Chapter 2: Pride goeth


John made beans and toast in the mornings for him and Harry. She was too small to pour the milk, so he made her tea as well, and checked that she had lunch money. Sometimes their mother woke up in time to see them off; she would watch them from the front window and think that it was not fair that every thing beautiful and good should leave her so soon.

Sherlock had never made his own breakfast until he was released from rehab at age 25. There was no doméstica in London, no lunchroom, no cafeteria. Just a half kitchen in his flat on Montague. Most days, however, Sherlock didn't bother with breakfast. Breakfast was boring.

Sherlock professed to hating rules; John prescribed to them. Neither had it right about themselves. When Sherlock was Away, he made his bed with hospital corners. And John let the bins fill up.

After Violeta died, Sigur's rules fit Sherlock as tightly as a corset. Behind the garden shed, where he went to be alone, the cigarettes burned his insides. Sherlock's lungs were his father's lungs, held in place by his father's rules. He let his bicycle rust because his father mentioned that Sherlock would make a good cyclist (he had no such hopes for Mycroft). He would never fully clear his alveolae, never swim the Channel, never win a tennis tournament. Sherlock poisoned his lungs rather than give his father that satisfaction. He only rode a bike again because a case required it of him, but he was far away from England then, and Sigur was dead, and New York (Nueva York) was a Spanish city, like Seville, and it somehow seemed different to ride a bicicleta when he called it by that name.

Sherlock learned to be solitary. John learned the burden of dependence.

The more John threw himself into his studies, the prouder his parents were of him. They looked to him when Harry misbehaved, reminded her that if her brother could be a good son, why couldn't she be a good daughter? John was proof that the Watsons had done something right, at least. But he resented being the evidence of his parents' success. The success was his, after all – the late nights, the weekends forgone, the spring term holidays in the library. And later, the rotations, the license exams, the commission in the Army. His accomplishments, all of them. Not theirs, not hers (Harry's).

Sherlock, on the other hand, made sure that his accomplishments were not the kind to make Sigur proud. His father did not understand chemistry, did not understand his need for silence during those tedious term holidays, when he consulted textbooks and built a makeshift laboratory in the old hay barn. It was easier to tell Sigur that he was working on an experiment than to sit through another dinner party with the Cornish peerage, easier to take on Sarasate and Mendelssohn than to refuse his father's company just because. Sigur did not seem to notice; was that because Mycroft was there, because Mycroft did the talking and the eating and the sitting so much better than Sherlock? Because Mycroft didn't scare the dinner table with talk of poisons and decay ('How macabre Sherlock is getting to be,' his aunt Gladys had said.), didn't shock Mormor by explaining what a 'poofter' was, just as she was serving the kransekake on Christmas Eve? Because Mycroft didn't ask for drug money as if it were lunch money?

After that, Sigur mostly left him alone.