A/N: Surprise lol, finished tag means nothing.

Explanation for anyone who'd like one: been too busy with work to feel up to tackling the more complicated plot of the story I'd resolved to finish (I'm still doing that, by the way, just slowly), decided to goof around with sillier stuff in the meantime so as to at least keep in the habit of creative writing, enjoyed this bit enough to tack it onto the end of this story.

There is an extremely vague possibility I'll slap yet another chunk on at some later date, but I have no actual plan to continue this as a "real" story. It's just an amusing diversion.

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John was not, in fact, a complete idiot. Regardless of Sherlock's frequent assertions to the contrary. Obviously he'd nothing on the superhuman genius of the Holmes brothers, but he'd made it through medical school, and he could deduce basic facts as well as the next bloke. Particularly when it came to things he'd firsthand experience with. And, unfortunately, having been an army doctor stationed in Afghanistan meant he'd amassed a rather horrific amount of experience interpreting the body language of traumatised young men.

Would've been vastly less strain on his psyche to dismiss the scene before him as nothing more than an awkward moment. Just close the program and forget about it. Impossible, sadly, because he knew that hunted stare and rigid posture. Seen it far too many times during civilian outreach clinics - youths brought in by older men who insisted they'd no idea how such specific injuries could've been inflicted. Men whose smiles echoed the predatory leer of the weasel-faced man.

Simple enough to piece together what had happened, then. Much more difficult to get his brain to accept that the boy making that too-familiar expression was Sherlock. Try as he might, all he could see was some nameless teenager. He continued to stare at the photo for the next several minutes regardless, turning every detail over in his head, trying to find a way to make it fit.

The sound of Sherlock's bedroom door opening startled John quite badly, and he hastily closed the gallery program, then a split second later remembered Crenshaw had actually just shut the lid. He had barely enough time to snap the laptop shut again, turn back towards the counter and set about fussing with his tea before Sherlock appeared. All a bit pointless, really, given the near-certainty of the Great Detective spotting some preposterous clue betraying he'd been snooping. One had to at least try, though.

Sherlock didn't even glance towards the table as he entered the kitchen. He'd instead spun round to walk backwards whilst speaking to Crenshaw, his bearing a bit silly and overdramatic to match the inflection of his words.

"Buy some clothes of your own, then. No one's forcing you to wear mine."

Crenshaw emerged into view, trailing after Sherlock. Both of them were dressed properly now, Sherlock in one of his usual outfits and Crenshaw with the trousers he'd already had on along with what appeared to be the same loose t-shirt Sherlock had been wearing a moment ago. While the two of them were roughly the same height, Crenshaw was a bit wider in the chest and shoulders, making the shirt look much less like a pyjama top on his frame.

Crenshaw shrugged. "Nah, some coke-addled toff once told me being able to share a wardrobe is 'too efficient not to take advantage of'. Can't say I disagree."

Sherlock gave him a flat look, which quickly shifted to acceptance.

"Yeah, alright. Fair," he admitted with a shrug of his own. "It was efficient, though."

"Efficient way to get acid burns on all my shirts, sure," Crenshaw countered blandly.

John couldn't help a small chuckle for the mental image - that impossibly young version of Sherlock from the photos continuously nicking his boyfriend's clothes, blithely unconcerned with the basic courtesy of not spilling chemicals on them. No trouble slotting that into his mental model.

Speaking of mental models - he eyed Sherlock with interest as the man jumped with almost comical surprise and whipped around to look at John, as if he'd not noticed he was there. Failing to notice an entire person stood by the kettle was of course nothing too out of the ordinary for Sherlock, but the relaxed, animated way he was moving certainly was. Usually after a forced display of vulnerability like that he'd spend at least the next few hours moody and withdrawn. Seeing him bounce back so quickly was a bit bewildering.

"We're out for lunch, John. You're welcome to join if you'd like," Sherlock said offhandedly after a brief pause to process that John did in fact still exist. A flash of irritation seemed to cross Crenshaw's face behind him, but the man said nothing.

John shook his head. "Nah, thanks." Didn't want to intrude, especially given Crenshaw's apparent desire that he not, and besides which he very much wanted to have a look through the rest of the photos. Reached for an easy lie instead. "Busy morning at the clinic, bit knackered."

Sherlock, of course, instantly spotted some telltale clue betraying the truth - that it had been an incredibly dull morning at the clinic, hence why he'd spent some portion of it mulling over Sherlock's past deeply enough to recall the photos. John took a placid sip of his tea and settled in for the inevitable barrage of deduction. Alright, fine, get on with it. Walked right into that one.

Just as Sherlock opened his mouth, though, Crenshaw cut him off with a flat "don't."

Sherlock snapped his mouth shut and turned a disgruntled frown over his shoulder. "What?"

"Just take him at his bleedin' word and quit messin' about, christ."

"I'm not messing about," Sherlock objected petulantly.

"Right, 'course not. Cause showin' off for folks who already know how clever you are ain't a silly waste of time at all," Crenshaw replied with a sarcastic eye roll as he turned towards the door. "Catch up when you're finished, then."

Sherlock stared after him, visibly wrong-footed. John pressed his lips into the side of his tea mug and did his level best not to burst into laughter.

This became much easier as Sherlock's indignant stare after Crenshaw dropped to a pensive, strangely forlorn look. The sort of face a man might make in response to a sudden realisation that he still loved an ex, if John had to guess. Odd interaction to spark such an epiphany, perhaps. But then the idea of Sherlock only recognising the depth of his feelings for a bloke after being flatly dismissed by said bloke did seem rather on-brand.

Despite a renewed temptation to start laughing over this John swallowed his mirth down to a gentle smile.

"Take him someplace nice," he suggested. "That little bistro, maybe."

A flash of wariness crossed Sherlock's face as he glanced over to John, but it faded quickly.

"No need to spare the ridicule, John. I know I've been acting a fool," he muttered, sounding a bit tired and lost.

John shrugged. "'Course you have. Love makes fools of all of us, right?"

Sherlock turned a disapproving frown on the word 'love', opening his mouth as if to object, then seemed to lose steam and breathed a small sigh instead. A beat later he shook his head and strode off towards the door. John leant to the side to watch after him, smiled as he saw Crenshaw pop out from around the corner and hand Sherlock's coat to him with a quick kiss. Evidently he'd not actually expected to have to wait for Sherlock to finish deducing. Detective whisperer, John thought to himself with a smirk.

As they made their way to the stairs together, Crenshaw spoke up with a flippant, "So I've decided if your brother nabs me again I'm just gonna start describing th' whole rest of the morning in, like, excruciating detail."

Sherlock made an odd noise somewhere between a sputter and a laugh. John ducked his head to try to stifle his making about the same noise himself - both for the impossible task of trying to imagine Mycroft's reaction to such a thing, and for the new knowledge that Sherlock's brother had wasted no time whatsoever putting Crenshaw through the whole kidnap-and-interrogate rigmarole. What an absolute lunatic.

"He'd literally die of discomfort," Sherlock replied. "You'd be tried as an assassin."

Crenshaw laughed and said something in reply, but was sadly now too far away to make out the words. The sound of the front door closing announced their departure.

Shaking his head in wonder, John's attention was caught once more by the laptop. Sherlock hadn't spared it a single thought. Left the photos unguarded, waiting.

Snooping around in someone else's computer was terribly rude, obviously. Sherlock's habitual disregard for John's privacy did, however, make the intrusion feel somewhat less egregious - the man had gone digging through John's laptop multiple times already under various excuses ranging from 'checking for tracking software' to 'mine's too far away', after all. Given that, it didn't seem unreasonable to take this opportunity to just have a quick look through the rest of the album. Hadn't even any plans to go rooting around through anything else, which put him a step above Sherlock in terms of basic common courtesy, so by any reasonable moral framework it was fine.

Having sufficiently convinced himself, John moved to sit in the chair Crenshaw had recently occupied. Opened the lid and then grimaced as he remembered he'd closed out the gallery viewer. Bollocks. Well, the folder full of files was still open. Perhaps if he double-clicked on something in there it would launch the viewer program automatically? Worth a try.

He clicked a random file, and was mildly annoyed to see the program it pulled up wasn't the gallery. A beat later he realised that was because this wasn't a still photo but a video file instead, which turned the mild disappointment into a flash of juvenile glee. Hadn't even considered the possibility of videos - the pub band again, maybe? He quickly hunted about for the volume controls, and managed to get the audio loud enough to catch the tail end of a woman speaking through the tinny laptop speakers.

"- anyone touch it, yeah? Won't be a minute!"

On-screen was the view from a camera which seemed to have been strategically placed and left to surreptitiously record. The shot seemed to be angled down from a higher surface towards a short set of steps, which John recognised to be the stairs off the side of the cellar pub's stage. Two lanky teenage boys were sat on the steps, roughly centred in the frame, their faces turned away as they both tracked something moving out of frame.

The distant sound of a door opening and shutting again signalled someone had left the room, presumably the woman who'd just been speaking. The two boys were silent for a moment. Then the dark-haired one nearest the lens spoke up in a voice so familiar as to be disorientating.

"Why does she always respond like she's heard something completely different to what was actually said?" he asked blankly. His cadence was identical to Sherlock's, tone nearly the same save for perhaps being a few steps higher in pitch. He turned forwards again, which put his features roughly in profile, of course revealing the same surreal de-aged copy of Sherlock's face from the photos. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips, as it had in so many other shots, and he glanced down to an open packet of crisps held absently in one hand with a frown as if he'd forgotten how they'd got there.

John studied the screen with rapt fascination. The doppelganger's movements, while subtly off in a way John couldn't quite put his finger on, were still very recognisably those of his friend. And, of course, the face - thinner, younger, scruffier, but indisputably Sherlock's. It all came together to the impression not of a simple copy of the man's face, but of the essence of the Great Detective having been somehow superimposed over the awkward frame of an adolescent. Absolutely eerie in a way the photos hadn't been.

And then, as suddenly if a switch had been flipped, the portion of John's brain which had stubbornly refused to accept evidence finally gave up. All at once he found himself able to fully reconcile that this was, indeed, Sherlock. A snapshot in time he'd actually lived through, not some impossible copy of his likeness. The realisation felt daunting, somehow.

As John was busy mulling over this train of thought, the other boy in the video shifted into better view. He briefly turned towards the camera to casually pluck the cigarette from Sherlock's lips, revealing a constellation of freckles and warm brown eyes.

"Dunno, Sherly," the teenaged version of Crenshaw muttered dully, taking a drag off the cig. He let himself flop backwards over the stairs behind and watched as the smoke he blew out drifted upwards, then shut his eyes as if to fall asleep right there on the stairs. "Reckon she's just a bit of a cunt."

Recognisably the same voice, though with an accent much thicker than John had yet heard. The white fibreglass cast on the boy's arm and not-quite-adult body proportions were all familiar enough from the photos; nowhere near as eerie to see in motion, as John didn't know the man well enough to have formed any preconceptions, so focussing on him rather than Sherlock was a welcome break from the uncanniness. Doing so made it easier to notice how the two boys were sat directly beside each other despite having enough space to spread out, same as in the garden wall photo. John recalled the way Crenshaw had seemed to unconsciously keep himself within arms' reach of Sherlock earlier and smiled bemusedly to himself. Bloke was a bit clingy, apparently.

On-screen the young version of Sherlock offered no reaction to the theft of his cigarette. Instead he'd turned to idly shuffling through the bag in his hands as if hunting for the ideal crisp.

"You don't have to keep telling her off like that, you know," he said after a long silence. "I don't care anymore."

Crenshaw made a frustrated noise. "Quit fuckin' doin' that."

Sherlock looked over with a quizzical tilt of his head and held up the crisp packet, as if asking if that was what he was meant to stop doing. Crenshaw opened his eyes to see the movement, then irritably closed them again.

"Not th' crisps," he grumbled. "Though, yeah, quit doin' that too and actually eat 'em."

Sherlock huffed like a petulant child, picked exactly one crisp out of the bag and ate it sullenly. Crenshaw opened his eyes again a few seconds later with an exasperated glare, presumably as he heard no other eating happening.

"Fuck's sake, Shers."

"I'm not hungry!" Sherlock whinged.

"Next time you pass out I'm leavin' you on the goddamn floor."

"I didn't pass out."

"You fell flat on your stupid face."

"I tripped," Sherlock objected. Crenshaw glared up at him.

"Fine," he snapped. "You tripped after not eating a fuckin' thing all day. Scared me half to death anyhow, so maybe try'n keep from doing it again, yeah?"

Sherlock turned to regard him silently a moment, expression unreadable as he was facing away from the camera. As he looked forwards again he sullenly ate another crisp.

A few moments of companionable silence passed, during which Crenshaw decided to heft himself back upright and shifted his legs to a less sprawled-out position, Sherlock's cig now dangling from his mouth. Sherlock managed to eat several more crisps, though looked pointedly unhappy about each one.

"What else was I supposed to quit doing?" Sherlock suddenly asked out of nowhere.

John snorted to himself - well, that certainly hadn't changed. Sherlock's habit of picking up a conversation thread he'd dropped minutes back and expecting everyone to just miraculously know what he was on about.

Crenshaw responded without missing a beat, evidently having no difficulty following this erratic communication style.

"Sayin' you're fine with shit when you ain't."

"I am fine with it," Sherlock insisted.

"No," Crenshaw said flatly, glaring out into whatever space lay beyond the camera frame. "You're just gonna pretend t'be til you can't no more, then you're gonna panic or go all dead-eyed and suddenly shit'll be my problem to sort out. Same as every other fuckin' time."

"Well if I'm such a burden to you-" Sherlock's snippy rebuttal cut off as he was jolted sideways by a light shove to the shoulder.

"Shut up, christ," Crenshaw groused. "Y'know that ain't what I meant."

Sherlock did shut up, but also shoved him back. In the usual manner of adolescent boys this devolved into a short, silly scuffle, culminating in Sherlock twisting under Crenshaw's arm to duck an attempted headlock, then letting his upper body flop down over the man's lap with a finality as if he'd won. He fixed a childish pout up at his boyfriend with arms crossed over his thin chest, crisps now abandoned on the step below.

Crenshaw shifted to support the sudden weight of a nearly-grown man across his legs with the casual acceptance of someone very used to randomly finding their partner draped over them. Still so impossibly strange to imagine Sherlock initiating physical contact with anyone, let alone tolerating anything more than the bare minimum. And yet the boy he'd once been seemed to have no complaint with Crenshaw's hand shifting to idly bounce one of the short curls sticking up from his mop of unkempt hair.

After a few seconds Sherlock dropped his comical pout and stared off moodily towards the ceiling instead. At this angle his face was almost directly in line with the camera, making his expression much easier to read.

"I tried asking her to stop," he grumbled.

"You asked one time," Crenshaw replied in an exasperated tone. "An' when she didn't listen you just gave up."

Sherlock turned a vaguely confused frown up at him. "Having to ask more than once means you're just whingeing."

"Says fuckin' who?"

"Says, er…" Sherlock trailed off, seemed to consider a moment, then looked away as if embarrassed. "Mycroft, I guess."

Crenshaw scoffed and shook his head, muttering something too quietly for the camera mic to pick up. Sherlock scowled.

"He is still my brother, you know," he snapped. Crenshaw lifted his good hand in a placating gesture.

"Fine, sorry," he groused. "Just seems like he ain't ever much cared whether folks are bein' awful to you."

"No one's ever cared about that," Sherlock retorted with an exasperated eye roll. "You're the first person to give this much of a shit, and honestly I'm not even sure why beyond maybe you think trying to be nice is some sort of requirement for getting to shag me? Which it most decidedly is not, given prior history."

Despite the snark in his tone Sherlock's expression had darkened considerably into a vicious glare off at nothing. Over the subsequent stretch of silence this slowly morphed into a vacant stare.

Crenshaw, who'd been gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance, appeared to sense something and glanced down. His solemn expression on catching sight of the blank stare seemed far too world-weary for a face so young. With a small sigh he stubbed his near-spent cig out on the step next to him, sat quietly a moment as if in thought, then leant over and murmured something to the boy in his lap. The camera angle made it difficult to see exactly what he'd done, but John guessed it must have been some variation on the odd little ritual he'd witnessed earlier, because Sherlock's response was near-identical - he blinked, appeared briefly confused, then grimaced and shook his head.

"Fuck. Sorry," he muttered. Then a beat later scowled and added a petulant, "Sorry for saying sorry."

Crenshaw huffed but said nothing. Sherlock seemed to fall into a bit of a preoccupied sulk, and they sat in silence for a long moment.

Finally Crenshaw spoke in a voice nearly too quiet for the microphone to pick up.

"It's cause I care about you, you fuckin' moron."

Sherlock appeared taken off-guard by this, and turned a bewildered look up at his partner. A short staring contest ensued before Sherlock looked away again.

"I'll… try to tell her off myself next time," he said in a hesitant grumble. "Instead of just ignoring her."

Rather than reply in any verbal manner Crenshaw simply patted him on the head like a puppy, which Sherlock strangely tolerated. Another quiet moment stretched out.

Crenshaw was the one to break the silence again. "How does it even make sense to think I'd go to all this bother just to shag you, anyway?" His tone suggested he was intentionally trying to lighten the mood, though the teasing cadence wasn't quite enough to mask a note of melancholy. "Your arse is only cute enough to make up for, like, maybe a quarter of the dumb shit you do."

"Bullshit," Sherlock retorted immediately, expression comically serious given the next sentence. "My arse is cute enough to offset at least half of all the dumb shit I do."

Crenshaw sputtered out a laugh. Sherlock cracked a small smile along with him, then looked up towards the camera and appeared to spot some detail - he furrowed his brow as his gaze shifted to look at something near the lens.

"Mandy left that thing recording," he pointed out, nodding towards the device.

Instantly Crenshaw stopped laughing and whipped his head around, then up as he realised where the device actually was. The brief moment of levity evaporated with his angry glare.

"What? Oh fer fuck's sake. Turn it off."

Sherlock hefted himself up from his boyfriend's lap and approached the camera, his chest growing larger in the frame until just the Oxford crest on the front of his hoodie was visible. A flurry of blurred movement filled the screen as he presumably picked it up. For a brief second the image clarified to a view of Sherlock staring down into the frame with a calculating expression on his too-young face, and John realised with a start that the boy's pupils were enormously overdilated for the level of ambient light. He'd been high this entire time? Hadn't seemed any different to his usual self - perhaps a bit oddly relaxed, if anything, which was not at all the effect John expected a prodigious dose of cocaine to have on anyone.

As John was busy puzzling over this, the image of young Sherlock's face shifted, appearing to be turning a thoughtful look back towards Crenshaw. Then the frame shook and blurred with movement until it had settled back round to a steady shot on the boy, now being filmed from a spot directly to his side and much closer, as if Sherlock had crouched down on the stairs with the camera held up to his face.

"And here we find the majestic chav in its natural habitat," Sherlock's voice said from behind the frame. Aside from a slight snicker he'd done a fair job of impersonating David Attenborough.

Crenshaw fixed him with a flat, sidelong stare. Still angry, it seemed, and not at all in the mood to entertain whatever nonsense his boyfriend was up to.

"What th'fuck are you doin'?" he asked tiredly.

"She wanted to film a documentary, right?"

"You said that were th' stupidest idea you ever heard."

"Well, I've changed my mind," Sherlock quipped brightly. The image zoomed in on one of Crenshaw's freckled cheeks, and Sherlock started mimicking a BBC programme again. "Observe the chav's unusual speckled complexion - a form of camouflage, perhaps? Or simply evidence of too much sun exposure? Researchers have yet to agree upon an explanation."

Crenshaw drew away slightly, making his expression of reluctant amusement visible despite the extreme close-up. John furrowed his brow in confusion, then furrowed it further in baffled realisation - was Sherlock… trying to cheer his boyfriend up? The thought felt absurd, and yet here he was. By all appearances just a kid trying to get his friend to laugh.

"Observe the pasty-arsed toff bein' an obnoxious little shit," Crenshaw replied, sounding a bit annoyed but willing to play along.

A few jumbled seconds of movement followed, and suddenly the both of them were in frame, Sherlock apparently now holding the camera out in front of their faces. He shoved his cheek against Crenshaw's and stuck his tongue out at the lens, then nudged his partner insistently until Crenshaw relented to follow suit. After a second of childishly sticking their tongues out they both broke down laughing, and Sherlock must have finally deigned to flip the power switch, because the video cut off.

John sat in thoughtful silence for several long moments. Well, that had certainly been… something. An unexpectedly forceful push into accepting that the boy in the rest of the photos was actually Sherlock, for one thing. For another, reasonably solid confirmation that he had, in fact, been sexually assaulted at some point during this stretch of time. Also evidence that Sherlock's behaviour on cocaine seemed to lack most of the usual tells of stimulant abuse, which of course raised concerns about whether John would've noticed if he'd relapsed.

And, perhaps the least objectively important detail yet also somehow the most fascinating, evidence that Sherlock could actually behave like a normal human being. Or like a normal twenty year-old, at least. Play-fighting, foul language, joking about having a cute arse… nothing John would've thought the man capable of before today. An entire facet of himself he kept hidden away, for whatever inscrutable reason.

Or… perhaps not hidden, exactly, but more some strange, emergent effect of how he and Crenshaw interacted? Briefly John weighed that possibility - tried to guess Sherlock's reaction should John ever say anything remotely similar to 'it's because I care about you, you fucking moron'. Nope. Wouldn't work. John couldn't even imagine himself voicing such a sentiment, certainly not with that wording, and Sherlock would take the insult far too seriously. Excruciatingly awkward just thinking about it.

And yet Crenshaw, for some reason, could say things like that, and Sherlock not only accepted it but responded by actually doing as he'd been asked. Grudgingly, but still.

A small, shameful urge to grab his own laptop and start working through this via writing arose, but he fought to suppress it. No, no. Absolutely not. He knew himself, knew that once he'd organised all his thoughts he'd want to share it and get input from other people, which would ultimately mean putting a load of Sherlock's personal business up on the internet. And while Crenshaw seemed to hold very little faith in his discretion John did at least have some standards - Sherlock's ability to forget the entire concept of planets was one thing, his relationship dynamics and dating history were quite another. Even if the urge to chat about all this with someone was sure to become a gnawing hole in his brain.

"Yoo hoo!"

Aha! Perfect! John turned a bright smile up to Mrs Hudson, who'd just appeared in the doorway holding a stack of folded linens.

"Sorry for barging in, dear, wasn't sure if anyone was home. Did you put all those sheets and things in the wash just now?"

John bit back a laugh for the reminder of why Sherlock's sheets would need washing.

"Nope," he said with only a small snicker. "That's all Sherlock's."

"Oh." Mrs Hudson looked a bit confused. "When did he learn to use the machine properly? Got all the settings right and everything."

John gave into the urge to laugh openly as Mrs Hudson walked over to hand him the stack of clean wash.

"Must've been his ex. They seem to have spent the morning, er… reconnecting."

Mrs Hudson gave him a light smack on the shoulder for the admittedly terrible innuendo, but turned a delighted smile regardless.

"Really! That young man from last night? What was the name… Eric, was it?"

"That's the one, yeah," John confirmed with a light nod. He set the wash down on the table beside him and turned his attention back to the laptop. "Apparently… " He trailed off as he scrolled quickly through the folder of photo thumbnails, then gestured triumphantly as he found and successfully opened the photo of the uncoordinated pub snog from earlier. "They were 'housemates'."

Mrs Hudson's hand went to her mouth with a small titter, then dropped to press over her chest as her smile shifted melancholy.

"Goodness, look at the state of that boy. I'd forgotten how thin he was."

John glanced quizzically over to Mrs Hudson.

"You knew Sherlock at this age?"

"I'm afraid so, dear!" she confirmed with a laugh. "Found the poor thing half-dead on the pavement down a side street in Tallahassee. Really should have just left him there, you know, what with everything going on. Suppose I've never regretted it, though."

"What was he doing in Florida?" John hedged, partly to confirm he'd correctly placed the unfamiliar city, and partly in hopes of prompting her to elaborate. He'd just been hoping she'd gossip with him about Sherlock's relationship dynamics, hadn't realised they'd met so soon after all this happened.

Mrs Hudson just chuckled. "Well, I'm sure you'd have to ask him! I certainly won't be going into details. Sherlock would have my head if you wound up on a hit list."

John blinked. "Sorry, what?"

Mrs Hudson flashed him a sweet, guileless smile, then crossed her arms expectantly and gestured down to the screen.

"Well, go on then. Let's see the rest."

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