Give and Take
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC 2010)
Rating: Gen
Characters: The City of London, Sherlock Holmes
Warning: None, that I'm aware of
Beta: M
A/N: I felt that it was time that Sherlock got to be examined.
Sherlock Holmes had never been what one could call a normal child. The teachers called him “extremely gifted though slightly odd” to his mother and “the wee strange bastard” behind her back.
He floated through the early years of his life like a piece of glass, never making connections, never making friends. He sat in the back of classes, answering the questions he was asked, and never saying more. It wasn’t until ninth year that he started correcting everyone, pointing out exactly where they were wrong, and doing the opposite of making friends by telling everyone their secrets.
By this time Mycroft was already in London, having succumbed to the lure and the pull. Sherlock was beginning to feel that same pull, that same tension. The country was so boring. Boring, dull, exanimate, he knew all the words, if he hadn’t erased them off his mind yet. As soon as he could, he left without looking back.
London welcomed him in, and tried to solve his boredom. Being the City , it sent him things, gifts, and if self-destruction was the means to Its end, well, that was to be expected. The mind remained sharp, brilliant, knife-like, and London smiled. There were things that had to be done, done by the crueler parts of its past, before all could be well. So it sent him the dealers, watched him stumble in a sharp-focused and out of control haze though the streets, which did not trip him, and usually set him right. He did not die because of London. There were those who would attempt to stop the Lore or take a wallet or even murder for fun. Those few disappeared, and the streets hid them until weeks later, if they ever gave up the bones. Instead, he mumbled and played and invented and two weeks later than the City expected met a silvering haired DI who was the first connection.
The City used these times of madness to meet the man that it would later try to break. It needed him, the way it needed the Thames, it needed his madness and his brilliance and his arrogance. In some ways, he was the City, its colleges and its libraries but also its depths. But it needed him whole, and there were parts missing. So it broke him down to fill the holes, to hone the blade. (And when the Centre found out that this was his baby brother, there were problems for a week and Sherlock almost died for the first time.)
Through these times, London gave him more gifts than this. It gave him, out of some sense of long-forgotten guilt, the knowledge of its streets, the undetected ways that one could slip through and over and around and catch even the quickest of quarries. In a perverse moment, it showed him its own boredom, its own deep-black points, and then gave him its Lost as recompense.
This continued, the City giving and taking, until the day that it set John Watson down with an unimportant teacher, and handed Baker Street its pair.
Rating: Gen
Characters: The City of London, Sherlock Holmes
Warning: None, that I'm aware of
Beta: M
A/N: I felt that it was time that Sherlock got to be examined.
Sherlock Holmes had never been what one could call a normal child. The teachers called him “extremely gifted though slightly odd” to his mother and “the wee strange bastard” behind her back.
He floated through the early years of his life like a piece of glass, never making connections, never making friends. He sat in the back of classes, answering the questions he was asked, and never saying more. It wasn’t until ninth year that he started correcting everyone, pointing out exactly where they were wrong, and doing the opposite of making friends by telling everyone their secrets.
By this time Mycroft was already in London, having succumbed to the lure and the pull. Sherlock was beginning to feel that same pull, that same tension. The country was so boring. Boring, dull, exanimate, he knew all the words, if he hadn’t erased them off his mind yet. As soon as he could, he left without looking back.
London welcomed him in, and tried to solve his boredom. Being the City , it sent him things, gifts, and if self-destruction was the means to Its end, well, that was to be expected. The mind remained sharp, brilliant, knife-like, and London smiled. There were things that had to be done, done by the crueler parts of its past, before all could be well. So it sent him the dealers, watched him stumble in a sharp-focused and out of control haze though the streets, which did not trip him, and usually set him right. He did not die because of London. There were those who would attempt to stop the Lore or take a wallet or even murder for fun. Those few disappeared, and the streets hid them until weeks later, if they ever gave up the bones. Instead, he mumbled and played and invented and two weeks later than the City expected met a silvering haired DI who was the first connection.
The City used these times of madness to meet the man that it would later try to break. It needed him, the way it needed the Thames, it needed his madness and his brilliance and his arrogance. In some ways, he was the City, its colleges and its libraries but also its depths. But it needed him whole, and there were parts missing. So it broke him down to fill the holes, to hone the blade. (And when the Centre found out that this was his baby brother, there were problems for a week and Sherlock almost died for the first time.)
Through these times, London gave him more gifts than this. It gave him, out of some sense of long-forgotten guilt, the knowledge of its streets, the undetected ways that one could slip through and over and around and catch even the quickest of quarries. In a perverse moment, it showed him its own boredom, its own deep-black points, and then gave him its Lost as recompense.
This continued, the City giving and taking, until the day that it set John Watson down with an unimportant teacher, and handed Baker Street its pair.