he doesn’t want him to. Having Lestrade just sit there next to his bed, with his arms crossed and his feet planted on the floor feels like a comfort, though he’s essentially doing nothing.
A quarter of an hour later, Sherlock turns his head on his pillow.
“Thank you,” he says.
Lestrade smiles at him, small and warm. He leans over and pats Sherlock on the arm affably, then rises and leaves without another word. Sherlock feels heavy and exhausted, but all the bitter has seemed to drain out of him. He lets his eyes fall closed and dozes dreamlessly.
Mycroft comes in shortly after to loom at the end of Sherlock’s bed. If he ever did lay down his scolding, Sherlock doesn’t remember it.
He gets clean if only out of spite to show he can, and Lestrade keeps his word.
It takes Sherlock an embarrassingly long time to discover that Mycroft never did call Lestrade to come to Sherlock’s aid, and that it was in fact the other way around.
If Sherlock cared, he could also trace the beginning of Lestrade’s marital problems to that night – because Lestrade had been suspicious that Sherlock was using, he’d taken it upon himself to check up on him at such an odd hour. When he wound up staying the night at Sherlock’s bedside, Lestrade’s wife jumped to the conclusion that he was having an affair, using it as justification to begin her own.
Sherlock convinces himself he doesn’t care. He’s become very, very good at that.
---
London is trudging reluctantly toward spring when John Watson limps into Sherlock’s life.
John is just like any other man.
He complains about the messy piles of books and papers Sherlock makes in the sitting room, the potentially biohazardous conditions in the kitchen, the lack of use his bedroom sees. He gets angry when Sherlock runs off without him, if Sherlock gets hurt and John isn’t there to patch him up. John never listens when Sherlock tells him to leave or to run away. John always asks the wrong questions and draws the wrong conclusions, and he is frustrated and frustrating when he can’t keep up with the lightning-quick pace of Sherlock’s mind.
But John is different, because John stays.
John is fierce and protective of Sherlock. John makes him tea and gives him hard-eyed looks until he eats the food he sets down in front of him. John hides Sherlock’s cigarettes and stays with him on nights Sherlock doesn’t trust himself not to go out looking for something stronger to thread through his veins. John apologises for Sherlock’s social ignorance, yet still shares secret smiles with him on the outskirts of crime scenes. He stands at his side in front of the looming press, looking unassuming and boring and normal, and deflects flashbulbs and questions and smooths over Sherlock’s abrasiveness.
Sherlock wonders why. The answer that comes is a question in itself.
Once, after an intense three-day-long stakeout and subsequent chase, they tumble back into Baker Street sated with victory at having caught their thief. Mrs. Hudson has left them plates of food in the fridge (triple-wrapped), and they strip off their shoes and coats and collapse in a heap leaned up against each other on the couch to eat.
Sherlock is so exhausted he gives up after three bites, lays his head back and lets his plate droop precariously on his tilted lap. He feels John get up and take the fork and dish from him, then John’s warm hands are hoisting his legs up onto the cushions. There are footsteps into the kitchen and back, and then Sherlock is enveloped in the fuzzy, threadbare warmth of the green plaid blanket that usually graces the back of John’s chair. Sherlock can barely move, but he breathes deeply in; the blanket smells like John, like home.
“Out cold,” Sherlock hears John say to himself, in a tone that indicates he’s smiling. Then he senses another kind of warmth, a soft pressure, and a little huff of breath against his temple.
In his ear, so quiet Sherlock might have imagined it, John whispers, “Sherlock Holmes, I’ll love you ‘til the day I die.” John walks away, only to pause at the door as Sherlock hears the snap of the light switch being flicked off and add beneath his breath, “If you don’t get me killed first, you git.”
---
John calls these times his black moods.
Sherlock will lay on the couch for hours at a stretch, dressing gown puddled around him, staring at the ceiling. Or he’ll drape himself over his chair with a sigh, plucking the same note on his violin, seeing if he can detect minute variations in the tone. All told, it’s really no different than he usually acts in between cases – which is why he finds it strange that John, who is so consistent in his inability to observe, seems to have a sense tuned specifically to the delicate shift in Sherlock’s demeanour when it tips from mere boredom into something heavier and more difficult to shake. In this respect, he is hardly ever wrong. No one, save Mycroft, has ever been able to read Sherlock so accurately.
It is both impressive and infuriating.
“Hello?” John’s voice calls up the stairs. Sherlock hears him ascend, then the door to the sitting room swings open. He hears the rustling of paper and plastic bags and smells something savoury. His stomach turns in repulsion.
“Hey, Sherlock. I got us some dinner. Glad you’re home, I thought you might have – been out.”
John’s last few words are halting and slow to finish as he takes in the state of Sherlock. He’s cocooned himself in his chair, wrapped around the skull. One arm dangles over the floor; long fingers idly brush along the edges of the pages of an unabridged Oxford dictionary.
Fwip, fwip.
“Have you eaten yet today?”
Fwip.
“Is it still Friday?”
“Sunday, Sherlock,” John sighs. “It’s Sunday.”
“Oh. Then no.” That explains the pain in his stomach, and the headache.
“Sherlock,” John says again, and this time, it’s more concern than exasperation. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Harry’s. I need to know you’ll be all right while I’m gone.”
Sherlock shifts around restlessly, sitting up. The skull falls off the chair and rolls across the floor, its mandible coming awkwardly unhinged.
“I’m not a fucking child, John,” Sherlock snaps. “I’ll be fine.”
The corners of John’s mouth turn downward, and his brow goes rigid.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” John says, his voice taking on the strain of keeping his annoyance in check.
“Then what did you mean?” asks Sherlock. He’s indulging his baser spitefulness, if only to put an end to his incessant boredom and mental squalour. It’s cruel, and he knows it. John has spent the better part of the week fixing up the flat to have guests over Christmas night, on top of arranging travel plans to get to Harry’s and back. Sherlock knows John wants him to be appreciative or commiserative – at the very least indifferent – but all he’s finding is an intense disdain for all the useless sentimental trappings to which John’s assigned arbitrary value.
“I just –” John takes a deep breath, reining in his annoyance. “You know what? Maybe you’d feel better if you helped me out a bit, for a change. There’s still a lot to do before we’ll be ready for the party. Mrs. Hudson wants help with her baking, I know.”
“Puerile.”
“Lestrade could always use a hand with the backlog of petty cases. Give you a chance to show off, at least, if they’re not up to your usual specs.”
“Tedious.”
“Why not go take those abnormal gallbladders back to Bart’s and get Molly to help you dispose of them correctly? I hear they also just got a new ultracentrifuge in, perhaps she’ll let you give it a whirl.”
“Pointless.”
“I’m just trying to give you a distraction!” John yelps, clearly at the end of his rope. “Isn’t that what you always say you need?”
“Since when are you the arbiter of what I need?”
“It’s called being your friend, Sherlock.”
“Well I don’t need you, I don’t need any of you!” Sherlock bursts forth, inexplicably enraged. He shoots up from the chair and paces erratically from chair to coffee table to mantle, clawing his fingers through his hair. “All you do is clog up my life, slow me down, pack my brain with useless flotsam to remember like holidays and birthdays and work schedules and how you take your tea. It’s infuriating and I hate it!”
“So memorising tobacco ashes and bug larvae and oven models is more important than remembering our Christmas plans,” John says. “I see how it is.”
John has gone very still where he stands in the kitchen doorway. Sherlock stops to look up and sees his tight face, the way his eyes have gone hard and his gaze shallow. Suddenly all his useless anger turns into a sick, heavy weight that presses down on his stomach and chest.
“Do you?” Sherlock asks, and though he means it to come out as a genuine question, he hears the sting of spite it still carries nonetheless, and winces internally.
“Yeah. You’re probably right too, like you are about everything else. You’re much better off without friends.”
John says it in such a cool, factual way, not allowing any trace of sarcasm or spite of his own to soften the statement. Nevertheless, it hits Sherlock in the face like a blast of icy water.
“John, I –”
“No, really, Sherlock. I understand,” John says. His back is very straight, and his voice very steady. He is looking slightly past Sherlock at the windows, glowing blue with the last dregs of afternoon daylight. “You did tell me at the beginning. Work will always come first for you, and when there isn’t any, the need for it will. Always wanting to play the game, and to hell with anyone else. We take up too much of your precious time – I slow you down most of all, I know it. You think I’m what will make you fail. I just – I didn’t realise just which way the scales were weighted on that until now. If that’s how you feel, then fine. I’ll leave you alone.”
Sherlock has never seen John look defeated. He didn’t even think it possible – but here is John, leaving the food and other bags abandoned on the table, lowering his head just a fraction, and marching up the stairs to his room without another glance at him.
Sherlock had thought he’d reached the apex of his hatred for everything.
As it turns out, he hadn’t until this moment ever felt so full of loathing.
He goes into his room and rips off his dressing gown, throwing the ball of it at the bedside table, upsetting the lamp. He doesn’t care at all. He shoves socks and shoes onto his feet and thrusts his arms into his suit jacket. He whips his coat and scarf around himself as he clatters down the stairs, ignoring Mrs. Hudson’s distant protests about the racket. He slams the door closed, just to drive home the point that he wasn’t listening. He’s forgotten his phone on purpose too, hoping John will notice and use his brain for once to infer that he shouldn’t bother with any inane where are you texts.
They don’t matter. They don’t.
Sherlock walks for a long time, until his legs are sore and his feet burn and his cheeks are blotchy and scarlet from the cold. It must be nearly midnight when he finally stops to lean against a brick wall at the opening of an alleyway.
He used to always be alone. It was just him, and his mind and the next puzzle. What he said to John was true: his thoughts have become cluttered in the past two years with things that have nothing to do with his work. Nothing good had ever come of him being attached to anyone. He is worth more alone.
What John said was true too. More true than he cared to admit. But John doesn’t understand. Sherlock would be better off without them, and they’d be better off without him.
“I hate Christmastime, too,” says a voice behind him.
Sherlock turns around sharply. In the angular shadows of the alley, a familiar face is framed: shining dark eyes stare at him from inside the darkness, and somehow look even darker when he finally does step into the light, as if they swallow it all up like a black hole.
“How –” Sherlock begins, but there are too many endings to that question that he wants answered, and cannot begin to choose which he wants to know the most.
Jim clicks his tongue, holds two fingers up in a silencing gesture, leaving the other cradled nonchalantly in the pocket of his expensive, leather-trimmed coat.
“Now isn’t the time for interrogations,” Jim says. “Your brother had his turn enough for both of you.” His voice every bit as lilting and dangerous as it was at the pool and in the sitting room at 221B. Sherlock has been waiting since then for Jim to resurface, and it had only added to his maddening boredom that he had all but disappeared after that afternoon, to the point where Sherlock was sure his plan was to merely watch him waste away from ennui.
“Come on, then,” Jim says, loops his arm through Sherlock’s and starts off down the pavement with him in tow.
It begins to snow.
They walk, and walk, and walk. Sherlock knows he could take his arm from Jim’s at any moment, but he doesn’t. He is compelled to keep following him, mad with the need to fulfill his curiosity about the strange man who has danced at the periphery of his life for so long, and is now leading him to the unknown, to another puzzle, another level of the game.
Yes. This is what he wanted.
To return to the mind which he had left too long cluttered, sweep out the cobwebs and purge the uselessness. Delete, delete, delete.
They stop.
Sherlock looks up, suddenly aware he hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the steady pace at which his feet were carrying him along next to Jim. They are somehow atop the Tower Bridge, both standing precariously on the edge, overlooking the dark water of the Thames below as the wind and snow whip around them.
“My snipers have been busy,” Jim says, sounding like a father bragging about his ambitious children. “And so have I.”
Jim produces his mobile from his pocket. On the screen, he opens up three video feeds, one after the other. The images are grainy but unmistakable; he has three killers trained on them, one to each.
Mrs. Hudson.
Lestrade.
John.
He stares at them for what feels like a long time, almost not believing what he sees proof of right in front of him. Sherlock has never been more terrified in his life.
“Here’s the deal, Sherlock: I can grant your most ardent wish,” Jim says. “I can make your friends disappear. Poof!” He waves his arms theatrically; his phone vanishes from his hands as they pass over each other. It unsettles Sherlock, because he is not able to parse the sleight as he is usually able to with such tricks. It’s almost as if he actually made it dissolve in thin air.
“I meant none of that,” Sherlock says, trying to shake the strangeness from his head.
“All that and now you’d go back on your words?” Jim tsks. “Really, Sherlock. Don’t disappoint me with your sudden lack of conviction.”
Jim circles him like prey, and comes to stand close behind Sherlock’s shoulder.
“You worry about what they’ve done to you. Ruined your perfectly-tuned instrument of a brain, rotted you through with sentiment and worry and care. But look at what you’ve done to them, now,” whispers Jim, “You’ve signed, sealed and delivered their deaths, just by existing.”
Sherlock can hear the smile that splits Jim’s lips rather than see it. He is dizzy and slow, the feeling creeping up on him almost imperceptibly. He thinks it must be the swaying of the bridge, or the whip of snow, or the heights – but it’s unlike any version of vertigo he’s ever felt. He swallows hard, bile rising inside him as the images of the video feeds flash imprinted behind his eyes each time he blinks.
“Imagine how lovely it would be, with them out of the way,” Jim says, his voice edged with laughter. “You’d never be bored again, I would make sure of that!”
“There must be a way,” Sherlock says, as much to keep himself grounded as to stop Jim from talking any more. “A way to stop you, to fix this.”
“There is. I just told you what you’ve done wrong, but were you listening?”
“You said nothing save that I’ve done this by existing! There is nothing that can change that.”
“Oh, but if there was,” said Jim, coming around to face him on the narrow ledge. His incisors gleam in the dim light of the city night. “Would you do it?”
“There isn’t,” hisses Sherlock through gritted teeth.
“Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock,” Jim tuts. “Did you not take my advice and learn your fairytales by heart?” The smile grows wider, more grotesque. “Are you prepared to do anything?”
“Yes,” says Sherlock, “If it will spare them, I am.”
“Fine then,” says Jim, and the smile falls from his face, though his eyes remain wide and his voice incongruously giddy. “It’s not the choice I would’ve made, but hell is hell whether it’s here or there. What is it that the kids say? You only live once – or rather, you don’t.”
And before Sherlock can react, Jim is grabbing his hand and striding off the edge of the bridge, with Sherlock in tow. The air is cold as it rushes past, and the water comes speeding up to meet them. Jim’s hand is like a vice around Sherlock’s and he grips tighter and tighter and tighter until –