A/N: Hello and thank you for reading! I thought of this story and wrote it as a one-shot, but it ended up being too long so I broke it up into different chapters.
Whole story warnings for attempted suicide, character death (kind of. There are dead bodies.), language, and...I think that's it.
Hope you enjoy!
Everything hurts.
He's too useless.
Entirely not useful.
Even his reasoning is repetitive, stupid, useless.
Sherlock lays face down on his bed with no hope and a sinking feeling in his chest. It hurts all through his entire body; it feels like someone is sitting on his back. He turns over, to perhaps relieve that ache, but it hurts more.
His skin feels tinged with the words of his peers.
"Freak," it says across his too-thin, noodly arms and his inset slanted eyes.
"Stupid," it says across his forehead, the shelter of his marvelously large brain.
"Queer," it says across his chest, right over the heart that he has yet to learn to control.
"Waste of space," is says across his too-long legs.
He knows, he knows, fifteen-year-old kids are cruel. He knows sixteen-year-old kids are rude. And he knows seventeen-year-old boys like to pick on the younger kids; but damn, does it have to be him?
Sherlock sighs and turns onto his side. He opens his eyes for the first time in a while and sees the photo Mummy insists on leaving on his bedside table. Him and Mycroft as kids, pudgy little Mycroft quite larger than his baby brother, who was celebrating his fifth birthday.
Sherlock imagines Mycroft alone in the photo, wishing that's the way it was.
It's all too much. Mother and his doctors complain that he doesn't care enough, they fear he has no emotion; but the truth is that he has too much. Too many feelings pulsing through those thick veins and controlling his every day.
"Caring is not an advantage," Mycroft had said once.
"It's true," Sherlock says out loud now.
Sherlock adjusts his eyes to look past the photo to the bulletin board on his wall. Tacked there are newspaper cutouts of unsolvable crimes, or crimes he solved before the police did. A four year old cutout is stapled alone at the top: the "tragic death" of young Carl Powers.
Sherlock scowls at the cutout. He solved it, or at least he could have solved it, had someone listened to him.
"It was murder," he'd told them.
"You're a kid," they'd told him.
Sherlock sighs and flops onto his back again. He grabs a pillow and holds it close to his chest, wondering if he had someone to hold if he'd feel better.
Too much. Too much noise. He needs it to just shut up for five minutes so he can rationalize, but it won't shut up. He quickly stands and rushes out of his bedroom, down to the kitchen, grabbing the largest, sharpest knife he can.
He glares down at the metal utensil while he takes his shirt off. No use messing a perfectly good shirt. He tosses it in the hamper and thinks that his mother could give it away to a boy who needs it, who deserves to wear the hundred-pound shirt more than he does.
He shucks his trousers and socks, too, leaving himself only in his boxers. No use making a mess. Mother would be upset by dirty trousers. She'd tell Sherlock that he has an image to uphold, that it's no good to run around with dirty bottoms.
Well, now she won't be scolding him for anything.
He picks up the knife and holds it to his chest, the pointy end indenting his skin. He's so very tired of this skin.
"Your skin is so white you look like a ghost," a kid had said last week. "Maybe you'd be better that way."
He can't help but agree.
He's about to push, about to end it all, when he thinks to not dirty up the sink, so he takes a quick step back.
His untidiness saves his life, for Sherlock steps on the hand towel laying on the slick floor and falls back, back, back until his thick skull slams against the loo tiles.
His body slumps in relief.
Everything is black.
