Work Text:
John watches as Sherlock mashes at the keys of his laptop and takes another fortifying sip of tea.
“Is—“
“No, John.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“I know it was stupid.”
John doesn’t sigh. Sherlock would deduce something from a sigh. He takes a sip of tea instead.
“I could—“
“You’re not calling your friend who works in IT.”
“He’s really quite good.”
Sherlock gives him a look that John feels like he should be able to deduce something from and holds out his hand.
“You do know you haven’t actually told me what you want me to hand you, right?”
Sherlock gives him another one of those looks and this one John can deduce perfectly well. It says John you idiot I want my mobile phone and also a good slap around the head.
John hands over the mobile and just barely restrains himself from giving him the slap to the head as well.
Sherlock types in a number and gives the number back to John. John stares at the mobile. Then at Sherlock.
“Well?” Sherlock sniffs impatiently. “Press send.”
John obeys automatically. “Last time I did this I sent a text to a serial killer,” he says over the rings in his ear.
Sherlock snorts. “He’s not that bad. Just my friend in IT.”
The other end of the line picks up. “Not now, Sherlock,” a harried, young voice says.
“Erm,” John says and looks helplessly at Sherlock. Sherlock looks back without expression. He’s probably laughing at your awkwardness, John thinks.
“You’re not Sherlock,” says the harried young person that John is apparently asking for computer advice.
“No, I’m—“
“John Watson. Is my brother in mortal peril?”
“Your brother? Wait—you’re…no, he’s not in mortal peril, but you’re—“
“I’m his brother, and I’m very busy so if you’ll please tell him that I’ll call him back when I’m not guiding a missile through Saudi airspace, I’ll be very grateful.”
“I’ll, erm, I’ll tell him.”
“Lovely. Goodbye.”
The connection ended and John stared at the phone.
“Sherlock, I think you might need to explain some things to me.”
***
John is not surprised when all he gets out of Sherlock is that his brother is younger, very bright (in Sherlock’s words: Well, he’s a Holmes, isn’t he?) and also works with computers. John is just shy of actually getting the youngest Holmes’ name when that very person calls his mobile. Why it is his mobile and not Sherlock’s, John is not sure.
“Hello,” John answers cautiously.
“Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?”
It startles a laugh out of John. Sherlock looks half suspicious, half…is that jealousy?
“What did he say?” he hisses. John waves him away.
“I actually haven’t been able to touch the damn thing since it started malfunctioning, so I’ve no idea.”
“That sounds like him,” the mysterious younger brother hums. “I’m remote accessing it now.” There’s the sound of keys tapping in the background. “Good god man, how many gifs of cats do you look at in a day?”
John blushes. “They help me de-stress.”
“I’m sure you need plenty of that,” comes the wry answer.
Sherlock looks even more suspicious and…worried, John decides. Worried sounds much better than jealous. Because John is not dating Sherlock, and Sherlock is not dating him.
“What’s he saying?” he hisses. “Is he saying things about me?” John ignores his flatmate. If it were really important, he’d get off the sofa.
“Well,” says the youngest Holmes. “It looks like a virus. Nothing too incredibly bad. Sherlock should have been able to clear it up himself—he’s just too lazy to expend the effort. Tell him I’m a high-ranking member of the government, I shouldn’t have to trouble-shoot his idiotic computer problems.”
John figures he owes the younger man that much and repeats the complaint.
“Tell him he owes me for the Vatican job,” Sherlock answers back.
“Wait, that was him? We did that job for your brother?”
“Tell Sherlock—“
“No, I nearly died on that job, if you want to fight, you can come in and argue with Sherlock yourself.” John rings off in a huff.
***
Sherlock’s brother comes for tea the next afternoon. Well, to be more accurate, Sherlock’s brother breaks into the house while they’re out hounding Lestrade for any leads and makes them tea in Sherlock’s fine china.
They’ve just climbed the stairs, listening to Mrs Hudson chatter about Mr Whatsit from down the way and how apparently he’s just had a child with Mrs Cipi and she’s called off her wedding even though she’d already spent over five thousand quid on the dress and did you know a young man was waiting for you dears?
Sherlock had obviously known (“The curtains, John, honestly.”) but John hadn’t and had burst into the flat to find a younger, oddly dressed, bespectacled version of Sherlock sipping Earl Grey and looking down the barrel of John’s service revolver with a sort of amused impatience.
“Do you greet all your houseguests with your handgun, or am I just lucky?” He said, setting down his cup and saucer carefully and extended his hand. “After all, you did invite me, Doctor Watson.”
John shook Sherlock Jr.’s (he still didn’t know the kid’s damned name) hand automatically.
“Invite you…” He says, feeling stupid. It’s how he feels anytime there is more than one Holmes in the room. Or really anytime the Holmes in the room isn’t Sherlock. He’s not sure how that works, since so far neither of the other Holmeses have told him he’s stupid and Sherlock seems to say it all the time, but John tries not to analyse that.
“You told him if he wanted to fight he would have to come in person,” Sherlock supplies helpfully. He’s quite relaxed around this brother, John notices. None of the posturing or tension that Mycroft seems to induce plagues him in the presence of…
“Sorry, but do you have a name? I haven’t been able to get one out of Sherlock.”
The brother looks amused. “You can call me Q, Doctor.”
“And you can call me John, Q.”
Q shakes John’s hand, and John begins to notice the differences between this young man and Sherlock. They both have the same mop of dark hair; the same bone structure and thin, pale features, but there are some key differences. Q’s eyes are darker, closer to Mycroft’s than Sherlock’s, and he is an inch or so shorter than his middle brother. He holds himself with a careful stillness and posture. Almost like a soldier at command ready. Nothing like Sherlock’s almost cat-like slumps and droops.
Q nods and sits again with his back to the fire. Sherlock joins them and they sit in silence as John pours the tea. John is just about to make a comment on the weather when his mouth opens up and he says what he has been wondering but determined not to ask.
“So why is it I only hear about you after Sherlock’s death?”
Q smiles. It is odd. To see a Holmes smile that is. Sneers are expected, smirks even more so, but smiles are rarities. Sherlock has smiled—really, genuinely smiled, not that skull’s grin he gets on a case or when an experiment goes right—maybe twice in John’s vicinity. The first was a quiet, almost-missed twitch of the lips that first case in the taxi, when John said he was brilliant.
The second was when he finally came back to life and John had hugged him and punched him and hammered on his chest and wanted to kill him and kiss him and cling to him all at the same time. And it had startled a smile out of Sherlock.
And John had wanted to cry again because Sherlock had looked so damn surprised that John hadn’t hated him. Nothing surprised Sherlock, but the fact that John had missed him and wanted him back had, and John hated it.
Those were his two smiles, and seeing Q give one up for him the first time they meet gives John a distressing feeling that Q is somehow being cheap. Giving up smiles for every man on the street while Sherlock hordes them away for John to badger out of him.
John shakes off the feeling. It isn’t fair to judge Q by his brother.
“You are direct, Doctor,” Q says, bringing John back into the present. “I was absent from Sherlock’s life for a number of reasons. First I was in France, working for the European branch of SI and I did email Sherlock, though he never seemed to get back to me except to correct my grammar.”
Sherlock smirks at John. “Oxford commas are necessary, little brother.”
“And then Mycroft wrangled me back to England and into a rather messy spot—“
“Q saved the world, John. For Queen and country, yes?”
“Quite. I was dealing with that chaos, and I had originally intended to return to France, but—“
“He’s in love, John.” Sherlock says it with a kind of mocking sweetness that has Q’s eyes narrowing and his lips thinning.
“I am not in love, Sherlock,” Q seems to spit the dreaded word. He turns back to John and says, “I was persuaded to remain, and I was thus inundated with more work. I think it was a tactic by my brothers to keep me from checking on them.”
Sherlock looks contemplative. “Perhaps on Mycroft’s side.”
“But I must assure you, Doctor, that I was not aware of the actions of James Moriarty or my brothers. Had I known—“
“Had you known, you would have been a target,” Sherlock says, and John notices that he is no longer looking at his brother, but at his hands.
“Had I known I could have helped,” There is something in those words. Some kind of harkening back that John cannot fathom, but Sherlock seems to hear the unspoken conversation and looks…guilty, perhaps? John isn’t sure.
“I am fine,” Sherlock says. And just for a second Q looks unbearably tired and old. Then he is back to impassive.
“I suppose if you say it, it must be true,” Q murmurs, and it has the same feeling of a long dead secret.
There is a long silence after these words. Eventually John gets the conversation back onto small topics, but the brothers still sit stiffly and the talk is stilted and awkward.
When Q must leave (to feed his cat, and isn’t that an odd notion, a Holmes with a pet?) he breaks another Holmes norm and wraps Sherlock in a fierce embrace, digging his chin into the elder’s shoulder. And Sherlock hugs him back, his hand coming up to touch the back of Q’s neck like a deep muscle memory from childhood.
When the hug ends, they right themselves, Sherlock smoothing his shirt and Q pushing up his glasses (they even look guilty, what does that mean?) and nod to each other. Q is almost to the door when he turns around and points at both John and Sherlock.
“You had better be good, young men. Big brother is watching.”
Sherlock’s laugh is a rusty old thing, but it makes both John and Q smile anyway.