(Sherlock fic) All This Space
Oct. 17th, 2010 01:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frith_in_thornsTitle: All This Space
Prompt: Here. Everybody in the family worries about teenage Sherlock and the damage he might do to other or himself. Nobody sees it coming when young adult Mycroft ends up in hospital with a cut up arm and no will to go on.
Rating: PG-13 (Gen)
Word count: 800
Warnings: Suicide attempt.
[]
Sherlock huddled into the uncomfortable chair with his legs tucked tight against him, and observed.
Mycroft wasn’t asleep, for all that his eyes were closed and his body was perfectly still. His right arm was on top of the blankets, but his bandaged left arm was twisted defensively into them, hidden. His breathing was too even. Mycroft never breathed that evenly when he slept; it would speed up or slow down or hitch at random.
“I know you’re awake,” Sherlock said, finally. He had told himself he wasn’t going to talk until Mycroft did, but the white sterile silence was becoming too big and too empty and too unbearable.
Mycroft didn’t respond, and made absolutely no sign that he’d heard anything. The blankets rose and fell perfectly steadily, perfectly controlled.
“I know you were awake earlier, too,” Sherlock said. He was cold, and aching somewhere inside himself in a completely unfamiliar way. He should have been putting off homework tonight, not sitting in a hospital room. “I didn’t tell Mummy or Daddy, though, and they didn’t realise. They’re upset. Mummy’s gone home with a sedative. She wanted Daddy to stay here, but he’s got that conference, you know.”
He waited, and filled the time by trying to make more observations, as he was training himself to, but there was a blank white space in his mind where all his thoughts usually were, because he didn’t understand. Mycroft was supposed to be the perfect one, the one no one had to worry about because he was frighteningly clever and focused and controlled and he was at Oxford and was supposed to have a perfect life ahead of him. There had never been any point to trying to deduce him because all anyone could want to know had been written all over him for even idiots to see.
Except for this, apparently.
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
It was a private room, a fearsomely sterile and expressionless and empty room, because their parents had donated a lot of money to the local hospital in the past. They’d probably expected Sherlock to be the one to end up here.
“This was supposed to be the other way around,” he said, and got just a tiny stutter in the rhythm of Mycroft’s breaths – no one who hadn’t been attuning to it for the last couple of hours would have noticed it. And there really wasn’t going to be any point in calling him out on it because it had only been for a flicker of an instant. It showed him that they had both been thinking along the same lines, though.
“There has to be a reason. Please just tell me. I won’t tell anyone else, I promise.”
He’d seen the photographs. He was certain that this was something he could never tell Mycroft, because he knew instinctively that he would never be forgiven, which was right. But the police officer had showed one to Mummy to stop her from screaming over and over that her oldest son wouldn’t do this, there must be some mistake, he must have been attacked, this wasn’t right. And Sherlock had been there, forgotten about in the corner, his stillness invisible behind the screen of everyone’s overreactions. So he’d caught a glimpse of the slashed lines, the redness, the jagged tears – uncontrolled, random.
Seeing them had made him think that maybe he didn’t know his brother at all. Maybe no one did. And yet he had spent so much time practicing how to read people – how could he have missed something as big, as bleak, as this?
“Please,” he said again, and hated that Mycroft was making him repeat himself, making him ask over and over while he got no response at all and the blank walls swallowed up his words. His thoughts were repeating as well, cycling, getting no further than why?, and he hated that too.
The even breathing continued, in and out.
Sherlock curled up as tightly as he could on the chair. Everything always had to have a reason. And Mycroft always had a purpose. Always.
But now he was lying with a blank face in a blank room and saying nothing at all and responding to nothing, and maybe that was an answer, of a kind.
Sherlock couldn’t think of anything else to say. There was only blankness, and the white, and the yawning emptiness which needed to be filled.
And he didn’t know how.
Prompt: Here. Everybody in the family worries about teenage Sherlock and the damage he might do to other or himself. Nobody sees it coming when young adult Mycroft ends up in hospital with a cut up arm and no will to go on.
Rating: PG-13 (Gen)
Word count: 800
Warnings: Suicide attempt.
[]
Sherlock huddled into the uncomfortable chair with his legs tucked tight against him, and observed.
Mycroft wasn’t asleep, for all that his eyes were closed and his body was perfectly still. His right arm was on top of the blankets, but his bandaged left arm was twisted defensively into them, hidden. His breathing was too even. Mycroft never breathed that evenly when he slept; it would speed up or slow down or hitch at random.
“I know you’re awake,” Sherlock said, finally. He had told himself he wasn’t going to talk until Mycroft did, but the white sterile silence was becoming too big and too empty and too unbearable.
Mycroft didn’t respond, and made absolutely no sign that he’d heard anything. The blankets rose and fell perfectly steadily, perfectly controlled.
“I know you were awake earlier, too,” Sherlock said. He was cold, and aching somewhere inside himself in a completely unfamiliar way. He should have been putting off homework tonight, not sitting in a hospital room. “I didn’t tell Mummy or Daddy, though, and they didn’t realise. They’re upset. Mummy’s gone home with a sedative. She wanted Daddy to stay here, but he’s got that conference, you know.”
He waited, and filled the time by trying to make more observations, as he was training himself to, but there was a blank white space in his mind where all his thoughts usually were, because he didn’t understand. Mycroft was supposed to be the perfect one, the one no one had to worry about because he was frighteningly clever and focused and controlled and he was at Oxford and was supposed to have a perfect life ahead of him. There had never been any point to trying to deduce him because all anyone could want to know had been written all over him for even idiots to see.
Except for this, apparently.
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
It was a private room, a fearsomely sterile and expressionless and empty room, because their parents had donated a lot of money to the local hospital in the past. They’d probably expected Sherlock to be the one to end up here.
“This was supposed to be the other way around,” he said, and got just a tiny stutter in the rhythm of Mycroft’s breaths – no one who hadn’t been attuning to it for the last couple of hours would have noticed it. And there really wasn’t going to be any point in calling him out on it because it had only been for a flicker of an instant. It showed him that they had both been thinking along the same lines, though.
“There has to be a reason. Please just tell me. I won’t tell anyone else, I promise.”
He’d seen the photographs. He was certain that this was something he could never tell Mycroft, because he knew instinctively that he would never be forgiven, which was right. But the police officer had showed one to Mummy to stop her from screaming over and over that her oldest son wouldn’t do this, there must be some mistake, he must have been attacked, this wasn’t right. And Sherlock had been there, forgotten about in the corner, his stillness invisible behind the screen of everyone’s overreactions. So he’d caught a glimpse of the slashed lines, the redness, the jagged tears – uncontrolled, random.
Seeing them had made him think that maybe he didn’t know his brother at all. Maybe no one did. And yet he had spent so much time practicing how to read people – how could he have missed something as big, as bleak, as this?
“Please,” he said again, and hated that Mycroft was making him repeat himself, making him ask over and over while he got no response at all and the blank walls swallowed up his words. His thoughts were repeating as well, cycling, getting no further than why?, and he hated that too.
The even breathing continued, in and out.
Sherlock curled up as tightly as he could on the chair. Everything always had to have a reason. And Mycroft always had a purpose. Always.
But now he was lying with a blank face in a blank room and saying nothing at all and responding to nothing, and maybe that was an answer, of a kind.
Sherlock couldn’t think of anything else to say. There was only blankness, and the white, and the yawning emptiness which needed to be filled.
And he didn’t know how.
