Disclaimer: I own neither Sherlock nor The Lord of the Rings.
Just to clear up any confusion from the get go: Sílafinn is Sherlock, and Mídalath is Mycroft. You don't know how hard it was to find names that both fit and sounded similar enough that people aren't going to go 'wait, whut?' too much. Although, since I've already had to explain it anyway…
…yeah, so, Sílafinn is Sindarin for 'Shining Hair', Sherlock means 'Bright Hair'; Mídalath is something like 'Misty flat ground', while Mycroft is a very obscure surname meaning 'Waters by the field'. I work with what I've been given.
Why you pick such strange names, Doyle?
They still hanged criminals for all to see in Dol Amroth; hardly befitting of a city with such claims of beauty and culture. Still,out of their family it was only Mídalath who condemned the practise. And really, the boy believed his elder brother only spoke out so passionately – or as passionate as that fat boar could possibly be - because the deaths were so unattractive as often as not, faces turning blue, tongues sticking out, bowels loosening. And his brother did so despise mess.
And then there was the fact that the watching crowds provided fertile ground for pickpockets. More than five hundred years and Dol Amroth still had those as well.
But Sílafinn found it all…intriguing, the crowds waiting to see the condemned swing, the humanity that seethed. If it weren't for the public gallows he wouldn't have seen his first corpse when he was four, or been able to return to see a person in all the various stages of becoming one.
He perched on a stall one day to see over the people and watch the latest man's relatives try to break past the guards, to pull on his legs and help him die quick instead of slow. Then Mídalath came up from nowhere and stood beside him, his head within kicking distance.
"I have heard, little brother," he had said, eyes never leaving the spectacle, "that there are those who come to the gallows constantly. Not to see justice done, or for the excitement of the crowd, or even to cut purses. Why do you think that they come, then?"
"For the same reason you pretend to detest them?" The relatives were pushed back, the man must die slow. "To turn your eyes away and denounce such practises and those who flock to the spectacle. And all the while you imagine the bulging eyes and the twisting mouths…and the twitching feet and the kicking legs? And the noose around their necks as well, and their hands bound too, and your blood racing all the while as you grow-"
"Enough."
"Dying men can come erect as they perish, surely it's only courtesy to join them-"
"Enough." The hanging man made his last noise in this life and showed his 'Maia Lust', but the boy was pulled off the stall and taken roughly away before the body even finished its twitching and shrivelling. He never feared Mídalath's grip on his arm, even when his brother was angry. It was not the elder son's duty to punish the younger one, and usually not his desire.
The blood of Númenor ran in the boy, diluted but still there. None of those watching him grow mentioned that rivers could be slow and sluggish or swift and unimpeded and yet be polluted all the while, and that sooner or later the taint would poison someone. Perhaps everyone.
But the blood ran weakly-true in Mídalath as well, even the few agreed on that, and it ran (mostly) pure. The elder brother would watch over the younger to curb his excesses, and if it came to such…well, he would surely deal with the man the boy might grow into.
Few thought that, if the same blood and water flowed in his veins, it might carry a touch of the same taint, or that Mídalath might have grown quite adept at concealing the mark left upon his own mind and spirit.
(He at least believed that, far from a blemish, it was a useful addition. And if the touch were of the Enemy, what of it? None would ever master either of them.)
Really, when the boy was being so idiotic, it was his duty as a brother, as man of the house, to raise little Sílafinn above the maddening crowd. But he made it so difficult, sometimes! For, you must understand, Sílafinn rarely took what he was taught to heart.
Or, for that matter, to his head.
Early one morning they were walking down by the docks. They passed a crowd, there were sobs and keening, a slimy body being pulled up from the water and placed on a litter. When Mídalath paused to ask what had passed the answer (whispered only to him, as if the boy had never seen all those hangings) was that the dead lady had taken her own life. Stones in her dress to weigh her down.
Both brothers looked at the corpse, both thought the same, but only Sílafinn spoke out: "She took nothing. She was murdered."
There were murmurs and shouts, a grip on his arm to drag him away and a whisper in his ear, "Do not say such things, little brother, people do not like to hear them."
"But it is true. She was murdered. You saw those marks on her neck, you know as well as I-"
"Aye, maybe. But it does not concern us, and so the matter rests."
Between breath and breath Sílafinn could have taken his knife and stuck it in Mídalath's eye for his sloth and idleness, that he'd drag him away when something of interest was at last all but thrown in their path.
But with his next breath he obeyed his brother, followed him back to the house. And Mídalath and mother contrived to keep him there until the woman was judged a suicide, and interred in a fitting grave.
He wondered if the one who had strangled their mistress, and dumped her body where it was certain to be caught in a tide, would do it again.
Sílafinn prided himself on being the despair and infuriation of his tutors. He would argue that they returned the infuriation tenfold, as well as excessive pain. To any other boy they would surely have been the very pattern of wisdom and instruction. To Mídalath they had been just that, but to Sílafinn they were, quite simply, insufferable, and he let them know it.
And they let him have the best of the birch.
"What does it matter who Elros was, or when Númenor fell, or where the line of kings was broken?" he had demanded once. "That was then. And this is now! Teach me things that are of the now, or leave me be!" And for good measure he swept vellum, books, quills and ink bottles off the work table in one big smash.
After that, though Mídalath frowned and sighed ever so, their mother no longer employed tutors in history and languages for her younger son. Instead she engaged an alchemist, a merchant, a sword-smith who'd fled from the South, a retired Ranger.
Mídalath had to admit that it did keep his brat of a sibling content, for the moment.
On the good days – and there'd been quite a few of those, Sílafinn would recall with some surprise, years onwards - they'd stop for a while in crowded places, standing at ease and watching the world go by. They took the passing people apart for sport, discerning where they'd come from, their living, their likes, their loves, their ancestry, their progeny, their crimes.
"Clear sight into the hearts of men…" Mídalath sighed, and twisted his lips. "So trumpeted throughout the land, and so very useless, really. So they are strong-willed or weak, what does it matter if you have no hints of how to use that, no evaluation of the man's life as well as his heart? That man with the boy," he went on, coming back to their ever constant contest.
"A widower," Sílafinn replied at once.
"He's been so for some time," and the game began again.
Mídalath never bore him home upon his shoulders, and Sílafinn would never have wanted him to. But they'd eat oranges together, and the youth would pretend not to notice when the boy experimented at how far he could flick the pips.
His second deduction began when he went out alone on a misty morning, before most of the city had risen, and his efforts to find interest again and keep it this time took root when he stood quite still and watched a dead cat.
Cats were not a favourite pet in Dol Amroth, but they were useful for keeping down mice in the kitchens and at the docks, and various high born maidens would sometimes defy tradition and pamper the beasts in their bowers. If he liked anything in this world (besides mother, and the boar) it was cats – not to own, feed and stroke, to cuddle and risk a paw of claws like needles, but to watch and understand. A cat walked alone and beholden to none, killed what it liked when it liked, stayed if it was intrigued and walked away when it was bored. Why could Men, all Men, not be more like cats?
And now here was a cat, no longer warm but not quite cold, the body not yet stiff; lying on the lip of a fountain in the middle of this fine, rich square of houses.
He did not speak to cats, but he did now to this one: How did you come to be here?
He looked at the smashed open head, the claws with dried brown blood on them, maybe the cat's own, maybe that of whatever had killed it. One front leg was bent oddly, broken, the other had been placed so that the foot reached out beyond the stones. What was left of the head suggested the eyes were open and the teeth half bared, the cat had fought for life even as it died…though the soot made it difficult to tell.
Yes. Soot. The cat seemed to have been plumped head first into the stuff by its tail - after it was dead, naturally. There were places on the hide where it had streaked off to show the mangy brown beneath; it clung most to the head, making the blood look even blacker in this weak moonlight.
You surely haven't been here long. Sílafinn reached out to touch the pelt and felt, besides the soot, that it was barely damp. The one that did this left you here only a very short time ago, or you would be more wet and colder.
Your leg, stamped on so you couldn't run. Your other leg pointing to…something. And your head smashed in. Maybe with a kick, or…maybe you were picked up by the tail and your head swung at the wall. And then the soot. Why the soot?
He looked at the body for a little longer. Perhaps your killer will do this again.
He stood back at last, not saying I will find out who did this and I will catch them, because he saw no need. He simply would.
He left the cat for another to find and clean away.
After reading 'The Greek Interpreter', I always had this head canon that Mycroft and Sherlock honed their skills of observation with each other when they were younger, Mycroft teaching his little brother the ropes and then improving alongside him.
Yes, little Sílafinn watched people get hanged. A lot. By the standards of his surroundings, it's fairly normal; parents bring their children to watch and everything. For the purposes of this story, let's assume there were public executions in Gondor, although rest assured criminals only dance the hemp fandango if they've done something really heinous. No flaming sacrifices here.