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Sometimes Sherlock would dream of a different time, when she had been a girl. In that time, a witch had come, cajoled and laughed and joked. And then she had turned Sherlock into a boy, and- then she would wake, panting, sweat soaking the sheets. It was just a dream. Except it wasn’t.
* *
If you asked Sherlock's parents, they would tell you that they had always had a son. He was called Sherlock, extremely bright, three years above peers academically. What they would not know to say was that he was picked on and bullied for being a nerd, a runt, a geek. He's an excellent boxer, they would say, but never that he took up boxing to prevent the older boys from practicing on him.
If you asked Mycroft, you would get a shrug and narrowed eyes, and he would lean forward until you scurried back to the cubicle from whence you'd come. For knowing about Sherlock, you would then have a team of people assigned to watch you and make sure you weren't out to use Sherlock as leverage against his brother. If your questions had been more personal than most, you took a one-way vacation to Siberia.
If you asked Sherlock, she would blow smoke in your face and walk away. You might notice her hips, her height, the stubble on her face, and your mind would provide "man."
After a year or so of uni, Sherlock stopped trying to explain that, except occasionally, if one were to make a Venn diagram with "Sherlock" as one circle and "man" as another, they would not touch at all.
* *
Sherlock is eighteen before she is brave enough to put a word to the way her body seems to sit wrong on her bones. "Trans." As soon as she learns it, she deletes it. It doesn't matter, really, it doesn't fix her. It just gives her problem a name. She doesn't need that- she’s never fit the boxes other people put her in, why should she make one for herself?
It isn't long after that she gathers the salient items, shaves her face closer than she ever has- she'll have razor burn in the morning- and dresses in a short cocktail dress. Padding, makeup, hair in place and styled, she collect her clutch and slips on her heels.
Perhaps, in hindsight, it was a mistake to choose a bar populated mainly by straight men and not much else, and where people knew her as "him." She wakes in a private hospital room Mycroft has acquired, dress cleaned and pressed in the closet, with a concussion and a broken wrist. Boxing helped, but when she goes to stand she finds a twisted ankle as well.
She never does wear heels more than an inch high again.
* *
Four years into her time at uni, Sherlock is matched with Victor Trevor as a roommate. A week in, Sherlock finds him alone in their room in women's dress. It takes almost a month before Victor confirms what Sherlock had deduced- that she is, in actuality, properly called Victoria.
Sherlock doesn't mention that her name always fits her, but asks for help with her makeup a few weeks later when she's going out. A tentative friendship blooms.
This, then, is the reason that Sherlock forswears friendships. Victoria is caught in a dress in the wee hours of the morning, but is not found till around nine AM, beaten and left to die in the cold in a pool of her own blood. It can't even be logged as a hate crime, because no one except Sherlock knew about Victoria's secret.
Sherlock attends the viewing for Victoria at the funeral home, cringing at the pressed tuxedo she's been dressed in. Even in death, she is invisible.
The night after her burial, Sherlock commits her first real crime, sneaking into the graveyard and plundering her grave. Victoria has been embalmed, but it still takes hours to wrestle the dead weight of her body into her favorite dress, settle the wig on her head and apply the eye and lip makeup she favoured.
When Sherlock leaves, the mud sloppily piled back over the casket, the gravestone reads "Victoria Trevor," the last two letters of her name inked on in Sharpie. It isn't until Sherlock goes to wipe the sweat from her face that she realises she has been crying this whole time.
A week later, Sherlock visits to find that the letters have been rubbed off. The dress and wig will have to do.
* *
It would be wishful thinking to hope that Mycroft would remain in the dark about Sherlock's identity and association with Victor Trevor. She is twenty-three when Mycroft invites her to a dinner out, and she accepts. They spend most of the meal in silence, over crab legs and soft bread. Finally, when they have drunk half a bottle of wine together, Mycroft asks about Victoria.
Sherlock affirms, hesitantly, that Victoria was a woman, and when Mycroft asks further, about her, she continues, in a dark brown voice that causes a dull ache in her belly, to explain that she rarely considers herself a man.
Mycroft nods slowly, and sips at his wine, considering her words. He asks about the dresses, the makeup she buys, and she nods- yes, she wears it, has for years.
This seems to mark the end of their conversation, and they continue with their meal. By the time it is done, they've drunk a bottle and a half of wine, and Sherlock feels almost light-headed; she rarely drinks, except (usually) with Mycroft.
He doesn't mention it again, but a couple of days later a second bank account appears in her name. She spends it on clothes.
* *
It is early in the spring when a man asks her out one night, walking home from classes on her way to her dorm, and Sherlock waits a day before saying yes. They date for a week, and then Henry works a thigh between her legs while they kiss against a wall and bile rises in her throat.
She pushes him away, gasping, and stumbles a few feet. Behind her, Henry asks questions, concern etched on his face, and she waves him off. "Not feeling well," she mumbled, and allowed him to walk her home.
They part ways a few weeks later, when Sherlock finally explains that she doesn't want a sexual relationship. Her excuses aren't enough to make him stay, but as she watches him leave in a huff, she realises that she doesn't really care to try.
* *
Lestrade won't tell you about the first time he met Sherlock as "her" instead of "him". In fact, he met her stumbling from a bar, high on cocaine because the itch of boredom and invisibility had been too much; she'd shot up and pulled on a dress and, against her better judgement, gone out to dance.
When Sherlock slurred something about the reason he was at the pub in the first place- something about an affair- Lestrade shook his head and took her wallet from her clutch, because in all their time together he’d never been given an address. Sherlock's breath hitched, and she paused as Lestrade read the ID, read it again, eyes sticking on the bold black "M" listed as her gender. Then he nodded, tucked it back into the wallet, and put the whole package back in her clutch.
"Right then, love. Let's get you home." And that was that. He helped Sherlock back to her hovel on Montague Street, got her into her pyjamas and into her bed.
He came back the next day to check on Sherlock, when she was dressed in a clean pressed suit, sharp lines and flat chest and dark brown voice. He doesn't ask about the dress.
* *
At twenty-five, Sherlock visits an endocrinologist. When her initial attempts to gain a prescription for estradiol fail under such excuses as the need for a few more blood tests and a gender therapist, Sherlock deduces the state of her family's relationship and that her mother is failing.
She leaves with a prescription for estradiol gel tucked into her wallet.
After a week, she sets the tube in the back of her medicine cabinet and leaves it there. She knows, logically, that the cream does nothing unless used regularly, and with spironolactone to block testosterone from entering her system. Nonetheless, when she uses the gel, she feels empowered, more feminine and more like herself- and is it her imagination, or are her breasts tender? She uses it rarely, not overly eager to return to the endocrinologist, but the tube lasts over a year before she has to renew the prescription. She makes do.
* *
When her grandmother dies, Sherlock is twenty-eight. She doesn't attend the woman's funeral; Grandmere had caught her playing with Mummy's makeup once, as a child, and had told her with the severity of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis that such things would "send little boys straight to hell." Their relationship had been strained ever after, because perhaps the old woman had been more perceptive than Sherlock gave her credit for; perhaps she knew she had a granddaughter and didn't want to admit it to herself or others.
Mummy calls after the funeral, asking where Sherlock had been, why he hadn't been there, and Sherlock sighs and explains that she'd forgotten that the funeral was today, she'd thought it was tomorrow. She looks at the black dress she'd bought for mourning, smirks, and sips at her scotch as her mother scolds her. At least, she thinks idly, she has been clean almost five years. She dumps the rest of the bottle into the toilet and goes to bed.
* *
Sherlock Holmes is a man the day he meets John Watson in St. Bart's morgue, and offers him a flatshare.
He takes most of the rest of the time between their meeting and his scheduled visit to move all of Her dresses, skirts, makeup, purses, and shoes into the downstairs bedroom.
When John comes, then, later on, she is a woman again, and has a bra clasped about her thin chest under her men's shirt. John comes, and Sherlock stabs her dagger into the mantel to direct her nervous energy. When the Lestrade summons her, she slips the bra from under her shirt and tucks it into the inside pocket of her coat.
After a man dies in front of her and she tortures him, steps on his wounded shoulder, after dinner with John and the rare feeling of trust pervading her body, she tucks the bra into her sock drawer, in the toe of a pair of thick woollen socks. John won’t touch them and neither will Mrs. Hudson, and neither will ask questions about objects they don’t know to wonder at.
* *
John doesn’t question the hair product’s Sherlock keeps in his cabinet, the styling gels and skin lotions that fill the shelves. He doesn’t ask about Sherlock occasionally going out with a duffle bag not quite full of laundry, or the discrete packaging of his flatmate’s drycleaning. Sherlock has known less observant people, interacts with them every day, but still, it amazes her that the doctor misses something so obviously in front of his face.
Not that he’d have it another way.
* *
Moriarty can see far less of Sherlock than he thinks he can, though Sherlock sees right through his bravado, the tailored line of his hips and the loose legs of his trousers, to the curved hips and the disguised slope of strong thighs, and Sherlock knows him. The sparse stubble on his chin, the high pitch of his voice, and it bites at Sherlock that Moriarty has done what Sherlock never can.
The man promises to burn the heart out of her, but Sherlock knows that he never could. He couldn’t. Could he?
* *
This was never meant to happen. He’s running through the streets, chained to his flatmate with a gun in his hand, assassins before and police behind, and nowhere to go.
This was never meant to happen, as she dials John’s number and he holds it to his ear and reaches his hand out to his friend, watching him pace the street below.
Moriarty was never supposed to touch him. He wasn’t supposed to see the secret lacing his skin, tight in his eyes and the way she moves and he was never meant to see her.
None of that matters, because Moriarty is dead and he threatened Sherlock’s friends, and she has to save them, so she holds back sobs and speaks to John and then she’s falling and oh, she will miss London so very much.
* *
The cocaine is like a warm embrace after so many years, flashing through her nerves and eradicating the line between man and woman, until she can simply be. For days, she drinks it in, revels in it, the supply of her favorite drug never dwindling thanks to a steady stream of dealers who filter into this hellhole of a drug den.
Thus fortified, she approaches Janine, propositions her, and the kisses, the warm body against hers and the breasts against her flat chest mean nothing with the chemicals singing in her veins.
When she doesn’t know where she is one day upon waking, she lets herself become sober, pushes back the angry ache of the shape of her skin, and purchases morphine. She rides the calm of it all day, kisses Janine slow and leisurely in her bath and inhales a line of cocaine before sleep. She copes, and enjoys the ability the drugs give her to pretend that the breasts in her hands are attached to her own body.
When John storms in, like a firestorm with his rage and his self righteousness, the ache sinks into her bones, thick and slimy between her muscles as he drags her to Bart’s, and nothing John can say to her can match the hurt in Molly’s eyes when the woman smacks her.
* *
Of anyone John could pick, it would be harmless, sweet, saccharine little Mary. And Sherlock knows, she sees too much of him, she knows from the way he moves and recognizes the whiff of perfume, barely there, on the couch in the living room. The woman knows what John does not, and Sherlock is pathetically grateful for the way she doesn’t say anything, the way Mary lets her help with the wedding plans and steal John away to help Private Bainbridge with the man who watches him.
But then it’s real, there’s blood and a mystery and John calls her nurse- but no, he’s back in the desert, helping a man whose blood mixes with sandwatersweat and uses Sherlock’s scarf to staunch the blood while he calls for an ambulance.
Sherlock hugs Mary, close and private on the landing outside the kitchen door, and she tucks one hand on his hip and the other against the back of his neck and murmurs that she understands, John is an idiot but she understands. And Sherlock thinks to herself that John has made a very good choice.
* *
Nothing could have prepared her for John’s punch. John had always been safe, John had protected her John wasn’t supposed to punch her when she returned. And then that Mary, the girlfriend- oh. John was going to propose to her, and from the stress of her shoulders when she looks at Sherlock, she was going to say yes.
Anger and a sense of unjustified betrayal boil hot in her belly and she refocuses herself on John’s moustache, the shine of unshed tears in his eyes and the gray at his temples. His hair is long now, and it puts Sherlock off.
Mary smiles at Sherlock, later, when he dabs at his bleeding nose in confusion and and frowns after his old flatmate. Already his skin is tender and hot to the touch, bruised and beginning to swell, and he combs his fingers through the hair closest to the CCTV camera focused on him, signalling Mycroft to stand down.
“I’ll talk to him,” Mary says with a smirk, and Sherlock feels his skin crawl at the idea that he can’t reach John anymore, that it takes his girlfriend to communicate with him. A lot has changed in three years.
* *
Sometimes Sherlock went into the bathroom and stared at her face in the mirror till it melted into a pale blob framed by blackness. Sometimes she would climb to the roof of 221B and stare at the stars, lay back on the gravel there and let London grow quiet around her, till she felt that she and her body were completely different entities. Then she would get up and go inside, ignore John’s questions as to where she’d been, shave her face, and take a long hot shower.
Those nights, danger nights, she would shave her legs and her chest and her armpits, tuck and tape herself into her lingerie and tug on a slinky dress. With minimal padding, she made a striking figure, tall and dark and luscious. Then she would wet her hair down again, curl it carefully, arrange and toy with it till it framed her face. She found that mascara accentuated her eyes and drew the eyes of others away from the smattering of high cheekbones and strong jaw. Carefully, she would shave her face again, closer, to get as smooth a face as possible. Moisturizer, more makeup, and she would gather her heels and clutch purse and make her way down the stairs. Generally by that time, John had gone to bed or was preparing to upstairs, so she could creep out unnoticed and for a short few hours, she was free.
On these nights when she went out, she would go to a park and walk, or shop, or got to a club and collect the stares of those around her. Even with the lust the men around her felt, they must have detected a difference in her, a lack of approachability, and let her alone with her drink. Nights like these, where she kept her mouth closed and her eyes lowered, were times she tucked close to her heart.
* *
Getting shot can’t hurt more than the coming down from her one and only interaction with methamphetamine, but the pain is more intense, more centralized, and the scream gets caught in her throat as she races into her mind palace to formulate a course of action. Her brother’s stinging tongue hurts far worse than the dull ache that tells her she’s going into shock and as she falls backward she welcomes Redbeard into her arms.
But then the pain is roaring back, filling her consciousness, and she can’t tell if she’s screaming or if it’s in her head, but she’s frantic, racing through the halls of her memory for a solution. Molly is there, telling her to control the pain, and Anderson fades into the background with Mycroft. And then there is Moriarty, leering at her, but this one, unlike his namesake, knows her secret. It’s evident as he leers at her, and she convulses, fighting the pain, fighting to keep Moriarty locked where he is, and he’s mocking her, telling her to let go, to die, and she knows that if she just gives in, the pain will go away. But then he makes a mistake.
“John Watson is definitely in danger.”
Sherlock reels, and her eyes fly open. John. After all of this, he has stayed beside her, been near her and helped her, even after she broke his heart. And she made a promise. With a roar, she surges to her feet and pushes out of Moriarty’s cell, ignoring his biting remarks. She can’t die now.
* *
Everything hurts. Breathing hurts. His room is too bright, full of flowers, and if he were able to struggle past the morphine he would try to see who they are from, perhaps throw some away because the smell overwhelms him. But the morphine is warm and sluggish in his blood, and he finds it’s easier to drift in and out of sleep. Until the door clicks open, and none other than Charles Augustus Magnussen strides in.
Sherlock’s heart picks up it’s pace as he begins to panic, fighting the morphine, but the man strokes his hand, unclips the pulse oximeter while Sherlock braces himself for the shrill alarm that never comes.
“Look at them,” he comments, petting his fingers. “They’re musician’s hands. An artist’s,” and he lowers his mouth to press a wet kiss to Sherlock’s knuckles, his whiskers tickling his skin and tongue laving briefly before he pulls away. His next words, however, send a thrill of true horror up Sherlock’s spine. “A woman’s?” It takes all of Sherlock’s strength of will, it seems, to shift his hand away from the man’s grasp, feeling weak as a kitten and more vulnerable.
He knows. His heart’s going faster than a rabbit’s, but Magnussen’s power is greater than Sherlock ever imagined, he’s here undetected and outside of visiting hours and he knows who Sherlock is.
The man clips the oximeter back onto Sherlock’s finger and sets his hand down. Against his will his breath picks up as Magnussen leans in, whispering about Mary, but all Sherlock can think is that this man would kill him if it didn’t serve his purposes to keep Sherlock alive.
And Sherlock’s eyes are open, staring, unfocused, and he can’t see a damn thing except that disgusting man’s eyes, feel his breath hot on his cheeks. He closes them as Magnussen moves away and feels tears catch in his lashes. Magnussen has made note of that dampness, he knows, but that can’t be helped.
And then he is gone, and Sherlock’s heart slows, and his breathing calms, and he drifts into sleep once more. His life is falling apart around him, and he must do something to protect his family.
* *
What truly hurts, in Mary’s betrayal, is that she understands. Mary saw her when no one else could, when John, his best friend, refused to see him. Mary has known him intimately, taken from him something he never wanted to give, and then she hurt them both.
The truth is that Sherlock doesn’t care about her secrets. She can keep the years of her life she’s thrown away, never to be seen again, and why shouldn’t she? But she knows what Sherlock hides, knows what it’s like to hide a lifetime of lies and hurt, and Sherlock had hoped to trust her.
* *
When Sherlock is seventeen, she discovers the kiss of cocaine, the way it sings through her veins. Hours disappear under the drugs’ thrall, and Sherlock learns to give up control and let herself drift, slide, accept.
Six months in, Mycroft discovers her, pupils blown and mind finally fast enough to process the deductions that flash through her head in an instant. The disappointment in his eyes makes her want to sleep, so she buys a twist of morphine and adds that to her needles. What follows is a night of shadows and cotton-wrapped silence, her mind muffled beyond belief.
From there follows almost two years of cocaine by night and days laced with morphine, highballs and alcohol and the silence of her body clamoring against her skin. The days she feels male, the days she can stand tall and embrace her deep voice and the stubble on her jaw, lessen, and she loses a year, two years, and wakes in hospital tied to a bed with a splitting headache and a cottony mouth.
Mycroft had had enough, it appeared, and had her collected from a hovel under a bridge where she’d taken refuge. She didn’t remember past two months before, and in the detox that followed she allowed more of the memories to slip through her grasp as the pain overwhelmed her.
The day she was due to be let out of rehab, she received an acceptance letter to Cambridge and a slightly more personal letter from her brother, notifying her that she was to remain clean, that he would see about something to quiet her mind.
Within six months the cocaine was back in her veins, and she sped through university and landed in a hovel on Montague street with only a degree in biochemistry and a collection of track marks along her arms.
* *
Mycroft’s fiance winds up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Mycroft stops contacting Sherlock for three months in the wake of his death. The silence is perturbing enough that Sherlock abandons the drugs and drowns his new mobile in the river, makes his way to New Scotland Yard and sneaks himself into the forensics lab.
One night spent in a holding cell, too bored to talk to himself but not bored enough to count ceiling tiles, and then Mycroft is standing in the doorway to the cell, looking as if he’s aged ten years in the time since they last spoke. Sherlock simply stands, gathers himself, and follows him out. Ten yards from the door a stressed young man with eyes that speak of too many nights of coffee instead of sleep, and whose badge reads “DS Lestrade”, informs Sherlock that he had, in fact, managed to solve two cases in his time spent tampering with their evidence, and if he promised not to do it again, would he like to help consult on cases?
She threw out her needles that night.
“The Science of Deduction” goes up, complete with Sherlock’s new mobile number, email, and P.O. Box, and within a week he has enough money from solving petty cases to pay for the website and one hundred business cards which read:
Sherlock Holmes
Consulting Detective
The cards don’t last long, but the word gets out, and people across London and back call on her for help with their petty problems. The trust fund Mycroft gave her goes untouched and gathers a hefty amount of interest, and he uses the extra cash which now lines his pockets to plan a trip to Florida.
* *
Her first dress was stolen, from a girl Mycroft snuck in and then out of the house in quick succession. The dress ended up in their laundry, and Sherlock pilfered it and hid it behind the mythology books her parents had given her for her twelfth birthday. Her body was too tall and too angular to be able to wear the thing, but late at night she would lay the skirt across her lap and imagine what it would be like to own one that fit.
* *
“Faggot!” The inane insult was a common response to her deductions, especially those which revealed secrets no one had ever meant to share. After hearing it slung at her almost daily for five years, the sound meant nothing.
Still, when a hand landed on her shoulder, Sherlock let her knees buckle and twisted out of the hand’s shocked grasp, swinging around to kick the young man and relishing his look of shock before he went down.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed, drawing her coat closer around herself as she walked away.
* *
Sometimes, Sherlock found as she built her business from Montague Street, gender meant almost nothing- she was a woman, or he was a man, and it was unimportant. Casual suits and a long coat lent her power and mystique, hid her body and gave a lovely swish as she walked.
But sometimes, sometimes expressing her gender was so important it clung to her teeth like caramel, cloying, choking the life from her, like her gender were an equation and she had learned, long ago, to add just the right amount of masculine and feminine to make her look like herself.
Wearing skirts with a man’s suit jacket added just enough femininity to make people question his gender instead of assuming he's a man. Sometimes it’s lipstick and sometimes it's skirts and sometimes it's hair extensions and smoky eyes and long clingy dresses that drive people round the bend because they lend him curves beyond imagining
And sometimes everything within her comes together with such a crash that she is left with no choice but to curl up in her bed and tuck herself into a tiny ball, imagine she could disappear entirely.
* *
Killing a man is not new to Sherlock. She had strangled an attacker in an alley, late one night on her way back to Montague Street. She’d had no choice, he’d tried to do the same with her own scarf while he hissed profanities into her ear. The body had been gone within an hour, and Mycroft sent her a veiled rebuff to clean up her own messes.
But Magnussen was important, influential; he held control over Mycroft, and that made him dangerous to everyone Sherlock cared about. It was John’s gun, he’d fired it before, and premeditated murder was something he’d not done before, and he flinched at the slack look on Magnussen’s face as he fell backwards.
Murder was not something she forgot for a long, long time.
* *
Some things I can’t save you from, little sister, Mycroft had murmured on the way to the airport, and she flinched. She had never been called a sister before, and she knew that it was a calculated move. He thought she should share her secret with John.
It wasn’t hard to get the words out. She’d never wanted to tell someone so much, but saying the words wasn’t difficult- it was finding the words.
“Sherlock is actually a girl’s name.” And then she waited, and held her breath, and he laughed, and she laughed too because her heart was breaking and really, he was far too obtuse, what did she expect.
“We think it’s a girl,” and oh, that hurt. But she nodded, and walked away, and boarded the plane.
* *
Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?
He’s not allowed to be back. He’s not allowed to return, he’s dead, he shot himself. He can’t come back, not now. They’re still not safe.