#*handwave*

Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family

Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice Rating: T Tags: Solitary Confinement, Abuse, background Victuuri because that's always ambient in my works, Viktor focus

If he stands on the tips of his toes, Viktor can just manage to see a tiny patch of sky through the thin horizontal slit that serves as a window in his cell. Today it's cloudy, gray; is it autumn, now? The stone walls and floors have been getting colder, and the wind that filters in has a crispness to it.

He tries to breathe deeply, to see if he can catch any other familiar scents of the season: crisp leaves, smoked meats, or beer. But his nose feels numb at this point. All he's able to discern is his own unwashed odor, and the filth from the crude hole in the floor's corner that serves as his toilet. 

I would have thought I'd be better at this, he muses. Viktor has spent much of his life alone, after all. His parents died young and his family was too distant to visit, so he'd been raised by paid servants, distant and deferential, until he'd gone to school. 

Handsome, talented, and quite rich, many classmates were eager to be useful to him there, likely at the urging of their own families. Viktor learned quickly to remain polite but distant, to reject marriage offers carefully but firmly. To allow certain people to believe they were closer than they actually were, and to protect his own position.

A lot of good that did him, in the end. 

It must be autumn. The days are getting shorter, he thinks, watching the weak sunlight pass across the bare walls. If he's still here come winter, when the sun rises late and sets early, Viktor will be spending most of each day in darkness. They don't waste candles on their prisoner. 

There's the sound of scraping metal, which signals that the small slot they give him food and water through is opening. He hurries, picking up his empty tray so he can exchange it for a fresh one. If he's too slow, or tries to speak or yell, they will not feed him.

The empty tray is taken. A bowl of water, a bowl of thin soup, and a hard roll appear. Viktor takes them silently, trying not to think about how much weight and muscle mass he's lost here; how much his body aches. He's lucky he hasn't caught a fever yet, but if he's still here in winter—

There's a note under his bowl, folded up tightly. Viktor unfurls it with shaking hands.

Tonight. Be ready.

He knows that handwriting—he knows those hands, intimately. Viktor stares at the note, doubting his own eyes. This could be a dream, or hallucination. Or even a cruel trap. Perhaps they've captured Yuuri, too, and have forced him to write this note, and he's locked away somewhere in a little box away from the sun just like Viktor is.

But if it's real...

Sherlock Holmes is psychic.

Okay. So there is experimental evidence that indicates that people do NOT come to a logical, rational decision and THEN act. Instead, people very frequently act first, and then come up with a rationalization afterward. They are completely unaware that they are doing this. For instance, in split-brain experiments, the test subject is cued to do something - raise their hand, for instance - and is not consciously aware that they are responding to a cue. So when you ask them afterward why they raised their hand, they'll just tell you that their arm felt fidgety, or they thought there was a bug, or they had a question. Our subconscious knows things and does things without our conscious input, and then our conscious mind rationalizes our actions afterward. (See: theory of cognitive dissonance.)

Now. Sherlock Holmes frequently displays a supernatural level of foreknowledge. He KNOWS that if they hide in a particular place, they will catch the perpetrator. He KNOWS that if the client's girlfriend hangs out in the parlor the ENTIRE day and then goes straight to bed at midnight, that the evildoer will be forced to behave in such-and-such a way. He sets up these little traps, and then explains them after they have already succeeded. (He is sometimes wrong, but not often.)

Many - perhaps even most - of these rationalizations make perfect sense once they are explained. Because Holmes is hella intelligent. But sometimes he reacts to future events that he simply could not have logicked his way to, and his explanations fall short. He couldn't possibly have KNOWN that this person would act in such-and-such a way. He might have predicted it based on certain evidence, but people very rarely act rationally when in a highly stressed state (like while committing a murder), and there's no way he could really have logically predicted that they would take Choice A instead of Choice B. People's behavior in such instances include so many variables that for someone who isn't omniscient, their choices are going to basically be a coin flip. And yet Holmes is right, again and again and again, while his explanations for how he knew just somehow fall a little short.

So WHAT IF: Sherlock Holmes has precognitive / empathic / psychic abilities. That is why he is able to predict people's behavior so perfectly. But he doesn't really believe (for the most part) in woo-woo shit like psychics, so he has to rationalize how he knew the things he knew. He can't just say, "Because I can see the future, baybeeeee!!!" Instead, he has to come up with this overly intricate, not-really-100%-convincing rationalization for how he knew. He is fooling himself as much as he is fooling his enemies.

Relax and let the fics tell you how long they want to be. Maybe you’ll end up with a book

Thank you so much for your encouragement! I really appreciate it. 

(but I already wrote a book-length fic! and it took me six months! and whine whine whine whine whine it was actually really fun to write ok fine you win I’ll try to relax a book would be great.)

And in thanks for your support, here’s an excerpt of one of the scenes I wrote this morning, because it required Research which I’m normally too lazy for, so I’m kinda proud of it: 

Stars spiral overhead in whorls and flurries of light. The moon is a narrow blade, sharp at both ends, so Poe looks at the constellations instead. That’s Orion, there, killed by a scorpion. Andromeda, chained to a rock. Cassiopeia, chained to a torture chair.

Six movies I can watch over and over again (and do watch over and over again)

1. Sister Act 1 & 2 2. School of Rock 3. Mrs Doubtfire 4. My Cousin Vinny 5. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 6. Hot Fuzz

when the thought came to me

maybe he wears dentures oh my god

and then I went to a really weird mental place and had to pinch myself on the hand to stop from bursting into giggles while the dentist was actively mauling my mouth

(and then I went onto thinking what it means for your teeth to be immortal, period, because my novels have at least one immortal character, and I came up with the cool tidbit that maybe dragon teeth work like shark teeth and they just shed them and get new ones every so often and oh my gosh awesome)