A/N: I know this is creepy. Sometimes the muse is very dark.
Everyone meets the Devil.
Sometimes he lives inside of you.
.
Fist meets flesh, bone. The other boy cries—loud, ragged, uneven.
But all he can see is the blood on his knuckles, thick and sticky and pain.
He is six years old, and he smiles.
.
His mother tells him that she loves him.
Cigarettes in shaking hands, chipped teeth. Promises she keeps, promises that cost her.
She never leaves him. He has to kill her, for that, and he does. But he does it in her sleep, partly because he likes it quiet, at fifteen, and partly because (deep, deep inside) he doesn't want her to be afraid.
.
Back when he was twelve, he met his first. A big, bold boy with pretty teeth and an ugly laugh. The swimmer with the flashy shoes.
He hears the shrieks, the splashing, the bubbling water, and afterwards, he puts the shoes somewhere nobody will find them and sits alone for a long, long time.
The little figure in the corner of his mind unfolds its dark spindly self and creeps out, bigger and bigger. And it laughs and laughs and laughs until he finds himself laughing too.
.
He is changeable. He drinks his coffee thick and sticky some days, doesn't drink it all for a year and a half. Everyone is boring and everyone is frightened when they're dying.
It's a disappointment.
He waits for the only interesting person in all of England (not in all the world—there were two in Serbia, but they're dead) to grow up, to become something that can be broken.
And then.
He strings his human puppets with care, until the day he strings them up. Everything has to play like clockwork.
Tick tock.
.
Bombs are so—loud. He doesn't like it quiet anymore.
Blood and water don't drip the same. Blood and coffee don't taste the same, but they stain his carpets quite alike. He drizzles gasoline along the floorboards and drops a match.
Thirty-three people die in that fire. He watches it on the television at a country estate, feet propped up on the chest of the man who used to live there.
.
He switches channels—another murder solved. The most interesting man who doesn't know him has grown up, and he's made a friend.
Something that can be broken.
.
Everyone meets the Devil.
Today it's Sherlock Holmes' turn.