Author's Note: This is just a random collection of mini-accounts of Sherlock and John's lives, revolving around their dreams. Eventual S/J slashiness hopefully (if I get that far!) Initially inspired by Morgan Stuart's 'Five Nightmares' – thank you! :)
WARNINGS: Child abuse and bad language – sorry!
Sherlock, aged 7 years
Sometimes, he remembers them, sometimes he doesn't. He doesn't know which is better, because if he doesn't remember, then that lingering fear stays with him all day as he tries to recall them, never quite able to. Sometimes, he will wake certain that the darkness is coming to get him, and that it is only a matter of time before the monsters push open the door of his bedroom and come to take him away.
The dreams vary. Sometimes, he is being chased by creatures - hideous gargoyles like the ones on the roofs outside, with knobbly wings and horrible yawning mouths.
Sometime it is his father, tall, dark and looming above him, and Sherlock will be trying to escape from his angry eyes, but finds himself glued to the floor.
Sometimes, there is nothing but a steadily growing fear, a nameless darkness that crept towards him – voices that shout in his head until he thinks he is losing his mind. These are the ones that scare him the most.
He will wake, alone in the cold blackness of his bedroom, and switch on his lamp, crouching closer to the light until it hurts his eyes and burns his fingers, because the light chases away the darkness, and it protects him from the shadows crouching around his bed, chattering and hissing at him like angry demons, trying to steal him away. He will cry quietly until he falls asleep again, tumbling back into a fresh, whirling current of dreams.
No one ever comes to comfort him.
Mummy doesn't hear him because she is ill, and the doctors have given her pills to make her sleep.
Father doesn't hear him because he sleeps deeply because of all the brandy he drinks.
Mycroft swears that he never hears his brother's cries. Maybe it is because he often escapes the oppressive silence and cloying smell of oldness that haunts their house to stay with friends, or maybe because he often spends long hours downstairs studying.
Or maybe he does hear, but he chooses to ignore his curly-haired outcast of a brother, because it is easier that way.
Sometimes Sherlock has night terrors, too, and he doesn't know whether they are better or worse than the nightmares.
Better, because he hardly ever remembers them.
Worse, because he screams, and that wakes Father up.
He comes into Sherlock's room once, and Sherlock is woken by the sharp slap of a hand across his face. It knocks him clean out of his bed, and he staggers to his feet, dizzy and disorientated, to recoil from the angry shadow that is his father.
"Shut the fuck up, you little shit!" he snarls, and Sherlock wriggles backwards, trying to hide beneath the quilts than have half fallen on to the floor, because he can tell that his father has been drinking even worse than normal. His heart is beating so hard that it hurts.
"Don't… Please don't…" His breath catches in his throat, and panic rises in his chest. "I'm sorry… I'm sorry…"
"Well keep your fucking mouth shut in future. Screaming like a bloody girl, enough to wake the dead. You'll wake your mother, and d'you know what'll happen then?"
Sherlock shakes his head mutely, shuddering with terror.
"She'll die," his father leers, puffing alcohol-smelling breath over Sherlock. "And you don't want that, do you?"
"No, no…
"Well, then, quit the bloody racket then!"
He storms out, leaving Sherlock to shiver on the floor. He doesn't want Mummy to die, he doesn't want her to die, he doesn't want her to die. She is the light in a world that is cold and dark. When she is well, she teaches Sherlock how to play the violin, and they play duets together. Her face is full of laughter and beauty, and Sherlock loves her with all his heart.
When she is ill, a cold grey dullness settles over the house, and Sherlock hides his violin, because he knows Father hates it. Father snapped Sherlock's bow once, when he found it left on the piano stool.
Sherlock grows a little older, and things don't change.
Sometimes he wets the bed, and that is even worse. The first time his father finds him crouching before a bowl of water on the cold kitchen floor, trying desperately to scrub the incriminating stains from the bedclothes, he dunks him in the water until Sherlock thinks he is going to die. Then Mummy comes in, and his father pulls him out of the water, and leaves him gasping and dripping on the floor, curled up in a ball to prevent any malevolent blows directed at him.
The teachers at school notice the bruises, but Sherlock says he got them climbing trees. Or, he simply divulges the personal secrets of the teacher in question to the entire class. That usually cuts any caring instincts they have towards the stick-thin, pale little boy, with ebony curls and pale, guarded eyes. One day, he comes in with the entire right side of his face swollen and stained with blue bruises, his arm in a clumsy sling. He sits with his face turned to the wall to hide his injuries, and no one says anything. Even if the teachers are not put off by Sherlock's rudeness, everyone knows that Dr. Reginald Holmes is an important man, and to mess about with one of the richest and most powerful families in the neighbourhood is a bad idea. Dr. Holmes is a Member of Parliament and a governor of the school, amongst other things, and he is known for being ruthless.
Sherlock never finds out whose idea it was, but once they take him to a therapist, because Mummy is worried by how pale and tired Sherlock is all the time. The therapist is small and thin, with blond, frizzy hair, and her name is Claire. Sherlock likes her on sight because her eyes are different colours. Sherlock never knows what colour his eyes are, because sometimes they are blue, and sometimes green-yellow, and sometimes grey. Claire has one eye that is blue and one eye that is green. She is quite old, older that Mummy, and she has wrinkles on his forehead and around her mouth when she smiles. Sherlock also knows that she is thinking about leaving her husband, because the pictures of the two of them together on her desk are dusty, and the glass in one of them is cracked, while the rest of the study is immaculate. She fiddles with her wedding ring too, absent-mindedly, as though she is thinking about pulling it from her finger and discarding it.
Sherlock doesn't tell Claire that he knows this, because by now he knows that it's rude to say things like that to people – Mummy has told him so on more than one occasion.
At first Sherlock doesn't want to talk to Claire, but eventually he begins to tell her things – like how sometimes he has so many thoughts in his head that he thinks his mind is going to explode. And Claire doesn't tell him that he's being silly, or worse, that she understands. She just nods, and listens. Sherlock likes that. He likes having someone to listen to him, especially when they don't expect him to listen to them in return.
One day, Sherlock tells her about the dreams – about the gargoyles, and about his father and about the darkness. He tells her how sometimes he thinks about doing stupid things, like jumping off the church spire, because he wants to know what would happen.
"You mustn't ever do anything like that. You would die, Sherlock," Claire Averly tells him.
The 8-year-old looks her straight in the eyes.
"I don't care," he says.
And somehow, she believes him. She knows he is telling the truth. It frightens her, that cold disregard for human life that she sees in that little boy's eyes.
Sherlock never knows what Claire tells his parents (in fact, she was recommending that they should take him to an expert child psychiatrist), but he does know that he never sees her again. That night after they return home, his father beats him, too, though that's not particularly unusual.
Sherlock realises that if he had told Claire when he first saw her that he knew she was planning to leave her husband, then she wouldn't have liked him, and she wouldn't have made him like her back, and he wouldn't have told her the things he had. And his father wouldn't have hit him.
Sherlock realises that if people don't like him, then that is better, because "caring" causes more hurt than "hating".
Sherlock realises that if it doesn't trust people, then they can never betray him.
That night, when Sherlock's father beats him, he also calls him "freak" for the first time.
Thanks for reading and please leave me a little review if you have the time :) xxx