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Sherlock pressed his body tighter into the cracked polyester seat of the bus, trying his hardest to block out the commotion of all the schoolchildren existing so vividly and so carelessly inside.
There was so much information flooding in that Sherlock forgot to blink, forgot to even breathe.
The mud on his trousers wasn’t quite dry, and it was making him very cold.
Somewhere in the front, a girl in year 1 was turning a sickening shade of green. Within five minutes, she would be throwing up her lunch. Not enough sleep. Not enough water.
A ball of paper whizzed over Sherlock’s head, thrown from the older students who inhabited the back of the bus. He turned to look at them.
The thin blonde girl must have stayed at her mother’s house overnight because her hair was in two neat plaits and her mind was clearly elsewhere, judging by her complete ignorance of the bright eyed brunette chattering beside her. Best friends. Recent fallout. Something petty.
The scrape in his palm still stung, even though the nurse had picked out the pebbles and disinfected it before the lunch break was over.
In the seat farthest back, a boy and a girl, year 10, were mashed together in what looked like an uncomfortable heap. Kissing? Dating? Dare?
Directly behind Sherlock, a redheaded boy was munching on a bag of ruffled chips, his teeth making obnoxious crunching sounds and the bag rustling from where it was half concealed in his backpack. Bullied about his love of grease. It gets to him.
Freak. Victor had called him. Sherlock didn’t think so. Freaks were the people who teased girls in the year below about their pigtails, not the people who saved them from teasing.
Across from Sherlock, a round faced girl was clutching a couple papers stapled together. Her lips were pressed in a tight line. Failed math test. Strict parents.
The bus smelled like rubber shoe soles and car exhaust with the occasional whiff of body odour coming from the mid pubescent teens in the back.
It wasn’t his fault. Victor really had started it this time. He just didn’t like to stand there being called names as a crowd of older kids gathered. Third years could be so cruel.
The driver scratched his three day old beard and chewed loudly on a piece of nicotine gum. He had the radio tuned to some pop station, loud enough that you couldn’t ignore it, not loud enough that it drowned out the dozen conversations going on in the bus.
The second window on the left was open and Sherlock watched as a green beetle got sucked into the bus. It landed on the brunette’s forehead, causing her to jump up yelping and shaking around to get it off.
It just slipped out. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked Victor why he still wet his bed so loudly in front of the crowd. Maybe if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have gotten pushed and wouldn’t be covered in mud.
The bus screeched to a halt, its first of many. The doors swung open and a comically small stop sign flipped out from the side of the bus.
Sherlock was so lost in the influx of information and his whirling thoughts that he didn’t notice Mycroft standing over him until he gave his shoulder a light shove.
“Come on. Its our stop,” Mycroft said, exact as always.
Sherlock stood, swinging his backpack over his shoulder and following numbly. He had meant to spend the bus ride thinking up an excuse as for why he was so dirty, but he hadn’t even managed that, and now there was no time.
The walk up the driveway seemed shorter today than it was any other day. Perhaps it was because Sherlock was dreading facing his mother inside.
As it turns out, dread was exactly the thing to be feeling.
The door was pulled roughly open on protesting hinges just as the boys stepped onto the front porch.
“William. Sherlock. Scott. Holmes.” Mother glared down at him, arms crossed over a flour dusted apron.
Sherlock shrunk against his mother’s anger. It didn’t hurt any less for being expected.
The boys were ushered into the house and Mycroft slipped quietly into the sitting room while Sherlock was steered into the kitchen.
“i just don’t know what I’m going to do with you Sherlock. I slave away at home all day, cooking and scrubbing and setting things in order. I do my best to teach you and your brother good things. And for what? To get a call home that you humiliated a boy on the playground in front of all his friends? You think school is a game? That you can behave however you wish and get away with it? I never had such trouble with Mycroft. You’re six years old already, haven’t you learned to be nice to your friends yet?”
Sherlock opened his mouth to defend himself, to let her know how mixed up things had gotten and how it wasn’t like that at all, but she held up a hand to silence him.
“You will go to your room and think hard about what you’ve done. Tomorrow you will apologize to Victor and I don’t want to hear any more of this again. Understood?”
Sherlock held her angry gaze for a moment. He felt as though his insides were trembling. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all and she wouldn’t listen or try to understand.
For a brief ridiculous moment, he considered asking if he would be allowed downstairs for dinner, but then the moment passed and he realized he wasn’t hungry anyways. There was simply too much injustice in the world.
Sherlock hung his head.
“Understood mum.”
He trudged up the stairs, heart heavy, and heard his mother call up to tell him not to track mud everywhere, but her voice sounded far off and artificial.
He closed the door to his room gently, because slamming it would make noise and there was already too much noise in his mind.
There was too much everything.
His room smelled too strongly of freshly mowed grass, and he realized with annoyance that his window had been left open and the neighbour must have mowed his lawn while he was at school.
Suddenly Sherlock was acutely aware of how uncomfortable the cold mud on his uniform trousers was. He pulled them off and tossed them to the side.
His socks were itchy. He pulled those off too.
His tie was strangling him. Off it went.
His uniform shirt was sticking to his skin. Off as well.
This is how minutes later, Mycroft entered the room to find a stark naked Sherlock standing in the middle of it, glaring at the open window.
He sighed loudly.
Sherlock heard the door close again and a rustle of fabric. Something thin and soft and smelling freshly laundered was draped over his shoulders like an oversized cape. A bedsheet.
He debated throwing it off but realized Mycroft would probably leave if he did, and Sherlock didn’t want Mycroft to leave. Not right now.
He tugged it more tightly around himself and watched as Mycroft shut the window. It did nothing for the grass scent.
“Sherlock I have something for you.” Mycroft said, coming to a stop directly in front of him and meeting his brothers eyes with a matching blue gaze.
This piqued Sherlock’s curiosity. He liked receiving things.
“Follow me.” Mycroft walked to the dresser against the far wall of Sherlock’s room and knelt on front of it, then looked back expectantly.
Sherlock followed, mind racing to try and figure out what Mycroft could give him that was already somewhere in his own drawers.
“What is it Mycroft?”
“First I need you to do something. I need you to tell me what truly happened today.”
And so it came tumbling out. Sherlock talked about Anna and how she was being beat by her alcoholic father at home. How she had worn pigtails today and how Victor had teased her incessantly all of morning break and half of lunch break. How Victor had chased her and tugged her pig tails and called her swine.
He talked about how he told Victor to pick on someone his own size and how Victor had called him a freak who was too thin and scrawny and dumb to even be in year two. He talked about how the information flooded in. Constantly. How among these scraps came the perfect weapon. Victor was a bedwetter.
Sherlock told Mycroft how he hadn’t intended to make such a big deal of the situation, he just wanted to be left alone and he wanted Anna to be left alone. How should he know Victor would get angry and push him into the mud and run into the school in tears?
Sherlock talked in fits and starts and he didn’t realize he was crying until his story finished and all that could be heard was the occasional hiccup.
Mycroft said nothing, he simply opened the bottom drawer to the dresser.
“Picture this drawer Sherlock. In your mind.”
Sherlock looked up at his brother in confusion, but was met with an expectant gaze, the one that made it impossible not to listen. He imagined the drawer.
“Empty it.”
Sherlock pictured removing the sweaters from the drawer.
“Now take the story about Victor and place it in the drawer.”
Now this was a truly silly thing to do. Sherlock squinted at his brother.
“How am I meant to take a story and put it into an imaginary drawer Mycroft? What sort of gift is this?”
“I am showing you something very cool Sherlock. Do you want to learn it or not?” Mycroft asked sharply.
Of course Sherlock wanted to learn it. He was curious, always grasping for something new. He nodded and did as Mycroft had asked, but he imagined the story he had just told as a book, and set the book in the mental drawer.
Mycroft smiled.
“How did Victor make you feel today?”
Sherlock thought for a moment before answering. “Angry. And a bit sad.”
“Good. Lift that away and put it in a separate drawer. Your anger will change someday, what happened won’t. Never taint fact with emotion.”
Sherlock imagined a thread spooling up and out of the book, barbed and sharp. He imagined another drawer on top, and set the spooled thread inside it.
“If you can’t organize your thoughts brother, things will always overwhelm you. Do you see this dresser?” He asked, gesturing to the entire piece of furniture.
Sherlock nodded.
“Fill it with what happened today. Fill one drawer with what you know of Anna, another with your conversation with Mummy, another with what you learned in school, another with the bus ride home.”
“It won’t all fit here.” Sherlock said, quickly realizing that so much had happened in one day, so much had been revealed to him though each persons little quirks and movements, that the drawer simply couldn’t hold it all.
“Who says it has to fit? Look around you. There is a whole room you can imagine. There is a whole house. You can create a palace.”
Sherlock breathed out, not daunted in the slightest by the enormity of the task ahead. It seemed like great fun, organizing his thoughts somewhere familiar. A delightful challenge.
Mycroft unfolded himself from the floor.
“I have homework Sherlock. I hope this helps you in some way.”
He left the room, shutting the door behind him again.
Sherlock didn’t move for the rest of the evening. He didn’t move when the sounds of dinner floated up the stairs. He didn’t move when the sun began its dip below the horizon. He didn’t move when the lack of sunshine made his room cooler and the thin sheet insufficiently warm.
By the time it was dark and Sherlock was ready to crawl into bed, he had an exact replica of his room in his mind, down to the pirate hat on his desk and the pencils in his backpack.
He had never felt more organized, never before had more space to think.
In the moment before he slipped off to sleep, he thought of Mycroft and how tomorrow he would thank him for the wonderful gift.