[Fic] When I Stop
Title: When I Stop
Rating: PG I suppose; a little morbid
Written for the
sherlock_flashfic community on DW.
Sherlock is not quite seven when he sees his first corpse.
Daniel Wainwright tunes the Holmes' piano every three months, and Mycroft nods politely when he and Sherlock pass the man on their way to the village sweet shop. Mycroft is still inside making his careful selections when the lorry plunges over the curb and its side mirror cracks Mr. Wainwright in the back of the head.
Mycroft leaves the shop immediately with his little packets of white mice and toffee, and sees Mr. Wainwright stretched out across the sidewalk with his neck clearly broken. Some bystander is trying to interpose her skirts between Sherlock and the dead man. He, of course, is trying to shove past with a look of annoyed concentration on his face.
Within thirty seconds, Mycroft is smiling and thanking the woman as he takes Sherlock's hand and squeezes his fingers in warning. They keep their hands linked until they are out of sight of the village, on the mile-long footpath that cuts back across the fields to their home.
Neither of them speaks. Most people would be chattering, explaining, trying to comfort a child they assume is in shock. Mycroft is not most people, and Sherlock is not in shock. He merely needs time to process, and Mycroft lets him have it. He pretends to be surprised when Father mentions Mr. Wainwright's death at dinner.
Their parents debate at length over whether to attend the visitation. Mummy worries that it may upset Mycroft and Sherlock. Father disagrees because he believes that practicality is very healthful for children, and in the end they all go. It is open casket, and Sherlock spends a long time looking at Mr. Wainwright's face. Mycroft can see that any moment someone is going to start interfering, so he goes to stand beside Sherlock as if paying his own respects to the deceased.
“I've never seen a dead person before,” Sherlock says. “Only pictures.” Sherlock had become fascinated by anatomy several months prior, and spent hours studying anatomical drawings and photographs in medical texts.
Understanding the finality of death was something of a developmental milestone for children, Mycroft knew. Sherlock tends to handle these stepping stones to adulthood in his own good time and peculiar way. He had displayed self-awareness almost since he first opened his eyes, but had given sharing and imaginative play a miss. He didn't say a word until he was almost four, and then abruptly began speaking in complete sentences. Mycroft can see from Sherlock's face that this is going to be one of those slippery stepping stones.
“You shouldn't stand here much longer,” Mycroft murmurs after a moment. “People already think it strange.”
“People are stupid,” Sherlock says. His posture is stiff but his face placid and thoughtful. Father and Mummy tried to prepare him for this, giving him unasked-for explanations of death: “going to sleep,” “a long journey,” “part of the cycle.” Later on, the vicar will add “going home to the Lord,” a euphemism that Mycroft despises as being particularly vague and insipid.
They follow the hearse to the cemetery after the funeral, because Father agrees with Mycroft that a thing isn't done unless done properly, and sometime during the burial Sherlock wanders away from the grave site. They find him at the bottom of a grave awaiting its casket and it's the work of only a few moments for Father to haul him out.
“Oh darling, did you fall in?” Mummy asks, smoothing his hair from his dirty face.
“No,” Sherlock says sulkily, jerking away. No one asks him why he would jump in a muddy hole, because despite the sure knowledge that Sherlock is not an ordinary child, their parents are always ready to take ordinary childhood behavior for what it seems to be.
On Monday, Sherlock locks himself in a cupboard at his primary school. The head sends a note home with Mycroft when he picks Sherlock up, and of course Mycroft reads it.
“Learn anything?” he asks later, when he is eating the last of his white mice one nibble at a time, and Sherlock is stretched out on the library rug studying a dead spider with a magnifying glass.
“No,” Sherlock says, kicking his legs in the air. “Everyone kept shouting.” Mycroft nods, and saves the nub of the tail for last of all.
Father and Mycroft go to an evening fundraiser at the hospital, and take Sherlock as well because they're having a string quartet and Sherlock adores live violin music. Near the end of the evening, Father finds him in the morgue, where he has crawled into one of the lowest drawers, already occupied by a corpse.
“Well of course I got in with it,” Sherlock says irritably. “I'm hardly strong enough to move it, am I?”
Father and Mummy spend a long time talking to Sherlock, after. They are sure he must be traumatized by seeing poor Mr. Wainwright buried. Sherlock sits drumming his heels against the squashy leather sofa in the study, giving his parents the look that says he thinks they are dreadfully stupid.
Mycroft hurls a look of his own, because his parents are far from stupid and it's not fair to look at them the way you'd look at someone ordinary. He uses the sideways sort of manipulation he's best at to convince them not to send Sherlock to another psychiatrist. Sherlock still hasn’t said anything about the last one and Mycroft only knows what he could glean from the man's notes, which said things like sociopathy and schizoid personality disorder. Talk about dreadfully stupid.
It's best to let Sherlock work these things through on his own. Mycroft fondly remembers his father providing hints that allowed Mycroft to grasp a solution for himself. Now it is Sherlock's turn to solve, and Mycroft's turn to hint. It requires a light touch, because there is nothing more likely to send him into a fit of rage than condescension.
But Mycroft does not quite have a grown man's patience yet, and after Sherlock is caught crawling into a casket in the funeral home, he grows tired of waiting for his brother to get there in his own time.
The next night, once their parents are in bed, Mycroft redresses and pads down the hall to Sherlock's room, where he shakes his little brother awake. They carry their shoes down and put them on outside.
Mycroft flicks on his torch and leads Sherlock down through the culvert to a hole in what was until recently an unbroken stretch of forest floor. Mycroft has carefully dug away the top layer of dirt and shifted the wooden platform that had blocked the hole.
Sherlock's intake of breath is sharp, his tone accusatory. “I've never seen this before. Why didn't I know this was here?”
“Because you did not observe properly.” He descends the ladder and Sherlock follows, breathing rapidly in his excitement. Mycroft plays the torchlight across the interior of the small room, showing Sherlock the cracked slab floor, the wall inscriptions that have blurred with age, and the heavy stone sarcophagus situated in the middle of the chamber.
“This was a burial vault, but the above-ground portions were torn down a long time ago,” Mycroft says. The space is so small that there is no echo; his voice sounds strangely muffled. “It was partially open to the air, but Father had it sealed off a number of years ago.” After Mycroft had fallen in and broken his ankle, but there was no need to share that. Sherlock grips the stone and peers in, and Mycroft shines the torch inside to show him that it's empty. He spent the afternoon carefully removing the fragmentary remains of the former occupant. “The lid was broken,” Mycroft went on. “But it should be dark enough without the torch.”
Sherlock is already trying to pull himself up, jumping and catching his chest against the edge of the sarcophagus, feet scrabbling in an attempt to climb. “Boost me,” he demands, and Mycroft tucks the torch under one arm to oblige. He tumbles Sherlock into the ancient stone casket and climbs the ladder back into the night air. He slides the sheet of wood over the opening, pulls a book from his back pocket, and stretches out on the grass to read by torchlight.
Father routinely sleeps past nine on his days off, and Mummy never stirs until Mrs. Henratty arrives at 7:30 and starts breakfast, so Mycroft gives Sherlock until the sky is just beginning to pink. When he shines the torch into the sarcophagus, Sherlock is sitting up with his knees tucked under his chin. “Well?” Mycroft asks.
“It's not a journey,” Sherlock says decisively. “You don't go anywhere, you just lie there. It's not like sleeping, either. It's not really a cycle, because you don't come back alive later.”
“I think that metaphor refers to the biogeochemical cycle, in which bacteria and other organisms recycle dead organic matter. Some say that symbolically speaking the dead 'live again' by becoming part of other living organisms,” Mycroft says.
“But it's still not you any more,” Sherlock points out. Mycroft shrugs. “No,” Sherlock says firmly. “Death means you just stop. No more breathing or thinking or anything.”
He scrabbles his way over the edge of the sarcophagus and Mycroft follows him back up the ladder and re-covers the hole. He is reaching for the shovel to replace the dirt when Sherlock unexpectedly says, “Leave it.”
Mycroft looks at him very hard. One can see the thoughts leaping behind his eyes no matter how still he is; his mind is never still and Mycroft knows from personal experience how exhausting that can be. “Did you stop thinking, down there?”
“Almost,” Sherlock says. Mycroft nods slowly, and when he picks up the shovel it’s to walk it back up to the house.
Sherlock pauses in the doorway of Mycroft’s room, on the way to his own. “I think I would like that, when I stop,” Sherlock says. “Being underground in a stone room, with no thinking.”
“All right,” Mycroft says, and listens to Sherlock pad back up the hall to his own room.
+++
Forty years later, Mycroft lets the funeral director pick the casket and his PA pick the cemetery. But he makes sure the casket goes into the crypt that he selects himself.
Rating: PG I suppose; a little morbid
Written for the
sherlock_flashfic community on DW.
Sherlock is not quite seven when he sees his first corpse.
Daniel Wainwright tunes the Holmes' piano every three months, and Mycroft nods politely when he and Sherlock pass the man on their way to the village sweet shop. Mycroft is still inside making his careful selections when the lorry plunges over the curb and its side mirror cracks Mr. Wainwright in the back of the head.
Mycroft leaves the shop immediately with his little packets of white mice and toffee, and sees Mr. Wainwright stretched out across the sidewalk with his neck clearly broken. Some bystander is trying to interpose her skirts between Sherlock and the dead man. He, of course, is trying to shove past with a look of annoyed concentration on his face.
Within thirty seconds, Mycroft is smiling and thanking the woman as he takes Sherlock's hand and squeezes his fingers in warning. They keep their hands linked until they are out of sight of the village, on the mile-long footpath that cuts back across the fields to their home.
Neither of them speaks. Most people would be chattering, explaining, trying to comfort a child they assume is in shock. Mycroft is not most people, and Sherlock is not in shock. He merely needs time to process, and Mycroft lets him have it. He pretends to be surprised when Father mentions Mr. Wainwright's death at dinner.
Their parents debate at length over whether to attend the visitation. Mummy worries that it may upset Mycroft and Sherlock. Father disagrees because he believes that practicality is very healthful for children, and in the end they all go. It is open casket, and Sherlock spends a long time looking at Mr. Wainwright's face. Mycroft can see that any moment someone is going to start interfering, so he goes to stand beside Sherlock as if paying his own respects to the deceased.
“I've never seen a dead person before,” Sherlock says. “Only pictures.” Sherlock had become fascinated by anatomy several months prior, and spent hours studying anatomical drawings and photographs in medical texts.
Understanding the finality of death was something of a developmental milestone for children, Mycroft knew. Sherlock tends to handle these stepping stones to adulthood in his own good time and peculiar way. He had displayed self-awareness almost since he first opened his eyes, but had given sharing and imaginative play a miss. He didn't say a word until he was almost four, and then abruptly began speaking in complete sentences. Mycroft can see from Sherlock's face that this is going to be one of those slippery stepping stones.
“You shouldn't stand here much longer,” Mycroft murmurs after a moment. “People already think it strange.”
“People are stupid,” Sherlock says. His posture is stiff but his face placid and thoughtful. Father and Mummy tried to prepare him for this, giving him unasked-for explanations of death: “going to sleep,” “a long journey,” “part of the cycle.” Later on, the vicar will add “going home to the Lord,” a euphemism that Mycroft despises as being particularly vague and insipid.
They follow the hearse to the cemetery after the funeral, because Father agrees with Mycroft that a thing isn't done unless done properly, and sometime during the burial Sherlock wanders away from the grave site. They find him at the bottom of a grave awaiting its casket and it's the work of only a few moments for Father to haul him out.
“Oh darling, did you fall in?” Mummy asks, smoothing his hair from his dirty face.
“No,” Sherlock says sulkily, jerking away. No one asks him why he would jump in a muddy hole, because despite the sure knowledge that Sherlock is not an ordinary child, their parents are always ready to take ordinary childhood behavior for what it seems to be.
On Monday, Sherlock locks himself in a cupboard at his primary school. The head sends a note home with Mycroft when he picks Sherlock up, and of course Mycroft reads it.
“Learn anything?” he asks later, when he is eating the last of his white mice one nibble at a time, and Sherlock is stretched out on the library rug studying a dead spider with a magnifying glass.
“No,” Sherlock says, kicking his legs in the air. “Everyone kept shouting.” Mycroft nods, and saves the nub of the tail for last of all.
Father and Mycroft go to an evening fundraiser at the hospital, and take Sherlock as well because they're having a string quartet and Sherlock adores live violin music. Near the end of the evening, Father finds him in the morgue, where he has crawled into one of the lowest drawers, already occupied by a corpse.
“Well of course I got in with it,” Sherlock says irritably. “I'm hardly strong enough to move it, am I?”
Father and Mummy spend a long time talking to Sherlock, after. They are sure he must be traumatized by seeing poor Mr. Wainwright buried. Sherlock sits drumming his heels against the squashy leather sofa in the study, giving his parents the look that says he thinks they are dreadfully stupid.
Mycroft hurls a look of his own, because his parents are far from stupid and it's not fair to look at them the way you'd look at someone ordinary. He uses the sideways sort of manipulation he's best at to convince them not to send Sherlock to another psychiatrist. Sherlock still hasn’t said anything about the last one and Mycroft only knows what he could glean from the man's notes, which said things like sociopathy and schizoid personality disorder. Talk about dreadfully stupid.
It's best to let Sherlock work these things through on his own. Mycroft fondly remembers his father providing hints that allowed Mycroft to grasp a solution for himself. Now it is Sherlock's turn to solve, and Mycroft's turn to hint. It requires a light touch, because there is nothing more likely to send him into a fit of rage than condescension.
But Mycroft does not quite have a grown man's patience yet, and after Sherlock is caught crawling into a casket in the funeral home, he grows tired of waiting for his brother to get there in his own time.
The next night, once their parents are in bed, Mycroft redresses and pads down the hall to Sherlock's room, where he shakes his little brother awake. They carry their shoes down and put them on outside.
Mycroft flicks on his torch and leads Sherlock down through the culvert to a hole in what was until recently an unbroken stretch of forest floor. Mycroft has carefully dug away the top layer of dirt and shifted the wooden platform that had blocked the hole.
Sherlock's intake of breath is sharp, his tone accusatory. “I've never seen this before. Why didn't I know this was here?”
“Because you did not observe properly.” He descends the ladder and Sherlock follows, breathing rapidly in his excitement. Mycroft plays the torchlight across the interior of the small room, showing Sherlock the cracked slab floor, the wall inscriptions that have blurred with age, and the heavy stone sarcophagus situated in the middle of the chamber.
“This was a burial vault, but the above-ground portions were torn down a long time ago,” Mycroft says. The space is so small that there is no echo; his voice sounds strangely muffled. “It was partially open to the air, but Father had it sealed off a number of years ago.” After Mycroft had fallen in and broken his ankle, but there was no need to share that. Sherlock grips the stone and peers in, and Mycroft shines the torch inside to show him that it's empty. He spent the afternoon carefully removing the fragmentary remains of the former occupant. “The lid was broken,” Mycroft went on. “But it should be dark enough without the torch.”
Sherlock is already trying to pull himself up, jumping and catching his chest against the edge of the sarcophagus, feet scrabbling in an attempt to climb. “Boost me,” he demands, and Mycroft tucks the torch under one arm to oblige. He tumbles Sherlock into the ancient stone casket and climbs the ladder back into the night air. He slides the sheet of wood over the opening, pulls a book from his back pocket, and stretches out on the grass to read by torchlight.
Father routinely sleeps past nine on his days off, and Mummy never stirs until Mrs. Henratty arrives at 7:30 and starts breakfast, so Mycroft gives Sherlock until the sky is just beginning to pink. When he shines the torch into the sarcophagus, Sherlock is sitting up with his knees tucked under his chin. “Well?” Mycroft asks.
“It's not a journey,” Sherlock says decisively. “You don't go anywhere, you just lie there. It's not like sleeping, either. It's not really a cycle, because you don't come back alive later.”
“I think that metaphor refers to the biogeochemical cycle, in which bacteria and other organisms recycle dead organic matter. Some say that symbolically speaking the dead 'live again' by becoming part of other living organisms,” Mycroft says.
“But it's still not you any more,” Sherlock points out. Mycroft shrugs. “No,” Sherlock says firmly. “Death means you just stop. No more breathing or thinking or anything.”
He scrabbles his way over the edge of the sarcophagus and Mycroft follows him back up the ladder and re-covers the hole. He is reaching for the shovel to replace the dirt when Sherlock unexpectedly says, “Leave it.”
Mycroft looks at him very hard. One can see the thoughts leaping behind his eyes no matter how still he is; his mind is never still and Mycroft knows from personal experience how exhausting that can be. “Did you stop thinking, down there?”
“Almost,” Sherlock says. Mycroft nods slowly, and when he picks up the shovel it’s to walk it back up to the house.
Sherlock pauses in the doorway of Mycroft’s room, on the way to his own. “I think I would like that, when I stop,” Sherlock says. “Being underground in a stone room, with no thinking.”
“All right,” Mycroft says, and listens to Sherlock pad back up the hall to his own room.
+++
Forty years later, Mycroft lets the funeral director pick the casket and his PA pick the cemetery. But he makes sure the casket goes into the crypt that he selects himself.