sherlock
The moon bled silver all over the night sky, touching the clouds, turning them into gaping silver wounds, making them drip with luminescence.
Sherlock Holmes sat cross-legged in bed with a tissue pressed against the corner of his lips, an acrid, bloody taste filling his mouth, coating over the bile that still lay on his tongue from when he'd retched just a few minutes ago. It was a harmonious blend of flavours that reminded him of the way branches twisted on themselves, choking themselves, gnarled and ugly in the darkness.
The boy's gaze wandered across his room and lingered on the action figure that lay perched on top of his desk: Superman. John had given it to him last weekend after making Sherlock sit through two hours of Superman whilst his boyfriend made John sit through two hours of complaining.
"Superman's stupid," Sherlock had said.
"You're stupid," the reply had come.
John had seen him out of the house after having shoved the figurine into his hand. "Promise me you won't throw it away."
He had promised he wouldn't. And, ridiculously so, he had kept his word so far.
It had seemed such a childish thing to have, to be given: a plastic toy figurine of a buff superhero that probably came out of a happy meal John had had as a kid. The blue colouring on the hero's left biceps had started to come off, but it was its own imperfection; its old imperfection that allowed Sherlock to appreciate it. It was a bit like John. Flawed, and yet perfectly so.
Sighing softly, Sherlock crumpled up the bloodstained tissue and tossed it in the bin's general direction. It missed its mark, bouncing off the rim and onto the dark grey carpet.
Sherlock thought the scarlet against the white and grey was morbidly beautiful. He didn't bother himself with picking it up.
It was getting late: far too late, but Sherlock couldn't sleep, and he still hadn't taken a shower. The book he was supposed to be reading for English lay open, face-down on his bed, the spine caving in half. The book's title was Heart of Darkness, and he didn't care much for it.
He plucked a tissue from the box on his night table and stuffed it into the novel, closing it. As much as he didn't care for the story, he detested dog-eared pages. They disrupted the neat way in which the pages slotted up against each other, all the same size, flat against each other. Sherlock flung the book onto his desk and lay back on his pillows with a sigh, rubbing his eyes. He missed John, although it was his fault he missed him.
Meet me at work tonight. 7:00. John had said. It was already past eleven and Sherlock had barely gotten out of bed since he'd come home that afternoon. He hadn't even replied to the text.
But he was Sherlock Holmes, and he didn't feel bad about it.
.::.
"Hi, Dad," he murmured, as he walked downstairs to get a glass of water.
Siger didn't hear him. He sat at the small dining table with a bottle of whiskey in hand, his fingers clumsily tracing the printed lines of text in a file that lay in scattered pages across the polished oak wood. Sherlock had spent hours nicking files and cases from his dad's office, had spent hours sifting through them, absorbing what he could, solving the older cases in the margins of his chemistry notebooks, in the insides of the covers of John's textbooks which he found abandoned in his boyfriend's locker at six o'clock in the evening whilst John was off at practice.
The cold water condensed in large droplets on the outside of the glass, and the boy watched as it slipped between his fingers; clear, pristine, beautiful, in some way. He shook the droplets off after a moment and looked back at his father as he leaned against the kitchen doorframe, taking a drink.
It cooled his mouth, washed the blood and the bile out from the pores of his tongue, made the taste disappear after a few swallows, made his head stop spinning so much. It didn't look like water would do the Detective Inspector much good at this point, though.
His father drank because he had killed innocent people, and he took his guilt and anger out on his son because Sherlock had killed his mother. The detective would remember all those things as he poured over files at one in the morning, the bottle of alcohol emptying itself in his glass, diluted from the melted ice cubes.
And all he did was drink more at night, turn up sober for work, waste himself away.
Sherlock left him to it, treading back upstairs with his glass of water to get changed and get into bed.
Sometimes, he would dream things that were so hallucinogenic yet so harsh that they became Sherlock's nighttime reality.
He saw his father in the neurological ward of the hospital, bottle in hand, taking a swig, standing outside room 709.
He saw himself standing there, across the hallway from his father, staring with dead eyes at the door of the room.
He didn't need to see Siger to hear him, to feel the weight of every single blow as it crashed upon him like brackish, powerful waves thundering against a coastline.
Still he blamed himself for things that were not truly real.
"I see her here, you know," came the slur, although it was still crisp, sharp. "I see her, and I think to myself- how the fuck am I supposed to raise this kid- this hyperactive, stupid kid alone? You fucking killed her, William, do you hear me? You fucking killed her, and she's not coming back."
And then he would throw the bottle, and it would rain shards onto the floor of the empty corridor, and Sherlock's clothes would be soaked in the pungent, bittersweet odour of whiskey.
We're a family of psychos, Sherlock would often joke to himself in the middle of the night, before falling asleep with the tears drying up on his face.