Salutations, my fellow Sherlockians! :3 I happen to be exceptionally exhausted on this fine day in history, so this may be the most absolutely terrible 'chapter' ever. Just warning you. :P But thanks for reading anyway, and I hope you enjoy! Go ahead and leave a reveiwwww... ^^
The world was gray that morning.
The light was white. It blurred my vision, fogged everything into crystalline, stinging tears, like insubstantial eye-drops. I was black. My mind was all darkness, the stars themselves blown out like birthday candles on a giant, charcoal-colored cake dripping with un-rainbowed oil-icing.
The world was gray.
Gray hair and gray eyes and graying face full of worry lines and revulsion looking back at me.
"Get out."
My voice had been meant to be a threat, a booming, resonating command full of cold fury and lofty self-position. I fell miserably short of my goal.
Instead, it was a hoarse, broken whisper. Like I was pleading. I horrified myself.
Was I pleading?
"How dare you."
I could feel my lips curl independently into a snarl, a grin, my breath tripping and stumbling into a humorless chuckle.
"You're beginning to sound like Mycroft," I growled. He looked down at the thick, interlocked fingers clasped between his knees, unmoving, silent, the aura of spiraling desperation filling the air with its thick smoke.
His hands were shaking nearly as much as mine.
"Sherlock..." His voice was quieter than his thoughts as he sat there, under my gaze, observed and laid out bare, dissected like a terrified white rat. "Just... tell me why."
Why?
Tired. So. Tiredly, quietly, echo-y stillness and the empty air filled with the scent of hairspray and grilled-cheese and golden retrievers and crushing nothingness. Exhaustion, heavy with eyelids, tucking in like dryer-warmed blankets of snow, squelching tires, slipping headlights... Weighed-down, deep-end drown... Tying yourself to a dead man, his vice-grip clenched on your elbow. Cut him free and slit-your-throat for those gills, ghostly webbing stretched through pale, thin, trembling phantom-trees, gulping down the saltwater wrung out from their pink crocodile-ducts. Tired. So. Tired...
"I don't know."
Lestrade looked up at the sound of my voice shattering the momentary silence. It wasn't the suddenness of my response that he reacted to, however, but the voice which spoke it, the terror behind it, the hollowness of tarred-and-feathered innocence. His lower eyelids drew up toward his nose as he contemplated me with his lips pressed together; his prominent Adam's-apple bobbed as he swallowed.
My cheeks flushed, my throat sickly-sweet with guilt and self-hatred as he stared at me, rearranging the details into the man of four years ago. The man with greasy, unkempt hair. The man with bloodshot eyes. The man with bruised arms. The man with a hole-filled trench-coat and an empty violin case. The man who was not yet old enough to even be properly identified as a man...
"When did you start again?" Lestrade asked hoarsely.
My closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. Composure. Perfect serenity. Lean forward. Elbows on knees... slowly. Fingertips together. Hold them still. Open your eyes, look into his...
"A month after I left your flat," I said quietly, moving my gaze away from him, unable to stare into the depths of his furiously working mind, "It got worse. And then better. And worse again... The spans of time between cases were always more difficult, as were the winters. Workless days and cold weather together were... entirely impossible. You... you don't know how many times I awoke on the floor without any recollection of how I had gotten there."
I glanced up at Lestrade uneasily, who was listening with a countenance betraying bewildered horror.
"Even more so recently," I continued. Unfeeling. Uncaring. Emotionless. "The high has been eluding me. I've built up entirely too much tolerance to the drug; it's becoming necessary to take a great deal more than could be considered prudent. It's really only a matter of time until..."
"Oh my... No, Sherlock," Lestrade broke in, his deep voice trembling. I stared down at the carpet, cool, stoic grimness carved permanently into the angles of my face. He was being ridiculously oversensitive to the facts. "Please don't say that..."
"Until I overdose," I continued loudly, drowning him out, spitting out the words he needed to hear in advance, "I've already done it once before, as you well know. And this time..."
"Sherlock!" Now he was the one pleading.
"...it's very likely that I won't survive."
