2Written 2013 - July - 10.
Sherlock means it when she says 'transport', means it every time, means it like how the pulse that echoes through her veins means life and the balance of the chemicals that spark through her brain means that her life sometimes feels like a constant round of psychologists and tutors and therapists.
It doesn't mean she doesn't like the body, because she does, after a fashion. It even goes beyond its use to her, the endless experimentation and the capabilities that stretch somehow ever further than even her imagination can supply. She likes the way it looks (the way her bones move under her skin, the way her eyes catch out at her from her reflection, the way bruises look dark against her paleness, proof of her continued existence and autonomy), and she likes the way other people see it (she likes being a girl, even if that has nothing to do with clothes or manners or overall worth). She's happy with it.
It's just that thinking of it as transport makes it easier to identify the problems, because Sherlock can love cabs and horses and her bicycle but can also say, with perfect clarity and presence of mind, that all of those things have their own faults and limitations, and sometimes when Sherlock's womb is washing itself out she just needs to fucking scream, because the sight of the blood opens up something in her mind that she doesn't know how to close, and the feeling of slick right where she doesn't want it twists her gut more than it already is, and she knows it's irrational but it just makes her feel so much like she is dying.
She knows she's got it better than most. Mycroft is eternal reminder of that, Mycroft with the too-much-perceived-flesh and the too-much-perceived-femininity, Mycroft with the no-pronouns-really-fit and the never-not-hungry, Mycroft with the scars marking wrist and thigh and chest. Sherlock looks out of the corner of her eyes sometimes and just looks at Mycroft and lets herself feel the pity and pretends that the depth, the pure gaping reality of it all, makes her own pain cease to be real and her own problems cease to be troubling.
But the thing about it is that it is the transport, and you can be on the most beautiful, most meaningful, most important journey in the world, and you'll still notice when your horse starts bucking or your bicycle's tires are punctured, or your cabbie's actually a serial killer, or at least you will if you're Sherlock Holmes.
And Sherlock knows, on every level, that there is everything in the world to be grateful for, but still there are the days and the nights when her corporeal self just doesn't fit, and the first time she feels the cocaine in her bloodstream she can't wipe the grin off her face because finally, fucking finally, she's found a way back into her own flesh.