In Blood by sick-atxxheart
Warnings: profanity, drug usage, major character death. Possibly AU in regards to timelines, but pretty canon.
Sherlock is five years old when he first completely deduces something about someone, a precocious smile lighting up his face. He announces his findings to a room filled with their parents' friends, looking up at them through dark eyelashes, bearing a skinned knee, with a childlike sense of pride and expectation of approval.
Mycroft, sitting in his best suit with gel in his hair, already trying to fit in with adults at twelve, is torn between pride and regret. Adoration of his baby brother comes easy – Sherlock had picked up deducing much more quickly than he had – but dread arrives just as readily, as Mycroft knows that the guests will not react well and Sherlock is now forever doomed to be one of those strange Holmes boys, the misfit geniuses.
When the inevitable happens and Sherlock's announcement is treated as a rude imposition rather than a display of brilliance, he is sent to his room to consider how to properly treat guests.
Mycroft watches Sherlock's face crumble, and knows that his parents' cruel indifference and disregard will be the first item on the list of why his brother considers himself abnormal.
Sherlock is ten when he tells Mycroft that he's the only friend he has. Mycroft fights to keep his face blank as he hugs his brother's small body to his chest, but inside he is thinking, We are too alike, you and I.
For Mycroft knows it's true that he doesn't have any friends, either; he has allies and enemies, and their interactions are simply examples of diplomacy at work. Even at seventeen, Mycroft the first Holmes genius is not normal. He's politically inclined, diplomatically brilliant, and severely alone.
If Mycroft, who has better people skills and can deduce things as well as Sherlock can, doesn't have friends either, what hope is there for Sherlock? He is clearly the more volatile of the two: more explosive, prone to anger, ready to fire on all pistons at a moment's notice.
A sharp burst of anger flares through Mycroft, and he takes Sherlock's hand and leads him off to play.
It is in that moment that the thought begins to cultivate in his mind, that perhaps what is right for other people is not good for him and Sherlock, the outcasts.
Caring is not an advantage.
Sherlock is fifteen, puberty and teenage attitude in full force, when the first real insults start to fly: freak, retard, mental, even ugly.
The insults, which now go beyond the loneliness that accompanied his early school days, are almost too much for Sherlock. Mycroft can see it in the way he holds his shoulders back and his head high, and yet refuses to meet eyes with anyone. His brother is soft-spoken, tentative, as if he is still trying to please everyone and realizing more and more each second that it is impossible.
Mycroft also sees the moment when he breaks.
Suddenly, there is no sullen teenage boy anymore; rather, there is an arrogant boy with pimples and flyaway hair, with knowledge to use as a source of condescension, deduction for blackmail, lying skills for bait, and what appears to be just the right amount of apathy to pull the act off.
That's what it is, of course: an act. This is Sherlock saying fuck you to those who have hurt him; this is Sherlock building walls, brick by brick, between himself and the world so that he cannot be hurt further.
It is when Mycroft finds even himself outside those walls that he realizes he cannot protect his brother forever.
Sherlock is twenty-one when their parents decide to divorce, a nasty business that is not particularly amiable on any side and appears to have no hope of improving.
It is the cliff that Mycroft had been dreading; the last straw in Sherlock's tenuous control, perhaps the one that will decide where Sherlock's brilliance will be directed.
Because Sherlock is brilliant; there's no point in denying it, and no one ever has. He has the ability to focus on a single thing with a tenacity that is unmatched, and he has regulated his mind so rigidly that he is aware of every single piece of information he puts into it.
But Sherlock's favorite word is bored, and Mycroft knows that they are entering dangerous territory, now. His schooling is not enough, research is not enough, nothing is enough.
As it turns out, at least for a while, drugs are enough.
Mycroft doesn't have as many connections as he'd like yet, and it takes him longer than he's willing to admit to track down Sherlock. It takes all of his resources and the help of a friendly Detective Inspector, Greg Lestrade, to finally locate his whereabouts.
When he does, he finds his baby brother drowning in cocaine and heroin and god knows what else, culminating in a strangely disembodied mixture of long limbs and eloquent attitude and mumbled profanity.
When Mycroft pays off all of Sherlock's dealers and drags his brother into a car headed straight for detox and rehab, he finds it hard to meet his brother's hazy, wandering eyes.
"Why couldn't you just leave me, M-Mycroft?" Sherlock mumbles, slouched over in the cab, a real touch of anger tracing through his words. "It's never going to be any different."
Mycroft stays silent, trying not to think about how fearful the idea of a stagnant, unmoving Sherlock makes him.
Sherlock is twenty-three, has been clean for eight months, and is still angry at Mycroft for taking away the one thing that made him feel normal, made his mind stop running at a million miles a millisecond.
Mycroft's mind spits out phrases like it was for your own good and I was just worried about you and please, Sherlock, for me, but instead he settles for long glares and unspoken words, falling into the trap he dug for himself thirteen years ago, being afraid of emotion.
Sherlock follows suit, their relationship falters and crumbles, and Mycroft is spiteful and angry and full of regret, knowing that getting Sherlock off drugs hadn't been enough. Sherlock had needed someone to find a solution; he had needed someone to tell him he was okay, to accept him just for a moment and let him breathe.
As much as Sherlock pushed away the idea of normal, somewhere deep inside him was still the five year old little boy looking for approval.
Sherlock is twenty-eight when he meets John Watson, an invalided army doctor, and there are car chases and tea and the immediate intake of breath of fresh air that indicates best friends for life, and Mycroft is jealous.
Not of John Watson himself; the man appears ordinary on all accounts, and yet he fascinates Sherlock so. He can keep up with the consulting detective, stay the scattered genius, calm the unpredictable waves of Sherlock's impulses with an ease Mycroft had never thought possible.
In short, he is the brother Sherlock needed, the personality that would have calmed him, that would have made his life more appropriate for a brilliant genius than that of an antisocial recluse.
Mycroft is jealous, yes; he can admit that to himself. What is harder to swallow is the sense of guilt that threatens to drown him every time John reprimands Sherlock on a particularly callous comment, or schools him once more in social niceties.
I was trying to protect him. All I did was make him cold.
Sherlock is twenty-nine when Jim Moriarty silently demands his life story in the interrogation room, and there is a quiet sense of nostalgia in the air, mixed with the softly spoken tales.
For every story of Sherlock being teased at school, of him crying in the stairwell because no one would be friends with him, there is a happy memory, too: playing pirates over the sweeping acres of the estate, studying flashcards together, Sherlock handing Mycroft a handmade birthday card with I love you, Mycroft scrawled across it in child's handwriting.
Mycroft smiles on the way home, reminiscing about a world that was not easier, perhaps not even better, but one in which he could still protect his little brother.
A world in which Sherlock still wanted to be around him.
Sherlock is thirty years old when he jumps to his death, and there is pain, and longing, and a palpable sense of guilt thrust like a knife.
There are flashes: the little boy with the skinned knee, willingly holding Mycroft's hand. The teenager, who will still grin at Mycroft's handshake and cuff on the back of the head when he achieves top marks at school. Adult Sherlock in rehab, right before their relationship crumbled, holding onto Mycroft's hand like a lifeline as his body rebelled.
And then there is the image of Sherlock jumping off that fucking building that he's only seen on videotape and the memory of telling Moriarty all of Sherlock's secrets damn him and needing to order a gravestone and the guilt the guilt the guilt and did I do enough and is this my fault and I was supposed to protect you and I'm sorry.
But most of all, through the pain and the guilt and the regret, there is one thought that overcomes all the rest.
You could have come to me, Sherlock. Did you not know that I would have done anything to help you, to protect you?
Mycroft feels like he's suffocating, and he cries.
Mycroft is thirty-seven going on what feels like eighty-six and Sherlock is dead.
Leave it to Sherlock to confirm what he has believed, almost from the start: that caring is not an advantage. If this is what caring feels like, Mycroft isn't sure he can handle it.
Because God, does this hurt.