Grey.

Grey grey grey grey grey.

It's all so grey around him. The colors have vanished—or perhaps they were never around. He goes through his days mechanically, only pausing to glance at the bigger things. To search them for color, except there never are any.

The only color he knows is scarlet. Deep scarlet. The scarlet of blood, the scarlet of his cheeks as he dashes madly through the streets, the scarlet of the pipettes that he squeezes gently, allowing substance to meet substance with a hiss or a bang or a faint explosion.

But there is only ever scarlet.

Sometimes he thinks there is more— a dash of the darkest blue, close enough to be mistaken as black to anybody's eyes but his own as he slips his bow lightly across the strings of his violin, fills the air with music, blows a breath of color into his surroundings for just a little bit.

And sometimes the reddest orange as he lies on the sofa, watching black and white and grey and red and blue dance around him. Only very rarely blue in these situations, because he can hardly control himself— can only take in breaths and release them, can only think and breathe and sleep as he falls deeper into the clutches of the substances he continues to abuse.

But they are too close— too close to black and grey and white and red— and soon they morph into it, the blue fading to black with the silence of the notes he has cast into the room, the sensation of waking up in his bathroom, cuts standing out against his skin that he cannot remember putting there, broken glass beside him from where he has broken another test tube. And Mycroft scolds him, and sometimes he thinks he sees him cry a little— cry that his brother is so out of control, so bored. He hears the words casually thrown around: depression, anxiety, even attention deficit disorder. But he doesn't have attention deficit disorder— he pays too much attention, sees too much, and cares too little.

.

I'm kind of playing around with depressed Sherlock right now. I can see mild pointers as to where this will go, but right now the journey is as much mine as it is yours.

I own nothing.