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watch it burn around you

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“I’m sorry.”

No response.

 

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You want him – of course you do, you would be mad not to, not matter how heteronormative you previously thought you were.

He’s insane and brilliant and dangerous and beautiful – and you can’t have him. You won’t let yourself have him.

(He expects it, after all. It’s probably one of his games. Again)

He watches you with those all-knowing, all-seeing eyes and he knows. You’ve known him long enough to realise how his mind would work (well, to somewhat understand a small part of the process. You aren’t a genius) when it hits you in the middle of lunch why he has been acting strange. Stranger? Different? It’s difficult to put a word to it because of how he usually is.

He expects you to be normal, to be dull, boring, predictable.

He expects you to be the same as the rest of the human race and to merely give in to your most base desires.

You’ll show him. You aren’t normal compared to others. You won’t do something just because it is expected of you.

Just because Sherlock Holmes expects it of you.

 

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At first it is strangers. Going out on the pull, like you did at uni. Having a good time, showing your mates (what few you have left) that you’ve still got it. You’re still the guy who managed to get laid by women on three different continents.

The best part is the look on his face when you walk through the door to the flat in the morning, when he sees what you’ve been doing and who you’ve been doing it with. Or, rather, who you’ve not been doing it with.

He didn’t expect this.

The first few times, you felt… bad. Like you’d kicked a puppy when it was already sad. Then you remembered that you’re simply proving a point and he does it to you sometimes, so why not?

But, it isn’t all strangers.

That would be boring.

 

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Dangerous people know dangerous people, and people who hang around with dangerous people are also acquainted with other dangerous people.

Sherlock is dangerous, like you see every day – crime scene after crime scene, criminal after criminal.

Mycroft is dangerous. A different sort of dangerous, but dangerous nonetheless. More so than Sherlock.

Your flatmate’s brother is like the big bad wolf. He’ll eat you if you piss him off. And by ‘eat you’, you mean ‘make you disappear off the face of the earth so well that even your family would deny that you ever existed’.

Sometimes he likes to randomly pick you off the side of the street and take you for a ride in a black car – after the first time, it never occurred to you to wonder how he knows where you are at all times.

His specialism is omniscience, after all.

(He knows what’s going on with you and Sherlock. Of course.)

You aren’t very surprised when the older, smarter and quite frankly scarier, version of Sherlock picks you up on your way back from work.

You are, however, surprised when the older, smarter and quite frankly scarier, version of Sherlock has his driver bring you both to a rather expensive Italian restaurant that you’ve been looking to go to for a while.

It’s a date.

You don’t have to be a Holmes to figure it out.

It’s an unexpected twist in the tale, but not unwelcome.

He smiles at you over the risotto he ordered and the two of you make awkward small talk that gradually becomes less awkward and less small.

 

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It seems that dating your flatmate’s brother who he intensely dislikes is a sure fire way of getting yourself barred from sharing taxis and crime scenes with him. The first two weeks that this happened, Lestrade told the both of you – mainly Sherlock but you got a talking to as well – to stop being so childish.

What does he know?

Anderson and Donovan were more or less the same. Annoying, pathetic, whiny. Convinced that Sherlock was a freak.

Convinced that you thought he was a freak.

Oh, how wrong they were.

You still love him, more than anything. When you are with Mycroft, it’s Sherlock that you pretend to see, Sherlock who you pretend is there. Mycroft hasn’t said anything about the couple of times when you came with his brother’s name on your lips.

Sherlock is quieter, more withdrawn and instead of a few days, now goes a couple of weeks at a time without saying a word to you. You can’t remember why you started this, this game. Were you trying to see how far he would let you go? Were you trying to show him that you weren’t property?

He can barely stand to look at you now. You’ve hurt him, you know you have. (And here you were, thinking that sociopaths couldn’t love.)

 

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You’ve ruined everything. You didn’t mean to take it so far.

Mycroft sits opposite you as you tell him what happened, even though you know that he already knows. He’s like that.

He’s watching you, blankly. Not a single tell to give you any idea what he’s thinking, how he feels.

 

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“I’m sorry.”

No response.

 

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