by Arianna James
His hair gets long. He forgets that hair grows, forgets that he is anything more than a brain, than reaction, than a pair of hands and feet (to run, to hide, to kill). There is an ever-present layer of grime on his skin, dirt caked underneath his fingernails like bravery secreted away for the moments he needs it most. His fingers seem foreign. His toes. He is nothing but an endless stream of consciousness, of thought. His synapses fire like gunshots, going off in his brain like bared light bulbs. His mind is made of maps, push pins pressed right into brain matter, blaring bright red in flashing signs of REMEMBER.
He loses everything unimportant. It is too difficult to stay him, to stay himself, so he doesn’t. He loses his coat, gives it to his sister for safekeeping; he loses his phone, his keys, leaves them hanging by the morgue door number 4. If numbers and letters had ever been a prayer (and if he had ever been the praying sort) – that would have been it – the prayer to a god that Sherlock knew did not exist. There are no patron gods of lost geniuses. If there were, people would have just called him the Devil.
So he loses himself. Loses the coat, the keys, and the name. He finds himself a skull, names it Yorick, and loses it somewhere (he thinks). The places all look the same now. So he ignores the windows, ignores the mirrors. There are no maps large enough with which to escape himself.
He waits for the rapture; he had waited – the world hadn’t ended.
He ignores the mirrors because he wouldn’t recognize who it was that glared back anyway.
The house of Hades is his only home.
