««
"You're not going mad."
"Will you please just shut th'fuck up?"
"Not until you acknowledge what I'm telling you."
Eric whipped around angrily, but of course all he found was an empty field. Rolling expanse of vibrant green, capped in the distance by a squat stone wall. No houses to be seen from here - for reasons he didn't understand he'd begun to feel their windows as judgemental, staring eyes, so he'd set himself the goal of putting as much distance between himself and civilisation as the English countryside allowed. Or at least enough distance to avoid being seen. Succeeded on that front, for now. Though he'd not thought through the consequences of running out of cigarettes so far out from a shop. Been off the weed for a while now, so that bit was fine. Hadn't really meant to quit nicotine as well.
Rabbits were dotted about the grass all around him, long ears swivelling to track him. He huffed a frustrated sigh to himself and turned back to continue in the direction he'd been going. Just ignore the voice. Don't engage. Avoid contemplating the horrifying prospect of losing himself to the same disease which had swallowed Mum.
"That's not what's happening."
Bloody fucking thing was reading his thoughts now and why did it have to keep using that voice and couldn't he just be fucking normal for one day in his entire bloody life and just-
"SHUT UP!"
Every rabbit nearby scattered for the sudden noise. Save one which had been directly in front of him - brave little bastard, speckled brown and white, which stood on its haunches to stare him down reproachfully.
"Um… s-sorry," he told it. The rabbit flicked an ear.
"You're talking to a rabbit," Sherlock's disembodied voice pointed out.
Eric grit his teeth against the urge to ask how that was any worse than talking to a schizophrenic hallucination of one's ex.
"This isn't schizophrenia," the voice insisted. Fuck. He'd forgot it could tap straight into his thoughts now. "It's temporary psychosis. You knew this was a risk of quitting nicotine."
"I didn't fuckin' know I might get harassed by a fuckin' ghost."
"A benign auditory hallucination," not-Sherlock corrected, sounding utterly bored.
"Fine, I don't fuckin' care! Piss off anyhow!" Eric snapped. A wave of directionless anger rose up, making him shake his head violently and redouble his pace. He'd spotted a large, solitary tree stood tall down the field a bit. Good a place as any to post up. He'd enough supplies in his knapsack to survive just about anywhere.
"Ugh, really?" the voice asked as Eric's goal apparently became clear to it. "A willow in a field?"
Eric stared straight ahead into memory.
««
"Where d'ya go when you're like that?"
Sherlock grimaced, shaking his head to clear it as he usually did after being snapped out of a trance. Thankfully he'd set the chemicals down before spacing out this time. He glowered to himself and returned to setting up whatever step of his purification process he'd been at before his brain froze.
"The willow, usually," he grumbled. Eric blinked, raised his brows. Considered whether he was going to ask the obvious question or let it slide by without comment.
Sherlock had glanced sidelong to him and apparently caught the confused look. He huffed a frustrated sigh. Cross with himself for saying too much, perhaps, or with Eric for stumbling upon an unexpectedly complicated question. Impossible to tell. Whatever the case he apparently thought it best to explain without waiting to be asked.
"It's an abstraction technique I came across in a book about human cognition once. You're supposed to visualise a familiar location and use it as a sort of, I don't know… like a mental short-hand? Meant to help utilise the visuospatial portions of the brain to induce better recall ability."
Eric continued to keep his brows raised. He knew most of what those words meant, and honestly didn't have much trouble sussing out those he didn't through context clues, but it was more fun to play stupid. Usually got Sherlock to talk more, in any case, which was always good. Bloke's voice had captured Eric's fancy from the moment he'd first turned up on the doorstep.
Sure enough Sherlock frowned at Eric's blank look, and carried on trying to explain. "I'd messed about with it a bit when I was younger but it never really worked properly. And then when I started doing cocaine I gave it another go, and it worked that time, and now I suppose it's sort of got out of hand? Can't really turn any of it off now."
"And a… willow tree's involved somehow?" Eric asked, because he wasn't sure if Sherlock forgot to explain that bit or if he didn't want to.
Apparently he'd just forgot, because he shrugged and clarified gamely. "You're supposed to use a familiar location as an anchoring point, so I went with the tree I always used to hide in back h-" He cut off, scowled to himself, shook his head. "At my family's estate. Old-growth weeping willow stood alone in a field, with a little stream nearby. Seemed a simple enough visual to start out with. Stupid book never discussed the perils of using a setting fraught with childhood association, of course."
Eric didn't miss the self-correction of the word 'home', but as with most such details let it slip past. By this point in their relationship it had become clear (to Eric, at least - he was relatively certain Sherlock didn't think about such things at all) that a large part of why they got on so well came down to a mutual instinct to sidestep topics too painful to discuss. Unhealthy avoidance, perhaps. But also… oddly comforting? Made it easier, somehow, to get near the difficult things, knowing they could trust one other not to stray too near the raw edges hidden in the details. Things like feeling you ought to call the place you'd grown up something else besides 'home', or why you might use the word 'hide' instead of 'climb'.
So rather than call attention to any of that, Eric just gave an easy shrug.
"Good to know you're someplace safe when you get stuck, I s'pose."
Sherlock shot him a baffled look. "Were you… worried that I wasn't?"
Eric made a noncommittal noise, which by this point had come to be shorthand between them for not knowing how to answer and not really wanting to try. Unlike anyone else Eric had ever been close to in his life, Sherlock accepted this without question or comment. He returned to his work, and they fell easily back into peaceful coexistence.
««
Back in the present moment, Eric shook his head trying to dispel wisps of memory. Had to quit doing this to himself. Yes, alright, so he'd spent a brief, surreal month with a bloke miraculously fluent in all the little tricks Eric used to keep himself from falling into the suffocating pit of trauma in his head. Someone whose own pit was just as deep, and who thus understood the lengths one went to keep well clear of the edge.
All that was past now, though. Good while it lasted, a collection of memories to fall back on, but he'd not be risking forming such a close bond again. Fallen to an itinerant existence specifically to avoid it, in fact. Never lingered in any one place more than a night or two, limited human contact to the bare minimum, fled like a spooked hare the instant anyone learnt his name or he theirs. Every person he'd ever cared for had died a horrific death and left a scar on his psyche, and if he was doomed to keep living he refused to let anyone get close enough to hurt him that badly again.
"You don't know if I'm dead or not," Sherlock's disembodied voice said, drifting from the empty fields. "All you know is that I left you."
Eric ignored it.
He'd come upon the tree now (which was indeed some manner of willow stood alone in a field, and the association felt like a jagged knife to the soul but he wasn't about to dwell on such bullshit) and slung his bag off his back as he took a heavy seat against the trunk. Exhausted, empty, terrified. Stupid brain always with the slow drip of adrenaline. Fear and anger and regret and anxiety and crushing loneliness all mashed up together in the shape of one useless idiot.
"You don't get extra points for self-reproach, you know."
"Shut up," Eric tried again, plaintively. "Please. Just leave me alone."
He brought his knees up and buried his head in his arms as if that might somehow muffle a voice his mind had invented to torment itself.
"No."
Fuck.
Well, perhaps another tack. Maybe he could convince it to stop fuelling memories of the only man who'd ever got him seriously contemplating the concept of romantic love? Would it be more bearable that way? Seemed worth a try.
"At least use a different fuckin' voice, then?"
"Like this?" the voice asked, and suddenly it was Benny's instead. "Sure, mate. Happy to accommodate."
A grisly, burnt-in image of Ben's face all smashed in, blood pooling in a halo round his head. Eric made a high-pitched keening noise and curled in on himself.
"Ah, right, sorry." The voice, still Benny's, sounded genuinely apologetic. "Er… how 'bout this'un, yeah?"
The voice became Rosie's, and that was infinitely worse - Benny's ruined face transformed into her lifeless eyes and ashen skin, blood soaked through her hair, dripping off the tips of the plaits he'd done for her that morning. Bailey nearby with her wild curls fanned around her like a lion's mane, face and arms all cut up because of course she'd fought back. Mum on the floor and the knife in her…
"No no no nono STOP!"
He screeched the last word out into the empty field, scattering a handful of rabbits who'd crept back. The spotted one he'd apologised to earlier carried on being unfazed, but shot him a reproachful look. He met its deep brown eyes with savage glare. The rabbit didn't appear to give a shit.
"God's sake, stop being so dramatic."
Sherlock's voice again. Mum's empty gaze transformed into his, but the scene wasn't of him lying dead - just stuck staring into space like usual. Eric felt the ghost of his past self reach out to touch him and saw the spark of life return. A dozen tiny snippets of memory - giggling over a stupid joke, a coy little smirk, a questioning frown for some social concept gone over his head. And it was confusing because, of course, Eric had awful memories of the bloke as well. His demonic visage in the street fight, the snarl on his face when he'd left. But somehow those didn't eclipse all the happy moments like the corpses did.
"How kind of him to leave before you had a chance to stumble upon his lifeless body," the voice remarked blandly.
Eric didn't reply. Sat and stared out over the field instead. Watched the rabbit tearing up a dandelion and imagined the anxiety eating him alive as its teeth ripping into his brain.
"I don't think that's how the visualisation tactic is meant to work."
Considered imagining the rabbit eating the voice, but of course if he tried to give the thing a proper form it would have to be with Sherlock's face, and he couldn't bring himself to picture that. Best just resign himself to living with it, then.
He huffed a tired sigh and stared dully out over the field. "Where's he at right now, d'ya think?"
"Decomposing in a shallow grave."
Fuck's sake. Even his imaginary version was a tactless shithead.
"Ain't funny, mate."
"Sorry."
A silence threaded by the whisper of the wind in the tree above, the gentle noises of springtime around them. Eric couldn't remember the last time he'd slept. Or ate. Or what time it was. Wasn't sure what time even meant anymore.
"Well… let's deduce, then, shall we?" Sherlock's voice started up. Eric quirked a small smile for the wording - 'deducing' had been the term they'd eventually settled on for what to call his manic coke-fuelled logic trains no one had asked for and no one besides Eric wanted to hear. "Start with the parcel he left you: given the vague wording of the note and omission of any names, we can assume he'd been trying to avoid including any details which might have drawn a connection to him should the package fall into the wrong hands. We know he worried about you being threatened as a means to control him, since that was a common theme of nightmares. Most likely a tactic his father is known to use. His being concerned with avoiding being extorted that way, however, implies he must not yet have fallen under the man's control. Wouldn't have risked drawing attention to you if he were already caught. Furthermore, the fact that he left you his peacoat along with a frankly absurd amount of cash would seem to indicate he intends to get sober. Doesn't want to have disposable money nor the association-laden item on hand. Therefore the only logical conclusion we can draw is that he's wandering the streets in some foreign country trying to go cold turkey off coke. Which doesn't actually mean he's not dead, of course, but it does leave open the possibility that he isn't."
Eric had shifted into a full, proper smile as the diatribe progressed.
"Still don't understand how you do that shit, Shers."
"That was all you, moron," the voice corrected irritably. "I'm not Sherlock, I'm an auditory hallucination triggered by a combination of grief and tobacco withdrawal. You're the one deducing all this."
Ah. Right. That… that was true. Probably.
Dwelling on that was overwhelming, so he shook his head, felt his expression fall. Imagined the idiot sat next to him and then regretted it immediately for the spike of painful longing.
"Why couldn't he have just taken me with?"
"Eric, you are not suited to a life on the run from a load of rich psychopaths."
"W-well maybe I coulda learnt t'be!" The sudden surge of emotion in his outburst startled both himself and the rabbit, which resentfully hopped a few feet further down the field away from him. Eric glared after it, found the words still pouring out his mouth. "Maybe if he'd fuckin' asked I'd have told him I'd rather die in terror by his side instead of-" He was forced to stop and swallow heavily around sudden tears. Carried on regardless, because even if he wasn't really talking to anyone it still felt important to force the words out. "... instead of being left alone again."
"That went without saying, I think."
Eric choked out a laugh or a sob, he couldn't tell anymore. "Why'd he leave me, then?"
"You know why."
««
"What nonsense mental abstraction are you stuck in, then?"
Eric blinked. Realised he'd been staring into space there for a bit and smiled to show nothing was wrong.
"Weren't stuck, mate."
Sherlock made a dubious sound. "You've been stood there staring at nothing for…" He glanced at a nearby clock, paused, then turned back with an awkward air Eric could by now interpret to mean he'd forgot what it said when he last looked and thus had no idea how much time had actually passed. "Er… a while."
"Bit over three minutes," Eric supplied automatically.
"Right. A while."
This was funny enough to draw out a chuckle - both for the bland delivery, and the fact that they both knew Sherlock's concept of 'a while' really just meant any arbitrary amount of time he happened to have noticed passing. Which, on reflection, implied that he probably wasn't actually concerned about how long Eric had been staring. Must have picked up on something else that worried him and not known how else to ask.
"I'm alright," he replied in answer to the unvoiced question. "Just tired, is all."
"Seemed like you'd got lost in thought."
Definitely not been worried about the length of time staring, then. Eric cracked a small smile. Was nice to have someone looking out for him, he supposed. Even if it felt strange to be on this side of the caretaking equation. And even if Sherlock was rubbish at communicating.
"Nah. Ain't got deep enough thoughts to be gettin' lost in."
A flash of irritation cut through the coke-induced placid calm Sherlock had been in since his last hit. Eric raised his brows curiously. Figured he must have just mucked something up with the chemistry, so he asked after it in hopes of triggering one of the usual rambling science lectures.
"Somethin' get fucked up?"
"What?" Sherlock frowned at him, then down at the beaker he was holding. "Oh. No. I was just… I don't understand why you keep doing that."
"Doing what?"
"That!" he exclaimed, waving a hand impatiently. Eric blinked down at himself.
"Standing?"
"No," Sherlock snapped. "Saying things like… that. Like you haven't got deep thoughts or whatever. It doesn't make sense why you keep up the idiot act when it's just the two of us."
Eric was now very puzzled. "You think I'm… pretending to be stupid?"
"Obviously."
"You call me a dumbarse, like, all th'time."
"Yes, but not seriously! And you do the same, so that doesn't-" Sherlock cut himself off with a frustrated noise and appeared to try a different tack. "Look, it's ridiculous to keep up such a farce when it's clear you're at least as clever as I am."
Eric had to laugh for that one. "You fuckin' what?"
Sherlock looked about as insulted as Eric had ever seen him.
"I'm serious."
Regardless, Eric was still giggling over the idea of a thick pillock like him being anywhere near the level of a bloke who'd been attending bloody Oxford a few months ago. Sherlock appeared to find this deeply frustrating.
"Eric, you've been stoned literally the entire time I've known you, and yet with very few exceptions you've had no trouble whatsoever keeping up with me in conversation."
"Does that mean I'm smart, or does it mean you ain't half as clever as you think you are?"
Sherlock whipped around to point at Eric's face with a pair of tongs, which he clacked together as if to punctuate his accusatory scowl.
"There, see!? Firing off a devastating repartee like that without so much as a pause to think? You're not some common idiot, you're a mastermind hiding behind freckles and a stupid accent!"
"Mastermind," Eric repeated, scoffing for the sheer absurdity.
"How many strings did you have to pull to get Corey to offer me a job?"
Eric opened his mouth, shut it. Met Sherlock's accusing stare for a beat, then glanced sheepishly away to the far wall. Fuck. Hadn't thought he'd caught on to any of that.
"I just… made a few comments here n' there. Weren't anything clever."
"And then you convinced him to let me have access to the whole stock even when he said absolutely not, you smoothed things over with the crew those idiot thugs were from even though I nearly killed two of them, you got permission for Rhys to stay…"
Sherlock wasn't angry about any of this, of course. Smug, if anything. Eric met his triumphant look with a peevish little huff.
"What're you tryna get at?"
"Just want you to acknowledge your latent potential for greatness," Sherlock said airily.
Eric was unimpressed. "Why? So you can pretend you didn't settle for th'first dumbarse willing t'put up with you?"
Sherlock didn't respond with the expected teasing banter - instead he became unusually serious, staring down into the beaker of acid now swirling away on the plate he'd set up.
"So you won't settle for less than you're worth."
««
He sat a long time under the willow. Listening to birds slowly return after his shouting had driven them off, the rabbits creeping back over the grass. Wondered dully if he even existed anymore. If he'd ever been real at all. It had been so long since he'd spoken more than a handful of words to another human being. Felt like he couldn't be sure.
"You could shout at the rabbits again," the voice suggested. "Prove you're real by scaring the piss out of them."
"Wouldn't prove shit, rabbits get scared over nothin' all th'damn time."
"True."
They sat in silence for another while. Unwilling to voice the obvious. How he'd fallen to such a spectral existence, and what he'd have to do to resolidify.
"There was a music shop with a 'help wanted' sign back in the village," the voice offered, somehow a quiet mutter despite echoing from within his skull.
Eric felt like he should object. On principal, if nothing else. "Don't need money."
"No," it agreed. "You don't."
He breathed an exhausted sigh and leant his head back to stare into the willow boughs above.
"... I can't do it."
"What do you mean you can't?" Sherlock's voice sounded both outraged and disbelieving, like he'd said something profoundly stupid.
"I mean I fuckin' can't, Shers. I can't get attached to someone again and just… watch 'em disappear."
"So don't get attached," the voice said in a tone as if this were dead obvious.
"Fuck's sake," Eric huffed. Brought his knees up again and ran his fingers through his overgrown hair, pushing it back from his face. Shook his head and pulled the elastic from his wrist where he'd put it out of long-dead habit; always used to keep a few extra for his sisters. Tied his hair back just for something to do with his hands.
"It's a perfectly reasonable strategy," the voice went on. "You packed a lifetime's worth of affection into one whirlwind romance with a lunatic, then cut yourself off all human contact like a junkie going cold turkey. And that's clearly not gone well, as evidenced by the fact that you're being counselled by a hallucination."
"Yeah well nobody fuckin' asked you to-"
The voice carried on speaking straight over him. "So split the difference. Go for surface-level connection. Pop round the shop, say hello, ask after the job. Not aiming to make friends, just colleagues. It'll be like a test run."
Eric frowned into the tree limbs above. Felt right on the verge of agreeing, just to get it over with, but fear rose up like a smothering fog. Couldn't. Too much risk. Too much pain and loss and grief to open up again.
"Sleep on it," the voice suggested, sounding rather irritated but doing its best to stay supportive. "Haven't in days anyway."
Hadn't he? Felt like he'd slept recently enough. Days all blurred together now, though. Perhaps he'd not slept last night. Or the night before. Just kept walking.
Reluctantly he let himself list to the side and lay stretched out in the grass under the willow.
««
"You shoulda said sommat, though. I coulda hurt you," he heard himself protest, words distant and dreamlike. Felt both the grass beneath him and another, parallel experience, where he was back on the ratty, threadbare mattress in the tiny bedroom in Stockwell. And his stupid boyfriend was rolling his eyes at him as he hunted for a pair of clean pants.
"It's fine, Eric. You couldn't hurt me if you wanted to, let alone by accident."
Well. That was… hrmph. He frowned, tried and failed to fight back against the deranged teenaged instinct to defend his masculinity. Still felt bad about having got a bit rough when they'd been fooling around earlier, of course - hadn't meant to wrench his arm round like that. But facts did need to be set straight. Eric wasn't weak. God's sake, likely twice Sherlock's weight by now with how often the idiot skipped meals.
"I'm well stronger'n you are, mate."
Sherlock shot him a bemused smirk over his shoulder as he finished pulling on the pants he'd retrieved from the floor. Then, still mostly nude, he flopped back down onto the mattress and sat criss-cross facing him.
"Hit me," he ordered simply.
Eric scowled. Knew the proper response was probably confusion, refusal…but, nah. Wasn't about to play that game. Eric wasn't some limp-wristed fairy - he'd been a footballer, found himself in a few scraps back in his school days. Of course he'd never done much of the actual fighting, preferring to hang back and try to negotiate whilst his mates got into it, but still. Bloody well knew how to punch a bloke. He threw a swift right took at Sherlock's shoulder.
His fist deflected smoothly off a bony forearm, which had shot up at just the right angle to clip the back of his hand. Sherlock then did some clever twisting movement to flip his arm round Eric's, caught his wrist with a firm grip, and in the space where a counter blow might have gone he instead leant in and kissed him. His face when he drew back was the sort of unimpressed smile one might give a small child.
"If you'd managed to connect you would've dislocated your thumb," he pointed out. Shifted Eric's wrist to where his finger placement was visible, then let go and made a fist of his own to demonstrate how it ought to look. A line of fading bruises across his knuckles fell in step with each other to mark the strike points.
Eric grumbled a bit for how easily he'd been blocked - wouldn't admit it, of course, but the speed of that counter had been bloody impressive. Despite keeping up his annoyed front he dutifully shifted his fingers to mimic Sherlock's example. Thumb out, not tucked under the others. Once he'd got it Sherlock nodded, then threw a slow-motion, demonstrative punch at Eric's shoulder, thumping into him lightly but with enough force to still shove him back a bit.
"Extend, twist, follow through. Always try to hit with the middle knuckle first."
Eric dropped his good arm to catch himself before he fell over backwards. Stabilised, then re-made the proper fist he'd been shown. Experimentally tried the punch again, slowly - Sherlock reached up to guide his arm into the correct form and had an oddly proud little smile when he managed to connect with the middle knuckle. Of course Sherlock hadn't budged a fraction from the weak blow, even sat criss-cross as he was.
Eric absently tried it a few more times as he thought back to that first street fight. How seamlessly Sherlock had shifted from giddy drunk to ruthless fighter, the deft confidence in his movements. At the time Eric had vaguely assumed the bloke's thoughts just moved so fast he could read opponents and plan his attacks lightyears ahead. Now, though, he understood that Sherlock really didn't think at all whilst shitfaced as he'd been that night, let alone plan things out - turning his brain off was the entire point, after all. Must have been acting on instinct instead. Pure muscle memory.
"You're proper trained at this," he eventually concluded.
Sherlock huffed a flat little laugh. "If getting the shit kicked out of you until you learn to defend yourself is proper, then sure."
He paused, glancing away with a bit of a thoughtful, reflective expression. Didn't even blink when Eric aimed another weak punch at his shoulder.
"At school, y'mean?" Eric asked. "Picked a load of fights tellin' folks shit they didn't wanna hear, right?"
"I… yeah, at school." Sherlock's voice came out distracted. Eric stopped the silly punches to carefully study his face. Thankfully he'd not checked out, just got distracted. Finally he shook his head. Furrowed his brow as if trying to piece together several loose scraps of thought. "No… I think that's a lie? I keep telling myself I learnt it on my own, to deal with bullies, but… I'm pretty sure I actually had to teach myself not to fight. Or to… do it less viciously. Read a load of books on self-defence trying to learn less aggressive techniques, to avoid putting other boys in hospital. But then I pretended like that was where I learnt it to begin with? I don't know. It's confusing."
Eric, too, was confused. But he was used to that by now. Easiest to just ask questions until he could catch hold again. "Y'mean you think you were trained t'fight as a little kid?"
Sherlock nodded. "If I'm not paying attention I'll default to the same style Father uses, so he's probably the one who taught me, but I've no idea when or how. A lot of my childhood is just… blank. Whole sections I can't remember."
A memory of Mum's face flitted through Eric's mind - back when he'd been small, and she'd been younger than he was now. Explaining why she couldn't tell him stories about his grandparents.
"Mum used to say that's how brains protect themselves. Blank out the really bad shit so it don't get in the way."
Sherlock gave him a morose little half-smile. "Don't think my brain's much interested in protecting me."
"Maybe it's doing its best wit' what it's got," Eric offered. He tried another soft punch again.
"Or maybe it's trying to get me killed so it'll finally be free of my nonsense."
"Or that," Eric agreed.
The fond smile on Sherlock's face seemed rather more sentimental than was usual for him, so Eric let his own smile shift a bit questioning in return - no idea what he could've possibly done to elicit a look like that.
"Would that we could all have your fortitude, Eric," he muttered, looking away into the middle distance.
"Fortitude?"
Sherlock shrugged. "You're always so… calm, I guess. Even when we're discussing awful things."
Eric laughed and shook his head. "Mate I'm freakin' out, like, all th' time." He stopped, frowned to himself thoughtfully. "Or I used to be, anyhow. I guess with you around I'm more like how I was back home? Before everything happened, I mean. Benny says it's weird."
Belatedly Eric bit his lip over the 'before everything' comment, hoping Sherlock wouldn't ask him to elaborate. As usual, though, Sherlock seemed intuitively able to tell when simple words were hiding demons, and kept well clear.
Sherlock had looked off towards the far wall thoughtfully. After a few seconds of silence Eric tried one of his little punches again, thinking he'd try to put a bit more force into it so he could knock the bloke over and maybe pin him down for a cheeky snog, but in the distraction of not looking his direction Sherlock's mysterious training seemed to have kicked back in. He caught the punch easily, blinked down at it, then over to Eric with an unimpressed expression.
Eric gave him a silly, apologetic smile, then leant forward and kissed him. Sherlock met this with the same passive acceptance he afforded any sudden physical affection - as if he weren't sure why it was happening but saw no reason to object. Let the kiss deepen into something more passionate, and then allowed himself to be pushed backwards until he was lying on the mattress with Eric on top of him. They'd been vaguely intending to sleep at some point, before they'd got distracted by each other. Probably best to try to actually get some rest.
But, of course, being the age they were, hormones had far more power than they'd any right to. And the physical reaction to lying atop a cute, mostly-naked bloke was both immediate and difficult to ignore. With an almighty effort of willpower he managed anyway and drew back to regard the boy below him. Looking for the first signs of any shift in mental state, making sure he had enough cocaine in his system - all the little things he'd begun to make a habit of checking for before they did anything.
"Eric, I just want you to know I find it incredibly weird how often you stare at my face," Sherlock said blandly. Eric huffed a small laugh and briefly stuck out his tongue at him.
"It's cause you're hot."
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "No, it's because you're looking for signs that I'm about to have a psychotic break."
Eric bit his lip, considered denying it. Realised he'd have absolutely no luck even trying and shrugged. "Yeah, sorry."
"No, it's fine. Probably warranted." Sherlock sighed and looked away again. "Sometimes I worry that…ugh, nevermind."
Eric frowned. "You worry that what?" When Sherlock didn't answer he insistently prodded at the bloke's face, whingeing "say it" in an irritating tone until he huffed and reached up to grab Eric's hand.
"That Father was right about…" He trailed off, let his hand flop down onto the rumpled duvet. Closing his eyes, his voice shifted into the cold, clipped tones Eric had by now learnt to associate with him mimicking his dad. "'You're a weapon forged in brutality, doomed to mirror that which created you.'" He opened his eyes again and let the chill drop out, replaced by quiet resignation.
Eric tried to parse the meaning of this, but must have looked utterly lost because Sherlock gave him a smile and a tiny laugh.
"He meant I'll only ever hurt people, because that's all I've ever known."
"Oh. Well that's fuckin' stupid," Eric replied easily. Earned himself a bemused look.
"Stupid?"
"Yeah," Eric affirmed. "Really just callin' himself a shit parent, ain't he? People get over shit parents all th' damn time."
Sherlock sniggered, then laughed, and then, quite suddenly, kissed him.
"You're such a fucking idiot," he said as he buried his face in Eric's shoulder.
He'd said it in that way which actually meant he appreciated Eric's habit of poking fun at awful shit, so Eric let the jab pass without comment. Thought back to his own life instead. To the things Luce had done to him. To feeling so helplessly terrified whilst a man held you down and hurt you. But people got over shit boyfriends all the time too, didn't they? And shit upbringings and all the shitty consequences of their shit decisions. People always found ways to keep living.
Perhaps he'd more hope for the future than he'd thought.
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When he came back to himself, to the moment which might have been the present but which felt more like a dream than the dream had, it was to find he'd already dragged himself to his feet. Walking was pure automation, now. Done so much of it lately. And so the whole distance back to the village passed by in a blink. Might have still been asleep, for all he knew.
Afternoon sun danced merrily over the window before him, a handwritten sign behind glass. He caught sight of his own reflection above it. Beard he'd given up shaving months ago had grown past the patchiness stage now, begun to look mostly intentional. He'd let his hair get long enough to where tying it back was easiest - currently bundled into a bun as he'd always done to keep his sisters' curls more manageable. And with the posh cut of the peacoat offsetting the ragged condition of the rest of his clothes one could hardly tell he'd been wandering homeless for the better part of four months.
"Doesn't matter even if they notice the stains," the voice in his head piped up. "Just win them over like you always do."
"Won't have a chance if they toss me out soon as they hear me talk."
"So talk differently."
Dropped eye contact with his own reflection to stare instead at the pavement. Considered whether he'd be able to pull off an Estuary accent well enough to fool anyone. They were a long ways from London. Possibly no one would notice even if he mucked it up a bit.
"If you're interested in the position you'd do far better coming in and asking about it!"
Eric startled quite badly, looked up to find a young woman had poked her head out the shop door. A twinkle in her eyes said she'd meant her words playfully. Eric tried a smile.
"… I think I might be, yeah."
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