The Fall - Sherlock Fanfic 2

Chapter 7

'It all started when I was four, I think. My brother was six then, and he saw me running around with a bunch of his friends, just having fun for once. He wanted his friends to come play with him, but they didn't because they were looking after me - I had tripped and cut my knee. They took me back to my house and mum was looking after me - dad was out - and Mason got really jealous. Mason is his name, by the way.

'Anyway. He thought that, seeing as I was getting attention for getting hurt, he would get more attention if he got hurt, and blamed it on me. So he threw himself down the stairs and said I had pushed him. They all believed him - I was only four - I though Mason had actually loved and cared about me, so I went along with it. Somehow, I believed I had pushed him down. I rewrote the memory in my head. But then he tried it again, and my parents didn't believe him. He freaked out about how I had cut his hand with a knife, when he had done it to himself. He was only six, though - he didn't understand, properly, what he was doing. And, being four, neither did it. But I remembered that I hadn't actually pushed him down the stairs, and got mad when he said I had cut him.

'It sort of all calmed down a bit for the next four years, until I was eight and he was ten. He did little things to me, like push me into radiators or force my hand over hot smoke from the oven to get back at me for little things. But he was extremely annoyed, and craved attention, so he pushed me down the stairs. I told my parents he pushed me, but he pretended to be innocent. He reminded them of the 'trauma' I had put him through by pushing him downstairs, and he calmed that he would never do that to someone. But he had - I knew he had. And that was only the start of it.

'He did lots of things to me for ages - he holds me on the floor and scratches and slaps at me, and whenever I told my parents, they thought I was faking it. They hit me for the first time when I was ten.

'He had swapped my shampoo for bleach, and I hadn't realised until I had poured the stuff all over my hair. I washed it out with soap as quickly as I could, but the soap and the bleach dried it out, it looked so horrible. I ended up cutting my hair very short because of it, yet my parents still thought that I had done it to myself. So they slapped me, and dragged me off to my room. That was when it really sunk in, that I couldn't tell them about what Mason was doing to me,w hat he was getting away with, behind their backs.

'Things just got worse and worse - he put spider eggs in my bed, he dyed all of my clothes black. He snuck up on me in the middle of the night and cut the word, 'bitch,' into my arms, once. My parents didn't know because I didn't tell them, but Mason got my blood all over him and said that it was his blood, and that I attacked him. So my parents hit me more and more, dragging me to my room a lot.

'I tried to run away once, I thought living on the streets would be better than this, but Mason blocked my way out. He ended up locking me inside my room during the night, sticking bolts got he outsides of my windows so that I could never escape - the glass is too thick to smash. He put bricks in front of my door so that I couldn't open it.

'I couldn't do anything about anything. I didn't even have any friends - no one ever even looked at me.'

'Wow.' I said simply. 'Im so sorry, you seem to have had it... Pretty tough.' I didn't know how to respond.

'Yeah...' She muttered.

'Well, now I'm here!' I told her reassuringly. 'I'll listen to you and be friends with you, you know. I'm here for you.'

'Thanks,' she replied. 'It really means a lot.'

'No problem.'

'Now, tell me about your 'difficulties''

'I doubt they're as bad as yours...'

'Not much is, really,' she said. 'But I still want to hear it. It's nice to know someone else has been through crap and survived.'