A one-shot giving meaning to touch for Sherlock. I'm sorry for writing this, it's intense—on that note, warnings for mentioned child abuse and rape/non-con. Please don't read if you'll get triggered.
Disclaimer: I don't own Sherlock, nor am I making any profit out of this.
Please review! I'd like to hear what worked and what went wrong. Also reviews do wonderful to egos ;)
Novalie ❤️
Nothing goes as planned
Everything will break
People say goodbye
In their own special way
All that you rely on
And all that you can fake
Will leave you in the morning
But find you in the day
Oh, you're in my veins
And I cannot get you out
Oh, you're all I taste
At night inside of my mouth
Oh, you run away
'Cause I am not what you found
Oh, you're in my veins
And I cannot get you out
~ In My Veins, Andrew Belle
Touch hurt. Fingertips pulsed against skin like beating hearts, streaking agony tracing lines and then digging crescent moons. A blunt blow; sharp, stinging memories. Always pain, trickling at the end of nerve responses, all heating blood and shuddering spine.
He had always loathed it, the responses elicited from his own body, the loss of control, feeling himself being torn from his own judgement by other's hands.
His doctor never understood why Sherlock would wrap himself up in his Belstaff and turn away from people, mold insults into an iron shield. Learn how to breathe like his life depended on it, inhale as though his lungs were being crushed and the air was his last chance to escape, silently. Learn to glare, stare at strangers until they backed away, fix his face into a series of bland facades, and refuse to let on that he broke with every glance, every single touch. Shattered in his own negation to flinch.
Hands had always terrified him. Their heat when they pressed into his throat, robbed him of his speech, menaced death with taunting darkness; how frostily cold palms slapped his cheeks, icy punches thrown at him, tearing at every fiber of a child's body. They gripped every part of him and he would look to stare at the hollow stairway, an empty place where his brother had stared at him a minute ago. He had pleaded, no, no, I'll be good, because he would die to make this end. Touch: breaking his wrist with a deft twitch of rough hands, forced him to swallow agony, the sum of an assassin.
Sherlock almost envied John, who would lean in to kiss with closed eyes as though he trusted, John who hugged and patted and was ever so carefree with his movements. John never had to watch out of the corner of his eyes. John never waited for a blow when somebody waved hello, didn't feel fingers crawling over his skin when he drowned in his own past, never cast his eyes downward because stop, stop and I can't.
And then he had ended curled up on cement, pebbles digging into his cheeks, gaze darting like he didn't know what to look at, choking on cloth, never screaming loud enough to break free from the silence, the invading touch—he had ended. Broken with every unwelcome probe, every hand sliding across his skin like he was a thing to be owned, to dig fingernails into and slap with every bleeding surge of pain.
It's only transport. It doesn't matter.
It betrayed him.
His own hands had stopped struggling, and he had fallen limp like a rag doll, forgotten what fight had ever meant to him. And Sherlock had sobbed, lied limp and let himself sink into the hurt, wet salt streaking his cheeks and burning his split lip and blinding him. And the whole world crashed, burned beneath his sore legs and gashed arms and the stones embedded in his soft skin, and he fell open, a glass shell cracking with every whispered torment.
He was touched. Touched and touched and touched and he hated every minute of the hands on him, pulling his body out of his own shaking grasp and claiming it. Always hurt.
Sherlock couldn't forget, couldn't drown it out of his veins by overflowing them with burning liquid; a high couldn't break down a memory. The touches festered in his mind, drove him to the point of inexplicable terror and trembling gasps when he felt hands. Every touch, every breath, every word was a man taking everything that was Sherlock's, panting harshly into his ear and murmuring lies. Lips latching onto his neck like suction cups, leaving it wet, exposed.
John would let him come or shy away, he wouldn't push and jab and injure, and his eyes were mild in their darkness. A slip of shimmering sun, knowing and forgiving, warm without fire, all soft and no fear. But Sherlock could never let go, never fake wholeness without touch sneaking up to grasp him on the shoulder, couldn't stop himself from cowering away from hungry eyes and parted mouths.
Some days it was more than he could take, and he would huddle beneath his bruised dignity, wrap his arms around him as though they could protect him when the time came, back himself in a corner and teach himself how to breathe again. And it always felt like he had been born strangled by all these touches, never relenting when he told them no, pleaded and grovelled, wept into the ground and shrieked for rescue that he knew could never save him. Stared into Lestrade's wide, dark orbs, and couldn't bring himself to move from where he was left a pitiful mass of stolen flesh, crimson pooling into the cracks between ashen ground.
Victim, they said quietly, voices harshly sympathetic. Victim, they had whispered when he was younger. When the world spoke it felt like that was all he was, a broken consulting detective who felt like none of his clothes fit right anymore, who carried scars that people couldn't unsee. Born asphyxiated, with blood in his lungs and breath in his heart.
And Sherlock Holmes had always, always hated touches.