Sherlock (BBC) Fanfiction: Art of the Reasoner [ch.7]
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 | chapter six ]
A/N: Do not worry, I am still working on the alternative POV one shot. I’ve just been really busy lately.
⌘
“I want to go out and paint the town red,” Sherlock complained, bored out of his mind. Nothing to draw, paint, sketch, colour, copy, write, do.
The nicotine patches-decorated with stick men John had drawn, all dodgy lines and inaccurate representations of body proportions-were itchy and he was scratching the skin around them raw.
“Literally or figuratively?” John asked, shooting Sherlock a stern look telling him to stop it. Something told Sherlock that if he broke the skin and bled that John would give him a lecture.
Tedious.
He stopped scratching.
“Literally,” Sherlock replied in a flat voice. “Why would I figuratively paint the town red?”
“Never mind,” John sighed, looking back down at his newspaper. Sherlock wondered when he would notice the missing articles, (he needed the letters to make a collage of words). “Don’t do it though.”
Sherlock considered it for a moment and then said, “I said I want, not I will.”
“Are you going to tell me anything else you want?” John asked with a smile in his voice, even if his face was hidden from view.
In all seriousness, Sherlock said, “Blood red paint.”
But when John laughed, he joined in.
-
“What is this place?” John asked, eyes wide with awe as he spun around slowly.
“It’s my storage unit,” Sherlock replied, shrugging as he rummaged through the canvases. “I got it when I went backpacking around Europe and I kind of just kept it.”
The walls were absolutely covered in pictures and there were many unopened crates lying about. Sherlock knew each one had several canvases in them he did not wish to accidentally paint over and were therefore stored here, safe and sound.
John wondered over to a bookshelf and pulled a thick, leather-bound sketchbook down. He opened it to random pages, fingers sometimes pausing and hovering over the pieces, never quite touching them.
A picture of Paris, a picture of Berlin, a picture of Bangkok-where was the damned capital of-
Sherlock’s fingers landed on the picture of Rome and not-so-gently pulled it from the crate. He had been on GoogleMaps and apparently the satellite view of Rome had evolved greatly in the last few years. He had to makes changes.
“Why don’t you keep these things at the flat?”
“Not enough room there,” Sherlock said in a muffled voice, a paintbrush in his mouth as he rummaged through his bag for some paints.
“No,” John said, “I mean that downstairs one.”
“That’s my studio. I’d hardly wish to clutter it.”
There was a moment’s pause where John was undoubtedly thinking of the chaos of their flat and then another moment of silence in which he decided not to press the matter.
“Would you ever sell any of these?”
Sherlock shot John a look, an expression he dearly hoped convey, Are you crazy? There were pieces that were sellable, replaceable, destructible-but these all had meaning.
John shrugged and put the book back on the shelf in its rightful place. “I was just asking because I know I would pay for some of these. You’ve heard this a million times, but you have talent.”
Pausing in his efforts to repaint the west side of Rome from memory, Sherlock said, “John, that’s unnecessary. Take any piece you wish.”
“I thought you wouldn’t sell them?”
From his voice and body language, Sherlock could tell John didn’t want to take any of them. He admired them but didn’t want to take away something personal from Sherlock without reason. Sherlock made a mental note to present him with something later on.
“There’s a big difference between selling something and giving something as a gift.”
John raised an eyebrow and asked, “So you would really let me have one of these paintings, if I so wished?”
Admitting that he’d give John anything he wanted from this warehouse or from their home was a bit much, so Sherlock simply nodded and gestured for John to wander around some more.
It would take fifteen minutes for him to complete Rome, and then they’d leave. John wouldn’t take a painting and Sherlock wouldn’t insist on it.
Simple.
-
Footsteps clomped down the stairs. Not Mrs. Hudson-her tread was gentler-not Mycroft-he had heavier footfalls-and not John, who was still out at work.
“Detective Inspector,” Sherlock acknowledged without turning around. “From the speed at which you are travelling, I hope you’re bringing forth something rather interesting to see.”
“The air stinks in here, Sherlock!” Lestrade exclaimed. “How can you breathe?”
“I’ve long desensitised myself to the fumes,” Sherlock replied, turning around from the collage of newspaper clipping he was creating. It was filled with headlines of murder, embezzlement, theft and robbery. Fascinating things, indeed.
“Some of these are clippings from the French papers,” Lestrade observed, stepping closer to Sherlock’s work, mouth and nose covered by his sleeve.
Shrugging, Sherlock said, “I speak French.” Not to mention Mrs. Hudson did too, and they would read the French paper when the mood struck them.
Something trickled down his wrist and he looked to see glue running from the crook of his elbow to his fingertips. He wiped it off quickly, ignoring how it felt like blood.
“Can you speak German though?” Lestrade’s voice cut through Sherlock’s thoughts. He spoke as if he had a cold, though it was probably the result of trying too hard not to breathe.
“German?” Sherlock repeated, eyes alight with curiosity. “Ohh, we have a case with foreigners, don’t we?”
“Technically, we just need you to listen to their statements and draw up a representation of the thief.”
“I assume there aren’t any bodies then.”
“Sorry, Sherlock.”
Sherlock sighed and said resignedly, “I understand that people don’t get killed every day, but I have far better things to do than fix up some petty crime involving tourists.”
“Not so fast,” Lestrade said. “Change it to German nationals and the theft of some pretty classified documents.”
“Still boring.”
A chime rang through the room, causing Sherlock to immediately pat down his pockets before realising he had left his phone in one of the stacks of discarded newspaper clippings. The text read:
Should you solve this, I will send you a box of gold leaf for you to experiment with. I hear it’s very effective with a wood or ceramic base. -MH
As a quiet aside, Sherlock swore vehemently. Looking back up to a puzzled Lestrade, Sherlock announced, “I’ll help you.”
“What ever happened to, ‘Still boring’?”
“Some sacrifices must be made in the name of art,” Sherlock replied shamelessly, bounding upstairs with a relieved Lestrade following close behind.
-
When Sherlock felt slightly overwhelmed, he would lie down on the couch with one hand over his heart and the other over his stomach. He would close his eyes as if he was sleeping but really he was trying to relax.
It was a trick his father taught him. Sherlock always felt irritable and keyed up after school, so this was one of the methods to relax because sometimes drawing just stirred him into an even bigger frenzy.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
He could feel his heartbeat, his pulse thrumming under his fingertips, the throb of his thumb and if he let himself relax enough, Sherlock could even hear the blood rushing in his ears in sync with his heart.
Out of habit, he thought about arteries and veins, listing them in no particular order-superior vena cava, great cardiac, right pulmonary-and the list was always spoken in his father’s deep, reassuring voice. Sherlock remembered always countering the arteries with colours; he and his dad would just sit there speaking in turn one word at a time until everything was better again.
There was something rather special about those simple moments.
“The heart ties everything together, Sherlock.”
Except now father was dead and it wasn’t quite as calming as it used to be.
Badum-badum-badum.
The couch was too short, didn’t smell like the detergent used to clean his sheets and there was a missing warmth-presence-beside him to make him feel content.
Sherlock took his hands off his heart and stomach and put them fingertip-to-fingertip, under his chin, almost like he was praying.
As he considered getting up, John walked into the room and Sherlock could hear his heartbeat again. The bustle of noises in the kitchen, the soft rustling beside him in the living room-it was oddly calming.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
He wondered if his father’s voice would stop listing the veins and whether John’s voice would ever take over.
-
Late one evening, John walked down the stairs, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Where’s my toothbrush?”
“Used it to paint something,” Sherlock replied. He was lying sprawled out on the floor, looking at the cracks in the ceiling and wondering whether it was worth the effort to hide it with plaster, and maybe some extra layers of paint on top of that.
“Paint what?”
Without hesitation, Sherlock answered, “221C’s floorboards.”
John exhaled heavily. “Really? Couldn’t you have used yours?”
“I did.”
“So you needed both then, did you?”
“I have two hands, John.” After an awkward lull, Sherlock added, “But don’t worry, I’ll sterilise it before returning it.”
“Don’t go to the trouble,” John said, resigned. “I’ll just get a new one.”
Beaming, Sherlock made a pizza for dinner with all the toppings rearranged to look like a colour wheel. John seemed surprised that it was not only edible, but rather delicious, all the same.
-
One day, Lestrade asked why he always signed his text messages.
“After all, the random ones are always from you.”
It was before Sherlock had fully joined the police; he was still in a trial period and there was still so much for them to learn about each other.
Sherlock smiled before saying, “A good artist always leaves a signature.”
Sally, listening in to the conversation, then added, “Yeah, so why do you sign stuff then?”
“Maybe some people are just too stupid to connect the dots and it saves time from having to type ‘who are you?’ texts,” Sherlock bit back mildly, hiding the smile as Sally huffed in a show of indignation.
Lestrade sighed heavily and told them to quit fighting like children.
Sherlock had made a mental note to sign the next scrap of paperwork they shoved under his nose with the most embellished signature he could muster, just to make a point.
-
A gun was infinitely more fascinating than spray painting. So wild, so intense and violent.
Bullets firing into the wall, holes blossoming at the points of impact.
Not all art was about creation.
There was as much beauty in destruction.
A long time after, Sherlock would feel his heart jump to his throat when a man in a Westwood suit said exactly that. Except that madman sought out destruction more than creation and threw the world out of balance.
He scared Sherlock-almost more than blindness-because that could have been his life.
-
“You don’t know the sun goes around the earth?”
“Does it matter?”
“Does it-Sherlock, this is elementary school knowledge-”
“Which helps me how?”
“I don’t know, but you should know it!”
“Ridiculous. Knowing more doesn’t make me smarter. It... clutters. If I have too many paints on my palette then how will I have any room to mix them together to get the right shades? How will I have any space to add more vital paints in? John, I said the details were important; everything excess is utterly unnecessary.”
-
“Don’t wait up, Sherlock,” John called out as he left. Didn’t say where, didn’t need to say where. Sherlock could see in the crispness of his clothes and the brightness of his eyes that John was going on a date with Sarah.
It didn’t hurt, exactly. Didn’t bother him, not quite. But the concept twisted in the back of his mind and all of his sketches in the next half-hour took a dejected turn for the worse, even his brightest memories shown in sepias and blacks, whites and greys.
That’s why he cared, Sherlock figured. It was messing with how he worked.
Shaking that thought from his mind, Sherlock went into his room and searched his wardrobe for some large sheets of black plastic. He spent the next hour cutting out an intricate design, every slice of the scissors a grating noise in the silence.
He rolled up the finished product, pulled out a roller, a can of paint, a tray and a roll of duct tape. All those weeks ago, he said he wouldn’t, but this was a different time now, and Sherlock decided he could.
Time to paint the town red.
Sherlock arrived at the first wall, the area dark and deserted. While he wasn’t a fan of the Warhol movement, the colours and repetitive style of the works a little jarring for his taste, there was something to be said about the simplistic nature of using stencils.
Slowly but surely, he soon covered the entire stencil with bright red paint. Stepping back, Sherlock looked upon his work and smiled. There was no need to add any writing because it was essentially only made up of writing.
The word bored was written over and over in English and French and German and Spanish and Italian and so many languages, even in Egyptian hieroglyphics-of course he did not speak all of them fluently, but bored was a word he learned in many occasions just because he could.
Also, for Mycroft’s sake, he knew quite a handful of colourful swear words too, but felt that was a little too crass to be covering London’s street with. There were children around, after all.
He had gotten around to roughly forty walls, fences, buildings and deserted alleys before his phone chimed for the first time. That would be Mycroft, Sherlock figured, indifferent to his brother at the moment.
When he had completed the sixtieth copy of his stencil; he reached in and pulled out his phone, staining the keypad with a thumb drenched red. The screen told him there were two messages. He must have missed the chime of the second one when he crossed the main streets, bustling with noise and floating letters that always drove him to distraction.
Quickly, he read the text messages:
Mummy wouldn’t be proud. -MH
Which, in all honesty, made Sherlock’s gut feel a little hollow, but it was only a few clicks before that was deleted and forgotten.
Sent only fifteen minutes earlier: I’m home, where are you?
Sherlock blinked and looked at the time. It was nearing 1am in the morning. John had told him not to wait up.
The date hadn't gone as well as expected. He purposely ignored the welling of vindictive joy and tampered it down to a mild hum.
Glancing at the red-stained stencil, with the words bored written over and over, Sherlock had an idea. He calculated he would roughly have enough time to make it work.
I’ll be home soon, Sherlock texted as he walked to one of his favourite suppliers.
Art suppliers, that is. The one he used-a long time ago-for cocaine was all the way on the other side of town. Drugs were one of the furthest things on his mind right now though.
He was so engrossed in the ideas around his new project, he barely noticed that he left the stencil and roller behind in a pool of red paint. The Met would have a fun time trying to pin the culprit down: Mycroft would have removed video footage, Sherlock wasn’t stupid enough to have fingerprints lying around, and Lestrade would probably work to keep the fact that someone they hired-a sketch artist, if nothing else-was breaking the law.
-
He was in Belarus interrogating a man. Taunting him by correcting his grammar until he snapped-anger issues, too easy, nothing interesting to record.
Unfortunately he missed out on John’s birthday-as trivial as the celebration was, it still should have been celebrated because it signified John had survived another year. A comfort he found was in the fact John should have been getting his gift in the post very soon, if not already.
Sherlock made John a cane. It was more symbolic than practical (as he explained in the letter attached). John could go most days without it, but on those bad days, Sherlock felt he could do with something a little better than the hospital standard walking stick he had been making do with for so long.
It was made of mahogany, but Sherlock didn’t consider that the special part. What was special was that he carved into it, in every language he knew and some that he didn’t, the words and characters for protection and strength.
The only exception was one sentence in the middle of the cane: in a very small font, written in Latin, Sherlock had etched, ‘Property of the sketch artist’. Not that John would ever know about that.
The best place to hide a book was in a library. The best place to hide insanity was in more insanity.
-
Sherlock Holmes was an artist, not an entomologist. He had no idea about the scientific name for the common house fly. He did, on the other hand, know the names for the poisonous insects, the quiet killers.
Did you know that bees killed more people than sharks every year?
Bees just happened to be beautiful and interesting just as well.
He painted the window of his bedroom with them all buzzing around in glass paints so the when the sunlight shone through the images they would shine. Around them floated their scientific classification and certain paragraphs from texts he liked describing them.
The words ranged from professional, analytical-opportunistic foragers, and will gather pollen from a variety of plants-to poems that caught his eye.
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
Sherlock vaguely wondered whether he should go and somehow see the real thing. He wanted to see the chaos of those little insects dance around him, far too fast for the eye to catch and concentrate on, and he wondered whether he could figure out their secrets too. Really though, just seeing them would be enough.
One day.
Perhaps when life wasn’t quite so hectic and the allure of the city lights wasn’t so strong.
-
John and Sherlock rushed into their flat, soaked from head to toe, dripping water on to the carpet. The rains outside pelted the roof and winds roared like a thousand hungry beasts waiting for a feed. It was lucky that they weren’t caught somewhere far from home.
Sherlock was sniffing, rummaging through his bag, moaning at how his things were ruined, positively ruined forever and as paper turned to pulp in his hands, he looked up. The words died in his throat.
“John, don’t move.”
“What?” John had his back to Sherlock, struggling out of his heavy jumper weighed down with water. It was caught around his head, trapping his arms in a raised position.
Sherlock watched with an artist’s eye, following the curve of John’s body, the movement of the muscles, the tan lines and the faint covering of hair. But the most fascinating thing was the interlocking webbing that spread from a point on his shoulder, the only sign of a devastating impact.
“Sherlock, what is it?” The worry creeping in John’s voice brought Sherlock back down to Earth, where he was soaking wet and holding a stack of papers crumbling underneath his hands and-
“It’s nothing, but don’t move.”
He ran into another room, waterlogged jeans restricting his movements, but he wasn’t thinking of that when he grabbed his newest canvas and brought it to the living room. John was still there, his face confused but pliant for the moment, watching with a curious gaze as Sherlock searched the shelves for his watercolours.
Squeezing some of the water from his scarf in a little well on his plastic palette, he announced, “This will be quick, I swear.”
“I’m starting to get worried here,” John said mildly. “Can I at least remove the blasted jumper?”
“A moment, a moment,” Sherlock replied, distracted, hands blurring almost as they danced around the white, changing the pristine blankness into a blast of colours.
Somewhere during the chaos of Sherlock working, John had removed his jumper, tossed on the back of a chair in the kitchen. However, he stood dutifully with his back to Sherlock, even though the clothes he still had were clinging and uncomfortable.
Sherlock’s pants didn’t bother him so much, but his coat and scarf and long-sleeved shirt, well, they were all in the way, and they disappeared too, all in their own time finding their way to the floor. Except for the scarf, that had somehow landed itself on the mantelpiece next to the skull.
By the time he finally said, “Done,” voice soft and tired, both men’s hairs were barely dripping now, dried from the warm air of their flat.
John spun around on his heel-he was still wearing his socks, still looking as drenched as if he had walked through puddles, how uncomfortable-and looked at Sherlock with a gaze of awe. Sherlock turned his head away, face flushed, and John asked,
“So will I be able to have a look at this then?”
Neither seemed to care that they were shirtless together; why would they? Contrary to popular belief, they were neither lovers nor partners. Well, they were partners of an entirely different kind, one that had a little more complexities of emotion than the brackets of love or lust. It was more powerful than friendship, ran deeper than a brotherhood and wasn’t quite a perfect kinship as you might believe.
Still, it was so many levels close to perfect.
Humming, Sherlock ran his fingers through his hair, dragging paint residue through it as he did so, and then he nodded, swiftly, stepping out of the way for John to get a good look.
When John saw the painting, he gasped.
It was a rough piece, watercolours blending together without enough time to dry and set properly with acrylics occasionally causing small rises from the canvas in sections Sherlock was too busy to wait for it to dry just enough. Still, in all its haste, it was beautiful.
The background was neglected in detail, dark shapes of no consequence almost forgotten. What was captured in stark detail so unlike a photograph was John. More specifically, his back and the scar that made it unique.
“I was right when I first met you,” Sherlock murmured from behind John. “I did need to create your skin colour from scratch. None of the bottled ones or the shades I’ve made before quite matched it.”
In the picture, John was painted with dark clothes that almost melded into the background, whereas his skin almost glowed. For a second, Sherlock could see his roommate’s lack of comprehension and then-
A cock of the head, John leaned a little forward and then froze.
One of the greatest defining aspects of Sherlock’s art was the writing. And Sherlock had writing in white all around John’s body, locking into something tangible all the amazing and wonderful things he had observed over the time they had spent together.
There were so many words, the image almost glowed.
For a while they stood in silence, before John conceded, “Not wanting to sound vain, but this is brilliant.” He didn’t say brilliant like he did at a crime scene, or the way he would bite out brilliant sarcastically when paying the bills or facing off with an armed criminal.
It was something entirely rawer and completely more than any of that.
The smile Sherlock shared with John, secretive and humbled, almost glowed, too.
-
When Sherlock was younger, he had no patience for games.
Board games, after the initial intrigue, were boring, vibrantly coloured for all the wrong reasons. They grabbed attention and abused it by killing it, wasting time.
Sherlock didn’t like the physically demanding games because he had better things to do with his energy. Kicking a ball around and around and around seemed like a waste. It was more interesting to sit at the sidelines and paint the movement of the ball spinning, the colours of the players and the background-red, green-yellow, teal-blending together like broken shards of a stained glass window all chucked together in a blender.
Sometimes he went down to the local pool because the way the light bounced off the water, in just the right way, could be absolutely captivating.
“He’s your biggest fan.”
The only games Mycroft wanted to play were mind games, and Sherlock indulged him because it was one of the ways they bonded. It was far from conventional, but the Holmes boys were always considered a little off, a little strange and weird, so nothing more was said of it. In those games, Sherlock liked to think he let Mycroft win.
Sometimes, anyway.
Then there were other greater pursuits to enjoy, life and art and blooddeathgore. It was a cacophony of noise and sight and feel and everything. Sherlock didn’t ever really think about playing games when all of this was so much better, so much more stimulating.
“He likes to be called an art connoisseur, but I reckon he’s art thief by the stuff he claims to have.”
“Why should that interest me?”
“Because, Mr. Holmes, he intends on adding your work to the list.”
“How flattering.”
“I don’t know. I hear artwork is worth more when the artist is dead.”
In the beginning, he didn’t want to call it a game. And it really wasn’t, to begin with. It was a puzzle and legitimate prize and a problem all in one. He wasn’t quite sure where or when it began to get so interesting.
Perhaps it was when he nearly died, at the hands of a pill he almost swallowed. (He had painted that pill in the following morning, every granule inside the clear capsule-white, ash and cadet grey-superimposed on his mind’s eye, each one with a list of possible poisons listed next to it in ink that stained his fingers for days.)
“Moriarty!”
Then again, perhaps it was when he was faced with symbols painted in bright yellow spray paint, taunting him by forcing him to hide in galleries and find the key in the forest of colour. (John didn’t know this, no one knew this, but all of Sherlock’s sketchbooks he had done while on the case had all the people he drew with their eyes blocked with a stroke of bright yellow. Next to each one, he had written, death is coming.)
It wasn’t quite so fun when John was involved-not as a saviour, but as a hostage-and even bringing Sarah along added that extra element of discomfort. Not just who Sherlock cared for, but whoever cared for what Sherlock cared for would be taken, too. For a brief while it again stopped being a game and reverted back into a mystery. Something that needed more than his paints and his pencils and his brilliant artist’s eye.
But his attention-when focussed led to genius-could not last that long and he drifted on to other projects. He categorised every single one of his paintbrushes (and of those he found, the number topped near a thousand). He discovered that painting with food products was not allowed, though even John had to admit that the experiment with food colouring had gone astoundingly well, far better than predicted.
Sherlock even had the time to wander around and check up on all the major players of his homeless network, sketching them so should they ever go missing-kidnapped or something awful-then the police would have something to go on, especially when they cringed away from photos.
Except ignoring, but never quite forgetting, the problem just exacerbated it.
“Why does anyone do anything? Because I'm bored. We were made for each other, Sherlock.”
The shade of white on the sneakers was off. The colours of the blood on the seat weren’t right. The corpse was wrong, wrong, wrong. Why weren’t people looking?
How come they didn’t see?
“Ten... Nine... Eight...”
It had to be a game now, Sherlock thought. Games had rules and protocol and this one had a timer. In the voice of a child.
His eyes scanned the painting back and forth, looking for something, anything, to give him an answer. Voices, yelling, in the background. All distractions.
He could feel his mouth rattling off facts and notes about the piece-tastefully done, a classic piece, but there’s something off about it, I know it, it has to be false, what is it, don’t tell me, I can see the brushstrokes aren’t quite right, great forgery, but it has to be something greater, has to be something bigger, why don’t I know, why can’t I see this?!
There was adrenalin flowing through his veins, poisoned with a tinge of guilt. He was an artist, one of so many kinds and he couldn’t figure out the crime involving art? What was wrong with him? Wrong question. What was wrong with the painting...?
“Seven.”
Fingers tapped against his leg. He had nothing to sketch on, nothing to write with, nothing to copy down the world around him and make things clearer. Too many questions, concentrate-
Oh.
The child recited the countdown, “Six... Five...” and Sherlock was still reeling from the brilliance of his epiphany.
“The Van Buuren supernova!”
(Later, after John had smiled tiredly at him and told him, “Good work,” Sherlock had repainted the Vermeer, a proper picture-perfect forgery. He scowled at it and taken a marker and wrote all over it. Wrote the names of all the people that had died thus far in the game. They thought he didn’t know the people who had died, thought he kept them faceless. No, how could he? They were all over the news and even though that was trivial, a part of his mind recorded the information. When he set the canvas alight, he deleted their names and decided to start this game afresh.)
Should he have felt so guilty for feeling so alive?
⌘
A/N: YAY, look at the pretty update! *Sighs and collapses.* So... tired...
Also, the bee poem Sherlock referenced is actually The Pedigree of Honey by Emily Dickinson.
[ chapter eight ]