Sherlock pictured the crime scene in his head again, loud echoes of familiar voices sounded in his ears.

"Bloody boy! Spying on his own father!" slurred the tall man.

He was backed into a dark corner, dark bruising already appearing on his pale little body. It had been a puzzle, he wanted to disprove his theory, he wanted to… to be wrong…

"No one needed to know! Why couldn't you mind your own damned curiosity!" the man shouted as each syllable brought another blow down on the boy.

His mother tried to hold back his father, grabbing him from behind, her tear stains visible and her eyes bloodshot and puffed. "Get off him, Edmund! Let him go, he's just a boy!" she reasoned hysterically, "Please, just let him go." The boy's eyes met his mother's watered ones, a desperate look in her eyes trying to tell him that it would all be alright. But all hope was gone. It had been there once, but no more. All he knew was that pain was coming.

His father slipped out of her weak grip and turned on her. "Mind your business, woman. It's your fault he's this way! This bloody useless little sneak!" he said as he backhanded her to the ground and her sobs echoed throughout the nearly empty room.

"Mummy!" he whispered weakly.

He wanted to go to her, to hug her, to hide her away from father, from the hurt that the little boy's detective work had caused.

As his father took another swig from his bottle, the boy watched as a pudgy shadowed figure rushed over to his Mummy, took her hand, quietly pulled her up, and led her out of the room, stopping in the doorway as his Mummy disappeared out of sight. The pudgy boy glanced back with a sad, sorrowful look at the smaller boy.

"My… Mycroft! ... Help… Mycroft…!" the small boy begged.

A low voice rumbled from the boy's father, "Don't you dare."

Mycroft looked at his father with wide, frightened eyes, then turned and stared at the little boy, his brother, a tear rushing down his cheek as he turned his back on the scene.

Suddenly, his father seemed to grow much taller and his voice seemed to double over with menace.

"This is your fault, Boy. No one needed to get hurt. And now, I must teach you a lesson."

His father's thick fingers snaked their way into his black, curly hair, and grasped a large clump of it and dragged him from his dark corner and into the light by it.

His Father removed his belt as the boy tried desperately to unclench the hand from his hair. His father looped the belt and lassoed it around the boy's neck as he then tied the other end to the doorknob of the closed door his mother and brother had exited from moments ago.

He clawed at the worn leather that was restricting his breathing, feeling small rivulets of blood dripping down his neck mingling with the blood dripping softly from his scalp. The boy stilled as he realized the more he struggled the tighter the belt would become. His eyes widened in horror as his father unsheathed his long hunting knife from his back pocket.

"Please… Please, no, Father… I swear… I swear I didn't mean it…" the boy spoke in a rough, hoarse voice, "… I'll never… Never again…"

His father's eyes suddenly began to glow a bright crimson and as he walked through the patches of light and dark, the room seemed to extend and his father to change.

Through each patch of darkness, his father grew and hunched into a hideous caricature of a human being. When his father reached him, he gripped the boy's wrist tightly and made sloppy slices of the boy's forearm. The boy began to scream and struggled as the belt tugged tighter and tighter at his neck and his eyes, wet from tears and drips of red, blurred from loss of blood and asphyxiation, but before he lost consciousness, he saw a bright light and someone encased in it standing behind his father, gently whispering to him, "Sherlock… Sherlock…"

The boy thought for a moment, this voice was familiar... He... he had heard it somewhere before...

"… John?" he said loudly, his voice slightly deeper somehow, "John! Get out of here! Don't… Don't let him... Get…" the last thing he felt was the long knife across his throat…

… And his eyes shot open. His head was leaning on the back of the sofa. He felt at his neck, finding his favourite scarf still hanging there and was somehow tucked behind him, giving the occasional slight tug at his neck when he moved. His pale body was drenched in sweat and he feared the dampness of his cheeks were mingled with tears. He stared blankly at the ceiling, regaining his emotionless sociopathic self. He always had these random bouts of emotion that exploded from him, memories in the form of dreams that reminded him of why he was a high functioning sociopath. His emotions were walled up in a box inside of him, festering and living a life of nonexistence. He told himself he was not afraid, that he did not feel, that there was nothing to feel. His father was dead. And even if he were alive, he would still not feel anything towards him. He felt nothing. But what about the end of the dream... Why was John there, engulfed in light, calling to him...?

"Erm... Sherlock...?"

Sherlock slowly lifted his head to see John standing in the ever-open doorway of their flat. Sherlock looked next to him and pressed the button on his cell phone. 2:37.

"John." Sherlock said simply.

"Sherlock, are you..." John stopped, "...What happened?"

Sherlock swiftly stepped toward his chair, took his violin by the neck and perched on the squishy armchair.

"I was bored, that was all. Just bored." he stated simply as he began to play cacophonous chords on the instrument.

"Sherlock, you were asleep." John said quietly, "Asleep and..."

John took the armchair opposite Sherlock's as Sherlock closed his eyes against what was coming, "It was nothing, John." he said with a sort of finality.

John only paused a moment, but continued. "The crime scene that Lestrade asked you to look at this morning, it struck you differently, didn't it? That boy, alone in a room, thin, pale, and bruised..." he said softly.

Sherlock stood swiftly and played fiercely as he strode to the kitchen, the chords becoming louder and more cacophonous as John went on and Sherlock buried himself in the music.

He wasn't going to speak about it. His father was dead. He didn't feel anything. His father was dead. He wasn't reminded of any feelings as he saw the broken corpse of a boy with dark hair. His father was dead. The blood splattered around the room. His father was dead. The small boy's blood. His father was dead. He felt nothing as he pictured the young boy, forced into cleaning his own blood from the floor. His father was dead. Nothing as boy's brother walked away from him being beaten. His father was dead. The brother that was meant to protect him. His father was dead. He couldn't picture look in the boy's mother's eyes. His father was dead. Helplessness, fear, pity, tears. His father was dead. His mind wasn't being drowned in the sound of a child's screams. His father was dead.

Thoughts flowed rapidly around his head as did memories, the smell of blood, the sound of his own screams, Mummy fixing up the wounds and telling him it would be alright, Mycroft going to university and leaving him alone, John's incessant explanation of the crime scene, the music he didn't realize he was still playing, his mind was a blur of thoughts and memories and deductions and sounds and pain...

Everything, John's descriptions, the loud chords, the sound of London, even his own thoughts, all turned to white noise, to static. He needed quiet, he needed...

"Damn it, John, why can't you mind your own damned curiosity!" Sherlock shouted, taking two long strides to the now standing doctor, the neck of his violin clutched in his hand as he swung it above John's head as if to strike him with it.

John didn't flinch, not a blink of an eye, but Sherlock... Sherlock's breathing was heavy and laboured and becoming more so by his constricting muscles. His grip on the violin slackened and it fell to the floor with a hollow thump. Without looking at John again, he stepped back to his chair and put his head in his hands and just dropped as he slid from the edge of the chair and to the floor.

"Who was it, Sherlock?" John asked solemnly. Silence embraced the room. Sherlock could hear nothing but his heart thudding in his ears like the sound of the periodic blows upon him as a child and he closed his eyes against it. Sherlock glanced down at his exposed forearm and recognized small discreet scratches across the pale skin and a fleeting glimpse of the fingernails of the hand opposite easily explained the reason for the cuts. Sherlock's fingertips floated up to his neck, feeling more crosshatched scratches hidden beneath his scarf. A few of the wounds were gently bleeding soft drops like the caress of rain against his skin, warm and familiar.

John noticed this and gave him a momentary reprieve as he stepped away and returned to kneel next to Sherlock with a rag in hand. The Doctor in John taking over, he gently applied the rag to Sherlock's forearm attempting to stop the bleeding. Sherlock could feel the burn of the Doctor's gentle blue eyes on him, still hoping for an answer, but Sherlock's vocal chords refused to allow him to speak.

John, seemingly giving up on understanding what was running through his friend's mind and observing that all bleeding had ceased, stood and turned away from Sherlock to toss the rag into the kitchen sink. At the moment when Sherlock could no longer feel the kind blue eyes on him, he felt the vice grip on his throat slacken and words seemed to stream out of him without his consent.

"My Father." He spoke softly.

He paused, trying to regain his ability to control what words exited his mouth. He refused to speak of it. Not to John. Not to anyone. He knew that John's eyes were not upon him and he did not hear John turn towards him. Even though he could feel the man's caring as if a breeze through the air, he could not stand to be seen as weak in John's eyes, which is why he could not speak his weaknesses under John's gaze, he deduced. John saw him as a singularity with no faults and for some reason he could not give way the facade of being so. When with other people, he believed it was not a facade, but when only with John... it seemed a mask...

John seemed to understand this in the silence and also understood that sleep would not be returning to 221b.

"Fancy a cuppa?" he said, diffusing the tension from the room. A lighting fast flicker of a smile crossed the detective's lips as he swiftly stood and in one fluid gesture took his violin in one hand the bow in the other and perched yet again on his chair.