A/N: So this creepy little fic came to me after a weird dream about putting a child into a curio cabinet to keep it safe. I literally sat down and wrote this in one sitting today. Do let me know what you think!
It's a small thing, something one might not notice amongst the clutter of his flat. Just a wall-mounted curio cabinet with a few ceramic pieces inside it: an Irish Setter, a female saint with short blonde hair, a little girl holding up a toy aeroplane, a Victorian gentleman with a moustache, a uniformed police officer with a blinding smile, a gangster's moll with a motherly expression…and a fierce warrior-woman wielding a sword in one hand and, somewhat incongruously, what appears to be a tiny scalpel in the other.
They are his treasures. They are safe there, stored away where no harm can come to them.
He remembers how they came to populate this little safe haven he created for them, when he chooses to remember. He's an old man now, living alone or so people believe.
With the contents of the curio cabinet, however, he's never alone.
Today is a day he chooses to remember.
He's six years old and his best friend is playing pirates with him while his annoying younger sister is whining at him to play with her, come play with me, Sherlock! He laughs and runs after Redbeard, leaving his sister alone as usual.
Redbeard goes missing. His sister starts singing a song, and Sherlock - Yellowbeard - knows it's a clue, a hint, and so he searches desperately, digging all over the place while in the background his parents receive phone calls about his missing friend. No, they haven't seen him since the last time his parents dropped him off to play, no Sherlock hasn't seen him either, he's been frantic, he's-
Suddenly he remembers, their special secret place. The place they bury their treasure when it's too precious to be left to chance. His sister followed them there one day, the only day the two of them had allowed her to join their game, in order to get her solemn promise never to tell about it.
The well has been covered over for so long even their parents don't know about its existence. And ever since Redbeard nearly fell into it, even he and Sherlock have stayed away. But he knows, oh, he knows now, that's where his friend is.
He hears Redbeard's calls for help and drops the rope he'd taken from the shed down to his friend. He's carefully knotted the other end around a sturdy oak and with a great deal of effort, manages to haul his friend back to safety.
"Eurus did it!" Victor cries once he's sitting under the tree with Sherlock by his side. "She pushed me in, told me I would d-drown before anyone found me!"
Sherlock recoils; no, his sister could never do such a thing! "No!" he shouts, jumping to his feet. "You're lying, Redbeard, pirates are liars!"
Victor, his face tear-streaked, shakes his head. "I'm not lying, Sherlock, she did it! She pushed me! She tried to, to kill me!"
Shaking his head in denial, his entire body shaking, in fact, with terror, with outrage, with anger, with a truth too terrible to believe, Sherlock shoves his friend away from him. "No!" he screams, screwing his eyes shut and slamming his hands over his ears. "No, no no!"
The world seems to silence itself around him, deafeningly enough to penetrate through his growing hysteria, through the sound of his own terrified voice. He opens his eyes, cautiously lowers his hands, his lips still parted on the word "no".
Redbeard is gone. Puzzled, Sherlock looks around, but there's no sign of him anywhere. Has he run off? Fallen back down the well? Wide-eyed, Sherlock makes his cautious way back to the edge, calling out a tentative, "Redbeard?"
No answer. A glint of sunlight off something shiny catches his eye. He stoops down and picks the object up, turning it over in his hands curiously.
A ceramic dog - an Irish Setter, he thinks. Something with long red fur and a fluffy tail. The dog's tongue is lolling out of its mouth, which is stretched in a happy doggy grin, and he smiles back down at it, entranced. Almost absently he undoes the rope, carefully rolling it back up and dragging it back to the shed, holding the ceramic figure in one hand the entire time.
By the time he returns home, he's entirely forgotten about anyone named Victor Trevor. Only Redbeard remains, safe in his possession - safe from whom, Sherlock will be decades in recalling. But safe, always, and never leaving him again.
"Redbeard," Sherlock Holmes, former consulting detective, many years retired now, whispers as he opens the cabinet and lays a gentle finger on the ceramic dog's head. "Redbeard."
And he remembers how Redbeard was joined, many years later, by Our Lady of Sacrifice.
Vivien Norbury is screaming when John rushes into the room, her face contorted in terror, finger still desperately clicking on the trigger of a gun that has long since run out of bullets. Sherlock is on the ground, bleeding from shoulder and leg, and there are several dings and cracks in the glass tank opposite the two of them.
While John tackles Norbury, Sherlock staunches the bleeding as best he can, blinking away tears that have nothing to do with physical pain.
"He put her in his pocket!" Norbury is screaming as John wrests the gun from her hand. "He put her in his pocket!"
John glances over at him; Sherlock shrugs, then winces, and John goes instantly into Doctor Watson Mode. The gun safely in hand, he automatically engages the safety lock and drops it by Sherlock's side as he improvises tourniquets and checks for any further damage.
Only when Sherlock's bleeding is under control does he speak. "Where's Mary?" he demands tersely.
Sherlock shakes his head. "She never came. Norbury is Amo, by the way, not Mary, not that we thought she was, of course, and I'm afraid Norbury didn't take too kindly to my deductions…"
"Mary never came? She left ahead of me, I had to wait for Molly to watch Rosie, what d'you mean, she never came?"
John is shouting, shaking Sherlock by his good shoulder, concern, worry, etching lines into his face. "Sherlock, are you sure? Are you sure you didn't, I dunno, send her for help?"
Sherlock shakes his head again. "She never came," he says, one hand creeping down to his Belstaff pocket. He clutches the smooth ceramic figure he finds there, but doesn't withdraw it. John, he thinks vaguely as shock starts to set in, wouldn't understand. Wouldn't believe.
Vivien Norbury never recovers her sanity and spends the rest of her life screaming - when she's not sedated - in a very secure mental facility for the criminally insane.
So Mary Watson becomes a missing person, and Sherlock's curio cabinet obtains a second figure, a saint with short blonde hair, a determined rather than beatific expression, and - if one examines it closely - a handgun beneath the bare feet peeping beneath her long, blue robes. She stands over Redbeard, one hand lowered as if to rest on the ceramic dog's head, but not quite touching.
It's only fitting, Sherlock thinks as he smiles fondly down at the two figurines, since they'd never met in life. But he likes to think they'd have been friends if they had.
The smile fades as he gazes at the next figure, the little girl with the bunches in her hair holding up a toy aeroplane as if helping it to catch the wind. The little girl he'd forgotten until she burst back into his life, fully grown and as pure a psychopath as any human being had ever been.
Sherrinford. The memory of that terrible place still haunts him, even knowing that it had been destroyed years ago in a 'freak gas line accident'. An accident he's certain his brother had engineered after their sister had vanished, never to be seen again.
Well, never to be seen by anyone except her favourite brother, of course. The one who believed firmly in the axiom "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." And Eurus Holmes had been both. The shock of her hands grasping his between the glass-that-wasn't-there, the madness in her eyes, the violence of her attack against him…he remembered it all too vividly. What he couldn't remember was the aftermath of that brief, horrific encounter; he'd awoken in the prison hospital with John and Mycroft hovering over him, demanding to know what had happened.
The cameras had been disabled on Eurus' orders. Two guards had been found dead in the antechamber to her cell, with Sherlock unconscious between them, bruises on his throat and a lump the size of a cricket ball on the back of his head.
Neither man had discovered the small ceramic figurine in his jacket pocket, the one he'd surreptitiously transferred to his own Belstaff pocket upon his release from his hospital bed.
Eurus Holmes was still a wanted criminal, but she would never be found. The damaged child had become a damaged woman but the memory Sherlock chose to cherish was that of the little sister who only wanted him to play with her. If he had only done so, so much would have been different about his life…
His eyes stray to the next figurine, the Victorian gentleman. He lifts the ceramic figure out and studies it with a sorrowful eye. "Oh John," he whispers. "I'm so sorry." He replaces the figure back in the cabinet and passes a trembling hand over his eyes. This memory, he can't force himself to revisit; John had nearly died because of him, would have died if he hadn't…if he hadn't…
Hadn't what? He's never been able to find an answer for how it happens, how living, breathing people become…what he makes them into. Or what some other force makes them into? Because he's never been able to do it consciously.
Take his sister, for instance. He'd buried his memories of her so deep into his subconscious that she'd vanished, not transformed like Redbeard, simply…gone. And Mycroft, at the advice of their Uncle Rudy and, apparently, a slew of government psychologists, had allowed his brother the supposed peace of that reinventing of the truth.
A peace that had led to a lifetime of substance abuse, misanthropy, and an obsession with the abstract concept of justice that had led in turn to the creation of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.
John had been the first person to pierce that carefully-created shell, knocking holes into his protective armor in a way even his landlady had never been able to manage. But once the process had begun, there had been no turning back; Mycroft had been forced to watch, helplessly, as slowly but surely his brother's path to restoring his memories had been forged.
John, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade - and one other he couldn't bring himself to name.
The one who, in the end, mattered most.
The one he'd so recently lost and yet would never be parted from again.
Resolutely he returns his attention to the other two figures, the police bobby and the gangster's moll. He misses them both in different ways; the fatherly figure who'd taken a troubled junkie under his wing and given him something to use his mind on instead of trying to drug it into submission; the motherly figure whose case had been his first success and had set her free.
He laid a gentle finger atop each figurine's head in turn, smiling as he recalled just how much they had impacted that wild young junkie's life, and how glad he was that they were still so close to him after all these years. Lestrade had been spared the worst ravages of brain cancer, and Hudders the indignity of dementia.
This time when his smile fades, he knows it won't return. Reluctantly he reaches down and lifts the last figurine out of the case. The fierce little warrior-woman with the sword and the scalpel in place of the traditional knife or shield.
"Molly," he whispers, his eyes closing as tears slip down his cheek. "My Molly." He lifts the figurine to his lips, presses a soft kiss to the tiny face, and sinks to the floor. He can feel it coming, in the way his heart stutters and falters in his chest, in the spasms of pain, but he can't bring himself to care. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you, Molly. I'm so, so sorry. It's my fault those bombs were in your flat, it's my fault Eurus wasn't there to stop them from going off. I hope you can forgive me."
I'll always forgive you, Sherlock, a voice whispers in his mind. A much-loved, much-missed voice. One he hasn't heard in, oh, far too long. Despite his earlier belief, a smile curves his lips as he feels her love for him like the softest of caresses; he can almost feel her fingers carding through his curls, the touch of her lips against his.
That evening, when his adopted daughter Rosamund comes to the flat to check on him, there's no sign of the aged detective. She never stops searching for some sign of what happened to him that day. Neither does his brother, his only other living relative.
Neither of them take any note of the odd configuration of the ceramic figurines in the little curio cabinet tucked into a corner of the sitting room, lying half-hidden beneath a pile of old case notes, notebooks, and loose photographs. Where once they had been lined up in a row, now all but one stand in a half-circle - almost protectively, one might think - around the last figurine.
Nor do either of them ever realise that that final figurine - that of the warrior-woman - has been altered. Where once it was just the fierce warrior, now there is a second figurine joined to it. That of a kneeling penitent with his arms clasped around her knees, his head raised in a joyful smile that is matched by the one on her own lips as she gazes back down at him. Gone are the sword and the scalpel; instead, her hands rest on his head, and if one looks closely, one can see that her fingers are threaded through the other figure's dark curls.
End note: I suppose technically this isn't actually Sherlolly since they didn't get together in life, but since they are together in eternity I figured it still counts :)