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If Mycroft dies, Sherlock will retire. It is a foregone conclusion. If his brother dies, tragically, heroically, silently, in the service of God, England and St George, it is the only option. Sherlock will pack up his singular occupation, quit his rooms in Baker Street and move to Pall Mall. He will probably, also, pension Anthea off. If she hasn’t killed herself already. Perhaps, he supposes, he will have to arrange her funeral, and see to the alteration of the records that indicate her suicide, at the confirmation of his brother’s death. She’s hardly likely to linger if she believes that Mycroft’s death might have been in any way preventable. She is his bodyguard, his assassin, his sword and shield, after all. Without him to devote herself to, she will reject the world of the living. She will, of course, be endeavouring to follow him across the Styx. He will need her at his side in Elysium.
There will be nobody to follow Sherlock so blindly. John would be Sherlock’s comrade, in a way, Lestrade would be his protector, but none of them would follow him with such fanaticism. It’s enough to make Sherlock wonder just what it is that Mycroft must have said to Anthea in those first few meetings. She serves him with a level of idolatry that makes her own actions seem positively inhuman. Perhaps, underneath it all: she is. In an earlier age she might easily have been a true crusader, driven by faith and an unshakable belief in her chosen cause. In an earlier age, Mycroft would not have been nearly so undiplomatic as to utter the word ‘infidel’ in public. It’s a mixed metaphor, if metaphor it really is. Mycroft would be neither Pope nor Sultan. He is much better suited to the visual pun that seems to amuse him so much. Éminence grise. Grey and scarlet. The humble friar with the poise of a cardinal.
Of course, Sherlock will not wear grey, should the day come. It doesn’t suit him nearly as much as it does his brother. Their father was fond of grey suits, and sometimes brown. Moderate colours. Much gentler in tone than the sharp black that both Sherlock and his mother favour. His mother wore black predominantly, with odd flashes of colour. She was fond of a deep and regal purple to accent the swathes of black. He is very much aware that he often dresses like his mother. Occasionally, he has even painted his nails, but only ever purple or black or similar. Never the burgundy she preferred. Dark as deoxygenated blood. Of course she wore a bright and shocking scarlet when it seemed like the world would end. He recalls her toasting the Falklands War with scarlet lips and fingernails.
He comes from a family of shadows, to put it poetically. Men and women who prefer to have their deeds seen, only in the remaining evidence. In the lingering spaces where once there was the statement of a lingering political game, in the bodies hauled off to unmarked graves, in the policy that has made London a fortress of cameras. Mother, father, brother. Each of them significantly changing future and past. Names whispered in the dark, spectres stalking the corridors of power. None of them courting public favour or accolade. The frailty of genius is that it, eventually, turns in on itself. It creates futures out of inhuman reason. It ends wars, it starts them. All because that is all it sees fit to do.
It isn’t that Sherlock is disinclined to follow in familial footsteps, it’s just that he’s far too prone to. He’s been fighting it all this time. Struggling against the inevitable tide. When John shouts at him for his indifference, it reminds him that there is a chance, at least for a little while, to pretend at being human. When Lestrade cajoles, he can pretend that, for a moment, perhaps he even cares. Sometimes he even does. Yet emotions are fleeting and never linger. They exhaust him just as much as physically chasing across London. He tries to wear himself down deliberately, because if he is too weak, too fatigued to do anything more, then, for a while, he won’t think. He won’t see or dream or theorise what can only be grand architectures of ruin.
Eventually, he will fail. It is only for so long that he can fight the inevitable and soon enough he will drown in an already growing dissonance. When those last, tenuous, shackles that bind him to humanity slip free, he will be just as much of a monster as his brother. Mycroft is perfect in that respect. Amoral, not immoral. Efficient, not cruel. Pitiless, relentless, indomitable. So much so, that surely, Sherlock feels, Mycroft must be the end product of some grand experiment. It is Mycroft who the generations before him dreamed of, Mycroft upon whom all points converge, the shortening of the way. A mind so perfectly refined that it can no longer, truly, be called human.
Sherlock himself is almost complete. There are still lessons to be learned, emotions to be understood. His analysis of his environment is not nearly ready for its purpose. He does not yet, entirely, understand the rules of the game. He cannot yet make himself bend to them. He still craves contact and recognition. Mycroft desires neither. He is already forging the golden path. Disengagement will take time. Non-attachment is a lesson that Sherlock has only recently decided that he will accept. Of course, that is the next step, to perceive the lesson and embrace it. It will take time and, in some small portion of what remains of his human self, Sherlock trembles at the idea. To be free from feeling, to reject all emotion, all joy and pleasure, is an idea that overwhelms him. To relinquish those so positively touted emotions, alongside the negative ones. To feel only a chilling serenity.
There are half-measures of silence, of course, were he to embrace them. If he were capable of walking that fine line between silence and emotion. If his mask were as good as others’. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, what he possesses in perception, he lacks in strength. The twilight that Lestrade chooses to linger in would be impossible for him. It requires a little feeling, a little cynicism and a dangerous self-possession that might easily be called arrogance. Lestrade walks that fine line with a curious ease. Passionate enough to feel the tremors of emotion on the surface, dispassionate enough to feel only schadenfreude and other such emotions beneath. Of course Lestrade admires Mycroft’s chilling calm, with an intensity that is almost sexual. Perhaps it is. Sherlock supposes that Mycroft must have experimented, and who better to experiment with than Lestrade. His mild smile and cold eyes probably provide an endless source of interest for Mycroft. A spark of mechanical fascination in a world of heat and passion.
Sometimes, Sherlock has noticed, John smiles the same way. His lips curve but his eyes are still. Sometimes, even in the brightness of his expression, there seems to be a vacancy behind his eyes. Perhaps then, John walks that fine line too. Perhaps it is only Sherlock who has fallen behind. The last piece in the puzzle, the last one to wake to the terrible dawn. Perhaps, in waking, he will be reborn and all that he has supposed himself to be, will be washed away. That may be all that it turns upon. All it will take is a single step, a stretching of a hand out into the unknown. Once he steps off that pier there will be no going back. He will be irreversibly changed. What he will become is beyond his sight and that alone is reason enough to hesitate. He does not, cannot, know what he will become.
He could stay here forever debating it, clinging to stasis, while everything around him moves on. He could strive to deliberately halt his progress. He could fritter away his energy on the struggle to remain the same. He could, and yet, he has never been one accustomed to cowardice. Discord and strife are only another name for entropy. And in truth, he abhors nothing so much as a lack of change.