A/N: Wing!fic is fun: fact. There isn't enough of it: fact. So I decided to write some, woo~ This will be chaptered and I'm going to do my best to keep writing ahead so I can update in a consistent manner. For the record, this an AU, but will not be a re-hash of A Study in Pink. However, it will contain certain elements and a few lines from it, especially in the beginning. As always, a big thanks to my bestest buddy Courtney (shhjustcomeandjamwithme on tumblr, go follow her) for beta-ing for me because I fail at typing.
Alright, I'll shut up now. Please review, feedback is always appreciated!
In the end, the world is made of up Haves and Have-nots - and Sherlock Holmes is very used to Having. He's used to having a Mummy who doted on him, having an older brother who shoves his nose where it oughtn't be in a meaningless attempt to assume the mantle of an absent father. Most of all he's used to having one of the most brilliant minds in London and by God does he know it. He's not afraid to let everyone else know it either, which might have gotten him in a bit more trouble if it weren't for his sharp, pale eyes and dark curls - and, most importantly, his wings like an avenging angel, all dark, glossy feathers that gleam green-black in the sunlight and hang effortlessly around his narrow frame.
Everything in life had been given to him, so it was only natural that he had to go and bugger it all up.
Mental health professionals might venture to call it acting out - a lonely young man spurned by his peers turning to drugs in search of what he didn't even know was lost. Sherlock wouldn't hesitate to call them idiots, of course, but there was nothing surprising in that. Those years had been…an experiment, or so he told himself. The cocaine and the heroin and the other drugs he only went so far as to sample were merely variables in his experiments as he played with his mind like it was a toy.
But that was a lie - or at least a half-truth. He did the drugs because he needed them, and not just in the sense of the physical addiction. Some nights he needed the way they crafted his mind into something inhumanly sharp and deadly, turning his thoughts into bullet trains half-derailed from the start that ricocheted off the insides of his skull until they crashed into one another with a great and terrible sort of beauty. And other nights he needed silence. The kind of deep, permeating silence of the mind that he suspected came so easily to the great, driveling masses, but eluded him with impossible efficiency. Either way he was a god among mortals, twisting and turning the world with his fingertips until it was molded to his liking.
Except he wasn't a god, not really. He wasn't invincible or immortal or anything of the sort - a reality that came crashing down when he flew too high, too close to the sun, and fate herself plucked out the feathers he didn't deserve and threw him back to earth in disgust.
When he wakes up the first thing he sees is Mycroft set against a backdrop of too-white hospital walls and a window with its blinds drawn against the London dusk. He looks impossibly tired, his face even more pinched and drawn than usual. Sherlock wants to make a crack about how the diet must not be treating him well, but his mouth refuses to cooperate and he fails to get any sound out before he sinks from muddled consciousness back into the grasp of oblivion.
When he wakes up again he's aware that he is lying on his front and his eyes feel like they're glued shut but he isn't inclined to care at the moment, because the dull but fierce ache centered around his shoulder blades is taking up the majority of his attention. His wings feel raw and sore where they connect to his back and he's sure he must have wrenched them somehow. Think, think. What was the last thing he could remember? Flying, he'd been flying. Higher, faster, farther than ever before, his heart pounding in his ears and his mind on fire, his eyes watering in the wind. One moment he'd been so alive and the next the sky was letting go of him and the earth reclaiming her lost son with enough force to send him spiraling into a haze of senseless pain and darkness.
Like Icarus he fell, and so he paid the consequences.
Sherlock Holmes has a lot of things. Like cruel, puckered knots of scar tissue on his back and a small wooden box filled with dark, glossy feathers. He still has a brother too nosy for anyone's good, but he doesn't have the drugs anymore. What he has instead are crime scenes and deductions, triple murders and serial killers with maybe just a touch of fraud on the side for variety.
But what he doesn't have, are wings.
