Sherlock is thorough in his education of Rosie. When she starts asking about clocks, watches, and time itself, he dives in like an eager schoolboy.
John thinks it’ll be sufficient to teach their daughter about digital numerals. Of course, Sherlock cannot agree to such outrageous and inadequate tutelage.
“She might come across analogue clocks or watches, John, and what then? They will seem like hieroglyphs to her; she won’t understand them. At all!”
“Calm down, my precious husband. She’s barely eight, you know.”
“The sooner she learns this, the sooner we can move on to other topics. It is never too early to start.”
“What other topics?” John asks suspiciously.
Sherlock just waves a hand in lieu of answering, as if to say: “Oh, you know. Useful skills.”
This does not placate John, but he knows which fights to pick and which to leave behind. For now, at least.
***
Sherlock does his research and brings Rosie to the Clockmaker’s Museum in South Kensington, which is a part of the Science Museum. There are clocks, watches, and chronometers; more than 1400 objects in fact. John is sceptical when Sherlock divulges where he’ll take their daughter on a Saturday morning, but in the end, he decides to trust his husband.
Rosie is in awe of all the different items, and when Sherlock presents the treasure hunt form, she beams up at him.
Of course, they start with the frightening and gruesome section.
Can you find a watch which looks like a skull – ugghhhhrr!
Sherlock shudders at the unseemly collection of letters at the end, but Rosie just laughs and tries to find the correct glass case, which to Sherlock’s delight are all numbered with Roman numerals.
Rosie is obviously not overly impressed by the metallic skull. There is after all a real human skull residing on their mantle back home.
The next object on the scary list, as Rosie calls it, is more to Sherlock’s liking.
A lock of hair from the beheaded King Charles in 1649 is believed to be in this case – please do not faint!
“As if,” he scoffs, while Rosie makes her way to the case with the number VI on it.
They move to the Explosive Stuff after that, much to Sherlock’s delight.
This clever clock rewinds itself by making its own really explosive gas – do not worry it is not working today!
“Pity,“ Sherlock mutters.
***
Once Rosie has found every object on the list, Sherlock decides to start the education for real. They walk around to look at the clocks now, which have larger faces and hands. He avoids the ones with Roman numerals since Rosie’s had enough of those after the hunt earlier.
The girl is just as curious as Sherlock was himself at her age, and she marvels at the ticking sounds the second hands make. She even startles a bit when the minute hand moves once the second hand has completed its revolution.
“Is time broken, papa?” she asks when they encounter a large grandfather clock that has stopped.
“Not as such. But most of these older clocks need to be wound up to work.”
“Do they get tired?”
Sherlock hides his smile and places a hand on his daughter’s nape.
“You could say that. They work relentlessly all day, always ticking and showing the correct time. That does sound exhausting.”
Rosie yawns and nods solemnly.
***
“Look, papa! They have that strange thing Uncle Myc has in his living room.”
“Ah, yes. That is a clock of sorts too, you know. It is called an hourglass.”
“Oh! Why is it called that? Does it only show one hour?”
“My clever girl! Though, the time depends on how much sand there is in them. They have been around for around one thousand years.”
“Wow! That’s old.”
“Hence why your uncle has one,” Sherlock smirks.
“Can we make one ourselves?” Rosie wants to know.
“Of course. There’s an instruction manual we can take home right there.”
“Brilliant! And when all the sand has run through, it will be as if time has stopped.”
“Well, yes. The hourglass is used to measure time, not to show it like clocks and watches do.”
“Like an old-fashioned stopwatch?”
“Exactly.”
***
Over dinner that evening, Rosie tells John all about their excursion.
“It was too bad you had to work, daddy. I had such fun!”
“I’m glad to hear it, sweetheart. Knowing how to read the time is a useful skill,” John replies and winks at Sherlock, who smiles knowingly at him.
“And in the end, I found another weird clock thing which is ill suited to show the time. At least in this rainy weather. Another time breaker.”
John lifts his eyebrows at his daughter, who rolls her eyes in a sherlockian fashion.
“A sundial. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” her parents mirthfully reply in unison.
Inspired by a prompt from @flashfictionfridayofficial
"Even Unto This Day" by @jack-of-crowns
He adjusted focal depth on the mass spectrometer’s lens and blinked hard, as though a physical reset of his eyes could change the impossible data scrolling past. Bathed in a soft glow of laser calipers, the object vacuum-sealed within the observation chamber looked utterly ordinary, a small disc of bronze with a square hole at its center.
Four raised characters scuffed by heavy friction on the malachite green obverse bore silent witness to the fact that the coin had been buried for thirteen centuries in Ānhuī soil. It was undeniably authentic.
So was the thin layer of iron-60 isotopes trapped beneath that mossy crust, microdust only forged within the furnace of a dying star, then blasted across spacetime by supernovæ. Bhaskar Bhat was an astrometallurgist who knew the signatures of the cosmos as a jeweler of Karnataka knew diamonds.
'Kāi, Yuán, Tōng, Bǎo.' The closer he looked at this proof that the universe itself could glitch, that inscription read something less like political gesture and more along the lines of some sort of grand jest.
Two different timelines in a single piece of metal.
He tapped the thermal imaging controls. The coin had been held by high-intensity lasers for six minutes. By all the laws of thermodynamics, the bronze should be scorching hot; patina vaporizing.
The readout read exactly twenty degrees celsius.
Protocols be damned. Bhaskar pulled off his glove and slapped a bare palm onto the exterior casing of the observation chamber, right above where the coin rested. The glass was warm from the lasers. But through the feed, the coin remained a perfectly static island of twenty degrees. It wasn't absorbing heat. It wasn’t radiating heat. It was simply refusing to interact with its current coordinates in shíkōng.
The realization hit him with all the force of a pilgrim witnessing an apparition at a sacred shrine. The coin neither decayed nor populated as every other physical object in space did. It was anchored.
This wasn't just another archeological find; this was the currency of a being that had broken time itself, a hard-coded asset retaining the localized save state of the exact moment it had been cast away. The literal translation of the clerical script on the face of the coin read "The Universal Treasure Of A New Era."
There was a hollow coldness in his chest, an overwhelming smallness in the presence of something so inexplicably vast. No thought of grants or publications, just a strong desire to share the data bubbling up through that hollow in his chest as though a parishioner in need of confession. Here was a literal crack in the basement of creation, proof that the universe had a mechanism by which the architecture could be changed whenever it pleased. For a man dedicated to the certainties of mathematics and metal, the coin was his epiphany.
Miracles were not confined to mouldering pages of ancient books, dusty whispers from the past. They were that which endured; that which were eternally coherent. They continued, even unto this day.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial using the prompt #FFF366 ~ broken time. This is the missing scene in the manga, Score 45: Virtuous Maneuvering. Mild spoilers herein. Schinichiro and Jun in the hospital. Something, something is not resolved between them.
—
Fandom: Medalist
Characters: Schinichiro Sonidori, Jun Yodaka, Hikaru Kamisaki
Word count: 689
This is the moon's tear. The moon is crying, and its tear falls onto my cheek.
—Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's *A Portrait of the Mother*
THERE is something comforting with the whirring of the machines next to Schinichiro’s bed. The soft staccato of the ECG device monitoring his heart’s electrical activities reminds him of the soft susurrus of the waterfalls he once visited in South America with Eva when they were still young discovering love in the figure-skating world. Or even the gentle breeze of wind that strokes his cheeks whenever he sits at their veranda.
How many days has it been since his body has broken down?
He senses another human being in an otherwise darkened room contrasting with the whiteness of his robes. The constant tapping of fingers on the clothed thigh suggests anxiety. There’s only one person he can think of doing it.
Schinichiro gradually opens his eyes to check if he’s right.
“J-Jun kun…” His mouth is dry, he’s also a bit croaky. That’s what he gets for not speaking in a long time.
“Schinichiro…”
“How long have you been waiting there?”
Jun times it whenever his family is not around during the visitation hours.
“…”
He watches his friend lying on the hospital bed with deep concern on his face. If the fates would have been kinder to both of them, no scratch that, if they could have been braver and more honest with themselves when they were still active…
Alas, the fates have other plans for them. Different priorities.
They can never fix the broken time between them. Schinichiro is now married with two children. And Jun is fixated on someone else.
“It is rare of you to visit me. In the hospital nonetheless.”
“That’s not true. If I need to tell you things I’d rather visit you than call you on the phone… unlike you.”
Schinichiro gently chuckles. Out of fear of losing him again, he regularly keeps tab on him via mobile phone if only Jun doesn’t channel his frustration to the gadget.
“Quite right.” Schinichiro throws a glance at his friend. “What is bothering you?”
“I just came back from Bangkok last night. I saw Akeuraji.”
Ah.
Tsukasa Akeuraji. His current obsession. Coach Akeuraji’s student Inori Yuitsuka from Lux Higashiyama is one of the representatives of the Japanese team for the Junior Grand Prix in Thailand. She hasn’t won but finished fourth in the competition. The girl is getting stronger after doing the quad Salchow last year. No wonder it is Coach Akeuraji’s dedication to bring her to the top as fast as possible. A high bar that he sets himself up that stems from his bet with Jun and Hikaru.
“I have decided Schinichiro. Hikaru will transfer to Starfox. Then within a few months time, I am going to give up the coaching. Riley Fox and I have an agreement that she will slowly take over her full guardianship.”
“Why?”
“It is time for Hikaru to spread her wings.”
“I never complain. And so does Eva. We always treat Hikaru like one of our children.”Schinichiro feels a sudden lump in his throat. The ECG makes a loud beep that shows a spike on his heartbeat. “Are you leaving us again?”
He means “me,” but he stops himself from saying the word.
“Schinichiro…”
“I fulfilled my promise. I won a silver Olympic medal despite my fatherhood and my wound…” Schinichiro whispers even though they are alone in the room. One can never be sure who comes in. “You have an excuse to skate forever. But it is not enough, isn’t it?”
The silence is deafening.
“What are you searching for?” Schinichiro wishes he could turn back the time. He sees two young athletes standing on the rink’s baseline. The young Jun surged in front of him, he couldn’t wait to step on ice while Schinichiro looked on.
“I…”
Jun cannot find the right words. He hugs himself shaking his head.
We are too late.
“All right.” Schinichiro sighed, his lips creating a thin line.
Like a shadow, Jun leaves the room as he enters. A memory, a crack in time, yet holding a permanent record in Schinichiro’s life.
When he is all alone he hears a soft knock on the door.
The inherent problem of writing a time-travel story, and knowing that no matter what you do, people will be thinking of a person when you're trying to write about a concept XD
