Chapter Text
“Look,” a finger pointed out the car window. “Left and right,” the voice instructed, “are not real in the same way up and down are.”
Sherlock, five years old, followed his brother’s finger and nodded. He always nodded when Mycroft said anything like that. He pressed his palm to the window on his side and watched the glass fog and clear as he breathed. He tried to picture the letters on Mycroft’s school tie—MYCROFT HOLMES—flipped in a mirror. The M would still be an M. The Y would look like the tracks the rain traced on the other side of the glass.
Outside, a field. A broken fence. A white shape—a sheep or a tarp—tucked into the dusk. Their parents’ voices drifted in from the front, softened by the steady whisper of rain.
“Mycroft,” Sherlock asked, “if mirrors don’t reverse up and down, why does the sky look lower in the raindrop?”
“That’s not a mirror,” Mycroft said. He was patient today. Sometimes he was not. “That’s refraction. Distort, not invert. They bend the image—”
“Like the spoon,” Sherlock said, because earlier there had been a cafe and a spoon and his face upside down in it. He liked the feeling of having matched the right word to the right thing. It was like sliding a puzzle piece into place and hearing, inside his head, a very small click.
“Yes. Like the spoon.” Mycroft’s sleeve brushed Sherlock’s hair when he reached to adjust Sherlock’s seatbelt. “And the sky doesn’t look lower,” he added after a moment. “You only think it does because your view is narrower. You are framing a smaller world, so everything seems nearer.”
Smaller world, Sherlock considered. He liked the sound of that. He looked out at the world and tried to shrink it further—to see if he could fit it inside something. The window frame. The oval made by his fingers when he squinted at them. The circle of the dashboard clock: a pale face with two black hands. Tick. Tick. Tick. He tried to match the sound to the precise short jumps of the longer hand. They didn’t align. That bothered him more than it should have. He wanted to reach forward and set the sounds to the hands or the hands to the sounds so that everything could move together. He fidgeted, but the seatbelt was tight on his body.
“Smaller world,” he repeated quietly, trying to taste the shape of those words. The phrase formed a shape that he could almost hold in his small fingers. Mycroft’s fingers were longer, he could hold a lot more things in them—stars, particles, time…
The car rounded a curve. The fences fell away into an open field, a river beneath them reflecting the sky like a torn strip of foil. The rain grew louder, then suddenly muted, as if they had passed through a veil.
The light dimmed, though the sky hadn’t changed. Sherlock felt the air thicken, the way it did before thunderstorms. He thought the car looked smaller inside than it had a moment ago, but he wasn’t looking through raindrops this time.
His mother turned back and said, “Almost there,” and his father said, “Just this lane and the next,” which always meant three lanes and a forgotten turn. Sherlock nodded and looked to Mycroft.
But Mycroft didn’t answer. He was looking out the window—through his own reflection in the glass. He could almost see two versions of Mycroft—one solid beside him, one caught in the glass with the rain running down his cheeks.
Then something changed. Sherlock felt it first—a new note, an extra hum, a dissonance in the engine that hadn’t been there before. The car slowed. The clock ticked. The rain tracks ran almost horizontally across the window. The road bent left under a canopy of beech branches that met overhead like a tunnel.
Headlights appeared at the far end—two pointed stars fixed on the road and growing. Sherlock liked stars. He memorized them by color and name: Sirius was blue and bright; Antares was red and very large; the Sun was yellow—the same yellow as the stars heading towards them.
But these were no stars. He knew that in the way children know things—prior to and beyond words.
“Mycroft,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a question.
“Hold on,” his mother said.
Mycroft’s hand came across Sherlock’s chest so quickly that Sherlock did not see it move. One second he was flying free, the next second, a warm softness pressed him back into the seat. The car made a sound—low and high at the same time. The beech tunnel filled with light.
For a few seconds the world lost its sequence. The clock ticked, but he didn’t see the hand jump. The raindrops fell away from the window and flew upwards; the sky spun in an endless kaleidoscope of green, yellow, brown, and white.
He was weightless again. His arms flew into the air though he hadn’t raised them. Raindrops joined him, each holding a perfect image of the world inside. He reached out a hand towards one, to preserve the world in his fingers, but something pinned him down—a block of flesh and bones.
His heartbeat seemed to pause, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
There was a sound—a soft implosion. A crunch and a boom that folded into vibration. Then the sound of metal groaning. His head went forward into Mycroft’s shoulder and the smell of his brother’s wool coat, rain-soaked, filled his mouth. Something hot ran across his cheek. He thought for a second it was hot chocolate—he had had that at the café. It was the same warmth, the same texture. But the smell was wrong, metallic. He thought he heard Mycroft’s voice: Sherlock, distinguish temperature from substance.
Open your eyes.
He had closed them without noticing. He often did that when things were too loud. It was at times like this when Mycroft would hold his hand; he thought hard and let his brother’s words fill his mind: breath—in, then out.
He could smell iron and hot dust and damp earth—petrichor—a word he had learned just the day before. He blinked. A thousand stars drifted in a muddy brown. Not stars—fractured glass. Not brown—crimson.
Other sounds drifted in—rain, running water, the engine stuttering. He could hear the wind whistling around him, and a voice that might have been his mother’s—calling his father’s name. But there was a silence in the middle of the noise—a blank, a hollow where sound should have been. He felt it grip him.
“My—” Sherlock said. He couldn’t move his lips very well. But he mustn’t stutter. He tried again. “Mycroft?”
His voice was blocked by something—a weight on his chest that wasn’t the seatbelt. Mycroft’s arm had gone slack, a band of cooling warmth. Sherlock tried to turn. He was pinned down. He pushed once, then stopped. Something—he didn’t know what—told him not to move. He had been developing something called an “instinct”, but those were usually warm and smelled like cotton candy. This one was cold all the way through.
“Mycroft,” he said again, and this time the syllables broke in the middle, not because he was crying—he wasn’t, he was a big boy and big boys didn’t cry. The car shifted. Something fell, it bounced, rolled, wobbled, and came to a stop before his eyes. The dashboard clock. It said 7:42. The hands were still. Sherlock didn’t like that. He wanted to reach forward and flick it so the hand would jump and the world would start again.
He could see part of Mycroft’s face. One of his eyes was open and fixed on the seam of the seat in front of them. Sherlock followed his gaze and found a neat rip in the seat’s gray vinyl. A straight, perfect line.
“It’s all right,” he said—to Mycroft, to himself, and to the seat. “It’s all right,” he repeated, because that’s what Mycroft would have said.
There was silence for a while, then suddenly hands—on the doors, on him, on Mycroft. He would not let them take Mycroft. Voices came in—sirens, shouts, footsteps. A terse, low voice found him, asking him if he could move. Another voice told him to stay still. A woman’s face appeared above him, pale and wet and distorted. She reached out a hand, her fingers were long and slender—like Mycroft’s.
“Hold on, sweetheart,” the woman said softly. But another voice cut in—sharper and colder. “Male, mid-teens, unresponsive.” A beam of light slid across him and found Mycroft’s face. “No pulse. No spontaneous breathing.”
The voice paused. Sherlock heard his heart pause but he didn’t know why. Then the voice again: “Time of death, eight forty-two p.m.”
The number landed in his head as clearly as the tickings of the still clock lying on the floor—7:42. One hour difference. He thought, absurdly, that as soon as he was free he could move the hand back, and everything would be alright again.
The woman’s voice found him again. “Lucky boy, just hold on.”
Lucky. The word lodged, but there wasn’t a clean, precise click this time. It was the wrong word, he thought, because lucky implies an opposite—a shape on the other side of him, warm and still. Yet, the wrong word dug itself in his head with a clean, sharp pain.
Sherlock did not cry. He counted. He counted the raindrops racing each other and drew imaginary lanes for them with his eyes so he could decide which would win. He counted his own breaths, which had gone shallow. He counted the seconds of a clock that no longer moved. He could still hear a soft tick and he counted that too.
When they lifted him, the bar across his chest slipped away. He reached for it without thinking. He didn’t like the gap. He tried to put his hand where Mycroft’s arm had been and found only air. The air was cold. He did not like that either.
Tiny lights pulsed beyond the trees. Stars, he thought, with a grateful sense of familiarity. The rain had become very fine, like drifting dust. Stars swirled; the inky blue of the sky filled his vision. Then black.
When he woke, the light was different—thin and sterile. The air smelled of antiseptic and starch. A steady electronic rhythm pulsed nearby, calm and indifferent. Something tugged lightly at his wrist—a tube taped to his skin.
A nurse stood beside him, holding a clipboard. She noticed his eyes open and smiled. “Good morning,” she said softly. “How are you feeling?”
He didn’t answer.
The clipboard rested on the edge of the bed. He could see the heading, the lines filled neatly in black ink.
Name: Mycroft Holmes. Time of death: 20:42, 18/11/1998.
He looked at the numbers for a long time.
In later years, Sherlock pruned many things from his memory—the sound of the crash, the names and colors of stars, the smell of rain—but he never pruned those numbers.
They endured, etched into him like the coordinates of a fixed point in time.