Chapter Text
Sherlock had always tried to keep the attic of his mind tidy, only storing useful information—categorized, labeled, accessible, forming the clean architecture of deduction. But now, an entire sitting room’s worth of mental space had been overtaken by matters concerning the Lord of Crime—no, Liam. The two identities blurred together in his mind.
Since receiving William’s final letter—a suicide note—Sherlock had lain in bed, brain hurled into a deep-water blender. Rational fragments spun out of control, and his sense of self, of logic, began to derail. Love had never belonged in his system. It wasn’t an unsolved variable. It was a concept he had long since deleted.
Love? Of course he had considered its existence.
It had simply never passed a single test. Every hypothesis failed. Every simulation collapsed into chaos.
So he filed it away with ghosts, myths, romanticism—under: misleading concepts.
And now Liam’s presence was expanding, nearly swallowing every mental chamber. The Lord of Crime had been identified, the mystery resolved. But Liam kept eating away at his thoughts, pressing other data into the margins. That wasn’t right. It couldn’t go on.
Why had he become like this?
Suddenly, he smelled burning—his cigarette had singed a hole in the bedsheet.
"Damn it!"
He jumped up, grabbed a half-cup of cold coffee from the table, and doused the flames. With a foul smell and a puff of smoke, the sheet was ruined, a blackened hole in its center, the edges curled like a cracked map. He yanked the ruined sheet off and flung it to the floor, too distracted to think about what Mrs. Hudson would say in the morning. He collapsed back onto the bare mattress.
Liam always had a scent about him—that deep, smoky aroma, like ash falling silently onto carpet or the steam that rose from factory stacks at sunrise. It was nothing like Mycroft’s cologne. As a child, Sherlock had often watched his brother apply shaving foam and aftershave in the mirror, pulling faces at him from behind.
Maybe they were the same type—men who treated appearance as a duty. And duty meant inevitability. But something was different between them. He couldn’t say what, exactly.
Liam reminded him of a building about to collapse—not visibly cracked, but crumbling from within.
First: his hair. So straight it mirrored the Noahdic’s lights, platinum-bright and cold. Second: his waist. Liam always fastened his belt on the fifth hole, with space to spare—enough for another hand, perhaps.
Wait. What am I thinking?
Sherlock realized his thoughts were veering toward territory that would land someone in prison for sodomy.
"Am I gay?" The question struck him like a tidal wave. No. He’d never been interested in anyone before. Liam wasn’t a man or a woman to him. Liam is Liam.
He is an exception.
Sherlock had no conception of "procreation." No desire to pass on his genes. He didn’t believe reproduction was the reason humans came together. At least, not for him.
He refused to accept it as a biological instinct. To him, it was base—almost insulting. Mycroft had once said Sherlock was like a racehorse with blinders, only able to see the track ahead. That was why they had grown apart.
He kept thinking. What is gender, really?
Without social context, it meant nothing. Heterosexuality wasn’t a special word. Homosexuality wasn’t either. Their Latin roots were symmetrical.
How did God distinguish male and female in those first six days of creation? He couldn’t remember.
So without the need for reproduction, what was this undeniable pull toward a specific person? What did you call that?
He suddenly remembered something John Watson once said:
“When you love someone, they become part of you. If you lose them, that part of you drifts away too.”
Watson had called it "sublimation."
But Sherlock frowned. He disagreed with the word.
To him, this didn’t feel like sublimation. It felt like corrosion.
Finally, amid the chaos, he forced himself to reach one single, clear conclusion:
Whatever this is—whatever the definition—he could not accept a world without Liam.
He didn’t believe in love at first sight. But he believed every intimacy must begin with friendship. Now that he had that friendship—
What came next?
Would he be completely consumed?