A/N: WARNING for attempted suicide. It gets better I promise! This is the darkest I've ever written, I don't think I've ever directly addressed drug use. Sorry. But like I said, it gets better!
When Sherlock finally hears Mycroft leave, he sneaks downstairs for a bottle of any bit of alcohol he can find. There's a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, but he finds a full bottle of wine and takes that upstairs instead.
Between long swigs of wine straight from the bottle and smashing his mirror into smaller pieces with the heel of a boot, he toys with the baggy of coke. He feels awful, today is worse than yesterday, but he's all cried out and can't sleep either.
Sherlock looks at himself in one of the larger shards of glass mirror. He looks ridiculous. His eyes are too slanted, his nose too small for his long face, his lips are too fat. He's a mess of absurd traits and there's nothing he can control.
What Sherlock can control is his hair. His stupid hair. He liked it once, way back when John told him it made him beautiful, that it looked like he has a perfect angel halo on his head.
He hates it now, can't stand the look of it.
In his desk drawer is a thick pair of scissors, so he gets them out and chops away. Thick clumps of black fall off his head; they resemble rain clouds or puffs of smoke from a car: ugly things.
Soon his hair is short enough to barely run his fingers through, and Sherlock's satisfied.
Sherlock finishes the bottle within the hour and finally squints his blurry eyes at the label. He recognizes the logo as the Watson family's company, so Sherlock unlatches the lock on the window and swings it open. He chucks the bottle out and grins when it explodes on the street.
He starts to think about how his family will be home soon and he doesn't want to deal with them. They'll want to talk to him about yesterday, about where he was last night, maybe about the missing bottle of wine.
He doesn't want to deal with it. He wants to be gone, like last night.
Sherlock tries to remember how that guy prepared the coke last night and mimics his actions. Right or wrong, he gets it in his body and quickly feels as great as he did the night before.
After a while, Sherlock loses track of everything. He wonders if he's still breathing; he wonders why everything's gone pitch black. He doesn't really feel his body hit the ground at all.
His last complete thought is spent wondering if the dark, cold silence is heaven or hell.
"Sherlock?" he hears next to his head. "Sherlock, can you hear me?"
Sherlock blinks his eyes and tries to focus, but everything is blurry.
"Relax, it's alright."
Sherlock blinks towards the voice. "Myc?"
"You're in the hospital. How much coke did you take?"
Sherlock manically laughs. "A lot."
"Sherlock..." Mycroft sighs, disappointed.
"It didn't kill me?" Sherlock asks.
"Did you want it to?"
Sherlock nods. His head is heavy.
"I'm going to talk to dad. Go back to sleep."
Sherlock nods again, letting his head land back on a pillow while he closes his eyes.
It's light out the window when he wakes up. It was light when he talked to Mycroft, but now it's dusk light. The sun is going down.
"He's awake," a soft female voice says.
Sherlock's eyes bolt open. Maybe it is heaven, for the woman's voice sounds an awful lot like his mother's, what he remembers. But it's not. He closes his eyes again when he sees a short blonde nurse smiling at him.
"Sherlock?"
A softer deep voice. A boy, young boy. Sherlock feels like throwing up.
"What do you want?" he asks, not opening his eyes or turning his head to face the boy.
John strokes his hair. His short, bristly hair.
"What happened, Sherlock?"
Sherlock shrugs. "What's it to ya?"
John's fingers trail down his cheek.
"Why'd you do this?" John asks.
"Lotta nerve you have asking me that."
"I'm sorry."
Sherlock finally looks at him. "You broke me, John. Do you understand? I'm the laughing stock of Salinas High School because...because of you."
"And I'm so, so sorry."
Sherlock turns away. "Don't you have some pregnant deb to get to?"
John snorts. "What?"
"Isn't Lucy pregnant?"
John laughs. "If she is, it ain't by me."
Sherlock looks at him, confused. "What?"
"I only took her to a dance, that's all."
"What about Charlotte? Mindy? Beth? Avery? Sarah? Jeannie? Nina?"
"Sherlock, Sherlock. Stop. Sure, I took 'em all out, but..."
"How many of them did you have sex with?"
John clears his throat. "Just two...or three..."
Sherlock turns his entire body away from John. "Leave."
John stands and places a hand on Sherlock's hip. "I'm leavin' at the end of the month, not long after graduation."
"Lucky you," Sherlock whispers, and with that John leaves.
Sherlock doesn't return to school once he's released from the hospital. With less than a month left, he isn't going to miss much anyway. Instead, Thomas takes him north to San Francisco so Sherlock can go to a real hospital that has a psychiatric ward. After his suicide attempt via drug overdose, Thomas doesn't trust Sherlock in their home in Salinas anymore. He doesn't want Sherlock to have access to anything in the outside world, and this hospital will make solitary confinement possible.
He's to be there for six months, which means he won't be out until Thanksgiving. But it doesn't matter to Sherlock. Maybe missing all that school will make going to Harvard impossible.
His family doesn't visit. Thomas keeps his distance, claiming over the phone that the business needs him every time there's a visiting weekend. But Sherlock knows that Salinas is a small enough town that everyone must know of what happened, and without visiting, Thomas can deny any facts, making the excuse that Sherlock went to Harvard early like his brother. Parents don't visit their kids at college, so the idiots of Salinas would gladly accept that excuse.
Mycroft has a valid excuse, being away at his last year of Harvard. He doesn't call, though. Sherlock knows he's ashamed of having a little brother who tried to take his own life. That's worse than having a little brother with a boyfriend.
