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He calls himself a sociopath because he’d rather be hated than pitied.
Anderson and Donovan believe him. Lestrade doesn’t, but he doesn’t press.
John couldn’t care less.
---
Sherlock stole the coat.
At the time, he owed rather a lot of money to some extremely questionable people. There was a poorly attended shipment outside a shop on Conduit Street, and Sherlock sensed an opportunity. He made off with two boxes that netted him several thousand pound when all was said and done.
The coat was the only one of its kind in either box (placed incorrectly, no doubt; possibly unaccounted for in inventory and won’t even be missed). He picked it up, peered at the price tag, and raised his eyebrows. Curious, he took it out of its plastic wrapping. At first blush he scowled. Wool. Wool was problematic. Scratchy. Uncomfortable. Made his skin prickle for hours after. But this was different. It was...softer, somehow, smoother, and the weight was satisfying. He shrugged it on and knew immediately that this piece wasn’t getting fenced.
The weight was perfect. Heavy, solid, an anchor against the tide. It buttoned up perfectly, the fit close, but not uncomfortably so. Sherlock’s eyes slid shut and he breathed out, long and slow.
The coat would stay.
It turned out to be his best decision in a long time. With the coat on, he could bear just a little bit more. With the coat on, Sherlock could walk through the crowded city streets and withstand the insipid, detestable conversations required of him, stay in his skin in the moments when everything is loud and bright and reeking without resorting to stereotypies. And when it was worst, he could shove his hands in his pockets, lower his head and squeeze his body in on himself. Hiding in plain sight.
---
“What are you hungry for?”
Sherlock shrugs.
John rolls his eyes. “We’ve got some leftover soufflé.”
Sherlock shudders.
“Beef stew? Curry? Shwarma?”
Sherlock makes a despairing sound.
John sighs. “Ham sandwich?”
Sherlock narrows his eyes suspiciously. “White bread, dill pickles, no cheese?”
“Whatever you’ll eat.”
Sherlock grins.
---
Sherlock is conscious of his body because he had a therapist when he was five. Most of her job was to alert him to noticeable repetitive movement. She took her responsibilities a step further and corrected his perceived transgressions. Mycroft put a stop to it by the time Sherlock was ten, but by that point Sherlock had learned to control himself. He trained himself to be still for hours at a time, to electrify the urges as they arose or to channel them into motions too subtle for the average, dull mind to notice.
Mycroft always notices, the bastard. He never says anything, but Sherlock sees his eyes tracking his twitching pinky finger or jiggling leg.
---
One of the married ones next door has taken up the electric bass. Sherlock knows this because he has been tuning it for twenty-two minutes.
He has been trying to ignore it by curling up on his Thinking Sofa in his favorite dressing gown and covering his ears. It isn’t working.
He’s playing something now, a simple, syncopated rhythm. C sharp, C sharp, E natural, C sharp, B natural, A natural, G sharp, repeat. Sherlock can see it sketching across the backs of his eyelids, dark hateful marks flashing past his vision.
He is going to scream. Or be sick. The second option is uncomfortably likely. Something must be done, and quickly.
“John.”
“Hm?”
“I need you to shoot someone for me.”
John snorts. “I’m tempted, but no.”
Sherlock starts. “You can hear that?”
“Are you joking? Yeah, it’s near to driving me batty.”
It’s well passed driving Sherlock “batty.” The noise is now well into the range of burrowing into the base of his skull and living there, writhing at the back of his head and vibrating in his fingertips and toes and the pads of his feet.
“John, give me your gun.”
“Ha. No.”
“It’ll be quicker.”
“Than what?”
“The other ways,” Sherlock says ominously. He’s got a very creative scenario worked out involving a steel bass string as an improvised garrote.
“No,” John says, but not angrily. Sort of...smugly, if that’s the right word. Or maybe pondering. “Haven’t you got an experiment to do for that American case? Something about sonic shockwaves in jellies?”
Sherlock grins. "Get the amplifier."
Thirteen minutes later, the bass player stops.
Six minutes after that, there is a knock on the door.
---
Sherlock didn’t talk until he was six, but he could read and write in two languages by the time he was four. He didn’t see the point of talking when no one around him seemed to speak the same language. The words made sense, but they didn’t seem to mean what they should mean.
He learned eventually. He’s very good at people now. Most of the time. When he’s paying attention. And when he cares to. It’s far too much effort to keep it up at all times, though. Wasteful.
---
“Damn!” Sherlock halts at the end of the alley, bends double and presses a hand to his throbbing ribs. Their suspect screeches off in his stolen car.
“Get the plates?” John asks as he stops short just behind him.
Sherlock shoots him a scornful look and straightens. Pain and warmth flare across his chest. He winces and looks down.
“Oh,” he says, regarding his bloody hand. “That’s unexpected.”
John takes hold of him by the shoulders, steers him to a bench and sits him down. “Where did he—”
“It’s not important. I need to—”
“If you bleed to death over a car thief, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
“If I bleed to death, I’ll be dead,” Sherlock says, but he opens his coat and unbuttons his shirt.
When John sees the wound, he goes very quiet and serious but not quick, which means Sherlock is going to need quite a few stitches but is not going to die.
“That’s at least a dozen stitches,” John says. Sherlock smirks. “Come on, let’s get you to hospital.”
“Unnecessary. You have the necessary supplies at the flat.”
“No lidocaine, no, so unless you’re planning on making vodka your painkiller of choice—”
Sherlock shakes his head. “I’ll be fine.”
John blinks. “Really? You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Sherlock’s eyes slide sideways. “Not the hospital.” Poorly-maintained fluorescent lights, invasive questions, medical histories, the wrong brand of blue nitrile gloves. “Please.”
John frowns, but nods. “Yeah. Yeah, if you’re sure.”
I’m positive.
Back in the flat, Sherlock shucks off his shirt, perches on the sink and watches John sterilize his tools.
“Sit still,” John warns, holding up an iodine wipe.
Sherlock frowns a little as John carefully cleans the blood from around the gash. He’s gentle, but it tugs at the edges of the wound all the same. It’s not unbearable. Almost...pleasant.
“Had you pegged for a complainer,” John says lightly. He tosses the iodine wipe into the trash.
Sherlock shrugs. “Pointless.” Which isn’t entirely true. Expressing pain makes a very important point, but not one he feels the need to make. There’s no way to say “it doesn’t bother me” that doesn’t make him sound like a masochist, though, so he says nothing at all.
John steadies his hands on Sherlock’s chest. The needle is pinched between his thumb and pointer finger. He studies Sherlock’s face. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
Sherlock nods.
“You don’t want to look away?” John shakes his head. “Of course you don’t. Okay. Hold still.”
When the needle punctures his skin, Sherlock makes a face, but doesn’t flinch. John’s eyes flick up to his and back down. He doesn’t ask if Sherlock’s alright.
When he’s finished, John wipes the whole area off and tapes on a patch of gauze. He smiles. It’s a little tight around the edges, the way it is when he’s worried. Sherlock frowns. He’s fine, he’s stitched up, he was relatively normal; why is John worried?
He’s just opening his mouth to ask when John straightens with a little wince and looks away. “Those’ll need to come out in a week. More if you don’t leave them be. Watch out for them in the shower.”
He washes his hands and goes to bed without saying good night.
Sherlock lies awake for a long time, tracing the outline of the gauze.
---
He had never meant to be selfish. Merely...focused. Efficient.
These days, he tries to make sure his cruelty is intentional, but there are always accidents.
“Isn’t that kinder?”
“No, Sherlock. That wasn’t kind.”
He does not respond except to bring the conversation back into his domain.
---
Helen Cubitt is dead and her wife is a vegetable, and it is Sherlock’s fault. Elsie’s ex-fiancé is sitting in a holding cell under New Scotland Yard, but that’s hardly going to remove the bullets from Elsie's head and Helen’s heart.
“Vegetable” isn’t fair, exactly. She’ll probably regain the ability to walk, some powers of speech. She’ll be able to feed herself.
She was a brilliant programmer and mathematician. Now she’ll be lucky to work long division.
Sherlock sneers and presses the side of his face against the cold glass of the cab window. He is rubbing at the inside of his left wrist with his right thumb, which is acceptable, since he’s not allowed to hit himself or pull his coat around himself too tightly to breathe and rock back and forth until his fucking brain goes back into order. If he did that, John would see, and John would know, and that is...unacceptable.
It had been good for a while. Helen brought Sherlock the case, since her wife refused to tell her why something in the code she was working on had terrified her senseless. Sherlock found himself hopelessly outclassed by Elsie’s computer skills and was forced to enlist the aid of a boy who was sleeping in a bed and not a prison cell purely by the grace of Mycroft Holmes. The cipher wasn’t hard to break, once he’d worked out that the odd symbols out were actually different pieces of ASCII art that corresponded to various Egyptian hieroglyphs which, in turn, stood for different letters. He translated “I KNOW YOUR HEART,” and “COME BACK TO ME MY LOVE,” eighteen repetitions of the word “PLEASE” and twenty-three of the name “ELSIE” scattered throughout.
He finished “TONIGHT YOU MEET YOUR GOD” at 2:31.
The Cubitts’ burglar alarm went off at 2:33.
They reached the Cubitts’ house at 2:54.
Helen Cubitt was declared dead at 3:01.
Sherlock digs his thumbnail into his skin. The pain is sharp. Startling. Clarifying. The fog in his mind dissipates. The feeling of his skin crawling eases.
And it’s ridiculous, really, that he didn’t see Abe Slaney’s intent earlier, that he couldn’t translate faster. He clearly shouldn’t have overlooked Egyptian hieroglyphs. If he hadn’t needed to reference that book on Egyptian languages he easily could’ve trimmed twenty minutes off the time it took. Or worked backwards. Or simply moved more fucking quickly. What good is he, if he cannot even put his stupidly overactive mind to use? What good is he at all?
A hand clamps down on his wrist and pulls his hand away. Sherlock flinches.
“Stop that,” John says.
Sherlock struggles for a moment, but then he realizes what he’s doing—dear God, stop that, you mustn’t, STOP—and goes still, if not entirely relaxed.
“Let go,” he says, voice dark but not threatening.
“Sherlock—do you even—look at your arm.”
Sherlock looks.
It’s not bleeding, so he still thinks John’s reaction may be a bit much. There’s definitely a mark, though. Yes, now that he thinks, he definitely scraped up a bit more skin than he intended to.
“Oh,” he says.
John doesn’t seem to know what to do with his face. It eventually settles into a quiet, wrinkled, tired sort of expression that Sherlock suspects is something like concern. Seeing it makes his stomach churn, and he can’t figure why.
He jerks involuntarily. John’s hand tightens. Sherlock’s breath catches in his chest. He relaxes.
And John doesn’t move his hand, circling around his ulna and radius with heart-stopping force, the pain just short of being more than Sherlock can bear.
It’s wonderful.
When John finally lets go of him as they’re getting out of the car, Sherlock bites back the urge to ask him not to stop.
---
Touching is hard.
The delicate brush of fingertips makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. A weak handshake and his skin prickles for hours, every whorl of a fingerprint and guitar string callus sticking in his head like a dozen catchy pop songs.
That isn’t to say he doesn’t want it.
He couldn’t, though. John wouldn’t understand. Or worse, he would, and he would know.
There are words in great block typeface on the front of his mind palace: If John Knows What You Are, You Will Lose Him. No one is going to call a retarded man “brilliant.” No one wants to fuck a man who starts to whine and curl into a ball if you touch him wrong. No one loves someone who does not understand why telling someone they are a conductor of someone else’s intelligence is not an appropriate expression of affection.
Sherlock will suffer not having John if it means he can keep him. That is an acceptable, if not optimal, state.
---
Sherlock is the last to realize it has already happened. In retrospect, he understands that it had been in the making a long time. It was always there, in the excessively prolonged eye contact and lack of personal space and frankly ridiculous codependent tendencies.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t fully make the connection until he’s sprawled in his chair in a dark mood and John kneels in front of him—directly on Sherlock’s feet.
It seems that the weight on his feet is indirectly proportionate to the measure of the (entirely metaphorical) weight in his cranium. He lets out a slow breath as his mind clears, rising up from the watery depths and into reality.
He blinks. “What are you…”
“Hush,” John says, and pulls Sherlock down into a kiss.
His hands on Sherlock’s shoulders are gentle, but confident. Sherlock is stunned into reciprocation. Kissing is...surprisingly pleasant. Wet, but not as messy as he expected.
When John sits back on his heels, he bites his lip and smiles. “Was that—okay?”
Sherlock takes a moment to consider. He’s still mildly dazed, but John is still sitting on his feet, which sufficiently pins him to Earth.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Sherlock says bitterly. “You can’t.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing when I moved in,” says John. “Try another.”
Sherlock frowns. “I am...not normal.”
“Thumbs in the veg crisper. I’ve noticed.”
“I cannot give you what you want.”
“You already have.”
Sherlock looks hard into John’s dark blue eyes. They meet his unblinkingly. Sherlock feels the overpowering urge to look away, but he fights it down. The realization floods him all at once, and he feels almost ill. He does let himself look away then, so he will not have to see John’s face before he leaves.
“You know.”
“Know...oh. That?”
Sherlock grinds his teeth. “Don’t make me say it.”
“I’m not doing anything you don’t want.”
“If you know, then you are already aware of precisely what I mean when I say that I am not suited for what you want from me.”
“And you’re not listening. I don’t want anything you’re not willing to give.”
He squeezes Sherlock’s shoulder. He feels like a sponge being wrung out, and bites back the urge to ask “again.”
“I am—not whole,” Sherlock says finally. “I am not a real human. Not the way people mean.”
John does not say anything to this, so Sherlock looks back at his face. He is not disgusted or disappointed. Instead, he is wearing the sort of deeply careworn expression that he has when a widow recounts her husband’s suicide, or a teenager reveals her stepfather’s malefactions.
“Oh, God, Sherlock,” John says miserably. “Is that what—oh, God.”
John is still not leaving. Sherlock’s heart clenches with panic. His throat feels tight.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he hastens to say, “not on purpose, but I might accidentally. I do that, sometimes, which you tolerate now, but you wouldn’t, if you had me. And I’m afraid I would be a constant disappointment to you in that department. You’re really better off—”
“Jesus Christ, Sherlock, can I maybe be the judge of that?” John says, all in a rush. He rubs a hand over his face. “Please, I just—”
The tightness in Sherlock’s throat and chest is rapidly constricting into actual pain. His eyes are burning. “You can leave now, if you like, now that you know.” No, stop, you can’t, you CAN’T— “I never expected you to—”
“Sherlock, just—stop.”
Sherlock stops. His chest heaves. Is he crying? Oh, God, he is. He wipes at his face with a shaky hand. Hell. Crying is hateful. Uncomfortable and distracting and attention-drawing—
“Can you just—” John rubs his hand over his face again. He looks very tired. “Do you want...this?”
“You mean...you.”
John nods. Sherlock swallows.
You mustn’t tell him, he thinks.
“Yes,” he says.
John’s face splits into a grin. He laughs a little.
“Okay then. Can we maybe start that again?”
Sherlock nods. The pain in his chest is easing. He thinks maybe he’s stopped crying, which is a relief.
“Was that good?”
“It...might be,” Sherlock hazards.
John smiles and pulls his face down again.
It just might be, Sherlock thinks, as he pulls John off his knees and into his lap.