Here's chapter 40. Have you seen the Oscars? They were brilliant - well the parts I have seen of it - Benedict photobombing :D

Anyway - enjoy!

It's dark and the air is stuffy in his room when Mycroft finally manages to pull himself out of his nightmare. It's the second this night, and it was a bad one. He doesn't mind the ones when he's shouting – the only bad thing about them aside from the obvious fact is that Kiara will hear him. She doesn't come into his room any more, not since they came home and he told her clearly to stay out.

He can wake himself up when he's shouting. They don't last, he never reaches the end. Or rather, he is just pulled harshly out of it, and knows there would have been a lot more had he not woken up.

No, it's the ones where he can't move, can't make a sound, can't breathe which he hates so much. He dreams until the end, which usually is him dying or Sherlock.

Mycroft knows that Kiara is aware he had a normal nightmare this night. She always knows, she always hears, and when she had still slept in his room – Mycroft shakes his head to interrupt his train of thought. It's good that Kiara is further away from him, it's good that she is shutting herself off from him.

Memories flood his mind, pictures of Kiara waking him up at night; of Kiara with him in the hospital, after the events in the basement; Kiara in her room looking up to him standing in the doorway, smiling quickly and then going back to murdering somebody in her playstation game; Kiara with her cheeky, triumphant smile after she made a joke. Slowly, the pictures change. Kiara, lying on the floor, Stone on her, knife at Kiara's neck, Sherlock in the chair, screaming. Kiara, in the hospital bed after being stabbed. Kiara, standing in the warehouse, standing over Sherlock's bleeding form. The last one is just his imagination, he knows that, but it is still in front of his inner eye.

For the first time in his life, he is seriously letting emotions stump his judgement, and he knows it. He knows there is a grain of logic in Kiara's actions, in shooting Sherlock, but his emotions are telling him otherwise. His emotions are telling a story of betrayal, and now in hind-sight, he can see the symptoms for it in all his memories.

For the first time in his life, he lets his heart rule his head, knowingly, hating it, but not changing a thing about it.

The air suddenly seems too thick, the blackness too dark, so Mycroft gets up. He'll just take a quick walk, he tells himself, even though he knows he'll end up in his study, in front of his computer, but he doesn't want to admit that to himself. He knows he doesn't get enough sleep.

When he steps outside of his room, he finds something genuinely unexpected. Kiara is sitting next to his door, leaning against the wall, breathing deeply.

She is fast asleep, head resting on her forearms which she placed on her drawn-up knees, the red hair surrounding her face and shoulders and falling over her legs. It looks like an armour, wild, messy, a fiery protection.

He has half a mind to wake her. To shout at her, see her retreating again, eyes wide with fear. Beneath her fiery armour she looks small, and he wants to know whether he can break it.

Less than a second later he shakes his head in disgust. There they are. The emotions, fighting to be let out, trying to chip away the mask on Mycroft's features.

He sees her tired eyes during the days, the dark circles beneath them, the lack of grace with which she moves because she is so exhausted. He sees her quick looks towards him, sees the slight fear in her eyes, he sees her flinching away when he takes a step in her direction. He sees the effect it has on her.

He walks through the manor, to the room in which he used to study as a child. His textbooks are still there, in their perfect order, books about politics and management and he knows he could recite them all by heart, but he takes out one about the Weimar Republic. It's old, and there are some mistakes in it, and he has a better version just half a shelf away, but he has kept this one. He opens it and looks inside, quickly leafing to the twenty-fourth page. Sherlock's handwriting his stiff and scrawly, the pencil smudged, but he can still read the corrections Sherlock wrote.

It was Sherlock's birthday present to him, for his twelfth birthday, Sherlock had been five. It wasn't the fact that for the first time Sherlock had given him something besides a painting or a piece of music on his little violin, but the fact that he had bothered to learn about the Weimar Republic and correct the mistakes. In hind-sight, Mycroft suspects that Sherlock had picked the book for that exact reason, but it is still the nicest present he ever got. He doesn't get any nowadays, he doesn't trust the gift-baskets he receives, too many people hate him, but this, this is important.

Mycroft stays in the room for ten minutes, thinking, remembering, then decides it's time to go back to bed. When he arrives at his room, Kiara is gone, only a singe red hair betrays the fact that she was there.

For the first time in weeks, the atmosphere is not as tense as usual, but rather a concentrated silence. It is relaxing, not to feel Mycroft's distrust the whole time, but also very strange. There is a certain quality in the air, I'm not sure whether Sherlock or Mycroft can feel it, but I feel something similar to an itch, to a tickle. It is disconcerting how similar it is like it used to be and I miss it. But this is the better of two evils. At least both Irene and Sherlock are alive and well and I don't have to worry about Irene any more – as she promised to go to one of her clients and get proper security.

I try to concentrate on the screen in front of me, but my thoughts keep straying away. I am pretty sure Mycroft knows I slept next to his room. I didn't mean to, I was just so tired and fell asleep, but when I woke up, the door was open and Mycroft was gone. And since I hadn't heard anything, Mycroft must have left his room silently. He doesn't mention it, doesn't show it in the way he is behaving, as he hasn't talked to me since I woke him up from his nightmare and he told me to leave three weeks ago.

At least he doesn't say anything really mean to me, I try to make myself feel better, but it's not really working. The only thing he does is glare at me when I come too close to him.

And because I am so distracted, I am so surprised when I notice something very strange.

"Sherlock?" I think about calling Mycroft as well, but decide against it. If it is a true lead, then Sherlock will be able to read a lot more out of it, and he'll tell Mycroft.

"Hmm?"

"Can you – Can you come for a moment, I think I have found something..."

He steps behind the comfy chair I'm sitting in and I tilt the screen so he can see.

"From all the bank-accounts, somebody takes some money. I checked, from every big one – he takes more than ten-thousand twice, more than five-thousands four times. It's nothing compared to what is on the accounts, you could manage an entire, admittedly a small, country with the money Father had. Moran isn't as clever, he has less, has been careless with it, but it's still a huge amount.

Anyway, this person takes the money and transfers it to another account – sometimes another big one, sometimes a small, private one. I'm checking it right now, but from these accounts, the money goes to one account – or is collected from cash machines in London. He has been doing this for months, all in all I guess he has taken more than two hundred thousand pounds."

I look up to Sherlock who is staring into air with narrowed eyes, rapidly looking around. After a moment he snaps out of it and looks at the screen again.

"Mycroft?" He calls out, and I sigh quietly.

"I've listened," Mycroft answers and gets up, standing behind my chair as well. I can't help but cringe away, moving towards Sherlock's side slightly, trying to put some distance between Mycroft and me, and wait for both of them to say something, as they are both staring at the screen. After a second, Mycroft leans down and scrolls down the list. I am ultra aware of his hand near mine, and don't move, but he just keeps looking.

"Could it be – Do you think it might be Daunt?" I ask, trying to understand what the Holmes-brothers are thinking.

"I mean, we thought before he was somewhere else, or in Russia, and he never was. What if it was his deputy we were tracking, not him?"

Mycroft looks down at me, and for the first time in ages, our eyes meet without any anger in his.

"I don't know. But if it's true, and it sounds very likely, we are in great danger. An – She helped him escape our grasp once, so she might have communicated with him more than just that. Who knows how much he knows now. We'll need to be careful."

He straightens up suddenly, then swiftly walks to his computer again and sits down in front of it.

"I'll check through the money-transfers again."

I swallow the retort I want to give, try to hide that I understood the hidden insult.