Sherlock Holmes

Appearance
Dark, curly hair and chiseled facial features: other people seem very keen to mention his cheekbones. He has a slightly starved look, as he sometimes goes for days without eating. He dresses in plain but professional clothing: solid-color button-up shirts with black trousers and slim jackets, along with an impressively sweeping coal gray coat.

Personality
With only a few, extremely rare exceptions, Sherlock has had a lifetime of being - by an enormous degree - the smartest one in the room. This has given him a prejudice of most people as being morons and idiots, as he’s had to watch people catch up to points that had become obvious to him ages ago, as well as listen to them calling him things like “freak” or telling him to piss off just because he displayed his natural talents. Somewhere along the line, he decided that if people were just going to think of him as a weirdo anyway, he needn’t make any efforts at being friendly or fitting in. Although he does not deliberately antagonize everyone he comes across, he makes no effort to reign in his cleverness or try to accommodate anyone for the sake of politeness. And he’s a terrible smartarse. And a showoff. Put all that together, and he’s not one to normally leave a good first impression.

He describes himself as “a high-functioning sociopath,” but although much of his behavior could be called antisocial, the truth is more complex. He does, in fact, lack empathy for the vast majority of people and sentimental instincts in most cases. He also claims that being sympathetic would slow him down when it comes to his work as a consulting detective. These expressions are genuine, and there may have been the seed of an antisocial disorder planted by something in his childhood, but it’s also something Sherlock has nurtured and encouraged in himself, on purpose. On a perverse level Sherlock wants to be a sociopath - to divorce himself from emotions entirely, because all that matters, all that keeps him going is the work, and logical reasoning is hindered when sentiment gets in the way.

But he hasn’t been entirely successful. Although it may have taken him until recently, he’s found a small circle of people he genuinely cares for and who care about him in return. It’s telling that Sherlock accepts these connections (once he manages to acknowledge that they exist), and even attempts to repair them when something goes wrong. Underneath the antisocial shell is an extremely lonely person who only got used to being solitary because he was so far ahead of the pack. If someone can prove themselves loyal beyond all doubt, if they can prove they won’t abandon him or turn on him, he will cling to them and defend them with everything he has - his considerably brilliant mind, or, if it comes to it, his life. At the same time, he doesn't tend to discuss his past or his feelings, even with those he trusts. He's just not used to friendship, and he still believes that distance lends him protection.

Sherlock is an addict. Not in the sense that he is currently using (although the show hints that it is either an on-again-off-again or semi-recent thing), but that he has an addictive personality - an addict never really stops being one. This is shown in the absolute obsessiveness with which he approaches his work. In the absence of their drug of choice and to avoid falling off the wagon, an addict has to find something else to occupy their life, and it will often consume them in the same way the drug once had. For Sherlock, the science of deduction is that something else. When he finds himself with no problems to solve, he turns quickly to destructive and erratic behavior.

Speaking of his obsessiveness: Sherlock has a near-eidetic memory and is always learning, but he only bothers to focus on things that might be relevant to his work. Anything else gets 'deleted,' forcibly forgotten. For this reason, he can come off as oblivious to things that ordinary people take for granted. Meanwhile, when he's working, he's like a machine. He can pluck the facts of a case from a crime scene in under two minutes, his racing mind transforms into a focused engine of reasoning, and he appears to lose any need for food or rest.

Sexuality
Sherlock is both straight and asexual. With the right woman, he will flirt (in his own way). With the right woman, he might consent to certain forms of physical intimacy: kissing (not on the lips), touching, sleeping in the same bed. But he’d go cold at the prospect of anything generally defined as “sex,” unless by some miracle a woman managed to earn enough of his respect and trust for him to enter into a relationship with her (and even then, she would have to wait upon his very low sex drive).

He has unexplored potential as a BDSM sub/masochist, and it's likely to stay unexplored for a long while yet.

In Bete Noire
CONTENT WARNING: The following contains lots and lots of talk about drug use, as well as one instance of questionable consent.

Arrival
Sherlock Holmes landed, literally, in Bete Noire after stepping off of a rooftop, and things only got stranger from there. His initial broadcast was answered by immortals, wizards, aliens, a dragon, and one mysterious voice that knew far too much. The following week was spent on his own, holing up in a grubby hotel room when he needed to sleep and wandering the streets when he couldn't. It didn't take long for him to understand there were only two possibilities: either he had managed to totally and completely lose his mind and thus the ability to trust his senses, or he had found himself in a world where the laws of reality had been rewritten.

One way or another he needed proof, and he turned to drastic measures for it. He arranged and carried out an intentional morphine overdose, inside of the hospital to ensure that he received immediate care. The next several days were spent in forced convalescence, allowing him to fully process everything he'd seen and sort through this new reality.

Crashing the Crypt
While in the hospital, Sherlock became acquainted with Conrad Achenleck, Bete Noire's favorite ultra-neurotic vampire. Sherlock was unfazed by Conrad's vampirism as it was obvious how entirely harmless he was despite it. For his part, Conrad was compassionate enough toward a new arrival and fascinated enough by Sherlock's unusual charisma that when Sherlock turned up on his doorstep and more or less dictated that they were flatmates (cryptmates?) now, Conrad didn't put up much of a fight. With his mind mostly at ease and a more permanent living space arranged, Sherlock began exploring the city in earnest, laying the foundation of knowledge he would need to build a life in Bete Noire.