The Problem with Sign Names Chap. 3
Mycroft worried about his brother. He truly did, and although he mainly told himself it was because of his brother's deafness, he couldn't help but wonder if he'd have been like this regardless of Sherlock's ability to hear.
It was so easy to pass of so many of Sherlock's problems onto his deafness. His lack of friends growing up, most certainly, could be blamed on the fact he couldn't communicate with most of his peers. His lack of stability as he grew up into a teenager could also be put on the fact he changed to a school for the deaf after their father's death when Sherlock was 13.
Their father had not been a particularly nice one.
Their father had never liked Sherlock using sign language, insisting that he try to speak, that he lip-read all the time. He had made Sherlock grow his dark curls long, a stark contrast to his brothers' neatly cut hair, in some poor attempt to hide his hearing aid, a habit that still, Mycroft noticed with no slight amount of (although he dare not admit it) pity, lingered with Sherlock long after the hearing aids had been forgotten and neglected.
Visitors to the house were never informed of Sherlock's deafness; instead he was made out to be stupid and ignorant, although even as adults neither sibling could understand how that was a better impression than having a deaf child. But as his father had said many a time to Sherlock's long suffering mother, "one simply mustn't allow him to close himself off from normal people, he's just not concentrating hard enough!"
Mycroft had been sent to the local prep-school, Westbourne House; a smart, public school set in the countryside with boarders allowed from the age of seven years, following in the footsteps of every other "normal" Holmes boy throughout the generations.
Sherlock was, instead, home-schooled as a child by an elderly, greying tutor called David Hynes.
Hynes had a deaf wife and had taught Sherlock BSL as well as the subjects that father did approve of.
At eleven years of age Sherlock was sent to Harrow with an interpreter. Mycroft wasn't sure if his little brother would have been able to make friends should he have been hearing, but he certainly didn't make any being Deaf. Not the creepy deaf kid who spoke like a drunk.
Their father died when Sherlock was twelve and Mycroft was 19 and studying PPE in Cambridge. His death was a loss that not many people mourned, their weary mother included. A mother that had always blamed her son's deafness on herself.
He was pulled out of Harrow immediately by his mother and sent to attend St. John's Boarding School for Deaf Boys, a decision that Mycroft backed up, although he questioned this on a number of occasions. One memory that stood out vividly in his mind was the headmistress wrote to tell him that Sherlock had been teased by his peers and locked in an abandoned classroom. With very few hearing people in the building no one had heard him bang against the wooden door. A cleaner had found him 16 hours after he'd been locked in.
Sherlock had refused to respond to any of Mycroft's increasingly anxious letters.
He had finished secondary school the same way he started. Very much alone.
Mycroft had poked and prodded at him, trying to encourage him to attend college and then continue his studies and to go onto university. Chemistry, Mycroft had said, you'd be a huge asset to the field.
Sherlock had simply glared, pressing his right thumb to his tongue, jabbing in aggressively into his left palm before pointing his fist, thumb still outstretched over his shoulder.
Such crude ways of asking Mycroft to leave didn't stop the man from bothering him.
Deaf clubs, Sherlock. It would help that hobby of yours, detective work. Knowing how people work and all that.
Deaf pubs, even. I know you're underage, but I'm not naive enough to believe that will stop you. There's one nearby, I can arrange a lift for you.
Sport. There's a boxing club on Wednesday morning in the town hall.
Eventually Mycroft gave up on his little brother.
Sherlock left mainstream education aged 15 and 8 months.
He left home 3 months, 12 days later on his sixteenth birthday.
Mycroft had kept up with the boy, if only on CCTV, occasionally sending in help when he'd taken too much cocaine or a deal had gone a bit wrong. One night he had to watch his little brother resort to more…desperate and unsavoury, to say the least, measures in a bid to fuel his habits. Mycroft made sure he was never short on money after that.
Aged eighteen Sherlock OD'ed in a strange man's house. A lethal mix of coke and morphine. His heart gave out once on his way over the hospital and he'd been put into a medically induced coma for four days afterwards. After that Mycroft forced him into rehab.
After that whole incident Mycroft had also taken the liberty of tweaking some university entrant letters. Sherlock was accepted into Oxford to study chemistry. He dropped out after five terms, diving straight back into the drugs that his older brother had hoped he left behind.
Mycroft still remembered how immensely weary he had felt after the news had been relayed to him. It was that tired, hopeless fog, a lethargy that provided him an excuse to take the rest of the day off work.
But there had never been any friends. There had been countless drug dealers and numerous, faceless people he hung around with for the sake of being able to scab a piece of crack of them. But not friends. Never friends.
That's why Mycroft had dropped everything to act as a terp when he had heard the news of a man, a rather interesting man at that, was considering sharing a flat with his brother.
Korea would simply have to wait a few more hours.
Upon arrival and the flat two-hundred-and-twenty-one 'b' was greeted by an apartment that was small, cluttered with mess, some of which Mycroft recognized as being his own. Books that had gone missing when Sherlock had stayed with him, a laptop that certainly belonged to Mycroft at some stage in the last trimester. His favourite tie lay half melted by a Bunsen burner on the kitchen table.
Other items he simply recognized from their childhood, a stuffed moose head that belonged to their great grandfather, where Sherlock has super-glued the headphones on, convinced the moose the listening in on his music. He had been high on acid at the time. (1) All of mother's old records were stacked precariously on the worn-out armchair, most likely second hand (Mycroft was glad for the small bottle of antiseptic hand gel that resided in his pocket.)
And there was this man, propped up awkwardly up on a cane, a small crease forming between his brow whenever he shuffled to change his position.
Blond hair, a jumper the colour of porridge, worn denim jeans, hospital issued cane. Bland, much like porridge Mycroft supposed. He held the cane in his right hand, although it was also his right leg that was damaged. He should be holding it in his left, easier balance, less strain. The man was a doctor; he knew this, so obviously his left shoulder had been injured. Slightly more interesting, he supposed.
Overall Doctor John Watson was not the man Mycroft had been expecting. He'd expected a man in his early 20's, straight out of university, middle class upbringing, if he was able to afford a flat share with a postcode like NW1, a young man who was in slight awe of Sherlock, most likely a Deaf boy too then, but mainly wanted a quick way to drugs and money.
John didn't tick any of those boxes, bar to possessing male genetalia.
What had interested Mycroft the most, though, was what he heard whilst standing on the staircase, texting his little brother to warn him of his arrival.
Sherlock had been talking, talking to John.
For as long as he could remember Sherlock had only, very rarely, spoken orally to a stranger, and only when it was absolutely unavoidable. Speech therapy had been nothing short of a nightmare for him; such slow progress, people watching him, patronizing him. Mycroft remembered being aged 14 with a 7 year old Sherlock sat cross legged on the floor of his bedroom, trying to form words with frustrating inaccuracy. R's were forgotten, pauses too long between words, intonation non-existent. The first syllable of each sentence seemed to be dropped in a rush to finish the sentence. Such sessions usually resulted in temper tantrums where Sherlock would scream as loudly as he could just to watch everyone else flinch back from such a noise. His throat would later be soothed by mummy's lemon and honey tea.
By the time he was 14 he had had enough of the seemingly endless stream of therapists, each giving up one after the other, tired of the boy's sulking during the sessions. Not even mummy could persuade him to give it one more shot and with their father dead no one demanded that he do it.
There had been other therapists, too. Ones that Sherlock had loathed. A terp had sat in on them all, after a failure to find a shrink fluent in the language that the nine year old boy so required.
Mycroft remembered Sherlock reluctantly passing on his diagnoses clearly, his hands facing outwards, framing his face before pointing down, into the chest his gaze meaningfully averted. At the time is had only mean introverted. A characteristic, definitely. But signs don't work just like that, Mycroft knew. Interpretation was what it said on the tin, not a translation. When he has asked for clarification Sherlock had glared before signing again, this time a 'v' shaped hands pointing together in front of his chest, twisting alternately from the wrists. It was a sign to indicate lack of eye contact. He added a hasty finger spelled A S at the end.
Sherlock had wished to challenge the shrink, claiming he was wrong, that the questions were different. Questions such as "do you feel as if people stare at you?" (I don't think they do, I know they do. It's because I sign, it's because they think I'm an idiot, not because I'm paranoid).
The shrink's own observations hadn't helped either. Sherlock is an extremely blunt child, stares incessantly and does not sugar coat his meaning.Of course Sherlock had stared; he had been trying to gauge everything about a man. Reading his body language, facial expressions, even trying to lip-read, although the old fool had a stupid handle-bar moustache that made the task nigh-impossible. And of course Sherlock was blunt; it was part of the Deaf culture, it was hard to mince words when one used signs and obvious facial expression to get the point across.
In the end Mycroft had destroyed all the files mentioning the entire thing and neither sibling had brought up the topic again.
He had never forgotten the diagnoses though. It had been easy to pin all of Sherlock's problems on two things.
His deafness and his believed Aspergers Syndrome (2).
That was when Mycroft had really begun worrying. When he was just sixteen years old and his little brother was nine. He had made sure to protect his baby brother from all the dangers in the world, a task which he eventually failed miserably at. Mycroft had painted an image of the life Sherlock would leave, a miserable, pitiful thing. A forensic scientist or some kind of police work, although Mycroft was aware that he would have to pull strings on the latter, deaf police were not allowed (3).
He had turned out so much worse for such a long time. Before that policeman, Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade, had turned up and taken the misguided imbecile under his wing. Before he got a job that he excelled at, that he loved.
Before, it now appears, he met John Watson. John Watson, in all his ignorance of sign and of the Deaf community.
John Watson. The first man his brother had willingly spoken to without due cause sincehe told Mycroft to eff off, aged fourteen when Mycroft had tried to push him into speech therapy.
Mycroft hadn't expected to hear his voice again. Not his brother's voice, now apparently broken. More slurred and incorrect than Mycroft ever remembered it being, to the point Mycroft could barely understand what he was saying.
John Watson seemingly could.
John Watson was good enough for Sherlock.
Therefore, John Watson was certainly good enough for Mycroft.
____________________
This idea was told to me by my wonderful beta, OddlySane. It has since become my head canon.
The signs described as for autism. I'm not a medical terp. So I just added on a finger spelled A S for Aspergers Syndrome
I'm not sure on the laws now, but at the time Sherlock would have been a teenager, HoH people weren't allowed in, never mind deaf people.
Thank you so much for reading 3
As always, reviews are really useful!
Whether you want certain topics breached or explained, whether you just wanted to say you hated it, it's all really good feedback! My inbox is also open to everyone and anyone.
I think it's probably obvious that I struggled somewhat with this one and I'm worried I tried to tackle too many subjects in such a short chapter. The next one will hopefully be more based on the episode and everything, rather than background information. If people want to see certain things happen then please, please tell me!
It was so easy to pass of so many of Sherlock's problems onto his deafness. His lack of friends growing up, most certainly, could be blamed on the fact he couldn't communicate with most of his peers. His lack of stability as he grew up into a teenager could also be put on the fact he changed to a school for the deaf after their father's death when Sherlock was 13.
Their father had not been a particularly nice one.
Their father had never liked Sherlock using sign language, insisting that he try to speak, that he lip-read all the time. He had made Sherlock grow his dark curls long, a stark contrast to his brothers' neatly cut hair, in some poor attempt to hide his hearing aid, a habit that still, Mycroft noticed with no slight amount of (although he dare not admit it) pity, lingered with Sherlock long after the hearing aids had been forgotten and neglected.
Visitors to the house were never informed of Sherlock's deafness; instead he was made out to be stupid and ignorant, although even as adults neither sibling could understand how that was a better impression than having a deaf child. But as his father had said many a time to Sherlock's long suffering mother, "one simply mustn't allow him to close himself off from normal people, he's just not concentrating hard enough!"
Mycroft had been sent to the local prep-school, Westbourne House; a smart, public school set in the countryside with boarders allowed from the age of seven years, following in the footsteps of every other "normal" Holmes boy throughout the generations.
Sherlock was, instead, home-schooled as a child by an elderly, greying tutor called David Hynes.
Hynes had a deaf wife and had taught Sherlock BSL as well as the subjects that father did approve of.
At eleven years of age Sherlock was sent to Harrow with an interpreter. Mycroft wasn't sure if his little brother would have been able to make friends should he have been hearing, but he certainly didn't make any being Deaf. Not the creepy deaf kid who spoke like a drunk.
Their father died when Sherlock was twelve and Mycroft was 19 and studying PPE in Cambridge. His death was a loss that not many people mourned, their weary mother included. A mother that had always blamed her son's deafness on herself.
He was pulled out of Harrow immediately by his mother and sent to attend St. John's Boarding School for Deaf Boys, a decision that Mycroft backed up, although he questioned this on a number of occasions. One memory that stood out vividly in his mind was the headmistress wrote to tell him that Sherlock had been teased by his peers and locked in an abandoned classroom. With very few hearing people in the building no one had heard him bang against the wooden door. A cleaner had found him 16 hours after he'd been locked in.
Sherlock had refused to respond to any of Mycroft's increasingly anxious letters.
He had finished secondary school the same way he started. Very much alone.
Mycroft had poked and prodded at him, trying to encourage him to attend college and then continue his studies and to go onto university. Chemistry, Mycroft had said, you'd be a huge asset to the field.
Sherlock had simply glared, pressing his right thumb to his tongue, jabbing in aggressively into his left palm before pointing his fist, thumb still outstretched over his shoulder.
Such crude ways of asking Mycroft to leave didn't stop the man from bothering him.
Deaf clubs, Sherlock. It would help that hobby of yours, detective work. Knowing how people work and all that.
Deaf pubs, even. I know you're underage, but I'm not naive enough to believe that will stop you. There's one nearby, I can arrange a lift for you.
Sport. There's a boxing club on Wednesday morning in the town hall.
Eventually Mycroft gave up on his little brother.
Sherlock left mainstream education aged 15 and 8 months.
He left home 3 months, 12 days later on his sixteenth birthday.
Mycroft had kept up with the boy, if only on CCTV, occasionally sending in help when he'd taken too much cocaine or a deal had gone a bit wrong. One night he had to watch his little brother resort to more…desperate and unsavoury, to say the least, measures in a bid to fuel his habits. Mycroft made sure he was never short on money after that.
Aged eighteen Sherlock OD'ed in a strange man's house. A lethal mix of coke and morphine. His heart gave out once on his way over the hospital and he'd been put into a medically induced coma for four days afterwards. After that Mycroft forced him into rehab.
After that whole incident Mycroft had also taken the liberty of tweaking some university entrant letters. Sherlock was accepted into Oxford to study chemistry. He dropped out after five terms, diving straight back into the drugs that his older brother had hoped he left behind.
Mycroft still remembered how immensely weary he had felt after the news had been relayed to him. It was that tired, hopeless fog, a lethargy that provided him an excuse to take the rest of the day off work.
But there had never been any friends. There had been countless drug dealers and numerous, faceless people he hung around with for the sake of being able to scab a piece of crack of them. But not friends. Never friends.
That's why Mycroft had dropped everything to act as a terp when he had heard the news of a man, a rather interesting man at that, was considering sharing a flat with his brother.
Korea would simply have to wait a few more hours.
Upon arrival and the flat two-hundred-and-twenty-one 'b' was greeted by an apartment that was small, cluttered with mess, some of which Mycroft recognized as being his own. Books that had gone missing when Sherlock had stayed with him, a laptop that certainly belonged to Mycroft at some stage in the last trimester. His favourite tie lay half melted by a Bunsen burner on the kitchen table.
Other items he simply recognized from their childhood, a stuffed moose head that belonged to their great grandfather, where Sherlock has super-glued the headphones on, convinced the moose the listening in on his music. He had been high on acid at the time. (1) All of mother's old records were stacked precariously on the worn-out armchair, most likely second hand (Mycroft was glad for the small bottle of antiseptic hand gel that resided in his pocket.)
And there was this man, propped up awkwardly up on a cane, a small crease forming between his brow whenever he shuffled to change his position.
Blond hair, a jumper the colour of porridge, worn denim jeans, hospital issued cane. Bland, much like porridge Mycroft supposed. He held the cane in his right hand, although it was also his right leg that was damaged. He should be holding it in his left, easier balance, less strain. The man was a doctor; he knew this, so obviously his left shoulder had been injured. Slightly more interesting, he supposed.
Overall Doctor John Watson was not the man Mycroft had been expecting. He'd expected a man in his early 20's, straight out of university, middle class upbringing, if he was able to afford a flat share with a postcode like NW1, a young man who was in slight awe of Sherlock, most likely a Deaf boy too then, but mainly wanted a quick way to drugs and money.
John didn't tick any of those boxes, bar to possessing male genetalia.
What had interested Mycroft the most, though, was what he heard whilst standing on the staircase, texting his little brother to warn him of his arrival.
Sherlock had been talking, talking to John.
For as long as he could remember Sherlock had only, very rarely, spoken orally to a stranger, and only when it was absolutely unavoidable. Speech therapy had been nothing short of a nightmare for him; such slow progress, people watching him, patronizing him. Mycroft remembered being aged 14 with a 7 year old Sherlock sat cross legged on the floor of his bedroom, trying to form words with frustrating inaccuracy. R's were forgotten, pauses too long between words, intonation non-existent. The first syllable of each sentence seemed to be dropped in a rush to finish the sentence. Such sessions usually resulted in temper tantrums where Sherlock would scream as loudly as he could just to watch everyone else flinch back from such a noise. His throat would later be soothed by mummy's lemon and honey tea.
By the time he was 14 he had had enough of the seemingly endless stream of therapists, each giving up one after the other, tired of the boy's sulking during the sessions. Not even mummy could persuade him to give it one more shot and with their father dead no one demanded that he do it.
There had been other therapists, too. Ones that Sherlock had loathed. A terp had sat in on them all, after a failure to find a shrink fluent in the language that the nine year old boy so required.
Mycroft remembered Sherlock reluctantly passing on his diagnoses clearly, his hands facing outwards, framing his face before pointing down, into the chest his gaze meaningfully averted. At the time is had only mean introverted. A characteristic, definitely. But signs don't work just like that, Mycroft knew. Interpretation was what it said on the tin, not a translation. When he has asked for clarification Sherlock had glared before signing again, this time a 'v' shaped hands pointing together in front of his chest, twisting alternately from the wrists. It was a sign to indicate lack of eye contact. He added a hasty finger spelled A S at the end.
Sherlock had wished to challenge the shrink, claiming he was wrong, that the questions were different. Questions such as "do you feel as if people stare at you?" (I don't think they do, I know they do. It's because I sign, it's because they think I'm an idiot, not because I'm paranoid).
The shrink's own observations hadn't helped either. Sherlock is an extremely blunt child, stares incessantly and does not sugar coat his meaning.Of course Sherlock had stared; he had been trying to gauge everything about a man. Reading his body language, facial expressions, even trying to lip-read, although the old fool had a stupid handle-bar moustache that made the task nigh-impossible. And of course Sherlock was blunt; it was part of the Deaf culture, it was hard to mince words when one used signs and obvious facial expression to get the point across.
In the end Mycroft had destroyed all the files mentioning the entire thing and neither sibling had brought up the topic again.
He had never forgotten the diagnoses though. It had been easy to pin all of Sherlock's problems on two things.
His deafness and his believed Aspergers Syndrome (2).
That was when Mycroft had really begun worrying. When he was just sixteen years old and his little brother was nine. He had made sure to protect his baby brother from all the dangers in the world, a task which he eventually failed miserably at. Mycroft had painted an image of the life Sherlock would leave, a miserable, pitiful thing. A forensic scientist or some kind of police work, although Mycroft was aware that he would have to pull strings on the latter, deaf police were not allowed (3).
He had turned out so much worse for such a long time. Before that policeman, Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade, had turned up and taken the misguided imbecile under his wing. Before he got a job that he excelled at, that he loved.
Before, it now appears, he met John Watson. John Watson, in all his ignorance of sign and of the Deaf community.
John Watson. The first man his brother had willingly spoken to without due cause sincehe told Mycroft to eff off, aged fourteen when Mycroft had tried to push him into speech therapy.
Mycroft hadn't expected to hear his voice again. Not his brother's voice, now apparently broken. More slurred and incorrect than Mycroft ever remembered it being, to the point Mycroft could barely understand what he was saying.
John Watson seemingly could.
John Watson was good enough for Sherlock.
Therefore, John Watson was certainly good enough for Mycroft.
____________________
This idea was told to me by my wonderful beta, OddlySane. It has since become my head canon.
The signs described as for autism. I'm not a medical terp. So I just added on a finger spelled A S for Aspergers Syndrome
I'm not sure on the laws now, but at the time Sherlock would have been a teenager, HoH people weren't allowed in, never mind deaf people.
Thank you so much for reading 3
As always, reviews are really useful!
Whether you want certain topics breached or explained, whether you just wanted to say you hated it, it's all really good feedback! My inbox is also open to everyone and anyone.
I think it's probably obvious that I struggled somewhat with this one and I'm worried I tried to tackle too many subjects in such a short chapter. The next one will hopefully be more based on the episode and everything, rather than background information. If people want to see certain things happen then please, please tell me!