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He’s six years old and there is blood blooming on his cheekbone and inside his mouth, copper-bright on his tongue.
“—Sherlock?”
Hands on his shoulders, pulling him up to sit and then to stand. Wings come forward and mantle around him, dimming the light. They’re much larger than his own, pitch-dark and neatly trimmed. Mycroft.
“Sherlock, what happened?”
“I’m a magpie,” says Sherlock. He feels something in his hand, sticky with blood, and remembers. He brings up his fist and uncurls his fingers. There’s a feather, and it’s crumpled, but it’s perfectly shaped, green-blue-black with white fluting. “Look, Mycroft. My first adult flight feather.”
Mycroft’s face twists violently and then goes flat, eyes cold and bright with anger. “It’s beautiful, Sherlock,” he says, but the tremor in the corner of his mouth says I want to kill maim hurt.
“They hurt me because I’m a magpie, didn’t they?”
“They hurt you because they are ignorant fools.”
Sherlock looked down at the feather still in his hand, clenched his fist around it again until that white streak was gone from sight. “I will take this information into account,” he says, sees in Mycroft’s face that he’s once again different, odd.
Mummy arrives and by the end of the day the boys involved have been expelled and the white on Sherlock’s wings was paint, nothing more than paint, and isn’t it lovely that Sherlock is a rook? Him and Mycroft, a pretty matched pair.
Sherlock keeps his chin up and his wings folded tight, his feet on the floor. He doesn’t need wings to be smarter than the teachers. If anyone comments on how he always has them held so close, well, that’s a sign of good posture, isn’t it?
* * *
Sherlock gets top grades in school, an isolated ship of success. He takes physics, maths and French at sixth form, pivots wildly between As and Us. His teachers think he is brilliant but out-of-tune with reality. They recommend therapy.
Mummy goes into school to talk to them about it. Sherlock doesn’t see those teachers again.
He gets into university and leaves home with a duffel bag and a debit card linked to the Holmes family account.
* * *
He experiments with clipping his wings, cutting away the damning white, but he has to stop when one of his seminar leaders takes him aside and asks if he’s being abused or targeted. He doesn’t want anyone to look too close, to see what he is, and he recognizes that in a university environment he is theoretically safe but when he tries to unfold his wings with people around he just seizes.
He hates it, hates this fear that controls him, takes away his rationality, and when Sebastian offers him a strip of white powder late one night Sherlock takes it and his world dissolves. He spreads his wings and no one says anything, bodies on the floor seeing stars in the dirty plaster of the university dorm ceiling.
Sherlock wakes up early in the morning the next day, finds a girl lying next to him choking on her own vomit. He rolls her onto her side and scoops the sick from her mouth, makes sure she’s breathing. He leaves and his wings are still loose, white slatted through the black, and people look but he doesn’t feel it.
He finds white powder himself next time, falls into oblivion and misses all his classes the next day.
Sebastian kisses him in the shadow of a doorway and they fuck that night, biting and rough, and Sherlock wakes up alone with a sore arse and bruises on his collarbones. When Sherlock touches Sebastian’s hand in class he gets slapped away.
“Back off, Sherly. You know I don’t bat for that team. Even if I did, I can do better than a magpie.”
The next time Sherlock seeks out oblivion is less than a day later, and it comes from a needle. He leaves university the same night, when Mummy finds out.
Rehab isn’t something he likes to think about.
* * *
Mycroft doesn’t like John. He says he’s dangerous, and the fact that he isn’t lying makes something in Sherlock light up with excitement.
John likes him, likes his wings, and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do. It’s been years since rehab and he’s relearned how to walk with his wings held comfortable and high inside of crushed against his back, grown used to the looks and the comments.
John is an unforeseen entity. He is a shortish, stocky man with a square face and crinkled eyes and a psychosomatic wing that has him Grounded, and Sherlock is lost.