Disclaimer: If I owned Sherlock, do I seem like the kind of sadist who would make us wait all this time?

...

"I love the clever ones. They're always so desperate to get caught."

He'd know, wouldn't he?

...

Sherlock Holmes had a tendency to be doing whatever he shouldn't be, and usually a whole lot more that no-one had even thought to warn him about.

This would be fine, of course, if he didn't also have a tendency to be found out.

...

When he was five: caught stealing books from his father's study. He'd been shouted at. He'd cried, as well, but he doesn't like to remember that.

Eight years old: his teacher found him trying to conceal a dead bird in his school bag. (It was going to be an experiment.)

The other children knew enough to call him a freak, but the words the teacher whispered to his mother when she came to collect him struck him as much worse. Little whispers about "strangely morbid" and "disturbed", that stung just a little less than his mother's nods.

And high school – oh God, high school. Caught skipping ahead in Chemistry; he almost blew up the school by accident. Caught selling answers for money for cigarettes, and later, caught smoking them out of the bathroom window.

"Three serious incidents in one year," they said. Not even counting the bruises he recieved from other students, not even counting what went on at home with his power-hungry manipulative government brother.

University was not much of an improvement, and it had much more serious consequences. Mycroft had gone to see him at a bad time, to say the least. Caught in bed with some boy he didn't even particularly like, high on cocaine, face flushed with defiance. Rehab, severe talkings-to, his mother was disappointed in him, urgh. Caught punching a mirror so that it smashed – bruised knuckles and a warning about his attitude.

He deleted the majority of those years.

The first time he illegally entered a crime scene, there was an arrest and a night spent in a cell and the new knowledge that no matter how clever he was, the police didn't care. It didn't stop him from trying, though.

Sherlock Holmes was always caught.

...

When he was found out, it didn't matter what they threw at him: words, psychoanalyisis, punches, expulsions, eviction notices, threats, a criminal record. They couldn't hurt his feelings if he had no feelings to hurt, could they? So Sherlock closed himself off, became cold and brilliant, and he pretended it didn't matter if he got caught doing something he shouldn't.

The last thing he would ever be caught doing would be falling in love, even with John Watson. Especially with John Watson.

That's what he tells himself, anyway.

...

He's very good at hiding, Sherlock Holmes. Disguise, blending in, imitating behaviour, spying.

He's also very good at seeing things.

And it would appear that another thing he's very good at is overestimating his abilities, because he's been caught and he never saw it coming and –

...

Sherlock is not very good at relationships.

John kisses him anyway.

...

AN: So. My first actual Sherlock fic (I've written Wholock before, though). I hope you liked it. Leave a review to let me know, yeah?