See ending for warning.
Temptation ate the bomb and lived to tell the story. Here is a story of mine.
"I used to have scars on my hands. Not like what I get on cases now. Little nicks and gouges in my palms and in back of my knuckles. I'd get them from the thickets outside the house, the brambles. Mummy hated them, but no matter how much she complained to the groundskeeper, they always stayed. I used to think that was Mycroft's doing as he loved to toss me in them. I'd get myself all caught in the thorns and roots. Our housekeeper never let up about the state of my nightclothes. I hated Mycroft for that for more years than I ever idolized him." He didn't let himself count the years; they went on much too long.
John remained at the door with the shopping in hand. He hadn't had the chance to take off his coat. "What'd he do that for?"
"At the time, I didn't know. I didn't ever know what it was I'd done to upset him, but he'd shove me into the brambles on the odd night and order me to stay until he returned for me. It could be minutes or the whole night long. I was seven before I thought to follow him back. I was determined that Mother and Father should know what he was doing to me, so he'd be punished and leave me to my bed. Not that I slept. It was the principle of the thing."
Sherlock drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair. "I found them with our relatives that night; they and their contemporaries having nightcaps in the den. My brother was with them in one of his 'grown-up' suits, sitting prim at Uncle Lysander's elbow. The lot of them were discussing my latest escapades at high volume, some het-up about what damage my 'outlandish' behaviour was doing to the family name. They hadn't a care about whether I could hear them—and I would have from my bed. The external walls were thicker; their voices would have been muffled by the wind at night." He hadn't cried at that age, he was more studied in property damage than emotional outbursts, even at seven. The kitchen had been a loss.
"Mycroft was watching out for you. Brothers tend to do that." John took his purchases to the kitchen where he put everything in its place.
Sherlock hopped up to follow. "Mycroft was lying to me. All my life, he'd drilled into my head that knowledge was power and he kept the ultimate power out of my hands. He was always doing that. He kept me weak when I most needed to be strong. I might have trusted then in time and they would have lorded their disdain over my head like I was some sort of performance animal. What kind of brother does that?"
"The kind who never wanted to see you hurt." John adeptly rounded him in his pursuit of evening tea.
Sherlock ground his teeth till pain radiated throughout his jaw. "He sat there, evening after evening, nights on end, while he left me in the cold." Sherlock sat against the counter, cataloguing John's every move in absent fashion. "He didn't even enjoy it." Sherlock had concluded that much from a single glance. "An entire gathering devoted to air grievances at my abhorrent behaviour and he didn't enjoy a moment of it. Any idiot could have seen it and given the fortune in Oxbridge education inhabiting the place, they all should have. He hated them."
John put the kettle on. "I can't imagine why." His reply crackled, dry as tea leaves.
"Every one of them that had doted on his blessed head the day he was born, every one that had called him precious when he was brilliant, and every one that insulted me; he hated them all. On my behalf, if you believe a word he says." Before Mycroft had wielded influence, he had collected knowledge. Sherlock had been his first conquest. He hated that his brother warranted even that much credit.
"But he stayed."
"Yes, of course he stayed. Knowledge is power and Mycroft has always been powerful. They spoke too freely in the presence of a child." Sherlock chuckled in memory of their arrogance. "For all that I was the outlier, for all that they treated me like a leper to be borne, they forgot my brother. They failed to remember that Mycroft was the Cuckoo child before me. He sat with while they reviled me to my parents' faces and they forgot he was there. That fatal mistake was ultimately their undoing." He had loved them to his capacity for the sentiment when he was small; he had mistakenly believed himself to be loved in return.
Sherlock wanted a drink or a cigarette, he wanted a needle. John was what he had.
"You must understand. Mycroft changed after my birth. He ceased to be the troublesome firstborn and became someone brand new. He sat with them and he loathed them for all they said about me, loathed them. He never forgot, nor did he allow them to plead ignorance when they came with hands outstretched for their bit of my late father's estate." At John's confused mien, he explained, "My father was the Holmes patriarch. The roots of our family run deep in England. Our holdings are what some would call impressive."
"Loads of useless cousins thrice removed?"
"More than bear mentioning, save for their heritable greed."
"So, Mycroft kept the inheritance from the ones who'd made merry at your expense."
"That's...the most of it." But never all; some stories lived on deathbeds best.
"Remind me why we hate him again." Sherlock's neck didn't warm at his use of 'we,' the steam from the electric kettle was merely a bit humid. John poured them each a cup and dropped the teabags in.
"Because knowledge is power and he left me powerless! How can I ever trust that he won't do it again?"
"Given that you've pretty much heard the worst that a child can, you don't think he's out of things to hide for your own good?"
"I don't know, but I won't take a chance on being left flatfooted again. Knowledge is power, John—"
"And you're tripping over your royal sceptre every day. Simmer down, Highness, before you give yourself an aneurysm." John placed his mug directly in his hand.
Sherlock huffed, taking a drink solely to dispel his flatmate's piercing glare. "I'm not wrong."
"Maybe not, but there's such a thing as long enough to hold a grudge."
Sherlock spotted the opening he'd been seeking. He cradled his tea to his lips. "Does that edict also apply to us?"
John paused mid-gulp to regard Sherlock. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm referring to the couch...incident. Am I going to be punished for it indefinitely, or do I at least get the chance to plead my case?"
"I'm not punishing you for that, or anything, though I've gotta say I'm not tickled to see the necrotizing flesh experiment is back on again."
"I need it for a case. If I'm not being punished, why are you hiding from me?"
John returned to his drink. "There isn't any case, but thanks for playing. Hiding?"
"Repeating the question in abbreviated form is unlikely to deter me. You're back wearing the jumpers. I thought you gave them up. You should also be aware by now that I don't discuss the details of every case with you."
"Sure you do, I'm the skull upgrade: I talk back. And you know I get cold in London weather. I'm still adjusting."
"It's been over a year, you're well past the acclimatization period. And I wouldn't get too cocky. Upgrades can be downgraded, or even replaced."
"Sorry my body chemistry doesn't behave to your liking. I'll try to do better. I'm sure Monsieur Flesh-free over there will be happy to pick up the milk when I'm not here to do it."
"Needless sarcasm," Sherlock bared his teeth, "how clever." John wasn't going to leave, John would never leave.
"Insulting my intelligence again, how shocking." John poured out the remainder of his tea, a sure danger sign. Sherlock scrambled internally to salvage this conversation. John could never make anything easy, ideal for a consulting detective who abhorred ease.
"You're taking my actions personally when they aren't personal."
"I'm not taking them as anything. My tats were giving you trouble, so I put them away. 'S not like it's the first time they ever bothered anybody. I wear layers because I'm accustomed to it. I'll get accustomed to it again. So will you." John turned his back on Sherlock to rinse out his cup. Sherlock ruffled his dishevelled hair.
"I didn't want things to be like this."
John sighed. "They're not like anything."
"We're estranged."
"Oh, I don't think so. Estranged is Harry and me. You and I talk every day, we're not estranged." John sat the cup to dry on the rack and began tackling the breakfast dishes.
"You won't let me see you like before." Sherlock missed that signs that John wasn't ordinary, the other man faded into obscurity without them.
"You don't want to." John gave a casual-seeming shrug. "You said it wasn't working for you anymore, so I put it away."
He keeps using that phrase. It was driving Sherlock to distraction. "You can't just tuck bits of yourself out of sight like a magpie."
"You do it all the time. I certainly do it. I'm a doctor and a soldier, you don't think there are parts of me tucked so far down I couldn't find them with a tour guide? Think again. 'S not like anyone else is interested in those bits."
Sherlock placed his hands on his hips to keep himself snatching John up to remind him how interested Sherlock was.
"I don't want anyone else seeing you like that." That trust was his—had been. He didn't want to chance John finding someone who wouldn't turn their back, for whom control wasn't a philosophy lifelong.
"Don't worry, no one else will." John left him standing by the sink. "Is the paper still out here or have you already burned it?" This was John, sliding from him in peerless British gestures of dismissal. 'Biscuits, tea, and silence. Calmly carry on.' Despicable. My life now, my doing.
"Burned it first thing. You'll have to borrow Mrs. Hudson's."
"Will do. Back in a mo'."
Sherlock stood sentry over the kitchen in motionless deliberation until John's footsteps vanished toward the ground floor. He sent his mug careening toward the kitchen's unoccupied wall in a swing. It served more purpose as decoration than solace for his nervous, churning stomach.
John thudded back up the stairs, the paper tucked into his back pocket. "I assume there's a good reason for the mess you just made."
"Assume whatever you like." Sherlock grabbed his coat on his way past the hook. He needed something more than constrained reassurance ill-disguised by farcical normalcy. What he wanted was John and his mind palace set to rights and sweat and skin of all colours under his lips. He wanted more of improbable verging on impossibility. He wanted to forget that he had ever known different. He wanted to know himself again.
There he had a smattering of luck: there was a proven solution for that.
...
Sherlock made it as far as Bond Street before his taxi was diverted from its original destination. He might have cursed his luck if it would have done anything more than give evidence to his annoyance. He wasn't even allowed the outlet of slamming his way into his brother's unlit apartments, the door having been opened and shut by a cheerless, moustachioed butler of blank affect.
The hearth was ablaze in Mycroft's study, casting the imposing chamber in a rust and ochre hues over lush green drapes and mahogany panel walls. It had never belonged to Father or Mother or mother's brother Lysander, the letch. This was a place largely safe from history. Sherlock chewed his lip, shed his coat, and sat in wait. Mycroft would show his face in time; Sherlock would fume—and fret and wallow and pine. Sentiment is an unpleasant by-product of attachment. He unearthed a cigarette to light.
"That was a frightfully tall tale you told. How many overheard childhood horrors did you pillage to concoct such a gem?" Sherlock had noted his arrival by the slant of the flames, repelled and nourished by the breeze from the open door.
"Shut up, Mycroft. It's not as if you came off badly." Mycroft entered from the hall to pour himself two fingers of Lagavulin, the twenty-five-year old variety.
"No, I suppose it wouldn't do to anger John to the degree he resorts to physical violence next time we meet. Better to lend me a sheen of unwitting heroism and give root to your emotional dysfunction than confess that you hate me because I know you better than you'd like."
"A nursery-age child could parse your rudimentary deductions." Mycroft drank in the manner of a connoisseur, respectfully, reverently. The source of Sherlock's learned reverence became all too plain. He heaved a plume of fragrant smoke.
"We're no longer children, Sherlock. I cannot be the agent of your redemption forever."
"As you have no redemptive qualities to speak of, I believe we've discovered a rare topic on which we entirely agree. Shall I alert the media?"
"No, we'd hate to plummet the stock market. Best to keep this one between us."
"Gladly."
Mycroft observed him openly. "What are you doing, Sherlock?"
Sherlock stubbed out his fag on the polished end table, drew his knees to his chest. "I don't know." He would kill his brother if he made the obvious remark. There was little Sherlock could not parse in his own time yet he feared time was in short supply. The spider spins and weaves in the distance.
His elder brother lowered himself to rest beside him on the settee. He smelt of ink and foreign soil. Denmark was this week. Next week will be Syria, I think.
"Your John, he said something once."
Sherlock bent his lip. "You could at least pretend not to watch us at the flat."
"To what end? You're aware of my surveillance; we've no need for subterfuge. It's only the two of us here." Sherlock made wordless, perturbed acquiescence. "In any event, John remarked that a confidence cannot be coerced. You have been attempting to draw blood from the stone since the inception of this fascination of yours. Have you considered it may be time to allow your stone to rest?"
John's addiction to the relentless torture of metaphors was eclipsed only by Mycroft's perfection of the art. "You mean let him go."
"I mean, let him breathe. He has been at the eye of your intellectual storm for months; put an end to it. Allow him the option of doing the same."
"You are saying I should let him leave. You're saying I should sever ties." Panic buffeted him on all sides. This was Dartmoor without the benefit of a steady mate beside him.
Mycroft resorted to a vague, quelling gesture. "Not in the slightest. In whatever manner you're capable, you care for John—though I suspect worship to be a more appropriate descriptor of your feelings for the man. As with any such devotion, responsibility exists on each of your parts: his to stay until this arrangement no longer satisfies and yours to leave him the choice." Mycroft gently swished his whisky about the glass. "If I may be so presumptuous, I would like to offer a word of advice."
"As if I have any hope of stopping you."
Mycroft puffed, indulgent humour lightening his mien. "Quite." He sobered. "I would strongly recommend against attempting to deceive John again. That he forgave you Baskerville was a triumph of sentiment over self-preservation, but John is a soldier, Sherlock. How long do you wager a soldier can ignore his survival instinct before deciding to withdraw?"
"John is unique to any soldier I've known." I'd have lost him long ago were he not.
Mycroft's eyebrows ascended to new heights. "Have you developed a habit of frequenting military installations the world over without telling me, brother?"
Sherlock treated his elder to a glare fuelled by decades-long suffering. Mycroft's habitual pedantry wallowed at the shallow end of his patience.
"I've played unwitting guest to a slew of your Box 500 lackies on a frequent enough basis to evince repeatable responses to situational stimulus. John is unlike any of them."
"Faulty logic, though I respect your attempt to analyse your emotions empirically. MI5 recruits a very specific subset of service personnel. You'll find much of the force to be made up of the same sort, people who can and are willing to do what's necessary to gather intelligence vital to the interests of Queen and Country. John is unlike them because John is not of them. Though I must say, I believe you'd arrive at similar conclusions given the chance to analyse every soldier in John's particular demographic."
"You can't know that."
"Caring is a disadvantage, Sherlock, but that has never stopped me. Perhaps you shouldn't allow it to stop you either?"
"If this is one of your trifling stabs at fraternal commiseration—" Mycroft disregarded his supposition in a wave.
"This is nothing of the kind. You care for him and, despite what you may say, you've allowed past events to cloud your judgment where sentiment concerned. You care for him and have done without cause for months now. Now there's cause and no reason for you to delay. What's stopping you from having what you desire most?"
"He deserves more."
"This is not a world where anyone gets what they deserve, Sherlock. Karma is best left to chance and fiction, and to the machinations of men very much"—he blinked—"like myself, I suppose." Mycroft finished the last finger of his single malt in a hearty gulp. "What we get, we bleed for. Some of us are merely forced to bleed more than others. The question is whether the treasure we gain is worth the wound. Is John?"
"John is worth many, many wounds."
"If you truly believe that, you've done yourself a disservice coming here tonight, as well as John. Perhaps it's time to make your return."
The likelihood of this night ending in anything less than a row is decreasing by orders of magnitude. "I think I'll stay, if you don't mind."
"Running away from your problems, again? And here I thought you'd made progress."
Sherlock glared daggers at his brother's smug, bare throat. He'd bleed as well as any man. "Leave me in peace."
"As you wish, petit frère." Mycroft rose in his irrefutable grace to leave Sherlock to his own devices.
"Mycroft?"
His brother glanced back at him, tumbler glinting in hand.
"Would he forgive me this?"
His expression was fond. "Sherlock, your doctor would forgive you anything, including this. That will be the ruin of you both, but is nonetheless quite true."
"He knows I lied." Mycroft's face registered no surprise. He hadn't expected events to take any other turn. Overeating, overindulgent, interfering prat. His face registered underlying amusement, now.
"Yes, I imagine he deduced you weren't being entirely truthful. You are not inscrutable to those who care to look. If he does not know currently, I expect he'll recognize your duplicity in due course."
"What should I do?"
"Batten down the hatches, as it were. Perhaps...even take your medicine." Gruffly emptying his throat, Mycroft removed an item from his trouser pocket and laid it down for Sherlock to see.
Sherlock gawped at the syringe on the side table. "Brother?"
"You'd see your way to it, eventually," he opined, his knowing smile bleak. "Emotionalism has ever been a source of immense distress for you. I'd rather know that the solution is secure and that you're safe than have you stumbling about in the dark." Mycroft furled his pianist's fingers into eloquent fists for want of a brolly. "Better you should fall tonight than on another day."
Sherlock supplied him a nod of vague acknowledgement. There was a chance, a minute glimmer of a possibility that his answer this way laid. John was a quandary that could be resolved. He was not impossible, not for a mind of Sherlock's calibre once properly nourished. I can have this. Not as a habit, not anymore, John wouldn't stand for it, but for a night—for a night Sherlock could have a lover who demanded nothing of his morality and whom he could not destroy untried. He wouldn't have to find out.
Mycroft sighed from the depths of his lungs, resigned as always. "You must realize, Sherlock, that this is you making a choice. The consequences will be yours."
Sherlock could not avert his eyes from the crystalline solution. Not 7 percent as he preferred, but it would be heavenly at whichever proof Mycroft allowed. His brother could not abide low quality even in vice.
"You did say it, if you recall: 'Money is influence for the uninspired. Knowledge is the only power worth killing for.'" Mycroft gaze had slipped to the flames as Sherlock's fingers closed around the barrel.
"I did say that, but the cousins never came to me after father's death."
"Don't be daft, the dead can hardly protest a will." Mycroft's posture became ever so slightly taut. Only one who knew him well would see. "Yes, I knew." Sherlock slumped further on the leather sofa, button embellishments embossing his skin, the smooth plastic tube secure in his hold. No mark worth tasting was ever plastic.
"Power is not all that's worth killing for." Mycroft set a grave hand atop Sherlock's head. Like father's hands. Not at all like John's. He missed John, had missed him when he was three feet nearby.
"I still have scars on my palms," he admitted where his doctor would not hear. Preparing the syringe was old hat, habit, effortless as the rosining of his bow, veins bursting with colour under thin skin. He felt no pain on the prick of his arm. Only Mycroft's proximity, protective and sure.
"Had I had my way, brother mine, you would have no scars at all."
Sherlock inhaled euphorically as the warmed solution rushed into his veins as a pet might greet its master after an interminable separation. I had forgotten this. How could I forget?
"If John cannot love you alongside your scars, there isn't a chance to be had." The feather touch on his brow was exactly like Mummy's. Exactly. "Be safe, little brother. Forgive me."
Sherlock sank into the oblivion of warmth and safety and narcotic bliss in his brother's home. This would be the last time, he swore; he would not partake again. John would not forgive him that. But John would never know.
...
Mornings never have the kindness of nights. Sherlock would have counted himself fortunate to wake feeling empty. Instead, he was cold. No fireplace. His surrounding made his head swim though his eyes were screwed shut. He no longer smelt laundered wool and drink but perspiration emanating from a body he'd set to ravaging only to encounter his point of no return. Without meaning to, he had raced past it, twice and again.
"If I didn't care about you as much as I do, I wouldn't be here right now."
Sherlock slit open one eye to see a pair of forearms clasped together by agile hands. John was seated on edge of their coffee table, watching over him. It might have been an entirely new day for all that Sherlock's internal clock was out of sorts. Mycroft! He'd meant to return to Baker Street under his own power.
"What?"
"You heard me. Even high off your arse, you can always hear me. It's bad enough you got the drugs for yourself—five years of sobriety, give or take a Woman, down the toilet—but you brought them home. You know how hard it was for me to get clean and you still brought them home. That's not something you do to a friend."
Sherlock covered his face. His nose was wet and tender. He daren't check the state of his arms. When did I leave the apartments? Where have I been? He could surmise what else he'd gotten hold of, what old 'chums' he had met. He let me go. The bastard let me leave!
"I needed them." Not a complete lie, he thought in a corner of his mind. Not especially useful, either.
John's laugh was embittered. "Figures."
Sherlock peered from under peeled lids, the sunlight vicious pinpricks through the curtains' lace. John's face hurt to see. "You're going to leave."
"I should."
"You never do what you should."
"Not when it comes to you." John slumped further over his knees. He ground his fists into his eye sockets. Sherlock couldn't watch.
He picked tiredly at John's vile jumper instead. "You shouldn't wear this anymore. I hate it."
John dropped his hands. "Evidently, you hate everything about me. Maybe I shouldn't be here." His voice shook with his hands.
The statement settled in the hollow of Sherlock's stomach. He remembered when John hadn't wanted to be here or anywhere. "Don't talk like that."
"Like what? How am I allowed to talk? What am I allowed to be? Tell me, Sherlock, because I haven't got any idea what you want. You've seen all of me. Mischief managed. Are you through?"
I'm not ever going to be through. That's what's frightening about you.
"No."
"Could have fooled me."
Sherlock sat up slowly in deference to his buzzing head. "I don't know the proper way to do this."
"To do what? What are you trying to do here?"
"Want you. Have you." Before the Woman, he hadn't wanted anyone. After her, he hadn't any more of a clue.
"There isn't a proper way. If you're interested in me, say so."
"I am, I obviously am. I just...I don't, I can't. John, I lose control with you. I can't lose control." A trait he and Irene had shared, but he'd been the better player. After all, he hadn't had his heart—in all its shrunken, atrophied glory—to lose.
John appeared to consider it a while. "All right, so you won't lose control. No problem."
"But, John, what you expect of me..."
"We'll figure it out. We'll have to anyway, since it'll never work, me seeing someone else as long as I'm here. They'll leave me because I put you first, same as always."
"You think me a burden."
"I think," John said, carefully, "that you are unlike anyone I have ever known or ever cared for." Sherlock waited. "And for that, you deserve some special consideration."
"Then, you'll stay."
"Where else do I have to go? Nowhere else has you."
Sherlock's pulse fluttered away beneath his jaw, a swallowed hummingbird begging for reprieve. He wet the chapped skin of his lips. There was no high on earth to compete with John's affection. This would be Sherlock's opiate of choice henceforth, the steady supply of which he would not jeopardize and whose loss he might not survive.
"May I see them?"
John rose to precious alertness. "See what?"
Sherlock huffed, irritable, limbs twitching from his comedown. "Your prize collection of bottle caps! Your tattoos, John."
"I don't think that'll help our problems much."
Sherlock raised a shoulder in a noncommittal move. He wanted to see some hidden part of John to prove he was still allowed in. John's clothes were locked doors—not that Sherlock had any use for those—he wanted to be sure he still had his key.
His partner let out a noisome exhale. "Okay, fine." He pushed the sleeves of his jumper up to the crooks of his arms. Places and times. It was enough for today. That his hands itched for contact was more than the work of the drug leaving his system.
"I noticed you haven't got any below your waist, why is that?"
John was neither visibly impressed nor surprised by his presumptuousness. "You're the detective, you tell me."
"You enjoy that phrase entirely too much." Sherlock traced the chords of violin string as though they might resound with notes. John's flinch rang discordant. Sherlock blamed his tuning. "You're a soldier but a doctor first. You've a deep psychological attachment to your upper body, yet you have a more tenuous relationship with your lower anatomy. Curious given your penchant for sexual excess." John hummed in noncommittal reply. "Have you considered that a having something done there might help with your limp, perhaps to serve as a reminder of danger?" A reminder of me? He skimmed his palm along the inseam of John's jeans. John latched his hand over Sherlock's like a shield, or a vice.
"I've thought about it, just never took the time to do it. I was more interested in occupying the space above deck anyway."
Sherlock gave his answer the unfocused nod it warranted. For a moment, he couldn't think. He'd struck a chord. John had immortalized Sherlock on his skin to carry as his companion for all time. He didn't see how he could bear to do less himself when he wouldn't risk a gift of more.
Chapter title from Lord Byron's Stanzas to Augusta.
Warning: Drug use
