Author's Note: I had the urge to write something short and less plot-based than "His Brother's Keeper", and so I present to you now a series of short vignettes centered around the characters of Sherlock.

(I leave it to you to figure out who is who. It shouldn't be terribly difficult.)

The Puppeteer

You don't remember the first time someone looked at you in fear, nor the first moment when you tasted power and found in it the flavour of a thousand lifetimes all swirling together under your smooth and silver tongue. You do recall a slow, patient process, a climb on the social ladder that for all its gilt finish is still only made of wood and clay. A fragile structure, at best, and yet your life depends on it, and death has long since ceased to be the ultimate enemy.

You have watched the missteps of nations – in worry, in sorrow, in triumph – and your smile has grown cold and cynical with the passing of many dark days and sleepless nights. There is something to be said for this world, after all, and you say it, to many names and to many faces, and you somehow derive a low, drawn-in breath of pleasure in watching the strings play out from your long and subtle fingertips.

His music is loud, but yours is silent; the whispered melody of code and coin and tightly-closed doors, from behind which only a few carefully misplaced phrases escape.

They scurry away, and you smile, and you wait.

Your eyes are cold; a steely grey that mirrors a low cloudcover and an adamant pen. You know precisely the measure of control it takes to make those eyes widen in feigned surprise, flash with sudden anger, narrow with the calculation of delicately-implied threat. To be a master of others, a man must first be master of himself, and you have discipline in quantities that cause braver souls than you to wither slowly away in the face of it.

It is hard to imagine, then, that you doubt yourself.

But you do. Your fears are great and very, very real, and in some dark recess of your thoughts that sees never the light of day, but only the utter silence of a black and hopeless night, somewhere in a place you yourself have placed out of reach, you are confronted with a terror that you hope you will never know. Consequences are the stuff of nightmares, and mistakes the ghosts that drift, hollow and loathsome, in front of your vision when that near-perfect mask of self-control edges out of place.

You are aloof, pragmatic, wise in the ways of the world that you can see, at times, to be falling to pieces all around you, and so you know that failure at some point becomes inevitable. Perfection is naive, and yet, still, beyond all reason, you are afraid.

Afraid because your heart is still there, beating a steady rhythm that is as much in your head as it is in your chest, and you often wish you could have rid yourself of it long ago for fear that one day it will compromise you when it matters most.

And your greatest fear, you know, is that it won't.

Hope you enjoyed this first one! Reviews are loved more than chocolate and almost as much as leek and potato soup. :)