Written for Tumblr's "Let's Write Sherlock" Challenge 3, stories inspired by songs. This was inspired by the song "Superpowers" by Dismemberment Plan. It's very strange, and a large departure from my usual stuff.
Trigger warnings: light mentions of drug addiction, references to prostitution, and description child molestation (not too graphic, fairly brief) - none of these acts are perpetrated by Mycroft, in case you were concerned.
Mycroft Holmes drifts, lost in cold light. He cannot move, cannot see, blinded by the endless brightness. A rumble, felt rather than heard. Another, and then another, until they are coming so fast that they become one continuous jolting rattle. And Mycroft feels a consciousness, pressing against his own. It is so different, so alien, that if he had corporeal form Mycroft would be screaming and jabbering and clawing at his own face to escape the horror. But he does not, so instead he can only do his best to harden his mind against the putrid caress of the other.
When he wakes, he laughs until he weeps and weeps until he laughs again. Once he is able to stop, face wet with tears and cheeks aching, he wonders whether he is going mad. He thinks the answer is probably yes.
blink
The day his partner cheated on him, he was swept with a sudden unexplained wave of cold fury as he sat in a meeting with the ambassador of Israel. The feeling was so intense that for a moment he thought he was going to pass out, and for a much longer moment after that he was afraid he was going to lash out and attack the ambassador. He managed to hold onto himself, keep his face smooth and his emotions in check long enough to complete the meeting and reach a satisfactory resolution to the problem at hand. Then he excused himself and fled to his hotel room, where he sat and shook for over an hour, still with no idea why. His partner was in America at the time, attending a conference on international relations. He did not learn what had transpired until months later, and then was able to pinpoint the exact moment that it had occurred.
blink
He was only a child when it began. He was frightened by what he saw and felt, frightened by the things that were so terribly realistic and by the things that were so horribly not, frightened by the intensity of the dreams. So he went to his mother seeking comfort, as frightened children do. He told her about the visions, about the creatures with beaks and tentacles that silently spoke to him in the screaming voices of a million children, about the feelings that blasted him sometimes, emotions not his own, about the sense that he is being watched by something huge and arrogant and other, about the dream of his father and a strange lady wrestling and grunting without their clothes on. And his mother had laughed, laughed right in his face.
"Superpowers!" she had shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him until he could not hold back his tears. "That's what they are! Superpowers! You and me both, my darling! But I'll tell you something else, sweetheart. No one will ever save the world with these powers!" And then she released him and collapsed to the ground, laughing and weeping at the same time, until the housekeeper came in and helped her away.
Mycroft did not stop crying for hours.
The next day he learned that he was expecting a baby brother.
blink
Mycroft tosses and turns, unable to find a comfortable position on his bed. He sleeps so rarely, he thinks, that to be unable when he finally surrenders to the need is horribly unfair. He bunches his pillow beneath his head and rolls over again, Egyptian cotton sheets rasping against his skin like sandpaper. He forces himself to lie still, breathing evenly, his eyes closed, and counts prime numbers until he can feel his mind start to unclench. Just before he drifts to off sleep, a phantom sensation; the cool caress of satin, shifting and slipping across his back and legs…
blink
He cowers back against an undefined surface, screams echoing around him. The body in front of him writhes, twisting in agony and wracked with bone-snapping tremors. Longer, louder, horrible piercing shrieks of pain stabbing at his ears. He covers them with his hands, but it does absolutely nothing to decrease the sound. The scream builds to a terrible inhuman crescendo and then stops, completely, instantly. The silence is nearly painful in its absence. And as he watches, still crouched in the corner where he fell, the being sits up, eyes wide and empty, and steps off the cold steel table…
blink
He often dreams of real things, true things, sometimes things that are valuable to know and sometimes things that are completely useless. Less often, he dreams of things that feel real, feel true, but are so far from the reality he knows that his mind bends under the strain of containing the images.
One night while he is sleeping he sees his little brother, Sherlock, being led into the stables by the cook's son. Sherlock is as he is in reality, a skinny seven-year-old, tall for his age, pale, his hair a messy rat's nest of uncombed dark curls. The cook's son, Jeremy, is older, around Mycroft's age; maybe fourteen. He is short and spotty and greasy, his hair a lank dirty blond. And as Mycroft watches, held in the vision and unable to move, even to look away, he sees the older boy pull down his pants and withdraw his erect penis. Sherlock approaches, expression curious. Jeremy says something, and Sherlock shakes his head. He reaches out and touches the other boy's penis, perfunctory like he is examining a new type of plant, and in his head Mycroft is screaming but still he can do nothing. Jeremy shudders and speaks again as Sherlock moves his hand, sliding the foreskin back, leaning in close to study the head. Then Sherlock drops his hand and starts to turn away, apparently done with his examination. Jeremy grabs his shoulder, hard, and spins him back around, shaking him. Sherlock looks frightened. Mycroft is trying as hard as he can to reach out, to intervene and stop this travesty, but he cannot. Then he jerks awake, the vision shattering like glass in his head.
He flies out of bed before he can think, pelting down the corridor to Sherlock's room. He throws open the door and turns on the light, and there is Sherlock, blinking blearily at him, face smooshed from sleep.
Mycroft leaps across the room, hugs him close. Sherlock fights, of course, and twists from Mycroft's grasp. And Mycroft starts babbling, telling Sherlock that Jeremy is a bad person, that Sherlock is never to follow him to the stables, never to go anywhere with him at all, never to speak with him unless there are other people around. His heart rate is calming down now, with Sherlock here safe in bed. Until Sherlock speaks.
"He took me out to the stables last week. He showed me his penis, which was interesting. I've never seen one hard like that. He wanted me to put it in my mouth, though, and I didn't want to."
"What…" Mycroft has to swallow before he can say anymore. He wants to weep. "What happened?"
"I told him no. He tried to make me, so I kicked him and ran away. He told me not to tell anyone, but I don't care what he says."
Mycroft swallows his heart back down and tells Sherlock he did well, that he should never let anyone force him to do anything he does not want to do. He asks Sherlock to avoid further investigations of genitals until he is older, in order to avoid risking similar situations in the future, and Sherlock agrees readily enough, not wanting to repeat the experience.
That is the night Mycroft finally realizes the truth about his visions. They are not prophetic. They are of events that have already happened, things that can no longer be changed or undone. Mycroft has visions of the past.
blink
Sometime he is overrun by emotions that are clearly apart from him, and there is nothing he can do about it. Twice he has been overcome with weeping fits with no explanation. The first time he was able to excuse himself from his meeting before the tears started to fall, and although his sudden departure was noticed, he was able to keep the reason hidden. The second time he was at home, and simply retreated to his bedroom. He wept and wept, for hours each time, awash with soul-wrenching sadness. He has never been able to identify the source of these incidents.
blink
Mycroft hangs in darkness. He cannot move, cannot turn, or possibly he can but it is irrelevant because all is darkness and nothing is changed. He can feel himself, but he cannot move his limbs, cannot touch his body with his hands. He knows this space, and so he does nothing, just waits for it to begin. A tickling sensation on the back of his neck. As always. The feeling makes him shudder, whether in pleasure or revulsion he has never been able to tell. Possibly both. The sensation increases until he can feel the distinct press of lips and tongue, and then slides down the length of his spine. Over and over, as he hangs in the dark, motionless and trapped. When he wakes, he knows he will have an aching erection. It happens every time. And, just like every time, he will ignore it until it goes away, because he refuses to dignify this unwelcome intrusion with even that much of his attention.
blink
A vast plain, perfectly flat and stretching out in all directions. Littered with huge red boulders, colossal chunks of rock, split and shattered, spread across the vast flat expanse as if thrown there by an enormous giant during a fit of temper. In the distance, a single spire, silver and narrow and impossibly tall, juts up from the plain. The purple sky is painted dark with swirling grey masses of clouds, but the air is still and heavy with potential. From the tower, shimmering indigo light flashes and pulses. The light reaches inside of Mycroft and tugs at him, resonating with some part of his soul and drawing him forward. If he listens, he can almost hear voices, crystal clear and indescribably beautiful, singing from within the light. He does not listen. He stands firm, unmoved, and resists the draw. In this, only this, he is being offered a choice, and his choice is to remain apart, to ignore the call.
It is more difficult each time he comes here.
blink
Joy, bubbling effervescent joy, overflowing, filling his heart and his soul and spilling out onto his face in a wash of tearful smiles. He cannot contain it, any more than he could contain the weeping, and he grins helplessly at his assistant. When she asks, confused, why he is so pleased following the disastrous meeting he just concluded, all he can do is throw back his head and laugh joyfully at the ceiling. This is the first time one of his irregularities has been observed, and Mycroft is grateful that it is she who sees it. She can be trusted. He laughs again, still; just laughs and laughs, helpless, until the tears run freely down his face.
blink
More than once he has tried to simply stop sleeping all together, in a desperate bid to avoid the visions. The longest he has managed is just shy of two weeks, and by the end of that time he was hallucinating badly. Just hallucinations, though, clearly unreal and disordered snippets of sensory information. Nothing like his visions, which ring so true because they are. Despite the pain, he counts that as a success. However, the unintended consequence of these bouts of wakefulness is that, once he does finally fall asleep, he will sleep for days. Sometimes the sleep is dreamless and devoid of visions, but. Sometime it is not.
blink
A stunning woman sits on the edge of a canopy bed draped in white silk. She sighs as she leans back, shaking her hair out from the tight curls in which it has been confined, and it falls in a cascade of glossy brown behind her. She kicks off her shoes, letting them fall where they will, and then rises again. Humming quietly, she twists to reach the zip on her gown and tugs it down until the fabric slips down her arms, revealing a sheer camisole and lacey knickers. She steps out of the gown and picks it up with care, walking across the room with weary steps to hang it gently on a waiting hanger. Then she grasps the bottom of the camisole and begins to pull it up over her head…
blink
Strolling through Regent's Park, enjoying the rare fine weather. He has just stopped to admire the view, flowers and pond and ducklings, when a sudden sound rends the air. It is impossibly loud, a sharp crack that blasts across the world, driving Mycroft to his knees, head clutched in both hands. When it stops, echoes dying away gradually, Mycroft raises his head and looks around. People wander past, sparing him confused glances where he kneels in the grass in his bespoke suit with his hands over his ears. A child points, and her parents shush her and move away, throwing concerned glances back over their shoulders. Immediately, Mycroft climbs to his feet and moves quickly in another direction. As he walks he cannot escape the sensation that the world beneath his feet is… looser, somehow, than it was before. A bit more tenuous, a bit less certain.
When he climbs into the car waiting for him near Baker Street, his assistant gives him a curious look. He ignores it.
blink
Mycroft waits for years for Sherlock to come to him with the visions, but he never does.
The first time Sherlock looks at something and sees everything there is to make his deductions, Mycroft is shocked. How can someone see all of that? Sherlock is still a child, and bright and curious though he is he does not yet have the world experience to comprehend everything he sees, but somehow he knows anyway. The human mind has filters built in, mechanisms that allow an individual to focus on whatever they believe to be the most relevant and important pieces of information to the exclusion of all else. Sherlock, it seems, lacks these filters. He sees absolutely everything. Always. When he comes to Mycroft for help, their mother long having been taken away to an environment better for her health (Mycroft understands that this is code for mental hospital), what he begs for is a way to turn it off, to make the overwhelming slew of information stop just for a few minutes so that he can rest.
Mycroft has no help to give. This is not a problem he has had to overcome, and the strategies he has created for himself will not apply. So he offers Sherlock the only advice he can think of, which is to find a way to store the information, to organize it. If he does not have those filters naturally, he will have to make his own. Sherlock accepts this in all seriousness, his little face scrunched up as he concentrates.
It is not until years later that Mycroft understands what is happening to Sherlock. He does in fact have "superpowers", just like Mycroft and Mummy. But where they have visions of the past, visions of what has been, Sherlock is different. He sees the present. Sherlock has visions of what is.
blink
An airport toilet. After a moment of consideration, he identifies it by the color scheme and the layout as being located in the international terminal at Heathrow. A man enters, and Mycroft recognizes him. A Member of the House of Commons, well-known and publicly respected. Influential. He enters a stall but does not latch it. A moment later another man enters. Young. Very young. And skinny. Scratching at his neck and his shoulders, over and over. He slips into the same stall, and the MP passes him a small bundle of notes. He unbuckles his belt…
blink
He is screaming, and he cannot stop. Pain wracks him, unimaginable pain, filling his bones with fire and his skin with acid. It is like nothing he has ever felt before, obliterating his thoughts and robbing his breath. All he can do is scream and twist in a desperate futile attempt to escape the writhing torment. His security team calls an ambulance and he is rushed to the hospital, where doctors work to identify the cause of his agony. He would laugh, if he could in the face of this pain. He wants to tell them not to bother, wants to beg them to simply knock him unconscious until it stops. Because the truth is, there is no cause. This pain is not his.
blink
Mycroft never forgets his mother's words. No one will ever save the world with these powers, she had said. But he tries, because he wants to believe that there is a reason for all this suffering. So he pursues a career in politics, and he works and works and works until he has the power he needs to get things done. At first, his visions are more a hindrance than a help, but as time passes he finds way to use them to his advantage.
He sees things, sometimes, that he can use to put pressure where he needs it to further his own agenda. An MP purchasing the services of an underage, drug addicted prostitute; a member of the Royal Family with a predilection for petty theft; a foreign ambassador's affair. Mycroft is skilled at collecting these little bits of information, saving them until such time that he needs a favor, needs a vote to go a certain way, needs a word in the right ear.
And he can use his more mundane powers, those granted to him through his job, to help and support Sherlock. Sherlock, who does not know about Mycroft's visions, about the source of his own unique skills. He has struggled, trying to find a way to control his own visions before they overwhelm him, and Mycroft was not able to provide much help. The only help he could offer, forcing Sherlock to overcome his dependence on chemical assistance before it completely ruined him, drove his brother out of his life for good.
But nevertheless, Mycroft will persist. Because, though he might not be able to save the world with his powers, sometimes he believes Sherlock can.
blink
On the plain, red-orange boulders looming above him, ominous. The tower is closer, sending out a continuous pulse of indigo light that batters against the walls of his mind with its siren song. Above him the clouds churn, and a razor wind whips between the rocks, tearing at his clothes and his flesh.
He stands in place, feeling the voices within the light seeping into his mind, calling him, tempting him, pulling him; he hears his mother's voice among them. He stands firm against the wind, fights the draw, fights it with everything he has, as sweat pops out on his brow and the voices rise to a scream in his ears.
He will not succumb. Not yet.
Yes, this was deliberately ambiguous, and I would love to hear people's interpretations of it. Also, if you listen to the song, this is an extremely accurate representation. I literally did a paragraph for each lyric, plus a few extras to fill in Mycroft's personal story. I did rearrange the order of them, though, to make the story flow better.