Chapter Text
Nothing happens to me.
John puts his pen down and sighs. This was a terrible idea and the school counsellor, Karen, should be sacked. Writing a diary about everything that happens to him is not going to stop the bullying. Expelling the bullies would stop the bullying, but John has refused to name names for weeks now, and Karen hasn’t stopped trying to extract them from him with increasingly cruel and unusual interrogation techniques. Forcing him to write a diary is only the latest.
Looking at his last rather depressing statement again, John crosses it out. Best not to let Karen think he might do something stupid. He puts the (spiral-bound, cheap) diary away in the desk drawer, where it will sit unused, innocuous next to his Swiss Army knife, and closes the drawer with a shove. A shove that was slightly too forceful, because it causes his older sister to shout from the next room: “Keep it down, shithead!”
Ah, his mother must have gone out again, so Harry can use whatever words she likes without fear of retribution. Funny, he didn’t even hear the front door go. Fuck-off-Alan must have arrived to pick her up when John had his headphones on. Good, that means he’s managed to miss Fuck-off-Alan’s smug, shiny face and his patronising backslaps.
John glances at his watch – five to eight. Looks like he’s on cooking duty tonight then; it’s only a matter of time before Harry starts bellowing about that too. He gets up, back stiff after sitting at his desk for so long. As he stretches, movement outside the window catches his eye.
It’s still snowing heavily and it’s a little hard to see, but John can make out a woman lifting large boxes out of a car. Moving in? At almost eight o’clock on a Sunday evening?
The lamppost casts a sickly orange glow over the woman as she moves under it, highlighting the wrinkles on her face and her greying hair, and John realises she’s actually quite old. Too old to be moving heavy boxes like that. He’s just considering going downstairs to offer to help when the front passenger side door of the car opens and a shadowy figure slips out. The woman stops walking towards the building, turning towards the car again as though her name has just been called. As the shadowy figure approaches her and comes into the light, John sees a boy about his own age take the box from the woman. Probably her son, or grandson more likely. The woman ruffles the boy’s curly hair and he scowls, striding away from her and up to the building.
Bored and somewhat curious, John watches him for a moment. The boy walks swiftly up the path, not struggling with the box at all like the woman was. As John watches, the boy suddenly stops his determined march, jerks his head up and to the left to stare directly at John’s bedroom window and their eyes meet. The boy does not look curious like John; he looks knowing. John ducks down out of the way, ashamed at being caught spying.
Crouching below his windowsill, John’s heart pounds a fast, erratic beat, and he shudders at the chill that has settled over him.
He doesn’t dare look out again to see if the boy is still staring up at his room.
The main door of the building creaks open and then rattles as it slams shut – he’s probably not still staring then.
“You going to do dinner or what, John?” yells Harry.
John looks at his watch, dead on eight o’clock. He laughs uneasily, shaking his head, and goes to make dinner. As he does, he puts all silly thoughts of unsettling pale eyes out of his mind.
He can’t help but notice the muffled thuds and thumps and the low voices that go on for the next hour or so, letting him know that the woman and the boy are moving into 221B Baker Street Court, the flat next door to his.
There had been someone at the window. About twelve or thirteen years old, light blond hair, scared face when Sherlock caught him looking.
Sherlock waits. Nothing happens.
“Come along, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson says, bustling past him with another box, much lighter than the one he took from her. “What are you staring at, hmm?”
She goes by without waiting for an answer.
The face (the boy) at the window doesn’t return. Sherlock shakes his head and carries on up the path, meeting a bemused-looking Mrs Hudson in the entrance where she’s holding the door open for him. She lets it close when he steps through.
“I think we’ll be okay here,” she says, “for a while, anyway. Nice and anonymous. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
Sherlock says nothing, counting windows in his head on the mental picture of Baker Street Court that he’s just saved, quickly working out that the boy he saw must be his new next door neighbour.
Interesting.
When John walks to school in the morning, he looks back towards home, to the windows of the flat next to his and finds them covered – blocked entirely, in fact – by pieces of cardboard.
He shakes his head at that bit of eccentricity and carries on, enjoying the crunch of his feet through unblemished snow and wondering if he might see a new boy today at school.
Blood dribbles from John’s nose as he hits the ground and spots of crimson flick onto his shirt. Damn it, he’s going to be the one who has to get that out.
“Shit,” Irene Adler says, sounding shocked rather than gleeful. “He’s actually bleeding! How hard did you hit him, Moran?”
Moran shrugs. “I only gave him a shove, I didn’t even touch his face! Weak, John. That’s pretty weak.”
John opens his mouth to retort and blood drips in, finding its way onto his tongue. It tastes revolting. He spits it at Moran with all his might, wishing he had something contagious.
Moran takes a frantic step backwards to avoid the spray. John takes a moment to be absurdly pleased that he’s managed to do something that surprised the bastard, something that made him lose composure for even a split second.
“Oh, Johnny-boy,” Jim Moriarty croons from behind them, rocking back on his heels, hands in his trouser pockets, “that’s just filthy. You’re an animal.”
John glares at Moriarty, removed from getting his hands dirty as he is, far enough away from the action that he didn’t even need to stumble back a pace when John spat. What a glorious sight that would have been.
“A dumb animal,” Moriarty continues, “and dumb animals need to learn their place.”
He looks to Moran and gives him a nod. Irene is looking uncertain, but she says nothing. It’s incongruous, but in that moment, John remembers with startling clarity a time when she was his girlfriend in primary school. For the entirety of Reception, she told anyone who would listen that they were to be married when they “growed up”. She’s lost her lisp and her teeth aren’t crooked now like they used to be. Daddy must have paid good money to get those fixed for her. How secondary school has changed them all.
John looks at her wide kohl-lined eyes darting between himself and Moran, her perfectly straight, brilliantly white teeth biting into her red lower lip.
Maybe it hasn’t changed them so much after all.
Moran advances. John closes his eyes.
“Remember, John,” he hears Moriarty say, “I’ll burn you. I’ll burn the heart out of you.”
The bell rings to signal the end of lunchtime and the start of a new lesson, but John is a million miles away from his maths class.
He goes home afterwards, licking his wounds. He couldn’t go to classes in that state, there’d be too many questions. His absence from maths will hardly be noticed, Mr Powell will be too busy looking down the girls’ shirts to take the register. Mrs Lewis is more likely to question John being missing from history, but Henry should cover for him if he can stop looking down Molly Hooper’s shirt for long enough.
The snow is up to his ankles, the bone-deep cold settling in and making itself at home as the ends of his trouser legs get soaked through. He shivers, pulls his coat tighter and shoves his hands in the pockets, wishing he had gloves. He’s almost home now, at least. The front door of Baker Street Court is in view now he’s made it to the quadrangle created by the four tower blocks of flats. Whoever thought to name tower blocks in London after streets in London was obviously a complete wanker – Baker Street Court? Ridiculous.
The inhabitants of the flats refer to the quadrangle as a playground or park. In fairness to playgrounds and parks everywhere, it is a poor excuse for either, housing only one frequently vandalised bench and a stark metal structure with ledges that was probably meant to be a climbing frame before the builders got bored.
John looks over at the playground as he walks past, purely by chance, and sees him. A boy – dark curly hair and pale face – is hanging upside down from one of the bars of the climbing frame, his legs hooked over it.
It’s the boy from last night, John realises with a peculiar lurch of his stomach, the one moving into the flat next door. He frowns, because that lurch? Seemed a little bit too much like something he overhears the girls in his form giggling about when they point out the boys they like. It’s fear, he supposes, left over from that moment when he caught the boy staring at him (when the boy caught him staring).
The boy is fixated on him again, it seems. Even upside down John can tell the boy is looking at him with a sort of focus that’s unnerving.
“Hello,” John calls out. He awkwardly rubs the back of his neck for something to do with his hands, which he is suddenly very aware of despite them having been there for thirteen years already.
No answer. Well, that’s just impolite. John’s still a little way away though, so maybe he hadn’t heard?
Mind made up, John trudges over to the boy, resolutely ignoring the squelch of his shoes and the icy cold that’s spreading further up his legs. He was meant to be going home.
The boy continues to stare, not blinking or moving even slightly.
“Hi,” John says as he gets nearer. “You just moved in, right?”
With impossible grace, the boy swings himself upright and jumps down from the climbing frame. As he does, John sees that his feet are bare.
John is about to remark on it when the boy turns to face him. He’s not smiling. John feels his own friendly smile flicker and fade.
The boy is even paler up close, as white as the snow he’s surrounded by. He’s dressed in what looks to be a suit (and not a school uniform either, a proper suit, what the hell) underneath a dark, heavy-looking coat. Said coat is clearly too long for him; he’s positively drowning in it even though he’s taller than John, who draws himself up to his full height when the boy still doesn’t answer.
“Last night,” John tries again, “I saw you out of the window.”
Best to admit to that moment of accidental creepiness so he can stop feeling oddly guilty about it.
The boy considers him, grey eyes bright and gaze sharp. Penetrating, even. It’s hard not to squirm under that sort of scrutiny, so John does. He feels like the boy is looking all the way inside him, teasing out all his secrets, poking at the exposed underbelly he hadn’t meant to be on display.
That searching gaze strips him from head to toe and then settles around the centre of his face. John realises with a jolt that there is probably still some dried blood under his nose, and wipes at it with his sleeve. It’s already filthy, he reasons.
The boy blinks for the first time at that, rapidly, maybe six or seven times. He shakes his head as if to clear it.
“Yes,” he finally replies, a strange creak to his voice.
John waits, expecting him to expand on his answer. He doesn’t.
“You’re…” John starts, stops, tries again, “you’re not wearing any shoes.”
“An excellent deduction.”
Bristling at the boy’s tone, John goes to cross his arms over his chest, and then remembers why he shouldn’t do that when everything suddenly aches. “I’d like to see you do better,” he replies shortly, embarrassed by his aborted movement.
“How many bullies?”
John’s eyebrows draw together. “Sorry?”
“One that hit you, and some bystanders, most likely. You won’t tell anyone at school who’s doing it, so it’s just getting worse. You have a distant mother who’s more interested in her new boyfriend than she is in you, so she doesn’t know anything about it. You’ve got an older sister but you won’t go to her for help, probably because she resents you, maybe because you don’t like her drinking.”
John gapes at the boy, stunned. “How do you know all that?”
“There’s blood under your nose, and you look to be in a fair amount of pain with your movements, but from the way you’re holding yourself up still, I’d say there was only one hitting you and one or two watching. There’s always a lookout in groups of bullies, one who’s even more cowardly than the others so he doesn’t get involved. You haven’t told anyone who’s doing it, because you’ve come home in the middle of a school day, rather than going to your headmaster.”
“And how did you know about my mum and sister?” John asks, fighting that overwhelming urge again to cross his arms over his chest in defence.
The boy huffs through his nose in a parody of a laugh. “I don’t know, I notice. I can tell your mother is distant because your hair is too long, your shirt is going grey when it should be white and there’s a stain on the collar that isn’t blood from today – most mothers wouldn’t let their sons go to school like this, no, you’re doing the washing yourself. Badly, I must say. And I know there’s a new boyfriend in the picture because that’s usually the cause of a distant mother, and this area is infamous for its high population of divorced or unwed mothers.
“Your older sister was a bit of a leap: your backpack is a hand-me-down. It’s not obviously a girl’s bag, but it’s not a bag a boy would choose for himself either. So, older sister that resents you because older siblings generally do, and I got the drinking habit from the number of bottles I heard you carrying out this morning for recycling with the other household waste – too many to just be your mother’s or she’d be in hospital awaiting a liver transplant if that was a regular occurrence.”
John has no idea what to say. Well, other than: “That was fantastic.”
“Really, you think so?” the boy looks surprised.
“Of course it was, it was brilliant!”
“That’s not what people normally say.”
“What do people normally say?”
The left corner of the boy’s mouth lifts briefly. “Piss off.”
John laughs, and the boy joins in after a moment, albeit with less mirth.
“Well, I think it’s brilliant. I’m John,” he says, sticking a hand out, “John Watson.”
The boy looks at his hand like he’s not sure what to do with it, then seems to come to a decision, taking John’s hand in a loose grasp and giving it what could loosely be called a shake. His fingers are cold and stiff, and John is quick to let the boy’s hand go. “Sherlock Holmes.”
Unusual name, so of course it fits this strange boy perfectly. Unlike that coat of his. Speaking of which…
“Your hands are freezing,” John says, “and your feet must be worse! Don’t you have shoes or gloves?”
The boy – Sherlock – shakes his head. “I don’t feel cold,” he says, frowning.
“You do to me! How can you not feel cold in this weather?”
“I suppose I’ve forgotten how,” Sherlock murmurs. “You don’t have gloves either,” he points out, like an accusation.
“No, but at least I’ve got shoes. Here, try mine and if they fit then I can go get you a pair.”
John walks over to the bench, ignoring the newly sprayed ‘Benzi’ on it (that Paul Benson from 37 Baker Street is a right knobhead) and starts unlacing his (soaking wet) shoes. Sherlock follows him, and sits down almost tentatively, putting a good metre of space between them. He immediately draws his feet up and out of the snow, knees to his chest as he watches John as if he was the most interesting thing in the world.
“There you go,” John says, dropping the shoes the right way round in front of Sherlock with a grin.
Sherlock delicately pokes his right foot into the right shoe and then does the same with the left. He gives his toes an experimental wiggle, like you do in Clarks when they want to see if the shoes fit. John fights the impulse to lean down and press his thumb against them.
“They fit,” Sherlock says quietly, looking at his feet with the sort of intensity that a pair of shoes never really warrants.
“Great, well, your feet must be much colder than mine, so if you want you can wear those home and I’ll—”
Sherlock has already slipped the shoes back off and deposited them (the right way round) in front of John. He stands up suddenly, looking up at the sky. What is he looking at? Nothing interesting about the sky today, just clouds full of snow obscuring all traces of the sun. Although they do look to be clearing a bit now.
“I have to go,” Sherlock says.
“Oh,” John fails to keep the disappointment from that single syllable. “Okay, well, how about I just run in and fetch you some shoes? Would that be okay?”
Sherlock shifts from foot to foot, snow barely crunching beneath him as he does, like there’s no weight to him. There probably isn’t, John thinks; he’s skinny as a rake, looks like he needs a good meal or four.
“I expect so,” Sherlock says.
“Great! I’ll go get them then, be right back. Don’t go anywhere!”
A nod from Sherlock. John takes off running, sparing a quick glance to see Sherlock behind him, waiting in the playground but fidgeting on the spot like he wants to be somewhere else. John had better move quickly.
He dashes up the stairs when he gets into Baker Street Court (the lift is out of order again) and digs out his key as he goes. He bounds into the flat, empty at this time of day – mum at work and Harry at school – and retrieves a pair of trainers. They’ll hardly go with Sherlock’s suit, but he’s in too much of a rush to be choosy.
His haste proves futile anyway. When he runs back to the quadrangle, panting and beginning to go red in the face, there is no sign of Sherlock. John’s arm drops to his side, the trainers dangling loosely from his fingers.
He’s surprised by how let down he feels.
John leaves the shoes under the bench where (with a bit of luck) they won’t be seen and get nicked by any of the local kids, hoping that Sherlock comes back and is observant enough to spot them. He tucks the laces in so they won’t get wet and then he goes home, where he realises that all that running about really hasn’t made his various injuries feel any better. Funny how he didn’t really feel it while he was doing the actual running.
Lying on his bed and trying to keep very still so as not to jostle anything further, John wonders where Sherlock went. It’s not possible for him to have just gone home, he and John would have crossed paths on the way.
It’s strange, that, he thinks: Sherlock moving into 221B. John didn’t even know old Mrs Sykes was leaving. Her bedroom used to be on the other side of his wall and he often heard her pottering about, playing her old records from the wartime. He used to enjoy those, actually.
He wonders who is in that bedroom now, Sherlock or the old woman he lives with. Feeling silly, he reaches out to knock on the wall. He jumps about a foot in the air when there’s a knock back no more than five seconds later.
He sits up on the bed, pressing his ear to the wall. No further sound comes and John is just about to take his head away from the wall when the violin starts up. It’s a beautiful piece of music, sad and wistful, and at first John thinks it must be a recording it’s so well-played, but then the music suddenly stops and a voice makes a growl of frustration before the piece starts again from the beginning.
Someone is playing the violin in 221B.
John contemplates that growl – male, young, not deep enough to be a man’s voice. Sherlock.
It must be Sherlock playing the violin.
John lies back down, listening intently, almost holding his breath as Sherlock plays. After quarter of an hour Sherlock stops that piece for good after several stops and restarts, and he changes to a piece John recognises as Bach or Mozart, he’s not sure which, and plays it through note-perfect before beginning another. John can’t believe his luck, he’s got a prodigy for a neighbour. He laughs, missing the music faltering for a moment as he does, and then lets the new melody (soft, languid, soothing) lull him to sleep. He’s so relaxed that he forgets to question just how Sherlock did get back into his flat that quickly without John seeing him.
Sherlock plays for hours, forgetting himself and the world, remembering only notation and time and key signatures. Legato, staccato. Adagio, andante, allegro.
Everything he had tried to delete when he decided he would never play again.
He plays for so long – caught up in the music flowing and swirling around him, colours and meanings and everything he could never delete, only store somewhere less painful – that he misses the door, the gentle footsteps, the soft intake of breath, the quiet presence in the entrance to his room.
When he finally stops playing, it isn’t silent. It’s never silent, not to Sherlock.
Waiting for Mrs Hudson to speak, Sherlock lowers the violin, sets it in its case and puts away the bow. No ritual or ceremony, not when he’s being watched.
“That was lovely, dear. I’ve missed your violin. Not at three in the morning, mind.”
“Is it three in the morning?” he asks, turning to look at the smile he can hear in her voice and answering it with a customary frown. It could be that late, for all he knows. Time means very little to him these days.
Mrs Hudson only tilts her head slightly, smile in place, unwavering. “I’d be cross if it was.”
Harry’s arrival breaks John out of his restful slumber when she crashes through the front door, whirlwind that she is. John sits up, startled. The music from 221B has stopped.
He gets out of bed, meaning to run to the bathroom to clean up before their mother gets home. It wouldn’t do for her to see him battered and bloodied. Unfortunately, he has to go through the living room to get to the bathroom, so Harry is going to see him. Bugger.
“Jesus,” she says when he’s almost managed to sneak past her (she was rifling through the cupboards for cereal, Harry’s post-school habit), “what the hell happened to you?”
“Slipped in the snow.” John shrugs, attempts to brush past, and she catches his arm, making him hiss at the sudden flare of pain. She doesn’t pull her hand back though.
“Liar. It’s those bastards at school, isn’t it?” It’s not a question. “Fucking hell, you need to start standing up for yourself, John. Like I did.”
And with that, she releases his arm and goes back to looking for the cornflakes. There are none, she had the last of them yesterday, but John’s not going to the shop today. If she wants more, she can bloody well go herself.
He doesn’t tell her that half the reason they’re bullying him at all is because he’s John Watson, because he’s got a “dyke” for an older sister and so he must be a “bender” himself. They aren’t close, Sherlock was right: she does resent him, and he does hate her drinking. But he’s not going to make her feel guilty by telling her why he gets bullied. It’s not her fault.
The blood swirls down the plughole where, diluted with soap, it turns a faded rusty orange colour. It flakes off easily enough.
John looks at himself in the tiny mirror. They’re clever, he’ll give them that. Moran really hadn’t caused the nosebleed (just a happy coincidence), because he’s never hit John’s face, never split his lip or given him a black eye – too obvious.
No, the marks are all under his clothes. John unbuttons his shirt, sees his reflection giving a grimace as he reveals a plethora of green, yellow, brown, blue, and purple. He’s a rainbow under his shirt, Moran would be so pleased to have decorated him thusly, the very symbol of what he despises. Queer.
The shirt may be salvageable, but he can’t leave it in the sink to soak. His mum will see it. Hopefully, Fuck-off-Alan will come over again to take her out and he’ll get the opportunity later… Unlikely. Fuck-off-Alan only has so much spare cash as an out-of-work builder with a back problem, after all.
John sighs, balls the shirt up and goes back to his room, where he throws the crumpled blood-spattered mess under his bed. It’s not like his mum tidies in here now anyway. His secret is safe.
The next morning, John walks through the playground on his way to school. He looks over and… the shoes are no longer underneath the bench. In their place, there’s a small Rubik’s cube that needs solving. John picks it up, dusts the snow off, and pockets it with a short laugh. He grins throughout the rest of his journey into school, and throughout the day whenever he touches it in his right trouser pocket, like a talisman.
When Moran shoves him into a locker between the last two classes of the day, the cube gets crushed between his thigh and the unyielding metal door, one corner digging into his flesh. Another bruise for the collection.
After that, John goes back to touching the Swiss Army knife in his blazer pocket – a much more familiar talisman.
Stab. Stab.
“I’ll burn you,” John says. “I’ll burn the heart out of you.”
Stab.
“Are you afraid?” he asks the tree. “Are you going to scream?”
The silver birch in the middle of the playground doesn’t answer, it doesn’t look afraid and it doesn’t scream as John stabs it for a fourth time with his knife.
Parroting Moriarty’s words to him doesn’t make him feel better, it just makes him feel sick. John’s pretty sure if he ever did stab Moriarty he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d just do it.
There’s a rustling movement from behind him and John freezes. It’s ten o’clock at night; there shouldn’t be any kids around now, or at least, not hanging around in the playground. Street corners and back alleys, maybe. John himself would not ordinarily be out quite this late, but Harry and his mum are both out on Tuesdays so he has the night to himself.
He turns around sharply at another crunching noise and sees Sherlock is standing on one of the ledges on top of the climbing frame. He’s missing his too-long coat, but he’s still dressed in a dark suit – the same one from the day before if John’s not mistaken, it looks like the same ivory shirt that only serves to highlight his unnatural pallor. On his feet he has a pair of white trainers. John’s pair of white trainers.
“Good evening, John,” Sherlock says, dropping down neatly to sit on the edge of the climbing frame.
“Hi,” John waves the hand that isn’t grasping the knife. He folds the blade and slips it into the pocket of his jeans with as much nonchalance as he can muster. Sherlock’s keen eyes track the movement, of course. John supposes he’s already seen him stabbing a tree and not run off screaming, so hiding the fact that he has the knife is a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Sherlock smiles, just a little, as if he’s just followed every thought in John’s head. “Have you solved the puzzle yet?”
“Solved what puzz- Oh!” The Rubik’s cube. John pulls it out of his jacket; he’s nowhere near solving it, hasn’t even managed to get one side yet. John climbs up to sit beside Sherlock and holds the cube out to him with a sheepish grin. “I’m hopeless,” he says. “How do you do it?”
Sherlock takes the cube, icy fingers just barely brushing against John’s, enough to cause him to shiver. “There’s mathematical solutions, but I think I’d be wasting my time even if I could be bothered with explaining them to you,” John starts to protest at that, but Sherlock continues. “You should start with the corners, like this, and then…”
He begins twisting and turning the cube in his hands, still muttering quietly as he does it, but John’s not listening to him, he’s watching Sherlock’s hands as they expertly manipulate the puzzle until all six faces show solid colours. It took him less than two minutes.
When he finishes, he holds the cube up with a flourish, “Like that.”
“Amazing,” John breathes.
Sherlock raises an eyebrow at him, “Do you know you do that out loud?” he asks, sounding amused.
John shuts his mouth. He can feel his ears turning red, and not just from the cold. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”
“No, it’s…” Sherlock stops and smiles. “It’s… fine.”
Sherlock turns the cube deftly in his hands again, mixing it up, and gives it back to John. “Have another go,” he says.
They sit in silence for a time while John tries again to solve the cube, the only sounds in the park the buzzing from the lamppost above them and Mr Rogers from number 61 putting his bins out.
“I don’t have friends,” Sherlock says, all of a sudden.
John looks up at him and tilts his head to one side to consider Sherlock: his strange face with its harsh (delicate) lines, the curiously vulnerable curve of his upper lip. John wonders if it’s possible for someone to look lonely just from the way their face is constructed.
“Why not?”
“Does there have to be a reason?”
“Everyone has friends, Sherlock.”
That statement gets a haughty sniff. “I don’t. And I’m just telling you so that you understand. We can’t be friends.”
John’s feels a downward tug in his chest, and thinks he now knows the meaning of the expression about hearts sinking. “Oh,” he says.
“In fact, I came out here to be alone.”
“So did I, and I’ve lived here longer, so I should stay and you can go somewhere else.”
Sherlock says nothing for a long moment, looks down at his (not his: borrowed) shoes and then at the Rubik’s cube in John’s hands. “I don’t want to though,” he says, and he sounds confused.
John isn’t sure what he means by that. He looks at his watch and finds it’s nearly twenty past ten. Mum would go spare if she knew he’d been out this late. “Well, I should probably be going in now anyway, I’ve got school in the morning.”
“Ugh,” Sherlock scoffs. “School, school’s boring.”
“What school do you go to?” John asks. Sherlock sounds posh, like the boys that go the boarding school on the other side of town. He doesn’t sound like he should be living in a place like Baker Street Court, certainly.
“I don’t.”
“Don’t go to school? But- but you must do! How old are you?”
Sherlock shrugs. “Thirteen, give or take.”
“What do you mean, ‘give or take’? Don’t you know? When’s your birthday?”
“I don’t remember.”
Just like he didn’t remember how to be cold. John shakes his head. “Don’t your parents remember?”
“They’re dead.”
Sherlock’s reply is toneless, and his face is even more bland. Purposely so, John would say, so he pointedly doesn’t say “I’m sorry”. He remembers too many people saying that to his mum at Nan’s wake, and it only made her cry harder when they weren’t looking.
“Who’s that woman you live with, then?” he asks.
“Mrs Hudson,” Sherlock says, and there’s fondness lurking in the words, the first John’s really heard from him. “Friend of the family.”
“Oh, right.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence, and John jerks a thumb at Baker Street Court. “I really should go in,” he says, holding out the Rubik’s cube. “Here.”
Sherlock glances down. “Keep it.” He nods at John’s hand. “You’ve almost finished the green side, look.”
John does look. One more turn, and click – he has a solid green face. John laughs in surprise, looks up to share the moment with Sherlock, and sees that he’s already gone.
Later that night, just as he’s getting into bed, John hears raised voices from next door. It’s Sherlock, he realises, almost-but-not-quite-shouting at the woman he lives with (Mrs Hudson, he had called her). She shouts back, louder than him but frailer. There’s a tremble to her thin, aged voice.
John only hears bit and scraps, but he picks out one clear question from Sherlock: “Do I have to get it for myself?”
The flat next door goes quiet then, but it takes John a long time to get to sleep after that.
The hand that runs through his hair after midnight is unexpected, but not unfamiliar. Sherlock rolls over on his mattress to see Mrs Hudson, arm outstretched and looking stricken. “I thought you were asleep,” she admits.
“I don’t sleep.”
She nods, moving towards the door, melting back into the shadows. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she says. “You know I’m trying my best.”
Sherlock says nothing, knowing she will take it for the concession that it is. He does know what his secrets cost her.
“Have you heard from Mycroft lately?” she asks, sighing at the predictable twist of Sherlock’s mouth at hearing that name.
“Nothing,” he says bitterly. “Nothing from the research facility, either.”
“What about your end? Any breakthroughs with your experiments?”
“None.”
Silence. Sherlock shuts his eyes against the barrage of questions he can hear her deliberately not asking, knowing the action is totally useless as any kind of barrier to such things.
“John seems like a nice boy,” Mrs Hudson says eventually, and she walks out of the room before Sherlock can ask how she could possibly know about John.
She’s a perceptive old girl, he’ll say that.