![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
info } all the fishes in the sea.
TW: DRUGS.
timeline;
→ On January 6th 1977, an extremely noisy baby girl is born. For reasons of tradition, she's named Sherlock Vasanti Holmes.
→ "I'm not upset—you keep saying I'm upset—I just know he was murdered, and you're not listening to me. The shoes are—the shoes—stop it! Why would I be upset? I didn't even know Carl Powers—stop telling me to calm down!"
→ Their father stays as removed as ever, unsure he even wants to try connecting with his genius progeny. Their mother, already buckling under the strain of trying to understand Mycroft, gives up when presented with the idea of another genius child, nevermind a loud one, and Mycroft essentially raises Sherlock until the age of eleven, at which point she leaves for Oxford and Sherlock for her first boarding school.
→ "Why've you got a boy's name, Sherlock?" "It's not a boy's name. It's my name."
→ And then her second.
→ "Miss Holmes, smoking is not permitted on school grounds—certainly not for fourteen year old girls." Nothing, apparently, is permitted for fourteen year old girls, be it smoking or drinking or skipping English to sit in on the A-Level Chemistry lessons. Fourteen year old girls aren't permitted to stay in bed for thirty one hours, and they aren't permitted to break windows, and they aren't permitted to rip their school uniform skirts while climbing the walls to sneak off into town. They aren't even permitted to fence, only the over sixteen girls get to do that, even though Sherlock knows for a fact that the boys at St John's get a chance to at least try foil (though she fancies herself as a sabreuse, personally) from first year. Fourteen year old girls aren't permitted to wear any shoes but patent leather flats and, Sherlock is repeatedly reminded, they really ought to tie up their hair, or at least brush it regularly, especially when it's waist-length like Sherlock's. Fourteen year old girls aren't permitted to rest one ankle on their knee and lean back in their chairs, surveying the world, but Sherlock wants to.
→ After five different schools as both boarder and day pupil, Sherlock finally does five A-Levels at a HE college in London and applies for Cambridge—no other university, just Cambridge. She absently mentions this to a man on her French course (a cop-out—she's been fluent in French since childhood, while everybody else here is slowly slogging their way through the evening classes) who is impressed, and makes jokes about her going off to find a rich husband there. She's fairly sure he's attempting to be friendly.
→ She gets in, studying in the Natural Sciences tripos. In her first year, some of the boys—they grow up to be doctors and bankers and lawyers, the lot—start a betting pool on who's going to bed her first. They think she doesn't know. She's not sure what to do about it, so she keeps sneering at them and lets them pay for her drinks, except after a while that gives her a crawling feeling of being in debt and she stops going out with them.
→ Anyway, as much as she appreciates alcohol, there are better substances. They take up a lot of her time; she quits fencing (despite, as it turns out, being a rather fine sabreuse) and even stops boxing and judo, because the coaches keep telling her to quit smoking and train when they want her to rather than when she wants to, and she's suddenly got other interests.
→ And there's Vicky Trevor, who is muddy and famous for rugby, who dates boys who row and who doesn't really ever pick up on Sherlock going slightly slack-jawed and nervously distracted around her. (Fortunately or unfortunately, Sherlock never really picks up on what she's doing either).
→ "You can't just arrest me for being here!" "Considering 'here' is a crime scene, then actually, yeah, we can. Name, please?" "Sherlock Holmes." "Real name, please?" They only keep her in for a night; students are always doing stupid things, after all.
→ Waiting to audition for the university orchestra, a female cellist she's vaguely familiar with takes her to one side and reminds her; don't cough, don't wear perfume, run back up to your room and swap those heels for something flat, don't do anything which might give away the fact that you're a woman—the conductor likes to talk about how he can always tell when it's a woman playing, particularly on strings, but he's just having a laugh, and good luck. Sherlock blinks at her and runs to fetch flat shoes. She's sure she's going to cough when she walks in, but instead she just lifts her violin to her shoulder, plays the first few bars of her own arrangement of Fauré's Pavane Op. 50 for solo violin, thinks again about coughing—stops. "I can't be bothered with this," she informs the blank screen behind which three men have stopped taking notes, and walks out of the audition.
→ She struggles. She bewilders more tutors than she impresses, doesn't keep notes, writes on her room walls, does the experiments she wants to do instead of the experiments she's meant to be doing, refuses to specialise and instead chooses modules ranging from plant physiology to elementary number theory and cryptography and insists she is specialising, it's not her fault if no one's following the pattern. She gets called up to numerous offices; people are concerned.
→ In her second year, after she turns up to a lab session high, she's called up to one final office, where she's told she's being sent down. She says, "Actually, I'm leaving," and does so.
→ She gives up, and heroin helps her do it.
→ She ends up in London. Mycroft keeps her off the streets, but there's more to a home than a roof. She drifts between bedsits she inevitably gets evicted from and B&Bs she can't really afford. She stops bothering the Met and starts just barely existing.
→ "Can I ask if the overdose was intentional?" "I don't remember. Does it matter?" She goes into rehab anyway.
→ And she gets back on track, she really does. She hates rehab, but it's the best facility Mycroft's money can buy, and she's bored enough to get back into sport—fencing, boxing, MMA, judo, aikido, running. She starts calling up the Met again and telling them they're wrong about things. When she checks out, she runs off, goes travelling, half to make it harder for Mycroft to watch over her but half because she wants to. She's never really been abroad much before; it would have been too much hassle when she and Mycroft were children, and after, she just always had other things to do. She does the Continent, the States, India and Japan and Morocco and Brazil. In Florida, she meets Martha Hudson, and helps make sure her husband gets sentenced to death.
→ She feels so slow, though. It frightens her. And while it's okay when the sun's out, sometimes night comes and she'll be in a hotel room afraid that her brain isn't what it was, and that her life isn't how she wanted it to be, and everything's spiraling away from her. Her mind won't work like she wants it to.
→ She's in New York when she first does coke. It doesn't really count as a drug. She's not a stimulant person (she says, chainsmoking wildly). She sniffs it at first, but she soon returns to the ritual of the needle, excusing herself by pointing out that being on cocaine is wildly different from being on heroin. Heroin made her not think, made her fall and slip and sleep and blocked out the whole hateful world when she needed it to be blocked out, and then just blocked out verything regardless of what she wanted. Heroin dragged her down. On coke, she feels functional for the first time in years, in control, talking and talking and having everyone hang on her word—it's wonderful. She's wild and happy and angry where she's felt bleached out and exhausted since rehab; she doesn't think she's ever felt more like herself. She solves cases, she knows the answers, she screams at the police when they don't listen to her.
→ She's hospitalised for septic arthritis of the elbow joint caused by infection of an injection site; she unwillingly starts detoxing by virtue of how amazingly difficult it is to find cocaine when you're half delusional with fever, in hospital and terrified you're never going to play violin again.
→ And then she runs with it. Rehab's worse the second time round. There's not even any novelty to it.
→ But when she gets out, there's a case—one she's been asked to take instead of one she's inserting herself into. Reggie Musgrave used to buy her drinks in first year; now, his girlfriend and au pair have both gone missing at once, and the police are getting nowhere. After she solves it—after she's thrown open a casket to reveal his girlfriend's body inside and cried, "Marvellous!"—he says awkwardly, "Sorry about—you know." She's not really paying attention; she's too busy feeling higher than she ever has in her life.
→ And the police keep her number this time.
→ Lestrade is sure she's going to die, or have something else horrific happen to her. Sherlock sneers at him and informs him he's not her father. (She wishes he was as detached as her father—she can deal with detachment so much better than people thinking she needs to be looked after).
→ Sally Donovan wants to make a difference; Sherlock Holmes wants to solve crimes. They don't like each other, but they don't really have to in order to stomach working together. They've both got work to do, after all.
→ "Afghanistan or Iraq?"
data data data;
→ Sherlock is a mixed race (East Indian/white) woman. (Her middle name, Vasanti, is Hindi—it's a headcanon based on a headcanon; when I play original!Sherlock, I go with his middle name being Vernet).
→ Sherlock is much angrier than her original-universe counterpart, and it shows. She's in a constant state of pre-emptive self-defence; while much of that involves being cold and above it all, she's also more aggressive.
→ She retains a certain androgyny; she will dress effeminately, certainly, but her posture and body language have been called butch. She takes up space; it's a conscious rebellion against repeatedly being told to sit like a lady.
→ On clothing; she absolutely wears (in addition to rather similar-to-the-original trousers and tops), skirts, heels and other such impractical clothing. Yes, it's difficult to run in them, but it's also difficult to run in tight trousers and a floor length coat. Really, try it; there's no way Sherlock hasn't tripped up steps at some point. If she wears makeup, it will be dark and slightly aggressive, usually focused around her eyes.
→ Original!Sherlock tends to automatically disparage women; this Sherlock tends to automatically disparage men.
no subject
no subject
...also, s...emi related, what can I say, the thought of Sherlock saying the word 'Sapphic' cracks me up for reasons I don't quite understand.