Warning: Extra long chapter, angst practically oozing all over the place, violence, dark thoughts, ecetera.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/n: Thank you for all your reviews/favorites/alerts and I'm sorry for off-schedule update. I've been pretty busy lately, swimming in the sea of essays and tests and eyes wide open for late-night-writing. It feels like my brain was drained dry.
Enjoy.
3.
Mycroft Holmes was a man of means, connections and knowledge. A superior intellect, a manner of complete control, clever at when to strike and when to smooth and a deep wrap of the human minds applying him the upper hand to grasp, to understand, to twist and to manipulate. Some said he was a master holding the strings to people, setting them up, playing them under his thumb, leading them to the paths he had meticulously and profoundly drawn out, performing their roles on the necessary stage. Not to any audiences, but to his will.
Sherlock Holmes had not overestimated when he said Mycroft was the most dangerous man you had ever met.
But even the most dangerous man had his moment of dangerous uncertainty.
There was a knock at his office door, not pressed or weighted or at high-level enough to be an adult, but too polite, knowing and sharp for any child. Here went many possibilities, many odds. A name appeared in his string of thoughts, which at the very first was already a dominant percentage, yet brought many questions. Even if one held an observation to the biggest certainty, one shall not be careless when drawing a final conclusion. Because tables always turned, there was no absolute, a man could just play smart and hard to keep the advantages and control his way.
"Come in," it was curt, layered with forefront acknowledgement and readied waiting.
When the little figure of Arthur's appeared, blanket fold neatly and dismissively on one hand, back straight like a solid pillar and steps not bouncing or innocently honest or shy; Mycroft Holmes was not at all surprised.
There were only questions and confirmations.
"Do have a sit, England."
The child-like body seated himself too gracefully and experienced on the armchair facing Mycroft's desk. The chair that held guests – the people who were to be questioned, effortlessly peeled apart thoroughly like a target had been set up unknowingly willingly, to be aimed with razor mind and manipulative masks – now braced to open its cushioned self wide and warm and vulnerable for a child, who looked like a man knowing his intention and sure with his body. Ease and control were hold in those little hands placed on the handles. A kid looked at Mycroft in the eyes, but an old life's smile graced the lips, "It won't be long, Mycroft."
Mycroft shifted very lightly and pointedly in his seat, "I must admit I can't fathom your intention." England put his tilted head on his palm, not breaking eye-contract, and Mycroft continued as though he himself wasn't analyzing every movement of the other's, "And I'm not a man who will go along with which is just deemed, obvious."
"A man of reasons, always in control," it was said in the perfect voice of a seven-year-old, and Mycroft clenched his jaw minutely, eyes hardened, all infuriated and sharp sword-like lines. England sighed, a sound of an ancient rumbled throat and infinitely sorrow, "We've been through this before, Mycroft. I'm not playing hard. I don't want to push anyone."
"It's surely proved to be quiet hard," Mycroft cut back, imperiously composing and vengeful for the neat–as–a–thin–silver–string and itching incision on his left chest. He might not be a fighter or a warrior, but Mycroft knew how to hold an end of a sword to someone's neck. "When you are a presence of people, of general needs and purposes, every single one of your actions affects the whole."
And little shoulders tensed, brow ceased in contained anger – anger that was so used to being wrapped up, kept closed, carefully fold before it could burst. "I've broken the rule," England spoke unevenly, as if he was looking down a deep, dark cliff, feet only a vague distance from falling and shattering. "Many times already, but this is the biggest."
Emerald gaze sliced away, looking over his own tiny body, "And I break one to come back now." England raised his hand, to see the flesh or to cut off any of Mycroft's sentences, "But I don't want to mislead, there's still regret in my action. I want to be sure for the last time if 'myself' is going to the right direction, Mycroft."
A pause, near silence. Near because the two involved individuals were too efficient, foretold, and calculating to let silence reign. And he thought back to little Arthur, the little person that would let the silence swallow him whole. "He says his name is only Arthur, always insisting everyone on calling himself so."
There was a twitch up the corner of England's lips, "I ensure he does that."
"He doesn't remember 'Kirkland'," a pointed reminder, a glimpse of a certain sharp deduction. Mycroft, he had strings, now he needed to stitch them together. However, he always made certain he would not do the legwork.
"I make sure he won't."
Eyes contacted again, battles within battles. England creased his eyebrows in a repeated honesty, deep and sorrowful. "Please don't take my will lightly."
And Mycroft, in that maelström of honesty, such bared confession and desperation – it was not a battle of will, not a battle of whom was the most clever and the sharpest, not a mind-play or mad fury – it was a telling, a saw in Mycroft's own action and reaction –, felt misjudged and lost within.
Which was in and of itself an unbelievable incredibility and laughably ironic.
But England before him laid out his inside under the condemning eyes of others, exposed in front of Mycroft the lands, the time and the dark flesh of a heart, leaving Mycroft a King who must step down from his great golden throne, asking for amends and prophecies.
"What is your wish, England?"
The sky thickened with dark clouds, like oozed dark-purple skins, sagging under the weight of heavy drops ready to fall down and burst on the ground. Mycroft was still seating in his chair, hands fold carefully under his chin and umbrella-bared. There seemed to be a raging storm under the surface of calm skins and smooth dark suit, twisting his feature in a strange way, making it tighten, shadowed with thoughts and decisions.
The light outside was dying, cut sharp and thin like a seen-through and worn-out plastic layer, the unlit office filled with patches of false illusions, stretching the solid, long and thick shadow of a man who carried on his shoulders the responsibilities so big across the room as the carpet underneath couldn't soften anything.
Mycroft was a statue - whirring storm of a mind wrapped with a still control like calmness. He always made sure to feel the solidity of the ground under his shoed feet and the quiet of vaporous peace merged with the soft breathing of a sleeping child. Mycroft recalled his younger time, when those veins of his throbbed with ambitions and the determined want to rule and control. When he could still be slightly careless and make mistakes to mark his experience.
- When he stepped into the room that held Britain's biggest and most well-kept secret sharing a cup of tea with the Queen herself; green eyes immediately greeted his, already having hands around the depth of his vow.
There had been a slight but certain and respectful dip of chin, emeralds twinkling as if rippling gentle waves on the tranquil surface of a very profound lake.
"Here are you, young man. Thank you."
Hearing the exact two words, Mycroft had known instantly and so directly that was for him. And whilst remaining standing in black suit and polished shoes, for the first time in his life, Mycroft felt an absolute honesty and gratefulness of so many that the cold ice in his heart felt burnt. Her Majesty held out her white-gloved soft hand as though an elegant breeze in the windy land of Nobles, landing them on his shoulders each, so very lightly yet weighted and cold like a sacred sword placed upon a Knight's shoulders bellowing his upcoming loyalty and devotion.
"You are now the man who works for this land – The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."
The burn of Her fingertips he could still feel now. Vows carved deep into bone, to soul and willingness.
The lines around Mycroft's eyes formed clear, drawn deep on his skin as marks of tension and wills and remembrance. There was a strong fire burning at his spine, a richly bitter taste of determination in his tongue.
He was going to cross the line of his vow to protect it.
He was, with all his worth and power, going to break England's wish himself.
Jane walked briskly on her high heels, eyes straight ahead like hard stones with pointed purpose. Her black dress suit lined the curls of her body into powerful and professional contours, warning every barricade to move out of her way. The blackberry gripped in her hand was like a ready weapon and almighty method as a folder was hold on her other one.
The paperwork and the process were going to be complicated if not messy and irritating. Too many services to go through, questions may arise while discretion was a must, always.
But she'd dealt with worse emergencies; she was perfectly and experienced-y capable. If not, she would have been gladly to pack all her things and have Mycroft get rid of the burden of a useless and incompetent assistant. At least that would be more efficient and much less time-consuming.
No, what troubled her was what she had seen.
In the form of Mycroft Holmes and that mysterious boy, Arthur.
Arthur seemed to be a perfectly normal child, small feature for his age and shy in a cautious way. But his mind, his knowledge was something she could not put her finger on, almost unnerving her to a certain point of frustration. It was like something so unexpected slamming hard onto her familiar and well-prepared surface, and while in its presence, she couldn't help but be truly honest and open. Someone had peeled her guts apart and she unknowingly allowed them to look into the details. The smile of those little pink lips made her mouth ache for an up-twitch. Those green eyes peered at her through long pale lashes thoroughly like reading her life story just in brief seconds and bottling up her soul. Even years working with a mind like Mr. Holmes had not prepared her for this - this unexpected, seemingly harmless little person.
Who half an hour ago curled up into the deep dark-cushioned underbelly of the chair facing Mr. Holmes' desk, letting the quietness and blackened shadows crawl at his baby skins, engulfing him in a blue and purple embrace, leaving him looking so battered and barely alive in his unconsciousness.
It wasn't physical, it was some things belonging to the deep inner side.
Holmes had his right hand surround a side of the kid's head, placed solely there and fingers bent stiffly with strangely light touches; his left hand held his faithful umbrella, white-knuckled under the coiling impact of his palm. Rigid air dug into flesh and raked. Dark circles threatened his gazes and Mycroft Holmes looked like he was gripping a knife too sharp, ready to pierce through the figure he was holding close but kept distance.
A man knowing clearly what he was capable of doing and always realizing how vulnerable the person he was to hurt.
It was frightening.
It was like a picture of tragedy.
And now each step she took grown heavier as her flow of thoughts got more tangled and worried. The request of her boss imprinted in her dutiful mind as well as his hardened and haunted brown eyes.
Tomorrow Arthur would be the child of Holmes.
Life wasn't fair. They had always said, and Sherlock had always sent a look of angry despair and fights to his way whenever he uttered the sentence. It had been and always was an excuse. A repeated excuse that got people to believe in it and inconsiderately became a fact.
"If life is indeed unfair, it doesn't mean we should let it remain that way," seven-year-old Sherlock had said to him when the child's eyes stared hard at the carpeted floor in front of their mother's closed door. They both had the image of the tears their mother had used the solid wooden barrier to push them away and prevent them from seeing. Push them too far away.
Mycroft had said nothing, and still nothing twelve years later as Sherlock's smoky eyes looked up at him with all accusations, anger and almost defeated. Sherlock's canthus were too hollow and dry like a cracking laughter of miserable madness and suffering. His brother was pale with drug scratching at his brain, high in all the whiteness.
Life wasn't fair. They were all under the upper hands and there were rules of consequence for those who played God, prizes for a little compulsion and impulsivity.
Mycroft glanced down at the small person whose golden strands were under his fingers. A person created for purposes not of his own, for paths he had not chosen or even acknowledged. A shield of real flesh and skin, born to be shed, ripped into pieces. An uncontrolled existence of its own enormous soul.
This was England. But this was also a child whose memories were still far-fetched, not allowed to return to him.
Might Mycroft not be able to change the unchangeable, he would change what he was able to change.
Arthur remembered raising his both hands to receive his crayon box, murmuring a thank you for Jane. He avoided looking at her in the eyes, because she seemed to be very stiff and uncomfortable with it. Like his gazes alone could tell all her secrets and display her honesty. But they somehow felt so right, the things he knew about her. As if they were supposed to be there, in the whole of his.
"Mycroft told me," said Arthur as he laid out his papers and continued to paint. He could felt Jane's attention leaving her phone – people always tended to do that, always focusing on his calls.
"About what?"
Clever, sharp Jane. Already knowing what she was dealing with. There would be no assurances, no soft words and tender questions like any other adults mistakenly treating him with. She knew he was not an ordinary child (and what kind of child he was, he wasn't sure – Maybe Mycroft would answer that question for him some other times). But he still lied anyway, he just wanted to make her feel comfortable.
"About your real name is Jane," He kept his eyes on the half-drawn figures on the sheet of paper under his small hands and messy crayons. Arthur stopped abruptly when he realized those painted people were a little girl named Jane and her mother, Mary.
(Little Jane would be holding her mother's hands, leading her through the crowded road of a Christmas night to reach their home because her mom was so tired and clumsy it made her frustrated and loved her mom even more. She wanted to become stronger and more capable to take care of her mom. Because Mary's boss was a filthy man with greedy palms that always wandered to touch. And they needed the petit money to keep on living so Mary bit down the foul bile in her throat and acted like nothing happened.
Under the colorful lights, two persons held their hands together to move on, to keep warm and share emotions. Jane would not look at the warm glows of those bakeries or the twinkling smell of cooked food. There was laughter and unending flows of people, and her mother's pulse was so silent and alive in the spreading noise. And might she take a look at the grand Christmas tree at the square, it was just for a wish. Wishing for her mother to have a better life.)
And Arthur hurriedly slipped the paper away – hiding it among the others, mind and eyes still flooded with million neon lights and shared warmth and unspoken sad wishes. Jane – strong Jane, sweet Jane who was now more than capable, who now sent her mother gifts and flowers on Christmas day – was quiet; Arthur could feel the softened glance she gave him, a glance one may have whenever seeing another person perform a trick that they were much more skillful at doing.
Stiffness still touched her body's lines, but it was the stiffness of being in control.
That was better than nothing.
And when he finally held up his head to see her, black clouded suddenly his vision.
There was a man standing ahead of him, emerald eyes just like his. The man gazed at him kneeling in the middle of darkness, "Let me in charge now, Arthur."
"What is your wish, England?"
Arthur could see Mycroft clearly – his smoothly stony feature and tightly sincere low voice. Mycroft here sat with time threading every fiber of his being, brightened and deepened with every mental power and awareness, a dark-like-oil figure that stood in the middle of a black hole of the universe, attracting and hungering for all the pitch-dark truths and deep belief and minds.
This Mycroft made him feel and scared.
But the man standing next to him in this blackening space of his mind, controlling his body seemed unfazed, as though it was what he faced with every day, as though he had a crave-ness bigger and more terrified. As though life was a hole of evil and he drowned himself in it.
Arthur wanted to back off, to run away, to hide from all of this madness and honesty and reality.
Yet hands so strong and sure kept him in place, as a firm and harsh grip of your father when he told you to grow up and fight back and win no matter the cost. So much he looked up at the man and on the verge of shaking his head.
Who was this man - this strong force of power and tragedies?
Arthur felt his – their – arms spread wide, so open it was like a trap, "I wish to end this pain, Mycroft. Even if just temporarily."
The man locked eyes with Arthur (it felt strange when they did it in a mind), there was truth and desperation and harshness, like tears and screams that could not be released. He felt a connection between them, as though they breathed with the same heart – They were a paper, which was ripped into two, came to be glue back but could not help feeling each other foreign with all the changed folds and ugly torn edges.
"It's going to be fine."
When Arthur opened his green eyes, it was to the calm beating of Mycroft's layered, firm pulse. Each throb sent a wave of feelings Arthur couldn't name, yet for them he was alive.
Mycroft was very still, a stillness that raced with thoughts and intentions and restlessness. He gradually raised his little hand and pressed it against where that living rhythm came from. Mycroft tensed like an instinctive machine or just a stranger to all human touches.
Arthur gave him calmness.
Mycroft gave back a minute inhale, then silence, and finally an explanation of how he would be an Arthur Kirkland Holmes.
After a week the Holmes' estate was home to Arthur, and its histories since it was just a wild wood awaiting for human's hands to cultivate had already stored at the back of his remembrances. He knew every corner, every hiding place and room before Mycroft had a chance to lead him around the old and delicate architecture.
The way Arthur touched the walls and pressed his ears against them as though listening to the singing silent speeches of stories (– here, an Abigail had ended her thwarted love with a knife over ten decades ago, a kid named Sherrinford hid that knife - a gift of his grandmother who said it was from her twin sister Abby – still stained with blood of a bird – half a century later, and a Sherlock found it in a crack behind the portrait hung on the wall of his father, Sherrinford, thirty years following –),like he lived here long and loved astonished the staff in the large estate.
And while he wandered around, he was with his brown blanket.
Images (or were they memories?) often resurfaced very suddenly, in a flash and made little sense.
(But it didn't mean it made Arthur feel any less.)
There were pieces of papers and notes everywhere in the room he was used to enough to call his – Messily drawn and colored pictures and symbols, notebooks full of many handwritings that weren't his, yet belonged to him – All were from great someone in the far centuries in the past, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Eliot, Dickens, Austen … Arthur'd lost count but he remembered each one clearly.
Mycroft read all of his noting. Kneeling beside him while he was sprawling on the carpeted floor, dancing out words from mind and pen's points. Or soothing his hair like a calm breeze in the middle of his whirling storm of whispered explanations about a painting or unknown nights of inspirations and high waves of emotions of some famous British authors, while he relaxed his head on those laps, which had turned into something far too assuring and familiar.
Mycroft wasn't home much, but Arthur knew when he was at the time being, when he came back and what mood he would be in. It became a routine that Arthur would seat himself at the front stairs of the Holmes's estate and waited before a black sedan arrived with Mycroft Holmes in his perfect suit and manners ten minutes later.
"Has daddy phoned you ahead, dear? Holmeses are surely discreet with their affection," the chef of the estate, Mrs. Teagan, had teased with that warmth-full voice of her when he appeared at the kitchen, asking for some dark tea and no-calories-biscuits because the meeting with the French ambassador hadn't gone very well. She was a woman who would steal your heart after a straight-forward and rich laughter, who would pinch your cheeks and asked why you were so bony a wind surely could sweep you away with it, while you looked at her buxom body in childish admiration and adultery fear of her theory about fitness-standard.
"Or are you both just telepathic?"
He smiled up at her shyly, as if embarrassed and confused. The hearted hair-rubbing and warm assuring laugh was well worth it before he could vomit any confusing and knowing sentences.
"Why do they say you're my daddy?" Arthur asked, one of Dickens's pieces opened on his laps, halfway through being read.
"People tend to assume irrelevant things," there was a nonchalant lifted eyebrow in Mycroft's voice. And Arthur suddenly watched him with a critical interest of a pure child.
"There is no smoke without fire," the child said with all the wisdom, "You tell me that."
Mycroft didn't bother clearing his throat, "When one brings home a child, there are rumors to satisfy some onlookers, who don't know any better. People like to talk; it makes them feel clever. As I said, it's irrelevant."
"Or, you can say I'm your… guardian," he added after exact one minute of silence, not raising his eyes from the documents on his desk once.
Arthur chewed on his lower lip, creasing his brows and looking very thoughtful, then murmuring, "I like 'Mycroft' better though."
No sooner had he said it than he rolled his blanket around himself as if a protecting barrier and ran out of the library, leaving Mycroft who hadn't decided to be surprised or not.
Feet ran through the forest of trees and shadows, fleeing away from the thundering footsteps of the hunters. Little hands torn pass hidden and thick-set pathways; he didn't even dare to breath.
A little bit more.
Just a little bit.
Then he would be safe.
Please let him be s-
A arrow pierced his flesh, almost sending him falling over the round, ripping at his heart.
He couldn't breathe.
Pain, so much pain-
But he kept running, even when blood flowed out his wound, dampening his cloak, oozing onto the ground. His head pounded, his ears ringing with deafening screaming, his body burning and rigidly numb. His two eyes opened wide; one half was of a dead animal and the other half struggling.
He didn't know how he hid, he just wanted to crawl out of his skin, nails digging into infant flesh, at his stopped heart, rasping and sobbing and thrashing and screaming. He bent his arm to reach for the arrow but could not tear it out. He was wailing, a creature that couldn't reach death to get rid of its pain while it had fallen out of the verge of living.
A creature in between.
An agony lasted for eternity.
It was horrifying, it was terrible-
He shuddered-y curled up with pain, bringing soil and dust and blood and tears into himself, embracing his dead heart in his ribcage.
When his eyes burst open, the four walls of his room were surrounding him. He pressed his tiny palms against his mouth, muffling all of his screams and sobs.
As morning barely came over the horizon, Arthur was already awake.
He felt a strange wave of calmness wash over his being, as if a soldier knowing and ready for his battle death - a grip of acceptance then came the fearlessness.
He had realised.
He didn't tell Mycroft, but thought the man'd known at the beginning anyway.
To escape pain was to die.
"Here are your biscuits, dear. Oh my god, you look so terrible. Nightmare, little dear?"
"Thanks, I'm fine, Mrs. Teagan."
"Are you sure, dear? I will tell Mr. Holmes when he gets back."
"It's fine! Really."
"I've checked."
"My heart is still beating."