and means the world to me.

— Cynthia A. Sieving, ThoughYou Are Grown

#

It began like this:

A child was born, named, and loved by his brother without pause for all his years. The brothers grew apart and grew together. They grew older. They grew wiser. They loved, although neither of them knew how to express that emotion. The oldest was clever, so clever. So clever that he dazzled the youngest and left him reeling in the wake of his success. The youngest was alive. Alive with passion and love. He loved everything with all of himself. His city, his job, his mind. His friends. He was reckless and brash and brilliant. And they always knew that it would end with the oldest standing over the grave of the youngest and saying goodbye. That was the agreement. Because the oldest had spent his lifetime buying his brother time, and the youngest had never even considered it the other way around.

#

It ended like this:

John bent over Mycroft with his deft hands working to keep his heart beating even as the great muscle failed. Sherlock watched and didn't say a word because it wasn't just Mycroft's heart that couldn't continue past this day.

It ended with the wail of sirens and a touch on his arm. It ended with his brother being borne away on a clattering stretcher. He wouldn't live to see the hospital.

It ended.

#

The day they buried Mycroft Holmes was bright and bitterly sunny, as though the weather itself sought to mock Sherlock with the emptiness of the world around him.

John spoke. He spoke of a brother's love, and of dedication, loyalty and honour. He spoke.

Sherlock said nothing because there was nothing he needed to say to the hordes of people gathered there to mourn Mycroft Holmes. There was nothing they needed to hear from him. The only man he wanted to speak to was lying cold in a wooden box.

It occurred to Sherlock with a taciturn sort of regret that now when the tabloids called him the most observant man in the world, it would be true.

#

He waited until night had claimed the graveyard before jumping the fence and making his way over to the freshly turned earth covering his brother. The air was bitterly cold and it bit at his throat and ached in his bones. Mycroft would have been appalled to see him jumping fences and skulking about at his age.

"Behaviour unbecoming for a Holmes," grumbled a ghostly memory.

It was wonderfully melodramatic. Sherlock laughed.

"The headstone will be pretentious," he told the plot of land firmly, as of yet still unmarked. "Grotesquely pretentious, no doubt, but then, you would have liked that. I shall have to get my revenge some other way. Perhaps I shall plant some sort of nasty, pervasive weed on you."

The wind answered, and he drew the scarf tighter. He wasn't done yet.

"You were," he said, and stopped. The words tore from his mouth and carried away on the breeze, taken to God knows where. "You were…my brother. And you were, quite frankly, the worst brother anyone could've asked for. Plotting, conniving, meddlesome, and, above all, dull. I honestly don't know how I put up with you." He spared a glance for Mummy's grave, still immaculate despite the years of weather beating down upon it. "And yet, always your favourite, no matter his many faults."

The wind picked up. Sherlock shivered. He felt sick. And lost.

It wasn't meant to be like this.

"I love you," he whispered to the earth. "I love you so much, and you still left me. Did you even know how much I love you?"

He had been the one man who Sherlock had expected to stand by his side forever, and yet, when he needed him most, he wasn't there. It didn't matter how old he was, or how old he grew, he would never stop needing his brother. Or loving him.

But death didn't care how much someone was loved or needed.

And no matter how much he ached for the click of an umbrella up the hall or a sighed chuckle, he would hear neither again.

"He knew," said a soft voice behind him. Sherlock wasn't at all surprised when John ghosted out of the mist. He still wore awful jumpers, still had the same haircut and wise blue eyes. He walked with a limp that this time Sherlock couldn't fix. There were a lot of things Sherlock was finding he couldn't fix anymore. How his younger self would have scoffed at him. What a disappointment he had turned out to be.

"He always knew. He was the smartest bloody man we'll ever know, Sherlock. Of course he knew."

Sherlock nodded and leaned back into the warmth of John's shoulder. They stood together and waited until the wind began to bite once more and then they turned as one to leave.

#

The headstone was pretentious, as promised. Eventually, it was obscured by a clinging ivy that mysteriously appeared one day and resisted all attempts to remove it. Soon, only the inscription on the bottom of the stone could be read.

In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

(Forever and ever, brother, hail and farewell.)

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AN: Edited in July, 2019.