Relativity of Normal
John had no idea what that one simple comment would mean to Sherlock, but to be fair, Sherlock had probably been annoying him. People generally didn’t like it when he pointed out the obvious difference between their respective intelligences. He didn't understand it at all-it was only the truth, after all.
“What’s it like in my funny little mind?” John had fumed, scowling and finally at his limit. “What’s it like in your mind? Your massive, brilliant mind that can’t bear to show itself to us normal folk?”
Normal, he’d said. Normal.
What was normal? Sherlock’s prompt response would be that he was, of course. But he wasn’t, at least not according to everyone he’d met. And of course, it was his thoughts that made up the difference.
His thoughts. The first misconception people made about him was always about his thoughts.
They weren’t conscious. They didn’t line up like dominoes. They didn’t fall together like a puzzle. They didn’t even flow smoothly like a flow chart, from A to B to C to D, and even if they did, he would still follow it with a whirlwind speed that left everyone else breathless.
He had no idea how normal people’s minds were, but his mind was more like a labyrinth than anything else. At the beginning of a problem, he always found himself in the center of a tall ring of hedge. If he craned his neck, he could see the gray sky above him, the green grass beneath his feet, the slight fog of a London night. He already knew how many paces across the circle of foliage was-he knew its diameter and circumference too. Inside the circle was dull and boring and it made him desperate for respite, made him crave anything to break the monotony.
And then a problem was presented, as it eventually always was. Of course it took him time to gather his evidence-it always did-but he did it slowly, methodically. Experience had taught him better than any teacher ever could that sound analysis was always based upon fact, and the more facts one had, the better.
And once that evidence was collected, he found himself already knowing what it all meant before his brain had caught up to why; he found himself halfway thorough the maze in his mind without having consciously moved. It was like he’d vanished from the Circle of Overgrown Plants and had appeared halfway through the labyrinth instantaneously. He wasn’t even conscious of making a deduction; all he knew was that something told him what he wanted to know and he accepted the answer unquestionably. He supposed that if his mind was a flow chart, it would have skipped B, C, and D and gone right to L.
After a few more deductions, he’d find himself out of the maze, leaving the tall hedges behind and being faced with a questionable, strange landscape full of possibilities-perhaps a network of forest on one side, a web of moor on the other. Once he’d made a decision about what direction to pursue on the case he’d be in the center of another maze, waiting to deduct his way out.
He could do this in a matter of seconds (or minutes, if it was a particularly hard deduction to make). It had taken him a while to realize that by the time he’d be through with one or two series of puzzles that others were still in the center of that very first ring of hedge. They may have traveled down the wrong mental corridor, realized they were wrong, and had to backtrack. Maybe they couldn’t make up their mind as to which way was right. Maybe it simply took them time to run around the twists and turns that Sherlock had just bypassed.
Was it really surprising that he’d turned to anything he could for stimulation, anything that could make him forget about his massive intellect for even an hour? (Cigarettes didn’t do it, Sherlock remembers cataloging absently in his freshman year of university. He’d just gotten himself a habit. He didn’t like alcohol-didn’t like the taste or the way he acted when he was drunk. But cocaine-that was a drug he could always trust to stimulate his senses.)
He was used to this process taking significantly longer for others than it did for him, but he still didn’t understand why, hadn’t understood why ever since he’d begun questioning it as a child.
Needless to say, interacting with children his age had always been akin to torture. How was he supposed to relate to the rest of the people his age when they were barely learning multiplication and he was reading a book he’d nicked from Mycroft on algebra? High school wasn’t better at all-he distinctly remembered a chemistry lab where his two partners had done nothing but discuss some football game they’d gone to last Saturday and Sherlock had spent the lesson trying to find a chemical that could melt polyester without being intrinsically harmful to humans.
Even with the inherent differences, however, it was better when he was small. He’d intimidated people even then, perhaps more than he did now-adults didn’t like to believe that a child that small could perhaps be more intelligent than they were. But there was always someone who was on his intellectual level-an elderly friend of his father’s, perhaps. He’d assumed that things would always be this way-there’d always be someone older than him who he could relate to intellectually. He hadn’t counted on his intellectual and emotional growth, however, and by the time he was fourteen he found relating to anyone difficult. The sudden realized wave of isolation was actually painful.
But if isolation was painful, people were even more so. The comments they made to him were biting and hurtful and stung down to his very core, no matter how much he wished they didn’t. After all, he wanted acceptance as much as the next person. No, he couldn’t really understand others on an emotional level, but he could comprehend their motivations and purposes and wasn’t that enough? Apparently not. He was still a freak, a lunatic, a psychopath.
This coupled with the growing oddity of his interests-most people weren’t more interested in a murder than the daily crossword, after all, and even having an interest in anatomy made him a freak at University-was what prompted him to announce his famous sociopathy.
He found the process of slipping into the persona of a sociopath remarkably easy. The acerbic and sarcastic remarks that slipped out of his mouth definitely had a root in what was said to him as a child, but he refused to follow that mental pathway to self-discovery. None of that mattered any more-it had never mattered, and any proof that it once had was swiftly deleted from his memory. Other than the dark memories constantly lurking under the surface of his facade, it eventually became addicting to shed his emotions like a pair of soiled pants and tuck them away behind a cloak of numbness.
By the time he’d gotten to University, he’d already deluded himself into thinking his peer’s opinions didn’t matter to him; by the time he’d gotten unrestricted access to the university’s anatomy labs, he no longer internally flinched when he looked at a decidedly gruesome murder scene. They were corpses. Carrion. No different from the bodies he dissected in class, or the dead squirrels one found at the edges of roadways.
And what if that invisible barrier between him and those around him may be his fault now? What did it matter if he subconsciously gave up on the possibility of friends, acceptance, or-dare he say it-love? What did it matter if those lines of worry around Mycroft’s eyes hadn’t been there when his little brother had still admitted to having emotions? What did it matter if Sherlock was now more reckless than ever before, as if putting his life in danger was now his way to prove he was even alive in the first place?
But even from behind the mask of his cold, unfeeling, acerbic nature, there was a part of him that knew that no matter what he said or did to others, he was always the better man. After all, they needed him, they would be utterly lost without him-they, who had never cared for him, had never deigned to even try to understand him, who probably wished he was dead. And whenever one of them-Lestrade-tried his patience, he’d reminded them of this with an icy, controlled fury that caused a telling moment of guilt to flash upon their faces.
So what did it matter, what did any of it matter, when all of this was simply his price to pay for being born on the wrong side of normal?
Back in the room, their sitting room, the room that felt so far away right now, John saw Sherlock's head snap up and stare at him levelly for a few moments, seemingly considering something. John, more than ready for the challenge, stared back in what felt like sudden apoplectic anger, his left eyebrow slightly raised and lips thinned.
Sherlock knew John wanted the argument to continue, wanted someone (him) to vent his rage and stress to, and it made him want to snap back, bring up his fortress-like defenses until he'd left John a gibbering wreck of reproach upon the floor.
He didn't, but it wasn't out of a lack of self-confidence. He knew he could. He could dissect John just as well as he could dissect who Sally's most recent conquest (consolation prize) was, and with his abnormal, freakish, anti-Christ-like intelligence, it would be catastrophic.
Somewhere in the back of his head he remembered that John was still furious, still staring, that it had been less than a second since he'd last spoken. He made himself turn away, shut off the emotional floodgates. It hurt. It hadn't hurt before he'd met John.
Catastrophic. Yes.
© 2011 Trina Rutz