Let your body decide Part 3
Note: Re-worked in May 2012. Sherlock's nickname for Rainflower is inspired by a stupid Swedish song from the early -90th called Tess. One line of the song goes "Jag vet vad hon heter, men jag kallar henne Tess" ("I know her name, but I call her Tess").
Summary: Sherlock does his best to get comfortable with his new sexual identity, but somehow it doesn't fit either.
***
Someone knocked on the bathroom door, or more accurately: someone tried to break the bathroom door. It was Victor, the door-banger had said so when the pounding had still been knocks. Sherlock wasn’t capable to care.
The shower had been running over his face for an hour now. At one point he had played with the thought of drowning himself but it was really hard to do this way. There were so many more efficient ways to commit suicide if that’s what you’re after and Sherlock was pretty sure he wasn’t.
His clothes were lying around him in the shower, fallen where he had undressed. The expensive suit was ruined, maybe the shirt could be saved, and the socks, but compared to the suit it was nothing worth saving.
The pounding on the door stopped. Sherlock had no idea why, or how it made him feel. He turned up the water temperature, scolding his skin even more. In the back of his mind he reflected on how useless this was, but the back of his mind didn’t control this situation. At all. No part of him had control right now actually.
The door opened and Sherlock turned his head to see why. In the door-way, getting up of her knees, was Nina and behind her were Victor and Tess. Damn Nina and her lock-picking skills. Tess had a phone in her hand and he wondered who she was calling before realising that he didn’t care. Sherlock looked up into the shower head again, closing his eyes.
Nothing happened. Sherlock imagined his friends were a bit thrown off guard. He almost heard them exchanging looks but he didn’t care about that either.
A hand reached into the shower and turned off the water. Nina.
A towel was wrapped around him. Tess.
Sherlock couldn’t make himself open his eyes and look at them. He still knew them by smell alone. Nina smelled like a mixture of the chem. lab and the Persian rug and Tess always smelled like coffee. Always just coffee. Sherlock wonder what her real smell was.
Without warning, Sherlock collapsed in Tess’ arms, making both of them crash into the wall. Tess whimpered, Nina and Victor screamed. Sherlock started to cry. Finally. He had trouble understanding why it felt like such a relief to cry.
The women helped him out of the bathroom and tended to him in silence; Tess dried him and helped him into his robe while Nina looked him over physically. Sherlock let them. He knew what Nina was looking for and he loved them for their care. He didn’t look at them; still with tears running down his cheeks his eyes were locked at Victor who devastated sat on the floor and stared right back at him.
“Sherlock,” Nina whispered, gently touching his cheek to make him look at her, “Hon…oh hon….”
Sherlock could see the same devastation in Nina’s eyes that he saw in Victor’s. Probably in Tess’ as well, but she had murmured something about tea and disappeared. He knew what they saw when they looked at him, he knew perfectly well what this all looked like and he felt the need to correct them. He always felt the need to correct them when they were wrong. This time more to still their worry than to set them straight.
But he couldn’t.
There was no way he could explain how the act of consensual sex had made him react as a first class rape victim. They would never understand because he couldn’t even start to grasp what was wrong with him. He had been the one initiating it; he had really thought he wanted it. Apparently he’d been wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured resting his forehead against Nina’s shoulder. He didn’t want to worry them. How had they even known? Was it Victor? Had Victor saved him again? Sherlock had no recollection of that and if Victor had saved him, then Victor should know that this wasn’t rape.
“It’s not your fault, luv,” Nina whispered back, pressing a soft kiss at his temple, “Nothing of this is your fault. It’s going to be okay, it’s not your fault.”
Sherlock shook his head. She didn’t know how wrong she was; it was entirely his fault. Something was messed up. He was messed up. This couldn’t be how it was supposed to be. He wanted to tell her that, but when he looked up he caught a glimpse of Victor again who had turned ash grey. It made Sherlock feel sick, but Tess came back with the tea which probably saved him from throwing up. She got an appreciative look, because it was the only thing he could manage.
Tess sat down next to him, rubbing soft circles on his back, and Nina took his free hand. Sherlock didn’t think he would ever be this close to a group of people again. Still he couldn’t bring himself to ease their pain by telling them that he - technically - hadn’t been raped.
***
Sherlock’s friends tip-toed around him for weeks. They made sure he wasn’t alone, tried their hardest to get along (Victor and Tess that was), going out of their way to make him feel safe. It just made him feel ashamed. Ashamed for what he made them believe, ashamed of how he had reacted. Just ashamed in general. It was not a good feeling at all.
One day - 41 days after “the incident” - Tess took him to a small church close to where she lived. Maybe a chapel was more accurate, but Tess called it a church and therefore Sherlock did the same. Sherlock hadn’t been in a church since he’d been forced to go through the ritual of confirming a Christian faith he’d never had. He just indulged Tess in this as a way to feel less ashamed for not telling her the truth.
“Tell me again, why are we here?” Sherlock asked when they walked in.
“I want you to meet some of my friends,” Tess repeated the reason she had given him before. It made no sense; Tess wasn’t the kind of person who would have friends in the church. From what Sherlock had deduced, all of his friends were just as pronounced atheists as he was.
“Rainy!”
A woman, mid-30s, greeted them with a big smile as they walked over to the group of twelve women standing round a table with cookies and beverages. For the life of him, Sherlock couldn’t figure this out; the group’s age span reached from late teens to early pensioners and there was a good mix of ethnicity and social classes. Judging by their necklaces alone, four of the women belonged to other faiths than the one of this church; if he took the women as a whole in consideration only two of them were practicing Christians.
“I’ve told you to call me Flower,” Tess said with a smile, hugging the woman who had greeted them.
“Like the skunk in Bambi,” the woman replied in a way that told Sherlock this was a running gag between the women. Odd.
“This is the boy I’ve been telling you about, the one who calls me Tess,” Tess introduced Sherlock to the group of women who all looked very curiously at him.
“Hello,” Sherlock said, raising his hand in a small wave.
“I thought he might benefit from listening,” Tess said, talking as if he couldn’t speak for himself. It annoyed him, but he wasn’t sure what this was, so observing was the best option.
“Of course,” an elderly lady said, showing all of them, including Sherlock, to a table. “How much have you told your friend Rainflower?”
“Nothing really,” Tess gave Sherlock a smirk, “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have agreed to come if I had.”
“Maybe you’d start us off, then?”
Tess nodded with a smile, taking Sherlock’s hand. For a moment she looked at Sherlock with a mix of sympathy and an insecurity he had never seen in her.
“Sherlock, this is a group for rape survivors,” she explained, squeezing his hand, “We meet here once, maybe twice a month. We’re about thirty people who come on irregular basis to help each other work through and process it.”
“Oh….” Sherlock’s mouth remained opened. He felt so ignorant and self-centred, how could he have missed that Tess had been raped? Especially during these last weeks, how could he not have seen it? “Tess, I’m sorry.”
“We don’t pity each other here,” Tess said with an encouraging smile, “We’ve all gone through it, we’re in the same boat. So there is no need for being sorry.”
Sherlock kept staring at her. He had forced her to throw up pills once by sticking his hands down her throat, but this was too much. He wanted to run away but Tess’ grip on his hand made it perfectly clear that he needed to stay. Not for his sake but for hers.
Sherlock powered through two hours of tears and rape stories; starting with Tess who had been raped repeatedly by a man she referred to as “uncle” (but who she had no relation to) and who had lived in her parents’ collective. Sherlock vowed that if he ever got the opportunity - and he would make sure he did - he would see to that this uncle of hers had an accident called castration. With dull scissors.
Leaving the church/chapel/whatever Sherlock felt worse than he had done in his entire life. Listening to the women telling their stories had been more traumatising than the incident that had made him stand in the shower for an hour. That had just been sex, what these women had described was evil. Pure evil. It was a wonder these women didn’t hate all men. He was pretty sure he hated his entire gender just by hearing about what the women had gone through.
Participating in the meeting, pretending he belonged there, that he actually knew what they had talked about? He hated himself for it, every step of the way home to the shower. He stayed in the shower for two and a half hours. This time no one picked the lock, no one tried to break down the door. This time he was all alone with the thoughts and sense memories of another man’s penis inside him. It hadn’t been rape, it had been consensual sex, but he still felt so extremely violated and the little trip with Tess had made him feel like a liar. There were people out there with real traumas, people like Tess, he had no right to claim any sympathy.
He was just screwed up.
***
Sherlock was balancing his bow on the tip of his index finger while listening to Victor playing Louis Spohr's Violin Concerto No 7. It was beautiful as always even though it wasn’t Sherlock’s favourite Spohr. He loved listening to Victor when he played, but today it sounded sad. Not just today, it had sounded sad for weeks and Sherlock was fairly sure he knew why.
That’s what finally did it. He couldn’t let his incapability to tell the truth ruin the musical wonder that was Victor. He wouldn’t forgive himself for that. The world wouldn’t forgive him.
“Victor,” Sherlock said, gently placing the bow beside him but his friend didn’t seem to hear him and he raised his voice, “Victor!”
Victor held up, he was almost done with the piece and with an exchange of looks Sherlock let him finish. It sounded just as sad, but Victor picked up the melody as if he’d never stopped. He was wonderful. When he was done he lowered the instrument and waited for Sherlock to say whatever was so important that it had been necessary to interrupt his playing.
Victor was such a snob sometimes. Sherlock loved it.
“I don’t know what you think” - a lie, Sherlock knew perfectly well what Victor thought - “but Anton never raped me.”
It looked like at least five stone was lifted off Victor’s shoulder. The worry and concern were still present, but Sherlock could see how relieved he became. Oh god, Sherlock had completely forgotten that Anton was Victor’s friend. Victor had even been the one introducing them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Poor Victor, this must have put him through hell.
Damn it! Why was he always so self-absorbed? First Tess and now Victor, he didn’t even want to think what he had done to Nina in his ignorance.
“What happened, then?” Victor moved Sherlock’s bow and sat down, “Anton called me that night and said you’d run off. And when I came to your place you were locked in the shower, not answering.”
So that’s how Victor had known! It made sense. Good to straighten that out even if it shouldn’t be the main concern right now.
“We had sex, in his bed,” Sherlock started - it had been a long time since he had tried to have sex in a bed actually. Since coming out it had mostly been unpleasant blowjobs in bathroom stalls, “He….I asked him to…well…penetrate me.”
It felt like a too clinical word to describe the messy nastiness that the experience had been. It was accurate, but it didn’t seem like the word a friend used when he told the story of a sexual encounter. In Sherlock’s defence, he didn’t have many experiences to talk about and not many friends to tell them to.
“Damn it hurt,” Sherlock didn’t even mind that it came out in a sob, but he did place one hand over his eyes following it up with a sigh, “and it was just wrong. It felt….”
“Did you tell him to stop?” Victor asked.
“I don’t know,” Sherlock admitted, lowering his hand and looking at Victor completely guilt struck, “You saw me that night; I was high as a bloody tourist in Amsterdam!”
Victor failed to suppress a laugh, “Yeah, Nina told me that, but it…it’s not supposed to matter, you know.”
“It does matter,” Sherlock felt frustrated, “If I don’t remember then I can’t know!”
“Can’t know what?” Victor looked lost - he was not the only one, “If you feel sexually assaulted then that’s all you need to know.”
“No it’s not. It’s…. I….”Sherlock sighed, wishing he’d never started this conversation, and reached for his violin before getting up. “Can’t…can’t we just play?”
Victor nodded. “In the Hall of the Mountain King?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes, he just had to. He didn’t protest though and as soon as Victor stared to play Sherlock noticed that his playing wasn’t as sad as before.
That was…that was good.
***
Sherlock stared at white powder in front of him. It had been in a small plastic bag under his mattress for almost three weeks now, just lying there, keeping him up as if it had been a pea and he’d been a princess.
He couldn’t remember ever hesitating before trying the different substances he and Nina had got their hands on. He really thought the step from the Persian-rug-experiments to cocaine would be smaller. Easier to take.
Maybe school drug-programs had got to him somehow? Cocaine was a real drug, a real narcotic. A destroying-lives-and-overdosing-on kind of drug. It wasn’t a getting-giggling-high-with-a-friend-on-a-Thursday kind of drug.
The logical part of his brain, the scared part, kept telling him that the small pile of powder wasn’t a permanent solution. It told him, repeatedly, how addictive it was (it wasn’t just propaganda, he knew that) and how easy it was to overdose even the first time.
At least he was sure it was pure. Having taken most of the chemistry courses the university offered made the testing of cocaine purity a simple task. It decreased the risk of overdosing; the calculation of how much he needed wasn’t hard.
Still.
The risk was there.
It was cocaine.
He played one of Victor’s recording; Victor would probably kill him if he knew what he used his music for. Hopefully he’d never find out.
His hand trembled when he started to prepare the powder; it was easier to think about it as powder and not as cocaine. Maybe that was a sign to leave it be? His brain definitely had a point. The only problem was that logic had no control over emotions whatsoever. Because logic had no feelings. Logic was the opposite of feelings.
He loved logic. Emotions and feelings were complicated and they’d started to take over his whole being. They were everywhere. Confusion, shame, hurt, uncertainty, awkwardness, embarrassment….He just wanted to know who he was. Who he was and why he wasn’t like everyone else.
When had he started to wish to be like everybody else? He loathed almost everyone else; they were all stupid and uninteresting. He was better than them. He was. This shouldn’t bother him; it was just sex and sex was not important.
He closed his eyes and tried to block out the thoughts. It wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t sex at all, because sex wasn’t important. It was the inability to fit in. His inability to fit in. His inability to belong.
He was used to not fitting in, not belonging. He had done that most of his life, but he had always secretly hoped that when he grew up it would sort itself out. That he would sort himself out. Now he knew it wouldn’t happen; he would never share what other people shared. And he had really started to fear the answer to why that was.
There were no words in the English language to explain how grateful he was that he’d never tried to have sex with the people he really cared about. Because sex messed everything up.
It messed him up.
And left him empty.
Alone.
He leaned down over the table, careful not to breathe on the cocaine. He closed his eyes and inhaled through one nostril, following the line as well as he could.
Sherlock gasped. It hurt. It burned. It…it made his eyes tear up, but he leaned back on the sofa, let his head hit the wall and let the feeling of chemically enhanced happiness fill him. He was in no way a novice to the concept, but the intensity made a wide smile spread over his face. For the first time in over six months he felt no shame, no regret, no embarrassment, no demands.
He knew it was a quick fix, that it wouldn’t last. The logical part of his brain had lost all its right to vote, to have an opinion, because now he was - finally! - at peace. If only for a short while.
***
Sherlock never graduated.
It didn’t surprise anyone.
With some paperwork and an administration hazard, he would have been able to scrape up to a master in chemistry (maybe even a bachelor in biology) but he didn’t see the point. It was the knowledge he wanted, not the degree.
He stayed at university for six years until the cocaine habit made it impossible for him to keep up the appearance of actually doing something. For three of those years he was openly gay, an arrangement that served many purposes: Mycroft never bothered him about visiting their mother and most of the human population refrained from approaching him in a sexual way. Having Mycroft stay out of his business was almost worth being wrong, but just almost. The nagging feeling of resentment and self-doubt was eliminated with the help of cocaine. Or whatever was available.
Victor dropped out during Sherlock’s fourth year after the self-proclaimed music prodigy figured out that he really didn’t need a teaching license; he was never going to work as a teacher anyway. Soon afterwards they lost contact since Victor had no idea how to deal with Sherlock’s increasing drug use and in the end Sherlock decided it was kinder to just stop calling.
Sherlock didn’t mind losing Victor due to cocaine.
Nina, a lot more drug liberal than Victor, left university - and the United Kingdom - shortly after Victor to pursue a PhD in Canada. Before she left she made an attempt to get Sherlock to stop using, but when it didn’t work she washed her hands and moved. For almost a year she called him every Tuesday. Then he lost his phone and never bothered giving her his new number.
Sherlock didn’t know he lost Nina due to cocaine.
Tess stayed put during all Sherlock’s university years. Her study plan was almost as messy and incomplete as his, but at least she saw the point of putting black on white that she had a master’s degree in industrial management - for the life of him Sherlock couldn’t see the use of a degree like that. She stopped taking him to the group for rape survivors after his third visit and when he finally got kicked out of university she let him stay at her place. He came and went as he pleased until one day when he couldn’t to find his way back.
Tess thought Sherlock had died due to cocaine.
Part 4: Will I be happy one day?
Summary: Sherlock does his best to get comfortable with his new sexual identity, but somehow it doesn't fit either.
***
Someone knocked on the bathroom door, or more accurately: someone tried to break the bathroom door. It was Victor, the door-banger had said so when the pounding had still been knocks. Sherlock wasn’t capable to care.
The shower had been running over his face for an hour now. At one point he had played with the thought of drowning himself but it was really hard to do this way. There were so many more efficient ways to commit suicide if that’s what you’re after and Sherlock was pretty sure he wasn’t.
His clothes were lying around him in the shower, fallen where he had undressed. The expensive suit was ruined, maybe the shirt could be saved, and the socks, but compared to the suit it was nothing worth saving.
The pounding on the door stopped. Sherlock had no idea why, or how it made him feel. He turned up the water temperature, scolding his skin even more. In the back of his mind he reflected on how useless this was, but the back of his mind didn’t control this situation. At all. No part of him had control right now actually.
The door opened and Sherlock turned his head to see why. In the door-way, getting up of her knees, was Nina and behind her were Victor and Tess. Damn Nina and her lock-picking skills. Tess had a phone in her hand and he wondered who she was calling before realising that he didn’t care. Sherlock looked up into the shower head again, closing his eyes.
Nothing happened. Sherlock imagined his friends were a bit thrown off guard. He almost heard them exchanging looks but he didn’t care about that either.
A hand reached into the shower and turned off the water. Nina.
A towel was wrapped around him. Tess.
Sherlock couldn’t make himself open his eyes and look at them. He still knew them by smell alone. Nina smelled like a mixture of the chem. lab and the Persian rug and Tess always smelled like coffee. Always just coffee. Sherlock wonder what her real smell was.
Without warning, Sherlock collapsed in Tess’ arms, making both of them crash into the wall. Tess whimpered, Nina and Victor screamed. Sherlock started to cry. Finally. He had trouble understanding why it felt like such a relief to cry.
The women helped him out of the bathroom and tended to him in silence; Tess dried him and helped him into his robe while Nina looked him over physically. Sherlock let them. He knew what Nina was looking for and he loved them for their care. He didn’t look at them; still with tears running down his cheeks his eyes were locked at Victor who devastated sat on the floor and stared right back at him.
“Sherlock,” Nina whispered, gently touching his cheek to make him look at her, “Hon…oh hon….”
Sherlock could see the same devastation in Nina’s eyes that he saw in Victor’s. Probably in Tess’ as well, but she had murmured something about tea and disappeared. He knew what they saw when they looked at him, he knew perfectly well what this all looked like and he felt the need to correct them. He always felt the need to correct them when they were wrong. This time more to still their worry than to set them straight.
But he couldn’t.
There was no way he could explain how the act of consensual sex had made him react as a first class rape victim. They would never understand because he couldn’t even start to grasp what was wrong with him. He had been the one initiating it; he had really thought he wanted it. Apparently he’d been wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured resting his forehead against Nina’s shoulder. He didn’t want to worry them. How had they even known? Was it Victor? Had Victor saved him again? Sherlock had no recollection of that and if Victor had saved him, then Victor should know that this wasn’t rape.
“It’s not your fault, luv,” Nina whispered back, pressing a soft kiss at his temple, “Nothing of this is your fault. It’s going to be okay, it’s not your fault.”
Sherlock shook his head. She didn’t know how wrong she was; it was entirely his fault. Something was messed up. He was messed up. This couldn’t be how it was supposed to be. He wanted to tell her that, but when he looked up he caught a glimpse of Victor again who had turned ash grey. It made Sherlock feel sick, but Tess came back with the tea which probably saved him from throwing up. She got an appreciative look, because it was the only thing he could manage.
Tess sat down next to him, rubbing soft circles on his back, and Nina took his free hand. Sherlock didn’t think he would ever be this close to a group of people again. Still he couldn’t bring himself to ease their pain by telling them that he - technically - hadn’t been raped.
***
Sherlock’s friends tip-toed around him for weeks. They made sure he wasn’t alone, tried their hardest to get along (Victor and Tess that was), going out of their way to make him feel safe. It just made him feel ashamed. Ashamed for what he made them believe, ashamed of how he had reacted. Just ashamed in general. It was not a good feeling at all.
One day - 41 days after “the incident” - Tess took him to a small church close to where she lived. Maybe a chapel was more accurate, but Tess called it a church and therefore Sherlock did the same. Sherlock hadn’t been in a church since he’d been forced to go through the ritual of confirming a Christian faith he’d never had. He just indulged Tess in this as a way to feel less ashamed for not telling her the truth.
“Tell me again, why are we here?” Sherlock asked when they walked in.
“I want you to meet some of my friends,” Tess repeated the reason she had given him before. It made no sense; Tess wasn’t the kind of person who would have friends in the church. From what Sherlock had deduced, all of his friends were just as pronounced atheists as he was.
“Rainy!”
A woman, mid-30s, greeted them with a big smile as they walked over to the group of twelve women standing round a table with cookies and beverages. For the life of him, Sherlock couldn’t figure this out; the group’s age span reached from late teens to early pensioners and there was a good mix of ethnicity and social classes. Judging by their necklaces alone, four of the women belonged to other faiths than the one of this church; if he took the women as a whole in consideration only two of them were practicing Christians.
“I’ve told you to call me Flower,” Tess said with a smile, hugging the woman who had greeted them.
“Like the skunk in Bambi,” the woman replied in a way that told Sherlock this was a running gag between the women. Odd.
“This is the boy I’ve been telling you about, the one who calls me Tess,” Tess introduced Sherlock to the group of women who all looked very curiously at him.
“Hello,” Sherlock said, raising his hand in a small wave.
“I thought he might benefit from listening,” Tess said, talking as if he couldn’t speak for himself. It annoyed him, but he wasn’t sure what this was, so observing was the best option.
“Of course,” an elderly lady said, showing all of them, including Sherlock, to a table. “How much have you told your friend Rainflower?”
“Nothing really,” Tess gave Sherlock a smirk, “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have agreed to come if I had.”
“Maybe you’d start us off, then?”
Tess nodded with a smile, taking Sherlock’s hand. For a moment she looked at Sherlock with a mix of sympathy and an insecurity he had never seen in her.
“Sherlock, this is a group for rape survivors,” she explained, squeezing his hand, “We meet here once, maybe twice a month. We’re about thirty people who come on irregular basis to help each other work through and process it.”
“Oh….” Sherlock’s mouth remained opened. He felt so ignorant and self-centred, how could he have missed that Tess had been raped? Especially during these last weeks, how could he not have seen it? “Tess, I’m sorry.”
“We don’t pity each other here,” Tess said with an encouraging smile, “We’ve all gone through it, we’re in the same boat. So there is no need for being sorry.”
Sherlock kept staring at her. He had forced her to throw up pills once by sticking his hands down her throat, but this was too much. He wanted to run away but Tess’ grip on his hand made it perfectly clear that he needed to stay. Not for his sake but for hers.
Sherlock powered through two hours of tears and rape stories; starting with Tess who had been raped repeatedly by a man she referred to as “uncle” (but who she had no relation to) and who had lived in her parents’ collective. Sherlock vowed that if he ever got the opportunity - and he would make sure he did - he would see to that this uncle of hers had an accident called castration. With dull scissors.
Leaving the church/chapel/whatever Sherlock felt worse than he had done in his entire life. Listening to the women telling their stories had been more traumatising than the incident that had made him stand in the shower for an hour. That had just been sex, what these women had described was evil. Pure evil. It was a wonder these women didn’t hate all men. He was pretty sure he hated his entire gender just by hearing about what the women had gone through.
Participating in the meeting, pretending he belonged there, that he actually knew what they had talked about? He hated himself for it, every step of the way home to the shower. He stayed in the shower for two and a half hours. This time no one picked the lock, no one tried to break down the door. This time he was all alone with the thoughts and sense memories of another man’s penis inside him. It hadn’t been rape, it had been consensual sex, but he still felt so extremely violated and the little trip with Tess had made him feel like a liar. There were people out there with real traumas, people like Tess, he had no right to claim any sympathy.
He was just screwed up.
***
Sherlock was balancing his bow on the tip of his index finger while listening to Victor playing Louis Spohr's Violin Concerto No 7. It was beautiful as always even though it wasn’t Sherlock’s favourite Spohr. He loved listening to Victor when he played, but today it sounded sad. Not just today, it had sounded sad for weeks and Sherlock was fairly sure he knew why.
That’s what finally did it. He couldn’t let his incapability to tell the truth ruin the musical wonder that was Victor. He wouldn’t forgive himself for that. The world wouldn’t forgive him.
“Victor,” Sherlock said, gently placing the bow beside him but his friend didn’t seem to hear him and he raised his voice, “Victor!”
Victor held up, he was almost done with the piece and with an exchange of looks Sherlock let him finish. It sounded just as sad, but Victor picked up the melody as if he’d never stopped. He was wonderful. When he was done he lowered the instrument and waited for Sherlock to say whatever was so important that it had been necessary to interrupt his playing.
Victor was such a snob sometimes. Sherlock loved it.
“I don’t know what you think” - a lie, Sherlock knew perfectly well what Victor thought - “but Anton never raped me.”
It looked like at least five stone was lifted off Victor’s shoulder. The worry and concern were still present, but Sherlock could see how relieved he became. Oh god, Sherlock had completely forgotten that Anton was Victor’s friend. Victor had even been the one introducing them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Poor Victor, this must have put him through hell.
Damn it! Why was he always so self-absorbed? First Tess and now Victor, he didn’t even want to think what he had done to Nina in his ignorance.
“What happened, then?” Victor moved Sherlock’s bow and sat down, “Anton called me that night and said you’d run off. And when I came to your place you were locked in the shower, not answering.”
So that’s how Victor had known! It made sense. Good to straighten that out even if it shouldn’t be the main concern right now.
“We had sex, in his bed,” Sherlock started - it had been a long time since he had tried to have sex in a bed actually. Since coming out it had mostly been unpleasant blowjobs in bathroom stalls, “He….I asked him to…well…penetrate me.”
It felt like a too clinical word to describe the messy nastiness that the experience had been. It was accurate, but it didn’t seem like the word a friend used when he told the story of a sexual encounter. In Sherlock’s defence, he didn’t have many experiences to talk about and not many friends to tell them to.
“Damn it hurt,” Sherlock didn’t even mind that it came out in a sob, but he did place one hand over his eyes following it up with a sigh, “and it was just wrong. It felt….”
“Did you tell him to stop?” Victor asked.
“I don’t know,” Sherlock admitted, lowering his hand and looking at Victor completely guilt struck, “You saw me that night; I was high as a bloody tourist in Amsterdam!”
Victor failed to suppress a laugh, “Yeah, Nina told me that, but it…it’s not supposed to matter, you know.”
“It does matter,” Sherlock felt frustrated, “If I don’t remember then I can’t know!”
“Can’t know what?” Victor looked lost - he was not the only one, “If you feel sexually assaulted then that’s all you need to know.”
“No it’s not. It’s…. I….”Sherlock sighed, wishing he’d never started this conversation, and reached for his violin before getting up. “Can’t…can’t we just play?”
Victor nodded. “In the Hall of the Mountain King?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes, he just had to. He didn’t protest though and as soon as Victor stared to play Sherlock noticed that his playing wasn’t as sad as before.
That was…that was good.
***
Sherlock stared at white powder in front of him. It had been in a small plastic bag under his mattress for almost three weeks now, just lying there, keeping him up as if it had been a pea and he’d been a princess.
He couldn’t remember ever hesitating before trying the different substances he and Nina had got their hands on. He really thought the step from the Persian-rug-experiments to cocaine would be smaller. Easier to take.
Maybe school drug-programs had got to him somehow? Cocaine was a real drug, a real narcotic. A destroying-lives-and-overdosing-on kind of drug. It wasn’t a getting-giggling-high-with-a-friend-on-a-Thursday kind of drug.
The logical part of his brain, the scared part, kept telling him that the small pile of powder wasn’t a permanent solution. It told him, repeatedly, how addictive it was (it wasn’t just propaganda, he knew that) and how easy it was to overdose even the first time.
At least he was sure it was pure. Having taken most of the chemistry courses the university offered made the testing of cocaine purity a simple task. It decreased the risk of overdosing; the calculation of how much he needed wasn’t hard.
Still.
The risk was there.
It was cocaine.
He played one of Victor’s recording; Victor would probably kill him if he knew what he used his music for. Hopefully he’d never find out.
His hand trembled when he started to prepare the powder; it was easier to think about it as powder and not as cocaine. Maybe that was a sign to leave it be? His brain definitely had a point. The only problem was that logic had no control over emotions whatsoever. Because logic had no feelings. Logic was the opposite of feelings.
He loved logic. Emotions and feelings were complicated and they’d started to take over his whole being. They were everywhere. Confusion, shame, hurt, uncertainty, awkwardness, embarrassment….He just wanted to know who he was. Who he was and why he wasn’t like everyone else.
When had he started to wish to be like everybody else? He loathed almost everyone else; they were all stupid and uninteresting. He was better than them. He was. This shouldn’t bother him; it was just sex and sex was not important.
He closed his eyes and tried to block out the thoughts. It wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t sex at all, because sex wasn’t important. It was the inability to fit in. His inability to fit in. His inability to belong.
He was used to not fitting in, not belonging. He had done that most of his life, but he had always secretly hoped that when he grew up it would sort itself out. That he would sort himself out. Now he knew it wouldn’t happen; he would never share what other people shared. And he had really started to fear the answer to why that was.
There were no words in the English language to explain how grateful he was that he’d never tried to have sex with the people he really cared about. Because sex messed everything up.
It messed him up.
And left him empty.
Alone.
He leaned down over the table, careful not to breathe on the cocaine. He closed his eyes and inhaled through one nostril, following the line as well as he could.
Sherlock gasped. It hurt. It burned. It…it made his eyes tear up, but he leaned back on the sofa, let his head hit the wall and let the feeling of chemically enhanced happiness fill him. He was in no way a novice to the concept, but the intensity made a wide smile spread over his face. For the first time in over six months he felt no shame, no regret, no embarrassment, no demands.
He knew it was a quick fix, that it wouldn’t last. The logical part of his brain had lost all its right to vote, to have an opinion, because now he was - finally! - at peace. If only for a short while.
***
Sherlock never graduated.
It didn’t surprise anyone.
With some paperwork and an administration hazard, he would have been able to scrape up to a master in chemistry (maybe even a bachelor in biology) but he didn’t see the point. It was the knowledge he wanted, not the degree.
He stayed at university for six years until the cocaine habit made it impossible for him to keep up the appearance of actually doing something. For three of those years he was openly gay, an arrangement that served many purposes: Mycroft never bothered him about visiting their mother and most of the human population refrained from approaching him in a sexual way. Having Mycroft stay out of his business was almost worth being wrong, but just almost. The nagging feeling of resentment and self-doubt was eliminated with the help of cocaine. Or whatever was available.
Victor dropped out during Sherlock’s fourth year after the self-proclaimed music prodigy figured out that he really didn’t need a teaching license; he was never going to work as a teacher anyway. Soon afterwards they lost contact since Victor had no idea how to deal with Sherlock’s increasing drug use and in the end Sherlock decided it was kinder to just stop calling.
Sherlock didn’t mind losing Victor due to cocaine.
Nina, a lot more drug liberal than Victor, left university - and the United Kingdom - shortly after Victor to pursue a PhD in Canada. Before she left she made an attempt to get Sherlock to stop using, but when it didn’t work she washed her hands and moved. For almost a year she called him every Tuesday. Then he lost his phone and never bothered giving her his new number.
Sherlock didn’t know he lost Nina due to cocaine.
Tess stayed put during all Sherlock’s university years. Her study plan was almost as messy and incomplete as his, but at least she saw the point of putting black on white that she had a master’s degree in industrial management - for the life of him Sherlock couldn’t see the use of a degree like that. She stopped taking him to the group for rape survivors after his third visit and when he finally got kicked out of university she let him stay at her place. He came and went as he pleased until one day when he couldn’t to find his way back.
Tess thought Sherlock had died due to cocaine.
Part 4: Will I be happy one day?