A/N: Please see the note in my profile if you'd like an explanation for why I've suddenly emerged from a dark cocoon of inactivity after nearly a decade.
Cliff notes version: Recently re-read my old stories for the first time in years, found them surprisingly decent to the point of wishing there was more, then realized I kept the hard drive from the laptop I used back then and could just go look for cut content in my writing folder. Found a nearly-completed extra chapter of this story which I liked enough try my hand finishing up. I don't remember why I cut it originally - I think I thought the subject matter was too dark? And it kind of is, but the whole series is dark, so whatever.
Anyway so after getting this polished up I also wrote a new chapter of Rabbit Song from scratch which dovetails with the content here. Anyone interested enough to be reading this might want to have a look at that as well.
I've now moved on to having a strange and fun time trying to finish the last story of this series.
And if you've arrived here via some sort of 'recently updated' list - hah! How bizarre this must be for you. I offer no apologies.
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John returned to the flat around half past noon, having had a rather uneventful morning at the clinic and looking forward to a nice cuppa and the remainder of the newspaper he hadn't finished reading. His plans were somewhat vexed, however, when he got to the landing just before the entrance to the sitting room. Sherlock and Crenshaw were in there.
Ordinarily of course he'd just walk in - wasn't exactly worried about interrupting a conversation in his own home. But this... well, this could be an opportunity to see how the two of them interacted in private. And he had to admit he was curious. What was their dynamic like, really? When they thought themselves alone?
He had the perfect chance now to find out. Because by some stroke of luck (or perhaps just down to his being distracted) Sherlock hadn't yet noticed his presence. John was still hidden just out of sight around the doorframe. Quickly and quietly as possible he shifted to press his back against the wall, craned his neck to peer through the gap between the jamb and the door.
Both men were standing near the sitting room window a few feet apart from one another, appearing for the moment to be lost in their own thoughts. With confusion that morphed quickly into shocked amusement John noted that Sherlock's hair was clumped up in that way it did when partially wet, and that Crenshaw had a towel draped over one shoulder as if he'd paused in the midst of drying his currently-shirtless torso. Oh lord... they'd both just showered. John failed to fight down a juvenile grin over the implications. Sherlock and his bloody holier-than-thou attitude regarding anything to do with sex, hah! He'd just been bluffing the whole time.
"Realistically, though..." Sherlock started, glancing up from where he'd been staring at the fireplace. Crenshaw sighed and rubbed at his neck, other hand going to his hip as if exasperated.
"Realistically, yeah. That's what I bleedin' meant by fucking stupid. But then you had to go an' reciprocate, you arse."
"Oh I'm the arse, am I?" Sherlock retorted, rolling his eyes. "Remind me again, which of us was the one who decided to snog the other without warning in the midst of a bloody conversation?"
Crenshaw scoffed. "Remind me again, how exactly did our first kiss go? Back in Stockwell? Cause I'm pretty sure it involved a certain someone being high as a damned kite and pinning me against the table outta nowhere. Turnabout's fair play, mate."
"I didn't pin you," Sherlock grumbled. "Not for long, anyway."
John had to exercise quite a lot of self-control to avoid snorting in a mixture of amusement, disbelief, and a sort of vague wonder. The thought of Sherlock doing something so bawdy as pinning a bloke down and kissing him… unreal. Hilarious, surely, but incredibly difficult to imagine.
Crenshaw huffed another short sigh. "Look, it don't matter now, do it? Th'point is we really shouldn't've let it go that far, cause I've still got to leave, and you're… well, I mean…"
"Not willing to relocate. And neither are you, understandably. I do believe we've gone over this."
"Yeah, we did, right before deciding not to shag. And then doing exactly the opposite."
Crenshaw sounded extremely irritated about this. John exercised all his self-control to avoid snorting in mirth - mixed, again, with something like… well not quite disgust. He didn't actually mind in the slightest. But the inadvertent imagery now running through his brain was definitely something he could have done without.
Rather than react to the word 'shag' in any way John might have expected him to, Sherlock instead just gave a casual shrug.
"Can't resist my charm." A distinct smirk was audible in his tone. Crenshaw snorted.
"Yeah alright, Casanova. Whatever you wanna believe there."
Shaking his head, he turned to look out the window. Sherlock followed his line of sight and shifted uncomfortably, seeming to hesitate over his next words.
"We… I mean there is the whole, I don't know… visiting, whatever people do. Keep in touch."
"Well obviously there's that, yeah, but I'd rather-" Crenshaw cut himself off, making a frustrated noise, then abruptly turned to Sherlock and grabbed the front of his shirt. The subsequent kiss was as casual as it was abrupt, leaving John in a bit of a state of shock. Even more so when Sherlock didn't react beyond shifting his head a bit so their noses wouldn't bump into each other.
"I ain't actually… dated anyone, you know. Since then," Crenshaw muttered as he drew away, glancing toward the window once more. "Well I mean not long-term. None of 'em were… er…"
"If you end that sentence with 'you' I'm going to officially declare you the most disgustingly sentimental moron in the universe."
"Shut up," Crenshaw snapped, smacking Sherlock lightly on the chest as he turned back to him. "What's your excuse then, huh? Gonna fall back on the whole being of pure logic bullshit, no point findin' someone cause it's all just a massive waste of time?"
"Uh... yeah, that was more or less my reasoning." Sherlock shrugged, unconcerned as his ex's expression turned flatly annoyed. "Look, I don't see why you're so worked up about this. We've already agreed on the sensible decision."
Crenshaw huffed another frustrated sigh. "It were a sensible decision until we decided not t'be sensible in th'least and made it all bleedin' complicated and confusing instead."
"It's been that way the entire time," Sherlock pointed out. "No more so now than yesterday."
"No, a lot more so now. Yesterday it were still just some old aquaintances thing. Now it's... I don't know, rekindled flame or whatever." He frowned to himself and added, quietly, "... Now I don't want to leave."
"Well, you're in the city another week. So there's no need to think about it for the moment," Sherlock pointed out with a shrug. "Just carry on as normal."
Crenshaw let out a frustrated growl and, in a gesture which John wouldn't have thought anyone could get away with, grabbed both Sherlock's upper arms and gave the man a little shake. "Oh my god, you thick ponce, that's the problem - what the hell is normal? Are we dating? Friends with benefits? A casual fling?"
"I don't know, why does it need a label?" Sherlock countered with a bit of a whinge to his tone. He'd made no effort to extricate his shoulders from Crenshaw's grip, hadn't even seemed especially annoyed with the shaking. How bizarre John found this small detail served to create a jarring disconnect between what John had thought was simply Sherlock's inherent aversion to physical contact (with exception, of course, for Mrs Hudson, whose affectionate gestures he'd just seemed willing to tolerate for her sake), and this new reality where the man evidently didn't mind being touched at all so long as the person doing the touching occupied some hereto-unknown special category. A category which thusfar appeared to contain just this one single unassuming bloke from Lancaster.
Said bloke now paused, glanced away for a moment in thought, then seemed to realise he had no answer to Sherlock's question. With a defeated sigh he dropped his grip on Sherlock's arms and allowed himself to list forward. Sherlock caught him round the middle in a casual embrace and gave the man a slightly exasperated pat on the back. This was perhaps much more strange than his consenting to be shaken, though John didn't get a chance to dwell on it as a beat later Sherlock looked up and appeared to catch some detail.
"John, how long have you been standing out there?"
John cringed to himself and considered the merits of bluffing. Likely no point trying. Reluctantly he squared his shoulders and pushed the door open.
"Sorry, sounded like a serious conversation. Didn't want to interrupt."
Sherlock looked highly dubious of that excuse. Crenshaw drew back from him somewhat hastily and turned to smile at John with a faint blush on his cheeks.
"Oh, er... hullo, Dr Watson," he muttered, sounding a tad embarrassed. "Ah, you'd said you'd be back around now, hadn't you? Completely forgot, sorry."
"That's alright, I'm sure it's been quite the morning." John tried to keep the amusement out of his voice so as not to betray how much he'd actually overheard, but didn't quite manage. In an effort to push past the awkward moment he set himself to his own banal activities - stowing his bag, putting the kettle on. Tried to make it clear he'd no intent to be an arse about things.
He hadn't forgot Crenshaw's little lecture from earlier. And, while he had to admit he was still a bit sceptical over the idea of Sherlock not speaking up about being made uncomfortable (the man complained loudly and continuously about everything else, after all, surely he'd have no problem putting his foot down over a silly blog) one did have to admit that the conversation he'd just eavesdropped on made it hard to deny Crenshaw must have some degree of special insight into Sherlock's inner workings. How he'd come to occupy that privileged position, of course, remained a mystery.
Oh, speaking of, though… John had actually remembered something very important during clinic hours. He turned towards the other two with a small smile of victory, empty tea mug in hand.
Sherlock and Crenshaw were still stood in the middle of the sitting room, watching him. Sherlock's bearing had gone taut with a sort of frigid poise, not an uncommon sight when he was expecting to be teased about something. John had no intent of doing so (mostly, one had to admit, because he didn't want to piss off Crenshaw - he'd probably not have been able to resist a bit of ribbing otherwise) but he still paused to collect his thoughts before speaking, just to be sure not to word anything poorly.
It had only been at the very end of his shift that John's brain finally shook loose an errant scrap of memory - a simple case they'd wrapped up ages ago, his recollection of which had been near-fully eclipsed by the excitement of a string of high-stakes cases they'd picked up directly after.
Bog-standard homicide, photographer victim, old photos of Sherlock as a shiftless young delinquent. John had managed to pry out a reluctantly-told story from Sherlock about getting hooked on cocaine in uni and dropping out, but the retelling had cut off rather unsatisfyingly right as it got to what seemed the most interesting bit - Sherlock had explained how his father collected him from rehab instead of Mycroft, he'd been disowned and left to his own devices in London where he promptly relapsed. But then he'd gone quiet and John had stupidly cut in with some banal comment about being surprised by how easy it was to just buy hard drugs on a moments' notice, asked if you could really just suss out a dealer and pick up a bag of cocaine like visiting the corner shop. John had thought it an innocuous enough question, mostly meant it as a way to show he wasn't especially bothered by the drugs stuff, but it seemed to have sparked some sort of memory Sherlock didn't want to venture anywhere near and he'd abruptly dropped the story. They'd had a new case so soon afterwards John hadn't had a chance to ask for the rest before it escaped his mind.
Prior to his and Crenshaw's chat this morning John wouldn't have guessed him connected to any of that - the man seemed far too kind-hearted and nervous to be hiding some past life of crime. But at some point he'd got annoyed and let his accent drop, and the abrupt switch to rough cockney helped to recontextualise him a bit. Speaking that way didn't automatically mean he must have been a criminal, obviously, but it did make it much easier to picture him having had a rough childhood in some council estate, skulking about the backstreets of London, that sort of thing. From there John had slowly worked through the scant details of personal history he knew about Sherlock, finally recalled the case with the photos, and realised he'd known from the very start about Sherlock having once dated some freckled boy. His recollection had just been partially impaired by Sherlock (doubtless intentionally) dragging them out on a load of dangerous business straight after.
In the brief gap while he'd been thinking, John saw Crenshaw glance over to Sherlock's rigid stance, frown in a way that seemed oddly annoyed, and lightly elbow him in the side. Sherlock shifted in surprise, flicked his gaze over to meet Crenshaw's, quirked an annoyed frown of his own, then noticeably relaxed. Fascinating. Best not comment, though.
"So I had a small revelation at work," John said brightly instead. He gestured towards Crenshaw with the empty mug he'd been holding. "I've seen you before. That case with the photographer, Sherlock, remember? And you having been in some pub band?"
Sherlock did not seem to remember. He made a very perplexed face and offered nothing but a confused, "what?" in response.
John blinked - hang on, had Sherlock really deleted all memory of the case? Over a few old photos? Why?
Crenshaw, for his part, suddenly looked almost wary. His palms came together in that nervous tic again.
"... pub band?" he hedged. Definitely wary. Definitely recognized the context. Meant John could at least be reasonably certain it had indeed been Crenshaw in those photos. Even if he wasn't quite sure what was so terrible about them to trigger Sherlock to delete the whole thing and Crenshaw to sound so suspicious.
Crenshaw's question seemed to unlock some sort of mind-cold-storage for Sherlock, or whatever he called it when he'd 'deleted' things only to later recover them without much apparent difficulty, and before John could reply the detective groaned with recognition. Finally leaving his spot stood in the middle of the sitting room he made his way over to the table where his laptop was, and without bothering to sit down opened it and began clicking around as he spoke. John noted with vague bemusement that Crenshaw trailed after him in an oddly automatic way, as if his body had developed some set function to keep Sherlock within a certain proximity.
"An utterly dull case involving a photographer having snapped a few candid photos of a man with his mistress and being murdered over it," Sherlock was grumbling. "Only remotely interesting detail of the entire thing was that the victim turned out to have been Mandy living under an alias."
Crenshaw made a strange sort of face, halfway between grimacing and unsurprised.
"Ech… well, awful I s'pose, but to be honest that's kind of exactly how I expected she'd go out."
Sherlock huffed a small amused breath through his nose, then appeared to become distracted by whatever he was doing on his laptop. John gamely picked up with his usual role of facilitating conversation.
"We'd found old photographs of you and Sherlock on the victim's computer," he explained. "Sherlock deleted the lot of them before anyone had a chance to look through them properly. I'd not remembered until now."
Crenshaw frowned and fiddled with the towel still draped over his shoulder.
"Well… probably for the best," he muttered. "Embarrassing as anything." His voice sounded torn between disappointment and relief.
John found himself very interested by the conflicting emotions - Sherlock had abandoned his tale before getting anywhere near the point where those photos would have been taken, but it seemed Crenshaw might have been involved for roughly the span of the missing time frame. Perhaps an opportunity to get the rest of the story? He'd have to be careful asking, though, since he had a feeling Crenshaw wouldn't be keen on sharing sordid histories. Not with him, at any rate.
"They're not that bad," Sherlock cut in. He drew back from his laptop and gestured towards it, indicating Crenshaw should look. The man did so and instantly his expression became a very complicated mixture of surprised, embarrassed, dismayed, nostalgic, and about a hundred other things besides. "You look like an unkempt tramp in most of them, of course, but I always assumed that was the aesthetic you were going for."
John wasn't entirely sure if he was being invited to view the screen as well, being on the wrong side of it, and although disappointing he figured it would probably be best to get on with making tea and not come off over-eager to have a look. Luckily for him, though, Crenshaw drifted to a seat at the table and slid the laptop round to face him, which meant it was now angled to where John could see it over his shoulder.
Pulled up on some gallery program was a photo reel, with the file in current focus being a shot of an unimaginably young Sherlock and Crenshaw seated on a low brick wall sharing a bottle of vodka. John vaguely remembered seeing that one at the crime scene, though he'd not caught more than a glance then.
"You kept a copy?" John asked Sherlock in surprise. All that trouble to erase the files from existence, yet he'd kept an entire set on his laptop? Lord knew the implications of that.
Sherlock huffed to himself and glanced away at the far wall with a put-upon scowl.
"Might have needed them for evidence, never know when old cases turn out to be relevant."
A comically transparent lie, but there would be no point calling it out. Besides which John was much more interested in the photos Crenshaw was now scrolling through.
John hadn't seen most of these, and they looked to be in a different order than when Donovan had first discovered them. Past the photo of Sherlock and Crenshaw on the garden wall there were several assorted shots of Sherlock, Crenshaw, or the two of them together, most set amidst the backdrop of a dingy cellar pub, a few out in the streets of what looked like a rough area of London. He caught glimpses of Sherlock sat on a short set of stairs playing guitar, a close-up shot of a very young Crenshaw grinning into the camera with a lit joint in his mouth, a candid photo of the both of them sitting on some sort of large speaker at the side of a stage sharing a bag of sweets.
Crenshaw paused on a photo of a dingy room done up in the same burgundy as the rest of the pub shots, where his younger self sat on an oddly out-of-place Victorian sofa with his feet resting on a battered guitar case. A skeletal wraith of a boy who'd presumably once been Sherlock was curled up against his right side, fast asleep, young Crenshaw's arm draped loosely round his shoulders. A few feet away from them a thin black man was seated on the floor with a tray and seemed to be in the midst of rolling joints, smiling as if in response to something just said.
Current Crenshaw's face shifted to a look of fond sadness as he stared at the unknown man. Beside him Sherlock's bearing had gone tense again. He shifted as if meaning to step away, but before he could move Crenshaw halted him by gently grabbing hold of his wrist, the movement so casual as to seem unconscious. Hadn't even looked up from the laptop. Instead of pulling his arm free or otherwise objecting Sherlock appeared to simply accept his fate and remained standing in place.
Apparently trusting Sherlock wouldn't try to wander off again Crenshaw dropped his hold on the man's wrist, then leant forward with his forearms resting on the tabletop. With a short huffed sigh he clicked the key to advance again, though now with a growing air of guarded, almost wary reluctance.
Next up was a shot of himself and Sherlock snogging at a bar. John snorted in amusement. What an impossibly surreal image - Sherlock allowing some bloke to grab his face and kiss him in a move so uncoordinated they'd both nearly toppled off their seats. The disconnect was such that it was becoming necessary to forcefully remind himself that the dark-haired boy in these photos had actually been Sherlock and not some coincidentally identical teenager.
Opening his mouth to make some silly teasing comment about decorum, John thankfully realised before speaking that Crenshaw was staring at this photo with a look just as dour as he'd had for the last. John swallowed the juvenile comment and tried to collect himself a bit.
"Cute couple," he offered instead. Admittedly a weak attempt at lifting the mood, but better than the jab would've been. Crenshaw quirked a faint smile in response. A beat later his face darkened again.
"Those kids are a few hours off from being jumped on the street and almost dying," he muttered quietly. John baulked and glanced up to Sherlock, who for some reason just rolled his eyes.
"We did not almost die. I had it handled."
"Only reason we weren't cut clean open is cause you were so far off your bleedin' face you turned into some kinda coke-fuelled angel of death," Crenshaw snapped back, countenance growing ever more stormy. "And even then you've still got that scar on your arm to show for it, haven't you? How close was that to being a knife through the ribs?"
Sherlock glanced down towards his left bicep, clearly visible in the t-shirt he was currently wearing, and frowned at what John had long ago guessed to be the remains of a fairly deep slashing knife wound. Hadn't ever asked after it to confirm, of course, as he was far too sick of people calling attention to his own battle scars to consider doing the same to anyone else.
"... coke-fuelled angel of death?" John found himself repeating quizzically instead of anything perhaps more relevant, finding that phrase too bizarre not to highlight.
Crenshaw brought one hand up to rub his forehead as if warding off a headache.
"Ah, nothing, sorry. He just turned out to be better in a fight than I'd expected, is all."
Sherlock rolled his eyes again. "John knows I was a junkie, it's not some dark secret."
"Alright. Still weren't my place to bring it up, though."
Sherlock looked like he didn't know quite how to respond to that. Crenshaw breathed a short frustrated sigh and again hesitated about advancing the photo reel, but finally did so with a quick, almost aggressive jab at the keyboard.
Next was another candid shot, this time whilst the pub was much more lively, background populated by groups of young people drinking and laughing. A bit off from the centre of the frame were a young Crenshaw and Sherlock, the latter of whom was leaning against the edge of a tall pub table peering dubiously into a half-full glass he was holding. Young Crenshaw was stood pressed directly up next to him, right arm raised as if reaching up to touch his companion's hand, left at his side hanging at an odd angle due to the above-elbow fibreglass cast John had noticed in a few other photos as well - recent unstable wrist or forearm fracture, most likely. The freckled boy's attention was trained to his right and slightly behind, towards a much older man with a face disconcertingly reminiscent of a weasel, who by his posture looked to be in the midst of casually claiming a spot at the far side of the table. The darkly lecherous smirk the man had fixed on the two boys was the focal point of the shot.
Crenshaw stared at this photo for a long, silent moment, face unreadable.
Finally he snapped the laptop shut and crossed his arms.
"It's past now, that's all that matters," he said flatly.
John glanced up to see what Sherlock made of this, only to find his flatmate had fallen unnaturally still, gaze distant and unfocused.
Zoned out, John realised. Hadn't seen him do that in a bit. Didn't think much of it, though - Sherlock fell into these odd little trances often enough. Usually in response to some random detail he'd spotted, or a snippet of noise, or sometimes for no discernible reason at all. Compared to the rest of the man's quirks the occasional suspension of conscious awareness hadn't seemed much out of place, so John never felt a need to pry. Instead he'd learnt to just give it a bit of patience. Allow whatever genius intellectual process to work its way through, he'd come round again soon enough.
Crenshaw didn't seem inclined to be so blasé about the matter, however. As soon as he'd glanced up and noticed Sherlock's stillness his expression morphed into one of deep concern. He grabbed the man's wrist again with a firm grip.
"Sherlock," he said in an even, deliberate voice. "Look at me."
John was struck with the odd sense of performing a ritual; some key invocation delivered in just the right tone and cadence to dispel a formless evil.
Sure enough, Sherlock's eyes snapped back into focus as if released from a spell. He blinked down at Crenshaw.
John expected the detective to become angry or defensive, as was typical whenever Sherlock felt he'd been caught in a vulnerable moment. He didn't. Instead he seemed to take a beat to realise what had happened, grimaced, then lightly shook his head as if to clear a lingering fog.
"Sorry," he muttered. For what, John had no idea. Crenshaw seemed to be operating with a more complete picture and replied with an exasperated look.
"You don't gotta bleedin' apologise for havin' a-" He cut himself off, glanced at John. A brief silence filled the room.
Abruptly Crenshaw stood up and flung an arm round Sherlock's shoulders.
"Right," he quipped, voice gone suddenly bright and chipper. Sherlock made an annoyed noise but didn't otherwise object to finding a shirtless man draped over him. "This idiot's not eaten a bloody thing all day and I for one am famished, so perhaps we'd best see about lunch, hm?" Sherlock opened his mouth to protest but Crenshaw cut him off. "And you're not about to whinge about not being hungry, because you know I don't care."
Sherlock shut his mouth with a small, childish huff. Despite lingering confusion over what exactly he'd just witnessed John couldn't quite smother a silly grin over their dynamic. Luckily Crenshaw had already turned to steer his partner-of-indefinite-label off towards Sherlock's bedroom (presumably to get the both of them properly dressed) and didn't catch the juvenile expression.
Sherlock didn't seem to have noticed either, despite usually having some odd sixth sense for John being an immature git. No, he'd still seemed preoccupied by whatever had just happened. Just one of his staring spells, hadn't it been? John hadn't spotted anything noticeably different to any of the other ones - was it just because it had been brought on by that photo?
Struck by this thought, and with the other two men now out of the room, John curiously flipped up the laptop screen once more. Sherlock hadn't set it to lock when the lid closed, so the photo jumped back to life. Couldn't see much of note, aside from the weasel-faced man looking perhaps a bit sinister. Idly he hit the key to advance the reel.
The next photo depicted the same scene but an instant later. Weasel-Face now had his mouth open, speaking through a predatory grin. Young Crenshaw's expression had gone uncharacteristically furious. Beside him the boy who'd been Sherlock (looking far too young and fragile for John to fully reconcile as the same person) was still staring down at his drink, but his expression had changed. Instead of the bored, unimpressed stare John could easily map to his concept of adult Sherlock, the boy was now wide-eyed and ashen-faced, posture pulled taut as a bowstring.
John stared at the terrified expression on the too-young face, and slowly felt the pieces click together.
««
"You alright?" Eric asked gently as he shut the bedroom door behind them. Sherlock wasn't honestly sure - he'd always had flashbacks of one sort or another, of course, but over the course of his life their disruptiveness had slowly diminished until they'd become little more than a minor nuisance. Typically just brief snippets of unpleasant childhood experiences, occasionally a fragment of one of the many life-or-death situations he'd faced as an adult. Over in a flash, easy enough to cover up as having paused to think or reboot or whatever the hell he'd told John he was doing.
Hadn't found himself trapped in a memory so vivid as that last one in years, and certainly not of that incident - of the lowest point of addiction he'd ever hit, the moment he'd conclusively made cocaine the most important aspect of his existence. In fact he'd spent the majority of his adult life successfully suppressing all conscious recollection of that experience.
"Yes," he answered automatically. Then, because he remembered Eric would be able to spot the lie and moreover was likely to get very annoyed by it he amended with, "... no? I don't know."
Eric sighed and patted him on the shoulder. As he moved away into the room his expression darkened considerably.
"Christ, I hadn't realised Mandy were around when he pulled that sick little stunt," he said in a low growl, quiet enough to sound as though he were mainly talking to himself. "Did she seriously just fuckin' watch 'im say that shit to us, snap a bloody photo and then leave without a word? What the fuck?"
"She'd just done a bump of K with Amélie," Sherlock explained vaguely. Not having to clarify what that meant nor how it related to her behaviour was oddly refreshing.
His tone must have come out more preoccupied than he'd realised, because Eric shot him a worried frown.
"You'd not looked through all the photos yet, I take it?"
"Of course I looked through them, it was fine before." Sherlock tried to say this snappishly, but it transformed into more of a distracted mumble. Was trying not to remember the moments preceding the scene they'd just seen depicted on-screen, but of course the images kept seeping up unbidden through tiny cracks in their containment cells.
Mandy and Ami passing by their table whilst Eric had stepped away, Ami stopping to say something nonsensical to him in a jumble of French and English which he'd briefly tried to parse before realising she was shitfaced, Mandy dragging her off by the arm, feeling relieved they'd left so quickly. Turning back to the table, noticing his glass had been moved, thankfully still sober enough to think to check for tampering, not really registering when Eric pressed up beside him. Racer's gravelly voice slicing through awareness like a knife. Implying via lewd innuendo he'd tried to slip Sherlock a sedative, might be lying, impossible to tell whilst brain shorting out, Eric shouting at the bastard to piss off, trying to tell him to stop, not worth risking a fight, his muscles weren't listening and how was he supposed to defend them like this…
Sherlock grit his teeth against a phantom stab of sick dread and shook his head violently, then scrubbed his hands through his hair as if attacking his own skull might make it stop throwing unwanted memories at him.
"God's sake, it's just a stupid bloody photograph!" he snarled. "Why am I reacting like this!?"
Eric paused from where he'd been hunting for a shirt and shot him a bemused, faintly concerned look.
"Sherlock… you do know I know what he did to you, right?"
Sherlock shot him a venomous scowl from under his fringe. "Hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means we're both aware you just had a dissociative flashback triggered by a photo of a man who raped you."
"It wasn't rape," Sherlock spat, bristling. "I agreed to it."
Eric just huffed a tired sigh and shook his head. "Yeah, alright, if that helps."
Turning away, he seemed to deliberate for a moment. Torn between their mutual instinct to drop traumatic topics as quickly as possible and his apparent desire to discuss something he'd doubtless been mulling over for the past eight years. The second option must have won out, because he continued in a melancholy voice. "Look… I couldn't ever work up the nerve to say it back then, but I always wanted to tell you that shit weren't your fault, yeah? He knew what he was doing, waited 'til kids were too strung out to fight back. Did it by force if they said no. You didn't miss some better option."
"How would you know?" Sherlock was aware his tone had crept well into the realm of excessively defensive, but a touch of raised hackles didn't seem unreasonable given the subject matter. The lack of coat pockets to shove his fists into was unfortunate.
Eric gave him a look that said he really should have been able to deduce the answer himself, but then elaborated anyway.
"Benny worked for him."
Oh. Right. Sherlock had been aware of that fact but never thought through the implications. A dark scowl must have crept onto his face as he did so now, because Eric made an annoyed noise whilst tugging one of Sherlock's t-shirts over his head.
"Obviously he weren't involved in all that, christ." Having got a shirt on he turned to the business of gathering up and sorting what laundry he hadn't already put in the wash with the sheets earlier, presumably just to have something to do with his hands while he spoke. "Look, after we'd got in with Corey's crew Racer took a liking to me, right? Fucker always went for us gay kids. Kept tryna get me alone, wouldn't back off. Eventually we figured out he weren't into black guys so it were safe for Benny to take up with him and play nice, get in good graces enough to keep the sick bastard off me. And you, later. As much as he could."
Sherlock was a bit taken aback. In truth he'd never paid much attention to Ben, aside from vaguely trying to be civil because he was Eric's friend. They'd not had much chance to interact, anyway, as the man had been out of the house more often than not.
"Remember how Benny ran off that night, before we got jumped?" Eric continued, voice gone thoughtful and a bit melancholy. "He only did that cause if he hadn't filled in he were worried he'd not be in good enough standing to protect the both of us. Felt awful bout what happened."
"I didn't think Ben even liked me," Sherlock objected, frowning. Eric chuckled.
"Ah, nah, he thought you were an arsehole. But you made me happy so he looked out for you anyways."
Sherlock found himself at a loss for what to say. Mind still too frazzled to pick through the layers of emotion in that statement, to come up with a suitable deflecting quip. Eric, somehow still able to pick up on his discomfort at a glance despite the years, took pity and broke the tension by tossing a bundle of clothes at his face.
"Get dressed and take me out for lunch, you bleedin' prat."
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