Sherlock (BBC) Fanfiction: Art of the Reasoner [ch.6]
Art of the Reasoner.
Summary: A world in which Sherlock is an artist, not a detective. Though that doesn’t mean he can’t help solve crimes. AU.
[ chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five ]
A/N: This took a longer time to write than the others because I wasn’t happy with the order/layout of the scenes and had to do a lot of shuffling.
⌘
“There’s a head in the fridge.”
“I know, isn’t it lovely?” Sherlock said without taking his eyes from the microscope. The Thames River water was especially fascinating under high magnification. “Molly loaned it to me as a belated gift for my birthday.”
“A human head.”
“I do believe it is,” Sherlock said idly. “Homo sapiens sapiens if you want to get technical.”
The fridge door shut with a half-hearted slam. “Do you always get insane gifts?”
“If you’re talking about the fingers or the eyeballs,” Sherlock mentally noted to move those out of the microwave, “they’re for some cases I’m working on.”
“What fingers and eyeballs?”
“Never mind.”
-
Sherlock usually curled in balls or lounged around in some contorted shape when he was at home. He stood tall when he worked, but he felt most comfortable stooped and half crouched when he was busy doing something more meaningful than reading the world out loud: writing it all down and making it permanent.
He had heard girls describe his cheeks as sharp enough to slice through glass, boys grumbling that his eyes were cutting enough to see into their souls, and his mother worrying he was too thin to be healthy.
Hard lines, sharp lines, cold, cutting and angular.
It was rather unfortunate because a small part of him wished he was compared to his dad. His father was bestowed with a chubby midsection and a rounded chin, but he was kind and warm. Sherlock’s mother was the angles, was from whom he had inherited his appearance.
In a way, Sherlock disliked Mycroft’s multiple attempts at dieting because he felt like that was a roundabout way of expressing distain towards their father. It was absolutely ridiculous, but didn’t stop him thinking like that.
Sherlock saw some of his father in his brother and didn’t want that to go, too.
He started painting Mycroft again in case it did.
His brother was as flawed as any other person, but he was as close to perfect as Sherlock could see. And Sherlock saw an awful lot of things.
-
Now really, if someone wanted to attack Sherlock, there were plenty of opportunities for them to get him when he left his house. It was actually rather dangerous how often Sherlock would wander into isolated areas to paint.
So why someone tried to kill Sherlock in his own flat is anyone’s guess.
Well, he had several very good guesses in mind, but that was neither here nor there.
He quickly sent off a text to Lestrade to come and arrest the now unconscious man. The shine of the thin sword caught Sherlock’s eye, and after a moment of deliberation, Sherlock propped it against the bookshelf for safe-keeping; a memento of sorts.
Walking over to the kitchen, he looked at the scratch on the table and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. After a short pause, he rummaged through the kitchen drawers and found a stencil knife.
Lestrade walked in fifteen minutes later to Sherlock creating an intricate carving in the wooden surface of the table.
At the right angle, the lines and curves looked like a tree, yet at another angle it looked like waves off a beach. The original design was stitched into the curtains of one of the crime scenes, but Sherlock had been looking for a place to recreate it for nearly a week.
Hide a book in a library. Hide a scratch in a carving.
“Is John all right with you destroying the furniture?” Lestrade asked as he walked across the room to feel for a pulse on the man on the floor.
“People are surprisingly tolerant of destruction when the results are aesthetically pleasing,” Sherlock said mildly before blowing away some of the accumulating wood shavings.
Lestrade snorted in disbelief before calling Sherlock over to help carry the assailant down to the car. But it was true. When John came home later, tired and grumbling under his breath about the terror of technology, he stopped mid-tirade to almost smile at the carving.
“Is it a tree or is it the ocean?” John asked.
“It’s whatever you want it to be.”
-
His father played the harmonica when Sherlock was very young. It had life, but the noise had a whiny, tinny effect that irked Sherlock to no end. He wanted something smoother, more classical.
Mycroft learned how to play the piano, so Sherlock tried to learn it. It was intolerable. Fingers on ivory, pressing, pressing, tapping, tapping, no heart, no soul, boring, simple. It was like chemistry, like cooking: mix the notes to a particular beat and you get sound.
Sebastian tried to get him to play the piano, too. And then the saxophone (which was initially interesting and then as boring as everything else). He was surprisingly persistent, and it was only when Sherlock threatened to reveal the scandal of Sebastian’s sister having an affair with a married professor that he backed off.
Victor Trevor came the closest to convincing Sherlock that there existed other instruments worthy of his time. They had spent many afternoons playing the guitar together. He could feel the vibrations of the strings and the hum of life. When he played guitar later though, on his own, it wasn’t the same and he wondered whether companionship made the experience enjoyable.
None of them quite compared to the violin he found when he was younger, scrounging around the attic, avoiding thoughts of school, hiding from reality. When he played that, he could feel the music running up and down his arm in vibrations, his ears humming with the music and each pull of the bow creating beautiful music.
Why would he need anything else to play when the violin made him complete?
-
He staggered home-even after all these years the word home still felt a little strange-his head buzzing with thoughts of aquamarine and aureolin and wondering why some parts of his vision were turning a fuzzy monochrome.
-black and white, father and mother, right and wrong, ying and yang, life and death and the follies in-between-
Was the world swaying or was that him?
Sherlock stumbled a few steps before finding the wall and leaning against it, breathing heavily. He dropped his violin case to the ground with a solid thunk and his fingers felt for the wallpaper, the rough texture grounding him a bit.
The spots in his vision were familiar, but he hadn’t touched cigarettes in years (or months?) and he could only feel one nicotine patch on his arm, a thick band of swirls drawn atop in purple ink.
His hands were covered in a fine dust-of seashell and steel blue-and when he tasted his fingertips, he found it to be chalk dust. That explained what he had been doing, and judging from the blunted, scraped nature of his nails, he had spent the better part of the day drawing on pavements.
The world was going black and white and it was harder to remember. Look, look! he thought angrily, trying to sum up the energy to move. Since when was he on the floor? He couldn’t recall sinking to his knees, but he must have.
Spots in his vision, like little stars in the sky-
Snapping out of it, Sherlock clicked over his violin case. The strings were coated in dust and shiny coins littered the bottom. Vaguely, Sherlock thought he could thread all the coins together and make them hang from the ceiling into something gorgeous, but the words in his vision were blurring.
The stain on the corner of his case proclaimed in caps locks TRAIN STATION, the words disappearing as soon as he scratched it into his dry skin with his nail. The white marks disappeared with a rub of his thumb and they might have never existed at all.
Except it had said TRAIN STATION and Sherlock was almost positively sure that it was there where his day had drained away. Sluggishly, he felt for his phone and the screen displayed several missed messages from blue and yellow and gold.
-tired, tired, tired; bags under his eyes like bruises of cool grey; his coat so thin and heavy and suffocating; scarf like a choker around his neck; and it was all so familiar-
He closed his eyes and sighed, just as a voice from the edges yelled out, “Bloody hell, Sherlock! Are you-”
-
Sherlock awoke in a warm bed. By-passing the normal reaction of disorientation, he catalogued that he was in his room, waking after a seven hour sleep, and that John had carried him up here to his bedroom.
Thank God, not the hospital, not the damned hospital, was all Sherlock thought for a full moment of relief as his eyes took in the chaos of colours on his walls. He didn’t paint them like he had done in 221C, but he had covered almost every inch of drab wallpaper with his art.
A shift in the mattress returned Sherlock’s attention to John, who appeared to have fallen asleep watching over Sherlock. The letters were brighter and clearer now, telling Sherlock that John’s job interview went well.
Work. How dull.
He purposely ignored the irony that he found much of his entertainment these days in his work with the Met.
A laptop was beside him on the nightstand. Sherlock grabbed it without disturbing John. It wasn’t his computer, but the password was so easily hackable-birthday and the name of his first pet.
Via a quick search of the Internet history, Sherlock smiled to see a few pages of his website in the Favourites section. It seemed there were some pieces John was fond of, and Sherlock made a mental note to paint a little more in those styles.
While Sherlock was checking his emails, John stirred and blinked wearily through the haze of sleep. He snapped awake rather quickly after that and fixed Sherlock with a grim stare.
“When was the last time you ate?” he asked.
“A few days,” Sherlock said. But that was long enough to make him tired. He had stopped eating because he had an art block and even while the rush of a new case had given him the boost he needed to draw huge murals, he had forgotten about food again.
It was trivial. No wonder he forgot.
“Sally told me to watch out for you because you’d starve yourself sometimes.”
“She said that?”
“Not in so many kind words, but that was the general message.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to drop dead anytime soon.”
John looked increasingly annoyed and agitated. “You passed out in front of our door. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that’s unhealthy.”
“I’ll eat later.”
“You’ll eat now.”
Sherlock’s eyes darted to the clock on the wall, a gift from Mrs. Hudson. It was stuck upside down and had the numbers in mathematical formulae, but he immediately saw that they were late.
“We’re on a case! We should have-”
“Food first,” John said firmly.
“We need to find the connection between the two dead men.” Sherlock swung his legs over the side. He ignored the slight ringing in his ears, but he couldn’t ignore the sharp look John threw his way.
In a softer voice, Sherlock said, “I’ll eat after we figure it out.”
Sherlock could see John’s reluctance to agree but he did so in the end anyway. That was how they found themselves dining in a small restaurant in Chinatown, mulling over the details of the case as John made sure Sherlock ate something.
It could only last so long though, as Sherlock noticed a wet book and just had to do some breaking and entering.
-
Murders that looked like suicides.
Unrelated deaths connected only by the killer.
He wondered whether that was a new theme between the London criminal underground. Then he realised Chinese letters were appearing in his vision and thought that perhaps the web stretched wider than just England.
Moriarty.
He had only a name and instinct to go on. Interesting.
-
He remembered the first time he was kidnapped.
Sherlock forgot a lot of things on purpose, but this was something he couldn’t remove from his mind. Seeing John reminded him yet again.
It was many years ago. Sherlock had a knack of pissing off the wrong people.
There was pain-tolerable, familiar, but ultimately forgettable. The rough treatment, the cloth gag, the ropes that chafed his wrists-all of those forgettable, forgivable, but then they covered Sherlock’s eyes.
That was when the fear set in.
It trickled slowly at first, like ice water down his spine. Then it burned like acid rushing down his veins, searing his blood to boiling point and all the while he had to act calm, stay cool and try to work his way out of the situation.
Trying to compensate, his other sense leapt to life-hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting, touching, thinking-but they were all aiming for the same thing: to get his eyesight back.
It was suffocating, even though he could breathe.
Sherlock remembered the first time he was kidnapped, the first time he was completely blind and vulnerable, and the first time he felt relief upon seeing his brother’s minions.
-
“I’d appreciate your artwork more if you ceased using stencils so often,” Sherlock commented with a critical gaze.
The teenager turned around with a start, almost dropping the spray can he was holding until he saw who it was. The metal of the can glowed in the light of the moon. Sherlock stared on coolly; almost smiling at the scowl directed his way.
Raziah returned the look with a scathing one of his own. Dark eyes, dark hair, pale skin, fingers stained different colours, reeking of paint fumes. If Raziah lost a few pounds, grew his short hair, and had a more prominent facial bone structure, then maybe he could pass for Sherlock on a cloudy day.
Perhaps, Sherlock thought; filing away that half-formed idea to the back of his head for another time and place.
Frowning, Raziah dropped the empty spray paint can and picked up another one from his bag. Black paint, how endlessly dull. There was a sharp clicking noise as he shook it up.
“Not all of us can freestyle quite like you, Holmes,” was all Raziah said before tagging the graffiti. It was a strange tag, less loops and sharp points, but more whorls and complex little half twists in-between.
For a short while, the only thing that could be heard was the faint sounds of traffic echoing through to the empty lot, and the faint hiss of the spray paint being released from the can.
“Raziah-”
“Don’t,” Raziah cut in gruffly. “Only me mum gets to call me that. You call me ‘Raz’.”
“You ran away from home,” Sherlock pointed out softly. “I doubt your mother has the chance to talk to you.”
“Shuddup,” Raziah bit back, but without any real heat. He didn’t bother acting surprised that Sherlock knew-Sherlock always knew. He chucked the can back into his duffle bag and slung it over his shoulder. “You comin’ or what?”
The boy didn’t wait for a response before he started walking off, looking much more bulky than he actually was since he was covered in so many layers of clothing. Sleeping in the streets wasn’t a walk in the park, especially in England. Days got short, nights got cold.
As they walked, they passed more and more buildings absolutely covered in graffiti. Sherlock passed a few atrocious tags-some teenagers had no imagination or talent, really-and he snorted derisively at some of the slogans splattered against the brick and plaster.
“One moment,” Sherlock murmured, hand slipping and snatching of Raziah’s cans before the other could protest. A hiss filled the air as Sherlock added a few deft strokes to some weeks-old graffiti.
“You are possibly the only guy I know who would correct their grammar, you know that, right?” Raziah muttered. “Not to mention you bother copying their handwriting. It’s freaky how you do that sometimes.”
Sherlock shrugged and said, “Some pieces deserve the editing. I blame the education system more than the artist.”
Raziah snorted. “Holmes, mate, you’re pretty intense about all this, ain’t you? We hardly call ourselves artists. This ain’t some fancy pants museum gatherin’, all right”?”
“Art is expression through a medium,” Sherlock said with a quirk of his lips. “Where does it mention anything fancy?”
“Ha.” Raziah stopped in front of a stretch of untainted concrete. “Try telling the coppers somethin’ like that and see how they like it.”
“The police aren’t always incompetent.”
“Right, right.” Raziah looked almost apologetic. “Forgot you’re on their payroll now.”
“Hardly,” Sherlock said with a slight sneer. He shook the can he was still holding and started drawing an outline. In spite of himself, Raziah paused to watch Sherlock work.
There was something oddly freeing about spray painting. It was so much less controllable, more volatile, something quick and dirty to play around with. The feel of it was so much more encompassing-the sounds of hissing, the stink of toxic fumes, the cold touch of metal and the burst of colour spreading on the floor and dancing on dust motes.
“So, did you get what you needed from the yellow paint?” Raziah asked, not knowing what happened hours earlier-how could he have known?-oblivious to what those symbols meant. “I spent ages roving the streets for them marks. Better have been worth it.”
Sherlock stilled his finger on the spray can for a moment and thought about it. Gunshots-white, red, yellow; tunnel-black, blue, grey; death-crimson. Did he get what he needed? Worth it?
“Yes, it was,” Sherlock replied, finishing the outline of a man collapsed on the ground, a spear jutting out of his gut. “I’ll need some red to finish this,” he murmured, eyes bright in the darkness.
Raziah watched on silently as Sherlock encircled the outline of the dead man with words all scrawled in red paint positioned to look like blood. Before it dried, the moon shone on it and it glistened as if it were really blood.
Sherlock stopped when the red paint ran out and Raziah didn’t bring up the yellow characters again.
-
Art is expression through a medium.
Sherlock’s definition of art wasn’t really that clear cut.
When he was seven, his brother told him that acting was an art form. Well, to be more specific, Mycroft had said lying was an art form. So Sherlock learned to pretend to be normal, just enough that teachers pitied his erratic behaviour, rather than feared it.
When he was fifteen, his mother told him that dancing was an art form. That it showed emotions through the subtlest kick of the ankle or flick of the wrist. It’s because of that Sherlock knew the steps to the over a dozen various types of dances. His favourite was, strangely enough, the Waltz. Slow, graceful, beautiful-and a dance his mother had absolutely adored, so he would dance it with her; for her.
At twelve, Sherlock was told by his father that surgery was its own kind of art; one of repairing and fixing and looking at the details to see the truth. Siger was a well-respected heart surgeon who had often waxed eloquent on how humbling it was to see the root of all life laid bare before him.
Six weeks after that conversation, Siger had to have another stern conversation with his son explaining how catching and killing birds for dissection was not something beautiful or condoned. Taking a picture of the birds, making them live forever, was more beautiful than killing them.
If Sherlock had been given another year or so to fully appreciate the mystery of life and death and the beating heart, who knows whether he would have picked up a paintbrush again?
He might have become a doctor like his father, a dancer like his mother, or a politician like his brother. Or maybe the world’s only consulting detective...
Then again, Sherlock’s only real passion in life was art. It would be insanity to think otherwise.
-
Sarah was nice; pretty; understanding. All of those trivial things. Something a man who had been in a war zone for far too long would appreciate and crave. She was safe and soft in pastel colours, but something brighter than Molly’s subdued tones.
She was the genuine article of someone normal, and thus boring.
Sherlock gave Sarah’s relationship with John a few weeks before they both realised they were better off as friends, or at the least, co-workers.
His smile was a little wicked as he texted John, Need your help. -SH
His phone chimed back immediately with a response. I’m on a date. What do you need help with?
You’ve already left Sarah, I can tell - ditching her for me on both your dates is poor form, by the way - so it hardly matters what I need help with. -SH
Sherlock, John had written, you have got to be joking. You didn’t pull me out of the date because you’re bored, have you?!
I am bored though. I’m considering how much heat it would take to burst your beer cans. I’m sure the splatter pattern would be fascinating. -SH
I’m coming home now. Don’t touch /ruin/destroy ANYTHING.
-
“Why the hell has our bathroom been turned-”
“-into a dark room?” Sherlock finished for John. “I’m interested in photography again.”
“Seriously?”
Sherlock looked up and raised an eyebrow. He lifted up the camera in his hands and snapped a photo of John’s surprised expression. The flash sparked brightly, like a glimpse at the sun before it disappeared.
“Yes, ‘seriously’.” Sherlock was smiling but John had a faintly irritated expression on his face which wiped the smile clean off.
Was this the tipping point? Would he yell ‘I’m sick of this!’? Would John move out and leave Sherlock alone again? Something cold seized his chest and Sherlock made a move to say something-
John’s face relaxed and he shook his head fondly. “Just give me some warning next time, will you?” he asked as he opened the fridge.
Next time. He was staying, there would be a next time, a future and he wasn’t leaving.
“What the hell’s in the juice bottle?” John exclaimed suddenly. “It smells toxic.”
“That would be the paint remover then,” Sherlock said, leaning back in his seat as he fiddled with the camera settings.
“Is there anything else poisonous in this kitchen I should know about?”
There was a pause. Then Sherlock admitted, “Probably,” before taking another candid shot of John by the open fridge door.
John hid a smile with a groan and Sherlock hid his fear with a laugh. All good things end eventually...
-
Taxies were more expensive, but they were a luxury Sherlock readily used for no other reason than to keep his sanity.
Buses were loud, dirty and packed with people. The sensory input was beyond overwhelming because there was no escape, no way out. He had to wait until his stop, but the irony lay in that he was so distracted that he normally missed them. And then the cycle would begin anew.
Sherlock could see in the nails of the man across from him that he was a labourer and a cross-dresser when his wife was out of town.
Two girls in front of him were only half-sisters, though they believed otherwise. It was in their chins, noses and eyes. Faces were one of the first things he learned to draw and he knew the markers of relatives.
He could see entire lifestyles from the patterned ties businessmen wore as an embellishment to their suits. Their watches told stories of their ego and their financial status. Scratches told Sherlock their drinking habits, whilst stains and burns spoke their smoking habits.
Jewellery teemed with secrets-anniversaries, weddings, engagements, affairs, love lost and found-and make up spelled out the person’s plans like a map before him. The dirt on their shoes and their accents told him where they were from and the way they cut their hair told him a dozen other little things.
And all of that was only what he saw, not what he heard, or what he smelled, or tasted in the air around him.
The words would cram together and he’d be scribbling desperately, trying to get them all down, to get them out of his mind. Using the bus was always so draining, so exhilarating, and so utterly wasteful of his time.
Taxies were simply easier.
-
“Pick up some eggs next time you’re out,” Sherlock as he walked upstairs to 221B. His shirt was soaked through with paint - he had spent the evening painting the ceiling of 221C to look like firework explosions.
“Sure thing,” John said from where he sat comfortably in his armchair watching the television. “You feel like making an omelette?”
“Not hungry,” Sherlock said, “but I need the yolks. I’m going to make my own tempera colours-I have the pigments, but I just need the binder.”
“I ... am not even going to ask.”
“Methods are unimportant when you see the finished piece,” Sherlock waved an ink-stained hand. That hand had been stained for nearly a week now - he had been messing about with a pen and it had burst in his hands.
As an afterthought Sherlock said, “Can you buy some milk and honey while you’re there?”
“I just bought milk!” John cried out. “How the hell can we be out? I know for a fact you don’t drink any of it.”
“Drink it?” Sherlock scoffed. “Egg yolks are hardly the only binder I use for tempera paint.”
“Christ, don’t tell me you’re painting the walls with milk.”
“Of co-wait. John, don’t tell me you actually think I like honey?”
“Dear Lord, no. Ants, Sherlock, did you think about that?” John groaned loudly. “We’ll get infested!”
“Hardly, I should think. Anyway, the watered-down honey mixture is mainly for the canvases. They absorb it better.”
“I- You know what? Fine,” John sighed. “Anything else you want?”
“Some new crayons would be lovely.”
-
“Look at the feet of the girls. If there are scars, then they are sex slaves. People hardly want something marred and broken. So they hide signs of training and reconditioning on the feet.”
John’s eyes were wide when Sherlock hung up.
“How did you know that?”
Sherlock scanned the bookshelves, and pulled a sketchbook down and flipped through the pages. It was a year old, full of sketches of dead bodies. Unhelpful.
“Time abroad,” Sherlock explained in an offhand voice. “I learned things. Awful, morally wrong things, but I suppose that can’t be helped. Knowledge is knowledge.”
The small sketchbook slammed shut with a neat whump and Sherlock slid it back in its place.
“Wait, all this art is real?”
“Real in what sense?”
“That you’ve seen it.”
“Most of it is. I hardly have enough patience to work with imagination.” Sherlock looked through a newer notebook-only bought and filled a few weeks ago. “Does that... bother you?”
“No. It’s just, well; you painted things from most of Europe.”
“Parts of Asia, too.” Sherlock spun around and opened a thick, leather-bound book to a sketch of Tiananmen Square.
“It’s hard to imagine you backpacking across countries.”
“I had a rebellious youth, you could call it.”
John opened another sketchbook with fresh curiosity. The page showed a charcoal rendition of the Milan Cathedral. It looked like white against a black background, but that was really just layer upon layer of writing, the air thick with snippets of history.
“Care to tell me about some of it?” John asked.
Sherlock nodded, saying, “Find a picture and I’ll tell you about it.”
-
“Writing another anecdote for your blog?” Sherlock asked after listening to the pattern of the clacking of computer keys for several moments.
“Ah, you so you read the case write-up then?” John stopped typing and took a sip of his tea, looking at Sherlock with interest.
“A Study in Pink,” Sherlock commented dryly. “Clever.”
John’s lips twisted downwards. “You didn’t like it?”
“Don’t take it personally,” Sherlock said. “I generally dislike anything fictional written within my lifetime.”
“How can you call it fictional?” exclaimed John. “You were there when it happened!”
“You left out so many critical details it might as well have been fiction.”
John sighed and replied, “I never said I was a writer.”
“You’re going to keep writing the cases up, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Nothing I say will convince you otherwise?”
“Nope.”
“So be it.” Sherlock sat up from the couch, wrapping the robe tightly around him. “I’m going to criticise all your entries.”
“Duly noted.”
Sherlock nodded and lay back down, listening to the clacking of the keys again. John was such a slow typer...
-
For his tenth birthday, Sherlock got a Rubik’s Cube. It was a puzzle of colours. He solved it a few hours. If he realised all that was needed was a mathematical formula to solve it, he might have completed it even faster than that.
Then again, learning such a mathematical formula would have been a waste of time and headspace. He didn’t need it.
Sherlock liked the Rubik’s Cube for its simplicity. When he was feeling particularly stressed, he would just sit and slide the sides around, not quite aiming to solve the cube, just trying to rearrange it into patterns.
There was a certain special kind of therapy in just watching the colours move, no distracting letters or words in the way since he’d painted them all down.
Just him and the colours spinning and twisting in his hands.
Then he learned the world wasn’t quite that simple.
-
Sherlock remembered the first time the Met thought he was the killer. It was almost funny in a way. Not so much at the time, but hindsight allowed for many concessions.
He had correctly drawn the face of the next victim. The serial killer had a type, a very clear type, and Sherlock had nearly been thrown in jail for guessing it.
If the killer had refrained from murdering another victim, perhaps Sherlock would have been charged as guilty. But three more blonde women were killed and Sherlock was asked how he knew that would happen.
Unfortunately, the event had caused Mycroft to come down and lecture Sherlock about the importance of explaining his methodology because people feared what they didn’t understand.
“I do explain though! I explained and they couldn’t see it and damn it all if I don’t one day snap and go on a homicidal rampage!” Sherlock paced as his pulled at his hair. “All this painting is to help them see, but none of them get it!”
Slowly, Mycroft stood, saying to his brother, “People might be under the impression that you’re cruel, but you’re not, Sherlock.”
“Pardon?” Sherlock was slightly thrown by the turn of conversation.
“You help people that want to understand,” Mycroft explained with an empathetic expression, “and you’re only cruel to those that refuse to.”
For a moment, Sherlock didn’t know what to say. Then he scowled and snapped, “Run along, Mycroft. You could do with the exercise.”
With a genial tilt of the head, Mycroft left the flat and Sherlock alone to his thoughts.
⌘
A/N: I would like to write a separate one shot in this universe but from the POV of other characters. Yay or nay to the idea? I’d love to know!
[ chapter seven ]