The childhood of Sherlock Holmes wasn't deprived.
Sure, there were a few bumps, his brother could be mean, he didn't make friends too easily, but other than that, he was doing pretty well. He could act like he cared and make a few friends, he lived in a lovely town with a nice house. The weekends were probably his favorite because it was the only time his brother would actually be willing to play with him, and even more than that, he let him pick the game every other week. Practically a dream come true. And whenever it was up to Sherlock, it was hide and seek.
He laughed as he ran from the house. He's never going to catch me this time! He insisted to himself. He ran fairly far through town, past house after house, before his laughter stopped and he halted in his tracks. He looked up. The big gray building loomed just to the side of him, with its long, intimidating shadow, dirtied and sometimes broken windows, and vines crawling up its back. That was the old orphanage. Nobody went in there. Nobody even crossed it. He had heard kids say it was haunted, even. Of course, he didn't believe that, but… well, he didn't know what he believed.
He took a few wary steps forward. If he could hide in here, Mycroft would never find him. Then again, what if he was caught? He surely wasn't allowed in there. He should really turn back, he figured. And he planned to, but something stopped him in his tracks.
A paper airplane was stuck, face down in the grass in front of the orphanage. As he looked forward, he found that several more littered the ground. He could see by the fact that the paper airplanes were dry and by the fact that it had rained two days ago that they were all recent, some more than others based on how crinkled up they were by the wind. Carefully he leaned over and picked it up off the ground, unfolding it.
Spaceship builder wanted!
The words were clumsily scrawled across the paper in purple crayon. Sherlock glanced up at the window. Was this place really haunted? Who was in there? Spaceship building? Was that code for something? One by one, he read the rest.
Reqirments: Must be cool, clever, and not boring!
Bring glitter if possibel!
If you want to travell all of time and space, this job is for you!
NOTE: This project is a SECRET! Come at NITE!
Aplication:
NAME:
WHY YOU WANT THE JOB:
BONUS QUESTION! WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND?:
YES MAYBE NO
Taped to the top of this one was the purple crayon. Sherlock glanced up at the window. He considered what to do. Build a spaceship? That was impossible. Physics didn't allow it. Then again, maybe it would be interesting. What was wrong with trying? He removed the crayon from the tape but stopped, hearing footsteps behind him. He crammed the note and the crayon in his pocket as he turned around, hoping his brother didn't notice, but he probably did.
"Found you, Sherlock," Mycroft sighed with his hands in his pockets, "Can we go home now?"
"Aw, just one more round!" Sherlock whined.
"No!" Mycroft insisted, "What are you doing here anyway? Get away from that creepy old place," he continued, nodding up at the building with disgust. Sherlock pouted, shuffling back over to his brother.
"Okay…" he moped. He followed his older brother reluctantly over to the house and headed inside.
At around 6:30 that night he pulled the letter back out of his pocket and grabbed a pen off his desk. Hey, why not? Maybe they would really build a spaceship and they would get to leave the stupid planet altogether and mean real, actual aliens. It said they'd be able to travel in time too, anyway, so if it was a stupid decision, he could just go back and fix it. He grabbed a wide, hardcover book out off his cluttered floor for a hard surface and set his application on it. He thought about each question very hard, doing a lot of crossing out and corrections before finally smiling at the finished letter.
Aplication:
NAME: Sherlock Holmes
WHY YOU WANT THE JOB: I am very intella intelligent and I would really like to travel in space with space and time with you. I once built a birdhouse and it was very good, so I have expere experience.BONUS QUESTION! WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND?:
YES MAYBE NO
After a moment of consideration, Sherlock circled maybe. He wasn't going to make any promises he couldn't keep. And then, he did something so shocking and rebellious he ought to have been kicked right out.
He snuck out.
His heart racing, he opened his window up, checked behind him, and then hurried outside, the application held tightly in his hand. He ran as fast as he could through the darkened town back to the big gray building. He swallowed. It was even scarier at night, like a bunch of demons and monsters would crawl out from the windows and hurry toward him to kill him and eat him up, like the bedtime stories Mycroft told to scare him. With a gulp, Sherlock took another step forward. He could tell from the trajectory of the paper airplanes that they had come from the window on the top floor, the third window across. He folded his crinkled up message back into a pretty good paper airplane, carefully aimed, and then threw. He crossed his fingers that no wind would blow when it flew. He punched the air when it flew square into the window. And then, without waiting another moment, he hurried back home and snuck back into his bed, closing his window and letting a rebellious feeling settle into his heart as he fell asleep.
Tomorrow was Sunday. That was church day.
He had never really believed in that stuff all that much. I mean, to him, science made a whole lot more sense. But he sat there, bored, just to make his parents happy. It wasn't hard. Just boring.
After church ended, they returned to his house and he told his parents he was off to go play outside. They babbled something about wearing a coat and being safe as he left out the door, but he barely heard it at all. As soon as he could, he ran out into town to the old gray building, stopping before he crossed through its shadow. He wondered if it would ever stop being scary.
He peered up at the window in question. He could see a child about his age with his arms on the windowsill and his head resting on top of them. He looked somewhere between bored and half asleep, with poofy brown hair that went off to one side, brownish-olive eyes, practically non-existent eyebrows and bright rosy cheeks. He had fairly thin arms and a prominent chin, his hopeful eyes staring down at the ground. Sherlock took a few steps forward and the boy saw him.
His eyes lit up like flashlights and a smile lit up his pinkish lips. He was practically bouncing; well, no, literally bouncing. He hopped ecstatically up and down, making his hair bob freely up and down and his clothes head come dangerously close to the top of the window. His small, babyish hands gripped the windowsill.
"Are you Sherlock Holmes?" he asked Sherlock.
"I am," Sherlock called back up. The boy gasped eagerly, continuing to bounce up and down. Sherlock wondered if he would ever get tired.
"You're gonna help me build a spaceship!" he shouted, more as a statement than as a question.
"I thought it was a secret!" Sherlock called back up to him.
"Oh! Right!" He said. Finally, he stopped bouncing and ducked down, "Shh!" he said, "Come inside, we can start today! But you have to use the secret entrance!"
"Secret entrance?" Sherlock asked. He was beginning to understand why he wrote with so many exclamation points, because that was the way he talked, too.
"Yeah!" The boy said in a sharp, yet loud whisper, "Go around the side alleyway, I can set it up, trust me!" Sherlock nodded and headed around the side of the building. As he walked around, he could hear the Doctor singing a tuneless, happy song to himself.
"Secret entrance, secret entrance, settin' up the secret entrance, gonna build a rocket ship, rocket ship, nenenenenene!"
Sherlock scoffed as he broke into a vocal guitar solo. Some secret entrance. He hurried around to the side of the building. Suddenly, the second window opened up and the boy could be seen behind it. He put a finger over his lips, said "Shhh!" and let out a long ladder made of rope and wood that was clipped to the window. "Climb up!" he told Sherlock. Sherlock obeyed. With a bit of difficulty, he made his way up to the window and fell inside. Before he even had time to get up, the boy was hurrying down the hallway.
"Come on," he whispered. Sherlock groaned at the bruises he thought he had got after falling in but the boy shushed him again. He was starting to think the answer to the bonus question would be no as he stood up and followed him. The boy rushed into the third door on the right, and he followed him in. He could see that this was where all the airplanes were coming from by both the view from the window and all the paper covered in purple mistakes and wrong folds all over his miniature plastic desk. He had a bed, a small desk, a dresser, and, taking up most of his room, a strange shape covered in a white sheet that had probably come off his bed. Was that his spaceship?
The boy sat down on his bed, his legs criss-crossed and his chest puffed out.
"I'm the Doctor!" he said pridefully. I joined him on his bed.
"That's a weird name," Sherlock commented.
"Well, it's not my real name!" he said proudly, "I picked it myself! I don't remember my real name!"
"So, other people just call you the Doctor?" he asked curiously. The Doctor pouted for a moment, a grimace spreading out behind his eyes.
"No," he said as though it was very disappointing, "Other people call me John." he stuck his tongue out, but his disgust was gone in another instant and his pride returned. "They say it's on my birth certificate and that makes it my name, but what they don't know is my birth certificate is all rubbish!" he shut his eyes and stuck his nose in the air like he was very mysterious and Sherlock couldn't help but be interested.
"How can your birth certificate be rubbish?" Sherlock asked incredulously, "Are you an illegal immigant?" he asked, his eyes going wide as he slightly mispronounced it. The Doctor leaned in close, giving an over the top glance to the right and then to the left.
"Yes!" he whispered sharply. Sherlock gasped. Did he just apply to help an illegal immigrant?! Was he dangerous?!
"But it's even worse than that," the Doctor whispered. He looked back and forth again. "Okay, I'm gonna tell you a secret, but you gotta promise not to tell anyone!"
"Yeah, okay, what?" Sherlock asked. The Doctor hesitated for a moment. He peeked out the window, then at the door.
"I'm an alien from another planet!" The Doctor said sharply, "My parents are aliens who dropped me off here, like superman! I'm building a spaceship to get back home to my own planet!"
Sherlock's jaw dropped. That was ridiculous. He couldn't really be an alien, could he? ...Could he?
"That's crazy. You couldn't have gotten here, it would have been all over the news!" Sherlock reminded him with a scowl.
"It's not a flying ship, silly!" The Doctor replied, "It's a teleport ship! And it's bigger on the inside, too, so it's really small! My mum and dad just parked in some alley and dropped me off, nobody noticed at all!"
"So where are they, then?" Sherlock asked without thinking, "Why haven't they come back?"
The Doctor didn't answer for a second, a deep-thinking frown crossing his face. He leaned forward, putting his head in his hands.
"I think they must have lost their spaceship for some reason," he hypothesized, staring at the bed. But suddenly, his eyes lit up again and he leaned back on his hands. "But that's okay, though. I just need a spaceship so I can get back to my home planet!"
Sherlock was silent for a second. However much, he would have liked to believe the Doctor was an alien, he was getting a different vibe from him. He tried to remember what Mycroft had told him about denial and what it could do. It could even make someone delusional, he'd said. Well, he was living at an orphanage. It made sense.
"Delusional…" he whispered.
"What was that?" The Doctor asked.
"Nothing, sorry." He wasn't sure exactly what to say. He knew it wasn't healthy to feed into his delusions, but he could hardly help himself. He was so excited. "So, a rocket ship?" he asked.
"Yeah!" The Doctor cried excitedly. He stood up from the bed, walking over to the object covered in a sheet, "I present to you," he began. He pulled off the sheet, "The TARDIS!"
I looked at the object. It was made entirely out of cardboard, a cardboard box really, colored blue with crayon and looking like a police box from the 1950s. Filled coke bottles were taped to every end and a few forks stuck out from the top on each corner, and a strange cap of metal was taped to the top. Atop the metal was a small LED light, now turned off.
"Don't worry, this is just its disguise! It's like a police box from really long ago, I looked up a picture!" he babbled. I stared at the cardboard box. It would never fly, "TARDIS stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space! I picked it myself! It needs work though! Wanna start working tomorrow?"
Sherlock glanced at the Doctor. His eyes were bright and filled with uncrushable excitement. He should really stop now, tell him to get a grip and tell him his parents were just humans who left him behind. But even with that plan in mind, Sherlock found a smile spreading across his face and the words "Yeah, definitely," leave his lips. The Doctor's smile somehow got even wider. He bounced up and down a little, the way he had before.
"Cool!" he exclaimed.