A/N: I wrote this in the middle of a lecture after opening my three WIPs and realising that the scenes I'm writing for ALL of them at the moment are smut. I had to have something I could write while people were looking over my shoulders. Have some brotherly love, everyone – despite the themes in this first one, I don't intend to include Holmescest. Please review, as I've never tried this sort of theme or format before.
-for you!
One
When Sherlock was four and Mycroft was eleven, they were best friends.
Well – if you were to ask four year-old Sherlock who his best friend was, he would have answered 'my big brother' before you'd even finished asking the question. If you were to ask eleven year-old Mycroft who his best friend was, he would have thought for a long while before providing you with a diplomatic answer involving a few other first-year Etonians, some older students and perhaps a professor or two. Sherlock would have been discounted on account of being family; and any well-educated eleven year-old knows that your family and your friends are two separate things and that is quite simply that.
Little Sherlock thought that Mycroft was God on earth, or he would have if he'd ever believed in either of those things. Mycroft thought that Sherlock was annoying and too loud and completely incapable of picking his moments.
It was one of those moments.
Mycroft was working on a particularly complicated political essay that was probably at least four years above his age-level and had left clear instructions written on the door of his bedroom that he was Not To Be Disturbed. While four year-old Sherlock could read perfectly well, thank-you very much, he wasn't quite tall enough to read the sign.
It would take years for Sherlock to learn the skill of entering a room quietly, and years more for him to learn to apply this skill in the right moments. At age four, he knew the word subtlety only in a hypothetical sense.
"My!"
A careful line of neat handwriting jumped nervously across the page. "Sherlock! Didn't you see the sign?"
Dark curls that Mrs Holmes could never bring herself to get rid of flew from side to side as the whirlwind of barely-contained energy shook its head. "Too high. What's it say?"
"What does it say," Mycroft corrected quickly. "It says I'm busy, Sherlock. I'm doing schoolwork."
Sherlock huffed the sigh of the mortally aggrieved. "Your schoolwork is boring. Why would you do something all day that's boring?"
Mycroft put his pen down and turned to face his younger brother, not bothering in the slightest to conceal his irritation. "It might be boring, but it'll pay off in the end and I'll have a good and easy life. Which you won't have if you're always so noisy and annoying."
"Good and easy is boring."
The little boy's pout almost made Mycroft's frustration die out. Sherlock was still so young. He couldn't be blamed for the things he didn't know about life. "You have to do some boring work sometimes so that you can do the exciting work that you want to do later. Do you know what you want to be when you're grown-up, Sherlock?" he asked gently.
Sherlock nodded furiously. "I'm going to run away from the boring people and be a pirate. So I don't need to do any boring work ever."
The corners of Mycroft's cruelly-put-together mouth twitched upwards. Mycroft's mouth was not made for smiles; from the day he was born, his lips were suited for stern looks and calculating glares. Sometimes he envied the way his younger brother's face lit up so easily with the provision of a new and interesting occupation. "There are things you'd have to give up as a pirate, too, though, Sherlock," he explained patiently. "You'll never be able to marry anyone, for example. Mummy would be disappointed."
"Why do you marry people, My?"
Mycroft blew out his cheeks in frustration. Because Mummy wants you to? Because society expects it of you? "Because you love them."
The little boy sat down heavily on the floor and crossed his arms, beaming. "Then I'll marry you. There's room for you on the pirate ship, I don't mind."
He actually chuckled. "You can't marry me, Sherlock."
"But I love you."
The conversation, he judged, had reached the point where he should abandon ship entirely when it came to the essay and leave his chair, crouching to sit cross-legged in front of his younger brother. "I know. But… you marry someone when you love them in a different way."
Sherlock blinked, nonplussed. "I love you in every way."
Mycroft's smile was starting to grow to the point where even someone who didn't know him would notice it. How did he explain marriage to a four year-old? "I… that's… it's illegal for you to marry me."
"Why?"
"Well, for one thing, we're both boys. In England a boy can only marry a girl."
Sherlock's smile, apparently, was not to be deterred, and his boundless imagination seemed to have an answer to everything. "I'll have a pirate ship. We can go somewhere it isn't illegal."
He sighed, suddenly imagining that a much older Sherlock in a creaky old pirate ship could probably counteract so many arguments, offer so many reasons and justifications, that he'd give in and marry him just to make him quiet down. "It'll still be illegal, Sherlock, because we're family. You're not allowed to marry your brother in any country."
Sherlock was silent for a long while; Mycroft felt an immature flickering of smugness at being able to produce a stipulation to which his brother could not brandish a loophole. Finally his younger brother looked up at him, his already striking green-grey eyes wide and sad.
"I wish you weren't my brother," he said slowly.
Mycroft remembered then that he was supposed to be annoyed. "Yeah, well, the feeling is mutual," he huffed out, standing up and moving back to the desk. "Now get out of my room."
It wasn't until the door closed quietly behind the dejected little boy that he started to feel a twinge of guilt. After all, he wanted Sherlock to always love him this fiercely.