Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters of Arthur Conan Doyle, nor any of the various dramatic incarnations thereof. No profit is being made from this work.

Note: Welcome to this story! This one kind of rose up suddenly in my mind and demanded to be written. The demand was well-timed, so I gave in.

The death in this story is a canon event, but the circumstances under which Sherlock first hears about it are inspired by real-life events. This story is set during the early months of 1989. Sherlock has recently turned thirteen, an unpleasant age for a lot of kids, and probably especially so for a kid like Sherlock.

Enjoy the story, and I'll see you at the end.

1. Morning Shows The Day

The world was cool and blue and silent. Sherlock floated aimlessly in the water, not weightless, not exactly, but supported evenly all over his body. In the water, he could move gracefully, any way he wanted to go. All the ungainliness of long limbs and oversized feet and hands that puberty was inflicting upon his thirteen-year-old body melted away in the water, and Sherlock could think, free of distraction for a few precious moments. In the water, he could shut out the chattering voices of people endlessly wanting things from him and contemplate his changing circumstances in peace.

Unfortunately, that peace was always short-lived. No matter how good Sherlock got at holding his breath, he would always have to surface sooner or later. His chest began to tighten, and his feet kicked even before he could think, propelling him upward. As soon as his head broke the surface of the water, his ears were assaulted by shouts and splashes echoing in the cavernous, tiled pool area, and bodies shoved past him as he bobbed in the water trying to re-orientate himself.

"Everyone out!" the lifeguard was shouting. "Free swimming period is over for today! Everyone out of the pool!"

Sherlock breaststroked to the side of the pool nearest his blue-curtained cubicle and hauled himself out. Warm as it was, the air still felt chilly on his wet skin, and he hurried to wrap himself in his towel. When he glanced at the large clock on the wall, he noticed that it was a full hour earlier than it usually was when the free swimming period ended. He wriggled into flip-flops and padded over to the lifeguard.

"The free swimming period is meant to end at noon. It's just eleven now. Why can't we swim any more?" he asked.

"Swimming tournament," the lifeguard replied absently. "Whole lot of school teams coming in for a championship today. We have to get the pool ready for them." And, indeed, some of the other boys who worked at the pool had opened the doors to the equipment room and were bringing out the lane markers.

Sherlock sighed and flip-flopped back to the locker room to shower and change back into his clothes. He took as long as he could about it, but he still emerged from the locker room with forty minutes left before Mummy was scheduled to come and pick him up. It was enough time that Sherlock could easily have taken the Tube home, but the lesson had been driven home in recent years that arriving at home unexpectedly sometimes led to seeing things he shouldn't have seen and the decidedly unpleasant consequences of that.

There was always the option of simply sitting in the entry hall and waiting until the arranged time, allowing the activity of the building to flow around him as he indulged in a long flight of the mind. But no sooner had Sherlock seated himself on a bench than he caught sight of Mr. Burton, who taught the little children's swim lessons. Mr. Burton glanced at Sherlock speculatively, hunching over and fiddling with something in his coat pocket in a way that made Sherlock uncomfortable. He slid off the bench and went to the manager's office.

"What do you want?" the manager asked, not unkindly.

"May I use your telephone?" Sherlock asked. "I need to ask my mother to come and fetch me."

The manager slid the telephone across the desk, and Sherlock dialled the number. Mummy answered after four rings, and her greeting sounded oddly forced.

"Oh, it's you, darling. Aren't you still swimming?"

Sherlock sighed. "Obviously not. They've closed the pool early. Come and fetch me."

"Right now? I'm in the middle of a meeting with my solicitor."

"But you're home. Solicitors have meetings in their offices . . ." Sherlock's mind skipped him directly to the end of that chain of logic, and he decided that he definitely did not like what he saw there, and closed his mouth.

Now it was Mummy's turn to sigh down the telephone line at him. "All right. Give me a few minutes to make myself presentable, and I'll come and fetch you. Wait in the entry hall like a good boy."

"Thank you, Mummy." Sherlock hung up and returned to the entry hall. Mr. Burton had left, so it was probably safe to sit there for fifteen minutes or so. Sherlock sat down, took a deep breath, and blew it out, sinking deep into the recesses of his mind.

Usually, this was a perfect refuge, clean and orderly, a mental landscape marked off into sections. The smallest section was marked "Known," and it was a fine starting point, though Sherlock never cared to remain there for very long. Far more interesting was the larger stretch marked "Unknown" that spread out into the far distance, a wild territory just begging to be conquered. Off to one side was a third territory, somewhat whimsically designated "Here There Be Dragons," in a Gothic typeface that Sherlock suspected he had taken from one of his old storybooks. This region was full of dark, uncomfortable things that Sherlock did not want to know about. He didn't know quite how big that region was, or when he might find himself drifting along its edges, but he could always recognize the cold, prickly feeling that rolled around him when he encountered it.

The most interesting place to be was just on the border between "Known" and "Unknown," but it was hard to locate that place today. Wherever Sherlock turned, he encountered the unnerving edges of "Here There Be Dragons," and he would have to take a step back. After the fifth or sixth time that this happened, he retreated back to "Known" in despair and discovered that someone was waiting for him there.

The figure turned out to be Samuel Johnson, which did not surprise Sherlock in the slightest. Mycroft had given him Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson as a combined Christmas and birthday gift that year, and Sherlock had spent much of the intervening time devouring the book. Johnson-in-his-mind smiled kindly at him and intoned, "Depend upon it, Sherlock, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Sherlock opened his eyes and stared at the industrial-green wall opposite him, with its corkboard filled with notices. Johnson was right, of course. It was nothing more than childish anxiety over the afternoon's appointment that prevented Sherlock from thinking. But, to his distress, identifying the anxiety did not make it go away. It was with a certain amount of relief that Sherlock looked out of the small window near the door and saw his mother's old grey Renault pulling up outside.

He snatched up his bag and hurried out to the car, tossing the bag into the back seat before he climbed into the front seat next to Mummy. "Hello, darling," she said absently. "Make sure to hang your wet things to dry when we get home. You don't want them to get mouldy."

"Will your solicitor still be there when we get home?" Sherlock asked. Mummy's solicitor was called Mr. Fraser, and she talked about him often. Sherlock had never met him, and he had no desire to do so, especially not today.

"Of course not. I sent him back to his office when I left to fetch you. I'll have to make another appointment with him." If there was any reproach in Mummy's voice, Sherlock did not care.

There was silence in the car for a few moments as Mummy navigated an especially tricky intersection. "Did you have a good time swimming?" she asked after a while.

Sherlock shrugged. "It was all right. I wanted to stay longer, but they had to get ready for a school sports tournament. Stupid."

"Not every school has holidays at exactly the same time as yours," Mummy said.

"Well, they ought to. It would be much more convenient."

Mummy laughed. "You'd hate it. They'd end up shortening your hols to fit in with everyone else's calendar. You do have awfully long hols, you know."

Sherlock slouched down in his seat and folded his arms over his chest. "Doesn't make a bit of difference if you're just going to ruin them by making me go to the dentist. I don't want to have teeth ripped out of my head. They're perfectly good teeth."

"Yes, but there are too many of them to fit in your jaw. We've got to take a couple of them out for the braces. Don't you want nice straight teeth when you grow up?"

Sherlock ran his tongue over his teeth. They weren't quite crooked, but the dentist had decided that he was developing an overbite and wanted to push his front teeth further back. Sherlock had watched Mycroft suffer through two and a half years of braces, and was under no illusion that any part of this would be at all pleasant. "I don't want braces," he said, "and I certainly don't want that dentist tearing up my mouth today."

"You won't feel a thing," Mummy said. "Really, Sherlock, this is the modern era. He'll give you Novocaine."

"But how will he know when it works? I don't want him to start pulling right away."

Mummy smiled. "Don't you worry. I worked this all out with Pansy from church. She's a dentist. She said that, when she gives someone Novocaine, she waits a bit and then - this is very clever, Sherlock - she gives their mouth a poke and asks if it hurts."

"Ha ha." It was bad enough that Mycroft could never remember that Sherlock was thirteen and therefore very nearly grown up. It was even less pleasant when Mummy treated him like a child as well.

Mummy ignored his sarcasm. "Pansy also told me that half of your problem is worrying." She gave that word a disapproving emphasis. "So I've spoken with the dentist, and he'll also give you some medicine for that. It's all taken care of, darling. All you have to do is sit there and let the poor man do his job. Then you can come home and put your feet up, and you'll have the whole holiday to recover. That's not so bad, now, is it?"

There was precisely nothing about that plan that appealed to Sherlock in the slightest, but it was a grown-up plan, and one thing that Sherlock had learned very early in life was that grown-up plans were as unshakeable as the British Isles themselves. If Mummy decreed that he would start the half-term hols by being assaulted by a dentist, then that was what would happen.

They had arrived at home. Mummy parked the car, and they went inside. Sherlock made a show of hanging up his wet swimsuit and towel, and Mummy ignored him in favour of going into the kitchen to make lunch. She re-emerged a few minutes later with a bowl of tomato soup and a piece of toast spread with Marmite. Sherlock stirred the soup and nibbled at the edges of the toast, but couldn't bring himself to eat any more than that.

Mummy watched him for ten seemingly endless minutes before she heaved another long-suffering sigh. "Fine. If you won't eat it, I will. But you still have to clean your teeth before we leave for the dentist's. Don't forget."

Sherlock watched her eat the soup and toast with vague disgust. "Mycroft said that you made him a banana milkshake when he had his braces put on."

"I might have done. It was a long time ago."

"Mycroft said."

Mummy gazed at him coolly over the soup bowl. "Are you asking me to make you a banana milkshake? You hate bananas."

That was true, and yet it did not stop Sherlock from wanting a banana milkshake anyway. There was no logic there that he could explain, so he stared at the table and shrugged.

"Please yourself," Mummy said. "Go and clean your teeth before you forget."

Sherlock got up and left the table without a word.

An hour later, he had managed to lose himself in a book about the First World War that he had taken from Daddy's study at Christmas, telling himself that he would return it when, and if, Daddy came home again. He tried to imagine himself as a soldier, and then changed his mind and decided on a cavalry officer, kitted out in a sharply pressed uniform, ready to ride into battle. The thought of courage in the face of certain death appealed to him today, although he had not yet finished Life of Samuel Johnson.

"Sherlock!" Mummy called. "Put your shoes on. It's time to go."

Sherlock stuck an old birthday card into the book in lieu of a bookmark, rolled off of his bed, and stuffed his feet into his trainers. He dragged his feet as he came downstairs, put his coat on with exaggerated care, and made sure that all the buttons were done. When he could think of no more ways to dawdle, he went out to the car, where Mummy was waiting for him. After he had put his seatbelt on, Mummy took something out of her handbag and handed it to him. It was Mycroft's Walkman, with headphones and a cassette of Bach's organ chorales.

"Almost forgot," Mummy said. "This was Pansy's other suggestion. She said you'd be much better off if you couldn't hear the dentist working in your head. She said that disturbs her patients sometimes."

The explanation made sense, and Sherlock was always glad to have a chance to lose himself in Bach. Sherlock had managed to evade many of his religious obligations in recent years, and could not remember if he had ever met Pansy from church. But as he considered her suggestions, the treacherous thought wormed its way through his brain that Pansy might just be a dentist who cared about her patients and looked after them as doctors were meant to do. As the car headed toward its ultimate destination in Queen Anne Street, Sherlock huddled down in his seat and wished that Pansy could be his dentist.

At the dentist's office, Sherlock scowled and stared at the floor while Mummy registered him with the receptionist. There were toys scattered around the waiting room meant for much smaller children, and the only magazines available were the sort filled with large, brightly coloured pictures of celebrities doing boring things. The door to the office proper opened, and a little girl skipped out, holding a balloon in one fist and carrying a brand-new toothbrush in the other. She had clearly just come from an exam in which the dentist had found that her teeth were in excellent shape, with not a single cavity. Sherlock had had plenty of those exams as a child, though he had never quite understood the point of the balloon and had always released it immediately upon exiting the building, content to watch it sail away into the sky.

"Sherlock Holmes?" the nurse asked. Mummy prodded Sherlock's shoulder and followed him into the dentist's office. Sherlock's insides wobbled a bit as he sat down in the large padded chair. Instantly ashamed of his cowardice, he thrust out his lower lip and stared hard at the nurse, noticing that her bright red lipstick was smudged.

The dentist arrived a moment later, and Sherlock clamped his gaze upon him, not wanting the man to make a single move that he could not see. The dentist smiled at him, though not a friendly smile. "Hello, Sherlock," he said. "How are you doing today?"

The question was so blindingly stupid that it just had to be a ploy to get Sherlock to open his mouth. Sherlock said nothing. He refused to meet the dentist's eyes, but stared at his hands. There was a curious dent on his ring finger where a ring would go, but there was no ring there.

"Ahaha," the dentist said. "You're a stubborn one, aren't you. Can you give me a little smile? I promise I won't hurt you."

This was a transparent lie, and Sherlock glared at the dentist. The dentist smiled again, and Sherlock saw the traces of something bright red on his teeth.

"I see you've brought your music," the dentist went on. "That's a good boy. You'll grow up to be really clever one day."

This was too much. Sherlock's indignation overcame his resolve to keep his mouth shut. "I'm already clever," he said. "I know that you like to kiss the nurse. Are you going to get a divorce?"

"Sherlock!" Mummy cried.

The dentist smiled a tight, patient little smile. "Oh, don't worry about it, Mrs. Holmes," he said through gritted teeth. "He's just nervous, ahaha. I've heard worse, believe me." He turned back to Sherlock. "Let's just take care of that mouth of yours, shall we?"