My brother was a difficult child that grew to be an impossible man.
In his youth, he was often quite misconstrued for his many exoticisms and perceived oddities; his passion for the unique, his love for the unlovable, and most commonly, his uncanny ability to deduce.
Through his adolescence and into his adulthood, he became increasingly stubborn and perplexingly opposed to all authority, answering to no one but himself. Occasionally, he'd take my word into account as white noise in the background of his thoughts.
I'd brought him up, essentially, in the wake of a crumbling family. He became my priority within the first year of his existence, and he remained as such for every year to come. Somehow I knew he knew that.
However, I was never much for sentiment, and I certainly wasn't a man of much affection. With Sherlock, though, I quickly learned to balance feeling and intellect as needed. I put myself through hell, retraining myself to pay mind to my emotions and put aside my anxieties long enough to guide my brother through his. I willingly sacrificed all I had to give, and I willingly would do it a thousand times more if that meant saving him from this.
As I looked at him laying there in the ratty old hospital gowns, hooked up to countless beeping machines, I can't help but see the painfully fragile-looking tint his pale, sallow cheeks had taken. His eyes, once so vivacious and blithe, were now firmly shut and rimmed with red. His locks of inky black stuck out at all angles, plastered to his head with a cold sweat. It pained me to think that the disheveled man laying comatose before me was the same child that used to rush outside at the break of dusk to catch insects in a fit of excitement. He was still the child that would lay out beside me at night and watch the stars, pointing out various constellations and laughing at the silly names they had. Time has a funny way of changing things, you know. It twists them and turns them, wears them away until they're barely recognizable as a broken shell of the thing they once were.
How could I not have known that he'd been shooting drugs?
How had I not noticed sooner?
Twenty-six years of observing him, of teaching him and of knowing him, and I didn't have the slightest inkling as to what he did to ease the intolerable boredom he suffered at the hands of his genius. All I currently felt was the sickening sense of failure.
There's no greater pain than watching the world beat down the one person that you've strived so hard to build up. Watching them suffer, watching them go through all the things you prayed to God they'd never have to go through, it brings fourth a sense of deep, wistful melancholy. It's the knowledge that killed me, though. Knowing that I can't help him right now, knowing that the next step in freeing himself is his to take, that's what hurt the worst.
Things had long since been complicated between the two of us. He was stubborn, crude, sarcastic, and blunt. His words were so commonly filled to the brim with boiling poison, his tongue sharp as a dagger. He was a man of science, not sensation. Of action, not expression.
He wasn't the kind to ask for help. In fact, he was frequently rather insufferable when it came to things of that sort. He was stubborn and obstinate, insistent that he was fine when he so clearly was not. Radically impulsive. An expert in the mastering of facades and pretenses. A man of many hats. He was more like myself than I'd ever like to say.
I stood silently and blinked a few times, ridding my eyes of the unwelcome moisture. He'd glare at me and sigh if he were awake, saying something along the lines of how I was such a sentimental old fool. I'd likely scowl in response and call him an insufferable git.
Chuckling dryly to myself, I switched off the lamp beside his bed and drew a deep breath. My eyes fell once again to his still form, lingering there for a short moment before snapping to the clock. A quick turn of my heels and I was on my way out. He would recover, of that I was sure. Life would go on. The world would continue to rotate, and I would continue to long for the days in which it really was that simple.