My Child (Sherlock Holmes/John Watson)

[baudown]

Title: My Child
Author: baudown
Fandom: Sherlock (TV)
Pairing: John/Sherlock
Disclaimer: Not mine
Note: Note: A 221b ficlet (221 words, the last word beginning with the letter b). Also on AO3.


Nanny feeds and bathes him; her fingers are knotty, palms rough and tender. Nanny sings him lullabies, and tells him tales of animals who talk. Nanny sits by his bed when he's ill, wiping his forehead with a cool, damp cloth. Nanny smiles fondly. "A leanbh," Nanny says.



Sherlock is eating his soft-boiled egg. "Drink your red," Nanny says. He blinks at her, confused. "Your red," she insists. One of her eyes is drifting. Her mouth is slack and wet.

"A stroke," Mummy explains. Mycroft clarifies: a disturbance of blood flow to the brain. She's unable to speak; her appearance altered. Sherlock will never see her again.






An odor penetrates the lab's synthetic smell. Faint, but familiar -- beeswax, laundered linen, toast. Nursery smells, Sherlock thinks.

Mike is there, and with him, a man. The scent is simply sense-memory. Still, it's the man who's conjured it, somehow.

The cane, the limp -- a soldier. Wounded, but not in the leg. Shoulder, perhaps? And lost. So lost he's lost the desire to be found.

All the jigsaw pieces before him, but they won't fit correctly together. There's something Sherlock is missing: a shape, a color, a sound.

The words that spring to mind -- destiny, and fate -- are concepts he's always disdained.

Odd, then, this sudden warmth, like the heat of an ember, long buried.

Comments

[sparrow2000.livejournal.com]

So interesting - both are about beginnings and endings and beginnings again - or at least that's how I read them. As always, you have an impeccable way with words and images.

[baudown.livejournal.com]

That's how I meant them!

Thank you, hon.