Disclaimer: All characters were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and have been gloriously portrayed by many artists over the years. I intend no harm, and make no money. There are references in this vignette to the events of a specific Doyle short story, "The Greek Interpreter." This piece is a character study. Thanks for reading.
Strangers
The bay window of the Stranger's Room remained his favorite haunt; so far only his brother had caught the joke. The Diogenes interiors had been surrendered to committee design, and inelegant plaques over various doors directed silent visitors to 'Newspapers,' 'Refreshments,' and finally 'Strangers.' On his first visit, Sherlock's nervous stride had faltered for a moment in the hallway; he'd rounded the last door with irony curled, pleasant and domestic, behind his eyes.
Mycroft Holmes was a stranger to no one.
Sherlock, he knew, functioned best amid details. He walked through crowds picking out professions, diseases, domestic habits…crimes. The minutiae of daily life laid out a trail for logic to follow, and his sharp eyes never deviated, never lifted, from that path. Mycroft had raised his eyes so long ago that he hardly remembered a time when logic's elegant lines had set the boundaries of movement.
He had learned to think, in silence, for himself in the drowsy parlors and crooked dirt roads of their childhood parish. He had taken his time, telling no one his methods or conclusions, musing freely without recognition or the fear of error. He had been wrong often at first, before he had seen enough of life to recognize the multitude of possibilities clustered behind each detail. It had been mildly frustrating, though he never invested overmuch in private mental games; but the exhilaration of learning to balance probabilities had ruined him for life. He could not be happy in the countryside; he'd had to find more variables, more data to entwine in patterns of intuition which leapt the safe and placid bounds of rational certainty.
Sherlock had never worked in silence, and had learned too young to dread mistakes. Crushed by every childish misstep, he fiercely suppressed emotional intuition and clung to careful and limited causal chains. He mastered the details as Mycroft never had, but his deductions drew men and events in outline. Mycroft reached deeper.
He knew the strangers he watched through the window; their smallest gestures, their most fleeting expressions combined with the wealth of incidental data they scattered behind them to create a totality, a human being. Mycroft did not shy from meeting them at every level, from motive and character to thought and emotion; quicksilver impressions carried him beyond the protective circuits of cause and effect upon which Sherlock relied. Mycroft encountered concrete facts as banners blazing across his vision, so inescapable he could hardly be bothered to collect them. It was the hazy, insubstantial tells that drew him in, the subtle shifts in behavior, the concatenation of innumerable individualities into mass movements which redirected the course of events.
Mycroft was a student of human nature; there was no choice for him but politics.
Sherlock chose criminal justice, a field suited to his strengths. The profession demanded elimination of all reasonable doubt; in the eyes of the law, matters which did not admit of proof had no standing at all. Logic reigned supreme, and speculation was worse than useless; it was dangerous. For officers of the law, there was nothing more painful than to know what could not be proven.
Yet Sherlock had an artist's blood, no matter how hard he sought to crush unruly inspirations, and every now and then a flash of insight leant him dreadful certainty; he could feel the truth of guilt or motive in his bones, dictated by an overwhelming probability which could never carry conviction in court. He came to Mycroft sometimes in such moments, troubled and turbulent, wearing himself out in thrashing struggles of conscience and abortive, trailing cycles of guilt-ridden lassitude.
Soon enough, he began to break the law. Mycroft had long suspected matters might reach such a pass; Sherlock must have anticipated it, too, or else deceived himself into believing that his decision to remain free of official oaths and institutions had been merely a matter of temperament. Mycroft understood all this, and even approved, but he never tried to instill any more of his own mental habits into his rational, driven, reckless sibling. In the profession he had crafted, Sherlock's fear of error was the only safeguard of his honor; taking justice in his own hands, he could never afford to be wrong.
Mycroft trusted his brother implicitly, and paid him the courtesy of respecting his choices. Dispensing advice was Mycroft's profession, not his hobby, and he knew enough of his brother's mental world to grant Sherlock the independence his judgment required. Yet, once those vibrant little sketches began to appear in print, Mycroft found it harder to maintain his distance.
It was oddly enjoyable to view his brother through another man's eyes, and to hear mental habits articulated which he had watched in silent development for decades. The tableaux of cluttered, cozy rooms that opened every tale carried him back to his parent's dusty estate and the mad organizational systems his brother had invented only to discard at a moment's notice. He read of the cocaine with regret. He had recognized signs in his brother for years, but had never seen him – or anyone else – under the active influence of the drug, and found its description disturbing. He was not a man to lecture others on questions of bodily health, but he secretly rejoiced that Sherlock's living arrangements kept a doctor constantly on hand. Perhaps the lad's subconscious was inconspicuously attending to the neglected demands of self-preservation. One could hope.
And this doctor…this doctor. Mycroft found, the more he read, the more he wished to meet him. It was hard to capture a sense of the man through his writings; he portrayed himself less as a character than as a narrative device. His sharp humor and quick eye were clear enough; Mycroft discerned a proud temper as well, easily ruffled but just as quickly appeased. The quality of his mind was harder to judge, but Sherlock put up with him; this might mean only that he was amusing to ridicule, but Mycroft suspected instead a sound judgment, or at least a pedestrian good humor. No more could be deduced through the entertaining half-fictions in The Strand, but it would take only a moment in the doctor's presence for Mycroft to complete his impressions.
That was a moment Sherlock seemed determined to deny him. His brother could be oddly and irritatingly possessive at times; he did not like to have his privacy invaded by over-perceptive eyes, and he maintained an almost superstitious wariness of his elder brother's capabilities. Mycroft unbent so far as to drop numerous hints that he would appreciate an introduction, but Sherlock merely smiled non-committally before redirecting the conversation toward the latest logical tangle awaiting Mycroft's corrective attention.
Mycroft could empathize with such behavior, and retained a full measure of patience. After all, he normally remained as detached from his fellow man as did Sherlock, though for different reasons. His brother could rarely sustain much personal interest in others once he'd unraveled the initial puzzles they presented. Mycroft, on the other hand, knew everyone he met quite intimately, far better than they suspected; preferring to spare them unease, he almost never advertised his deductions, shunning the near-compulsive habits of disclosure his younger brother adopted. As a result, Mycroft offended fewer acquaintances, but simultaneously burdened himself with an awkward reticence.
He felt that moving into the realms of the personal – pretending to get to know people he already understood – was horribly uncomfortable and vaguely dishonest. He never spoke to a woman socially without being aware that he had her at a disadvantage, and rushed to extricate himself from such unpleasantness. Over the years, he'd found it best to restrict his interactions to questions of business. Only with a few of his long-time colleagues could he openly display familiarity; they assumed he had picked up his insights through the slow process of osmosis which seemed to be the norm in civilized company. Still, it was a blessed relief to be in their presence, or Sherlock's; they allowed him to exercise the full scope of his mind and personality in plain sight, without calculating consequences.
He knew the precious rarity of social freedom; if for no other reason, Mycroft accepted his brother's decision to keep his friends to himself.
But, even after so many years, Sherlock could still surprise him. On the afternoon of Mycroft's forty-first birthday, his brother paid his obligatory call with an unexpected visitor in tow. Mycroft accepted the unspoken gift with understated pleasure, and finally completed his long-delayed assessment over the course of a few standard pleasantries.
The doctor's mind was a fine instrument, alight with curiosity; Mycroft could sense the man looking beyond the ungainly hand and somewhat affected bonhomie he himself was extending – with a slight shock, he felt himself instantly classed as pure intellect, an approach few had ever cared to take in his presence. Mycroft allowed himself to relax into a game of simple deduction with Sherlock, and noted with approval their companion's quiet fascination and playful incredulity. Even better was the sly smile Sherlock offered when Mycroft showed him up on a minor point; this doctor must be a colossus indeed, to stand witness to a public error and yet leave his brother at ease.
Wonders never cease, Mycroft thought, and repaid his visitors' generosity with a home-grown mystery, simple enough in itself, but oddly stirring to the blood.
In the moments of solitude after his guests' departure, before embarking toward their adventure's dark conclusion, Mycroft settled back into the window and watched a world of strangers passing by.
He found it very beautiful.