#darksherlock

Sherlock was thirteen, and his father had been especially hard on him since Mycroft’s departure.  Mycroft had always been the perfect one, Mycroft was always blameless.  Not Sherlock, who experimented on himself or classmates, testing how long it took for them to beg for mercy, not Sherlock who stayed home from school some days with sensory overload (a weakness to be pushed through, his father said), not Sherlock, who had no ambitions for the future and who liked to hurt the other children during playtime.

Sherlock, thirteen years old, was, in his father’s eyes, a defective creature.  No friends, except his cat.  Always quiet, except to laugh at things that shouldn’t be funny or to tell someone when they were wrong.  He got excited when he heard about multiple homicides on the news.  He researched poisonous plants and the various stages of bodily decomposition with the glee that most boys his age studied sportscars.  His only real saving grace, to Mr. Holmes, was that he was an excellent violinist.

It wasn’t that Mr. Holmes was deliberately cruel to his youngest, simply that he’d been disappointed and a little bit frightened.  After all, Mycroft had successfully juggled an internship, school, a sex life, friends, and several minor hobbies, while Sherlock seemed incapable of any of those.  But the words were wrong, they always came out bitter and mean, get over it and what's wrong with you and why can't you be more like your brother?  Always Mycroft this, Mycroft that.  It was harsh, cruel, and downright uncalled for.

So one afternoon, Sherlock decided to kill him.

It wasn’t that hard, when it came to it.  His father was taking antibiotics for a chronic ear infection that had flared up again.  Sherlock knew from casual research that large amounts of potassium could be used to instigate a heart attack, and he knew how to concentrate certain substances and how to acquire highly dangerous amounts of certain chemicals.  And nothing about the act would be difficult.  After all, he did have a chemistry set and he already had surreptitiously sent a classmate with a shellfish allergy to the hospital after weeks of carefully measuring and refining a technique to turn low-concentration samples to very high-concentration samples.  And he had a way to make tablets which no one but him knew about.

Mycroft had already moved out, living in Oxford, and their overly-nervous mother had begun to shut herself off, living in silence in her room for hours on end.  Sherlock had no one to check on him as he smiled, the small slices of pure potassium cutting so easily it was almost sexual.  He had been going for the other technique, take super-concentrations and bring them to the point where the exposure to internal liquids wouldn’t cause a literal explosion, but in a moment of genius decided to abandon that plan.  To see his father's chest or stomach burst open once the capsule dissolved and to have the living room splattered in the filthy gore of the family dictator was a very beautiful image indeed.  But he’d changed his mind once he realized how traceable it could be, and so had continued to whittle the little shining metal into a powdered form that could be mixed with the antibiotics and swallowed safely.

It was well into the night before he’d finished his little task, and he had to sneak into the bathroom to gain access to the bottle.  He slipped one solitary tainted pill into the bottle and returned to his bedroom, content in the knowledge that before two weeks would pass, his father would be dead and he would no longer have to deal with the insults or the constant comparisons.

Sherlock Holmes had glorious dreams of murder that night.

It was a Saturday, the day it finally happened.  The family had been watching something on telly, Mrs. Holmes coaxed out of her room by a pleasant dream that day, and she hadn’t even had to take her medicine to feel calm enough to interact with her husband and youngest child.  Sherlock sat on the floor, as usual, inspecting his ant farm, bored, when his father shifted uncomfortably in the chair.  Sherlock’s heart leapt, wondering if it was time, knowing his mother would be too panicked to call paramedics, knowing he never would, and knowing Mycroft would come tomorrow and find a distraught widow and an off-kilter brother, upset by the thought of losing their patriarch.  Supposedly.

“Avery,” his mother asked, when Mr. Holmes put his hand to his chest.  “Are you—are you alright?”  The only response was a garbled gurgle and the man standing to go to the telephone in the corner.  He didn’t make it, and fell to the ground, clutching his chest and cringing.  Sherlock let out a little excited squeak that the thirteen-year-old would later be mildly embarrassed about, and his mother let out a whimper of fear.

“Oh, having a heart attack, are we?”  Sherlock smirked, rising from the floor and walking over to his father.  “Funny, that.  Wasn’t sure you had one.”

“Sh--!”  A hand pointed towards the telephone, towards the corner of the room, desperate for lifesaving aid.

“No.”  Sherlock whispered the word in his father’s ear, a simple utterance that told of his guilt in this.  “Oh, I’m sorry, why don’t you get up?  After all, other people feel bad, and they rise to the challenge of the day.”  He was spitting his father’s words back at him, the words uttered when Sherlock had been in too much pain from sensory overload to go to school.  “Or are you too weak?”

“Stop,” his mother begged through gasping sobs of panic.

“No, I won’t.  He’s been nothing but a pestilence since I was an infant and he deserves far worse than this.”  Sherlock turned back to his dying father and grabbed his face.  “Look at me.  I want my face to be the last thing you see before you die.  Know that you made me what I am with your cruel, spiteful hate.”  Oh, Sherlock loved this, this revenge that would not be punished.  “Mother can't help you, look at her.  A mess.  I wonder just how whole she was before she met you, how sane she was.  So it's just you and I now, Father.  A monster and the boy who slayed him."  He started to laugh as he gripped his father’s cheeks in one hand. "And Mycroft, your precious little perfect son, he won’t be here until tomorrow, but you'll already be dead and rotting.”