Fic: Another Life to Live

[medorikoi]

Title:Another Life to Live
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, lanuage
Summary: It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?



Tonight is a family dinner, the Whole Shebang. Everyone sitting around the table and the boys are positively beaming. Mycroft and Mrs. Hudson are here of course, and Harry and Mrs. Holmes, and now D.I. Lestrade. If I was going to fall back on my clichés I would say it takes a whole village, to raise two children in this case. And tonight I am invited as well. My presence does get a sigh or two and one halfhearted ‘It just isn’t proper!’ from Mrs. Hudson, but I know she does not really mean it, we have shared too many cups of tea for that. I sit as the proud centerpiece, grinning at our family.

I think they would take me away but John is right, this month has been hard. So even if it is not entirely proper to have a skull at your family dinner I am a distraction from Sherlock’s discomfort, I make him laugh when John puts a straw near my mouth. I make him giggle because I am just slightly uncouth. And besides, these boys are as much mine to watch over as anyone else’s, I am family now too.

They have adopted me the way everyone else seems to think they have adopted Sherlock and John. An oversight, I think it may be the other way around.

Lestrade is still new enough to be slightly ill at ease with the rest of the eclectic family, but he is fitting in fine. I even got a smile out of him. We go way back, drug bust buddies.

But no one wants to hear a skulls account of a meal. I can hardly review the food and my conversational skills are not exactly on par with my ability to listen intently. But all of the players are here for the story no one really knows except in pieces. So while they eat and cajole and slight one another fondly I can remember for them.

I remember so they do not have to.

One of the benefits of being dead is that technically, I do not have a heart to break.

I was for all intents and purposes a failure. Not Sherlock’s failure but he saw it that way regardless. Convinced that if he could have understood the rational for my actions I could have been saved in spite of myself. But it was worse than that, I was the failure of a family. I was proof that what happened to Sherlock was not a unique occurrence.

I was proof that sometimes, families destroy the innocent.

Failure is never a thing Sherlock has been good with, especially back when he was in university, more wild than tamed, no one to restrain him or keep him from his dark moods and forays into drugs and near madness.

The one good that seemed to come from my death was that beyond university work Sherlock had a developed a hobby. Dogging Scotland Yard.

It was easy for him to bully his way into the cubicles and desks of the lower ranking, to con and blackmail his way into the door and into petty cases.

But Sherlock did not want petty cases. He abhorred how easy they were, how the officers he was forced to work in conjunction with found every deduction so mind-boggling because of their own simplicity and restricted mental capabilities. He hated them for not understanding.

He changed tactics, instead of blackmail going for bribery, going for the ambitious and the stupid, the people who would want to break rules to get him the interesting cases. The officers who would have made slightly better criminals than they did enforcers of the law, or in fact, held both titles. And so he found a man who embodied all of these things. Past middle aged, not risen to a point of prestige and yet yearning to, almost enraged at what he envisioned were dozens of promotions that had ‘passed him by’.

Perfect.

Well, almost perfect. It was not out of sense of preserving the security of the public or a fleeting thought to the oaths he had made when he became part of the police force, but the very same traits that had made him so prefect to use that made Inspector Athelney Jones black out the details of the cold case murders he gave Sherlock Holmes.

And maybe it was a little Sherlock’s fault, purposefully boasting that from what he had seen in the files the only thing left missing was the written out and obvious conclusion, the way he purposefully made Jones not only feel small and insignificant but know that he was. This was before finesse was even a part of Sherlock’s vocabulary, when pawns were fully aware of their status and expendability.

There is nothing quite as certain to make a man take out insurance than letting him know that you are liable to break him.

And so Sherlock’s first murderer cases, his first kidnappings and unexpected deaths all had names like Male Victim One and as the pile progressed and Jones had gotten more bored and daring with coffee and self-assurances that he was doing the right thing for his career by using a man that could, in fact, be his pawn, names like Mr.SelfAbsorbedWanker with all of the victims of abuse and murder being named variances of Sherlly and Shmerlock.

What had been a pile of maybe twenty cases dwindled down quickly to six as we skimmed them together as the clock was chiming annoying things like ‘2 AM!’ as if to remind us that the world was passing on without us, flooding around us as we glanced back into the distant past.

The dismissed cases pile was thrown haphazardly to the floor, a group of lives in glossy photos and coldly professional black typeface spilled out across our scratched wood floor, lives ended for a second time in a flat that Mycroft threatened to condemn at least twice a week. Some were simply too old, kidnappings that even if the perpetrators could be caught they would likely not remember the crime, dementia and death wiping their sins and lives clean; and some, though he would never say it aloud even to me, were beyond him. The data was gone and the people lost.

But five, five made Sherlock grin the way he never did for Christmas. Five were real, honest to goodness cases. They were misfiled and stretching across England, brought to main headquarters in London for filing or burning, cases never even destined for the modern world of computers, cases closed before DNA testing had ever been conceived of let alone brought into court rooms.

With a single interesting case Sherlock will neglect food and sleep, he will forget entirely that he is human and, at least in his own mind, become a machine for data.

This is Sherlock in the first blush of romance with his yet unconsummated marriage to his work, Sherlock with five cases laid out before him, begging to be solved and as addictive as any substance he had ever injected.

The first case took us an hour and made him scowl and shove away the papers in distaste. It was the butler. In the living room. How cliché! How incredibly droll! Never mind that it was the butler in a whirlwind romance with the wife in the living room and an escape from a mildly political marriage to Casablanca of all places. He threw the folder to the ground in a fit of pique and stormed off to find yet another packet of cigarettes. I asked him to please not smoke so much because he knew better damn it, he had dissected a pair of smokers’ lungs last week and didn’t he remember their sick color? As he smoked and fumed I wished the best for the couple and their ill thought romance and wondered if they survived their ensuing poverty intact or if they grew to hate each other for it. Both the wish and the reprimand were made as loudly as possible in my absolute silence.

The second and third cases were…not what I would have wished for Sherlock. If I had hoped naïvely in the beginning that detective work would pull Sherlock from his occasional drug use those hopes died in the few days after Sherlock threw the folders into the fire in a rage and watched the photos of children curl and burn. No one would ever say it and it would never appear in the notes of big brother in so many words but Mycroft would never stop thinking ‘addiction’ after he came into the flat that he hated to find Sherlock on the floor and me silently screaming.

If the cases before were a tribute to the failure of humanity the next was an attempt at redemption. Pallid and emaciated and armed with a new phone from Mycroft that buzzed endlessly but had all of the capabilities Sherlock could never afford on his own, we delved unthinkingly into the next case, Sherlock determined and I desperate.

It took days and the ‘befriending’ of a well-placed and informed if not technically clever intern at Saint Bart’s but the result was phenomenal. John would have loved it, he would have come up with a cute title and written it up and told Sherlock that he was brilliant and Sherlock would have been insufferably pleased with the comment for hours.

Victim ‘Sherly’ was a 42 year old nurse found hanging in her living room only moments after she had stopped breathing. Heart still beating. She was pronounced dead at the hospital. No enemies, no family to speak of save for her twenty-two year old estranged son, and a widower of at least a decade. No suicide note and one anonymous call saying that an ambulance was needed immediately but no one had tried to cut her down.

Am I too obvious? Giving all of the important details and none of the useless dead ends we had to sift through in the near darkness of the rooms where Sherlock seemed not to notice that outside night had fallen and cast us into dusk with it?

A suicide of course, and wasn’t it lovely? Too obvious and unverifiable without the names of the victims but Jones could take care of that in a second, go on his computer and Bam! There in black and white and pixels.

It was the aspirin that did it, the aspirin in her blood during the postmortem, and tucked into its usual place in her purse instead of missing from the scene.

Jones would eventually verify it for us over the phone in a put-upon manner. The husband had died of heart failure, of course, and from there it was only a few illegal clicks away from reading about ‘Victims Son’ and his recent diagnosis of Fukuhara syndrome, hereditary and extremely rare, and his mortal cardiomyopathy. Hereditary on his father’s side. Medical records said that after the heart transplant he did extremely well.

I did not expect Sherlock to have the opposite reaction as he had had to the previous cases, for him to jump for joy, I knew that it would not redeem humanity, but I did not expect the depression that followed either. After the intellectual challenge was gone I did not expect the silence and the self-imposed seclusion, the refusal to take anything into his body that was not smoked or injected, a habit which would follow him for years and be axplained to John Watson as ‘days will go by without my saying a word’. Mycroft’s reaction of appearing when Sherlock had worked himself into a mild coma however was predictable and, if only from me, welcome.

For a moment, as I watched him abandon the folders and myself on his little work table and sink to the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him and his head falling back onto the cushions in agony and chemical induced bliss I wondered what had happened to the lure of the last case.

He thought then that the last of the five was too easy to bother with. He had glanced over it and that was more than sufficient. The other cases had been interesting but they had not produced results that would goad Inspector Jones into action, the inspector needed murderers, not suicides, to be a hero.

The fifth case was necessity. It would bring him more work and give the inspector a taste of the glory Sherlock could give him, but it in itself was nothing.

It was, Sherlock thought as he drifted in his private oblivion, inconsequential.

We had no way of knowing then that this case would be the second painful failure of Sherlock’s career.

Everything is frustrating. One day you are on the top of the world and everything is games and laughter and nothing could possibly take this away because everything is brilliant and perfect. Everything is the way it should be.

And then the you wake up in the morning and before you even open your eyes, before any data has even filtered into your brain to tell you that something somewhere has gone amiss everything is terribly, inexcusably wrong.

Except it is not. It is just him. Just Sherlock.

He tries to keep his mind empty as John wakes up and gives him a sleepy smile like he is content and happy just to be here and like everything is not acid on his skin. Sherlock pushes his face back into his pillow and closes his eyes. He can’t think of John now. He knows that, he has felt this before. After days of agony and frustration and acid burns on his mind he knows better. He cannot let himself think about the people he loves when he is like this because on these days, when his mind is filled with white noise, they never look the same.

They are the same, still perfect, still loving him, but they are worse, he is worse. His chest tightens and he wants to crawl out of his own skin and he cannot stop the pangs of frustration. He is bored and he knows he will not be able to get his mind to focus long enough to drag him out of this.

He closes his eyes hard enough to see bursts of light in red and yellow against black and he growls into the pillow. Beside him John laughs and runs a hand over his curls, a breath comes close to his cheek.

“I will tell Nana that you are sleeping in.”

And he is gone. Footsteps and the rustle of clothing which is soft so as not to disturb his ‘sleep’ and even that makes Sherlock swallow back the hot rising pang of frustration and anger until the door clicks and he is alone.

Because that just make it worse. That John is sweet and caring and even that provokes animosity that makes Sherlock want to scream. Because no one is that nice, no one can possibly be that sweet all of the time and Sherlock is never like that and each moment of John caring is another moment of debt he owes. Each kindness is a step that will eventually take him away from Sherlock.

And then the frustration is not just anger and wordlessness, it is guilt and loss. A guilt that rests just under your skin and makes it crawl and itch. And the thoughts he tried to suppress rise up unbidden and suddenly John is not the boy he loves, he is not a history of actions and shared words and the other half of himself, he is a million painful mistakes.

He is blood red hands torn to pieces because Sherlock hurt him so brutally that he had to hide to protect himself. He is sleepless nights because Sherlock is not brave enough, not strong enough to not scream and rail at the bumps in the night. He is tears and hunger and fear and far, far too good.

And then his mind goes static, and his stomach rolls and there are no more thoughts of John.

He takes a deep struggling breath against his pillow and waits for the itch of energy under his skin to fade before he goes out to face the day.

Because he knows that every person he sees will be the same until he can make his mind stop. Until he can take control again.

Sherlock avoids the kitchen. John will be upset and Nana will tut but it is easier this way.

He can’t let himself hurt them.

They have no classes today to distract him. They were going on a trip this afternoon. Lestrade was going to come by and take them to see police headquarters. It would be nearly empty on a Sunday afternoon but that was fantastic, less people to see them when they slipped away to go into forbidden places.

And now the only feeling he could muster was hot irritation and intense dissatisfaction. Like it was ruined before it ever happened.

He could fix this. He would fix this.

He just needed to reset his brain, to turn off the white noise, to focus, and everything would be alright again.

He tore into his book bag which was already out of place in the living room, and began throwing the unwanted contents around him as if he were a natural disaster. He liked the comparison. Human tornado. Human disaster. He threw the papers, the books, harder. The books he wanted were at the bottom, huge unwieldy tomes that strained his arms. Two of them he had purloined from his Grand-mère, Mycroft had started dropping them off with her and she would let them into her laboratory, the three of them running experiments together.

He stopped thinking about it. Locked the memory down.

Can’t think about that. Can’t let the nothing in his brain taint anything else.

The thoughts linger.

He can’t handle any more.

He pulled the books out and glanced momentarily at the heavily stained book left secreted under his sweatshirt. It was on poisons, and the pages were crisp with unknown substances that he longed to test but that was not his subject of study for the moment, he had another…more pressing experiment to run first. But it had been an interesting find, not with the other books but in their flat here, packed away in cardboard boxes. He covered it back up.

The thought itched.

A fresh surge of irritation.

He took the two new glossy books and dragged them to the study where chances were no one would bother him, thinking he was too focused rather than…adrift. Numb. Burning from the inside out.

At least four hours before Lestrade was due.

He could do this.

He could- try.

With an hour left Sherlock stood and stretched his stiff muscles. He was lucky. Very lucky. He had hit a break through, he was set to do his experiment next time he had access to the lab equipment and the thrill of it had carried him out of his…fugue.

And now he was not filled with anxiety or white noise or distress.

He was blank.

Nothing.

Not good or bad. He was data. He was chemical reactions and sequences and they surged through him like a living thing.

This at least, was better. He could go with Lestrade and observe and that would be enough.

He did not have to be human at all.

His stomach rumbled slightly and he could acknowledge intellectually that he was hungry. Might as well.

The books he took with him, putting them back into his book bag which had magically restored itself to its organized state. Johns doing rather than Nana’s, his poorly hidden book was still there. He felt the twinge of guilt and unvoiced loss but it was easy enough to bury now. He pulled the chemistry whirring in his mind over himself like a blanket.

John had settled on the couch, Sherlock had barely noticed him as he put away his things.

John normally would have said something by now.

Would have come up behind him and wrapped him in a hug.

Would have-

There was a book on Johns lap, something romantic more than likely. Like a flicker if a light in his mind Sherlock imagined John reading it to him, sitting here and letting the hour pass them by with his voice falling into the easy cadence of story telling. John was good at that.

He could be made of chemistry and the sound of John’s voice.

There was always a smile on Johns face as he held books up with one hand and gestured wildly with the other, telling Sherlock stories that would never have been worth hearing had it been told by anyone else.

But today the book was open and untouched in his lap, falling slowly away. His eyes were lost behind his hands, fingers pressing into his eyes in a way that Sherlock knew too well.

All of the inhumanity in him, the cold apathy, the white noise that had strung itself through his veins raveled together and bent into a cold stone that fell heavily into his stomach. The chemistry and data that made up his mind stopped in midflight and broke apart, falling the floor in glittering gold fragments.

Sherlock ran for their room without looking back, stockinged feet nothing but a hushed whisper of fabric against the carpet. The blanket was easy to find, easier to rip off the bed and leave the sheets and covers in a trail behind him. Gathered in his arms the orange fabric was soft with age and a comforting weight against his chest, he hugged it close even as it spilled around him.

Sherlock ran back down the hallway, silent except for his heavy breath, not even slowing down as he flicked off every artificial light he passed.

The curtains were open and the sun was streaming through the windows and Sherlock debated the time it would take to access the ties. Too long. Far too long.

They would have to make due.

Orange blanket in his arms Sherlock hesitated, clutching it closer, wanting desperately to touch but frozen a step away from John. He bit his lip knowing it would never be seen or known, blue eyes searching the room for any way but this.

A dance they had done before.

One that hurt every time.

Sherlock laid the blanket over John’s shoulders, folding it around him and bringing it to clutch together at his chest with such deliberate delicacy that were John sleeping he might never have known Sherlock were there.

John did not open his eyes but he knew. Knew Sherlock was with him, knew the weight and warmth of the blanket around him was theirs.

Sherlock’s kiss, the soft touch of lips against blond hair and the brush against skin was felt but not seen. Sherlock closed his eyes as his heart began to ache and his cheeks to blush. This was the best and worst part of John’s migraines.

He could touch and kiss and comfort and never have to hide the way his heart raced and ached at the same time, the way his hands longed to reach out and brush his messy blond hair. No one would ever have to see that he would give anything to take Johns pain away. That he would, given the chance, take all of his pain onto himself. No one would have to see that he would gladly die if it meant John would live.

A holdover, a whisper in his mind and a way of acting so ingrained that it was part of him, inescapable now as blue eyes or black hair.

Don’t ever let them see you care, and never, ever, fall in love.

John did not open his eyes to see the look of broken hopelessness on Sherlock’s face but curled into his arms trustingly, letting himself be swaddled and held as he adjusted to the feel of standing.

It was barely a moan, more a painful exhalation, a sound so small that John himself may not have heard it but to Sherlock it might as well have been a scream.

It was his touch that caused this, his kiss that made John pull himself to stand when he could not bear to open his eyes.

Heaven and hell.

Sherlock wrapped an arm around him carefully and led the way slowly to their room.

John never said a word, never opened his eyes, not even as he was helped onto the bed they shared and the orange blanket was pulled tight around him. But before the last fold of soft orange dulled by the darkness of their room was pulled in place over his head John reached out and gently took hold of Sherlock’s arm, the only bit of him he had found to touch, and beneath the throbbing mindlessness of his pain, beneath the soul crushing agony of having even thoughts stripped away, curled his lips into the smallest of smiles. A tired, broken, I love you.

Sherlock left without a sound. Sounds would hurt John, each whisper and footfall a spike of pain.

He tried to wash away the look on his face, tried to erase each line and gesture that betrayed him so clearly. He tried to make his heart stop breaking, or at least to hide the sound of it.

But when he ran to Nana she bent and scooped him up into her arms and brushed the tears he would not cry away from cheeks and kissed his hair as she set him down.

“It is alright, luv.” She promised as she lifted his chin with a finger, watching him as if he really could take Johns pain.

Nana disappeared and a moment later she returned with a few small pills and poured a glass of water.

They went together to the bedroom, Nana in front and Sherlock trailing after her, hiding behind her skirts. Sherlock watched from the edge of the bed as Nana Hudson sat John up and gave him the medication, watched his face emerge from darkness and cloth, the normally happy countenance pinched in suffering.

She cooed and ran a hand down Johns back as she laid him back down, gently righting the blankets and sheets Sherlock had displaced.

John reached out and touched her wrist before curling it back into his cocoon of blankets and forgetting that anything existed but the pain.

Sherlock had not been the first to enter the bedroom but as their Nana stood with a final stroke of Johns back and took her leave without comment, Sherlock stayed. When the door shut and clicked behind him and the world stopped seeing him he lay down in the darkness and unraveled the blankets and refolded them around himself until it was like they were three years old again. Just the two of them, surrounded in dark orange.

John did not move but Sherlock could feel the heat of him, could see the outline of his face and his closed eyes as the day light pierced through the closed curtain and into the soft weave of the blanket.

Sherlock thought of their fieldtrip and knew that somewhere out in the world Nana was rescheduling, still talking in a soft voice as if John were in her mind if not in the room.

He thought of chemistry and of a nothingness that takes hold when bitter frustration has been staved off. Of the impossibility of shrugging off the anger that permeates every cell and of being at best, inhuman.

He thought of the way his heart raced and ached and of the whisper in his mind that never, ever, went away. The way it felt to need to touch when he knows that he shouldn’t. That he can’t.

Sherlock reached out and blushed at the intimacy of carding his hand through John’s hair and feeling the soft strands sift through his fingers when the other boy could do little more than breathe. John didn’t smile, half awake and half just lost in pain, but he curled into the touch and the lines of anguish in his face and in the corners of his eyes lessened slightly.

Heart thundering Sherlock did it again, running his fingers through gold hair and over the warm skin at the nape of his neck, watching his touch comfort John in a way that could not be quantified.

He didn’t stop.

After all, the world could not see here, and even with John he was still invisible under the blanket reaching out in a way that was not inhuman at all.

And if the world could see, if everyone knew, Sherlock would still give his life for John.