5. Title : Happy Ending
Fusion with : Snow White (Grimm rather than Disney). This was written before S2, so I regret to say that Jim and his apple play no part in it.
Pairing : Sherlock/John
Rating : PG-13
Warning : This chapter is somewhat angstier and mentions drugs in the first part.
1. Once upon a time, there was a woman who was bored.
In all of Sherlock's cases, there is a story before the story.
Broken and secret, it waits for him to join its sharp edges together and make it whole again. Every time, Sherlock is drawn to the promise of a story like a child raising their hopes at nightfall, and so far he has managed to piece them all. But in Mother's case the tale keeps cracking apart - perhaps because Sherlock does not want to hear the whole story, the story that began not long after he was born.
He keeps one shard in a corner of his brilliant mind, where it strikes up a glint now and then, beckoning him to the past.
His fifth Christmas, and he has just discovered that he can see eye to eye with the pear-shaped keyhole on the library door. The hole is filled with chalky morning light and as Sherlock peeps into the light, it shows him Mother standing before a shelf of books and pushing a needle into her arm. Years later, he will remember how the dark-bound books, turning their backs on the scene, set off a pure white gleam in the glass syringe, hovering above the dot of red where Mother's white skin had broken.
The three-coloured picture is eerie and puzzling and new, and Sherlock gazes on in captivation until a tall hand falls on his neck, shoving him aside, and his father shatters the picture.
2. She gave birth to a son, and he grew up to be beautiful. And bored.
Father increases the surveillance and the scene fades out, leaving the shards.
As he grows up, Sherlock can feel Mother's quiet eyes on him, scanning his dark hair and white relentless face with a hybrid of fear and longing — because he is so much like her in all his brilliance and impatience, yet still young enough to escape. And she thinks he should escape, and she does not want a reminder of what she used to be.
When he is eighteen she pushes him away, the apple of her eye; tells him to go to London and shine bright; tells him in a jagged hush that she will keep his heart with her, or he too will fall in love and grow bored to death.
And so he goes to London and locks himself in a small, dark, book-lined room. It does not take five years before he is standing before the bathroom glass, looking into his mother's eyes as he bares his arm to another red dot. Mycroft increases the surveillance but Sherlock escapes once again, and finds unexpected shelter in a Scotland Yard office.
'All right, we'll keep you,' Lestrade says, gruffly but affectionately, and adds something about cleanliness and godliness. Sherlock shrugs.
'I now live among the little men,' he tells Mother in the mirror. 'They're nice, but they're not much good. They trudge and trudge, and sometimes they come up with a nice bright case, but then it's over and I just lie down on my bed and shut my eyes. What shall I do?'
Mother's eyes are gazing back at him, filled with clarity and taut silver nerves, unanswering.
3. And then the prince came, and they shared the apple.
Now and then, people try to shatter the glass house in which he lives. Some, like Donovan, by throwing stones repeatedly, others by tapping a shy finger like Molly. He smiles at them behind the hard glitter, not caring whether they bleed or leave.
Until John Watson shoots a cabbie across two glass partitions and Sherlock finds himself wide awake and trembling for the first time in years.
This has to be another story in the making, but so far Sherlock can't make head or tail of the shards. They include tea for two and fingers in the fridge, falling asleep together and racing killers across London, and sharing the mirror with John in the morning. There is no way the story makes sense, and Sherlock wonders if, one day, he will be able to look back and say : this is it. This is our tale.
But then, the story would have come to an end, and he does not want that. Better let let John type it then, one letter at a time so the tale can go on and on and have a happy open ending. After all, they live in the modern age.