"Special."

Yes, yes he was. Very special, in fact, though not because that was his first word, not even because of his gift, or even how quickly it had come to him. No, Sherlock Holmes had a fairly common gift, it was estimated nearly 2 out of every 10 people would have it. He'd started showing signs at age five, when he'd traced the path a book had followed from his mother to Mycroft to a basket in a living room. He could've gone back further, but Mrs. Holmes has drawn the line at tottering to the publishers. Five years old. Very young to understand a gift, unusual, but not unheard of.

What was special was a kind of defect that had come with him, something previously unseen. Sherlock couldn't see the pasts of people. It indicated something very wrong. A lack of empathy, certainly, though it didn't quite touch on sociopathy, thank goodness. Hand him a pencil, he could tell you every detail of its manufacture, down to the location of the tree it was cut from. Hold his hand, and, as he put it, "It goes blank. Dull."

He wishes, at age 14, that his gift was less common. Showing off doesn't resonate far when three other people in your class can do exactly what you do, but better, but with living people, not objects that nobody cares about the history of anyway.

At age 17 he explores the gully near his house and discovers a human skull. His mind blazes with questions, wonders if he can read it since it is, after all, an object now, dead like a pencil, or if it will yield as few answers as a brother's hand given that it once belonged to a living person.

There is only one way to know.

When his fingertips meet the smooth dryness of the bone plates, he almost instantly has to draw back, because the information, the past that the thing holds explodes behind his eyes in an overwhelming burst.

Jesus, it's readable.

He tries again, more slowly. Facts, dates, and something very new seep in more gently, one by one. Born October 16, 1946. Educated at home. After this, Sherlock swears he glimpses a woman, holding books, just an aftershadow of an image. Concussion at 19 years. This fact comes with knowledge of pain, as if Sherlock's head should be hurting terribly, but it's as if he's only witnessed the blow rather than felt it. By the time the skull's list of facts reaches its owner's marriage, he realizes that what he's seeing are memories. They move like gray ghosts, which in a sense is fitting, given that their owner is long dead. Sherlock wonders if the others see memories when they touch each other, and if those memories are in living color like their keepers.

He spends hours that night holding the skull, absorbing what it offers him. It never gives up a name; it must have died with the man, but this is new, and fascinating, and this object has what everything else can't, it has a personality. Just enough personality. It is in this way that the skull becomes his companion. They can't converse, obviously, but Sherlock has never needed conversation in a relationship. He knows the skull like he does most humans, and the skull doesn't call him a freak.

He explores cemeteries. Never digs anything up, no, but headstones, as it turns out, have stories too. Snippets of funerals, of the process of their engravings, stories they soak up from the corpses beneath them. For a year, Sherlock finds solace there.

He takes the skull with him to the university in London. There are no cemeteries nearby, only dozens of loud, living people. He tries to read them like bones, and eventually it actually comes quite easily to him based off the pasts of the objects around them. A shirt they also wore yesterday, a battered phone, not to mention the things he simply observed without a gift. There are patterns in the way his room mate speaks, in how often his biology teacher has her hair up every week, in smells and the size of someone's steps.

And what terrifies him about it all the most is that once you learn these patterns, people are boring. It's just like at the doctor's when they asked him to hold his mother's hand and report what he saw. It's dull. He isn't exhilarated by them anymore, isn't in constant wonder about how much new knowledge they have to offer because it isn't new anymore, none of it is.

He can feel his brain rotting.

So he turns to a more pedestrian method of stimulation.

Cocaine, now that is a fine substance. It makes his brain spark and quicken and it floats him away from this haze of vapidity and restlessness. And so long as he's careful nobody sees the track marks on his arms.

His logic gets flawed though, he starts believing things he shouldn't. Like how far his-or really anyone's-tolerance for higher doses can go.

It is through this flaw that he meets John Watson.