Chapter Text
When Elisabeth Holmes told her oldest son, aged seventeen, that his father’s declining health meant that their family would very likely downsize their home after he left for Cambridge, the first place he went after their conversation was the bench underneath the magnolia tree in their back garden.
Cigarettes, at seventeen, were a new thrill for Mycroft, though he suspected even then that they would follow him over years and miles, days and nights, loneliness and comfort. He pulled a cellophaned packet out of his jacket, looking around for a long moment before deciding that he was alone and taking a deep drag.
The smell of the tobacco winding up alongside the magnolia had a strangely centering effect, and as he breathed out, he reviewed the facts.
“It’s too much,” his mother had explained, eyes pleading with Mycroft to either understand or to deal with the pain on his own. “It’s too much to keep up. I can’t take care of your father and your brother and this enormous old house by myself.”
Which, under review, was in fairness likely a perfectly reasonable assessment. The Holmeses often described their home as modest, but the house, Mycroft conceded, was in truth enormous; seven bedrooms with all of the interior and exterior features accompanying a house built for entertaining.
His mother, he knew, had merely been asking him to understand. Instead, the way a seed finds itself planted before a long autumn, Mycroft had found a barb that would burrow into his skin and settle into his bones, making a home for itself for the rest of his life. As his mother had explained, he’d closed his eyes, the letters making up by myself swirling in front of him to cross themselves out and then reveal themselves anew, rewritten: without you.
I can’t do all of this without you.
It is the first time he realizes: this is the cost of the leaving. And if the leaving will grow, spiraling outward throughout his life, then so, too, will the debt.
Mycroft, who had always had a knack for problem-solving but had never had a perfect grip on the boundaries of where his responsibility began and ended, had felt almost underwater while talking with his mother. He took another long drag from his cigarette and realized that the unique pain of threatened loss was blurring the boundaries of obligation into a picture that left him very unclear indeed about how to proceed. I don’t know how to stop this from happening, he’d thought, closing his eyes against the idea as magnolia swirled around him. I don’t know how to be helpful.
He found it a singularly awful sensation.
Certainly the neatest solution was to delay Cambridge for a year, to remain home and help his mother care for the estate.
But I’d wanted to go so badly, some still-wild part of his heart shrieked, immediately silenced by the way that duty snuck up behind it and whispered back: how dare you?
His mother, earlier, had stared at him, the silence of admitting that she was no match for the encroaching untidiness of the Holmes estate threatening to swallow them both alive; it was ultimately this discomfort which had pushed him to respond.
“Of course,” Mycroft had said, without argument, and Elisabeth, who had clearly been bracing for a fight, visibly deflated. “I understand.”
“Mycroft,” she’d despaired, saying his name in the way that meant that she couldn’t understand what to do next.
“Mother, I understand,” he’d repeated, offering her impatient comprehension when even he knew that he was being asked for compassion.
I didn’t understand how difficult it must have been for you, all this time, he thought to himself now, exhaling a long curl of smoke as his mother’s face swam to the front of his mind. But then, how else would any of this have gone?
“Mycroft, are you smoking?” Sherlock’s tiny voice called through the garden, pitched high enough for Mycroft to hear but low enough to avoid the attention of others.
“No,” called Mycroft immediately, crushing the cigarette out on one of his mother’s decorative stone platings as his younger brother slinked up next to him. “What are you doing out here, Sherlock? It’s getting dark. You should at least go back inside and get a sweater.”
“Came out here to check on you,” Sherlock responded. “And I’m not cold. I’m never cold.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“You always come out here to think. This tree is your favorite. I brought you a sweater, by the way.” Sherlock looked at him meaningfully. “It’s getting dark, after all.”
“Well hello, then,” Mycroft had said softly, and took the sweater from his brother. The younger boy’s mop of curly dark hair blurred into the dusk as he’d settled next to Mycroft, touching his knee to his older brother’s thigh.
“You’re sad about us moving,” Sherlock announced, without preamble.
“Not sad.” Mycroft surprised even himself with the speed with which he had rushed to correct Sherlock. “Simply… contemplative. It has been our family’s home for a very long time.”
“But you’re going to leave soon anyway,” Sherlock pointed out with a tone that Mycroft couldn’t read. There was no follow-up; Sherlock did not say and then it won’t be your home anyway or but if we didn’t move you’d be able to come back or even so there.
The memory of that single sentence has been studied over and over for decades in vain. Mycroft has never been able to learn the language, often wondering if that was the exact moment it began; the distance had always been there, probably since the day Sherlock was born, but at some point, Mycroft had stopped keeping pace and had one day been startled to realize he could no longer jump it. Mycroft, at forty, would be able to identify this quite precisely: there are many chasms characterizing his relationships, but this is the last time such a chasm had been allowed to grow without being monitored carefully.
“You’re right,” Mycroft had said, unwilling to speak anything else into the air in light of not truly understanding what his brother had said. “You’ll leave someday, too,” he added, bowing a little under their shared silence.
“Maybe,” Sherlock responded, with a lightness that had suggested that the very heart of him was not underpinned by the foundation of this home, this tree, these birds, the wallpaper, the small scorches and gouges and dings left on the dining room table from years of shared meals.
He is eight years old, Mycroft reminded himself with a sharpness. There is no reason to ascribe your sentimentality to him. He could still be anything. Anything he chose. Your strings will not serve him.
“Probably.” Mycroft’s correction was gentle but firm. “No one can see the future, but the balance of probability would suggest that you will leave, too. It’s nothing to fear.”
“Then why are you scared?”
Mycroft had looked upward then, thanking god and goodness for dusk and for the dark hair that fell into Sherlock’s eyes, letting his own face go unread. “Because I do not know what it will be like to leave,” he’d answered, finally, deciding to be honest with his brother and wondering whether eight years old was too young to recognize a gift in absence of glitter and ribbons. “Because I have never done it.”
Because of the things I will leave behind, his heart had completed, and he’d thanked the same god and the same goodness for filters, knowing that honesty is a gift, but sentimentality is not.
I am not nearly half-prepared, but I will be good to you your entire life, he’d thought, then, and the unbidden declaration startled him with its fierceness as Sherlock moved closer to him. His brother’s breathing grew gentle as the two of them sat together in silence, watching night fall across the house where they’d both been born. He found himself desperately grateful for Sherlock’s proximity. If I cannot love you properly through what I am, I will love you as best I can by sifting out that which will not help you. I will always do my best for you.
“I will miss you,” Sherlock admitted, sounding quite small indeed.
“I will visit,” Mycroft promised, and Sherlock tightened his hand across Mycroft’s forearm.
“I could even visit you, too,” Sherlock suggested, and Mycroft had been taken a bit aback by the way that his heart gripped the thought of showing his brother around a life he’d crafted for himself. “When you move to Cambridge.”
“Yes, of course you will.” Mycroft swallowed. “I will show you everything.”
+
“I don’t have to leave, you know. Would it help you if I stayed?” Mycroft had asked, the next morning, and Elisabeth Holmes set down a tea towel very slowly and looked her oldest son over for a long time before speaking.
“It would not help you if you stayed,” she’d answered, finally, and then gestured. “So, no. Sit down, my love.”
He truly hadn’t known what he’d wanted her to say.
It was early in the morning, the sun throwing light all around the kitchen, and they were sharing a cup of tea, and he had been thinking how uncommon it was for the two of them to be alone together. He’d been thinking that the house perhaps did seem a bit big, especially with him planning to move out at the end of the year. He’d been thinking that his mother looked old; the thought, bright and jarring in its newness, wrenched something deep and painful inside him that he immediately folded up and put away, to be examined later.
He’d been thinking, he realized with a pang, that he’d had seventeen years to get to know her, on her own terms, and now, a month before he was due to leave, it was just occurring to him to learn her enough to miss her.
“You are such a careful boy,” she observed, the lines around her eyes crinkling as she looked at him with a fondness that was nearly blinding. “You take such good care of each of us, Mycroft. I’ve never told you how proud I am of that.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
“But Mycroft, I… it would break your poor mother’s heart if you went through life thinking that it was your job to take care of your parents.” She smiled at him over her teacup. “I rather suspect that in time, Sherlock will become a full-time job, all on his own.”
It would take many good years, two good therapists, one good partner, and untold bottles of good scotch, but someday, Mycroft would look back and call that moment the anchor of his life.
“We are all born with so much,” Mycroft’s mother had continued, then, and immediately his head had indeed been flooded with images: the small town where he’d grown up; a sick father; a vulnerable brother; a kitchen with the same green paint he’d put up with his father when he was eight years old and which any prospective buyer would immediately paint over if they had any shred of sense; his mother’s Cambridge diplomas, hung up and framed in the study that she now used as a sewing room, repairing buttonholes and letting out trouser hems for boys who grew too quickly. “But along the way, we make choices. We can’t keep it all. It’s the saddest part about life, Mycroft. We have to be very careful about what we keep, and about what we set down in order to make room for it.”
When she’d reached for him, he’d moved to her, with an ease and a quickness that would suggest that he’d never been ashamed of the way he loved her.
“Please don’t think for a single second longer about not going to Cambridge,” said Elisabeth plainly, wrapping him up in her arms, and in that moment Mycroft knew that for however sick his father became, and for however much his brother might need him, he was always going to leave them behind. “Life will be a little trickier without you around, but it would kill me if it meant that you decided to stay here with us.”
“I don’t want life to be… ‘tricky’, for you,” he’d confessed, the way a person might confess a secret or a sin, and his mother had looked like her heart was breaking anew as she’d taken his face in her hands.
“It was never your job to give anything up for us,” she’d replied. “Your father and I will get by.”
He thought, again, about his mother’s framed degrees. She is brilliant, his father had said, just last week at a luncheon: radiant, even then, with the joy of describing his wife. Mycroft hadn’t even known she’d studied mathematics until he was thirteen.
“You could have been anything.” His voice was strangled, but she had just smiled.
“Well, not anything.” She squeezed his hand. “But… yes, many things, probably. And in all of it, I got to be your mum. I assure you I wouldn’t have been able to dream up anything so wonderful.”
There are a million reasons that Mycroft Holmes has spent his life wishing he could love his parents better. The sincerity on his mother’s face when she tells him that even her brilliance could never have dreamed anything so rewarding as mothering him is first on the list.
“I’ll do well,” he’d told her, not out of hubris but because he needed her to know. You did well with me. I will do well for you.
“Be careful.” She brushed the curl out of his eyes. “About what you keep. Sometimes the choices are not easy.”
“I am careful, Mummy,” he’d promised, the love and the honesty springing so easily into his eyes because nothing could be more true, nothing in the whole world, unless maybe he’d told her why, told her: I am careful because I love you too much, Mummy.
“I know you are, my Mycroft,” she’d whispered, holding him so closely to her that he’d let himself hope for the briefest moment that she’d heard it, anyway, and that the smell of magnolia would never fade out of his mind. “And I still worry so much. Isn’t that funny?”
He understands, now: the worrying, and the knife that a person wields when they use funny to cover up devastating. It’s funny, too, to think that his mother, of all the things in the world that might bring Mycroft heartbreak over the years, had chosen to advise him to inoculate himself against carelessness. He wonders what she advised Sherlock.
But then, he thinks, she’d done her best. Perhaps her best didn’t always shelter him, but she gave it willingly every time, anyway; what other choice does a person have?
+
What other choice, indeed, he wonders now, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly in his fingertips reviewing the footage of his little brother, reaching up and disabling yet another camera. Mycroft’s never been sure whether Sherlock disables them because he doesn’t know that cameras are the only way left that Mycroft has to say I love you, or whether it’s because he’s very aware indeed. He’s never been sure which feels less heartbreaking.
It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, using all the same words that he uses for Sherlock when Sherlock needs them, and all the same tricks he uses on himself to convince himself that it’s okay that though they’ve both always needed reassurance, Mycroft is the only one who’s ever given it. All hearts break.
What matters is what has always mattered: that Sherlock is safe, that he is well. And in this, Mycroft, however broken-hearted, is still a good older brother: as long as he lives, so, too, will Sherlock.
Have you spoken to my brother recently? Might be a danger night. -MH
The reply comes almost instantly:
Ran into him at a scene a few days ago but not since. Will check in & follow up. -GL
Gregory Lestrade is a man who texts back quickly. Gregory Lestrade is a man who always has a bandage, a granola bar, a lighter, and a pack of gum. Gregory Lestrade’s name floods Mycroft’s mind for a moment and brings with it several acknowledgements, not least among them an appreciation that the man’s presence in his brother’s life is evidence that the universe is unfolding as it should, or an appreciation that Mycroft’s relationship with his brother has somehow morphed into a world where a cop is their gatekeeper, or even an appreciation that if there had be a gatekeeper, Mycroft supposes that he could have picked no better by his own hand than one Gregory Lestrade.
Thank you very much, Inspector. I am much obliged to your kindness. -MH
Before Gregory, Mycroft had not dared to breathe aloud the words danger night to anyone else. He’d spent six miserable years trying, ineffectively, to rein Sherlock in alone.
It’s not any trouble, Mycroft. I’m happy to do it. I’ll let you know when I know anything. -GL
+
“You left,” Sherlock had snarled, the first night that Mycroft wondered whether he was going to have to watch his brother die. His mother’s voice floated into his head (it was never your job…) and he had realized, all in one breath, that a person’s job is defined much more by their abilities than by the technical bounds of their responsibility.
“I am here now,” Mycroft had said tightly, and Sherlock had rolled his eyes before closing them: “You never get it right, Mycroft.”
When the officer on duty arrived, Sherlock had paid him an attention that Mycroft hadn’t seen from Sherlock in years.
He’d promptly kidnapped the officer, of course; there was nothing else for it. Where he’d been expecting to see all the same traps and pitfalls normally associated with his brother’s consorts, he’d seen a flash of white teeth and a firm, immediate refusal before Mycroft had even gotten a chance to name an amount.
And somehow, in the vast wildness of the universe, the sergeant (Lestrade, Mycroft had gleaned, and had promptly spent the rest of the night buried in his file) had kept texting him. And kept texting him. And kept texting him. For six years, now. And then had said, one night: come over to mine? And had kissed him. And kept kissing him. And kept kissing him. For six months, now. And that, Mycroft thinks, is certainly something upon which to hang one’s hat. Or the sun, the moon, and all the stars. For a start.
Mycroft isn’t completely sure what about this evening has turned him into such a sentimental sot, but he’s glad of at least being in private, with no further obligations for the evening. He rewinds the surveillance tape, once more watching Sherlock glance furtively around before reaching upward.
You never really fit into my life, Mycroft thinks to himself, watching his brother’s deft movements and sighing, calculating the distance from the newly-disabled camera to each known crack house. There was never anything about me or my life that you’d wanted.
That, he consoles himself, is not sentimentality. That is an honest and accurate view of the situation. Truth feels good to lean on, and in this case life has been kind by giving him a perfect experiment: the neat, unquestionable dividing line between when Sherlock brought him sweaters and when Sherlock disabled cameras is also the line between when Mycroft’s life had been shaped by his family and when he had been allowed to grow into himself.
Mycroft indulges himself in a brief moment of pride: it is difficult but surely worthwhile to accept the results of good science, however unpalatable. He presses ‘eject’ on the tape.
I will miss you, Sherlock had admitted, weeks before Mycroft moved away: a terribly brave thing for a Holmes to say, Mycroft grants, even as a young child. Mycroft, in turn, had had the temerity to reassure him that things would not change; that he would simply introduce his baby brother to his new home, new friends, new life.
He had, eventually, learned humility.
The first visit was also the last visit: Sherlock, nine years old, sitting on the twin bed in Mycroft’s Cambridge dormitory and unimpressed by it all; Mycroft, eighteen years old, realizing that perhaps a life crafted by his own hands is not one that Sherlock would appreciate after all.
That Christmas, they’d sat together in Mycroft’s bedroom (“your real bedroom,” Sherlock had scowled, by way of an invitation) in the exact same stony silence, as Mycroft realized with unease that nothing had gotten better since Sherlock’s visit to his dormitory; it was as if seeing each other, being together, navigating the world outside the Holmes estate, had broken some sort of spell. Mycroft, having not realized that his brother’s love was such a fickle enchantment, allowed himself no small amount of heartbreak that Christmas, and had consoled himself that at least his bedrooms (both of them, he’d noted bitterly) were temporary. He could stare down the years to anticipate many more years spent re-realizing, each holiday, the depth of the asymmetry surrounding his and Sherlock’s hearts, but at least he would not endure it in the very rooms that had introduced the idea.
In the end, he’d gotten even this, as so many other details, wrong; in the end, his family had not moved. In the end, his father had recovered: an easy surgery, a benign tumor that cast a long shadow over their family without ever truly touching them. In the end, he and Sherlock had smoked underneath that magnolia tree for decades and would likely keep doing so for decades more; Mycroft’s parents, being the only threads in the world able to draw his little brother to him, are healthy. In the end, that same green paint had continued to surround them each year on Christmas; in the end, the dining room table proved to have room for many more scorches and gouges and dings over many more meals.
In the end, the house had not been enough. In the end, neither the table nor the tree nor even the health of their father had had anything to do with what kept Sherlock from drifting away from him. In the end, Mycroft would spend many more days in the house where he grew up, feeling a million miles away from the parents who’d given up everything for him, and from the brother who’d brought him a sweater and come into the darkness to tell him that he would miss him.
In the end, his brother had learned what Mycroft looked like out in the world and had decided: no, thank you.
In the end, Mycroft thinks, feeling hopeless even as he breathes into the idea, I perhaps ought to guard a bit more cautiously against getting worked up over how things end.
+
Greg Lestrade has taken Mycroft Holmes out for a drink - a small miracle by itself, such a milestone standing proudly above a relationship that until now has barely been spoken aloud - and is currently stirring the ice in a gin & tonic he’s been nursing for forty-five minutes, and Mycroft is thinking to himself, for perhaps the first honest time, that he doesn’t care how this ends.
Their conversation has been, for most of the evening, light and easy, which is a testament to Greg’s disposition and to Mycroft’s heart’s damnable ability, even now, to be wrenched open along the slightest faults.
He remembers an issue of New Scientist from when he was twelve: Running water (that is, water that flows on the Earth's surface in streams and rivers) is the most powerful natural agent operating on the surface, and it changes the face of the Earth. He’d regaled his parents at supper that evening, making sure that three-year-old Sherlock was listening, too.
Water is one of Earth’s most plentiful substances, he’d explained, his parents beaming at his preternatural understanding of the natural world. It’s unassuming, but it’s persistent, and will find its way anywhere, given enough time. It erodes; it freezes and expands to crack. It will weather everything away, eventually, and there’s almost nothing we can do on a grand scale to guard against it, because we need it to live. He’d been awed, and a little terrified, even then, explaining to his parents the processes that changed the very face of the planet.
“You were outstanding today,” Greg tells him, now.
“Thank you.” Mycroft blushes. There’s nothing for it.
“I’m glad you came along.” Greg’s voice seems to get quieter at this last, as he tips his glass toward Mycroft’s.
Groundwater, given enough time, will enter any features containing the smallest cracks or joints. Repeated freezing and thawing can, over centuries, carve spectacular features into slabs of hard stone.
Mycroft finds himself wondering whether Greg would find himself enchanted by a thirty-nine year old man who recites decades-old New Scientist articles on frost-wedging to himself in hopes of recognizing his own familiar patterns in the larger global geology, so as to remain calm when complimented by charming men who have been married, for many years (if perhaps excluding more recent years; details), to beautiful women.
His preternatural understanding of the natural world at twelve, he acknowledges, was perhaps not followed by a similarly nuanced understanding of human relationships.
“I was glad to accompany,” he murmurs. “And your performance was equally competent.”
Greg smirks a little into his drink; Mycroft finds himself thankful for how well the other man seems to have learned to read his reserved language. “Don’t mention it.”
“Mycroft.”
“Yes?”
“Are you…” Greg runs his fingers through his hair. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I am.” Mycroft’s answer is more rooted in instinct than in any true reflection.
“Okay.” Greg frowns. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Greg repeats, relaxing a bit into the echo. Mycroft can observe the precise moment that Greg decides to lean into trusting Mycroft not to lie. “Good. I’m glad.”
“Thank you for asking, though.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And thank you,” he says, “for your kindness to my brother,” and Greg looks at him with a smile that makes him want to die.
It has been six months. Six months of kissing in corners, six months of Googling ‘texting parameters semi-romantic relationship’, six months of raised eyebrows from Sherlock. Six months, and each time Greg looks at him, Mycroft is decimated.
It will destroy everything. And we need it to live.
He wonders, for a moment, if he isn’t perhaps being a bit melodramatic. Those were the words, though, spoken by a source as undramatic as New Scientist magazine: It will destroy everything. And we need it to live. And if it’s true of something as unassuming as water, why not Gregory Lestrade?
“Kinda wanna go somewhere and make out with you a bit,” Greg murmurs, the edges of his voice sanded off by a day of shouting and an evening of whisky. “Kinda wanna mess up your hair a bit. Kinda wanna get you a little messy, get your jacket off, get you to stay for a bit.”
Mycroft gestures a bit frantically for their check with Greg’s hand on his thigh as he makes peace with the idea that if anything, he has not had the vocabulary to describe Greg properly up to now: Greg absolutely will destroy him.
Which is fine, he reasons, as he scrawls his name inelegantly across the bottom of the receipt, Greg’s fingertips playing across the back of his neck and Greg’s breath hot across the shell of his ear. He catalogs, for a moment, each potential ending, and then he closes his eyes and allows himself to catalog the way that the very tip of Greg’s tongue feels as it brushes softly over the skin immediately behind his earlobe.
All things end, he thinks, snapping the billfold closed and gesturing for Greg to follow him as he rises, knowing that his eyes can’t possibly look anything but dark and hungry as the other man jumps up behind him. And I am ready, having guarded so well against getting worked up over how.