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If Diogenes was the patron saint of Mycroft Holmes – one who represented all the rejection of emotion and sharp acute armour of impenetrable loneliness as strength, then it was fitting that when Sherlock saw his sister for the first time in 15 years, it was in a lockup, after she had been arrested for stealing a gold and diamond encrusted broach in the image of none other than Cupid himself.
So sharp was the contrast between Sherlock’s two older siblings.
One warm and loving, another cold and calculating. One driven by passion, the other ruled by intellect. One warning off human attachments, one who would hold her little brother tightly when he told her of a torment in the schoolyard that day, and promising that love would cure all wrongs.
Amelia Sherrynford Holmes – known as Sherryn to her family, but always Shezza or Shez to her little brother. Although, when Sherlock saw her, alone in a Scotland Yard lockup, she was going by the name Amber Lyn.
Lestrade had called Sherlock in, telling him that the suspect in the string of jewellery thefts had been caught red-handed. When they offered her her one phone call, she had asked if anyone knew how to contact Sherlock Holmes. She said she knew something about what he was missing.
Sherlock had arrived, expecting nothing more than a fan, someone infatuated with him, or worse, someone who considered themselves the new Moriarty. An arch enemy. He’d lost count of how many of those he’d had.
He never expected anything other than plain-old Amber Lyn.
He certainly didn’t dare hope that this woman would have information about the whereabouts of Smith, or an answer to the puzzle of who exactly it was who terrorised greater London with a five-second clip of Moriarty’s face.
But when he saw his sister, grinning the grin he remembered so well, and eyes gleaming with the same mischief she always had he realised he should have known straight away.
Amber Lyn.
Anne Boleyn.
Of course.
As children, she would write plays loosely based on history. And, with Mycroft refusing to participate, it always fell to Will. And it was always Will to her. Never William as their family called him. And certainly the idea of taking his middle-name as a moniker had never crossed anyone’s mind.
So Will would play the villain. Richard III, carrying Shez’s dolls into the Tower of London to be executed. Brutus, stabbing the cushion-Caesar 26 times in the back. And Henry the 8th, ordering Anne – a cabbage patch doll - off to be beheaded.
“Shez.” He said, the model of Mycroft’s reserve. Older brother would be pleased.
“Will!” She jumped up and ran towards the bars, as if willing them to disappear in order to hug him.
For a moment, Sherlock wished it too.
Taking a step backwards, Sherryn surveyed her brother, and he her. Matching steel-blue eyes charting miniscule changes in each-others appearance over the last decade and a half. Although, Sherlock reasoned, Sherryn did have one-up on him. At least she could have seen images of him in the news, in the papers, online. He hand’t heard hide nor hair form his sister since the day she dropped him off in rehab. His first stint. The first of many.
Her hair had been dyed blonde, but it suited her. A few wrinkles around her eyes, and eyes drooped. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Her frame, always diminutive, was even smaller than he remembered. Her dress hung off her too loosely.
She was sick.
“You look like death.”
But they were her words, not his.
He honestly hadn’t looked at himself for a few days. So driven by the current case, so fuelled by stimulants – legal and illegal – and so wrecked from lack of sleep, he could only imagine what he looked like to her. Unkempt. Unshaven.
“You haven’t changed, except your hair,” he noted.
“You haven’t either.”
There was no disappointment there. Just fact. He knew she didn’t mean his appearance. She could see him, would know from a glance how heavily he was using again.
There was no sign in his appearance that revealed the decade of sobriety he had just squandered.
Sherlock turned to the guard who had accompanied him into the lockup, “Could you give us a moment?” he asked. The guard nodded, before Sherlock added, “and, could you let me in?”
Taking a glance over to where Lestrade was standing by the door to the cellblock, the cell was opened and Sherlock stepped in. Sitting next to his sister on the metal bench, he waited for the guard and Lestrade to leave.
“This really is like old times,” she smiled, and for a moment Sherlock was taken back to their misspent teenage days when frequently they would fend off boredom through petty crime – pick pocketing mostly. Shez would find the mark, distract them with a smile or a giggle, or sometimes a flirtatious pat on the arm, while Sherlock would pretend to bump into them, pushing Shez into their mark and giving her the opportunity to grab wallets, cash, and one time a Rolex.
Games that ended abruptly when owner of the said Rolex had them arrested after pressuring a local bank for access to their surveillance feed. When the cops came to their house, Shez opened the door, watch proudly hanging oversized from her wrist.
Shez was sent to boarding school to finish her O levels. When she came back, the games were over. Mycroft had made his mark. Sherlock was never the same.
“You’re certainly replaying old tunes – shoplifting? Really?”
She rolled her eyes, “I was bored.”
Sherlock had heard that word come out of his own mouth so many times, he just never had any idea what an empty excuse it really was.
“So…” Shez began, then stopped.
“So what?” Sherlock asked into her anticipated silence.
“Who is she?” Shez asked casually, the same way she used to ask him about his day at school or what the latest gossip was.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I know you, Will. Only a broken heart would have you acting out like this.” She looked into his hollow eyes, followed the line of his unshaven face up into his unkempt hair. She took a few steps back towards the bench in the corner of the cell, flopping down on it. “It’s just like when we were teenagers.”
“There’s no ‘she’,” he said indignantly, despite the fact that screening on repeat, 24-7 on all walls in all rooms in his mind palace was the image of a furious Molly Hooper slamming a door in his face, playing in a cruel loop over and over for the last three weeks since he last saw her, on a night he’d rather forget but couldn’t yet bring himself to delete.
“Will, your face is glass, I can see it, see how it’s plaguing you, and how no matter what you’re taking – five percent solution, is it?”
“Seven,” he found himself idly correcting her.
“Seven,” she repeated, “well whatever drugs you take, little brother, you can’t make your emotions go away.”
“I don’t have emotions,” he said, enunciating every word in order to make his point as clear as possible.
Shez laughed. “Jesus, you sound just like him.”
Neither of them had to say who he was.
“So if you’re not going to tell me, will you let me guess?”
“I haven’t seen you for twenty years-“
“fifteen”
“-fifteen, but you think you can diagnose, and I suspect, cure my broken heart?” The way he spat out the words were so venomous. Yet Sherryn remained unfazed.
“A ha!” She stood, triumphant, “It is a woman!”
“I said no such thing.”
“You may as well have, little brother.” She waited a moment, twisting her hair idly around her finger before asking, “Do you love her?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because Molly Hooper can’t stand the sight of me.”
“You’re right. I can’t.”
Out of nowhere. A voice so familiar, yet so unexpected, Sherlock’s eyes began to water.
“Hello Molly,” Sherlock said, refusing to turn to meet the woman who had arrived and was looking at him through the other side of the holding cell bars. “What brings you here?”
“Lestrade called me.” Her tone was even. He didn’t dare look into her eyes, knowing that her pain, disappointment and barely-supressed rage would be there, plain as day.
He turned to Sherryn, eager to placate his sister by introducing her to the woman she’d been pestering him about for the better part of an hour. But she was gone.
He stood, turning wildly, desperately trying to work out what had happened.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Get Lestrade, now,” he ordered. Molly, no longer willing to be ordered around by him, didn’t budge.
“Who are you looking for?” Molly asked evenly.
“The woman Lestrade brought me in to see. She’s my sister.”
Molly glanced away towards the doorway out of the cellblock. He couldn’t see Lestrade standing there but assumed from Molly’s face that he was.
“Sherlock, there’s no one else here.” Molly’s tone was even, calm, in complete contrast to the panic rising in Sherlock’s body.
“Ask him, Molly. Ask him about Anne Boleyn.”
“The wife of Henry the Eighth–“ she said, pausing after each word.
Sherlock waved into the air as if trying to delete her mistake, “He brought me in to talk to a woman named Amber Lyn. Ask him. He must have her papers.”
Molly reached through the bars as if trying to placate, to calm his fractured nerves.
“Lestrade brought you in because you were wandering the streets of South London. Why else would you be on that side of the bars?”
“Because I was talking to my sister!” Sherlock hit the bars in frustration, causing Molly to jump back with shock.
“Your sister died fifteen years ago.” The voice came from the shadows.
It wasn’t Lestrade standing there. It was Mycroft.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Mycroft continued as he walked towards the cell.
“No.” Was Sherlock’s quiet response.
“When did you last see her?”
“She took me to rehab.”
Mycroft smiled, a sad, wistful smile.
“Yes, I suppose she did, in a way.”
“She was driving the car-“ Sherlock closed his eyes.
“So…” Shez began, then stopped. She kept her eyes fixed on the road when it was clear her interest was more in the answer to his question.
“So what?” Will asked into her anticipated silence. Between them the wiper-blades whirred.
“Who is she?” Shez asked casually, the same way she used to ask him about his day at school or what the latest gossip was.
“Whatever do you mean?” He smiled then. There was a girl, a young pre-med student who had caught his eye. He was about to strike up a conversation with her just that morning as she was sitting alone outside the campus café. He was going to ask her if she wanted a coffee.
But before he could get up the nerve
“I know you, Will. Only a broken heart would have you acting out like this.” She looked into his hollow eyes, followed the line of his unshaven face up into his unkempt hair.
“You’re wrong Shez,” he laughed, “Anything is an excuse for me to be acting out like this.”
She turned to him, her eyes full of grief for her little brother, her kindred spirit. A mind full of intellect and a heart full of feeling. It was no wonder he needed chemicals to keep them both in-check.
She took her hand off the wheel, placing it gentle on the coarse roughness of his cheek. “Please, Will. Try to-“
She never finished the sentence.
“She died on impact,” Mycroft’s voice supplied the rest.
Sherlock didn’t need to look to Molly to see the tears streaming down her face.
“All lives end. All hearts are broken,” Sherlock recognised the words now. They were his brother’s attempts to comfort him, said at the graveside of his sister.
Mycroft turned and walked away.
“Caring is not an advantage,” Sherlock whispered.
From beside him came a long-forgotten voice that he knew now was only chemical stimulants running haywire through his head.
“Caring won’t kill you, little brother. Love will let you live.” He he closed his eyes then just maybe he could feel her hand on his cheek again.
He opened his eyes again only when he heard Molly’s footsteps retreating down the hallway.
“Molly,” he called her name as a question.
“Yes?”
“Please stay.”