Chapter Text
Mycroft had been six and a half when his brother was born, and he’d waited with his father, watching him as he paced the parlor.
His father's daemon, Gwen, paced behind him in perfect eighth notes with her hooved feet. When the midwife emerged from the room, he’d looked up expectantly, but instead of announcing the good news to the both of them, she’d leaned in to his father like she had a secret. The color seemed to bleed out of his father’s face, and Gwen made a startled sound.
“What’s wrong, father?” he asked, when she’d disappeared again.
“Nothing, Mycroft,” he’d said, voice low. “Your brother’s daemon is just a little ahead of schedule.” He hadn’t cut the cigars yet, so his brother didn’t exist yet. QED.
“Okay,” Mycroft said, unconvinced, and his father went back to pacing. Papagena, shaped like a possum, sat on his shoulder and fidgeted with her little paws for another two hours. His father had paced a mile before Mycroft fell asleep in his father’s armchair, Papagena perched in his hair.
In the morning, his father woke him up to show him while his mummy was still sleeping. The baby’s daemon was shaped like a kitten, and had laid tangent with him in his little crib, soft as melted butter. Mycroft had reached out to touch him – his brother, not his brother’s daemon – but she had batted at his hand anyway. He’d laughed, charmed with both of them already, and his father had ruffled his hair.
“What do you think, Mycroft?” he’d asked him, eyes shining with exhilaration behind the evidence of a long, sleepless night.
“I think he’s…” he spluttered, flushing. His father didn’t usually approve of shows of sweeping emotion, and Mycroft had felt like his heart might explode in his chest. Papagena, Mycroft’s daemon, leapt from his shoulder towards Sherlock’s crib. Mycroft’s stomach went into free-fall until she shifted into a hummingbird before she reached him and he was unspeakably relieved that she hadn't squashed him with fat paws.
“Amazing,” she’d breathed, hovering so close to his dark, fine hair that it fluttered under her.
Mycroft felt fleetingly nervous, but his father let out a booming laugh. “That’s what I thought, too.”
*
Enola learned to walk with Sherlock, a warm shadow behind him that favored the four legged mammals from the start. Her speech came slower. Sherlock babbled at her and she’d just look at him, until he was three and starting to argue to get what he wanted. His ability to get his demands met at such a formative age was quite impressive, and when Enola started chiming in, skipping the syllable building blocks in favor of full words, their success rate became frankly scary.
When the two of them weren’t united by the common goal of getting what they wanted, Enola seemed to be rather withdrawn. Enola spent most of her time sitting out of Sherlock’s reach. Sherlock privately had the sort of relationship with Papagena that he should have had with Enola.
“Sherlock,” his mother said once, in a stunned voice, “unhand Papagena this instant!” And Sherlock had, pulling his hands back from her long silky ears as if he’d been burned, eyes like globes.
“There are things I didn’t think I had to explain to you, Sherlock,” she said, voice fresh from the icebox.
He stuttered an apology, and their mother’s daemon moved to Papagena, looking her over as if she’d been hurt, and Mycroft had to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Evven at ten years old, he had found her melodrama tedious.
His mother softened as she pulled Sherlock into her arms. “Doesn’t it feel terrible when someone accidentally bumps into Enola?”
Sherlock hesitated a moment before nodding, but Mycroft could tell he was only agreeing because that seemed to be what their mother wanted. She seemed placated though, and stroked his hair with shaking fingertips. Enola sat, petulant and distanced, beneath Papa’s armchair by the fire.
Later, alone, Mycroft explained to Sherlock what he hadn’t seemed to have an innate grasp on. He hadn’t realized at that point that there was some lack in Sherlock: a hollow space where most people’s instincts lived, but now he supposed it made sense. “When you touch someone else’s daemon,” he said, trying somehow to explain a feeling that everyone else just knew, and for a second, he thought he had it: Mycroft almost described the feeling he got when Sherlock his a dissonant chord while practicing, magnified by a power, but then he remembered that little Sherlock was immune to those, too. It was why they made him practice in the old nursery, half-soundproofed as it was.
Eventually, Mycroft said, “It’s very jarring. It hurts somewhere you can’t touch.”
“I, I didn’t mean to—”
“Not with me, Sherlock; it doesn’t hurt when you touch Papagena, except, maybe don’t do it in front of mummy. But definitely not a stranger. You must never touch anyone’s daemon, Sherlock. Not if you’re not invited.”
Sherlock frowned. “Why would I want to touch anyone else’s daemon?”
So there was the miniscule relief of that. He worried constantly about nearly everything: his brother and the economy and the news and the fact that he was suddenly aware that year that his father was made out of geometry angles and hard edges, but he seemed to take after his mother, who was made of organic contours and pastries. But he didn’t have to worry that little wild-child Sherlock would pick up a strangers primate daemon because he found them so utterly fascinating.
Small miracles.
*
At eleven, Papagena and Mycroft were getting ready to go away to public school. Papagena hadn’t officially settled, but she spent so much time as a platypus that Mycroft was warming to the idea that it might be permanent. His father, of course, wasn’t particularly pleased, and reminded him with embarrassing regularity that it wasn’t the Holmes way to let people know how singular you were from a hundred paces.
Mycroft fount himself caught in the duality of agreeing with his father and being secretly pleased with Papagena for edging towards a form his father thought made him look “singular.”
She’d caught on first, actually, that there was something fundamentally wrong with Enola. “Mycroft,” she said, in her low, sweet voice. “We shouldn’t leave Sherlock.”
Mycroft didn’t want to leave Sherlock, but he did want to leave the day-school behind, as his father often reminded him, he was nearly too old for all of his childishness. He pretended he couldn’t hear her and kept his eyes trained on A Brief History of Time. “Mycroft!” She barked, landing her bill against his bare chest like an open handed smack. “Your brother’s daemon does not like him.”
“You’re being dramatic, Papagena,” he said, eyes scanning the same line over and over again, but he couldn’t seem to parse the meaning. “Everyone bickers. Even mummy and father.”
“They don’t bicker,” she said, and suddenly the weight on his bed changed and he rolled towards her. It had probably been her intention, he realized: she’d shifted into a deer very similar to his father’s daemon. “She rarely even talks to him. There is something very, very broken there.” He wanted to deny it, but some part of him was convinced it was true, and that part of him spent most of its time with Sherlock.
Their father died that year, postponing his boarding indefinitely, and Mummy seemed to expect him to know what to do with Sherlock when he became a howling thing. And he was, often, a howling thing. Sherlock would descend into shrieking insanity, and all Mycroft could do was wait it out. He would sit on the kitchen floor with Sherlock, or on his bed, or in the garden with Sherlock and he rolled and cried and had his meltdown over whatever it was that has sent Sherlock into a tailspin.
“Sherlock, Sherlock,” Papagena crooned, climbing right on top of him on her goofy flippers. “Darling boy, what’s wrong?”
Sherlock would hold her tightly while Mycroft sat a few feet off, watching intently. Watching Sherlock treat Papagena like a grubby ted he could drag around by the ears which his own daemon perched atop his wardrobe with ramrod posture gave Mycroft a nebulous, humid feeling in his chest.
Mycroft, by then, was old enough to have observed by then that nothing about them was completely normal. He’d never met anyone who’s daemon kept so much distance between themselves and their human, for one; at least, not that wasn’t necessitated by their size or circumstance. For another, Sherlock touching his daemon didn’t bother him like he thought it should.
In private, and away from Mummy, Sherlock essentially treated Papagena like his own. And Mycroft didn’t mind. Papagena liked being scratched between the ears when she had ears and her flippers being rubbed when she had flippers; Mycroft found that when Sherlock saw to those things, Mycroft felt the same sense of warmth that he might feel if he’d leaned down to tap on her himself. It didn’t hurt that Sherlock looked so happy with her that it always made Mycroft realize how lonely he must be during the day, with only their grieving mother for company.
“Sherlock,” Papagena said once, when they were all four in their father’s study. “be a love and fetch me your fathers globe.”
Sherlock, who was only five at the time, smiled sweetly at her. “If you would settle on something with an opposable thumb, Pap, you wouldn’t need me to fetch for you.”
“Ah,” she said, “That is true, Sherlock, but then who would I teach to read latitude and longitude to after I’d pulled the globe down all by myself?”
Sherlock, delighted, leapt for his father’s desk, which they’d left untouched like a shrine. He had practically climb on the desk. Mycroft watched them over the top of the newspaper for a few moments before he was assured that Papagena was hovering below him in case he lost his footing. Enola, from the corner of the room, let out a huff. The sound made his blood run cold. Papagena’s voice in his head, “there is something very, very broken…”
And Papagena’s voice in the study, “First Sherlock, find me London...”
*
When Sherlock Holmes, age six, mastered writing, the mystery was gone.
After the basic format of writing words in order became tedious, (a new word Mycroft heard often that year) Sherlock started organizing everything he ever wrote alphabetically by first letter of each word in a sentence and then shredding the individual words until they were ordered sequentially. He kept notes on everything he experienced in a little notebook that said ABEINOORSSTV on the front, like his whole life was a case study.
Mycroft watched him write, in the early days of this trend, when he was curious about it. Sherlock, curls askew like a wild thing, hunched over his notebook at the table, wrote so fluidly that for a moment, Mycroft was convinced that he’d already become bored of his newest habit and had gone back to writing words in the vowel-skeleton shapes the OED had them down under.
When he crept in for a closer look, he was wrong. “Can I see this?” he asked in low voice, and Sherlock handed him the whole book, almost luminous with his excitement.
“This is very clever, Sherlock,” Mycroft told him, his eyes glued to the page for a long moment. “You misspelled something in here, though.”
“There’s no way you can tell that fast,” Sherlock says, half amused and half petulant. Impish, Mycroft realized. The word could have been invented for him. His face shifted into a look Mycroft recognizes as prove it, which is the only way Mycroft can convince Sherlock to believe anything.
Mycroft pointed it out to him and made him get out the OED to verify while Enola snickered.
A month later, mummy comes across his AVEUBIIRSSTV notebook, and flipped through it casually. “What am I looking at, Sherlock?” she asked, puzzled.
He smiled up at her, face like a Botticelli angel, and lied through his teeth: “Just pretending, Mummy.”
Enola flew up to the table as soon as Mummy put it down, and shredded it with her frankly ferocious claws in a matter of a few seconds. Sherlock looked small and terrified for a moment, and looked to Mycroft in his moment of panic, eyes filling with tears. Papagena, a badger at the time, grabbed Enola by the neck with her pointed teeth and shook her around.
“Mycroft!” Mummy screeched, and Roland lept onto the table as well to thump Pap on the back of the head with his great paw.
Papagena spat her out, then, but she didn’t look at Mummy or apologize to Roland like he’d expected her to. Instead, she barred her teeth at Enola until she quivered, and then demanded: “Apologize.”
She repeated it woodenly, a word divorced from its meaning. “Apologize,” she said, looking at Sherlock with a cool gaze. Mycroft had to be sent to his room without supper, but his anger curbed his appetite anyway.
*
Mycroft, nearly thirteen years old, somehow had become his mother’s co-parent.
There is always something. Sherlock’s room was connected to a place in the foyer that acted as a convenient intercom for mummy to unload her disappointments about Sherlock without acknowledging him or having to look at the obvious disconnect of his soul. She always seems unsettled by Enola’s posture and position in relation to Sherlock: spiny, feathered, or furred back to him, eyes on the other humans in the room instead of other daemons. Sherlock at seven years old spends slightly less time throwing full on tantrums as the grief bleeds away, but he’s still a tropical storm.
Some days he barely gets in the door before his mother is steering him to the part of the house that makes his stomach clench in preemptive anxiety. Papagena usually slinks off to comfort and distract Sherlock from what they both know is coming. “I had to go down to the school again today,” she’d sigh.
“Ah,” he’d say, inquiring but not zealous, always always aware of the little boy who was probably huddled under his vent, head tilted up as if taking his penance.
“Fighting, again,” she’d sigh. Roland curled around her shoulders, an ocelot painted in tense lines. Roland always seemed to be tense since father passed. His tail twitched in short, annoyed flicks. “He’s seven years old, Mycroft, what am I supposed to do?”
Well, Mycroft thinks, you could talk to him instead of sighing into his bedroom through the woodwork.
Mycroft is only twelve, so instead he says, “I’ll talk to him, mother.”
Papagena is not amused, when he gets to Sherlock’s room.
He knows Papagena is not amused because she has shifted into something Mycroft doesn’t recognize: like an artichoke with claws. Claws which she currently has pressed against Enola’s windpipe. Enola, beneath her, is squirming her little rabbit body in all directions to escape the hold.
“Pap!” Mycroft screeches, voice cracking humiliatingly, and she turns to look at him, steel in her eyes. “What are you doing!”
Sherlock is face down in his pillow, not even looking. The tips of his ears are red on either side of his messy curls, and the pit of him has to feel the bruise of Papagena’s brutal hold.
“This little shit,” she hisses, which is strange, because Mycroft has never sworn before. Mycroft physically lifts her off of Enola before things go too far and sets her back on the floor. She immediately scampers onto Sherlock’s bed, nuzzling between his neck and the mattress. She practically disappears, and Mycroft doesn’t know what’s happened, but he trusts himself. He glares at Enola. “Explain.”
She resolutely doesn’t look at him.
Mycroft doesn’t touch Enola as often as Sherlock touches Papagena, but he picks her up now, swiftly, with firm hands, and does something extraordinarily undignified: he stuffs her in the hamper, and closes the latch.
“Sherlock, sit up please.”
After a few moments, Mycroft thought he might have to repeat himself, but eventually his little brother pushed himself off the bed with one elbow, the other arm still firmly wrapped around Pap. His face was flushed, and Mycroft could read some of his day in the details of his scuffed shoes, damp neck, scraped cheek and rumpled blazer. “Why would you pick a fight with an older boy? And,” another glance down to the hem of his trousers, his coat tails, fingertips, inkstained and spindly, “so close to the end of the day?”
“I didn’t,” he snuffled, glaring accusingly at the hamper. Before, Enola had obviously been systematically scratching and shredding all four walls of her wicker prison, but now she went suspiciously silent.
“Enola picked a fight with someone else’s daemon?”
“No!” Sherlock huffed, jumping to his feet so emphatically that his hair bounced around his head for a few moments like a wild thing. Sherlock looked like a wild thing. “She keeps talking to other people, Mycroft, it’s…” Sherlock spluttered off, but Mycroft could hear it all the same. Holmes men, they didn’t admit to being humiliated; they waited it out and plotted and they cut the other person off at the legs when they were given the opportunity.
“… do the other kids… talk back?” Mycroft knew that good manners kept people from interacting with other people’s daemons as a general rule, and vice versa, but good manners were not always fully developed in six year olds.
“Yes!” Sherlock’s little fists were clenched so tightly that he was shaking. “They like her! They like her because they gang up on me!”
Mycroft didn’t know what to do with that one. And then it crystalized into clarity: Sherlock, who was small for his age, and brilliant and sad, and desperate to make friends but didn’t know how, had a daemon who was all of those things but did. And she did so by bypassing Sherlock, and making him the common enemy with other humans. Mycroft’s whole brain was spluttering.
“Sherlock, you cannot tell Mummy. She’ll send you away.”
Sherlock, small and miserable, composed himself enough to look at Mycroft like he was a complete idiot, which was heartening, at least. “Of course not. What could Mummy do about it?”
Summer was almost there, and Mycroft’s heart thudded in his chest like a wild thing, sped on by secrets and adrenaline, and he told Sherlock, “I am going to figure this out.”
And Sherlock said, “Okay, Mycroft.”
Papagena didn’t change again after that. Mycroft identified her in short order as a pangolin, and he wished his father was around to answer his questions: what did that mean about him? Would he still have found it singular?
Sherlock, for his part, thought she was wonderful and demanded that Mycroft take him into town to the library to find the proper reading material.
*
Summer came shortly after, and for a little while, everything was golden. He took Sherlock out to the park and Enola chased after ducks, shifting midair into something more suitable for swimming than her hare form. Papagena followed closely on Sherlock’s heels, and strangers didn’t know the difference.
He taught Sherlock to watch, and which details were throwaway or anomalies and which ones would yield relevant information. “Those two girls are of some relation,” Mycroft would quiz him, “what do you think?”
Sherlock was a quick study. As summer drew to a close, his guesses became both more plentiful and more creative. The day he responded to a ("it's too cold for American shorts. Tell me about her.") question with a diagnosis: hyperthyroid syndrome, could make her feel hot all the time, and look how far her hipbones jut! Mycroft felt a warm surge of mingled pride and affection.
He was teaching Sherlock to put together all of the clues, though, and dismiss the irrelevant, so he couldn’t congratulate him just yet. He affected a scoff. “Skinny is very chic right now, Sherlock.”
To which Sherlock gave her a second look and pronounced: “The outfit, in its entirety is very unattractive in extremely obvious ways. If it was about fashion, she could find shoes that don’t clash with her top.”
The theory was not what Mycroft personally suspected about the young woman in question, but Sherlock was seven years old. It was all very promising.
*
It was difficult to come to terms with the fact that Enola was part of Sherlock’s soul because Mycroft loved Sherlock, and with Enola, he sort of … didn’t. It didn’t seem normal that half of his soul would be so unimpressed with the rest of it.
At thirteen, Mummy told him how very sorry she was that she’d let her grief steer his education plan off course.
“Come September,” she informed him, smiling, “you’ll be at Eton, like your father.”
Mycroft was excited for himself, but anxious for the little boy that waited on the steps for him to get home from school. Who came home from his own primary school with the joy of felons being released from solitary confinement.
He knew the rules of the game he played called “dutiful son/ doting mother” encouraged him to say thank you and move on with his day, but he couldn’t seem to make his tongue work. Finally, he pushed a question out of his mouth, tongue suddenly leaden and dry like a dead slug: “What about Sherlock?”
“Oh darling,” she said, pulling him close. Within arm’s reach, she seemed delicate, like a pressed flower. “It’s sweet that you worry about your brother, but he’ll be fine.”
He’d never heard her say anything like that before, and he studied her face intently. On close inspection, she seemed to believe it. “How do you know?”
“Because I’m your mother,” she smiled, carding her fingers through his hair, “and you’re a child. It’s not your job to worry, Mycroft.”
Of course, it was Mycroft’s job to worry. She’d been asking him to worry for years now. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and in September, he left for Eton. Sherlock wrote him letters, sometimes in alphabetical order, but he grew out of that infatuation quickly enough. Mycroft wrote back in codes, and could read more in the time it took his brother to get back to him than in what he actually said to him. He was miserable, he wasn't making friends, he missed his brother terribly. He said little of that, instead keeping to lists he'd made a types of bees, times he heard mother swear at him, what he thought about other people's settled daemon's forms.
At his first break, he came home excited to see his brother and to teach him the rules of yarder cricket, which he was pants at, but his seven year old brother wouldn’t have known that.
*
At Christmas, Sherlock seemed sullen and unshowered and Mycroft couldn't get him to engage in any of the interesting things he wanted to tell him about, and instead had to content himself with sitting in the nursery with a Sherlock who held his bow like he was posturing for a fight, tense little eyebrows looking so far out of place on his sweet little face. Near the end, Sherlock hit a cluster of notes that set his teeth on edge until Enola snarled: enough already and Sherlock said, "Are you sorry yet, Mycroft?"
Mycroft said, "Of course I am," and Sherlock seemed to collapse under the weight of his own relief, his bow hitting the ground with an artificial sound, but he set his violin down gently. Mycroft looked at Enola accusingly. "You could have let me know you wanted an apology."
"I didn't," she said, condescendingly, but crept closer to him all the same. "I happen to know you were at school, not having adventures."
He reached down to scratch Enola between the ears for the first time in months and she purred under his fingertips as Sherlock glared at her sullenly from his spot on the floor. "Besides," she muttered, self satisfied, "you can't possibly have done anything exciting; you got fat."
Sherlock laughed so hard he started choking on his own spit, and Mycroft picked up Papagena and went to his room, feeling betrayed and angry.
*
On boxing day, he gave Sherlock a complicated snake-bite puzzle box, and his mother arranged for him to have a tour of an apiary south of London and Sherlock and Enola seemed to have reached some sort of truce forged of their mutual excitement on the subject of bees.
At the apiary, she eventually got them kicked out by shifting into a bee-form and trying to see the colony from the inside, but Mycroft noticed that she'd waited until the tour was almost over. On the way home, ignoring the scolding they were recieving from their mother, Sherlock and Enola shared conspiritorial whispers. When he had to go back to school, Mycroft apologized again. "It's just school, Sherlock. It's one of those important things. You'll go off, too, when you're older."
"I know," Sherlock had huffed. "And I'm sorry Enola was rude to you."
"Well, to be fair," Mycroft allowed, "I have sort of gotten fat." Both of their daemons were underfoot, and fleetingly, out of context, they looked so ordinary: Papagena playfully nipping at Enola's toes, Enola trying to climb aboard Papagena's back. They looking like siblings, not Holmeses. He left him feeling less worried about Sherlock than he could remember.
*
The last day of term, his mother was unavoidably detained dealing with Sherlock, so she sent a driver to pick him up.
On the way home, Pap sat on the seat next to him, strapped in with her little harness she thought was undignified, and didn’t even complain about it like she did during car rides that didn’t culminate in seeing Sherlock.
When the driver dropped him off, Mycroft thanked him and let himself in. He could immediately hear Sherlock, somewhere in the house, doing his best impression of a train whistle, piercing the usual oppressive silence of the Holmes house. Mycroft was running before he has time to consult with his reasoning brain, or the memory of his father who valued subtlety and discretion above all else, or even Papagena because she was bounding forward on all of her paws, too, in time to burst into the old nursery where Sherlock was clawing at his own curls from the floor, face red and blotchy, and his mother looked frankly, somewhere south of furious. She doesn’t even look at them when the door opens, as focused as she in on Sherlock when she screamed, “IT WORKED FOR YOUR FATHER.” And Sherlock howled at the same time, “I’M NOT GOING BACK, I WON’T, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.”
Then Mummy’s eyes fell on Mycroft and her expression shuttered. “Oh, hello dear,” she said demurely, and Sherlock scrambled to his feet, lurching off-balance as he launched himself at his brother. “Mycroft,” he howled, his face pressing into Mycroft’s soft stomach, “you can’t leave again.”
Papagena clawed at Sherlock’s trouser leg, needing to look him over for damage, but he didn’t budge. “Mycroft,” he sobbed again, and Mycroft realized with a stifled gag that there was already a substantial amount of snot on his school blazer.
“Your brother is being dramatic,” she sighed. “Sherlock, go to your room, so your brother and I can talk.”
“I am not!” Sherlock’s voice was small and heartbroken, and Mycroft wanted an answer now.
“Sherlock started therapy last week, for his problems.”
“Thomas Edison only did it to criminals,” he mumbled, “and he said no, at first, until it worked with his—” Sherlock hiccupped, softly, three times. “—smear campaign.”
A lead ball dropped in Mycroft’s stomach: he’d taught Sherlock about that. “You’re letting them electrocute Sherlock?” he whispered, hands clutching his brother tightly against him as if he were suddenly worried that Sherlock might scurry off.
“Not you too,” she sighed. “It’s a medical procedure.” And then she added, cutting her eyes between Sherlock and Enola, who was currently a large bird of prey sitting on the windowsill, not involved in the scene at all: “it gives them a common enemy.”
That caught her attention. Enola’s eyes flashed nastily. “I think I have enough of those, don’t you?”
Mycroft didn’t generally agree with Sherlock’s daemon, but felt fleetingly proud of her. Sherlock was seven years old, but Enola sounded fierce, undaunted. He'd spent his whole life coaching Sherlock into seeming ordinary: into not letting anyone see the glimpses into his broken brain, into his strange relationship with his daemon, which was something like an amputated limb, if limbs were prone to hate you after they were no longer attatched. Now, he felt so angry that it didn't matter. She could see how truly wrong Sherlock's daemon was.
He sent his mother a frosted glare, picked Sherlock up – he was an awkward bundle in Mycroft’s arms – and turned on his heel as gracefully as he was able. “Come along, Enola,” he said, heading for his room. He knew if she tried to fight with him, Papagena would pick her up by the back of the neck, but for once she had the sense to follow him, leaving their mother gaping.