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Mycroft, my bow in his hand, his fingers loosely grasping the frog. Knuckle perilously close to the hair. Hate that. Bounces it about like a baton to a beat in his head (slow 6/8, like a bloody-minded German), throwing ictuses everywhere. With Mycroft, music starts and finishes with conducting. All that matters to him is what’s in his head; he doesn’t need to pick up his viola and actual play. Lazy bastard. (Does he even still have a viola? Did he lock it away with the rest of the family treasures when Mummy died?) My icy glare is pointless; he’s not looking at me. He’s reading from a notebook he’s holding aloft as though he’s Lord bloody Byron. Trying to get my attention. He always has it. It’s infuriating.
Pluck at the strings of my violin, the dull sound of it hums through my chest. (A little Tchaikovsky, only every other note of the melody. Mycroft doesn’t need to know how I soothe my little hurts.) Want to snatch my bow from his fingers so I can play, loudly, and drown out whatever drivel he’s trying to read, but he wouldn’t let go if I did. He’d much rather let me break it in half. He’ll smirk and just keep reading at me.
“Trust issues.” I’ve heard this before, why is he reading this to me? He hits the the high ictus and swings a long preparation down to the next beat. My bow hisses through the air. Can almost hear the strains of the Wagneresque march he’s conducting and it’s putting me off. “Intimacy issues. There’s a whole section on that here, you’ll want to know more about that, won’t you.”
John does not have intimacy issues. Well, he doesn’t have intimacy issues as a general rule. Intimacy with me, however: a frightening prospect. Others: no. If Mary is anything to go by. He is prepared to share an intimacy with any woman who shows the slightest inclination. And a few who don’t. Heterosexual panic? (Or is it just me, causing panic? It’s probably just me.)
“Not interested in the slightest.” Not looking at him now. Look instead at the smooth body of my violin, my own fingerprints on it, visible only at a certain angle (this one). Fingers shift on the fingerboard in pure muscle memory. Swan Lake. (Vulgar. But comforting.) Pluck the strings gently. Still see the ivory tip of my bow bobbing about out of the corner of my eye. He always manages to keep my attention, no matter how I try to fight it. Intensely frustrating.
“Prone,” Mycroft says, pausing for effect, “to bouts of infidelity. But you already knew that, didn’t you.”
I look up. He’s got a wicked half-smile on his face. He’s enjoying this.
Mary. Didn’t think she had a therapist.
“These notes are several years old.” Flourishes them at me. “Think much has changed?” My bow is still slicing through the air: ictus, ictus, ictus, preparation swing. “Cold distant father, hints of covert incest.” Puts the notebook down on his lap, lets me see the tiny print. Densely packed. Pages of it. Mountains of information on Mary. “You know that covert incest isn’t actual--”
“I know.” I spit it out. I’m impatient. Anxious. What does he want? Why is he telling me all this?
“She’s been married three times. That can’t be news to you. She was engaged a fourth time, but she sabotaged that one quicker than the ones before. It says here,” lifts up the notebook again, “fear of intimacy coupled with low self-esteem and desire for approval from men results in her aggressive sexuality and serial infidelities.” Flips a page. “This therapist recommended regression therapy. Incompetent.”
“Do I need to remind you,” I pluck one of the strings on my violin particularly hard, “That I am not the one marrying her?”
“She showed remorse.” He goes on as if I said nothing. Makes my blood boil. “She doesn’t do it deliberately. It’s compulsive. Her therapist felt sorry for her. Did you know, she ended up sleeping with him? He lost his license. Not her fault, of course. She’s a powerful narcissist, this one.”
“She’s not a narcissist.” Defend her? Of course I will. Mycroft lies.
“You’d know, of course.”
“I’ve met her.”
“You’ve evaluated her as the competition.” He thinks he’s correcting me. The conducting hasn’t stilled; it hasn’t even faltered. Mycroft could have this entire conversation without me.
Ictus, ictus, ictus. “I’ve suspected all along, about you and your flatmate. You know that.”
Sigh noisily. None of his business. None at all. If he wants to have this conversation, he can just insert the parts I should say without me actually saying them. If I think very very hard maybe I can block out the sound of his voice. There’s an experiment in the kitchen (lead, salt, coagulated blood) I could check on; count prime numbers; 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107...
“From the moment I first met him I suspected he might have this effect on you. Is that when it started? Just then, the moment you first clapped eyes on him? Or did it come later?”
...109, 113, 127 God no too boring, he’s breaking through. Dammit.
He doesn’t know everything. Wants to, even these irrelevant things. The unquantifiable. Things that don’t belong in the open. Things he can hold over my head later, get me to do what he wants. Won’t give in to him. Never do. Manipulative bastard. Itching to grab the notebook off his lap; notebook, or my bow. One or the other. He can’t have both. Mary’s failings or mine; pick, Mycroft. Pick just one.
“You fancy yourself in love with him, don't you.” Not a question. I hate him. “Ah. Yes. You do. Good, Sherlock. That’s progress. Mummy would have been pleased.”
Roll my eyes. Of course he’d bring her up. Just trying to score a point. Hit a little harder. Yes: she wanted me to do this, to feel this. She worried. Wondered if I could. (Or, more precisely: if I would, if I would deign to let someone else come so close to me. She never doubted that I was capable. Unlike others. Unlike me.) There was nothing I could do, then, to reassure her. She would have liked John.
“Until now, I thought it was mostly unrequited. Foolish, adolescent, and unrequited. But I understand now that is not entirely true.”
He holds up the notebook again. “This was the evidence that finally swayed me, the part where her therapist writes: Mary is primarily attracted to emotionally compromised men. Men who are emotionally unstable, or unable to love her back, or who are in love with someone else.” Drops the notebook into his lap; it falls shut. “He was speaking of himself there, the way his love for his wife made him more attractive to Mary. He might as well have been writing about your John. You have to blame yourself for her interest in him. He fancies you a great deal. A great deal indeed.”
So well orchestrated, as always. My eyes lock with his without my permission. He’s grinning at me. “Did you already know? Ah. Of course. You did. Oh, poor Sherlock. You don’t know what to do with him now, do you.”
Sigh. I hate him for this. Why won’t he leave me alone? “He’s not in love with me.”
“The evidence suggests otherwise.” He drops a file on the table in front of me, but I refuse to even glance at it. Why must he always pry?
“He’s getting married.”
“Marriage doesn’t physically prevent you from loving someone else, Sherlock.” Roll my eyes. “And you sit there, plucking out Swan Lake as if that will make him love you enough to leave her.”
I can feel the blood rushing to my face.
“You can do better than that, Sherlock.”
“No.” I drop the violin back into its case. Hold my hand out for the bow. Wait for it. He finishes out the last two bars and then slides it gently into my hand. Hands are sweaty, shaking slightly. Try to hide it, but he sees everything. Hopeless.
“Yes, you can.”
"It's irrelevant." I can feel my anger spilling over, making me lose all sense of judgment. I am going to say things I do not want to say, do not want to admit, do not want to let Mycroft know, all because he knows exactly how to inspire my most blind and most absolute rage. There’s a moment before dropping down the precipice that I understand with startling clarity how well Mycroft manipulates me, forcing me to revert into the child he will always consider me to be (aged seven with a broken fishbowl in my hands, red-faced and livid and ashamed), but then I dissolve into blood and spit and indignation. “He doesn’t want to.”
A pause. “Ah.”
Don’t look up. Shaking with rage. World tinted red. Some part of me hoped he would see a way through. But he doesn’t. My assessment is painfully correct.
“Perhaps they deserve each other then.”
After he’s left I discover that I’ve snapped my bow in half.