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Sherlock couldn’t help but to frown as Mother finished delivering another embarrassing childhood anecdote of his, only for James, predictably, to respond with a much-too-delighted peal of laughter. James had a pleasant laugh, objectively speaking. Full-bodied and rich with mirth, the kind that crinkled the corners of his dark eyes and drew his mouth into a wide, joyous grin. The grin was full of teeth, however, just a bit too sharp to be entirely friendly. Similarly to his eyes, and the gleam in them that was a shade too keen to be anything other than predatory.
What the man was hunting for, it seemed, were the stories falling so easily from Mother’s lips. Ammunition for teasing, Sherlock suspected, although plain curiosity was likely a factor as well. He and James shared a drive to sate the insatiable, on that front. Either way, James was currently lapping up Mother’s stories like they were fresh claret.
Sherlock could never be cross with Mother for revealing such things, especially not with how cheerful she seemed in her recitations. And James was his friend, after all. The first he had ever brought home, let alone introduced to her, circumstances aside. There was so much glee in her expression, as she regaled them with Sherlock’s boyhood antics, fondness and conspiratorial joy written across her face in equal measure.
She was happy. Sherlock could never fault her for feeling that way, even if it came at the expense of his pride. James, by contrast, knew exactly what he was doing with each probing question and encouragement lobbed Cordelia’s way. Sherlock had less and less tolerance for that, as the conversation went on. Things were shaping up rather unevenly as far as information went.
“When I think about it, I hardly know anything about you, James.” He remarked, interjecting before James could press his mother for any more humiliating details of his boyhood.
“Well that’s not true, Sherlock.” James chuckled, although the sound of it was less mirthful than before.
“Isn’t it?” He countered. “I don’t know a thing about your time before coming to Oxford.”
“There’s not much to tell.” James shrugged, before taking a rather large mouthful of his wine.
“Surely you must have something to share.” He pressed. “After all, Mother has been so generous in sharing details of my childhood with you. I don’t even know where you’re from.”
The look James slanted his way was witheringly deadpan.
“Ye don’t know where I’m from, do ye?” He drawled, over-exaggerating his accent to a preposterous degree.
“Of course, you’re from Ireland.” Sherlock allowed. “But it’s rather a large island, don’t you think? Are you from Dublin? Or perhaps Belfast?”
“No.” James said flatly.
That much had already been somewhat apparent from the specific way in which James lilted his vowels and how his tongue curled around certain other sounds when he spoke. As far as Sherlock could tell, it precluded either of the Irish cities he’d already named, but he wasn’t familiar enough with how people in other regions of Ireland spoke to make a proper guess. He had hoped James would volunteer to fill in the information for him.
“Oh! You must be from around Limerick, James dear.” Mother said brightly. “You have such a lovely musicality to the way you speak. Just like poetry!”
James huffed a laugh that Sherlock could only describe as bewildered.
“Well, you’ve a far better ear than your son, Mrs. Holmes.” He demurred, taking another mouthful of wine. “Limerick is much closer than Dublin or Belfast.”
“But not correct?” Sherlock queried. “You said closer.”
“I’m from Cork, if you must know.” James offered, but there was a flatness to his tone again that Sherlock couldn’t quite place.
Still, hailing from Cork was more than he had known previously about his friend. He took a moment to consider what he knew about the place, while James and Mother both returned to their plates.
“Did your family work in exports then?” Sherlock asked.
“No.” James replied.
“A lot of butter and beef comes from Cork.” He remarked.
“Aye. Most of it all bound for Britain and abroad.” James agreed quietly, still so much more subdued in tone than he had been previously.
Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure what had necessitated this turn toward solemnity. He’d been hoping to uncover something more along the lines of what Mother had been sharing before, stories of childhood antics or perhaps even something embarrassing.
“Lumber imports then?” Sherlock hedged. “A great deal of the good, Canadian timber comes though the ports at Cork, if I recall.”
“I’m from County Cork, Sherlock, not the city.” James corrected, sounding almost exasperated now, which Sherlock hardly thought was fair. “We were farmers.”
“What about now?” He asked, James shot him another deadpan look, but with something more bitter behind it. “You used the past tense, just then. What does your family do now?”
“Sherlock…” James said simply, which really wasn’t an answer at all.
“It must be something that allowed you to be away at University.” He continued. “Most craftsmen wouldn’t be able to send their only child away, so your family must be in some other kind of business.”
“I’m not an only child.” James declared in a strained sort of whisper, again looking a bit bewildered.
It was odd, that his friend’s mood seemed to have soured just from such surface level questioning. Sherlock had hardly begun to pry into his personal life, certainly not to the degree in which his own past had been laid out for James’ perusal by Mother’s indulgence of his curiosity.
“Well, you must tell me about your siblings then!” Sherlock pressed, aiming for a brighter tone in hopes of bringing James along out of his sudden dourness. “How many do you have?”
“Darling.” Mother said, her own voice oddly solemn now as well.
Sherlock certainly didn’t want Mother to be sad, so he tried to infuse even more levity into his tone. Surely James would indulge him in order to help lift her spirits again, he seemed rather fond of Mother in his own right, even if he hadn’t known her for long. He had been nothing but gentle and kindly towards her.
“James has met Mycroft, Mother, it’s only fair I should know about any siblings he has.” Sherlock argued. “Do you have brothers, sisters, or both?”
“Sherlock.” James said again, there was an odd undertone of pleading to the way he had said it.
“At least tell me how many you have, James.” He insisted.
James was silent, a sullen, almost defiant look in his eyes as he regarded Sherlock from where he sat.
“How many, James?” Sherlock asked, losing a bit of patience at his friend’s obstinance. “I’m hardly asking you for—”
“I have two brothers left.” James said in a rush, cutting Sherlock off.
No sooner had James spoken than his face drained of blood and his expression took on a sickened countenance. He almost appeared to be surprised at what had come out of his own mouth.
“Left?” Sherlock demanded, struck by that particular clarification and what it implied.
James didn’t react. At least not until Mother reached out and lay a soft-looking touch to the back of his hand, where it had come to rest clenched in a fist beside his discarded cutlery. James recoiled from her touch like it had burned, careening onto his feet abruptly enough to almost overturn his chair. He was wild-eyed and breathing hard.
“Excuse me.” He stammered, before stumbling from the room, face still bloodless and drawn.
Sherlock was left reeling, even as he heard the sound of the front doors opening and closing. Guilt was a sour sensation brewing in his gut.
“Pardon me, Mother.” He managed, once the silence left in James’ wake became too oppressive to bear. “I feel as though I should go check on him.”
“Perhaps you could bring him a coat?” She suggested gently, forlornly. “It’s quite cold out, Darling.”
Sherlock nodded his assent as he got to his own feet, leaving Mother behind at the table. There were no proper coats hung on the rack by the front doors, and he didn’t want to spend too long in search of one. Instead, he grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch that sat before the main hearth.
It was quite cold, when he stepped outside, and he didn’t immediately see James, when he looked about for him. It was dark, the grounds only lit by moonlight and by the faint light seeping out from some of Appleton’s windows. Before too long, however, he noticed a scuff-mark in the finely crushed gravel beside the main walkway. Indicative of a someone using a quick, less than measured walking pace. After that, it was easy enough to track James to where he sat with his back to one of the stone retaining walls, hidden from Sherlock’s initial search by a decorative shrub tree that was more than a bit overgrown.
James didn’t look up at him, as he approached, but there was a subtle shift in his posture that showed he was aware of him, still alert. Sherlock didn’t know how to approach the haunted look on his friend’s face, nor the way he was sitting with his knees tucked up to his chest on the gravel, which was likely already damp with evening dew.
James looked small in a way that was distinctly uncomfortable to witness. Sherlock found suddenly that he couldn’t bear to loom over the man as he was currently doing, and so he sat down beside him, leaning against the stone retaining wall in kind. It was unpleasantly cool again his back, even through his shirt, waistcoat, and jacket.
“Here.” He offered, shuffling closer and spreading the blanket out over them both as best as he could, draping it over their knees. “Wouldn’t want you to freeze out here.”
He ended up sitting closely enough to James for their shoulders to brush, and mercifully, James didn’t recoil as he had from Mother’s touch.
“It’s not cold enough to freeze.” James said quietly.
“As neither of us knows that for certain, I’d prefer not to take any chances.” He argued, careful to do so gently.
“I do know, Sherlock.” James replied. “This isn’t cold enough for that.”
His tone was unsettlingly matter of fact. Paired with the haunted expression lingering on his friend’s face, it was enough to make an acute kind of discomfort begin squirming in Sherlock’s belly. He swallowed thickly against the sudden tightness climbing up the back of his throat.
“Even if you’re not at risk of freezing, I wouldn’t want you to be cold.” He explained, reaching over James’ knees to pull the blanket up towards the man’s opposite shoulder.
James didn’t respond, but again, he didn’t shy away from Sherlock encroaching upon his personal space. He decided to take it as an indicator that his presence wasn’t unwelcome, which was good, considering he had no desire to leave James out here on his own.
They sat together in silence for a while, touching slightly at both the shoulder and hip. James remained hunched over in a manner that could almost be described as timid. Sherlock hated to see him like that, and hated even more that his own line of questioning had been the cause.
“James—”
“Don’t.” The man interrupted.
Sherlock said nothing more for a while, allowing them to return to their earlier silence. It wasn’t a peaceful silence, however, and so he felt obliged to break it after a while.
“We lost my sister, Beatrice, when I was young.” He confessed. “She drowned in the river.”
“I gathered.” James acknowledged.
That was fair enough, Sherlock supposed. James was much too observant to have missed the signs, especially after having witnessed Mother’s earlier delirium, before Dr. Maltby had prescribed her new medication to ease the withdrawals from the alkaloids she’d been given in the asylum.
“I still feel inclined to say that I am one of three, whenever anyone has had occasion to ask about my family.” He added, when James said nothing further. “Although now it’s only myself and Mycroft.”
He’d felt strangely compelled to share that, perhaps as a kind of penance for his earlier blundering.
“I was one of six children.” James whispered.
Sherlock felt those words land like a physical blow. James had said he had two brothers left, earlier. He couldn’t imagine what tragedy had struck the Moriarty family in order to reduce the number of children from six down to three.
“What happened?” He asked, needing to know, to try to understand.
“What do you think?” James spat, almost sneering.
Sherlock was taken aback by the sudden venom of it, watching how James’ lip curled back from his teeth in an approximation of a snarl. His dark eyes flashed menacingly in the low light.
“I… don’t know what you mean.” He admitted haltingly.
“Come off it!” James scoffed. “I’ve already told you we were farmers from Cork, what do you think happened to us?”
Sherlock had no idea.
“I truly don’t know, James.” He insisted.
The man beside him spat out another string of words that took him aback, although this time it was because he couldn’t understand them. They hadn’t been in English. He hadn’t realized that James knew how to speak the Irish tongue, but he thought he’d heard Sasanach among James’ presumed cursing, which he knew with some certainty to be a term of Irish origin.
“I never knew you spoke Irish… I’ve only ever been called that in prison, by Irishmen, whatever it means.” He said, before attempting to imitate that one word in particular.
“It means English.” James supplied, although not particularly kindly.
“What does me being English have to do with anything?” He frowned.
James laughed, but it was a sound utterly devoid of humour. It was bitter, and biting, cutting through the night air to echo off of the cold stonework around them.
“For such a brilliant man, you’re incredibly fucking thick sometimes.” James sighed, as his sardonic laughter trailed off. “What do you think I’m talking about?”
“Explain it to me then.” Sherlock said. “Since you clearly seem to think I’m missing something obvious.”
“Jesus, Sherlock…” James sighed again, with more exasperation this time. “Are you going to make me say it? Have you never heard of The Famine before? I should think you would’ve even living on this side of the Irish Sea.”
For a moment, all he could do was try to absorb the words. He had, of course, heard of the famine in Ireland. Blight had ruined the potato crops, upon which a large portion of the island had been subsisting. It had occurred when he was a boy, which he supposed, meant it had been when James was also a boy. A boy living in Ireland at the time, among a family of farmers.
He hadn’t ever thought to imagine how James might fit into what he knew of recent Irish history, not until now. It didn’t paint an optimistic picture of James’ circumstances, given everything else Sherlock had learned tonight.
“You had siblings who died because of the potato famine?” He demanded, aghast at the notion.
James said nothing. His eyes were screwed shut and his shoulders were hunched up near his ears.
“I don’t understand.” Sherlock said. “How could—”
“You don’t understand! You can’t!” James half-shouted, cutting him off, as he buried his head in his hands. “Look around you! Look at this place with its stone roof and its full fucking pantry even after years of you all being away! Just, stop! Please, Sherlock… Please, just stop! Ná cuir iallach orm labhairt faoi!”
James sounded most of the way to crying now, as if his voice were being strangled in his own throat, especially when he’d slipped back into the Irish tongue. Sherlock felt inclined to join him in his misery, especially when James’ breath began to hitch sharply in something akin to sobs. He was shaking, where he was still sitting so close to Sherlock’s side.
“I’m sorry, James.” He whispered, surprised he managed to get the words out. “I’m so sorry.”
He had done it again. He had missed the warning signs and had pushed too far.
“I’m sorry.” He said again.
They were so far past propriety at this point that he didn’t hesitate long before wrapping his arms around James’ heaving shoulders and pulling the man in as close as he would allow. It turned out to be quite close, with James leaning in until they were pressed together at the ribs tightly enough for him to feel how the other man was now trembling. James’ remained more or less curled up, but his knees tipped over far enough to sit atop Sherlock’s own legs under the blanket.
“I’m sorry, James.” He repeated, for a lack of anything else to say, trying to arrange them in a more purposeful embrace, rather than a proximity borne of happenstance.
It was the only thing he could think to do, to pull James close and hold him, as he shook and heaved for breath at Sherlock’s side. The man still had his head buried in his hands, fingers knotted in his own hair. His grip looked tight enough to be painful, and so Sherlock decided to try and do something about it. He didn’t want to watch James cause himself pain, couldn’t bear the thought.
“Let go.” He prompted gently, as he pried James’ fingers free as gently as he could.
With his other hand, he had begun to smooth up and down the man’s flank without much conscious thought behind the action. Still, it allowed him to keep better track of how he was breathing, feeling the rise and fall of his ribs just as well as he could listen to the sounds of his inhales and exhales.
He replaced James’ fingers in his hair with his own, and was surprised by how immediate the reaction was. James had already been pressed close against his side, but he melted when Sherlock carded softly though his curls, angling his head into the contact like a cat seeking attention. It might’ve been comical, if the circumstances hadn’t been what they were.
As it was, Sherlock simply did what he could to indulge him in silence, petting through his hair and scratching over his scalp until he could determine the exact combination of pressure, rhythm, and location that James seemed to respond to best. He catalogued what exactly made James tilt into his touch, or what made a breathy, if still-trembling sigh slip from his mouth. He experimented with short, circular motions and longer, sweeping strokes, from nape, to crown, behind the ears, and back again. He eventually landed upon what seemed to be the optimal synthesis of his observations and practical efforts thus far. He kept at it once he had figured it out.
James, in turn, remained pliant in his arms all the while, settling in with his head tucked beneath Sherlock’s chin, as he continued to run soothing touches through his friend’s hair. The man’s breathing slowly calmed from the frantic sounding hitching of earlier into a steadier, more sedate pace. What tension had been in his frame before dissolved along with the motions of Sherlock’s fingers moving through his curls. Even the way he had been shaking softened from outright shuddering into less-convulsive tremors.
It was cold enough that Sherlock suspected the temperature had as much to do with James’ shivering as his emotional state did. He was reminded suddenly, and uncomfortably, of how certain he had sounded when he’d declared earlier that it wasn’t cold enough outside to freeze. In light of what he had learned tonight, he couldn’t bear to imagine how James might’ve come to possess such knowledge with any confidence. He refused to allow himself to speculate either, not while he was still attempting to comfort James, in the aftermath of his own carelessness.
Instead, he focused on the weight of James against his side, the vague warmth of him leeching through their respective layers of clothing. He focused on how soft his curls felt beneath his fingers, how he could smell James’ cologne and pomade both from where he was sitting, chin propped atop his head.
It was a nice feeling, getting to hold James in his arms like this, if still under very unfortunate circumstances. He wished it could’ve happened differently, although he didn’t know what could’ve prompted such a thing. They were friends, certainly, but even then, closeness like this wasn’t exactly proper. He found that he couldn’t give a damn about it just then, though, as he held James close.
Eventually, the cold began to encroach upon them strongly enough that he couldn’t ignore it any longer. No matter what James had said earlier about it not being cold enough to freeze.
“Come on.” He urged gently, moving to stand and pulling James to his feet along with him.
James looked a bit dazed, when he was jarred out of the position they’d been sitting in for so long. Blinking in bewilderment, almost like a confused child. Sherlock felt badly about startling him, but not enough so to second guess his decision to move them inside.
Still, he kept a guiding arm around James’ shoulders, gathering up the blanket with his other.
“Let’s go somewhere warm.” He encouraged, as he lead the man back to the front doors of Appleton and inside.
James allowed himself to be lead quite easily, dark eyes half-lidded in a drowsy sort of way, head swaying as if he were almost asleep on his feet. Sherlock didn’t question it, he knew now that he couldn’t understand whatever torrent of emotions had overtaken the man before. Certainly not without James explaining everything to him, which he was in no condition for. Sherlock had decided he’d had quite enough of stumbling past boundaries with insensitive questions for one night, still feeling sickened with guilt for having caused James so much distress without meaning to.
Before too long, he was able to guide the man upstairs and towards his own old bedroom, pausing briefly to look in on Mother and confirm that she was tucked safely into her bed with a fire going. Once he was in his own room, he sat James down on the edge of the mattress and crouched to unlace and remove his shoes, but didn’t dare to undress him any further than that before encouraging him to lay down and covering him with the blankets. Then, he set about lighting a fire for them, to fill the room with heat.
Afterwards, he stood before the bed, looking at James laying under the blankets, eyes closed and breath coming evenly, despite the faint shivers still wracking his frame. Sherlock warred with himself for a few moments before giving in to his initial instinct and crawling onto the bed beside James, after having removed his own shoes and stripping down to his shirt and trousers.
The bed was very small, smaller than Sherlock remembered it being, although he supposed it had been years since he’d slept in it. It was far too small for a pair of grown men, in truth, but he managed to arrange himself under the sheets in such a way as to stay on the mattress without falling off, but he was forced to drape an arm across James’ middle in order to achieve it. The man gave no reaction beyond seeming to lean a bit closer toward where Sherlock lay at his side.
“I’m so sorry, James.” He whispered one last time into the steadily warming air, barely enough to be heard over the building, crackling flames behind the fireplace grate.
There was no reply, and he wondered if perhaps James had already fallen asleep. There was no way to know for certain. When they’d stayed in the theatre’s attic, after James had broken him out of prison, he had always been the one to fall asleep before James, and James had always been awake before him in the morning.
He supposed that he was simply going to have to wait for morning to come, as he settled in, arm resting over James’ middle, rising and falling with his breath as he in turn breathed in the scent of the man’s cologne and pomade from how closely their heads were arranged atop the pillow. He doubted he would be able to sleep, given all that was running though his mind. All that he’d pushed aside earlier in favour of trying to comfort James.
He resigned himself to his thoughts for the rest of the night, unpleasant as they were sure to be, but he still took what solace he could from having James at his side, beneath his arm. If nothing else, he knew that his friend was safe, and warm, and that anything else was merely a matter for Sherlock and his overactive imagination to consider, at least until the dawn.