A/N: Here's an idea I haven't had the courage to try until now. The lovely bcbdrums inspired me. Kudos to her!
Enjoy!
"Sherlock, this is ridiculous. You need to clean this rubbish up," John said scoldingly, wading through papers that covered the floor of the sitting room.
"I'll never find any of it again!" Sherlock protested, sulking on the couch.
"What is all of this, anyway?" John asked, trying to read Sherlock's cramped handwriting. And supposedly doctors had bad handwriting. Try consulting detectives.
"Mostly experiment related," Sherlock explained.
"Well, look. Mrs. Hudson's threatening to evict you if you don't get this straightened up, at least a little, so get moving," John said, tossing a bundle of papers at Sherlock, who had seated on the couch.
"She wouldn't," he answered, unconcerned.
"No, but she won't be making you any tea," John warned.
Sherlock seemed to weigh his options before coming to a decision.
"Fine," he said with a sigh. "I'll take what I can to my room and start putting it away," he said, referencing the boxes of files he had stowed under his bed. "You stay out here and start sorting," he commanded, as if John had offered to help.
John sighed as well. "Alright. But if I come in there and you're playing Angry Birds again, I'll evict you myself," he warned solemnly.
"Honestly, will you let that go," Sherlock mumbled sulkily, and picked up a huge armful of papers, and took them to his room. John took a few as well, and then sat down to start organising. Sherlock had told him to split it into piles of case-related papers, experiment-related papers, and other papers. The ex-RAMC had been going steadily when he spotted a spiral notebook that caught his eye.
It was a plain, untitled object, that had clearly seen a lot of use. The pages were a bit dog-eared and yellowed from touch and oxidation. The cover was a bit faded. Old, then. Though John wasn't prone to prying, he decided to pick it up and have a peek inside. Really, it wasn't as if Sherlock kept a diary or anything.
The heading on the first page read: 'I've finally gone crazy.' John snorted at that, and looked for the date. Not long after Sherlock had returned from his two-year hunting trip, when criminals were his game. Interesting.
John began to read, intrigued. The sounds of Sherlock dutifully sorting papers didn't stop, so John was sure he wouldn't get caught. Not that he was guilty of anything, and he wouldn't pretend he hadn't read it, but Sherlock was irritable when it came to people touching or looking at his things without his express permission.
I never had problems in believing in things I couldn't see.
John paused, bemused at the odd admission. It was unlike Sherlock.
For example, as a child I believed that Mycroft had midnight snacks every night. I never saw it happen, but that didn't make it impossible. In fact, due to Mycroft's ever-growing weight, I just took the most probable explanation at face value.
John laughed, but quietly, to keep from drawing Sherlock's attention.
I've always had a scientist's mind; ever since I could remember, and every day since, I've been asking questions: how do the phone lines carry the sound? How come the sky changes colour? Why does ice float? My father usually shrugged and answered 'that's the way it is, I suppose', and ruffled my hair, which I had always liked. My mother was the one to give detailed answers, and I liked that even better. This zeal for knowledge fuels me in The Work; it is the inspiration for my experiments. I want to know how, why. It is my nature.
John stopped again, once again wondering. Was this a diary after all? But everything he knew about Sherlock dismissed the possibility. And John was also surprised to read such expressive writing from Sherlock. He read on, mesmerized by this part of his friend that had been hidden from him.
Yet this knowledge has always been restricted to the scientific; where philosophy or spirituality entered the equation, I lose interest. If I can't measure it in my beakers, or on a calorie meter, or any other concrete form of measurement, I fail to see the purpose. How does it have any bearing on anything?
What was he getting at?
So it would be safe to say science, or The Work, is my belief system. If it doesn't relate to the work, it doesn't relate to me. I never gave any thought to my 'beliefs', because what does it matter? Your professed set of beliefs have nothing to do with your lifestyle. I've met terrible catholics and saintly Muslims, and vice versa. I never saw why I should 'believe' anything.
There was a chance that I had a vague belief in 'Heaven', or at least some kind of happy afterlife, when he was very very young. When my dog was about to be put down, I was absolutely sure that there was a sort of 'Dog Heaven,', like most children. That sounds embarrassing even on paper.
John was saddened and amused at once by this statement.
No one in my family had the heart to tell me otherwise, and so I steadfastly clung to the notion until Mycroft eventually told me. I had thought it a cruel thing to do at the time, but now I see it as a kindness. After that incident, I had bitterly abandoned any idea of any kind of afterlife.
But that was before everything went wrong.
John was enthralled by the narrative. Sherlock was a good writer, he realized.
It started with me faking my death - that had really started to get me wondering about the more abstract ideas. Being so close to death every day for two years afterwards left me no choice but to begin to consider it, but only in passing. But I was so busy, I didn't have time to contemplate it seriously, nor experiment or research it. If one can research or experiment with such a subject.
John could sense Sherlock's awkwardness and defensiveness, even from a page. He still felt a tightening in his throat, reading about those years.
It wasn't until recently that the vague ideas began to blossom, to permeate into the scientific half of my mind. After all, why not? If I could look at it scientifically, that would be a huge point in the general idea of spirituality.
Now I begin research.
That was the end of the first entry. John sat back, amazed. Sherlock? The one who openly ridiculed - everything?
John turned the page, soaking in the new information.
I've spent my whole life being exposed to the commonly accepted viewpoint of cosmic evolution, but to be honest, I never much cared about that either. What did it matter how we ended up here? If it doesn't help solve crimes, it goes in the rubbish bin. Yet it was impossible to delete all of that information.
I've started by researching for any kind of evidence for intelligent design. It feels stupid to be doing scientific research for religion. And I will have to be very careful; when it comes to the subjects of the origin of the universe, people get incredibly biased and not very scientific, making facts difficult to obtain. Though I have never seen a single scrap of scientific argument for anything other than Darwinism; I assume that all the religious people just attribute everything to the supernatural and call it done.
However, today I found some things.
Not all of it could be proven, of course, but there were some things that simple logic could not deny; not necessarily ideas that supported the Deist or Theist worldview, but ones that strove to disprove any other standpoint. They were basic, and on their own could not make a compelling argument. It was a bit of a straw man fallacy. But it was interesting. For example, if the world is billions of years old, and the planet is continually losing momentum in its rotation, the speed at which the world would have been spinning even millions of years ago would make any kind of life impossible. Same thing with gravity - the sun would have been so close the planet would have been roasted.
John began the next entry, dated some time later.
I had planned to abandon this experiment. I felt as if I was wasting my time. But today it occurred to me; according to most religions, there is a code you must follow, rules you must not break, something you must not do, to avoid eternal punishment. I have always written this off as extortion of the stupid, but now I wonder; in the possibility that any of those particular beliefs hold any sort of truth, it would be of infinite importance to be doing the right thing. If not, it doesn't matter - but would that not, therefore, mean that it is of infinite importance to know whether those beliefs hold any truth?
And as a scientist, I am sworn to find the truth in things. Shouldn't that commitment also extend to the unseen?
The logic was sound enough. John found himself wondering along with Sherlock. He really would have to give him kudos on his writing skills.
I plan to keep this secret. Even from John, who blatantly admitted to praying when in desperate need. If he knew I was beginning to wonder about the existence of -
Then that entry was over. John felt guilty now. But he had already started. He planned to finish, then make a full confession. Who knew, Sherlock might not care at this point anyway.
I have found more and more holes in the Darwinism theory - not that this proves anything, necessarily, because any supernatural beliefs have 'holes' as well, they just explain it away using a nice generic excuse called 'spirits'.
I had another thought today.
Humans are clearly the dominant species of the Earth. So far so obvious. But how did this come to be? We don't have talons, or sharp teeth, or strong limbs, or good senses of smell, or incredible speed, or flight, or even nightvision. If everything marcoevolved, why were the first humaniods not killed instantly? Especially if we are gaining intelligence, and therefore were less intelligent then? Intelligence is all humanity has, really, and dexterous hands. That's it. It doesn't make sense for Nature to select such a weak and helpless species in the prehistoric world that would have been brutal.
And I realize that, no matter how far science advances, it will never fully explain the universe. Does that mean that there is no option but to attribute the inexplicable to floating essences? Of course not.
But there could never be any scientific explanation for the soul. I have seen records of old experiments where, according to some studies, the body inexplicably grows a bit lighter at the moment of death. It is a very unreliable thing to put your money on. Souls, of course, are electrical firings in the brain, which stores memories, and the unique composition of each brain causes different hormones to be released in repsonse to stimuli in varying amounts, giving a 'personality'. Yet, that can't be it. There is something more important than action potentials and chemical reactions in a person. Surely there has to be such a thing as a soul?
What if one day science discovered the 'soul formula', a concrete grasp of a human's spirit, maybe even able to produce 'soul juice', whatever. It seems that such a secret is too precious, too sacred, to ever be understood. Mary Shelley has already thought of the horrors of humans able to give life.
Yet if there is a soul, that begins to bring in the question of afterlife again. Honestly, while it was fine for Redbeard to have somewhere to go, I have always been terrified of the idea of an afterlife. It doesn't matter, Heaven or Hell, both sound like torture. To be trapped in one place forever - to even exist forever, never having any escape, is nothing short of a nightmare for me. I had, in fact, had an actual nightmare about it, when I was a child. I dreamt of being calmly escorted by Mycroft through a door.
"This is Hell," Mycroft had explained in that eerie calm found only in dreams.
I looked around to see a large, plain room, painted a pastel orange. There were raised platforms that I thought I would like to play on, but I was too frightened to be excited.
"I'm going to pop over to Heaven after this," my big brother went on. "The orange walls are what made people think Hell had flames. How silly."
I was scared. "I'll be here forever?" I asked.
Mycroft nodded grimly, looking a tiny bit sad for the first time. "I'm just saying goodbye," he said solemnly. Then suddenly, the door had shut and I was alone. I walked farther into the room, already panicking. Forever? In this room? Orange everywhere, the walls, the ceiling, even the door. No windows. Eternity, in this room.
The dream sufficiently made me hateful of any idea of eternity. I'd rather cease to exist. But now I wonder, wouldn't Heaven be, well, Heaven? As in, a perfect place, for each individual. In my idea of Heaven, I would never be bored. Is such a thing too impractical to wonder about?
End that entry. John moved to the next, immersed in the narrative.
In my teen years, I had begun to think somewhat strange thoughts about reality; our entire perception of the world is achieved through nothing more than signals from the nervous system, and that was all so fragile, so easily misunderstood or manipulated, how can we know anything to be true? It had worried my parents to see me walking around seriously questioning reality, and soon I ended up having regular meetings with the school counselor, who looked at me like I'd grown another head and recommended medication.
Why does no one ever think about anything?
I now consider; if (assuming) a supreme being had created the universe, it would be impossible to produce an alternate theory. It would be like trying to understand the existence of ice without acknowledging the concept of absence of heat. Impossible.
Yet really, we can't know anything, can we? We know A is true because of B, and B is true because of C, and C is true because of D, an infinite regress of proofs, leading nowhere. What you don't know is just as, or arguably more so, important as what you do know. And while a scientific theory like Darwinism can be disproven, the existence of the supernatural cannot. Not to say that proof of the supernatural must therefore exist; but you can never fully dismiss the possibility. And to have any kind of certainty, we would have to know everything. Everything. That, or have a a revelation from a being who does. Is this reasoning scientific? Have I become biased? I cannot tell.
That was the end of the entry. There wasn't another one. He thumbed to the back, finding urls to articles, references to books, even some pieces of paper with articles printed on them glued in like a scrapbook. John looked up, and jumped to see Sherlock standing in the doorway, arms crossed and leaning on the post. His expression was neutral, as if hiding an emotion.
"Good reading?" Sherlock asked sarcastically. There was the barest hint of nervousness in his voice.
"Yeah," John answered honestly. "It really was. I didn't know you could write."
Sherlock made a face. "Well, it hardly takes any effort at all to write better than you," he said, and moved a bit stiffly to pick up another bundle. John could tell he was trying to play it off like he didn't care, which he clearly did.
"I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't have read your stuff," John said, a bit sheepishly. Sherlock shrugged.
"I probably shouldn't have left it on the floor," he replied.
There was a pause, where Sherlock seemed to be waiting for response.
"I didn't think it was silly," John offered. "Really good thoughts. I'd like to see some of that research," he said amiably, though not oversweet to make it seem fake.
"I don't need your approval," Sherlock said, seeming uncomfortable.
John shook his head, stood, and waded to Sherlock. He placed his hand on Sherlock's shoulder, and looked straight into his eyes.
"Sherlock," he said in a straightforward tone, "I am not judging you. I think you're braver than most people to be asking those kind of questions like that," he said honestly. Braver than me, he added silently.
The consulting detective seemed to be searching John, as if making sure he was telling the truth.
"And did you really have a dog named - Redbeard?" John asked, smirking a bit.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Is that what your mother said after she named her children?"
"No, I believe that was your father after giving you your middle name."
"At least it isn't a glorified version of Goldilocks."
"'Glorified' isn't necessarily the word I'd use."
"Oh right. It's just the male form, right?"
"I'm not inviting you to crime scenes anymore."
"Good. Now I'll be like you and show up when I feel like it and never when I'm wanted."
"I think I've just started hating you."
"Don't worry, you'll get over it. Now, clean," John ordered, passing Sherlock more papers. Sherlock grumbled and carried them to his room, and shut the door.
John returned to his spot, and looked again at the old notebook, still open on the last entry. Getting an idea, he picked up a pen and wrote a short note a couple of lines down.
'Don't stop now. I think you're onto something.'
A/N: The author of this fic is a Christian who believes the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and wants to try to incorporate her beliefs into every area of her life. That's me by the way, hello! *waves*
Thanks for reading. I hope the boys don't seem OOC.
Let me know what you thought!