"Sherlock?" A pause, a cold hand on his forehead "Sherlock sweetheart, wake up."

Sherlock Holmes blinked and sat upright, his eyes wide. "I'm a father." He murmured. "I'm a father." His mother laughed softly, supporting his head in her lap, stroking her fingers through his hair soothingly.

"Yes. Good you know you actually grasped that concept before telling me."

Her son sat up and rubbed the sore lump on his head. "How long?" Rinata asked, not needing to extend her question.

"A while ago, John and I decided we both wanted a child. It seemed the most logical and comfortable decision to adopt I suppose." His mother nodded.

"Your daughter, Irene, she looks very much like a Holmes." She mused thoughtfully.

Sherlock pressed his lips together. "I know." He answered.

There was a pause. "Sherlock,"

"Yes?"

"You have absolutely no idea how to be a father to these children do you?"

"Haven't the foggiest."

Ms Holmes smiled and kissed his forehead adoringly. Her son smiled at her and huffed a laugh.

"Well you're doing everything right from what I can see." Sherlock looked taken aback at the remark. He sighed, standing up and moving to the wide window, his mother followed. The room was dark, and the cold aqueous moonlight rippled through the glass and cast watery puddles of quicksilver on the worn carpet. The rows upon rows of thick ancient books stood sentinel to their every breath and movement like silent guardians of the knowledge they possessed between their world weary pages.

"It's just that I feel that don't deserve any of this." Sherlock reached out and spread his fingers over the cool glass, watching a creeping fog bloom across the window panel under his heated touch. He bent his head in anguish, concentrating on the throbbing of his pulse through his veins, and the rush of oxygen to his lungs.

"Sometimes I can just sit and watch John for hours when he's with them, so natural and right. It fits. And I feel like I'm an intruder in my own family. I don't feel like I have a right to belong with them, like it's all so perfect and mundane, and it's everything that I ever dreamed I could have with John, without even knowing it's what I've been searching for all my life. I have the perfect family, a home and a place to belong, and children with the man I love, and I can't even enjoy it because it doesn't feel like I deserve them."

His mother remained silent and placid, quietly resigned to her thoughts. She gave him the time he needed to continue, walking forwards to hold her sons hand as she had done when he was little, staring into his beautiful eyes. They were his grandmother's eyes. She had never told him how much they reminded her of her own mothers, how much she wanted to cry every time she saw them crease when he laughed, just as hers had done. How the loss was so great it burned like a fire inside her, a blaze reduced to crackling embers over years of yearning, repressed, but never fully extinguished.

Rinata Holmes had lost her mother to cancer when she was nine. Too young to know how to deal with her irrevocable grief, old enough to remember her as mother as she had been, smart enough to know she would never return to her only daughter to hold her in her arms again and kiss her when she cried.

It was something she would never leave behind, a deep seated pain she was bound to carry until the end of her days. She vowed that her son would never feel that pain, and so he knew nothing of her internal struggle. She couldn't trust her voice, so laden with hurt was it that she feared it may break.

"I-I love them so much mother. It actually physically hurts. Right here-" He broke off and prodded the place over his heart angrily. "I want everything for them. I would die for them. I want them to live forever, I want them to have friends like I never had, and I want them to dance and sing and learn Latin, and play the flute and tell jokes and travel and write poetry and camp out under the stars. I want them to grow old. I want them to fall in love." He choked on his own overwhelming emotion, shaking as a desperate little tear spilled down his cheek.

"And you don't think that makes you the most perfect father for these children I could ever imagine?"

Sherlock and Rinata Holmes turned in unison from the window, where John Watson stood at the door to the library with their two children at his heels.

"John" Sherlock breathed.

"Call yourself a genius? You're a bloody fool if that's what you believe."

"I-I don't-"

"Now, Ms Holmes," John addressed his mother-in-law. "I must ask you to kindly stop beating my husband."