Chapter Text
Mycroft was gone…gone in a way Sherlock didn’t even know how to address. Couldn’t talk about. Hated, and couldn’t correct.
Oh, his older brother was alive. He still worked in the shadows formed by MI6, MI5, and any number of sister organizations. He still went daily to the Diogenes. He still lived in rooms across the way on Pall Mall—when he wasn’t in residence at the country house. When he crossed paths with Sherlock he was wan, polite—and terse, disappearing as quickly as possible.
Things had been that way for some time, growing worse and worse from the time of Sherlock’s return. By now, the two brothers had reached an unprecedented state of truce—a truce rooted in Mycroft’s complete and utter reserve around his younger brother.
Sherlock couldn’t talk about it. It was private. It was—complicated.
Therefore he was sitting at Mary Watson’s table, drinking hot black tea, balefully watching the ritual of feeding the baby strained spinach.
“It’s a repulsive color,” he growled. “No wonder she spits it out.”
“She cries if I don’t offer it,” Mary said, cheerfully. “Yes, yes, lovey, that’s a beautiful long drool! Now let your mum wipe it, there’s a good girl…”
“Revolting.”
“I’ll remember not to give you any come dinner time,” Mary said, still good natured. “You are eating dinner here, yes?”
“No,” he grumbled. “Why do you always assume I’m staying for dinner?”
“Because you always say no, and between you and John you always end up staying,” Mary said. She paused and looked at him. “After the past six months, love, it’s no surprise. We’ve been through the drugs and the murder and the exile-that-wasn’t. Be kind—we worry.”
“You sound like m….”
“Like….?” She gazed at him, blue eyes suggesting he complete his sentences so she didn’t have to.
“Like Mummy,” he said, lying outright.
“Not John,” she said. “That fibbing thing, remember?”
“Not fibbing,” he said, and sulked into his chair.
“Mmmm-hmmm. Here, lovey-duck, have a biscuit….” She avoided clarifying whether baby Em or Sherlock was the “lovey-duck” in question by shoving a big, chewy American-style ginger biscuit toward each of them. “Your Mum doesn’t worry, she outright frets.”
Sherlock ate his biscuit and drank his tea. He made faces at Em. He nodded sharply when John came home, and sat silent as the married couple danced the ritual of evening greetings, discussion of meals, making of tea, contemplation of scotch or beer…
The two were conniving—conspiring against Sherlock. He knew the symptoms by now, and tolerated them only because he’d accepted it was all done in goodwill and affection. Mary gave the odd little head-jerk that meant “come talk in the other room,” and John rolled his eyes in the “what-now” manner he had down cold.
They weren’t as quiet as they thought they were. When they slipped into the pantry Sherlock could still make out their whispered dialog.
“Take him out for a bit of a run before dinner, John. He’s miserable and won’t tell me why. Something to do with Mycroft, I think.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he won’t mention the man’s name.”
“Does he ever willingly?”
“John, he shifted from ‘Mycroft’ to “Mummy.’ I can’t think of a time he preferred talking about his mother to talking about his brother.”
“Mmmm.” John sounded somewhat convinced.
Sherlock scowled. That woman was entirely too astute for his good. And he rather resented “being taken for a run.” So when they came in he’d kicked off his shoes, stripped off his jacket, and was jigging baby Em on one knee, clearly far too busy to go out for a walk around the neighborhood.
He didn’t want to talk about Mycroft. He was afraid of what he might realize if he did.
oOo
“Change the subject. Now.”
“Why? Afraid of what I see?” Sherlock, dressed carelessly in his pajamas and dressing gown and nothing more, flounced across the sitting room at 221B and dropped all akilter in the homely chrome and leather armchair. “Oh, but that’s right. You don’t do ‘friends.’” His eyes hid behind drooping lids and thick lashes. “What do you ‘do’ then, Mike? Strangers?”
Mycroft had retreated as the conversation played out—a reprise of one they’d had almost a year before, only louder and more intense. The older man had shifted from the chair to the fireplace, then almost raced across the room to hover, arms crossed, behind the kitchen table, having paused to start a kettle brewing—as though that had been the reason for his flight.
“I don’t ‘do’ any of it,” Mycroft snapped.
Sherlock smirked. “Oh, now we both know that’s not true. A little weekend shag, a quicky between projects.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mycroft growled. “You never did.”
“And you presume to suggest I’m the one afraid of sex,” Sherlock snarled back, refusing to stir from his chair, refusing to flee the conversation the way Mycroft did.
“I thought we were talking about ‘friends,’” Mycroft said, lingering with acid sweetness on the word. “Or was that a euphemism?”
“You mean the people you sleep with aren’t friends?” Sherlock asked, smug and stroppy. “Enemies, then? Strangers?”
“Change the subject, Sherlock.” Mycroft didn’t often venture into direct, burning command mode. He was attempting it, though…and failing, catastrophically. Hearing his own voice shake, he paused, gathered himself, and returned to the easier strategy of attacking Sherlock rather than defending himself. “And you’re doing so well? Still caught between Miss Hooper, who’s finally realized you’re incapable of being what she wants, that Irish girl—who may make you into what she wants, if you’ve got the nerve to let her—and…ah, yes. John Watson and his dear wife.”
Sherlock wanted to be the one demanding a change of topic, then, but he dared not give way. “Caught between them? I think you’ve misunderstood—but, then, with your limited experience of friendship…”
“Not so inexperienced as to think it appropriate to have left John unaware of your survival,” Mycroft said. “Nor so foolish as to think the Irish girl wouldn’t mind being used merely to break into Magnussens’s office. Or to miss the obvious fact that after the past five years Miss Hooper’s been permitted to see enough of your hidden life to know you’re not capable of the rose covered cottage, the white picket fence, the dog and the evening at the pub she’d so like to splice to your relationship. You’re playing all three—and the two you could have you don’t want, and the two you want you dare not have.”
“And you?” Sherlock’s temper was near boiling. “Who do you want that you won’t admit to, Mike?”
“Change the subject. Now.” The words were out so fast and so furious they seemed to shiver the air in the room and rattle the china in the cupboards. “Now…” The repeat was quieter, but more desperate.
“No.”
Mycroft drew a breath. “Very well, then, brother mine. It appears there is no reasoning with you…so I shall take my leave.” He turned his back on his brother, and sought out his umbrella in the entryway.
“Mike…” Sherlock wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, suddenly. He dealt badly with uncertainty. Insecure, he shifted back to teasing, prodding sark. “Running away from intimacy, brother?”
“Your definition of intimacy seems to be somewhat lacking,” Mycroft snapped back. “Little wonder you’ve got ‘friends’ but no lovers.” And with that he gripped his umbrella, swept open the door, and left, feet rattling down the stair as though he couldn’t exit 221B fast enough.
Sherlock slumped deeper into the chair, furious—with Mycroft, with himself, with the entire odd, muddled mess. He was sure there was something wrong with Mycroft—but somehow every time he attempted to address Mycroft’s issues, he found Mycroft tossing them back into Sherlock’s life and relationships, as though somehow the two had bearing on each other.
He and his brother were nothing like each other, though, Sherlock thought. Not in this. He had friends. He did. And if sometimes he found his own connections confusing, that didn’t alter the fact that they were real, and deep, and profound. Nameless….but profound.
What did Mycroft have that compared? Nothing! He had his brotherhood to Sherlock, and nothing else. Nothing at all.
Not so much as a goldfish.
He was alone…and appeared unable to change that.
Why, then, did he keep trying to turn the conversations back on Sherlock, as though his younger brother’s successes were as clearly failures as Mycroft’s empty life?
He didn’t know—and something assured him he didn’t want to know.
That was one of the nights he backslid, and retreated into old habits. Not the most dangerous ones—he stayed free of the cocaine and the heroin. But he had a knob of premium hashish hidden in the Persian slipper behind the pack of cigarettes. It was soothing.
That night “soothing” was a good thing—a very good thing.
oOo
“Par-tay!” Mary said, and grabbed a notepad. She began jotting things down immediately. “Halloween party. I can invite Molly and her latest sweetie, and Janine, and Elaine and little Archie and Mrs. Hudson and…” She rattled on and on, picking up momentum, at last running out of steam. “Who else?” she asked.
“What about Greg?” John said. “I don’t see him often these days. Not so many cases with the Met. It would be good to see him.”
“Won’t come,” Sherlock said.
“Why not?” Mary asked, with a campy pout. “I throw good parties!”
“That you do, love,” John said, and drew her to sit half on the arm of his chair and half in his lap. The two took a moment for what Archie sometimes called “icky kissy-face.” Sherlock sometimes agree with Archie’s dismay.
Lestrade wouldn’t come because Lestrade had less and less to do with them all. Sherlock wasn’t sure whether the older man still worked with Mycroft—but there was less sign that the two men tag-teamed Sherlock’s business in tandem. Of course, since Magnussen’s murder Mycroft had been very wary about what he involved himself in, where his brother was concerned. Too much involvement could bring down trouble on both of them.
Maybe Lestrade sensed that. Maybe Mycroft had even discussed it with him? Sherlock could imagine the two older men talking at the Diogenes, over glasses of scotch. “It’s a matter of appearances,” Mycroft would say. “There can’t be any indication of nepotism or of Sherlock having undue influence over me. You may want to be careful, too—you’re still recovering from the scandal when he jumped.”
What would Lestrade say, though? Once Sherlock would have assumed the bluff, good-natured man would brush it off with a laugh. But they’d somehow grown apart since the jump from St. Barts. In spite of the warmth of Lestrade’s greeting on his return, Sherlock and he had never quite managed to fall back into harness together.
Maybe now he’d see Mycroft’s warn-off as a good excuse to cut ties with the younger brother?
Sherlock hated that. He hated the way he seemed, these days, to have many friends—but no actual intimacy. John and Mary and Em were a solid unit, to which Sherlock was attached—but of which he was not fully a part. Molly loved him—but had grown sensible and wary about him, openly conceding she loved best what she couldn’t have and wouldn’t enjoy if she did have it. Janine scared Sherlock stupid, because it had become plain she might manage true intimacy—and her alert, practical self suggested to him that if they did cross that line, he would never again be free.
Here he was, more surrounded by friends than ever before in his life—and alone.
He remembered the previous day. He'd walked to the window and looked down at Mycroft, who stood in front of Speedy’s smoking a cigarette and shifting restlessly from foot to foot as he waited for his sleek black car to arrive. Mycroft waited alone.
Sherlock wondered how they could be so different—and, yet, in their loneliness, so alike…
oOo
“Are you coming to John and Mary’s Spook-do?” Sherlock asked, as he and Lestrade walked away from a rare shared case together.
“Not likely,” Lestrade said, eyes on the pavement, dodging puddles. “Not really my sort of thing.”
“Oh, for goodness sakes,” Sherlock snapped. “You’re nothing if not a party animal, Lestrade. A pint-at-the-pub sort of man. A good bloke. You can’t leave John and Mary high and dry.”
“Doubt I’m the only person they invited,” Lestrade said, voice amused and ironic. “They’ll be fine. You just want someone to talk crime with.”
“Granted, it would improve the conversational resources of the company,” Sherlock said. “But, no. I’m concerned. You seem to be isolating yourself from old friends. I am told that’s a sign of depression—among other things.”
“Times change,” Lestrade said. “You’re not crawling up my bum begging for cases any more, yourself. Just how things go, you know?”
“No,” Sherlock growled, “I do not know. If John and Mary thought to invite you, it’s because they value you and your presence in their lives. You ought to go.”
Lestrade sighed. “Fancy dress?”
“If you mean do you have to wear ridiculous clothing—yes. But Mary assures me it can be highly restricted—I am going as a consulting detective.”
“How will they know?”
“I’m wearing The Hat.”
“Ah, yes. Well. Obvious, that. And if I go as a Met detective?”
“I should think your warrant card would constitute sufficient costuming, all things considered, yes.”
“That means you’ll have to give mine back, won’t you?”
Sherlock grudgingly returned the card he’d pick-pocketed only minutes earlier. “You and Mycroft—you’re both so fussy about your stupid warrant cards and passes.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Lestrade said, and placed the card in the pocket farthest from Sherlock. “I’m sure Mycroft just loves thinking of you running free through all the high-clearance buildings he knows about.” He snorted. “Someday you’re going to give that man a heart-attack, you know.”
“Only because he’s a pig.”
“No, he’s not.”
“You always liked him best,” Sherlock snapped, in an attempt at whiny teasing. It didn’t play the way it had in his mind, though, sounding both too pitiful and too accurate. He clamped his mouth tight.
Lestrade said nothing, pacing along in silence.
“You did like him best,” Sherlock ventured, after too long a gap in conversation.
“Hardly know him,” Lestrade said. “Private man, your brother.” He sighed. “Like I said—things change.”
Sherlock stopped, and stared at the retreating back. “You miss him.”
Lestrade shrugged, and turned, walking backward. “I miss you all, you prat. But—really, things do change. You can’t bring back yesterday, not for blood or money or tears. Gone is gone.”
Sherlock’s head spun with the vision of himself and Mycroft, lone asteroids hurtling through the firmament, slightly off-course from everyone they knew and loved—off course even from each other. The two would move deeper and deeper into space, spinning away from the light and warmth of the sun, the comforting companionship of the planets and moons and other asteroids. What was the physics principle about inertia? Once you started in a particular direction, it took force to move you out of that direction, didn’t it?
You had to actively work to change the vector of your travel.
He looked at himself and Mycroft, and shivered.
oOo
“I’m not lonely, Sherlock.”
“Then you should be.”
“Sherlock, it’s dangerous—for me, and for anyone I ventured to care for. And who would I befriend? Really—goldfish.”
“You once told me only an idiot is bored—that even an empty wasteland offered an infinity of fascinations. Maybe goldfish do, too.”
“Caring is hardly an advantage.”
“Solitude isn’t, either.”
“Are you planning on moving into my Pall Mall rooms again?” Mycroft snapped, voice caustic. “I’ll have to increase the insurance coverage again. It’s been so long since you used to set the sofa on fire during your little ‘experiments.’”
“God forbid,” Sherlock snapped. “Live with you? We’d kill each other.”
Mycroft sniffed, and turned away. “Yes, well. It’s not like either of us lack the skill.”
Which was, for Mycroft, diplomacy. Rather than calling Sherlock a murderer outright, he’d conceded his own field skills for a change.
“How does this end, Mike?” Sherlock shivered, trying to deduce the future that lay ahead of them. “You and I, each alone, each growing older and slower, until we stop entirely? Will some future Met detective come in and conclude we’ve not been killed, but merely stopped in our chairs, too worn out to keep on going?”
Mycroft looked out the windows of 221B, staring at the street below. He said nothing.
“I don’t want to end that way,” Sherlock whispered.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” Mycroft said—and Sherlock had known him enough years to hear the hopelessness slip like dust blown across marble, dimming the brighter tones of his voice.
oOo
“If you don’t like where your life is heading, love, change it.” Janine’s tones were brisk and wry and without sentiment. “For the love-a God, Sherl, of all the people to get stuck: you do what you want to do. You grab what you care about. You’re Sherlock—snap out of it.”
“I don’t do people all that well,” Sherlock said.
She cocked her head—and laughed. “Yeah, well—just because it’s not pretty doesn’t mean it’s not effective. You mostly get what you want, you silly tosser.”
He considered it. “And if I want too much? Or what isn’t mine to claim?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she pointed out.
“But…”
“But nothing. Shezza, me-darlin’ me-love, don’t be a complete idjit. Trying may hurt—but not trying? You know that one will be the death of you, don’t you?”
He nodded, and began to think things through.
He might, he thought, have to actually work at friendship. And love. He might even need to risk kissing a few people.
But he wouldn’t end up alone, in the void, slipping into the darkness in solitude.
Having concluded as much for himself, he started considering Mycroft…
oOo
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sherlock. I do not attend Halloween parties.”
“John and Mary will be disappointed.”
“Hardly.”
“I’ll be disappointed.”
“At the risk of repeating myself…hardly.”
“Molly loves to see you.”
“Ditto, ditto, etc.”
“Mrs. Hudson’s going to be there.”
“Ah, I see. Reverse psychology: you really don’t want me to go. Mission accomplished, baby brother. I shall spend the evening at the Diogenes and go home at ten.”
“I’ll send Lestrade to kidnap you and bring you over.”
“Change the subject, Sherlock.” Mycroft’s voice was suddenly cold and empty.
“Handcuffs and all.”
“Now.”
The vision came again—this time of Mycroft, alone, forever alone, trapped in a bell jar, like a Victorian specimen under glass. He knew nothing else. He feared change as much as he might also yearn for it.
“It’s been a while since the three of us were together,” Sherlock said.
“We never were together,” Mycroft pointed out. “That was the idea, after all. Lestrade could go where I couldn’t go, and be who I could never be.”
The words suggested all Mycroft saw were his own limits.
“Still—we were a team,” Sherlock said.
“You don’t need me, now,” Mycroft said. “And even if you did—things changed.”
Sherlock had murdered Magnussen—and Mycroft could not follow him beyond that point. From that moment on, they were brothers—but separate.
Mycroft could kill, at need or on command, within the purview of his professional calling.
He would not murder—and, in the end, it was a difference he and Sherlock couldn’t bridge. Sherlock could murder, for his own reasons and to accomplish his own aims, entirely aside from the good of the nation or the needs of the many.
“I’m not a passionate man,” Mycroft murmured. “Dry. Discreet. Very ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ when all is said and done.”
“I hear the mermaids singing. I do not think they sing for me.”
“Not a perfect quote—but close,” Mycroft said.
The sun was setting and the flat was dim. The elder brother stood at the window, looking out, unware of how intently his brother studied him. Janine was right, Sherlock thought. To change your life, you only had to act—but Mycroft would not act.
He wondered why the mention of Lestrade had brought the conversation to this maudlin, echoing end.
He feared he knew the answer.
He was going to change his own life, he thought—then wondered if it was possible to act to change Mycroft’s too.