Chapter Text
Dark, eyes, dark face, dark mouth, big teeth.
Mycroft whined high in his throat like an animal. Feeling his bladder make funny movements, even though Mycroft is a big boy, even though he’s going on eight. Sherlock is making the sounds of a rabbit, panicked little arms in fists.
Dark staring hungry grumbly eyes and, crouching munching crunching slickening teeth.
Mycroft is very afraid. Very alone in an alley.
He’s small, but he knows already that no one cares about street children; no one cares about round little boys with hunted eyes. They are boys with no sense of time. It’s not important what the hour, or the day, or the month or the year is. That knowledge has no power to feed, or shelter or protect them. He knows that he is Mycroft and his little brother is Sherlock and they drift slowly forward with only that knowledge without bothering about time at all. He knows that you can’t trust grownups to save you. Mycroft reached into his bag and grabbed the first thing his small fingers touched, a pair of cuffs he had knicked from a grumbling policeman.
Throwing them into the dark, his little hand outstretched, Mycroft watched the twin rings, orbiting each other on their chain.
“It’s a present,” Mycroft called, watching them flash, hoping the bribe would be accepted. “A gift from me to you. Go away please. Please go away.”
The dark thing snatched the cuffs out of the air and licked off Mycroft’s fingerprints, his dark tongue sliding softly over the glinting metal, before gamboling off into the night-black-ness.
The two of them do alright on the street. Sherlock and Mycroft. They did before the thing came and made horrible sounds at them. Before Mycroft threw the first shiny distracting thing his fingers touched into the dark.
Mycroft is very smart, smarter than some grownups and he always has money or something to trade. He drags Sherlock along with him, tied to him by a monkey strap.
Mycroft is smart; he can take care of them.
He can do okay because he’s quick, he watches quietly, he can watch and see. He sees where people go to get good food, which places toss the most. He feeds Sherlock, dropping slips of chicken into Sherlock’s mouth as he crouches back on his haunches like a baby bird. Sherlock has wounded little eyes and small narrow hands that he uses to cling to Mycroft. He likes it that Sherlock needs him, but it makes him sad that Sherlock is so small and fragile.
Sometimes Hob comes. Which Mycroft doesn’t like. Hob makes him feel tight and awful inside. But really, there’s nothing he can do. He is grateful that it’s warm out and not cold. He thinks about things like Sherlock, and where the best food is, and who he can pickpocket. Is it possible to get a kitten? No, he decides, it isn’t. Sherlock will surely forget about it soon with all his other high summer thoughts.
When Mycroft is done thinking Hob is gone.
It doesn’t bother Mycroft, it mustn’t; it’s his job to keep Sherlock safe.
He hears the scape of a solid against old brick and races away from the sound shivering like a frightened mouse, drifting away into survival, that no thought trundling existence, pretending in his head he is a gentleman like the man in the castle in the book he found in the garbage. The book smells like fish, but Mycroft doesn’t care. Someone must have taught Mycroft to read, but if they did it was long ago, to far back to remember and has been long sense pushed to the back of his mind. The back of his mind is where everything lives until something wakes him again, makes him twitch and fight.
“Don’t!” he screams at Sherlock, pulling him into the light by the monkey strap, away from the shadow of an alley. He holds Sherlock’s startled face to the plush of his too big, filthy coat, shaking from head to toe in the grey piled up snow. “Stay in the light Sherlock, you have to stay in the light.”
It’s too much to keep a torch burning at night, he tried it, but people complained and made trouble. But during the day, there’s no excuse not to stay away from the shadows.
It’s always the same when it comes.
Click, click, click, the sound in the dark. Click, click, click. The sound of metal coming together.
Mycroft closes his eyes and hides under the blankets he and Sherlock had scavenged, tucking his brother’s dark mop of hair, his tiny frail body close, curled up in the dark like a black and white bean.
Click, click, click.
In the morning Sherlock takes small bites out of three stale biscuits, Mycroft has one. He carefully brushes out Sherlock’s curls with his fingers and checks his eyes, nose, behind the ears, hands and feet for signs of illness or infection. He’s only holding onto Sherlock by his fingertips as the little boy bends his pale face toward an old boot set near their pallet. Sherlock is poking it with a stick despite Mycroft tsking and it overturns spilling feathers, some of them filthy.
“Ick,” Mycroft says. Even Sherlock pulls back a little. “Don’t touch that Sherlock, its dirty.”
During the day there are different monsters and Mycroft meets them with stony self-control and all the fight he has in him. Words and favors and hints and understatement, the weapons of a gentleman.
“You’re a clever boy,” Hob says with one hand on Mycroft’s chin. Hob does not believe Mycroft is a gentleman, Hob believes Mycroft is an asset. Commercialism instead of molestation on his mind at the moment but Mycroft still feels filthy, like he wants to crawl out of his skin. He shivers and gags.
Hob pulls away disgusted. Face pulled into that of a wild pig.
Your face is horrible, Mycroft doesn’t say. Your words are awful. You are an abomination of a human being. You embarrass my every aesthetic. I am ashamed to even know that you exist.
Mycroft is able to scare away the others; he can move things, ideas, resolve, fears. Get people to do things for him and Sherlock. He can get in people’s heads. It is sloppy and he is timid, gentle, intrinsically human. He has the drunks and the addicts stumbling around him blearily.
But he can’t get rid of Hob.
“Stubborn, but clever. Probably good for lots of things, with the right training.”
Because he’s not thinking, Mycroft steps back with one foot. One foot in the light, one in the sharp shadow dark cast by the crisp line of a building wall. Two soft fingers push down his filthy sock and stroke gently, purposefully over Mycroft’s ankle bone. They don’t feel right, a little too broad, not quite the same sort of solid human fingers are, a fuzziness, like felt almost.
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
“Go away,” Mycroft whispers at night with his blanket pulled over his head. “Go away, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away.”
Six inches, six inches from the crown of his head he can feel the edge of his palette shift, as if something is leaning on it.
Click, click, click.
He wishes he wasn’t so smart, that his imagination wasn’t so good. He can picture the width and breath and curve of the arm distending the surface of his palette.
They walk together from their summer tunnels to their winter tunnels. The walls are covered in sprayed art, swirls and lines and letters that have been enlightened to wild, beauteous shapes as edgy as newsboys. Mycroft stops in his tracks when he sees a dark gray and black shape, something like a mix between a dog and a man, painted amongst the graffiti violently ripping at the erstwhile tail of a letter while the rest of the word shudders. Its eyes are two flat black rings staring empty and horrid.
Sherlock peers, but Mycroft jerks him forward, “Don’t look Sherlock.”
He is so focused at not looking at dark shape he misses how Sherlock’s small face breaks open into a grin and how he waves to the odd drawing, happily, with familiarity. Mycroft feels relatively safe, the dark thing only comes out at night. It can’t get them in the sunshine.
One morning Mycroft turns from where he’s been conversing with Tony to notice Sherlock playing with a tennis ball. It is brand new and startling yellow.
Mycroft smiles at him, “That’s lovely Sherlock, where did you get it?”
“I made a friend, I gave him a button and he gave me a present too. That’s because we’re friends. How do tires work? What’s inside them?”
“Air,” Mycroft smiled at him, stroking his hair gently. It really needed a cut before people would start mistaking him for a girl. That would be… Mycroft’s face tightened and his hand curled protectively around the back of Sherlock’s head. “I’m glad you made a friend.”
Mycroft was smart. He did his best but he couldn’t get rid of Hob. Hob who was mean and ruthless and cruel, he was always so cruel. It was one thing with Mycroft, but Sherlock was another thing altogether.
“Leave him alone!” Mycroft kicked against Hob. “Leave Sherlock alone!”
“A pretty little thing like that?” Hob lifted Mycroft by his forearms and threw him against the wall, half turned away.
Mycroft never struck the wall; he landed against a body, surprisingly soft and warm. All jointed together funny and wrong. Arms the color of mottled-puddle-darkness closed around Mycroft, shifting him until it was holding Mycroft like a baby rocking him in its arms. Gently pulled against the flat of its chest. It had the cuffs in between its lips, holding them in its teeth. It was soft to feel and coarse to touch, like the pelt of a wild dog or a fox. And its eyes, of its eyes, so flat and terrible It tucked the folded cuffs gracefully under its chin and nibbled a gentle line across Mycroft’s forehead. The delicate sensation, so infinitely tender, makes Mycroft’s entire body break out in goose bumps. He was crying even though he isn’t bad feeling inside.
For once, Mycroft didn’t tell it to go away.
He pressed his face to its soft flat chest, burrowing close, wiping his cheeks on its coarse fur.
It sniffed his ear and nipped at his cheek.
Hob hadn’t seen, had his back to them, was talking to Sherlock, tight in a small huddle against the alley wall.
Mycroft took its face, funny shaped and flat except its wide, wide mouth, in his small hands and whispered secrets into the flared shell of its left ear. Secrets about Mycroft. Secrets about Hob.
Secrets about the cruel things men can do.
After that Mycroft stands stone faced, hiding Sherlock’s head against his hip turned away from Hob with the damp spot of urine and the dark warm shape of the thing, spinning the metal cuff, clicking them together. Hob was trying to scream, but he can’t, the thing has broken him. Hob’s mouth is open and gaping. The thing was furious. Something past furious that only monsters can feel.
It pressed the edge of its cuffs to Hob’s chin and traced a tributary down to his toes, unzipping him so all the red came out. The cuffs hung from one of its curled fingers by the chain, they swung back and forth while Hob fell open wetly. The two silver cuffs tapped against each other while it watched.
Click, click, click.