I know I'm mostly writing and publishing this for myself since it has gotten relatively little response, but it is fun so I shall continue to write it :)

Translation:

Finis ta bouche, après tu pourras parler: finish your bite, then speak.

Enjoy!

"Pére, I'd like to go by Sherlock. If that's alright with the two of you and Mummy." Peter and Richard startled at the table, not having heard Sher—Sherlock—come down to breakfast. He'd gone up to his room in a fury the night before, about something he wouldn't speak of. Richard thought it was about a girl, Peter suspected it had something to do with that awful drowning.

Richard was the first to recover his wits, but then again he always was where Sher was concerned.

"Of course, of course. Though Heaven knows when your dear mother will come back from Argentina."

Sher's face split into a painful little grin as he sat down and filched some food from Peter's plate. Peter and Sherlock knew that Belinda wasn't coming back from Argentina—this week's pretend destination, though Richard was none the wiser—any sooner than she was coming back from the grave she'd put herself in two years ago. Mummy was their code-word for George and the Circus. Sher—Sherlock had come up with it after a lot of thought. George had been a far better mothering figure to Sh—Sherlock than anyone else had.

Neither George nor Peter faulted the boy for the assessment—George was the one who'd made Sher's birthday cake for the last three years, something Peter could only remember his own mother doing for him.

Watching the skinny boy across the table from him, Peter wondered what he would think of George's new scheme. They'd recently ended yet another Bond project—though Williams was making noises of reviving it in a few years—and George had come to him with an old notebook just a week ago. They'd had a long conversation in Arabic—the language nearly dead to Peter and quite broken from George's mouth but at the very least confidential in a home where they spoke French more often than English—about the contents of said notebook. It was an old manual, written in George's hand, marked with the Scalp-Hunter division stamps. It was called Tiny Tim.

Peter had vaguely heard of it once or twice in his early days with the Service, when the Circus still felt new and dangerous to him—before it was just his job.

Tiny Tim was in effect a branch-out of the Bond program. Train a secret agent—the perfect secret agent—but send them not to foreign climes but keep them at home. To test the fences, as George put it. Someone able to effortlessly gain access to the very highest echelons of power and secrecy—all while doing it in service to the Crown. They were to break into various locations—The Circus, secret testing sites, the Palace, among other places—to test how long it took to get in and out. To see if anyone noticed. It would require an incredibly loyal operative to not utterly abuse the knowledge and power required of them.

The project had been scrapped in 1962, George having decided that the kind of agent he needed was one he'd seen grow up from earliest infancy. A mind which could hide no secrets from him, a mind which he trusted far more implicitly than he trusted taking the next breath. Once, he'd said with a gruff chuckle, he'd thought to revive it and use Peter but that he couldn't quite make himself do it. Perhaps, he'd continued, he'd been really waiting for Peter's son.

S—Sherlock was that puzzle-solver. Sherlock would be, for a time, their Tiny Tim. The project was named after the Dickens character—the character whose very existence saves the soul of Scrooge, the livelihood of Cratchit, and his own life. George had never been very good with naming his projects, but Peter understood the motivation.

"Pére I was wondering if later today you might take me down to the police station—or to Scotland Yard, even. Please? S'il te plait?" Peter smiled a little and nodded. He always caved when the boy brought out his French—though last year Sherlock had scowled so very fiercely when he'd figured out that his dear Pére wasn't actually French. The fact that he hadn't minded too much was another point in George's favor that Sherlock might grow up into just the agent they needed.

"Why do you need to go there?" Richard was always too curious, and always forgot Sherlock's sometimes massive inability to communicate in English—he still thought entirely in French, Peter believed. Sherlock rolled his eyes, muttering "Shoes," as he stuffed his mouth full of toast. Richard looked askance at the boy—he had been the one to ensure all of them had manners around the house, but with Sherlock he seemed to have failed miserably.

"Your mouth was full, couldn't understand your toast-mumble. Finis ta bouche, après tu pourras parler." Sherlock glared and started chewing with his mouth open—wide and comical chomps, his mouth an awful cement mixer of black bread and white butter—before he finally swallowed in such an exaggerated manner that Peter had a passing thought that the boy might have choked himself by accident.

"Shoes!"

George's plan might work, Peter remembered as he watched Sherlock dash up the stairs to get his things.

But it also might blow up in their faces because of the very person they needed to make it succeed. Sherlock Holmes would be the one to really decide it, they both knew. Peter quickly finished his own breakfast, pecked a kiss to Richard's cheek and then went to find his jacket and coat. Sherlock would be ready within moments, demanding to go—the twelve year old was unrelenting when he got like this. He'd found a puzzle, and he was bent on solving it. Tiny Tim was at least that lucky with Sherlock.

Thank you SO SO SO SO much proof-that-sherlock-has-a-heart and alexiel2001 over on tumblr for the help with the French translations!

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