Ink in the Ice
Title: Ink in the Ice
Author: marshwiggledyke
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Rating: PG-13 for harsh survival situations, pre-neolithic pagan magic ceremonies, heavily implying the existence of cannibalism practices.
Characters: Mycroft before he was Mycroft, Sherlock before he was Sherlock. Two OMCs, one alive, one recently dead.
Author's Notes: This is a prequel to an AU in the works, so I don't expect people to really get what the hell is going on until wafflestories and I actually publish the main story. I decided to start from the beginning, or as near to a beginning I could get. Mycroft is a ageless, sentient tattoo. So is Sherlock. But you always have to start somewhere.
Heavily inspired by the death of Otzi, some of the elements from Terry Pratchett's Nation, Kit's Wilderness, the amazing indy film The Man From Earth, and half a dozen different tattoos.
*
Little Snake awakes, and it is cold. He’s small, and exposed, and his human is going to die soon, Little Snake stretched taut over his shivering ribs and under his thick, rank furs. They’d wandered out onto the ice alone about a week ago, chasing the wild reindeer. To become a man, they must bring back a kill to the tribe all on their own. There will be feasting for the boy-who-died-and-came-back-a-man, and the tribe leader will cut out the heart of the beast with his beautiful bone-handled knife and eat it.
His boy is praying to his power animal, rubbing a thumb around the tight coil of Little Snake on his sternum, begging for wisdom, for cunning. He’s too smart a human to know that the small praying for strength will get him much; it’s why his pre-hunting ceremony left him inscribed with a snake, instead of a bear, or one of the huge deadly wolves. The strong pull down their prey. The weak must trick it.
Little Snake tries to be reassuring in his reply, a soft, sibulant hiss into the mind of a frightened boy, but he doesn’t hold out much hope. They’d lost the small flint and the leather pouch of twigs and dead leaves when a rangy snowlion took an interest in the young hare they’d trapped and been cooking last night. No sleep, no food, no fire. It’s a forgone conclusion, really. He tells the boy to follow a star at random, just to keep him moving, just to keep him warm, to keep him from thinking what Little Snake has no choice in contemplating.
There’s demons on the ice, says the boy a little while later, trudging along the elegant, impossible curve of a crevasse and looking for some way across, so he can keep following his meaningless point of light. The elders told stories…
The elders are stupid men, barely past their prime, who love to watch big eyes widen in small faces. There are enough real dangers out here as it is, like if that snowlion decides to follow their trail, or if they run into one of those tribes from the north…
I’ll bite the demons to pieces if they come near you, Little Snake tells him, and the boy believes.
He believes even harder when they come across a natural bridge across the chasm, a healing in the seam of ice. The boy darts forward, eager to head in his chosen direction (predetermined by the gods, of course), and his tattoo doesn’t have the time to say no, don’t, it’s snow…
They fall.
Little Snake is constantly amazed at the fragile hardiness of humans. One small hole in the skull and they’ll never get up again. But then there are the ones who cling to life, who will shrug off a mauling from a cave bear, or the loss of a limb. This one, starving, exhausted, weak, falls twenty or thirty spearlengths into the blue abyssal heart of a glacier, and lands in several years accumulation of soft, dry snow with a paff.
No doubt Little Snake will receive the credit for this luck of the draw. His human groans and splutters and digs himself out of the snowpile, staggers a few steps, and retches an empty stomach against an ice wall.
It’s a lot warmer down here, out of the wind, and the boy, unable to think about the enormity of working his way back up the slope, shakily retrieves most of his supplies, and starts walking along the alien blue path in the dark, wherever it leads.
And that’s when they trip over the dead body of the northern tribesman.
His human is terrified of it, muttering a ward against angry ghosts, thumbing the spiral of Little Snake for protection. If this man had survived his fall (and he patently hasn’t, judging by the stoved-in head), no doubt he would have hidden and killed the boy as he passed, then salted what nourishment he could have scraped off the boy’s bones. More ‘luck’.
Take his knife, hisses Little Snake, ever the pragmatist. Take his mammoth-fur mittens. I’ll keep his angry spirit from hurting yours.
It’s a dicier affair trying to get the boy to take the stranger’s cured meat, but Little Snake can smell reindeer a mile off, as he reassures his human (a lie. He can smell reindeer when held in the hand, and his human needs food. And after all, there’s no reason he shouldn’t be given more counsel when it comes to hunting reindeer later.).
Cautiously, the boy pulls off the warmer mittens off one, then the other hand. Hidden in the boy’s furs as he crouches over his work, Little Snake misses what makes his human cry out and jump back. At first.
And then he sees (as the boy reopens his furs to trace Little Snake’s body yet again for good luck), cupped in the palm, a, tiny, miserable, serpentine coil.
No, no, he won’t hurt you, he says, quickly, Go back, I…
He doesn’t know quite how he knows this, this feeling of instant recognition, but it shouts at him like a language he’s never learnt because it is sort of packed-in with what he is.
It’s his power animal, gibbers the boy, it’s his totem and it’ll kill me if I-
Really, it is astounding how accurate human guesswork can be, even if it’s based on total nonsense. Sometimes Little Snake wonders if they’re almost intelligent.
Does he look like he could hurt anything? Look, you can have two power animals. Press the man’s hand to your chest. It’ll be alright.
The boy is squeamish, for some reason. Do it, insists Little Snake, and the boy gets to his knees, and, shaking, places the corpse’s tattoo to his own.
It’s the work of a moment to pull his brother from the dead skin to living flesh, and the little tattoo shivers, stirs, squirms as the larger snake noses him about. Like him, his brother is scaled, but there are soft feathery spines, an underdeveloped mane of fluff around the face. The head is different, longer, less triangular. And then there are the short, stubby legs curled into the body, like a panther at rest. Somehow, though the concept of birth to a tattoo is fuzzy at best (he’s yet to understand the concept of agelessness that comes part and parcel with their kind) he understands that the small form cupped in his coils is much younger than himself.
It makes a certain amount of sense, he theorizes. Humans have drawn from nature for years, have imitated, have struggled to master it. Now they’re trying to make a better power animal to counteract the demon shadows thrown on their tents, and here he is, a better serpent, a baby dragon, newly minted and half-dead on a half-frozen northern tribesman in a crevasse, his perfect little claws sheathed because he’s just too young to know what to do with them yet.
Eat some of the dried reindeer while you walk, Little Snake tells his human, who has broken out in a proper sweat at being in such close-quarters with one of the wendigo people, even dead, This crevasse is old, there’ll be a way out. Walk until you’re warm- but mind you walk quietly, to keep the ice spirits from noticing us and getting angry- then wrap yourself up and sleep. We’ll hunt the reindeer tomorrow, and you’ll become a man.
The wind moan-sings over the carved lip up above, like the earth has fashioned for itself an enormous ceremonial pipe, an uncanny range impossible to reach with human lungs and whittled bone. Little Dragon curls contentedly into the heat of his older brother, opens a little, toothless mouth- the jaw nearly inverts his whole pointy head- and yawns.
*
Years (and nearly a thousand human bodies) later, Mycroft can no longer remember any of this particular lifetime. His own memories are imperfect, and flake away eventually, just like the ochre the ancient humans once painted on their dead. Only that one, perfect moment remains; where his baby brother- possibly even too young to grasp language- myops like a kitten into his face, and goes back to sleep, safe and protected.