Knowledge or Wisdom
Disclaimer: I do not own/am not associated with/make no money from Sherlock.
Warnings: This story contains all the darkness of episode three from the Final Problem, including what happened to Redbeard and how Eurus claimed she 'made Sherlock laugh all night', when by laughing she meant screaming.
That said, it offers an interpretation of her character as a child that is somewhat less disturbed than the show made her out to be...which in turn could make the person she grows up to be twice the tragedy. This is not the story of a budding sociopath or a child monster; it's the story of a girl who loved her brother but didn't know how.
The story
They called her a genius, but she didn't understand. Then again, that's the thing about genius. When people say genius, they usually really mean to say polymath. They mean someone who is brilliant at everything. A genius is brilliant at one thing. She could see how the world fit together, learn complicated concepts in seconds, memorize a book's page with a glance. She could understand the outside world. She couldn't understand the inside bits.
She tried. She cut herself open to look inside. It was messy. It didn't look at all like the pictures of insides in her book. It also made her brain go a bit fuzzy, a bit wrong, even though it was her arm she cut, not her brain. Then Sherlock saw her and started laughing.
Sherlock always found the oddest things amusing. She found a snake once. She liked the snake because it felt cool and smooth in her hands and could stare and stare without blinking. She's fairly certain that's what people mean when they say they 'like' something. Holding the snake was fascinating and not repulsive, so she must like it. She showed it to Sherlock. She wanted him to like it too, or perhaps to explain about 'liking' things again. Her brother just laughed, even after the snake bit him. She could understand why that time though. It would be funny to watch a bit of your body blow up like a balloon. She laughed too, until Mycroft came running. Later, Mycroft gave her a book on snakes while they waited in hospital for the doctors to put Sherlock's arm to rights. Mummy held her and called her brave and now she didn't have to be scared because Sherlock was fine.
She hadn't thought she was scared. Then again, that was an inside bit, and she wasn't good at those.
Another time she found a funny looking kitten that somehow had turned itself to stone and she had been so impressed she gave it to her brother, on his pillow while he slept where he'd have no chance to miss it. He just laughed at it though. It was Mycroft who explained about the turning to stone trick, after Daddy had come and taken Sherlock away and Mummy had made her scrub her hands so hard they bled at the knuckles. The kitten wasn't stone after all; it was just really really stiff. That happens when a living thing turns into a not living anymore thing. It was Sherlock who explained that it was sad and to make it less sad they had to bury the kitten in the back yard.
She understood Mycroft's explanation about decomposition. Mycroft was good at helping her to learn more about how the world connected together. Sherlock tried to teach her about the inside bits. That was harder to understand.
"Why is it sad?" she asked.
"Because the kitten has gone away forever and ever, and we'll never see it again."
"We can see it. It's right there."
"The inside alive bits have gone away. They don't come back."
She thought about this for a moment. "What is sad?" she asked. "And why does burying the kitten make it go away?"
"It's the sharp bit inside you that pushes and pushes to be outside, and it comes out in tears," Sherlock answered. "And it's the frowny face picture. Mycroft showed me."
"The frowny face picture is anger," she corrected. Mycroft had shown her the pictures too. There was a whole page of faces, neatly labeled with emotions.
"Without the pointy eyebrows."
She scanned the picture again inside her head and found the one labeled sad. She tried to see the same picture in her brother's face. It didn't really match.
"Why does burying the kitten make it go away?" she asked again.
"I don't know. It's what people do."
She decided that one day, when she was older and smarter, she'd make a great study of these confusing, inside feeling bits. She hated not understanding. Not understanding things was BAD. She knew this because Mycroft told it to them daily.
"Come on Sherlock," he'd say, "I know you're slow but really, this is too obvious! Eurus gets it, and she's only four! I understood this when I was three!" Then Sherlock's face would be a funny warped mixture between sad, angry and happy. Happy was when your teeth showed, and angry was a furrowed brow and narrowed eyes, and sad was tears. Sometimes she'd try to mimic his face, to see if she could understand it better when it was part of her. Perhaps if she made the right faces, the right feelings would bubble up and she'd memorize them and recognize them at will.
She knew not knowing is bad because of the way Mummy sometimes shouted at Mycroft instead of shouting at her or Sherlock.
"How could you be so stupid! I told you to watch them! Perhaps I'd do just as well to leave them to be raised by wolves; it'd probably be safer!"
"How was I to know they'd be stupid enough to try and learn to swim on their own?" Mycroft demanded back, his face a horrible mask of merged feelings, all trying to turn to stone, like the kitten. She didn't like that mask. What if he managed to turn completely to stone, and his inside alive bit went away and they had to bury him in the backyard?
Mummy shouted at all of them a bit. Later, Daddy explained that they scared her. She was afraid they were going to drown.
"What is drown?" she asked.
"It's when you breathe in water. If you do that, you die. It can kill you. You both could have died." Daddy didn't shout; he spoke in a careful and matter of fact way.
"Like the kitten? We'd go away?"
"Yes," he said, his voice soft. "Like the kitten."
"Can we have an alive kitten?" Sherlock asked. "Or a puppy?"
Sherlock asked this question a lot, because he was slow and forgot the answer. The answer was always no because those animals made Daddy sneeze.
"Can we have a snake?" she asked, because no one was allergic to snakes. Daddy's face turned a funny sort of white and the answer was still no. Sherlock shouted at her a bit too, and said he wanted a dog who killed snakes and protected him from psychos like her. She hadn't known she was a psycho. Daddy frowned a sort of frown that was maybe sad or maybe angry. She put both pictures against his face in her mind and they both sort of fit. Sherlock was told not to call names. Apparently, psycho is name calling, like when Daddy tells Mycroft not to call Sherlock stupid or slow, and tells Sherlock not to call Mycroft fat. Name calling is telling the truth when the truth makes a person's lips downturn. She doesn't understand why it's wrong to tell the truth. Apparently, 'Truth' is one of those inside ideas that are hard to understand.
Later, Sherlock took back the words, and she let him, because he was slow and got words wrong sometimes. He said she wasn't a psycho after all. He just doesn't like snakes because they're scary. She doesn't understand scary either.
"It's when something might hurt," Sherlock explained.
She didn't understand hurt.
There was so much she didn't understand, and so much that Sherlock didn't understand. She could connect a loose thread to the unwashed socks to the eyes that say one thing in the feelings chart and the mouth that says something else to all meaning the postman is alone, but she doesn't know why it matters.
She doesn't know why it matters when Sherlock blurts out, "Mrs. Postman doesn't wash your socks anymore. Did she die?"
"Mrs. Postman isn't dead." She told her brother, because sometimes he is slow about seeing things. "Mr. Postman hasn't been digging. He hasn't buried her in the backyard. I think she just doesn't love him anymore. That's why he isn't looked after."
The postman mutters something about witchy children and doesn't answer Sherlock or her and he tosses their letters on the ground instead of handing them to Sherlock like he usually does.
She knows how important being smart is when she is two and eleven months, and Sherlock is four and one months, and Mycroft is ten and infinity months, or might as well be in her eyes, so wise he seems, when Mycroft calls Sherlock a stupid infant, among other words.
"You have the IQ of a rock. Even your baby sister is smarter than you; it says so right here when they tested her. You're so stupid we're going to send you away to an institution where people drool and stare at the wall all day long! And you can be there with the other idiots!"
She doesn't want her Sherlock to be sent away to live with the idiots. She doesn't know why. Perhaps it has to do with love. Mummy and Daddy use that word all the time and no one can explain what it means except that when you feel it about someone, you don't want them to be hurt or go away. It's a bit like 'like', except more. Or perhaps it's a bit like with her dolls and her pencils and her books. They are hers and if someone takes one away then she loses part of herself.
She knows how to be smart, so she teaches her brother. That way no one will take him away. The way to be smart is to say the obvious all the time.
"It's not obvious!" he screams at her.
She doesn't understand. He has the same eyes. He sees the same things. Sometimes she doesn't understand what she sees because she lacks experience, like with the stone kitten, but she still sees. She knows Sherlock can see too. Sometimes, playing with Sherlock is like being the big sister and little sister at the same time.
It's after the kitten that she makes connections she hadn't before to 'going away'.
"Do you want to kill Sherlock because he's stupid?" she asks. She doesn't know what she'll do if he says yes. She can't read the new expression on his face. His eyes are staring down at her, not blinking, like the snake. He's twelve now and she's four and Sherlock's five.
"I don't want to kill anyone," is what he says in the end. "Do you want to kill people who are stupid?"
She thinks about this. Does she want to send people away where they can never come back?
"Sometimes," she decides. "Don't kill Sherlock." Mycroft is still staring in her direction when she gets bored and leaves the room.
She is five and Sherlock is six and Mycroft is thirteen. Sherlock's arm is still a bit funny from the snake bite and he's supposed to do exercises with his arm but he won't. He laughs when they try to make him.
She doesn't know why they don't say the right words to turn his mind around so that he wants to do the exercises. It would be easy. They know what Sherlock likes and what he doesn't. He likes pirates and blackberries and bees and dogs and putting things together until they are something else. He likes being called clever and smart and brilliant. He doesn't like snakes or dead kittens or feelings or Mycroft. He doesn't like being called stupid or baby or slow. But his parents don't use the right words and Mycroft doesn't use the right words and Sherlock won't do his arm exercises.
She finds the violin in one of the upstairs unused rooms. One of the ones covered in white sheets. She plays around with it until she understands how to make the strings sound like they do in one of Mummy's records, and then she brings it to Sherlock and teaches him. He's enchanted with his ability to clear a room in thirty seconds just with noise. He's enthralled when he doesn't clear the room.
"I can make the inside feelings come out," he tells her. For one moment, she has an impulse to grab the violin from him and smash it to pieces. She doesn't know why. She has an equal impulse to keep Sherlock's face like that forever. It fits so exactly with the picture labeled 'happy'. There's none of the confusing mismatch between eyes and mouth, none of the blend or stone that fills Mycroft's face.
She finds that she can copy any music she hears after listening to it once. She doesn't play perfectly; the violin is the wrong size and her brain is far too fast for her child fingers to catch up, but she can figure out the right notes easily enough. Mummy buys her and Sherlock a set of violins, ones for their size. She's better after that. But she still doesn't understand what Daddy means when he says she plays beautifully, or why Mummy smiles and cries at the same time when she plays a duet with Sherlock.
His hurt arm hardly bothers him at all, now.
She can play flawlessly but Sherlock can play emotion. She doesn't know why this makes her want to smash his fingers. She doesn't. If she did that, he wouldn't play with her anymore.
When she is five and Sherlock is six and Mycroft is thirteen, Victor Trevor comes into their lives. He's tells Sherlock he's six and a half and Sherlock tells him he is too. Victor thinks he is telling the truth. He's actually six and seven months, which is more like being six and seven twelfths, but he just looks at her and calls her a freak when she tells him. Sherlock is not telling the truth and he knows it. His birthday was only three weeks before. She says that too and Sherlock's face becomes the angry face in eyes and mouth, and he doesn't say one word when Victor calls her a freak.
She is a freak. Freak means an anomaly in nature, something new in evolution. She wonders why Victor was frowning when he gave her a compliment. Of course she's unique.
She figures out it isn't a compliment fairly quickly. She always was quick. It's in the way he says he doesn't play with freaks. She finds out more in the library. People used to burn people for being different and unique. Mycroft says they still do, they're just cleverer about it and don't do it with fire. They do it with words. She finds more books on the power of ideas and words in the 'fiction that people believe' section. Later, Mycroft finds her speculatively sticking pins into one of her dolls. It has a bit of Victor's hair taped to it.
"It isn't the doll that is magic, it's the words," she explains to him. "Someone falls over and you tell them it's the doll. They make connections in their head that aren't there."
Sherlock thinks Victor is the best thing ever. They make up lies together and act like they are true. They put on paper hats and wave around pretend swords and call themselves pirates. Victor doesn't want her, so Sherlock says he doesn't either. He hesitates, but he says it.
"Go play with your dolls," he shouts. Victor turns very pale and makes a squeaking noise, like a little mouse.
She is six and Sherlock and Victor are seven and don't want her at all and Mycroft is fourteen and does. He shows her problems and smiles when she finds the answers. He calls her brilliant and incandescent. She plays her violin and he cries. She wasn't trying for sad. He tells her he's not sad, he's happy.
She doesn't understand. She doesn't understand why she's six and no little girl who is six years old moved in nearby, who likes learning about how the world fits together, who would pretend the world is different than it is like Sherlock and Victor do, who would play. She doesn't understand why Sherlock never plays anymore. It makes no sense at all. Victor isn't a freak. Not like her. Not like Sherlock. Sherlock spouts facts to him all about the pirates of old and all he can say in response is 'walk the plank!' and 'argh' and silly nonsense that no pirate ever said and Sherlock lets him. Sherlock shows him the funny graveyard with the funny numbers and he doesn't even notice. Instead he just hides behind a gravestone and jumps out to shout 'Boo!'. Then he walks funny and says he's a mummy.
One day, she goes to show Sherlock how she can make a dead frog dance with electricity. Perhaps electricity was the elusive thing inside that she just can never understand? She finds him outside throwing a ball towards Redbeard. It misses and the boy shouts how that was a sissy throw and runs after it.
Sissy is a baby word for sister. It's a way of saying 'you throw like a girl'. Sherlock never plays ball with her. She wouldn't want to, anyway. She isn't a dog.
He doesn't come in when she tells him about the frog. Redbeard calls her a psycho freak and makes the sign of the cross at her. Sherlock frowns a sad frown, looking from her to his friend. She feels her lips downturn too. Victor is making Sherlock sad. She doesn't like that. Sherlock still turns away and plays with Victor, his faithful Redbeard.
One day she worked on their daddy with the right words in the right way to make him let them camp in the backyard, just her and Sherlock and no Victor. She drugs Sherlock's cocoa with something she put together with her chemistry set and pulls him in the wagon away to the graveyard and it's just her and Sherlock the whole night long beneath the stars. She made Sherlock laugh the whole night, until his voice went wispy and hoarse, until Mycroft found them as the sun was rosy at the edge of the world.
Mummy and daddy took Sherlock to hospital again. It was Mycroft who was left to explain that she had gotten it wrong. That was screaming, not laughing. He had a look on his face, the one he got whenever Sherlock tried to pretend he hadn't taken something from Mycroft's room and Mycroft didn't believe him. He thought she was lying.
She tried to ask Sherlock what the drugs were like. She was curious, and Mummy had taken away her chemistry set so she couldn't test them on herself.
Sherlock wouldn't stay in the same room as her for two months.
She was six and Sherlock was seven and Trevor was eight and Mycroft was fourteen when she cut her arm open.
She just wanted to understand, and she thought it might let her see if she could look inside where the feelings lived. She told Mycroft it was to see her muscles working. This was also true. Sometimes, there are more truths than one. Sherlock found her and laughed.
No, she knows better now. Sherlock found her and screamed and screamed and started crying and he didn't look sad, because sad is just a frowny face and tears. His mouth was open and his eyes crying and he was loud.
He gave her a present later. It was an airplane. It wasn't a very real airplane and didn't seem to be any particular model. She put it with the collection she had since she was three and Daddy told her she was an airplane and swooped her around the room and she went to the library and learned how real airplanes fly and asked for one for her birthday. She meant a real one. She got a toy.
"I don't want you to go away," Sherlock told her when he gave her the plane. "I don't want you to go away and be stone."
He still went out later and played with Victor.
She is six and Sherlock is seven and Mycroft is fourteen when Victor calls her a psycho freak.
"She is not!" Sherlock screams back. "She's my sister."
They have a sword fight over it. Sherlock makes Victor's nose bleed and he makes Sherlock's poor arm turn all sorts of colors when Victor hits it with his wooden sword a few times and the end of it means the boys are still friends, somehow.
They both have a bit of trouble playing the violin together later for Mummy and Daddy. Her arm still feels funny from being stitched back together. She wonders if that's the pain Mycroft meant. He wasn't good at explaining inside things, not like Sherlock.
Mummy and Daddy still clap and tell them they were perfect. She knows they weren't. Sherlock smiles a big Happy smile.
Later, she asks Mycroft was 'fag' means. She had looked it up in the dictionary and it hadn't made sense, not how Victor said it. Mycroft wanted to know where she heard that word.
"Sherlock said he liked playing the violin with me. Victor said that makes him a sissy fag. But it doesn't make any sense."
Mycroft doesn't explain. His face tries to stay pleasant while his eyes go angry.
She is six and Sherlock is seven and Mycroft is fourteen and Victor is eight and he tells her he's going to throw her down the well, and if she floats that means she's a witch and he has to burn her. He says he's going to burn her alive and Sherlock will be his forever and ever. He says he can make Sherlock do whatever he wants because Sherlock is his friend.
Victor Trever is eight years old and two weeks when he goes away and doesn't come back.
Everyone wants him to come back except her. She wants him to go away and never return. Sherlock is hers again and she makes up a game, just like she used to when it was just them and she had to make him smarter so he wouldn't be sent away to the place where idiots live.
She waits in her room for days. Sherlock never comes.
She sees him through the window, digging and digging and digging. She wonders if he wants to bury Redbeard, because he's digging graves, but he never puts anything in them. Redbeard tries to breathe water because Daddy never sat down with him and told him he shouldn't do that because that turns living things into dead things.
She dreams that Sherlock digs a hundred graves in the backyard, and then he lies down in one and turns to stone. She dreams the same dream for seven nights, and then she reads about dreams. It's quiet in the library. No one seems to want to be in the same room as her. Not Mummy, not Daddy, not Mycroft. Even the doctor that comes to talk to her doesn't really want to be there. He just wants to know more about freaks so he can write a paper. Sherlock is digging outside. His hands are very raw and red.
She draws pictures of dead and gone Sherlock, picture after picture after picture. Mycroft walks into the library and sees her pictures and his face goes a funny color. She thinks maybe he doesn't want Sherlock to go away forever either. He doesn't ask any questions, though, so he must understand what she's doing. It's obvious, with the books she has out and the way Sherlock keeps digging and digging.
Everything is always so obvious.
She sets the pictures on fire so that they aren't true and can never be true. It's like doing magic, except it's really just telling your own mind a story it wants to believe. The books explained how it worked.
Mummy and Daddy and Mycroft never let her or Sherlock find out about fire. She understood matches. She didn't know about how fast it grew or how hungrily it fed. She didn't understand why this made something well up inside her, her lips twitching upwards. For the first time in her lift, she felt like she had a friend. She wonders if this makes her a witch, and if she's going to burn alive after all.
It's Mycroft who grabs her and drags her away from her new friend and runs out of the house. The entire building burns and burns and burns.
In the end, it turns out she was right all along. Not knowing is Bad. She always worried about Sherlock, that he was too slow, too stupid, too normal. But Sherlock understands what pain means, and he understands what fear means, and he not once mixed up screaming and laughing. She can see the world and find connections and understand the way of things, but the inside bits elude her completely.
She wants Sherlock to explain them to her, like she tried to explain the outside bits to him. He doesn't talk to her. He doesn't talk to anyone. It's like he went away after all, without turning to stone.
Mycroft finally fulfills his promise about stupid people and sends her to the place where idiots drool all day and stare at walls. For all she was a genius and for all she worried about Sherlock being too slow, it was her sent away in the end. She was just too stupid to understand.