The Autobiography of Mycroft Holmes

Chapter 7: A Study in Deduction

*Finally, this is ready to be published!!! It is a bit shorter than some of the previous chapters, but it is one of my favorite chapters since it is one of those which display the deduction skills of the Holmes sisters. Hope you enjoy!*

I hung up the phone and walked back into the sitting room. I set Sherlock's phone on the table in the kitchen and sat at the table. Sherlock was sitting across from me.

"So she'll call us in a few days to let us know what's going on, in case you wanted-"

"I'd have thought as much," Sherlock said, seemingly looking at something on the table right in front of me. A minute detail that she was trying to work out and couldn't seem to get just right.

"What?" I asked her, not seeing what she was seeing.

"Why can't I have your focus?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why can't I have that way of focusing on things that you do?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Deduction. I'm okay at it. But I'm not good at it, I have not nearly perfected it like you have. Why can't I?"

Honestly, I had never really tried to acquire the skill; I had been doing it for so long that it was just another part of my existence now. But it was a large part of me that not many people ever knew about; those select few individuals including my parents, Sherlock, Lestrade, and... I said I wouldn't talk about him yet.

"Sherlock, I think it is that you see but you do not observe. For instance, do you know how many books we have on the shelf by the fireplace?"

There was a large bookcase on the right of the fireplace, and it included one-hundred and thirty three volumes of mine. But Sherlock would not have known this unless she really looked at it and observed; they were not her books, so she wouldn't have cared.

"How am I supposed to know that? I've never counted."

"Obviously. You see the books, but you do not observe the numbers of books there actually are on the shelf. You do not observe that the one in the upper right corner is missing half its pages because I tore them out during Law School; or that the one in the exact center of the shelf is titled The Dissertation of Mycroft Holmes. Do you know what it was for? The final of my many bookkeeping internships. You see these things, but you do not observe them like I do."

Sherlock stared at me as if I were some sort of stranger. She tried to focus on something on my face; something that I knew she saw and was observing. She was utilizing her absolute full potential in doing this; this thing that I could do in my sleep if I so desired to.

"The scar under your eye. From when you fell two stories off a play set when you were six; before I was born. The cut got infected, and it needed surgery. That's what the scar is actually from. The surgery, not the fall itself."

"Correct," I responded to Sherlock. "You are now seeing, observing, and deducting from your observations. That's the way to do it. The only way to do a true deduction. It takes practice, and you'll need to store an awful lot of information in your mind. But I know you can do it; I used to do it when I first began. Now, it's second nature to me. It can be for you, too."

I left the room, and left Sherlock studying the empty space that I just vacated. I shut the door of my room and looked into the mirror that I had placed next to it on top of my dresser.

I stared into my own gray eyes in my mirror while taking off my watch and my gold ring. I set them both where they belonged, knowing that they were symbols of the two things that mattered most to me. And I went to bed that night, not thinking that that night would be one that I would never forget, let alone one that Sherlock would never forget.