Author's Notes: Another Hiatus drabble. In the aftermath of the Reichenbach, Mycroft meets Watson to reveal a truth. About the lullaby: My inspiration was from a piece in Guillermo del Toro's film 'Pan's Labyrinth', which can be heard on Youtube at: .com/watch?v=boz2bGu5M4A if you're interested.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock Holmes.
When Mycroft comes, I am standing lost in our old rooms, watching Jemima roaming, poking her noses into corners, flicking her tail, her shadow black against the wall. As he comes in, she bounds under a chair, hissing furiously, her tail switching in agitation.
"I do hope you're taking charge of the beast," he says to me, pointing to the cat with his cane.
"She never quite took to me, even as a kitten." Jemima bares her fangs at him and swivels her ears back against her skull, the very picture of feline fury. Mycroft chuckles from somewhere deep in his vast, mourning-clad bulk, and I stare blindly at the black cloths that cover the picture frames.
"A kitten.." I echo quietly, thinking of souls trapped in mirrors. Mycroft's piercing gaze, so like his brother's, cannot fully rouse me from my stupor. I feel strangely heavy, anchored to the ground, and I do not resist as he pushes me into a chair. His chair. My skin crawls.
"Did he ever tell you?" The question hangs in the room, swooping with dark wings. Did he ever tell me why. Why. I wish I could say he had done, that I knew, that he would, or could trust with such half-sensed, dark things as the subject of her name. That our grand friendship had extended to such things. Not one soul in London knew that we did not whisper our secrets aloud to each other, that he was as closed to me, then, now, still, as he was to any common stranger. The shame is hard to swallow, bitter on the tongue, Mycroft pushing a glass into my nerveless hands, expression somewhere between sympathy and exasperation.
He tells me, finally, the story caught in the closed-up rooms, haunting it, possessing it. He tells me of Jemima, and as he speaks the knowledge swells within me: I shall never be able to come back here. I half-see the events unfold; the little girl in the attic, dying as the sunlight fades, poison convulsing her young body until even her sobs are choked and shattered by them. I can see the last rays of sunlight making her hair glow, turning his fine hands translucent as he holds her, his gentle humming, trying to make the horror of her last moments a little farther away, her mother's ancient lullaby smoothing the way to sleep. I can even see him pacing in his brother's rooms, all the fear and guilt and rage and horror and despair in his twisting pianist's hands, how difficult it must have been to cage those demons and leave with some semblance of dignity. The ghost of Sherlock's pride.
"But he told me that she was the only woman you ever feared."
Mycroft smiles gently. "She was a formidable woman indeed. To set my wayward brother so irrevocably upon his path. I never spoke to him of the matter again, after her."
The ghost between them. Sending Holmes down that road, which only ended… To the only possible ending it could ever have, with such a beginning.
It is only later when it becomes clear to me. When I sit up, gulping huge gasps of air, Mary asleep by my side, the nightmare folding away into the shadows of our bedroom.
I remember Holmes..oh how could I forget? Every so often, when a particular case would not release its grip on him, and he would walk in all the watches of the night and refuse to eat, growing hollow-eyed and bony. How sometimes the wailing of his violin would come floating up the stairs, a strange tune which set me to shivering under my sheets, an eerie music which I had always thought was some mad improvisation upon his part.
But it wasn't. Because if souls can be trapped in mirrors, then why not a dead girl's lullaby twisted up in the strings of the Stradivarius?
Concrit and reviews appreciated.
Taluliaka.