In which Sherlock tries to root out his past and finds that Mycroft has been MORE than thorough.

Enjoy!


He didn't remember anything but Baker Street, and a woman named Maggie Hudson. She hugged him with surprising familiarity when he knocked on her door—let me look at you! Oh your hair is just mangled, though I suppose they must have needed to look at your head after—well!— but when she pulled away her mouth twisted in the same way Elaine's did. Mycroft was extremely good at finding every loose end and tying it up neatly, and apparently even this woman that Sherlock shouldn't have even remembered had been tidied. He didn't let his disappointment show on his face, though, instead awkwardly asking how they'd met. He hoped that maybe whatever cover story his brother's people had invented might be a little shaky with a woman of Mrs. Hudson's age.

What he got instead was a flat—a quick call to Mycroft soon had a year's lease paid for in advance—and a landlady who treated him like a second son. He filled the flat with his things and then set about looking for a flatmate. He did not want to spend all of his time in the place by himself and seeing as Molly Hooper wasn't quite ready to move on—which was a damn shame but he forced himself to respect boundaries in this oen case—he needed to look elsewhere than Barts. He certainly wasn't going to ask the other pathologist, Stamford, to move in with him.

His flat had come with the stipulation from Mycroft that he turn his mind towards occasional mysteries that his older brother didn't have time to contemplate and solve. He both resented and appreciated this—surely he had supported himself before his accident? Why else had there been the pretense invented that he'd been living with Mycroft and Elaine, and why had their children been sent away to school in such a hurry when the house still bore marks that they'd lived there full time only months ago? Children couldn't quite be trusted to maintain a cover story, and it was best for Mycroft's smoke and mirrors that they not be present at all to present such a weakness.

Sherlock kept his resentment at his brother simmering in the back of his mind. He wanted to know who he had been before he'd fallen, he wanted to move towards being a man in his thirties rather than trapped in with the racing thoughts of a twenty something and the easiest way of doing this would be to force himself to accept the life he'd had. If he knew what he'd lost he might someday grasp the weight of it—but at the moment he had been grabbing at moonbeams for nearly six months. Whatever his life before had been, whatever might be missing from it now that he'd apparently accidentally gotten someone killed—he wanted it. He wanted to look at it like a biography of someone important that he should know things about.

This wasn't possible because of Mycroft's actions, and that made Sherlock irrationally angry.


Review?