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It’s no fun being the responsible one. Sherlock will blame the monotony of it for the fact that it takes him nearly half a year to bother breaking into Mycroft’s flat again.
It’s a pleasant surprise that he can get in at all, as he climbs in through a second-floor window. He would have thought Mycroft would make it harder for him to get in. His brother was usually quite petty like that. He gets in without trouble, and quietly sneaks his way through the room and onto the landing.
There’s something off, and he pauses as he tries to place it, mind whirling through possibilities as he seeks clues, one hand still on the sill so that he can retreat if necessary. He’s not sure what’s wrong.
Cautiously, he moves deeper into the house, scanning for the source of the unease…it becomes obvious when he sees the portraits in the hallway. They stare accusingly at him, still bloody-eyed, and alright, that had been juvenile. It had been quite fun though, setting up the droppers, the timers. John had been himself for nearly the first time since. Since then. And it wasn’t even just to indulge John, Sherlock had thought the effect would be… dramatic.
There’s the faintest layer of dust, Mycroft’s cleaning has been in every third or fourth day, but that’s trivial, all the little clues processed independently in his super brain finally coalescing into something Sherlock doesn’t like at all.
He turns and walks quickly to Mycroft’s home theatre, the easiest place where he could find confirmation of what he now suspects. What he is beginning to see as every new trace reinforces what he knows.
Mycroft, stepping into his home, coming home too late, long after dinner. He lets himself in, locks the door, and walks straight to his bedroom. He keeps his eyes shut, the lightest trail of the fingertips of his left hand trailing against the wall as he blindly walks to his room.
John and Sherlock hadn’t wandered in there during their home invasion, so Mycroft still saw it as safe. The rest of the house had been restored and then abandoned, written out of his home. They were extraneous, unnecessary. Mycroft didn’t even see them as he passed between his bedroom and the door…
He finds himself walking back, towards Mycroft’s bedroom. Though he owns a three-bedroom flat, Mycroft had never inhabited the Master, leaving it as a guestroom for their parents. There are actual signs of life here, in the form of a recently installed security system. He has to peer at it a moment before he sees the signs of self-installment. Mycroft so rarely did his own work. Sherlock can see the careful effort that had gone into getting the alignment right.
Small scuffs on the doorway implied that some heavy furniture had been moved, most likely to the room further down the hall. Yes, there were several scratches on the door frame there, and indentations on the carpet. Most likely a bedframe, because…oh.
Oddly, the instance that pops into his mind first isn’t Mycroft, standing there waiting to be shot by Sherlock’s hand, no he remembers him sitting in The Chair, at Baker Street. Remembers the faint satisfaction that Mrs. Hudson and John were giving him a tough time and the fury that Mycroft had hidden something so important from him.
“I never bullied you,” he’d said, in that infuriatingly Mycroft way. Self-assured, clinical, merely one more fact amongst the others. Yet it had been truer than Sherlock had been willing to accept.
Mycroft isn’t in, he would’ve noticed by now if he was. Sherlock finds himself sitting down right there, leaning back against the wall. There have been so many times in his life where he has been unnecessarily cruel. No one that he knows has been spared, not even John, but Mycroft… Mycroft has faced him down for years.
He looks up when he hears the door open, waits for the steady footsteps up the stairs. Mycroft’s eyes are open when he appears at the end of the corridor, but Sherlock would bet anything that he’d walked up the stairs with them closed.
“Sherlock,” he says. Mild surprise, mild irritation. Mild confusion and worry. More than a little exhaustion, though he tries to hide it.
“Mycroft.” He doesn’t get up, doesn’t want to.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” There’s that tic in his voice that means that it isn’t, but he ignores it the way he always does.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, instead of answering his brother’s question. He’d seen him last at Sherrinford, with their parents. He’d thought Mycroft would be okay.
“In what context do you mean?” he asks, then his facial muscles tighten. She’s ruined that word for the both of them, it seems.
“Why are you all but haunting your own house?” he stands, he can’t bear for Mycroft to look down condescendingly at him. “You’re thinner, exhausted, clearly overworking yourself. You’ve abandoned most parts of your house.”
“I’ll thank you to barge into my house and judge how I treat it when you consider my opinion before shooting bullets in your wall,” he says, and he’s taken the extra steps forward at some point, his left hand rests on the doorknob to his bedroom. “I trust you can see yourself out.”
“No.”
“Then stay. The guest bedroom remains where it always has,” says Mycroft. He opens his door. When Sherlock makes to follow him, he shuts it quickly before he can catch a glimpse inside.
“Is there a reason you’re here, brother?” he asks.
There hadn’t been any real reason to break in today. It was just something Sherlock has been doing on and off since he was twelve years old and he thought it had been too long. But was there a reason he had stayed when it was obvious that not only hadn’t Mycroft put up any new security for him to disable, but that he also wasn’t even in to get ticked off? There was. Sherlock was worried.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“For breaking into your house, ruining your movie, and frightening you.”
Mycroft looks nothing short of suspicious, but he answers, “Very well.”
“We didn’t trap anything else, you don’t have to avoid the rest of your house.”
“I know.”
“Then why have you been-”
“Because I choose to, Sherlock.”
“This is your house. You don’t have to live like this.”
“Your beneficence is appreciated. Now get out.”
“You’re not embarrassed,” he says, thinking out loud as he so often does these days. Even though John’s not here to hear him. “You’re upset.” But why? Something flits across Mycroft’s face, too quick for him to identify. Then he opens his door and slips inside the bedroom. Sherlock can hear the locks (at least three) as they activate, and he is left alone in the now empty corridor.
Sherlock waits there some time longer, but the chance that Mycroft would come back outside to yell at him is decaying exponentially. He lets himself out, making sure to reactivate the security measures that he had disabled and some that Mycroft had just left off. As though his safety mattered less than it used to.
It’s a good thing Sherlock was heading home, because he really needs John for this.
When Sherlock describes his last night’s adventures, John just wants to curse. Usually…usually he could just blame whatever mess the Holmes brothers had made of their fraternal relationship on their…Holmesness, but this time was partly his own fault. It had been John’s idea to frighten Mycroft into revealing Eurus’ existence. Sherlock had taken to the idea with his usual insane enthusiasm and John had egged him on instead of playing moderator.
But how to fix it? Mary would have known how to approach Mycroft, she could play Sherlock like a fiddle when she needed to. She played John just as well, and he misses that as much as he misses the rest of her. Rosie starts to cry, distracting him for the time being from the bigger child in his life, but when he’s calmed her down, fed her breakfast, and dropped her off at Molly’s… he has time to think on it again.
Mostly, John is just ashamed of what they had done. It had felt great, at the time, watching Mycroft with his oh so high and mighty attitude brought down a few pegs. Watching him ask Sherlock for help and then leaving him to stew until the next morning, taunting him until he sat down in that chair.
They hadn’t known what they were playing with, though. Mycroft, terrified of his probably criminal baby sister, what fun! Not until John had actually been in Eurus’ clutches, feeling like a rat, like a worm to be dissected… had he understood that deep visceral fear. John has faced down enemy soldiers, and pain, and trauma. He had lost his best friend (temporarily) and then his wife. But nothing… nothing compared to the feeling of being a plaything in a higher being’s power, so utterly completely at the whim of an insane entity…
If that was what Mycroft was afraid of, possibly had been since his teenage years, then mocking him for it had been tastelessly cruel. John had hoped that Mycroft would just brush it aside though, as he seemed to have done with the entire episode. Trust a Holmes to somehow get over his younger sister murdering several of his underlings, attempting to get his younger brother to kill him (and oh god, those few moments, when John had been horrified, no, no, Sherlock you can’t but also, the beating of his heart in relief, not me, alive still) but to be incapable of moving beyond a well-meaning home invasion. John chuckles out loud at that, how ridiculous has he begun to sound after knowing Sherlock? He needs a real therapist.
“Quite ridiculous, John, and not my fault,” Sherlock answers from the couch. There was probably a time when John would ask, enthralled by the exact steps Sherlock took to reading his mind, but at the moment he just takes comfort in the fact that he doesn’t need to speak his thoughts aloud.
“I am sorry,” Sherlock says, and John doesn’t know which part, in particular, he is apologizing for. “For?”
“For making you think, for even a moment, that I would shoot you.”
They’ve rehashed this topic before, but knowing what he now does about Mycroft… John’s feeling a little sorry for the man. “Mycroft made a convincing argument,” John says.
“No. No, nothing about what he said was convincing.” And John has to admit, it's kind of nice to know how vehemently Sherlock disagrees with everything that was said.
(Sherlock was aware that John was slow, but he only sometimes proved it this obviously. Now was such a moment. Mycroft’s pathetic speech, convincing? Sherlock didn’t mind death, that was what made him so suitable to be Moriarty’s true archnemesis. Neither one of them cared all that much, because in truth - everyone died. One of them got high killing people, and the other by finding out how. But Mycroft was different. He hated it when people died, somehow making him the most normal, goldfish-like of the Holmses. Heaven knows Eurus couldn’t understand the difference.
“He was right, soldiers have to die for their countries, sometimes. Damn him for saying it, but he was right. I was even the first to say it,” says John.
“Mycroft was the man who solved the Coventry conundrum. He wouldn’t want you dead.”
He’d wanted them to direct the child into crashing the plane. Always with the bigger picture, Mycroft. If his brother had been the child on that plane, Sherlock is certain he would have crashed it himself without prompting. So fundamentally different from Eurus.)
Mummy and Dad are having everyone over for Christmas again. It’s a little different from last time, since Mary is gone, and Rosie is crawling all over the house. Wiggins has been invited again although Mycroft has banished him from the kitchen in no uncertain terms. His work laptop is also present again (and, once again, it is encrypted. Stupid Sherlock, assuming that stealing his laptop was the same as accessing it. If someone like Ms. Adler could have a secure phone, a man of his minor means in the British Government certainly could).
Just like last time, Christmas day seems to stretch for an absolute eternity. His patience is strained by ten am, and everything after is agonizing. The little amusement that the exuberant antics of Rosie Watson offers winds down along with her energy around lunchtime, and he excuses himself shortly after to hide in his mother’s office and attend to work. None of it couldn’t wait another ten hours or so, but the domesticity was giving him a headache.
Half an hour in, there’s a quite dramatic escalation in one of their ongoing operations, an entire field station compromised. Two agents are dead and the rest have scattered. He gives out curt apologies and goodbyes to his family as he steps outside to meet the chopper they’d sent him. Every second he spends vetting the clean-up crews is a second’s delay in planning an extraction strategy which is time not spent on determining the source of their leaks and therefore the safety of their other stations. By the time the incident has been dealt with to his liking, the other issues on his back-burner are now pressing again, and he finds himself working into the night, and onwards.
Thoughts of Christmas completely escape him, and he doesn’t think about the gathering he had left so suddenly until New Year’s Eve, when Mummy calls to demand his presence back at the house. They never did Christmas, and they never did New Years’ but apparently that wasn’t true anymore. his mother wouldn’t hear of it. When he returns, there’s not that much of a difference, the house is a bit messier, the inhabitants a bit lazier.
There’s a bit of kerfuffle at the very beginning, as Mummy scolds him for all that he’s missed this week, “You missed out on our Boxing day visit to Eurus, Myc,” never mind that he’d been the one to arrange the expedition “and Christmas dinner,” - he hadn’t eaten at all that night, trying to get his people to safety - she goes on a bit more; apparently, he’s missed sledding, cookies, and a murder.
“Gwaine Wilson?” he asks at that last, a little surprised, addressing Sherlock who’s sulking on the couch. It’s the only death reported in the area this week, but he hadn’t thought that one was a murder. “Suicide,” his brother answers, “Boring.” John gives Sherlock one of his looks, “You saved his wife from being arrested for murder, Sherlock.”
“Suspected murder then, dear,” says Mummy disapprovingly.
“The incompetence of your local law enforcement does not fall under my purview,” he says, grateful that that’s the case. “And I’m not sure how my presence would have helped.”
However, he’s soon folded into the slowly chaotic pointlessness of the holiday, browsing through a stack of magazines his father has left in the living room while Sherlock (who hasn’t moved since Mycroft got back, even for lunch) watches an infomercial on their parents’ television. Only the two of them are present, as John has gone upstairs to set Rosie down for a nap.
“You’re the older brother,” Sherlock says randomly, eyes fixed on a seven-mode vegetable peeler that for a limited period only could be bought at the bizarre price of twenty-four ninety-nine.
It’s such a ridiculous observation that Mycroft doesn’t even bother responding, just looks at Sherlock. His face is drawn and Mycroft can’t deduce his intent.
“Have you had the portraits cleaned?” he asks.
“That is none of your concern, Sherlock.” Mycroft doesn’t want to argue this now, and thinks longingly of the car waiting outside for him. He could change his mind about staying for new year’s and just leave. Only, that would mean rekindling the fight with his mother, who’s only just stopped complaining about his handling of Eurus. It might also make Sherlock curious enough to follow him home, where the portraits have not, in fact, been cleaned.
“I apologized to you for breaking in. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.” Sherlock’s eyes gaze at him steadily. Deducing, but not coming to a conclusion. Mycroft feels a stab of irritation.
“You do nothing, Sherlock. If I ever find myself desirous of your help, I assure you that I will visit 221B Baker Street and seat myself in your infernal chair.”
Oh dear, he shouldn’t have said that. Should have kept his temper, he’s far more exhausted than he’d realized if he’s displaying emotion so haphazardly. He wonders if he could get away with hiding in his childhood bedroom for an afternoon nap, but most likely his mother would find that disappointing as well.
Sherlock doesn’t answer, just watches him carefully, and to get away Mycroft relocates to the kitchen table. He’s relieved when his brother doesn’t follow him, and he pulls out his phone and checks on his minions. They haven’t faced any calamity in the hours since he got here, at least. He’s texting Anthea about a set of files she should have ready for him when he’s finally permitted to leave this house when John Watson walks into the kitchen.
“I’m getting myself a cup of tea, would you like some?”
“No, thank you,” he says without looking up. He’s typing out: I’ll be in my office at 2 a.m. I can have the files signed and deliv- when John interrupts, “Mrs. Holmes won’t be pleased if she sees you working, Mycroft. You sure you don’t want a cuppa?”
“As certain as I was two sentences ago, doctor.” -ered before the voting begins. It won’t change the numbers significantly but will be enough to win by a narrow margin. Follow up on D just to be safe. If he seems incompetent, reassign W to it. At your discretion. He hits send, and is about to start another text when he realizes that John’s looking at him from across the table.
“Can I be of assistance, Dr. Watson?” he asks, finally giving the man his attention.
“Sherlock is worried about you.”
“Advise him not to be, it’s an appalling waste of mental resources.”
“It’s about your house. He thinks that you’re annoyed with us for breaking in,” he says.
“On the contrary, breaking and entering into my private spaces is something my brother has been doing since I was old enough to try to keep him out. This was not a significant deviation from the norm.”
“I’ll bet you anything that he’s never broken in with company, before,” he says. Mycroft narrows his eyes. If Dr. Watson is leading up to accusing him of jealousy he will be incredibly disappointed.
“I want to apologize for breaking into your house with him. It was an awful idea, and in hindsight, not one that I can excuse. We shouldn’t have done that to you.” Oh.
“If I was truly disturbed, I would have had you arrested,” says Mycroft. “I don’t understand why you and my brother are obsessing over it so many months after the incident. I suggest you forget it and move on, Doctor.”
He picks up his phone again, assuming that since the doctor had appeased his conscience by apologizing, he would be allowed to get back to work.
“Sherlock told me that if you were the child on the plane, you would have crashed it,” says John instead. What was wrong with his brother and his friend today, their conversations jumped from point to point without logical sense.
“As would you have if you knew how, I would hope,” he says, shortly.
“You never understood her, did you?”
“Pardon?”
“She was brilliant, you called her an era-defining genius, but she wouldn’t have crashed the plane, and you never understood why.”
Mycroft makes a small sound of disgust and turns back to his phone. “My brother could do with your insipid company, Doctor, I suggest you go bother him,” he says. Only seven more hours of this enforced socializing before he is free for another year, he can do it.
(He finds Sherlock sitting on the ground beside his bedroom door again three days later when he returns from work. “If you’re going to make a habit of this, I suggest you bring yourself a chair,” says Mycroft, looking down at him.
“John says I’m right to be worried about you.”
“Your Doctor is abysmal at conveying messages, then.”
“Why won’t you just let it go?”
This is getting ridiculous, and Mycroft doesn’t want to deal with it any longer. “I will call a cleaning service in the morning. Good night, Sherlock.”
He slips inside his bedroom and locks the door before Sherlock can say anything else.)
Sherlock breaks into Mycroft’s house again the following week and finds the place spotless. The portraits have been replaced, all the traces of neglect and all hints of their ill-advised home invasion scrubbed clean.
The house still feels vaguely foreboding and completely unlived in.
This time he sits on the stairs and watches as Mycroft opens his front door. “Bit late for a visit, brother-mine.”
“I need to talk to you. Do you have time?”
Mycroft blinks at him, and Sherlock takes the time to read. Exhausted. Started his day at an ungodly hour. Had too much caffeine, which meant Anthea was slipping or Mycroft ignored her because he was in danger of falling asleep. Three different government meetings, hours of busywork. Skipped dinner but had a working lunch. He’s not sure what Mycroft had managed to read off of him in the meantime.
“Sitting room, or would you like to stay on the stairs?” his brother asks, leading the way into his living room once his coat and scarf are off. Sherlock follows him and takes the couch. Mycroft sits primly in an armchair.
“Do you want me to order take-out?” he asks.
“I’m neither hungry nor incapable of placing an order if I need food.”
“So you don’t need chips?”
“Yes, yes, cholesterol, diabetes, hilarious I’m-” he stops then, eyes wide. Looking quite offended, he snaps, “I am not suicidal, Sherlock.”
Sherlock’s watching him very carefully. “You don’t think you’re lying,” he says quietly.
“Because I am not.”
“You wanted me to shoot you.”
“That was months ago. Is this what you wanted to speak of? Because I would rather retire for the night than listen to this idiocy.”
“Mycroft. You wanted me to shoot you.”
“And your solution, brother,” Mycroft says, with cold fury, “was to shoot yourself.” They hadn’t discussed this, had made offhand sarcastic mentions of the incident before deciding independently that it was tasteless. Perhaps Sherlock should have pressed the point, because he had no idea Mycroft was that angry about it.
Mycroft is standing, a few moments away from storming up the stairs and to his heavily fortified bedroom, but he still asks, “Was there any matter of pressing concern to speak of?”
Sherlock just shakes his head no. “You’re the one who said that all lives end, Mycroft,” he calls, once his brother has left the room. He hears him pause on the stairs. He doesn’t hear further movement so he follows and finds Mycroft leaning with his forehead against the wall.
“What do you want, Sherlock?” he asks, and he sounds. He sounds defeated. Broken. Suddenly, he remembers how Mycroft had continued that statement. It’s not something he’s thought of, usually obsessing over the first. “All hearts are broken.”
Mycroft laughs, and it sounds odd. Unhappy and pitiful. Choked. Nothing at all like laughter should.
“What has brought this on, Sherlock?”
Sherlock shakes his head. “They’re not.”
“Pardon?”
“All hearts aren’t broken Mycroft,” he says. “Just yours.”
“And you’d know, would you?” asks Mycroft.
“Mycroft, please.” It’s amazing, truly amazing, that those particular words still make Mycroft raise his head and look down at him and ask, “What?” In spite of everything that happened before it. Sherlock can pretend all he likes that he doesn’t ask Mycroft for help out of a desire for independence, or out of contrariness. But the basic truth is, if Sherlock asks, Mycroft would move heaven and earth to satisfy his request.
Sherlock has known, has always known, that Mycroft would do anything for him. Maybe not no questions asked, maybe he’d whine a bit, but. There’s not one single mess that Sherlock has gotten himself into that Mycroft hasn’t tried to get him out of, it doesn’t matter if it’s a drug den, a high-security army base, or a murder charge (or from the attentions of a murderous sister, as he knows now). Sherlock doesn’t understand that selflessness, might never understand it, but he knows one thing…Mycroft doesn’t know that he knows.
He’s at three steps below his brother now, looking up into his exhausted, gaunt face, and he reaches out and grabs his hand. “Your loss would break my heart,” he says.
“Oh, spare me,” his brother hisses, trying to pull his arm away, but Sherlock holds tighter. “I’m not lying. You know I’m not lying,” says Sherlock, even though maybe Mycroft didn’t. He was supposed to be the smart one, he thinks. Maybe Sherlock has to spell it out.
“It wasn’t because of the clip,” he says, meeting his brother's eyes. Mycroft just stares uncomprehendingly.
“It wasn’t the clip of Moriarty taunting me that changed my mind. About who should leave the room alive. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. Not on you. Not ever.” And I’m sorry you ever thought that I would, foolish brother. Mine.
Mycroft looks gobsmacked. Stupid, stupid brother, who could deduce rings around everyone else and not comprehend something as simple as this. Not that Sherlock had ever tried to make his feelings very clear.
Well perhaps that should be fixed, then. So Sherlock hugs him, his arms around Mycroft tight, his head buried into Mycroft’s chest because Sherlock’s standing on a lower step and it’s so familiar when Mycroft’s arms carefully encircle him and hold him back.
“You’re all three supposedly smarter than me,” he says quietly, disengaging from the embrace. “But all of you were wrong.” He should shut up but he can’t, Sherlock never can, it’s the reason the rest of the world always glances slantways at the thought of being seen in public with him.
He adds, “Moriarty and Eurus, I know they couldn’t have understood. But why-” he stops, doesn’t voice the words didn’t you, because he understands with startling clarity why.
It’s because Sherlock had never said, had always pushed and pulled and snapped, accepted Mycroft’s help grudgingly, while still taunting and insulting him. Mycroft usually returned the acerbic insults in kind, but he had his moments of uncommon candidness. It shouldn’t have mattered; Mycroft should have been able to see through it. Would have, if he hadn’t already been preyed upon by their younger sister, who’d crushed Mycroft’s heart long before any of them reached majority.
“And this is why I’m the smart one, brother,” Mycroft says quietly. “You assumed that I was trying to make it easier for you to shoot me over John Watson. When I was trying desperately to distract you from seeing the real solution. As long as you were feeling self-righteous and indignant and clever… I hoped you wouldn’t consider turning the gun on yourself. And I failed.”
That doesn’t make sense. “That was the right solution, all three of us are still alive, and Eurus stopped.”
Mycroft stares for a really long moment, as though weighing his words is taking longer than usual. “It would be far kinder to shoot me than leave me to witness your death, Sherlock,” he says finally.
“No one had to die, Mycroft.”
“Only because she wasn’t done playing with you, and she didn’t want to stop right then. If she ever wakes… do not underestimate her indifference.”
Sherlock doesn’t say anything, just waits. This is an almost masterful evasion, on Mycroft’s part.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Mycroft.”
“I’m not lying, Sherlock, I am aware. You were the one who needed constant reminders. Your juvenile inability to communicate has never obscured that you do - foolishly- care for me.”
Sherlock weighs this, trying to judge if Mycroft was lying. Had Mycroft really always known? Because Sherlock had always loved his brother, but there were many many years when Sherlock had kind of hated him too.
“I know what it would look like if you did not care, brother,” says Mycroft, and Sherlock catches the thread of that sentence, tugs at it and follows it further. And finally, it clicks, what Mycroft had actually been doing refusing to clean up the mess that was in his house.
“What Eurus is missing… and everything she did. That was never your fault,” says Sherlock.
“I am aware.”
Sherlock eyes his brother carefully. “Are you?”
And Mycroft smiles, small but genuine. “Well, I think I'm prepared to be convinced.”