A/N:Please read and review and favorite!
Disclaimer :Sherlock belongs to BBC and Sirius Black Arthur Conan Doyle. I own nothing, per usual.
Warnings:Substance abuse, johnlock hints, and major angst and feels (hopefully!)
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Sherlock Holmes had learned a lot in his years on earth. He'd learned how to deduce, observe, and keep a mind palace. He'd also learned that people led to emotions, and emotions led to loss and pain and grief.
He'd wanted to be a pirate, explore the world on a boat, sail off into the vast unknown, adventure around every corner. He'd wanted Redbeard by his side always. He'd wanted to be happy, live the life he'd dreamed of for so long. He wanted to smile, laugh, find someone to love, and maybe someone to not just love him, but understand him. More than anything, Sherlock wanted someone who'd make him feel like he belonged.
Years had passed and he couldn't find in those around him what he desperately wanted. His mother and father loved him, of course, but they just couldn't see, didn't realize, who he was, what he wanted to become. He felt that even when they looked at him, glanced away into the shadows cast by his elder brother, they saw through him, and that he might as well have been invisible.
He knew what it was like to be invisible. He'd become inept at blending in, people watching for hours, training his detective skills, honing in and testing his memory in the already expansive mind palace. He often was alone. He had supposed that was alright, because all those around him seemed to judge before they even gave the slender, knobby-kneed boy with the dark mop of curls a chance.
Maybe that was all he'd wanted after all. To be given a chance. He knew he didn't fit in, didn't want to. But that didn't mean he didn't crave acceptance deep down. He just wanted someone to look at him, truly look at him, and see the person he was and would be, and simply like him because of it.
Needless to say, that never happened. He spent his early childhood experimenting, enthralled in the science around him, and taking no notice of the 'boring' people growing beside him. They weren't boring so much as cruel, the names they called him, even at that age, the things they threw at him. He let it happen, let the rocks and insults assault him. He figured, if they were the normal ones, didn't he deserve it? He was the odd one, the monster, the loner who could never fit in. And so they were awful, and mean and rude, but never boring. That was a blatant lie and an excuse to escape from socializing with his tormentors.
By the time he was a teenager, Mycroft was moved out, in a prestigious business boarding school. Sherlock had secretly been hopeful, thinking that maybe his parents would notice him once he was out of Myc's shadow, maybe he'd become important enough to cast a light with a shadow of his own.
One glance at his mother's tear-stained face and his father's trembling hands as Mycroft Holmes departed, and he knew that would never happen. So he did the first thing a lonely and borderline-depressed teen would. He ran away. Sherlock had mused that the kids around him couldn't hurt him anymore, that Mycroft wouldn't be able to put him down, his parents wouldn't be able to ignore him. In the first week, Sherlock felt something he hadn't since Redbeard was put down. In that first adrenaline-filled week, Sherlock felt happy. He remembered sprinting down alleyways, dodging cabbies amidst shouts from those around him. He could've stayed hidden in the corners, but for once, he didn't feel invisible. So what if he was being yelled at, so what if the cops were after him because he'd stolen that pocket watch? He was visible, vibrant and alive, living in all the ways that mattered.
That had lasted about a month, the euphoria of being free and alive. If it had been anyone else, they might not have survived on streets of London by themselves at age fourteen, but even then Sherlock was uncannily resourceful and intelligent. He knew how to bend people's wills and pretend to be someone he wasn't. He was particularly talented at that, because he'd spent most of his time wishing he was.
It wasn't until the second month of Sherlock's time as a runaway that he discovered drugs. He'd met a seller on a street corner, quite literally ran into the man. He'd asked what Sherlock wanted, how much he'd be willing to pay. And Sherlock, being angry and alone and bored, decided that he'd give in to the dangerous chemicals and the annoying rumors he'd heard about the growing popularity.
He became quickly addicted. It wasn't hard, not at that age, especially when he was alone. He'd do random jobs for people on a street, then move to others. He'd seen others like him, other kids outcast and searching for money to buy the drugs that would only kill them faster than the inevitability of time. He'd make acquaintances, never friends. He'd never had a friend before, besides Redbeard.
They became a part of a secret smuggling ring called the Homeless Network. He found the name ridiculous and far far too obvious, but that was beside the point. He was a part of something. He belonged somewhere.
So he should've been happy, should've felt content. But he wasn't. No matter how much he'd have liked to deny it, at age fifteen, Sherlock Holmes was desperately homesick. The others around him were too, of course, but then none of them talked about that with him. Come to think of it, they didn't tend to talk with Sherlock much at all. So once again he was an outcast, he was the odd one out in a crowd of misfits. And that was when Sherlock had decided he didn't care anymore.
He took more drugs, took more chances, did riskier activities, got into fist fights at bars with men twice his age. He lived like he was dying, because inside, he felt like it. He felt like he was collapsing in on himself, that he didn't belong. Not just to the people around him, but didn't belong to himself. Maybe he was ashamed of his actions, perhaps just confused about who he was. Whatever the reason, he let the risk-taking fill the endless void, let the substances take the place of his shattered heart, let himself become so numb that he'd convinced himself it was better this way than to ever feel again.
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And he'd never been so wrong in his life. He knew that now, sitting beside a gravestone, eyes dry, heart numb again. He felt drained, all the energy seeping out of him. Before he'd had the feverish excitement, before he'd been...okay. Now? Now he was seven all over again, Redbeard's haggard face looking at his one last time, eyes cold and lifeless. But it wasn't Redbeard's face he saw. It was his own, and with a gasp Sherlock realized he was looking in a mirror. He'd been gone for so long, away from himself, away from sanity.
Slowly, slowly, he inclined his head and nodded mutely as he read the name on the grave. It was just as he'd expected, just as he'd feared. It was his own.
Sherlock's eyes bolted open, heart thudding, blood pounding in his ears. He was on a hospital bed and there beside him, asleep in a chair was Detective Inspector Lestrade. Instantly he knew what had happened, the same way he could know a woman's daughter's name from her left pinky finger. An overdose. Sherlock Holmes had overdosed, and the man who relied on nobody, who wanted nobody, was saved when all he'd wanted was to be dead.
And yet he was supposed to be grateful, show his thanks to this man. He'd sat and mused why this was. Did a criminal thank the officer when caught in the act of crime? Then why would the one trying to kill themselves be thankful when stopped by a 'friend', saved from death, but still alive and forced to remain on earth.
The rehab facilitators eventually let him lead with a warning, one he'd known years ago, that his personality was an addictive one. Sherlock knew that, he really did. So the first month back in the world, with occasional people 'discreetly' monitoring him, he didn't touch any substances, because for the first time since primary school, he was afraid.
Not afraid of what the rehab people would do. No, he was afraid of himself, afraid to lose control. Maybe he didn't feel like he belonged and maybe he was lost, but he needed a way to make a living, and he needed a way to regain that control, take a simulation environment where he'd know the outcome before anyone else.
That was when Lestrade showed him the crime scenes. It wasn't difficult, putting all the clues together like some sleuth, and solving the murder or crime case. That was until one particular case. He was told to go in early, but it was a child's case of abuse and bullying. His father would beat him, and the kids around him bullied him because of the bruises.
Something in Sherlock remembered, saw through the bank of numb unfeeling, built-up sociopathic tendencies, and he thought back to how it was as a child for him. And in that small boy, Sherlock felt something inside him snap, and not a second later he had scooped the small boy into his arms and hugged him to his wiry frame. The boy whimpered against him, and Sherlock would always remember those teardrops staining the front of his purple shirt, the one that made him feel more human, feel less like the alien he had to convince the world he was.
In that small boy, Sherlock Holmes let a lone tear trickle down his sculpted cheek, because in that one boy, one who he never did learn the name of, Sherlock allowed himself to mourn. He didn't mourn for the boy, or for his own twisted, mucked-up fate. He mourned for all the children out there had to endure such hardships, and still not be able to find someone who cared.
And while he mourned, for the first time in years, he remembered. He flashed back to those years of his own, of endless torment, of ridiculous teasing from Mycroft, endless insults and injuries. Yet he didn't let them get to them. Sherlock was stronger than that. He was strong enough to survive a rough childhood because that little boy made it, and so could he.
So he worked hard on the cases, helped those who needed helping, but never let any of those get close to him, because he'd forgotten long ago how to let people in, how to knock down the walls he'd tried so hard to build.
He went back to nicotine patches, went back to a rhythm, a pattern because despite how idiotic they were, the workers at the rehabilitation facility were right. He needed an addiction, needed it almost as much as the cases. With the cases from Lestrade and the three patches on his wrist, he was almost okay. Almost.
Then Mycroft visited. He should've expected his older brother, should've realized he'd come, but he'd tried to forget all about him. So when Mycroft Holmes arrived at the door of the near empty flat Sherlock was currently living in, he had five seconds to compose himself and lock all his emotions in the mind palace Mycroft had told him how to build so many years prior. He'd never let the emotions back out after his brother's visit. No one knew exactly what the two talked about, but Lestrade seemed to notice in Sherlock a change from overgrown boy solving crimes for good to a young man solving crimes to prove he was clever, to prove himself to the world. Or perhaps, more accurately, to his brother.
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He'd been asked many times why he stuck with John, why he'd possibly be able to stand anyone so boring. There were many ways he could answer.
'I see him as more than a friend,'
'He keeps me right,'
'He's the only one that's come close to understanding me and still stay with me,'
or, 'I'd be lost without my blogger.'
Regardless of who was asking, he'd answer simply, with no emotion except the almost imperceptible softening of his eyes, "because I have an addictive personality, and John Watson is the drug that keeps me alive."