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Title: Uncalculated Data
Verse: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: G
Wordcount: 500
Warnings: Depression, Death Wish, Past Drug Use
Summary: Sherlock had forgotten to take certain factors into account before freezing himself.
Also on AO3: Uncalculated Data
He sees a bit of Watson gleaming in Amy’s eyes sometimes, while she loyally helps him in whatever he needs for the next case. On other occasions he glimpses Ms. Adler’s wit scorching across her smile, as she triumphantly espirts facts that have eluded him. Flashes of both are buried inside her and when they shine through, it’s like a flicker of a candle in a mirror. In one second to the next he goes from a soaring heart to a plummeting gut. He tries desperately to quash down these absurd comparisons and the accompanied bouts of sentimentality and - Dare he even say it? - subsequent grief. However, it is to no avail.
A small voice keeps echoing in his own brain about how appallingly irrational it all is. The utterances sounds suspiciously like Mycroft. He’d never have conceived in his wildest imaginings that he would actually miss his brother. In spite of that, he finds that he very much does. Each time he is reminded that he’ll never sit down to another stilted, mocking, familial teatime in The Diogenes Club, it’s like his chest is covered in a heavy, invisible compression, that prevents him from taking in air. Those are the times when he desperately wishes Amy had not done away with his cocaine - that he could find a way to slip down into that safe, empty place that he craves so dearly. If only it had been made a legal practice.
Things have changed in this world - a world of wires and gears, of instant gratification and twisted values - yet too many parallels are still there, tugging on the edges of his conscious mind, miring him down in the similarities and repetitiveness of things he thought would have been buried long ago. He might have thought to laugh at his own shortsightedness (had he any inkling that he would then be able to cease and not descend into unseemly hysterics) at not noticing the one simple flaw in his plan: the world may have changed, but he, Sherlock Holmes, had not.
In retrospect it was such a simple miscalculation. Now he was no doubt paying for his hubris, burned by the unstable sands of time he had been tampering with like a child at his first chemistry set. The comparison is both mortifying in it’s accuracy and woefully deficient in depicting his true agony. He’s not sure he’ll ever find the right words.
It is what it is, he supposes. There’s no way back now, only forward. Even if going forward feels like trekking through endless mires of suffering and confusion. This is where he has placed himself and he can’t rest the blame upon anyone else. Nor would he want to. He is meant to be above such banal human afflictions, after all. He will overcome them, because he has to.
If he sometimes fantasizes about his experiment having failed, of having never made it out of that frozen box, it is no one’s business but his own.
Verse: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: G
Wordcount: 500
Warnings: Depression, Death Wish, Past Drug Use
Summary: Sherlock had forgotten to take certain factors into account before freezing himself.
Also on AO3: Uncalculated Data
He sees a bit of Watson gleaming in Amy’s eyes sometimes, while she loyally helps him in whatever he needs for the next case. On other occasions he glimpses Ms. Adler’s wit scorching across her smile, as she triumphantly espirts facts that have eluded him. Flashes of both are buried inside her and when they shine through, it’s like a flicker of a candle in a mirror. In one second to the next he goes from a soaring heart to a plummeting gut. He tries desperately to quash down these absurd comparisons and the accompanied bouts of sentimentality and - Dare he even say it? - subsequent grief. However, it is to no avail.
A small voice keeps echoing in his own brain about how appallingly irrational it all is. The utterances sounds suspiciously like Mycroft. He’d never have conceived in his wildest imaginings that he would actually miss his brother. In spite of that, he finds that he very much does. Each time he is reminded that he’ll never sit down to another stilted, mocking, familial teatime in The Diogenes Club, it’s like his chest is covered in a heavy, invisible compression, that prevents him from taking in air. Those are the times when he desperately wishes Amy had not done away with his cocaine - that he could find a way to slip down into that safe, empty place that he craves so dearly. If only it had been made a legal practice.
Things have changed in this world - a world of wires and gears, of instant gratification and twisted values - yet too many parallels are still there, tugging on the edges of his conscious mind, miring him down in the similarities and repetitiveness of things he thought would have been buried long ago. He might have thought to laugh at his own shortsightedness (had he any inkling that he would then be able to cease and not descend into unseemly hysterics) at not noticing the one simple flaw in his plan: the world may have changed, but he, Sherlock Holmes, had not.
In retrospect it was such a simple miscalculation. Now he was no doubt paying for his hubris, burned by the unstable sands of time he had been tampering with like a child at his first chemistry set. The comparison is both mortifying in it’s accuracy and woefully deficient in depicting his true agony. He’s not sure he’ll ever find the right words.
It is what it is, he supposes. There’s no way back now, only forward. Even if going forward feels like trekking through endless mires of suffering and confusion. This is where he has placed himself and he can’t rest the blame upon anyone else. Nor would he want to. He is meant to be above such banal human afflictions, after all. He will overcome them, because he has to.
If he sometimes fantasizes about his experiment having failed, of having never made it out of that frozen box, it is no one’s business but his own.
