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“Get married again,” Greg said—not once, but over and over during that last year. He said it the first time when the diagnosis came, and kept saying it till he stopped saying things entirely. “Don’t let tragedy stop you, you damned berk. Look for someone. Find someone. Get married again.”
Mycroft argued the whole time, in all the voices natural to him. “I’m not likely to want to,” he said, priggishly. “There are so few people of your caliber.” Or, sharply, “As if I could.” Or in angry denial, “It’s not going to matter—you’re not dying.” Or in tears, “I don’t want another husband…just you.”
Through it all Greg was adamant. He found a meme on Facebook, one day—a sorry-ass, old, battered-up dog with a white muzzle and rheumy eyes. The print added over advised the dog’s owner not to refuse to love a dog again, but to find one who needed a home and let the new one take the old dog’s place. “That’s it,” he said, voice full of too many feelings. “That’s IT! Damnit, Mike—for me. Get married again. Find someone and love them. For me.”
Mycroft had thrown the laptop across the room, taking savage satisfaction in the crash it made striking the wall. “That’s sick,” he’d shouted, and slammed away to go terrorize mere minions until he was fit to come back and try once more to explain to Greg—his one, his only Greg—why he couldn’t do it.
“I’m not brave enough,” he said.
“It’s not fair to the next one,” he said.
“I have no talent for love,” he said.
“I’m not good at it without you,” he said.
Greg shook his head. The overhead light gleamed on bald skin. “Go on, Mike—for me. For some bastard who needs someone like you to make life worth living. Don’t be a miser, you stupid sonofabitch.”
Mycroft growled. “I won’t insult your memory with a cheap replacement.”
“I didn’t say you had to,” Greg growled back. “He doesn’t have to be cheap, or a replacement. I’ll accept there’s just gonna be one me and one you… But there’s a million marriages. There’s a million people who need to be married. It’s no insult to me to decide I showed you how good marriage could be.”
“You’re being manipulative.”
“Damn right I am. I don’t have time left to argue with you. Gotta push buttons.”
He was too thin, Mycroft thought. His bones were solid, and there was still strong muscle underneath, but the fat was stripped away and the result was strange: that cobby build with the stomach hollowed out, the tendons showing on the back of his hands. He sat on the edge of Greg’s bed, then eased down to lie next to his husband. “I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Really. It took me over half my life to find you. I suspect it will take what’s left to mourn you properly.”
Greg sighed and turned, wrapping too-thin arms around his husband. “Mike—that’s a waste. Mourning…it’s not worth turning into a project. Cry. Swear. Throw my ashes someplace we both love: the pond in Regents Park would be nice. We spent enough time there feeding the ducks and bitching about Sherlock. Get it out of your system, then look around. It’s a big world, love, and it’s got so many people in it who need love like you give. Find one. Love them.”
“I’ll marry Anthea,” Mycroft said. “She won’t be hurt when she learns she can’t be you.”
“Marry Anthea,” Greg agreed, amiably. “Give her the baby you’ve both wanted all your lives. Or marry John’s ex: she and the baby deserve to finally have someone who understands what she is and admires it. Hell, marry Donovan. She’s going to be lonely when I’m gone. Just find someone and take them in.”
Mycroft didn’t answer. He knew no matter what he said, what he threatened, Greg would find a way to turn it on him—offer him some happy ending Mycroft didn’t want. He only wanted one happy ending, and he already knew that one wasn’t ever happening. Even his genius could not defeat cancer.
He was there when Greg died, holding his hand.
He arranged the funeral—not that there was much to arrange. He and Greg had already put most of it together in the weeks before.
He spread the ashes at night, in the pond at Regent’s Park.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” a park guard said.
Mycroft got out Greg’s warrant card. “MET police. If anyone deserves the right to go in the lake, he did.”
The guard scowled, and began to protest. Mycroft sighed, lifted his head, and nodded, then turned away as he saw Anthea lead the team to deal with the man. He said nothing, even as the argument was waged in the background. He just dipped his hand in and feathered out the gritty, grimy, tawny-brown ash. It clung to his fingers. He was tempted to lick it off—bitter ash, clean ash. Was it cannibalism to suck down all that was left, that oddly adhesive dust? He wanted Greg inside him, part of him, unable to escape.
Too late, though. He was already gone. The ash was no more than a memory.
The following weeks were bad. He couldn’t stay home: Greg wasn’t there. He couldn’t work—the absence rattled his nerve and broke his concentration. He couldn’t talk to Sherlock, who ranted at his sentiment and scolded him for breaking his own standards.
“Out! Get out! If you can’t act like my big brother I don’t want you here.”
“You didn’t want me here when I could act like myself,” Mycroft pointed out.
“Exactly,” Sherlock said. “So go—don’t come back until you’re fit to be evicted for being an arse, instead of moping around like this.”
“He does understand, really,” Mrs. Hudson assured him at the bottom of the stair. “He’s not unfeeling. He misses him, too.”
Mycroft’s throat closed up, and he couldn’t speak. He tugged on black gloves and ducked his head, hiding his face. “You’re looking out for him, then?”
“Me. John. We know. Who’s looking out for you, dear?” She radiated motherly kindness.
“I don’t need looking after.”
She studied him from a safe distance, not coming closer after he’d growled that way. “I don’t think it’s working,” she said, softly.
It wasn’t working.
“Eat some dinner,” Greg’s memory whispered to him.
“Go to bed now.”
“Time for a cuppa, love.”
Mycroft couldn’t even dignify the voice with the title of “ghost.” There was no question that it was just his own mind, filling in what Greg would have said.
“Get married again.”
“Why? I’m still married to you,” he snarled at the memory-voice.
“No, love. You’re not. That’s the problem.”
It was a sorry thing when even his memory chided him.
“It’s not like I’m likely to meet anyone,” he said to memory-Greg.
“Yeah. Too stubborn to go out, aren’t you?”
“Too proud to go stalking strangers,” he argued back.
“Don’t have to stalk someone.”
Mycroft huffed…but relented enough to take himself to dinner at a restaurant he’d once loved, and given up because Greg didn’t like it. He ordered oysters, which Greg loathed. He found they tasted as good as he had recalled. Better, even, after years without.
He attended the opera, and experienced the magic of not having to translate or explain: just drop into the fantasy and drift on words that made perfect sense to him because languages were among his talents. Having attended once, he went again—and again. He avoided the tragedies, though, which limited his choices.
“Madame Butterfly is later this spring,” one of his old social connections said one evening. “Would you like to attend?”
“I couldn’t,” Mycroft said, and meant it. “Only the funny ones these days, I’m afraid. I don’t trust myself at the sad ones.”
It was more personal information than he’d been able to offer in months and months.
One of his associate’s guests leaned in, and nodded. “Oh, I do know how that works,” she said. She was a plain woman—stout, with a terribly ordinary older-lady haircut and ill-considered streaking. She clearly hoped her long black-velvet duster disguised a multitude of figure flaws, most measurable in raw pounds. “After my daughter died all I could bring myself to read were Georgette Heyer novels and P.G. Wodehouse. Anything darker and I melted.”
“That must have been quite repulsive,” Mycroft snapped, unsettled by the sympathy and ashamed of his own mortal weakness. He had nothing in common with fat old women in polyester velvet dusters. He turned away and left, stalking into the crowd in a fury.
The next day he called his associate, apologized, and asked for the woman’s name and contact information.
“Oh, no,” she said when he called her. “It’s no worry. I understood. Sometimes it just hurts too much.”
“Yes,” he said, feeling his eyes burn. “Yes. Exactly.”
They said a few more things and then hung up. He didn’t expect to call her again ever.
He was wrong.
“How long does it take to get past it,” he gasped late one night—going on three in the morning. “How long does it take to heal?”
“I don’t think you do,” she said, sensibly. “You just learn to cope. Why don’t you come by mine this weekend. You can help me walk my dog. I find it soothing.”
“No. Why don’t you bring your dog out to my estate,” he said, feeling vaguely guilty. She was a stranger, sharing nothing in common with him but loss—and here he was calling her when anyone should be sleeping if they weren’t working.
The dog was a cocker spaniel. It tried to flush butterflies from the perennial beds.
“How old is he?” Mycroft asked.
“Nearly fifteen,” she said, sadly. “He won’t be with me much longer.”
“Will you get another when he dies?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m fifty. Who knows if I’ll even be fit to take care of a dog in my sixties?”
He grunted his agreement. “My…Greg. Greg, my husband. He wanted me to marry again. After he died. I…couldn’t.”
She hummed under her breath, thinking about it. “It’s not really like they can expect you to get another daughter,” she said. “At my age pregnancy is out of the question, and they’d hardly allow me to adopt, would they?”
“Who knows?” Mycroft said. “They do so many things these days. Perhaps you could get a surrogate. Clone your daughter’s DNA.”
She made a queasy sound. “I think not.”
He agreed.
They walked in the garden together.
“The Beeb is showing a production of ‘Hamilton,’” she said. “Apparently it’s the original Broadway cast. Would you mind if I watched? Do you even have a telly?”
They ended up watching together, Mycroft providing footnotes on American history to help her follow along. That was the night he finally chose to call her Angela, rather than Mrs. Evans. The old dog lay at their feet as they sat on the sofa drinking wine and recording the show. It wheezed and snored dreadfully.
Mycroft slept better than he had in over a year.
He showed Angela pictures of Greg. Talked to her about who Greg had been, how much he’d admired his husband. She took out a single scan of a drawing.
“I was never good about photos,” she said, sadly. “Not my thing at all. But I drew this after, while she was still fresh in my mind. I have the original in my safety deposit box at the bank, but I copied it and laminated it. That’s what my Audrey looked like.
“She was beautiful,” he said, looking at the bright-eyed, round-cheeked young woman with pink hair.
“No,” her mother said, voice lost and alone. “No. Only to me, I’m afraid. I drew her the way I saw her. But, oh…she was so beautiful to me…”
He took the picture from her and put it on the coffee table before awkwardly embracing her. Soon they were both crying.
It was maudlin, he thought. He still cried.
Eight months later the dog died. He’d been ill for weeks before. Mycroft took Angela and the dog to the veterinarian’s, where the dog was put down.
“I remember when Mummy and Father had to have Redbeard put down,” he said. “My brother’s and my dog, when we were little. Sherlock didn’t know. I was…older.”
“It must have been terrible,” Angela said, her hand stroking the old dog’s silken ear over and over again.
“It was,” he admitted for the first time ever.
He let her spread the dog’s ashes out at the estate.
“Marry me,” he said that night.
“No,” she said, laughing. “You don’t want to marry me. You just think it would make it all come out right, like a fairy story.”
He grunted, unwilling to admit she was right. “We get along,” he pointed out.
“Yes, we do,” she said. Then, sighing and leaning against him, she said, “You can help me adopt a dog. I’ll help you find a husband. And we can be friends forever. That’s better, isn’t it?”
He put his arm over her shoulder and snugged her close. He smiled. “Do you want another cocker?” he asked.
“I want a dog that will love to have me love it,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said. “A husband, that is.”
“Give it time,” she said.
Two months later he’d located a guide dog whose master had died. Angela loved her—and the dog loved Angela.
A year after that, Angela introduced Mycroft to Aaron, a Cambridge professor who’d recently retired.
“I told you it would work,” Angela said, later, smiling.
“Me, too,” the memory of Greg said, with a grin. “I told you it would.”
Mycroft, holding Aaron’s hand, smiled, and said to both, “So very wise…”
And the dog ran golden over the estate, and Angela made coq au vin for them for dinner, and Mycroft and Aaron were happy as long as life allowed.
And Greg?
He was never forgotten, and always loved, and none of us know more than that.