Summary: Sherlock was his brother first and foremost. But somewhere along the way, something changes, and Mycroft doesn't know how to turn the clock back. Pre-ASiP. References to 2x01.
AN/ Written for the Johnlock Party, Prompt 6: Failure. In light of SiB, faint references to that were just BEGGING to be included during re-draft.
Warnings: Drug abuse/overdose. Very very very soft SiB spoilers.
Burning Bridges
You've always been there for him in your own way. You were in your youth a solitary, but prepossessing child when the circumstances called for it, finding more friendship within old books than real human contact. People, you discovered early in life, lied often and not very well. You catalogued the signs that gave them away, and as you aged – faster than you should of, made mature before you ever had much chance to be a child – you understood their contexts. Your nanny's drinking habit, the butler's affair with the stable-boy, your father's penchant for gambling and his wandering eyes. You saw the dark corners of your sheltered world, and when Sherlock came along, you vowed to shield him from it.
You held your office of an older brother longer than your later role in the Government, were running after an excitable dark haired child long before you were running the country. You belonged to him first, and you never begrudged the ownership he held over you. In him you found a companion, your charge – it was you who he went to for attention, never your parents, absent as they often were. In your own way, in you was held all the familial roles required; the steady hand of a father, the soft undemanding affection of a mother.
He was always so possessive, clinging to your trouser leg with grasping pudgy fingers, asking, demanding: "My. Pick me up, My". Every other week, he wanted to be something new; a policeman, a dinosaur-hunter, a long stretch of time when he went around the mansion rooms decked out in a pirate costume and a small wooden cutlass, prowling for treasure-troves, squinting through one eye and lifting up his eye-patch every so often to see where he was going. He always wanted you to indulge in his fantasies – you were the criminal mastermind, the nemesis to his superhero, you were the swashbuckling Blackbeard whose ship he was commandeering. "Play with me, My," he would plead. You rarely refused him.
It was you who taught him a love of the sciences, of chemicals and biology. He, unlike you, never had much of an interest in the humanities; books to him were tools to provide facts, not fictions, but for bedtime stories, you introduced him to the Homeric epic of the Iliad, and through the medium of this tale, taught him of the chivalry and bravery of Hector, the wrath of Achilles at the death of his beloved companion the foolhardy Patroclus. It was you who first introduced to him his first love; the Stradivarius, and never missed the recitals he held just for the two of you.
He saw the things you saw, the deductions, the lies and the ways the world could hurt him, and he didn't learn fast enough to keep quiet about it. You had longer to perfect your own subterfuge, but he was always such an inquisitive child, wanted to know, wanted to learn. He was smarter than them all from the beginning, and of course that set him apart. Your parents in their foolishness decided it would do their youngest child some good to interact with children his own age, and you remember dropping him off at the school gate that first day, and he wouldn't let go of your hand. Even when he finally did, he kept hitching his backpack further up and glancing back at you with big confused eyes, dragging his feet. You stood there until he disappeared inside the building.
His backpack came home ripped. And it was you who hauled him upright after every school day in the month it took for everyone else to realise that this was not going to work, your arms a secure fortress against the cruelty of a world not ready for either of you. He snuffled into your t-shirt that he tried, he tried to make friends, he tried not to boast or brag, and you shushed him and cradled him close. He asked once, with teary eyes, whether there was something wrong with him. And you could only hold him nearer and murmur fiercely that there was nothing wrong with him, knowing that no amount of Sherlock pretending would make the other children accept him as one of their own, knowing that the two of you would always be different and that that would always hurt.
Even as you aged, nothing changed. Your parents tried again – even though you begged them not to – sent him off to your boarding school. The other children ignored him, blanked him and laughed at him – for his gawky limbs, his slight lisp, his books. He managed a term there, and the worst thing was that you couldn't protect him. You were never embarrassed by him, never ashamed of your association with him when it was mentioned as ammunition against you. You got into a fight with another boy in your class who called Sherlock a freak, The bust lip stung and the grounding you got from giving the other lad two black eyes was extortionate, but when Sherlock found out that it was his honour that you had fought to defend, he glanced up at you with such worship in his eyes it was worth it.
Your parents home-schooled you both after that.
You wanted to be the brother he always thought you were. The strong one, a protector against battering wind and the rain slamming down threatening to knock him to the ground. You picked him up when he cried and asked 'Why?', demanding answers again but ones you couldn't give to him, you held his hand even as his tears hardened into steel and he stopped showing his extraordinary predilection for violent and complete emotions in front of people. Around you, you could see his lip wobble for a split second, noted glassy eyes before he blinked tears away, and seeing such a solemn lonely little boy blocking off all the emotions that he thought made him weaker made you want to shed those tears for him. You took the emotions he did show like a punch, but held them to you as precious things before they too faded away.
He didn't forgive you for leaving him to live your own life. Maybe you don't either. But you were eighteen and grasping at freedom, the chance to escape. The day you left, your hugs almost crushing around his small lithe frame, you promised him you would come back. You promised that you would take him away from here, that he would come and live with you when you got a house of your own. He asked if you meant it, and you nodded soberly, covering his small hand with your own. You told him just to wait. Three years. That was all.
But at that point, you took a different fork in the road. You left him, and as such, were not there to warn him of the wrong way when he came to make his own turnings. Three years was too long.
When you returned to visit, the small curly haired brother you left behind, the one with the big eyes and the mile- a-minute questions, was a nostalgic memory. It took barely any time at all for abandonment and loneliness to cut him a second skin of world-weary apathy, replacing your brother with skinned knees and the fascination with bees with a paper pale stranger, with lanky limbs too thin and a self-destructive mind that ate away at him without the correct stimuli. He was not the brother you left behind, though he wore his face, adjusting smiles to sneers, excitability to indifference. Rather than pulling you close and asking to be lifted into your arms like he used to do, his hands actively avoided yours, his back turned away. He did not let you in anymore.
You tried since then. But betrayal dug too deep into the marrow of his bones, and he continued to push you away. I don't need you, his eyes flared, you left me. And his lessons in turn informed your own transitions – you grew aloof, icy, angry at him and angry at yourself, and over time, your interactions became extreme, he snarked and you hissed and your methods of protection only served to enforce the barriers between you.
That wide eyed child playing pirates and this stony faced adult playing detective teach you that caring about someone makes no difference at all.
And now, you are the one who is sitting by his bedside, fiddling with the black umbrella you always carry that was once a birthday gift from him, the green lines of a respiration monitor like a repeated cut slicing shallow over the thrumming area of your chest. Scratching deeper every time you catch sight of the dotted scarring of track marks along his arm, evidence of your failures and of his. He would not want you here, if he was awake, but for the moment, his eyes with their sleepless shadows are closed, and he dozes under medication. You look at him and see the last vestiges of the child he was, the one with the stories and the questions and the wonders of the world at his fingers, see the adult he is becoming, the hard planes that disappointment has carved, the sharpness and the cold, none of the warmth of his younger counterpart that now doesn't exist anymore.
You sit by his hospital bed, not for the first time and not for the last, and wonder where it was that you went so wrong.