Secretly I Think You Knew

The Lonely Life Of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock sighed, closing the door and sitting down on his old bed. It was an old four poster, with curtains around the edge if he wanted privacy. Sometimes he closed the curtains when his brother was being extremely annoying, but that's about it. There wasn't much else except a bed in his room, a large wooden wardrobe where he kept his personal belongings and his closet, which he hung all of his clothes in. Not all of his clothes were inherited from his grandparents, considering they hadn't had many that fit him. Mycroft had bought him some of his other clothes from thrift stores and yard sales, but never in retail shops. He had a thing against public places with happy people on large signs and sales on useless junk. He preferred to do his shopping at old places where he could get good deals without much human interaction, and he never let Sherlock come with him. Mycroft didn't like Sherlock being exposed to the outside world, he said that people would taint his simple way of life, with their pointless conversation, their illegal acts, their money spending and time wasting personalities, Mycroft insisted that it was best to avoid the rest of the world. He claimed it was because he cared, but Sherlock secretly thought it was because he was selfish. He wanted to raise his little brother in an environment where he could control every aspect of his life, his social life, his past times, even his personality were all closely monitored by his older brother. School was the only acceptation, and the only reason Mycroft didn't home school Sherlock was because he believed he needed to get a better education. Sherlock was brilliant, and of course, he knew that and Mycroft knew that and they made sure everyone they met (however few), knew that too. Sherlock was the valedictorian at his school, and if you asked most of his peers they wouldn't even know who he was. Sherlock blended into the shadows a bit too much, engulfed in a book or in his homework and too preoccupied to bother socializing. Even if he wasn't occupied with practical things, he wouldn't want to talk to his classmates anyway. All they seemed to care about was partying, cheating on tests, and pointless sports games on TV. Pathetic, impractical, and an overall waste of a human life. Then again, it wasn't Sherlock's area to complain, that was always Mycroft's job. After he went into town for errands or something he would always come back complaining about the people these days, as if he were some old man who had seen the world at its best. In reality, Mycroft was seven years older than Sherlock, and he really didn't' know much about the world either. He did; of course, he had led a much better life before their parents had died, before Sherlock was born. He lived as a normal kid for those seven years, but after the accident he was left as an orphan, left in the hands of a rather abusive uncle, moving into this house with his baby brother. Their uncle was never mentioned, and Sherlock never really did know what had happened to him. Maybe he ran away, maybe he got himself killed as well, either way, somewhere along the line, their uncle disappeared. If the government had known about that they would've been sent to an orphanage, no family left to take care of them, but somehow it all worked out. Sherlock had never known any care other than his brother's, and Mycroft never spoke about his life before that. They lived a reclusive sort of life, but it was happy for the most part. Sherlock didn't know any other sort of life, so he was in no position to complain. He sighed, staring out the window and watching as the sun set over the vast fields surrounding his house. That was the good thing about living in the middle of nowhere, you literally where in nowhere. There were no neighbors to worry about, no cars driving along the road, the only people Sherlock had ever seen wandering around his house were farmers tending their crops on large tractors, but he never saw their faces or talked to them. The only person Sherlock had ever talked to outside of school and town was, well, John Watson. He was a peculiar boy, to say the least, amusing for his cluelessness but a rather a shame, to have such a potential and to have it wasted with the technology and conveniences of the modern day. If John had been raised in the correct way, to a simple life without any human distractions, he might have found out his true calling, his self-actualization, a long time ago. Sherlock had, with the help of Mycroft, found that he was gifted in academics, and he found on his own that he was very skilled in the arts, whether it be the art of words or the art of pictures, Sherlock could paint a picture that no one else could. He had a little notebook which he kept under his mattress, in which he wrote poetry and drew pictures. It was like unlocking his subconsciousness in a way, channeling his inner feelings through the tip of a pencil, which is why he kept it hidden. In that notebook there were feelings, ones he shouldn't have being who he was. Mycroft would be furious if he had found it, the poems were about love, the drawings about humans, friends, fear, emotions that were impossible for a self-proclaimed sociopath. Then again, he wasn't self-proclaimed, Mycroft had diagnosed Sherlock to be a sociopath from an early age, and for the most part he played the part well. But then again, there were times when Sherlock didn't fit the profile, when he broke out of his mold and acted as a normal human. Those times had been quickly exterminated, a mistake in his programming, and ever since then Sherlock had kept himself distant from any type of feelings that might be considered, in his brother's mind, impractical. Sherlock sighed, grabbing a textbook from his backpack and starting on some last minute homework he had neglected to do. Not that he weekend was very action packed; he was just engulfed in other ways of entertaining his mind, nothing as feeble as the pathetic worksheets his math teacher gave him. Sherlock was already completed extremely complex math problems, complicated problems that he wrote out on notebook paper and plastered proudly on his closet door. Of course Mycroft was very proud of the math his brother was able to do, but always made a habit of one upping Sherlock, whatever the younger could do, Mycroft had to prove that wisdom came with age, and he did better. Sherlock lived a life in his brother's shadow, something that might affect him more if there were people to actually judge the Holmes family. When Sherlock finished with his homework he tucked all of his papers away and brought out the little notebook he kept under his bed. It was more like a diary really, leather bound with a strap and his grandfather's initials stamped on the front of it. It had been inherited, like most of the things Sherlock owned, but this notebook had never been used. Sherlock opened it up and flipped through the many drawings, poems, and random words he had scrawled on the pages over the years. There were beautiful pictures of a single teenage boy, his short hair in a curl above his forehead, a smile on his beautiful face, immortalized in graphite in Sherlock's little notebook. Sherlock sighed, running his finger over the many lines of the boy's face, gazing at the drawing as if wishing it could spring to life and comfort him in this lonely time. All of his lonely times. But then again, it was no more than a drawing, it didn't move and nothing happened. So Sherlock shut the notebook quickly, not wanting his mind to wander at the moment, to happy places where emotions ran free. No, he shouldn't think of any of those pointless emotions, regret, longing, love, all irrelevant. Because the boy was nothing more than a drawing now, and nothing Sherlock did would ever change that.