Sticks and Stones (1/2)
Rating: M
Pairings: Sherlock/Victor, Sherlock/John
Warnings: non-con, verbal abuse, elements of self-harm
Summary: It was never a decision; he prefers to think of it as a logical impulse. When the needle hits his skin, guided by a disapproving man who cannot afford to be disapproving, the pressure in Sherlock’s chest shakes loose, dissipates, and melts away.
Notes: Unbeta’d first part of a short two-shotter that I wanted to post before I let it sit in my drafts forever. To be considered a scribble more than a polished work. Please read the warnings before embarking on the fic, and read the author’s note at the end before bringing up any issues. This is not meant to be easy. The second part is half written and will be posted eventually but not within the next two weeks or more.
He’s 16 years old when it starts; on the day after Victor Trevor’s sixteenth birthday party.
He hadn’t wanted to go, but Victor had insisted and Mummy had begged, and somewhere during the course of his sixteenth year he’d lost the ability to deny either of them anything they asked of him.
Sherlock often found himself surrounded by the unbearably asinine and incompetent, but neither Victor nor Mummy fit that mould - Mummy by way of being deceptively shrewd in her understanding of her son and Victor by way of being … well … Victor.
Where Sherlock is cold logic and scientific observation, Victor is passionate erudition and profound intuition. Where Sherlock is solitary and misanthropic, Victor is genial and affable. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, but something in Victor’s personality allows him to ignore the caustic front of Sherlock’s words and get straight to the real heart of meaning behind them. Victor is the only person who can follow Sherlock’s arguments and who is never offended by Sherlock’s arrogant belief in his own superiority. (Victor is the only one, after all, that has been deemed worthy of the time of day; he is seemingly able to understand and make do with the compliment inherent in that small fact.) He is endlessly handsome in a warm, enticing way, all golden curls and tanned olive skin, while Sherlock’s gangly limbs and sheaf of riotous curls call to mind a brand new colt, still clumsy and awkward on its own legs.
If Sherlock were the moon then Victor would be the sun and Sherlock cannot help but be utterly and irrationally infatuated with him.
They are inseparable for two years and while Victor enjoys a whole host of friends (for no one is impervious to his charm, and Victor likes to surround himself with loyal admirers), Sherlock is the one he seeks out most frequently. It is a cherished sliver of knowledge that glows golden in Sherlock’s chest, no matter how hard he tries to stomp it out.
That night, Victor gives Sherlock his first glass of wine (and then his second and his third) and Sherlock drinks them down, letting himself be flattered into folly by the fact that Victor has chosen to separate from the crowd of his adoring followers to spend time alone with Sherlock in the field behind the house.
Victor’s smile is soft and his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders warm. It’s a balmy night in June and Sherlock learns swiftly that despite all his previous assumptions he is not immune to the potent combination of starlight and merlot. When he slides his hand down the front of Victor’s trousers, the other boy smirks and leans back on his elbows and says, in that golden syrup voice of his, “Go on, then.”
So Sherlock bends over and opens Victor’s chinos and lets the hand tangled in his hair guide his head downwards. It’s messy and uncomfortable and he nearly chokes several times but even so he’s hard in his own trousers - as soon as he starts he wants it to be over (hates the way Victor’s fingers tug painfully at his hair, the way his lips have to stretch around Victor’s penis, the ache in his jaw and the bitter taste in his mouth and the strange foreign scent of another boy’s crotch) but he can’t back down now, not until it’s finished.
As it happens, it never does finish. Sherlock is dizzy and disoriented, from the wine and the lack of oxygen (and, he later suspects, some other toxin besides) - he doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching, too focused on finishing what he started, frustrated with himself because surely he’s been doing this for hours already, is he doing it wrong somehow? Why hasn’t Victor said anything?
Suddenly Victor is scrambling backwards, strong hands shoving at Sherlock’s shoulders and pushing him off. Sherlock can’t quite focus, he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. (How did he get so drunk so quickly? Is this what it’s like, being drunk, so fuzzy and unclear? How hateful.) Victor is saying something, shouting at him to “Fuck off, you little faggot!” and suddenly Sherlock is surrounded by a group of his jeering classmates but he can’t quite manage to stand up or do anything but scramble at the ground, at Victor’s ankles … and then the world turns black.
He wakes up the next morning in a field several hundred meters away, his brand new clothes torn to shreds, his body covered in aches and bruises, and his head threatening to split in two.
He finds his way home and sneaks into his room before anyone can see him; catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror he freezes and stares at his own reflection.
The word is there, scrawled dozens of times in stark black ink (a single Sharpie pen) across his skin (by seven individuals, judging by the variety of handwriting).
The rubbing alcohol stings his eyes and makes him retch, but he manages to get the ink off of his face and arms, the backs of his legs and crest of his chest.
His hand hesitates, though, when he comes to the scrawl above his right buttock. It’s Victor’s handwriting, he’d know it anywhere; the arch of the F and the swooping, curled G’s.
Sherlock unearths an old hand mirror he’d been using in a recent experiment and uses it to stare at his own back, the way the word sits there on his skin. His memories of the night before are drowned in wine and distorted with lust and remorse, but he can still hear the word falling from Victor’s lips, can still feel the way it cut him from clavicle to sternum.
The alcohol-soaked cotton wool falls to the floor; he twists his arm to thumb over the ink stain - if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to tell it was there. Except that it will always be there, even if he washes it off: Victor’s handiwork is, in a metaphysical way that would no doubt delight him to no end, indelible.
It was never a decision; he prefers to think of it as a logical impulse. When the needle hits his skin, guided by a disapproving man who cannot afford to be disapproving, the pressure in Sherlock’s chest shakes loose, dissipates, and melts away.
Faggot
----------
It strikes him that this could be a costly enterprise and so the next time he tries to do it himself, with a needle dipped in ink, slowly and methodically poking through the epidermis of his left wrist into the dermis below, all the time deliberately not thinking about the way his mother had sounded talking to his father, telling him Sherlock was “sick”, spitting it out as if the word offended her.
The final effect is messy and blurry and unpleasant to look at: no matter how meticulously he had worked, he’d struggled to keep the needle poking to the same depth, and it hurt much more than it had in the shop. Sherlock resolves to seek out professionals (or at very least someone with a functioning machine) in the future, but he never has the ragged edges of his homemade tattoo touched up or fixed.
The next week, when his mother has him sent to a psychiatrist, he is neither surprised nor upset. He keeps his sleeves rolled down and stares the stuffy old psychiatrist straight in the eye and doesn’t reign himself in, not at all, not like he usually does, like he knows he should, and he comes out of the sessions with yet another word to have inked into his skin, which is satisfying if not entirely accurate. He puts it below his right clavicle in the psychiatrist’s own script, and wears it on his chest like a badge.
Sick
Sociopath
-----------
After Victor, school is a minefield. Sherlock endures sneers and smirks and whispers behind hands with cold indifference, because he had learned very early on that retaliation just makes other children even more vindictive, and he is too clever not to realise when he is outnumbered. (Of course that doesn’t always stop him from spitting back retorts and insults and angry deductions when provoked, but it is enough to make him - for the most part - resigned to the abuse.)
He takes up judo because its interesting and methodical and the burn in his muscles after bouts is lovely and distracting, and the fatigue in his muscles sends him straight to sleep at night. He chases every roommate away with caustic deductions and experiments in jars and, in the case of one particularly recalcitrant boy, dead animals on their beds, until the school has no choice but to give him a single room. They cannot, after all, afford to expel him.
He’s just defeated Harrow’s judo champion, an enormous and powerful boy by the name of Thompson, in a long, hard fight and has retreated to the changing rooms when Thompson approaches him from behind, executing a fairly beautiful Hadaka Jime that is too tight to be misconstrued as playful, crushing Sherlock’s windpipe and sending his vision swimming.
Thompson’s voice is low and hoarse when he whispers in Sherlock’s ear: “I’ve heard about you, you know. Eton’s resident poofter. No-one ever mentioned what a fucking tease you are, though. Don’t think I missed that, the way you were grinding around on my cock out there. Think you’d really have won if you hadn’t been such a fuckin despicable cocktease, Holmes? You’re gagging for it, aren’t you, faggot?”
Sherlock grapples with the arms about his throat, but his mind has gone strangely blank. He can feel Thompson pressed hard against his back, and all the fight goes out of him. He ought to fight, he should flip this idiot over and stand on his windpipe until his lips turn blue and his heart stops beating, but something in him is so unspeakably exhausted that he simply can’t do anything but struggle half-heartedly as Thompson undoes the draw-string on his zubon and pushes the tails of his uwagi out of the way. Sherlock doesn’t even shout when Thompson shoves himself in and afterwards, when he’s left bruised and bleeding and utterly defeated on the floor, Sherlock cannot even bring himself to cry. Maybe he should, that’s what normal people would do, isn’t it? Sit and cry for the violation of body, for the aches and pains and rips and bruises? Perhaps he should report it, but then it would be his word against Thompson’s, and no one ever takes him at his word, not anymore.
Instead of crying, Sherlock picks himself up and washes himself off and the next day, Saturday, he sneaks into town and slides into the backroom of a studio that knows to expect him already.
He’s made strict rules for himself about this. He’s got a limited amount of space and the set of data to record is unpredictable in terms of its size. He wouldn’t usually be here, not for such a small word, but it seems to be going around and around in his head, all day and all night, all he can feel is Thompson’s arms around his throat and the word digging into his skin, tease tease tease tease tease. Sherlock resents it, because he’s not a tease, and he wasn’t asking for it, he’d been fighting fair and properly, and he may be any number of things, terrible things most likely, he hasn’t had time yet to discover the sum of all his myriad failures and darknesses, but he is not a tease.
He no longer even has to talk to the owner of the studio; simply walks in and hands him the list, the one he’s been compiling for months while saving up any pocket money that he doesn’t have to spend on aparatus for his experiments. Sherlock pays the man five times his normal rate because he knows, he can see in the man’s eyes, that he wants desperately to turn Sherlock away.
The needle buzzes across his left scapular spine, a sharp, vibrating point of focus that goes a long way to soothing Sherlock’s tumultuous mind, and as it moves, shaping the e and smoothing over the a, Sherlock takes a deep breath and deletes.
PoofterNancyPonceQueerFagGayerCockslut
Tease
----------
Some words he records simply for the sake of posterity - they are tossed at him entirely too frequently to be ignored, he feels, space constraints or no. He is taller now, and beginning to fill out, and he reserves his left shin and ankle for these worthless little repetitious phrases, which he thinks should be plenty of space. He adds to the list when he feels the need, if he has nothing else to add in a particular Month. The tattooist writes the words in tiny, careful typewriter print, because they are not worth any more effort than that.
By the time Sherlock gets to Cambridge, he has spent thousands of pounds on ink and time and the power to erase by recording, and his tattoo artist has stopped looking at him with sad eyes and instead welcomes him with a warm smile (still coloured with pity) and always gives him a cup of tea after. (He is the only person Sherlock knows from Eton that he would ever consider calling a friend.)
GitPrickArseholeTosserTwat
PratCuntSodWankerShitBastard
-------
Sherlock develops a reputation for himself at Cambridge.
It’s just that it’s all so dull, and fucking his way around town is the only thing he can really be bothered to do. Not because he enjoys it - but it is interesting, after a fashion. You can learn a lot about a person when their guards are down, and no one is more vulnerable than they are in the midst of coitus.
It’s reckless behavior, but Sherlock is always relatively careful when it comes to secretions and bodily fluids, and when one of his conquests introduces him to the sweet, intense bliss that is cocaine, the serendipitous irony is not lost on him - that once more he should be finding release at the end of a needle.
His infuriating parents have him on rather a tight budget, but people of a certain class are surprisingly willing to lay down rather a lot of money for a good fuck or a quick suck and so Sherlock has no problem paying for either of his little fixations.
The new words come from his ‘benefactors’ and classmates alike; he has started carrying a small notebook around to make sure he doesn’t leave any of them out.
Chemistry is mildly diverting, but not at all challenging, not hardly, and he has to get down on his knees to convince his supervisor to grant him free access to the chemical stores. He sits in on other classes, as well, because they might be useful one day: anatomy, pathology, neurobiology, psychology, behavioral sciences, mathematics and logic. By the end of his first year he is known throughout the University, showing up unannounced to seminars and lectures, and by the end of his third, though he graduates with first class honours in Natural Sciences, he could have qualified for no less than five separate degrees.
LunaticWhoreInsaneDickhead
ManiacSlutMadmanShowoff
---------
In his third year, Sherlock seduces a girl - the secretary of the Vice Chancellor of the University, in fact - because she has information he needs in order to solve a little ‘case’ he’s been working on, and because it seems a lark.
He becomes a different person, just for a few weeks. He sends flowers and brings expensive coffees and flirts with her cleverly and makes love to her with his eyes. It’s the easiest thing in the world; he is, after all, very attractive and very, very intelligent. Charm is nothing more than intelligence applied within a given set of parameters set by society, after all - and when he stands in front of the mirror with his clothes on, he understands what it is that other people see when they first look at him: a beautiful, flawless young man in impeccable garments, with elegantly arching cheekbones and the sort of lithe figure many people would die for and that even more long to touch.
The girl is helpless under the onslaught of his affections; kind and trusting and sweet in her own incredibly dull way. Ultimately, she is a good person, caught up in a web of lies and deceit that extends so far beyond her ability to even comprehend that it’s entirely laughable. Maybe that’s why the terrible, devastated look on her face when she realises he’s been playing her for information haunts him for days, despite his best efforts to ignore it.
He visits his local artist and has him write the word she’d screamed at him in big, thick letters down his side. While the needle buzzes across his ribs, Sherlock hisses in his breath and tries to pretend he doesn’t agree with her, tries to pretend that she wasn’t right, that the word doesn’t apply.
Monster
-----------
He moves to London because he loves London, and because it will be easier for him to disappear there. He’d had to write disgrace on his arm the day of his graduation, the day after Father had walked unannounced into his room at Uni to find him surrounded by alcohol and cocaine, flat on his back on his bed with his trousers pulled down to his knees and his knees pulled up to his chest and one of the professors inserted between the globes of his arse.
His parents hadn’t attended the ceremony, but Mycroft had. It is the look in his brother’s eyes that Sherlock excises from his memory while under the needle that day.
London is relentlessly big and unapologetically chaotic and Sherlock loves it. He disappears into back alleys and tenement buildings and dark, dingy clubs; he stalks the city like a wraith and it envelops him completely, pulling him with warm, welcoming arms right into its sanguine, degenerate bosom and refusing to let him go.
He bumps into Victor one night, in a club in Soho, and when Sherlock fucks him over a rusty toilet it feels almost like revenge. It is not at all as satisfying as it ought to be, and when Victor picks himself up off the floor and looks at him with golden eyes turned cold and says, “Always thought you might end up a fucking junkie, Holmes.” Sherlock has to try very hard not to let it shatter him to pieces.
Instead, he turns on his heel and all but flees.
It’s been months since he’s been in a tattoo parlour and almost none of them want anything to do with him, not with the drugs glinting in his eyes, but finally he manages to pull himself together enough to convince someone to let him in. The smell of disinfectant is soothingly familiar; the artist is a tiny pixie of a woman who frowns deeply while she writes the latest word down his left arm, around and over and in between the track marks that he’s carelessly let get out of hand.
Of all the words he’s had inscribed into his skin, it is this one that he hates to see the most.
Junkie
---------
He is actually part of the first crime scene he helps to solve. He’s collapsed in a corner of the drug den, riding out a particularly unpleasant trip, when the police rush in and start arresting anything that still has a pulse. (There are quite a few bodies in there for whom this is no longer the case.)
Sherlock had figured it out months ago: the drug cartel and the dubious ingredients they were using to cut their supply. He’d deduced all the details - how they were getting the drugs into the country, how they were pushing them onwards, who was in control and who people thought was in control. They’ve been clever, really clever about it, and even if the police catch every single one of them, they’ll never know it all. But Sherlock knows. Sherlock can tell them.
They throw him in a jail cell for a few days and he screams bloody murder while he comes down from the drugs until finally a haggard, prematurely grey man pulls him out and sits him at a green table in a green room with a cup of tea and three stale hobnobs on a plate. The detective inspector sits, switches on the tape recorder between them, and asks him to explain himself.
Sherlock launches into it, agitatedly breaking the hobnobs into a million crumbs as he speaks, and the detective inspector listens, canted back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest.
When Sherlock is done, the detective inspector looks at him thoughtfully for a few long seconds before abruptly leaning forward and hitting the switch on the recorder.
“Explain it to me. Tell me how a genius like you finds himself off his face on a drug cocktail that should by all rights have killed you in a shithole in Hackney?”
Sherlock simply stares back at the man for a few seconds of his own and then shrugs. “You don’t know what it’s like, being a genius. I get ... bored.”
The grey-haired man sighs. “Listen. Completely off the record - if you clean yourself up, really get your act together, get rid of the drugs, I could ... well. Let’s say maybe we could make sure you have some more puzzles to solve.”
“You want me to become a detective?” Sherlock scoffs at the very idea, but shuts up very quickly when the detective says, “More like a consultant. If we ever get stuck. I like having people to bounce ideas off of.”
“Oh,” Sherlock says, and then finds himself so lost in contemplation he doesn’t notice the detective slipping his card under his hand and leaving the room.
He goes to his flat and, while he stands in the midst of the chaos thumbing over the long, jagged J on his left arm, he invents himself a job. Consulting Detective certainly has a nice ring to it.
That week he calls up to cancel his standing appointment at the tattoo parlour, because for once he has nothing to add.
---------------
Coming off the drugs is agony, but he does it. Mycroft sends him to a secure facility and leaves him there for months, and it is dull, dull dull dull, and everything is so white his eyes throb with it. One of the doctors sees his tattoos and sends him for another psych eval, but Sherlock refuses to go. He doesn’t need another word to carry around while he is still trying to erase the last one.
Eventually, after months of agonizing tedium, he returns to his flat on Montague Street. It is nothing short of a bombsite, but he ignores that. He has work to do.
There was nothing to do in rehab but think, and Sherlock had a lot of thinking to do. He is about to take a habit and turn it into gainful employment, after all, and that bears rationalisation. Once, he’d tried to explain his methods to Sebastian, one of the more frequent partners he’d had at Cambridge: that deduction was more a science than a hobby, that it could be used to solve the question of anything from motive to method. Sebastian had laughed in his faced and called him a nutter, and Sherlock had gone to sulk at the tattoo parlour in favour of defending himself.
Sherlock reads and experiments and runs about London, solving things for people he sees whether they want him to or not. He gathers an unprecedented amount of data and finally, when he feels ready, he calls the number on the worn business card the detective had given him nearly two years before.
The first crime scene is a bloody, brutal murder of a family and children. Sherlock is ushered in by Lestrade, takes a single look around, and declares that the husband’s estranged ex-wife, who will be on her way to France with a new lover, is their killer.
“Boring,” he says, looking away from the bodies to find the entire forensics team staring at him.
“What?”
“You freak,” a curly-haired sergeant all but shouts at him, shaking her head with disgust. “These people died, horribly and brutally, and all you can say is boring?”
“Well I’m sure it wasn’t for them,” Sherlock admits. The sergeant looks like she’s about to lunge for him, but Lestrade pulls him out of the room, muttering “Jesus Christ” under his breath as they go. By the time Sherlock has helped them finish up the case, Sally Donovan has called him a freak no less than fifteen individual times, and Anderson - the weasley, greasy forensics tech Sally has her eye on despite the fact that he’s clearly engaged - has joined right in.
He starts a tally in a fresh notebook; after the first time, he has to start a system of multiples. For every ten times someone (usually Donovan, though most of Lestrade’s regular team joins in on occasion) calls him ‘freak’, he has the word inked into the skin over his spine once, starting just over the first thoracic vertebra, right under the nape of his neck, in crisp copperplate lettering.
He keeps the tally book in a drawer with his sock index. By the time he meets John Watson five years later, the word freak has been written on his spine thirty four times (once over each thoracic and lumbar vertebra and once in each space in between, varying in size to mirror the flare of the spinal column), and he has started to adjust the corresponding multiples instead.
------------
The small army doctor that Mike brings into the lab at Barts is interesting in ways he shouldn’t be. He limps for no physical reason and has a bullet wound in his shoulder and is a Doctor, a fully trained medical professional who clearly eschewed the business of healing people in order to become a soldier and, presumably, hurt people instead.
Not that John Watson is the cold-blooded killer sort, oh no, he is merely a soldier, and that means honour, and patriotism, and pride.
It is so incongruous that Sherlock decides he must, absolutely must, get to the bottom of it, and so he decides they will live together after all. At least for a few days, until John realises just what it is that he’s dealing with and moves away again. Inevitable, but hopefully it will grant Sherlock enough time to figure this man out.
The new flat at Baker Street is perfect, just the right amount of space for two bachelors and comes with the added bonus of Mrs. Hudson downstairs who despite many protests always seems to be willing to put a spot of tea on. (Sherlock has considered taking the words “Not your housekeeper!” to the tattoo parlour simply on merit of them having been shouted at him so frequently. It is always kindly done, though, and so he refrains.)
He’s in the middle of deducing something about John when Lestrade shows up with a case, an irresistible tetris mess of a case, and Sherlock is immediately caught up in the whorls and eddies of facts and information. He brings the small army doctor with him, because the man is a puzzle he wishes to contemplate further, but pays him no particular mind at first, preferring instead to focus raptly on the prone form of the lady in pink.
Until, that is, a word suddenly bubbles out of the tiny doctor’s mouth that stops Sherlock dead in the middle of his sentence.
“Amazing,” John says, shaking his head and looking at Sherlock like someone would look at something that is good. “That’s fantastic.”
For a split second that seems to last an infinity, Sherlock is left stunned and gaping like a hapless guppy. He draws in a sharp breath. “Do you know you do that loud?”
Instantly, John’s face shutters, and he seems to shake himself out of his trance. Sherlock wants to chase the expression back onto that face, those enigmatic features weathered by sun and sand, but he doesn’t quite know how to. “Sorry,” John says. “Sorry, I’ll stop.”
He wants nothing less. He would rather give away a kidney than to have John stop, and isn’t that a strange turn of events. “No,” Sherlock says. “No, it’s … okay.”
John grins at him and Sherlock is thrilled at his genius idea to keep this little doctor man around.
Of course, he then proceeds to leave the man behind at a crime scene with people who hate him and clearly will have no problem telling John exactly why, but John doesn’t actually seem to mind too much. And later, after Lestrade unceremoniously reveals the existence of a (mostly abandoned) drug habit, and Anderson forces the reveal of the sociopath, and Sherlock himself reveals his own innate not goodness … even after all that John is still there, in completely over his head and blissfully unaware. Or, at least, that’s what Sherlock thinks until after the cabbie has been shot and John turns up with powder burns in his fingers and without a tremor in his hand.
John calls him an idiot, then, but he smiles while he does it, and that night Sherlock starts a new notebook and writes it all down: Amazing, Fantastic, Idiot.
------------
In the throes of his infinite genius, Sherlock does realise he quite often overlooks the things that ought not to be overlooked.
He has been feeling relatively proud of himself, lately. (Of course he is always, and rightfully, proud of his mental acrobatics, but they come to him naturally and ought to be admired in due course by all and sundry, because really he is quite clever.) He has had to have only one word inked in the months since John arrived; he has not drunk himself into oblivion; he has not touched a single speck of cocaine; and he has not taken a single stranger into his bed to fuck until he can no longer think straight.
John, clever little John, seems to have rerouted most of his more destructive tendencies into more constructive pursuits. For instance: instead of cocaine, Sherlock now irritates John by finishing his cryptic crosswords for him; instead of alcohol, he runs experiments on how many cups of tea he can get John to make him in a given day; instead of sex, Sherlock trails John on his dates and sabotages them subtly from afar, because no mere woman deserves the undivided attention of John Hamish Watson. He has not had to add to his tattoos, because with John around the words seem to come less frequently or not at all, as if people can take a single glance at John and unconsciously realise just how badly it would go for them to insult Sherlock in front of a timebomb with such a devastating short fuse.
It is all going swimmingly (even though John wrote in his blog that Sherlock was sometimes amazingly ignorant - that had smarted) until John gets himself kidnapped and wrapped in explosives and Sherlock’s heart suddenly jumps into his throat and refuses to move. He hurls himself into a taxi and then, ten excruciating minutes later, throws himself into the building where John is. For the first, cruel ten seconds after John steps out of his cubicle Sherlock, terrified, thinks that maybe, just maybe, it has all been just an elaborate lie - and he should have known. No one could think, really, that he was fantastic. No one could think he was brilliant. No one would, of their own free will, and without ulterior motive, stick around with Sherlock for months after months in a flat full of mild squalor tending towards entropy, living on takeaway and tea and cleaning up dessicated livers from stovetops and finding toes in their toaster. Sherlock should have known, he should have known it was too good to be true, and instead of seeing it he’d gone and fallen in love with the lie of a tiny doctor soldier man who looked at him and saw impossible.
The relief that shatters through his limbs when John opens his parka to reveal enough explosives to decimate an entire city block is, Sherlock distantly thinks, a bit not good. It is also closely followed by acute and savage terror: because none of this was supposed to happen.
He wasn’t supposed to let John get hurt, or threatened in any way. He had tried to avoid it and already failed, twice, though admittedly he wasn’t entirely to blame for the fact that John had taken to carrying around most of Sherlock’s things and thus got himself confused for a Consulting Detective. More to the point, Sherlock was not supposed to have let someone in enough to hurt him again. He was not supposed to fall in love, not again, not ever again, and he should have realised what was happening before it was too late.
He should never have overlooked the signs; he’d let himself become too wrapped up in the warm fuzzy jumper-clad praise that John fairly hurled at him on a regular basis (interspersed with amusing insults and barely contained rage that entertained Sherlock to no end).
John, brave, incomprehensible John, tries to sacrifice himself to save Sherlock for the second time running and then, later, gives Sherlock a clear sign that it’s alright, it’s okay if he has to blow them all up just to stop this mad bastard of a man dressed in Westwood and malign.
In the end he doesn’t blow them all up, he takes John home and they have curry and a glass of wine and watch a James Bond movie and Sherlock sits and stares at the screen and pretends very hard that he is not in love with his flatmate and that it is not the most terrifying thing to happen to him since he was 16 years old. John, oblivious as ever, watches the screen rapt and does not notice for one second that his flatmate and friend is sitting next to him, quietly falling to pieces shaped like his name.
J O H N
Pairings: Sherlock/Victor, Sherlock/John
Warnings: non-con, verbal abuse, elements of self-harm
Summary: It was never a decision; he prefers to think of it as a logical impulse. When the needle hits his skin, guided by a disapproving man who cannot afford to be disapproving, the pressure in Sherlock’s chest shakes loose, dissipates, and melts away.
Notes: Unbeta’d first part of a short two-shotter that I wanted to post before I let it sit in my drafts forever. To be considered a scribble more than a polished work. Please read the warnings before embarking on the fic, and read the author’s note at the end before bringing up any issues. This is not meant to be easy. The second part is half written and will be posted eventually but not within the next two weeks or more.
He’s 16 years old when it starts; on the day after Victor Trevor’s sixteenth birthday party.
He hadn’t wanted to go, but Victor had insisted and Mummy had begged, and somewhere during the course of his sixteenth year he’d lost the ability to deny either of them anything they asked of him.
Sherlock often found himself surrounded by the unbearably asinine and incompetent, but neither Victor nor Mummy fit that mould - Mummy by way of being deceptively shrewd in her understanding of her son and Victor by way of being … well … Victor.
Where Sherlock is cold logic and scientific observation, Victor is passionate erudition and profound intuition. Where Sherlock is solitary and misanthropic, Victor is genial and affable. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, but something in Victor’s personality allows him to ignore the caustic front of Sherlock’s words and get straight to the real heart of meaning behind them. Victor is the only person who can follow Sherlock’s arguments and who is never offended by Sherlock’s arrogant belief in his own superiority. (Victor is the only one, after all, that has been deemed worthy of the time of day; he is seemingly able to understand and make do with the compliment inherent in that small fact.) He is endlessly handsome in a warm, enticing way, all golden curls and tanned olive skin, while Sherlock’s gangly limbs and sheaf of riotous curls call to mind a brand new colt, still clumsy and awkward on its own legs.
If Sherlock were the moon then Victor would be the sun and Sherlock cannot help but be utterly and irrationally infatuated with him.
They are inseparable for two years and while Victor enjoys a whole host of friends (for no one is impervious to his charm, and Victor likes to surround himself with loyal admirers), Sherlock is the one he seeks out most frequently. It is a cherished sliver of knowledge that glows golden in Sherlock’s chest, no matter how hard he tries to stomp it out.
That night, Victor gives Sherlock his first glass of wine (and then his second and his third) and Sherlock drinks them down, letting himself be flattered into folly by the fact that Victor has chosen to separate from the crowd of his adoring followers to spend time alone with Sherlock in the field behind the house.
Victor’s smile is soft and his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders warm. It’s a balmy night in June and Sherlock learns swiftly that despite all his previous assumptions he is not immune to the potent combination of starlight and merlot. When he slides his hand down the front of Victor’s trousers, the other boy smirks and leans back on his elbows and says, in that golden syrup voice of his, “Go on, then.”
So Sherlock bends over and opens Victor’s chinos and lets the hand tangled in his hair guide his head downwards. It’s messy and uncomfortable and he nearly chokes several times but even so he’s hard in his own trousers - as soon as he starts he wants it to be over (hates the way Victor’s fingers tug painfully at his hair, the way his lips have to stretch around Victor’s penis, the ache in his jaw and the bitter taste in his mouth and the strange foreign scent of another boy’s crotch) but he can’t back down now, not until it’s finished.
As it happens, it never does finish. Sherlock is dizzy and disoriented, from the wine and the lack of oxygen (and, he later suspects, some other toxin besides) - he doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching, too focused on finishing what he started, frustrated with himself because surely he’s been doing this for hours already, is he doing it wrong somehow? Why hasn’t Victor said anything?
Suddenly Victor is scrambling backwards, strong hands shoving at Sherlock’s shoulders and pushing him off. Sherlock can’t quite focus, he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. (How did he get so drunk so quickly? Is this what it’s like, being drunk, so fuzzy and unclear? How hateful.) Victor is saying something, shouting at him to “Fuck off, you little faggot!” and suddenly Sherlock is surrounded by a group of his jeering classmates but he can’t quite manage to stand up or do anything but scramble at the ground, at Victor’s ankles … and then the world turns black.
He wakes up the next morning in a field several hundred meters away, his brand new clothes torn to shreds, his body covered in aches and bruises, and his head threatening to split in two.
He finds his way home and sneaks into his room before anyone can see him; catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror he freezes and stares at his own reflection.
The word is there, scrawled dozens of times in stark black ink (a single Sharpie pen) across his skin (by seven individuals, judging by the variety of handwriting).
The rubbing alcohol stings his eyes and makes him retch, but he manages to get the ink off of his face and arms, the backs of his legs and crest of his chest.
His hand hesitates, though, when he comes to the scrawl above his right buttock. It’s Victor’s handwriting, he’d know it anywhere; the arch of the F and the swooping, curled G’s.
Sherlock unearths an old hand mirror he’d been using in a recent experiment and uses it to stare at his own back, the way the word sits there on his skin. His memories of the night before are drowned in wine and distorted with lust and remorse, but he can still hear the word falling from Victor’s lips, can still feel the way it cut him from clavicle to sternum.
The alcohol-soaked cotton wool falls to the floor; he twists his arm to thumb over the ink stain - if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to tell it was there. Except that it will always be there, even if he washes it off: Victor’s handiwork is, in a metaphysical way that would no doubt delight him to no end, indelible.
It was never a decision; he prefers to think of it as a logical impulse. When the needle hits his skin, guided by a disapproving man who cannot afford to be disapproving, the pressure in Sherlock’s chest shakes loose, dissipates, and melts away.
Faggot
----------
It strikes him that this could be a costly enterprise and so the next time he tries to do it himself, with a needle dipped in ink, slowly and methodically poking through the epidermis of his left wrist into the dermis below, all the time deliberately not thinking about the way his mother had sounded talking to his father, telling him Sherlock was “sick”, spitting it out as if the word offended her.
The final effect is messy and blurry and unpleasant to look at: no matter how meticulously he had worked, he’d struggled to keep the needle poking to the same depth, and it hurt much more than it had in the shop. Sherlock resolves to seek out professionals (or at very least someone with a functioning machine) in the future, but he never has the ragged edges of his homemade tattoo touched up or fixed.
The next week, when his mother has him sent to a psychiatrist, he is neither surprised nor upset. He keeps his sleeves rolled down and stares the stuffy old psychiatrist straight in the eye and doesn’t reign himself in, not at all, not like he usually does, like he knows he should, and he comes out of the sessions with yet another word to have inked into his skin, which is satisfying if not entirely accurate. He puts it below his right clavicle in the psychiatrist’s own script, and wears it on his chest like a badge.
Sick
Sociopath
-----------
After Victor, school is a minefield. Sherlock endures sneers and smirks and whispers behind hands with cold indifference, because he had learned very early on that retaliation just makes other children even more vindictive, and he is too clever not to realise when he is outnumbered. (Of course that doesn’t always stop him from spitting back retorts and insults and angry deductions when provoked, but it is enough to make him - for the most part - resigned to the abuse.)
He takes up judo because its interesting and methodical and the burn in his muscles after bouts is lovely and distracting, and the fatigue in his muscles sends him straight to sleep at night. He chases every roommate away with caustic deductions and experiments in jars and, in the case of one particularly recalcitrant boy, dead animals on their beds, until the school has no choice but to give him a single room. They cannot, after all, afford to expel him.
He’s just defeated Harrow’s judo champion, an enormous and powerful boy by the name of Thompson, in a long, hard fight and has retreated to the changing rooms when Thompson approaches him from behind, executing a fairly beautiful Hadaka Jime that is too tight to be misconstrued as playful, crushing Sherlock’s windpipe and sending his vision swimming.
Thompson’s voice is low and hoarse when he whispers in Sherlock’s ear: “I’ve heard about you, you know. Eton’s resident poofter. No-one ever mentioned what a fucking tease you are, though. Don’t think I missed that, the way you were grinding around on my cock out there. Think you’d really have won if you hadn’t been such a fuckin despicable cocktease, Holmes? You’re gagging for it, aren’t you, faggot?”
Sherlock grapples with the arms about his throat, but his mind has gone strangely blank. He can feel Thompson pressed hard against his back, and all the fight goes out of him. He ought to fight, he should flip this idiot over and stand on his windpipe until his lips turn blue and his heart stops beating, but something in him is so unspeakably exhausted that he simply can’t do anything but struggle half-heartedly as Thompson undoes the draw-string on his zubon and pushes the tails of his uwagi out of the way. Sherlock doesn’t even shout when Thompson shoves himself in and afterwards, when he’s left bruised and bleeding and utterly defeated on the floor, Sherlock cannot even bring himself to cry. Maybe he should, that’s what normal people would do, isn’t it? Sit and cry for the violation of body, for the aches and pains and rips and bruises? Perhaps he should report it, but then it would be his word against Thompson’s, and no one ever takes him at his word, not anymore.
Instead of crying, Sherlock picks himself up and washes himself off and the next day, Saturday, he sneaks into town and slides into the backroom of a studio that knows to expect him already.
He’s made strict rules for himself about this. He’s got a limited amount of space and the set of data to record is unpredictable in terms of its size. He wouldn’t usually be here, not for such a small word, but it seems to be going around and around in his head, all day and all night, all he can feel is Thompson’s arms around his throat and the word digging into his skin, tease tease tease tease tease. Sherlock resents it, because he’s not a tease, and he wasn’t asking for it, he’d been fighting fair and properly, and he may be any number of things, terrible things most likely, he hasn’t had time yet to discover the sum of all his myriad failures and darknesses, but he is not a tease.
He no longer even has to talk to the owner of the studio; simply walks in and hands him the list, the one he’s been compiling for months while saving up any pocket money that he doesn’t have to spend on aparatus for his experiments. Sherlock pays the man five times his normal rate because he knows, he can see in the man’s eyes, that he wants desperately to turn Sherlock away.
The needle buzzes across his left scapular spine, a sharp, vibrating point of focus that goes a long way to soothing Sherlock’s tumultuous mind, and as it moves, shaping the e and smoothing over the a, Sherlock takes a deep breath and deletes.
PoofterNancyPonceQueerFagGayerCockslut
Tease
----------
Some words he records simply for the sake of posterity - they are tossed at him entirely too frequently to be ignored, he feels, space constraints or no. He is taller now, and beginning to fill out, and he reserves his left shin and ankle for these worthless little repetitious phrases, which he thinks should be plenty of space. He adds to the list when he feels the need, if he has nothing else to add in a particular Month. The tattooist writes the words in tiny, careful typewriter print, because they are not worth any more effort than that.
By the time Sherlock gets to Cambridge, he has spent thousands of pounds on ink and time and the power to erase by recording, and his tattoo artist has stopped looking at him with sad eyes and instead welcomes him with a warm smile (still coloured with pity) and always gives him a cup of tea after. (He is the only person Sherlock knows from Eton that he would ever consider calling a friend.)
GitPrickArseholeTosserTwat
PratCuntSodWankerShitBastard
-------
Sherlock develops a reputation for himself at Cambridge.
It’s just that it’s all so dull, and fucking his way around town is the only thing he can really be bothered to do. Not because he enjoys it - but it is interesting, after a fashion. You can learn a lot about a person when their guards are down, and no one is more vulnerable than they are in the midst of coitus.
It’s reckless behavior, but Sherlock is always relatively careful when it comes to secretions and bodily fluids, and when one of his conquests introduces him to the sweet, intense bliss that is cocaine, the serendipitous irony is not lost on him - that once more he should be finding release at the end of a needle.
His infuriating parents have him on rather a tight budget, but people of a certain class are surprisingly willing to lay down rather a lot of money for a good fuck or a quick suck and so Sherlock has no problem paying for either of his little fixations.
The new words come from his ‘benefactors’ and classmates alike; he has started carrying a small notebook around to make sure he doesn’t leave any of them out.
Chemistry is mildly diverting, but not at all challenging, not hardly, and he has to get down on his knees to convince his supervisor to grant him free access to the chemical stores. He sits in on other classes, as well, because they might be useful one day: anatomy, pathology, neurobiology, psychology, behavioral sciences, mathematics and logic. By the end of his first year he is known throughout the University, showing up unannounced to seminars and lectures, and by the end of his third, though he graduates with first class honours in Natural Sciences, he could have qualified for no less than five separate degrees.
LunaticWhoreInsaneDickhead
ManiacSlutMadmanShowoff
---------
In his third year, Sherlock seduces a girl - the secretary of the Vice Chancellor of the University, in fact - because she has information he needs in order to solve a little ‘case’ he’s been working on, and because it seems a lark.
He becomes a different person, just for a few weeks. He sends flowers and brings expensive coffees and flirts with her cleverly and makes love to her with his eyes. It’s the easiest thing in the world; he is, after all, very attractive and very, very intelligent. Charm is nothing more than intelligence applied within a given set of parameters set by society, after all - and when he stands in front of the mirror with his clothes on, he understands what it is that other people see when they first look at him: a beautiful, flawless young man in impeccable garments, with elegantly arching cheekbones and the sort of lithe figure many people would die for and that even more long to touch.
The girl is helpless under the onslaught of his affections; kind and trusting and sweet in her own incredibly dull way. Ultimately, she is a good person, caught up in a web of lies and deceit that extends so far beyond her ability to even comprehend that it’s entirely laughable. Maybe that’s why the terrible, devastated look on her face when she realises he’s been playing her for information haunts him for days, despite his best efforts to ignore it.
He visits his local artist and has him write the word she’d screamed at him in big, thick letters down his side. While the needle buzzes across his ribs, Sherlock hisses in his breath and tries to pretend he doesn’t agree with her, tries to pretend that she wasn’t right, that the word doesn’t apply.
Monster
-----------
He moves to London because he loves London, and because it will be easier for him to disappear there. He’d had to write disgrace on his arm the day of his graduation, the day after Father had walked unannounced into his room at Uni to find him surrounded by alcohol and cocaine, flat on his back on his bed with his trousers pulled down to his knees and his knees pulled up to his chest and one of the professors inserted between the globes of his arse.
His parents hadn’t attended the ceremony, but Mycroft had. It is the look in his brother’s eyes that Sherlock excises from his memory while under the needle that day.
London is relentlessly big and unapologetically chaotic and Sherlock loves it. He disappears into back alleys and tenement buildings and dark, dingy clubs; he stalks the city like a wraith and it envelops him completely, pulling him with warm, welcoming arms right into its sanguine, degenerate bosom and refusing to let him go.
He bumps into Victor one night, in a club in Soho, and when Sherlock fucks him over a rusty toilet it feels almost like revenge. It is not at all as satisfying as it ought to be, and when Victor picks himself up off the floor and looks at him with golden eyes turned cold and says, “Always thought you might end up a fucking junkie, Holmes.” Sherlock has to try very hard not to let it shatter him to pieces.
Instead, he turns on his heel and all but flees.
It’s been months since he’s been in a tattoo parlour and almost none of them want anything to do with him, not with the drugs glinting in his eyes, but finally he manages to pull himself together enough to convince someone to let him in. The smell of disinfectant is soothingly familiar; the artist is a tiny pixie of a woman who frowns deeply while she writes the latest word down his left arm, around and over and in between the track marks that he’s carelessly let get out of hand.
Of all the words he’s had inscribed into his skin, it is this one that he hates to see the most.
Junkie
---------
He is actually part of the first crime scene he helps to solve. He’s collapsed in a corner of the drug den, riding out a particularly unpleasant trip, when the police rush in and start arresting anything that still has a pulse. (There are quite a few bodies in there for whom this is no longer the case.)
Sherlock had figured it out months ago: the drug cartel and the dubious ingredients they were using to cut their supply. He’d deduced all the details - how they were getting the drugs into the country, how they were pushing them onwards, who was in control and who people thought was in control. They’ve been clever, really clever about it, and even if the police catch every single one of them, they’ll never know it all. But Sherlock knows. Sherlock can tell them.
They throw him in a jail cell for a few days and he screams bloody murder while he comes down from the drugs until finally a haggard, prematurely grey man pulls him out and sits him at a green table in a green room with a cup of tea and three stale hobnobs on a plate. The detective inspector sits, switches on the tape recorder between them, and asks him to explain himself.
Sherlock launches into it, agitatedly breaking the hobnobs into a million crumbs as he speaks, and the detective inspector listens, canted back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest.
When Sherlock is done, the detective inspector looks at him thoughtfully for a few long seconds before abruptly leaning forward and hitting the switch on the recorder.
“Explain it to me. Tell me how a genius like you finds himself off his face on a drug cocktail that should by all rights have killed you in a shithole in Hackney?”
Sherlock simply stares back at the man for a few seconds of his own and then shrugs. “You don’t know what it’s like, being a genius. I get ... bored.”
The grey-haired man sighs. “Listen. Completely off the record - if you clean yourself up, really get your act together, get rid of the drugs, I could ... well. Let’s say maybe we could make sure you have some more puzzles to solve.”
“You want me to become a detective?” Sherlock scoffs at the very idea, but shuts up very quickly when the detective says, “More like a consultant. If we ever get stuck. I like having people to bounce ideas off of.”
“Oh,” Sherlock says, and then finds himself so lost in contemplation he doesn’t notice the detective slipping his card under his hand and leaving the room.
He goes to his flat and, while he stands in the midst of the chaos thumbing over the long, jagged J on his left arm, he invents himself a job. Consulting Detective certainly has a nice ring to it.
That week he calls up to cancel his standing appointment at the tattoo parlour, because for once he has nothing to add.
---------------
Coming off the drugs is agony, but he does it. Mycroft sends him to a secure facility and leaves him there for months, and it is dull, dull dull dull, and everything is so white his eyes throb with it. One of the doctors sees his tattoos and sends him for another psych eval, but Sherlock refuses to go. He doesn’t need another word to carry around while he is still trying to erase the last one.
Eventually, after months of agonizing tedium, he returns to his flat on Montague Street. It is nothing short of a bombsite, but he ignores that. He has work to do.
There was nothing to do in rehab but think, and Sherlock had a lot of thinking to do. He is about to take a habit and turn it into gainful employment, after all, and that bears rationalisation. Once, he’d tried to explain his methods to Sebastian, one of the more frequent partners he’d had at Cambridge: that deduction was more a science than a hobby, that it could be used to solve the question of anything from motive to method. Sebastian had laughed in his faced and called him a nutter, and Sherlock had gone to sulk at the tattoo parlour in favour of defending himself.
Sherlock reads and experiments and runs about London, solving things for people he sees whether they want him to or not. He gathers an unprecedented amount of data and finally, when he feels ready, he calls the number on the worn business card the detective had given him nearly two years before.
The first crime scene is a bloody, brutal murder of a family and children. Sherlock is ushered in by Lestrade, takes a single look around, and declares that the husband’s estranged ex-wife, who will be on her way to France with a new lover, is their killer.
“Boring,” he says, looking away from the bodies to find the entire forensics team staring at him.
“What?”
“You freak,” a curly-haired sergeant all but shouts at him, shaking her head with disgust. “These people died, horribly and brutally, and all you can say is boring?”
“Well I’m sure it wasn’t for them,” Sherlock admits. The sergeant looks like she’s about to lunge for him, but Lestrade pulls him out of the room, muttering “Jesus Christ” under his breath as they go. By the time Sherlock has helped them finish up the case, Sally Donovan has called him a freak no less than fifteen individual times, and Anderson - the weasley, greasy forensics tech Sally has her eye on despite the fact that he’s clearly engaged - has joined right in.
He starts a tally in a fresh notebook; after the first time, he has to start a system of multiples. For every ten times someone (usually Donovan, though most of Lestrade’s regular team joins in on occasion) calls him ‘freak’, he has the word inked into the skin over his spine once, starting just over the first thoracic vertebra, right under the nape of his neck, in crisp copperplate lettering.
He keeps the tally book in a drawer with his sock index. By the time he meets John Watson five years later, the word freak has been written on his spine thirty four times (once over each thoracic and lumbar vertebra and once in each space in between, varying in size to mirror the flare of the spinal column), and he has started to adjust the corresponding multiples instead.
------------
The small army doctor that Mike brings into the lab at Barts is interesting in ways he shouldn’t be. He limps for no physical reason and has a bullet wound in his shoulder and is a Doctor, a fully trained medical professional who clearly eschewed the business of healing people in order to become a soldier and, presumably, hurt people instead.
Not that John Watson is the cold-blooded killer sort, oh no, he is merely a soldier, and that means honour, and patriotism, and pride.
It is so incongruous that Sherlock decides he must, absolutely must, get to the bottom of it, and so he decides they will live together after all. At least for a few days, until John realises just what it is that he’s dealing with and moves away again. Inevitable, but hopefully it will grant Sherlock enough time to figure this man out.
The new flat at Baker Street is perfect, just the right amount of space for two bachelors and comes with the added bonus of Mrs. Hudson downstairs who despite many protests always seems to be willing to put a spot of tea on. (Sherlock has considered taking the words “Not your housekeeper!” to the tattoo parlour simply on merit of them having been shouted at him so frequently. It is always kindly done, though, and so he refrains.)
He’s in the middle of deducing something about John when Lestrade shows up with a case, an irresistible tetris mess of a case, and Sherlock is immediately caught up in the whorls and eddies of facts and information. He brings the small army doctor with him, because the man is a puzzle he wishes to contemplate further, but pays him no particular mind at first, preferring instead to focus raptly on the prone form of the lady in pink.
Until, that is, a word suddenly bubbles out of the tiny doctor’s mouth that stops Sherlock dead in the middle of his sentence.
“Amazing,” John says, shaking his head and looking at Sherlock like someone would look at something that is good. “That’s fantastic.”
For a split second that seems to last an infinity, Sherlock is left stunned and gaping like a hapless guppy. He draws in a sharp breath. “Do you know you do that loud?”
Instantly, John’s face shutters, and he seems to shake himself out of his trance. Sherlock wants to chase the expression back onto that face, those enigmatic features weathered by sun and sand, but he doesn’t quite know how to. “Sorry,” John says. “Sorry, I’ll stop.”
He wants nothing less. He would rather give away a kidney than to have John stop, and isn’t that a strange turn of events. “No,” Sherlock says. “No, it’s … okay.”
John grins at him and Sherlock is thrilled at his genius idea to keep this little doctor man around.
Of course, he then proceeds to leave the man behind at a crime scene with people who hate him and clearly will have no problem telling John exactly why, but John doesn’t actually seem to mind too much. And later, after Lestrade unceremoniously reveals the existence of a (mostly abandoned) drug habit, and Anderson forces the reveal of the sociopath, and Sherlock himself reveals his own innate not goodness … even after all that John is still there, in completely over his head and blissfully unaware. Or, at least, that’s what Sherlock thinks until after the cabbie has been shot and John turns up with powder burns in his fingers and without a tremor in his hand.
John calls him an idiot, then, but he smiles while he does it, and that night Sherlock starts a new notebook and writes it all down: Amazing, Fantastic, Idiot.
------------
In the throes of his infinite genius, Sherlock does realise he quite often overlooks the things that ought not to be overlooked.
He has been feeling relatively proud of himself, lately. (Of course he is always, and rightfully, proud of his mental acrobatics, but they come to him naturally and ought to be admired in due course by all and sundry, because really he is quite clever.) He has had to have only one word inked in the months since John arrived; he has not drunk himself into oblivion; he has not touched a single speck of cocaine; and he has not taken a single stranger into his bed to fuck until he can no longer think straight.
John, clever little John, seems to have rerouted most of his more destructive tendencies into more constructive pursuits. For instance: instead of cocaine, Sherlock now irritates John by finishing his cryptic crosswords for him; instead of alcohol, he runs experiments on how many cups of tea he can get John to make him in a given day; instead of sex, Sherlock trails John on his dates and sabotages them subtly from afar, because no mere woman deserves the undivided attention of John Hamish Watson. He has not had to add to his tattoos, because with John around the words seem to come less frequently or not at all, as if people can take a single glance at John and unconsciously realise just how badly it would go for them to insult Sherlock in front of a timebomb with such a devastating short fuse.
It is all going swimmingly (even though John wrote in his blog that Sherlock was sometimes amazingly ignorant - that had smarted) until John gets himself kidnapped and wrapped in explosives and Sherlock’s heart suddenly jumps into his throat and refuses to move. He hurls himself into a taxi and then, ten excruciating minutes later, throws himself into the building where John is. For the first, cruel ten seconds after John steps out of his cubicle Sherlock, terrified, thinks that maybe, just maybe, it has all been just an elaborate lie - and he should have known. No one could think, really, that he was fantastic. No one could think he was brilliant. No one would, of their own free will, and without ulterior motive, stick around with Sherlock for months after months in a flat full of mild squalor tending towards entropy, living on takeaway and tea and cleaning up dessicated livers from stovetops and finding toes in their toaster. Sherlock should have known, he should have known it was too good to be true, and instead of seeing it he’d gone and fallen in love with the lie of a tiny doctor soldier man who looked at him and saw impossible.
The relief that shatters through his limbs when John opens his parka to reveal enough explosives to decimate an entire city block is, Sherlock distantly thinks, a bit not good. It is also closely followed by acute and savage terror: because none of this was supposed to happen.
He wasn’t supposed to let John get hurt, or threatened in any way. He had tried to avoid it and already failed, twice, though admittedly he wasn’t entirely to blame for the fact that John had taken to carrying around most of Sherlock’s things and thus got himself confused for a Consulting Detective. More to the point, Sherlock was not supposed to have let someone in enough to hurt him again. He was not supposed to fall in love, not again, not ever again, and he should have realised what was happening before it was too late.
He should never have overlooked the signs; he’d let himself become too wrapped up in the warm fuzzy jumper-clad praise that John fairly hurled at him on a regular basis (interspersed with amusing insults and barely contained rage that entertained Sherlock to no end).
John, brave, incomprehensible John, tries to sacrifice himself to save Sherlock for the second time running and then, later, gives Sherlock a clear sign that it’s alright, it’s okay if he has to blow them all up just to stop this mad bastard of a man dressed in Westwood and malign.
In the end he doesn’t blow them all up, he takes John home and they have curry and a glass of wine and watch a James Bond movie and Sherlock sits and stares at the screen and pretends very hard that he is not in love with his flatmate and that it is not the most terrifying thing to happen to him since he was 16 years old. John, oblivious as ever, watches the screen rapt and does not notice for one second that his flatmate and friend is sitting next to him, quietly falling to pieces shaped like his name.
J O H N