Chapter Text
The first truly warm day of summer passed into an uncomfortably warm night. And though the sunlight hours stretched longer and later, Iris, at the age of seven-nearing-eight, was still kept to a regular bedtime as much as her guardian was able.
“You know how I loathe to be a stickler for bedtime, my dear, but in this instance I am afraid that I must insist.”
The time had crept just past the 9 o’clock hour—the time when Iris was meant to already be in bed with her light out. Instead, she was hunched over her desk in the sitting room with an overflowing wastepaper basket, scratching out yet another inconclusive equation with a pencil she’d broken the tip of three times in succession. Her pigtails were frizzy and drooping, and she rubbed her eyes with her free hand as the other set out redrawing the troublesome formula from the beginning.
“I’m so close to getting this right, Hurley, I know I am! I just want to try one more differential—”
“Iris…”
“Please!”
Sherlock did hate to tell her no. He avoided it at all costs, preferring to negotiate and explain through reasoning. It made the secrets he had to keep from her that much easier to bear. “Perhaps if you would allow me to look over your work, I may—”
“No! I already told you, I don’t need your help!” Iris looked determinedly away, blinking back tears of frustration.
He let the silence sit for a breath whilst he thought. Then he said, peaceably, “This is nothing that needs to be solved tonight. The work will still be there in the morning, and you’ll have a clearer mind after a night’s rest, wouldn’t you agree?”
“…I suppose.” She toyed absently with the messy end of one of her pigtails. “Would you brush out my hair for me?”
“I would be only too happy to oblige, my dear,” Sherlock answered with a smile, and then ushered her off to wash up for bed.
While she was in the washroom, Sherlock turned down her bedding and situated her pair of stuffed animals to be at the ready. Iris had long since stopped bringing them everywhere she went, but they remained necessary nighttime companions.
Iris soon finished and padded into her bedroom rubbing her eyes sleepily. She climbed onto the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest while Sherlock sat down behind her and began taking down her hair. It would be a good many years before she was ready to wear her hair completely pinned back, but even so, she preferred having it out of her way when she was working. They tested out different styles every so often, usually whenever Sherlock was particularly bored and Iris had an activity to hold her attention while sitting down.
When he’d unwound the plaits and ribbons, Sherlock combed through her strawberry hair with his fingers, dislodging gingerly the worst of the snags. Then he went over with the brush methodically, starting at the ends and working up, slowing moving around from the left to the right side. By the time he was finished, Iris was practically asleep sitting up. Sherlock gently coaxed her into lying back and draped the blanket over her. He watched with a fond, lingering glance at the doorway for a few heartbeats longer before quietly pulling the door shut.
Back in the sitting room, Sherlock let his curiosity draw him over to Iris’s desk. He ran his eyes over the sheet of notes. If she’s solving for…then there ought to be…hm, yes. He picked up the pencil and, as inconspicuously as he could, added the missing variable. There, he thought, now she may have all the satisfaction of a puzzle completed and without any of the tears. Sherlock then replaced the pencil, and by the time he crossed the room and sat down at his own desk, he had quite put the matter entirely out of mind.
The next morning, Iris awoke in a flash. Of course! That was the answer! It was so obvious to her now where she’d gone wrong before. She needed to fix it right away while the answer was still at the front of her mind.
She sprang out of bed and dashed to the sitting room. Hurley was there at the breakfast table with his coffee and the morning paper.
“Why, good morn—ah ah! No work before we’re dressed for the day. Was that not the rule we agreed upon?”
Iris halted before her desk. “But you break that rule all the time!”
“Perhaps I do. But, as you will observe,” he made a sweeping gesture towards himself, “I have not broken it today.”
“But Hurley, I—”
“Clothes first, my dear. I should hate for your governess to arrive and find you in such a state. I can hardly afford to fall any lower in her esteem.”
“Yes, you can,” said Iris, her arms crossed. “I know you even do it on purpose sometimes.”
He waved this remark away. “No distractions! Let us at least appear to be civilised people. I’ll even time you, if you’d like.”
“Fine,” Iris whinged. “Ready, go!”
She was a blur. A few short minutes passed, and she reappeared, panting.
“How’d I do?”
Her stockings were sagging and her pinafore was merely over her shoulders with the ties hanging loose, but she was, indeed, dressed.
Sherlock squinted at the grandfather clock. “Three minutes…twenty-four, shall we say?”
“You weren’t even counting!”
“I was hardly afforded the chance to mark a starting time what with how quickly you shot off.”
Iris let the matter drop and instead finally sat down at her desk. The answer had been there clear as anything in her mind when she awoke. She pulled the pages towards her and reached for her pencil. It was a relief, she thought, to know that she hadn’t been wrong in her hypothesis at all. It had only been a small error in copying the formula where she’d forgotten to account for one of the…variables.
“But…” she began, furrowing her brow, “I was sure that…I know that—”
Iris slammed the pencil down on the desk and whipped around in her chair.
“Hurley!” She cried. “How could you! Why did you mess with my work?”
He flinched, fully taken by surprise at her outburst. “I beg your pardon? What do you—” Then memory dawned on him. “…Ah, yes. Just a slight change was all. You had the rest of it entirely correct, but…I see that’s upset you, has it?”
Iris felt—well, she didn’t quite know how to say what she felt other than very, very angry. “I told you I wanted to solve it on my own! I didn’t need your help!”
“My dear—”
“No! I’m—I’m very cross,” she said while blinking rapidly against sudden tears, “and I don’t wish to speak with you anymore!”
With that, Iris ran from the room and stomped heavily up the stairs to the attic classroom.
In the still silence of the sitting room, Sherlock sat frozen in place, coffee cup in hand. He mulled over the facts of the situation for some time. Long enough, apparently, for Iris’s governess to arrive and his coffee to go cold. Miss Casion’s tactful knock on the sitting room door pulled him temporarily out of his thoughts.
“Good morning,” she said, entering as per their well-trod routine, but she stopped short upon finding Sherlock alone. “Oh, pardon me, Mr. Holmes…Is Iris—?”
“Waiting upstairs, I believe.”
That was all he said. Miss Casion had never in her almost three years of employment known Mr. Holmes to be anything but garrulous. When it was clear no further explanation would be forthcoming, however, she collected herself in a blink and nodded. “Very well, then,” she said, and left to join her pupil.
Once she’d gone, Sherlock shook himself free of his stupor. He stood and downed the last of his coffee, remembering only too late that it had gone unpleasantly cold.
The hours passed. After Miss Casion had returned to collect Iris’s uneaten breakfast with such a withering air of disappointment that felt distinctly targeted towards him, Sherlock thought it best to make himself scarce. He was out a good portion of the day, dawdling with errands he’d been neglecting, and he returned late in the afternoon to find Iris and her tutor had taken their lunch out of doors and then stayed out longer for tea. Miss Casion typically left them at teatime, as he recalled. The odds that Iris had forgotten the morning’s spat ticked lower.
Iris was returned home before 4 o’clock. Doing lessons outdoors had been lovely and had temporarily taken her mind off her anger, though it rekindled within her chest as the time to return home grew near. She hadn’t wanted to go back until she absolutely, definitely had to, and Miss Casion had been kind enough to indulge her using the excuse of the nicer than usual weather.
She had told Miss Casion after she’d arrived that morning what had happened and how upset Iris had been to discover her work had been tampered with—and by Hurley, no less. Miss Casion had listened in her usual equable manner. She hadn’t anything to say about it really, but Iris felt better for having explained it all aloud.
Miss Casion had also done Iris’s hair for her that morning since she had stormed out before Hurley had been able to. She’d given Iris practical twin plaits down to the nape of her neck and tied each one off with ribbon. It was a serviceable, simple fashion that got Iris through the day, but the way her curls tangled and tickled the back of her neck and arms had been a persistent annoyance.
Iris stayed in her bedroom until dinner, which was tense and unevenly quiet. Iris refused to break her silence though Sherlock gave his best attempting to entice her out of it. He talked about where he’d gone that day, about seeing the funny cat that lived at the end of the street, the latest titles at the bookstore he stopped in, and what was new at the pawnbroker next door.
Iris was baited by none of it. In fact, the only thing in the world she appeared to care for was her helping of shepherd’s pie as she ate to clear her plate and be excused from the table as fast as she could.
Sherlock’s plate went largely untouched.
She remained silent the rest of the evening. And as she put herself to bed that night—without Hurley’s help, thank you—Iris couldn’t help the tears that came to her eyes. She pulled the covers up over her head and hugged both her dear stuffed animals to her chest as she whispered to them under her breath.
“I don’t want to be cross with Hurley anymore,” she admitted, “but—but he hasn’t even said he was sorry! And he has loads of papers that I’m not allowed to see, and I’ve never touched any of them! It’s not fair. I’m not going to speak to him until he’s apologised, I really, really won’t!”
The following day was one without lessons. After an unbroken stalemate at breakfast proved Iris had not yet abandoned her grudge, Sherlock once again found reason to be away. He let her know before leaving that he would plan to be back around teatime, but she needn’t feel obliged to wait up.
He received no response.
Alone in the flat, Iris sat down at her desk in the sitting room. Her maths work was exactly where she’d left it. For want of something to do, she tried to turn her focus back to solving the equation she’d started, but her heart wasn’t in it any longer.
Why had Hurley left so soon after breakfast? What had he to run away from? He seemed to be waiting for her to forget her reasons for being upset and to carry on as normal, but Iris was resolved not to let the issue drop. Miss Casion had told her that her feelings were only too understandable in the circumstances. There had been a breach of trust, as she had put it, and it was to be expected that Iris would be angry and hurt as a result.
Miss Casion did not say, however, what Iris was meant to do about it.
It wasn’t fair! That was the point she kept circling back to. It wasn’t fair that Iris was the one feeling bad when it had been Hurley who made the mistake. And it also wasn’t fair that so many of Hurley’s things were forbidden to her when she evidently was not allowed the same privilege to decide when something was exclusively her own. He had always respected her opinions in the past, or else made clear the reason for being opposed. And yes, he was often silly and forgetful and did odd things other people couldn’t see the sense behind, but she had been so deliberate in telling him not to interfere! It just wasn’t fair.
Iris bitterly pushed the sharpened tip of her pencil against the pad of paper until it snapped. She opened her desk drawer, pulled out another pencil, and broke that one too. Then a third. She couldn’t say if it helped her feel any better, but it was rather destructively satisfying.
She let this spiteful whim take her across the room to Hurley’s desk. One by one, she hunted down every pencil she could find, and snap, snap, snap, they went until she was left with a sorry pile of blunted stakes.
Like an ember on the breeze, Iris scanned the sitting room for what tinder to alight on next. She had whet her appetite and wanted something bigger, something that felt reciprocal, something to make it feel fair. Looking with acidic intention put the room in a new light. She examined their ordinary clutter as if she was carrying out a deduction. If I were a stranger in this room, she thought, where would I suppose the secrets would be kept?
The answer was elementary. It was hiding in plain sight, something she overlooked daily. It was the very centrepiece of the room, enormous and conspicuous, and all they’d done to obfuscate its intrusiveness was drape a too-small table linen overtop and serve tea off of it to their guests as if that was the most normal practice in the world.
That was what she’d do. Iris had the flat to herself and a steady hand at lock picking. She would open that padlocked steamer trunk, and she would find out exactly the sorts of dumb, boring old things Hurley thought only he was clever enough to know.