This is a follow-up to "A Smile on Your Lips and a Cigarette in Your Mouth". I haven't written in ages, but for some reason that story always sticks with me. There's something in that story that I just can't get out of my head. So here's a bit more from it.
It was you
Breathless and tall
I could feel my eyes turning into dust
And two strangers
Turning into dust
Turning into dust
Mazzy Star – "Into Dust"
The doctors try to prescribe methylphenidate to him as a child. They call him "hyperactive", and tell his parents that in order to manage his excessive energy, they will need to medicate him. His father frowns, and his mother huffs angrily at the doctors, the scientist in her taking over.
"He's not hyperactive," she tells them, and it isn't with the customary denial that parents have. She knows it's not that – she knows it is something else in her youngest son, but no matter what she tries, she can't seem to find a diagnosis that fits. [Years later, four different doctors tell him it's Asperger's syndrome, while a fifth - the one he believes - tells him "high-functioning sociopath"]. The doctors insist that for him to function normally, that for him to make friends with his peers and finally fit in, that he'll need the medication, and that he won't make it without it. He'll be too strange, too different to be accepted [and the doctors say this all with Sherlock in the room, as if he's stupid and can't understand what they are saying. He's a five year old, not an idiot].
"We're leaving," his mother states, motioning to his father to stand. Sherlock rises with them, leaving the little cars on the toy table all lined up, organized by colour and size.
He's thirteen years old, trying and failing to fit in with the other males in his year [his mother had begged him to at least try this time, and he loves her, so he does]. They are sitting outside on the old bridge down by the quay, passing a bottle of cheap scotch between them, one that Billy Jansen had stolen from his stepfather's liquor cabinet. He knows it won't be long before his fellow classmates figure it out [they always figure it out] – that he is strange and he is different and he doesn't get their humour, doesn't get their obsession with teasing the girls in their year. He can hear his older brother in his head, smirking at him, asking him why it evens matters, these people are so ordinary, so normal, so boring.
"Shut up, Mycroft," he mutters to himself, and the boys look over at him.
"What's that, Wills?" Frank Sullivan asks him, the bottle up at his lips.
Sherlock grumbles to himself – he'd decided years ago he never wants to be called William, what a terribly boring name – but the boys had latched onto his first name and didn't seem to want to let it go ["What the hell is Sherlock as a name anyway?!" they'd told him, incredulous].
"Nothing," he mumbles, and takes the bottle from Frank's hands. He swallows the scotch, ignoring his watering eyes and focusing on the burning sensation it brings as it glides down his throat. It felt strangely warm – it made him woozy.
Hours later, he stumbles home, drunk for the first time. He hadn't even made it all evening – when the other males had finished the bottle, they'd wanted to go and seek out the girls, but Sherlock had asked if they could stay by the river instead. They'd teased him ["What are you, gay?"] and left him there, alone. He decides he hates the alcohol, hates the way it dulls his senses, makes him weak, makes him vulnerable. He'd wanted to stay by the river so he could enjoy for just a few more moments the camaderie the boys had offered him, the tentative friendship they'd offered.
Swaying on his feet unsteadily, he snorts derisively at the thought. As if he needed anyone. He doesn't need anyone. He will never need anyone.
He attributes the tinge of sadness in his heart as a symptom of inebriation, and stumbles on home.
He's twenty when he tries cocaine for the first time. It's the evening of his college's May Ball, and as he cannot stand the thought of attending another one of these insipid events sober, he might as well try it high.
He dances all night, the cocaine buzzing through him, making him feel good and healthy and alive.
He's twenty-one when he becomes addicted to heroin. He finishes his degree [dropping from a first to a 2:1, a new low for him], and moves away from Cambridge, determined to get away from the brain-dead little poshlings who roam the city streets during term, self-obsessed and oh-so-boring. He finds a flop house in London and doesn't answer his family's frantic calls [eventually he smashes the phone out of annoyance, the beeping irritates him]. He lets himself retreat into heroin, lets himself fall in love with it, fall in love with the feeling of being unconstrained by his body [mere transport, really], able to live in his mind palace without a care.
He goes out at night, occasionally. He enjoys watching all the ordinary people scurry around, likes to deduce what they are like, what they are doing, what they are hiding. He chain smokes cigarettes and relishes the tingle in his lips the nicotine brings him, the head rush it gives him when he inhales the smoke deeply into his lungs. He stands there on the pavement and stares at the humans that flow past him, rushing like mad from one place to another in their dismal, disappointing lives.
A bump into his left shoulder distracts him one night – he looks over to see a slight woman with mousy brown hair and big, glossy eyes stumble back from him. He studies her, intrigued.
"Can I…?" she asks him, her voice soft and gentle [and, if he knew how to process emotion, sad]. He passes her the cigarette.
She stares at him as she smokes, her eyes searching his. He likes that. He likes how intense her gaze his.
They smoke another, and when it burns down to ash and she turns to leave, he follows her, never speaking a word.
He remembers a dark, dingy flat decorated ironically with pastel colours and flowers. Dust on the surfaces, lack of attention or care. There are far too many bottles strewn about for just a single woman to have consumed, but he doesn't judge. How can he, when he injects himself with heroin on a daily basis and has track lines up and down his arms.
He remembers his lips on hers, soft at first and then hard, needy. He remembers undressing her slowly, her gasps and trembles as his fingers brush her skin. He remembers pressing her down onto the bed, his hands on her skin, grabbing and pulling at her soft, supple flesh. He remembers the rush of her mouth on hers, the surprising ecstasy of his release [he's never done this before, never pushed and pulled against another warm body, so desperately hungry for her skin and her moans].
He remembers her falling into exhausted sleep, soft little sobs racking her body. He remembers an insistent tug at his heart, making him want to reach out and touch her, comfort her. But he doesn't.
He deletes it all. Sentiment, he growls to himself, but then the memories are gone.
He gets clean – eventually – after Mycroft cajoles him into a rehab centre in Sussex. He leaves [is kicked out] after 18 hours, convinced he can do better than the stupid doctors and psychologists inside [and he does]. He goes cold turkey in his flat, playing his violin at all hours of the night, the melodies shifting with his moods. His fevers bring him vivid dreams, dreams of a shaggy-haired red dog that smiles at him [dogs don't smile, do they?], of a little pirate hat on his dresser door, and of an unfamiliar [yet so familiar] woman, her fingers ghosting over his face, her sad eyes looking up into his.
Mike Stamford is yelling at him to slow down, but really, he only has about ten minutes until Lestrade gets here, so he's not waiting for the short, pudgy man behind him to catch up. He bursts through the doors of the morgue, eliciting a little shout of shock from the small, mousy woman in the room. She's staring at him – staring so intensely, if he were any other man, he would be unnerved.
Stamford says something boring behind him [her name is Molly Hooper]. She stretches her hand out to his, and he notices her shaking, raised bumps on her skin from the shock of it all [what is she even shocked about? He's never seen her before]. He shakes her hand gruffly, and then drops it from his grasp [her palms are sweaty, she's nervous, on edge, but why?]. "I need to see the body in drawer 27D. Do hurry, Lestrade won't be far behind me."
She just stares at him some more.
He raises an eyebrow at her. Is this woman having a stroke? [But even then he realizes that she's staring at him like she knows him, and there's this irritating pulse at the back of his mind that tells him yes, yes he knows her. He ignores it.] "Shall I retrieve it myself?"
She turns beet red and casts her eyes downwards, blushing furiously. "Oh! No, no of course," she answers, flustered now, and embarrassed. "Pl-please, come this way, Mr… Mr. Holmes."
He dismisses her reaction to him as some sort of strange result of sentiment, and ignores her frequent side glances at him, as if searching for… something.
He is told what she does sometimes [fumbling and uncertain] is called flirting, and it's an annoyance at best.
Sometimes he doesn't even realize she's doing it at all.
"…you'd like to have coffee?" he hears, only realizing now that she is speaking to him again.
His mind is already racing ahead, to the next step of the problem. "Black. Two sugars please," he tells her, before going upstairs [and if he'd looked back, even just for a moment, he would have seen her face fall, her smile crumbling from the hurt]. He doesn't look back.
"Do you know what he calls you? The Ice Man… and the Virgin."
[Images once thought deleted rise in his mind, of his cold hands on warm skin, soft whispers in his ear, light kisses dusting the flesh of his collarbone, the feeling of a body pressed against his. Sad eyes, gazing into his.]
He doesn't rise to her bait.
He jumps off a roof four stories high, plunging down to the earth below.
Hours later, Molly is ushering him into her flat under a disguise and the cover of the dark, winter night. He's shaking, despite himself, and he curses his body for being so susceptible to something as simple as adrenaline and his fight or flight instinct. Molly cleans his wounds in silence, as he stares past her into the middle distance, still seeing Moriarty raise the gun to mouth, still seeing John's face even from his perch above, the pain and the fear evident even from his vantage point.
Molly gives him the bed, and he is grateful for that. He is exhausted, and collapses into the bed, but cannot sleep. Not when the knowledge of the end of his life as he knows it is still so fresh in his mind, not when he knows that this is merely the start of something much, much bigger. He can't help but clench and unclench his body, the adrenaline and the excitement and the nerves all taking over at once.
He starts to poke through Molly's things, rifling through her bedside tables. Magazines, moisturizer, tissues, a thank-you note from a friend, a birthday card from her aunt – all so boring. He's about to close the drawer when he sees an envelope tucked away neatly at the bottom, but he can tell from the oil stains on it that her fingers have often held this envelope, often clutched onto it desperately, transferring the oil from her fingertips onto the paper underneath. Intrigued, he takes it out, and empties the contents out onto the bed.
They are photos. Photos of a little boy at various ages, from newborn to toddler to young child. Bright blue eyes, curly dark hair – he doesn't really seem to look like Molly, so perhaps not a blood relative? But then… then he finds the photograph. A photo of Molly in hospital, looking exhausting and tired and a bit rough, but smiling softly down at a swaddled bundle of blankets in her arms. A little face looks back at her, curly black hair already taking over his head. Despite himself, Sherlock feels his stomach drop. He picks up the photo on top, the newest one [he assumes, from the boy's age], and he looks down at the smiling face, the sharp cheekbones, the clear blue eyes.
He hears Molly come in, hears her gasp. He looks up at her. He keeps himself calm.
He feigns ignorance when she looks at him expectantly, waiting – pleading – for him to say something. What could he say? He's not a father. Not even close. He's a high-functioning sociopath [Asperger's, his mind hisses at him], and his child [his stomach aches at that thought, that realization] is better off without him. Molly is better off. So he tells her goodnight, and waits until she leaves before he takes a photograph [one of the birthday ones] from the pile and slides it into his pocket. He leaves the photos on the bed.
And right before he leaves her flat – leaves London - he can't help but leave a cigarette under the photos, wanting despite himself, for her to know, to know that he remembers.
Sometimes, sometimes when he dreams he imagines a little boy with black curly hair and bright blue eyes running into his arms, his little face pressed up against his chest as he calls him "Papa".
[Sometimes, despite himself, he cries].