Young Writers Society

Sherlock laid down on the bed in the crisp yellow and pink striped bed sheet.  He lit a cigarette, knowing it was against the rules, and stared to study the pattern of triangles painted on the ceiling above.  Emily didn’t say anything while she bustled around the room collecting the necessary pieces for an actual outfit.  The state of his room wasn’t good but there wasn’t a real need to tidy it.  Until now.  If he was actually going to keep someone around and let them into the house, maybe it would be good to see the floor.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

“Sherlock?  Sweetheart are you okay?”

“I’m so sorry, Emily.”

The bed creaked from her climbing onto the bed with the squeaking that Sherlock so hated.  It was on him for ruining the last mattress and having to replace it before she might have noticed.  The clashing metal sound was continuing as Emily took the cigarette from his hand, pushing it into a well stained tray on the bed side table.  And then it was the gentle arms that sat his stiff body up enough to lay across her lap.

“Sherlock, what could you be sorry for?”

The last cloud of smoke cleared the room through the tape covered crack in the side window.  A crack formed as a result of someone taking a shot at Emily but not doing the proper research to find out her room.

“Can’t I just be sorry?”

“Nope.  You need to have a reason in my house.  If we ever tried to stop something without an explanation, it meant restriction of our powers and a sit in the cooler.”

From the day time cop shows, Sherlock had learned that "the cooler" was usually in reference to a jail cell. But as he had learned from the times when Emily's brother Jack had stopped by, "the cooler" had been a much more literal term for them. If a kid was misbehaving, their hands would be bound in gloves that dampened their powers. And if the scene happened to go further, they would be left in a shed under lock and key until the lesson had been learned.

"Jack said that your prophecy was revealed one day when you were sitting out there for beating some guy up."

The weight shifted behind him, bringing back the sound of the springs clashing together.

"I was eight when that happened, and Jack was goddamn proud of me. When I was out there, it was just so cold, and I was so mad, that the shed caught on fire and walls blew apart."

"What did your parents do when they realized what you were? Jack wouldn't tell me that part, he just looked away and asked how you were doing."

"They couldn't bind my powers, so they just made me rebuild the shed while the boards were still burning."

Sherlock managed to sit up enough to put an arm around her shoulder, quietly saying, "Oh."

"But we didn't come up here to talk about my sad backstory. We came up here to get you dressed and talk about being safe and then me showering before dinner."

The bed creaked again as she got out of it, walking across the hallway and opening a door Sherlock recognized as her old bedroom.  That was the way that they referred to the bed rooms in the house, no matter the current occupants. The footsteps moved from her old room to her great-grandparents master bedroom, followed with the familiar sound of the wardrobe slamming shut.

Emily’s footsteps came back quickly and from then doorway she threw down three books.  The titles were covered in masking tape but judging from the awkward looks of the people on the cover, and the small cartoon animals…

His thoughts were interrupted by the statement: "What do I need to do, Sherlock? Do I need to find you a specific gay sex clinic pamphlet and buy you a box of condoms? Do we need to get a banana model out?"

Her voice had changed to aggressive from the tender conversation they had just had on the bed.  There was no sign of the laughter from before but rather than question her change in pace, Sherlock just answered, "I know what condoms are."

"Then you better be using them from this point forward."

“Believe it or not, I do know most of this and I was using condoms.  Maybe you forgot because you never were on the island, but there was a computer in your room.”

With the weight that came back to the bed also came a new silence to hang over the room.  For all of the efforts made between them to make conversations more comfortable, there were those points that even best friends couldn’t skip over.  Emily felt bad for leaving the island in the first place, the action that caused Sherlock to rebel against her instructions.  And Sherlock felt guilty for getting caught in his rebellion, then having to wait for Emily to rescue him.

Those were the facts that everyone knew.

Another question floated to the top of Sherlock’s mind and he felt the need to ask, “How involved was John Mason with your brother?”

A sigh came from the person beside him, followed by one of the awkward sex talk books shutting. For as heavy as the books were, Sherlock doubted they could actually add any competent information.

"They were still engaged when I left but I heard through Purse that they had broken up. I guess between me and Mom leaving in the same year as Peggy coming out and Dad hitting the bottle too hard, Jack just couldn't take the pressure. I'm surprised John even stepped anywhere near my family ever again after the shit Jack did to him."

"I'm sorry you blame yourself."

"Even though I was trying to protect you, John is a better choice than other people I've seen you go after in the past. He's a good man, from what I remember. He might just be a little – corrupted."

Sherlock rolled the term ‘corrupted’ around in his head for a few minutes, considering picking up a cigarette the entire time.  He really should have been working better on quitting, but it wasn’t like it happened that often.  This wasn’t the 1890s where everyone was smoking things of different blends and you couldn’t walk through a café without having a breathing fit.

He didn’t smoke that much.  It was only when he was stressed and there could be worse things to do to his body.  And now that he had John, the worse things would no longer have a place in his body.

However, stress was becoming a more common factor in his life.

"Emily, you said I made a better choice this time but who I have sex with is my business."

"As long as you're in my house, it's my business."

While she did have a point about the rules of the house, Sherlock was still in the mindset of giving her a piece of his mind with, "Would you prefer it if I have sex in a car down by the river?"

He was surprised by her answering, “Whatever you want, kid.It’s your body.”

Those were not her words.Emily would never let him go when it came to issues of self-care and wellbeing.  It might have been his body, but Sherlock knew she had a personal mission to save his soul.

"It's just transportation anyways."

The classic line escaped his lips in a moment of wanting to test her reactions.  He wanted to know what she really thought about self-destructive behaviors and awaited the response that he had received a thousand times before.

As Emily asked, “How the fuck can you say it’s just transportation?” Sherlock mouthed the words and remembered them in perfect order.

“Because it just is. Unless you haven’t noticed, I’m doing perfectly alright surviving like this. Just taking a bit in and getting rid of a lot.”

“That’s not how the human body works, Sherlock.You can’t live like that forever.”

“Who made the declaration that I’m human?”

The gentle embrace from before came back to around his shoulders.  Sherlock stayed in Emily’s tight hold for a few minutes, recognizing her light sighing and started wondering about the other two occupants of the house.  They had been up here for at least forty-five minutes.  The check points in his brain were starting to make all sorts of bad connections, realizing that his dark secrets might have been spilled to “Joe”.

“So, Sherlock, what do you want for dinner?”

“Can we have macaroni and cheese?”

“Yes, darling.We can have that, again.”

Sherlock waited for Emily’s footsteps to finally make it downstairs and the water running before finally putting on the clothes she had set at the edge of the bed.  It was a pair of tweed trousers, a white casual dress shirt and a similar tied back vest.

His favorite outfit.