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1. Where the wild things are
As Mycroft pulled the book out of the packing box, he couldn't help a little smile: once, not that long ago, it had been one of Sherlock's favourites. He surreptitiously glanced over to where his brother stared, dead-eyed, out the window to the back garden of their new home. He was in all likelihood comparing it unfavourably to the meadows and woods that surrounded Musgrave and wondering how he could possibly have any adventures in this diminished universe their parents had chosen as their refuge.
For the last three weeks Mycroft had unwillingly submitted to his parents' directives that they were not to discuss the events that had sent them from Hertfordshire to Sussex. Sherlock's refusal to acknowledge any of it—Victor's disappearance, the fire, and Rudy taking Eurus away—had become the centre point around which the Holmes family revolved, and Mycroft was coming to hate it. Dumb and clumsy with grief himself, Mycroft had watched, powerless to intervene, as his boisterous little brother shrunk into this silent husk of his former self.
So that night, after Sherlock had completed his night-time ritual of bath, teeth, insisting to Mummy that he wasn't the least bit tired, and was finally tucked up in bed, Mycroft decided it was time to try and snap Sherlock out of his sullen lethargy. He propped himself up against the headboard beside his little brother, and with a ceremonious flourish, drew the book out from behind him.
“Sherlock,” he said down to the just barely visible crown of black curls under the covers. There was no response, so more in hope than in expectation Mycroft opened the front page, and began. “Where the wild things are, by Maurice Sendak.”
Still, there was no response. Mycroft told himself not to worry and turned to the first page. “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind—and another.” Mycroft paused for his brother's reaction, hoping that “mischief” would catch Sherlock's attention. To his relief, after a second or two a bright opaline eye appeared at the edge of the duvet.
“Would you like to see the pictures?” Mycroft asked, tilting the book slightly.
“Picture books are for babies. I'm not a baby,” came muffled through the duvet.
“This used to be your favourite.”
“Yes, when I was a baby.”
“I know. But sometimes it's nice to reminisce. And the pictures are amusing.”
Mycroft waited while Sherlock decided if he would play along. Eventually, with a sniff that said he thought he was doing his brother a tremendous favour, Sherlock shifted up and took a place next to him. He peered over at the picture of the hellion, Max, in his wolf costume, chasing the family dog down the staircase. He pretended disdain, but Mycroft saw a brief flicker of the light in Sherlock's eyes that he'd hoped the story might elicit.
A little heartened, Mycroft turned back to the book and continued. “His mother called him 'WILD THING!' and Max said 'I'LL EAT YOU UP!' and so he was sent to bed without eating anything.”
As they made their way through the story, Mycroft occasionally glanced down to Sherlock, who watched passively as the pages turned; when they reached the end, there was no sign of Sherlock's usual disappointment at the ending.
“Dreams are boring,” he intoned, and Mycroft almost wished for a return of Sherlock's past childish demands for his own voyage, following in Max's footsteps to the land of pirates and war dances with silent subjects under the moon and stars.
“Why do you think dreams are boring?” Mycroft asked, concerned, as he closed the book.
“None of it was real. And he just went back home anyway.”
“That's traditionally where adventures end.”
“When I leave I'm never coming back,” Sherlock muttered as he crawled back under the duvet.
Mycroft was taken aback that Sherlock had capitulated so entirely to his misery. But then, he'd lost almost everything in his life that had made him happy. Mycroft didn't know what to say, so he decided to ignore it. “If you don't come back, how will you tell me your stories?”
“You have to come along.”
“I don't think I want to run away.”
Sherlock's head popped back out. “You can't want to stay here. It's horrible!”
Mycroft hid his alarm by ruffling Sherlock's hair and putting him in a headlock, which thankfully elicited the look of comical disgust and “gerroff” that it usually did. “Well, we'll see. You'll have to wait until I finish my exams, so we have lots of time to sort out our plans before you get to adventuring age.”
Mycroft knew from the scowl he received in reply that Sherlock saw through the platitude to the brush-off; he could be inconveniently astute, even for a Holmes, at seeing through the little deceptions most people indulged in without thought.
“Don't lie. Only boring people lie.”
Mycroft snorted at the juvenile hauteur of the last sentence. “I wasn't. I don't lie to you.”
“Promise.”
“What?”
“You'll never lie to me.”
“I'll never lie to you. Unless I must for your own safety.”
“No, promise properly.”
Mycroft answered his brother's scowl with one of his own, but he knew the only way out of the situation was to concede, even though Sherlock would hold him to it, regardless of the circumstances or the inevitable fall-out when Mycroft had to break it. “Yes, Sherlock, I promise.”
– & –
2. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Mycroft couldn't help a frisson of concern as he watched his brother turn over the gift in his hands. From its weight and dimensions it was not much of a deduction to know it was a book, and the mulish cast to Sherlock's expression caused Mycroft to assume he had somehow figured out which it was.
When Mycroft had chosen the gift, he'd known he was running the risk of at the very least annoying Sherlock, but he'd hoped his brother would be able to put aside his disdain for the idea of reading that particular book and be willing to at least give it a chance.
When the paper came off, Sherlock's reaction was all that Mycroft had expected it to be.
“Wonderful,” Sherlock drawled as he dropped the volume to the floor by his feet.
“Sherlock!” their mother berated him. “Thank your brother for his gift.
Mycroft marvelled again at their mother's ability to rebuke both of them at the same time, despite their being on opposite sides of a matter. It was what he thought of as her real genius.
Mycroft and Sherlock shared a look. “Not to worry, Mummy. I understand he might still have issues.”
“Shut up, Mike,” Sherlock muttered, his foot toying with the book, and Mycroft knew the jury was still out as to whether or not he'd scored a minor victory. But by the end of the day, he'd know if Sherlock would be able to ignore his curiosity about the tales that had made their many-times-great-uncle famous.
Over the course of the afternoon, Mycroft managed to sneak a few glances into the back lounge, like a zoologist checking to see whether a new acquisition was settling in or had been eaten by its cage-mates. The first two times he'd seen Sherlock reading a book—not the one Mycroft had given him, of course, but at least it hadn't yet been tossed onto the fire.
That evening, while their parents bickered romantically in the kitchen (which Mycroft suspected they did to get some privacy, knowing their sons loathed listening to it and would bolt immediately they started), he ambled into the back lounge. Sherlock was glaring at the chunky paperback, disdain naked on his face.
“Please don't feel obliged to read it.”
“I'm supposed to be grateful for the reminder—” Sherlock grimaced as he pointed to the book. “That I'm named after a junkie arsehole?”
And you chose to go by that name, Will. “Speaking as the one named after the obese, indolent hermit, let me remind you that you are not your name, Sherlock. Any of them. It's part of the burden we carry, but it's up to you to decide if you want to make it an onerous one.”
“Thwart Mummy's experiment in nominative determinism.”
“Yes.” Mycroft let a short bark of laughter escape as he looked down to his stomach, ever so slightly larger than it had been a month ago. “Not that I'm doing any better.”
“Stop using it as an excuse to be a greedy bastard.”
Mycroft gave a hint of a shrug. “She's been unstinting this year. If I thought her capable of sentiment, I might be tempted to think of it as a pre-emptive apology.”
“She's turned her attention from maths to biochemistry.”
Mycroft was glad to hear the almost-humour in his brother's voice and decided enough was enough. “It's not that bad, you know.” He made a vague gesture to The Book. “Uncle Rudy gave me a copy when I was eleven. The clunky prose can be a bit off-putting, but the stories are reasonably engaging. The way he tried to clean up Uncle Sherlock's more egregious deviances is amusing, at least.”
Sherlock just made the sniff-and-grimace that meant he was unconvinced, then headed upstairs to his room.
Mycroft sighed and went to bed.
– & –
3. Madame Bovary
“I should never have let your mother convince me to revive the old family names,” his father said as they watched Sherlock's grey, slack face.
“He doesn't take drugs because our long-ago great-uncle did.”
“No, you're right. But it's a pity he can't seem to find a way to cope with the world, like great-uncle Sherlock did.”
“I strongly suspect great-uncle Sherlock's 'coping' was more Doyle's mythologising than reality.”
“Perhaps. Sometimes I have difficulty separating the truth from the Doctor's fancies, even though I know so much of it was just exaggeration for his readers.” His father turned a hesitant, expectant little smile to him. “Why do you think—”
“No idea.”
“I suppose not even he knows. He always was such a sensitive boy.” His father's attention drifted off into the past and Mycroft wondered what odd, tangential, seemingly random conversational segue he would come up with this time. “Do you think it's because of—you know. Her.”
The man didn't disappoint, Mycroft thought, scowling at the reference. “No. Why?”
His father shrugged, then they watched in silence as Sherlock continued to not die. Superficially, it was all rather underwhelming; Mycroft couldn't see anything resembling the “struggle” the doctors had told them would be necessary for Sherlock to make it through this, his third overdose in three years. Though Mycroft was glad to see that their “arrangement” about the lists seemed to have had its intended effect.
After about ten minutes' tense silence his father left, muttering something about tea, and Mycroft was alone with his brother.
“Nominative determinism, indeed,” he intoned into the eerie stillness: Sherlock unconscious, and the various machines he was attached to silent, unlike the false melodrama of beeping and wheezing depicted on television. He searched for the light controls so that he could at least dispel some of the gloom, then sat in the chair next to his brother's bed.
He'd known based on past experience that he probably would be there for some time, so he'd grabbed a book from his nightstand to help fill the hours. By chance his hand had gravitated to an old favourite, and looking down at the battered cover, Mycroft realised just how appropriate a selection it was. So instead of reading to keep himself amused, he decided to read aloud to the patient.
Once he was as comfortable as he could be in the plastic torture device disguised as a chair, he turned to the first page, cleared his throat, and began.
“Nous étions à l'Études, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d'un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d'un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail...”*
Mycroft stumbled a bit over the French; he'd been working on his Slavic languages recently. It took him some time to flush the choppy, guttural phonemes off his tongue and replace them with the soft, rounded vowels and almost-fluid consonants of Flaubert. Within a few minutes the rhythms began returning to him and as he fell back into the much-loved text, he felt his anxiety and dismay begin to dissipate.
As he turned the first page, he glanced up to Sherlock, who in his current state could so easily pass for dead that he felt a primal jolt of fear, which surprised him: it was hardly the first time he'd watched his brother in this state.
Mycroft turned his eyes back to the book on his lap, away from the shallow rise and fall of his brother's chest. He realised he'd been counting Sherlock's breaths, unconsciously willing them one after the other, as if Mycroft had the power to make them happen by force of will alone, paid for out of the store of his own life's allocation. From that point on, he allowed himself to only glance up briefly as he reached the end of each page, marking time with nouns, verbs and adjectives.
When he looked up the eighth time, the grey underpinning Sherlock's usual pallor had begun to slowly transform into the palest of pinks. Mycroft felt again the anger infiltrating his anxiety as the immediate danger passed; he wondered if this experience would become mundane before Sherlock grew out of this particular form of selfishness.
“What are you doing here?”
Mycroft's head snapped up and for a moment he was disorientated; the familiar semi-lucid frown on his brother's face immediately ripped him back from 19th century France. “Someone has to be.”
“Why?” Sherlock rolled away to face the far wall.
“To bear witness to the most recent in your periodic attempts to kill yourself in the most melodramatic way possible. Mummy's still in York,” Mycroft added as he turned back to his book. In trying to keep the relief out of his voice, Mycroft thought he might have overdone it a bit, but he was in no mood to apologise.
“Steadfastly shouldering the burden. Good old Mike; what a rock you are,” Sherlock drawled into his pillow.
As Sherlock drifted off to sleep, Mycroft wanted to reply, “Someone in this family has to be.” But nothing would be served by him indulging in self-pity as well, so he held his tongue and settled down to keep silent vigil through the rest of the long night.
– & –
4: Confessions of an English opium eater
Mycroft hated the very notion of his birthday, so he never acknowledged it, much less celebrated it. Other than his immediate family and Lady Smallwood, no one knew the date. He'd even managed to keep the information from Andrea for a decade, no easy task.
So he was a little discomfited upon arriving home the evening of his forty-ninth birthday to find a small, flat parcel waiting with his post on the desk in his home office. The envelope was not addressed, so either it had been hand-delivered or his housekeeper was remarkably resourceful and had taken leave of her senses.
He wondered if he should have Security scan the package, but it was obviously a small, slim book or thick pamphlet, so he decided to accept the risk and open it.
Mycroft couldn't help a brief, dry chortle upon seeing the title. He didn't know what to think of the—whatever it was. An excuse? An explanation? The one thing he did know: it certainly wasn't an apology.
As he read the brief blurb on the back cover, he decided he was going to interpret it as an explanation. His instincts wanted to discount the notion; Sherlock famously never explained anything, other than the peacock displays of his deductive skills. This was different, though, for a number of reasons. Mycroft instinctively wanted to discount it as a joke, but the customary assumptions about his brother had become somewhat threadbare recently, so he ignored them.
After dinner, Mycroft poured himself a brandy and pulled out the book. Skimming the text, he could see why the tale might have once appealed to Sherlock: the excuses of a childish coxcomb, it was very much a tale in the vein of the gothic moralist, designed to elicit the voyeuristic sympathies of the cloistered, naive middle class women of the author's day. Mycroft didn't like to think that the false repentance and trite moralizing exhibited by the author in his descriptions of the pleasures and pains of opium had any correlation to Sherlock's feelings on the matter. Especially now.
With a sigh, Mycroft put the book aside and pulled out his phone. To his surprise, Sherlock even picked up the call on his first attempt.
“Thank you for the birthday gift.”
“It's your birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Thought I'd deleted that.”
“To what do I owe the gesture, then?”
There was a thunk and Mycroft suspected that Sherlock had put the phone down. He wondered if he'd wandered off, distracted, and forgot about Mycroft. At least it was an improvement over Sherlock just hanging up on him, though the background rustling was hardly more edifying.
A minute or so later, Sherlock returned and picked up his phone. “I remembered something the other day. From when we were children. You used to read to me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm your older brother and that's what older brothers do.”
“No, older brothers teach you to smoke, drink and play football.”
Mycroft couldn't hold back a chuckle at the notion. “Well, one out of three's not bad.”
“You did it because you thought it was your duty.”
“No, because I enjoyed it. And I refused to countenance trying to teach you football.”
“I'd have only interested if you were the ball, anyway.”
“Very amusing.” Mycroft hesitated while he pondered the risks of full candour. Well, in for a penny, he thought. “Actually, I did it because Eurus didn't enjoy being read to, so she'd leave us alone and we could spend time together without her trying to take control of everything.”
The only answer was another long pause. In his mind, Mycroft could see Sherlock standing in the middle of the flat, probably blank-faced as he tried to process the unaccustomed honesty.
When no reply came, Mycroft thought it best to change tacks. “Why that book? Or was the presentation alone supposed to be the message?”
“I thought the title was amusing. Don't read anything more into it than that.”
Pull the other one, little brother, Mycroft thought. “All right, then I won't.”
There was silence from the other end of the conversation and Mycroft pondered his next move.
“Other memories have come back.”
Mycroft wasn't sure he wanted to pursue the subject, but recognised that the territory they were attempting to navigate was foreign to both of them, so he might want to refrain from pre-judging. “Oh? What?”
“Boring things.”
“Such as?”
“I've realised that other than Victor, then Eurus trying to kill us all, our childhood seems to have been rather dull. It's probably not worth trying to get the rest back. You remember everything and look how you turned out.”
Oh, but the dull parts were some of the best ones, Mycroft knew he couldn't reply. The everyday tiny happinesses. “You still haven't explained the book. You've never been known for spontaneous generosity. Have you even read it?”
“Seems a bit unnecessary. Did you?”
“I skimmed a few pages. You haven't missed much.”
“I won't bother then. Must dash. Donovan's getting impatient waiting for me to tell her how to do her job.”
Even without the tell-tape false spriteliness of Sherlock's tone, Mycroft knew that that was a lie; he could tell from the quiet that his brother was alone at Baker Street, but he didn't argue the point. “Good night, Sherlock.”
For a few minutes Mycroft contemplatively spun his phone in his hand while wondering: did the gift really mean nothing to Sherlock? What had his brother aimed to accomplish by sending it? Mycroft knew his brother had both chosen it and sent it for a reason beyond momentary amusement and the hope it might confound him.
As he returned the small, slim paperback to his inner pocket, Mycroft wondered if this act was a consequence of the Culverton Smith incident. In the weeks before their expedition to Sherrinford, Sherlock had been uncharacteristically subdued. At the time, Mycroft had assumed it was due to a combination of the fallout from Mary Watson's death and John Watson's (long anticipated by Mycroft) violent meltdown. Since then, he had watched from a distance as Sherlock's relationship with John crashed through those rough waters. Mycroft had begun to think that perhaps his little brother had finally accepted that his games had consequences, and sometimes those consequences were fatal.
If so, it was the culmination of eight years that had, strangely enough, caused he and Sherlock to become closer just as his brother found the means to finally reject Mycroft's path outright. And Mycroft now saw that in doing so, Sherlock had unwittingly regained the person he'd been before Victor's death and the grief-driven inversion of his personality that had resulted from folding his mind in on itself to escape his anguish at the disappearance of his best friend.
Of the many regrets Mycroft carried through his life, the greatest was that he had just stood back and watched, powerless, as a seven year-old Sherlock made himself a precocious Daedelus, turning his mind into an origami model of the Labyrinth, with Eurus' madness cast in the role of Minotaur. None of them, even their genius mother, had known what to do, or how to help, each of them consumed with their own grief and sense of guilt in the months after Rudy had taken Eurus away.
Mycroft had known since before Sherlock was born that love was not something Holmeses were very good at. Oh, their father tried, in his half-hearted, ineffectual way, as long as his efforts didn't draw too much attention from his wife. Even their mother occasionally bowed to society's expectations and unbent long enough to try, though her efforts were largely subverted by her partiality, self-absorption, and quixotic nature. Mycroft knew from observing other families that love was not supposed to be like that, and the knowledge that his family fell short of the mark had always rankled.
For over thirty years Mycroft had tried, and failed, to make up for their parents' deficiencies. He saw now that his efforts had been doomed from the start. He'd tried to build on a broken foundation, with the wrong tools, wielded by an untrained craftsman.
But in the course of only a few weeks, Eurus had accomplished what Mycroft couldn't in half a lifetime, and she'd done it by giving them the one enemy the brothers were willing to put aside their enmity for. The purity and directness of her rage had almost been admirable. It had been a rebuke to his and Sherlock's decades of fumbling attempts at mutual manipulation, pretending to communicate while secretly priding themselves on their mutual incomprehension. For decades their family had subsisted on self-delusion and artifice. Nothing had been as it appeared: anger had stood in for fear, distance for respect, and objects for love.
And what objects had they exploited over the years? Music, cases, puzzles, stories: all instruments that let them pretend they were communicating while hiding from what needed to be said. Perhaps this was the real meaning of Sherlock's gift: that he was putting an end to the metaphors. The ridiculousness of his gift was a challenge, calling time on the bad habits they'd allowed to come between them since they were children, and throwing down the gauntlet to see if Mycroft had the nerve to pick it up. And if that was the case, Mycroft was relieved. For he was so very weary of their old peculiar games.
Eurus' madness had insinuated its way back into the fissures of their lives and forced them to confront the real love behind the pretence. And despite the cost it was better, already. Pain had ripped away the accretions of lies and crippling nostalgia, exposing the festering flesh of those still-unhealed wounds. And now in the light of day they might just have a chance to heal, clean and new.