Chapter Text
“It’s nice,” said John.
Sherlock looked around the cluttered flat. Piles of books and papers on every surface. Boxes of files on the floor. His dressing gown on the sofa. Damn, he hadn’t put the eyes back in the fridge when he left this morning. There was a … smell. If this seemed nice to the boy, Sherlock wondered exactly where he had been living.
He picked a pile of correspondence off a chair and stabbed it to the mantel with a knife. John came closer to the fireplace. He put out a hand to the skull. The skull where the cocaine was hidden.
“Why do you have a skull?”
“Just a friend. Well, I say friend.” Sherlock put a hand on the boy’s arm to keep him from reaching for the skull.
John jumped back and moved behind the armchair, his eyes wary. His cheeks flamed red. He looked like he might run at any second, eyes shifting from Sherlock to the door.
Oh, thought Sherlock. Oh. He backed up. Careful.
“John, I’m not…. That’s not why….” He ran his hands through his hair. “Bloody hell. Sorry, sorry….” He held up his hands, looking at the boy as one might look at a skittish animal.
“I’m not going to ask you to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me, but I won't touch you. I didn’t think.”
John still looked wary. “Why did you then?” Sherlock sighed. He had always hated when people lied to him when he was that age, withheld information supposedly for his own good. Sherlock took the skull from the mantel, turned it over, and took out the coke.
“Cocaine,” he said. “I didn’t want you to see it. I was going to flush it. I won’t get high as long as you’re here.” He hoped that was a promise he could keep. “You can flush it.”
John came up to him, took the small, plastic bag he was holding out. “Harry drank. Used weed, angel dust. Rufus used crack, crystal, zero.”
“Rufus was the pimp?”
John nodded. “Why did you kill him?” asked Sherlock.
John looked at the floor. “He tried to…. He tried….” He stopped and took a long, shaky breath. “Harry thought he’d stop with her. He gave us a place to live.” Sherlock thought about the dirty mattresses in that abandoned building. Felt his skin crawl. “But he was high, and he tried… Harry tried to pull him off. He started h…hurting her.” The boy looked up. No tears. Face as white as paper. “I knew he carried a knife in his belt. I tried….” His voice trailed off.
“I will never use while you’re staying here,” Sherlock said, keeping his voice level. Thinking that it was a shame Rufus was dead so that he couldn’t kill him again. “And I’m not a pedophile.”
“Why did you bring me here, then?”
That was a very good question. He wasn’t sure he had a clear answer.
“You seemed to need a place to stay. I’ve been on the streets myself. I was….,” Sherlock stopped. It seemed important not to lie to John, so he hoped the past-tense was true. “I was an addict. I was on the street for a while. Not a good place to be. You’re too young for it. I have room. You can stay here until you decide what you want to do.” It wasn’t a lie to leave unspoken what he could barely express. That the boy hadn’t lied or snivelled or made excuses. He had tried to save his sister. He had been willing to turn himself in. He was honest and brave. And alone. He needed someone. Sherlock was useless to almost everyone, including himself. Perhaps he could be of some use to this boy.
“You won’t tell the police what I did?”
“No. Self-defense. Justifiable homicide. I would have done the same. But once they identify your sister, they’ll find you here. We’ll have to come up with a plausible story.”
John’s shoulder drooped. “Maybe I should just tell the truth.”
Sherlock thought about this slight boy, about the shite life he’d had already. Envisioned him caught up in the web of foster care and therapy and possible detention. No.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning. It’s late. You can sleep in my room.” The boy flushed, looking wary again.
“I don’t sleep much. I can sleep on the sofa. There’s a room upstairs. I’ll see Mrs. Hudson in the morning about clearing it out for you.” He pointed toward the bedroom door. “Go on. It locks from the inside. Lock it.”
John nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you’ve been nice to me. It’s just…,”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you should be suspicious. You’re not an idiot. Go on. We’ll talk in the morning.”
John went.
Sherlock sat slowly down in his preferred leather chair and put his head in his hands. What had he been thinking? He was wholly unfit to help anyone. He couldn’t even help himself. He felt the prickings of withdrawal. John had taken the cocaine into the bedroom, hadn’t had time to flush it. Could he do this? He would have to, he thought grimly. In for a penny. John Watson deserved much better than what life had dealt him so far. There was nobody to see to it except Sherlock.
He lifted his head from his hands. Hell. Breakfast. Children ate breakfast. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Petri dishes. Two old takeaway containers from…. two weeks ago? A hand in the process of dissection. He took out the milk. Opened it. Smelled. Hell. Mrs. Hudson should still be up. He had to talk to her about the room anyway.
~~~~~
“Sherlock, you can’t keep him. It’s not like a stray cat that you can just feed while it decides if it wants to stay. Surely he has family somewhere.”
He saw that he was going to have to tell her the entire story. He needed milk and eggs and bread and jam and butter. And he needed her to agree to let John have the room upstairs. So he told her everything he knew and much that he suspected.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put a hand up to her cheek. “The poor child,” she said.
“He’s…. good, Mrs. Hudson. You wouldn’t be in any danger.”
“Oh, Sherlock, I’m sure you’re right. I’m not worried about that. But what if he does have family? And, what about the…,” she stopped and gestured toward him vaguely, not wanting to call the spade she usually ignored a spade.
“Drugs? I’ll stay clean. As to family, if he does they’re no bloody use. I think I can…. I think I’ll be better than what he’s had up ‘til now, at least.”
Martha Hudson looked into his eyes. Suddenly she patted his knee. “You may be right. It’s kind of you….”
He cut her off. “I’m not kind,” he spat, as if it were an insult.
She stood and put an arm around his shoulder. “Well, you were very kind to me.” She felt him shrug. Then, inexplicably, he buried his face in her arm for a moment. Then, so softly that she could barely hear him, “Do you think I can do this? I’ve failed so many times.”
“Of course you can. I’ll help.” She tightened her arm around him, then stepped briskly away and opened her refrigerator and started pulling out food.
Sherlock cleared his throat and stood. “Thank you,” he said. “About the room. I’ll start taking on more paying cases, I’ll work more. I can’t pay you much to start, but I'll make it up later.” Bloody Mycroft controlled his trust fund and kept him perpetually short because of the drug purchases.
Mrs. Hudson was putting food into a basket. “You don’t have to pay me anything more. That room is just sitting there.” As she turned, Sherlock kissed her on the forehead.
“You’ll have to clean up that flat, mind,” she said, lest things get too sentimental. “You can’t keep all those chemicals and body parts about with a child in the place. And the dust, Sherlock. You’ll have to let me dust now. And you’ll have to paint the upstairs room. It’s pink.”
Sherlock laughed, a sound she had very rarely heard. It sounded good.
~~~~~
“That didn’t take long,” said Sherlock. He spooned scrambled eggs onto John’s plate. “John, this is my brother, Mycroft. Mycroft, this is John.” John stood, put down a piece of toast heavily covered with marmalade, wiped his hand on his jeans, and held it out. “Sir,” he said. Napkins, thought Sherlock. He’d have to procure bloody napkins. And where had John learned such beautiful manners? Certainly not from his father or on the streets.
“John,” said Mycroft. Then he pinned Sherlock with one of his eloquent stares. This one said I will not discuss this in front of the boy, but what in heaven’s name are you thinking?
“Tea?” asked Sherlock.
Mycroft sighed. “Please,” he said, and took a seat at the surprisingly clean and uncluttered kitchen table.
John tucked into his eggs. “They’re good,” he said. Sherlock shrugged. “Chemistry,” he said.
“When was the last time you cooked, Sherlock?”
“Christmas, 1997?”
“Oh, yes, Grand-mère Lucienne’s Brandade de Morue. You used too much thyme.”
“I disagree. You add potatoes when you make it, which is a travesty.”
Mycroft sniffed. “You were always her favorite.”
“That’s because I carried her painting equipment over half of Provence.”
“It’s because you were the youngest.” Mycroft took a sip of tea, as if that settled the matter.
John looked from one to the other. The corner of his mouth lifted, just a hint of a smile in his pale face.
Sherlock winked at him ever so slightly. “Yes, he’s always like this.”
“John, when you’ve finished, I need to speak with my brother alone.” Mycroft's tone was calm and also implied that the finishing up should be quite expeditious. The same tone had caused world leaders to rethink their stalling tactics in high-level geopolitical tangles. To Sherlock's amusement and admiration, John was not spooked. He just nodded and calmly finished the last piece of bacon.
“I’ll take you downstairs to meet Mrs. Hudson. She’s our landlady.” Sherlock saw Mycroft’s teacup hesitate ever so slightly on its trip down to the saucer at the word “our.”
Sherlock left John and Mrs. Hudson watching some inane program on television and mounted the stairs slowly. He had known Mycroft would come, but he had hoped to have a day to prepare at least.
Mycroft was standing, waiting for him, braced on his umbrella. “What are you playing at, Sherlock? It’s one thing to bring body parts back from the morgue, but you can’t bring a killer back from a crime scene. You must turn the boy over to the authorities.”
Sherlock didn’t bother to deny it. “How did you know?”
“A combination of CCTV footage and my knowledge of you, dear brother. It’s the obvious answer.”
“Do you think it will be obvious to the police?”
“Why does it matter?”
“It was self-defense, Mycroft.”
“If so, a Youth Court judge will reach that conclusion. He’ll get the help he needs. What is the point in sheltering him and postponing the inevitable?”
“He needs a home, Mycroft.”
Mycroft laughed. Then he looked at Sherlock’s still face. “Dear God, you’re serious. I can think of few people on the planet less suited to provide a stable home for a child, a seriously troubled child I might add, than you. And why would you want to do this? You have no tie of any kind to this boy. You are…. How shall I put this? … a needy, high-strung, unreliable, self-absorbed junkie. Why would anyone give you custody of a child?”
Sherlock clenched his hands, holding back the arguments and denials that crowded his brain. He would need Mycroft’s help. “That is not all I am, Mycroft. That’s not what I always was. I can stay clean.”
“How many times have you said that? A rhetorical question, by the way. By my count, fourteen times since your first year at Oxford.”
He wanted to tell Mycroft to get out of the flat. He wanted to find the packet of cocaine. Why he wanted to help John Watson more than either of those things was a mystery to him, but there it was.
“I know,” he said instead. “Please, Mycroft, help me. Help John.”
In spite of their history, in spite of their continual sparring, Mycroft loved his brother. In truth, could his brother’s life get much worse than it was now? And could he do much more damage to that strangely polite boy than had already been done? Two damaged souls. Perhaps they needed each other. He found himself hoping. It irritated him to hope. He had been disappointed so many times. He felt something odd flutter in his chest. Hope is a thing with feathers, he thought. Nonsensical sentiment.
“This is madness,” he said. “What if he has family? What if you get called out on a case? Where will he go to school? Sherlock, are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure. Help me do this.”
“What is the problem with his leg?” Mycroft asked. Sherlock knew then that he had won. He carefully restrained himself from smiling.
“Father. Damn him. Broke it when the boy tried to stop him from having it on with the sister. Refused to take him to the doctor, so it wasn’t set properly.”
“Sordid in the extreme,” said Mycroft. “I know Sir Edwin Crawford. Her Majesty’s orthopedist. We’ll consult him.”
“That would be…. kind, Myroft. Thank you.”
Mycroft dug the tip of the umbrella into the carpet and looked down. “So I take it John is now one of the family?”
“If he wants to be,” said Sherlock.
“Just….” Mycroft paused.
“What?”
“Just be careful, Sherlock. Hostages to fortune, you know.”