Reviews are appreciated, any questions feel free to ask. I don't know BSL, ASL only, and I know there's a huge difference so my database is restricted to google. I'll probably be keeping the sign descriptions vague for that reason. Thanks so much for reading.

Sherlock Holmes was a fussy child, a fussy baby. His father was a doctor and was never home. His mother was a socialite and found herself often far too busy for her two sons. She had a home birth with both boys, her husband doing the delivery. They probably would have noticed that Sherlock was different if he'd had regular checkups, but his father always performed the jabs and the once overs. For all intents and purposes, Sherlock was a normal boy.

It was Mycroft, however, who noticed something was different about his baby brother. Mycroft, who was six, nearly seven years older than Sherlock, noticed when the young thing began to crawl, began to get into things, that something was off.

Sherlock never smiled. He stared, intently. He cried, a lot, much more than normal. Mycroft was a genius, Sherlock was something above that, something new. Mycroft noticed that when Sherlock at age nineteen months was able to mimic Mycroft at writing a few letters when Mycroft was home for Christmas holidays.

At nineteen months, however, Sherlock was still not talking. He had mastered the art of facial expressions, and mastered the art of getting whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, sometimes on his own, sometimes by having a tantrum. Mycroft realised then, that Sherlock was probably deaf.

Mycroft conducted a series of experiments on his baby brother, between sound and vibration, and came to the conclusion that if Sherlock had any hearing at all, it was minimal. It was probably genetic, Sherlock had never really been sick or injured.

He told his father and mother over dinner that night as Sherlock sat at the table in his chair, his chubby hands feeding himself with relatively little mess, watching his parents, his brother, converse in a way he probably never would. His eyes were narrow, sharp and blue, and studying something that he simply could not understand.

"He can't hear us." Mycroft was not one for mincing words, even at eight years of age. "He's deaf, you know."

His mother dropped her spoon into her bowl of soup. His father's hand froze half way between his plate his mouth. Mycroft deduced that his parents were in shock simply because their son's condition had been so plainly obvious, yet neither one of them, the doctor or the socialite, had bothered to notice.

"Charles... do you... you don't..." Mycroft watched his mother gasp, her eyes welling with tears. Mycroft knew perfectly well his mother was not sad, but embarrassed at the thought of her son's future. All those signs he might have to learn, people staring. Would she have to learn sign? What would her friends think of her? How would they understand?

"I'll take him in to the clinic tomorrow for a hearing test, Amelia, don't fret," Charles said soothingly.

Through the rest of dinner, no one spoke a word. Mycroft watched with interest as their parents tried to prove him wrong. They created noise in all directions to see if Sherlock would notice. The only time he did was when the noise caused a vibration he could feel. Even then, he didn't look at the source of the noise, but the place on his body where he'd felt it.

Mycroft tagged along to watch the hearing test, his father didn't deny him that. His father was hoping that Mycroft might become a doctor one day, too. It was a quick test. There was a little wire that was inserted into Sherlock's small ear. It measured the response of the inner ear to sound.

Mycroft could tell from his father's face that Sherlock had failed the hearing test miserably. Mycroft mused that the hearing test was probably the only test Sherlock would ever fail from this day forward.

"Stay with your brother," Charles demanded and went off to his office to make a series of phone calls.

Sherlock was sitting in the middle of the floor, his blue eyes staring up at his older brother. He squatted down in front of the toddler and raised his hands. Mycroft knew no sign language at all, but that didn't matter. He made a gesture with wiggling fingers in front of Sherlock.

The child stared at it, and with precise dedication, mimicked it perfectly. Mycroft smiled and shook his head. Even at such a young age he knew, Sherlock was going to be one of a kind.

"Speech therapy," was the first thing Amelia Holmes said when her husband told her. Her face was firm, her arms crossed. "Deaf children can learn to speak, can't they?"

Charles Holmes licked his lips and sighed. "Some can."

"There are schools he can go to, right?" she pressed. "We need a better nanny. Charles, I can't handle this!"

Mycroft sat on the floor next to his baby brother, watching the small boy with messy black curls attempt to take apart Mycroft's old microscope. He was nearly succeeding. "We could all learn sign," Mycroft said quietly. Mycroft wanted to learn sign. Mycroft wanted to learn everything, much, like he suspected, his little brother would.

Charles and Amelia stared down at their oldest child. Amelia looked horrified, Charles looked impressed, as he usually did every time Mycroft opened his mouth to say something. "We need to decide what the best course of action will be for the boy."

The best course of action for Charles, it turned out, was to die. He had been drunk when he was coming home two years after they learned their youngest child had about ten percent of his hearing, with hearing aids. He was walking, he didn't want to drive and hurt someone. He didn't think about the other cars not paying attention to the darkly clad, wavering pedestrian wandering about the streets.

Dead on impact, the officer told Mrs Holmes as she sobbed into her sleeve. Mycroft was away, Sherlock was home, but he was only four, and he still didn't speak. He was watching his mother with wide eyes, curious, detached from the situation because no one explained to him what was going on. He tugged on her sleeve but she pushed him away.

Charles could communicate with the boy. They hired a nanny who could sign, despite Mrs Holmes' pleas to find a nanny who could teach the boy to speak. Charles acted like the interpreter between mother and son, and Sherlock lost all concept of her as a mother by the time he turned four.

Mycroft signed as well. He rather liked the idea of a secret language that none of his friends at school understood. He was brought home immediately upon learning of his father's death, and as sad as he was, he knew that life always ended in death, whether it was sooner or later.

He explained the situation to his little brother. 'Father has died.'

'Why?'

'Because that's what people do, in the end.'

Sherlock's little brow furrowed. 'What if we love them?'

'It doesn't matter,' Mycroft's hands stressed to the boy. 'People die, whether we love them or not. It's best not to let yourself love them too much. When they die, they stop, and we keep going. Why hurt if you don't want to.' Mycroft knew Sherlock wouldn't understand what he was trying to say, yet, but he also knew Sherlock would take those words with him in the end, and eventually he'd understand.

Amelia Holmes sent Sherlock to a special school after that, and rarely extended the invitation to come home. Sherlock spent a lot of time alone. He was with Deaf children now, but he never really fit in. When he was eight he mastered speech therapy, even if he wasn't good at it, it wasn't something he found particularly useful in his world. Everyone in his world knew how to sign, why bother having to pay attention to the way people moved their mouths, guessing sounds he'd never hear.

Still, it made for a more pleasant holiday experience when he did have to go home, which was usually just during summer, and only then so he could make his mother pay attention enough to provide him with the most basic things.

Sherlock was a curious child, but detached. He was fickle, and liked things a specific way. His mother put him into grief therapy when he nearly hit her with a vase he chucked when she threw away some old chemistry texts that Sherlock had dug out from his father's old book collections. She insisted something was wrong with him.

The therapist, who did not sign, had trouble communicating with the boy. When Sherlock felt the therapy session was going no where, he'd sit on the sofa and close his eyes. Eventually Amelia stopped taking him.

One summer, when Sherlock was thirteen, Amelia and her boys were invited to a cousin's wedding being held in Paris, at the Louvre. The wedding spared no expense, the boys wore suits tailored to them. Amelia left Mycroft strict instructions to keep an eye on his brother at all times. Sherlock had the worst habit, which only grew as he aged, of wandering off on his own and fiddling with things.

The boys sat through the painfully long ceremony well enough, but Mycroft grew bored with his brother, and had decided to pursue a rather attractive blonde from the groom's side of the family while the musicians were setting up for the reception.

Sherlock watched with curious eyes as a violinist, a tall man with stark black hair greased back, pale skin and very dark brown eyes, plucked the strings on the instrument and then drew his bow across. Sherlock had seen a violin before in passing, many times, but had never given it much thought. It wasn't even the violin that held his interest as it was the way the man held it, as though it was a sentient being, capable of pain if mishandled.

Sherlock approached the man and reached out while the man was playing, laying his fingers on the wood near his chin. The vibrations were so intense, Sherlock jerked his hand away, as though he'd been burned. The man, who had been so caught up in the music, was startled to feel a hand tug at his instrument, but instead of being cross when he looked at the boy, he smiled.

"Hello there," he said to Sherlock. "Do you play?"

The man had an accent, one Sherlock hadn't worked in in speech therapy. He was fair with French accents, Italian and passable with Spanish, but this one was different.

Sherlock raised his hand and signed to the man. 'I don't understand you."

The man's eyes flickered to Sherlock's ears, where the small, but conspicuous pieces of plastic and wires, sat, tucked just beneath his curls. "Ah," he said. "Guess not."

Sherlock caught that, and deduced that the man had asked him if he could play the violin. "Never tried," Sherlock said. He spoke carelessly when he did bother to speak at all, and while he was understandable, Sherlock didn't bother to make himself sound like other people sounded... or at least the way his speech therapist told him other people sounded. Other people were boring. Speaking was dull. What was the point, anyway? You could say so much more with your face, with your hands, speaking was just... stupid.

The man, surprising Sherlock deeply, held out the violin towards him. "Want to?"

Sherlock's fingers itched, they stung, with desire to touch the violin. Sherlock wanted to learn everything, to know everything, to do everything. He reached out, his long fingers careful, persistent, and he took the instrument from the man.

Grabbing the bow with a sort of curious abandon, Sherlock dragged it across the strings several times until the wincing man, with a huge smile on his face, stayed Sherlock's frantic hands with his own. He held up a finger, asking Sherlock to wait, and then grabbed a violin from a fellow musician who was standing near by.

Catching Sherlock's eye, he gestured for the young boy to follow his motions. Seeing as Sherlock could imitate almost anyone and anything, at everything, he was able to, with little effort, produce a sound better than most hearing children who had been playing the instrument for years.

This only lasted for a few moments when a red-faced, heavy-breathing Mycroft, looking rather fat and irritated, rushed over. He snatched the violin from Sherlock's hands and shoved it at the musician. "I'm so sorry. He doesn't really know any better. He's just..."

"He's fantastic," the man said, making sure he was looking directly at Sherlock. "He's deaf, yes?"

Mycroft nodded. "As a post. Were you mocking my brother?" Mycroft's tone had gone from apologetic to accusatory, suddenly afraid that someone was trying to make a spectacle out of his brother, giving a deaf kid an instrument.

"Your brother has... well an ability that most people don't," the man said.

Sherlock couldn't follow what the man was saying, however he did quite enjoy the look Mycroft was getting on his face. It was the look Mycroft often got whenever someone was praising Sherlock's talents.

'Let's go,' Mycroft's fingers snapped at his brother.

Sherlock turned back to the man and with a grin, signed, 'Thank you,' with a wide, sweeping gesture, attempting to encompass just how much thanks he had for that stranger.

When Sherlock told his mother, with Mycroft interpreting, of course, 'I want to play the violin,' his mother laughed at him. She was drunk, tired, and lonely, and the idea of a deaf child playing the violin was laughable to her.

Sherlock was frustrated. He tried to explain to her that he could play, he liked it. He heard it his own way and it was soothing. She just kept laughing and shaking her head and drinking, and eventually Sherlock started screaming, as loud as he could, wickedly enjoying the look of horror on her face at the guttural, deep sound he made.

When she stopped laughing and started crying, Sherlock crossed his arms and said aloud, "I want a violin."

Mycroft bought him one, of course. How could he not. As upset as he was with Sherlock's behavior with his mother, he had heard his brother play. He had watched his brother accurately mimic every move the violin player had made. Although the sound Sherlock had produced was muted slightly, from having never played before, the notes were nearly identical. Mycroft just could not say no to that request.

Sherlock took up lessons. Non traditional, of course. His teacher was a woman, older, happy. She and her husband, who was always away, lived on Baker Street, renting out the flats in their building. Mrs Hudson was her name, and she took care of the building while her husband spent most of his time in the States taking care of business matters.

Mrs Hudson had played the violin as a young woman, and had offered to teach Sherlock after she'd seen the boy and his brother picking out his instrument at a shop up the street. She found it facinating that the little deaf boy was taking up music like that.

"Oh it's not uncommon," Mrs Hudson told Mycroft as they watched Sherlock hold the violin up, touching the strings, examining the bow as though it was something under a microscope. "Deaf people play music all the time. Beethoven, of course, though he went deaf well after he had started composing. But it's no different, I'd imagine, than teaching a child without hearing difficulties. He seems to be a smart boy, anyway."

"Too much so, for his own good," Mycroft said sullenly. He was always in a bad mood now, Mycroft, seeing as his diet was rigid and what he really wanted to do was wash his hands of his brother and possibly take down an entire cake by himself.

"Have him come by my flat Thursdays, and we'll get started," she said and reached out to pat the boy on his head.

Sherlock, who rarely liked to be touched, simply smiled at her and signed a thank you while trying to balance the violin and bow between his shoulder and neck without using his hands.

'Stop that,' Mycroft insisted. 'It's going to break.'

Sherlock grinned as Mycroft paid and he was nearly skipping out of the shop with his new prize tucked under his arm.

The birth of Sherlock's music passion was probably the last thing that went well for Sherlock Holmes that year. He did do lessons with Mrs Hudson, every Thursday, for about nine months. Then, one day, Sherlock Holmes returned from school, eager to get started on a particularly interesting science project that was going to be due after the holidays, and he found his mother laying dead on the sofa.

Her skin was quite grey, her hair flacid, her mouth open, eyes bugged out. She had choked, Sherlock noticed, from the trail of left-over vomit leaking out of the side of her mouth. He touched her, inspite of himself, and she was cold, stiff. She had been dead for a while, but not an entire day.

Sherlock stared at the phone in the corner of the house. He couldn't use it, his mother had never agreed to set up the particular device that allowed the deaf to communicate over the telephone. He sighed, feeling sick. He wanted to sleep, but he couldn't just leave her there, dead.

Mycroft was supposed to be home, too. Mycroft was at University but his last letter told him Mycroft would be home on the first day of the summer hols. Sherlock stared at his mother's dead body and tried not to cry. His mother had never liked him. She had never connected to him, never bothered to care about who he was, or learn to communicate.

She was still his mother, though, and she was laying dead on the sofa, and Sherlock knew why. There were pills, prescription pills, in the traces of vomit. He could see the half-digested capsules laying on the floor after they'd dribbled out of her mouth. She had taken them with wine, the empty glass on the table.

The pills hadn't killed her though, the vomit did. Her body couldn't digest them, it tried to expel them, but she was too drunk, too unconscious to move, so she choked, and died.

His hands were trembling and he slid down the wall, unable to take his eyes off of her. Mycroft would be home soon, was the only conscious thought in his brain. Sherlock, being young, being so separate from the rest of the world, knew what happened, but couldn't figure out what to do after he had the answers.

So he sat. He didn't take into consideration that Mycroft, who really didn't want to be home in the first place, decided to delay his trip a by two days. It was Mycroft that found Sherlock, still sitting in the parlour with the dead body that had begun to stink. Sherlock, who had moved to drink and relieve himself, but sat in that spot, knowing only that it was the best spot for Mycroft to see him when his brother came home.

'I waited for you. I couldn't ring anyone,' Sherlock signed feebly.

Mycroft's face was drawn, hiding his own horror that his baby brother had been trapped in a house with a dead body for two days, unable to ring anyone, the police, himself, because of his mother's refusal to accept that her younger son was deaf.

'Why didn't you go next door?' Mycroft asked his bother as the pair went upstairs to get Sherlock bathed and changed. The entire house, including Sherlock's clothes, had begun to smell of rotting corpse.

'I don't know.' It was the most honest, and frankly the only answer, Sherlock had for his brother.

Mycroft was angry. He wanted to hit Sherlock for being so dense. He wanted to hit his mother's dead body for being so selfish. He wanted to lay down, like a child, and cry because now Sherlock really was his responsibility. Now he must play parent to a deaf, socially awkward, teenaged boy who really just needed some parents.

Mycroft did the only thing he really could do. He sent Sherlock off to school, avoided him as much as possible, and when he did have to see his brother, he put him on menial case-work, as he was currently interning at the Department of Defense where he was likely to enter into a rather successful political career.

Sherlock was lonely as a teen. By the time he was sixteen he was drinking quite a bit. No one talked to him anymore, even the kids that got picked on avoided him. Sherlock was no stranger to confrontation, either. He picked fights, he insulted the other kids at the school. He used his superior intelligence to make others feel stupid, and it felt good.

Sherlock was angry. He was alone, and he was angry, and he hated his parents for being rubbish, and his brother for showing him that he was smarter than the rest of the kids. He thought about Mrs Hudson every now and again, though he'd stopped going over there the summer his mother had died. Mrs Hudson had treated him like a normal human being, like he was smart, but fallible, like he was capable of loving, and being loved in return. No one had ever made him feel like that before, or since.

Sherlock was seventeen the first time he tried cocaine, and eighteen the first time he jammed a needle full of heroine into his veins and let himself collapse on the floor with the absolute pleasure of being outside of his mind and outside of his body. Where he could look at things and they wouldn't be numbers and statistics and information. In this state people weren't just a list of what they had done, and what they were about to do.

By nineteen Mycroft had lost all track of Sherlock, and every now and again bothered himself with looking for his brother, but he knew. Last time he saw Sherlock he'd seen the track marks and the dark circles under his eyes, and the shabby state of his dress.

Mycroft knew, but he was so damn busy that Sherlock just had to stop mattering to him. It wasn't until Mycroft got the phone call that Sherlock was in the hospital, nearly dead from overdose, that he realised he had failed his brother. He had let his mother win, he had stopped caring about the little freak.

Mycroft waited until visiting hours were well over before he showed his badge to the staff and went in to see his brother. Sherlock looked rather pathetic in the bed as he laid there, surrounded by monitors and wires and beeping things.

He was sallow, too-thin, malnourished. His arms were bruised, one of them infected but not enough to cause alarm, luckily, because his hands were how he communicated. His ears were naked, probably having sold his hearing aids for another fix.

Sherlock coughed, but didn't open his eyes as Mycroft stood over the bed and stared down at his brother. "I blame myself," he said, and looked at the door, wondering if maybe he could just wash his hands of this whole mess and flee. Sherlock would die, eventually, and then Mycroft would really be free of it all.

Instead he took a seat next to his brother's bed and held his hand until he, too, had fallen into the black of unconsciousness. It was Sherlock who woke him the next morning, tapping him roughly on the head.

Mycroft snapped his head up and squinted blurry eyes at his brother. Sherlock tipped his crooked fingers toward his mouth, asking for a drink.

Rubbing his eyes, Mycroft looked around and found a small pitcher of tepid water, and an unused glass. He filled it halfway and handed it to his brother. Sherlock drank it down and let the cup tumble from his weak hand, onto the bed.

'Are you happy with yourself?'

'I'm coming down,' Sherlock replied with very weak, sloppy signs. 'Want more.'

Mycroft, against better judgment, called the nurse who gave Sherlock another dose of medication for the pain. Sherlock let out a breath and closed his eyes. There would be no more questions for the moment.

Mycroft couldn't stay... or rather, he wouldn't stay, not when he was signing Sherlock into rehab against his will. Sherlock was unconscious when the decision was made, and Mycroft heard Sherlock caused such a fuss he had to be sedated and transported under restraints.

Rehab lasted a year and a half, and Mycroft never visited. He sent emails, sent Sherlock a mobile with some decent texting options to help for those with hearing impairments. He sent him a new set of hearing aids, which Sherlock sent back with a note that said, 'Piss off.' Mycroft smiled at the fact that Sherlock had kept the letters and the mobile. There was hope for him yet.

Sherlock eventually became sober. He sent Mycroft a letter saying that he no longer wanted to die, which in his way was a thank you, Mycroft supposed. Sherlock went off to University, where several paid students provided Mycroft with regular updates. At first he had the students attempt to be friends with Sherlock, but after repeated complaints that Sherlock would hit them, hard enough to crack ribs and break noses, Mycroft accepted information from them as they watched from afar.

Sherlock did good. He excelled in all of his classes, despite not being well liked by any of his professors. He had interpreters but rarely paid them any attention, and very often completely ignored them. He obtained several degrees in record time.

Sober and educated, Sherlock finally received his inheritance that had been denied him while he was using and acquired a flat, and with some convincing, met a contact at Scotland Yard who Sherlock knew simply as Lestrade, or his given sign name, the sign for the colour grey.

Lestrade was crap at BSL, and even more so in speaking slow enough for Sherlock to understand him, but the emails were punctual and efficient, and after Sherlock solved three cold cases in two days, Lestrade kept his number for texts on his speed dial.

Sherlock wasn't friendly, the others at the Yard hated him, mostly for the fact that he was so good at what he did, but also because they didn't understand him and when human beings don't understand something, they tend to dislike it. Sherlock wasn't there to make friends, however, and that was fine.

Sherlock was fine alone. He was detached, often accused of being soulless, inhuman, psychotic. He was none of those things, he simply was more attached to himself, his violin and his deductive reasoning more than anything else. Anything else, that is, until Dr John Watson walked into the lab one day, handed over his mobile and gave Sherlock a sad, but definitive smile that Sherlock hadn't seen since the days of violin lessons with Mrs Hudson.

John Watson was a game changer, and Sherlock knew that, and for the first time in a very, very long time, Sherlock's smile was genuine.