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Jim sees him once. That’s enough.
It’s dark and there’s barely enough light for him to really catalogue his features, but he sees dark hair, sharp cheekbones and strange eyes. He finds him beautiful.
In his head, the boy doesn’t have a name, Jim call him my own and it’s all that matters, he doesn’t need another title because he’s Jim’s- because he’s Jim, he’ll discover later, he doesn’t need to be called because he’s always at his side.
He has the bluest eyes one can imagine, except that sometimes they’re green, or grey, or not blue at all.
They still feel blue though, somehow, like something that you know should be a certain way but isn’t, they have a little something that blue eyes are supposed to have even when Jim’s mind turns them to gold, rubies or emeralds, they’re blue even when they aren’t.
Jim sees him once.
It’s at the pool, who would have thought that the place where he had orchestrated his first murder would also be the décor to him seeing the boy for the first time? Jim had just gone there to make sure that he had left nothing to tie him to Carl’s death- he hadn’t, of course he hadn’t, but like with everything, he had needed to check- and he had seen the other sneaking around the lockers, lockpicking his way into all of the closed rooms to do God knew what.
Jim knew what he was doing too, he was trying to find clues, trying to catch him. He wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t, but he was the only one acting like there was someone to catch in the first place.
The boy is there for what seems to be hours, going through what’s left of Carl’s stuff with a frown marring his beautiful features, then he shakes his head, seems to mentally berates himself, and leaves. Disappears.
He’s gone before Jim has the time to understand the loss to come.
Losing what he never had, never will have, it shouldn’t hurt but it does, oh it does.
Jim sees him once.
That’s a lie.
Jim sees him every day, every night, he closes his eyes and there he is, waiting for him, his sometimes-blue eyes crinkling in joy as they fall on Jim, the boy holds out his hand, waiting, and without a fail Jim takes it, letting the other drag him into another adventure. He dreams of him even when he’s awake, he sees him in the shadows of his classroom, waving at him, in the lights too, sitting near the window and bathing in the sun’s warmth, he sees him everywhere where he isn’t, everywhere where he can’t be.
Jim isn’t even sure that he wants him there, isn’t even sure that he want him at all.
The boy doesn’t leave.
Maybe he can’t.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t even have a name, the boy doesn’t feel real without one and that’s why he stays, he wants to be given a life, to continue his existence outside of Jim’s mind.
My own, mine.
Maybe with a name he would stop plaguing him, Jim thinks, so he tries to find him one, he goes through lists upon lists of names and tries them out inside his thoughts or aloud, he speaks them in the dark of his room, in the silence of his empty house, lets them roll on his tongue, and tastes the syllables.
He imagines that he’s tasting him too.
Still, as much as he tries, nothing feels right, nothing fits.
He isn’t lazy- his teachers say that, they don’t understand that not doing anything is his only way to somewhat blend in- and he isn’t stupid- his father is however, or maybe he’s simply blind if he really thinks that it’s a lack of intelligence that makes Jim stare at him without a word when he comes home drunk, he isn’t, so he tries, he really does.
At some point, Jim simply decides that the boy doesn’t need a name, that even if he has one, it can’t be worthy of him, it can’t feel right. It can’t, otherwise Jim would have found it, and maybe he would have found the boy too, maybe-
He discovers years later that he is wrong.
Sherlock.
My own.
Mine.
The name doesn’t have the right to fit so well, not when Jim tried so hard to find it only to fail, it has no right but it still does and Jim hates it. Hates him.
Sherlock- Sherlock, SherlockSherlockSherlock- doesn’t look at him like he knows, he’s smart of course, and he gazes at him like Jim is the most fascinating thing he has ever seen, but he doesn’t know and Jim isn’t a thing even if sometimes he feels like one.
But well, even if Sherlock tried, it’s not like he could know, really, he has no way to enter Jim’s mind, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t recognize the boy that resides there, with his impossible hair and his kaleidoscope eyes, with his smiles that cuts and his see-through skin.
The boy inside Jim’s mind laughs, this boy still doesn’t have a name but his blue eyes are flickering green with his giggles, he’s beautiful but he doesn’t exists.
He’s as real as Jim is.