Saving Sherlock Holmes (4/43)
Sep. 27th, 2012 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Saving Sherlock Holmes (4/43)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - General (eventually as high as Adult, which will be adjusted on a chapter-by-chapter basis)
Characters - Sherlock, Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson (so far)
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes, schoolboy. Yeah, that basically sums it up.
Author's Notes - I am sitting at the airport. My flight is delayed. Because we are waiting for the second pilot to get here. Literally. I blame Douglas Richardson for all of this. Don't even tell me that he's fictional. As if that would keep Douglas from a good scheme like this. Anyway, I figured I should use the time to do something productive...
Thank yous! Toflawedamythystandsensiblecatfor the Britpick; to the readers who read as this was being written, includingchicklet73; and toarctacuda, who uncomplainingly betas massive amounts of fic.
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3
Chapter Four
As far as Mycroft was concerned, things were going quite satisfactorily. Schools were as expected, he had plenty of money in sound investments, Iphigenia had signed away her rights to Sherlock and stayed silent, and no one else had raised an issue with his care of Sherlock. Sherlock himself had not committed any crimes and appeared to be flourishing. He seemed to adore Mrs. Hudson, which Mycroft deduced from the fact that he almost never spoke to Sherlock. If Sherlock had had complaints, Sherlock would have voiced those complaints, loudly and vociferously. Sherlock was silent, which meant that he must be pleased with the way things were, and Mycroft was relieved about that.
He liked to think they had made it through the hardest part. The reports of both Mrs. Hudson and the butler were soothing. The butler said Sherlock was an enormous amount of trouble and that recently he had taken to seeing how long frogs could go without eating, as part of an experiment. Mrs. Hudson said that Sherlock was making a mess of the house with frog carcasses, “bless his heart.” And Mycroft thought that maybe everything would turn out all right after all.
On the day he received the heavy envelope, he had managed to forget that he was expecting it, and then he locked himself in his room, took a deep breath, and sat and read through his mother’s autopsy report. Twice. Then he phoned Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson answered, and Mycroft said, with automatic politeness, “Good evening, Mrs. Hudson. How are you?”
“Oh, Mycroft,” said Mrs. Hudson, sounding pleased to hear his voice. “How are you? Things going well?”
“Yes,” he answered, vaguely, not interested. “Is Sherlock there?”
“Of course he is.” He heard her call for him. “Sherlock! Your brother is on the phone!”
There was the sound of a bit of commotion, and then Sherlock’s voice said, “What could you possibly want?”
“Sherlock!” Mycroft heard Mrs. Hudson scold him. “Be nice.”
“It’s just that you’re interrupting a very important experiment,” Sherlock said to him.
“You weren’t doing anything,” Mycroft heard Mrs. Hudson say.
“I was thinking about doing something,” Sherlock defended himself, indignantly. “Thinking very hard. What do you want?”
Mycroft wondered why he was having such difficulty just saying it. “I received Mummy’s autopsy report today.”
“Why did you get to receive it?” Sherlock complained. “Why do you get everything fun because you’re the oldest?”
“It isn’t fun, Sherlock,” Mycroft said, a bit sharply.
Sherlock paused for a moment, and Mycroft could perfectly envision his hurt offense. Mycroft didn’t apologize. Sherlock didn’t seem to expect it. He said, “What does it say she died of?”
“Anaphylactic shock,” Mycroft answered.
Sherlock was silent for a long moment. “That can’t be right. They’ve done it incorrectly. Idiots. This is why you should have let me do the autopsy.”
Mycroft rubbed at a headache forming between his eyes, on the bridge of his nose. “They did it correctly, Sherlock.”
“Do you know what anaphylactic shock is?” Sherlock demanded.
“Of course I know,” Mycroft snapped at him.
“What was she allergic to? She wasn’t allergic to anything!”
“The autopsy says it was nuts.”
“Nuts?” Sherlock repeated, in practically a shriek. “Nuts? We have to exhume her body and have this re-done.”
Mycroft gave up and leaned his head heavily in his hand. “We’re not…She developed an allergy to nuts, Sherlock, and died of anaphylactic shock. That’s what happened.”
“But that…The odds of that are…” Sherlock trailed off into uncertain nothingness.
“Improbable,” said Mycroft, wearily. “Not impossible.”
“So all it was was she…ate nuts.” Sherlock sounded as if this couldn’t possibly be true, and Mycroft understood the feeling, which was why he’d read it twice. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to be the reason why an outwardly healthy woman had abruptly dropped dead, but he had not expected this. “She had some nuts,” continued Sherlock, slowly, “on a day when no one was home. That was…That was all it was.”
Mycroft knew Sherlock was going back over everything he had ever observed about their mother, running through the halls of his mind palace in a frantic cataloguing, trying to make this make sense. “There was no way you could have known she’d developed an allergy to nuts, Sherlock.”
Sherlock was silent.
“Sherlock?”
“Did you want to talk to Mrs. Hudson again?” Sherlock asked him, dully.
“Sherlock,” he said, but it was Mrs. Hudson who answered him.
“Mycroft? Is everything all right? What did you say to him?”
“Where is he?”
“He’s going back upstairs at the moment, but he’s white as a sheet.”
Mycroft sighed. “Our mother died of an allergic reaction to nuts.”
Mrs. Hudson tsked sympathetically. “You poor dears. You’re just finding this out now?”
“I just got the autopsy report.” Mycroft hesitated. “Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock found my mother, the day she died. Possibly you should know that.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Hudson, but the single syllable was crammed with meaning. She paused for a moment, and Mycroft let her absorb what this might mean for however Sherlock might behave in the near future. “Maybe you should send him the autopsy report,” she suggested, eventually. “It might cheer him up. You know, the science of it. He likes that.”
Mycroft tried to imagine anyone else understanding that Sherlock might be cheered by the receipt of his mother’s autopsy report. He wondered, not for the first time, what they would have done had they not stumbled upon the gem that was Mrs. Hudson. “Yes,” Mycroft agreed. “Thank you. I’ll do that, Mrs. Hudson.”
***
Sherlock Holmes had found his mother dead on what was known in the household as the Off Day, the day when Mother gave all the household staff a day off. She had always said it was easier to remember one day without staff than to keep track of a rotating schedule of days off. So Sherlock had not expected to be met at the door when the driver had dropped him off after school. He’d let himself in the way he always let himself in and then he had stopped in the front hall immediately. Because he had known. And despite the fact that he spent much time afterward trying to determine exactly what had caused him to know that his mother was dead as soon as he walked through the front door, he had never been able to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. He had merely known, somehow, that the next step he was going to take was going to change his life irrevocably.
The things he remembered about the discovery of his mother’s body were carefully written in a notebook, in amongst his other scientific data, one more page to shuffle through.
Supine position
Head approx. 7 m. from the front door
Left arm bent, left hand resting against neck
Right arm fully extended, right hand clenched, in direction of telephone on coffee table
Slightly swollen eyes
Bruise on right temple
Skin blue – cold to the touch – slight rigor mortis – dead three hours?
Items on floor:
• Scattered chess pieces – white rook, 2 white pawns, 3 black pawns, black knight, black bishop
• Dessert plate
• Half-eaten piece of carrot cake
Sherlock sat on his bed and read through this page of notes for the seventeenth time in three days. He looked, as he normally did, at half-eaten piece of carrot cake, and wondered how he could have missed the obviousness of that clue. He had thought perhaps she had choked, her death had been consistent with choking, and she had in a manner, just for a very different reason. And he had been roughly three hours too late to be of any assistance.
He had known that immediately, upon discovering her. So he hadn’t phoned emergency services. What good would that have done? He’d phoned Mycroft. And then, once he had got Mycroft to understand that he was serious about what he was saying, he had carefully replaced all of the chess pieces where they had been on the board that morning and then had gone upstairs and taken down these careful notes.
He didn’t know what good they had done him. He had never anticipated the cause of death Mycroft had said. He was an idiot for not having seen it.
Mrs. Hudson knocked on the door. Well, someone knocked on the door, but it had to be Mrs. Hudson, she was the only person who ever did. The rest of the household staff avoided him as much as possible.
Sherlock closed his notebook and dropped it negligently to the floor on the far side of his bed, then called, “What?”
Mrs. Hudson entered, flourishing an envelope. “Your brother sent you the autopsy report, Sherlock. Thought you might like to have a look at it.” She gave him a bright smile.
Sherlock frowned at the envelope. He both did and didn’t want to have a look at it. What he wanted was a new puzzle entirely. Something else. Something that wasn’t his fault.
He took the envelope, dropped it on the other side of the bed with his notebook, and looked at Mrs. Hudson. “Your husband isn’t dead.”
Mrs. Hudson looked slightly alarmed. “What?”
“You lied about that that day. Somehow. But it isn’t a simple lie. There’s something strange about the whole situation that I haven’t figured out yet. Tell me what it is.”
Mrs. Hudson hesitated, but then she sat at the foot of his bed and looked at him. Mrs. Hudson, he had learned, seldom denied a direct request from him. “He’s…almost dead. Not dead yet.”
Sherlock studied her. “Sick?” he ventured, but that didn’t seem right, didn’t seem to fit what he knew.
She shook her head. “He’s—”
“Wait,” said Sherlock, eyes narrowed, thinking. “Don’t tell me. Let me think. Florida. He’s in Florida. He didn’t come back with you. Florida, and almost dead, but not sick, but expecting death—Is he on death row? Is your husband a murderer?” Sherlock knew he wasn’t supposed to feel gleeful about that. He normally didn’t care about the things he was and wasn’t supposed to take joy in, but he did care when it came to Mrs. Hudson. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Sorry,” he corrected himself, quickly. “I’m sorry. Is your husband a murderer?” He made himself ask it very soberly, trying to mimic Mycroft’s tone of sympathetic concern in situations like these.
Mrs. Hudson laughed at him. “You really, really shouldn’t get excited about things like this, Sherlock. People will think terrible things about you.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“I care.”
“Which is why you don’t tell anyone your husband’s on death row.”
“That isn’t the sort of thing you advertise, Sherlock.”
Sherlock dismissed that. What he was really thinking was that this was marvellous. It was a whole magnificent puzzle, just for him. “Has he been wrongly accused?” he asked, excitedly, sitting up straighter on his bed. “Do you want me to prove he’s innocent and save his life for you?”
Mrs. Hudson looked at him. She looked much more serious than Sherlock had ever seen her look before. He wondered what he’d said that was wrong.
“I could, you know,” he insisted, thinking maybe she doubted his abilities on that front.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that you could,” she said, slowly. “But he’s a terrible man, Sherlock. A…he’s a terrible man.”
“He’s guilty,” Sherlock realized.
“Of the crime he was tried for. Of more than that. He’s…terrible.”
Sherlock glanced at Mrs. Hudson’s hands, wrung in a tight knot on her lap, and looked back at her, and frowned a little bit. “You’re scared.”
“Maybe a little bit,” she said, with a faint tremor of a smile.
“Of what? Him? He’s on death row.”
“But what if… There are so many appeals, Sherlock. So many technicalities. The American legal system…”
This, thought Sherlock, was inexcusable. Mrs. Hudson shouldn’t be scared. Ever. Of anything. Not while he was around. “I won’t let him,” decided Sherlock.
“Let him what?”
“Go free. Get out. Take advantage of technicalities. I’ll make sure he stays where he is and is executed and never hurts you ever again.” He gave into impulse and settled his hands over Mrs. Hudson’s nervous ones, because he’d seen people do that before and he supposed it was thought to be comforting. And it kind of was. He even squeezed them. “You don’t need to be frightened,” he vowed. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Mrs. Hudson looked as if she didn’t know what to say. Sherlock wondered if she were about to start crying. “You don’t… It isn’t your job, to keep me safe.”
“Holmeses are good at keeping people safe, you know.” He thought of his mother briefly, and amended, “Usually. We make much better allies than enemies.” He knew that at least this last part was true, because Mother and Mycroft both said it frequently.
“You are much sweeter than you ever let anyone see,” Mrs. Hudson remarked, and squeezed his hands in return.
Which meant, Sherlock thought, that she’d agreed. He sat back against his headboard contentedly and said, “I’m going to need to see all of the papers you have pertaining to your husband’s case.”
Next Chapter
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - General (eventually as high as Adult, which will be adjusted on a chapter-by-chapter basis)
Characters - Sherlock, Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson (so far)
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes, schoolboy. Yeah, that basically sums it up.
Author's Notes - I am sitting at the airport. My flight is delayed. Because we are waiting for the second pilot to get here. Literally. I blame Douglas Richardson for all of this. Don't even tell me that he's fictional. As if that would keep Douglas from a good scheme like this. Anyway, I figured I should use the time to do something productive...
Thank yous! To
flawedamythystandsensiblecatfor the Britpick; to the readers who read as this was being written, includingchicklet73; and toarctacuda, who uncomplainingly betas massive amounts of fic. Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3
Chapter Four
As far as Mycroft was concerned, things were going quite satisfactorily. Schools were as expected, he had plenty of money in sound investments, Iphigenia had signed away her rights to Sherlock and stayed silent, and no one else had raised an issue with his care of Sherlock. Sherlock himself had not committed any crimes and appeared to be flourishing. He seemed to adore Mrs. Hudson, which Mycroft deduced from the fact that he almost never spoke to Sherlock. If Sherlock had had complaints, Sherlock would have voiced those complaints, loudly and vociferously. Sherlock was silent, which meant that he must be pleased with the way things were, and Mycroft was relieved about that.
He liked to think they had made it through the hardest part. The reports of both Mrs. Hudson and the butler were soothing. The butler said Sherlock was an enormous amount of trouble and that recently he had taken to seeing how long frogs could go without eating, as part of an experiment. Mrs. Hudson said that Sherlock was making a mess of the house with frog carcasses, “bless his heart.” And Mycroft thought that maybe everything would turn out all right after all.
On the day he received the heavy envelope, he had managed to forget that he was expecting it, and then he locked himself in his room, took a deep breath, and sat and read through his mother’s autopsy report. Twice. Then he phoned Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson answered, and Mycroft said, with automatic politeness, “Good evening, Mrs. Hudson. How are you?”
“Oh, Mycroft,” said Mrs. Hudson, sounding pleased to hear his voice. “How are you? Things going well?”
“Yes,” he answered, vaguely, not interested. “Is Sherlock there?”
“Of course he is.” He heard her call for him. “Sherlock! Your brother is on the phone!”
There was the sound of a bit of commotion, and then Sherlock’s voice said, “What could you possibly want?”
“Sherlock!” Mycroft heard Mrs. Hudson scold him. “Be nice.”
“It’s just that you’re interrupting a very important experiment,” Sherlock said to him.
“You weren’t doing anything,” Mycroft heard Mrs. Hudson say.
“I was thinking about doing something,” Sherlock defended himself, indignantly. “Thinking very hard. What do you want?”
Mycroft wondered why he was having such difficulty just saying it. “I received Mummy’s autopsy report today.”
“Why did you get to receive it?” Sherlock complained. “Why do you get everything fun because you’re the oldest?”
“It isn’t fun, Sherlock,” Mycroft said, a bit sharply.
Sherlock paused for a moment, and Mycroft could perfectly envision his hurt offense. Mycroft didn’t apologize. Sherlock didn’t seem to expect it. He said, “What does it say she died of?”
“Anaphylactic shock,” Mycroft answered.
Sherlock was silent for a long moment. “That can’t be right. They’ve done it incorrectly. Idiots. This is why you should have let me do the autopsy.”
Mycroft rubbed at a headache forming between his eyes, on the bridge of his nose. “They did it correctly, Sherlock.”
“Do you know what anaphylactic shock is?” Sherlock demanded.
“Of course I know,” Mycroft snapped at him.
“What was she allergic to? She wasn’t allergic to anything!”
“The autopsy says it was nuts.”
“Nuts?” Sherlock repeated, in practically a shriek. “Nuts? We have to exhume her body and have this re-done.”
Mycroft gave up and leaned his head heavily in his hand. “We’re not…She developed an allergy to nuts, Sherlock, and died of anaphylactic shock. That’s what happened.”
“But that…The odds of that are…” Sherlock trailed off into uncertain nothingness.
“Improbable,” said Mycroft, wearily. “Not impossible.”
“So all it was was she…ate nuts.” Sherlock sounded as if this couldn’t possibly be true, and Mycroft understood the feeling, which was why he’d read it twice. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to be the reason why an outwardly healthy woman had abruptly dropped dead, but he had not expected this. “She had some nuts,” continued Sherlock, slowly, “on a day when no one was home. That was…That was all it was.”
Mycroft knew Sherlock was going back over everything he had ever observed about their mother, running through the halls of his mind palace in a frantic cataloguing, trying to make this make sense. “There was no way you could have known she’d developed an allergy to nuts, Sherlock.”
Sherlock was silent.
“Sherlock?”
“Did you want to talk to Mrs. Hudson again?” Sherlock asked him, dully.
“Sherlock,” he said, but it was Mrs. Hudson who answered him.
“Mycroft? Is everything all right? What did you say to him?”
“Where is he?”
“He’s going back upstairs at the moment, but he’s white as a sheet.”
Mycroft sighed. “Our mother died of an allergic reaction to nuts.”
Mrs. Hudson tsked sympathetically. “You poor dears. You’re just finding this out now?”
“I just got the autopsy report.” Mycroft hesitated. “Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock found my mother, the day she died. Possibly you should know that.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Hudson, but the single syllable was crammed with meaning. She paused for a moment, and Mycroft let her absorb what this might mean for however Sherlock might behave in the near future. “Maybe you should send him the autopsy report,” she suggested, eventually. “It might cheer him up. You know, the science of it. He likes that.”
Mycroft tried to imagine anyone else understanding that Sherlock might be cheered by the receipt of his mother’s autopsy report. He wondered, not for the first time, what they would have done had they not stumbled upon the gem that was Mrs. Hudson. “Yes,” Mycroft agreed. “Thank you. I’ll do that, Mrs. Hudson.”
***
Sherlock Holmes had found his mother dead on what was known in the household as the Off Day, the day when Mother gave all the household staff a day off. She had always said it was easier to remember one day without staff than to keep track of a rotating schedule of days off. So Sherlock had not expected to be met at the door when the driver had dropped him off after school. He’d let himself in the way he always let himself in and then he had stopped in the front hall immediately. Because he had known. And despite the fact that he spent much time afterward trying to determine exactly what had caused him to know that his mother was dead as soon as he walked through the front door, he had never been able to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. He had merely known, somehow, that the next step he was going to take was going to change his life irrevocably.
The things he remembered about the discovery of his mother’s body were carefully written in a notebook, in amongst his other scientific data, one more page to shuffle through.
Supine position
Head approx. 7 m. from the front door
Left arm bent, left hand resting against neck
Right arm fully extended, right hand clenched, in direction of telephone on coffee table
Slightly swollen eyes
Bruise on right temple
Skin blue – cold to the touch – slight rigor mortis – dead three hours?
Items on floor:
• Scattered chess pieces – white rook, 2 white pawns, 3 black pawns, black knight, black bishop
• Dessert plate
• Half-eaten piece of carrot cake
Sherlock sat on his bed and read through this page of notes for the seventeenth time in three days. He looked, as he normally did, at half-eaten piece of carrot cake, and wondered how he could have missed the obviousness of that clue. He had thought perhaps she had choked, her death had been consistent with choking, and she had in a manner, just for a very different reason. And he had been roughly three hours too late to be of any assistance.
He had known that immediately, upon discovering her. So he hadn’t phoned emergency services. What good would that have done? He’d phoned Mycroft. And then, once he had got Mycroft to understand that he was serious about what he was saying, he had carefully replaced all of the chess pieces where they had been on the board that morning and then had gone upstairs and taken down these careful notes.
He didn’t know what good they had done him. He had never anticipated the cause of death Mycroft had said. He was an idiot for not having seen it.
Mrs. Hudson knocked on the door. Well, someone knocked on the door, but it had to be Mrs. Hudson, she was the only person who ever did. The rest of the household staff avoided him as much as possible.
Sherlock closed his notebook and dropped it negligently to the floor on the far side of his bed, then called, “What?”
Mrs. Hudson entered, flourishing an envelope. “Your brother sent you the autopsy report, Sherlock. Thought you might like to have a look at it.” She gave him a bright smile.
Sherlock frowned at the envelope. He both did and didn’t want to have a look at it. What he wanted was a new puzzle entirely. Something else. Something that wasn’t his fault.
He took the envelope, dropped it on the other side of the bed with his notebook, and looked at Mrs. Hudson. “Your husband isn’t dead.”
Mrs. Hudson looked slightly alarmed. “What?”
“You lied about that that day. Somehow. But it isn’t a simple lie. There’s something strange about the whole situation that I haven’t figured out yet. Tell me what it is.”
Mrs. Hudson hesitated, but then she sat at the foot of his bed and looked at him. Mrs. Hudson, he had learned, seldom denied a direct request from him. “He’s…almost dead. Not dead yet.”
Sherlock studied her. “Sick?” he ventured, but that didn’t seem right, didn’t seem to fit what he knew.
She shook her head. “He’s—”
“Wait,” said Sherlock, eyes narrowed, thinking. “Don’t tell me. Let me think. Florida. He’s in Florida. He didn’t come back with you. Florida, and almost dead, but not sick, but expecting death—Is he on death row? Is your husband a murderer?” Sherlock knew he wasn’t supposed to feel gleeful about that. He normally didn’t care about the things he was and wasn’t supposed to take joy in, but he did care when it came to Mrs. Hudson. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Sorry,” he corrected himself, quickly. “I’m sorry. Is your husband a murderer?” He made himself ask it very soberly, trying to mimic Mycroft’s tone of sympathetic concern in situations like these.
Mrs. Hudson laughed at him. “You really, really shouldn’t get excited about things like this, Sherlock. People will think terrible things about you.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“I care.”
“Which is why you don’t tell anyone your husband’s on death row.”
“That isn’t the sort of thing you advertise, Sherlock.”
Sherlock dismissed that. What he was really thinking was that this was marvellous. It was a whole magnificent puzzle, just for him. “Has he been wrongly accused?” he asked, excitedly, sitting up straighter on his bed. “Do you want me to prove he’s innocent and save his life for you?”
Mrs. Hudson looked at him. She looked much more serious than Sherlock had ever seen her look before. He wondered what he’d said that was wrong.
“I could, you know,” he insisted, thinking maybe she doubted his abilities on that front.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that you could,” she said, slowly. “But he’s a terrible man, Sherlock. A…he’s a terrible man.”
“He’s guilty,” Sherlock realized.
“Of the crime he was tried for. Of more than that. He’s…terrible.”
Sherlock glanced at Mrs. Hudson’s hands, wrung in a tight knot on her lap, and looked back at her, and frowned a little bit. “You’re scared.”
“Maybe a little bit,” she said, with a faint tremor of a smile.
“Of what? Him? He’s on death row.”
“But what if… There are so many appeals, Sherlock. So many technicalities. The American legal system…”
This, thought Sherlock, was inexcusable. Mrs. Hudson shouldn’t be scared. Ever. Of anything. Not while he was around. “I won’t let him,” decided Sherlock.
“Let him what?”
“Go free. Get out. Take advantage of technicalities. I’ll make sure he stays where he is and is executed and never hurts you ever again.” He gave into impulse and settled his hands over Mrs. Hudson’s nervous ones, because he’d seen people do that before and he supposed it was thought to be comforting. And it kind of was. He even squeezed them. “You don’t need to be frightened,” he vowed. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Mrs. Hudson looked as if she didn’t know what to say. Sherlock wondered if she were about to start crying. “You don’t… It isn’t your job, to keep me safe.”
“Holmeses are good at keeping people safe, you know.” He thought of his mother briefly, and amended, “Usually. We make much better allies than enemies.” He knew that at least this last part was true, because Mother and Mycroft both said it frequently.
“You are much sweeter than you ever let anyone see,” Mrs. Hudson remarked, and squeezed his hands in return.
Which meant, Sherlock thought, that she’d agreed. He sat back against his headboard contentedly and said, “I’m going to need to see all of the papers you have pertaining to your husband’s case.”
Next Chapter
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:52 pm (UTC)How awful for poor Sherlock, to find his mother like that, and be alone. Of course he wrote down everything he saw, he had to process it somehow.
I thought it was odd that Mrs Hudson said her husband was dead - but that makes sense, that she wouldn't want to advertise it. And that Sherlock goes from wanting to save him to wanting to make sure he dies on nothing more than her say so, and so quickly.
And Mummy dying of an allergy to nuts, when she had no such allergy before...I agree. That's weird. That doesn't sound quite right. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is why the story eventually goes AU and I bet Moriarty is behind it. *nods emphatically*
CARRY ON.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:38 am (UTC)I feel like Sherlock processes all information by *solving* that information.
And yeah, I had to do something with Mrs. Hudson's husband, and I wanted it to be as close to canon as possible while also staying within the rules I'd set for my AU.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 09:55 pm (UTC)Or how about now?
(I just rewatched series 2 today, so I'm feeling brittle)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 11:22 pm (UTC)11 year old Sherlock would gather enough evidence against Mr. Hudson just to protect Mrs. Hudson. No wonder he's imprinted on Mrs. Hudson like a baby duck.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 03:04 am (UTC)I LOVE that Mrs. Hudson raises Sherlock; it makes perfect sense. I basically believe everything you write as canon. So brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:52 am (UTC)Sometimes I get confused and forget that Mrs. Hudson *didn't* raise Sherlock canonically, because I agree, it does fit so well.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 03:23 am (UTC)I eagerly look forward to each chapter. Your characterizations are so rich, vivid and resonate with the characters I know so well and love.
Ah, this is so good.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 02:22 pm (UTC)Thanks for making the long wait much more tolerable.
p.s. I don't know who Douglas Richardson is but I will blame him too.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:55 am (UTC)(And Douglas Richardson is a character in a BBC radio comedy about a tiny airline called "Cabin Pressure." Benedict Cumberbatch co-stars. It's *hilarious.*)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 08:20 pm (UTC)And thus his life's work is set in motion!
I liked the contrasts in this chapter - the sadness and frustration at learning of the autopsy results, and then the almost glee at being able to set his mind to helping Mrs Hudson and her problem!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 04:10 am (UTC)And yes, I assumed their backstory was recent, but I agree with you that the strength of attachment between them and the level of understanding Mrs. Hudson has for Sherlock can be read to be much longer and deeper.
I love describing Sherlock as a tiger cub. He will grow up to be quite the protector of the few people he cherishes.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-03 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 03:03 pm (UTC)Such an intense chapter, I loved it! And I'm accepting your story as headcanon.
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Date: 2012-10-03 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-01 08:50 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing. x
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Date: 2012-10-03 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-23 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-27 06:21 pm (UTC)And then you trot out this amazing scene with grieving Sherlock taking CARE of uncannily understanding Mrs. Hudson and I'm just a mess. A teary mess, and it's all your fault, and thank you so much for writing so well.
And now, for the shock.
Seriously, as I was reading this chapter... and got to the cause of death...
I was eating a piece of carrot cake.
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Date: 2012-10-29 02:30 am (UTC)I am so glad you hadn't developed an allergy! That would have been terrible!!
I'm glad you're enjoying the fic, though. Even if it did make you a teary mess. :-)
Sorry but
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Date: 2013-01-24 02:11 am (UTC)Why has no one has said anything about the chess pieces? (Sherlock, you need learn to leave stuff where it lies, darling... At least until Mycroft gets a peek)
:-)
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Date: 2013-03-02 05:06 am (UTC)