"Hey, freak!" The shout, rather annoyingly, brought Sherlock out of his contemplative reverie. Turning around, before he could even see who was taunting him, he was hit with something hard and gooey. An egg, that was the only thing that could be that particular combination. He winced and squeezed his eyes shut so that none of the yolk would drip into them. He felt his hair hanging gooey over his forehead, and dreaded the amount of time it would take to get the egg out of it. That was time he had planned to spend in experimenting on the effect of sodium nitrate on vellum (and, no, he did not kill the sheep to get the vellum). The laughter of the boys followed Sherlock as he did his best to ignore them and get home as fast as possible, admittedly a difficult thing when one was trying to keep egg out of one's eyes.
He finally did make it home and slipped up the stairs, trying to avoid his parents. He knew his mother would only suffocate him with her concern, and his father would tell him he should try to be more like everyone else if he didn't want to be taunted. He had almost made it to the bathroom to try and wash the egg out of his hair when he ran straight into someone.
"Sherlock? What happened?" Mycroft, seventeen and almost ready to go to university, asked, eyeing his little brother carefully.
"You know what happened, Mycroft," Sherlock said defensively, shaking his dark, egg-filled locks out of his eyes.
"Yes, I do," Mycroft answered. His deductive abilities were already almost fully trained, while Sherlock's were coming along nicely, but were still childish. All the same, Mycroft knew instantly what had happened. "Who was it?"
"It doesn't matter, there are too many of them to be sure," Sherlock answered tiredly, wanting only to get the egg out of his hair before it hardened.
"Sherlock," Mycroft said warningly, knowing that his little brother was perfectly able to identify voices, and there was no excuse for hiding such intelligence.
"Oh, all right," Sherlock said with a petulant whine, "It was Jake Asper and Sean Richardson, and a bunch of their friends I didn't know." That was true; Jake and Sean were two years older than Sherlock, though only one school year above him, since Sherlock was accelerated. He was a favorite target of theirs and had been for years. Though normally they stuck to words and not physical abuse; Sherlock hoped this wasn't going to become a habit.
"Hmm," was Mycroft's only response, but he mercifully let Sherlock go, and he spent the next hour carefully washing the egg out of his hair, dreading the next day.
The next day, Sherlock rushed out of school, hoping he'd avoid any altercations with Jake and Sean. Nothing could equal his surprise when he saw Jake and Sean absolutely cowering near the rubbish tips, and his own brother walking calmly away.
Sherlock never found out exactly what it was Mycroft had said to them (physical threats were too brutish for him) but Jake and Sean left him alone after that, and what was more, told all their friends to leave Sherlock alone as well. The word spread that while Sherlock Holmes might be a freak, his brother was scary, and it didn't surprise Sherlock at all that Mycroft ended up basically running the country. He often got amusement out of imagining Mycroft intimidating the Prime Minister the way he'd intimidated Sherlock's tormentors all those years ago.
A/N I wrote this ages ago, but in addition to tearing my emotions to shreds, Series 3 has left me fascinated with Sherlock and Mycroft's childhoods, so I thought I'd start my drabble series off with this :)
